Author: Robin Browne

Categories
Media Racism TV

Why white people can’t wait for the zombie apocalypse

Like many people, I’ve watched a lot of TV during the pandemic including recently finishing all nine seasons of The Walking Dead. TWD follows the lives of groups of people near Altanta, Georgia trying to survive following an apocalypse that’s turned most of the world into flesh eating zombies with poor motor skills (they can’t climb, swim or move faster than an average Tim Horton’s lineup).

Life is pretty bad, except for one thing: there’s no racism. There are “good” and “bad” people of different races but no racism. In fact, in the 131 TWD episodes I watched, there was only one reference to race in one early episode when one of the minor bad white characters called one of the good Black characters the n-word and then the main good character smacked the bad guy and told him “There are no more n%$#s and there are more dumb as shit, inbred, white trash. There’s just us.” After that, nobody ever mentioned race again. So, to repeat: this story, set in Georgia, about groups fighting for scarce resources to survive, has no racism in it. Well, no blatant racism.

The leaders of all the major warring groups are white men, two are “bad” and the third, the star of the whole show, is “good”. Rick Grimes is a former sheriff from a small Georgia town who doesn’t seem to have a racist bone in his body (and, to his credit, manages to keep all his bones in his body for nine seasons). Rick leads his group in defending themselves against the walkers (as they call the zombies) and the other groups. They do some pretty bad stuff but always only in immediate or proactive self-defence. No one in Rick’s group or any other one ever does or says anything to suggest they see other groups as anything but bad people. They only see the walkers as sub-human. There aren’t any groups that hate people because of who they are and justify taking their stuff based on that. Sure, they kill each other for each other’s stuff and self-defence but all while respecting each other’s basic humanity – which is much easier to do when you’re literally surrounded by zombies. [Of course the zombies aren’t racist. They’ll eat anyone…although comic duo Key and Peele envision what things might look like if the zombies retained a little more of their former selves in their sketch White Zombies.]

There are many other times in TWD that scream for race to be raised only for the characters to remain silent.

  1. Rick hooks up with Michonne, a dark-skinned, dreadlocked samurai sword wielding warrior and they have a brown kid but they never mention race in the past, present or future.
  2. After Rick’s group defeats another group, some of the surviving former bad guys join Rick’s group at Rick’s urging and over the objections of some of Rick’s group who want to just kill them. Shortly after, the former bad people start disappearing. Two of Rick’s group investigating what’s happening discover members of their group about to execute a Black woman who was formerly with the bad guys and find out they’re responsible for killing the other missing people. After briefly trying to dissuade their comrades from killing the woman they walk away and let them execute her. However, a white woman who was with the bad folks before, including trying to kill members of Rick’s group like the Black woman did, is allowed to stay on as a trusted member of Rick’s group.

In addition to not mentioning race or racism on a personal level, no one mentions the role they may have played in starting the apocalypse. In fact, no one seems to know what caused it. This isn’t surprising since TWD creator Robert Kirkman only revealed the source of the outbreak in 2020. Comicbook.com reported Kirkman “said the zombie outbreak occurred because of a “space spore” when asked on Twitter, which is likely another homage to the godfather of the zombie-horror genre George A. Romero. In his classic [1968] film Night of the Living Dead, scientists speculated the creation of zombies could have been caused by a space probe to Venus bringing back radiation with unintended effects.”

Space spores? In all 131 TWD episodes, only one character ever mentions anything suggesting that the outbreak could have been caused by humans in, say, a lab designed to create viruses. In the last episode of TWD season one, the last surviving scientist at the U.S. Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta infers the disease might have been created by the CDC – before he blows up the entire place and himself to avoid anything (else?) getting out.

No other character ever questions if the outbreak could have been caused by something like a military bio-weapon gone bad or a drug company rushing a vaccine to market for profit. They don’t even wonder if it came from natural causes or not, unlike the media reports on the current debate over the origins of the COVID-19 virus. It’s like centuries of race-based capitalist exploitation that led to things like slavery and the decimation of Indigenous people and land never happened. There’s no memory, no accountability and best of all – no guilt.

Also, despite Atlanta’s almost 500,000 people being half Black, TWD has no groups of Black people roaming the countryside, some possibly looking for payback. The TWD world is essentially a massive chance for white folks to start over, blameless – and still in charge.

