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The Current Transcript for August 17, 2016

Host: Connie Walker

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Opening theme]

SOUNDCLIP

The International Olympic Committee has the honour of announcing that the Games of the 32nd Olympiad in 2020 are awarded to the city of Tokyo.

[crowd cheering]

CONNIE WALKER: Yes, after these Rio Games wind down the Summer Olympics will be on their way to the Japanese capital. And then who knows where next? Los Angeles, Paris, or Rome, all cities in the hunt. But no matter who gets the Games in the future it's safe to assume they'll come with world class headaches, and enormous bills, and debates over the value for the host city in the long run. But what if the games didn't move? What if there was one single solitary Olympic locale where the world came to compete every four years? We're running that idea around the track first out of the block today. Then...

SOUNDCLIP

No one would say that Arabs and Muslims are white, even though some of them may pass for white. What has happened is that they have become browner as the post-9/11 world unfolded.

CW: It's a skin tone found right around the world and perhaps a way of being in the world too. Writer Kamal Al-Solaylee reflects on the meaning of being brown. That's in half an hour. I'm Connie Walker and this is the summer edition of The Current.

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Should the Olympic Games have a permanent venue?

Guests: John Rennie Short, Robert K. Barney

SOUNDCLIP

[Non-english speaking language]

VOICE 1: [Through translator] It’s a total con job, this man told us. The Olympics are so foreigners can come here and enjoy it all while Brazilians bear the consequence of governments not…

VOICE 2: The Australians sure will remember their stay at the Olympic village. They had to evacuate the building after a fire broke out in the basement. And when they came back, their team shirts and a laptop had been stolen.

VOICE 3: But it was just odd watching this pool get darker and darker and darker.

VOICE 4: Don’t open your mouth in the water.

VOICE 5: Close your eyes, close your mouth and you’re fine. [laughing]

CW: Well, believe it or not we’re already at day 12 of competition at the 2016 Olympic Games. And even though the Rio organizers maintained the Games have been successful so far, they’ve had their fair share of headaches. Which it seems is par for the course when it comes to hosting Olympic Games, and perhaps especially so when a country is that is in a deep economic recession and embroiled in political chaos plays host. But what if we rethought the way we approach the Olympics and the practice of moving them to a different location around the world every time? Here is sports economist Andrew Zimbalist:

SOUNDCLIP

The current model of shifting the Olympics around every four years and expecting a new city in the world somewhere to rebuild Shangri-La every four years and spend 15 to 20 billion dollars doesn't make any economic sense. And particularly when you foist that burden on developing countries, developing cities, or cities in authoritarian countries, it tends to be particularly unfair to the mass of people in those places.

CW: Former Olympic sites are dotted with abandoned buildings today. From a swimming pool in Athens filled with rainwater and garbage, to a graffiti covered bobsled track in Sarajevo, and a fenced off beach volleyball venue in Beijing. We'll post pictures of some of those former sites on our Twitter feed. You can have a look while we ask whether it's time to rethink the status quo and stop moving to a new host city for each Olympic Games. We have two guests standing by with their thoughts on this today. John Rennie Short is a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has researched the effects on cities of hosting the Olympics. He is in Bethany Beach, Delaware. And Robert K. Barney is a Professor Emeritus in Kinesiology and the Founding Director of the International Center for Olympic Studies at Western University. He is in London, Ontario. Hello to you both.

ROBERT K. BARNEY: Good morning.

JOHN RENNIE SHORT: Hello.

CW: John Rennie Short, let's start with you. How common is it for Olympic sites to fall into ruin?

JOHN RENNIE SHORT: It's fairly common, especially when you have stadia and sports that are not usual for the country. I visited the softball stadium in Athens for example, very few people in Greece play softball. So the stadium for sports which the country doesn't play are particularly vulnerable to that. Secondly, there's the expense of keeping places up. It costs for an average stadium about 1 million dollars a year just to have security and regular maintenance. So it's quite easy to fall out of the maintenance cycle and then spiral downward. In some cases, there's Sarajevo you mentioned in your opening piece, that obviously that was connected to civil war and civil unrest, but in many places it becomes very very difficult to know what to do with certain stadiums after the Olympics have gone.

