Yusra Khogali Ali

FROM SUDAN TO ‘SIJUI’ AND ALL BLACK LIVES IN-BE-TWEEN

Yusra Khogali Ali

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

Yusra Khogali Ali Master of Arts

Social Justice Education Department Ontario Institute for Studies of Education University of Toronto 2018

ABSTRACT In this thesis, I write from a personal, political and embodied place using first person accounts and my personal narrative as a Sudanese Muslim activist, artist, and organizer to speak back to the Canadian state and its creation of me. From a place of epistemic self-assuredness, I write, re-write, unpack and speak back to these constructions using Evocative Autoethnography and Critical Discourse Analysis. Drawing on an anti-Black racism theoretical framework, I humbly offer the beginnings of a new mode of analysis which I name Black turbulent consciousness where I present the term ‘sijui’ and ‘sijui situatedness’ as an additional entry point into existing notions such as liminality and in-betweenness. By engaging in an in-depth look at my location and linking my experiences to the condition of Black life/lives in this country, I aim to paint a larger depiction of anti-Blackness, islamophobia, and fear of a Black freedom(s) in the

West.

ii AKNOWEDGMENTS I began my M.A Degree in Social Justice Education at OISE in 2014. A year later I co-founded the Black Lives Matter Toronto Movement here in Canada. Ever since, my life has entirely transformed. As I come to the completion of this degree, it is enveloped with many lessons, wisdoms and blooming realizations.

I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Rinaldo Walcott for his generous care, support and guidance throughout this entire process and for influencing, inspiring and deepening my understandings of Black life through all his powerful and prophetic contributions to Black people globally. I also want to thank my second reader Dr. John Portelli, for his time and energy in shaping the final version of this work.

This thesis has come with so much sacrifice; blood, sweat and tears. It is the product of a community. To my blood family, I love you. My chosen family; IA, CMG IJ, KK, RN, DM I love you. Thank you for holding me up through it all, through ease, hardship and everything in between! To the Black OISE student fighting to finish their degree and pushing through the whiteness of the academy – you are enough, you have so much to give and you got this!

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Aknowledgmemts iii Table of Contents iv List of Appendices vii Introduction 1

CHAPTER 1: PERSONAL LOCATION, BACKGROUND, CONTEXT 4 Allow Me To Re-Introduce Myself. 4 Be-coming Black through Poetry 6 Wake Work is NOT Woke Work: Form/ations of BLM-TO 9 Black Lives Matter Toronto: A Call to Action 10 Public Enemy Number One: #YusraKhogali 19 Education as ‘Liberation’ and as a Site of Violence 21 Paying for the anti-Black experience: Postsecondary Education 27 Black Liberation Collective Canada 32 Uses of Black Rage as Compass 34 The tensions of being an East Africans Organizer 38

CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL AND DISCURSIVE FRAMEWORKS 43 Brief Overview of Settler Colonialism 43 Anti-Black Racism 46 Black Turbulent Consciousness in the Third Space/Force 56

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY 65 Qualitative Design 65 Autoethnographic Approach 67 Limitations and Delimitations 70 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 72 CDA Data Collection and Analysis 74

CHAPTER 4: DISCUSSION 76 White Lies 81

White Supremacy and Discourse of Power 86 Discovery and Cartorgraphy 89 Expulsion/ Removal/ Resignation 91 Unwell/ Stupid/Crazy 93 Conclusion 95 REFERENCE LIST 97

LIST OF APPENDICES Appendix A Page 104

vi 1

INTRODUCTION “Canada [is] a racialized space, and more specifically, a Black space.”

- (Walcott, 2000, p.7)

In the edited collection; Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism,

Walcott (2000) introduced the notion of “creative insubordination” (p.8). Here, he described the ways in which artists utilize creative spaces both as a site of performance and resistance. It is in that vein and with those permissions that I write this thesis. By this, I mean I write from a personal, political and embodied space. I write as a Black woman refusing to make justifications for making herself present in text, research, and the social world. I've come to understand myself as a set of living histories and contradictions, as having knowledge yet consistently being in a space of becoming a knower. I make no apologies for this thesis in which I write from an ontological place and in the first person. Like many Black feminist thinkers who came before me, I understand the deliberate efforts made to subjugate Black women’s ideas and theorizing in the academy. However, it is the common, yet complex, “daily conversation, and everyday behavior[s] [which make] important locations for construct[ing] a [Black] feminist consciousness” (Collins, 2000, p. 251-252). Therefore, I use the notion of insubordination not only as a point of entry into the analysis of my work but in the choices I have made to write/unwrite and disrupt what is understood as ‘correctly’ or ‘academically’ writing, presenting and producing research. In fact, I would argue this is the work of undoing and decolonizing the academy which is required of those of us invested in our freedoms. As stated by Gordon (2006) as cited in Browne (2015):

Fanon’s insight, shared by Du Bois, is that where there is no inner subjectivity, where there is no being, where there is no one there, and where there is no link to another subjectivity as ward, as guardian, or owner, then all is permitted. Since in fact there is an

other human being in the denied relationship, evidenced by, say, anti[B]lack racism, what this means is that there is a subjectivity that is experiencing a world in which all is permitted against him or her [them].

(Browne, 2015, p. 110)

I refuse that world. Rather, I have intentionally chosen to write myself into this thesis and into the social world from a place of deliberate and epistemic self-assuredness. “Self- assuredness brings with it a kind of insubordination. It requires that one be aware of the various kinds of relations that serve to place subjects in subordinate positions” (Walcott, 2000, p.9).

When we accept positions of insubordination—when we actively respond to and operate within this context—we open new realities, we make Black life explicitly visible and make new formations of Black existence possible.

Using an Evocative Autoethnographic (Coffey, 1999) methodology informed by an anti-

Black racism theoretical framework, my thesis seeks to utilize my first person accounts and personal narrative as an activist, artist, and organizer to speak back to the nation state and its white supremacist, Islamophobic and sexist creation of me as a ‘threat to the state’, ‘person of interest’ and ‘Black supremacist terrorist’. To do this I drew upon a Critical Discourse Analysis and Black Redaction as proffered by Sharpe (2016). Critical Discourse Analysis “focuses on how social relations, identity, knowledge and power are constructed through written and spoken texts in communities” (Luke, 1997, p. 84). I apply this method in order to analyze two articles written about me by Canadian and American media outlets. First: Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Yusra

Khogali Needs To Resign https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/james-di-fiore/Black-lives-matter- toronto-yusra-khogali_b_14635896.html by James Di Fiore written in the Huffingon Post on

August 2, 2017. Second: Who is Yusra Khogali and Why Does it Matter? Written by by Pamela

Jablonski, in the Bearing Arms on February 16, 2017. https://bearingarms.com/pamela-

3 j/2017/02/16/yusra-khogali-matter/ . And finally, I will engage Sharpe’s (2016) practice of Black

Redaction in order to ‘imagine otherwise’ using an article I wrote in the Toronto Star on April

10, 2016 entitled, I was vilified for telling the truth about racism in Toronto - https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/04/10/i-was-vilified-for-telling-the-truth- about-racism-in-toronto.html. Redaction as defined by Sharpe (2017) points us “toward seeing and reading otherwise; towards reading and seeing something in excess of what is caught in the frame; toward seeing something beyond a visuality that is, [...] subtended by the logics of the administered plantation” (p. 117). Building upon the works of several Black scholars, I humbly offer the beginnings of a new mode of analysis which I have come to name as a Black turbulent consciousness where I offer the term ‘sijui’ and ‘sijui situatedness" as an additional entry point into existing notions such as liminality and in-betweenness; I encourage Black people to be steadfast in what I have also named a Black spirit of suspicion. My thesis seeks to speak about myself for myself and back to myself by engaging in introspective deep reflection, review and reckoning with myself in relation to and in relationship with the world in all of its complexity.

Through an in-depth look at my location (Turtle Island), my ancestral lineage, compounding colonialisms and my activism within these geographies I aim to link my experiences to the condition of Black life/lives in this country in order to use the ‘self’ to point to a larger depiction of anti-Blackness, islamophobia, and fear of a Black freedom(s) in the west.

The rest of my thesis will unfold as follows. Chapter one: I will provide a personal location, background and context. Here I will formally introduce myself to you and locate myself in the research. Chapter two: I will outline my theoretical and discursive framework of anti-

Black racism and Black turbulent consciousness. In chapter three I present my research methods; Evocative Autoethnography and Critical Discourse Analysis. And in my final chapter, I

4 provide a reflective discussion and analysis on the two media texts. Attached as an appendix is the redacted product.

CHAPTER 1: PERSONAL LOCATION, BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

Allow Me To Re-Introduce Myself.

My name is Yusra Khogali Ali. I’m a 26 year Black Sudanese Muslim woman who immigrated to ‘Canada’ as a refugee in 2002. I was 9 years old and came here with my mother and 6 siblings from Kenya, where I was born and lived all my life until we ‘arrived’ to

‘Canada’1. While I have visited Sudan in the past, I have few fragmented memories of this land to which I have ancestral, social, political and land claims. Yet Sudan is present everywhere. It is in my blood, my bones and my marrow. Sudan lives here with me in Canada, in my home, here, in Regent Park, and within the broader Sudanese community in Toronto. Still, with some regret,

Sudan remains a distant, unknown and imaginary space for me due to the colonial impacts that caused me and my family to traverse multiple waters, making multiple new meanings and memories. I exist as a ‘courier of memories’ (Hartman, 1997) from Sudan, even as I re-imagine and recreate myself in order to survive the multiple socio-political markings placed on my body as my family and I crossed several unwelcoming borders and checkpoints.

Prior to my birth, my mother fled Sudan with my six siblings and me, to Kenya and then across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada. The conditions in Sudan became so harsh that access to health care, to food, employment, education and safety were scarce during the multiple civil wars

(1983-ongoing) between the North and South Sudanese. These wars were facilitated by the

1 I use the term “Canada” in this paper when referring to any state-based interactions I’ve had for example immigration. I do this deliberately in order to separate Indigenous modes of governance from those enforced upon me via the Canadian state. I acknowledge and honor Indigenous claims to land and naming this space as Turtle Island.

5 compounding colonizing forces of the Ottoman and British empires (Idris, 2012). We came to

Canada as refugees seeking sanctuary from conditions of instability and unsafety created by the very colonial powers that would greet us upon our arrival. As my family and I began interacting with state agents, educational institutions and social service providers as East African, Black,

Muslim refugees, the myth of ‘Canada the great hopeful north’ was quickly busted. Our first

‘landing’ and living experience was in Hamilton, Ontario, where we were literally displaced and living in a shelter. We were similarly without a ‘home’ once we moved again to Toronto post

9/11. This was not the first time my family was forced to migrate. My parents left everything they have known including their family, culture, community, and belonging to provide a life with more ‘opportunity’ and possibility for their children than what the captivity of Sudan by colonizers offered. Education was supposed to be the vehicle to get us through and ‘free’.

My parents fled from Sudan to Kenya to seek asylum as political exiles for their roles in the anti-colonial resistance movement in Sudan. They helped to support and organize resistant efforts to the dictatorship of Omar Bashir, whose violent reign in the height of a civil war pushed the geographic division between the Sudanese nation into an ethnic and religious territories. This division fragmented our Black land with a colonial border that broke Sudan into two separate

Northern and Southern nation states. Ideologies of white supremacy and Arab domination served as the foundations of contemporary Sudanese governance and society ‘post independence’ (Idris, 2012). Upon arrival in Kenya, my mother began the next process of transition to Canada through a United Nations Refugee Program. She sought security, opportunity and the freedom for a different possibility of our Black lives as promised in the western world. Eventually, we made our home the first and oldest government housing project in

Toronto: Regent Park. The neighborhood was constructed in the 1940s, and as I continue to call

6 it home today, it is currently being gentrified. Yet again, I find myself bearing witness to displacement, financialization and the erosion of what was a predominately Black, racialized and working-class community.

My earliest memories are of my life as a young Sudania2 born (in ethnicity not nationality) and raised as a child in Kenya and then coming into my Blackness in Canada post

9/11 as an East African Black Muslim refugee. I have long been seeking clarity for the spiritual turbulence3 I’ve experienced, considering what Hartman (1997) has asked us to contend with:

“what does it mean to have this psychic inheritance of an experience for which one has no memory, where people are still living in the temporal space of being an ex-slave?” (Hartman,

1997, as cited in Saunders, 2008, p. 8). My experiences included but were not isolated to: anger, confusion and the experience of living as a ‘mute’ person, here in Canada but also in the context of colonial discourses and forces directly linked to my roots, home, identity, citizenship and belonging. These tensions cumulatively shaped my understanding and, initially, my refusing of my Black being. The arts served as my entry into learning, claiming and interrogating my

Blackness.

Be-coming Black through Poetry

As a child I came naturally into poetry, primarily through my ancestral connection to the oral tradition, which has a long and dynamic history among the Sudanese people, and many other

East Africans. I also found poetry as a fourth grader in Hamilton Ontario, seeking to make sense of the children’s story books, nursery rhymes and the broader cultural context within Canada. I turned to poetry and storytelling on my own, as a means to understand the absented presences of

2 The term used to identify a Sudanese woman 3 Please see “Black Turbulent Consciousness” in chapter two

7 myself, of children like me, within the primary school system. Poetry served as a space to reckon with and attempt to resolve my multiple queries about myself. It served as a sanctuary, a site of healing and space where wisdoms were born and grappled with. It also served as a response to the internal and external containment of being conditioned and displaced through the logics, mechanics and structures of anti-Blackness, by way of multiple colonial state forces within the empires I had called home.

In each creative introspection and with the production and completion of each poem or story, I felt like a wave that comes temporarily to rest at shore. I reverberated in-between

(Walcott, 2000) the Black abyss of my solitude, and underwent a sacred and intimate exploration of my emotional intelligence and acuity that holds the deepest, rawest and most powerful insights to critically articulate the complexities of Black being through ‘self’ (Hill Collins, 2000;

Wong, 2004) as a cite and archive of knowledges. Poetry also made visible the dark matter

(Browne, 2015) and Black holes (Sharpe, 2016) within the power structures that condition the everyday restriction of Black life. Lorde (2007) articulates that the “places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness” (p.36). I can only come into this darkness when I feel without fear, judgment or shame. In this creative space I can choose to live freely and outside of the delusions curated for us as Black people. I can refuse the prescribed sedatives offered up to us by the state by way of neoliberalism, white supremacist logics and heteropatriarchy, in order to pacify our anger and quell our will to imagine ourselves in and outside of our own freedoms.

My creativity gives my Black radical imagination (Kelly, 2002) a language and meaning through feeling and intuitive knowing (Wong, 2004) that manifests into my Black self- assuredness, (Walcott, 2000) which in turn creates a resistant and rebellious energy. It is this

8 sense of self- assuredness as a Black woman that disrupts the public at my every turn and with my every breath. This same sense of self-assuredness that demands I intervene, that I seek action.

My conviction informs me of the urgency required to act, with and for Black people, by disrupting and revealing the violent apparatuses of white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, capitalism while continuing to build a broader collective Black consciousness that suggests we can, should and must demand better here and everywhere.

Art was the first site of my politicization as a Black liberation activist and organizer but certainly not the last. It was here that I began to decolonize (Smith, 2012) my knowledge of self through a radical love for Blackness and Black people – it is where I first professed my commitment to fiercely fight for our right to life, breath (Sharpe, 2016) and self-determination.

As described by Lorde (2007):

For within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were meant to kneel to thought as we were meant to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They lie in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.

(p.39)

I continue to dare. To be audacious. To be unapologetically Black. I began to vehemently assert to Torontonians and Canadians that Black Lives Matter, In this city, province, country and globally. It was then, in 2014 that I, along with Pascale Diverlus4, Rodney Diverlus, Sandra

4 Names listed in alphabetical order by last name.

(Sandy) Hudson, Janaya (Jay) Khan and Leroi Newbold collectively co-founded the Canadian,

Black Lives Matter-Toronto Chapter (BLM-TO) movement.

Wake Work is NOT Woke Work: Form/ations of BLM-TO

As Sandra Hudson and I have previously written in Race and Racialization and Essential

Reader (2018) Black Lives Matter is an international organization for Black liberation and a continuation of a long tradition of Black resistance against white supremacy and anti-Black racism. At its core, Black Lives Matter is a contemporary manifestation of the ever-blazing abolitionist movement (Davis, 2011). The organization developed in the wake of the brutal slaying of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a murderer named George Zimmerman in 2012.

Zimmerman would never face punishment for the heinous crime he committed against Trayvon

Martin; he was acquitted by a legal system that routinely protects those who brutalize Black people. When the verdict was announced in the summer of 2013, Alicia Garza penned a “Love

Letter to Black People” on Facebook that ended with the phrase, “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter, Black Lives Matter. Together with Opal Tometi and Patrisse Khan-Cullors, she cofounded the Black Lives Matter movement amidst a renewed wave of agitation for Black liberation.

As the movement organized demonstrations against incidents of anti-Blackness, the events that attracted the most attention by mass media were those that directly challenged the use of force and violence – and thus the very structure – of the state. Black Lives Matter was becoming known as the organization challenging police violence against Black people. In 2014, demonstrations were taking place across the world to protest the killing of Michael Brown by

Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson5. Black communities across the world were

experiencing widespread devastation at what many have concluded was an extrajudicial

summary execution of Brown an 18-year-old Black man. It was this moment, along with the

police killing of Jermaine Carby by police officer Ryan Reid in Brampton, Ontario that would

inspire a Black Lives Matter movement in Toronto.

Black Lives Matter Toronto: A Call to Action

Jermaine Carby was killed by police officer Ryan Reid on September 24, 2014. Unlike in

the case of Michael Brown’s killing, however, the public would not find out the identity of the

police officer until 2016 due to weak laws enforcing transparency in law enforcement in Ontario.

A subsequent coroner’s inquest found the killing of Carby, who was killed just over a month

after Michael Brown, to be a homicide. Canadian news media widely covered the Michael

Brown case that occurred in the United States. But even though the details surrounding Jermaine

Carby’s killing were suspect, Canadian media did not cover it nearly as widely as Michael

Brown’s case. This is typical of the way that media is complicit in Canada’s false vision of itself

as a tolerant, multicultural, racism-free haven when compared to the United States. Jermaine

Carby’s killing should have been newsworthy simply because it happened, and even more so

because some of the details in the case suggested that police officers may have planted a knife

near Jermaine Carby after slaying him. Concerns were raised about why Carby, who had been

5 St. Louis County Health Office of the Medical Examiner. (2014). Brown, Michael: Narrative report of investigation. Exam Case 2014-5143. Retreived from: http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1371268-2014-5143-narrative-report- 01.html

the passenger in a car that was stopped by police, was carded6. Even still, the Canadian media

refused to dedicate time and scrutiny to investigate Jermaine Carby’s slaying.

We do not raise this comparison to suggest that Michael Brown’s case should not have

been covered by Canadian mass media, or to suggest that mass media should only focus on local

concerns. What we are pointing to is the ease with which Canadian news media will look in the

other direction when the subject matter would otherwise force the Canadian public to look within

itself and uncover something reprehensible within. The knowledge of anti-Blackness here would

force any decent person to action, and mass media and the broader public would rather avoid

such stories that upset the narrative of those who would proudly claim a Canadian cultural

identity. In November of 2014, a grand jury was set to decide whether or not to indict police

officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown. Black Lives Matter activists were calling for

widespread response regardless of the decision. In Toronto, folks in Black community had been

affected by Michael Brown’s case, including the authors of this piece. As [Hudson, 2018] stated:

“While searching for a solidarity action occurring in Toronto, my brother taught me one of the most important lessons I have learned in my social justice praxis. My young brother, Michael Hudson, asked me if anyone was doing anything about these issues locally. Had I found a solidarity action we could join? My brother was distraught. He insisted that something had to be done, by someone. It was then, in recognition of his distress that I realized there was no reason for me to wait and hope for someone else to do what I already knew needed to be done. One of the most heinous things about anti- Blackness is that it makes us feel isolated and powerless. But I had known after years of organizing and through my knowledge of the history of Black organizing in the city through organizations such as the Black Action Defense Committee, that true power comes from an organized community. I contacted dozens of Black organizers that I knew; mostly women, mostly queer; and we got to work organizing a vigil”.

6 Gillis, W. (2016, May 12). Peel cop sought to card Jermaine Carby before slaying, inquest hears. Toronto Star. Retrieved from https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2016/05/12/peel-cop-sought-to-card-jermaine-carby-before-slaying- inquest-hears.html

(Hudson, 2018, p. 698)

On November 24, 2014, a St. Louis County grand jury rendered its decision; they would not indict Darren Wilson. Ferguson was burning, and there was widespread public condemnation. In Toronto, we were distraught, and we got to work. Meeting at Toronto’s Black

Coalition for AIDS Prevention office, we met to organize the vigil in the heart of Toronto that occurred on November 25, 2014 across from the United States Consulate building. We decided that we did not want to contribute to Canada’s national myth-making exercise. We knew about

Jermaine Carby’s case, and we were furious that the injustice done to him was being ignored, so we involved his family. We decided we would hold a vigil not only to demonstrate in solidarity with the protestors in Ferguson, but also to hold a mirror up to the Canadian public and make non-Black Canada aware that here, too, existed a vile and reprehensible form of anti-Black racism that was constantly interrupting Black life through law enforcement. Each of our materials said “From Ferguson to Toronto, Black Lives Matter/Stop Police Brutality Against

Black Lives Everywhere/From Mike Brown to Jermaine Carby”. We made literature to educate attendees about the issue of anti-Blackness locally. We organized a vigil for what we thought would be in the realm of 50 –100 people in under 24 hours.

