Virtual influencers are becoming more popular and prevalent everyday. A full-blown industry has sprung up around them – an industry with agencies and companies dedicated to creating and managing them, with some of the top personas earning into the millions annually.

But our guest today has noticed a troubling pattern – many virtual influencers are crafted as young, women of color. But their creators? Often men with different racial identities, who work at marketing agencies.

Jul Parke is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information specializing in social media platforms, digital racism, virtual influencers, and AI phenomena. She is currently a visiting scholar at NYU.

Jul’s doctoral research explores what motivates companies and creators to produce these virtual, racialized women, which she says is a new form of commercializing gender and racial identity in digital spaces.

As we enter the world of AI proliferation, it seems virtual influencers are here to stay. There are at least 200 of these digital personalities out there today, and platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are rolling out new tools that enable everyday users to craft their own virtual personas.

Given the absence of a governing framework for non-humans, the rise of virtual influencers on social media raises a whole host of urgent ethical questions about authenticity online.

Visit here for a full list of the virtual influencers and resources discussed in this episode. 

Editor's note: This podcast episode is the first in our Don't Call Me Resilient live event series. Our next event — "AI-generated influencers: A new wave of cultural exploitation?" is coming up on Wednesday February 5th in Toronto — and we'd love for you to be there! Attendance is free. Click here to learn more and save your seat! 

Food is so much more than what we eat.

It is, of course, nourishment — the food we put into our body to fuel ourselves. It can be joyful, like the the smell of pancakes wafting through the house on a Sunday morning, or when loved ones gather around a feast at the dinner table. It can also be deeply personal and defining, connecting us to ancestral history, and cultural and racial identities. And it is also political — especially in the United States — which is the key takeaway in a new book by law scholar Andrea Freeman. 

Last fall, we sat down with Andrea to discuss her book in the first conversation of our new live events series from call-me-resilient.simplecast.com">Don't Call Me Resilient. In this new episode, we bring you an edited version of that conversation.

The book — Ruin their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United State from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch (Metropolitan Books/Raincoast) — is a history of the use of food in American law and politics as a weapon of conquest and control.

Freeman is a professor at Southwestern University Law School in Los Angeles. Much of her work explores food oppression and examines how food and law policy are influenced by corporate interests, which disproportionately impact and harm marginalized communities.

In her book, Prof. Freeman argues that food law and policy have created and maintained racial and society inequality in the U.S., which she says amounts to "food oppression."

Our conversation was wide-ranging. We covered some fascinating topics, including the love/hate relationship with frybread, how milk became a symbol of white supremacy and how the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been using nutrition programs — including "government cheese" and the National School Lunch Program — as a dumping ground for unwanted agricultural surpluses since the Great Depression.

Freeman's book also explains how this longstanding oppression has produced racial health disparities, resulting in higher rates of diabetes, disease and even premature death among Black, Indigenous and Latino communities.

Although the picture is bleak, Freeman — a constitutional law scholar — provides some potential avenues for change, vis-a-vis reparations and the U.S. Constitution.

In her concluding chapter, she writes:

"Corporations do not feel compassion. Sickness and loss do not move them. Appealing to their humanity is not an effective political strategy. Looking to the White House and its agencies for solutions has yielded only temporary results at best. The Obama era saw improvements in school lunches that Donald Trump swept away during his brief tenure. Joe Biden reinstated stricter guidelines, and the corporations stood ready to beat them back down again. In the face of near-complete capture of the legislative and executive branches, it is time to turn to the courts."

In addition to the podcast episode, you can read an excerpt from Freeman's book about frybread — a simple, versatile "comfort food" for many Indigenous communities that she says embodies the contradictions that have dictated Indigenous food and health in North America since colonization.

If you'd like to stay up-to-date on the remaining events in our series, follow us on Instagram @dontcallmeresilientpodcast or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at Another Story Bookshop in Toronto on Nov. 14, 2024. The episode was hosted and produced by Executive Producer Vinita Srivastava and co-produced by Associate Producer Ateqah Khaki, with support from Consulting Producer Jennifer Moroz. Ryan Clarke was our on-site audio engineer and mixed the episode.

Don't Call Me Resilient is coming back to your podcast feed this month with a whole new series!

We’ve been hosting some live events and we’re starting to roll them out as episodes in our feed. 

