One of the mental mistakes I made beginning this work was believing that my life would somehow become easier—that I would somehow experience less violence and pain around me if I was organizing against sexual violence. I was very wrong. What I instead found was a pain that increased and knocked against my threshold. I realize now that pain will always return, that this work brings the violence of my past into my chest like a fountain recycling its water, and that the only way to thrive in relation to this work is to allow the pain in, until it becomes like water washing over me. Allowing this, however, requires deepening my threshold for love and joy and touch and pleasure in other areas of my life simultaneously.
Finally, I also share this story about my mother because I believe that our personal histories of violence inscribe a trajectory in our lives that determines how we deal with violence when it hits home again. And violence always returns to the places where we believe we are finally safe again. The failure to face the hot pain of our personal histories of violence compounds with age. How do we fail the people closest to us when we cannot—and do not—do right by women in our community who have experienced sexual violence? I am constantly guided by this question: What kind of tools am I leaving behind for my three children?
My mother insisted on sharing her histories of violence with me. She was committed to not shame me as a sexually active young woman. In confronting and sharing the shame wielded upon her by her own father, she granted me freedom, joy, and the permission to explore sexually the first time I fell in love at sixteen. This is the same freedom I hope to pass on to my own children.
As Long As They Think They Are White
— Scott Fraser —
My father immigrated to Canada from Jamaica as a child. Ours was one of the first Caribbean families to arrive after Canada changed its racist immigration policies in 1962. With a great deal of ability, tenacity, and luck my grandfather was able to establish himself as a lawyer, first in Toronto, then Kingston, and eventually in Ottawa. His efforts and good fortune paved the way for my father’s generation to go to university and become established middle-class professionals. The socio-economic success of my Jamaican family reinforced our conservatism. Canada, despite lingering elements of racism, was a place with limitless possibilities so long as one was willing to work hard. Protest was something that happened in places without possibilities. I learned about the Civil Rights movements in the United States, I learned about resistance to slavery, and the efforts to integrate North American society. But race was more or less presented to me as something that had been largely solved. Therefore contemporary protestors were dismissed as layabouts, professional malcontents, and rabble-rousers.
I abandoned the right-wing politics I’d grown up with by my early twenties, politically hovering somewhere between the Liberal and New Democratic parties, but nevertheless I generally shared the inherited view that protest belonged to a past era and that everything would be fine with an occasional and minor adjustment here and there.
One of the turning points for me was the government’s heavy-handed reaction during the G20 Summit in Toronto. I’d actually been involved in planning the military’s involvement in that operation as a commissioned army officer on the Area Command staff. It was my insistence (largely ignored) that my fellow officers stop thinking of civilian protestors as enemy forces that made me start to lose confidence in the ability of state institutions to respond rationally to calls to adjust the status quo. I saw racist attitudes concerning the surveillance of Indigenous groups, also regarded as enemy forces, rather than as First Peoples making perfectly legitimate demands to adjust the status quo. I’d left the army by the time the summit took place. I hadn’t joined any radical groups or anything like that, but I saw my city transformed into a fortress in order to protect state leaders who really, in my liberal view, ought not to have had anything to fear from the public they supposedly served. I rode my bike out to observe some of the protests and witnessed the crackdown that took place outside the temporary holding cells on Eastern Avenue. The images stuck with me.
Then came Occupy Wall Street. Again, I saw state institutions that were completely incapable of responding rationally to legitimate grievances. I spent some time at the encampment in Toronto. The movement sparked my interest in more radical thought, and while to this day I’m not a part of any particular organization or movement, I’m a fellow traveller and the lens through which I observe society was forever altered.
In the years following Occupy, I’ve watched several mass mobilizations ebb and flow. The one I’d like to speak to is Black Lives Matter Toronto (blmto).
My successful immigrant family had constructed an image of Canada being a place that had largely solved its race problem, but the gilded facade hid a rotten structure. As soon as one looks past the lives of the small but highly visible Black bourgeoisie, one can’t help but see the dire necessity for a revolution in our understanding of the race question in Canada. This is why I’ve become a critical supporter of Black Lives Matter in Canada.
Some of the movement’s most prominent members (notably Yusra Kogali) have said some profoundly outlandish things about race, including:
“Whiteness is not humxness.”
“In fact white skin is subhumxn.”
“White people are recessive genetic defects. This is factual.”
But I’d rather call her in than call her out. She clearly doesn’t understand the science of genetics and evolutionary biology, but she’s also hardly the first Black radical to go down the road of reversing European race theory. These ideas aren’t a new phenomenon in radical Black circles. Elijah Muhammed and the Nation of Islam embraced a similar set of hierarchical racial theories that placed Blacks at the top. Whites, to Muhammed, weren’t even human. At least, they weren’t creations of Allah. They were devils. Muhammed and his more famous protégé, Malcolm X, did much for Black people in North America, but their ideas about race (which Malcolm would later reject) need to be dismissed out of hand. They are informed by the same kind of pseudoscience that inspired some of the worst moral catastrophes in the history of our species. African exceptionalism must be rejected alongside eugenics, Nazism, slavery, white supremacy, and American exceptionalism.
