Author: Robin Browne

Categories
Anti-Black racism Hate crime Police

Trump-style racism in Russell, Ont.

In 2018, in a ranking of 415 cities, towns and villages, MoneySense Magazine named Russell Township, 40 minutes southeast of Ottawa, as one of the best places to live in Canada. However, based on what happened last week, Russell’s few Black people weren’t home when they did the survey.

On Tuesday, Sept. 22, a 10-yr-old Black youth was biking with a white friend along a Russell street, when they passed two white boys their age, one of whom called the Black boy a nigger. When the boy’s white friend asked if the white boy had said what he thought, the white boy repeated it several times. When the boy’s white friend told the aggressor to stop, the aggressor hit the Black boy in his leg with his scooter, knocking him to the ground. The other white boy then jumped on the Black boy’s arm, breaking it in two places. When the Black boy’s mom found out, around 5:15pm, she immediately called the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) (who cover Russell), but they didn’t come. The officer who did finally call, around 9:30pm, was very rude and dismissive and said, “it was consensual” and “It’s not a crime to call someone a nigger.” The mom then asked for the officer’s superior and spoke to his sergeant, but he said she’d have to speak to the same officer. When she refused, the sergeant finally connected her with an officer who was empathetic. The 613-819 Black Hub immediately contacted the boy’s mom to provide support. 

The principal of the victim’s school said that the principal of the arm breaker’s school said he suspended the arm breaker but she didn’t know what, if anything, he did to the other kid who the mother said also called her son a nigger then assaulted him with his scooter.

With the mom’s consent, we emailed the head of the Russell OPP requesting a meeting to discuss the troubling police response, and the principal of the school the arm breaking kid attends also asking for a meeting. The response from OPP Russell County Detachment Commander, Luc Duval, is below.

“Hello Robin:

Thank you for reaching out.  I definitely understand your interest in this matter. The OPP takes incidents involving young people very seriously. Due to the ages of those involved, we cannot get into specifics related to those involved in the incident. For this reason, I must respectfully decline your invitation to meet. I am able to tell you that our area Crime Supervisor has reviewed the actions of the officers involved, to ensure proper steps were taken. As the injuries were not life-threatening, officers waited until the medical issues could be dealt with as a priority before responding to the hospital to talk to the victim.  It took one hour from the time of dispatch to the time the officer was at the hospital.  This is not unusual for an assault involving non-life-threatening injuries. We are aware that the incident allegedly started over a racial slur, but cannot speculate on the thought processes or the reasons it happened. As you are aware, under Canadian law, individuals under the age of 12 cannot be charged criminally. For that reason, the OPP is working with the parents of the young people involved and has engaged community support services, including the Intersections program and Valoris.

You can learn more about Intersections at http://improvingsystems.ca/projects/intersections-3. Information about Valoris can be found at https://valorispr.ca/en/about/.  Both families agreed with this approach.

Inspector Luc Duval, Detachment Commander, OPP, Russell County Detachment”

There are a number of problems with Mr. Duval’s response:

  1. He says he can’t meet with us because of the kids’ ages and the fact that he can’t discuss the specifics. But why can’t he meet the family to see how they’re doing and to discuss our other request: what the OPP is doing to address systemic anti-Black racism within the ranks of the OPP, that even Premier Doug Ford has acknowledged?
  2. He says proper procedure was followed and “it took one hour from the time of dispatch to the time the officer was at the hospital.”, when, according to the victim’s mother, no officer ever showed up at the hospital.
  3. He says, “We are aware that the incident allegedly started over a racial slur, but cannot speculate on the thought processes or the reasons it happened.” Really? A white kid calls a Black kid he doesn’t know a nigger and then breaks his arm and they can’t speculate what might have motivated that? Would he say that if a Black kid had called a white kid a honky then busted his arm?
  4. He says “the OPP is working with the parents of the young people involved” but the mother says they weren’t working with her at the time of his reply so he must have meant they were only working with the attackers’ families.
  5. He says nothing about the mother’s claims that the officer, who finally contacted her more than 4 hours after she called 911, was rude, said the attack was “consensual” and angrily told the mother, “It’s not a crime to call someone a nigger.”

But, at least Mr. Duval responded which is more than can be said for the principal. Instead, his school superintendent, Norma McDonald, who we copied on our email to him, responded on his behalf:

“Good afternoon Mr. Browne, I am responding to your email regarding an incident which occurred on September 22nd which resulted in an injury to a student from Russell. Immediately after learning of the incident, a principal’s investigation took place which resulted in appropriate immediate remedial action.  By reason of privacy obligations, I cannot supply you with any details of the steps taken by the Board to address the situation. You have requested a meeting with our principal to discuss the incident.  Unfortunately, I must decline your request.  As I am sure you can appreciate, we are not able to discuss the personal circumstances involving a particular student of the Board. I would add that the Board treats with the utmost seriousness any allegation of racist behaviour by any student, member of staff or any other official of the Board.  [Quotes board policy]. While I cannot speak to the specifics of any matter involving a Board student, I can advise that the Board will adhere to the commitments outlined in its policies and will take all reasonable steps to ensure their application to any student, staff member or other official of the Board who has acted in contravention of those policies.

Thank you for your email, Norma McDonald, Superintendent of School Effectiveness, CDSBEO”

The main problem with Ms. McDonald’s response is the same as with Mr. Duval’s. She cites privacy issues as a reason for not being able to meet with the family and us but doesn’t explain why she can’t meet with us to find out how the victim and his family are doing and to discuss what the school is doing to address systemic anti-Black racism on, and off, school property.

