Keynote Speech on the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

By Maurice Tomlinson
March 24, 2011

In this speech, delivered to the Toronto Police Service on International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, AIDS-Free World Legal Advisor Maurice Tomlinson calls for all groups subjected to discrimination to coordinate their efforts to end hate.

Permit me to express my sincere thanks to Division 23 of the Toronto Police Service for inviting me to address this very important topic; my dear friend Pierre Brouard, Deputy-Director of the Centre of the Study of AIDS at the University of Pretoria for providing invaluable research guidance for this presentation; my organization AIDS-Free World for facilitating my presence here today; and all of you for being present to demonstrate your commitment to working towards the elimination of the scourge of racial discrimination that still stalks our human family.

I have been advised that this year’s focus for the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination will be on the often invisible Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) community which transects all other communities and visible minorities. This is by no means an un-contentious focus because, while some view "gay" (an admittedly clumsy shorthand for LGBTI individuals) as the new "black" others, find even this designation and ranking of discrimination racist. To them this says to the world that homophobia is wrong because white gays and lesbians are now being treated like blacks and it is this — and not the evil of homophobia — that we must seek to challenge. Instead of this unhelpful formulation, it is the intersectionality between racism and homophobia that needs to be addressed, not some artificial ranking of hate.

Whatever your views, the fact is that even after over 60 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which proclaimed "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" and 45 years of this International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the topic of what constitutes discrimination still divides nations and peoples. This day, which remembers the savage extra-judicial killing by police of 69 people in Sharpville, South Africa, as they peacefully demonstrated against the apartheid "pass laws," was designed according to the UN General Assembly to call on the international community to redouble its efforts to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination.

Yet, while much progress has been made in this noble quest, for example the apartheid system in South Africa has been dismantled; a universal Convention to fight racism has still not yet been ratified. The UN, ever hopeful, claims that this International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is nearing "universal ratification," yet still, in all regions, too many individuals, communities and societies suffer from the injustice and stigma that racism brings.

My experience has been that racial discrimination lurks in even the most tolerant societies and manifests itself in subtle but insidious ways. For example, despite having traveled the world over, I have only had the "N" bomb used against me when I had the privilege of studying at the University of Calgary as a Canadian Commonwealth Scholar from 1996-1998. I have also experienced that some forms of racism can be downright silly. For example, the Italian Prime Minister notoriously commented on US President Obama’s "nice tan."

Similarly, I have experienced that discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression can range from the sublimely subtle (such as government officials in my country arguing that they criminalize homosexual conduct but not homosexuals as a class) to the ridiculously crass (such as Uganda’s attempted imposition of the death penalty on "habitual" gays).

But what happens when these two extreme forms of intolerance, racism and homophobia, collide? And what must a multicultural country like Canada, which is now home to many representatives of other nationalities, do to address these problems? At AIDS-Free World we believe that AIDS discriminates because we discriminate. Therefore, ending discrimination isn't just a kindness — it's a matter of public health. Any group that finds itself the target of discrimination, anywhere in the world, will score lower on health indicators than those in the mainstream. For example, the HIV prevalence among Jamaican men who have sex with men is 32% as against 1.6% among the general population. And if you are a member of two or more groups that are subjected to discrimination, your health (including access to preventive and curative medicines and care) will be multiply threatened. This is the reality of AIDS.

In regards to homophobia and racism and the connection between these two it is important to recognize that racist people can be both homophobic and non-homophobic and homophobic people can be both racist and non-racist. Essentially most human beings, however, want the same things: the right to simply exist, the ability to do meaningful work to make themselves self-sufficient, the right to express their mutual adult love in their various relationship configurations, the right to relax and have recreation, the right to normal personal and social protections, and the right to have a say in their governance.