CW: Robert Barney, from a socioeconomic perspective what is the legacy of the Olympic Games for the majority of host cities?

ROBERT K. BARNEY: Well, the real legacy impact I think is not so much in the sports facilities, but in terms of infrastructure improvements that improve the urban life of the residents of those particular host cities. That's a different story. When we look at the environmental improvements in terms of beautification and other measures, and making air cleaner and water cleaner, transportation circumstances in terms of improvement, communications, security systems, and a worldview of the city, these are all these are all positive aspects.

CW: So, I guess when those promises are actually delivered upon it can be beneficial.

ROBERT K. BARNEY: Well, yes. And all these improvements might be on a wish list of a particular city, but that doesn't mean that even in time that they’ll be enacted. So this speeds up the process, hosting the Olympic Games, and make certain that those improvements will be made. And they are of great benefit to the greater population, and that's one thing that should be taken into consideration.

CW: OK, so John I'll ask you. What do you think are the costs and the legacy for the majority of home cities after the Olympics?

JOHN RENNIE SHORT: They vary enormously. Mr. Barney was correct, there's been some positive benefits to the infrastructure of cities, and there's some classic examples of very good and positive legacies. The two best known examples are Barcelona, which improved the whole abandoned neighborhood Poblenou along the coast, they opened up the Ramblas, they introduced middle-income housing, they cleaned up the city all throughout the city. And in Sydney, the Homebush Bay, their main site was remediated from a site of tremendous pollution. It had some tremendous benefits. However, there's also costs even with getting those things done. Close to half a million people were displaced in Beijing for example for the Olympic Games. In Atlanta, low-income African-American communities were removed for Olympic stadium. So it's a mixed bag. But if a city does it particularly well, it can have a long lasting positive impact. However, the question is what are the benefits compared to the costs, and who benefits? So unless it's done carefully, the benefits can be for tourists coming into the airport and getting into a city quickly, and then out again. Low-income communities tend to get punished, as we can see in the case of favelas in Rio, whereas upper income groups get better access to international airports.

CW: So John Rennie Short, if hosting the Olympics can be so taxing on cities and the residents of the cities, what are other ways that the games could be held?

JOHN RENNIE SHORT: One way is a permanent site, or two or three permanent sites. It's been an argument that's been around for a long while. The initial idea for moving it around for the modern games was Coubertin wanted to avoid nationalism which was rampant at the time, so let's move it around to different cities so no one country can dominate. And to be honest, I think it worked for a while, moved it around. The problem was, as the games got bigger and bigger and more expensive and the environmental impact became massive, the footprint just grew and grew. First Olympic Games there's 300 athletes round about, now there's 12,000. You know, a few sports and now there's many sports, and they're increasing all the time. So the impact is just increasing. And so there's an argument, why don't we have it in a permanent site whereby you don't basically you know, destroy much of the fabric of a city once every four years.

CW: What do you think are the main advantages of setting up one permanent location or a few permanent locations for the Olympics?

JOHN RENNIE SHORT: Well one would be you would avoid the enormous cost and disruption to cities every four years. If you think about it in a sort of thought experiment, if you started off from the beginning, you wouldn't say well let's build the games anew every four years in a different city, and have problems of building, of security, just repeated it again and again as the costs increase. It seems a stupid thing to do now. The most obvious one is you keep the cost down by having a permanent site. Now there's other problems associated with a permanent site but they’re well within the sort of bounds of both credibility and doability. And it seems, I think it seems, an idea whose time has come because moving the games has created a number of downsides. One, is it makes it prone to corruption. IOC members are continually being caught being paid off to influence the votes for big cities. Secondly, there's a new narrative I think of the Olympic Games, is very critical of where they're being hosted and the impact. The Games are being slightly tainted. I mean, part of the coverage of the Rio Games for example are pollution, favelas, security, goes on and on and on. So I think it being the Olympic Games message is being tainted by the sort of constant circulation. And the other I think dominant notion is that big rich cities don't want them to the extent that they once did. If you have a democratic society and the costs and benefits are made plain to people, more and more city residents don't want them.

