U.S. media aren’t afraid to talk about race—so why is Canada so far behind?

I recently wrote an op-ed for The Walrus about how Canadian media can learn from America when it comes to covering diversity.

Read on for an excerpt, and click here to check out the full piece.

It was an innocent mistake—but one that brought widespread humiliation on a noted Canadian journalist and illustrated just how much our country lags behind America in terms of race coverage.

“Code-switching” is the act of changing the language you use, or how you express yourself in conversations, depending on the context. It’s a way to navigate different social and cultural settings. “Coat-switching,” however, is a gaffe that became a nationally trending hashtag last week after Toronto Star film critic Peter Howell misspelled “code–switching” in an article about Moonlight, a black gay coming-of-age drama.

Howell and the Star caught a lot of flack. On Twitter, readers surmised that if the Star’s newsroom was more diverse and covered race more frequently and with more depth, someone would’ve caught the error.