A NEW GENERATION LEADS
For Anastasia Marcelin, last Sunday’s march against racism and police brutality was ‘our moment to speak.’ She’s at the forefront of a re-energized Black activism — a force to be reckoned with, Jesse Feith discovers.
‘People say I want to be some sort of vedette, but I couldn’t care less about that,’ says Anastasia Marcelin, one of the leaders of last Sunday’s march against racism. ‘The only thing that matters to me is bringing a child into a better world than the one I see
right now. That’s all. That’s the only thing.’
Wearing a white shirt with the words “No justice, no peace” across her back, Anastasia Marcelin chanted, stomped, and called for change for nearly three hours last Sunday, leading thousands as they marched against racism and police brutality in Montreal.
Microphone in hand, she climbed atop a van and — her other fist pumping the air — called out Premier François Legault and other politicians to consider who put them in power. She pulled young protesters away from heated standoffs with police officers, hugging them and telling them there’s a better way.
She collapsed to her knees, overcome with emotion, after reading from a list of Black men killed by police in Montreal, thinking of all the nights her own mother worried herself sick when Marcelin’s younger brother didn’t come home on time.
And she apologized, in front of thousands of people, for something she feels unjustly brought criticism against the very community she’s fighting for.
Since late May, when the issue of systemic racism and policing was thrust back into the spotlight following George Floyd’s death, Marcelin, 37, has emerged as one of the more outspoken leaders of the movement in Montreal.
In her short time in the public spotlight, she’s also become a lighting rod for online vitriol and hatred.
But on the heels of what she considers a monumental showing last Sunday, she finds herself re-energized and committed as ever to her mission: pushing minority rights forward in Quebec and inspiring the next generation to do the same, no matter the toll it can take.
“People think we were out there doing this for fun. Let me tell you, it’s not fun for us,” Marcelin says a few days removed from the march, walking around a park in the city’s north end.
“But this is our moment to speak. To have our voices heard.”
Marcelin was born in a poor neighbourhood in Port-au-prince, Haiti — “I’m a child of the ghetto, not ashamed to say it” — and moved to Montreal North with her family as a teen in 1999.
It was a difficult adjustment. Though she came with her parents and four siblings, she felt uprooted and lost without her extended family.
Even in her youth, she was already assertive and unafraid to speak her mind. Her youngest brother, on the other hand, was the most reserved and polite of the siblings.
But she witnessed a change in him as his new surroundings started to take hold. In Montreal North, he couldn’t go to the corner store to get milk without being stopped by police, she says, or be seen with friends without being considered part of a street gang.
By the time he was an adult, he had become entangled in the justice system. If it could happen to her brother, Marcelin says, then she knew it could happen to anyone.
“That’s when I understood if we didn’t do anything,” she says, “every son could turn out the same way.”
In 2012, she started dabbling in activism. It grew from there. By 2015, she was regularly posting videos to Facebook. In 2017, she ran in the municipal election as a candidate in Montreal North.
She’s been involved in the community ever since, whether through working with youths, collecting goods for asylum seekers or hosting fashion shows, called “50 nuances of beauty,” that aim to highlight diversity.
Four years ago, she founded the Ligue des noirs nouvelle génération, wanting to put the emphasis on a new wave of Black activism and a different way of doing things.
The group had been planning last weekend’s march since December, after the city’s public consultation on systemic racism and discrimination came to a close. It feared the attention on the issue would wane if nothing was done.
The protest was first scheduled for mid-march, but was cancelled due to the pandemic. Then George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, and protests erupted across the United States.
It was Marcelin’s decision, with the support of others behind the event, to invite Montreal police chief Sylvain Caron to the march.
She wanted the protest to be peaceful and build bridges.
“To me, the police aren’t our enemy,” she says. “Police officers are only individuals, some who haven’t been trained well. But it’s the system that gave them the power — the government, politicians. It’s that system we need to fight. We need the police to do their job: serve the community.”
Caron, facing mounting questions over systemic racism within the department, immediately agreed to participate.
