City’s anti-racism protests a defining moment, organizers and experts say
Calgary has never been known for protests, and crowds taking to the city’s streets en masse has historically been a rare occurrence.
But that didn’t stop thousands of Calgarians from marching through the city’s core Wednesday in memory of George Floyd and other black victims of police brutality in North America. The solidarity protest, held by YYC Justice for All Victims of Police Brutality, flooded Memorial Drive and the 10th Street N.W. bridge before ending with a candlelight vigil at city hall.
It was the second protest in a week after thousands gathered in East Village Monday.
For LJ Parker, an organizer with the Calgary Supports Black Lives Matter group, the huge turnouts came as a welcome surprise.
“You have to think about everything you’ve personally gone through and a lot of us have experiences with racism,” Parker said. “To have people come into a group and actually listen to you is really awesome.
“It was great to see allies there. We didn’t want a strictly black group.”
Maki Motapanyane, a Mount Royal University professor who studies social movements and race, said many of Calgary’s community members were likely moved morally to participate in solidarity with those protesting in other parts of North America against police brutality.
However, she says economic and job-market challenges and cuts to government services, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, have added urgency for many, even though the issue of police violence against people of colour has been prevalent for decades.
“For a lot of people of African descent, the question was, why now? Given that this issue has been ongoing, given that there has been so much advocacy up until now,” Motapanyane said.
“I think there’s a particular kind of receptivity now to issues of vulnerability and human dignity.”
A refrain repeated over the past week by some — including by Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who later walked back the comments — is that racism isn’t systemic in Canada or is less of a problem than in the United States.
Motapanyane said it’s important for Calgarians to understand that Canada and Alberta have been grappling with racism for as long as they have existed. For example, Alberta in the early 20th century had official documents meant to prevent black people from settling in the province.
“It’s not uncommon for someone who doesn’t experience something to not be able to understand it,” she said.
“In that sense, it’s not uncommon for white folks to have little to no awareness or profound understanding of racism.”
Parker said she has dealt with racism for most of her life, including with her white peers casually using racial slurs, including the N-word, in her presence.
“That’s probably the most common thing, actually, which is insane,” Parker said.
“There’s also little ones like people implying I’m a diversity hire and the only reason I got hired is because I’m black, which is really frustrating.”
She also detailed anxieties about being pulled over by police while driving, recalling that at one point she and a group of black friends were stopped multiple times by the same officer while driving to the mountains.
Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi said Thursday he was impressed by the size of the protest and echoed comments about experiencing casual racism, including in a tweet from prominent businessman W. Brett Wilson on Wednesday.
“Yesterday, it was the biggest protest I’ve ever seen (in Calgary), but I kept hearing words like ‘love’ and ‘understanding ’ and ‘listening ’ interspersed with words like ‘action’ and ‘change’ and ‘justice,’ and for me, that’s what really makes a difference here,” Nenshi said.
“One of the challenges we have in our community is that ease with which many of us go to a place of casual racism, even instinctively. … We need to figure out how to get that out of our system so it doesn’t affect our system even more.”
According to MRU professor Roberta Lexier, there have only been a handful of significant protests held in Calgary this century, including a march opposing the Iraq War in 2003 and the first Women’s March in 2017.
She says protests are taking place more frequently lately, however, with the global climate strike and rallies in opposition to government budget cuts also taking place in the past year.
“I think we’ve just started to see numbers creeping up, people getting more and more involved in these kinds of events,” Lexier said.
“Historically, there haven’t been big protest movements, but I think over the past three or four years we’ve been seeing that start to change and we’re starting to see people embrace this as a tactic more frequently.”