{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"She They Us ","title":"I Refuse to Disappear: Racialized Women Fighting for Space in Canada","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3653,"description":"Season 3 Episode 5I Refuse to Disappear: Racialized Women Fighting for Space in CanadaIn this episode of She They Us, host Andrea Reimer continues the series exploring how women and gender-diverse people create belonging in housing systems that were never designed for them. Building on the previous episode’s conversation with four Black women, Andrea traces the deeper roots of Canada’s housing inequities, roots grounded not in a neutral “free market,” but in policy choices about who was permitted to belong. In this episode, she turns to the histories of Chinese immigration in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and then those racialized women who came from the 1960s onward after decades of exclusion in Canadian immigration policy. Their experiences  as Chinese, Indo-Caribbean and Palestinian women reveal how exclusion, displacement, and segregation shaped not only neighbourhoods, but generations of families seeking safety, stability, and home.Andrea speaks first with Catherine Clement, a community historian whose work on Chinese-Canadian memory awakened her own connection to a heritage she had long pushed aside. Catherine walks us through the stark realities of the Chinese Exclusion Act and head tax era: a bachelor society of nearly 50,000 men and just over 1,300 women, forced family separation, and housing conditions so grim that many preferred the street to the overcrowded rooms where up to four men shared a single bed. She reveals how the effects of those laws continued long after repeal, through lingering prejudice, restricted mobility, and the silence families carried as they tried to build new lives in a country that had kept them at the margins.The episode then shifts to Toronto, where Ceta Ramkhalawansingh, an immigrant from Trinidad, describes how she became an “accidental housing activist” in 1971 when her student co-op discovered that their entire block was slated for redevelopment. What followed was a years-long organizing effort; students, newcomers,...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/FyS5L0aokTEqw3M81F3NG-1pIj_wjWeAlkjVfYfKmW0/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8xNTUx/NjZjZDZjMTYzNjFm/YjU5OGIyMzhhMmU2/YjA2Ny5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}