February 2024: Black life matters

“Anti-blackness in Canada often goes unspoken. When acknowledged, it is assumed to exist, perhaps, but in another time (centuries ago), or in another place (the United States)” (Robyn Maynard, 2017, p. 3.) Policing Black lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present.

Winnipeg, MB: Fernwood Publishing.

Marcia

As Black History Month starts, I’m reflecting on what I was taught about Canada’s history with enslavement in school: that we were the utopian endpoint of the Underground Railroad. It wasn’t until much later in life that my unlearning and relearning happened, often at the expense of the labour of Black friends and scholars like Drs. Delia Douglas, Onye Nnorom, and OmiSoore Dryden. Dr. Douglas is the Director of the Office of Anti-Racism, and Drs. Nnorom and Dryden visited our faculty in 2022, providing education on Anti-Black racism, including the social and physiological health impacts of injustice.

I think about the weight of this labour as Black History Month begins, and knowing how that weight is amplified by ongoing experiences of Anti-Black racism and violence, and the recent tragic killing of Afolabi Stephen Opaso. I am reminded that our collective responsibilities to address Anti-Black racism and enlarge and protect space for Black flourishing last all year long and offer a return to our January blog on rest for those who need a pause from their labour.


Delia

Breathing while Black: Bearing witness

It is Black History Month (BHM) – I regard this month’s blog as an opportunity to have a conversation that needs and deserves space… breathing space – the space that recognition of our humanness demands.

Black History Month 2024 takes place amid the tragic death of Afolabi Stephen Opaso, a 19-year-old student from Nigeria who had been attending the University of Manitoba. Mr.  Opaso had been experiencing a mental health crisis on December 31, 2023, when he was fatally shot by a member of the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS).

Machuar Madut’s family continues to wait for an inquest, five years after Mr. Madut, originally from South Sudan, was fatally shot by a member of the WPS on Feb. 23, 2019. Mr. Madut, aged 43 at the time of his death, had been struggling with mental issues. In 2020 the officer involved was cleared of any wrongdoing. In its final report into Madut’s death, the Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba said it found the use of lethal force by the officer was “reasonable, necessary, justified and unavoidable.”

According to a WPS spokesperson use of lethal force is justified when the life of an officer or other person is in immediate danger, or the police member or another person is in immediate danger of grievous bodily harm.

Keep in mind that Black folx are overrepresented in use of force, fatal shootings, and enforcement arrests, and charge rates in Canada.

In 2016 a UN Report from the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its mission to Canada expressed their trepidation about police involved deaths of at-risk peoples of African descent who were experiencing a mental health crisis.

Breathing is necessary to life.

Anti-Black racism(s) is part of local/regional/national/global political landscapes.

In enslavement’s afterlife Black folx continue to struggle to breathe. Is it any wonder that Black people cannot live, owing to white supremacy and anti-Black racism given that breath is required for life?

2020 was both a moment and a movement. Following George Floyd’s murder, tens of thousands marched across the United States, in support of Black Lives Matter (BLM), and inspired global protests against police brutality, anti-Black racism, and racial injustice. Across Canada people organized and gathered to stand in solidarity with Mr. Floyd’s family and the Black Lives Matter movement, drawing attention to racialized police violence, systemic racism, and inequality. In Winnipeg, Justice 4 Black Lives organized a rally called for justice an end to state violence and racial injustice which thousands attended. 

Reflecting B(l)ack

Black status and identity in Canada are linked to the country’s history of enslavement – of state sanctioned authorization and use of anti-Black racial violence.

The Atlantic slave trade involved the forced removal of millions of Africans which created a diaspora. The trade was fundamental to the economic and industrial development of Europe and North America, and the simultaneous under-development of Africa. Canada benefitted from the enslavement of Africans through profits accrued by the Hudson’s Bay trading company and the fur trade, and by the British Empire through traders of sugar, cotton, and the wealth generated by the colonies throughout the Americas. Settler colonial dispossession of the ancestral and traditional lands of Indigenous peoples was funded in part through the labour of enslaved peoples of African descent. The end of enslavement was followed by other manifestations of anti-Black racism such as racial segregation in schools, housing, and employment, the desecration of slave cemeteries in Ontario and Québec, and cross burnings on the property of Black families in Nova Scotia, Manitoba, and New Brunswick.

