Black Victimhood

"The likelihood of a Black person being shot by police in Toronto is just as high as for a Black person in the average city in the United States."                                 "The time for debate about whether systemic racism or anti-Black racism exists is over."                                                                                                                         "It is incumbent upon us all to re-envision the practices, the policies, the procedures, and importantly, the perceptions that shape policing in our city."            "The disproportionality, and the disparities in the commission report are more than just statistics. They are Black lives and Black Lives Matter."                                    Ena Chadha, interim chief commissioner, Ontario Human Rights Commission

"[Black people are more likely to be] arrested, charged, overcharged, struck, shot or killed by Toronto police."                                                                                "[Black people in Toronto are] disproportionately [arrested, charged and subjected to use of force by the city's police force]."                                                                 'A Disparate Impact' report

"This disparity cannot be explained away by racial differences in criminal history, civilian behaviour towards the police at the time of the incident, civilian weapons use, civilian mental illness, civilian intoxication, or local crime rates."                   Scot Wortley, criminology professor, University of Toronto

Black Lives Matter protests in Toronto. (Evan Tsuyoshi Mitsui/CBC)

"At the end of the day, when someone calls 911 they need to know that a police officer will show up at their door." "But is there an opportunity for other community agencies to do more? Absolutely."  "[Ontario has been] very active in doing things already [by increasing investment in community mental health and addiction resources, which account for 40 percent of calls to emergency services]."                                                                                   Ontario Solicitor General Sylvia Jones

Critics of Toronto police call for reform in the way mental health calls are treated, that mental health professionals, not police should be responding to mental health calls, pointing to the death of a 29-year-old Black woman, Regis Korchinski-Paquet who fell from a balcony while police were present in her apartment, called there by a relative who had alerted police to something going awry, wanting her taken to a mental health facility. For their part, police felt they were responding to a possible assault call. 

It's worth noting that Toronto has a (newly retiring) Black police chief, appointed back in 2015. His deputy chief was also Black, and is now Ottawa's chief of police. Many police chiefs in the United States are also Black. Some of them are Black women. Yet police in both countries are charged with prejudicial racism, that they deliberately target Blacks for suspicion of crime commission. Police are a professional public safety group. They become very familiar in the commission of their duties at every level where crime most commonly emanates from.

They also develop a fine-tuned sense of the relationship between elements of any population with the culture of crime. With gangs, drug dealing, weapons possession, and all the public/social malfeasance that follows from those propensities. Blacks do indeed become targeted for questioning, stopping, suspicion of anti-social acts, from drug dealing and weapons smuggling to competitive challenges between gangs leading to shootings, wounding and death.

That being so, they become a 'targeted' community in the sense that police, the guardians of public safety and security, are attuned to what occurs in those communities, dealing with the outcomes as best they can. Yet, in 'progressive' social cultures they come under fire by complaints and accusations that they're too hard on the criminal element among Black populations, as though being Black requires them to have special consideration. Black police and their Black police chiefs seem somehow to believe otherwise.

They respect their own cultural community to the extent that they see no reason why those within the community cannot be expected to respect society and their place within it by adhering to the public weal, eschewing criminality and living normal lives rather than choosing to be thugs, drug dealers and gang members. But the Ontario Human Rights Commission is convinced that the problem lies not with the culture of the Black underclass community but with police in general, whose reaction is too harsh.

The report published by the Ontario Human Rights commission lingered on the fact that Black people representing 8.8 percent of the population of Toronto, manage to represent close to a third of all charges. Refusing to credit the fact that smoke both precedes and follows a fire, the OHRC prefers to blame police reaction rather than a dire need for the Black social underclass to reform itself. The OHRC's first interim report after its inquiry was launched in 2017 found between 2013 and 2017 it was 20 times likelier for a Black person to be shot and killed by police than a white person.

Whether the study undertook to assess and analyze the number of Blacks shot, wounded or killed by other Blacks is as yet unknown, but that this is a problem of immense proportions certainly is not. The enquiry also highlighted that officers sometimes lack a legal basis for stopping or detaining Black people, searching them without justification, making unnecessary arrests and laying unnecessary charges. In the opinion of the Human Rights Commission obviously, which knows nothing about finely honed police intuition and experience.

The protests sparked by the police-involved death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May which led to protests and demonstrations by Black Lives Matter worldwide, that were often offensive and violent and ultimately led to the impression that among Blacks white lives don't matter, did nothing to achieve sympathy other than among 'woke' progressives whose 'guilt-by-whiteness-colonialism' sought to expunge itself through unquestioning support.

The Tragedy of Racism : History of America

"It's part of this bigger story, part of a history that we can learn from."
"The store should be one of the places [where] we share Emmett's story."
Reverend Wheeler Parker, 79, Money, Mississippi

"I did a lot of listening. And what I heard was a lot of pain."
"To move forward we've got to tell the story. We've got to tear off the scab and keep telling it."
Donna Spell, member, Emmett Till Memorial Commission

Emmett Till in a photograph taken by his mother on Christmas Day 1954

"Our community had been running from this since 1955."
"It's been complicated working with the family [that owns the original store involved in a white supremacist atrocity against a black teen]."
"I don't know if it's money or they want control of the story that's told, which has direct legacy implications for their father."
"I am hopeful that one day they can see a positive legacy by reclaiming the past."
Patrick Weems, co-founder, Emmett Till Interpretive Center

This is a dreadful drama that took place in Mississippi in 1955 when on an August day a young black teen, all of 14 years old, visiting the community of Money from his home in Chicago, walked into a grocery store alongside his cousin who lived in the town, to buy candy. The store, Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market, was owned by the white Bryant family. The owner of the store, Roy Bryant and his half brother J.W. Milam murdered the young boy.

The claim was that Emmett Till who was accompanied by his cousin Wheeler Parker, had whistled  at the white woman behind the counter. Because of this purported incident, the men in the store kidnapped, tortured and hung the boy, then dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. They had tethered a 34-kilogram fan from a cotton gin to his neck, a symbolism reflecting just how serious an affront against racial dignity he had committed.

In a photo provided by his family, Emmett Till poses in Chicago about six months before he was killed in 1955.

The boy had been kidnapped from his uncle’s home four days following the encounter at the store when the two men in the dead of night purposed to carry out their horrible plan. The boy's nose had been crushed, his left eye was gone, his right eye dangling on his cheek while a hole had been blown in his right temple and most of his teeth were missing. His mutilated body was found three days later in the muddy Tallahatchie River, weighted down with that cotton gin fan.

His funeral took place where he had lived with his family in Chicago. His mother had ordered an open casket, to the shock of the public. She felt the sight of her son’s battered body should be seen and not covered up as though in shame. Her son's murder has been credited with kindling the civil rights movement. Emmett Till's mother knew the right thing to do was to show and tell, not hide the truth. That everyone should know how her child died as well as why he did. It was her tribute to her son.

The two men faced a trial for murder. And despite the obvious and the evidence, the testimony of Carolyn Bryant Donham in defence of her accused family members saw them acquitted by an all-white, obviously neutral jury, of the charges brought against them. Recently Carolyn Bryant Donham recanted some parts of the story she had told over 60 years ago, to exonerate the killers. Which led the Justice Department to reopen the case.

Informal tours of the abandoned bridge where it was presumed the boy's body had been thrown into the river, take place. Memorials to the young boy were erected in various places where the atrocity touched the town; several of the historical markers have seen repeatedly vandalized, and always replaced. In 2006, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission was founded, which restored the courtroom where Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were acquitted.

The Clarion Ledger

A marker outside the courtroom commemorates the boy, steps away from a monument erected to honour Confederate soldiers in memory of the American Civil War. The building housing Bryant's Grocery was purchased in the 1980s from the Bryant family by Ray Tribble, who had been on the jury of all white men who had seen fit thirty years earlier to acquit the two killers. The building remains in the possession of the Tribble family, though the owner died in 1998. Efforts to buy the building to restore it as part of a memorial to Emmett Till, have failed.

The store lies in ruins, roofless, its walls covered in vines. All the efforts of preservationists, politicians, business leaders, even the state of Mississippi, have come to naught in their intention to save the building and restore it as a memorial to the young boy. Public opinion is divided, with some viewing the store as a blot on the community while others insist it be restored as a tribute to Emmett, a reminder of the poisonous hatred that killed him.

The Tribble family has set the price of the ruins of Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market at $4 million, clearly as a deterrent to its sale, but remaining speculative, since the family refuses to discuss the issue. They did lower the price of the store, which they claim to want to sell; their original selling price was $40 million. Mr. Weems of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, has attempted to negotiate with the family for the past several years with nothing accomplished for his efforts.

"I don’t know why, but every time the process breaks down, it seems the Tribble family is unwilling to let their store be turned into a monument that might suggest the complicity of their patriarch in letting Till’s killers walk free."
"There have been seven to ten efforts to buy the store, and there have been thousands of dollars offered [for a property for which the assessed value is $20,000]."
Dave Tell, author of a book about Emmett Till

Vines and warning signs cover the walls of the two-story, whitewashed brick building that was Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market in Money, Miss., in this 2005 photo. The store is where Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youth, whistled at the owner's white wife and paid for the act with his life in August 1955.

Hate Crimes in Canada

"It's obviously disturbing and alarming [increase in racist attacks]. But we have to remember the vast majority of Canadians are exceptionally tolerant and welcoming and accepting to minorities of all kinds."
"It's tricky [establishing a national strategy on hate crimes, particularly online]." But when people are engaged in really vociferous rhetoric online, that can also fuel and foreshadow violence off line, so we have to curb it."
Andrea Freedman, president of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa

"We were obviously surprised by the data, and not really surprised."
"It [the Muslim society's own tracking mechanism for racist attacks] doesn't track crimes based on their perceived identities."
"Islamophobia doesn't just target Muslims. It targets people perceived to be Muslim, like Sikhs, Christian Arabs and those from Southeast Asian communities."
Ihsaan Gardee, executive director, National Council of Canadian Muslims 

People hold up a signs during a demonstration to oppose motion M103 in Montreal, Saturday, March 4, 2017.
THE CANADIAN PRESS IMAGES/Graham Hughes

The latest report out by Statistics Canada on hate crimes taking place throughout the country in 2017 contained few surprises. That there would be a jump, although it is even so well known that up to 2/3 of total hate crimes that occur are not even reported, was expected. Casual narratives of ongoing incidents attest to the constant presence of prejudice, hostility and hatred directed against certain groups in society. Blacks in Canada have experienced incidents of prejudice since forever and continue to, accounting for 16 percent of all hate crimes reported in 2017. They characterize the most common race-, or ethnicity-related hate crime.

A doubling of incidents directed at Muslims was seen between 2016 and 2017. There were 139 incidents of hate crimes in 2015 and that number had soared to 349 the following year after an initial decline for that population group. The overall percentage of such crimes directed against Muslims in Canada represent 17 percent of the total, as opposed to 16 percent for Blacks. And then there is the perennial, most-favoured-by-racists target, the Jewish population accounting for 18 percent of all nationwide hate crimes; the second consecutive year of increases identifying Jews as the most targeted victims of hate crimes.

Jews, and undoubtedly Muslims and Blacks as well, must take steps to ensure security in high-profile gathering places such as synagogues and community centres where attacks are most common by employing electronic security measures along with hiring security guards. In a country like Canada, one which was built on immigration and where a general consensus exists that people of various backgrounds have traditionally integrated and accepted one another it is all the more shocking that the pernicious persistence of such incidents occur, grow in numbers and continue to threaten.

Police forces across the country dealt with a record number of hate crimes in 2017, Statistics Canada data found. Here, anti-Semitic graffiti that was spray painted on the door of The Glebe Minyan in Ottawa in 2016 is cleaned up. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

Yet a more comprehensive Statistics Canada victimization survey dating from 2014 found respondents to be victims of over 330,00 incidents believed by those suffering them to have been motivated by hate; and two-thirds of such incidents failed to be reported to police. Even so Statistics Canada feels that their records showing substantial increases year over year may be the result of a growing tendency to report, and perhaps not indicate an increase in incidents.

Nowhere in the report is there the merest hint of a suggestion that while Muslims speak constantly of "Islamophobia", inclusive of any kind of criticism of Islam, or reference to terrorism and Islam in one breath, many among them have indulged in slanderous campaigns against the state of Israel, bringing Middle East politics to Canada, and by extension impacting deleteriously on the lives of Jews in Canada through their all-inclusive campaigns. And if those campaigns don't qualify as hate campaigns, what would?

From establishing "Palestinian" friendship clubs on university campuses, to staging anti-Israel protests and campaigning against Jewish students who are Zionists as enabling a purported "Apartheid" regime, the vicious slanders fomenting hatred sweep Jewish students and their families into the wide-ranging anti-Semitism launched by Muslim-Canadian groups influencing non-Muslim leftists to swell the numbers of "anti-Zionist" anti-Semites clamouring against Zionism and isolating Canadian Jews.

One of the most active chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, organizing anti-Israel campaigns and events throughout the year (SJP at UOIT/DC Facebook page)

The incidents of Islamofascist terrorist attacks whenever and wherever opportunities arise more than adequately demonstrates a seriously dysfunctional Islam that threatens security and stability wherever Muslims have migrated, fail to integrate and agitate for Sharia law, threatening to Islamicize whichever European, North American or Asian country they infiltrate in astonishing numbers fulfilling their obligation to Islam's injunction to its faithful to jihad.

It's hardly surprising under those conditions that fear and resentment at the presence of Muslims who ghettoize themselves in Islamic communities, inspire in the surrounding population. A search of any daily newspaper where Muslims have congregated rewards by the appearance of Arab or Muslims names attached to crime reports of gangs and violence, disproportionate to their numbers in society. Little wonder that distrust and fear is the result, among the general population.

As for Jews, law-abiding, proud of their Canadian citizenship, leaders of industry, valuing  higher education, reaching out to the wider population base to build bridges, nothing seems enough to convince some bigots that their suspicion, fear and hatred has no rational basis. The result of which is that despite making an effort to be model citizens, reflecting a cultural, social proclivity to just that, there seems to be no successful way to convince detractors that in detesting the presence of Jews they expose their innate racist malice.

"Officer Down!"

"We're asking cops to do too much in this country. ... Schools fail, give it to the cops. Seventy percent of the African-American community is being raised by single women. Let's give that as well."
Serve  your communities. ... We're hiring. Get off that protest line and put an application in. And we'll put you in your neighbourhood, and we will help you resolve some of the problems you're protesting about."
"We're all on edge. And we're being very careful."
Black Dallas Police Chief David Brown

Dallas police chief David Brown was intimate with loss well before five police officers were killed at a protest in Dallas Thursday night.  (Mark Mulligan / Associated Press)

"I think it is fair to say we will see more tension between police and communities this month, next month, next year, for quite some time."
"[Those who don’t agree with the movement will do] everything in their power [to discredit it]."
"It’s not a new tactic, and we know it’s not an honest tactic. We should not have to protest. We’re in the street because police have killed people. We would love to go home, but we can’t go home. We are unwilling to go home."
Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson

"We've seen nothing like this at all."
"The average officer in America, who was tense anyway, their tension and vigilance is going to increase even more. Police officers have always been vulnerable, and they know it. But somewhere inside you, you didn't think it would happen. But now we're seeing it happen [snipers aiming to kill police]."
Darrel W. Stephens, executive director, Major Cities Chiefs Association; instructor, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore 

"I think commanders all over the country, me included, are worried about our officers as they manage different events."
"Dallas and Baton Rouge have probably showed us that we're going to have to err on the side of protecting our officers so we can protect the community."
Chief Jon Belomar, St.Louis County, Missouri

"Black Lives Matter isn't responsible for the deaths of anyone."
"Yet we can attribute scores and scores of deaths of black people to the hands of law enforcement, and I think that is where the attention should be."
Kareem Henton, activist, Black Lives Matter

The three law-enforcement officers killed in Baton Rough, Louisiana, were, from left, Montrell Jackson, Brad Garafola and Matthew Gerald. CNN

Three police officers shot dead in Baton Rouge on July 17. And ten days earlier than the Baton Rouge event, five were shot to death in Dallas. In both incidents an additional dozen police officers were injured in the attacks. Police in the United States are fearful, anguished and confused. The estimated 900,000 state and local law enforcement officers are in a collective state of disillusionment and concern for not only public safety but their own security.

The defenders have no one to defend them. So they are doing whatever they can. Across the country officers are now ensuring they drive in pairs in squad cars for an assurance of at least basic safety. They're more observant, watching for potentially untoward actions while walking their beats and anxiety remains at a high level. There isn't a police officer anywhere who isn't planning at the end of his daily shift to return home hale and sound.

There isn't a more horrifically ominous call than to hear "Officer down" over their radios. The threat seems to be coming out of nowhere. The ambush style of the attacks is totally unexpected; no police officer goes about with the thought uppermost in mind: there might be a sniper aiming directly at my head out there.  Videos displaying fatal shootings of African American men by police lead the news and lead Black Lives Matter groups to vociferously march in their own defense.

"Cops are hurt. They don't understand what's going on. Every cop in America is on their guard", noted Chuck Canterbury, president of the Fraternal Order of Police. "How many police funerals must occur before the American public finally says 'enough is enough'?, he asks redundantly. Black Lives Matter activists are not impressed, and they are not inclined to feel guilty, that they have had any involvement whatever in the lashback.

On the other hand, it should be fair to ask where the Black Lives marchers are in their own communities when the horrific death toll among African Americans at the hands of African Americans is colossal, and no one seems to be dreadfully perturbed and committed to finding a solution. The arguments that poverty encourages gang activity and criminal action, and drug- and firearm-peddling leading to violence and death can go only so far.

2 dead, 16 injured at Fort Myers Club Blu shooting -- news press.com

Why are African American men so loathe to be responsible for their offspring, leaving their raising to women alone, and in the process presenting to the young a formula to continue to ignore the needs of kids to be nurtured by whole families, by the presence of their fathers? Why is there so little emphasis in that community on the desirability of achieving an education? Why is self-respect not tied in with respect for others as a lesson in social harmony?

Why, above all, is the black community continuing to be over-represented in crime and social malaise? Why is it that the African American community is so averse to helping police solve the murder rate of black-on-black slaughter, to begin to clear up that file, which would actually be of help to the community?

"I've been watching this [activist group Black Lives Matter] for two years. I've predicted this. [BLM is a] hateful ideology", black Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke stated in an exchange with CNN's Don Lemon. As far as Sheriff Clarke is concerned, Black Lives Matter is wholly responsible for the violence unleashed on police in the United States. He is of the opinion that President Obama has tarred law enforcement as being racist whereas recent studies reflect the opposite being the case; that there is no institutional racism in American police forces.

He contends that the disproportionate profiling and perceived aggression by police in their reactions to and dealing with black males is off the mark; that bypassing the reality of disproportionate violent crime committed by blacks and the related risks to police performing their profession balancing out the equation is the real, unexplored issue for society to contemplate.

