Scarborough made me who I am today. I love it. Why don’t you?

The Ontario neighbourhood I grew up in was diverse and full of working-class pride, but all that its critics could see was crime and isolation, Omer Aziz writes

Idon’t remember the first time I heard slander spoken on Scarborough’s name, but I do remember the last.

It was 2018, and I was at a book event in downtown Toronto. An American journalist and a local moderator had packed the hall at the Reference Library, Torontonians flocking to hear enlightened opinions about the unenlightened U.S. president. At some point, for reasons I don’t recall, Scarborough was mentioned. What I do remember is the laughter: Rippling through the room, as if to say, you know, Scarborough, that place, why mention it here among the civilized? I sat in the back row and did what I’ve always done around polite Canadians – held my tongue.

I was born in Scarborough, grew up in Scarborough, spent the first decade and a half of my life in Scarborough – and then went out into the bigger world, studying in Kingston, Paris, London and New Haven, Conn., before becoming a foreign policy adviser in the federal government and a fellow at Harvard. Yet my heart has never left Scarborough. And as an adult, I came to learn all too well that laughter, that derision, was suggestive of other things as well.

In 2007, when I was 17 years old, Toronto Life published an article called The Scarborough Curse. The writer explored the ethnic gang violence plaguing the community, which had become “a symbol of a different kind of alienation, one that carries a hint of menace rather than complacency.” A menace to whom, I wondered. The story framed my community as a deeply troubled place full of criminals, a once-white town that had changed, menacingly, overnight.

The piece crystallized what many people really thought of Scarborough in those days. It didn’t matter that the same year the article was published, Scarborough’s per capita crime rate was lower than much of Toronto’s, and that the following year, the Toronto chief of police stated that Scarborough was one of the safest divisions in Toronto. There was violence in Scarborough, yes, but unlike other places, Scarborough was defined by it.

The stories told in the media were a far cry from the Scarborough I knew. Different shades and hues made up the mosaic of my childhood, a melange of brown and Black people. Families lived together, multiple generations, many recent immigrants, striving under the same roof, with the opportunities Canada afforded at our fingertips. Mechanics, retail workers, men who still worked with their hands and built things, West Indian aunties who sat on their stoops on Sunday, uncles who worked mysterious jobs and who when asked what they did, simply said, “Business.” This was our community: diverse, multiracial, working-class.

A kind of segregation emerged in the city – there was Scarborough, and there was the rest of Toronto. Scarborough was 600,000 people. It was also far away – taking hours to get downtown, depending on public transit. Rarely, did I venture into Toronto proper. We were too far, too cut-off. Unlike remote parts of New York and London, where low-income people can catch buses and trains, Scarborough felt totally removed. It seemed deliberately difficult for Scarborough residents to get to the city. Residents of polite downtown could be reassured that dangerous, menacing Scarborough was far away – our very own Siberia (or “Scarberia,” as it was often called).

Already, at the tender age of 10, coming up on Ellesmere and Pharmacy and Kingston Road, coming up on Vic Park and Birchmont Collegiate and the Bluffs, I had the feeling that I was from a place no one cared about. Social services were substandard. None of our representatives at either the provincial or national level seemed to care much for Scarborough, unless it was election season.

As I grew older, I asked myself the same question: Why did it feel like they did not like us, did not want us? What was it about Scarborough, my community, that even a child of 10 could feel so neglected – indeed, despised – by the wider world? More importantly, what did that say about the rest of the country?

My parents immigrated from Pakistan to Scarborough in the seventies and eighties, part of the great movement of peoples that began a decade prior. My mother was a teacher, from the town of Murree. My father worked as a parking officer. The first room I saw was in Scarborough General Hospital, where I am told the doctors took care of an immigrant mother and her early-born child with grace.

From kindergarten to eighth grade I walked Scarborough’s sidewalks – home, to school, to the mosque. Scarborough was Terraview Willowfield school and Parkway Mall, where my grandmother took my brother and me every Saturday afternoon. Scarborough was Bendale neighbourhood and Abu Bakr Masjid mosque, the overhead power-lines and large fields and spicy Jamaican food and Karachi Bazaar, old and new.

I remember when nine-year-old Cecilia Zhang was kidnapped, and the hysteria that spread through our neighbourhood. I remember the way the Black and West Indian boys would greet me with Whagwan Brejin? Every accent was heard here. Every colour seen here. Every dream lived here, behind private doors, in bungalows, or in tiny apartments. As a child, I felt that Scarborough was the entire world.

After the Second World War, Scarborough was the home of middle-class white families. Large rural tracts of farmland gave way to a manufacturing base that was built around the automobile. To this day, the wide roads and tiny sidewalks of Scarborough are a testament to the time when the family bungalow and driveway were the ultimate North American dream.

In the 1960s, things began to change. Thousands of immigrants, many of them from the Caribbean and South Asia, landed in Canada and many went to Scarborough. The old white population began moving out, to newer suburbs or to nicer postal codes in Toronto. Scarborough welcomed tens of thousands of immigrants and became a landing port for newcomers. Refugees, exiles, dreamers, would all find a home in Scarborough. More people arrived in waves, living with families, building social capital, putting down roots. Scarborough became Canada’s Ellis Island.

At one point, our family of seven – me, my two younger brothers, an older half-brother, my parents, my grandmother – all lived in a basement in Scarborough, just off Pachino Boulevard. We didn’t have much, but we had each other, had the hard labour of my father, had the sturdy resolve and iron will of my mother and grandmother. The immigrant dream in Scarborough was itself built upon