This wasn’t the case with the film that launched it all: George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead. In NLD, the main protagonist is a Black man named Ben who gets trapped in a house with a group of white people just as the zombie apocalypse starts. After leading the group in fighting off the zombies, Ben is shot by a white sheriff. So, NLD’s white sheriff shoots the Black hero and TWD’s white sheriff is the hero. How things have changed…

Now, don’t get me wrong. TWD was great TV. That’s why I watched 131 episodes and eagerly await season 10 hitting Netflix in July. But, as I watched it, I had the same feeling as I did while watching Game of Thrones that I blogged about. I was disturbed that so many people watched it with almost none appearing to notice how blatantly racist it was.

This brings to mind a quote by Princeton professor Ruha Benjamin:

“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.”

Her quote could be revised for the Canadian context as:

“Until we come to grips with the “reasonableness” of racism, we will continue to only see it on bloody London, Ont. street corners and residential school mass graves and overlook it in our technologies, policies, hiring practices, staff, management and the massively popular American TV shows we all happily consume.”

Comicbook.com also reported that, when asked about the origin of the zombie virus during a 2018 Q&A on Tumblr, TWD creator Kirkman said, “It couldn’t be less important to the story and the lives of these characters.”

It appears the other thing that both Kirkman and his characters have forgotten is the old saying, “Those that forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”

These zombie shows are the dramatic representation of a future where everyone says, “I don’t see color.”, still without realizing that’s part of the problem.

Categories
#metoo Cancel culture PC Political correctness

It’s time to cancel Cancel Culture

If you consume any mainstream or social media you’ve probably heard at least one story about someone being “cancelled”. That’s when someone says or does something, or someone finds out they said or did something years ago, then lots of people criticize them on social media and something of theirs gets taken away. 

The #metoo movement resulted in a bunch of people, mostly white men, being cancelled like actor Kevin Spacey, comedian Louis CK and movie producer Harvey Weinstein. Although most of the high profile cancelling (as far as I can see) came from the left, people on the right do it too. In 2018, some of them attacked Asian New York Times journalist Sarah Jeong for her satirical tweets about white people she posted in response to tweets like these that she got from white people:

Right wing critics of cancel culture say it’s political correctness on steroids (like, they literally say that.) Political correctness, or PC, is one of those terms that’s often used but poorly understood. Wikipedia describes it as, “a term used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society. In public discourse and the media, the term is generally used as a pejorative with an implication that these policies are excessive or unwarranted.”

In May 1991, at a commencement ceremony for a graduating class of the University of Michigan, then U.S. President George H. W. Bush used the term in his speech: “The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.”

The term PC, as we know it today, emerged in the 1970s and folks on the right have used it since then to target everything from policies against hate speech to affirmative action hiring policies for disadvantaged groups. But the term was used earlier than that. In 1934, The New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits “only to pure ‘Aryans’ whose opinions are politically correct”. This is particularly relevant since some folks on the right sometimes label those they see as being PC, as Nazis. This includes former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson. As a Republican presidential candidate in 2012, Buzzfeed quoted Carson saying, “political correctness has caused Americans to fall silent, very much like the people in Nazi Germany were silent.”  

Calling people Nazis is the clearest expression of something about the term PC that’s rarely discussed: it assumes that those being PC have both the desire – and power – to control others’ thoughts and actions. This idea is also behind the term “thought police” covered in the Dec. 1990 Newsweek article, Taking Offense: Is this the new enlightenment on campus or the new McCarthyism? Thought Police. The irony of the right using the term “police” is they’re equating folks on the left with a state institution that has the actual power to enforce behaviour, up to and including killing people. And, even in the U.S., I can’t think of one example of folks saying the police were run by the left unlike what they often say about the media. It’s not folks on the left yelling Blue Lives Matter.

The right also has more power to influence thought, and thus action, through conservative think tanks which include the most influential ones in the U.S. and are about equal in number with progressive ones in Canada. 

The conservative American John M. Foundation funded books like Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus in which D’Souza used “[PC] terminology for a range of policies in academia around victimization, supporting multiculturalism through affirmative action, sanctions against anti-minority hate speech, and revising curricula (sometimes referred to as “canon busting”).” Books like D’Souza’s, combined with social media misinformation and conservative talk radio that both overwhelmingly lean to the right, clearly give the right the upper hand when it comes to thought control.

One of the quotes that has stuck with me from my journalism degree is, “The media doesn’t tell people what to think but it tells them what to think about.” The more media “your side” has the more they shape what people think about.

