As I approach my decade-iversary of being a Legal Observer at Toronto protests, I have some thoughts I want to jot down.
I used to believe that the work would speak for itself, and then I realized that having a fixated stalker, who has literally nothing better to do than to spew volumes of nonsense, meant that that would comprise the record instead of the truth if I do and say nothing.
1. How did I start?
2016 was another year where the rise of right-wing racist rhetoric was unsustainable. The very day after Trump was elected the first time, I was accosted on the streetcar by a racist — and it was in fact one of those times where you don’t need to question whether or not it was actually racist: he dropped the n-word multiple times.
The white people on the streetcar wanted nothing more than for me to go the fuck away, and not hold them up any longer. One particular asshole said I should take the high road and just ignore him.
I allowed myself to be talked into making a police report about the incident, because a Black police officer said that the data on hate crimes is skewed because Black people will not report to police.
I do know that that is the only time I let myself be convinced of it, but it most certainly is not the only racist incident I’ve experienced.
Anyway, it was pretty clear that the racist right was organizing and feeling emboldened. That is the context in which I chose to get more active.
2. Why do I do it?
Watching the police literally protect Proud Boys, PEGIDA, various Nouns of Odin, and other racist groups certainly made it much more difficult for me to interact with them. I have been utterly incapable of functioning as a police lady is on since about 2018. I find it very hard to be even vaguely civil to police.
In the summer of 2017, several racist groups decided that they were going to team up to hold a reenactment of Charlottesville at Toronto City Hall, complete with Tiki torches, except at 3:00 in the afternoon. Not really sure why they needed torches while the sun was high, but racists are not known for their intellectual depth.
The response to that was overwhelming. Toronto means who had never attended a protest in their lives vocally planned to come out to shut that down. In the end, most of the right wing racist assholes didn’t even show up, and the two or three that I saw, came to the corner of Nathan Phillips Square, looked at the crowd, and fled.
I used to joke that I wasn’t ready to punch a Nazi myself, but I would certainly make sure that anyone who did had legal support.
3. What type of protests do I support?
As volunteers with limited resources it is not surprising that people imagine that we pick and choose causes based on what is closest to our hearts. But that worldview doesn’t understand the way in which different facets of Liberation Struggle are intertwined.
I will drag my ass out for any thing that falls in the spectrum of Liberation Struggle.
It’s wild how some people don’t understand the concept. They don’t understand why Black people care about Palestine. Why Palestinians care about Indigenous struggles here in Canada.
How, underlying it all, is this capitalist hellscape which has more and more people on the brink of being unhoused.
I promise to keep the lengthy philosophical treatise to another post, but we have created a world in which most people don’t even know what makes them happy, and instead substitute having things that other people can’t have. And we’ve taken that and applied it to everything including food. It’s grotesque.
In the end, I will happily freeze my butt off at Indigenous railway blockades, shelter hotel closings (these always seem to happen in the winter time), encampment clearings, anti-poverty demonstrations — anything where the risk of police violence against the marginalized is elevated.
Police are there to maintain the status quo. As though the status quo is some ideal and isn’t degrading every minute of every hour of every day.
4. What is one misconception you’d like to correct?
I don’t really understand why it’s so hard for people to understand a flat org. The whole idea behind flattening an org is that, while there may be different roles to be fulfilled at a given moment, anyone within the org should be able to fulfill that role, with adequate training and a bit of experience.
It’s not about being someone’s boss.
A peeve of mine is how my simple-minded obsessive stalker assumes that “coordinator” is a magical, special title.
I am A coordinator.
There’s a coordinator on site for every action. But there are at least 25 of us who do it. And I’m very happy to not be the point person at a protest.
If I am not the coordinator for the day, it in no way affects my self-worth. Possibly because I’m not a malignant narcissist like my stalker.
That’s a good place to make a break.
Part 2 to follow.