March 2021 – The "True" North

Depending on how old you are, you may, or may not, remember stories about Somali “pirates” that emerged around 2009. One story that got international attention happened over five days in April 2009.

Four Somali teenagers took over the American Maersk Alabama cargo ship and took its captain, Richard Phillips, hostage in one of the life boats until the U.S. Navy showed up and killed three of the teenagers. They captured the leader and brought him to the U.S. where he was tried and sentenced to 33 years in prison. Below is a letter I recently mailed to Abdulwali Muse:

March 25, 2021

FCI Terre Haute, FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION, P.O. BOX 33, TERRE HAUTE, IN 47808

ATTN: Abdulwali Muse, register #: 70636-054

Brother Abduwali,

I recently read more about what led to you serving your current sentence. What happened to you shows how unfair the U.S. justice system is, especially to Black people…wherever they’re from.

I co-lead the 613-819 Black Hub, an Ottawa, Canada-based Black advocacy group. We work on issues of systemic anti-Black racism and discrimination and, although we act very locally, we think globally. We think about why we only found out about you because of the movie Captain Phillips. We think about why the movie, as its title illustrates, is focussed on the white man’s experience instead of you and your friends’. We wonder why we heard lots about Somali “pirates” attacking ships, apparently out of greed, but little of how, for many years earlier, countries illegally fishing off Somalia’s coast and dumping toxic waste depleted the fish stocks and robbed Somali fishermen of their livelihood.

We ask why they tried you as an adult when your mom said you were 16 at the time…And why did they sentence you to 33 years in prison, for a crime where no one was killed except your friends, in a country whose own president gets off free after inciting a treasonous insurrection that left five people dead?

We have stories here of young brothers ending up dead after turning to activities that put them in harm’s way because they felt they had no other choice. Eighteen-year-old brother Manyok Akol, shot dead in Jan. 2020, rapped under the name FTG Metro and spoke about how he and his friends had few choices in their west end Ottawa neighborhood.

But things changed last year with George Floyd’s death and the pandemic.

Anti-Black racism has been exposed in a way that can never be reversed – because Black activists won’t let it be. Here in Ottawa, we’re fighting to get our city council to freeze our police budget and invest in social services, like housing and employment. I’m mentoring a young brother who’s a refugee from Rwanda and wants to go into nursing. This Saturday I have arranged for him to speak to a local Black surgeon to help the brother expand his ambitions and perhaps aspire to becoming a doctor himself. People of African descent are spreading positive Blacktivity all over the world. And we will not be stopped.

Stay strong my brother.

Barack Obama was president in 2009, having been elected for this first time in November 2008. In his 2020 book, The Promised Land, Obama wrote about the incident and the deaths of the three teenagers – which he authorized:

“The news elicited high fives all around the White House. The Washington Post headline declared it AN EARLY MILITARY VICTORY FOR OBAMA. But, as relieved as I was to see Captain Phillips reunited with his family and as proud as I was of our navy personnel for their handling of the situation, I wasn’t inclined to beat my chest over the episode…I realized that, around the world, in places like Yemen, and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men like those three dead Somalis (some of the boys, really, since the oldest pirate was believed to be nineteen), had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings or the schemes of older men. They were dangerous, these young men, often deliberately and casually cruel. Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save them – send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filing their heads. And yet, the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.”

If Obama wanted to save these kids, why didn’t he commute Muse’s 33 year sentence like he reportedly did for 214 federal prisoners in August 2016, about five months before he left office?

Did countries then, and do they now, have rules to ensure that their companies don’t buy fish for us to eat that were caught illegally? Do we ask the stores where we buy our fish the same thing? Do countries have similar rules about where their toxic waste gets dumped? If they have such rules, do they enforce them?

Why were young men like Muse immediately labelled as “pirates” when, initially, they were simply trying to protect their livelihood?

The 2013 movie Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks, is based on the memoir by the real Captain Richard Phillips, A Captain’s Duty. Although Phillips is portrayed as a hero who risks his life to save his crew, lawsuits filed by some of his former crew suggest a different story. In October 2013, the lawyer for nine of the 23-member crew who sued the company that owned the ship gave the Business Insider a different picture of Captain Phillips: “To make him into a hero for driving this boat and these men into pirate-infested waters, that’s the real injustice here. The movie tells a highly fictionalized version of what actually happened.”, said attorney Brian Beckcom. Phillips was not named in the suit.

I tried to find out how much money Columbia and Sony paid Phillips for the rights to his book but even the mighty Google couldn’t tell me.

Muse’s story is an international version of what has been happening to young Black men in the U.S. and Canada for decades. Systemic anti-Black racism leaves few choices that herd them down the path to criminality. The systemic racism is ignored but they’re harshly punished for their crimes. Then their pursuit and capture is turned into lucrative entertainment through TV shows like COPS and movies like Captain Phillips.

There often isn’t a bright side, but there is one to this story…

For his role as Muse in the film, Somali-born, Minneapolis-based actor, Barkhad Abdi, was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and a Golden Globe Award. And he won a BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor. Abdi was born in the Somali capital, Mogadishu but fled to Yemen with his family when he was six or seven, when the Somali Civil War broke out. In 1999, Abdi and his family relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where there is a large Somali community. He sold mobile phones at his brother’s shop at a mall, worked as a limousine driver at a relative’s chauffeur company and as a DJ before landing the movie role. Neither he, nor his three friends who played the other pirates, had ever acted before.

