Rev Left Radio - Policing Black Lives: State Violence and Systemic Racism in Canada

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

Robyn Maynard joins Breht to discuss her new book "Policing Black Live: State Violence in Canada From Slavery to the Present".  Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada. Please Support Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Music: 'Celebrate' by Grxwn Fxlks LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have Robin Maynard on to talk about her newest book, Policing Black Lives, State Violence in Canada, from slavery to the present. We really deconstruct the mythology of Canada as some multiracial, progressive haven. We talk about the history of settler colonialism, slavery, anti-black racism in Canada's past and present. We talk about fascist movements within the U.S. and their sort of mirrored image in Canada and just a lot more. This is a really great book. Too often people have this oversimplified version of Canada as, you know, being wholly better than the U.S. and an alternative to it. And

of course, many of us know that that's nonsense, but this book really lays out that history in a complete, complex way that's really important. So I love this discussion. I think you'll enjoy this interview as well and as always if you like what we do here at rev left radio um you can always support us on patreon.com forward slash rev left radio it really helps keep the show going and it helps importantly provide for me and my producers family during this pandemic um particularly as many of you know my my wife lost her job due to the pandemic so the support we get from patreon is really keeping both of our families afloat during these these intense times and so we deeply appreciate it and of course, in exchange for your support, you get access to bonus monthly content.

So, having said that, let's go ahead and dive into this interview with Robin Maynard on her newest book, Policing Black Lives. Enjoy. Hi, my name is Robin Maynard. I am an author writer based in Toronto. Most recently, I'm the author of the book Policing Black Lives State Violence in Canada from slavery to the present. I also helped put together and do some research for the website defund the police.org with the research team of Black Lives Matter Toronto, and I'm working on a police defunding

explainer in collaboration with Black Lives Matter Toronto. So I'm somebody who is a writer, an academic, but I've always been grounded in social movements to varying extent, part of movements against racial profiling, against anti-blackness specifically, especially as it impacts black young people, black sex workers. I have a long history of involvement in harm reduction outreach work, which I'm not doing anymore, but that's something that really does impact, you know, the way that I see the world that impacts my writing, that impacts the way that I focus my work on people who are using drugs, people who may be selling sex, that sort of thing. Yeah. Well, we're honored to have you on. I really enjoyed the book. I think it's really

important for many reasons, particularly because of the sort of skewed version of Canada that many non-Canadians have of the place, which we'll definitely get into. Before we get into the questions, though we are recording this the day after the Brianna Taylor ruling came out, wherein none of the cops were charged with the death of Brianna Taylor. One cop was charged with firing bullets into her white neighbor's wall. Predictably, protests have erupted around the country in every major city, more or less. Just before we get into these questions, I know this is not something that we talked about, but just do you have any thoughts?

Like, where are you coming from right now as you see the abject injustice? and then the response by the people in the streets. I mean, I'm just my, all of my heart is going out to, especially her loved ones, her family, her community for whom this is just, you know, yet another representation of how little value is placed on black people, particularly on black women in American society, in global society. And I'm also struck, though, with the words of Andrea Ritchie and Maryam Kaba, who wrote about Brianna Taylor and the conviction. Even if successful, the arrest, conviction, and sentencing of individual cops represent an exception to the rule. The rule is impunity. And I think this shows us yet and yet again that there is absolute impunity when it comes to destroying black people's lives. And I'm just thinking so much about the people on the street today really sending out, you know, love and rage for what is just, again, another brutal demonstration of how that, you know, the criminal justice system is precisely not created in terms of protection.

in any way, except for a protection of the white ruling class. Yeah, absolutely. You know, there's so many stories like this, and they're all heartbreaking, but, you know, something about the Brianna Taylor case, it just really breaks my heart. And I can barely say her name without tearing up. And I know this is true for so many people. She dedicated her life to helping other people. She did nothing wrong.

She was sleeping in her own house and still no justice. I mean, you know, what scenario would be possible in which a black person has killed by the police and the police is held accountable? Like how how depraved does it have to be? It's really heartbreaking and it's worth noting 65 years to the day that the Brianna Taylor ruling came out was the anniversary of Emmett Till's murderers being let off as well. So this is not new on this continent and it'll only stop when we stop the white supremacist settler colonial machine that reproduces these conditions. I'm just thinking exactly of how you know how this kind of violence continues to reproduce itself.

