Defunding Police & BLM Organizing in Canada: BLM Series #4

With everything on right during this pandemic of covid19, Black people and people of color have to continue to fight for their rights and systemic injustice especially in America. In this BLM Mini series, we got a rare opportunity to talk with Toronto-based organizer of Black Lives Matter movement to share her thoughts about the contrast and similarities between Canada and United States Of America with regards to Black people and systemic relations with the state. Sandy Hudson is a Toronto-based organizer, communication specialist, political strategist, writer, and abolition activist a founder of the Black Lives Matter Movement presence in Canada, The Co-founder of the Black Liberation Collective- Canada & Helped to found the Black Legal Action Center.

Resources:

Sandy & Nora Podcast

Black Legal Action Centre

Sandy Hudson’s Webpage


Transcript:

Nikki Giovanni:
Black Lives Matter, not a hashtag. I’m not ashamed of our history because I know there is more to come. I’m not ashamed of slavery neither bought nor sold, because I know there is another answer. I’m not ashamed of dark or light skin, straight or curly or nappy let’s call it that, hair. I’m not ashamed of thick or thin lips nor the time we waste singing and dancing. We taught the white folks to sing and dance too. I’m proud of Simon Cyrenian, nobody made him help Jesus he did his part. I’m proud of the woman who moaned on the ship at the 10th day for admitting, if not defeat, then certainly change. I’m proud of the rappers who rap. And most especially, I’m proud that black lives matter, we do, we honestly do.

Intro:
Welcome to the Radical Zone Podcast, where we get updates on the current state of the world and how various communities are impacted from activists and organizers who are out there doing the work. The Radicals Zone Podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. I know you’re probably wondering what the Arcus Center is. The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, also known as ACSJL is an initiative of Kalamazoo college whose mission is to develop and sustain leaders in human rights and social justice through education and capacity building. We envision a world where every person’s life is equally valued, the inherent dignity of all people is recognized, the opportunity to develop one’s full potential is available to every person and systematic discrimination and structural inequities have been eradicated. Listen to and engage in conversation with organizers and activists across the globe about social inequities that impact us all.

Rhiki Swinton:
Hey all. What’s up? Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Radical Zone Podcast. And thank you for joining us again on our BLM miniseries. Today we have a very, very special guest. I am so excited to talk to this person today about what’s been happening in the racial climate in America and the world. But before we get into that, I would like to introduce Tirrea who’s our co-host. What’s up Tirrea?

Tirrea:
Hello, everybody.

Rhiki:
Tirrea, tell the people a little bit about our speaker for today.

Tirrea:
Today we have with us the amazing Sandy Hudson. Sandy is a Toronto based organizer, communication specialist, political strategist, writer, and abolition activist. Sandy is the founder of the Black Lives Matter movement present in Canada. She is also the co-founder of the Black Liberation Collective in Canada. And she also helped found the Black Legal Action Center. Welcome and thank you so much for being with us today, Sandy.

Sandy Hudson:
Hi, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me on. 

Rhiki Swinton:
Sandy, we want to start the conversation with this question. What is some, ish is what I call it, or some shenanigans that has caught your attention this week?

Sandy Hudson:
Oh, this week? I’ve been doing a lot of organizing in Toronto, even though I’m in LA because I’m a law student at UCLA right now. In order to do that well I have to be a voracious consumer of the news. And so I’m going to start with Toronto and then I’ll finish off with Portland because how can we not mention Portland this week? This week in Toronto, a police officer was charged with a Mother’s Day shooting, a woman who is just going to visit her son, he shot her in her stomach. And she survived, thank God. But, it’s very rare that police officers are charged when they harm citizens, so it was a big deal. And then the cops made this big deal about being, well, this person is a former police officer because they resigned. They resigned like five minutes before they were charged. 

So anyway, there was that. And then more bad news out of Toronto. There’s an investigation against Toronto Police Service for some police officer is potentially being involved in a human trafficking ring of underage girls. Some more awfulness afoot. And then of course, just watching what was happening in Portland, it just seems like so much people take for granted about how our society works is it’s being proven false right in front of our eyes, in front of our screens even as too little media is following what’s happening. It just seems like anything that we imagined to be true in what should be a free society has come crashing down in Portland.

There’s lots afoot I’m sure I’ve missed. Biden apparently thinks that Trump is the first racist president. I don’t know. There’s just lots going on. Those are the first things that come to mind on this Saturday afternoon.

Rhiki Swinton:
Wow, that’s a lot. Tirrea what is some ish that you’ve experienced this week?