Adbi has since appeared in several other films, made his directorial debut with the Somali film Ciyaalka Xaafada, and directed several music videos. He now splits his time between Los Angeles and Minnesota.

After the Maersk Alabama hijacking, shipping companies instituted new security measures that have reduced attacks to nearly zero.

So ships deliver their goods to us unhindered as the world continues ignoring where our toxic waste is dumped as long as it’s not in our backyard.

But we will not be ignored.

Len Carby and Richard Picart, two of the original members of the Federation of Black Canadians (FBC) steering committee, are suing me for $45,000 and $35,000 dollars respectively. In fairness, I sued them first, but Carby is also suing the Black single mom, who served my libel suit papers on him, for $35,000. He’s suing her for “falsifying” the document she served on him because she made a couple of mistakes that were quickly corrected. That’s right: Len Carby is suing a Black single mom for doing her job. And he hired a Black woman to help him – Shala McDonald, a paralegal with Okola Law which is owned by another Black woman, Stephanie Okola.

Carby’s law suit against me and the single mom are the latest in confirmed and alleged bad behaviour by former FBC steering committee members.

In my post, Tales from the Plantation #2, I talked about how I was on interchange with the FBC from January to May 2019. Shortly after starting, I began questioning behaviour I felt demonstrated a lack of transparency, competence and connection to community concerns. On May 27, the FBC terminated my interchange. In their email to my department announcing my termination, the FBC made 10 allegations against me including that I had “physically threatened my direct report” at the FBC, a completely false claim. Len Carby sent the email so I launched a $6700 libel suit against him. His $45,000 counter suit alleges that I libelled and slandered him, including calling him a house negro (which I did, but that’s not libel as it’s an opinion…with which Carby clearly disagrees).

On March 27, 2019, when I was working with the FBC, I noticed an item in the minutes from the last meeting about the FBC getting approval to use some funding they had gotten from the Michaelle Jean Foundation (MJF) to support the FBC’s membership growth. As Carby was in charge of finance at the time, and had asked me to work on an application for federal government funding, I asked him how much the MJF funding was. This was relevant because the federal funding application asked what other sources of funding we had.

After several evasive answers, in which he never told me the amount, Carby wrote:

“I suggest you think about these relentless emails. They amount to attempts at bullying and I will not have it. If you copy [your colleague] on any conversation that does not relate to anything he is working on, your email will be ignored. You have a reporting relationship with the FBC though (sic) me and your personal relationship with [your colleague] has nothing to do with that. I am clear with my instructions about the Funding (sic) application and you have everything you need to complete your work.”

He considered my request for transparency as bullying when, in fact, he was the one doing the bullying because he had the power, being my boss.

I called both Carby and Picart house negroes because, in my view, they were behaving like Samuel L. Jackson’s character Stephen in the movie Django Unchained. Stephen is one of plantation owner Calvin Candy’s house negroes. When Stephen realizes that former slave Django is trying to trick his master, he tells his master and gets Django captured and nearly killed. In one scene, with Django hanging upside down, naked in chains, Stephen tells him that they’re not going to castrate him because he would bleed out. Instead they’re going to send him to a work camp where he will be worked to death.

When Carby emailed my department, knowing what I said my white managers had done to me, he was, in my view, engaging in house negro activity like Stephen.

These days, to be considered house negro activity, the activity must benefit those doing it, it must harm the Black community or impede things that could help the community and the people must not reply to – or aggressively resist – questions of accountability.

The topic of house negroes was also raised in March 2021 during the Ontario Judicial Council’s second hearing into judicial misconduct of FBC founder and former Chair, Justice Donald McLeod, a long time friend of Carby. (McLeod was cleared of perjury allegations.)

Justice McLeod’s defence team raised the topic of house negroes on the last day of his 2nd hearing. They called Dr. Wendell Adjetey to testify as he had at McLeod’s first hearing. Adjetey is a McGill University historian who specializes in the post-Reconstruction United States, specializing on the African American experience. Like he did at McLeod’s first hearing, he gave a short outline of the history, and current state, of systemic anti-Black racism in Canada. However, this time, McLeod’s lawyers specifically asked him to explain the significance of the term house negro to the all-white panel. Adjetey then did so, but used the term house n-word instead. McLeod’s lawyers didn’t say why they asked him to do this.

Many folks in the Black community, especially supporters of Justice McLeod, say myself and others, like journalist and author Desmond Cole, shouldn’t write posts like this that “air our community’s dirty laundry in public”. They tell us we should “talk it out in private”.

Did Carby attempt to talk to the single Black mom before deciding to sue her for doing her job?

If Carby cares so much about the Black community and justice, has he asked his employer, the Royal Bank of Canada, why they weren’t among the more than 450 companies that originally signed the Black North Initiative pledge to work to remove corporate Canada’s anti-Black systemic barriers or why a petition was recently launched against RBC for “climate destruction and violation of Indigenous rights”?

People like Carby and Picart don’t want to air our dirty laundry in public or in private – because they’re the ones dirtying it.

We must praise our leaders when they do good and hold them accountable when they do wrong. And we must all realize that we all can step up to lead ourselves in big and small ways.

Notes: Former FBC Chair Dahabo Ahmed-Omer is now Executive Director of the Black North Initiative. My comments apply only to former FBC steering committee members not current ones or staff.

Sometime after this was posted, the Black North Initiative removed all trace of the Pledge or who signed it from their website.

Update – On Oct. 18, 2021, Carby served me with an amended claim in which he revised his claim against Ms. Hylton to $11,017.