Humans of Burnaby

Acceptance (2 of 2)

I don’t want us to just tolerate each other. When I attended a conference as a speaker, one of the other speakers was Baltej Singh, the first RCMP officer to wear a turban. There was so much attention around that. I remember him saying, “People tolerated me, but I don’t want them to tolerate me, I want them to accept me.” 

Because when you tolerate someone, it’s saying, “I don’t like that you’re Muslim, I don’t like that you’re female, I don’t like you being successful in your life but I’ll tolerate it.” You don’t want that, you want people to say, “I accept you for being a Muslim woman who is being successful and doing incredible things.” That’s my long term goal - to be able to change the narrative into accepting each other.

There is a purpose for what I’m doing. I don’t know what it is yet but I just want to do better for the world even if it’s just one person at a time, I know it’s cheesy. I want to change people’s perspectives even if it’s just one person.

When something happens here, people are so shocked. They say, “-in Canada? Racism doesn’t happen here, we are a diverse country.” And yes we are but every tree has a few bad apples. 

Why are people being ignorant? Why are they racist? It all goes back to education. Teachers are the ones that feed the minds of the youth, and parents as well. We emigrated from places all over the world so everyone has different perspectives and ideologies of what’s right and what’s wrong. We need to figure out what they are, where they come from, and fix it. But first we have to get that conversation going.

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