The OPP did finally reach out to the victim’s mother, by phone, to offer support services, including those provided by Valoris that Mr. Duval mentioned in his email. Under “Services”, Valoris offers individual and family mental health counselling. There is also a section called Diversity and Inclusivity with a tag line: For Everyone. However, under that tab, it says, “Pick the topic that interests you”, and offers only two choices: LGBTQIA2S+ and FMIN (First Nations, Metis, Inuit). The chances of the young victim being able to see a Black counsellor through Valoris are about as high as Russell hiring its first Black police chief next week (like Ottawa did last October).

Russell may have been named one of the best places to live in Canada in 2018 but now it’s one of the best places in Canada to see systemic anti-Black racism up close and personal.

From the boy being the victim of a violent anti-Black hate crime; to the police response, first late, then hostile, then blaming the victim; to the school principal not reaching out to the family and continuing to ignore requests to meet with them; to the attackers’ families also not reaching out to the victim’s family to the mom being challenged to find a Black counsellor, Russell has it all.

So, our advice to Black families is as clear as the title of Jordan’s Peele’s Oscar winning movie: Get Out!

Leave Russell and come to Ottawa. We have Ottawa’s first Black police chief, its first Black director of education and its first Black city counsellor. The city has a new anti-racism directorate, the Federal Black Employee Caucus and the 613-819 Black Hub. We would also tell businesses not to invest in Russell until the people in power in Russell do something to address systemic anti-Black racism.

Ottawa is open to Black folks and open for business!

Categories
Peter Sloly Police

Ottawa police chief passes the leadership test

In his message, Testing Leadership: An Inconvenient Truth, posted on the Ottawa Police Association website, OPA president Matt Skof says Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly has failed on all five tests of exemplary leadership (Skof then only lists four things which reflects his quality of leadership): setting an example for people to emulate; creating a shared vision to rally around; creating an environment in which people safely experiment with new ideas; and building upon the successes within the group. Skof also accuses the Chief of being “loose with the facts and reckless in [his] conclusions” in the Chief’s Sept. 4 Ottawa Citizen editorial, Ottawa police are committed to resolving bias and systemic racism. The editorial addresses an incident where a white cop stopped a Black man for expired plates only to admit they weren’t when the man insisted on getting out of the car to check.

Skof is the one playing loose with the facts as Chief Sloly has clearly met all four leadership objectives: just not in the way Skof likes.

Since taking over in October 2019, Chief Sloly has created a shared vision to rally around and set a clear example for people to emulate via the actions he has taken in support of that vision. Under his leadership, the OPS has significantly increased its capacity to drive the principles of equity, diversity and inclusion in every aspect of the organization, including implementing the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Action Plan, which includes a specific action item to address “racial profiling.” The OPS also created the Respect, Values & Inclusion (RVI) Directorate – to ensure full implementation, ongoing evaluation and continuous improvement. And the OPS announced major organizational and operational changes to better serve all its members and better work with community partners – especially members of the most marginalized and racialized communities.

To do all this, Chief Sloly has built on the successes within the OPS as evidenced by things like promoting Isobel Granger to superintendent to lead the new RVI directorate. Lastly, the Chief has certainly created an environment in which people can feel safe to experiment with new ideas around diversity and inclusion.

Skof plays loose with the facts to make this point. He says the officer who stopped the Black man for the non-expired plates, “performed a random license plate review and identified an irregularity – the plate looked to be expired.” Since the issue at hand is whether the officer stopped the driver because he was Black what is Skof’s proof that the stop was random? And what is meant by the plate “looked to be expired”? Did the cop read it wrong the first time?

Skof mentions the traffic stop study that the OPS was mandated to participate in a few years ago, citing two conclusions: in 88.6% of stops, the officers could not identify the race of the driver and that the data did not confirm a bias within the police service. What he doesn’t mention is that the study also found that Middle Eastern and black drivers — particularly young men — were far more likely to be stopped by Ottawa police than other drivers. He also doesn’t mention that the OPS was forced to take part in the study after a young Black man, Chad Aiken, filed a human rights complaint against the force for being stopped while driving his mother’s Mercedes.

Skof says, “the Chief’s narrative now rests on a mistaken traffic stop, conducted by a two-year employee – for Sloly, this is more than enough to conclude that there is bias throughout the organization.”

Chief Sloly didn’t conclude there’s bias in the OPS based on this one stop. He concluded that based on, among other things, studies like the traffic stop study and the 2018 census of Ottawa Police Service officers and civilian employees that showed a deep divide over the force’s attempts to diversify its ranks.

Skof continues to take full advantage of his privilege to be ignorant. He doesn’t have to be aware of, let alone deal with, the reality that racism isn’t about intent, it’s about impact. It doesn’t matter what the officer’s intent was when he stopped the man. Given the number of Black men who have died at the hands of police in the U.S. and Canada, the impact on a Black man of a white cop stopping him while driving, is severe – and it’s even worse when the Black man has done nothing wrong, as in this case. If the officer was sensitive to this he wouldn’t have responded to the man asking if he stopped him because he was Black by saying , “Stop it. No. Never. I didn’t even see who was driving the car. I was looking at the plate, sir.” Stop what? Suggesting that police stop Black people, especially young Black men in nice cars, just because they’re Black? The officer’s comment reflects a lack of awareness of both OPS history and the current post-George Floyd reality. Stop it? How about cops stop pulling us over for “driving while Black with valid plates”? 

