After the terrorist attack, there was perhaps a week and a half of people being connected
with their humanity, and then the National Assembly started to have debates about women
wearing the hijab again and the empathy in the public debate really quickly stopped when
some people were not even buried yet in February last year.
I think there was a moment where people were starting to introspect
but that moment closed very quickly
Every morning was André Arthur in my house and so there's a certain kind of speech that
you hear all the time. Whenever you're in the car, people put that on.
If you're shopping at some mall or whatever, sometimes it's on.
Bus drivers turn it on so it's kind of this thing where it's not even you who has control
over whether or not you're exposed to it.
There's a normalization of disrespect, a normalization of hatred, a normalization of spite.
It's a stream of journalism where I've never seen people talk about what's going on politically
with such disrespect for people who chose to devote their life to serving the public.
When you're being exposed to this discourse over and over and over and over it starts
to be an issue in your mind.
A lot of people in Quebec City, there is a small Muslim community there, but a lot of people don't
know anyone Muslim in their personal lives.
So why are they thinking about this all the time?
It's because of the images that not only come from the radio.
It's also TVA and all these other media that have constructed Muslims as public problems
over the last 15 years.
But at the same time people's refusal to see how that works makes it impossible to find solutions.
There's so much anger when you listen to it, it's all just...people are angry and it's anger in
search of something to be angry about.
People need to get better at seeing the patterns of how this is normalized in every day in
insidious ways, not only react to the spectacular, obvious manifestations of it.
As a woman of colour, when I was living in Quebec City, when some topic comes out on
the radio, it changes how people see you in the street right away and people at the National
Assembly and people in the media will eventually need to catch up on this, because it will
bite them in the ass otherwise.