We organized with principles. We were against the violent colonial absenting of

Blackness and Black degradation under Canadian colonization. We ensured that the elements of our vigil were borne out of a principled refusal to accept both the violence of colonization and the ways such violence impacts Black and Indigenous people across the lands now referred to as North and South America. We were critical of border politics and the myths it creates of reified lines where racism ends. We made our vigil about Black unity across white

supremacist colonial borders. We wanted attendees to know that this was a vigil that demanded justice, dignity and liberation for all Black lives. We foregrounded Black trans organizers, queer organizers and Black women. We wanted to show that our struggle could hold everyone and be accessible. We provided free food, handwarmers, public transit tokens, gloves, child care and mental health supports. We wanted to show that there was beauty in coming together to hold one another in grief and mourning while building our community power. We foregrounded spiritual leaders and artists. And we wanted to center Black people. Ahead of the vigil, we asked any non-

Black allies attending to stand to the periphery and make space for Black folks to come together and mourn.

We expected 50 attendees, but over 3,000 people attended this first vigil. More vigils were held in Edmonton, Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, and other major cities. Though we had not set out to become an organization, we knew that it would be irresponsible for us to disappear;

Black communities had come forward in droves and made it clear that there was a need for a public mobilizing force for Black people in the city. Shortly thereafter Patrisse Cullors contacted us from Black Lives Matter’s national organization, and she made it official; we were to formally join the Black Lives Matter network. Our vision: to be a platform upon which Black communities across Toronto can actively dismantle all forms of anti-Black racism, liberate

Blackness, support Black healing, affirm Black existence, and create freedom to love and self- determine. Our mission: to forge critical connections and to work in solidarity with Black communities, Black-centric networks, solidarity movements, and allies in order to dismantle all forms of state-sanctioned oppression, violence, and brutality committed against African,

Caribbean, and Black cis, queer, trans, and disabled populations in Toronto.

In the three years of our existence, we have created a powerful social movement mobilizing our communities against anti-Blackness in government, education, health care and social services. We engage in “open source” organizing and ensuree we are upholding transparency and accessibility in our activism. Our work is grounded in our ethics and in radical notions of care. When we organize around an issue, we bring the impacted Black communities together and craft a response informed through our communities. For example, if we are aware of a situation where someone in the Black community has been killed by the state, we first contact the family members of that person to get their consent prior to elevating the issue in the media. We do this to ensure that our work will not unduly contribute to the trauma of the Black people left behind in the wake of police violence. We make sure, first and foremost, to offer families support and resources where we can. The affected families and community members are always a part of our organizing, strategizing and mobilizing, at every stage. In this way our work is thoughtful and reflective.

As activists, we must be knowledgeable of the terrain in which we are resisting. But more than that, as Black people, we are often challenged to name and explain our social conditions in order for our claims of anti-Blackness to be considered potentially legitimate by those in power.

For this reason, our work includes critical analysis and alternative forms of public education for our different communities. We explore and share with our communities’ multiple histories of oppression, racism and resistance in Canada within larger imperial colonial forces. We unpack the nuanced reality of Black bodies and souls surviving within oppressive white supremacist systems. We demand decolonization and reparations. These demands inform our unapologetic, expressive and self- assured Black rresistance, knowledge and teachings.

Who are we?

We are comprised of a steering committee with varied lived experiences in Blackness.

We are queer, trans, gender non-conforming, Muslim, women, femme, disabled, parents, educators, students, artists, academics, working class, descendants of enslaved people,

Indigenous, migrants, refugees, diasporic and continental. The composition of our team reflects our belief in engaging in a praxis of intersectionality in our resistance work. We refuse the relentless attempts to absent the pluralities of Blackness outside of Black communities by exploring the ways different colonial histories and geographies inform our sociocultural complexities, experiences of violence and experiences of trauma through anti-Black manifestations. We are keenly invested in creating the conditions and infrastructure that hold our entire complexity as Black people in every space that we make to build community power. This model of organizing operates with the principle of, “all of us, or none of us”; no one gets left behind. This principle directly challenges hetero-patriarchy, ableism, classism and the idea of a singular of Black experience. Our work is an intervention; it disrupts the myth that Black cis- gendered men are the sole victims of state violence by elevating the often-absented experiences of Black trans women in particular, who have been among the state’s most systematically brutalized victims. When we say Black lives matter, we mean all Black lives.

Strategies and Tactics

Our movement is intergenerational and linked to our predecessors. Our elders guide our strategy through past experiences and are direct participants of our work as healers, advocates and active listeners. We also carve out space to build with and protect young Black people in our movement. We provide child care that doubles as a space for political education.

Through this political education space for youth, we manifest actions developed and designed by children and youth, and we provide opportunities to nurture self-affirming, queer-positive growth and leadership for our youth every time we gather. It is our duty to honour African traditions in communal love, respect, dignity, and care in how we engage with one another for our collective breathing. Everyone, young, middle-aged or old, has a place in our movement. We have different ways in which we communicate our knowledge and messages of resistance. At times we present formally, in ways that normative ‘white culture’ would expect. But we make a point of intentionally refusing to ‘codeswitch’, and perform the Black grammars (Walcott, 2003) of Black youth culture through our chants and speeches. We combine language from our mother tongues with ‘street lingo’ birthed from our hoods in the east and west ends of Toronto when we publicly speak with our communities. Growing up both immigrant and diasporic as a young East African

Muslim woman in Regent Park, I learned that this syncretism is how we survive state violence waged on our bodies. The refusal to be the white supremacist system’s “perfect” Black figure in order to be worthy of attention from legitimate sources of power is an act of subversion.

Unapologetic, creative Black expression is part of the soul of our movement. From dabbing, to voguing, to twerking and milly rockin’, we shut it down on every block.

Our roles as public intellectuals

As Black students who struggle both within and outside of the academy, we deliberately use our positions in higher education as a means to document Black thought, to produce knowledge that reflects our communities, and to take the time to theorize our current conditions.

We intend to give such knowledge to our communities in our resistance projects. The knowledge that we build and the power that we gain from it comes directly from our community; it is both

ethical and necessary that we return it. Building community power from the grassroots makes our different ways of knowing accessible and informs a deep and humane understanding of

Black life. We are directed by the every-day lived experiences of our varied and intersecting communities. Black theory is crucial in naming the colonial forces that produce the weather we are in. It is a liberatory practice that articulates our evolving Black consciousness and lays the groundwork for the development of further strategies for action. We insist that the theory that we engage in goes beyond the abstract, that it refuses inaccessible jargon or other barriers to community praxis. The Eurocentric forms of knowledge production we are resisting are tools that serves the settler colonial corporate state, not those of us who are under its heel. This element of praxis is a necessary form of resistance. We acknowledge that the revolution will not manifest from within the ivory tower. But we are committed to mobilizing our intellectual work to politicize our community and give the power of transgressive knowledge back to our communities.

The gathering that became Black Lives Matter Toronto brought forth a new wave of

Black liberation organizing in Toronto, and it grew with every new intervention we made in public protest. In Toronto and beyond, we started to see a shifting of culture, language and consciousness of Blackness, activated Black and racialized communities, policies and groundbreaking conversations of Blackness in politics and coverage of Black issues in media. Black communities across ethnic differences, across intersections of identity, across generations, across social locations in the city were galvanized to gather and take different forms of action. These actions allowed us to imagine different possibilities of Black life in our various positionalities: in our homes, in the streets, in our places of work, schools and communities. More of us were seizing the political moment, the climate of the hyper-visible Black death we were in, and the

18 upsurge of Black resistance to assert our human right to life, to Black lives that matter and are valued.

It is as a proud co-founder and organizer within the Black Lives Matter movement that I became abruptly hyper-visible within the Canadian mainstream consciousness. It is in this role that I experienced Canadian and international media attempts to deceptively construct and malign my identity as a: ‘person of interest’, ‘enemy of the state,’ ‘terrorist’, as a ‘Black bitch’, as ‘crazy’ and an ‘unstable’ (Twitter Posts, 2016; 2017; 2018)7. Nonetheless, I was still described as “sexy enough” to get the Black consciousness “f*cked out of me”. I was a woman who simply required the disciplining of a “huge white c*ck” to keep me in line and quite frankly, either on my knees or on my back, neither of which I was willing to accept or tolerate.

7 I recognize that APA 6th edition requires the Twitter handle, the month and year of the sender the tweet for citation purposes (eg: Yusra Khogail. (January 1) “content of the tweet” [Twitter Post]. Retrieved from “insert URL”. I am deliberately refusing to provide space in my thesis for this racist, antiBlack, sexist and Islamaphobic vitriol. This content is searchable using #YusraKhogali on twitter.

This reprehensible sexual violence is the majority of hatred directed towards me in the comments left in my social media and email.

Public Enemy Number One: #YusraKhogali

On February 9, 2016 at 10:57 a.m., I wrote the above tweet in response to a public conversation online. To be clear, I was responding to a public exchange taking place on Twitter which was unrelated to my membership or participation in BLM-TO. Little did I know, this tweet would function as a mechanism for the deployment and justification of white rage against me for years to come. After Jerry Agar, a commentator of the Sun Media corporation and

NEWSTALK 1010, ‘discovered’ my tweet, it quickly became a fixed and ‘instructive’ text within the broader Canadian and international media landscapes. Approximately 2 years later, this tweet is still often circulated as if it is newsworthy every time my name, or the work of

Black Lives Matter, is addressed in Toronto.

I recognize and can appreciate that nothing in the online domain, or in this case, on the

Twittersphere, is ever private. The media never provided context about the tweet’s presumed intent, purpose, or the audience I was speaking to, and with, I was engaged in an online conversation for, about and led by Black women during Black history month. I was sharing my experience with Black people, specifically Black women. But these are precisely the privileges we are never granted as Black people. That is, the capacity and freedom to speak for ourselves and to each other the ability to write for ourselves and for each other without interruption, interference or the fear of willful White supremacist misinterpretation.

I wrote that tweet out of frustration, seeking restraint from God and support from my online Black feminist community. This tweet was seemingly inconsequential and lived in the

Twittersphere for nearly two months before it was deployed to serve its intended purpose: to

20 serve as a nail in my perceived coffin. Not until April 5, 2016, after the vibrant encampment of

#BLMTOtentcity8 in front of Toronto police headquarters, was my tweet not only taken out of context but used as a disciplining tactic against me, Black Lives Matter Toronto, and the broader

Black community. The best way to describe much of the vitriol that I and members of my team experienced was ‘how dare you be so audacious and bold to fight for your freedom and doing so will come at a cost.’ And it surely did. This old tweet was used to dox me immediately after the two-week action that mobilized a national conversation on: anti-Black racism, sanist anti-Black policing (Abdillahi, 2015) interventions, and law enforcement oversight bodies.

#BLMTOtentcity culminated in the historic release of the heavily redacted SIU report on Andrew

Loku by Premiere Kathleen Wynne. When Toronto Sun commentator and Newstalk 1010 host Jerry Agar published my tweet, it left me curious but not surprised. I wondered why he would spend so much time perusing my twitter. I wondered what he was looking for and I had questions about his intent and the purpose of reporting on a then 23 year old graduate student and organizer, and why I was important enough not only to be a local but national and international topic of conversation during a time where the issues in this country plaguing Black communities persisted. How was this tweet news? But I wasn't surprised because the actions of Agar and those of his ilk are heavily invested in surveilling, monitoring and controlling not just the movement of Black people but our thoughts, feelings, and theorizing as it relates to our freedom in this country. This is not a new phenomenon, it is one Black people across this country and globe have long been subjected to and have learned to survive. So I, Yusra Khogali, was no different from my

8 #BLMTOTentCity is two week encampment action Black Lives Matter Toronto held in front of the police headquarters at 40 College Street in response to anti-Black racist violent happening in Toronto from no charges laid on the officer Andrew Doyle who executed of Andrew Loku, additional black death in Toronto by police officers and the debasement of Afro-fest the largest annual African centred festival in Toronto from a two day event to one day due to ‘noise complaints’ from neighbours. See more: https://nowtoronto.com/music/city-downsizes-afrofest- due-to-noise-complaints-toronto/

21 overpoliced and hyper-surveilled counterparts living in social housing (which I already was), engaged with the child welfare system, or the people experiencing stop-and-frisk on a daily basis.

Given the consequences and impact of the above tweet for local and national politics, and for my work within BLM-TO, this tweet serves as a historical moment in shifting how I understood myself, as well as my understanding of what, discourses were being manufactured or muted, silenced or sensationalized about me. Therefore, I will revisit this discussion in greater depth in chapter four, where I will further unpack the discourses and temporalities connected to and absented from the tweet I wrote.

The efforts to discipline me, for my general activism and for this specific tweet, did not stop within the realm of the media landscape. White supremacy and its agents are consistently and tirelessly at work. It’s capillaries extended into my educational institution by way of

‘anonymous’ white students also attending the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. These students collectively demanded my expulsion from the

University among many other things. This, however, did not come as a surprise to me given my previous experiences within education including not limited to my experience at OISE.

Education as ‘Liberation’ and as a Site of Violence

Earlier in this chapter, I discussed my impetus to pursue poetry and the arts as a response to my early experiences in the educational system in Hamilton Ontario. It was there where I first began feeling like ‘the unexpected student’. Now upon reflection, while I was present in the classroom, I’m unsure that my teachers and to a large extent, most of my classmates, knew or acknowledged my presence. I often served as a marker of difference or as a site of study. For example, I distinctly remember on several occasions being called upon directly by my teachers at

ages 9, 10 and 11 to provide the rest of the class with my knowledge about the continent of

Africa. This became a really interesting predicament: while I was happy to be called on to share my experiences I was shocked to learn most of my classmates and the educators had little to no concept of Africa as a continent. Beyond this predicament was the internal dissonance I was experiencing. On the one hand, I was proud and excited to share my limited knowledge and the experience with my peers; on the other hand, it was this very joy of talking while Black that resulted in my daily experiences of anti-Black and anti-Black African racism. These experiences, however, are not unique to me. For decades, Black students and parents in Ontario have highlighted the ongoing and pernicious racism within the Toronto District School Board

(James, 2010). And while some may assume that perhaps once I transitioned to a more ‘diverse’ place such as Regent Park, my experiences would be starkly different, this wasn’t the case. In fact, as highlighted by James (2017) in the report entitled Towards Race Equity in Education:

The Schooling of Black Students in the GTA, significant data collected by the Toronto District

School Board (TDSB) suggests, becoming ‘accustommed’, ‘integrated’ or ‘assimilated’ into the school system as a Black person does not change the outcomes for Black students:

The longer the family has been in Canada, the worse the outcomes for Black students. That is, for the most part, second generation Black students have worse educational outcomes than their first-generation counterparts, with third-generation Black students having the worst outcomes.

(p. 31)

My experiences are certainly not unique. The epidemic that is anti-Black racism within all levels of education system has been well documented by several scholars (Abdi & Ibrahim, 2016; Dei, 2007,

2008; Hampton, 2007; Henry, James, Kobayashi, Smith,Ramos & Enakshi, 2017; Kelly, 1998; Sium,

2014; Walrond, 2008,) in school boards reports9 and universities over the past two decades. Education has always been a site of struggle for Black people in Ontario, from our concerns of being absented and misrepresented within the curriculum to the experiences of Black students who have indicated they are disproportionately streamed into applied courses10 or locally developed/essentials11 programs in comparison to white students who represent 81% of students enrolled in academic streams. James (2017) echos the concerns of anti-Black streaming by highlighting that “Black students were over twice as likely to be enrolled in the applied program

[at] 39% compared with 16% of White and 18% of other racialized students and three times as likely to be in the essentials program 9% versus 3% of White and other racialized students”

(p.29). Although the TDSB claims it officially eliminated the streaming policy in 1999, others argue at the practice of streaming not only continues, but also that it continues to disproportionately disadvantage Black and racialized students (People for Education, 2014) and those students coming from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

While the focus of this thesis is not education policy, it’s important to highlight some key policies which have significantly impacted Black students in Toronto. There has been much debate in this city and province over the past two decades about policies within the Toronto District

School Board, and about its poor and neglectful treatment of Black students. A brief review of literature

(Abdi & Ibrahim, 2016; Dei, 2007, 2008; Hampton, 2007; Henry, James, Kobayashi, Smith,Ramos &

Enakshi, 2017; Kelly, 1998; Sium, 2014; Walrond, 2008) indicates that problems within the educational

9 http://www.tdsb.on.ca/Portals/research/docs/reports/PortraitsBlack.pdf http://www.tdsb.on.ca/research/Research/Parent-and-Student-Census/Census-Publications

10 Refers to courses that prepare students for College preparedness courses and to enter college after high school (James, 2017). 11 Refers to a program of study that provides students with flexibility and support in meeting compulsory credit requirements. It helps students meet their educational needs if they are not working at grade level. Often this stream prepares students to enter the labour market directly out of high school (James, 2017).

system for Black students began several decades ago. However, the modern discussion of this history often begins with the creation of the zero tolerance policies in the mid-1990s when the Scarborough

Board of Education adopted a Safe Schools Policy on Violence and Weapons in 1993. Of keen interest to Black communities have been a few policies that sought to: a) unduly and unfairly target Black students, b) segregate or stream Black students and c) criminalize and punish Black students. These policies include and are not limited to the: Code of Conduct for Ontario schools

(2000), Safe Schools Act (2000) and the Education Act (2000). Collectively these policies sought to discipline and criminalize students in order to exhibit ‘zero tolerance’ for ‘bad behavior’ in Ontario schools. More precisely, “the provincial Code of Conduct also mandates police involvement, in accordance with the police/school protocol, for most of the infractions”

(Ontario Human Rights Commission Report, 2009). Additionally, the Education Act, which sought to “give force to the Code of Conduct and provide principals and teachers with more authority to suspend and expel students…[with ‘discretion’]” (Ontario Human Rights Report,

2009), not only frustrated but exacerbated the pre-existing tensions at school for Black communities, who were already and understandably distrusting of teachers, guidance counselors,

Vice-Principals/Principals, Superintendents and Trustees. This point was further substantiated by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which found in interviews found that “lawyers who provide summary advice to or represent students who have been suspended or expelled from school also report seeing a disproportionate number of Black students [...]” The same lawyers observed that Black students were disproportionately attending “alternative programs for suspended and expelled students and [the] strict discipline schools” (Ontario Human Rights

Commission, 2009).

The literature is clear that race is inextricably linked to the educational outcomes for

Black students. A few key themes emerged: a) race, and in particular Blackness, has a direct impact on one’s educational trajectory—this begins as early primary school, b) Blackness is a determinant of student achievement, and is a major factor in racist educational streaming, c) race, specifically Blackness, is a determinant of how teachers respond to the behaviours of Black students—this includes and is not limited to classroom behavioral management strategies and the sense of inclusion (or lack thereof) that Black students feel in the classroom, d) the excessively harsh and punitive responses from administrators in cases relating to discipline and finally e)

Blackness as a determinant which results in disproportionate criminalization of Black students for ‘bad’ or ‘unmanageable’ classroom behavioror.

We are asked to believe that the above concerns have since been remedied by policy change, by the brief tenure of a Black Educational Minister (June 2016- January 2018) and the establishment of Ontario’s Anti-Racism Directorate (February 2016), which has also been led by a Black person. The conditions for Black students have not only remained the same but the deployment of racist and problematic interventions in and out of the classroom has not stopped.

In fact, the issues plaguing Black students became more visible within the public discourse and with the increased public profile of Black Lives Matter-TO’s activism12. To be explicitly clear, I am not highlighting the race of either Minister in order to suggest that any one Black person is responsible for, or has the capacity to overhaul an entire educational system. Rather, I use these examples in an effort to point out the neoliberal logics of diversity and representational politics which often serve as a distraction to substantive policy change. It is important however to

12 These cases were elevated by the Black Lives Matter Toronto team to the public through the media and direct actions.

26 highlight the anti-Black climate within educational system within the Greater Toronto Area the past few years.

It was in November 2015, when 13-year-old Danae13, a Black student was admonished by her Amesbury Middle School Principal for wearing her hair naturally citing, her hair was ‘too poofy’ and ‘unprofessional’. Subsequently in October of 2016, six-year-old Anelka14 of

Brampton Ontario, was forced by his Brisdale Public School teacher to stand in a makeshift box/square outlined on the floor of his classroom and in front of his peers, as a means to “teach him about personal space”. On December 2017, when 11-year-old Isaiah approached his teacher seeking clarity on a poetry assignment called “all the places we love”, his Norman Cook Public

School teacher told him ‘It’s like home sweet home, or for you, in a dark alleyway like a crackhead”. 15In November of 2016, York Region District School Board Trustee Nancy Elgie referred to Charline Grant, the parent of a Black student, as a ‘nigger’.16 Elgie reluctantly resigned in February 2017, as public pressure and calls for her resignation increased. She did provide a public ‘apology’ by way of YouTube upon her resignation. As recently as, February

18th 2018, a teacher at Dennis O’Connor Catholic high school in Ajax wore a do-rag to class during Black history month as a gesture, according to a student, of ‘support’ for his “coloured friends”, who weren’t in the classroom and are not his students. 17These are just a few examples of the everyday overt, dignity-violating acts of anti-Black racism facing Black students. From

13 https://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2015/12/04/demonstrators-declare-black-hair-is-beautiful.html 14 https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/11/01/brampton-mom-shocked-her-sons-teacher-taped-off-an-area- around-his-desk.html 15 http://toronto.citynews.ca/2017/12/05/toronto-teacher-accused-of-making-racist-remark-to-black-student/ 16 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/nancy-elgie-resigns-from-york-school-board-after-racial-slur-used- against-parent-1.3988991 17 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/white-high-school-teacher-do-rag-black-history-month-ajax-1.4527186

27 teachers to trustees, to the School Resource Officers18, Black children are under siege in the classroom.

