Seen on many lawns and in many windows:
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Seen on a front-yard fence near the Ashland Dog Park:
Seen in the approach to every town and city so far: tent encampments. Whole villages of people without homes.
Alternative title: It Happens in Canada, Too.
Desmond Cole's book, The Skin We're In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power may be a difficult book for white Canadians to read. That's exactly why they should read it.
Cole documents events most Canadians would call "US-style" racism -- except they all take place in Canada. He uncovers historical anti-Black bias in Canada's immigration policies, ongoing anti-Black racism in its public schools, racism embedded in false historical narratives, and racist policing on the streets -- in short, systemic racism.
As Cole points out, Canadian media is happy to report on anti-Black police violence taking place in the US, which fits nicely into a narrative Canadians know and love. But when it comes to anti-Black police violence within Canada, incidents are glossed over, misreported, or completely ignored.
In the early days of this blog, before we had even emigrated to Canada, my partner asked if there was a Canadian equivalent of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States -- a counternarrative that tells the often invisible stories of injustice and resistance. Readers said that kind of history wasn't really necessary in Canada, because Canada's view of itself and its own history was more honest than America's.
That deserves one massive call of bullshit.
... political leaders’ resistance to the idea that systemic racism exists within state institutions often comes from a poor understanding of the country’s past, says educator and historian Natasha Henry, president of the Ontario Black History Society.“It’s part of the Canadian national narrative of positioning ourselves in juxtaposition to the United States. That’s how we get this ‘exceptional Canada’ of being welcoming and warm – and not paying attention to our own parallel history of racial exclusion and the dispossession.”In addition to being factually inaccurate, this popular view speaks to a “refusal to take responsibility” for two centuries of slavery within the country’s history, says Henry.For generations, Canadian history has concentrated on the country’s position as the last stop on the Underground Railroad – a place which meant freedom for those who escaped slavery in the US. But the same narrative omits the experiences of thousands of enslaved people within Canada, says Henry.According to Henry’s research, the earliest record of African enslavement in colonial Canada was the sale of a young boy, named Olivier LeJeune in 1629.Slavery was formally ended in the British empire in 1834, including British North America, but legislation was repeatedly passed that would weaken anti-slavery laws in the years leading up to abolition.After emancipation, black people in Canada still faced segregation, and the looming threat of hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan.“You have to decide – are you going to accept all of Canada or none of Canada?” said Henry. “Because you can’t parcel out what you want. That’s not how history works.”
Canadians, if you're ready to confront this -- or even to consider that there may be parts of Canada that you don't yet know or understand -- I urge you to read The Skin We're In.
Desmond Cole has done us a great service. With his unflagging activism, his lively, accessible writing, and his blunt truth-telling, he is helping Canadians to better understand this country, and to consider the experience of Canadians who don't necessarily look like them. If we want Canada to truly be better than the United States, this is a place to start.
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Personal footnote: Cole was the keynote speaker at the 2017 CUPE Ontario Library Workers Conference, which I helped organize (post is here).
Between May 25, 2020, the day George Floyd was murdered, and April 20, 2021, the day of the verdict, 640 Americans were killed by police.*
In the 24 hours following the announcement of the Chauvin verdict, six Americans were killed by police. That number includes Ma'Khia Bryant. Bryant was 16 years old. She called the police for help. A police officer got out of his car and shot this Black child at close range.
"We won't rest until the killer is brought to justice." If you watch detective shows, that's a familiar phrase. For victims of police murders, there is no justice. Even when there is video evidence of the killing, police murders might as well be lynchings that take place in the middle of the night.
But perhaps if there was accountability -- if there were actually serious consequences for these crimes -- we'd see fewer of them. Approximately 1,000 Americans are killed by police annually. Since 2005, 140 officers have been charged with murder or manslaughter. Seven were convicted of murder.
Black people comprise only 13% of the US population, but are more than twice as likely to be killed by police as non-Black Americans. Brown people are also disproportionately killed.
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First of all, it's not a boycott. It's a strike. And a wildcat strike to boot.
When the players on the Milwaukee Bucks chose not to play in the NBA playoffs -- joined by their baseball counterparts, the Brewers, with other teams quickly following -- they became part of a tradition that reaches back to Tommie Smith and John Carlos, to Muhammad Ali, to Carlos Delgado, all the way to the present, to Maya Moore and Colin Kaepernick.
Professional athletes are workers.
They may be wealthy -- though all are not as wealthy as the top earners -- but their working life is perilously short, and throughout history, has been awash in exploitation. If some earn huge salaries today, that's because so many people are profiting from their labour.
Strike vs boycott
So why is this action a strike and not a boycott?
If NBA fans refused to buy tickets to games, or watch the games on TV, that would be a boycott.
If fans refused to buy the products advertised during the broadcast of NBA games, that would be a boycott.