Tirrea:
Oh, shoo, Rhiki you put me on the spot. A woman I don’t know what state this is in but she was charged with setting her boyfriend’s car on fire. And there’s a video actually, when she put the gasoline in the car and then she lit the fire, it exploded in her face and she flew back. 

Rhiki Swinton:
I heard about that.

Tirrea:
Oh, man. That’s the best ish that I have found very amusing this week.

Rhiki Swinton:
Surprisingly, I was going to say the same thing. It was unrelated and it was about the lady setting the car on fire.

Tirrea:
Really?

Rhiki Swinton:
Yeah. 

Tirrea:
I’m going to go ahead and start off with the first question. Rhiki and I were having this conversation about Black Lives Matter, not really being a centralized movement. We want your opinion as far as what makes this movement different from the movements we’ve seen in the past. Most movements that I’ve seen personally, especially in the United States have been super unified and everyone is in the know, and really unified as far as how to strategically move. And I feel like with Black Lives Matter, there’s so many more smaller moving components, like individual groups that are doing what they can, but it’s really more sparse. It was worth to know your take on the differences that you’ve seen with this movement compared to others.

Sandy Hudson:
One thing that I think is really powerful is how much of the organizing is local and it scales up. There isn’t a national body that’s really telling people what to do, in fact, it’s the other way around. And that the strength of that local organizing makes it so that it’s not one of these formal movements that’s led by one central figure. It’s in fact, led by so many people who are demanding change in their very communities. Another thing that I think is very, very important about this iteration of the black liberation movement is that, I think that previous iterations had a really intense fixation with seeming a certain way, with presenting themselves in a certain way strategically to try to get people to care about injustice that black people experience every day all over the world. And that meant, people would dress a certain way and present a certain leader figure who could be appealing to so many people. 

And I think that this iteration is unapologetically saying, no, we’re throwing that respectability aside, and we’re saying that it doesn’t matter how we present, black people everywhere deserve justice and deserved liberation. And I also think we’re saying that by changing who we centralize as leaders. In fact, we’re saying we’re going to start with the most marginalized amongst us. It’s going to be the folks, the trans women, the gender non conforming folks. It’s going to be the folks with disabilities who are going to be running this show, who are going to be the leaders, the face of this movement, and you all are still going to have to listen to us like this. We still deserve justice despite the fact that those of us who you marginalize the most are going to be out here on the mic, taking charge and leading this movement.

Rhiki Swinton:
Yeah. Sandy, I’m so glad you brought up the topic of what is the term for? I think it’s the politics of respectability, about how in the past we had to present ourselves as these upstanding citizens with no infractions just for people to see us as human and worthy of justice and compassion. And I actually found myself in like a Facebook, I wouldn’t say feud. But we’re in this time now where you’re deciphering through which of your white friends are actually your friends. There was this post that somebody who, I’m not going to say any names, but who I considered a friend was just the whole all lives matter thing.

And they were basically were saying if you put a color in front of lives matter, then maybe you’re the racist, and I’m just like, “How could you say this? Why is me uplifting black lives matter, such a problem.” And then we went into a little debate but it eventually got to the fact that the Black Lives Matter movement or the recent uprisings have been those of what people want to call looting or riots, and how there’s some people out there that have some views about what’s the best way to push the needle forward.

And I’m just like, at this point does it really matter the way in which we protest? The main objective is that this thing is happening, we’re trying to make you see it, we’re trying to make it visible. We’re trying to get a message across and really all you’re doing is just finding a way to justify the fact that you don’t want to support the Black Lives Matter movement. But yes, those are just my thoughts.

Sandy Hudson:
100%. That is 100% it. I can’t tell you how many people in the last few months has said to me, “Well, I would support you, I would. But when you say defend the police, or when you say abolition, it’s too much. You need different words, you need a PR strategy.” Or when you guys are out there on the street stopping traffic or ruining property. It’s you guys need another tactic because that way more people will support you and more people will know about what’s happening. And it’s, “Hello, this is the largest global movement that has ever happened around the world.” People are having protests daily, weekly, it is imaginable that this has happened in a way that it has during a global pandemic in the last three months. The way that culture has shifted so enormously to worldwide, start questioning the way that we engage with black people, the way that we try to create safety and security in our communities. 

It has never been done before. This is unprecedented. Don’t tell me that we have a publicity problem, don’t tell me that we have a PR problem. There is never been a more successful movement in terms of reaching people, changing the minds of people on the ground in terms of grassroots support. All the stuff that these people are saying it’s not borne out in the way that people are supporting us. And as you say, there’s only one other reason I can think that people wouldn’t be rummaging around in their heads to try to find something bad to say about the movement. That’s because they need some justification as to what makes it reasonable that they won’t support it. Yeah.