The anti-Black assaults and trespasses deployed by educators in the primary and high school system do not end there. For those of us privileged enough to attend university, we quickly learn the university is a hotbed for anti-Black racism. In my experience, university programs/ departments that proclaim a ‘leftist’, ‘progressive’ and social justice-oriented education are among some of the most dangerous places in the academy.

Paying for the anti-Black experience: Post-Secondary Education

When I make use of the term ‘paying’ for school, I am, in part, referencing the financial costs associated with attending university. But the monetary sacrifice, while substantial, is only partially what I consider as the ‘costs’ of higher education. When I use the term ‘paying’, I’m actually speaking to the stakes for Black students, for Black intellectual life and ultimately for our human desires for freedom as Black students. Much of my undergraduate and graduate education was reflective of what Freire (2000) defined as the banking concept of education. This concept refers to the transactional disembodied nature of the education system. Freire (2000) writes, “in the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry” (p. 66). This pedagogical approach acutely

18 The School Resource Officer program was successfully removed in TDSB schools in Ontario through the advocacy of BLMTO, Latin American Education Network, Education not Incarceration and Jane and Finch Action Against Poverty. Advocacy continues for the removal of SRO’s in other district school boards. See more: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/school-resource-officers-toronto-board-police-1.4415064

impacted my university experience at the University of Toronto as an undergraduate student and later as a graduate student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. As a Black student, I experienced this approach to teaching and learning far more often then I care to describe. I was

‘dispensed’ an education that often absented, distorted or engaged Black Studies and Black scholars work in an adjunct capacity.

I entered university with the hope for better. For many Black students and for me in particular as a young Sudanese woman, university was not optional. It was an expectation. My educational path was clearly outlined for me early in my high school career. I would graduate high school, attend university—not just any university, but the University of Toronto—I would do well and attend graduate school, also at the University of Toronto and finally I would secure gainful employment. At the time, I was not aware that Black people only represented 11% of the overall Canadian population with university degrees (James et al, 2010) and that currently in

Toronto, we represent only 7% of the population with a university degree in comparison to the

18% of the general population (James, 2010). That said, having a university degree does not guarantee Black graduates the same access or success in the labour market as it does for non-

Black racialized people and white people (Block & Galabuzi, 2011; Galabuzi, 2006). While some argue education is the key to Black liberation, others caution that “not only has education not functioned to substantially improve the occupational status and earning capacity of Blacks in relation to whites, it may have impeded their progress as a race” (Williams, 1978, p. 269). Williams

(1978) goes to explain:

This assumption is based on two well documented facts: (1) education has drained off the upper echelon of the Black community and erected a barrier between the Black masses and the Black bourgeoisie; (2) education for Blacks has largely been controlled by whites who have-with few exceptions-denied or denigrated Black experience and culture,

substituting instead the white, middle-class model which has little meaning and little payoff for Blacks.

(p. 269)

Needless to say, when I was a young undergraduate student, the thought of entering the labour market seemed distant enough that I could begin to address those concerns closer to my graduation. I focused my attention on the lack of Black students and faculty on campus: it was not only jarring, it caused serious alarm for me and other Black students I later encountered in my studies at the university. In Cornel West’s Race Matters (1994), he asserts “the major enemy of [B]lack survival … is loss of hope and absence of meaning” (p. 23). I was determined to find hope, “a place where paradise can be created” as (hooks, 1994, p. 207) described. I was sick and tired of entering the classroom day after day and experiencing what felt like “the first contact”.

In other words, like I was a site for discovery, exploration and an empty vessel or space looking to be conquered, occupied, and made intelligible by way of Canadian multiculturalism, outdated anti-racist rhetoric and culturally competent liberalism seeking to mask race in lieu of ethicized discourses of difference. My interest was in engaged pedagogy (hooks, 1994) and in understanding notions of freedom as it related to Black life here and around the globe. I quickly learned that often my educators either had little to share or lacked interest in the world/view from my vantage point. Instead the neoliberal academic industrial complex leveraged professors who

“confuse[d] the authority of knowledge with his or her [their]own professional authority, which she and he [they] sets in opposition to the freedom of the students;” (Freire, 2000, p. 66). I began experiencing a strange and, at that time, indescribable feeling.

I would sit in women’s studies classes where Black feminist scholars were on the syllabus but Blackness was absented from the discussion. It was a particular kind of academic

trickery or academic bamboozling. For example, I wanted to take a course at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in 2015. I contacted the professor, who is purportedly a leading thinker on race and gender, and requested a copy of the syllabus. Upon receiving the syllabus, I noticed almost all, of the authors represented on the course outline were women non-Black but ‘of colour’—great! I was glad racialized women scholars were being centered in this classroom. But where were the Black feminist thinkers? Where were the Canadian Black feminist thinkers?

Where were the Black global-south feminists? Instead what I noticed was that Black feminist scholars were displaced and worse replaced with other racialized feminist thinkers writing about

Black women’s work. I experienced this as an act of deliberate anti-Black ‘epistemic violence’

(Spivak, 1998, p. 281). It is important we start naming and grappling with these issues publicly because Black lives are at stake. Further, we must stop representing these acts of violence as mere ‘oversights’ or ‘miscalculations’, they are not. Spivak (1998) emphasizes that “intellectuals must attempt to disclose and know the discourse of society's Other" (p. 334). This is precisely what is going on in the Canadian academy today. Black students continue to suffer, Black faculty and Black Canadian PhD graduates are not being employed, yet non-Black academics continue to weaponize against Black futures and freedoms. This outright trickery and academic bamboozling reminded me of the vigilance required when we as Black people engage these education institutions (among others). As Maggio (2007) instructs, it is “through th[ese] act of epistemic knowing/violence, the essentialization of the other is always the reinforcement of the menace of empire” (p.14). This experience, and countless other anti-Black and anti-Black epistemic violence within the academy, led my colleague Sandra Hudson and I to start the Black

Liberation Collective at the University of Toronto, which I will discuss later in this chapter.

The university curriculum that I was exposed to forced me to decipher a double speak of whiteness, a language that obscured Blackness in a colorblind myth of the benevolence of a multicultural Canada, both historically and in the contemporary. At the time I was studying, there were no Black-centred undergraduate classes offered. The curriculum was not relevant or restorative to Black students and communities—it was outdated in comparison with the intellectual conversations happening on the ground and in community, and it needed a counter- discourse to respond to daily manifestations of cultural racism (Giroux, 1993). More importantly, there was a need within the curriculum for a healing space to undo the impacts on Black spirit, cognition and consciousness of being conditioned in a white supremacist university space, including Black students’ common experiences in classrooms. Surviving post-secondary education meant creating alternative spaces for learning as I worked to pay my close to $100,000 debt sentence. In the various leadership roles I took throughout my first year until my current status as a graduate student, I created what was ‘groundbreaking’ and Black-centred conferences, feminist conferences, numerous skills-sharing opportunities, political education sessions and healing event spaces at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus as a substitute for the education I was technically paying for. I also would transfer and share this knowledge that I received from the community (not from the University of Toronto) though my spoken word poetry, like many Black poets, artists and public intellectuals (Alan 1993;1999, Baraka, 2002;

2003, Brand,1990; 1996; 1998; 2002; 2011; 2014; Cooper, 2006; James, 1999; 2013; Philip,

1992; 2008; 2015; 2017; Prince, 2012, also see Joseph, 1983)19 that came before me.

19 Clifton Joseph a Toronto based Black poet, one of the founders of the dub poetry movement in Canada he is also the author of Metropolitan Blues, Domestic Bliss, 1983.

From the time I was first enrolled into an elementary school here in Canada, the education system taught me what it means to be Black. I felt it in the violence of white students who called me anti-Black racist expletives; in the classrooms where I was immersed in a

Eurocentric curriculum that deeply destabilized and depersonalized me in my Blackness through

‘teachers’ who surveilled and policed me yet absented me in the classroom. I felt it in the limited amount of space I could take-up in the classroom in passionate discussion without being considered combative, angry, disruptive or rude when I critically engage with content and with my educators, in contrast to my white counterparts. Many times throughout my undergraduate and graduate courses I would have a couple of white women professors call me “angry”. This angry Black woman trope is one that has been constantly used to police my emotions, discredit, dehumanize, devalue and silence me more broadly in community organizing. It was then that I accepted Bogues (2015) instruction: “resistance must now turn to rebellion and freedom” (p.

205) and it was then that the Black Liberation Collective UofT and subsequently Black

Liberation Collective Canada was born.

Black Liberation Collective Canada

As highlighted in our previously co-published chapter: We Will Win: Black Lives Matter-

Toronto in Race and Racialization: Essential Readings (Hudson & Khogali, 2018), we outline in great depth the formation of the Black Liberation Collective at the University of Toronto. Here we detail the impetus of and responses to anti-Blackness at the University of Toronto, but also within higher education more broadly across Canada.

In the fall of 2015, the Black Liberation Collective – Canada came into formation. It was inspired by the actions of Black students occurring across the United States, and sparked by the resistance to anti-Blackness at the University of Missouri. But the foundation for the Black

Liberation Collective in Canada started a year prior in 2014. and drew its inspiration from two events: a forum organized to provide space for Black students to articulate the experience of being Black at the University of Toronto (U of T), and a podcast elevating first-hand narratives of Black students created by Hudson and I. A Black student movement in Canada experienced its rebirth through these events. The Black Liberation Collective consists of Black students dedicated to transforming post-secondary institutions through the same principles as Black Lives

Matter. We became affiliated with the broader Black Liberation Collective through a solidarity action with Black students at the University of Missouri. The resistance to the anti-Blackness at

Mizzou resulted in the resignation of the University of Missouri President and Chancellor.

In Canada, students from University of British Columbia, Guelph University, Carlton

University, University of Ottawa, Ryerson University and the University of Toronto used the heightened awareness of anti-Blackness in post-secondary education to design campus-specific actions to resist anti-Black racism. This movement became a branch of Black Lives Matter –

Toronto due to overlapping membership and reliance on Black Lives Matter for support. Since its inception, Canada’s founding Black Liberation Collective chapter at U of T has demanded institutional changes to significantly interrupt the manner in which anti-Blackness operates in the ivory tower. Demands include increased representation of Black students and faculty, culturally relevant mental health services, targeted scholarships for Black students, free tuition, and divestments from corporations who invest in the prison industrial complex, as well as mining companies that brutalize African people. As a result of this Black student organizing, U of T was one of the first Canadian universities to commit to collecting disaggregated race-based data on students, faculty and staff. Our current organizing is to demand the creation of the first Black

34 university in Canada, and the development of Black studies departments in universities all across the country.

As the work continues, so too does the experience of anti-Black racism within academic institutions across this country. I now carry out this work with caution, rigor and innate suspicion of the institutional distractions put in place to deliberately distract Black students, and other equity seeking groups, to buy into institutional diversity or equity agendas. It’s imperative during this progressively neoliberal time—an era marked by the co-optation of social justice language by institutions and governments—that we are not seduced by institutional figureheads seeking to protect the university’s interests at the cost of freedom for Black students. We will not and cannot participate in the politics of distraction that willfully seek to keep us in captivity and bondage while we incur exorbitant amounts of student debt.

Uses of Black Rage as Compass

I live in an anti-Black racist society, and having a Black political consciousness has given me a lens and language to critically see, understand and name the sophisticated mechanics of white supremacy in the city of Toronto and broader Canadian landscape. Before we came to

Canada as refugees, my family and I had to go through an assimilation process in Kenya to prepare us for ‘integration’ in our new ‘home’ through the sponsorship program that granted us a landed refugee status. To this day, I recall the way a video we watched narrated Canada as this utopia a land of freedom, opportunity and endless possibility. I used to imagine my life here in

Toronto before I arrived, and a lot of what I would construct in my head was the reproduction of whiteness. I thought we were going to come to Canada and live in a white picket-fenced house, with a car in the driveway, snow—lots of snow—white friendly neighbors and lots of childhood

35 friends like I saw in Western propaganda movies. I was unknowingly seduced by the allure of whiteness, which was indoctrinated into me through the institutions like media and education system under British colonial rule in Kenya. To my surprise, the moment we arrived in Canada we were met with an explicit anti-Black African racism by the state agents ‘integrating’ us to

Canada. At the border, I remember the white gawks, the offensive, invasive line of questioning about our past and what brought us to white saviour Canada, about the potential we might be connected to violent warlords back home, about any diseases we might carry in our bodies.

Anti-Black racism in the Canadian context is so vicious and insidious in its impact. It assaults us at every turn, individualizing and isolating our lives and our spirits, leaving us to tend to our own suffering while surviving in loneliness. To arrive here with no families from a

Sudanese way of life, where family and communities are central in the social fabric of our culture, and where an individual suffering is also the collective community’s responsibility and care—to arrive from that into white coldness and isolation left me in a deep white culture shock.

The unmasking of Canada through my actual lived experiences as a Black East African girl, the witnessing and experiencing of displacement of my family was destabilizing. The explicit verbal and physical anti-Black African racist and Islamophobic violence we experienced by white

Canadians was dehumanizing and undignified. The treatment of my Blackness in the Hamilton, especially in contrast to the things promised to us as newly landed refugees, impacted my family and in devastating ways. We were called “nigger” and “monkeys” by staff in the shelter we were brought to upon landing. White children in our community often told us go back to Africa and made fun of our strong accents. People used the specific ways my brothers dressed for Friday prayer, in Sudanese Islamic garb called the ‘jalabia’, to call them ‘Jihadist’ or “Osama Bin

Ladens”. I was coping with anti-Black racism, with an immigrant’s experience of knowing and

feeling yet being unable to name the anti-Black racist climate because I was told it was not real.

The explanation of this reality as one-off incidents of ignorance was cultivating a deep rage within me. “Women responding to racism means women responding to anger, the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and coopting” (Lorde, 2007, p.125). Through poetry, I came to name and put these feelings down, to humanize my Black being with each entry articulating what Canadian colonization of Black life in Toronto feels like. My Black rage was a compass that directed me to dive deeply into the pain and suffering at the hands of the state. It pushed me to look at myself and how I was surviving the multiple forces of colonialism in my East African diasporic identity. Engaging Black rage without fear means we “[...] cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us not seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the choice of this topic and the angers entwined within it because rest assured our opponents are quiet serious about their hatred of us and what we are trying to do here” (Lorde, 2007, p. 129). Black anger is a compass that points me to the source of

Black oppressions. When I think of what is Black and the queer nature of Blackness, it is a threat to the absolute and rigid structures of white supremacy and heteropatriarchal racial capitalism. I think about the Sudanese traditions I come from and how our style of dress challenges gender norms in the west; how we eat in social spaces, collectively and with our hands; how we share centuries-old oral stories passed down through the generations; how we understand our spirituality as inextricably linked to social justice and equity and the commitment and responsibility to caring for and sharing our lives and resources. My current experience as a

Sudania and the dissonancee with which whiteness organizes and destroys Black life makes me want to know everything about our Black condition. This thirst to seek truth by feeling through

37 my Black rage directed me into my Black consciousness. Lorde (2007) reminds us of the usefulness of anger as she writes,

Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in all those assumptions underlying our lives.

(p. 125)

Seeking a Black feminist political education through my Black rage brought me to understand that white supremacy has constructed Black feeling as criminal. Black rage makes colonizers fearful because of its potential to expose the fabric of Canadian society. In order to control Black people, the white supremacist logic frames Black rage in response to state violence as a hateful threat to the ‘national security’. What we have come to learn and has been evidenced is “white folks promote Black victimization, encourage passivity by rewarding those

Black folks who whine, grovel, beg, and obey…. The presence of Black victimization is welcomed. It comforts many whites precisely because it is the antithesis of activism.

Internalization of victimization renders Black folks powerless, unable to assert agency on our behalf. When we embrace victimization, we surrender our rage” (hooks, 1995, p.19). Black people, irrespective of how we perform respectability, are also understood in this monolith and will experience anti-Black assaults that engage our humanity (rage) as innately violent and threatening, especially in the moments when we use it as an arsenal against the state, instead of using it against ourselves and one another as the state pushes us to do.

White supremacy is founded on hatred, greed, envy, and fear of Blackness. As white people continue to express their white rage and white riot (Walcott, 2017) against Black people

through the colonizing institutions of the white supremacist state, we see white people deploy their violence in frontline combat in the form of military, police, teachers, doctors, and social workers, The state offers these actors impunity and rewards. White people acting out their rage are offered the protection, by design, of the entire apparatus of white supremacy in every sector.

The destruction of our world as we know it today is the expression of white rage. It is colonialism. As hooks (1995) cautions, “If aware Black folks gladly trade in their critical political consciousness for opportunistic personal advancement then there is no place for rage and no hope that we can ever live to see the end of white supremacy” (p. 19). The stakes for

Black life are always the highest, as we must realize that our collective breath rests on a Black radical insurgence that requires us to be unwavering in our commitment to fighting for our collective freedoms as Black people. Those of us seeking to organize for Black liberation must be able to connect to our collective Black rage, and “[p]rogressive Black activists must show how we take that rage and move it beyond fruitless scapegoating of any group, linking it instead to a passion for freedom and justice that illuminates, heals, and makes redemptive struggle possible” (hooks, 1995, p. 20) This requires us to look into ourselves and each other with radical honesty and compassion, to embrace each other’s pain and struggle and our (non)feeling that white supremacy has cultivated within and between our meeting as a global Black family. This means undoing the divide-and-conquer tactics that colonizers have used to interrupt and disrupt the formations of a transnational Black revolutionary consciousness, organizing and movement.

The tensions of being an East Africans Organizer

Adab and Adabu.

“Adab" is an Arabic word from an Islamic code of behaviour and gesture of respect, good manners, modesty, and politeness. It is deeply ingrained as the social fabric of Sudanese

Muslima ‘honour’ culture. By way of British and Ottoman Empires that colonized Sudan, internalized anti-Black racism and heteropatriarchy have decontextualized this sacred practice of care for one another, and turned it into a disciplining and control of women. Adab is a mechanism of misogynoir that is rooted in heteropatriarchy and antiBlackness that is very specific to East African women as it manipulates the tenets of Islam as a weapon of shaming, degrading and policing us when we resist the anti-Black foundations of respectability.

I have been policed through ‘Adab’ specifically by some east African Muslim communities my entire life for finding my identity in the relationships between my Black consciousness as a: Sudanese Muslim in ancestry but not in connection to geography; a Sudanese

Muslim born and raised in Kenya; and a Sudanese Muslim displaced in Canada into secular

Blackness. I have been told I speak an Arabic so broken, like a ‘fellatia’, a now anti-Black derogatory term used to describe Sudanese tribe with origins in west Africa. I’ve been told that the tone of my spoken English is like a ‘Jamaican’ as an anti-Black insult, and that my Black rage is not ‘Islamic’. The uses of Adab have been so insidiously ingrained in my life that they have created a multi-fragmented sense of self that is turbulent and makes me constantly negotiate my East African womanhood through shame, blame and guilt.

When I started to explore my multiple Black consciousnesses situated in the diaspora, there were no representations or archived histories for me to refer to that documented East

Africans’ organizing roles within Black liberation movements. The political education that was widespread was centred on African-Americans, particularly through the voices of Black men.

When I discovered Black feminist thought my entire life transformed, and I began to study more

in this vein because I was given a lens that was so empowering in its naming of white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism. This brought me into Black spaces here in Toronto, which were often Caribbean or pan-african, where I encountered Black people who were lamenting, romanticizing and fetishizing a distant Africa, often one they had never visited which

Hartman (2011) remarks is “vanished from sight and banished from memory were all that [we] could ever hope to claim [...] the slave route [...] both an existent territory with objective coordinates and the figurative realm of an imagined past” (Hartman, 2011, p. 9 as cited in Nayar,

2013). The Africa that local organizers idealized was not the Africa I was coming from. This

Africa, from here in Canada, was an unknown place they collectively imagined in the diaspora. It was also only west African/Africa—there was never an imagined East Africa/African vision, which led me to question not only my visibility but the visibilities of my communities.

When I began organizing within these spaces, we did not take up the nuances of anti-

Black islamophobia, nor the complexities of colonial histories that inform Black ethnic pluralities. In those spaces, I was not permitted to bring my Sudanese Muslim identity as Black because there was no recognition or care for it and in fact my light-skinned Muslimness made me

‘less’ Black. “The reality for today’s Black Muslims is bifurcated into a war fought on two fronts: a battle with one’s own community to be seen and respected as well as a battle to resist targeted state and vigilante violence” (Mire, 2015). The political and cultural moment I started organizing in did not allow for the specificity and variance of the Black diaspora to be understood or engaged—it had to be created. Although they had been organizing in Toronto for decades Black continental Africans operated in silos within what was considered the broader

Black organizing in Canada. To be seen, heard and understood within the wider spaces and

41 movement of Black Toronto, I had to strip the complexity of my Black being to engage

Blackness in a singular way, a way that was disconnected from my East African roots.