CW: Robert Barney, what do you think? Is a permanent Olympic site a realistic idea?

ROBERT K. BARNEY: I don't think so, and there's no sympathy for that within the chambers of the IOC. They faced this problem in the 1970s and in the early 1980s, when the Greeks put forward a plan for a permanent site just south of Olympia on the Peloponnese to hold the Olympic Games for all time. And there was an overwhelming vote at that time to keep the Olympic Games in the perspective which they found themselves. This is the globalization, the internationalization type of perspective.

CW: Why isn't this an attractive idea for the IOC?

ROBERT K. BARNEY: Well, it's not the attractive idea for the IOC because it goes against a couple of things. One thing it goes against is as Professor Short pointed out, it goes against the spiritual basis of the movement as being an international movement. And secondly, the members of the IOC like to see this in an international perspective. To visit these various cities in the world, this is an experience for them. And actually they are the ones who determine what action will be taken.

CW: So John Rennie Short, who in your mind would benefit the most from a permanent Olympic site?

JOHN RENNIE SHORT: The people, the athletes, would benefit for one. The IOC doesn’t want a permanent site because that's where they get their leverage. There's unappointed, unelected, non-transparent sort of cabal of elites, that's where they get their power. They have a bidding system so cities bid to host the games. That's where they make their money from. They allow the cities to kind of outbid each other. The IOC would lose power. So it's not about the international movement, it's about their naked power. That's where their power resides, in allocating host cities. And the international argument, I take the point, but we're moving towards a less international movement. There's only certain countries that can host the games now. Very much of Sub-Saharan Africa or much of South Asia, Southeast Asia will never be able to host the Games. So I think the international argument is slightly First World-ish. It’s either First World-ish or authoritarian. So we're narrowing the range of cities that can actually host the games now.

CW: So what is the solution? What would be the ideal location for a permanent site?

JOHN RENNIE SHORT: For me I think I'd resuscitate the Greek idea. I think Athens, Greece would be an ideal choice.

CW: Robert Barney what does the IOC stand to lose if this kind of idea was implemented?

ROBERT K. BARNEY: Well, I think the globalization stance of the modern Olympic movement and the hosting of Olympic Games is terrifically important for the basic income unit for the Olympic movement worldwide, [unintelligible] and the television revenues and the top sponsorship revenues. So, it is difficult to fathom what the impact on that revenue base might be if the Games were suddenly transported to a permanent site, or even two or three different sites.

CW: So Robert, you think that the incentive may not be there for the IOC. John Rennie Short how would you propose to convince the IOC to change the way the Olympic Games are held?

JOHN RENNIE SHORT: I think their main leverage comes from their revenue sources. Two main ones are as Professor Barney mentioned, one is the media, the television contracts, and that creates a globalization. Yeah it actually you know, very few people relatively go to the Games compared to the television audience. So, to some extent it's indifferent to location. And the other thing is the corporate sponsorship. The top sponsors provide a tremendous amount of revenue. And I think their leverage will come in the same way in previous years about the corruption scandal that Professor Barney’s written about in fact, will be that if the narrative of the Games begins to change, begins to become tainted with more and more evidence of corruption, and the bidding process, of white elephants, of polluted water, corporate sponsors don't want to be associated with an enterprise that looks more and more suspect. Which I think moving it around creates as I said before, creates the opportunity for corruption, creates the opportunity for let's call it cookups. You have a very tight time budget to get things done, a lot can go wrong. What surprised me is how little has went wrong in Rio compared to what could have went wrong. And so I think the corporate sponsors are now looking wow, we're now associated with a sort of slightly tainted product now that has this great global coverage. But the great global coverage also comes with a greater global scrutiny. And the IOC doesn't come out all that well from this, a fairly corrupt body. And to my mind, Rio I think is a turning point. I think there's always been criticism, but that's beginning to mount in a more persistent and consistent basis, especially of the impacts of moving the Games around to different cities.