Tirrea:
We are dying to know, I just feel like with the United States and our individualism I personally don’t really know or I’m educated with what’s going on outside of the US. We really want to know, what is the police infrastructure like in Canada? And how does it differ from that to the United States? And what are some of the efforts as far as defunding the police? How is that looking in Canada as well? 

Sandy Hudson:
Well, a lot of the things are quite similar, people would maybe not be surprised to know that a lot of our police forces go to the very same conferences that happened in Florida, or I know that there’s some special relationship between the LAPD and the Toronto Police Services and how they exchange ideas and so on. Much like anything else that happens in North America, there’s a lot of cross border strategizing and organizing building from their end. But there are some particularities that people should know about. Number one, in Canada, we have so little right to information when it comes to anything that the cops do. For example, there is a memorial happening in Toronto for Regis Korchinski-Paquet and this is being recorded on July 25th, who was someone who was experiencing some mental distress her parents called or family members called the police to get support and she ends up falling from her balcony. After the police show up there’s some struggle, they push her mother out of the room. She’s screaming, help mommy help and she falls to her death over 20 stories and is left outside for over six hours.

We have no idea which police officers were there and we won’t probably for like another three years when there’s some public inquest because we don’t have access to any information. When I spoke earlier about a police officer shooting a woman on Mother’s Day, we only know that police officer’s name because they’ve been charged now but it’s so rare that they get charged. But we didn’t know who it was for so long. Journalists don’t have the right to this information even if they file a, Freedom of Information Request, we have a very similar process for doing that in Canada that exists in the US. But we have no right to any information. We can’t check if a police officer who killed somebody has had a series of negative interactions with the public in the past. If there’s 911 call, we don’t get it. If there is a video footage, we don’t get that either. We have no right to anything. There’s typically some private investigation that is done with either a body that’s very, very friendly to police officers or another police unit. And 97% of the time, they find that no charges are warranted. 

That’s a big thing that we struggle with in Canada, is that we just have no access to information, no data, nothing to help us understand these issues that we know are going on in our communities. We have to rely on academics who take on those fights on their own. But just recently after these weeks of protests, Stats Canada, Statistics Canada, which is our federal body that collects data has announced that it will now start to collect data with respect to race when it comes to policing. And then another really big one is one that is a big issue in the United States to policing in schools. And again, we just suffer from a lack of information when policing, the special resource officers are in schools in Canada, what we found is that they’ll enter the school district, but it’s not across the entire public school district, it’ll only be in the schools where there’s a larger proportion of black students, because it’s very anti black practice. But they won’t give us lists of where exactly they are, we have to find out ourselves.

Often parents don’t even know that police are in the schools with their kids. And all of this lack of information, obviously, is designed to make it very, very difficult for us to challenge anything that’s going on. Like in Toronto, we didn’t even have access to the line by line budget of the Toronto Police Service until yesterday, they never published it. And that was fine. Every other public institution has to publish publicly what their line by line budget is, it only make sense, except the police. 

Rhiki Swinton:
Wow, that’s insane. I didn’t know that. Okay. I know if they have the video cam on their cop car, that isn’t being released. But are you able to pull out your phones and record a negative interaction with the police and release that? Or are there things that prevent you from doing that?

Sandy Hudson:
Yeah. We can do that on our own, but if it gets confiscated, obviously, we can’t. If it gets confiscated they can take it and then we’ll never see it unless there’s an inquest, or unless there’s a public trial, and oftentimes there’s not. I’m talking about not necessarily when someone’s watching. You know cops, they try to cover up any person who is making their own video of a situation, they try to block those cameras. But I’m talking about, in the instance of a man named Andrew Loku who was killed in Toronto in 2015, after again, going through some mental distress and police showed up to his apartment building and shot him within 20 seconds of arrival. There were cameras in his apartment building, security footage. And the police went and messed with the security footage. Regardless of whether they did that or not, you’d think that the public would have access to seeing that. The journalists would be able to publish, okay, so here’s the officer who shot him, and here is what the footage looked like that night. We had no right to that information but we knew that it existed.

Rhiki Swinton:
It just makes me think about what else, what other differences are there between the experiences of black people in America and black people in Canada or Toronto specifically. From your perspective I know being an American, we have an individualistic type of way of thinking where we don’t see things outside of our safety net that is America, so we just assume that our experiences are the experiences of other people across the globe. I’m going to be honest, when I think about anti blackness and black people’s experiences, I typically, if I’m not thinking about America, the only other thing I think about is Africa, if I’m being just as honest as I can possibly be. Enlighten me what are some of the things that black people face in Canada?

