As two of the few “brown” kids who went to the local French Catholic school in a 1970s Montreal neighbourhood, my older brother and I were teased mercilessly. Snowballs, rocks, anything handy, flew our way many a morning. One would say we learned the art of ducking as much as everything else the good sisters taught us.

Many new immigrants to Quebec may have similar stories but I like to think ours had a twist: it was the anglophones who couldn’t tolerate us. The nom du jour thrown our way across the snowy streets most often was FRENCH FRIES.

I’ll give you a moment to appreciate the fine pun factor that underlies that gem of a slur.

We spoke French. We were brown, perhaps indeed the shade of julienned potatoes fresh out of the fryer. Apt and witty, you might say.

However, the wit was lost on us as my brother and I didn’t understand anglais. Neither could the fellow students who walked alongside us, but that didn’t stop them from figuring out that one of the reasons these English kids didn’t like us was because we spoke French. Like them.

The dawning of this comprehension was a beautiful thing. Whereas, before, yes, we were the brown kids who went to school with them, now we became their brown kids who went to school with them.

War ensued, and as Bill 101, making French the official language of Quebec, was being enacted into law, the little Québécois on our street became our comrades in arms. Things flew back at the English – I distinctly remember a shower of spitty sunflower seed hulls cascading one bright fall morning – with a lot of French cuss words thrown in that they couldn’t understand.

The English bravado and superiority we faced retreated that school year but sadly, examining Quebec today, with its proposed Bill 60, or Charter of Values, it’s apparent that the intolerance hasn’t waned. There’s simply been a shift in who’s wielding it now.

Under Quebec’s Charter of Values, the right to display one’s religious affiliation (other than the Christian one) would be denied. Thus, I, as a hijab-wearing woman, would have to give up my sincerely held belief in clothing myself modestly while the nuns who taught me in my French Catholic school would be permitted to continue their similarly held belief to clothe themselves modestly. Discriminatory much?

Critics are flabbergasted at how un-thinly veiled the bill is at disguising its target: the increasing presence of veiled women in Quebec streets.

With the English Montreal School Board saying that it will never apply Bill 60 should it come to pass, the tables have turned in my personal histoire. Perhaps some of those English kids on our street grew up to understand what being a minority feels like.

As for us, in 1979, we moved to Ontario, as my father decided to finish his McGill PhD from afar, while working in Toronto. Our new Toronto school was filled with Trudeau-esque ideals like multiculturalism and a just society, where we could all be free to be you and me. While this was bewildering to our young minds, it felt safe and sheltering.

Here we have stayed but I would be lying if I said nostalgia doesn’t strike me now and then for the time the young Québécois fought for us “French Fries” to just be.

Sajidah Kutty is a teacher with the York Region District School Board.