This separation of Black and Muslim is so normalized that Black Muslims are not seen as true Muslims. This moral hierarchy defines the anti-Black racism of South Asian and Arab

Muslim communities. Mire (2015) explains that ‘Black people are not seen as viable potential partners in Muslim faith or love; Black families are not accepted into Muslim faith communities outside of their own”. These divisions are also replicated given that “state violence against Black

Muslims is not acknowledged or used to mobilize movements the way violence against non-

Black Muslims does” (Mire, 2015). This became evident most recently when Ottawa Police

Constables’ Daniel Montison and Dave Weir murdered Abdirahman Abdi with police-issued assault gloves. Abdirahman was left to die on the ground in front of his building. Abdirahman was a 37-year-old Black Somali man living with unknown mental health issues. He was publicly lynched on Hilda St. in Ottawa Ontario July 24, 2016.20 It was only after the public outrage of

Somali organizers that the broader Black community began to connect his death with the deaths of Andrew Loku and Jermaine Carby. Many Somali organizers wondered if it was his

Somaliness or his Muslimness that pushed his death outside of the ongoing conversation about anti-Blackness and fatal police shootings in Ontario. Black Muslims are often left questioning and negating our identities. Be it Black, Muslim, or Black and, issues of belonging and situatedness persist, both within the Black community and the non-Black Muslim community.

20 http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawa-police-officer-to-be-charged-with-manslaughter-in-death-of- abdirahman-abdi

As Black Muslims we are often on the periphery of the ‘ummah’21. Oftentimes when I would receive ‘commentary’ from brown Muslims about my activism they would tell me that the nature of the ‘dunya’22 and the oppressions we are in are merely a test. They said I need to seek prayer and guidance from Allah because my alleged “Black rage and hatred for white people” is a ‘disease’ of the spirit and my ‘deen’23. This “calling for the oppressed to take up the inner struggle of Prophetic remembrance while abandoning them in their struggle for justice, which is the essence of Prophetic resemblance, is a betrayal of both. Shaming those who are suffering by asserting that their sins are the reason they are being slaughtered” (Abdul-Jāmi, 2016). I see this as deeply anti-Black, and I believe the profoundly Islamophobic advice to silence and shame the rage I feel towards being dehumanized is not going to be the pathway to the afterlife. It suggests that my Blackness is a disease to my Muslim faith. More broadly, the general solidarity that is anti-Black that non Black Muslims partake in displays this furthermore. When brown Muslims face Islamophobic persecution by the state, they organize their communities to fight against these injustices as an attack on the collective lives of Muslims. Their solidarity stops at Black

Muslims, as we see time and time again, in cases of Black East African Muslims and in the case of Abdirahman Abdi24 (and more broadly) being murdered by police or, as in the case of Abdoul

Abdi25, having their citizenship stripped away, yet there is painful silence from brown and Arab

Muslim communities.

My position in between Blackness and Muslimness as an East African compounded the violence I experience from the white supremacist Canadian state. The state creates a particular

21 Arabi word meaning religion 22 Arabic word meaning world 23 Arabic word meaning muslim faith community. 24 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/abdirahman-abdi-s-fatal-encounter-with-ottawa-police-1.3697454 25 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/abdoul-abdi-deportation-hearing-postponed-federal-court-1.4586304

type of ‘Black-Muslim terrorism’ discourse that is deployed differently from those discourses about brown and Arab people. These double forms of weaponization of my identity specifically mark my body with the tropes of terrorist and criminal combined. The onslaught of attacks that I have received in organizing with BLT-MO have shown me that my vilification by the Canadian state as an ‘entity’, not as a person (or an individual) is very much similar to the ways the

Canadian state has imagined East African nation states. I will speak about this further in my discussion chapter.

CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL AND DISCURSIVE FRAMEWORKS

In this section I discuss the theoretical and discursive frameworks that inform not only my thesis but the overall lens that situates my realities, and thus frames how I have come to see, understand and interpret the social world. As highlighted earlier, I employ an anti-Black racism framework specifically and with intention. It is important however to note that anti-Black racism is informed by multiple theoretical perspectives including and not limited to: anti-colonialism, imperialism, critical race theory, Black feminisms, Black Marxism, ‘Postcolonial’ thought and decolonization, to name a few. However, given the scope of my thesis I’m limiting the discussion to focus specifically on anti-Black racism with particular attention to the contributions made by local Toronto-based activists and public intellectuals. That said, it is important to briefly mention that Canada is a settler-colonialist project that built its foundation on the oppression and subjugation of the Indigenous peoples, including their lands and multiple resources.

Through the colonial project came various state based apparatuses that determined whether some citizens were “legitimate heir to the rights and entitlements proffered by the state.”

(Thobani, 2007, p.3-4). The state engaged in deliberate actions: it created sanctions in order to

44 maintain a particular brand of white Canadian nationalism, identity and citizen (subject) legitimacy. These intentional attempts to ‘other’ resulted in the warped understanding of

Aboriginal peoples’ personhood in relation to the rest of European Canada. Thobani (2007) references the above experience as being ‘ontologically and existentially distinct’ (p. 5) vis-a vis the known national as opposed to the ‘stranger’. Further to the modern Canadian national mythology (Thobani, 2007), we see that “two manifestations of these racial ideas in the Canadian context at the turn of the century point to the integral contribution of racial ideologies in the shaping of Canada’s nation building and colonial racial projects: [1] the building of a white settler society and [2] the internal colonization of Canada’s Aboriginal population[s]”

(Thompson, 2013, p. 174). Outright enslavement of Aboriginal peoples, from residential schools to the Indian Act (1876), serves as Canada’s preface to engage ‘Others’. In this context, and a blueprint for explicit of acts of white supremacy26, racism and anti-Native racism. These ‘master’ narratives of Canada as a nation were/are not outside the purview of the state however, they were legally sanctioned acts. As stated by Thobani (2007),

“Constituted as ‘preferred races’ within the bureaucratic apparatus of the settler state, the settlement activities of these true subjects accomplished the violent dispossession of Aboriginal populations- a dispossession duly constituted and preserved as ‘lawful’ to this day”. ( p. 13)

As ‘othering’ occurred with respect to Aborginal peoples as ‘lawless’ and not belonging on their land, so did the politics regarding desirability and racialization[3]. Politics regarding worthiness and desirability continue to shape Canada’s interaction with racialized peoples, and

26 White supremacy refers to the policies and practices in settler societies and the exaltation of White people as national subjects, and the devaluation of racial “others” as threats to the security and prosperity of the nation (Thobani, 2007 as cited in, Pon, Gosine and Phillips, 2011, p.389)

45 this can be illustrated through immigrations processes. Thompson (2013) writes: “…during the period of immigrant-recruitment, non-white immigrants were considered “undesirable” permanent participants in the new nation, though their labour was required for nation- building…” (p. 177).

Although many begin to trace Canada’s history of race relations (Backhouse, 1991; 1999;

Calliste, 1993, Li 1999; Mathieu 2010; Walker,2008; 2010; 2012) with racialized and immigrant populations during historic peek immigration periods, it is argued that concerns regarding race surfaced long before, with the missing presence of racialized people in government enumeration.

Thompson (2010) states:

Racial origins became an explicit mode of categorization between 1901 and 1941, after which references to race were dropped – never to return. The censuses taking place between 1951 and 1991 focused on ethnic origins. Over the 20th century the lone source of stability in census categorizations was the descent lines of the European/white category, leading Boyd et al. to assert that though the racial/ethnic categories in Canadian censuses changed over time, “the emphasis was on demarcating a ‘white’ population from groups which are today considered African, Asian or Aboriginal” (Boyd et al, 2000, p. 36). It was not until 1996 that a direct question on race, or “visible minorities,” was reincorporated into the Canadian census (p. 168) Despite a lapse in enumerating racialized people, the state continued to design and

‘respond’ to its needs by failing to account for who was present within the country during varying historical periods of welfare state formation and expansion.

Though this thesis is not based on Indigenous peoples it is imperative to highlight the relationship between what Canada deemed as the ‘preferred race’ and the ‘Other’. Utilizing the colonial project as a frame of reference, we are able to track the overt racist acts that lead to the subjugation of racialized groups in the state’s continued nation building project. It is imperative to note there is no comparison being made in relation to the experiences of Indigenous peoples.

The references are important given the similar yet distinctly different histories replicated by the

46 state with each diverse group. Thus it is also important to underscore the above by drawing attention not only to the relationship between Indigenous peoples and settlers/ forced settlers but the relationship between racialized peoples and Aboriginal peoples. Thobani (2007) reminds us to “…examine the specific roles played by all non-Indigenous populations in the ongoing colonial project, even as the force relations among these various populations are taken into consideration.” (p. 17) Further she highlights “…the complex racial hierarchy developed by colonizing powers that introduce and sustained force relations not only among settlers and

Aboriginal peoples but also among the other racialized groups ranked in the Canadian hierarchy as lower than white but higher than Aboriginal peoples. (p. 17). Thus it is with these recognitions of deeply rooted historical racism that I am able to be centred and acknowledge this space

(Canada) in which I seek to grapple with ideas of self.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: ANTI BLACK RACISM

Brief Demographic, Review of Literature and Selected Data Overview

In Canada, visible minority groups represent 22.3% of the population this means 1 in 5 Canadians self-identifies as a racialized person. In relation to Black people, 53.1 % of Black Canadians were born outside of Canada, with the majority of this population (23 %) coming to

Canada between 2006-2011 from Haiti, Nigeria and Jamaica (Statistics Canada, 2016). During the same period (2006-2011) Canada received 145, 700 migrants from Africa, which represented 12 % of the newcomers to Canada during that period. These newcomers came mainly from Algeria, Morocco and Nigeria. It is important to note while these people may be coming from the continent of Africa that they are not all Black people, which plays a role in the Canadian rhetoric of the number of Black people coming to Canada based on the notion that Africans are coming to Canada. Not all Africans are Black people. A unique variable in the immigration/migration narrative is that the average age of a Black person coming to Canada is 29.5 years old. Among the overall number of Black people coming to Canada, 27 % were under the age of 14, making

Black youth the youngest population of newcomers coming to Canada (Statistics Canada, 2016). Toronto has an estimated population of just over 2.8 million in 2016, of which 9% is Black. Ontario is home to 60% of Canada’s overall Black population, and while Toronto maybe be home to a number of Black communities we still only represent 18% of the overall racialized groups—we rank third, after South Asians and Asian populations (James et al, 2010, Census profile, 2016, National Household Survey year). For the purposes my thesis it also noteworthy to mention that among the African languages spoken in this city, the following countries were represented: according to the most recent census data and the Canadian National Household survey there are 19, 864 Somali-speaking households in Toronto, 2,400 Oromia-speaking households, 11, 745 Amharic-speaking households, 8, 340 Tigrigna-speaking households, 6, 990 Swahili-speaking households, and 1, 000 households with people who speak Dinka. This is indicative of what I mentioned earlier in terms of East Africans living here in Toronto. Further, in 2011, approximately 1 million of Canadas population identified as Muslim representing 3.2% of the overall population and was a 3.2% increase from the 2001 census data (James et al, 2010, Census profile, 2016).

While Canada refutes, downplays or attempts to conceal its role in the slave trade, and many Canadians choose to romanticize the nation state in relation to slavery in Canada, there is a well-documented history of its harms towards Black people. Slavery existed in Canada from the

16th century until its ‘abolition’ in 1834 (Cooper, 2006; Moreau, 1996; Winks, 1997). It is important to note however that while slavery was formally abolished, enslaving practices have continued (eg: agricultural work programs) and working conditions of many undocumented Black people remain deplorable. The matter of street-checks and ‘carding’ continues as a practice similar to those identified during the time of slavery as ‘passcards’ and police patrols of predominately Black communities. Black people represent only 9% of Toronto’s overall population however the capture of Black children by social services means that almost 50% of the children in ‘care’ at Children’s Aid Society Toronto (CAS-T) are Black. Additionally, Black children are often not placed with Black families or are among the least likely populations to get adopted out of the child welfare system. Instead, the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies reported 65%

48 of the children in group care were Black. Group care refers to group homes, open or closed facilities which Black youth have identified is like “being in jail”. Incarceration is a common narrative among Black Canadians, be it in the formal sense or by way of systems that co- organize to incarcerate, surveil and over-police Black communities. While the overall Black Canadian population only makes up 2.5% of Canada’s population, the rate of Black Canadian offenders in federal prison was 9% and in fact, Black women are among the fastest growing population of those entering federal and provincial facilities daily. In the context of Black youth, the African Canadian Legal Clinic reported that Black youth are charged for criminal offenses at

52% without a complaint being initiated, while this was true in only 29% for white youth (ACLC, 2012).

The specific eexperience of anti-Black racism, has devastating effects on the Black community. James, Este, Bernard, Benjamin, Lloyd and Turner (2010) found that the overall well-being of Black Canadians is directly related with experiences of everyday racism, including anti-Black racism, at both institutional and micro levels of racism (James et al., 2010). Not only does racism impact the overall health of Black people but race is also a determinant of the type of access one receives in the healthcare system. Specific to mental health Abdillahi, Merai and Poole (2016) argue that anti-Black racism is present in the mental health sector. They note that young Black men are diagnosed with schizophrenia more than any other group (Fernando, 2012) and Black children are being psychiatrized and medicated at higher rates than other children (Contenta & Rankin, 2009), and that this treatment begins in the educational system at extremely early ages. They assert that the psychiatrization and medicating of Black children is inseparable from a pathway directly into the state’s ‘prison pipeline’ (Contenta & Rankin, 2009). Moreover, they draw our attention to the criminalization of mental illness particularly in the context of Black people, as they outline the coercive nature of using criminalizing instruments like community treatment orders and policing interventions disproportionally against Black people. Further, they suggest it is the intersection of Blackness and illness that results in the disproportionate shooting of Black people by police services across Ontario (Abdillahi et al, 2014; 2016).

At every juncture of social life in Toronto Black people make up those most reflective of the lowest socio-poltical indicators. In their study “Canada’s Colour Coded Labour Market”, Block & Galabuzi (2011) highlight that the unemployment rate for Black Canadians is 74% higher than compared to non-racialized Canadians. While the average Canadian worker earned $51,221 in 2006 with full-time employment, the average employment income for Black workers was $40,179 (Statistics Canada, 2010; Block & Galabuzi). While some argue the conditions of workers are getting better, especially with the provincial government plan to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour, the reality in terms of earning potential and increase is still low for Black people. Black workers’ pay increased at a rate of 2.1 % compared to 5.5 % for all workers from 2000 and 2005 (Fearon and Wald, 2011). According to the latest study from the Greater Toronto Civic Action Alliance, the unemployment rate for youth between the age of 15 and 24 in the GTA area is at 20% - three times higher than the national average. However, the percentage is up to 30% in the Black community (2014).

Black people have always had an arsenal of internal resources, and the will to survive and resist. In a qualitative study conducted with Black women in Nova Scotia, Moreau (1996) found that Black women survived an “education of violence” by engaging in a range of survival- orientated activities:

[S]isterhood, spirituality, solidarity, home-place, sharing, caring and other survival strategies were evident. These forces of resistance and survival challenged the almost invincible ideology of Black female (and male) inferiority imposed as part of the education of violence. (Moreau, 1996: 4)

Theoretical and Discursive Orientation

While many scholars argue the ‘newness’ or the ‘settlerhood’ of Blackness within the

Canadian context (Lawrence & Dua, 2005), and continue to position us as both outside the broader trajectory of state-based relationships, and as absent from the nation building project.

Black people have been here in Canada, and across the Americas, and have consistently faced

retribution at the hands of the state and its white supremacist logics. Walcott (2000), incessantly reminds us “Black people date their presence in Canada from as early as the 1600s. Blackness is still considered a recent phenomenon within the nation” (Walcott, 2000, p.7). Black people have build this nation state (Austin, 2013; Cooper, 2006; Walcott, 2000; 2003; Walker, 2008; Winks, 1997).

Not only have they built the nation state as we know it today, Black people have been subjugated at the hands of numerous racial groups and specifically non-white populations. Unlike other marginalized groups, our concern has not only been the state, but its agents that are sent for us by way of white supremacy, capitalism and heteropatriarchy. As highlighted by Kumsa (2014) “the anti-Black racism we experience daily is sharply inflected by the fact that we are Blacks from

Africa as opposed to Whites and Browns also from Africa. We notice the deference accorded to

Brown Africans of Asian descent in relation to Black Africans” (p. 25). These relationships that

Black people have had in the Americas are not only similar but are parallel; but for the purpose of my thesis it's important to note these relationships replicate the: British, French, Arab, Italian,

German, Portuguese, Dutch processes of colonization that were instrumentalized on the entire

East African region (Fanon, 1967). Most notably, they also include the United States’ and

Canada’s more recent intervention in East Africa.

So why do I bring this up? It’s simple. Black people here, there and everywhere, Black people unbound geographically (McKittrick, 2015; Mckittrick & Woods 2004) by space and borders can attest to one shared but multifaceted experience—anti-Blackness—which is racism directed at us enforced upon us, and consistently re-imagined from history to the contemporary experience of deprivation and dehumanization linked to race and body/embodiments of

Blackness. What I want to make clear here is that irrespective of space, what we can identify across lands, waters, political institutions and social life more broadly, is an inseparable need to

51 both fight and be freed from the same mechanisms that seek to bind Black people: colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy and anti-Blackness, which we know are inextricably linked to racial capitalism and multiple hierarchies (Kelly, 2017; Moten, 2013; Robinson, 2000).

We understand how these hierarchies relate to both the commodification of our bodies and the direct disavowal and refusal of our bodily autonomies which include and are not limited to our hyper christianization and islamization, the denial of our queer and trans and ‘cis’ autonomies (Snorton, 2017; Walcott, 2016) the murdering of our mad Black lives (Abdillahi,

2015;2016) the policing and over-policing of our Black lives (Maynard, 2017) and lastly, the online cries that seek to make our lives “invisible no more” (Ritchie, 2017) by consistently and publicly memorializing both our existence and execution in #SayHerName #BlackLivesMatter

#WeWillWin #Free[…]. What does it mean that our existence is only made real through our death, deprivation, calls to action, and a simple hashtag?

Christina Sharpe (2017) writes about the notion of ‘Black Redaction’: “Black annotation and Black redaction are more examples of wake work. The orthographies of the wake require new modes of writing new modes of making sensible. Redaction comes to use more familiar to those Blacked out”. (Sharpe, 2017, p.113). Here I add to Sharpe’s critical analysis by suggesting that this is not merely about familiarity to those the state Blacks out, but those it has already

Blacked out, backed out, blockaded out, and buried out. Similarly, both Sharpe (2017) and

Snorton (2014) grapple with the notion of humanity and Blackness which eeks out a space to draw our attention to subhumanity and the unhumanness of Black existences. To this end

Snorton writes (2014) “ to be not fully human - which seems to also mean to be something else

(other/Other?super?Sub?) and to survive-which means to be in excess (or perhaps outside) of life is a particularly Black predicament.( Snorton, 2014 as cited in Sharpe, 2017, p. 140)

The grammar on Black put forth by Walcott (2003) impresses upon us not only the need to name all of us who are ‘unfree’ but to situate that naming in the context of Black Canada.

Walcott’s seminal text ‘Black Like Who?” served as an intervention and response to a political moment which sought to turn the term ‘Black’ into an expletive. It served as a disruption to a

Canadian multicultural rhetoric that asked us to believe and participate in the kumbaya of ‘Oh

Canada’ but demands that we are ‘imagining Blackness as constitutive of Canadianness’

(Walcott, 2000, p.7). Black people have carried the onerous burden of situating themselves within the neoliberal falsehoods and mélange of what were and are identities such as ‘people of colour’, ‘racialized’, or ‘African’ but without a hue. This has all occurred amidst a broader liberal agenda that tried to sell Black people once again; the ‘customer’ was really buying notions of equality, multiculturalism, diversity, and inclusion without any acknowledgments or substantive political and policy changes. Yet over two decades later I, as a graduate student, have come to understand the text Black Like Who? as both a pathway for understanding what is current but also a fundamental prophecy to Black studies in Canada. “The two factors actually create something that is not merely a politics of exclusion: rather they can foster a retreat to discourses of nationalism which become short sighted in terms of transnational political identifications that might be crucially necessary in our times” (Walcott, 2003, p.33).

Thus, I centre Black people because like Walcott (2016), I too believe “Black people are central to the larger and deeper fulfillment of what we call freedom” (p.8), and that by achieving freedom, those of us who are most marginalized seek to improve the conditions for all of us. For the purposes of this thesis, I attempt to localize anti-Black racism. The theoretical understanding of anti-Black racism was developed by activists on the ground, working class people and public

53 intellectuals in Toronto’s Black community in the 1990s (Benjamin, 2003). While I recognize the theorizing around Blackness, anti-Blackness and Black life forms has a long, rich and deep history—anti-Blackness and the experiences of anti-Black racism are global. Maynard (2017) reminds us that “conversations across Black communities around the world are rendering it clear that anti-Blackness knows no borders: few, if any, places in the world have been untouched by the legacies of European colonization and slavery, or the racist worldviews left in their wake” (p.

15). These conversations require a particular urgency which seeks to interrupt the modus operandi of the Canadian state and its agents.

Many have sought to define anti-Blackness and anti-Black racism. Given the context of my thesis and the centring of ‘the local’ in Toronto, I begin with the definition proffered by Akua

Benjamin (2003) scholar, activist and one of the founding members of the Black Action Defense

Committee (BADC). Benjamin (2003) defines anti-Black racism as follows:

a conceptual framework for understanding a dialectic which involves a) “a particular form of systemic and structural racism in Canadian society, which historically and contemporarily has been perpetrated against Blacks and b) it also highlights the “resistance against dominant and hegemonic systems of Whiteness and the building of agency and social transformation against racism and other forms of oppression

(Benjamin, 2003: ii).