When workers refuse to work, that is a strike.
And when they do so without the direction of their union, when they are not "in a legal strike position," as it is called, that, my friends, is a wildcat strike.
And if we all did this -- if we joined them -- that would be a general strike.
Why it matters
I've been surprised to see some progressive people shrug off the NBA strike as mere display. It is anything but.
When people who command media attention are vocal about justice, it is noticed. That is powerful.
When those same people withhold their labour -- when they "down tools" and walk off the job -- it is exponentially more powerful.
Everyone is rocked by this action: the NBA, their sponsors, the media, the fans, even people who never watch basketball. It is news. It draws the focus of the entire country -- and a huge portion of the entire world -- to why this action was taken.
Professional and college athletes' support of the Black Lives Matter movement has been, continues to be, important. Athletes have spoken out, they have worn the t-shirts, they have knelt or been absent during the national anthem. All this matters.
But with this step -- a strike -- they put their bodies on the line.
As the shooting of Jacob Blake stunned us, left our hearts sore and broken, the very fact of this strike has made my heart soar with hope.
For important context, you'll want to read Dave Zirin's most recent column: The Milwaukee Bucks and Brewers Strike for Racial Justice.
This op-ed by Kurt Streeter in the New York Times is also good: With Walkouts, a New High Bar for Protests in Sports Is Set.
Zirin, speaking with Democracy Now, calls the players' protest "a challenge to the labor movement as a whole". He writes:
They are posing the question that all great strikes pose—to political people who hate sports and sports fans who hate politics, and to white fans who love them on the court but are oblivious to Black lives when the final whistle is blown—“Which side are you on?”
This story in The New York Times made me miss New York City more than anything has in a very long time.
All over the city, artists have created murals protest racism and police abuse. This critic surveys the murals, and compares them to the Neolithic cave art in the caves of France and Spain.
We saw cave art in Spain (stories here and here, but no pictures), something that I had longed to do ever since I first knew they existed. It was a peak travel experience for me. I love street art, and I love New York, and I love that someone links these things together.
Don't understand the protests? What you're seeing is people pushed to the edge
By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
May 30, 2020
What was your first reaction when you saw the video of the white cop kneeling on George Floyd's neck while Floyd croaked, "I can't breathe"?
If you're white, you probably muttered a horrified, "Oh, my God" while shaking your head at the cruel injustice. If you're black, you probably leapt to your feet, cursed, maybe threw something (certainly wanted to throw something), while shouting, "Not @#$%! again!" Then you remember the two white vigilantes accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged through their neighborhood in February, and how if it wasn't for that video emerging a few weeks ago, they would have gotten away with it. And how those Minneapolis cops claimed Floyd was resisting arrest but a store's video showed he wasn't. And how the cop on Floyd's neck wasn't an enraged redneck stereotype, but a sworn officer who looked calm and entitled and devoid of pity: the banality of evil incarnate.
Maybe you also are thinking about the Karen in Central Park who called 911 claiming the black man who asked her to put a leash on her dog was threatening her. Or the black Yale University grad student napping in the common room of her dorm who was reported by a white student. Because you realize it's not just a supposed "black criminal" who is targeted, it's the whole spectrum of black faces from Yonkers to Yale.
You start to wonder if it should be all black people who wear body cams, not the cops.
What do you see when you see angry black protesters amassing outside police stations with raised fists? If you're white, you may be thinking, "They certainly aren't social distancing." Then you notice the black faces looting Target and you think, "Well, that just hurts their cause." Then you see the police station on fire and you wag a finger saying, "That's putting the cause backward."
You're not wrong — but you're not right, either. The black community is used to the institutional racism inherent in education, the justice system and jobs. And even though we do all the conventional things to raise public and political awareness — write articulate and insightful pieces in the Atlantic, explain the continued devastation on CNN, support candidates who promise change — the needle hardly budges.
But COVID-19 has been slamming the consequences of all that home as we die at a significantly higher rate than whites, are the first to lose our jobs, and watch helplessly as Republicans try to keep us from voting. Just as the slimy underbelly of institutional racism is being exposed, it feels like hunting season is open on blacks. If there was any doubt, President Trump's recent tweets confirm the national zeitgeist as he calls protesters "thugs" and looters fair game to be shot.
Yes, protests often are used as an excuse for some to take advantage, just as when fans celebrating a hometown sports team championship burn cars and destroy storefronts. I don't want to see stores looted or even buildings burn. But African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you're choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it's everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it's always still in the air.
So, maybe the black community's main concern right now isn't whether protesters are standing three or six feet apart or whether a few desperate souls steal some T-shirts or even set a police station on fire, but whether their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers will be murdered by cops or wannabe cops just for going on a walk, a jog, a drive. Or whether being black means sheltering at home for the rest of their lives because the racism virus infecting the country is more deadly than COVID-19.
