Turning allies into outsiders
A year ago this month, members of the anti-racism group Black Lives Matter Toronto marched through the city’s Little Jamaica neighbourhood and demanded justice for Andrew Loku, a man from South Sudan with a history of mental illness who had recently been killed by police.
The protesters spilled out onto the Allen Expressway and called for, among other things, police transparency on the questionable circumstances around Loku’s death. They stood in the middle of the road alongside concerned members of the community and blocked the busy thoroughfare for two hours. The demonstration inconvenienced and annoyed many, which was exactly the point.
In the two years since its founding, BLM Toronto has worked tirelessly to make itself “impossible to ignore,” as co-founder Sandy Hudson told the Star earlier this year. They have demanded and been granted public meetings with the mayor and the premier. They have camped outside police headquarters, disrupted police board meetings and made scenes at Queen’s Park.
These tactics, while widely scorned, have yielded undeniable results. Nine months after the Little Jamaica march, the coroner’s office announced it would investigate the Loku shooting and credited BLM Toronto for prompting the decision. The group’s members played a crucial role in ending the discriminatory practice of police carding and shining a light on other troubling police practices. And they have amplified an important conversation in the city about institutional racism and the ways in which it not only affects lives, but also takes them.
Given the stakes of the Black Lives Matter fight, the confrontational approach should not surprise.
Yet, as the BLM Toronto protest at Sunday’s Pride parade demonstrates, when aimed at the wrong target, these tactics may produce less righteous results.
Invited as an “honoured guest” of the parade, the group held a sit-in along the way, stopping the procession for about half an hour. They issued nine demands, including increased representation of black people among Pride Toronto staff and, most controversially, a ban on police floats in future parades. Only after Pride’s executive director, Mathieu Chantelois, signed the list did the group allow the march to continue. (Chantelois has since backtracked on the promises.)
The trouble is that the cost of this particular action was to another worthy cause, whose goals of exposing and opposing bigotry overlap with BLM Toronto’s own. The Pride parade, imperfect though it may be, provides an important annual opportunity to reflect on how far the LGBT rights movement has come and the work still to be done.
Why would BLM Toronto, which cites “tackling heteronormativity” as one of its goals, approach this event in confrontation rather than friendship? As Chantelois said, “They could have sent me an email.” Indeed, many of the demands were totally reasonable, and as Pride executives have said, would have been granted.
Instead, while provoking exactly the kind of discussion it wanted, it seems to have eclipsed the also-important conversation around LGBT rights that Pride is meant to promote. This seems antithetical to the group’s stated principles.
The same can be said of the demand to ban an official police presence from the parade. BLM Toronto has no doubt raised crucial questions about police culture and policy. But surely it is to the good that police, as individuals or institution, publicly endorse inclusion and tolerance and, ideally, develop positive relationships with the diverse communities they are meant to serve.
As the Star has argued before, criticisms of BLM Toronto and its methods have often been nothing more than thinly veiled expressions of racism. But it’s hard to square the group’s latest action with its stated goals. The problem is not the tactics but the target. Black Lives Matter should think twice about making outsiders of its allies in the fight for inclusion and respect.
The disruptive tactics of anti-racism group at Sunday’s Pride Parade may have backfired