And while you’re at it, how about getting cops out of our schools? Skof disagrees, of course, and critiques Chief Sloly for not defending the School Resource Officer program that includes the controversial program that puts cops in schools. Skof cites a Jan. 2018 study on the School Resource Program in Peel Region, by Carleton professor Linda Duxbury. The study basically said everyone loved the program. The only problem is Duxbury didn’t separate out responses from Black students. Instead, she lumped everyone together as “people who considered themselves to be a member of a minority group.” That means, Black students’ answers could be potentially mixed in with women, any visible minority, LGBTQ+, white men feeling threatened by all the brown people around…well, you get the point.

Skof ends by saying, “As for Chief Sloly, a leader cannot be a community activist and a police chief at the same time – you must choose.” I’m not sure what Skof means by community activist but, to be a good police chief, you must be positively active in the community as Chief Sloly is. Skof should emulate his example.

Categories
CHRC PSIC Public service

FYI, PSIC: they don’t call us niggers anymore

One of the things I did to resist the anti-Black discrimination I was facing at my department was file a complaint with the Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner of Canada, or PSIC. PSIC’s mandate is on the front page of its website: “We handle disclosures of wrongdoing and help protect those who blow the whistle.” They protect whistleblowers by keeping their identities secret. The reason I’m revealing my identity now is because of the response I got from PSIC. Below is my response to PSIC Deputy Commissioner, Denis Bilodeau, who signed the letter I got.

“Mr. Bilodeau, I just received your letter explaining your decision not to investigate my complaint. Although, your decision is disappointing, it is not surprising. Your reasons for dismissing my complaint of systemic discrimination and anti-Black racism against my former [managers] at Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) are of most concern. You say that my complaint lacked specificity and would be better dealt with by the Canadian Human Rights Commission. This, despite the fact that I cited the results of the 2019 Public Service Employee Survey which had data on Black federal employees – for the first time ever – and confirmed that Black employees, public service wide, and at ECCC, report discrimination levels twice the average.  In addition, I provided detailed information about the discrimination I had faced. You further justified your decision based on my assertion that the discriminatory “treatment is subtle in nature but that beyond your own experience, you have not witnessed any incidents involving colleagues.” This seems to indicate that, in order to qualify for investigation, the discrimination must be of a blatant nature like people calling us niggers to our face. This rarely happens whereas subtle forms of anti-Black discrimination are daily occurrences.

Your response is consistent with the Canadian Human Rights Commission that regularly rejects the majority of race-based complaints – and tried to do the same with mine – so your referring my complaint to the Commission is clearly inadequate as a solution.

The ineffectiveness of organizations like PSIC and the Commission in dealing with anti-Black racism complaints is one reason why I advise Black employees, including members of the Federal Black Employee Caucus which I co-founded, to use tools like race-based grievances, Access To Information and Privacy requests, the media and small claims court to seek justice.”

In her book, Race After Technology, Princeton Professor Ruha Benjamin says, “Until we come to grips with the “reasonableness” of racism, we will continue to look for it on the bloody floors of Charleston churches and in the dashboard cameras on Texas highways, and overlook it in the smart sounding logic of textbooks, policy statements, court rulings, science journals and cutting edge technologies.” Regarding the way PSIC and the Canadian Human Rights Commission currently assess race-based complaints, and applying it to a Canadian context, her quote could be reworded as:

“Until we come to grips with the “reasonableness” of racism in the public service, we will continue to look for it on the bloody floors of Quebec mosques, the videos of Canadian police officers abusing Black people, and white public servants calling their Black colleagues niggers, and overlook it in public service hiring, promoting and sanctioning practices.”

Mr. Bilodeau, our harassers no longer wear white hoods – they wear white collars.

[Sept. 4 update – I ended my original email to PSIC Deputy Commissioner Bilodeau with the question, “Given all this, please clarify what would qualify as enough specificity?” Today, I received the response, “It is not the Commissioner Office’s role to pinpoint what specific information should be provided for an investigation to be launched into your allegations of wrongdoing.”]

Categories
Google SurCap Surveillance capitalism

Google wants you to pay them $2.79/month (and ignore the bad stuff they’re doing)

Like billions of people, I have happily used Google search, Gmail and Docs for years, marvelling at how they could provide all that free storage space. However, the fun recently came to an end when I started getting this message from Google:

The message doesn’t suggest deleting things to clear space, let alone provide any helpful tips on how to do so. The message is clearly aimed at scaring people consumed by FOMO (the fear of missing out) into paying for storage.

I’m sure Google told me about the 15GB limit when I signed up years ago, but I had long since forgotten, as I’m sure most people have. So, now we have the choice of deleting lots of things, moving them to physical hard drives or finding a free storage service (good luck with the last one).

I tried deleting things but, after wiping out my biggest files, I still had 14GB of stuff and couldn’t figure out how all my little files could add up to all that. These issues, however, pale compared to the larger one: that Google is asking us to pay to store our content from which they already make huge profits partly by enabling things like hate speech and disinformation.

As I explained in my rabble article COVID-19 could mean we lose and surveillance capitalists win — again, Google and Facebook make lots of money off hate speech and disinformation like conspiracy theories because they generate lots of engagement. The more engagement, the more they can charge for ads.

The excerpts below from Roger McNamee’s booked, Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook catastrophe, explains why this matters.

Here’s what McNamee said at the May 28, 2019 hearing of Canada’s federal Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics:

“For Google and Facebook, the business is behavioural prediction. They build a high resolution data avatar of every consumer – a voodoo doll, if you will. They gather a tiny amount of data from user posts and queries but the vast majority of their data comes from surveillance: web tracking, scanning emails and documents, data from apps and third parties and ambient surveillance from products like Alexa, Google Assistant…and Pokemon Go!. Google and Facebook use data voodoo dolls to provide their customers – who are marketers – with perfect information about every consumer. They use the same data to manipulate consumer choices. Just as in China, behavioural manipulation is the goal. The algorithms of Google and Facebook are tuned to keep users on site and active, preferably by pressing emotional buttons that reveal each users true self. For most users, this means content that provokes fear or outrage. Hate speech, disinformation and conspiracy theories are catnip for these algorithms.”