You're exactly right that what we're seeing is, you know, I think that writers like Christina Sharp and Cydia Hartman have really especially framed the way, you know, the particular racial logics of anti-blackness that are just entrenched into the way that, that U.S., you know, Canadian, North American, more broadly a society functions in the way that black humanity is, is never seen, is never protected, is in fact continually violated. Absolutely. Well, let's go ahead.

head and get into your book, which is obviously about all of these issues and many more. And first and foremost, I want to address the sort of a historical romanticization of Canada as this multicultural and progressive haven that sits in direct contrast to the giant neighbor on its southern border. Can you talk about how and why Canada is so often overlooked when it comes to discussions of anti-black racism and structural white supremacy? Sure. I think that's a great question. And I think that for that, we really need to look at the way in which Canada has always historically positioned itself as a kind of more benevolent sort of little brother country to the United States. And I think a lot of that looks at, you know,

it really takes a very romanticizing and really mythologized understanding of Canadian history in particular, right, where slavery historian Charmaine Nelson, for example, has pointed out repeatedly how Canada's, you know, being upheld as the end of the Underground Railroad, of course, in particular, tends up taking three decades of history and supplanting the fact that, of course, there was 200 years prior to the British abolition of the slave trade in all of its colonies in 1834, where slavery was legal and practiced in Canada. And instead, we really have the erasure of the two centuries and have them replaced with these three decades of what's understood to be a benevolent practice.

Canada is, you know, is very much advancing this romanticization all the time. time. So something that, at least up until recently, was up on the Canadian heritage website. I'm not still sure if it's there when it looks at black history is when the British loyalists are said to have provided freedom for some enslaved black people during the American Revolutionary War, bringing them to Canada. But what is often left out of that is the fact that there were also 1,200 enslaved black people who came as the property of white loyalists who would come across the border, right? So it's actually a very selective understanding of Canadian history that disguises the long-standing relegation of black people to being understood as

property, to being understood as pathologically dangerous, particularly after the abolition of slavery when we start to see the way that black people are being criminalized by police, by the criminal justice system, the work to keep black people from crossing the U.S. border into Canada to stop black people from coming from the Caribbean to Canada as well. That's, of course, an important part of Canada's 20th century history. So what it takes really is, the effacement of all of this, something that was particularly interesting that I came upon when I was looking into the way that this sort of foundational and myth-making takes place was the author Robin Winkz points out the fact that, so only about 30 years after slavery

had been abolished in the colonies that were not yet called, you know, we're not yet at that time called Canada formally. Already the school textbooks in what, you know, in what is now Ontario had reference to slavery in the United States, but any reference to slavery being practiced in the colonies now called Canada was not there, right? And that remains true to this day. If you talk to people around, you know, it's not only a myth internationally that Canada is this land of racial benevolence. The most Canadians are not learning in schools that slavery even existed in Canada, let alone that it was practiced for 200 years. Most Canadians are not aware that the last segregated school in Canada closed in 1983. Right? So it's not only an idea of projecting a certain image internationally. It's something that's very much socialized into the Canadian education system, into the Canadian media, such that every time there is a protest, which again happens frequently, especially in cities with large black populations like Toronto, like Montreal. There's often commentators saying that protesters here are just trying to say that Canada is like the United States, negating the fact that black communities have been protesting police killings since at least the 1970s in Canada, that this is particularly a Canadian crisis, but we're continually taught as black people in Canada who are trying to advance, you know, very well-documented arguments against the wanton destruction of black people's lives about the fact that black people in Toronto, for example, are 20 times more likely to be killed shot by police than white people, right? But we're

continually told again and again that this is an American issue, that we're Americanizing our analysis, that this is not a Canadian issue. So this is something that as black people living in Canada, we are continually coming up against. Yeah. And, you know, that's the sort of PR self-mythologizing version of history that, you know, white Canadians often tell about themselves. And it's very common in settler colonial white supremacist country is this redoing of history or this whitewashing of history because it's so bound up with people's sense of selves and all this complexity. So we know that this is a lie. Can you talk a little bit more about the truth of the matter and specifically what experiences, either your own or

the people you've come into contact with as an organizer and activist, what you talk about in this book, speak to the truth of anti-blackness in Canada? Sure. I mean, some of my earliest, I guess, my earliest entrance into organizing in any way in Canada was when I had been living in Montreal as around the time that I was 18 or 19. and in a neighborhood where I was volunteering, where I was doing work where I had friends live, I was talking with young teenagers frequently, and they were talking about the fact that, like, literally they could not play, you know, if they were walking to school or if they were trying

to be in the park, really anything, if they were in groups of three or more, then the police would break them up, would surveil them and ask them for ID and force them to separate because they would say that three or more means that you're under suspicion of being in a gang, right? Which, of course, we know is not something that applies to white people. people in public space. We know that white teens are allowed to move through public space with relative security. So in that sense, we ended up creating all kinds of rights-based guide and doing all kind of legal training. In that period of my life, I would say I was more one to believe that, you know, if we did enough know-your-rights trainings, if we did enough education, that

somehow this would have an impact, I think that, you know, as I become older, I do think it's important for us to know our rights, but I think it's extremely clear having worked on these issues now for for far more years that precisely you know the quote that I opened with that impunity is the law that it doesn't really matter what our rights are because living as a black person in north american society we know that rights are continually are you know are nominal right that rights are continually um not respected for black people's in particular so something that is really important to understand about the way that anti-blackness exists in Canada is i mean that precisely i think that it's not just about saying and Canada too but that we're looking at