So what other power does the left have?

The left has activists who put their security – and often lives – on the line every day by organizing to expose injustices that show that people in power aren’t following the principles in the documents upon which their organizations are based. The dream that Martin Luther King articulated in his most famous speech was basically that the United States would one day live up to its own constitution. When I was with the Federal Black Employee Caucus, which I co-founded, we spent our time trying to get the federal public service to follow government policy and treat Black employees equitably. We faced a lot of backlash for what we did…and we all know what happened to MLK…

Folks on the right imply that folks on the left have the power to get people cancelled but it’s not the tweeters who cancel people. In most of the high profile celebrity cases at least, it’s massive media corporations that cancel them. And I would argue that it’s the years of personally risky work of activists organizing and raising the issues that makes the companies decide that not cancelling the people could be a risk to their profits because viewers might move to their competitors. One thing backing up my argument is that Facebook and Google, both of whom essentially have no real competition, don’t cancel anything – ever.  

In my rabble.ca article COVID-19 could mean we lose and surveillance capitalists win — again, I talked about how Shoshana Zuboff argues in her 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, that Facebook and Google’s business models lead them to aggressively fight against any law or regulation that would require them to remove anything from their platforms. That especially includes misinformation and fake news like conspiracy theories as they generate massive amounts of engagement – and massive profits.

Luckily, most companies have competition and are still very sensitive to anything that might damage their brand, especially ideas spread via social media. But folks taking to Twitter to shame the latest celebrity raises some key questions – if you buy my argument that decades of organizing by activists has been key to causing companies to cancel people. Do those calling for people to be cancelled live their lives each day in ways that actively support activists’ work or do they make that work harder through their own inaction? And if those same people aren’t doing anything in their own lives to address systemic inequities but tweeting, then isn’t demanding apologies from those they shame letting society (of which they’re a part) off the hook for creating the conditions that allowed the people shamed to think that their comments were OK in the first place?

If you really want to show you’re down with the cause, get off the cancellation bandwagon and sign up for monthly donations to a local group working to improve Black and Brown lives.

Note: I took much of the PC info from Wikipedia’s Political Correctness post. 

Categories
Blacktivism Measurement

How do Blacktivists measure success?

We’ve all heard it before, “If you want to achieve anything you gotta set goals, preferably SMART ones.” This post is about the M in SMART: measurement. SMART goals include ways to measure progress towards your goal and when you’ve achieved it. (The other letters stand for Specific, Achievable, Relevant and Time bound.)

Measuring goals like fundraising campaigns is easy – you just look at your GoFundMe page (or whatever you’re using). However, measuring the success of political advocacy isn’t as easy for several reasons:

  1. Successes can take years;
  2. Many people and groups contribute to successes so it’s hard to evaluate the impact of your organization;
  3. There is often an active opposition working against you so, like fighting a strong current, success might be measured by how little you go back rather than how much you advance;
  4. Good evaluation can be expensive (i.e. measuring changes in public opinion); and
  5. Many people who are judging your success only consider final outcomes like successful policy change as “wins”.

Despite these challenges, advocacy work can, and must, be measured to:

  1. Know if your strategies are the rights ones;
  2. Know if your strategies are working; and
  3. Demonstrate success to the communities you’re trying to help, potential recruits and funders.

Advocacy efforts almost always involve a fight against a strategic adversary capable of learning and adapting over time. In some cases those counter-strategies come from interests who benefit from things as they are and resist change. Blacktivists are up against systems of discrimination and anti-Black racism that benefit, at one time or another, pretty much everyone except Black folks. What really distinguishes one group from another is the nimbleness and creativity it displays when faced with unexpected moves by its rivals or the reduced effectiveness of its key tools. Given this, adopting a “best practice” can sometimes be a disadvantage, if it means that one’s moves are easily predicted and countered. Advocacy, like war, rarely stays at equilibrium, and so success requires constant innovation to keep one’s adversary off-balance and force it onto the defensive.