CW: So Robert, what is your assessment? Do you think the serious issues that are plaguing the Rio Games could be a turning point for the IOC and its corporate sponsors?

ROBERT K. BARNEY: I don't know. This is something that only time will tell and experimentation will tell. The cost of experimentation will be great. That is i.e. making the decision to go to a singular place for hosting it, or to put the games every time in that they're held in two or three different locations. Certainly, the IOC is concerned and should be concerned, and all should be concerned about image. The modern Olympic movement has that pristine image of youth, health, vitality, and this is an image that the television industry and the advertising industry seeks. And if that image is not secure and in place, it's going to damage the entire fundraising structure that supports the Olympic movement worldwide. And plus that which is given to the hosting cities to help with the costs of the games.

CW: So I have a clip I want to play for you both. This is Megan Greenwell speaking on CBC Radio’s Q, a sports panel last week with a different idea on how to update the Games.

SOUNDCLIP

Progressives often propose creating a set of cities that would be permanent host of the Olympics. So it would just rotate between three or four cities. My idea was actually to go the opposite direction and split it up. So each individual Olympics would actually be held all over the globe. There's been no African country to ever host an Olympics, but an African country could host one event. So let's put the Olympic marathon in Kenya, where a lot of the best runners come from and let the runners go through the streets of Nairobi. Let's put fencing, which I'm a big fan of but nobody else in the US is, let's put it in Italy where it's an actual spectator sport.

CW: So Robert Barney, what do you think of that idea?

ROBERT K. BARNEY: Well, it’s an interesting idea. I think that the idea though would be tremendously hazardous to pursue in terms of the media attention. And I do not see the merit of that particular argument.

CW: What about you John Rennie Short?

JOHN RENNIE SHORT: No, I agree with Professor Barney in that I think there's a sort of fiscal reality. Corporate sponsors would have a sense of a diffuse experience you know, running in Africa sounds fantastic, beach volleyball in Australia, but you're fragmenting the public's attention. The corporate sponsors would pull out, the media coverage would lessen. You'd lose the impact of having something concentrated in a two-week period. Concentrating in one place in a two-week period maximises audience participation, audience rates, it has the highest television viewing rates of any event ever. You would lose that if you had like numerous events all over the world. And I agree, I like the idea of it, but there's a certain commercial reality that no would be interested in funding 50 events over be it 50 different weeks. You would just lose your audience, you'd lose your sponsorship, and I don't see that as going ahead.

CW: We'll have to leave this discussion here. Thank you both very much for joining me.

ROBERT K. BARNEY: Thank you.

JOHN RENNIE SHORT: My pleasure.

CW: John Rennie Short is a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has researched the effects on cities of hosting the Olympic Games. He was in Bethany Beach, Delaware. And Robert K. Barney is a Professor Emeritus in Kinesiology and the Founding Director of the International Center for Olympic Studies at Western University. He was in London, Ontario. The current contacted the International Olympic Committee for a response but we have not heard back. Now, we'd like to hear from you. What do you think? Should the Olympics have a permanent home, or keep changing locations? We posted a poll on our Twitter feed. Find us @TheCurrentCBC, or e-mail us by clicking on the contact link at cbc.ca/thecurrent. The news is next. Then not black, not white, what it means to be brown in the world today. Writer Kamal Al-Solaylee is coming up next. I'm Connie Walker, and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Extro]

Back To Top »

ENCORE: Author Kamal Al-Solaylee on how cheap labour shapes brown racial identity

Guests: Kamal Al-Solaylee

CONNIE WALKER: Hello, I'm Connie Walker and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Intro]

CW: Coming right up, how cheap labor around the globe shapes brown racial identity.

SOUNDCLIP

[TV Show: Master of None]

DIRECTOR: I want to try it again, but this time we need you to do an accent.

DEV: You mean like an Indian accent?

DIRECTOR: Yeah, yeah.