at a condition that black people face that is really that is the global that was globalized with the globalizing practice of the transatlantic slave trade. So what that means and particularly what I trace in my own book is that of course we can see that black people are more likely to be stopped, for example, by police. This is true in Canadian cities where it's been studied like Edmonton, like Vancouver, like Halifax and Montreal and Toronto. We know that black people are more likely to be arrested, more likely to be charged, are incarcerated at a rate that's three times our proportion in Canadian society and something that was really vital for me as well in writing policing black lives was also to look at the many institutions that are not

traditionally understood to be policing institutions to look at how the notion of black people that people's as pathological how the surveillance of black people's lives is embedded into many state institutions that are understood to be public so the creation of public schools for example, as something that has emerged historically in connection with anti-blackness, particularly in the provinces where there was segregated schooling, right, and understanding that the surveillance of young black people, the ongoing expulsions, the school to prison pipeline,

that this is another way, another carceral reality that black people are facing that is not necessarily understood if we think about policing in a very traditional sense and that we can see similarly if we look toward the child welfare system, right, where black families are subject to surveillance, especially poor black women, you know, punished in ways that are as painful as damaging as any harm to the body to have a child removed from a family is a kind of a punishment against black families that I think we don't that we need

to understand within the rubric of policing and captivity that if we look to the border or the way that bordering is policed in Canada that black people have you know differently than the United States in Canada just just around half of black populations here were born elsewhere So what that means, too, is if you're going to be, you know, I know this, I know many people that has happened too, if you happen to be stopped for something like driving while black or, you know, having a joint, like a joint in your pocket or something like this, right? Not only are you more likely to be stopped and possibly charged for this, but what that can actually result in, depending on the level of the so-called crime, is that you can actually

end up not only, you know, in jail, but in immigration detention. And in Canada, immigration detention is indefinite. So we have cases of black migrants who'd been in detention for up to a decade, sometimes for things related to like having a tiny amount of drugs, you know, outside of a homeless shelter in one person's condition. This can also lead not only to detention, but deportation, right? So anti-blackness is really embedded and congealed into multiple institutions across Canadian society. Yeah. And when we talk about policing black lives, you focus a lot, obviously, on the institutional perspective, on the systemic perspective in Canada. there's also in Canada and America the downstream effect of white settlers policing black lives on the streets, right?

We've seen numerous videos. The whole Karen phenomenon comes out of white people, often white women, but white men as well, of course, you know, thinking that just sort of assuming without even reflecting on it, that they have a right to police black people's behavior. You're having a barbecue here, you know, I don't think you should be here. I'm going to make a big fuss. I might even call the cops and put your lives in danger. So it starts in the institutions, it starts in history, and then it trickles down to the white individual settlers themselves

who sort of take it upon themselves. And this has always been true in settler colonial societies, stretching all the way back to the founding of these different countries, where they take it into their own hands to be sort of an extension of those white supremacist institutions and police black people's lives in the streets. And the videos that we're seeing coming out of those sorts of interactions are just further proof of that. Absolutely. I think you're pointing out something, you know, absolutely correct, which I think, you know, many scholars have argued in very compelling ways that, like, white people themselves get to function as the police, as a kinds of police. And I mean, something that I like to remind people as well, that even when we point to state violence, that's not, that shouldn't be anything that takes culpability away from the broader public. These are public institutions. They're paid for with tax dollars. The fact that this is happening in the name of so-called public safety also really. does culpabilize the broader population for not acting, for not failing to intervene,

for not demanding that so-called public institutions are not responsible for egregious harm and violence and even death inflicted on black communities on indigenous communities, right? So there's a responsibility there that I think doesn't disappear even when we do point to the state, right? Because who is the state acting in support of, you know, even though we do see a wholesale abandonment of many, many populations, not only black and indigenous, nonetheless, it is the supposed representative of, of public, right? And that, I think, means we need to have a certain responsibility of what the, you know, what people who are, who are the public, who are the so-called taxpayers are willing to accept being done in their name. Right. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know,

for an audience, mostly made up of non-Canadians, can you just talk a little bit more about the history of Canada? I know you've touched on it a bit already, but anything else you have to say about just the history of Canada in relation to slavery, to anti-black racism, and or to settler colonialism, just so, you know, I think a lot of people know America's history of much fewer people understand Canada's history with regards to these issues. Sure. I can definitely provide a little bit of that. So, and I already did a little bit, so I'll try not to say anything that I'd already stated. But I think, of course, it's important to understand Canada as being, you know,

that both Canada and the United States are countries that have histories of slavery, of indigenous genocide, settler colonialism, right? So in Canada, of course, it was not the same kind of plantation slave societies that we saw in the American South or in the Caribbean, right? If we look to, you know, numerically the number of people that were enslaved here, the economy was less based on slavery. As, you know, historians like Charmaine Nelson, like Harmi Amani Whitfield, have really done this incredibly valuable work of Fuha Cooper as well, of really uncovering this legacy. But that doesn't mean, of course, their work really shows us that it was not nonetheless important that the Settler Society in Canada was still economically very linked and tied into the transatlantic slave

