Hamilton racism survey provides insight but is it enough to move forward?

The results of a survey conducted by the Hamilton Anti-Racism Resource Centre (HARRC) provided some valuable insight into racism in our community, but is it enough to move things forward?

The results of a survey conducted by the Hamilton Anti-Racism Resource Centre (HARRC) provided some valuable insight into racism in our community, but is it enough to move things forward?

On Tuesday (Oct. 29) City of Hamilton staff and community partners presented the survey findings and key community recommendations for the HARRC, as well as engaged participants in a focus group exercise.

The survey found that 79 per cent of respondents have personally experienced or witnessed racism or racism-related issues in the past year in the community.

Of those who participated in the survey, 46 per cent identified as being racialized.

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One of the objectives of the survey and the public engagement event was to help the HARRC review and refocus their resources to better serve the community.

The HARRC is a pilot project involving the City of Hamilton, McMaster University, and the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion (HCCI). It launched in April 2018 but was put on hold early this year “to allow the partners to review and renew plans to achieve its envisioned goals.”

The survey asked questions about what services respondents feel HARRC should offer and how the operational model should look.

With less than half of the respondents identifying as belonging to the community HARRC intends to serve, it brings into question the usefulness of the survey in moving forward.

It’s a glaring gap in the survey data for the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion’s (HCCI) interim executive director, Kojo Damptey.

Damptey questions whether a survey on lived experiences of racism where more than half of respondents do not consider themselves racialized can really be looked to to form the basis of a group designed to support racialized groups and combat racism.

“If we are wanting to create an anti-racism [organization],” Damptey said in an interview with inthehammer, “How are we ensuring that the perspectives of the 46 per cent and their voices are being heard and taken into account?

“Moving forward, there are certain things we need to be asking ourselves,” he said and suggested that there needs to be some form of aggregation of the data to extrapolate the necessary information.

While Damptey questioned whether the survey provided the kind of information needed to move the HARRC forward in a way that would best serve the community, he felt the public engagement was important in giving a broad group of people the chance to listen.

“It’s very important to hear what residents have to say,” he said. “All three partners have a lot to consider going forward.”

HCCI, he said, is still dedicated to making HARRC work for the community.

“There’s still more groundwork to be done but we will all sit down together with this information and move forward. We are committed to making HARRC a reality,” he said.

Tensions in the city have been running high for months now as the community has been grappling with the issues of hate and racism. A number of protests, including one last month at Mohawk College out front of an event where Maxime Bernier appeared, have turned violent.

One troubling finding of the survey was that the most common place where people experienced or witnessed racism in the past year did so in public spaces. Also, the experiences with racism, whether personally experienced or witnessed, were most often identified to have occurred more than once in the past year, according to the survey.

The feedback that was given by the community to City staff during the focus groups, as well as the survey findings will be consolidated as alternatives for consideration for City Council.

City staff will prepare a Recommendation Report and present it to Audit, Finance & Administration Sub Committee on December 5, 2019, according to a City press release.