Sandy Hudson:
It’s very much the same, it’s what people are experiencing in the United States. Obviously there’s local particularities, but let’s be very clear about what America is and what Canada is. There’s a line between the two countries that some colonizers decided was the right… very straight line to separate those who were loyal to the queen and those who were loyal to the flag. You know what I mean, that is the difference between the history of our two countries, is two differing ideologies of loyalty to a different white supremacist way of colonizing a place. That’s not that different. They still in Canada had 200 years of enslavement, though, there have been politicians and people who said, there was no slavery here. 

They pretend Canada is just a really great PR, a nation of just general public relations exercise that pretends that nothing bad ever happens there. But it’s all very much very, very similar. Much of how we experience anti blackness comes from the denial of our institution saying, one, we don’t have anti blackness here. Two, we don’t have racism here. And three, gosh, black people aren’t even really here, so why are you talking about this. That’s how it is expressed. And that couldn’t be farther from the truth. So much of what you hear about happening in America also happens in Canada. And it’s just very frustrating that both our news and your news and global news never really focuses on it, partially because Canada has this reputation. The ways that this was so stark to me, it was in 2016 when, I can’t remember the name of the law, but there was a law that was changed in the United States that affected a lot of Haitian refugees who were in the US as a result of the earthquake.

And the fact that it was really dangerous to live in Haiti and so a lot of Haitians came up to the US and came up to Canada, as a result of that, the devastating impacts of the earthquake. And in 2016 or 2015, Trump decided to change a law that allowed some temporary amnesty for Haitian folks who were in US as a result of this earthquake. And people in Canada, people in the US were like, “Trump, terrible man has done this terrible thing, has ended this status.” It was going to affect tens of thousands of people were going to be deported to Haiti, to a place where that still hadn’t recovered from the earthquake and wasn’t going to be able to sustain that many people coming back home. And of course, it should have been roundly criticized and roundly condemned, because that was a terrible, terrible thing that Trump did, and that Justin Trudeau had done two years earlier, and nobody said anything about it, it’s like okay. And then so what happened? 

What happened was because people didn’t know tens of thousands of Haitians started crossing the border from the US to Canada, not at official ports of entry, but unofficial ports of entry and trying to claim asylum. Because people don’t know that we have the very same issues with migration in Canada we do in the United States. They did not know that they would be arrested, detained, children arrested, detained. Children separated from their families, put in different places than their families. It was the same stuff that you see happening in the US in a much greater scale, of course, because Canada’s only 30 million people. But is this that little line that makes one place Canada and one place the US doesn’t really change a lot of the sensibilities of white supremacy colonial place that is trying to that… That is designed so that people who are black are always constrained in terms of movement and how we are able to live a life of dignity.

We experienced so much of the same stuff, unfortunately, our policymakers, our people in power tend to get away with a lot of it, because our white supremacist media also refuses to really engage with the disgustingness that we see here on this side of the border or, you live in LA but over in Canada. And it’s much more likely that Canada is willing to say, “Well see, look at all those bad people down there in the United States, we’re better.”

Tirrea:
It’s interesting that you bring that up because, like you said, Canada to the public eye just seems like the safe haven, or this safe space, especially for black people when problems arise in the United States, especially ones dealing with racial identity and racial tension. Like you said the line that separates the US from Canada doesn’t necessarily stop the same issues from crossing the border. 

Sandy Hudson:
No. And in fact, one thing that I should mention, I try to mention this wherever I can. One thing that I was shocked to find out when I was doing my master’s degree, where I was doing a lot of work on anti blackness and origins and so on and colonialism. I read a piece by Dr. Afua Cooper who is a historian at Dalhousie University. She reveals in this historical record that the Fugitive Slave Acts that spurned the Underground Railroad where people were moving upward to Canada in an attempt to flee these jurisdictional acts that would really endanger their liberation were also in place in Canada. And as a result, there are people who are fleeing southward also to try to move from these places, St. Catharines, Windsor to the northern United States to escape the jurisdictional acts in Canada. There was actually a flow of people in both directions and trying to escape the jurisdiction from one bordered place to another bordered place. I just thought that that is such a fascinating history and so fascinating that we don’t hear about it. 

Rhiki Swinton:
Yeah, I never heard of that. And I think I’m so glad I asked you this question. There’s this joke going around, I think in most of America, but really Michigan. We say all the time, we say if Trump gets elected for a second term we’re just moving to Canada type of thing. Sounds like a joke but it’s also somewhat we’re serious, we’re about to leave. But I think we just never really heard about… Like you said, there’s not a lot being publicized on the issues, I think that’s happening in Canada, so I just don’t hear a lot about it. So we just assume it has to be better. 