DEV: Ah, you know, I'd rather not. I just feel kind of weird doing that voice. Is that OK?

DIRECTOR: You know, Ben Kingsley did an accent in Gandhi and he won the Oscar for it. So...

DEV: But he didn’t win the Oscar just for doing the accent. I mean, it wasn't an Oscar for Best Indian accent. Also, might be strange to play Gandhi and talk like I'm talking now.

DIRECTOR: I would argue that the same could be said with this cab driver.

DEV: I would argue that that's kind of a weird argument to make.

DIRECTOR: OK. We’ll be in touch.

CW: That is Aziz Ansari, the Indian-American actor and comedian in his semi-autobiographical Netflix series Master of None. And the question of what it means to be a brown person in show business, and in the wider world, is one he returns to again and again. It's also a question that Kamal Al-Solaylee has thought a lot about. The Canadian writer travelled extensively to research his latest work, learning about the social and economic realities of being brown around the globe. The book he wrote is titled Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means to Everyone. He spoke with Anna-Maria Tremonti last May.

AMT: Hello.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: Hello, Anna-Maria.

AMT: As you listen to that, does that resonate, that little clip at the top?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: It does. There are some expectations we have to perform brown and that sometimes come across in--I mean, it's interesting that he's auditioning for a part of a cab driver, which in itself is one of the stereotypes of who does the very labour intensive work around the world, probably.

AMT: How do you define being brown?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: Well, I had to do a kind of a stress test to my own thesis and my definition comes from two experiences, basically - global migration and cheap labour, so every community that I have written about has experienced one or the other or both. You can't possibly talk about the construction workers from South Asia in Qatar without discussing global migration as a whole, but also cheap labour is what brought, for example, South Asian workers to the UK after the Second World War. That’s part of the history of the large migration of South Asians to the UK was that, you know, after the Second World War, there was a demand for labour. These two were my criteria for finding brown. There's also some geographic precedence that I've used. From 19th century racialist science that has set the course for what was known as the brown race.

AMT: This is different. You talk about post Second World War, you saw a lot of European whites also migrating for cheap labour but there's something else going on here.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: Right, well that there are number of things. For example, the kind of commuters you're talking about, I'm particularly thinking of Italians or Irish in North America. I reference in the book another book on wishes they worked their way to whiteness and they had, among other things, the same cultural European heritage, the light skin colour, but they also managed to move from what was then the working class into the middle class. You see that here in Canada as well as commuters get more established, they move from the downtown core and they go to the more affluent and quieter suburbs. And then a new set of immigrants come in and it's just this juncture in history we are seeing that the new set of migrants who want to do well and make their way into the world tend to come from North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America which, to me is the brown continuum.

AMT: Where did you travel to find out about the experience of being brown around the world?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: I went to Trinidad, Thailand, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Qatar, the UK, France, Canada and the US.

AMT: And in your travels, did you find a common identity that connects people in these countries?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: Context is key, so things varied from one society to another, so in Trinidad for example, the brown identity was playing out against a country that was largely black, not just in population but in the way it identifies itself for the world. When you think of Trinidad, its identity is calypso music and carnival and just strongly black identified. But in a place, for example, like the US, I felt that there were certain experiences that linked undocumented Mexican workers with Arabs and Muslims after 9/11. They were both communities that felt the sting of right wing politics and you just have to think of who did Donald Trump pick on?

AMT: Mexicans and Muslims.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: Mexicans and Muslims and there are those communities that have technically nothing in common, they come worlds apart. The Mexican population is Catholic, by and large and yet, there they were, two brown faces that have become the enemy of choice for Donald Trump. He knew that he could scapegoat these two people and get away with it.

AMT: In other words, the one connecting thread is skin colour, it's not necessarily culture, it's the fact that they are not white.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: That is true but skin colour, you could also say that so how come it doesn't apply to black people? There's a certain ambivalence around brown and that probably comes from the fact that it is close enough to white but not as dark as black. I refer to the term buffer race a lot in the book and it is that group in the middle that also displays a huge range of skin tones, so no one would probably in North America would say that Arabs and Muslims are white even though some of them may pass for white. What has happened in a place like the US is that they have become browner as the post 9/11 world unfolded.