In Zucked, McNamee argues that what people do, or influence others to do, when they get access to our data voodoo dolls, legally or illegally, can be devastating:

“The vast majority of the data in your voodoo doll got into the hands of internet platforms without your participation or permission. It bears little relation to the services you value. The harm it causes is generally to other people, which means that other people’s data can harm you. That is what happened to the victims in El Paso, Christchurch, and so many other places. Do we want the power of roughly three billion data voodoo dolls to be available to anyone willing to pay for access? Would it not be better to prevent antivaxxers from leveraging Google’s predictions about pregnancy to indoctrinate unsuspecting mothers-to-be with their conspiracy theory, placing many people at risk of infectious disease? The same question needs to be asked about climate change denial and white supremacy, both of which are amplified by internet platforms. How about election interference and voter suppression? Internet platforms did not create these ills, but they have magnified them. Is it really acceptable for corporations to profit from the algorithmic amplification of hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories? Do we want to reward corporations for damaging society?”

Do you want to pay Google $2.79 a month to damage society? If we don’t, what can we do?

One thing would be to have massive Global Google Deletion Days (with the cool #G2D2 hashtag) where millions of users simultaneously delete big chunks of their data to avoid going over the 15GB limit. This would deprive Google of the extra revenue they’d get from people paying for Google One cloud storage, and the revenue they were making off the deleted content.

Start going through your stuff…and enjoy finding and sharing some gems from your past.

Categories
COVID19 George Floyd TV

Black lives matter until the Game of Thrones sequel starts

Like millions of people around the world, I got hooked on Game of Thrones because it was great TV. However, unlike millions of people, I discovered it late and thought it was the one of the most racist shows I had ever seen. The picture below has some of the key reasons why.

Game of Thrones (G.O.T.) was the ultimate white liberal fantasy. It was about good white people fighting bad white people with almost no brown people around. The only brown folks were slaves, former slaves or savage warriors, called the Dothraki, who loved violence and looked and sounded like Arabs (the Sinbad movie kind, who were also played by white or kinda white actors).

Instead of showing these white folks violently robbing brown folks of their stuff (i.e. what really happened), one of the lead characters, Daenerys Targaryen, was a pretty blond woman who attacked places and freed slaves. After she conquered a place, she would tell the former slaves that they were free to go – but none ever did. In one scene, after she freed the slaves, they hoisted her above their heads like in a mosh pit, and passed her around while calling her “mother” in their native tongue.

The only two brown, main characters are the two in the pic above. Both are former slaves who Daenerys freed. The woman, Missandei, is a translator who becomes Dany’s trusted advisor, but it’s the male character who sets a new racist high for character development.

He is a former slave who was raised as part of a slave army, he now leads. Called the Unsullied, they wear masks so it’s hard to tell what colour they are (but you can judge for yourself from the pic below). What we do learn is that they’re all eunuchs because their balls were cut off when they were young. We also learn that, despite his lack of balls, their leader can still feel attraction, but only towards Missandei. He never expresses any sexual interest in Daenerys (despite her running around naked a lot because she’s immune to fire and kills enemies by burning them alive and emerging naked from the ashes). And she never shows any sexual interest in him – despite his sex machine name – Grey Worm.

Members of The Unsullied

So let’s recap: white folks fighting white folks, white women freeing slaves, crazy violent “savages” and the most non-threatening Black guys possible. Oh, and one more thing…. All the white people have a common enemy in the white walkers, an ever increasing army of dead people led by the Night King who’s one of the most Black looking dudes in the show. The dead live outside the massive ice wall separating them from where all the white people live. (Trump must have ordered a similar wall on the Mexican border before one of his advisors told him it would melt.)

The only thing that shocked me more than how racist the mega-hit was, was how few people seemed to notice – or care. Prior to Googling “Game of Thrones racist”, I hadn’t heard about anyone calling the show racist. (When I did Google it, the first result was the Guardian story, “There are no black people on Game of Thrones’: why is fantasy TV so white?”)

Millions of people watched G.O.T. for eight years with very few having a problem with its blatant anti-Black racism. Then they saw an 8-minute video of a Black man being lynched and many of them hit the street yelling Black lives matter. What changed? The problem is, nothing.

White folks (and other non-Black folks) hit the street after George Floyd because 1) Black people hit the street first 2) Black people burned down other people’s stuff. If only one of those had happened, there would have been far fewer non-Black folks in the street.

The problem is that it’s only the most horrendous acts of anti-Black racism, followed by Black folks hitting and street and burning down other people’s stuff that gets people’s attention. Blatant racism in one’s favourite TV show doesn’t.

The riots following the acquittal of the cops who beat up Rodney King got lots of attention but that was partly because of what Black folks burned down – and why.

According to Wikipedia:

“In the year before the riots, 1991, there was growing resentment and violence between the African-American and Korean-American communities. Racial tensions had been simmering for years between these groups. In 1989, the release of Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing highlighted urban tensions between Whites, Blacks and Koreans over racism and economic inequality. Many Korean shopkeepers were sad, tired, and afraid because they routinely dealt with targeted harassment, shoplifting or theft, violence, and threats from their Black customers and neighbors. Many Blacks were angry because they felt routinely disrespected and humiliated by Korean storeowners. They still viewed the area as their neighborhood, which the Korean Americans had invaded to make a living in without learning any preexisting culture. On March 16, 1991, a year prior to the Los Angeles riots, storekeeper Soon Ja Du shot and killed Black ninth-grader Latasha Harlins. Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and the jury recommended the maximum sentence of 16 years, but the judge decided against prison time and sentenced Du to five years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine instead. About 2,300 Korean-owned stores in southern California were looted or burned, making up 45 percent of all damages caused by the riot.”