Sandy Hudson:
And it’s just not. In Toronto, and like I said, we don’t have a lot of Canada wide data so this is hard. But the Ontario Human Rights Commission did a large scale study. And that’s a legal body here in Ontario, the province where Toronto is, and discovered that a black person is 20 times more likely to be shot and killed by a police officer in Toronto than other folks, 20 times, yeah.

Rhiki Swinton:
Wow. Sandy, because of your extensive experience with organizing, I really want to ask you this question now that we’re in this global pandemic and people are confined and isolated to their house. What does organizing look like when you’re confined to your house? I feel like I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff on what you can do, how you can support the movement and a lot of it is geared towards white people. It’s the basic level stuff. Is the stuff that for people who are new to the movement they just recognize that race is an issue and it’s educate yourself and challenge your family and your friends. And just these very… I don’t want to say simple steps because there are important steps when you’re new to this movement, but it’s not geared towards me. It’s not geared towards a black person who’s been doing this for their life. What can I do to organize and support and bring awareness to the issues, but also do so in a way that where it doesn’t require me to be exposed to COVID, potentially?

Sandy Hudson:
Right. Well, this is such a hard question to answer, because who really, really knows what the answer is? There is no expert out there who is an expert in organizing during a pandemic. This is a very new thing that we’re dealing with right now. But I can tell you what I’ve been doing. Did I go to a couple protests? Yes, I did. Because I did some research about how being outside is less risky than interacting with people inside. But for those of us who are maybe immuno compromised or high risk, that might not be a reality for folks. What else have I been doing? Quite a lot. And I think that for us one thing that I think is so important is to be focused in what we’re talking about, in what we’re trying to do. It’s like the, “Hey, sign this petition and say that you’re against racism.” Or, “Put up a black square.” Okay, I get what people are trying to do, they’re trying to say, I feel bad about this, but it’s not enough to feel bad about it. Yeah, feeling bad about it should lead you to do something about it. 

And for me, being focused means I think now is the time to defund the police. I think now is the time to be asking ourselves the question, why do we have police? And the more that we can educate ourselves on that topic, on how the police get the money that they get, how it is that we can shift where that money is allocated? And maybe it’s the city council if it’s done on a city level. Maybe it’s the state, if it’s done on a state level. Or the province if it’s done on a provincial level or federally. How do we get that money to be reallocated elsewhere? How do we truly create societies that have options for safety and security and stop this money drain, this billion dollar money drain into these anti black institutions that are literally designed to just stop black people from living a free life, like that’s what it is. 

It is much easier to say, “Oh, man, racism sucks, I hate racism,” than to say, “I realize that one of the most massive ways that racism manifests in this system is through the policing department and so I realized that we need to give that up if we are to create a truly anti racist society. And I think that focusing there… there’s so much that’s been written on this over the years, and it’s all coming to fruition now, which I love, do some reading. And if you’ve done that reading and you realize that you need to make this more accessible to other people, do some writing, translating it for folks. I worked on this website called defundthepolice.org. I encourage people to check it out, which helps to distill that information down into really digestible pieces of information so that people can educate themselves, but also go forth and talk to other people, whether it’s family members, or maybe you’re part of some religious congregation, or maybe you’re in school. 

They can take that information and deliver it elsewhere to wherever else they are organized in the world. We, through creating that website, hired a bunch of researchers who are looking at the numbers in cities across Canada and the United States, and it’s due for an update this week. Where we can say, “Hey, did you know that in New York, they spend more money on policing than they do on transit, on the housing, on shelters, all combined, combined.” That doesn’t make any sense. Perhaps, perhaps people would be more safe if they knew where they were putting their heads at night. Perhaps people would be more safe if they found themselves in a domestic violence situation, they knew that they could go and access a shelter. These sorts of things are so important, and we need to be calling for that on a local level, wherever we’re at. 

We need to be calling for that. We don’t need to be out in the streets to do that. But we do need to make sure that we’re educating ourselves and focusing our message. It’s not enough to feel bad. Feeling bad is not going to stop the police from killing people.

Tirrea:
I agree 100%. I appreciate the gestures like the black square, the renaming of streets to Martin Luther King or BLM or whatever it may be, or all the murals and things that have been happening, all of those things bring awareness and attention to the issue. But we need to do more than that, like you said. We need to be really strategically organizing and demanding these resources and these initiatives to really truly make a lasting change and difference. And so switching gears a little bit Sandy, you have a podcast, Sandy and Nora Talk Politics, which I listened to a couple of episodes, and they’re really awesome. And I love all the topics are… Yeah, I love it. 

