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Unrest in U.S. brings up painful memories for Black Orillia woman

Rachel Scheirich says she 'always felt like an alien' while growing up in Washago; She says Canada 'has a long way to go'
2020-06-08 Rachel Scheinrich and Lincoln Hodges
Rachel Scheirich is shown with her father, Lincoln Hodges. Supplied photo

When Rachel Scheirich hears people tell her they’re sorry for what she’s going through, she appreciates the sentiment but can’t help but find it a bit strange.

Anti-Black racism is nothing new to the 25-year-old Orillia woman. Her parents — Lincoln Hodges, who is from Jamaica, and Beth Morris-Hodges, from Ontario — met in the Caribbean and moved to Canada together when Morris-Hodges was pregnant with Scheirich.

“The word that comes to mind is ‘alien.’ I always felt like an alien,” said Scheirich, who grew up in Washago. “I was the only person who looked like I did. There was always a feeling of otherness."

She recently made a lengthy Facebook post about her experiences growing up as a Black person in this area. As of Monday afternoon, it had been shared more than 400 times.

It detailed the racial slurs directed at her, the time she was barred from running for student council co-president with a gay friend, and having police show up randomly at her family's home "because people would call them hoping to catch my father doing something wrong, which they of course never did because he wasn't," she wrote.

She also recalled watching a group of men attack her dad "with the goal of making him physically defend himself so they could call the police on him."

"I remember them yelling and pushing him. I remember watching one of them grab my dad by his throat. He couldn't do anything, because any mark left on these men would be used as evidence against him," she wrote. "It would be their word against his after all, and they were friends with the police. It was terrifying, and although I was a child, I understood what was going on. All I can remember doing is screaming."

While those difficult memories have always been there, they became painfully clear when Scheirich saw the video of George Floyd, a Black man, being arrested last month in Minneapolis, Minn., as now-former officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on the man's neck for more than eight minutes, even as he lay unresponsive.

Scheirich couldn't watch the entire video.

"It triggered a panic attack," she said. "All I could see was my dad's face on George Floyd's body."

That is what led her to share her story on Facebook, even though the last time she posted about her experience, a couple of years ago, she was called a "cretin" and ended up removing some of her friends. This time, the reaction was "the polar opposite," she said, and she wants people to see it as a learning opportunity.

"I hope they just get that maybe they might need to take a look at the world as they know it and think that it might be different from how they see it.

"I need to keep in mind that even though it's been obvious to me for a long time that things have been like this, that's not the case for everybody."

That ignorance might be why some people are responding to the massive demonstrations in the United States with comments about Canada being better than its southern neighbour when it comes to racism.

"That is so far from the truth," Scheirich said, noting that was another point she wanted to prove with her post. "I'm very thankful I'm Canadian, I'm proud to be Canadian, but we're not perfect here. We have a long way to go. We're very similar, but not the same. A lot of things that affect the United States socially affect us, too."

She also doesn't want people using the protests that have turned violent as a distraction from the cause.

"It keeps happening over and over," she said of Black people dying at the hands of police. "People held vigils and demonstrations and peaceful protests, and it didn't matter. It wasn't enough.

"What happened to George Floyd was so blatant and obvious. Derek Chauvin — you could tell he felt comfortable with what he was doing and that he felt he wasn't going to face consequences.

"Now people are going, 'I don't understand why you can't protest peacefully.' We were."

She believes people can change, though, and she wants them to acknowledge their own prejudices, as uncomfortable as that might be.

"I just want people to know that it's OK to learn and grow. If you said or did ignorant things in your past, you can't change that, but you can change things going forward," she said.

"It sounds so simple, but I just want people to see Black people as people. I just don't understand why you would look at somebody who looks like you and judge them as a person and then you'd look at someone else and judge them by the colour of their skin."


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Nathan Taylor

About the Author: Nathan Taylor

Nathan Taylor is the desk editor for Village Media's central Ontario news desk in Simcoe County and Newmarket.
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