The problem is not dealing with the root causes of the tension before things blow up.

COVID-19 exposed tensions created by systemic equality and contributed to George Floyd’s death being the spark that set the tinder box on fire.

The question now is, are the majority of people going to see the light, examine their role in maintaining systemic inequality, and do their part to end it – or are they going disappear into the next G.O.T. fantasy, only to emerge after the next explosion?

Categories
613-819 Black Hub Heroes Hub Freedom School Statues

Canada needs more Black heroes

Our last 613-819 Black Hub Freedom School class was about hero building, sparked by the debate over what to do with statues of people who did really nasty things in the past.

One of our main goals was to come up with a recommendation on what position the Hub should take on whether to take such statues down. Ottawa mayor, Jim Watson, was recently quoted as saying he was against taking down statues of Sir John A. MacDonald because “he was the first leader of our country – warts and all.” Some citizens had been calling for MacDonald’s statues to be removed due to his documented racist views and actions against Indigenous people.

We didn’t decide on a position, as there’s still more discussion needed, but we gained some valuable insights into how societies create heroes, how that impacts our daily lives – and what we should do about.

We talked about how we learn about heroes from an early age, one of the first ways being from fairy tales. As Black kids, we were exposed to lots of heroes that didn’t look like us. They were in books, on TV, in movies, on cereal boxes – even on our clothing. If your parents did the extra work you might also have been exposed to heroes like Anansi the Spider – but only in books.

We talked about how the heroe-building machine works so well that characters like Robin Hood are known globally. I pointed out that, no matter where I have travelled, people make the same joke when they learn my name: “Like Robin Hood!” (“Like Batman and Robin!” is a distant second.) This happened even in West Africa.

We talked about Canadian national heroes and who has the power to create them. The ones that came immediately to mind were people like Sir John A. MacDonald and Terry Fox. Although we could have mentioned Viola Desmond, Donovan Bailey or any of the championship Toronto Raptors – no one did. We did spend a lot of time talking about sports heroes, however, when we moved from talking about make believe heroes to real ones.

The first thing we discussed was that sports heroes, like all real life heroes, aren’t actually “real” as their hero image is carefully crafted to leave out the bad stuff – unless the bad stuff is central to their image like Michael Jordan’s former Chicago Bulls team mate, Dennis Rodman. Sports heroes are made by the marketing machine of those that own the teams they play on. In the stadium, they model physical excellence, team work, competitive spirit and tenacity. Outside the stadium, some of them model community service. However, unlike fairy tale princes or super heroes, sports heroes don’t confront the powerful – especially the powers that control their sports. What happened to kneeling quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, is an example of what awaits Black athletes who break that rule (in contrast, American soccer star, Megan Rapinoe, is still playing despite having kneeled in solidarity with Kaeperinick in 2016).

Looking at Black sports heroes and Viola Desmond, the rules would appear to be that Black sports stars can be made heroes if they shut up and play and others can become heroes if they take an individual, non-violent stand against injustice. Black folks who aren’t playing with someone else’s balls and are challenging the system now, aren’t heroes – they’re trouble makers. And things get really bad when those trouble makers run into some other heroes: the police.

We’re taught from an early age that cops are good. We see them helping old ladies in children’s books, talking with Mr. Rogers and as pieces to add to our happy Lego cities. We see them in kids movies and TV shows usually coming to arrest the bad guys. But, just like sports heroes, these images of cops aren’t real. They omit the bad stuff and that means that folks that don’t have bad experiences with cops (i.e. most white people) grow up thinking cops are all good. The problem with that is, when a cop beats up or kills a Black person, most white people’s first thought is, “Well, cops are good so the Black person must have done something wrong.”

This is why Canada needs more Black heroes: so everyone gets brought up learning about a lot more Black folks who are all good too. (They need to learn about real, complex Black folks too but, hey, baby steps.)

We need more Canadian Black Panther/T’Challas, more Black teachers kids can look up to and more Canadian Zumbis. Who is Zumbi you ask?

In 2016, my family and I went to the Rio Olympics in Brazil. We spent the first part of our trip in Rio and the second part in the former colonial capital, Salvador. One day, while walking near Salvador’s town square, we came upon this statue:

It’s of Zumbi Dos Palmares who, according to Wikipedia, “was a Brazilian of Kongo origin and one of the pioneers of resistance to slavery of Africans by the Portuguese in Brazil. He was also the last of the kings of the Quilombo dos Palmares, a settlement of Afro-Brazilian people who had liberated themselves from enslavement in that same settlement, in the present-day state of Alagoas, Brazil. Zumbi today is revered in Afro-Brazilian culture as a powerful symbol of resistance against the enslavement of Africans in the colony of Brazil.”

Zumbi has his own national day of celebration and an international airport named after him:

This would be like having a international airport named after Louis Riel in Canada or Nat Turner in the US. (I can see Nat Turner International Airport having signs up saying, “If you see something you don’t like, please revolt.”)

My position on the statues is leave them up but put up plaques telling their whole story – warts and all. And put up statues of folks like Rocky Jones and Rosemary Brown.