What advice can you give us and the people listening about how to have conversations for change? And specifically, how to move those conversations past the surface level, past the safe conversations, and conversations that may be a little more uncomfortable and may lead towards action?

Sandy Hudson:
Well, one thing that I think is very important that I think we shy away from a little bit in a society where social media is so big, where we all have our own platforms that we’re curating to show everybody perfect the lives that we lead. I think that one thing that we lose in this world is the ability to have generative arguments. I love, I love a good political argument. I love a good political argument because I think that it really, really clarifies my own principles and where I stand on an issue. And it helps me be invigorated to move forward with the types of action that I want to take.

Nora and I know each other from… we were active in the student movement in Canada, in around 2007, 2008 era. And we ended up working in an office together at the Canadian Federation of Students, Ontario, I was the chairperson, she was the Government Relations Officer or something like that, I don’t know. But we would argue about everything. It was any type of strategy that we had around tuition fees, or student debt, or whatever campaign we were working on, racism in higher education. We would get into these really passionate arguments about how to move forward on an issue. And I loved that, I lived for them and so did she, because we were really clarifying our own positions. 

And it usually turned out that it wasn’t that we were on to very different sides of an issue. Because what happens when you are forced to justify your position, you can see where the weaknesses are in your own thinking and maybe even change your thinking to some compromise with somebody else. Or you see that if you can’t justify your position, then maybe your position is just wrong. And if the other person can… There’s so much value in having a really robust political argument, and I have them all the time. Nora and I, we talk weekly to do the podcast. My cousin [inaudible 00:38:15], who is an activist who I live with and we argue almost every night about something. And I think that we have lost the ability to do that at least publicly, people tend to want to agree with one another and only talk about things that are so easy. It’s obviously, you’re on this side of an issue unless you’re a piece of shit, white supremacist, racist. But let’s deal with those really hard things to talk about. 

I had an argument a couple weeks ago about voting and the value of voting and whether or not people should spend time engaging in the vote. And it was just such a robust argument that really, it clarified things about my principles and my position for me and same with the other person. We didn’t come to a conclusion either of us, but the argument itself was so useful in keeping us ready for whatever needs to happen next, as we move into a new election season. 

Rhiki Swinton:
I’m so glad you brought this topic up because… Okay, I’m working at Arcus now. But before that I was a master’s student and just a college student for a long time.

Sandy Hudson:
I hear you, I’m with you. 

Rhiki Swinton:
I really couldn’t stand being in classes that were supposed to talk about race and diversity and the ethnic studies classes and the social justice classes that, there was always… they throw this term around a lot in higher ed, it’s called trigger warning. But I can understand trigger warnings for classes where you want to talk about rape and different things like that that can be triggering to someone who experienced that type of trauma. But whenever you throw a trigger warning in reference to a class that’s talking about race and diversity in African American history or whatever it may be, it’s really just giving I feel like people who are uncomfortable with having this conversation an excuse to not engage, or to keep the conversation very basic, very surface level. I even had a teacher in one of our classes told us to write questions on the wall of things we want to discuss in the class. 

It was a higher ed class, so I wrote on there, I want to talk about how to dismantle the current higher education system because it’s a racial system. When that teacher read over my question, they’re were like, “Oh, that’s too big of a topic. There’s no way we’re going to get anywhere with that, so we’re just going to brush over that question.” And I’m just like, “Yes, it’s a big topic, but we’re never going to get close to the answer if we never tried to engage about it, because we’re so intimidated by how big it is.”

Sandy Hudson:
Yeah, I feel you. I’m currently in law school. And it’s just the biggest… the biggest frustration to go from my last… I did my master’s in a program called Social Justice Education, which is really just like an interdisciplinary program that looks at different aspects of how our world is shaped, and how it should be changed. And it’s done at an education school, so it has these principles of how to teach and how to engage with students and how students are just as important to the topic and to shaping a topic as a professor. That’s not what I’m getting right now in law school, it’s very different. The pedagogical approach is terrible. I hate it. And in my criminal law class, I remember in law school, they do this thing called the Socratic method where they’ll just call on a student randomly, and they’ll be here’s a question you need to answer.