Measuring success as a Canadian Black political advocate is particularly challenging as there are far fewer examples than in the U.S. of successful Black political advocacy organizations from which to learn. Also, similar to our American counterparts, some of our fiercest opposition comes from other Black folks. This is because generations of successful divide and conquering by white folks has trained many Black folks to see Black political advocacy organizations as uppity trouble-causing negroes – especially when we critique Black leaders. The Black Lives Matter movement didn’t always enjoy the widespread support it has now – from white folks or Black folks. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were both critiqued, at points in their careers, by members of the Black community. And it’s not just Blacktivists leading organizations who face critique. In Canada, activist, journalist and best-selling author of The Skin We’re In, Desmond Cole, has been harshly attacked by Black people for reporting on the Federation of Black Canadians. Since publishing their recent pieces critical of the BlackNorth Initiative, Cole and Nova Scotia-based activist, poet and educator, El Jones, “…have faced predictable push back by some members of the Black community who claim that asking questions or making critiques of Black people’s public actions equates to a malicious “destroying” of other Black people.”

Given all this, while striving to achieve the big, final goals, how else should Canadian Blacktivists measure success? Here are 10 suggestions:

  1. The media is calling you. – If your local media regularly calls you for comment, you’re probably doing something right. Use those opportunities to communicate your key messages, even as you know they’ll shape them to fit their agenda.
  2. People attend your meetings. – If you regularly get good attendance at your meetings, that’s good. If not, ask folks why they’re not attending and what you could do to make things more relevant.
  3. People in power meet with you when you ask them to.
  4. You are building new mutually beneficial relationships. – We have to work together to win so building relationships with other Black and ally groups is key (i.e. Indigenous, LGBTQ+, women’s groups, etc.)
  5. People attack you for asking tough questions. – One of the main things Blacktivists do is ask tough questions of people in power – and keep asking until we get credible answers. This often leads to people calling us aggressive or bullies, saying we have “agendas” or saying we’re trying to “shame” people. What they rarely, if ever, do is answer our questions. Keep asking.
  6. You’ve got haters on both sides. – If you’re following your principles and still occasionally get attacked by both white and Black folks, you’ve probably found a good middle ground.
  7. Other Blacktivists defend you when you’re attacked. – Being attacked is part of being a Blacktivist. If other Blacktivists defend you when you’re attacked, especially when they see things online, that’s a great show of support.
  8. People give you money. – One of the best measures of success is folks opening up their wallets – especially to sign up for monthly donations.
  9. People join – and stay with – your group.
  10. People thank you for helping them. – The best indicator of all.

As an example, our group joined many others in fall 2020 to lobby the Ottawa Police Services Board and Ottawa city council to reject the $13 million budget increase requested by the Ottawa Police Service (OPS). We didn’t succeed in blocking the increase but that was only one measure of success. We increased our group’s profile and credibility, made connections with other groups, learned lots about who’s with us and who’s not, educated people about what “defunding the police” really means in Ottawa and got council to commit to look at freezing the OPS budget next year – something we can now hold them to account for.

One final point…

To be an effective Blacktivist you have be as independent as possible from the people you’re lobbying. That’s not easy to achieve for a lot of Black folks as the current system leaves many individuals and organizations dependent on income and funding that limits their ability to speak out.

As more of us break free of those financial chains, the more powerful – and unstoppable – we will become.

Categories
Abolition Fundraising SURJ

Abolish the police! (but not white supremacy)

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:

  1. causing division amongst groups that oppose the police;
  2. knowing when and how those groups meet and infiltrating their meetings;
  3. targeting fundraising of Black groups; and
  4. 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.

Categories
Africa Entertainment Obama U.S.

Why Obama ordered the Navy to kill three Black teenagers

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.

Categories
FBC House negroes Small Claims Court

The Federation of Black Bullies

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 lawsuit 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.

Categories
Financial literacy

Financial literacy: the key to building wealth – and keeping it

Many of our efforts as Blacktivists focus on helping Black Canadians improve their economic situation. However, if Black folks aren’t financially literate, any money they get will go in one hand and out the other – and the hand it goes out to likely won’t be Black. Financial literacy is crucial to building inter-generational wealth. But what does it mean to be financially literate?

Well, in addition to basics like budgeting, financially literacy means knowing how to:

  1. Break the cycle of falling prey to predatory lenders
  2. Find out, and improve your credit score; and
  3. Reduce your taxes.

Avoid payday loans

Predatory lenders like payday loan companies target working people on low incomes. “Their ads pop up on computer screens and phones, offering fast access to cash”, according to Cathy O’Neil in her 2016 book Weapons of Math Destruction. A payday loan is a short-term loan with high fees and interest rates that make it a very expensive way to borrow money. You can borrow up to $1,500. You must pay the loan back from your next pay cheque. If you can’t pay it back on time, you face more fees and interest charges that increase your debt. Payday loans are meant to cover a cash shortfall until your next pay.

