**see Robyn Maynard's new book, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present http://robynmaynard.com/
some notes from the conversation (not word for word) - PART 1
-racism against white people does not exist (introduction)
-every inch you take makes room for another black, poc or indigenous person (spoken in relation to the folks who took the space at the front of the auditorium despite legal threats for the "unconstituonality" of the proposition that black, poc, and indigenous people take the front seats.)
Robyn Maynard - black feminist, critic of systematic race violence, helped co-found "Montreal Noir," helped found "Justice Against Police Killings."
Angela Davis - educator, feminist, social justice activist, prison abolitionist
DAVIS: Maynard's book is a book all Canadians AND all Americans should read. Americans will also learn a lot about racism through the prism of Canadian racism.
> death of Emmett Till - very sad that we can trace the history of black presence in North American by remembering and noting the loss of black folks; race riots at the beginning of 20th century, era of slavery (have you seen Underground?); the ways in which the violent behaviour of police replicate slave catchers...
> sometimes people have asked how depressed it must make me that after all these years we're still dealing with the same problem of state violence, doesn't this make you want to stop?
> it's true we're still dealing with structural racism, but what's exciting and what makes me want to continue is the fact that we have a much deeper understanding, we have tools... Our tools have become so much more capable of understanding what it is we're confronting. In the process we've created community, love, joy. So it's not just the violence. It's our struggle against that violence that has helped produce a culture of what the future should be.
MAYNARD: often we're deprived in Canada from understanding the legacy of slavery. Lessons you've learned as regards how we're trying to stop police violence.
DAVIS: I think what often happens is that the more we engage in these struggles the deeper our understanding becomes the more we recognize how important it is to question that which we take for granted. It is often what appears most normal that is the source of all of our problems. We've been contesting police violence for decades. The assumption can be to get rid of the bad police. And this has been going on since the very beginning of my activism.
> it's about much more than the white policeman. This period is exciting because we recognize that racism is a structural system and not primarily about individuals. Unfortunately many people assume it's about the behaviour or the attitude of the individual. We forget that it has persisted for so long despite the fact that there have been so many struggles against racism because it is engrained in economic, academic, health care, linguistic structures. We have to ask ourselves is it better police that we want? ... It's not as simple as it seems to be. Racism never exists on its own. It is never ungendered. Never unsexualised. Always in conjunction with other axes of oppression. Eventually we started to realize that we don't just need different individuals, we don't just need community review boards to review police (after the violence has been committed), we don't just need community control boards. We need to question the very process of policing and maybe we need to ABOLISH THE POLICE.
MAYNARD: Movement for Black Lives - not just about abolishing but about creating
DAVIS: it's about creating the conditions to make a system no longer necessary.
some notes from the conversation (not word for word) - PART 1
-racism against white people does not exist (introduction)
-every inch you take makes room for another black, poc or indigenous person (spoken in relation to the folks who took the space at the front of the auditorium despite legal threats for the "unconstituonality" of the proposition that black, poc, and indigenous people take the front seats.)
Robyn Maynard - black feminist, critic of systematic race violence, helped co-found "Montreal Noir," helped found "Justice Against Police Killings."
Angela Davis - educator, feminist, social justice activist, prison abolitionist
DAVIS: Maynard's book is a book all Canadians AND all Americans should read. Americans will also learn a lot about racism through the prism of Canadian racism.
> death of Emmett Till - very sad that we can trace the history of black presence in North American by remembering and noting the loss of black folks; race riots at the beginning of 20th century, era of slavery (have you seen Underground?); the ways in which the violent behaviour of police replicate slave catchers...
> sometimes people have asked how depressed it must make me that after all these years we're still dealing with the same problem of state violence, doesn't this make you want to stop?
> it's true we're still dealing with structural racism, but what's exciting and what makes me want to continue is the fact that we have a much deeper understanding, we have tools... Our tools have become so much more capable of understanding what it is we're confronting. In the process we've created community, love, joy. So it's not just the violence. It's our struggle against that violence that has helped produce a culture of what the future should be.
MAYNARD: often we're deprived in Canada from understanding the legacy of slavery. Lessons you've learned as regards how we're trying to stop police violence.
DAVIS: I think what often happens is that the more we engage in these struggles the deeper our understanding becomes the more we recognize how important it is to question that which we take for granted. It is often what appears most normal that is the source of all of our problems. We've been contesting police violence for decades. The assumption can be to get rid of the bad police. And this has been going on since the very beginning of my activism.