trade, you know, and the products that that were a part of that, including cod, for example, right, which was used to feed enslaved people in the Caribbean, that also it was not uncommon to see notices for enslaved people who were being sold in Canadian newspapers, right? Or to see what were called runaway slave ads in newspapers across the provinces, you know, of the colonies that are now called, that are now called Canada. So it's important to understand that it was nonetheless a feature of Canadian society. And I think that especially Charmaine Nelson's work helps us to see how, you know, the ways in which the ways in which that runaway slave ads in particular were, and the descriptions of black people were so much a part of the public realm was

that this was really the first ways that black people were criminalized in public life, in the public imagination, right? That this already set up a way that black people walking through public space were seen as already possible runaway slaves as already possible so-called criminals, right? Of course, the crime being having stolen yourself, but this is very much foundational into the relationship, into the ways that black people were perceived. And of course, really crucial to me is not only how were black people perceived, but how was that something that was really sedimented into state practices. So if you look to Canadian cities in the late 19th century in the early 20th century,

you can see many examples of black men, black women being disproportionately charged with, for example, in the case of black women, so-called vagrancy offenses, right? Which is in many ways, really, the crime of being in public space again, right? We see these disproportionate arrests. We see this. And of course, this is something that is extremely present in, in the contemporary moment, right? So this is important, particularly even, I think,

for Canadians to hear about, because in Canada you have this understanding that black people only began to arrive in this country after the immigration system began to be not so explicitly white supremacists, right, in the mid to late 20th century. But the fact that actually slavery as well as segregation, which as I'd mentioned, you know, schools were formally segregated in provinces

on the eastern end, like in the maritime provinces, where as I'd mentioned, the last segregated school was closed in 1983, and there's a really great documentary about that by a poet and filmmaker, and author Sylvia Hamilton, called A Little Black Schoolhouse for anybody that's interested. Then the province of Ontario, the last segregated school, was closed in 1965, right? So that these are legacies that are really important if we want to understand the way that black young people in schools are being disproportionately disciplined or being disproportionately expelled in the present day. But we often have this idea in the Canadian media of there's

this, you know, there's a massive surprise every time any sort of any of these numbers are revealed showing the massive disparities that black people face in in terms of any societal institution. And I think it's really important for me to answer another part of your question, even though the book's called policing black lives, you know, state violence in Canada from slavery to the present. If you look in any Canadian institution, whether that's jails and prisons, whether that's child welfare, whether that schools, you'll see that it's not only black people at that bottom rung that indigenous people face extremely high rates of incarceration, especially in the prairie provinces, you know, in some provinces being well over 50% of the population of incarcerated

peoples, right? That this is a country that was founded in genocide, that, you know, things, starvation was used as one mechanism in what was called the clearing of the planes, right, as part of the strategy to clear the, you know, to clear the land to make space for white settlers that residential schools only closed, um, a few decades ago, right? So there are people, you know, many people who are my age who might have grown up next to a residential school. And this is something that's really only making its way into popular understandings, um, now because of things like the, I don't know more movement, um, you know, and it's, relation to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and all of this.

So it's really crucial to understand if we're going to look at state violence as a kind of racialized and gendered violence, which I think that we need to, then the realities of indigenous peoples is really crucial to that if settler colonialism and slavery are, of course, aren't identical. But, you know, even since the pandemic began, when, of course, everything was to have slowed down, we see for black and indigenous peoples that, you know, the killing of our communities has, it's actually, there have actually been double the amount of police killings in half the year that they usually are in one year. And that includes the killing of, um, an indigenous teenager, Aisha Hudson

in Winnipeg of Chantal Moore, an indigenous woman who was killed by police during, um, who died at the hands of police, excuse me, during a wellness check, uh, Regis Karsinski Pakeh, who was an Afro-Indigenous woman who ended up falling from a balcony to her death when the police were called in order to support her during a mental health crisis, a black man named DeAndre Campbell, right? So we're continuing to see that it's really our peoples together who are being targeted, who are being killed at these massive disproportionate rates by the state. So if we're going to really under, we need to look at, I think, the legacy, the living legacy of colonialism and genocide and the afterlies of slavery as sort of functioning together in these institutions that are continuing

to hold us captive to end the lives of our community members. far before any natural, any natural time. Yeah, absolutely. Those struggles are so deeply intertwined. Those histories are so deeply intertwined. The entire project of European colonialism, really forged whiteness, forged the settler colonial genocides, forged the transatlantic slave trade. And so while you can talk about these things separately, sort of zooming out,

you can see how deeply they're connected. And I think activists and organizers all over the world, but particularly on this continent, are realizing that and are starting. starting to work together and figuring out, you know, how can we, you know, given the interwoven nature of our histories, how can we interweave our struggles and boost them and bolster them and have each other's backs? And I think we are seeing that. And I think we've seen that for a while. We can go back to the American Indian movement and the Black Panther Party and the young lords, you know, all movements we've covered on this show and just see how, you know, really at that time