As for sport heroes, if we don’t like the fact that they’re told to shut and play, maybe we should speak up and stop paying to see games until the athletes are allowed to speak up too.

Categories
Black Lives Matter Defunding Police

Defund the police (but give the Chief a raise)

As I marched through the streets of Ottawa with hundreds of others on June 20, I said to a Black activist friend that, if someone had told me two years ago that 2020 would see thousands of white people marching in the streets of the world’s cities yelling Black Lives Matter!, I would have said they were on crack (the person telling me the story and the 1000s of white people they imagined). Yet, here we are…

Two weeks earlier, I had marched with thousands of others in Ottawa and marvelled at white people holding signs saying, WHITE SILENCE IS VIOLENCE and DEFUND THE POLICE.

This was surprising on many levels, the first being – who the hell had ever heard the word “defund” before? Second was the fact that white people were calling for the defunding of an institution with which they have a fundamentally – and historically – different relationship than Black people.

In the U.S., the original idea of policing came from the south when slave patrols were hired to recapture escaped slaves. Then, when slavery was abolished, police enforced Jim Crow laws for even the most minor infractions. Canadian policing has a similar history. The Mounties were created for a specific purpose: to assert sovereignty over Indigenous people and their lands. Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. MacDonald got the idea for the Mounties from the Royal Irish Constabulary, a paramilitary police force the British created to keep the Irish under control. MacDonald envisioned his own Royal Irish Constabulary — except instead of the Irish, they would control the Indigenous people already living on the land.

Racist policing has led to racialized people, especially Black and Indigenous people, having a very different relationship with police than everyone else. Comedian Andrew Shultz sums it up succinctly in his YouTube video, “Black people. I’m going to say something that’s going to be incredibly surprising to you and incredibly obvious to white people: I love cops!” He explains that white people love cops so much they named a band The Police and spend hours happily watching the show Cops (at least they did until the Paramount Network recently cancelled it amid protests over police brutality).

So, white folks screaming to take money away from something they love isn’t something we’re used to seeing everyday…in fact, ever.

But what does defunding the police mean?

For some folks, like Nova Scotian prison and police abolitionist activist, El Jones, it means getting rid of the police completely. In her Washington Post article, Black Canadians are suffocating under a racist policing system, too, Jones argues for defunding the police because they don’t increase safety for anyone, “It is past time to stop believing in the fantasy that arming the police, increasing their surveillance powers and allowing them to commit violence with impunity upon black people keeps the public safe.”

For me, right now, defunding means immediately replacing armed police with people able to provide a non-lethal, compassionate response to people experiencing mental health crises. I speak from personal experience…

My older brother is schizophrenic and lives in Toronto and has workers from the Canadian Mental Health Association that check on him almost every day. He used to have occasional runs-ins with the Toronto Police but I can’t remember the last time that’s happened since the CMHA workers have been helping him. I am sure that they are a key part of the reason my brother is alive today. Why not shift police funding to the CMHA to provide more workers to help people from getting into crisis in the first place (which would, no doubt, be cheaper)? (But if they do end up in crisis, send people like the CMHA folks, not the cops.)

In addition to being for defunding certain police activities, I’m also against increasing funding to buy something that many of those calling for defunding are calling for: police body cameras.

One thing that has gotten very little coverage since George Floyd was killed is the fact the media is making money – and lots of it – off the images of Floyd’s death and the protests and riots that followed. These images and videos attract lots of eyeballs and lots of online interaction and allow mainstream and social media companies to charge more for ads. Body cameras would simply provide more lucrative footage of Black people dying – but wouldn’t stop us from getting killed. This is especially true since the police have to turn the cameras on before going to a call and can turn them off if something’s happening that they don’t want people to see.

Another issue is officer pay. A friend who lives in Toronto says they pay their officers very well and therefore attract officers with higher education. He argues that this leads to more outcomes like the one seen in the viral video of Toronto Police officer, Ken Lam, confronting, but not shooting, the white guy who had just mowed down several people with his van. My friend argues that, “People with masters degrees don’t shoot people.”, and that higher salaries attract people with higher education. If that’s the case, then why did a 2018 Guardian article report the results of a study showing that Black Toronto residents were 20 times more likely to be shot by police? Is it only those cops with undergrad or college degrees doing all the shooting? I haven’t seen anything to back that up.

One police officer who should get a raise, though, is Ottawa’s new police chief, Peter Sloly.

Sloly was sworn in as the Chief of the Ottawa Police Service on October 28, 2019 following an intense campaign by local activists to get him to come to Ottawa from Toronto. Since he arrived, he has reinstated the disbanded hate crimes unit and created a new Respect, Values and Integrity Directorate, led by former Inspector Isobel Granger, who Sloly promoted to superintendent to lead it. He also took swift, decisive action on the racist meme circulated around the Ottawa Police, leading to an officer being charged.

He continued setting himself apart from his predecessors by what he did during the June 20 march. Hundreds of us marched from the police station to City Hall to protest police violence, proclaim that all Black lives matter and remember Abdirahman Abdi who died after being pursued and beaten by Ottawa police in August 2016. Like the June 5 march, it was remarkable by the complete absence of police. I didn’t see a single officer from the time we started marching until the end of the demo – with one exception. When the march reached City Hall, and the temperature reached near forty degrees Celsius, one of the main organizers took to the stage, passionately talked about Abdi and stated the group’s demands. Standing in front of him, was one lone police officer in full uniform, standing with his hands crossed…just listening. It was Chief Peter Sloly.

Sloly is a smart guy. You don’t become a partner and Security & Justice lead at Deloitte if you’re not. Before he did that, Sloly was on the Toronto Police force for 27 years, rising to Deputy Chief.  He has a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Masters of Business Administration.

