A year after anti-racism protest, only token gestures
‘I don’t see anything change much’
Editor’s note: The Black Lives Matter movement has been pivotal in the efforts of raising awareness about racism and other racial inequities, and the year since George Floyd’s murder has amplified this message. This week, Saltwire takes a closer look at the racism the Black community experiences in Atlantic Canada and the solutions that could help effect change.
Quentrel Provo remembers how he and his cousins would be questioned by police while playing hide-and-seek.
He’s been asked if he was lost while in the building where he works.
And even as he participates in cultural panels advising the Halifax Regional Police, he gets pulled over because he’s a Black man driving a Mercedes.
“It took me 17 years to get to that Mercedes. Worked my butt off. And the profiling that I’ve experienced? I’ve been pulled over five times since I got that Mercedes in September,” he says.
It was almost a year ago that Provo — the founder/chief executive officer of Stop the Violence — and thousands of others rallied in downtown Halifax on June 1, 2020. Days before, George Floyd had been murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis.
That the rally happened during a pandemic was not lost on Provo. For him, it helped drive home the seriousness of the intent behind the people who gathered.
They were putting themselves at risk. Provo — with immune issues and a heart condition — was putting himself at risk.
The message they were sending was more important.
“It was more than just a protest. People risked their health, coming out. Old and young. That was a big part of it,” he says. “It was a moment. And to see how many people showed up within Halifax was such a powerful moment.”
People of different races gathered together, side by side, to raise their voices together.
“Here in little old Nova Scotia, where we do have issues with being Black in Nova Scotia and dealing with racism, to see the community, the province, come together, where everyone was like, ‘This is an issue that needs to be dealt with,’” he says. “When this all came out, so many people of privilege were scared to have uncomfortable conversations. And I said to them, ‘You’re scared of having an uncomfortable conversation. How do you think I feel, living uncomfortable every day, in a grocery store, getting followed, because I’m Black?’”
St. Mary’s University professor Rachel Zellars also attended with her children. It wasn’t an abstract lesson about political speech or justice.
“Bringing my children to the protest was simply about teaching them about the importance of protest and the ways in which their lives as Black children and as Black adults would be marked by more events such as this one, throughout the rest of their lives,” says Zellars, who studies the experience of Black migration and slavery in the Maritimes.
“I wanted my children to understand the importance of uprising and protest and a place to put, actively, their rage, in response to not only police killing, but state violence and all of the other injustices they were going to encounter in their lives.”
Black children don’t have the privilege of being sheltered from realities like the protest, she points out.
“As Black parents, we have no choice. With early childhood moments of reckoning, whereby we have to face death, police killing, and the possibility of both for our children. That moment of reckoning comes well before adolescence, well before puberty,” she says.
“And so, as a society, part of our reckoning with anti-blackness needs to entail what childhood means to black people and the way that white people get to preserve the myth of innocence in childhood. In short, Black families do not have that luxury.”
‘LIKE ELECTRICITY’
Dr. Lynn Jones, a long-time advocate for social justice, was uncertain about going to a demonstration during a pandemic. She credits the rally held days earlier in Truro’s Victoria Park for priming activists for the Halifax event.
Another Black life — that of 29-year-old Regis Korchinskipaquet, who plunged 24 stories to her death on May 27 during a domestic disturbance call — was the core of that rally.
“It was what revved people up. It was the first protest during the pandemic, and people were afraid, myself included, to come to that event, but it was like electricity. The electricity was unbelievable,” she says.
“It was because of the electricity and everybody coming together, wanting the same things, Black, white, there was so much diversity. The people that organized that were the really brave ones, because that was unheard of, to hold a rally during the pandemic.”
The world is not divided into “then” and “now.” Zellars has heard all the arguments stemming from that. The idea that the emancipations of 1834 in the British Empire and 1865 in the United States are somehow part of a distant past with no consequences today? She’s had enough of that.
“In this moment, I hope that there’s enough impetus and enough education for that narrative to be destroyed forever,” she says.
She hopes that when people watch Floyd’s murder, they “make the connection that Derek Chauvin absolutely believed he had a right to do what he did to that Black body. He believed it. He looked into the camera directly, and he refused to move even when foam was coming out of George Floyd’s mouth, even when he said, dozens of times, ‘I can’t breathe.’”
White people have believed they could do anything they wanted to Black bodies for centuries, she says.
“And within the institution of policing, the belief that cops can do whatever they want to Black bodies is part of the history of policing in North America,” she adds.
NO CHANGE
Zellars, Provo and Jones all acknowledge how historic that day in Halifax felt. So how can we justify the inaction that has followed?
“The execution of George Floyd was in no way unique, sadly. What’s different this time? We still don’t know. In our current moment, we are beginning to see what many of us expected would be the case,” says Zellars.
And that’s a steely resistance — a refusal, even — to make good on the promises and statements that corporations and institutions touted in the months of the aftermath, she says.
“In this moment, in realtime, we are watching the ways in which organizations and institutions a year or less ago made the most lofty commitments around diversity and equity and anti-blackness that they’ve ever made, and are simply not following through,” Zellars says.
Provo only sees token gestures — Viola Desmond’s image on a bill doesn’t change history or current events. He wonders who will be there when the lights go out and the work begins.
“We’re still fighting these issues. What are you doing to change those issues going forward?” Provo asks.
“After it’s not a hashtag, after it’s not trending on social media, after it’s not in the media — who’s going to be those real people, those people of privilege, those people that are going to be behind the scenes working on real change?”
Jones has been in the fight for decades, too long to be moved by words and pronouncements.
“I don’t see anything change much. I see the apology that the police chief had done, which doesn’t hold a hill of beans,” she says. “Because the community didn’t even get an opportunity to really respond to that. The police aren’t defunded. They gave them, as they say, more money than they ever had.
“The armoured vehicle we got rid of, so that’s gone. There’s not been an awful lot of change since then, so that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it.”