Whiteness refers to a system of domination that is deeply entrenched in all all our social and political interactions it is present at every institutional level, in order to maintain, replicate and advance institutional structures that privilege white people and advance white supremacist logics in order to main dominance over Indigenous, racialized and Black people. Given that all of our systems and institutions in Canada were established from a colonial European perspective, the cultural practices, rule of law, values and goals will not centre whiteness but it proves that the

system which was created never imagined the ‘the other’ which has grave and severe impacts for what Toronto looks like today and in particular for Black people. Thus, anti-Black racism both

“describes the practices and procedures of dominant and hegemonic structures and systems of power over Blacks...and emphasizes the resistance against dominant power and power holders in society” (Benjamin, 2003, p.62).

As a person who values theorizing from the margins, I see in anti-Black racism a particular nuance which made it precisely the framework best suited for this thesis. Anti-Black racism here in Toronto was not advanced by the academic elite in the ivory tower. rather, it was grounded in the day-to-day experiences of those who sought to name and survive the conditions they were living (and still are). It was Black people talking back to institutions, implicating them and demanding change informed by their everyday lived experiences. Benjamin (2003) adds that anti-Black racism served as an “analytic weapon” (p. 61) and “lightning rod” (p. 61) particularly regarding issues of police violence in Toronto. At its inception anti-Black racism had a focus on police violence, however it has since has emerged in Toronto in as being critical to many fields of study.

While Benjamin (2003) refers to the anti-Blackness framework as an ‘analytic weapon’

Sharpe (2016) calls the experience as common and everyday as the weather. She writes, “what I am calling the weather, antiBlackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation: it is the atmospheric condition of time and place: it produces new ecologies” (Sharpe, 2016, p.106). Here Sharpe (2016) asks us to reckon with the normativity and everydayness of the weather-climate and defines anti-Blackness as a condition which circulates around all us and often dictates our lives while being as ‘normal’ as the atmospheric cold harsh Canadian winter.

Browne (2015) reminds us of the commodified and de-commodified nature of Blackness and being, she suggests understanding anti-Blackness as a commodity, “that being to consume while at the same time alienating Blackness…” is often the reality of the anti-Black experience and this is due to “Blackness [being understood] as ungrateful and unruly (p. 95). These notions of ‘unruliness’ manifest differently as they intersect with sexual orientation, class, citizenship, ability and gender. Ritchie (2017) draws our attention to the gendered nature of anti-Blackness, and reminds us that when compounded, “anti-Blackness, including its specific manifestations with respect to Black women, is embedded within this fear of disorder […]”(p. 56). Most impactful however is the analysis on our humanities, captured best by Walcott (2000) when he writes “Black people are often so firmly ejected from the current, partial definition of what it means to be human, when Black people are centered, other modes of being emerge (p. 10).”

For the purposes of this thesis anti-Black racism fit well with the overall goal of the autoethnography and critical discourse analysis, insofar as anti-Blackness, while offering a real and local space to theorize from anti-Black racism, also offers multiple entry points from which it is informed such as Black radical tradition, to Garveyism to anticolonial anti-imperial theory

(Benjamin, 2003). These traditions have connected the struggle for Black people locally, nationally and internationally. Black nationalist perspectives put forth “the unity of people worldwide community that in this case is explicitly political” (Benjamin 2003, p.26; James et al,

2010). Additionally, this thesis was produced both for the academy and for myself. In thinking through my varied lived experiences and theorizing from this place, I also felt encouraged to engage in a “process of self-recovery” (hooks, 1994, p. 61) which included making a theory- practice connection that sought to bring to light not only my personal experiences but those of

56 other Black people. This reflectivity also led me to Black liberation psychology (Chapman-

Hilliard and Adams-Bass, 2016, p..487) which offers us:

a theoretical framework that gives specific attention to understanding the processes involved in deconstructing oppressive systems to facilitate empowerment and emancipation among Blacks. Ideas central to BLP emanate from the work of theologians (i.e., liberation theology) and later social scientists (i.e., liberation psychology) in Latin America (see works from Gustavo Gutierrez, Paulo Freire, and Ignacio Martín-Baró for some examples) who sought to challenge systems of power invested in the oppression and dehumanization of people (Lykes & Sibley, 2014; Thompson & Alfred, 2009). (p..487)

Ultimately my thesis seeks to make real and visible my experiences by way of the broader anti-Black machinery operating around us. It also seeks to make my individual, deeply personal narrative ontologically ‘real’ by being ‘enough’ as one individual Black person. In fact

Browne (2015) addresses the notion of ontological insecurity when she states:

is useful when thinking through the moments of contact enacted at the institutional sites of international border crossings and spaces of internal borders of the state, such as the voting booth, the welfare office, the prisons and other sites and moments […] is required to speak the truth of and for muted bodies. These sites and moments are productive of, and often necessitate, ontological insecurity, where “all around the body reigns an atmosphere of certain uncertainty” (Fanon, 2008, p. 90). This atmosphere of certain uncertainty is part of what Lewis Gordon refers to as “the problematic of a denied subjectivity.” (p. 110).

This thesis and its theoretical positioning is an active refusal my denied, muted or absented subjectivity and serves as a self-assured ontology recounting and responsive.

Black Turbulent Consciousness in the Third Space/Force

DEFINITIONS:

Turbulent: Characterized by conflict, disorder, or confusion; not stable or calm.

1,1 (of air or water) moving unsteadily or violently. 1.2 Technical - Relating to or denoting flow of a fluid in which the velocity at any point fluctuates irregularly and there is continual mixing rather than a steady or laminar flow pattern.

Turbulence: Violent or unsteady movement of air or water, or of some other fluid. 1,1 A state of conflict or confusion.

Sijui: Kiswahi word meaning ‘I don't know’.

I have come to theorizing what I define as Black Turbulent Consciousness as a traveler. A forced traveler. An unwanted guest. An arriver. A visitor. A refugee. A migrant. An immigrant.

As immobily mobile. As a Black person. As human. As human being. Trinh Min-ha (1994) describes the notion of travel as follows:

To travel can consist in operating a profoundly unsettling inversion of one’s identity: I become me via an other.... Travelling allows one to see things differently from what they are, differently from how one has seen them, and differently from what one is[....] (p. 23)

In this section, I utilized the term and sociopolitical identifier ‘indigenous’27. My use of the term indigenous refers to my location as an African and its associated subjectivities.

Therefore, my reference is to being indigenous to Africa, not Turtle Island. I recognize however, here, on Turtle Island there exists a population unique and distinct with claims to this land and who are Indigenous to here. Accordingly, I enter this discourse from an Indigenism framework as defined by Hart (2009). Indigenism is:

is a progressive Indigenous viewpoint that opposes imperialism and colonialism, acknowledges the ‘fourth world’ position identified by Manual and Posluns (1974),

27 I have chosen not to capitalize the word indigenous when referring to myself as a non- Indigenous person to Turtle Island in order to make the distinction between those who are Indigenous to here verse elsewhere in the world.

advocates for our empowerment ad seeks the ultimate goal of peace. Indigenism is also a process that acts as a counterweight to the hegemonic strategies of oppressive states. (p. 34)

As a student an activist I’ve come to learn and feel the wrath of the tensions that exist in referring to myself as indigenous within this geopolitical context. And while I appreciate and can respect the ongoing struggles of those Indigenous to Turtle Island for sovereignty and self- governance, I must equally and with the same urgency seek to define and locate myself within this geography but within the social, political and scholarly debates that seek to define Black people and relegate them to the margins outside of our own capacity to name and identify ourselves. So again, I must actively but with great care and generosity refuse the boundaries of identity placed on me by way of forced migration/’forced settlerhood’ to Turtle Island. Put plainly, I’m indigenous, just not to Turtle Island, and I will not allow for any human being to define or take precedence over my definition of self, for those of my peoples. It is noteworthy to clarify here that while I use this language, I make no claims to this land in the context of State and Indigenous relations.

As I begin this lifelong, meaning-making journey of self, it’s been helpful to do so with some nuance, texture, complexity, discomfort and comfortable confusion. Being Black and

African in the diaspora and living as in-between or in a state of liminality would suggest that in thinking through and about myself, I would need to think through what it means to be here, there(Africa), nowhere and in-between all of the spaces. In thinking and traveling, moving in being moved, staying and being stationed, there remains one constant: my Black skin. These tensions and contradictions are neither new or isolated, by which I mean that Black people have always been engaged in the consciousness of packing and unpacking the self. From the slave ship to the streets Black people haven’t been engaged in the dialectic of identity construction.

These liminal or in-between spaces offer possibilities to construct, co-construct and deconstruct what it means to be Black, particularly while the world around us seeks to identify us. As Hall

(as cited in Gilroy, 2005) remarks:

Culture is produced with each generation, we reproduce our own identities in the future rather than simply inherit them from the past. Of course we make them in the future, out of the past. So it’s not that I want people to forget the past – not at all, I want them to really remember it. For many years I lived in the Caribbean as a colonial subject in a society which did not remember Africa! So I don’t want people to forget Africa but I don’t want them to mistake the Africa that is alive and well in the diaspora, for the Africa that is suffering the consequences of neo-liberal development in Africa where they’re not waiting for us to go back there; they’re suffering their own fate there. (Hall as cited in Gilroy, 2005, p. 44)

As a Black Sudanese East African person who has moved and been moved, I have multiple Black diasporic, spatial and geography-specific experiences. In order to articulate these experiences and centre these consciousnesses, I draw on the Kiswahi word ‘sijui’. Sijui is the literal English translation for ‘I don’t know’. It is commonly used by East Africans who migrate to Swahili speaking countries, in particular Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Most notably, this term has been used by Somalis and Somalilanders for over three decades. The term sijui and its use particularly among Somalis is both contradictory and creative. The term serves two purposes: first, it is used as an identity marker to differentiate between those born, raised and who have the capacity to speak Somali. Second, it serves as an imaginary boundary which seeks to contour or

‘guard’: a) the geographic space- Somalia and Somaliland b) claims to nationality and nationhood c) claims to culture, history, religion and belonging and d) notions of ‘authenticity’.

For example, the fact of being born elsewhere—in my case, outside of Sudan—and not being able to speak Arabic would mean that I may or may not be able to stake authentic claims of

‘Sudaneseness’, given my sijui location. In my framing of sijui particularly in the context of

diasporic East Africans, I see this situatedness as a site of freedom and possibility. It is also important to note here that being sijui provides no claims to authenticity and often citizenship in one’s host country. So sijui effectively means you are neither of them (country of birth) or of us

(host country).

As a Black feminist I theorize through my ontological experiences. What follows is a brief reflection on how the pieces of my identities, travels and the traversing over waters has shaped me. Here I make an attempt to revisit, recollect, collect and leave behind pieces of myself and the ‘selves’ that have been denied, contained, shipped, flown, ‘refugeed’ and ravaged across borders. The colonial forces that produce my Sudanese ancestry and Black consciousnesses are interpretive, and are derived from a sense of longing. It’s complicated indeed. It is, however, my interpretation that allows me the freedom to define, to redefine, undo and undefine. In the context of longing, I see this as a longing to locate, to situate and to recognize distance. By this

I’m simply referring to the physical length and distance between myself, Sudan and everything I have forgotten. Longing, however, also provides a particular type of freedom, the freedom to create here on Turtle Island what it means to be all of me or some of me or maybe, none of me.

There are multiple and contradictory tensions that must be considered for Black people in the diaspora. As Sharpe (2016) outlines below,

As we go about wake work, we must think through containment, regulation, punishment, regulation, punishment, capture, and captivity and the ways the manifold representations of Blackness become the symbol, par excellence, for the less-than-human being condemned to death. We must think about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed; work; think the ways the hold cannot and does not hold even as the hold remains in the form of the semiotics of the slave ship hold, the prison, the womb, and elsewhere in and as the tension between being and instrumentality that is Black being in the wake[…]

( p.21)

This siuji space is at once imaginary and real. I don’t know Sudan in its terrain(s) on the continental land yet I know Sudan in the four corners of my government housing project in downtown Toronto. I am not Kenyan. If I go to Kenya I would not be considered Kenyan. But I identify with Kenya because that is where I was born, that is where I grew up and where I experienced my childhood. I speak better Swahili than I do Arabic. At the same time, I am much more of this thing (Kenyan) than I am other things. In this space (Kenya) as a displaced

Sudanese refugee I am other. And I am another (other other) in the context of Sudan. In Canada I am Other (othered three times), so that consciousness of my Africaness is another layer. Now since this is all that I’ve known in my African consciousness as a Sudanese displaced in Kenya, a

“Sijui” means to also be in a state that privileges non-Black migrants and in particular those of

Arab and South Asian descent more so than Black people such as those coming from countries like Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Oromia Sudan and Somalia/Somalilanders. It has often been

Somalis/Somalilanders who face the most marginalization in Kenya despite having been born there (even with citizenship) and growing up ‘from there’. Post-9/11, the Kenyan state has terrorized Somalis even more harshly than in the past due to Islamophobia. The West and the

United States more specifically have directly contributed to this islamophobia as the U.S. government seeks to document Somalis fleeing Somalia to Kenya in hopes of coming to either

Canada or the United States.

Many have grappled with notions of Blackness, being and location (Du Bois,1903 Fanon,

1976; Hall, McKittrick, 2015; Walcott,2000;2003;2017; Winks, 1997; Sharpe,). I draw specifically on the work on W.E.B Du Bois, who gave us a conceptual framework to understand

Black identity formations through coining the term “double consciousness”. Double

62 consciousness gives us a grammar to name a Black self with multiple identities that are at odds with one another. He writes,

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, —a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois, 1903, p.2)

This framework is applicable to the Black experience all across the world. We have gone from our ancestral homelands and ways of being (life) in our complex positions of indigeneity and diaspora into subjugation, and we live multiple Black turbulent consciousness in-be-tween these existences.

I don’t want the theory to rest at East Africa, I want to extend it into the space of the

“sijui”, to occupy this liminal space. We go through these states of in-be-tween which I take up as being illustrative of the multiple fragmentations that many east Africans have experienced, and that I have described above. This is different from living in-between in the ways Blackness exists. We have to be Black in-between being, not for ourselves but in the context of the state.

Black in-between is where we are living. We can draw on the concept of liminality, which is an important ideological cultural studies concept. We can define liminality as the space of being in- be-tween. But while we are in-between we come back to the realities that Black life has been.

‘Black’ has been here in this context for a very long time. Black has been everywhere but it is also our reality of having to identify and think through ourselves. Every time we do this, there are these instruments and apparatuses that are thinking through us and there is also fragments

63 and breaks that end up having to do that. So how do we end up in a space where we are clear. I am from Sudan, Kenya, maybe I am a person of the ocean. Walcott has tweeted (2017

@BlackLikeWho) that for some us, history lives in the bottom of the ocean because we are always in transit and transition and travelling. I love Sudan and it is my actual home. If I was to go back to Sudan, I would be taken up in Sudan in that same way: while I have a claim to this space, this historical claim, this ancestral claim, this love, what claim does this place have to me?

What claim do I have to Kenya, to Canada? One thing we know for a fact across the globe is the unshifting and unchanging experience of Blackness.

Here, on Turtle Island Indigenous scholar and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes in her seminal text As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (2017):

“My life as a kwe within Nishnaabewin is method because my people have always generated knowledge through the combination of emotions and intellectual knowledge within the kinetics of our placed based practices, as mitigated through our bodies, minds and spirits. In fact within Nishnaabewin I am fully responsible for generating meaning about my life through the way I think and live. this internal work is a necessary and vital part of living responsibly and ethically within our grounded normativity. (p. 290)

The use of sijui as a Sudanese displaced in Kenya is also in the context of a word that was created by Somalis that have been displaced in Kenya, in this in-be-tween space. My coming into this word from this place is also diasporic and born out of suspicion; this suspicion is another key element of Black turbulence in nature. I have found it most useful and instructive when I listen to my own internal compass or feeling or accumulated passed knowledge, and to my spirit. It is all of the above or what I refer to as my spirit of suspicion as a Black person that has kept me safe, informed and consistently questioning. For Black people, the acts of holding onto, nurturing and taking guidance from our internal logics, turbulences and vibrations is and

can be both theoretically and emotionally instructive. I am using this world sijui specifically as a

Sudanese displaced in Kenya, and I understand this as a creolization of Black displacement and the creolization of language. I also use this term with gratitude as it is not mine, but it exists within the Kenyan context and anyone who is not Kenyan, for example, could be referred to in this context. I wanted to use this thesis as an opportunity to theorize from multiple locations, here, there, in-be-tween, elsewhere and nowhere, given the efforts made to dictate my Blackness to me as a person in these different contexts (geographies). To some degree, I am Sudanese, I am

Sijui, I am Black, too Black, I am subjugated. From Sudan to subjugation and the Black lives in between. The thesis goes on to say that the global experience of Blackness is what we share. For other East Africans the number of intersectional coinciding and concurrent Black turbulent consciousnesses is further complicated by the pathway of displacement across the diaspora in different colonial geographies. We carry over the ongoing active residuals of other (previous) colonial forces and geographies that we are colonized into. Consider, for example, a Sudanese refugee born in Sudan, displaced in the UK, further displaced in Minnesota and further displaced in Toronto.

The notion of sijui can be connected to and seeks to build on pre-existing scholarship of liminality and in-betweeness. My small contribution seeks to begin the work of naming and theorizing notion of Black turbulence – the turbulent shifting of ships, the forced erratic and erotic movements, the mobility, the forced immobilities that continue to contain us, as we own homes in places like Toronto’s Dixon neighbourhood, places that have been constructed as social housing. I’ve come to recognize that turbulence is in fact the complication of all these mobilities and immobilities combined. It is the complication of unbelonging while being, and demanding

life and seeking breath amidst breathlessness and capture. This is the notion of a Black turbulent consciousness.

When I started writing this thesis in my mind I thought I had another way to explain what was happening, but this is what I have come to realize: if I don’t have a claim to Canada (here) and I can only state claim to Sudan (there) in very distant and particularly complicated ways, my

Blackness stays constant, but where do I live? Now I am coming to understand the travels of

Blackness. Maybe those waters carry the particular strength and stories and narratives that I’m trying to articulate as being the stories and ancestral knowledges from Sudan. the stories of these travels, these tribulations, this turbulence.

These travels of coming here, Du Bois names as double consciousness. Sharpe (2017) calls weather and in the wake, Simpson (2017) calls the Anishinabek and Kwe, Walcott (2000) calls in-between Austin (2013) calls fear of a Black Nation, Gilroy (1993) calls the Black

Atlantic, Hall (2006) calls representation, meaning language and culture. Thus it is through the gift of grammar and through the gift of the grammar of Black (Walcott, 2003) and Black studies and this refusal to borrow Blackness as defined that I contribute sijui- I will continue to think, feel, see and sense the turbulence, name it. and always, always fight it.

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY

“Counting dead Black bodies and the ‘lifelessness’ of Black people is not research”- Walcott 2017

Qualitative Design

Social science theories, [methods and methodologies] provide an explanation, a prediction, and a generalization about how the world operates (Creswell, 2009, p. 84). However,

Black people and Black lives are often outside the imagination of some non-Black researchers.

More concerning, within the context of social science research, Black people are too often a site of study, not the producers of knowledges. Yet with all of the problematics around the particular ethics of Black people as an over-researched group, I too acknowledge the potential, opportunity and possibilities which suggests "...qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or to interpret, phenomena in terms of the meaning people bring to them" (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000 p. 3), which is precisely my aim here. Given my course of study and the overall premise of my work, it was crucial to situate my thesis within the qualitative tradition, which is concerned with “inquiry that explore[s] a social or human problem” (Creswell, 2009, p. 15). The aim here is to understand the social phenomena using “a set of interpretive [and] material practices that make the world visible” (Creswell, 2009, p. 43).

Qualitative research/ers seek to understand how individual ‘participants’ or ‘subjects’ are positioned in relation to the each other, the space and the world.

Theoretical perspectives such as colonialism, anti-Black racism and Black studies more broadly, in combination with the predominantly western yet thorough qualitative design, can provide some meaningful insight into the lives of Black people. The purpose of this thesis was twofold: 1) engage in introspective deep reflection, review and reckoning with myself in relation to and in relationship with the world in all of its complexity, doing so with an in-depth look at my location (Turtle Island), my ancestral lineage, connection to colonialism and my activism within these geographies; and 2) to link my experience to the condition of Black life/lives in this country, ultimately resulting in my arrival to this country, activism and emergence as a ‘person

67 of interest’ in Canadian media as an entity representative of much more than the ‘self’, but of a larger depiction of anti-Blackness, islamophobia, and fear of a Black freedom(s). In particular, I am referring to Black, East African, Muslim immigrant freedoms in this country. To this end, I have used an Autoethnographic approach and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) coupled with the application of CDA in order to engage in the above process to interpret and understand media constructions of myself and the state in relationship to Blackness and the representation of Black

East/African people. This process involves examining not only myself as an individual but rather thinking about how the specific is always the general in the context of Black people.

Autoethnographic Approach

Autoethnographic research seeks to allow researchers to draw on their own personal experiences in order to understand a particular phenomenon or culture. According to Ellis and

Bochner (2000) "...an autobiographical genre of writing that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural" (p. 739). Therefore, placing “greater emphasis on the ways in which the ethnographer interacts with the culture being researched"

(Holt, 2003, p. 18). Additionally, ethnography provided me the opportunity to engage in this work from the personal while employing interdisciplinary approaches which “assume that identity is a social and relational construct, jointly produced through interaction with others,” rather than an “inherent, essential quality of individual psychology or demographic background”

(p. 10). Of the utmost importance to me was the use of self and the centering of my voice as a

Black woman. Autoethnography, coupled with anti-Black racism, informed from a Black feminist perspective that provides this opportunity. As highlighted by Chang (2013) “every piece of writing reflects the disposition of its author” (p.10). In keeping with the politics of my scholarship and activist roots, I wanted to be clear this was my voice and to provide no apology.