 Dallas Police Chief David Brown addressed his 3,600 member police department, to comfort them over the loss of police lives. His own experience as an African American, a father, and a police officer has informed him of the deep tragedy that infuses American life in a way few others have experienced it. "The past few days have been very troubling and emotional for all of us. My family has not only lost a son, but a fellow police officer and a private citizen lost their lives at the hands of our son. That hurts so deeply I cannot adequately express the sadness I feel inside my heart."

His 27-year-old son had amassed a few minor convictions. But there was a day when his girlfriend called police that Brown's son was in the throes of "a psychotic breakdown", had hit her. And then later that day, he shot a 23-year-old man in Lancaster, Texas. When a Lancaster police officer, 37-year-old Craig Shaw, responded to the shooting, Chief Brown's son shot and killed him as well. Totally unexpected. Wholly indefensible.

So the invitation to African Americans to be a part of the solution, not grow the problem instead, comes from someone who knows the intimate pain of grief and inconsolable sorrow that his own flesh and blood became the problem even while his father sought to pursue the solution.

And In Canada

"Something's got to change. This has to stop."
"Too many lives lost for no reason."
Alicia Jasquith, Toronto resident of Rexdale

"The things we need to fix are not just municipal issues. We need to focus on the probation system, on the jailing system ..."
"I think it's very important we are talking about the full scale of issues."
Dewitt Lee, community organizer

"Having the community feel they can approach officers, can talk about issues, whether it's crime issues, social issues, community issues and be assured there will be some action taken."
"We are trying to have a more visible presence. We have brought in more officers from other areas ... and over the last month and a bit, it's made a significant difference."
"It's not a telltale long-term sign but it's a positive one."
Superintendent Ron Taverner, Toronto Police Services, 23 Division

"There is lots to do here, we for years weren't doing much, to be candid. I think now there is the focus."
"These are deep-rooted social and economic problems, a lot of them having to do with lack of access to opportunity, some of it having to do with elements of discrimination that still do exist in our community, poor housing we've allowed to run down over a period of many years, lack of public transportation."
Toronto Mayor John Tory

Lecent Ross, 14, was fatally shot on July 9, 2015 in Toronto. (Facebook)

A community memorial had been organized for people to get together a year after the death of 14-year-old Lecent Ross. The young girl had been shot dead at a friend's home. The weapon was an illegal handgun. The teen had been an A student. Two others were charged in her death, a 13- and an 18-year-old. It was the 13-year-old who was charged with manslaughter; the 18-year-old was charged with weapons-related offences.


Black Lives Matter focus on the untimely and unfortunate deaths of blacks at the hands of police. And there is no denying that police run-ins with blacks result in inexplicable numbers of blacks losing their lives in the exchanges; in the United States the issue is volatile and dreadful in its reality. No less so the mind-numbing attack in Texas where a bigoted black gunned down five police officers and wounded another seven.

There are other facts not as often dwelt upon, that black-on-black violence within enclosed communities where no one wants to fully co-operate with police investigations takes another dreadful toll with the death of young black men and women, many in their teen years, for no reasonable cause. Other than the proliferation of street gangs and drug trafficking and the inevitable challenges and violence between them. And the prevalence of one-parent families, with absent fathers.

Despite the memorial for Lecent Ross, her grieving mother will always be inconsolable. But there to give her solace were community groups, police officers, politicians and neighbours to take part in a group barbecue and earnest discussions about searching for solutions to the ongoing gun violence that continues to take so many young lives. This is not solely a Toronto problem, other Canadian cities, like Ottawa, face very similar situations of gangs and guns. And sudden death.

