Taking Up Space with Eternity Martis
In January, we kicked off our third season of No Little Plans for Community Foundations of Canada via St. Joseph Communications.
Through interviews with real people and policy advisors, and academics, we’ve been tackling one big question: how can Canada achieve the United Nations’ seventeen Sustainable Development Goals by 2030?
We launched this season with a focused look at systemic anti-Black racism in Canada’s public schools.
We know that the bias against Black students doesn’t end with a high school diploma, so I reached out to someone who literally wrote the book on racism in colleges and beyond.
Eternity Martis is a journalist and author who published her memoir, They Said This Would Be Fun: Race, Campus Life, and Growing Up last year. Eternity has been an advocate for progressive changes in journalism, especially when it comes to how outlets speak about race and racism.
For the past several years, she has fought for publications to capitalize the “B” when referring to Black people. This work has resulted in changes to the style guides in newsrooms across Canada. Eternity recently developed and began teaching a course called Reporting Race: The Black Community in the Media at Ryerson University. With this course, she hopes to address harmful reporting practices and build cultural awareness among current and future journalists.
Eternity grew up in Toronto and has family from South Asia and Jamaica. I asked her about her experience growing up Black in a racially diverse community, and then moving to attend university in Kingston, Ontario.
In your book, you wrote that growing up with the side of your family that emigrated from Pakistan, they didn’t really refer to you as “Black.” Was there a point when you began to intentionally incorporate ‘Blackness’ into your identity?
To everyone else around me, it seemed that I was identifiable. I would go to Moxie's with my mom, and the server would ask, you know, “Do you need separate bills?” Or my mom would be having conversations with strangers in line at the store and they’d say, “Where's your daughter?” and I'd be standing right there. I was very aware that I did not look like the rest of my family.
But in high school, it seemed to be this time when people were starting to play with multiracial or biracial identities. And so, I felt really caught in the middle because I came into this experience of high school not really knowing where I stood in terms of my identity at all. No one at home spoke about it.
It was there when I started to realize that when I spoke to the Black girls, they saw me as Black. My peers saw me as Black or mixed or something, but it was blackness. It was never brownness.
How did you manage the shock of moving from Toronto to a whiter, less diverse city?
... With a lot of denial?
I was the first one in my family to go away, to leave the house and even go to university or college. So when I got there, and I'm hearing all these things like, ‘There's a Black girl on our floor.’ Or I'm getting groceries and someone's like, ‘You know, we don't have a lot of Black people here,’ I'm laughing. I think it's funny. Like, I'm kind of uncomfortable – but this is sort of wild for me not understanding that, you know, it gets worse.
But then it got to a point where it went from laughing, to an uncomfortable laugh and not knowing how to respond, to me trying to stand up for myself, to me being incapable of standing up and losing my voice because it always gets worse.
At school at Western, in like the whitest place ever, I found other Black people and I found other people of colour. So, I was grateful because I don't think I would've made it through without them – but I wasn’t finding them in the laughing phase, I was finding them after I had a complete existential crisis.
In your book, you discussed how, in order to be taken seriously, Black folks and other POC need to achieve a higher level of ‘respectability’ than their white counterparts. How do you think this has influenced your approach to school, and now, work?
I didn't come into the space aware of ‘respectability politics’ in the way that most Black folks did. I learned it from my grandfather. Not that he called them respectability politics, but you know, he came to this country many, many years ago when a lot of people in Canada didn't want immigrants here.
Understanding that you have to do better, you have to dress better, you have to speak better than everybody else – that was something I kind of learned, without it being said that you have to be respectable. There was an assumption.
So for me, it came to kind of trying to make myself smaller in these spaces. Don't take up too much space. Don't say where you're from. Make sure that when you speak, there's a “G” at the end of your “I-N-G.” It was all these things that I was so concerned about because people thought – automatically – that I was an idiot. And that's how racism really operates, right? Even without me speaking and not taking up space, there was still an assumption I was dumb.
It wasn't until I graduated and realized I didn't want to be that person, that I started speaking up regardless.
But I think it's still a reality – do you speak up at work or do you make a face at work and then suddenly, everyone's monitoring you? And your career and your education is at risk? It's a tough decision to make, but I don't know if ‘respectability’ has gotten us anywhere, really.
In the year we’ve had since your book’s release, have you noticed any changes in how racism within institutions is discussed and written about?
I published this book literally two weeks before everything completely shut down. My book tour was canceled and all of that. I was so concerned that we weren't going to be talking about this.
But then we had this other pandemic of Black death going on over the summer. I don't know if it's because COVID forced everyone to stay home – and one of the things that you do in your home is read – but the institution of education has been taken up in ways that I haven't seen with previous Black Lives Matter movements, or the reaction to those movements. So it seemed to be the right time to be talking about it.
Several times a week, I go talk to universities about race on campus. It seems like, definitely, there's student activism going on. It seems like things are moving slowly. Reports are coming out. They're considering the collection of race-based data. So all these things are moving ever so slowly, but I'm at least happy that it's being taken up.