there's a lot of theorizing and putting into practice these ideas of just how intercomers. connected these struggles are and these histories are. Yeah, that's so, that's so crucial. And I think that, you know, the Canadian media in particular is often trying to pit our communities against one another. Like there is an editorial, for example, from a major, major Canadian publication that was written by their editorial board recently that was talking about the black-led protests that were happening across the country and saying, wait, wait, wait, but we need to save some outrage

for indigenous people. And of course, this both pits our communities against one another. And it also is ignoring the fact that black and indigenous communities, particularly when it comes to this new push for defunding the police, right? In Canada, we see, I think, a lot of really important cross-collaboration that when Black Lives Matter Toronto, a few years ago, occupied the outside of Toronto police headquarters for over two weeks after a black father for Andrew Goku was killed by the police in a mental health crisis, that there was strong indigenous support for that, that Black Lives Matter then also showed up for an occupation. of INAQ, which is, you know, in support of indigenous occupation and fighting against contemporary colonialism, right? So yeah, there's actually a lot of really important crossovers that are happening that have always been happening that I think sometimes get displaced in more dominant tropes of like what racism, what anti-racist struggle looks like, right? Yeah, and it's certainly

in the interest of the ruling class and the hierarchies that be to try to separate and create divides between these different movements because the last thing any of them want to see is a multiracial diverse coalition of people working together towards total liberation for everybody. So it's certainly within their interest to start trying to figure out ways to separate and divide those movements. But moving on, I am curious as someone who has never been to Canada myself, what, if any, cultural and political differences do actually exist between Canada and the U.S.? in regards to these issues or even more broadly? Is there anything that stands out to you as something that really is a difference that matters? I mean, I guess in the U.S., there seems

to at least but you know for for different historical reasons and cultural reasons there is not there is more of an existence of the fact that at least something like slavery did exist did happen for example right so i mean i suppose that would be one difference i think that um there is a particular you know canadian proclivity too i suppose because of this self-identification with being this land of multiculturalism of benevolence that leads to like a particular way of some way in some ways tacitly acknowledging the existence of settler colonialism. And I think you can look, especially to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau right now, right? Who, I mean, you can see in sharp contrast to somebody like Donald Trump is taking a knee, right?

But at the same time, so I mean, this is a cultural difference, you know, talking, saying anti-black racism out loud, for example, right? But I think that this is a difference only in so far as it's a different way of perpetuating white supremacy, right? of naming something, of seeming apologetic for something, but then continuing to allow these same policies that allow black people to be killed and to be harmed by a multiple state institutions. So in some ways, there's just a sort of culture of apology and a culture of innocence,

but structurally we do see so many continuities in the ways that black people are treated, even though, of course, it's not identical that we do live in different countries, right? But there are so many continuities that I think we really, if we look to the ways that black people are living and dying, come into view yeah it's almost like at this moment there's a sort of good cop bad cop dynamic it's it's the liberal attempt to defend and buffer white supremacy and perpetuate settler colonial

logics and then you know down here we have the more explicit um reactionary version of it but you know the ultimate goal the ultimate system that they run is is the same malcolm x talked about you know the fox and the wolf um you know they're both they're both trying to destroy you but they just go about it in different ways. And I think that that comes into play here. And then with the whole idea of, you know, in the U.S., our notions of slavery and that history are there, and it's

certainly being bolstered by black-led movements like Black Lives Matter, the 1619 project, trying to bring these issues into the forefront. Because even though Americans know about slavery, the history that were taught in an educational system is still completely sort of simplified, whitewashed.

And even recently, Trump was coming out saying that He's pushing through an executive order for patriotic education to make an already whitewashed version of American history even more absurdly fever-dreamy and fantasy-ish for whatever fits the sort of right-wing mindset. So in a sense there is this recognition, but there's also this refusal to actually do anything about it. And there's even this pushback on the reactionary right here to even push back on the ground that we have made with regards to bringing these histories to light and making more people understand the complexities of them.

Absolutely. So one of the chapters in your book that I want to emphasize and you touched on it a little bit earlier is titled Destroying Black Families, Slavery's After Life in the Child Welfare System. This chapter, you know, it made me think initially of how in Malcolm X's autobiography, he talks about this exact same system in the U.S.

and sort of how it destroyed his family and particularly his mother's mental health in one of the most moving chapters of any book I've ever read, Malcolm X talks about how just devastated and angry and despair-ridden he is over what this system did to his mother, particularly. So can you talk a little bit more about the past and present of the child welfare system in Canada and how it's been used as a mechanism of black oppression historically? Absolutely. Yeah. So, of course, the subtitle, Slavery's Afterlife in the Child Welfare System is, you know, is referring to Sadiah Hartman's beautiful formulation of this idea of the afterlife of slavery.