> it's about much more than the white policeman. This period is exciting because we recognize that racism is a structural system and not primarily about individuals. Unfortunately many people assume it's about the behaviour or the attitude of the individual. We forget that it has persisted for so long despite the fact that there have been so many struggles against racism because it is engrained in economic, academic, health care, linguistic structures. We have to ask ourselves is it better police that we want? ... It's not as simple as it seems to be. Racism never exists on its own. It is never ungendered. Never unsexualised. Always in conjunction with other axes of oppression. Eventually we started to realize that we don't just need different individuals, we don't just need community review boards to review police (after the violence has been committed), we don't just need community control boards. We need to question the very process of policing and maybe we need to ABOLISH THE POLICE.
MAYNARD: Movement for Black Lives - not just about abolishing but about creating
DAVIS: it's about creating the conditions to make a system no longer necessary.
PART 2
ReplyDeleteDAVIS: WEB du Bois - creating a kind of democracy that would be able to incorporate previously enslaved people. It would be a new democracy, a different kind of democracy. When we began to talk about the abolishing of prisons (going back to early 1970s), the issue became not so much that of getting rid of the prisons (it would be a great idea!), but how do we create a society that no longer needs to rely on prisons. Not focusing myopically on the police, or on prisons. How do we reimagine a society in which racism would become obsolete. Where all people would have access to housing, to health care.
> ideas about abolition came through collectives, through community - not just me. It comes from struggle.
> Joanne Little: young black woman in jail in North Carolina (breaking and entering) - had been placed in all-male jail where she was attacked by a white guard who attempted to rape her using a screw driver. She ended up killing the guard and she was charged with murder. Became an important care because at the time the women's liberation movement (1973-4) was on the rise - a middle-class white women's movement. The case of Joanne Little presented some major challenges. First, the discussion of sexual violence within the context of the history of racism. The larger mainstream women's movement developed through 2 major issues: domestic violence and sexual violence. Many people assumed that if you were talking about women's issues you only talked about women (not racism). Gender was presented in a binary form. Only about men and women. So the challenge was to argue that the racist use of the rape charge historically directed against black men was linked to sexual violence against black women within a racist context.
PART 3
ReplyDeleteDAVIS: - case of a black man in florida convicted of raping a black woman. It was so clear that he was arrested because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Spent many years of his life in prison. Eventually he was released and with DNA testing he was shown to be innocent. We were trying to persuade white women that they needed to support Joanne Little but they also needed to protest the racist use of the rape charge.
> isn't it amazing that the assumption is that the more simplistic something is or the easier it is to understand (academics do this all the time) - the closer we get to reality?! Race is always gendered. There are links and connections. When intersectionality came to be used to express the messiness, the interconnection, it also became somewhat problematic (Crenshaw is the one cited). Problemtatic because what is missing is all of the history of activism where people were attempting to put things together in ways that were unfamiliar to academics but very familiar to activists. The citational practices often ignore that long and rich history that makes it possible for us to think things together that are presented as though they appeared separately and apart.
MAYNARD: historical context - similar history in Canada regarding sexual violence.
DAVIS: we learn to ignore so much of our reality. How we learn how to NOT SEE the predicament of women with respect to state violence. I first became really aware of this when I went to jail myself (1970). I had been involved in many many cases regarding prisoners and we had been thinking about the prison as racist instrument. But in all of that there was no discussion of gender. When I went to jail it struck me that we were assuming that that particular manifestation of state violence was only directed to men. I remember thinking (when I was arrested) - Billie Holiday was in this jail... I began to recognize that there were so many aspects of women in prison that never got taken up when we were talking of women in prison (the gendering of prisons). How prisons, in the context of capitalist democracy came to reflect what you might call the underside of democracy. Prisons are the quintessential democratic institution: designed to divest people of rights. You can only do that in a society that recognizes that people have rights. Prisons enter the historical arena at the same time as capitalist democracy.
PART 4
ReplyDeleteDAVIS: women's prisons came to be designed not so much to divest women of rights and to help them get rehabilitated into full citizens. They were designed to hold those who had failed to live up to the standards of good womanhood. To be good wives and good mothers. The cult of true womanhood. The true woman is a white middle class woman. What happens to black women? Women of colour? They end up learning to be domestic workers. When I went to jail, the women were still doing the men's laundry! There was a really patriarchal structure, institutional violence against women! I have been involved with an org in Australia (Sisters Inside) and one of the campaigns we did was that sexual violence is absolutely connected to the ways in which women are treated in prison. If one looks at the particular of condition of women in prison one gets insight into the link between institutional violence and domestic and sexual violence. Even thought women constitute a small minority of people in prison, the insights are vast. One can make the same kind of comment about trans prisoners. This is a feminist approach that allows us to be less myopic. Racism affects everyone. It is about gender but much more. Feminism today is exciting when it produces new insights that allows us to see the world differently. Regardless of your gender, feminism can be really exciting with respect to the production of knowledge. Not just within institutions. Some of the most significant production of knowledge happens outside academic institutions.
