‘I felt like the entire world was watching’
Pascale Diverlus is sitting in the cold at police headquarters on Day 11 of the occupation by Black Lives Matter.
People are still asleep, but she says in an hour everyone will get up and begin to clean the space, dreary under the overcast sky. Police have already been outside, taking down posters they said blocked the entrance and compromised public safety.
She answered Sandy Hudson’s Facebook post to hold the vigil after the Ferguson shooting because, she says, it was important to show solidarity with the family of Michael Brown and acknowledge Torontonians feeling the same way.
Meanwhile, she was glued to her TV, awaiting the grand jury decision on charging police.
“I felt like the entire world was watching,” the 21-year-old says. The jury decided not to indict the officer who shot the unarmed teen in Missouri.
“We needed to come together and heal and mourn,” Diverlus says of the vigil. “We cried. We shouted his name. This isn’t just happening in the States . . . anti-black racism is alive and well in the city.”
The journalism student was already an activist. She’d served as a vice-president of equity at the Ryerson Students’ Union and had worked at the university’s Centre for Women and Trans People.
Diverlus moved to Canada from Haiti with her parents and grew up in Hamilton. Her mother is a personal support worker and her father works for a bank and is a reverend.
Her brother, Rodney Diverlus, 26, a professional dancer in Calgary, has supported Black Lives Matter Toronto behind the scenes.
Diverlus says she has been carded, or documented by police, in Hamilton and Toronto three times.
“It happened to my dad, to my brother. As immigrants, often we don’t know of our rights. Often we are afraid . . . We don’t know that we can say no.
“The dehumanization that you feel after encountering those experiences is something that I can’t even describe.”
A revelation in the ring
Janaya Khan is at the other end of the phone line, pacing the floor of a hotel room in Minneapolis. The BLM Toronto co-founder is set to give a talk to students at a private college in nearby St. Paul about social justice.
The speaking engagement also means Khan will have time to debrief organizers of Black Lives Matter Minneapolis, who earlier occupied 4th Precinct police headquarters for 18 days.
That occupation, which Khan was a part of, began after Jamar Clark was shot in the head by police during his arrest in November. Reports say he was unarmed but tried to reach for an officer’s gun. Protesters demanded more transparency in investigations of fatal shootings by police.
For Khan, a York University graduate in English, the door to a career as a professional speaker was opened by boxing.
The Toronto native first entered the ring at the Toronto Newsgirls Club. Khan “stumbled” into an anti-oppression workshop after someone mentioned it at boxing.
There, Khan says “people were talking about racism and classism and sexism. I didn’t know people could have those conversations and I thought two things to myself: One, I can do this better. And two, I don’t have the language yet. But what I did know was boxing.”
Khan would take a huge hockey bag full of smelly gloves and drag them to conferences in Kingston or Montreal, holding free workshops on how to box. Then Khan started talking about issues such as violence and consent for women and trans people. The 28-year-old is gender-non-conforming and friends refer to Khan as “they.”
Khan mixed in research and experience, and speaking engagements in Seattle and Detroit followed.
Success came after a life in Toronto marked by hardship. Khan grew up in TCHC housing near Gerrard St. and Pape Ave. before being removed and placed in a group home by children’s aid. Khan’s mother had mental-health issues and received little support. Khan’s brother stayed in shelters such as Covenant House, while Khan’s twin sister stayed with a friend.
“I had multiple charges,” Khan says. “I had been arrested several times. I’d been beaten up by the cops before and humiliated by them several times over.
“I spent a lot of my high school years in Flemingdon Park or Regent Park with the rest of my friends and so there was always a heavy police presence. And very little support or infrastructure for folks like me.”
The former Crown ward says “looking at that experience now and talking about these things, I realized in so many ways that the image of Toronto, and of blackness in it, is one that I have really lived myself.”
Khan, who is married to Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of BLM in the U.S., was south of the border when the Toronto occupation began but came back to join in after the first week — even though crossing back into the U.S. usually requires Khan to show a litany of documents and a return ticket.
“I don’t want to look back and say I didn’t go because of a couple of gigs,” Khan says. “Or I didn’t go because I was afraid.”