And I think that if we understand the ways in which slavery, of course, was a kind of racialized engendered surveillance, a kind of captivity, that also, of course, engendered familial dislocation, the separation of family members from one other who are, of course, bought and sold separately as a particular kind of anti-black punishment of anti-black controls. Now that's, of course, not identical as we move forward through history. But what I was really trying to get out was that some of the practices where we really can see a continuity, particularly in the idea that black children were not seen to be children in the way that white children are, right, which is something that we know is still represented, you know, as the American Psychological Association study has shown us that black kids, this is a study of law enforcement officers, but I think really can be extrapolated more broadly. We're seen as less innocent than white children were seen as often older than they were, right? But this is something, you know, the idea that black children were not children where, of course, we come from a, you know, a country where, you know, legally, of course, black children were considered property, right? And that's something that's true in the colonies that became Canada as well. So if we look to the creation of the child welfare system, we see anti-blackness is something that had always been endemic to that. So in some instances, up until the mid-20th century, what were called so-called negroid children were considered non-adoptable.

in many levels. In Nova Scotia, there was, you know, the creation of what was called the Nova Scotia home for colored children, which was because of the ways in which orphanages were not accepting black children. So was this something that was, you know, that the state very much supported this idea of black children being placed in this entire, in this different system. And of course, this was subject to massive state neglect. In 1947, a staff report showed that there were only three staff and two bathrooms for 60 children, that there is inadequate food and sleeping space and the province refused to act, that we saw there were numerous allegations of serious child abuse and beatings throughout the 1950s that again

were ignored, that we saw that they were receiving almost three times less funding per child than other similar child care homes in the province from the 1940s through to the end of the 1970s, right? This is work by researcher Wanda Taylor in particular that makes this clear that, you know, even by 1980, the per diems that were allotted to this home were about 2788, and children in other words were receiving $55, right? So this really shows us the ways in which black children were considered to be, to be less than children within any kind of child welfare. But if we look more broadly, we can also see in the 1940s in Canada, oh, I think I'd mentioned this, the children with what was called need-grade blood were deemed to be non-adoptable.

that in the 1950s, the Toronto Children's Aid Society put children who appeared to be black in institutions rather than in foster homes because, again, they were seen as being less likely to be adoptable, right? So we can understand this ways in which black children were, you know, both taken from their families, but then also not even being treated as if they were children who needed families, who needed so-called care, right? I could go into the history for much longer, but I think that something else that I just really want to get at is because, you know, know, for so many reasons, of course, it is so valid and valuable that our movements put so much energy into, you know, what's called stop and frisk in the United States. Like the lack of black people's ability to access public space, the way in which we're policed by law enforcement, you know, this is particularly understood to be a male phenomenon, although we know that it's women that experience this too, is, of course, a crisis, right? But if we look to the ways

where poor black women, especially are being surveilled by child and family services are being massively overreported or having their kids taken away at far higher rates. The kids are being held longer. You know, there's situations that I, you know, I cite in the book, for example, child and family services being called on a kid because they went to school, because they'd gone to school and had a roti for their lunch, right? So we see this kind of intense pathologization of black families where black families themselves are seen as a site of risk, as a place that needs to be surveilled that

requires state intervention. And the kinds of harm that this does, and I'm really, repeating myself from earlier, but I think it's so crucial to see is absolutely a kind of violence, even if it's not the same kind of violence as, for example, of, you know, being beaten, right? The kind of trauma that this inflicts is long-lasting and really needs to be understood. You know, I think our movements really need to really need to look at this in a form or in-depth way as really one of the primary sites of violence against black communities where, you know, if we look to the amount of money that goes into putting a child in state care,

Dorothy Roberts, I think, highlights this so beautifully from a U.S. context. But imagine that money instead being invested into poor black families who often have far less per year to take care of their children, right? Because so much child removal is related to so-called negligence that is, in fact, deeply related to poverty, right? So just as we can see the policing of things like low-scale drug crimes and things like shoplifting as the criminalization of poverty, we also need to look at child removal as a kind of criminalization of poverty for black families for black communities.

Yeah, absolutely. One thing that's adjacent to that, that just made me think about when you were talking, was here in the U.S., the homeless mother who lied about what district she lived in so that she could get her child into a better school system. And she recently, I think, got a five-year sentence for, I think, the charge was first-degree larceny for just trying to get her kid a better education. And meanwhile, the police who walked in and killed Brianna Taylor as she was sleeping get nothing. And that's just one little example, one little juxtaposition. But I think it speaks to that broader idea of how black people,

specifically black families, black mothers are treated in this system, whether it's in Canada or it's in the United States. It takes many different forms, but it's that same underlying just sort of dominance and oppression and brutalizing of people's psychologies and people's lives, you know, nothing hurts more for a parent than to be separated from their child or to see their child go out into the streets and be worried they'll be killed by cops. I mean, that daily grinding psychological cost in and of itself is just a daily trauma that is really passed down through generation.

Absolutely. And I do just want to also be careful. You know, I'm using terms like pathologized, the ways that black families are being pathologized. I think I just want to be so clear that I'm not meaning that to say that black families are in any ways pathological, just the opposite, right? If we look to the intense amount of mobilizing that black families have had to undertake over generations to keep our families together, to keep our children safe, to keep our children with us, to fight against the kind of violence being inflicted by, you know, the so-called child welfare system, that again, that's organizing that can be traced back to generations, that is precisely, you know, black people. families have had to struggle in many ways among the most to really keep to keep our family structures intact against all kinds of systemic violations and at the same time nonetheless form

beautiful and protracted kinship systems that are and ways of loving and caring for one another against and despite all of this all of this harm right absolutely yeah well said so one of the things and this is kind of a good segue because one of the things that I really appreciated about this book is really how it centers the experiences of black women and and also queer, trans, and gender non-conforming black folks in Canada. Can you talk about the specific forms of oppression that people living at these points of intersection face in Canada? Sure. For me, it was really important when I was writing this book to take enormous care, not to just accidentally or unintentionally or even without thought inadvertently reproduce the kinds of particular tropes around policing that I think continue to dominate,

even some anti-racist, even some black studies work that really provide, I did not want to create an understanding of policing, of criminalization, of surveillance, of captivity that would only allow us to see the experience of, you know, presumably cisgender, black, heterosexual men, right? I do think that, of course, that is such, you know, one really crucial element of who we are fighting for who we've always been fighting for but i always i also think that you know following black feminists like andrea ritchie like joy james like angela davis you know like in canada like dion brand and beverly bane how how absolutely central is that if we look to the experiences of black women if we look to the experiences of queer trans gender nonconforming people this

actually drastically expands our understanding of what the policing of black life really is right If we look only in one particular way at one very particularly gendered experience, there's so much that we are missing. So I think particularly looking at, for example, the child welfare system as a kind of gendered and anti-black violence really allows us to see policing in a way that is more broad, in a way that actually allows us to create movements that are able to address the policing of black life everywhere that we find it, right? I think that if we look to the realities of, you know, we often understand in a Canadian

perspective, like the young cisgender black men as sort of the pretextual. primary target of police stops and police checks. But, like, what I, in my experience, even as a street-based outreach worker over the years, like what is so, so clear, and I mean, what emergent data that comes out also makes very clear is that for black trans women, the kind of policing, the kind of violence policing is something that is so brutal, particularly for women that are involved in sex work or are perceived to be involved in sex work, right? That there's a kind of brutality there, a kind of police brutality that is so ongoing. but that remains out of sight because of the ways in which misogy noir and trans misogy noir

and all these ways of refusing to see other kinds of victims of policing. So for me, it was really important to center those realities, you know, not only out of a political commitment, which I do have as a feminist, but because of what that asks of us, which is actually to look more carefully at how different people are experiencing policing and police harm. And that's something that was really vital for me to center throughout the entirety. of the book, as well as actually then with two chapters that were specifically focused on the policing of black women by including law enforcement violence, but also including the child

welfare system, also including the way that the war on drugs has particularly impacted black women, the way that black women have been targeted by border controls as well, because I think that it's really vital that we no longer reproduce framings that allow this kind of gendered violence. And of course, all violence against black people is gendered, but this particular particular kinds of gendered violence out of our frame because then we're leaving too many people out of our freedom struggles if we're not able to do this. Exactly. And I think that speaks to the fact that when these things go unchecked, when they go sort of

blindly replicated within movements and organizations, they act as a sort of a cancer and a rot within those organizations. And I think there's been a lot of progress within organizations in Canada, the U.S., etc. over the last couple decades with bringing forward, even within radical and revolutionary organizations and movements, the needs of women within there, the needs of queer people, trans people, gender non-conforming people. We've gotten better on that as time has gone on and a lot of those struggles were internal. So not only is this important to center them in the analysis of history and the analysis

of the present situation, but also because it strengthens our movements if we as organizers as an activist on the ground, learn these things and understand the complexities of intersection and really bring those insights into our efforts to fight back. And that actually strengthens our movements and allows us to bring in more people with different minds and different forms of creativity and different experiences, et cetera. So, yeah, on every level, this stuff is incredibly important. Absolutely. So shifting a little bit away from the text properly and just sort of zooming out a little bit,

talking about some of its implications, perhaps. Today in North America, you know, we're seeing historical protests and movements against anti-black violence, systemic racism, and police brutality that spans across borders. In the U.S., this burst of progressive and even revolutionary energy has given rise to the latest wave of fascist reactions,

spearheaded in lots of ways from the highest office in our country, the presidency. Given the brazen and hyperviolent resurgence of explicit fascism in the U.S., Canada can often be seen as tame by comparison. But of course, you know, this is wishful thinking. So can you just talk a little bit about Canadian fascism in what ways it's on the rise and how it might differ, if at all, from American fascism in 2020?

Sure. I mean, the first thing that I want to do, I guess, is just to rethink fascism, of course, in the ways that I think scholars like Cedric Robinson have asked us to do, like, you know, Du Bois and others have asked us to do, which is to understand that even as we start, start to see, you know, things like a turn towards perhaps more explicit fascism, that the ways in which our countries have historically treated black peoples, both domestically and globally, is something that already needs to be understood within that framework, right?

