BLM
Calgary nursing student looks to bring activist mentality to health care system Dorsa Zamanpour seeks to fight oppression in the health care sector and beyond
STEPHANIE GABRIEL sgabriel@cjournal.ca
Zamanpour takes the stage at Calgary’s first Black Lives Matter protest, June 2020. PHOTO: COURTESY OF DORSA ZAMANPOUR
D
orsa Zamanpour immigrated to Canada from Iran at the age of two. Even though it’s known for inclusivity and diversity, the actual experience of growing up in Canada as a person of colour exposes the country’s many ongoing racist nuances. Attending public school, Zamanpour was excluded by her peers. She endured remarks about having ‘dirty skin’ and being the ‘brown girl,’ and she noticed other children of immigrants being similarly isolated and picked on. In an effort to fit in, she stopped playing music from her country and bringing home-cooked food to school. “There were a lot of factors about being a newcomer
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that I didn’t understand when I was younger, that I understand now, that had an effect on me that I didn’t realize,” she says. She describes losing a part of her identity to a sense of shame about her ethnicity. However, the discrimination in her own life spurred Zamanpour to learn about the larger patterns of racism at play in the country and to speak out about these injustices. She was later involved in founding two anti-racism activist groups and is currently attending nursing school to advocate for equality in the health care sector. But, even before she started organizing anti-racist
actions, Zamanpour was always ready to face that problem head-on. Once, during high school, she found herself in line at a movie theatre with four of her friends, watching as a theatre employee dodged through crowds of people to locate her group. He started talking about a missing cell phone and asked to check the pockets of one of her friends. That friend was a young Black man. After he had turned out his pockets, Zamanpour made the group late the movie by hunting down a manager and explaining what had just happened. “[The employee] didn’t interrogate any other