B(l)ack to the future: Moving forward

We inherit the legacy of that which has come before.

Knowing our racial past helps us to understand our racial present. It also encourages us to imagine/dream/desire and build our futures ….

I stand on the shoulders of many who have gone before – known and unknown. My father, the late Dr. Lawrence F. Douglas, is one person whose shoulders helped lift me to where I am today.

My father was a single parent and the most influential person in my life.

He was also the first Black faculty member in the Department of Sociology at the U of M, and one of its four founding members. He retired in 1989 after 22 years of teaching. The Department would not hire another tenure track Black faculty member, for 32 years: Dr. Joseph Asomah.

Representation matters.

Fast forward: of the nearly 50 000 faculty that work across the 40 post-secondary institutions in Canada, there are approximately 900 Black faculty @ 300 of which are Black women…Black – and Indigenous peoples – are the most underrepresented Faculty in Canadian post-secondary institutions.

Racial equity matters.

In 2021 UM Law alumnus, David Sowemimo, established the David Sowemimo Law Entrance Scholarship awarded annually to Black undergraduate students enrolled full-time in the juris doctor program in UM’s Faculty of Law. It was the first scholarship of its kind at U of M.

Over the course of the past year, I have been working with Ekong Udobang in Donor Relations, to create a Fellowship in perpetuity for Black graduate students in the Department of Sociology and Criminology. The Dr. Lawrence F. Douglas Fellowship will be awarded for the first time in 2024-2025 academic year.

The Fellowship is a way for me to honour my father, and it is also an opportunity to pay it forward, to offer dedicated support to Black graduate students in their academic journey.

Where is the love?

The project of anti-racism is incomplete without addressing anti-Black racism(s). Nearly 4 years have passed since the events of 2020 – in many ways it seems like a lifetime ago. To paraphrase Janet Jackson – what have you done… lately? Or, more to the point, what will you do?

Breathing is necessary to life.

I can’t breathe

Is a proclamation…
A declaration…
A metaphor for the wounds/harms/effects of racism.
I can’t breathe is also
A protest statement,
and
A call to action…

         If not now, then when?


Resources

Dunn, T. (5 April, 2018). In deadly encounters with Toronto police more than a third of victims are Black. CBC. Available at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/police-deaths-blacks-data-1.4599215.

Olynick, H. (2021). UM Today. Alumnus creates scholarship for Black students. Available at https://news.umanitoba.ca/alumnus-creates-scholarship-for-black-law-students/.

Petz, S. 2024. (24, January). Nearly 5 years after fatal Winnipeg police shooting, Machuar Madut’s family still waiting for inquest. CBC News. Available at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/machuar-madut-family-speaks-inquest-delays-1.7092571.

United Nations report of the working group of experts on people of African descent on its mission to Canada. Available at https://ansa.novascotia.ca/sites/default/files/files/report-of-the-working-group-of-experts-on-people-of-african-descent-on-its-mission-to-canada.pdf.

“We do not accept your apology.” (16 June, 2022). CBC. Available at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/toronto-police-race-based-data-use-force-strip-searches-1.6489151.

February 2023: Black History Month: Meeting grounds of radical resistance, bold solidarity, and social justice

Delia Douglas

“The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.”

Audre Lorde (1984, p. 123)

Black History Month 2023 takes place in the shadows of the in-custody death of Nicous D’Andre Spring, a 21-year-old Black man who had been illegally detained in a Montreal jail in December 2022, and the January 2023 murder of Tyre Nichols, a young Black man who died in Memphis, TN following a “routine traffic stop” where he was beaten by 5 police officers, all of whom are Black. Mr. Nichols died of his injuries in hospital 3 days later. 

