Business owner brings lived experience, activism to Anti-Racism task force

October 22, 2020 · 0 Comments

It’s as vivid in her mind’s eye today as when she was just entering her teens.

On her 13^th birthday, family friends surprised her with a brand-new dress and a night out at a restaurant in the city. To say she was excited as she walked into the dining room might be something of an understatement, and she proudly walked in looking forward to the evening ahead.

The regular din of the restaurant went silent as they crossed the threshold, and the manager almost immediately approached them.

“Non-whites are not allowed in this restaurant,” said the proprietor as a cloud descended on the celebrations, and they were ushered out the door.

“I was excited to eat in a restaurant for the very first time and we were shooed out like bugs,” recalls Aurora business owner Mae Khamissa. “It was my birthday, I was all excited, but I remember it was one of the most embarrassing days of my life.”

Unfortunately, this was an all-too-common occurrence for Mae and her family when she grew up just outside of Johannesburg at the height of South Africa’s Apartheid era. Now, it is a lived experience she is bringing to the table as a member of Aurora’s recently constituted Anti-Black Racism & Anti-Racism Task Force.

The Town of Aurora announced earlier this month that Ms. Khamissa, who co-owns Omars Shoes with husband Raz, would be one of six citizen members of the group which is tasked to “develop and discuss strategies to eliminate all racism in our community and in the municipal corporation.”

Joining her on the panel are Phiona Durrant, Noor El-Dassouki, Keenan Hull, Mark Lewis, Tricia Wright, and Councillor Harold Kim.

“This is something I am very passionate about and when I heard this was happening, I was quite eager to want to be a part of it,” Ms. Khamissa explains. “Just dealing with what I dealt with as a child and growing up as a teen, this was a sure thing for me and something I really wanted to be a part of.”

Ms. Khamissa grew up in a time and a place where non-Whites were treated as second-class citizens. Earlier generations of her family originally hailed from India before her great-grandfather settled in South Africa as a labourer. There, kids with darker skin had to deal with the harsh realities of Apartheid early on.

Their schools, she says, were made of asbestos and riddled with broken glass. What they were only able to learn in the classroom what was gleaned from tattered textbooks, often missing pages, handed down from Whites-only schools.

“In the late 1970s, we started boycotting schools because we wanted a better education and we wanted to get somewhere in life,” she says. “The percentage of us getting into universities was also minimal. It got better at my stage, but for my brother who wanted to be a doctor in the 60s, it was like a 1 per cent chance of getting into university. In our case, my siblings had to leave school and make their way so we could survive.

“My brother fled South Africa in the 1960s and then came to Canada. He built a life for himself here and then sent for us knowing that we were under Apartheid rule and there was not much room for us to get a higher education. We immigrated when I was 15 and when we landed at Pearson, one by one we went up to the counter. There was a beautiful blonde White immigration officer there who looked at me and said, ‘Okay, honey. Your turn.’ I stood there and just looked around; I was so oblivious that someone with white skin could be so kind to me that I didn’t realize she was talking to me. Then, she turned around and asked my dad, ‘Does she understand English,’ and he realized what was going on.

“That was my first experience of what it felt like to be treated equally, as one. It is embedded in your brain that you’re not good enough because of your skin colour.”

As a Canadian citizen, Ms. Khamissa says she has largely had a positive experience in Canada, and within Aurora, when it comes to race. Her three children faced a few bumps on the road, including her son who was a minor hockey player, but many of these instances, she said, were examples of learned behaviour by children.

And this too is something that needs to be tackled, she says.

“Times have changed a lot.” she says. “It’s great the more diverse you become, but, at the same time, you will experience more racism as well. It is almost like with what is going on [in the United States] it has become almost normal to be openly racist and it is so prevalent now that we are seeing it more and more in our communities. People say nasty things to people of colour and in stores, in parking lots – and I don’t want us to be going backward; we need to be going forward and we need to make sure we remain positive.

“With this Task Force, we need to make sure we remain positive, that we tackle anything that happens within the Town and we know what is going on. If there are issues in schools, we need to be able to deal with that.”

By Brock Weir
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter