Hide and Sikh

Canadian journalist Sunny Dhillon’s resignation from The Globe and Mail, announced in his October 29, 2018 essay “Journalism While Brown and When to Walk Away,” published by LEVEL on Medium, went unexpectedly viral. The essay exposed the realities Dhillon and other journalists of colour faced within an industry he described as resistant to meaningful diversity, and marked his refusal to continue working within systems that, in his experience, minimized racial inequity and constrained perspectives for what were considered newsworthy. Seven years later, Dhillon returns to the experiences that led to that public act of departure in “Hide and Sikh: Letters from a Life in Brown Skin,” a memoir that traces the quieter, more intimate personal experience beneath the viral essay. 

Published by Wolsak & Wynn on November 4, 2025, the book takes the form of a series of letters to his daughter, reflecting on what it meant to grow up Brown and Sikh in Canada and on the accumulated experiences of racism that shaped him long before he walked out of the newsroom. In this sense, “Hide and Sikh” becomes an expansion of the argument begun in “Journalism While Brown,” where the earlier essay documented the moment Dhillon finally refused to remain complicit. 

The reason for this collection of essays now, especially directed to his daughter, is that Dhillon identified that he has hid his entire life. When facing episodes of racism throughout his adolescence he would pull inward, camouflaging and tucking deep down his heritage and culture. “I did the only thing I knew how to do — I hid.” During the virality after posting his resignation letter, Dhillon found that he was black-balled and could not enter back into journalism. His coping mechanism of hiding would soon expire. 

There is a moment in the resignation letter that is re-printed in the essay, “Brown Militant,” when Dhillon asks, “How many battles do you have in you?” This resilience, the reality of a life of taking punches and forcing yourself to get back up, that is the pull of legacy resonating from the collection: to seek more from life. 

Other reviews for “Hide & Sikh” have noted that the letter format is ‘highly effective.’ Writing to his daughter enables the reader to enter into the conversation with ‘gentleness’ and some humour. Dhillon is conscientious of the narrative he is delivering to young ears, and his ‘tenderness’ has been upheld, yet, there is fear pulsating within his words that every parent faces, what atrocities will our children have to face and endure? Most readers can enter into the memoir here. 

There is a moment at the beginning of the memoir where I needed to set the text down and let the full resonance of what Dhillon’s daughter and he himself experience work through me. 

“It was not. It couldn’t be and, truth be told, the world feels as ugly now as you begin to navigate it as it did when I was growing up. There, at that playground, I was faced with the moment I’d feared since your mother first told me we were having a child. It was, my darling daughter, your first undeniable brush with racism.” 

This memoir is intimate, a glimpse into a sacred relationship between a father and child. We are not accustomed to access to this paternal voice, always. The function of the narrative is successful yet confronting, does it have to take contemplating the safety of a child to tear down systems in place in our own country that would exploit and oppress? 

“Hide & Sikh” is reclamation and ultimately optimistic. Dhillon writes to empower the next generation. He wants to give his daughter teachings that he could not receive in his own youth. He tells her, “You are Sikh. You are Punjabi. You are Indian. You are brown. You do not need to doubt these facts. They are true…Know who you are. Move with confidence….”

Move with confidence. 

Sunny Dhillon brings to “Hide and Sikh: Letters from a Life in Brown Skin” a career shaped by journalism, advocacy, and a sustained examination of belonging in Canada. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of British Columbia and has continued to write and speak about racial justice. Now living in Ontario, where he attends law school, Dhillon turns from journalism to memoir. 

Wolsak & Wynn has become, in my reading, a particularly compelling home for books that resist easy categorization, works that allow literature to become a meeting place for lived experience. The book moves between humour, vulnerability and the difficult process of learning not to hide the parts of oneself that the world has taught you to conceal. 

Founded in Hamilton in 1982 by poets Heather Cadsby and Marja Jacobs, Wolsak & Wynn began with a commitment to publishing poetry that larger presses had overlooked. Over four decades, that original impulse has expanded into a catalogue of poetry, fiction, memoir, translation, cultural analysis, and other works that refuse easy categorization. The press describes itself as a home for “important work” overlooked by larger publishers, while its Buckrider and James Street North imprints extend that spirit toward formally adventurous writing, social critique, and the distinctive cultural life of Hamilton. There is therefore something fitting about “Hide and Sikh” appearing in this catalogue, Dhillon’s memoir is accessible without being uncomplicated, personal without becoming insular, and rooted in one life while reaching toward the larger questions of who gets to belong, who gets to speak, and what we inherit when we finally stop hiding. In that sense, “Hide and Sikh” continues the particular Wolsak & Wynn tradition I have encountered across my own reviews, literature attentive to the margins, suspicious of fixed boundaries and willing to find expansive questions inside deeply particular lives.

“Hide & Sikh” is about not hiding anymore, but taking the risk and calling on bravery to face an unkind world. We want to believe that the battles we fight are not the ones our children will have to. Unfortunately, that is not true. We will not change the world. 

As this memoir demonstrates, what we can control is providing the tools for the next generation to face these battles more equipped than we were. The hope is that it will take less time for the next generation to get back up and more profoundly, we do not want our children to have to feel the need to hide. 

Thank you to Sunny Dhillon, Wolsak & Wynn and River Street Writing for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.