Further, the purposes of the academic exercise illustrate the utility and validity by “subtly and explicitly revealing who I am and what I value” (p. 10) With the central principle of autoethnography as a method (Chang, 2013).

Autoethnography is situated in the qualitative tradition (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000).

During the ‘traditional’ research era in 1900s, the goal of most research and researchers was to present modernist positivist accounts of ‘objectivity’ in their studies. A shift in the post-war era of the 1970s “was characterised by researchers’ concerns about formalising qualitative research to be as rigorous as quantitative research. The period of blurred genres (1970-1986) was characterised by the diverse research strategies and formats used by qualitative researchers” (p.

84). After what Holt (2003) termed the crisis period of representation in the mid-late 1980s, we see the development and investing in autoethnography because of "the calls to place greater emphasis on the ways in which the ethnographer interacts with the culture being researched"

(Holt, 2003, p. 18). Put plainly, “autoethnography is at once ethnographic, interpretive, and autobiographical”(p.18).

An authoethnography is an approach compatible with my thesis because the intention was

“not just writing about oneself, it is about being critical about personal experiences in the development of the research being undertaken, or about experiences of the topic being investigated” (Reed-Danahay, 1997, pp. 3-4). Equally important was having an opportunity for radical scholarship and self-introspection at the multiple intersections of my life in relation the social world. Prior to beginning the process, McIlveen (2008), asks us to consider the role and function of the autoethnographer in the narrative, and poses the following questions for consideration:

is the autoethnographer an insider or an outsider of the phenomenon being described? (2) Whose voice is being heard: who is speaking, the people under investigation or the researcher? 3) Cultural displacement: some realities are being described by people who have been displaced from their natural environment due to political or social issues. Although autoethnography can be approached with different focuses, I would like to adhere to the description given by Ellis (2007), who states that, ‘Doing autoethnography involves a back-and-forth movement between experiencing and examining a vulnerable self and observing and revealing the broader context of that experience. (p. 14)

The assumption might be made that there is one particular way to conduct an autoethnographic study or deploy the approach. After conducting my research into the field of autoethnography, using an evocative autoethnographic approach worked best when combined with the theoretical perspectives I was using towards the overall goal of the study; “evocative autoethnograpy” focuses on researchers’ introspection on a particular topic to allow readers to make a connection with the researchers’ feelings and experiences.” (Coffey, 1999, p. 54).

However, evocative autoethnography (or emotional autoethnography as as it is referred to by some) has some distinctions from different forms of method, such as analytic autoethnography.

Below, Anderson (2006) asserted the following about the analytic approach which:

(1) a full member in the research group or setting, (2) visible as such a member in published texts, and (3) committed to developing theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena. (p. 373).

While Anderson (2006) suggests evocative autoethnography and an analytic autoethnography are different, I would argue that from my thesis perspective these are not only one in the same but in fact they are dependent on each other. And like many Black feminists and

Black scholars have suggested over the years, thinking, feeling and academic knowledge

production are not different or separate exercises. Rather, they are deeply connected to our survival as Black people. Writing about myself also seeks to make Black life ordinary— in other words, I chose to focus on the “numerous elements of Black everyday living” (Walcott, 2003, p.109)

Black people are a living people, we are not merely sites of study for white people. We exist as humans with real experiences and who make connections between real life torments, while attempting to tend to a world that is effectively attempting to eradicate us daily, often through research, consultative processes and state sanctioned violence. Therefore, my goal was to think and feel through what has been my journey and hope that like Bochner and Ellis (1996) remind us, "on the whole, autoethnographers don’t want you to sit back as spectators; they want readers to feel and care and desire" (p. 24). It is with that intention this thesis was written.

As alluded to above, while conducting primary research is important, there is no social or political phenomenon that Black people in this country have not researched. From health and housing to education and policing, Black people have the data reflecting the problems. Through my understanding of the context of our being an over-researched people, I wanted to take a different approach which autoethnography supports. Given I am my own ‘subject’, there is an

“ease of access to data since the researcher calls on his or her own experiences as the source from which to investigate a particular phenomenon” (p.29). This is done deliberately instead of again drawing on and from community as a site of study. We’ve been there, done that, and have the multiple shelved reports to prove it.

Limitations and Delimitations

Conducting research from a critical perspective often calls into question issues surrounding generalizability (Philips & Hardy, 2002) and while this not my intention or purpose of my thesis, it is important to acknowledge the limitation of autoethnography. Indeed the obvious critique must be addressed: that the explicitly personal account of this method which will not only limit my conclusions but the overall generalizability of my thesis. I take no issue with that. My intention is not to speak or write from anyone else’s perspective, but instead to share my limited experience among the experiences of other people discursively and socially.

Similarly, Bochner and Ellis (1996) consider that this limitation of the self is not valid, since, "If culture circulates through all of us, how can autoethnography be free of connection to a world beyond the self?" (p. 24).

Through the reading of a cultural or social account of an experience, some may become aware of realities that have not been thought of before, which makes autoethnography a valuable form of inquiry (Bochner and Ellis, 1996, p. 282). Additionally, there is the positivist critique that research that is introspective or centers emotion/feeling is ‘non-academic’ and has no place in the academy. It seems that there are no formal regulations regarding the writing of an autoethnographic account since it is the meaning that is important, not the production of a highly academic text. However, I wonder if the concern is in fact that autoethnography can be understood as an ‘emancipatory discourse’ because “…those being emancipated are representing themselves, instead of being colonized by others and subjected to their agendas or relegated to the role of second-class citizens" (Mendez, 2013, p. 1724). I reckon with what enterprise of academic research would look like if all Black researchers (in the all its complex meanings) did this? Outside of the lack of ‘rules’ in autoethnography such that there is no perceptive way to write or disseminate this type of study, another frequent criticism of autoethnography is of its centering on the self, “which is at the core of the resistance to accepting autoethnography as a valuable research method. Thus,

72 autoethnographers have been criticized for being self-indulgent, narcissistic, introspective and individualised (Atkinson, 1997; Coffey, 1999 as cited in, Méndez p. 283).

While there are shifts in research to center the experiences of marginalized people and their experiences, there exists a condemnation of critical/radical perspectives with reference to autoethnography, Walford (2004) writes, "if people wish to write fiction, they have every right to do so, but not every right to call it research" (p. 411). Ultimately, my interest and focus was to humanize myself (to and for myself) and Black people here on Turtle Island through the eyes and experiences of the individual in relation to social phenomena (Creswell, 2009; Merriam, 2009).

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

Evolving in January 1991 scholars such as: Teun van Dijk, Gunther Kress, Ron Scallon,

Siegfried Jager, Ruth Wodak and Norman Fairclough advanced Critical Discourse Analysis

(CDA) as an emergent critical method of inquiry rooted in postructuralist theory and critical linguistics further underpinned by Habermas; Foucault; Bourdieu. As cited by Wodak (cited in

Titscher et al. 2005), the core philosophies of CDA are;

1.) CDA is concerned with social problems.. .Accordingly CDA is essentially interdisciplinary. 2.) Power relations have to do with discourse (Foucault 1990, Bourdieu 1987),and CDA studies both power in discourse and power over discourse. 3.) Society and culture are dialectically related to discourse: society and culture are shaped by discourse, and at the same time constitute discourse. Every single instance of language use reproduces or transforms society and culture, including power relations. 4.) Language use may be ideological. To determine this it is necessary to analyze texts to investigate their interpretation, reception and social effects. 5.) Discourses are historical and can only be understood in relation to their context. Discourses are not only embedded in a particular culture, ideology or history, but are also connected intertextually to other discourses.

Given the centrality of discourse, construction and interpretation in my thesis, it was imperative to select a methodology that integrates the personal, political and systemic.

Additionally, I sought to deconstruct dominant ideologies and situate what may appear to be

‘micro’ level social issues within the larger macro- social world, thus creating spaces to trouble

‘meaning’ using multiple entry points. CDA “focuses on how social relations, identity, knowledge and power are constructed through written and spoken texts in communities…”

(Luke, 1997, p.84). It is vital to consider the implication of how issues are socially constructed, how they come to the attention of society and thus become a part of the political agenda, and are compelled and expelled from the social fabric. CDA can serve as a response to current tensions in Canadian media constructions and beyond insofar as it requires CDA researchers to “provide detailed analysis of cultural voices and texts in local educational sites, while attempting to theoretically and empirically connect these with an understanding of power and ideology in broader social formations an configurations”( Luke, 1997, p.3). In focusing on “discursive activity structures the social space within which actors act, through the constitution of concepts, objects and subject positions” (Phillips & Hardy, 2002, p. 25), CDA provides an epistemic and ontological space for researcher and participants to negotiate subjectivities. As stated by van

Dijk:

Unlike other discourse analysts, critical discourse analysts (should) take an explicit sociopolitical stance: they spell out their point of view, perspective, principles and aims, both within their discipline and within society at large. Although not in each stage of theory formation an analysis, their work is admittedly and ultimately political. Their hope, if occasionally illusory, is change through critical understanding. Their perspective, if possible, that of those who suffer most from dominance and inequality. Their critical targets are the power elites that enact, sustain, legitimate, condone or ignore social inequality and injustice. That is, one of the criteria of their work is solidarity with those who need it most (van Dijk, 1993, p.3-4)

As highlighted throughout my thesis thus far, the current and historical climate not only substantiates anti-Blackness but is reliant upon it in order to continue to create unequal social relations in Canada, and to continue to enforce white supremacy and its logics on us. Therefore, the use of CDA, coupled with a critical Black-centered theoretical framework, serves to challenge the existing normative and dominant response to anti-Blackness in media by exposing

“the privileged positions held by politically powerful groups” (Schneider & Ingram, 2016, p.

190) in an effort to bring about social change. CDA fits particularly well with both autoethnography and the theoretical framework, given the vast amount of Black scholars who have both utilized but also interrogated CDA. Given that race is a social construct, Smith (1990) suggests the use of CDA in illustrating how texts are “active in organizing the social relations that they mediate- in this case the relation of public opinion” (as cited in Chouliaraki &

Fairclough, 1990, p. 262). Thus the contextualization of race, gender, Islam, activism and ongoing colonialism, and of the factors that make these positions ‘real’ and ‘visible’, requires that responses consider that “One aspect of the analysis of more immediate conjuncture is to locate the discourse in focus in real time in a way which links it to its circumstances processes of consumption, which brings the question how the discourse is interpreted (Chouliaraki &

Fairclough, 1990, p. 266). In order to engage in the CDA process I selected 2 sources as my text for analysis.

CDA Data Collection and Analysis

One of the main tenets in CDA is what is understood as access to ‘objects of knowledge’, what is legitimate knowledge and how it is perceived. This in turn gives life to particular

‘knowledge scripts’ that include or exclude ‘truth’ and what is constituted as truth. For the

75 purposes of my thesis, one of the main sites for CDA data collection was Canadian and

American media texts, specifically:

1) “Who is Yusra Khogali and Why does it Matter?” by Pamela Jablonski 2) “Black Lives Matter Toronto Co-Founder Needs” to Resign by James Di Fiore.

Philips and Hardy (2002) assert, “what makes a research technique discursive is not the method itself but the use of that method to carry an interpretive analysis of some form of text with a view to providing an understanding of discourse and its role in constituting social reality”

(p.10). The literature highlights multiple ways to engage CDA methodologically. In fact, Wodak and Meyer (2002) remind us there is “no typical CDA way of collecting data” (p. 23). Rather, the researcher seeks to make the connection between: 1) text 2) discursive practices and 3) the broder social context (intertextual28) (Fairclough, 2010) during the analysis of CDA data. Similar to other qualitative methods, coding29 is among the first steps for data analysis. For the purposes of this thesis, the following codes were developed: raced, gendered, islamalized, national/state protection, terrorism, anger, expulsion, dangerousness, respectability and foreign/er from the local and international newspapers, as well as key themes drawn upon from the literature on anti-

Blackness. The collected content was analyzed thematically and coded. Beyond the normative data and, given my positionality and keen sensitivity to layers of oppression, it is imperative that

I engage reflexivity in particular as an outsider-within the data collection processes. I approach this research as a Black woman with multiple complicated and complex identities I occupy in relationship to this work as outlined throughout the thesis. For this reason, I utilized reflexive

28 “seeks to compare the dominant and resistant strands of discourse” (Ibid: 29). 29 “naming segments of data with a label that simultaneously categorizes, summarizes and accounts for each piece of data (Charmaz, 2006, p. 43)

76 journaling as “a kind of diary in which the ‘investigator’ records a variety of information about self and method” (Guba & Lincoln, 1994, p. 327).

CHAPTER 4: DISCUSSION

On Wednesday March 7th, 2018 I sat in conversation with the revolutionary civil rights activist, scholar, academic, organizer, educator and author Dr. Angela Y. Davis. This community event was organized by the Black Student Association at the University of Toronto and drew a packed house full of Black students, professors, art and cultural producers, activists, community leaders and members of the public from all over the city. The conversation was moderated by

Toronto’s well-known, loved and respected feminist, author, activist and community leader

Angela Robertson. I was asked to consider with Dr. Angela Y. Davis what has changed in this intergenerational fight for Black lives. This is an important question for us to consider in this intergenerational fight. The inherent power structures and anti-Black climate that my elders were organizing in remains the same. Essentially, the terrain has not changed, but it’s the mechanisms and the mechanics that have changed. As young activists in this present day, we contend with the sophisticated and unrelenting machinery of heteropatriarchal, white supremacist, islamophobic violence in a digital age, while simultaneously combating the proliferation of fake news and doxing in the fight to raise consciousness for collective social change. Every political moment comes with its own unique issues, trials and tribulations. I am not suggesting that the experiences for my elders were less taxing, but the different social, political and technological times have presented us with different issues to contend with.

In 2018, we are organizing as millennials, in a completely different geography than our elders in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. We live in a social media digital age, where we have two lives; real and virtual, reality and perceived reality. However, there is always a real impact on the

real lives of real people. The interconnectedness of these two realms are inseparable and inform each other, and present us with tools to organize in more direct, intimate and widespread ways, but also allow for confrontations with the organization of dominant power(s) through violent responses. One such example is the online white supremacist heteropatriarchal and xenophobic tool of doxing, a practice that we have to challenge as front line activists in the social media age.

Doxing derives from the word dox, an abbreviation for ‘documents’, and whose definition can include but is not limited to the malicious practice that right wing conservative white supremacists use to research and widely broadcast private and identifiable personal information about an individual activist. The purpose is to target individuals online through harassment, coercion, violent insults, shaming, and death threats as well as an online mobilization of white supremacists in the local geographic space of a target individual to actively organize to destroy their life. A person may experience death threats in emails and phone calls, letters sent to places of employment or to institutions of education that demand disciplinary actions against them, and threats of verbal and physical assault and harassment to make school, working and social spaces unsafe. Doxing is the how white supremacists (and others) organize their frontliners from all walks of life, professions and social locations. Locally they are here on our campuses under the guise of advocacy for free speech, men’s right activism, anti-choicers, tenured professors, and they exist in every day working class society, including media personalities, journalists, politicians and police.

Doxing is a form of white, sexist, anti-Black rioting in the online sphere. This behavior is cloaked in anonymity and covered by the cowardice of the keyboard under the guise of whiteness. In many ways it is legitimized through conversations about free speech, and it functions as an omnipresent phenomenon without location to a specific place or person. It is so

78 sophisticated that doxers have an entire science dedicated to acquiring, disseminating and mobilizing hate online and across the world in their brazen hunts and attacks, which primarily affect Black women, queer and trans people, Muslims, Indigenous and racialized people. There are millions of pages in the web space dedicated to specifically doxing activists that challenge the white supremacist, hetero-patriarchal islamophobic violence in radical ways that are not politically correct. These doxing spaces include blogs, websites, pages on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, and right wing media outlets like local D-class Toronto based newspapers.

Oftentimes the practice of doxing utilizes one decontextualized sound bite, media interview, tweet or facebook post as its source material.

That is what happened to me after a tweet I sent out that read: ‘plz Allah give me the strength not to cuss/kill these men and white folk out here. Plz plz plz”, I wrote that tweet out of frustration, seeking restraint from God and support from my online community. I wrote that tweet on February 9, 2016 in an online conversation about the absenting of Black women during

Black history month. This tweet was inconsequential and lived in the twittersphere for nearly two months before it was deployed to serve its intended purpose as a nail in what was my perceived coffin. It was only until April 5, 2016 after the vibrant encampment of

#BLMTOtentcity that my tweet was not only taken out of context but used as a disciplining tactic not only against me, but against Black Lives Matter Toronto, and the broader Black community. The best way to describe much of the vitriol that myself and members of my team experienced was ‘how dare you be so audacious and bold to fight for your freedom, and doing so will come at a cost.’ And it surely did. This old tweet was used to dox me personally, and the backlash came immediately after the two-week action in front of the Toronto police headquarters that mobilized a national conversation on anti-Black racism, sanist anti Black policing interventions, and law enforcement oversight bodies. The demonstraation culminated in the historic release of the heavily

79 redacted SIU report on Andrew Loku by Premier Kathleen Wynne. When Toronto Sun commentator and

Newstalk 1010 host Jerry Agar publish my tweet, it left me curious but not surprised. I wondered why he would spend so much time perusing my twitter. I wondered what he was looking for and I had questions about his intent and the purpose of reporting on a then 23-year-old graduate student and organizer, and why I was important enough not only to be a local but national and international topic conversation during a time where the issues in this country plaguing Black communities persisted. How was this tweet news? But I wasn't surprised because the actions of

Agar and those of his ilk are heavily invested in surveilling, monitoring and controlling not just the movement of Black people but our thoughts, feelings, and theorizing as it relates to our freedom in this country. This is not a new phenomenon, it is one Black people across this country and globe have long been subjected to and have learned to survive. So I, Yusra Khogali, was no different from my overpoliced and hyper-surveilled counterparts living in social housing, engaged with the child welfare system, or the people experiencing stop-and-frisk on a daily basis.

So the doxing served its purpose. It focused all media attention on me and it unleashed an onslaught of violence to make an example out of me, a young Black Muslim woman who spoke truth to power as an activist for Black liberation. The backlash also sought to purposefully ignore our demands for justice. We refused to engage in what was the politics of distraction at that time.

That, however, did not shield me from what was to come. After Agar publicized this tweet, it was picked up by white supremacists online who began doxing me, who threatened my life, livelihood, and who publicly lynched me by contributing to my anticipated social death and murder by social media. However, this did not stop in the online realm, it followed me into my everyday real life. Doxing manifested as an active and daily interruption into my life: I was physically attacked in public, and threatened on subway platforms, my education was

jeopardized, and my mental and physical health became acutely compromised. Simple things such as being in public space became not only a challenge but a chore and an ongoing scare.

None of us should have to live this way, although I recognize that for a variety of different reasons many of us live in fear on a daily basis. This tweet was picked up by every corporate media outlet in Canada and in other media outlets across the United States and other parts of the world two years ago, yet it still affects me today. On the web, my identity is carried on white supremacist pitch forks; ‘the haters’ are constantly tormenting me for using my voice to challenge white supremacy. Today, I continue picking up the pieces of the recurring lynch-mob that keeps following me. This is the experience of many who choose to resist.

As I look back to the conversation I had with Angela Y. Davis, I reflect upon living in a social media age that has completely changed how we organize for Black liberation, but also how white supremacists have used this very tool to organize themselves against our resistance. I think about how doxing is part and parcel of the contemporary context we organize in, and how this online/offline violence is different than what our elders and predecessors went through. I also think about the importance of widespread political education to give the public literacy and consciousness on our current conditions of white supremacy, and on tools like doxing. There is an urgent and imperative need to protect ourselves in our current organizing climate.

When the tactics change, so must the responses. I want to point us to some specific suggestions to actively challenge and continue to counter-organize against this onslaught of violence. Firstly, the movement needs to make direct investments in building our collective technological savviness. Secondly, we must bolster our information technology skills, and identify experts versed on the workings of the web to develop ways to guard ourselves from violent interruptions like doxing. Thirdly, we must recommit to understanding and taking

seriously the impact of what is often perceived as ‘only online violence’ in our social movements—by this I mean understanding the particularity of this kind of violence and trauma on our individual and collective selves. The stakes continue to be high for those of us who risk our lives on the front lines, and so does the violence. It has become more insidious, quickly moving from the political to the personal, from the public to the private, from the infamous to the intimate, following us from the street to our homes and to our bedrooms. Every time we hear the notification ring go off on our phones, it could be another attack on our personhood. We must preserve ourselves, protect ourselves, and push back in order to continue carving out spaces for our peace while journeying on this path for justice on our own terms, with a focus on our commitments. Like everything else, when it comes doxing we will win.

In this final chapter, I present the major themes that emerged from reviewing the following media articles: “Black Lives Matter Toronto Co-Founder Needs To Resign” by James

Di Friore and “Who is Yusra Khogali and Why Does it Matter?by Pamela Jablonski

After reviewing these articles, I coded the following five themes: (1) White lies, (2) White

Supremacy and discourses of powers, (3) discovery and cartography (4) Expulsion/Removal/

Resignation (5) Unwell/Crazy/Stupid.