And we read theories of punishment and the professor calls on me and says, “Sandy, what’s your favorite theory of punishment?” I don’t have a favorite theory of punishment because I believe that we can live in a society where we don’t engage with crime and law with punishment. I think there are other ways to resolve problems and so I don’t have one. And he literally said, he was like, “Oh, you sound like you might be some abolitionists? Is that what you’re saying?” It’s like, “Yes, yes, I am.” He literally responded with, “Well, see how you feel when we get to the rape cases.” Okay, moving on. And I was like, “Man, as if I had never thought about that before. Come on. Do you want to engage that, engage with me. Engage me on the question,” but now he just shut me down and moved on. And I really, really, really dislike that. You know what, I love that you brought up trigger warnings too, because I have had that political debate with someone. And it was very clarifying. 

I have never believed in trigger warnings. I don’t like them. I understand why people want them but my position on them is that we have always had trigger warnings in our society. You’d be watching the news when you’re younger, or watching a television program that says, “This television program might be dealing with sensitive topics that may not be appropriate for some viewers.” That is a trigger warning. It’s not called a trigger warning, it’s called a warning because that’s when it makes sense to call it. I think that sometimes in social justice and activist spaces, we come up with terms that actually in you using them, says something more about us. I am a part of this group of people who knows to use this term, to call out or to say something about something that’s about to happen.

And what it tells you is who I am, it doesn’t necessarily tell you that there is like something terrible that’s about to happen. The proof of that to me is if I go to my mom and dad and say, “Oh, trigger warning, I’m about to tell you something.” They’re going to be like, “What the hell are you talking about? What did you just say? What is these words that you strung together? Trigger means one thing, warning means another thing, but we don’t understand them in a context like you put them together.” So it actually isn’t helpful to everybody. It’s only helpful to a very select group of people who are part of a certain type of culture. And if we are out here trying to change the world in a mass way, I don’t think that that’s helpful. That’s not helpful. 

Do I think that we should be decent humans and tell one another when we’re about to have difficult conversations and prepare people for difficult conversations? Yes, I do. Do I think that trigger warning do that? I don’t really think that it does. I don’t. Putting TW before you post something on Facebook isn’t going to help my mom who’s on Facebook more than me apparently. 

Rhiki Swinton:
Yeah, I agree. And then it’s like when we’re having a racial conversation specifically it’s like, “Okay, what about talking about race is going to trigger you?” Because let’s be honest, this is not for the people of color in the classroom, it’s for the white people in the classroom. How is this going to be triggering, or if it is triggering, it’s probably you that could trigger anything by saying something blatantly racist, or saying something-

Sandy Hudson:
Or crying and making it about yourself. If that’s the philosophy, then what we need to do is when I wake up my eyes in the morning, I need to have TW written on my ceiling so that I can just see it, so that I am just prepared for the day because living in this anti black world, okay. 

Tirrea:
Sandy, lastly, we just want to ask you, what are some of the current projects and or initiatives you’re working on right now?

Sandy Hudson:
Oh, my God, I feel like I’m doing so much all the time. But I’m always working on the podcast, I’m always writing. You’ll see, I have a bunch of stuff that I’ve written in mainstream media, some things that I’ve written in academic stuff. I’m always writing. And I’m always thinking about ways that I can engage the public in different things. I’m thinking about putting together a book about some of the experiences of how we organize. I’ve released a book with a couple other organizers earlier this year about being black in Canada, and the Black Lives Matter movement in Canada called Until We Are Free. I’m thinking maybe to do something that’s more along the lines of how to organize and the lessons that I’ve learned over the years of being an organizer. And then I’m always working with BLM to try to shift where we’re at in society. I think that we’re in this place where we’ve done so much education around the police that we really have the ability to shift some public policy positively.

In the last couple of weeks, there’s some school boards that have announced they’re done with police in schools. I see what’s happening in the States, Minneapolis voting to abolish police. Oakland, getting rid of weaponry for frontline police officers. And I’m just like, we can do these things too. I’m really trying to bring that to the fore. And then I’m trying to finish this law degree, who knows what we’ll do with it afterwards but we’re almost halfway there.

Rhiki Swinton:
Well, power to you for tackling that monster. I once thought about a law degree, and then I was like, nah. We don’t know what the future will hold for me. I’d like go with the wind when it comes to what I want to do next.

Sandy Hudson:
I hear you. But just for me, it’s wherever we can, wherever we see that we can have an impact on the power that shapes the world that’s where I’m trying to be. I feel like maybe I could have an impact with having that JD credential, we’ll see if I’m right about that. But that’s why I’m here.

Rhiki Swinton:
We were having a conversation the other day, about how to create change, and the ways in which we can do so. And we had this conversation about infiltration. Definitely, you need the pressure from the outside to change the system. But you also need like minded people on the inside working to change the system from the inside. So then we were starting to talk about politics, specifically, and how we need more government officials who think the way we do and I totally agree. But if you asked me to be that person, to get that law degree to be that, that candidate that runs for this thing, I’m like, nah. I don’t want to be that person. What are your thoughts about that?