Nothing good comes from travelling those worn-out roads.
That said, I support the spirit of blm even though I’ve come to the somewhat paradoxical conclusion that it has reached its limits as a movement and will never be able to achieve the revolutionary objective on its own. blm has had success in various locations at adjusting this or that policy on police profiling, or drawing attention to specific cases of police brutality, and so on. But as currently constructed, it’s not a revolutionary movement.
I’ve said that we need a revolution in race. So why would I claim that blm (which I love and respect) has reached its limits? The answer has to do with the nature of the problem. The race question in Canada and other comparable societies has to do with the notion of Whiteness. The required revolution, in a real sense, has nothing to do with us Africans living in Canada. It’s not our problem.
All we can do is try to live our lives as if we had a right to exist and, by so doing, hold up a mirror to the Europeans we live amongst. Our protest movements have value to that end, but the revolution in race needs to occur within self-identified white people. Let us, to quote James Baldwin, return to them their problem. Because as long as they think they’re white, there’s no hope for them.
James Baldwin’s Insight
Baldwin’s formula, which I’ve borrowed, might hit the ears of self-described white people as sharply as the remarks Yusra made, so it requires explanation. The key distinction is, whereas Yusra claims a defect in whites, I claim instead that there is a defect in Whiteness.
‘Whiteness’ was invented to separate. It holds no explanatory value. Its margins are arbitrary and shifting. As Africans, we really shouldn’t believe in race. Science d
oesn’t support the notion. Race is a story that has been told to convince some people that it’s okay to dominate or destroy other people. We can do without it. At least I can. We Africans can contribute to a race revolution simply by rejecting European notions of race. Living as if we had a right to exist is an act of revolution.
Why is it so hard for white people to let go of the stories they’ve invented? There is no such thing as a white human or a black human. These are divisions that are experienced socially and politically, but there is no substantive, material difference between us. White and Black? These are categories invented and utilized by Europeans to act as a kind of psychological balm. Perhaps to sooth guilty consciences as Europeans set out to dominate and control other populations. It was okay to enslave, to colonize, to eradicate, to segregate, to imprison, to hate, to lynch because there was something about Whiteness that had to be protected. On some level, likely a subconscious one, even the most radical and/or progressive ‘white’ person shares the same racial ideology as the worst Klansman or Nazi, otherwise they wouldn’t be categorizing us as Black and themselves as white. They could instead call themselves what they are, European (settlers).
Baldwin’s brilliant psychological insight was to point out that what one says about others reveals more about the speaker than their subject. In other words, when white people invented the racial categories we live with today, it revealed something about them. When white people today maintain the categories their ancestors created, it reveals something about them…not us.
Baldwin put it more forcefully when he said of white people, “You’re the nigger baby, it isn’t me.” The philosopher Cornel West defines niggerization as the process of being made to feel so scared, insecure, and intimidated that you defer to the powers that be, that you consent to your own domination. So in this Trump moment, and with the rise in North America of vicious, murderous alt-right racists, I ask, who’s the nigger? The Black people straightening their backs up and living as if they have a right to exist? Or the European people collectively losing their minds over perceived threats to their stories about Whiteness? Baldwin knew that the nigger (or the Negro, or the coloured, or the Black) was an invention of the white man and was a reflection of his fear, insecurity, and uncertainty. We didn’t need race, but they sure seemed to. The nomenclature changes, but the categories do not. This, incidentally, is why politically correct language does nothing to stop racism or any other form of oppressive hate. White people can call me nigger or they can call me Black, but no matter how rude or polite their words, the categories belong to them. Who’s in, who’s out. It’s decided by their gaze and on their terms.
So what do we call ourselves? Who are we? Where are we from?
“Where are you from?”
I am asked this question often. And it takes on a different meaning depending on who is asking. When I hear it from another Black or brown person, I generally take it as an attempt to find out whether we share some kind of geography. Are we both Jamaican? Might we both have roots in the islands? Might I be a fellow Indian or Arab? But the question feels different when posed by someone who presents as white.
When white folks ask me where I’m from and I say that I was born in Ottawa and have lived primarily in the Greater Toronto Area, they find my answer unsatisfactory. They were ‘politely’ asking about my skin, not my birth certificate or where I went to school. The truthful answer, and one that I hope can be used by everybody who is interested in starting to abolish the racial categories invented by white people, is that I’m of mixed European and African descent, but as long as Whiteness exists, I know precisely that I am a Black man. I’m not ‘biracial’. In fact, the now offensive term ‘mulatto’ is far more honest than ‘biracial,’ since we would never apply the terms ‘mixed’ or ‘biracial’ to the product of an Anglo-German coupling, or the child of a Norwegian and a Dutch couple. In the context of a politely white supremacist society like Canada, terms like biracial and Black are merely the politically correct forms of mulatto and nigger.