Games had been organized at the event for younger community children present. Alicia Jasquith, Lecent Ross's mother, had expressed her personal wish to see the community's children happy and healthy. "It is unfortunate that it is the anniversary of the passing of this young woman. But let's make some positives come out of it. We want to show all these young kinds in our community that they are valued", said Althea Martin-Risden, director of health at the Rexdale Community Health Clinic.

Past Time for Reconciliation on all Fronts

"We brought the Pride parade to a full stop with a list of demands (see below) reflecting the needs of some of Toronto’s most marginalized LGBTQ2SIAA community members. These demands challenged the erasure of Black infrastructure and called for the removal of police floats from the Pride parade and community fair, among other things."
"Canada, too, has a long history of homophobia and transphobia. From the 1950s to the 90s, LGBTQ2SIAA people in Canada were surveilled, violated and brutalized by police forces, resulting in raids and incarceration."
"We achieved a commitment to our demands despite intense push-back from a primarily gay white male community. The same community did not want Black Lives Matter involved in Pride at all, even going so far as to create a group on Facebook called No BLM in Pride. Gender and sexual diversity, it seems, does not preclude racism or white privilege."
"The majority of the leadership within Black Lives Matter – Toronto and Black Lives Matter internationally identify as queer or trans. Pride has always been for the most marginalized, and has always been for us."
"Since the action, I have received hate mail and death threats, primarily from gay-identifying men. I have been screamed at on the street. I have been called a “nigger” more times than I care to count. People have told me I’m no longer part of the queer community because my Blackness has no place there."
Janaya Khan, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto, 6 July 2016

Ethan Eisenberg   Black Lives Matter – Toronto activists brought this year's Pride parade to a halt.

From the horrors of persecution, societal rejection and violence against gays just about everywhere in the world, to the present time where society has finally learned to accept human beings in all their diverse, natural dimensions and projections, fully invested in living their lives as they were meant to be in reflection of their biology and their values, we have the amazing spectacle of the once-persecuted, now mainstream, continuing to hound and demean other equally-deserving members of communities who have long lived on the edge of 'normative' society.

Activists within the black community who identify as varied-gendered are outraged that within the greater community of diverse iterations of sexuality, they have been shunted aside as irrelevant and unwanted, to deal with the consequences of historical predation of their dignity as human beings. When most gays were hounded and desperate to escape the threats aimed against them, they were still privileged as white males in comparison to people of colour, coping with skin-discrimination alongside that of gender-orientation rejection.

Now that the varied different-gendered community has found its place with pride in general society in many countries of the world, including Canada, where they were once rejected and harried and violated, it is only natural for outsiders to conclude in their wholesale ignorance that all is well within the community itself. Yet it is human nature to be obtuse, and to not want to know more than what appears on the surface. And it is also human nature to define one's own interests as being superior and more worthy than those of others.

The black LGBTQ2SIAA community clearly finds itself outside the heartfelt welcome of the Caucasian LGBTQ community and feels aggrieved and ill done by. And during Sunday's annual Pride Parade that took place in Toronto, Black Lives Matter protested their exclusion within a supposedly inclusive community. It is a moral comeuppance. A reminder that if a community truly does represent the best interests of all its members its actions and its general atmosphere should reflect that. Toronto Pride fell quite a bit short of doing that.

The irony for some lies in the fact that the greater Pride community  had previously allowed itself to be highjacked by an agenda that attempted to politicize Gay Pride in a manner that coloured it not rainbow but black and bleakly self-harming when it adopted the searingly rancid message of the supposedly underdog Palestinians in messaging that Israel is an Apartheid State, when the reality is that Israel is anything but that, and that the LGBTQ community in Israel has legal status and security, the only place in the Middle East where this is true.

Queers Against Israeli Apartheid delivered a searing message of pure hatred on a pretense of justification, and Gay Pride Parade was clearly complicit until public pressure and bad press resulting from it convinced it to re-neutralize itself publicly on the issue. This certainly did not redeem it, but it removed an irritant. Now, it transpires that bad blood of discrimination exists in the LGBTQ community along racial lines just as it does outside that community, when compassion bred of knowing what it is like to be a victim should logically have cleansed the community of rejection.