PART 5
ReplyDeleteDAVIS: I've been really fortunate in my life because for the vast majority I've seen myself as a global citizen. We're missing that these days (without nostalgia). What I really appreciated about the 1960s was that I learned to imagine myself as part of the world (Africa, Cuba, Vietnam etc). That has always remained with me. 2 examples - 1. Palestine; 2. Brazil
> struggle of Palestinians is similar in many ways to the struggle against Apartheid. The Palestinian struggle has become so marginalized and people are afraid to associate themselves with Palestinians who are just struggling for the right to be free. That struggle teaches us as well that we cannot live on the laurels of our past (point to South Africa - replication of some of the same structures of racist violence that existed under apartheid). Why is it that Israel is supposed to be immune from criticism? Why is it possible to be critical of any other state in the world but not Israel??? And the ideological crouching of the criticism of Israel as anti-semitism makes no sense because it makes it impossible to understand the real dangers of anti-semitism.
> the Palestinians are not giving up. I found it so inspiring when I visited Palestine in 2011 that there is practically no illiteracy. They fight for the right to educate each other. Classes are held in cafes and in peoples' living rooms. So much of the world here has been not allowed to recognize, to understand what is happening in Palestine. Especially if we're interested in state violence and prison. Palestine is the largest open-air prison in the world.
> I've been involved in the campaign to achieve justice in Palestine since before 1967. I went to a Jewish university (Brandeis). It was there that I learned from my jewish friends about Palestine.
> Brazil: what's exciting about Brazil is that black women are at the centre of progressive movements. Now that the government is very conservative and there is no official path to a better world, it's the black women's movement that is seen to be the hope of progressive Brazil. There is the understanding that black women are the most oppressed sector of Brazil. If finally black women are free that means that the whole country will be free.
PART 6
ReplyDeleteDAVIS: a way of achieving a different kind of universality. We often assume that we achieve universality by looking at the majority. Universality has always been raced as white. The assumption has been that if we are to achieve our rights then we must become equal to, not just white people, but a particular kind of white people. Not poor white people. The figure of normality has always been the affluent, able-bodied, straight white male. And so the question is how we have access to a different vision of the future, a different universality. Why can't it be grounded in those who have always had to struggle for their freedom as opposed to those who have been given their freedom. And this means that we have to think about radical ways of imagining the future. Not primarily about assimilation. We're so caught in the equation of equality with assimilation that we forget that it makes no sense to want equality in a racist world if you're going to be integrated or assimilated in a world that is still racist! How can we get away from "inclusion" or "diversity" or "fitting in." All these assume that the structure stays exactly what it was. See how easy it is to assent to these ideas, to these ways of promoting change that only recreate the same structure over and over again. I want to end oppression! I don't care if it has a white face or a black face! We have to learn to argue for transformation, for abolition, for REVOLUTION! Then we can MOVE ONTO THE UNIVERSITY! Right?!
Question - safer space for women of colour to party. How can we as young women of colour create radical change in 2017?
ReplyDeleteDAVIS: we often tend to assume that the world begins and ends with our lifetimes. We don't try to situate ourselves within something larger... Our enslaved ancestors must have imagined something like this, one day. They imagined being free. At this moment, we are the matérialisation of what they imagined. And so if we think about ourselves as a part of a very long process - this is why I appreciate and learn from indigenous cosmologies, that go beyond the lifetime of a person and the impact of what I do now will have 5 or 10 generations down the line - this helps us generate hope and... allows us to see that the work we do now will make a difference and that we will present in the work that people do 200 years from now. It's so wonderful to imagine that which we cannot possibly imagine now. That the work we do will lead to processes that are different from what we can imagine. What about our relationship to the other beings on this planet. We are rethinking our relationship to those with whom we inhabit the planet. It's important to do the specific work we are doing but I encourage a broader vision and let the imagination soar.
In case anyone wants to a reminder of what the failures of an 'inclusion' approach are, look no further then the new Montreal City Flag, and the revamped $10 Canadian bill.
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