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Nursing student pushes for change in
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
Dorsa 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 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
> Dorsa Zamanpour
white people around us. Like, you didn’t ask to check anybody’s pockets., you’re not a police officer, so why are you asking my friend?”
The incident is only an echo of systematic discrimination across the nation. Zamanpour learned that racism in Canada manifests as an underlying bias that affects one’s perception of people belonging to ethnocultural groups, such as a teacher favouring certain students over others.
“It makes kids and even adults… develop selfesteem problems.”
Victims of racist interactions will be also frequently be left with uncertainty. It is difficult to prove and there are innumerable consequences for those who make such accusations, even when they feel they have sufficient evidence.
Zamanpour realized the importance of speaking out on the behalf of those that can’t. She says the transition to activism wasn’t a choice for her: “I’ve always been an activist. I’ve always learned to speak up when something isn’t right.”
As a result, Zamanpour co-founded two Calgarybased advocacy groups: the Black People’s Allyship Movement and Advocates Alberta.
UBPAM focuses on supporting and advocating for the livelihood of Black lives across Canada. Zamanpour isn’t as involved with UPBAM as she once was. However, she remains one of the leaders of Advocates Alberta, which aims to target institutional racism at all its points.
This July, Zamanpour represented Advocates Alberta in an address to the Calgary City Council to propose a 16 per cent reallocation of police funds.
She outlined the ways targeting the root of socioeconomic problems would decrease crime and the need for police intervention, which she described as a “reactive” service.
Factors that statistically predispose individuals to commit crime include addiction, mental health issues, homelessness, unemployment and lack of education. However, organizations that address these issues are allocated only a fraction of what the police service receives each year in the city budget.
“It’s going to be a long road to the goal that we want, which is to decrease crime by stabilizing people,” she says. “Abolish police and defund police are very different.”
Though Zamanpour urged the council to create a new policy after the meeting on July 7, she did not hear anything about it.
However, in November, a motion was passed to consider reallocating $20 million from the police budget in the next two years. The motion was put forward by Coun. Evan Woolley in response to protestors and documented police brutality incidents from this year.
It’s not the 16 per cent that Zamanpour and other advocacy groups asked for (it’s approximately 2.5 per cent), but the increase in community service budgets will be more substantial.
“We’re going to keep applying pressure,” she says.
After defunding the police, addressing Alberta Education school curriculum is next on Advocates Alberta’s task list.
Zamanpour would like to see social studies material revised to include perspectives of minorities in history.
“One thing that’s missing is how Canada was involved in slavery,” she says.
Canada enslaved Indigenous peoples and was involved in the transatlantic slave trade from the early 1600s. Though Canada had started make efforts to restrict slavery by 1793, it was only abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834.
Zamanpour says it’s surprising that this information isn’t included in the school curriculum: “The old textbooks are not doing anybody any favours.”
Additionally, Zamanpour and Advocates Alberta are working on an improved anti-bias training module for schools and workplaces. She says the training should lead people to acknowledge their biases so that they may be overridden, allowing them to perform their jobs without prejudice.
Zamanpour’s activism work is not confined to the work she does with Advocates Alberta.
A passion for medicine stemmed from watching her parents’ careers in healthcare and, after a year studying neuroscience and another studying psychology, Zamanpour settled on nursing as her chosen field.
She sees nursing as the perfect intersection between healthcare and activism.
“Nurses are the ones who really get to know their patients. And that’s what I like – getting to know people well enough to help them,” she says. “You get to be a part of so many important moments in peoples’ lives. It’s really such an honour to be able to do that.”
Zamanpour (middle) sitting with her father Kamran Zamanpour (left) and mother Parivash Enghiad (right) PHOTO: COURTESY OF DORSA ZAMANPOUR