We live in a present created by dispossession, genocide, enslavement, and ongoing settler colonial projects. We live these histories intimately, intensely, quietly, and at times grievously (lateral and internalized violence).

Their needless deaths remind me of the fact that we are all exposed to images, ideas, beliefs, and practices (e.g., white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, dis/ability, capitalism) which structure our institutions and shape our relationships to ourselves and each other. Simply put, we need not be racialized as white (for example) to reproduce settler colonialism and uphold anti-Blackness. 

The fact that we are not encouraged and taught to see ourselves as equals and the fact that we are not encouraged and taught to see ourselves in each other are examples of the normalization of racism. That is the very definition of systemic racism.

I am thinking about Black life matters, Black liberation, and lateral violence – within and across diverse Black communities and beyond…I am thinking about radical resistance and bold solidarity… 

In 2014 – 3 Black queer women – Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors – established the contemporary #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) movement – a sociopolitical and ethical demand for action against state sanctioned anti-Black terror and anti-Black racism. Garza, Tometi, and Cullors advanced an expansive lens that sheds light on the experiences of those who have frequently been excluded as contributors to social justice movements and victims of anti-Black violence, namely Black women and girls, Black folks who are disabled, gender non-conforming and those who identify as LGBTQIA+.

Black freedom struggles are as multifaceted and diverse as are Black folx.

The events of the past few years have not only exacerbated existing inequities, they have also laid bare how racism is a public health crisis. 

Racism lowers life chances. Racism kills.

The enduring legacies of residential schools are revealed in the uncovering of the bodies of the 215 children who died at the Kamloops Indian Residential School (and the thousands more graves identified since), the death of Joyce Echaquan, the murder of George Floyd, the rise in racism against people of East Asian descent, Islamophobia, and the death of Indigenous, Black, and racialized people in police involved shootings across Canada. These are not individual acts of racism, or the actions of a few bad apples – these are instances of systemic racism. These are acts that demonstrate how racism influences who lives and who dies. 

This is not a zero-sum game – racism is not a competition to see who has endured the most harm – comparing ourselves to each other to construct hierarchy is itself is a form of violence. Lateral violence does just involve Black people, it occurs between members of different marginalized groups. Lateral violence also occurs when we don’t show up for each other – when we adopt the settler colonial strategy of divide and conquer…

Systemic racism requires a systemic response. 

Solidarity requires courage. We cannot eradicate racial inequality and injustice unless we challenge the divisiveness of hierarchies of oppression and recognize the interconnectedness of systems of domination.
Bold solidarity is that which affirms and embraces the marginalized and excluded in our communities. 

Movements such as Idle No More, #AmINext, #BLM, #Sayhername, #MeToo, and Dream Defenders make visible and affirm the lives of Indigenous and Black women and girls, 2SLGBTQQIA and those who live along the gender spectrum as targets of, and resistors to, oppression, creating space for the recognition of the humanity of all Indigenous and Black lives. 

These are acts of radical resistance.

Our freedom struggles and futures intersect in complex and complicated ways owing to these histories of racial violence and their enduring legacies. 

There is no time like the present to analyze our investments and allegiances and to commit ourselves to broadening our understanding of the diversity and complexity of Black identity and lived experience.

Consider this February/BHM as an opportunity to examine how anti-Blackness is manifest within ourselves and in within and across our various communities…

As political activist, scholar, and freedom fighter Angela Y. Davis asserts, “freedom is a constant struggle.” 

…We…. can’t stop…We… won’t stop…


References

Cathy J. Cohen (1997). Punks, bulldaggers and welfare queens: The radical potential of queer politics. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3(4): 437-
465.

Angela Y. Davis. (2016). Freedom is a constant struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the foundations of a movement. Chicago, Il: Haymarket Books.

Alicia Garza (2014). A herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.” The Feminist Wire. Available at: https://thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/.

Audre Lorde. (1984). Sister Outsider. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press

Robyn Maynard. (2017). Policing Black lives. Winnipeg, MB: Fernwood Publishing.