If we were solely concerned with the physical world, then bricks and mortar would be enough to house our places of worship, courts, and government buildings. Instead, we adorn structures with fluted columns, gleaming windows and intricate masonry. The structures are decorated because society has esteem for institutions and the values they espouse and enforce.

The same institutions celebrated and protected by many, inflict pain and suffering on to the lives of racialized immigrant women lives. Establishing institutions in the absence of an equitable lens on class, gender or race, the consequences are inevitably devastating. The Wall of Grievances are vignettes and stories from Artist Participants. Harmful and poisonous incidents are extracted out of their memories and plastered on to the wall. They expose the impact of the systemic racism experienced in schools, healthcare, workplaces, and media. With authoritative support, systemic racism spreads throughout the environment with ease. Systemic racism leaves its institutional host and spreads to the individual level. Here, people casually do its bidding in everyday settings in the form of micro-aggression. Unchecked, systemic racism continues its coverage and seeps into the mental of health of racialized immigrant women where it is internalized. What sits here on the gallery wall to view and look away from, is what racialized immigrant women endure.

Definition of Systemic Racism*: Institutional, which means policies and practices at an organization level that perpetuates racism (such as biased hiring processes resulting in a lack of diversity at a company), and then structural, which is how these effects interact across institutions and across history (a history of discrimination in college admission processes, for example).

*- Ontario Human Rights Commission. (n.d.). Racism and racial discrimination: Systemic discrimination (fact sheet). Racism and racial discrimination: Systemic discrimination (fact sheet) | Ontario Human Rights Commission. Retrieved February 7, 2023, from www.ohrc.on.ca.