AMT: Well, let's talk about it because you start your story through the prism of your own racial identity. When did you first become aware of your racial identity?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: I became aware of skin tone at a very young age because I grew up in Egypt, and even though it's sort of an Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern country, it is a country where light skin colour is highly prized and I wasn't light skinned. When I had friends, I had always envied the fact that they could pass-- like the idea of passing for white meant so much, but my awareness of racial identity probably happened when I moved to the UK when I was about 24 to study. For the first time, I was called Paki on the street, which is the slur word for a Pakistani, and it kind of stopped me because I didn't think I would be considered Pakistani because I thought I was Arab from an Arab background and I'm relatively lighter skin toned than most Bangladeshi and because Pakistan is not just about Pakistani but anyone who's who is Indian. And that's when it hit me that to a lot of the mainstream English society, I'm just a dark skinned person and I could be Bangladeshi, I could be North African, I could be Arab, it didn't matter. I just wasn't white and all of us were Pakis.

AMT: You write about something called shade-ism and being affected by shade-ism. What do you mean by that?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: Well in different societies of people of colour, there is a kind of pigmentocracy where there are people who have lighter skin tones within, say within the brown or the black colour. They tend to do better or tend to benefit from that lighter skin tone, so if you're in a job in the media or in somewhere where there's public presence, the lighter your skin tone, the more likely you'd be the face of an organization or the front of the service, whereas the darker skinned tend to be seen as less than valuable. It is part of the racism family, in a way.

AMT: Pigmentocracy? That's a new word for me, or is that shade-ism?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: That’s shade-ism, but pigmentocracy also refers to the ordering of society along colour lines which is a model that I talk about in the book that some US social scientists are beginning to talk about. Instead of a black and white society, it is moving to as a three-tier society of whites, honourary whites, and blacks.

AMT: So to what extent are brown people responsible for perpetuating the idea that a lighter skin a good idea?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: Oh, it's a huge responsibility and this book—

AMT: Where does that come from?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: It predates colonialism, but it certainly was perpetuated through colonialism and the idea that the fair English skin or the fair French skin is not only an ideal of beauty, but also an ideal of moral fortitude and bravery and courage.

AMT: Well, I want to look at a few examples of brown experiences around the world. You went to a hospitality training school in the Philippines. What did you see?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: What I saw was how young Filipino men and women are taught pretty much by the very young age that their future lies in the service industry and many of these people had no chance of good jobs in the Philippines at all. The only way out of poverty is to get a job somewhere else. It's all about working somewhere else.

AMT: And it's all about working somewhere else as serving someone?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: In the service industry.

AMT: Basically the Philippines has become a nation reliant on the remittances-- it exports labour the way some people export other material goods.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: Absolutely. It's almost ten percent of the GDP and it is a very regulated industry. I mean, it's hard to meet a Filipino person who hasn't worked abroad or doesn't know someone who's worked abroad or who longs to work abroad, but it's usually in the service industries or in industries where local populations outside of the Philippines, don't want to do the job anymore. So, hotel cleaning service, or in the kitchen or, the bellhops in hotels and I refer particularly to cruise ships which are largely staffed by Filipino workers.

AMT: And of course, we know domestic workers here, nannies and personal caregivers for the elderly now.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: Everywhere in the world. When I was in the Philippines and I would see a woman carrying a child that looked like her and I was actually quite surprised because I'm used to the Filipino workers looking after children that look nothing like them whether that's in Hong Kong, in Canada, or in Qatar.

AMT: If we go from the Philippines to Sri Lanka, another country where the economy relies on exporting labourers, many Sri Lankans have darker skin than people from the Philippines. How does that influence the kind of work they end up doing overseas?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: Oh, it actually influences that hugely. Sri Lanka is not quite as organized as the Philippines has been. I mean for Sri Lankans, Philippines is the role model for how you handle the export of labour. But Sri Lankan domestic workers particularly tend to come from poorer and rural areas, so they're not very well educated. Sometimes they've never seen a washing machine or a dishwasher and on top of all of that, they tend to be much darker in skin and therefore less preferred in a number of settings because it would be like a hollow victory to boss around someone who is that dark, whereas to boss around a Filipino who is lighter skinned, it's some kind of moral victory.