I will discuss each theme and go beyond what was presented in the article, to further unpack and in some instances respond to, clarify and critique the above texts.

1. WHITE LIES:

White lies are about discourse, violence and power. In a settler colonial state like Canada, the country’s foundational fabric is the dispossession and ongoing genocide of indigenous

communities, and the enslaved labour of stolen and displaced Black people through the ideological framing of white supremacy. White supremacy functions through centuries worth of accumulated power to shape white lies through education, media, culture and politics. White supremacist violence is designed to eradicate the histories of Black and indigenous people and their cultures, and to centralize white subjects as the only holders of truth about Canada. This force shapes the cultural imaginary of our present day relations so deeply that White Canadians believe that the land “Canada’ is on actually belongs to them.

White lies have been weaponized in the assaults of Black people for so long, in the form of state violence that is enacted by police, educators, health care providers, politicians, academics and white Canadian citizens more broadly. These lies often accelerate into state apprehension and detention because of the institutional white supremacy that privileges and believes white people without question. When a white lie is deployed on a Black person, it means life and death for us. It is white lies that told us Jermaine Carby had a knife in his possession when the Peel Regional police officer that carded him as a passenger in a vehicle to murder him. It is white lies that permit Justin Trudeau to wear Indigenous regalia as pipelines are being built across Turtle Island. While Trudeau is on a reconciliation tour, Colten Boushie's murderer is set free. It is white lies that say Canada is 150 years old and that Black people never existed here before Canada did, even as Trudeau recognizes that we are in the United Nations

International Decade for People of African Descent, three years late. Di Fiore's article is full of white lies, but in our white supremacist climate, he does not have to get facts right to address any of what he arrogantly claims as truth. The subjectivities of maleness and whiteness and their associated authorities automatically grant him legitimacy and suggest that anything he says is accurate and truthful. These subjectivities also allow the apparatus of white supremacy to act as

a guarantor, to take me up and ‘expose’ me as a ‘racist’ as untruthful by default.

Di Fiore’s piece exposes this reality in an interesting way. Firstly, I am made visible specifically through his racist constructions—he defines me as inherently racist to his reader.

Secondly, Di Fiore attempts to ‘meaning make’ what my role should be within the Black Lives

Matter movement. He asserts that I have been at the centre of every racialized controversy in

Toronto. Di Friore also comments on me calling Justin Trudeau a white supremacist terrorist, and defends Trudeau’s actions as “changing our refugee policy as a response to Donald Trump's executive order that would temporarily halt the flow of refugees and immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries.” He characterizes my critique as a ‘hyperbolic’ and doing an

‘activism that belittles my own cause’ and only works to centre me in controversy. The remarks I made about Trudeau’s capacity as prime minister are not solely in response to this but to the previous and ongoing policies he enacts. I have a right to criticize Trudeau in his capacity as head of government because his decisions have impacts on the communities I am a part of. I do not know Justin Trudeau, nor care to, however my critiques are not specifically about his personal traits or commitments. My critiques were and are about his public commentary, policy response or lack thereof, and his leadership of a nation. The idea of the prime minister of Canada feeling ‘bad’ or ‘offended’ should not supersede the need to uncover the veil of Canadian contradiction and the ongoing marginalization of multiple groups in this country. I am not the first person to criticize Justin Trudeau, nor I am the only one criticizing him in this political moment. But this is an issue of who is permitted to say something, and about whom. While writing this thesis I revisited multiple social media outlets and I was able to find many individuals including politicians, news commentators, academics who also offered critiques of

Justin Trudeau in the moment Di Fiore is referring to. Indeed, I used more plain language in

saying that Justin Trudeau is white supremacist terrorist when others were subversive but saying the same thing.

Towards the conclusion of the article, Di Friore boldly states “to be honest, I really don't care if this comes off as ‘whitesplaining.’ That's a word designed to get white people to shut up about important issues. It's part of the lexicon among some activists that doesn't serve the greater good, which is supposed to be justice and equality for everyone.” Whitesplaining is not in my lexicon. Whitesplaining is a lie that is underpinned by the logic of white supremacy and the system of whiteness to create a worldview that is understood through white lies and white eyes.

White Canadian consciousness is interpreted and understood as normal and universal. White people are in the positions to speak down to, speak on behalf of, and speak to interrupt the groups they oppress, and have done this throughout multiple colonial histories. They are not the subaltern.

Di Friore also directed me to resign from my activism, if I really believe that Black lives matter, because my ‘divisive’ rhetoric impacts optics, and ‘they matter too’. Optics are white supremacist illusions and impositions of respectability that seek to construct and police the ways that Black activism is viewed and deemed appropriate. Optics don't matter—action is what does.

The everyday actions I take to actualize my belief in Black life, fight and freedom are not subject to validation from whiteness. This logic has been used for centuries to distort public perception through institutional manipulation of anti-Black tropes to vilify, discredit and divide community leaders from their community. Di Fiore is an excellent example of the audaciousness of whiteness, as he actually believes he can tell the public about the Black movement of our time and who belongs in it. This kind of rhetoric really parallels for me ideas about immigration, admissibility and desirability and the ways the state assesses these factors. Di Fiore is referring to

85 a Black group that I co-founded, that seeks no permissions from him or has any point systems attached to its membership or participation in the fight for Black lives.

In the American article on bearing arms, Pamela Jablonski asks “Who is Yusra Khogali and why does it matter? At the time I, Yusra Khogali, was a 24-year-old graduate student fighting for Black life. And why do I matter? In this context as an individual I don’t matter30, the issues I am fighting for do, and that is what should take precedence. I am framed by the white lie of singling me out as the individual Canadian leader that should be known to an audience of right wing racists in the U.S, to people interested in the promotion of bearing arms. Indeed, Jablonski effectively instructs her readers to take arms against me. This individualizing of my Black

Muslim womanhood, is a direct positioning of me through a false narrative that singles me out as a Canadian leader who is detached from a larger team. It is a practice of public lynching to identify me as a person of interest. Furthermore, Jablonski claims that I am “inciting people into committing violent action and criminal behavior in response to [my] words.” Here she not only makes the assumption that Black people and anyone in support of Black lives are erratically and irrationally prepared to respond violently, but Jablonski also lies about my words. I have never alluded to or incited the public to act out in ways that are violent, never. The propaganda and scare tactics Jablonski deploys set out to do the very same thing she accuses me of, which is to incite the public to act out violently against me and the movement for Black lives and its

‘sympathisers. She ends by calling me an ‘incendiary device who is looking to spark millions of short fuses.’ describing me as an explosive entity. I do not dissociate this commentary from tropes about terrorism.

30 To be clear: my Black life always matters however I’m writing in context.

2. WHITE SUPREMACY AND DISCOURSES OF POWER:

In Di Fiore’s and Jablonski’s articles, the discourses used to narrate me are rooted in domination, and they create a fiction enforced by power and violence through the multidimensional and complex system of whiteness. What is not being addressed is the nature of whiteness and how it operates from a position of power that is relational. Di Fiore and

Jabowinski are able to assert their entitlement and ownership of their white identity in opposition to me through an anti-Black islamophobic positioning. They are able to think and speak with such power because white supremacist thought is considered to be universally normal, and define the order of the world. Throughout his article, Di Fiore makes false equivalences of me promoting ‘hate speech.’ The suggestion that my language has institutional, structural and systemic power to inflict violence is ignorant to say the least. He is equating my social position as a Black Muslim woman to his own social position, through a reverse-racism rhetoric. This lack of analysis of whiteness and power demonstrates the state of unconsciousness, and arrogance that white people enact after being conditioned for centuries to view the world as

‘equal’ and structural oppression as due to ‘individual traits’ in meritocracy.

I am not in a position to make any decisions on policies that will impact an entire nation of communities. I am not entrusted with the violent weaponry of the state. I do not decide how the country’s resources and wealth are distributed. My critique does not have the structural force to re-order the conditions of the white supremacist settler colony. I am speaking about the system of whiteness, but Di Friore and Jablonski assert I am speaking about individual white people, which I am not. The advocacy work that I do is systemic in nature. I have no interest in talking about John, Jim or Justin personally. But if I did, why would that be problematic? By virtue of

social and institutional arrangements, white supremacy and its logics have allowed white people to speak about and for Black people for centuries. Furthermore, the nature of white supremacy orders the world in a binary where whiteness narrates Blackness as inhuman, which gives meaning to whiteness as being human.

Di Fiore and Jablonski also take the position to punish me for questioning whiteness as opposed to aspiring to or centering it. This refusal to be seduced by whiteness, and instead to challenge and speak directly and unapologetically to it, is deeply destbalizing as it produces a white rage that is unable to cope with or comprehend not being lied to, or not having its white lies believed. Both Di Fiore and Jablonski caricature me as a person who is not credible and truthful on the basis of deontextualized critiques of my language. This creates the dynamic where it is permissible to fight for Black people only when we are dead, but not speak to our conditions as we live in white supremacy.

As a Black woman, my Black self-assuredness in speaking back to the state and whiteness is destabilizing and feels threatening enough that Di Friore makes the charge, judgment and execution that I will not be forgiven, since this is not a one-time offence. “now, maybe if this was her only controversial statement all could be forgiven, but this is a pattern of hate that can't be ignored any longer.” His use of language like ‘offence’ not only assumes that I have committed a crime punishable by the Criminal Code of Canada, but in the absence of that crimes he puts me in direct conversation with notions of criminality. This demand for me to seek absolution and forgiveness for truth is to dictate that I am apologetic about naming white supremacy and that I am looking to be forgiven for it. I have no reason to seek absolution which further fuels white rage and white expectations. My critics seem to assume that if they push me hard enough and back me into a corner, I will apologize on bended knees. That was not, is not

88 and will never be an option, most notably because I do not work for the state. I work for Black liberation. I owe an explanation only to Black people and anyone who genuinely supports the movement for Black lives. It is a bizarre and phony expectation that I should seek forgiveness for offending white Canada, as if I am representative of the government even as a low-level bureaucrat who receives payment from the state. I have purposely chosen not to be in the positions that would require me to respond in that way. Take for example the recent debate on

March 6, 2018, in which conservative Member of Parliament Maxime Bernier and Liberal

Member of Parliament Celina Caesar-Chavannes argued on twitter regarding the 2018 federal budget and its impact on racialized Canadians. Bernier advanced notions of colorblindness, ultimately suggesting that racialized people did not need specific policy interventions—Bernier effectively suggested that we are all the same. Caesar-Chavannes tweeted to Bernier to ‘check your privilege and be quiet!’. She later issued a public apology which he ‘refused to accept’31. I am not Celina, nor do I think that she should have apologized for asking someone to assess their privilege or reflect on their social location within the broader social world. In fact, as adults, this should be a normative everyday practice. That said, the individual and unnecessary apologies from Black people who expose white supremacy emboldens white people to feel like they have the right to demand an apology, but also suggests that an apology is appropriate. We know within the Canadian discourse that what one Black person does is never understood as solely the actions of one Black person. Our words and actions are extrapolated to the entire community. In my view, Celina apologizing also has an impact on the way the Canadian public would expect any Black person to respond if and when they found themselves in this situation.

Di Fiore also partakes in white liberal posturing that is dishonest and cowardly. He

31 http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/bernier-twitter-hussen-identity-politics-1.4564125

says that “the tweet was widely covered, and many media outlets faced scrutiny for focusing on that tweet instead of the issues Black communities are facing. This was and is a legit criticism of the media. Black people are treated unjustly by the criminal justice system at all levels, and the press is almost as bad, and that's why I support the underlying credo of BLM.” This is not allyship or support, and Di Fiore’s white liberalism is in fact a softer form of white supremacy, with far more dangerous impacts than brute racists because it hides under a trickery that assumes an allegiance to an oppressed group through the co-optation of ‘progressive’ language. In actuality, white liberals (including some of the white ‘left’) are the primary and most insidious agents of white supremacy in this present neoliberal moment.

Di Fiore also tells me what I should do a Black activist, and advises on what is strategic for me and the rest of my team. His whiteness is so entitled to instruct me on how I as a Black activist should organize against the system of whiteness that enables him to write this embarrassing and mediocre hot take on my life as he outs himself as a racist throughout the article. Furthermore, he suggests that in order for Black movement building to be able to organize and produce results, they must center white people and their approval.

3. DISCOVERY AND CARTOGRAPHY:

The concept of mapping is crucial in the context of colonial cultures and practises.

Colonization is in fact an act of discovery, naming and capturing in order to rename space and thus map onto it its European/colonial machinery in order to re-make not just the physical land but its associated socio-political and spiritual realities. I draw on cartography as understood here:

“Maps also inscribe their ideology on territory in numerous ways other than place-names. The blank spaces of early maps signify a literal terra nullius, an open and inviting (virginal) space into which the European imagination can project itself and into which the European (usually

male) explorer must penetrate…. such blank spaces invite other cultural superscriptions, such as the elaborately drawn monsters and sub-human wild-men (savages) of most early maps.

Imaginative transferences are frequent” (Huggan, 2017, p. 120).

The ways that white supremacy has engaged me as a person of interest are through the logics that I am an empty body with no meaning prior to their discovery of me. Throughout the articles by Di Fiore and Jablonski, I am described as a new site that is uncovered in which all these meanings—Black supremacist, terrorist, angry, Black bitch, crazy, etc—are mapped on to me. In this imaginative transference, the texts that have been used to map these colonial meanings onto my body are also scripted on to me through the use of visual collages. These visual collages always have a racist undertone. For example, turning my face into a monkey, distorting my face to have certain features look ape like, strategically darkening my skin, or depicting me in ways that make me appear animalistic in nature either roaring or prepared to pounce as if I am an animal in the jungle. They interestingly also depict me with historically white supremacist and racist people, for example, putting me in a Hitler uniform. The caricatures can also depict me as not real, as cartoon-like, and such depictions evokes notions of silliness, stupidity or foolishness through the use of dunce caps, or by attempting to elude to my intellectual ability by engaging in deeply ableist, harmful behaviour by suggesting a lack of intellectual capacity. These problematics work in concert to create numerous different yet connected discourses. For example, while I might be disgusting, crazy and unhinged, colonial desires and heteropatriarchy simultaneously work to hypersexualize me in ways that have resulted in white men specifically suggesting that ‘f*cking me’ or raping me or sexually satisfying me would somehow change my behaviour. So while my Blackness is repulsing, my

‘Black p*ssy’ is somehow seen as disconnected from the rest of my body is the only entry point

in being able to have a conversation with me. Put bluntly, they intend to “f*ck the freedom fight out of me”, discipline me with their dicks all of which is disgusting and absolutely unacceptable.

None of these things are new. There are histories of Black people across the Americas who are depicted in these ways. What's made clear by these interventions how deeply ingrained anti-

Blackness is, so much so that these tactics have not changed in hundreds of years.

4. EXPULSION/ REMOVAL/ RESIGNATION:

The act of expulsion, removal and resignation of Black life from citizenship and belonging is so normalized that it traverses itself into the virtual sphere. At every turn, anybody who has been engaged in this public conversation around the tweet or the comments I made in regards to the head of government have coincided with two themes: (1) ‘send her back to where she came from’ and (2) ‘if she hates it here so much, then she should leave’. Both of these discourses have to do with either my deportation from this country or suggesting that I cannot live here and have a critique about the Canadian state, that our borders are guarded by politeness, gratitude, respectability, silence, and not having an opinion. It is these notions that grant us acceptance as a Canadian citizen. This is further complicated by the fact that I’ve been honest about who I am, and that I came to this country as a refugee with my family. This reality quickly again re-emerges in the public discourse about me. In other words, I came from such an ‘awful’ place that I need to be grateful that I am here; in fact, the conditions that I came from are so much worse that I need to go do my advocacy there. These dismissals suggest, firstly, that I would not be fighting the same conditions there that I am fighting here (I would be), that I am not simultaneously doing advocacy work that is both local and global (I am). Black people like me who are living in-be-tween our efforts cannot and should never be constricted by time and

space. I simultaneously have to consider the global Black condition every time I chose to speak and advocate.

Throughout the article, Di Fiore calls for my resignation multiple times, and demands that I must be displaced from the rest of the Black Lives Matter Toronto team. He states that

“BLM should either force Khogali to the background or martyr her as a way of trying to maintain the momentum they found after they forced Toronto Pride to give them a seat at the table last year. Instead, after winning that controversial fight against Pride, BLM likely squandered the gains made with the public and may even face a Pride team not comfortable with having a person so vitriolic occupying a spot side-by-side with Pride leaders.” Make no mistake, he’s offering to make BLM-TO appetizing to the public, if only my team will get rid of me.

Di Fiore calls for the BLM-TO team to either absent me or socially and symbolically kill me in order to maintain any gains made through our organizing. This expulsion of me from my membership in the group, this suggested erasure of memory, visibility and cultural imaginary from the Canadian landscape is also an act to fix me. He is attempting to “mummify me” as an artifact of example, defining me as without appeal in order to close and fix me. Again, I want to draw in notions of immigration and displacement. While BLM on the outside is a group of people doing Black liberation work, we are also a community and a family. So when Di Fiore is asking the BLM-TO team to get rid of a part of their family to fit into the Canadian discourse, that is not different from asking families seeking to immigrate to Canada, who may have a family member who has an ‘undesirable’ trait, to leave their family behind. Often these undesirable traits are connected to health status which I will discuss later on.

Di Fiore also makes the arrogant assumption that the rest of my team doesn't have the analysis I have of whiteness. He decides, by singling me out and instructing the rest of the

BLM-TO team that my views are stepping out of line, that I deserve a removal to maintain the

‘optics’ of white acceptance. In this process where all my team members are known to the public, I am positioned in this context as having more visibility and responsibility through the calls for my resignation, this notion not only has an individual impact, but it seeks to deligitimize the entire group and disrupts the very same work Di Fiore so claims to ‘support’.

5. UNWELL/STUPID/ CRAZY

In both Di Fiore’s and Jablonski’s articles about me, there is a running theme to crazy- make me as an unhinged and ‘explosive’ person. Both of these articles have a clear subtext that marks me as a bad, mad, Black woman (Abdillahi; Abdillahi et al 2016; 2017). To be clear I use the terms ‘bad’ and ‘mad’ (Abdillahi et al, 2016) because often times the social world has a way of accepting madness as acceptable for some and not others. In this case I am the bad, crazy, dangerous, unwieldy Black woman who much be psychiatrized urgently in order to save the public. I don't need to qualify my health status in particular because I understand madness and its constructions within the social world as a site of oppression and as a signifier that is used against mad people in order to delegitimize them consistently. Because I understand this, I don't need to say that as a Black woman who also understands how Black bodies are often marked as mad irrespective of madness, that I am not mad. Depicting me as mad has a strategic credence which is that mad people are often dismissed and not taken seriously by way of sanist constructions of sensibility (Abdillahi, 2015; 2017). By successfully depicting me as mad, crazy and unhinged, my critics attempt to undercut anything I say and always position me as lacking credibility by way of anti-Black sanism (Abdillahi, 2015).

For centuries Black women who have been outspoken have only been depicted in some of the following ways: angry, rude, crazy, unsafe, a Black bitch and reckless. I am no different. If speaking truth to power maddens me to the Canadian public, then so be it. However, let's also hold in congress what is at stake when Black people are understood as mad. It is death. So Di

Fiore and Jablonski, do not take into consideration that for a person like me who is in direct opposition to state violence, who is constantly at public rallies, deputations and inquests, the state’s response may replicate the ways that police services across this province have responded to Black mad people, which is to shoot and kill us in seconds. At no point do these writers have to consider what is truly at stake for me—this isn't an issue about whether people can write and present a difference of opinion from me. I welcome that, but what they don't understand is these very same op-ed pieces can turn into my autopsy report.

Also noteworthy are the ways these writers obscure my physical size and embodiment.

They depict me subversively as big and huge, which is also a common narration of how Black people are understood. For example, Black children are seen as adults, Black boys seen as men,

Black girls seen as women, all in an attempt to respond to them often in ways that are much harsher and require physical intervention. For me they have created a supernatural, magical,

Black person (Abdillahi, 2016). They make me unreal and grotesque, all while situating me as more grand that who and what I am. Again, these depictions of me on paper have real life consequences which include six-foot-five, 250-plus pound white men attacking and stalking me, which has a direct impact not only how they have been told to understand me but validates the idea that whatever they would do to me wouldn't hurt or kill me because I am mythical. These are the things at stake, it is not only online distention or difference of opinion. It is about being

followed in cars, harassed on the subway platform and being stopped on the street to be lambasted by strangers. It is my life that hangs in the balance every day.

