Schooled in the art of protest
Alexandria Williams is in the courtyard of police headquarters near a poster of Chief Mark Saunders that bears the words “Wanted for murder.”
The 27-year-old isn’t bothered that Saunders, Toronto’s first black chief, could be inside, looking out the big windows at 40 College St. that provide a fishbowl view of the Black Lives Matter Toronto occupation.
“I’m not scared,” says Williams. “I feel like the things that we’re doing is no comparison to what it is to be black in Toronto.”
Williams was 21 when she says she was pulled over by police near York University and asked if she was aware of drug trafficking in the area. Officers told her she fit the description of “someone who looks like they could traffic drugs,” she says. The incident ended, she adds, when police saw her mother in the car.
Another time on the York campus, police asked her to empty her book bag to prove to she was a student.
Williams came from Bermuda in 2008 to study theatre at York. She had seven different scholarships, without which she couldn’t afford the international student fees.
Her parents still live in Bermuda. Her father joined the Black Panthers as a student in New York in the ’70s. Her grandmother was a member of Bermuda’s Progressive Labour Party.
When she answered Hudson’s Facebook post in 2014, Williams was head of the York United Black Students’ Alliance. She had never done organizing on such a wide scale.
The theatre graduate says BLM Toronto decided to include art forms such as singing, dancing or poetry in all its actions.
Drumming kicked off one rally during the occupation of police headquarters in late March. Volunteer DJs often came to play music during the occupation. And on one Saturday evening, a small group of women and men sang hymnals, their harmonies echoing off the granite walls of police HQ as they would in a church.
The group spent 15 days there, staying after police doused the fire they had built in a drum and ripped out the tents they’d put up to represent Caribana, Africville, Andrew Loku and U of T’s transitional year program.
“Them putting out our fire, them putting out our heat — they just lit the flame,” Williams says.
‘They don’t see us as human beings’
Words pour out of Yusra Khogali like water from a tap, revealling a lot of pent-up frustration and anger.
“I just knew from the start that there was something wrong with the conditions that we lived in — being exposed at an early age to police violence, police brutality,” she says after arriving at the occupation and giving Williams a brief hug.
Later, a tweet posted by Khogali back in February, and unearthed by a Newstalk 1010 radio host this month, would put the Black Lives Matter co-founder in the centre of a media storm.
“PLZ Allah, give me the strength not to cuss/kill these men and white folks out here today. plz plz plz,” wrote Khogali. In an opinion piece in the Star, she later wrote that the media’s overwhelming response to the tweet, instead of the goals of the occupation, was an example of antiblack racism.
Khogali grew up in Regent Park after emigrating at age 8 from Nairobi, Kenya, with her family, who were originally from Sudan.
“Seeing so many of my friends that I grew up with lose their life to gun violence in really messed-up ways — it was such a real and normal thing for us,” she says.
She was about 15 when she stood up to an officer who was questioning one of her friends in a “derogatory and demeaning way” about something she says her friend knew nothing about.
Khogali told the officer to leave him alone and asked: “Why are you violating us? We’re just chilling in our neighbourhood, our home.
“He grabbed me by the hand and shoved me in his police van and told me to shut the f--- up,” she says. “And if I talked anymore he would cuff me up and take me to jail.
“They don’t see us as human beings,” she says.
In school, Khogali recalls, teachers told her she wouldn’t amount to anything; she says the subjects she was taught didn’t reflect her reality.
She felt even more disenfranchised by the city’s makeover of Regent Park into a mixed-income neighbourhood, a gentrification process she found “isolating.”
“Everything that represents being black in the city is essentially what I experienced when I was young.”
Khogali became active as a spokenword poet, railing against injustice, stereotypes and poverty. She gave it up when she entered U of T and joined the student movement, talking to black students about how to “challenge the Eurocentric curriculum, to challenge the whiteness that we’re surrounded by and the violence that we experience every day.” She is finishing a master’s at OISE in social justice education.
The occupation of police headquarters and the demonstrations at Premier Kathleen Wynne’s home, city council and Queen’s Park were necessary because “we have no choice,” says Khogali.
“So many elders in the space have been telling us: ‘We have been doing this when we were young and we’re 60 now and we’re still fighting.’
“I don’t want to do this for my children to keep fighting,” says Khogali. “It stops here. We’re done. We’re fed up.”