You can expect the same thoughtful conversations with scholars, shining a light on how systemic racism permeates our society. And we're diving into some fascinating topics...

Like how the US government has used food to suppress and control marginalized communities.

We’ll also be looking at the rise of AI-generated influencers… Who creates these virtual social media influencers? And why are so many of them young, racialized women?

And that’s just the start!

The first episode drops Thursday, January 23, with new episodes monthly after that for the next few months.

So stay tuned. And follow us on Instagram @dontcallmeresilientpodcast to learn more about these events, and how to attend.

You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter on news stories that intersect with race and racism.

After seven seasons and 65 episodes, we really want to meet our listeners. So we’re going to be taking the podcast on the road, and recording some live episodes across Canada with a live audience. You can expect the same thoughtful conversations with scholars, shining a light on how systemic racism permeates our society.

And we’ll be bringing those episodes to our feed in the New Year.

Follow us on Instagram @dontcallmeresilientpodcast to learn more about these events, and how to attend - including the first one coming up on Thursday, November 14th in Toronto. 

You can also stay in touch by re-listening to past episodes, or by signing up for our biweekly newsletter on news stories that intersect with race and racism.

We’ll see you back here in 2025!

Official reports have been declaring systemic racism in North America’s education system for more than 30 years. What will it take to change?

Even before COVID-19, education experts were sounding the alarm about the future of racialized children in our schools. And the COVID-19 pandemic has only underscored — even deepened — the divide.

On this episode of Don’t Call me Resilient, we speak with Kulsoom Anwer, a high school teacher who joined us from her classroom in one of Toronto’s most marginalized neighbourhoods. With her is Carl James, professor of education at York University. Together we discuss the injustices and inequalities in the education system and, in the conversation, we also explore some possible ways forward.

Every week, we highlight articles that drill down into the topics we discuss in the episode. This week, both articles say that combating racism in schools is not only possible, but also that solutions are in the hands of educators.

To make change, teachers must not only question existing power dynamics, but they must also acknowledge and validate the racism that is experienced by Black, Indigenous and racialized youth.

For more information and resources, go here: SHOW NOTES 

A full transcript of the episode can be found here: TRANSCRIPT

In this reflective and personal episode of call-me-resilient.simplecast.com/episodes/detangling-the-roots-and-health-risks-of-hair-relaxers">Don’t Call Me Resilient, Prof. Cheryl Thompson of Toronto Metropolitan University and author of Beauty in a Box untangles the wending history of hair relaxers for Black women — and the health risks now linked to them.

For decades, Black women have been using hair relaxers to help them “fit into” global mainstream workplaces and the European standards of beauty that continue to dominate them. More recently, research has linked these relaxers to cancer and reproductive health issues — and a spate of straightener-relaxers-cancer.html">lawsuits across the United States, and at least one in Canada, have been brought by Black women against the makers of these relaxants.

Prof. Thompson and I get into it: including her own relationship to using relaxers as a Black woman, the lawsuits and the wending history and relationship between these relaxants and Black women. We also — for obvious reasons — dip into The Other Black Girl, the novel that is also now a horror-satire streaming series about mind-controlling hair products.

For more information and resource, go here: SHOW NOTES

A full transcript of the episode can be found here: call-me-resilient.simplecast.com/episodes/detangling-the-roots-and-health-risks-of-hair-relaxers/transcript">TRANSCRIPT

If you don’t pay close attention to news about COVID, you might think the pandemic is nearly over. But for the millions of people worldwide suffering from long COVID, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

And the number of those experiencing long-term symptoms keeps growing: At least one in five of us infected with the virus go on to develop long COVID.

The effects of long COVID are staggering. Researchers say it can lead to: blood clots, heart disease, damage to the blood vessels, neurological issues, cognitive impairment, nerve damage, chronic pain and extreme fatigue.

And there is no treatment for long COVID.

So why don’t we hear more about long COVID? Why haven’t governments warned people about the risks we face with infection?

It might be that this debilitating disease is largely overlooked because of who gets it: Almost 80 per cent of longhaulers are women.

And in the United States, where our guest on this episode is from, many of those suffering from the prevailing conditions of COVID are women of colour, with Black and Latinx people most likely to get the illness.