But the backlash from inviting the chief was swift. It came from other organizers, who said it was disrespectful to victims of racial profiling and police brutality, but especially from young people who planned on participating. Many said they weren’t ready to take that step and feared it sent the wrong message.
After a restless night, early Saturday morning, Marcelin sent a message to the police force, rescinding Caron’s invitation. Overwhelmed, she hadn’t noticed the spelling errors it included.
The Montreal police service then shared a screen grab of her initial message to its Twitter account, typos and all. People latched onto the errors, ridiculing the message and questioning the group’s credibility.
It weighed on Marcelin as the march approached. At a rally just before, she stood on a stage and apologized. It was her idea to invite the police chief, she said. And she who wrote the message.
“I’m human, I make mistakes. I’m learning every day,” she says later, saying she should have waited to calm down before writing the message. “The community shouldn’t have to carry the burden of my emotions.”
For Mathieu Léonard, a community advocate in Montreal North who’s worked closely with her, Marcelin is often disproportionately targeted as a woman of colour.
“She takes up a lot of space. She’s very out there,” Léonard says. “I tell her sometimes, ‘You’re nuts.’ But she doesn’t hold back. She raises her voice and stands up for what she believes in. She doesn’t always listen, but she gets the message across.”
Last year, as debate raged over the Quebec government’s immigration plan, Marcelin posted a 40-minute-long live video to Facebook. It went on to be viewed more than 23,000 times.
In it, she criticized the government for not appreciating immigrants. But in a one-minute clip that is being resurfaced this week, she also said “the majority of you all” sit around collecting welfare cheques while immigrants get up and go to work.
What people sharing the clip don’t realize, Marcelin says, is that she was reacting to comments left on the video in real time.
They included repeated racial slurs, hateful and misogynistic insults, that escalated to outright death threats: “You on your period, blackie?”; “There are containers for people like you”; “I thought I was watching the Planet of the Apes"; “Someone should burn a cross on a lawn somewhere.”
As the abuse continued for weeks, Paule Robitaille, MNA for Bourassa-sauvé, denounced the situation at the National Assembly.
Robitaille described Marcelin as a dedicated leader at the heart of her community and a “force of nature.”
“And yet it still hurts,” Robitaille said of the attacks.
Marcelin says she can take the abuse, although she admits it hasn’t been easy on her mental health or her family. But putting herself out there for the cause remains a choice, she said, and one she always knew would come with consequences.
“People say I want to be some sort of vedette, but I couldn’t care less about that,” she says. “The only thing that matters to me is bringing a child into a better world than the one I see right now. That’s all. That’s the only thing.”
The protest had ended but some still lingered downtown.
On Ste-catherine St., a group of younger protesters had come faceto-face with police in full riot gear. Tempers were flaring. It felt like something was going to give.
Marcelin got word of it happening and, blocks away, ran toward the crowd. She put herself between the police and protesters, most of them younger than her.
“I’m with you, but this is not the way to do it,” she pleaded, some yelling back at her. “We need to do things the right way.”
Marcelin grabbed hold of one of the protesters and embraced her. Both were shaking with emotion. “We’re dying, we’re dying. They’re killing us every day,” the woman screamed. Marcelin held her even tighter.
It was a moment, she would later say, that encapsulates everything she’s pushing for.
“I don’t want them fighting with the cops,” she says of the younger generation.
“I want them to go to school. I want them to get an education,” she says. “I want them to enter the system, to become police officers, lawyers, mayors, premiers. To become the first Black police chief in Montreal.”
When Marcelin got home after the protest, she sat down in her living room, put her phone away, and dropped her face in her hands. It was a long and draining day. She felt numb, almost as if she didn’t exist.
On the table, her phone kept vibrating with notifications — congratulations, criticisms, people asking what comes next.
When she finally looked at it, she saw the full size of the crowd that had marched, not only in Montreal, but also in Quebec City, Sherbrooke, and as far as Rimouski.
“This is really happening, isn’t it?” she thought to herself. “And it’s only the start.”