The Government of Canada has information about pay day loans including the graphic below that starkly shows their high price compared to other forms of borrowing.

Learn your credit score

Credit lets you get goods or services before you pay for them, based on the trust that you’ll pay for them in the future. Credit cards let you buy relatively small things like groceries, and loans, lines of credit and mortgages let you get bigger things like cars or houses.

Your credit report is a summary of your credit history. It’s a record of when you’ve bought things on credit and how well you’ve done at paying things back. How well you’ve done is represented by your credit score, a three-digit number that comes from your credit report. It shows how well you manage credit and how risky it would be for a lender to lend you money.

Why your credit history matters

Financial institutions look at your credit report and credit score to decide if they will lend you money. They also use them to determine how much interest they will charge you to borrow money.

If you have no credit history or a poor credit history, it could be harder for you to get a credit card, loan or mortgage. It could even affect your ability to rent a house or apartment or get hired for a job. If you have good credit history, you may be able to get a lower interest rate on loans. This can save you a lot of money over time. (For more info see Credit report and score basics and Improving your credit score from the Government of Canada.)

Reducing your taxes

Two ways to reduce your taxes are to claim deductions and tax credits on your taxes. Deductions reduce the amount of income you get taxed on, called your taxable income. Tax credits then reduce how much tax you pay on your taxable income.

One of the most common deductions comes from putting money in things like a Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP). You can deduct money you deposit in an RRSP, up to a limit based on, among other things, the income you earned in previous years.

Other deductions include:

  • child care expenses for children under 16 years old;
  • expenses a person with a disability paid to earn income or go to school; and
  • support payments to a spouse, common-law partner or child under a separation agreement or court order. (More info on federal deductions)

Tax credits reduce the tax you pay on your taxable income. The more tax credits that apply to you, the more you can reduce your income tax.

The best known tax credit is the Basic Personal Amount (BPA) which is used to ensure that people making a certain amount, or below, don’t have to pay any federal tax. In 2020, the BPA was $13,229 so anyone making $13,229 or less didn’t have to pay any tax. People earning above this amount were able to claim 15% of $13,229, or $1,984.35. (More info on Tax Credits.)

So increase your financial literacy and share what you learn with others in your community so that everyone can get better at achieving goals like buying a house or paying for their children’s education.

Together we grow stronger – and wealthier.

Categories
Home ownership Small Claims Court

Small claims, big results: the power of suing our oppressors

Of all the tools Black employees can use to battle the discrimination they face in their federal government jobs small claims court is, by far, the most powerful. There are several reasons for this but the simplest is: when people discriminate against Black people – because we’re Black – they break human rights laws and/or codes and that often means we can sue them. Small claims is also much cheaper and faster than a full trial and includes a mandatory, confidential settlement conference that brings the two parties together with a judge to find a solution and, hopefully, avoid a trial.

Filing a small claims suit in Ontario cost about $100 and can be done online. Once you file your suit, and serve the papers on the defendant (i.e. deliver the papers to them physically, which you can do yourself or hire a bailiff to do for around $100), the defendant has 20 calendar days to respond or they can be found guilty and be required to pay you the amount you’re suing them for. The maximum amount is $35,000.

If they don’t file a defence, you can have them found “in default” which can lead to you having the right to collect your money using a collection agency or even garnishing their wages from their employer. If they file a defence the next step is a mandatory settlement conference that, as mentioned above, brings the two parties together with a judge to find a solution and, hopefully, avoid a trial.

The settlement conference is key to the power of small claims court as it gives the defendant a clear choice: settle, pay you and keep it all confidential or go to trial which will be much more expensive and lengthy, where they’re likely to lose because they broke laws and where everything they did will be made public. Given that choice, most will pay and, if they don’t, you can always take them to trial or drop the suit.

An employee I worked with sued the investigator her department hired to back up some bogus claims against her with an equally bogus report. The investigator got a lawyer to send her a letter saying her suit was “without merit” and threatening to sue her for lots of money if she didn’t drop it. When she ignored the threat, the investigator filed a defence and was then required to attend the mandatory settlement conference which he did with two lawyers. The employee attended by herself. She had sued the investigator for around $7000. When the judge asked her what it would take to settle, she realized she hadn’t really thought about it because it wasn’t about money for her, it was about principle. She blurted out, “$2000”. After it was all over the investigator agreed to pay her $2000.