What you should see when you see black protesters in the age of Trump and coronavirus is people pushed to the edge, not because they want bars and nail salons open, but because they want to live. To breathe.
Worst of all, is that we are expected to justify our outraged behavior every time the cauldron bubbles over. Almost 70 years ago, Langston Hughes asked in his poem "Harlem": "What happens to a dream deferred? /… Maybe it sags / like a heavy load. / Or does it explode?"
Fifty years ago, Marvin Gaye sang in "Inner City Blues": "Make me wanna holler / The way they do my life." And today, despite the impassioned speeches of well-meaning leaders, white and black, they want to silence our voice, steal our breath.
So what you see when you see black protesters depends on whether you're living in that burning building or watching it on TV with a bowl of corn chips in your lap waiting for "NCIS" to start.
What I want to see is not a rush to judgment, but a rush to justice.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the N.B.A.'s all-time leading scorer, is the author of 16 books, including, most recently, "Mycroft & Sherlock — The Empty Birdcage"
Thus, the very same year Human Rights Watch was reporting that African Americans were being arrested and imprisoned at unprecedented rates, government data revealed that blacks were no more likely to be guilty of drug crimes than whites and that white youth were actually the most likely of any racial or ethnic group to be guilty of illegal drug possession and sales.The fact of incarceration alone is only one piece of the picture. Before incarceration, there is a series of court rulings that have gutted constitutional protections (especially the Fourth Amendment, the right to be free of unwarranted search and seizure), and make it impossible for citizens to argue racial bias in any criminal proceeding. There are draconian mandatory sentencing laws, which lead to the normalization of plea bargaining, in which people who have committed no crime plead guilty to some crime, in order to avoid a life sentence. There are huge financial incentives to municipalities to militarize their police forces, and to states for building -- and filling -- prisons.
Law enforcement officials often point to the racial composition of our prisons and jails as a justification for targeting racial minorities, but the empirical evidence actually suggested the opposite conclusion was warranted. The disproportionate imprisonment of people of color was, in part, a product of racial profiling -- not a justification for it.
In the years following the release of the New Jersey and Maryland data, dozens of other studies of racial profiling have been conducted. A brief sampling:
• In Volusia County, Florida, a reporter obtained 148 hours of video footage documenting more than 1,000 highway stops conducted by state troopers. Only 5 percent of the drivers on the road were African American or Latino, but more than 80 percent of the people stopped and searched were minorities.
• In Illinois, the state police initiated a drug interdiction program known as Operation Valkyrie that targeted Latino motorists. While Latinos comprised less than 8 percent of the Illinois population and took fewer than 3 percent of the personal vehicle trips in Illinois, they comprised approximately 30 percent of the motorists stopped by drug interdiction officers for discretionary offenses, such as failure to signal a lane change. [These discretionary offenses are often an excuse to search vehicles or to arrest people for "resisting".] Latinos, however, were significantly less likely than whites to have illegal contraband in their vehicles.
• A racial profiling study in Oakland, California, in 2001 showed that African Americans were approximately twice as likely as whites to be stopped, and three times as likely to be searched.
Pedestrian stops, too, have been the subject of study and controversy. The New York Police Department released statistics in February 2007 showing that during the prior year its officers stopped an astounding 508,540 people -- an average of 1,393 per day -- who were walking down the street, perhaps on their way to the subway, grocery store, or bus stop. Often the stops included searches for illegal drugs or guns -- searches that frequently required people to lie face down on the pavement or stand spreadeagled against a wall while police officers aggressively groped all over their bodies while bystanders watched or walked by. The vast majority of those stopped and searched were racial minorities, and more than half were African American. . . . .
Although the NYPD attempted to justify the stops on the grounds that they were designed to get guns off the street, stops by the Street Crime Unit -- the group of officers who supposedly are specially trained to identify gun-toting thugs -- yielded a weapon in only 2.5 percent of all stops. . . .Perhaps the most surprising portion of The New Jim Crow is Alexander's history of the War on Drugs. The "tough on crime" stance that began under President Nixon and intensified under Presidents Reagan and Clinton was born when rates of drug use and crime were low.
Rather than reducing reliance on stop-and-frisk tactics following the Diallo shooting* and the release of this disturbing data, the NYPD dramatically increased its number of pedestrian stops and continued to stop and frisk African Americans at grossly disproportionate rates. The NYPD stopped five times more people in 2005 than in 2002 -- the overwhelming majority of whom were African American or Latino.
On March 13, 2015, Capital New York and other news organizations reported that 50 of the 15,000 IP addresses belonging to the NYPD were associated with edits, dating back to 2006, to English Wikipedia articles, including this article on the Amadou Diallo shooting. These IP addresses geolocate to NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza. Detective Cheryl Crispin, a NYPD spokeswoman, said that "the matter is under internal review."