Our insightful guest for this conversation on long COVID is Margot Gage Witvliet, assistant professor at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. Margot is a social epidemiologist who studies health disparities, including as they relate to long COVID and fifth-covid-19-health-equity-task-force-meeting.html">has presented her research findings to the United States Health Equity Task Force on COVID-19.

Margot is also a Black woman living with long COVID and has created a support and advocacy group for women of colour.

For more information and resources, go here: SHOW NOTES

A full transcript of this episode can be found here: call-me-resilient.simplecast.com/episodes/long-covid/transcript">TRANSCRIPT

In this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient, we continue our conversation about forced famine and its use as a powerful tool to control people, land and resources. Starvation has, for centuries, been a part of the colonizer’s “playbook.”

We speak with two scholars to explore two historic examples: the decimation of Indigenous populations in the Plains, North America, which historian David Stannard has called the American Holocaust and in India, the 1943 famine in Bengal. According to a recent BBC story, the Bengal famine of 1943 killed more than three million people. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side in the Second World War. (The United Kingdom lost 450,000 lives during that same war.)

Although disease, environmental disasters and famine were features of life before colonialism, decades of research has shown how these occurrences were manipulated by colonial powers to prolong starvation and trigger chronic famine. In other words, starvation has been effectively used by colonial powers to control populations, acquire land and the wealth that comes with that. This colonization was accompanied by an “entitlement approach” and the belief that Indigenous populations are inferior to the lives of the colonizer.

According to scholars, prior to the arrival of colonialists, both populations at the heart of today’s episode were thriving with healthy and wealthy communities. And although disease and famine existed before the arrival of Europeans, it cannot be denied colonial powers accelerated and even capitalized on chronic famine and the loss of life due to disease and malnutrition.

As the famous economist Amartya Sen has said, famine is a function of repression. It springs from the politics of food distribution rather than a lack of food. Imperial policies such as the Boat Denial Policy and Rice Denial Policy meant that, as curator Natasha Ginwala wrote: “freshly harvested grain was set on fire, or even dumped into the river.”

Joining on this episode were two experts on the North American and Bengal famines.

James Daschuk is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina. He is the author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life.

We also spoke with Janam Mukherjee, an Associate Professor of History at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the author of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire. Mukherjee was recently a primary historical advisor on the BBC Radio 4 series “Three Million,” a five-part documentary on the Bengal famine of 1943.

For more information and resources about this, go here: SHOW NOTES

A full transcript of this episode can be found here: call-me-resilient.simplecast.com/episodes/a-history-of-using-starvation-as-a-tool-of-oppression/transcript">TRANSCRIPT

Land has so much meaning. It’s more than territory; it represents home, your ancestral connection and culture — but also the means to feed yourself and your country.

One of the things that colonizers are famous for is the idea of terra nullius – that the land is empty of people before they come to occupy it.

In the case of Palestine, the Jewish settlers in 1948, and the British before that, viewed the desert as empty — something they needed to studies.org/en/node/38553">“make bloom.”

But the land was already blooming. There is a long history of Palestinian connection to the land, including through agricultural systems and a rich food culture that is often overlooked by colonial powers.

Our guests on call-me-resilient.simplecast.com/episodes/palestine-was-never-a-land-without-people">this week’s episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient have been working on a film about the importance of preserving Palestinian agriculture and food in exile.

Elizabeth Vibert is a professor of colonial history at University of Victoria. She has been doing oral history research to examine historical and contemporary causes of food crises in various settings, including Palestinian refugees in Jordan.

Salam Guenette is the consulting producer and cultural and language translator for their documentary project. She holds a master’s degree in history.

For more resources and information about this, go here: SHOW NOTES

A full transcript of the episode can be found here: call-me-resilient.simplecast.com/episodes/palestine-was-never-a-land-without-people/transcript">TRANSCRIPT

Every year thousands of migrants come to work in Canada. From harvesting the food in our stores to caring for the elderly, these workers form a vital part of the economy. Yet despite being critical, they often face harsh conditions, isolation, abuse, injury and even death as a result of immigration policies designed to leave them powerless.

Documentary filmmaker and OCAD University professor Min Sook Lee has been documenting the voices of migrant farm workers in Canada for two decades. What she has to say about the treatment of these workers during COVID-19 shatters any remaining myths about “Canada the Good.” How do we treat the workers who put food on our tables?

For more resources and information about this, go here: SHOW NOTESA full transcript of this episode can be found here: TRANSCRIPT