Sandy Hudson:
Oh, I think that makes perfect sense. I think everything that you just said makes perfect sense. I think that we need people wherever power resides. And power resides everywhere. We’re going to need people on the ground organizing grassroots communities. And we’re going to need people who can tell us, whisper in our ears, “This is what Trump’s about to do.” Or who can tell us, “Okay, we can make an impact in this place and they’re not watching here. So let’s do this.” We need people everywhere. And quite frankly, for someone like me, I’m really talented on the ground. I’m really, really good at choreographing an action on the ground. I’ve been doing it for years, I know how it’s done. I’m just really good at it. There might be a time where I’m no longer good at it, and I’ll have to move on to something else. But for now, it makes no sense for me to take all of that talent, throw it away and go sit and be someone’s representative at City Hall, where half the time I’m talking about streets and how wide they are. 

It makes more sense for me to be able to have the ability to do that stuff on the ground, because that’s just where my talent is. There’s other people who have different talents who are going to be amazing at doing the formal politics thing or maybe they grow out of the type of organizing that they were doing. Maybe it doesn’t make sense anymore, maybe social media world isn’t something that someone who’s a little older can engage with in the same way, and so wants to move into another realm of being effective at poking power, and does it in a different space as a bureaucrat, as an academic as something else. And I think that that’s totally fine. And that makes sense. We shouldn’t just be relegated to either the streets for academia, which is where it seems like some people think is the only place to be as an activist. And I think that that’s just wrong, we need to be everywhere, we need to be in all the places that we can be. But we shouldn’t force ourselves to be places where we don’t fit either.

Rhiki Swinton:
I feel that. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. We really appreciate it.

Sandy Hudson:
My pleasure. It’s like a homecoming because I used to work with the Arcus Center. 

Tirrea:
I know, it’s so cool. When I think about the different people that Arcus has touched, I’m just like, “Wow, why wasn’t I here earlier? So I could have met Sandy and [inaudible 00:51:39]. I guess if you would just do the honors and the pleasure of closing us out with something that you think, whether that’s a quote that you said, or something that you’ve read, that sticks out to you that can really help us and keep us inspired during this time.

Sandy Hudson:
Sure. Here’s something that came to me in the last couple of weeks. It made me feel little good. We are going to win this fight, we’re just going to win it. We’re going to win it, the fight to get rid of police, which is what my fight is. And I believe that we’re going to win it. And the reason why I know this, I have such a deep conviction about it, is because it’s like, “This situation can’t go on forever.” The one thing that we know that’s constant is change. And the situation where black people are fighting the police isn’t going to go on forever, at some point it will end and there are a couple options, right? One, they get rid of all of us, they’ve been trying that for years, and they’ve been failing. 

I’m going to go with they’re going to continue to fail at that. Option number two, is that we all just stop fighting for the end of the police harming us or being around as this ineffective institution. And that’s also not going to happen. We’ve been fighting against it in different ways as the institution of anti blackness generally. And now we’re really focused on the police. I don’t think that’s going to change unless it’s just not going to change. That one’s not going to work out. And the only other option is that we win. This won’t stop until we win. 

I do believe that there’s going to be a time where we look back, hopefully, maybe 20 years from now, we’re a little older, and we get to look back and say, “Yeah, we had this really weird institution that would go around killing black people, show up to people’s houses when they needed help. They’re in some mental distress and end up killing them. And only ever solved less than 15% of burglaries and thefts but we kept it up for, we don’t know why.” And think, that made no sense. I wonder why we did that back then. I just have such a strong and deep conviction that with all the things that we know about this institution, of all the things that we know about the movement for black lives and the different forms that it’s taken over the last 600 years. And all of the things that we know about the police.

There’s no other way that this ends than with us winning. It’s inevitable. It is an irredeemable institutions, it’s not going to be reformed. And that type of eventuality, that inevitability gives me so much inspiration because I’m just like, here we are, we’re living it, we’re bringing it and we’re going to be the ones to do it. And that that is one of the most inspiring and motivating things that came to me in the last couple weeks.

Rhiki Swinton:
I really appreciate that, that I think we need to hear that sometimes. Because sometimes we just think it’s never going to end, we’re going to be fighting forever, but no, we’re going to win. Well, thank you all for listening to this episode of our BLM miniseries. Remember that the conversation is not over. If you like this episode, please let us know by commenting on our social media platforms and be on the lookout for what’s to come next on the Radical Zone. 

outro:
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