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Randy Boyagoda, a University of Toronto professor of English and principal of the University of St. Michael’s College, was surprised when one of his daughters told him that a girl on the playground said “she likes her white friends more than her brown friends.”

“Understanding themselves as ‘brown friends’ wasn’t supposed to be part of their life stories,” Boyagoda writes about his four daughters .

Boyagoda, who is Sri Lankan-Canadian, spoke about how raising mixed-race kids in an upscale neighbourhood in Toronto, a city celebrated for its multiculturalism, cannot save them from experiencing prejudice.

“Now I am faced with the unnerving fact that my daughters are also growing up being perceived and assessed in everyday encounters according to the colour of their skin, and also, of course, perceiving and assessing themselves,” Boyagoda writes.