How do you reconcile the idea that schools are where we have this huge concentration of people that are active and ready to get things going, but are also still these large institutions that are run by the old guard?
It's a bit ironic that students are doing all this unpaid emotional labor, especially for their universities right now – but are paying to get an education. There is a huge weight on their shoulders to be activists, to speak on behalf of the university. If they want something done, they have to do it themselves.
Right now, the way that we do that, especially for students, is using social media. It's coming together, writing letters, it's talking, having spaces. But all of that is incredibly exhausting. And I think that universities, historically, have never taken accountability for the environment that they've created around racism, around homophobia, transphobia, sexism – rape culture!
And I think to even acknowledge that has been an issue – it's like admitting that they were at fault. But the reality is that institutional racism is a thing, and that’s okay but they won't even get to that point. So I don't even think that universities understand what it means to own up to the fact that racism is an inevitable part of being in an institution.
So if we can't get there, we have all these students who are going to burn out trying to fight the good fight. And I want all students – who feel that they want to – I want them to do that, but they also need allies! And they can only get so far. If the decision makers are making six figures a year and don't even understand the amount of Black students they have, or what their needs are, we're not going to get very far.
You’ve influenced the way publications write about Black people and you’re also developing and instructing a course on ‘Reporting on Race’ at Ryerson University. Why do you feel that education in these areas is so important?
I think because when we talk about race – police brutality, all of that – we're talking about it as it happens today. But I think that if you asked Canadians, even Black Canadians, ‘What is our history?’ very few people would know. We don’t know what our history is. We don’t know what our power is. We can’t see what has stayed the same throughout history, we don’t know what’s changed.
One place that I think could do a whole lot better is journalism. There are numerous theories that support the idea that, if you are a journalist, people perceive the world – other groups and marginalized groups – based on what we put out, based on how our own biases play a role in our reporting.
If journalism students, and just journalists in general, don't understand the history of systemic racism and how it affects their reporting – don't understand their bias, haven't even looked at how the media has played a massive role in perpetuating stereotypes of Black communities – how are you going to do better?
The course that I've created – and I think a lot of other instructors are doing this right now – is to remind people of that history. So we don't make the same mistakes, but also so that we can start to be accountable for it and learn new ways of doing better.
You also write with an intersectional lens, bringing in LGBTQ2S+ perspectives and Feminist perspectives as they pertain to racism. Could you share how these different groups can be impacted by systemic racism in different ways?
Yeah, absolutely. In my Reporting on Race class, we looked at Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Feminist Theory, and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality.
So when it comes to the LGBTQ2S+ community, we're looking at serious issues of mental health, poverty, exclusion from spaces, loneliness, the epidemic of violence against trans people, especially Black trans women. There are all these issues that are going on in the community, systemic issues.
Through our reporting, we're not really seeing them unless it's in a reaction to something. So say it's Pride Month and then we have stories about Pride. There's a huge epidemic still of HIV, especially among Black gay men.
When it comes to women, we're not talking about young women. We're talking about domestic violence, and our strategies and prevention programs are about domestic violence. But we're not looking at intimate partner violence. And the most at-risk age group are young women, young girls, women ages 15 to 24.
Why are we not talking about where they're at in this in quarantine and lockdown? There are so many different kinds of intersecting factors and identities that we're not talking about as journalists. We haven't gotten to a place yet even where we're honoring the language people use to describe themselves – pronouns, names. There’s still a ton of work to be done there.
If you could talk to your 15-year-old self, what piece of advice would you give to her?
I would tell her to take some time to understand who she is. And not be so concerned with what other people think, enjoy your damn emo music; it is okay to be who you are and to spend less time worrying about that.
Because I think that when 15-year-old Eternity turns into 18-year-old Eternity, part of the reason she moves away is because she wants to be somebody else. So I would say, be okay with who you are, be proud of who you are and who you are is perfect. You don't have to fit in. You will find the people that are meant for you.
What’s next for you?
I’ve had lots of thoughts during isolation, many thoughts – but ‘what's next’ was not necessarily one of them! The TV and film rights for the book have been sold, so I'm hoping that we can start getting moving on that.
I'm starting to think about book two. For the next six months, I'm doing reporting on the lack of black jurors in the Ontario criminal justice system and jury system and what that means for all of us.
You identified yourself as a Black emo kid in your younger years. Could you give me your top 3 bands at the time?
I thought you'd never ask!
Fall Out Boy, I don't care if I get hate. I actually had tickets to go see them, but you know, COVID.
My Chemical Romance... also had tickets. I want a Broadway show of “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge.” I'm saying it. I want to be part of it whenever it happens.
And From First To Last; I was a Sonny Moore fan before he became Skrillex.
I’d keep My Chemical Romance, I'm going to sub out FFTL with Brand New. And honestly, I'm not even going to front. I really liked Panic! At The Disco.
Oh, I forgot about Panic! At The Disco! I’m switching FFTL for Panic! At The Disco.
