Yahoo Finance Rights Back at You: Amnesty International Canada’s debut podcast tackles anti-Black racism, surveillance, and policing in the post-2020 era
Running throughout Black History Month, Season 1 of Rights Back at You amplifies the voices of changemakers and storytellers building a better future now
OTTAWA, Feb. 01, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Amnesty International Canada’s first-ever podcast, Rights Back at You, launches Wednesday, introducing listeners to frontline activists creating unstoppable, lasting change in Canada and beyond.
Season 1 is an unflinching look at anti-Black racism in the post-2020 era. In each episode of the five-part series, host Daniella Barreto examines a different critical threat to Black people’s freedom and security – from facial recognition to the War on Drugs, to police violence – and passes the mic to changemakers building a better future now. Marrying intensely personal, no-holds-barred storytelling and painstaking investigation, Rights Back at You unravels the Canada you think you know and challenges the systems that hold back human rights.
“In 2020, there was a lot of listening, learning, and commitments to making systemic change,” said Barreto, Amnesty International Canada’s Vancouver-based Digital Activism Coordinator. “Three years later, powerful decision-makers across Canada are increasing police budgets and doubling down on surveillance, policies that have a long history of harming and criminalizing Black people. Our goals for the podcast are to centre and amplify the voices of advocates who refuse to be scared into silence and to inspire and challenge listeners – whether they are Amnesty supporters or not – to think differently about public safety and how it relates to human rights.”
Available to stream on all the major podcast platforms, the first two episodes launched Wednesday to mark the beginning of Black History Month. A new episode will be released every Wednesday until the end of the February. Rights Back at You is the product of an all-women creative team featuring Barreto (host, writer, and producer), Serisha Iyar (producer), and Vocal Fry Studios’ Katie Jensen (story-editing, sound design, and post-production).
Barreto’s own brushes with police overreach and surveillance inform her approach to Rights Back at You. A former organizer with Black Lives Matter Vancouver, she learned in 2017, after a year of organizing protests and publicly challenging systemic anti-Black racism, that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had monitored her group’s activities.
“Discovering you are the target of police surveillance is terrifying, to say the least,” she said. “It’s also infuriating because it’s not surprising. Black, Indigenous, and other racialized people are routinely and systematically harassed simply for exercising their rights to protest, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and privacy.”
One of the most personally impactful conversations for Barreto was her interview with Hugh Lampkin, a long-time harm-reduction advocate in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and the focus of the podcast’s second episode. “Hugh was remarkably open with me about his experiences as a drug user and activist in an incredibly criminalized and marginalized environment,” Barreto said. “Vancouver is now known as a harm-reduction capital, but it wasn’t long ago that Hugh had to smuggle naloxone out of a research conference to make life-saving overdose reversal medication available on the street.
“For me, Black histories and Black futures on this continent are defined by acts of resistance: people and communities who imagine a better, more just world and, through their collective action, birth it into being. And that’s ultimately what – and who – Rights Back at You is all about.”
Episode release dates and descriptions
Ep. 1 (1 February 2023): “Facial Recognition and Policing Protesters” – After posting on the internet a photo from a Black Lives Matter protest, Derrick Ingram heard pounding on his apartment door. On the other side was a team of heavily armed police officers yelling for him to let them in. It seemed like they had tracked him down using facial recognition. If police can use surveillance technology to target activists like Derrick, will people think twice about speaking out?
Ep. 2 (1 February 2023): “Street Surveillance and the War on Drugs” – What does the future of harm reduction look like for communities that are already overpoliced and surveilled? In Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, we connect with harm-reduction activist Hugh Lampkin, who saves lives with naloxone and community-building. We investigate how drug criminalization impacts Black people in Canada and visit the MySafe machine, a palm-scanning smart vending machine for drugs.
Ep. 3 (8 February 2023): “Don't You Be My Neighbour” – Rowa Mohamed showed up to support her neighbours at an encampment eviction and was injured by police during the protest. Her experience of violence is not unusual – Black Muslim women are often treated with suspicion, like they don’t belong. What happens when people “fight crime” with home surveillance technology and treat their own neighbours as suspects?
Ep. 4 (15 February 2023): “Walking While Black” – Gyasi Symonds filed a complaint with the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission after being street-checked by Halifax police. He won. Despite his victory, street-level surveillance and carding are still widespread across Canada. A movement to defund the police and invest in the community has erupted from coast to coast. We pass the mic to grassroots groups to hear about where they want funding to go and what new worlds we can imagine.
Ep. 5 (22 February 2023): “Access Denied: Tech at the Border” – Borders have long been sites of colonial enforcement about who can come and go and how Indigenous peoples are treated. Canada is no exception. Increasingly, governments look to technology to make potentially life-or-death decisions about whether a person fleeing danger should be allowed to cross a border. What happens when that technology reinforces bias and makes unreliable choices?
About the host
Daniella Barreto is the host and producer of Rights Back at You and Amnesty International Canada’s Digital Activism Coordinator. She was an organizer with Black Lives Matter Vancouver when the group discovered they were under police surveillance. She has a background in epidemiology and public health and is concerned with the intersections of racism, health, and policing. She co-produced RUDE the Podcast and was runner-up in the 2019 Hot Docs Podcast Festival Pitch Competition. Daniella is an immigrant from Zimbabwe to unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories (aka Vancouver, B.C.).
Media contact: Cory Ruf, Media Officer, Amnesty International Canadian Section (English-Speaking), cruf@amnesty.ca, +1-647-269-1795
