Digital Rage Seeded In The Comments
(Pause — inhale)
“DEPORT THEM.”
That statement is ripe fruit.
fertilized by colonial violence,
accross oceans,
watered by algorithms
and grown in comment sections.
It lives on pages like 6ixBuzz
where outrage gets compressed into captions
and pain is sport.
Every headline;
an audition for who can hate the fastest.
But, the algorithm doesn’t ask is this true?
“DEPORT THEM”
is now a game.
A pile-on.
A joke no-one has to clean up.
For a whole new generation raised on clickbait,
Truth gets edited.
Context gets cropped.
Rage gets rewarded.
Keyboard warriors flex their outrage
and find ways of flipping it into currency.
Retweets get mistaken for courage.
Violence is justified in GIFs,
in memes
and in threads.
Comments gain fuel,
the loudest cruelty gets promoted
keeping the city scrolling,
laughing at the expense of humanity.
“DEPORT THEM”
Says history without a mirror,
fear with a username,
from basement Wi-Fi
on stolen Indigenous land
in a country built on selective memory and convenient forgetting.
Turtle Island was already stewarded,
already governed,
already alive.
Colonization is the first “DEPORT THEM”.
Reservations,
residential schools
(ongoing) organized genocide,
working to erase language
erase history
erase people.
But the land never forgets.
the land reminds us of the stolen women and children.
The land reminds us of Africville,
bulldozed into memory,
paved over,
for a fuckin ‘ dog park!
We should all have rage that the family trees of those that built economies are not allowed to inherit it.
Instead we’re caught up with “wealth” on stolen land,
from the sweat and blood of stolen labour,
by displaced people
sold fake dreams,
actively benefiting
from the (28+ still active) boil water advisories.
“DEPORT THEM”
a sentence we inherited
when we forgot who paid the cost of our arrival.
Because silence is a form of agreement when the benefits keep arriving on time.
They don’t mean criminals.
They mean accents,
not “Canadian enough.”
They mean turbans,
They mean thawb’s,
Ederly on buses who don’t know a lick of English,
They mean young brown immigrants hustling to their third job,
young kids laughing in parking lots,
young kids dancing in public places,
missing their homelands and mother tongues.
They mean first-generation shopkeepers,
barbers,
Tim Hortons employees,
truck drivers,
uber drivers,
they def mean uber drivers.
They mean people whose names are (not) “hard to pronounce”.
They mean women in hijabs,
families eating outside restaurants,
families eating in parks,
international students,
they mean brown joy that refuses to shrink.
They mean everything that doesn’t look or sound like them,
everything that provokes discomfort
in someone who jokes about “foreigners taking jobs”
or how “different” Canada was back when?.
Underneath it all
“DEPORT THEM” is how fear points without naming itself.
brown bodies,
brown tongues,
brown cultures,
brown history that refuses to disappear quietly.
So as they type
“DEPORT THEM”; now an archive of hate.
The slogan the future will remember of our time.
Aimed at the very people who;
cleaned our hospitals,
drove us to hopitals,
stacked our grocery shelves,
drove us home from grocery stores,
delivered our packages,
kept the eonomy alive through COVID,
held us up while we slept.
It’s how our governement was able to afford CERB.
Remembered as the applause
from a system that exploits,
imports,
and discards
mass immigration.
Labour
extracted from hopes promised
and then exiled.
Already carried the weight of a nation that refuses to call them family.
They type “DEPORT THEM”
without understanding that the people they target
already paid for the country’s survival.
The future will read “DEPORT THEM” as the sentence of a moment defined by fear, injustice and blatant ignorance.