Len Carby and Richard Picart, two of the original members of the Federation of Black Canadians (FBC) steering committee, are suing me for $45,000 and $35,000 dollars respectively. In fairness, I sued them first, but Carby is also suing the Black single mom, who served my libel suit papers on him, for $35,000. He’s suing her for “falsifying” the document she served on him because she made a couple of mistakes that were quickly corrected. That’s right: Len Carby is suing a Black single mom for doing her job. And he hired a Black woman to help him – Shala McDonald, a paralegal with Okola Law which is owned by another Black woman, Stephanie Okola.
Carby’s law suit against me and the single mom are the latest in confirmed and alleged bad behaviour by former FBC steering committee members.
In my post, Tales from the Plantation #2, I talked about how I was on interchange with the FBC from January to May 2019. Shortly after starting, I began questioning behaviour I felt demonstrated a lack of transparency, competence and connection to community concerns. On May 27, the FBC terminated my interchange. In their email to my department announcing my termination, the FBC made 10 allegations against me including that I had “physically threatened my direct report” at the FBC, a completely false claim. Len Carby sent the email so I launched a $6700 libel suit against him. His $45,000 counter suit alleges that I libelled and slandered him, including calling him a house negro (which I did, but that’s not libel as it’s an opinion…with which Carby clearly disagrees).
On March 27, 2019, when I was working with the FBC, I noticed an item in the minutes from the last meeting about the FBC getting approval to use some funding they had gotten from the Michaelle Jean Foundation (MJF) to support the FBC’s membership growth. As Carby was in charge of finance at the time, and had asked me to work on an application for federal government funding, I asked him how much the MJF funding was. This was relevant because the federal funding application asked what other sources of funding we had.
After several evasive answers, in which he never told me the amount, Carby wrote:
“I suggest you think about these relentless emails. They amount to attempts at bullying and I will not have it. If you copy [your colleague] on any conversation that does not relate to anything he is working on, your email will be ignored. You have a reporting relationship with the FBC though (sic) me and your personal relationship with [your colleague] has nothing to do with that. I am clear with my instructions about the Funding (sic) application and you have everything you need to complete your work.”
He considered my request for transparency as bullying when, in fact, he was the one doing the bullying because he had the power, being my boss.
I called both Carby and Picart house negroes because, in my view, they were behaving like Samuel L. Jackson’s character Stephen in the movie Django Unchained. Stephen is one of plantation owner Calvin Candy’s house negroes. When Stephen realizes that former slave Django is trying to trick his master, he tells his master and gets Django captured and nearly killed. In one scene, with Django hanging upside down, naked in chains, Stephen tells him that they’re not going to castrate him because he would bleed out. Instead they’re going to send him to a work camp where he will be worked to death.
When Carby emailed my department, knowing what I said my white managers had done to me, he was, in my view, engaging in house negro activity like Stephen.
These days, to be considered house negro activity, the activity must benefit those doing it, it must harm the Black community or impede things that could help the community and the people must not reply to – or aggressively resist – questions of accountability.
The topic of house negroes was also raised in March 2021 during the Ontario Judicial Council’s second hearing into judicial misconduct of FBC founder and former Chair, Justice Donald McLeod, a long time friend of Carby. (McLeod was cleared of perjury allegations.)
Justice McLeod’s defence team raised the topic of house negroes on the last day of his 2nd hearing. They called Dr. Wendell Adjetey to testify as he had at McLeod’s first hearing. Adjetey is a McGill University historian who specializes in the post-Reconstruction United States, specializing on the African American experience. Like he did at McLeod’s first hearing, he gave a short outline of the history, and current state, of systemic anti-Black racism in Canada. However, this time, McLeod’s lawyers specifically asked him to explain the significance of the term house negro to the all-white panel. Adjetey then did so, but used the term house n-word instead. McLeod’s lawyers didn’t say why they asked him to do this.
Many folks in the Black community, especially supporters of Justice McLeod, say myself and others, like journalist and author Desmond Cole, shouldn’t write posts like this that “air our community’s dirty laundry in public”. They tell us we should “talk it out in private”.
Did Carby attempt to talk to the single Black mom before deciding to sue her for doing her job?
If Carby cares so much about the Black community and justice, has he asked his employer, the Royal Bank of Canada, why they weren’t among the more than 450 companies that originally signed the Black North Initiative pledge to work to remove corporate Canada’s anti-Black systemic barriers or why a petition was recently launched against RBC for “climate destruction and violation of Indigenous rights”?
People like Carby and Picart don’t want to air our dirty laundry in public or in private – because they’re the ones dirtying it.
We must praise our leaders when they do good and hold them accountable when they do wrong. And we must all realize that we all can step up to lead ourselves in big and small ways.
Notes: Former FBC Chair Dahabo Ahmed-Omer is now Executive Director of the Black North Initiative. My comments apply only to former FBC steering committee members not current ones or staff.
Sometime after this was posted, the Black North Initiative removed all trace of the Pledge or who signed it from their website.
Update – On Oct. 18, 2021, Carby served me with an amended claim in which he revised his claim against Ms. Hylton to $11,017.