He also clearly understands the power of symbolism and the need to back it with real action.

Give that guy a raise.

Categories
Awareness raising Diversity and Inclusion Government of Canada Public service White women

How my white women bosses terrorized me

The global response to George Floyd’s death has got people talking about other incidents where white people did bad things to Black people. One of those incidents surfaced in a viral video of a white woman threatening to call the police, then doing so, on a bird-watching African-American man who asked her to leash her dog in New York’s Central Park. Amy Cooper’s apology to Christian Cooper (no relation), following her being fired, is a classic case of too little waaaay to late.

In his New York Times article, How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror, Charles M. Blow argues that what Cooper did was simply the latest in a long history of white women using themselves as weapons against Black men. And Blow adds, “There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for them to deny knowing precisely what they are doing.” I agree and here’s why…

In the fall of 2017, I got a new boss. She was my sixth boss in 18 months and she immediately began micromanaging me on a level that, to me, qualified as my first case of professional harassment. I told my union representative about it and he told me he had informed the Director General. I heard nothing from the DG for about a month while the situation with my boss worsened. Then, one day, after a tense email exchange with my boss, I went to a meeting in a boardroom full of my colleagues, who were mostly white women. When I entered the meeting, I saw my boss sitting at the table, went to her and asked, “Was my email clear?”. I was angry and tense when I said it. In response, she sent an email to my DG that said, “He is getting in my face in a threatening way.” (I got the email through Access to Information – i.e. the federal government equivalent of taking part in a slave rebellion.) A few minutes later, my DG entered the room, came over to where I was sitting silently in the corner and said, in front of all my colleagues, “ Robin. Do you have an issue? Because we can’t have you threatening your colleagues.” (This is the same person who, as I explained in Tales from the Plantation #1, had me banned from all of my workplace buildings without informing me.)

Despite the many complaints I have filed since that day, neither my former boss nor the DG have been held accountable, in fact, the DG got promoted. The global reaction to George Floyd’s death provides some perspective on why that is.

Systemic discrimination means it’s normalized. Black folks suffer it every day. It’s not unusual. It’s not spectacular – and it’s rarely, if ever, filmed. However, like the cops who killed Floyd, the people abusing Black folks in the federal public service know exactly what they’re doing.

Blow’s argument that white women know what they’re doing is counter to the idea of “unconscious bias” that is so popular in government discussions of systemic discrimination. The idea is that, since the bias is unconscious, all we have to do is make it conscious for people through awareness training and all will be well.

However, my experience shows that isn’t the case. All that great awareness I’ve raised by taking the risk to speak out and file complaints has only made my harassers more aware that what they’re doing is wrong – but hasn’t stopped them from doing it. It has also resulted in me being hit by one sanction after another for the last two years.

That’s because systemic discrimination privileges certain groups over others and those on top don’t want to share the goodies. We must recognize that folks act in their own interest so, to get them to do the right thing in terms of diversity and inclusion, we have to change the system so that there are much bigger rewards for doing the right thing – and much bigger penalties for doing the wrong thing.

They should start by setting targets for executives, like actually hitting their legally mandated Employment Equity Act numbers by hiring, and promoting, all the talented Black folks around, and withholding their performance bonuses if they don’t.

Black lives matter – but docking performance pay gets results.

Categories
Coops COVID19 Sharing economy

COVID19 should be Black folks’ Ujam-Ahh! moment

The COVID19 pandemic reveals the potential of cooperatives as vehicles for economic development in Black communities.

In the “sharing economy”, exemplified by companies like Uber and Airbnb, just about anything can be shared – except the profits. The profits go the owners/shareholders as they did long before run-of-the-mill capitalism was upset by “disruptive” capitalism.

However, in the U.S., the COVID19 pandemic has shown that traditional capitalist companies, where a few owners, or many faceless shareholders, share the profits, risks and decisions, have not fared as well as those based on a very different model: cooperatives.

In his May 8 Truthout article, Pandemic Crash Shows Worker Co-ops Are More Resilient Than Traditional Business, Tessa Collective member Brian Van Slyke, gives examples of how, and reasons why, some American coops are weathering COVID better than their traditional counterparts.

Slyke quotes Esteban Kelly, executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, of which the TESA Collective is a member:

“Traditional firms, when times are good, they take that surplus, they distribute it to the investors or maybe pay off debt, but they don’t necessarily do a lot of bonus pay for rank-and-file or increase wages…When times are bad, they panic…They’re slashing jobs and benefits…” Kelly says things are different with coops. “When worker-owned businesses are doing well, they share the benefits among worker-owners. This is most commonly achieved by increasing wages, expanding benefits, distributing dividends to the employees (instead of absentee stockowners) and reinvesting in their communities. But when business is tough, a worker cooperative equitably shares the burden. Instead of mass layoffs, the workers, who are the equal owners, strive to find collective solutions. Worker-owners might vote to take voluntary pay cuts so no one person loses their job, and worker committees might try to find new markets the cooperative can expand into.” Slyke gives several examples of U.S. coops doing just this in response to the pandemic.

Cooperatives aren’t a new idea, including among African-Americans.

Long before Dr. Maulana Karenga created Kwanzaa in 1966 with its fourth principle of cooperative economics, Ujamaa, Ella Baker and George Schuyler launched the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL) in Pittsburgh in 1930. (Baker would go on to form the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee with Martin Luther King). As Barbara Ransby explains in her book, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement – A Radical Democratic Vision, the idea was to form “black consumer cooperatives as a strategy to combat the economic devastation being wreaked by the depression and to educate black people about socialism.” This, at a time when Blacks in the southern US were still struggling under the crushing poverty of one of the many systems that replaced slavery: sharecropping.