AMT: One of the places overseas that workers from South Asia end up is Qatar. What were the conditions like at the camps you visited that housed those migrant workers?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: It's probably the worst. The place where they live is largely six to eight per room in very small rooms. So, there are lineups for the kitchen, probably like 20 people lining up for one cooker. I talked to a number of people who said that they came under one contract and when they arrived in Qatar, they got something completely different. They had no resources to complain and they felt they were stuck.

AMT: We did some stories here on The Current about the migrant workers in Qatar working on venues for World Cup soccer and the exploitation of those workers.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: The incidence of heart attacks, for example, is very high because people just collapse from exhaustion or a heart attack.

AMT: You use these examples in Qatar and Doha, but these are Arab Emirates ruled by people who are brown. What are you observing there, what are you saying?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: I'm seeing a number of things there. As I argue in the book, racism is a universal experience. Everybody can be racist, everybody is racist on some level, but what I see there is a maniacally ambitious government and money, and the dehumanization of the lives of the poor masses. I mean just because someone is brown does not mean that they will uplift someone who is falling behind. I mean, the idea that people sort of lift as they climb is largely a myth.

AMT: Is there evidence that the children of parents who are migrant workers who are gone for long periods of time, are able to access new opportunities because of their parents' sacrifices?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: There are studies that prove that, particularly women who work abroad in the service industry and domestic workers, tend to invest heavily in their families and communities so that their families, the children definitely benefit from better schools, having a slightly better standard of living, maybe a better diet, all of that. Children who are well fed in a physical way but not necessarily emotionally always-- because many women I spoke to, particularly in Hong Kong, talked about the pain of not seeing the children sometimes for two or three years and only seeing them through Facebook or through Facetime or some other sort of modern technology.

AMT: I'm asking about the effect on the kids, but in fact the effect on their moms is huge, or their dads. They’re just so far away.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: It depends on the industry. For the domestic workers it is 83 percent female, so this is largely female driven whereas the construction workers tend to be male dominated but, yes a sense of ice sense of isolation. In a place like Hong Kong, there is a certain narrative around the Filipino women that is highly sexualized, for example. They tend to have to deal with that on top of the social stigma that is in itself, a struggle to become a worker but also an independent, respectable woman who is not seen as a sexual object.

AMT: We've been talking about brown people in the developing world. What does it mean to be a brown person in Canada?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: It largely depends because I do think that if you are a brown Muslim, it is slightly different from if you are a brown Sikh, even though we sometimes get confused for each other [laughs]. In the west, I noticed two different experiences. There is one that is specific to the Muslim community because I do think the faith self has been racialized into a darker skin colour, but it's also the idea of cheap labour that again, we are the people who drive the cabs, and work at the checkout, and at the coffee shops and—

AMT: Migrant agricultural labourers, too. We just talked to a filmmaker who did a whole documentary on farmer kids in the Leamington area, they're all brown skinned and they're hidden. We don't see them, we don't know who they are.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: No. Initially that was going to be my focus on the chapter in Canada but then the elections happened and I really want to include that [laughs].

AMT: That's interesting because what you're saying is that there are two things happening here. There is the class issue, still the work that other people don't want to do, but it's not solely migrant workers on farms, it's also people who are here. You actually talk about the bus rides at night in Toronto.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: Yes, I mean if you were to take the night bus along Yonge Street or Bloor after the subways stop working, at 3 or 4 am, you notice that the majority of the people on that bus are migrant workers who are about to go to a bakery, or a coffee shop, or the airport to start like a five o'clock morning shift. And also if you take a bus that goes through some of the tonier parts of Toronto like Rosedale, or Forest Hill, you'll also see that the majority of the bus riders are domestic workers who are about to go to clean or take care of the children of the upper crust of society.