Since you must physically deliver, or have delivered, your claim documents to the defendant, you must know either their work or home address. With many people working from home during COVID, another likely small claims cost is paying someone to find the address of the person you want sue. I have used a private detective agency twice, for $687 each time. Always include costs like this and hiring a bailiff in the amount for which you’re suing.

Black people across Canada could start making the legal system work for us instead of against us, as it too often does, by suing our oppressors and investing our winnings towards home ownership. We could then teach other folks in our communities to do the same.

Call it the courthouse to our house pipeline.

Now, that would be power.

Categories
Accountability FBC Leadership

Don’t judge people on their character…judge them on their actions (all of them)

I spent most of the last two weeks glued to the Ontario Judicial Council (OJC) hearing into a second complaint about the conduct of Federation of Black Canadians founder and former chair, Justice Donald McLeod. McLeod is facing claims, still unproven, of perjury, political lobbying and giving legal advice – all stuff judges aren’t supposed to do. McLeod’s defence, by both his legal team and his supporters on social media, can be summed up as, “Justice McLeod is a great guy and didn’t do any of this bad stuff or, if he did, it was for good intentions because, like we said, he’s a great guy.”

The problem with this is that it focuses on what McLeod is instead of what he does (or allegedly did), and discussions about what someone is often offer only two choices: good or bad. People’s defenders spend time giving examples to prove their guy (or girl) is good while their opponents do the opposite. The argument is that, if the person is bad, they deserve whatever happened to them and if they’re good they don’t.

One of the most recent, and most horrible, examples of this was comments by Black conservative commentator Candace Owens in videos like I DO NOT support George Floyd! And here’s why. In this video Owens says she doesn’t “support George Floyd” because she doesn’t support “turning criminals into heroes”. Meaning she doesn’t support turning “bad guys” into “good guys” just because something bad happens to them. She doesn’t say Floyd deserved to be killed. In fact, she says, “What I’m saying is not any defence for Derek Chauvin [the cop who killed Floyd]. I hope that he gets the justice he deserves and that the family of George Floyd deserves justice.” However, she also says:

“The Black community is unique. Not every Black American is a criminal, not every Black American is committing crimes, but we are unique in that we are the only people that fight and scream and demand support and justice for the people in our community that are up to no good.”

The implication is clear: Floyd was a bad guy who had gotten “up to no good” too many times and, therefore, doesn’t deserve the global outpouring of rage that followed his death.

One of the main problems with this “good or bad” thinking is that it only requires tarring someone with one bad act, real or implied, to label them as all bad. That’s why the term “known to police” in media reports about Black men is a problem. The person could be “known” simply because they got carded once but it’s enough to label them as “bad”, and deserving of their fate, in too many readers’ minds.

This same thing is used in reverse.

When COVID first hit, our group supported a young Black man who had been confronted by Ottawa school board trustee Donna Blackburn. During the confrontation Blackburn made some racially charged remarks and was eventually sanctioned by her fellow trustees for acts of anti-Black racism. In her defence, several of Blackburn’s supporters brought up that she has a Black daughter, suggesting that she, therefore, “couldn’t be racist.” (We countered that idea by saying Blackburn could have committed the racist acts in the morning then read a bed time story to her Black daughter at night – but that wouldn’t make her earlier actions any less racist.)

Another example of this was the July 2020 coverage of the heavily armed white man who drove his truck through the gate of the Governor General’s residence where Prime Minister Trudeau and his family live.

In the initial CBC story, Corey Hurren was described as an active member of the military who serves as a Canadian Ranger. It said he ran a meat products business called GrindHouse Fine Foods. It mentioned he was past president of his local Lion’s Club, an active volunteer in his community of Bowsman, north-west of Winnipeg, and that his group of Rangers were on call to be part of the military’s assistance with the COVID-19 response. In other words, Curren was a nice guy just having a really bad day – and was treated accordingly by the RCMP officers who apprehended him that day “without incident” and took him into custody for questioning.

Donald McLeod’s defenders, like Justice for Justice McLeod, want the OJC review panel, and us, to believe that McLeod is a good guy who did everything for the community and that his critics are bad people who misconstrued his actions and landed him, unfairly, in front of the OJC once again. They cite all the great work he’s done with programs he helped start, like the 100 Strong Foundation which aims to produce strong, ambitious leaders by changing the narrative of African-Canadian boys. They gloss over the facts that are the basis of the charges and, instead, stick to one narrative: he’s doing great stuff so he obviously couldn’t have done the bad stuff.

