This week I had an experience that showed that it seems white supremacy is alive and well in the place you’d least expect it: Ottawa’s police abolition movement.
On April 12, I attended the inaugural meeting of SURJ Ottawa. Standing Up for Racial Justice is a movement of white folks that began in the U.S. – before George Floyd – and now has 46 U.S. chapters. Ottawa is the 2nd chapter after Toronto. They educate white folks about their role in systemic racism and get them to “move” money to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) groups. They do so using an auction style method where they start the “bidding” high and move down. They ask people how much money they can give to hit their “stretch” point – the point where they feel they’re actually giving up some of their privilege. Using this method, they raised $2300 for us in 20 minutes much of which they’ve already sent us.
All did not go smoothly however as some of Ottawa’s police abolitionists crashed the meeting. When I recognized their names in the participants list I immediately asked the organizers to let them speak as I had worked with at least one of them with whom I had a good relationship…or so I thought.
The abolitionists, from the Coalition Against More Surveillance and the Crime and Punishment Education Project, harshly critiqued the SURJ folks and our Compassion not Cops campaign. After about 10 minutes, I intervened and said that, since their issue was mostly with our campaign, we should continue the conversation in our own meeting. I then put my email in the chat and said that if anyone wants to discuss our project, I was totally available, to which, one of the white male CPEP members replied: “It’s your idea Robin. You set up the meeting. Don’t side step.” All the abolitionists remained silent while their colleague did this. I emailed him immediately and he didn’t reply. I then met with the CAMS/CPEP folks for two hours the next day and he didn’t show up. In that meeting, they again critiqued our project saying it would cause harm. Later that day, a Black activist called me and said she saw the CAMS/CPEP folks discussing me online in such a way she felt she had to intervene and let me know. She also invited me to a 5pm meeting that day with the abolitionists.
I attended the meeting and told the abolitionists that, if they had issues with our project, the anti-racist thing to do would have been to reach out to talk with me. Instead, they – mostly white people – chose to crash a fundraising meeting of a Black political advocacy group and try to keep us from getting donations: which they did. We estimate they cost us about $1300 in unfilled pledges.
I ended my comments at the meeting by telling them: “We don’t know exactly what you do. We don’t know your training. We don’t know who you work with. We don’t know who pays you. But after what you did, we know you engage in, and support, acts of anti-Black racism and white supremacy and we certainly don’t trust you.”
The abolitionists critique the police for having a culture of white supremacy but clearly have more work to do to rid themselves of the same thing. Ironically, their actions are also consistent with police informants like those from the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation that had Martin Luther King and Black Panther leader Fred Hampton under surveillance and helped contribute to their deaths. Those actions include:
- causing division amongst groups that oppose the police;
- knowing when and how those groups meet and infiltrating their meetings;
- targeting fundraising of Black groups; and
- proposing alternatives that are vague and will take years to implement.
There’s another part of this story that highlights the problem with using the term BIPOC in Canada….
The abolitionist with whom I thought I had good relationship is one of the few non-white abolitionists (and, to her credit, the first one to apologize). Using the term BIPOC in Canada has always made me uncomfortable because, unlike in the US where there’s a large LatinX population that has, and still faces, systemic discrimination, Canada never had that. In fact, elements of the POC population here have opposed Black liberation efforts either openly or behind the scenes for years. An example is the federal government where we created the Federal Black Employee Caucus in Dec. 2017 partly in response to years of ineffective and/or hostile action by “visible minority” groups. Their opposition may partly be from visible minorities being one of the four designated groups under Canada’s federal Employment Equity Act along with women, people with disabilities and Indigenous people.
There’s no history of solidarity in the struggle between Black and Indigenous people and “people of color” like there is with, say, Jewish people in Canada and around the world who have fought, and died, along side each other for decades.
So, in the end, all the abolitionists behaved as expected and learned an important lesson: Black folks in Ottawa will not allow them to put their knees on our necks.