AMT: So in what you have documented in other countries, you found right here at home.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: I find a lot of similarities. I live also in a building where a lot of aging population and there's an army of Filipino and Indonesians and sometimes Somali and Sudanese care workers and security and all sorts of people who are doing work that maybe a few generations ago, would have gone to what we would have called the working class white.

AMT: And of course your point is that it's disproportionate, that even though we are a country, in this city, a city of immigrants and many cultures, that those jobs are disproportionately filled with people with brown skin.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: I would argue that, yes.

AMT: But then there is the fact that regardless of economics, your brown skin becomes a political wedge issue.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: It becomes a political wedge issue whether it is on a federal level or even on some local level. I talk about Brampton, Ontario as a community that has over the years become browner, and the anxiety of older, white residents there that there is a kind of white siege or surrender to this mass migration of, you know, swarthy looking people which is not new and in fact, echoes conversations that were happening in America in the early 20th century. It is frighteningly similar to what was going on at the time.

AMT: What impact has bill C-51, now known as the anti-terrorism act, what effect has that had on brown communities in Canada?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: I think it created a sense that there's a two-tier citizenship or the two-tier Canadian. There is the Canadian who is born here and largely white, and there's a Canadian who is naturalized and we’re all immigrants in this country, but even though it doesn't really specify any particular sort of race or religion, I think there was an understanding that it is really meant to target Muslim and Arab communities.

AMT: Going back to suspicions from 9/11?

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: Going back to 9/11, yes.

AMT: It's interesting-- you probably have caught the news in the last two weeks out of the US. Somebody sitting on an airplane, having a conversation, using the word Inshallah and next thing you know they're pulled off the plane because someone heard the Arab language. And then the case of another man sitting doing mathematical equations and the woman next to him who is described as blonde, complaining, worried that he's somehow doing a bomb equation. He turns out to be an economics professor of Italian descent who is quote, unquote “swarthy”. What does that tell you? That speaks right to the kinds of things you talk about in your book.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: Right. Traveling while brown is probably the expression that our skin colour, the languages that we speak, in the case of the first traveler who said Inshallah sort of sets us as suspicious just by being that having the skin colour and speaking and not doing anything—

AMT: You don't even have to speak.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: You don’t have to speak, you could just be sitting there jotting notes and the fact that these airlines have been able to take off these passengers, or just indulge in an investigation because someone spoke their native tongue, I find pretty shocking because they are caving in to fear.

AMT: Do you see things changing? You've tracked this and documented a wide swath of people whose skin colour affects their prospects, their futures, the way they're treated. Do you see that changing in more enlightened societies like--I don't what I'm asking. It’s a lot to ask.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: [laughs] I see it getting worse if anything. I find it very surprising that after eight years of Barack Obama, the conversation around race in America has degenerated to the level of Donald Trump and the racial and ethnic baiting that he has been indulging is completely unfettered. Despite the fact there is resistance to his rhetoric, it worries me that someone could use that inflammatory language and could pick on communities and say they don't belong here and still be the frontrunner in a presidential election.

AMT: Because I'm guessing when Barack Obama became President of the US you saw that as a real step forward when it came to the issue of politics and race.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: We all remember the post racial society that we lived in for like two minutes. Having a black American president has not changed the situation of African-Americans in the US dramatically. In fact, as I'm sure you're aware, in the last few years if you're a black male in the US, you're a target.

AMT: So, really you can have the economic and the educational advancement but by the sheer colour of your skin, all of that can be negated depending on where you are and who's across the counter from you.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, education and class will shield you to some extent, but walking down the street late at night, I would not be an author or university professor, I’d be just a middle-aged brown, suspicious looking man. Period.

AMT: Thanks for coming in.

KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

CW: That was Kamal Al-Solaylee speaking with Anna-Maria Tremonti last May about his book Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means to Everyone. He is an Associate Professor of Journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. That's our program for today. I'm Connie Walker, thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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August 17, 2016 full episode transcript

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