According to the PBS article, Slavery by Another Name:

“After the Civil War, former slaves sought jobs, and planters sought laborers. The absence of cash or an independent credit system led to the creation of sharecropping. Sharecropping is a system where the landlord/planter allows a tenant to use the land in exchange for a share of the crop. This encouraged tenants to work to produce the biggest harvest that they could, and ensured they would remain tied to the land and unlikely to leave for other opportunities. In the South, after the Civil War, many black families rented land from white owners and raised cash crops such as cotton, tobacco, and rice. In many cases, the landlords or nearby merchants would lease equipment to the renters, and offer seed, fertilizer, food, and other items on credit until the harvest season…High interest rates, unpredictable harvests, and unscrupulous landlords and merchants often kept tenant farm families severely indebted. Laws favoring landowners made it difficult or even illegal for sharecroppers to sell their crops to others besides their landlord, or prevented sharecroppers from moving if they were indebted to their landlord. Approximately two-thirds of all sharecroppers were white, and one third were black.”

Although sharecropping hadn’t done great things for Black folks, sharing had. Ransby explains that, “Cooperation, the sharing of resources, and a strong community spirit were fundamental values among African Americans. Ella Baker’s extended family was part of a larger network of black farmers in Warren County, North Carolina, who emphasized self-help and mutual aid as strategies for survival and the betterment of the race. The cooperative ethos that permeated Baker’s childhood was deeply implicated in prevailing notions of family and community; groups of individuals banding together around shared interests and promoting a sense of reciprocal obligation, not of individualism and competition. For example, African American farmers exchanged goods, services, and other resources among themselves. Expensive farm equipment was purchased collectively or used communally.”

Despite its promise, the YNLC only lasted about five years and “eventually collapsed under the weight of financial obligations” according to Ransby. She says Schuyler’s biographer, Michael Peplow, also attributed the YNCL’s failure partially to the fact that, “Schuyler’s inflammatory remarks about the black church and the black middle class had made him too many enemies.” For example, Schuyler had emphasized that, “…young [YNCL] recruits had to be militants, pioneers, unswerved by the defeatist propaganda of the oldsters, and the religious hokum of our generally parasitic clergy.”

So are there any signs of a cooperative resurgence among Black folks today? Yep.

After years of teaching and serving as a principal in Detroit schools, helping lead the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN) and starting D Town Farm on the city’s west side, Malik Yakini and DBCFSN are planning a 34,000-square-foot food co-op, event space, and commercial kitchens in Detroit’s North End neighborhood. The Detroit People’s Food Coop could serve as a proof-of-concept for the ability of co-ops to build wealth, create food security, and drive investment in underserved communities.

(June 12 addition): Events in the US following the death of George Floyd have many people comparing Canada with the US and saying we’re glad “we’re not like them”. Modeling initiatives like the Detroit People’s Food Coop would be a good place to make an exception to that.

Categories
CHRC FBEC Proof

Tales from the Plantation #4

Burden of proof should be on those accused of discrimination not their accusers

Currently, people who file union grievances against their managers or make complaints of discrimination to organizations like the Canadian Human Rights Commission, alleging discrimination based on race, must prove two things: that discrimination happened and that it was based on race. This is almost impossible to do as most organizations require proof similar to that of the Human Rights Legal Support Centre (HRLSC). The HRLSC is an independent agency, funded by the Government of Ontario, to provide legal services to individuals who have experienced discrimination. Its website states:

“To prove discrimination, you must show that there is a connection…between negative treatment that you experienced and one of the personal characteristics (or prohibited grounds of discrimination) listed in the the [Human Rights] Code.

Put another way, to prove discrimination, you need to show…that you were subjected to negative treatment because of your gender, place of origin, family status or any one of the Code-protected personal characteristics.”

Meeting these requirements is next to impossible because, by definition, discrimination means someone doing something to you that they’re not doing to others. How do you prove they’re not doing it to others and that the difference is based on race?

One obvious way to get an answer to the first question in the workplace would be to ask your colleagues if they’re treated the same way. That works for very visible things like telework. For things like that, you don’t even have to ask as, if your manager denies your telework request, it’s pretty easy to see if she approved others’ requests because they’re not around. However, less visible types of discrimination are harder to deal with.

I had such an example recently where my boss called a meeting to engage in what I label “hyper critique”. Hyper critique is when a manager rarely, if ever, praises an employee’s work, but critiques it, most often in private meetings. Hyper critique is a common complaint of our Federal Black Employee Caucus members.

Proving whether my boss hyper critiques my colleagues is challenging. I could ask them, but most people are, understandably, reluctant to admit if they are subject to such things. They’re also often reluctant to admit if they’re not subject to such things as they may see that as admission that they’re getting preferential treatment.

So what can you do? Right now, not much. That’s why I recommend we push the public service to do three things:

  1. Shift the burden of proof to those accused of discrimination instead of their accusers; require the accused to prove that they’re not discriminating.
  2. Until the burden of proof is shifted from accuser to the accused, create a discrimination investigator function staffed with someone given the power to investigate claims of discrimination, including being able to mandate colleagues to reveal, in anonymous interviews, if they have been subject to the same treatment.
  3. Start collecting race-based data on who managers sanction.

People who are being harassed and discriminated against have enough to deal with. Let’s take one thing off their plate.

Note: The opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Black Employee Caucus. To contact an FBEC spokesperson use the Contact Us page on FBEC’s website.