Not everyone will be in support of Black Lives Matters' demand that there be no police presence at future Gay Parades. Historically, police action reflected that of societal demands at a time when that social contract scorned and denied gays their equal place in society. Just as much has occurred since then to legitimize the presence of the LGBTQ community within society at every level, gaining them not only acceptance but protection under the law once denied them, so too have police services themselves been irretrievably altered in their relations with the LGBTQ community.

"I can say with absolute pride that my peers, and my employers/senior management, ahave never made an inappropriate comment to me. I have never been made to feel discriminated against. I speak as an individual. One who saw his first Pride, only to be excluded from the next", explained Constable Chuck Krangle in his open letter to Pride organizers, a man who had 'come out' at work, with the Toronto Police Services, of which he is a proud member.

Black Lives Matter's demands of Pride

• Continued space, including stage and tents, funding and logistical support for Black Queer Youth. 
• Self-determination for all community spaces at Pride, allowing community groups full control over hiring, content and structure of their stages.
• Full and adequate funding for community stages, including logistical, technical and personnel support.
• Doubling of funding for Blockorama to $13,000.
• Reinstatement of the South Asian stage.
• Prioritizing of the hiring of Black transwomen, Indigenous people and others from vulnerable communities at Pride Toronto.
• More Black deaf and hearing sign language interpreters for the festival.
• Removal of police floats in the Pride marches and parades.
• A town hall organized in conjunction with groups from marginalized communities, including but not limited to Black Lives Matter – Toronto, Blackness Yes and Black Queer Youth, in six months, where Pride Toronto will present an update and action plan on BLM-TO’s demands

Activist Says Historical Black Struggle ‘Hijacked’ After ‘Black Lives Matter’ Activists Endorse BDS

August 19, 2015 

Author:

Shiryn Ghermezian

Tags:

African American civil rights BDS movement Israel Chloe Valdary civil rights activists

Over 1,000 activists, artists, scholars, students and organizations signed the 2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

An African-American pro-Israel activist on Wednesday blasted a group of 1,000 civil rights activists who sought to connect the “Palestinian struggle” to the plight of blacks in the U.S., with a statement endorsing the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

“Quite frankly, it is a shame that the BDS movement has hijacked the historical black struggle in an attempt to build solidarity with a blatantly antisemitic campaign that seeks to strip Jews of their rights to their homeland,” Chloe Valdary told The Algemeiner. “That one would protest police brutality against a minority on the one hand and promote the disenfranchisement of another historical minority on the other — namely the Jews — is philosophically inconsistent and morally bankrupt.”

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The group of black activists, scholars, artists and students, some tied with the Black Lives Matter movement published their statement on Tuesday offering a “wholehearted” endorsement of “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel” and proclaiming their “solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and commitment to the liberation of Palestine’s land and people.”

Linking their cause with that of the Palestinians, the activists said, “We continue to see connections between the situation of Palestinians and Black people. Israel’s widespread use of detention and imprisonment against Palestinians evokes the mass incarceration of Black people in the U.S., including the political imprisonment of our own revolutionaries.”

The statement also accused Israel of racism in its treatment of Palestinians and claimed that the Jewish state is guilty of mistreating its African population.

Signatories included political activist Angela Davis; philosopher Cornel West; journalist Rosa Clemente; death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal; rapper Talib Kweli; Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors; and 39 affiliated organizations.

Valdary, currently a Bartley Fellow at The Wall Street Journal, expressed dismay at the activists for falling prey to such anti-Israel sentiments.

“That the youth would fall into the trap of parroting a blatant colonialist narrative wherein the ancient and now reborn state of Israel is referred to ‘Palestine’ is particularly upsetting given our people’s tradition of championing the rights of indigenous people,” she said