CONCLUSION

In this thesis I endeavored to use evocative autoethnography through an anti-Black racism lens in order to think through, respond to, write into and onto broader public discursive conversations about my activism and responses to the state. Utilizing discourse analysis informed by narrative and reflexive thinking I was able to review two texts then code and thematically discuss the subversive and inherent anti-Blackness which is publicly ‘hidden’ within these articles. I offered a humble framework which I have named Black turbulent consciousness as a way to grapple with our experiences as Black people, and not only from an emotional and spiritual perspective. I sought to contribute to a dearth of existing literature by

Black scholars and hope to continue to build on this theorizing in my works in the future. I also made a deliberate decision to write this thesis from a deeply personal place within a Black feminist framework which rejects the idea that to be academic means to be disembodied from our work. My thesis sought to speak about myself for myself and back to myself. By engaging in introspective deep reflection, review and reckoning with myself in relation to and in relationship with the world in all of its complexity, doing so with an in-depth look at my location

(Turtle Island), my ancestral lineage, connection to colonialism and my activism within these geographies and linking my experiences to the condition of Black life/lives in this country. This is much more than the ‘self’, but of a larger depiction of anti-Blackness, islamophobia, and fear of a Black freedom(s). Indeed, its limitation is precisely its intentionality. For this I make no apology. Rather, if you are reading this as a young Black person, organizer or student at OISE, it

96 is to tell you that you are not alone. That you can choose to do this differently, and you are your experiences are enough, you are enough

REFERENCES Abdi, A. A., & Ibrahim, A. (2016). The Education of African Canadian Children: Critical Abdillahi, Meeri & Poole (2017). When the Suffering Is Compounded. In Wehbi, S. & Parada,(eds.). Reimaging Anti-oppressive social work. Canadian Scholars Press. Abdillahi, I. (2015). An Introduction to Anti-Black Sanism: Death, Dismiss and Black Life. Abdul-Jami, Y. Black Suffering. (2016). Sapelos Square. https://sapelosquare.com/2016/11/21/of-silence- shuyukh-and-Black-suffering/ African Canadian Legal Clinic. (2012). Taking Charge, Actualizing Change: A Policy Manual For African Canadians. Retrieved http://www.aclc.net/wp-content/uploads/Manual- Edited-Version-Final- Feb-20-2009.pdf Allen, L. (1993). Women do this every day: Selected poems of Lillian Allen Women's Press. Allen, L. (1999). Psychic unrest: Poetry Insomniac Press. Amadahy, Z. and Lawrence, B. “Indigenous Peoples and Black People In Canada: Settlers Or and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 6(1) Atkinson, P. (1997). Narrative turn or blind alley? Qualitative Health Research, 7, 325-344 Austin, D. (2013). Fear of a Black nation: Race, sex and security in sixties Montreal Between the Lines. Backhouse, C., & Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. (1999). Colour-coded: A legal Backhouse, C., & Osgoode Society. (1991). Petticoats and prejudice: Women and law in Baraka, A. (2002). Piecing together the struggle. Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, 4(2-3), Baraka, A. (2003). National liberation and politics Congress of African People. Benjamin, Akua. (2003). The Black/Jamaican criminal: The making of Ideology. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Toronto: University of Toronto. Black history knowledge as a path to psychological liberation for Black youth. Journal of Black Psychology, 42(6), 479-507. doi:10.1177/0095798415597840 Block, S., & Galabuzi, G-E. (2011). Canada’s colour coded labour market: The gap for racialized workers. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Bochner, A. P., & Ellis, C. (1996). Talking over ethnography. In C. Ellis & A. P. Bochner (Eds.), Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing (pp. 13-45).Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press. Bogues, A. (2003). Black heretics, Black prophets: Radical political intellectuals Routledge. Bogues, A. (2011). C.L.R. James, pan-Africanism and the Black radical tradition. Critical Arts,

Bogues, A. (2015). Stuart hall and the world we live in. Social and Economic Studies, 64(2), Brand, D. (1990). No language is neutral Coach House Press. Brand, D. (1996). In another place, not here (1st ed.) A.A. Knopf Canada. Brand, D. (1998). Bread out of stone (Rev. ed.) Vintage Canada. Brand, D. (2002). thirsty McClelland & Stewart. Brand, D. (2011). Chronicles: Early works Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Brand, D. (2014). Love enough Alfred A. Knopf Canada. Brathwaite, Keren. (1996). Keeping watch over our children: The role of African Canadian parents on the education team. In C. E. James (Ed.), Educating African Canadians (pp.107-130). Browne, S. (2015). Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness Duke University Press. Calliste, Agnes. 1993. “Race, Gender and Canadian Immigration Policy: Blacks from the Canada Sense Publishers. Canadian Scholars' Press. Caribbean, 1900-1932.” Journal of Canadian Studies 28(4): 131-148.century America Oxford University Press.century America Oxford University Press. Chang, H., Ngunjiri, F. W., & Hernandez, K. C. (2013). Collaborative autoethnography Left Coast Press. Chapman-Hilliard, C., & Adams-Bass, V. (2016). A conceptual framework for utilizing citizenship tables: Immigrant status and place of birth of respondent, sex, and age groups, Coffey, A. (1999). The ethnographic self. London: Sage.constitution of a community. International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, 1(1), 109. doi:10.1504/IJMBS.2014.065066 Contenta, S., & Rankin, J. (2009, June 6). Suspended sentences: Forging a school-to 30 prison pipeline?. Toronto Star. Retrieved from http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2009/06/06/suspended_sentences_forging_a_schoolto prison_pipeline.html Cooper, A. (2006). Copper woman and other poems Natural Heritage Books. Coulthard, G. S., & Alfred, T. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition University of Minnesota Press. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1999). Narrative inquiry. In J. P. Keeves & G. Lakomski (Eds.), Issues in Educational Research (pp. 132–40). Oxford: Elsevier Science. Cresswell, J. W. (2009). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methodsapproaches. London: Sage. Reed-Danahay, D. E. (1997). Introduction. In D. E. Reed-Danahay (Ed.), Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the self and the social (pp. 1-17). Oxford: Berg Das Gupta, T., James, C., Anderson, C., Galabuzi G., Maaka, R.C.A., & Arat-Koc, S. (2018) Davis, A. Y. (2011). Are prisons obsolete? Seven Stories Press. De Genova, N., & Peutz, N. M. (2010). The deportation regime: Sovereignty, space, and the

Department of Political Science University of Toronto Du Bois, W. E. B. 1868-1963. (1903). The souls of Black folk; essays and sketches. United States. Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 733-768). London: Sage. Ellis, C. (2009). Autoethnography as method. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press for the Biographical Research Center.10.1353/bio.0.0097 Ellis, C. (2007). Telling secrets, revealing lives: Relational ethics in research with intimate others. Qualitative Inquiry, 13, 3-29. Ellis, C., Bochner, A. P., Denzin, N. K., JR., H. L. B. G., Pelias, R., & Richardson, L. (2007). Coda: Talking and thinking about qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin, & M. D. Giardina (Eds.), Ethical Futures in Qualitative Research: Decolonizing the Politics of Knowledge (pp. 229-267). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Fanon, F. (1968). Black skin, white masks Grove Press. Fatal shooting by peel officer. The Toronto Star (Toronto, Ontario) Fearon, G., & Wald, S. (2011). The earnings gap between Black and white workers in Canada: Evidence from the 2006 census. Departement Des Relations Industrielles, Universitee Laval - ISSN 0034-379X – RI/IR, 66-3, 324. Fernando, S. (2012). Race and culture issues in mental health and some thoughts on ethnic identity. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 25(2), 113-123. Fernwood Publishing. Fiore, Black Lives Matter Toronto Co-Founder Needs To Resign , 2017 Freebody, P. (2003). Qualitative research in education. London: Sage. Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power, and liberation Bergin & Garvey. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.) Continuum. Freire, P. (2009). Chapter 2 from Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Galabuzi, G. (2006). Canada's Economic Apartheid: The Social exclusion of Racialized groups in the New Century Canadian Scholars's Press. Garza. A. (n.d.). In Facebook [personal]. Retrieved Janurary 13, 2018, from www.facebookcom.garza.ph.ca George J. Sefa Dei. (2008;2007;). Schooling As Community: Race, Schooling, and the Education of African Youth. Journal of Black Studies, 38(3), 346-366. doi:10.1177/0021934707306570 Gillis, W. (2016, ). Cop Saught to Card Carby, Inquest Told; Testimony Details Events Before Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness Harvard University Press. Giroux, H. A. (1993). Living Dangerously: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference P. Global Contexts, 2(2), 163-174.

100

Grayson, C. L. (2014). Civilising kakuma: Shared experience, refugee narratives and the Great Toronto Area. Toronto, Ontario: York University. H. (Eds), In Reimaging Anti-Oppression Social Practice Canadian Scholars. Hall, S. (2006). Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972-79 Routledge. Hall, S., Mercer, K., & Gates, H. L., Jr. (2017). The fateful triangle: Race, ethnicity, nation Harvard University Press. Hammar, A. (2014). Displacement economies in Africa: Paradoxes of crisis and creativity Zed Books. Hampton, R. (2010). Black Learners in Canada. Race & Class, 52(1), 103-110. Hart, M. A. (2009). Anti-colonial Indigenous social work: Reflections on an Aboriginal Hartman, S. V. (1997). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth- Henry, F., James, C., Li, P. S., Kobayashi, A., Smith, M. S., Ramos, H., . . . Enakshi, D. (2017). highschool-2014.pdf Hill Collins, P. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and The Politics history of racism in Canada, 1900-1950 Published for the Osgoode Society for Canadian Hitchcock, G., & Hughes, D. (1995). Research and the teacher. (2 ed.) London: Routledge. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom Routledge. hooks, b. (1995). Killing rage: Ending racism. New York: H. Holt and Co. Horst, C. (2006). Transnational nomads: How Somalis cope with refugee life in the dadaab camps of Kenya Berghahn Books.http://www.peopleforeducation.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/choosing- courses-for-https://thenewinquiry.com/towards-a-Black-muslim-ontology-of-resistance/ Idris, A. (2012). Rethinking identity, citizenship, and violence in Sudan. International Journal of Insomniac Press.Interchange, 39(2), 185-203. doi:10.1007/s10780-008-9059-y Jabonski, Who is Yusra Kholgail and Why Does She Matter?, 2016 James, C. (2017). Towards Race Equity in Education: The Schooling of Black Students. York University Toronto. James, C., & Benjamin, A. (2010). Race & Well-Being: The Lives, Hopes, and Activism of James, J. (2013). Seeking the beloved community: A feminist race reader SUNY Press. Kelley, R. D. G. (2002) Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination Beacon Press. Kelley, R. D. G. (2017). The rest of us: Rethinking settler and native. American Quarterly, 69(2), Kelly, J. (1998). Under the Gaze: Learning to be Black in White Society Fernwood. Kempf, A. (2009). Breaching the colonial contract: Anti-colonialism in the US and Canada Kyratzis, A., & Green, J. (1997). Jointly constructed narratives in classrooms: Co- Construction of friendship and community through language. Teaching and Teacher Education, 13, 17-37.

101

Khogail, Y. I was Vilified for Telling The Truth About Racism in Toronto. (2016). Toronto Star Kia M. Q. Hall. (2016). A transnational Black feminist framework: Rooting in feminist Kumsa, M. K., Mfoafo- M'Carthy, M., Oba, F., & Gaasim, S. (2014). The contours of anti-Black Racism. Lawrence, B., & Dua, E. (2005). Decolonizing Antiracism. Social Justice, 32(4 (102)), 120-143. Li, P. S. 1999. “Race and Ethnicity.” In Race and Ethnic Relations in Canada, ed. Peter S. Li. Lines. Lorde, Audre. (2007). Sister outsider: essays and speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press. lose your mother. NJES: Nordic Journal of English Studies, 12(2), 81. Luke, A. (1995). Chapter 1: Text and discourse in education: An introduction to critical Maggio, J. (2007). "can the subaltern be heard?": Political theory, translation, representation, and Mathieu, S. (2010). North of the color line: Migration and Black resistance in Canada, 1870- Maynard, R. (2017). Policing Black lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present McIlveen, P. (2008). Autoethnography as a method for reflexive research and practice invocational psychology. Australian Journal of Career Development, 17, 13-20. McKittrick, K. (2015). Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis Duke University Press. McKittrick, K., & Woods, C. A. (2007). Black geographies and the politics of place Between the Mercury Press Méndez, M. (2013;2014;). Autoethnography as a research method: Advantages, limitations and criticisms. Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal, 15(2), 279- 287.10.14483/udistrital.jour.calj.2013.2.a09 Mire. M. Towards A Black Muslim Ontology of Resistance. (2015). The New Inquiry. Moreau, Bernice. (1996). Black Nova Scotian women’s educational experience 1900-1945: A case study in race, gender and class relations. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Toronto, University of Toronto. Moten, F. (2013). Blackness and nothingness (mysticism in the flesh). South Atlantic Quarterly, Nayar, P. K. (2013). Mobility, migrant mnemonics and memory citizenship: Saidiya Hartman's Nayar, P. K. (2013). Mobility, migrant mnemonics and memory citizenship: Saidiya Hartman's lose your mother. NJES: Nordic Journal of English Studies, 12(2), 81. Newman, J., Bernier, C., Wood, M., & Bradley, D. (2010). Round table Saidiya Hartman, Lose nineteenth century Canada Published for Osgoode Society by Women's Press. Nourbese Philip, M. (1992). Frontiers: Selected essays and writings on racism and culture, of Empowerment (Rev. 10th anniversary ed.) Routledge. Ontario Human Rights Commission (n.d.). Human rights settlement reached with ministry of Ontario Human Rights Commission. Retrieved from http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/human-rights-

102

People for Education. (2014). Choosing courses for high school. Retrieved from perspectives McGill- Queen's University Press. Philip, M. N. (1992). Frontiers: Selected essays and writings on racism and culture, 1984-1992 Philip, M. N. (2008). Zong: As told to the author by setaey adamu boateng Mercury Philip, M. N. (2015). She tries her tongue, her silence softly breaks Wesleyan University Press. Philip, M. N. (2017). Blank: Essays & interviews (First ed.) BookThug. Prince, A. (2012). In the Black: New African Canadian Literature Insomniac Press. Richards, R. (2008). Writing the othered self: Autoethnography and the problem of objectification in writing about illness and disability. Qualitative Health Research, 1, 1717-1728. Ritchie, A. J. (2017). Invisible no more: Police violence against Black women and women of color. Robertson, G. (1994). Travellers' tales: Narratives of home and displacement Routledge. Robinson, C. J. (2000). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition University Saunders, P. J. (2008). Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman. Scholarship of Cedric Robinson. Race and Class, 47(2), 1-22. scholarship, framing contemporary Black activism. Meridians, 15(1), 86-105. Plummer, K. (2001). The call of life stories in ethnographic research. In P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland, & L. Lofland(Eds.), Handbook of ethnography (pp. 395-406). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Pollack, S. (2013). An imprisoning gaze: Practices of gendered, racialized and epistemic violence. International Review of Victimology, 19(1), 103-114. Sharpe, C. E. (2016). In The Wake: On Blackness and Being Duke University Press. Silverman, D. (2000). Doing qualitative research: A practical handbook. London: Sage. Simpson, L. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance Sium, B. (2014). How Black and Working Class Children are Deprived of Basic Education in Smith, C. A. (2016). Towards a Black feminist model of Black Atlantic liberation: Remembering beatriz nascimento. Meridians, 14(2), 71-87. doi:10.2979/meridians.14.2.06 Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples (Second Snorton, C. R (2014). What More Can I Say? (A prose-poem on antiBlackness).The Feminist Wire. June, 8, 2017 http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/09/can-say-prose-poem- Snorton, C. R. (2017). Black on both sides: A racial history of trans identity University of Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism Spivak, G. C. (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Sporton, D., Valentine, G., & Nielsen, K. B. (2006). Post conflict identities: Affiliations and Springer.

103

Statistics Canada. (2016) National House Hold Survey. 2016. Statistics Canada. (2016). 2016 Census of Canada topic based tabulations, immigration and The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities UBC Press. The Journal of Negro Education, 47(3), 266-282. doi:10.2307/2294601 Steeg, S. M., & McCarty, T. L. (2012). Autoethnography as method - by Heewon chang: Book reviews. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 43(1), 124-126. 10.1111/j.1548- 1492.2011.01163.x Thobani, S. (2007). Exalted subjects: Studies in the making of race and nation in Canada. Thomas, D. C. (2005). The Black radical tradition - theory and practice: Black studies and the Thompson, D. E., (2010) Seeing Like a Racial State: The Census and the Politics of Race in the Toronto Press.Toronto: University of Toronto Press.tracts, 2016 census. Trinh., M. H. (1994). Other Than Myself/My Other self. In Robertson,. G(Eds) Travellers' tales: Narratives of home and displacement. London: Routledge. Walcott, R. (2000). Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism Insomniac Press. Walcott, R. (2003). Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada (2nd rev. ed.) Insomniac Press. Walcott, R. (2016). Queer returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black studies Walker, B. (2008). The history of Immigration and Racism in Canada: Essential readings Walker, B. (2010). Race on trial: Black defendants in Ontario's criminal courts, 1858-1958 Walker, B. (2012). The African Canadian Legal Odyssey: Historical Essays University of Walrond, J. (2008). Towards a Global Citizenship Education for Caribbean Canadian youth. West, C. (1993). Race matters Beacon Press. Williams, J. E., & Ladd, R. (1978). On the Relevance of Education for Black Liberation. Winks, R. W. (1997). The Blacks in Canada: A history (2nd ed.) McGill-Queen's University Wolcott, H. F. (1994). Transforming qualitative data. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Wong (2004). Knowing Through Discomfort: A Mindfulness-based. Critical Social Work, 5(1) work in Canada (pp.25-41). Wynter, S., Bogues, A., & Eudell, D. L. (2010). The hills of Hebron I. Randle.

5/24/2018 I was vilified for telling the truth about racism in Toronto | The Star

ITHESTARI

personal non-copimereialu^llPSo order presentationîî#6îii:dferorohtoj ir content for distribution to colleagues, clieg|^£Customers, or inquire about permiss^H^^nsin^B

s vilifkd for telling the truth abdW

[emic anti-black, patriarchal and Islamophobic discriminatioh. It is to behnder constant ^^pe^^^^ikemineignOTe^^t^^ disappear and when they

jj^hite men asking me to prove that racism, Islamophobia and miso^iy exist,, V^Bshouldl haveB prove the existence of the forces that torment me and members of my eommii3||||||HP|^H Ibn't believe they ^^lHI^ worse, wheperpetuate them? And'iSo two months ago I tweete^ ; Allah give me stretJBno^K) cuss/kill these men and white folks out here today." I nutJiiv and traunaa into words, not action, nn]^^|^|ireat. Faced withl^te. I sought restraint fri^l liH^iport from my online community.

https://www.thestar.com/opiriiori/commeritary/2016/04/10/i-was-vilified-for-telling-the-truth-about-racism-in-toronto.html 1/4 5/24/2018 I was vilified for tailing the truth about racism in Toronto | The Star

)ntario's Pariiament^£ding, Monday AgLrij^ailLC (LUCAS OLENIUK / TO 5TAR

mPUPlrd to now. Black lives Matter Tor(^||P|||P>vem^PP||PP^nde outsidei||||| lic^fi|dmiarters for two eeks th ohgh Qdredibly difficu] weather f^ndi ions fighting for ^^^^H^ %e,âck on black life in Torobto. lhe protest was prbmpfed by the police shooting HpLoku, a man armed only with a hammer, and the lack of transparency that followed. We p^'SeCTi calling for an end to anti-black racism in all institutions,.from the racist practice of ^Bding tothetack of accountabilily', transparency%nd oversight of police officers who kill black people in city. And we got results. In two weete, we eonvinced city coiuicillois to pass a motion ifcjâll to investigate tfeedack of transparency mid anti-black structures of Ontario's Special ViPestigôhS' Unit. Afro-fest was aving a piblictn^gffiig with u^

^fee movement ^B«®#'tra^Oit, I beeaii^iAcrfiasin^^ visible and increasingljthe target ofJi wno opposenur canse. Jeny Agar, a Toronto Sunfcolhmnist with a long, well-documeihed rec^r oi enmity to oumnti-racist goals, attempted to lise my vilsibility to discredit me. A day after the conclusion of #BLMTOtentcity, he cited the aforementioned tweet in an attempt to delegitimize a sition my community as undeseiying of justice.

miPi not a public officia^P|P^||B|PPb% pf^ with "^^fllllpaiip weaponry'. I have never cOTitnbmeato the m ; ss ta getmg oTarammuni y. All I have done fiS'ed a' turn of phrase, a rhetfec3|flpurish, tor^ii my frustration and dared to be a person ca ling for

https://vraw.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/04/10/i-was-villfied-for-telling-the-truth-about-racism-in-toronto.html 2/4 y disturbing death threats from white country. Sonjehow a tweet I wrote out of anger, months before our protest began has become a jigger media story than our protest's many and profound accomplishments. The noise surrounding his tweet has also drowned out the discussion we sought to spark about the black lives of those who have died at the guns of police in this countiy. Journalists have incessantly harassed me, iesperate to get a comment on the tweet. Where were they during the entire two weeks of ?TMTOtentcity? Th|,iniedia.i&,part and parcel of how anti-black racism works, often black. jle are ignored or vilified when we speak the truth about our con^tk^h;

iifce black in Toronto is to have- been o| know somebody who has ^BIBHHI battered by the Toronto police. Our lives are plagued by institutional and individual anti-Slack yacism that compromises our access to safety, econoimic freedom, proper health care, food, housing, employmenme^ |||||||giiillBiiMi^^ iiii

ihe more than.two weeks black people fought for mfr humanity in protest outside of police headguarters,;|«d#ie¥ed u&That is something everyone in this city should be concerned abfut . f ^Despite all the \iolence/^e endure when we resist, we can never lose sight of the issues; we niust ,con±inua4p;S^hJustice and accpuntability for our community. Y7e only have more workho db, a< |||^*is on^|||||||||||||g||g||^. Blac^Hnjn^tter, here as everywhere, and they always

ira

fmetion - April ig, stoi6i^f^^^d&^^pd^^^^^n0hp^^^^^^^^^^^T^î êfeêd to the Toronto Police's Special InvestigdtionsJJniL ln fact, the SIUis an indepervdent arm'STength agency of the Ontario government.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/04/10/i-was-vilified4oraelling4he4mth-about-racism-in-toronto 3/4