But this reasoning ignores the simple truth: people do good and bad things and deserve praise for the good stuff and to be held accountable for the bad stuff. McLeod’s supporters only want to praise his good deeds and vilify those who try to hold him accountable for his bad ones.

But, as McLeod’s second hearing shows: if we don’t hold our leaders accountable for the bad things they may have done, eventually someone else will, and the result won’t be good for anyone in our community.

Categories
GoC Legal

A class act: Black federal employees sue the government for decades of discrimination

On Thursday, December 3, 2020, 12 Black former and current federal government employees launched a class action suit against the Government of Canada. The Black Class Action home page lays out the claim’s details:

“A class action lawsuit has been filed in the Federal Court of Canada on behalf of all Black employees. This action concerns systemic racism in the Public Service of Canada, directed at self-identifying Black individuals who work for or with the Public Service of Canada – this includes current employees and those who have been employed within the past 50 years. This systemic racism includes the wrongful failure to promote, intentional infliction of mental suffering, constructive dismissal, wrongful termination, negligence, and in particular, violations of employment law, human rights law, and Charter breaches. ​This action alleges that as a result of systemic discrimination, Canada has failed to achieve equality in the workplace, such that no person shall be denied employment opportunities or benefits for reasons unrelated to ability. In the fulfillment of the goal of workplace equality, this action alleges that Canada has failed to correct the conditions of disadvantage in employment experienced by Black Canadians.”

There’s no question that the suit is politically and socially well timed but how strong is it legally? One way to assess this is to examine past precedent setting cases.

LGBT purge

The LGBT Purge was one of the longest and most harmful campaigns of discrimination conducted by the federal government against the LGBT community. The campaign, to identify and purge LGBT federal public servants on the basis of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression in the federal public service and military, began in the 1950’s and continued for decades. Many of the injured persons suffered in silence for many years. That class action suit ended the silence.

Three plaintiffs, Todd Edward Ross,  Martine Roy and Alida Satalic, launched the suit on March 13, 2017. On June 22, 2018, the Federal Court approved the Final Settlement Agreement with up to $110M in compensation. Most eligible class members were expected to receive between $5,000 and $50,000. Between October 25, 2018 and April 25, 2019 individuals submitted claims for compensation and/or Individual Reconciliation Measures. There were 719 claimants: 629 military, 78 public servants and 12 RCMP.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Harassment, Abuse, & Discrimination

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) began officially accepting female recruits in 1974. Unfortunately, since that time female officers – as well as non-policing staff and volunteers – suffered sexual harassment, abuse, and discrimination at the hands of their male colleagues. In 2016, the RCMP settled a suit brought by over 3,000 female officers for $100 million. Another class action for civilian employees and volunteers had 41,000 claimants. However, after three times as many women submitted claims for compensation than expected, the amount available was increased to $150 million. Another class action lawsuit seeking compensation for women in non-policing roles was settled in 2019 for $100 million.

Indian Residential Schools Lawsuit

In the 19th century, the Canadian government created a system of residential or boarding schools to educate the children of Indigenous peoples. However, instead of education, assimilation was the goal of this program. Attendance at residential schools was mandatory. Children systematically suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; isolation from peers, family members, and tribal customs; exposure to  disease; and overwork. Teachers and staff at the schools were often underpaid and unqualified, amplifying the mistreatment and neglect Indigenous students experienced.

Nora Bernard, a survivor of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School in Nova Scotia and an activist for Indigenous peoples rights, led a group that sought justice for the pain and hardships Indigenous children suffered in the schools. Survivors of other residential schools joined this lawsuit against the government of Canada.

The Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement was the largest class action settlement in Canadian history. Reached in 2006, the agreement created a fund of $1.9 billion for survivors of institutional abuse and neglect in the residential schools system. The settlement also included provisions for assessment of compensation for individuals.

So, given that history shows the government tends to settle large class action suits about historical mistreatment of marginalized groups, the Black class action seems to have a good chance of ending up with the government agreeing to pay up. The question is, how much?

The claim is for $800 million in total, but is that enough? How do you put a price on the destruction of someone’s mental health, or someone being denied promotions for years? It will be challenging to put an exact number on it but one thing is certain: it should be a really big one.

Note: much of the information on the RCMP and residential schools cases comes from the article Top Class Action Cases in Canada by Klein Lawyers LLP.