For us African people in Canada, ‘Black’ is at once a term of pride and a term of erasure, depending on the context. Amongst ourselves, and I think we intuitively know who we are on some level, ‘Black’ can bring us together in the best tradition of Pan-Africanism. We know it when we show extra concern for each other in predominantly white spaces. We know it by the way we can breathe just a little bit easier when we’re not alone in this society that doubts our desirability. We know it because it’s understood that we vouch for the Europeans we introduce into our circles. “This one’s alright,” may not be spoken, but I suspect it’s widely understood. We know it when a white friend notices that we acknowledge each other just because of the love we have for who we are. In racially mixed circles it’s sometimes called “the Black nod.” This kind of solidarity is important and beautiful and must be expanded as a matter of survival.
But the flip side is that we live in a white supremacist world. That world erases the fact that we’ve come from so many different places and over so many generations that we all have our own geography and history. Some of us are descended from slaves. Our previous geography is mostly unknown, but we proudly claim beautiful islands in the Caribbean, or the vibrant communities former slaves built in Nova Scotia and Ontario. Others have come more recently from Africa, and in that case may find it perplexing to be lumped under the umbrella ‘Black’ when, until they arrived here, they were Somali, Amhara, Zulu, Igbo, or any of the hundreds of other distinct cultures that call Africa home. Welcome to Canada, my brothers and sisters. Here you’re reduced to your colour, and nothing about where you came from will protect you from the assumptions and the violence of a European settler project built on white supremacy.
Before we were niggers, negroes, coloureds, and Blacks, we Africans born of the West had a geography. We had our own peoples and places. I reject romantic notions of pre-contact Africa, but good, bad, and ugly, it was ours. The slave trade ended that geography for my family and we became niggers, negroes, coloureds, mulattoes, and now Blacks and biracials. White supremacy erases the more recent African arrivals, shoehorning anyone with dark skin into categories invented by Europeans. To the European eye, it doesn’t matter if we’re descended from the families of Africville, Nova Scotia, Jamaican slaves, or recent Somali immigrants. They just see Blacks.
But let’s agree to a basic level of honesty. I’m here as the son of enslaved Africans brought to the colony of Jamaica. Much like Canada, Jamaica was built on the European destruction of Indigenous people. We migrated to the settler-colonial project known as Canada essentially as economic refugees. Refugees from a system that compensated our former masters for the loss of their property (our bodies, brains, and labour) while imposing on us an economic system that kept and continues to keep us poor and hungry, with limited opportunity to flourish. Eventually Canada’s appetite for cheap labour encouraged a ‘liberalizing’ of its immigration policy, allowing us Blacks to come in numbers dwarfing those of the much celebrated Underground Railroad, only to be denied the same opportunities white people can so often take for granted.
The same white people who applaud the Underground Railroad from the safe distance of the centuries don’t do a damn thing today to prevent the hyper-exploitation of Black and brown ‘temporary foreign workers’. They don’t say a mumbling word about police violence, mass incarceration, and the myriad of other examples of institutionalized racism in this country. And mostly, they don’t do a damn thing to challenge or begin to dismantle the racial categories their ancestors invented and they maintain. The needed revolution begins there. We have our role to play, including in our protest, but I want to stress that it’s not our task to dismantle Whiteness.
This isn’t a cheap rhetorical game. How we think of others, as Baldwin pointed out, says more about ourselves than it does the subjects of our thought and speech. So it matters how we think and verbalize the experience of race (built as it i
s on unscientific nonsense). This work, I claim, is up to self-identified white people. They can continue to maintain their racial categories or they can start to dismantle them. Only one course of action will make them my brother, sister, or comrade.
I’m very glad that Black Lives Matter Toronto exists.
I think their greatest achievement isn’t the pressure they’ve put on various governments to end this or that racist policy. It isn’t calling attention to the extrajudicial murders of African people by the police. The greatest success of the movement both here and around North America is that it has, for the first time since the heydays of the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party, put so-called white people on notice. blm scares white people. And considering that local blm movements have not gone beyond the most peaceful and moderate of tactics, this is telling. blm isn’t a revolutionary movement and it still upsets and terrifies Europeans, some of whom have taken to postering our streets with dog-whistle messages declaring that “It’s Okay To Be White.”
It used to take armed militants like the Panthers and the Nation to shock whites into seeing the pain and suffering of Black people living in their midst. Now all it takes is a highway sit-in or a minor delay in a corporatized Pride parade to cause great wailing and gnashing of teeth among white people. Hopefully those Europeans living in North America will begin to address their race problem before, to end on another Baldwin quote, “the fire next time.”
A Family Complication
Writing About Race as a Black, South Asian Woman
— Eternity Martis —
So what do you think about Black Lives Matter hijacking the Pride parade?”
Black Writers Matter Page 13