So I'm thinking about, you know, the role of Canadian RCMP officer John Timor being involved in the suppression of what was called the, you know, the Mao Mao rebellions in Kenya in terms of, you know, the massive torture and captivity that was enacted on Kenyan freedom fighters, right? So just understanding that there has already always already been a certain kind of totalitarian way in which black peoples in particular have been treated and have been targeted and the, you know, slavery and as legacies as well becoming a part of that just because I always like to historically situate, you know, the ways that I'm thinking about fascism. So I think that, but so to answer your question of more into the present, I think that there's always been

in Canada a strong, pretty like pretty intensive, brutal right wing. some, you know, some trying to be more respectable than others, right? So, for example, Delis Magabo's research shows us that, you know, there were Nazis that were attacking and even at some point lighting on fire, Somali families' housing in 1980s and 1990s, Montreal, that this is something that has, you know, been on the back burner and perhaps not taken seriously in the media over a long period of time, but is nonetheless very much a part of this. We just recently had, it sort of made Twitter news, but didn't make that much to the mainstream, but an RCMP officer who was talking about, you know, extreme violence

committed by right-wing and sort of fascist militias and saying that we need to see both sides, both sides, of course, of this are things that we need to look at, right? And the RCMP sort of, I'm sorry, being Canada's national police force, right? There was just a violent attack on anti-racist protesters in Alberta, right? So that this is something that if I would say within public discourse, it's slightly, you know, less acceptable, although this is always being pushed back and pushed back and pushed back to see, you know, the kind of very open racism that you would see by Donald Trump, that nonetheless these things are sort of, you know, allowed and continued to function, albeit sort of in

ways that need to be a little bit more discreet in a Canadian society because of people's sort of nominal commitment to outer politeness, to outer politeness, right? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, just thinking, like, I saw both those videos on Twitter this week that you mentioned. And, you know, I have a very, I think pretty in-depth analysis and understanding of fascism in America. And I can just see pretty much just the exact same sort of people, the exact same conspiratorial mindset. A lot of this development really is springing out of so many things, but an anti-Muslim sentiment sort of carried over from the early 2000s in the Iraq War. And then that is now, you know, folded into this kind of

conspiratorial hatred of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, even down to the aesthetics that the fascists in the U.S. and Canada have, you know, very similar face masks, for example. I think there's probably more open-carrying fascist here in the U.S. just because of our gun laws, but I mean... That's a good point, yeah. That is a cultural difference that I forgot to mention the evangelicals and the gun laws. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Oh, man.

Even yesterday in Louisville, we saw, you know, Mott's. of dozens of fascists in full tactical gear, assault rifles, AR-15s, menacing people in the street, opening people's car doors, and a block over police are brutalizing, totally peaceful, unarmed left-wing protesters while they're letting the right-wing fascists sort of roam around and menace people, really an extension of the state when it comes to reacting to these protests. And they're obviously working together. They're working together in Kenosha. I mean, the Kyle Rittenhouse who killed people in Kenosha was given a bottle of water and was told thank you by police before he did it. He was able to walk through the police line

with his hands up and the gun, you know, right in view and nobody even stopped. So it's a very disconcerning thing and they are connected. Yeah. And even if we looked, you know, to the mosque shooting of a few years ago, which was, you know, in, in Quebec, we see that, you know, even that that killer was reading Donald Trump was, you know, there's this understanding of being part of a worldwide movement for white supremacy on their end, right, that I think is pretty clear. I also just think, you know, if we look to the idea that something like Antifa has become this demonized word, when what it stands for is anti-fascist and that this is seen as a

greater threat than fascism really tells us something about where we are at, right? Absolutely. Yeah, and insofar as there is this sort of cross-border fascist emergence, there is also, there has to be and there always will be a cross-border revolutionary sort of presence. And we can see organizations across the border in the U.S. and Canada movements looking the same, learning from each other's strategies. And so I think that international dimension of our movement is incredibly important, particularly if the fascists are trying to build up their own sort of international connections. Absolutely. And I mean, this also goes for the fascists in power situations, right? Like I'm thinking about the kinds of carceral continuities that we see between the U.S. and Canada's border policies, right?

So even as Canada was understood as, you know, was being described in New Yorker and McLean's magazine as being the end of the underground world for these Nigerian and Haitian asylum seekers who were crossing from the U.S. to Canada in the right around, you know, the beginning of Trump's election and following through for years afterwards that, of course, the U.S. was being decried in Canada, you know, as this place where people were leaving to come to be rescued by benevolent Canada. And then you have Canada behind the scenes sending politicians to the U.S. to tell Haitian communities not to come. We actually have, you know, discussions between Canadian and U.S. government officials to, like, stop the U.S. provision of Nigerians of visas to let them enter the country, right? So we continue to see, even at this policy level, again, just to tie that relationship between what fascism means in a broader sense, right? Exactly. Yeah. And just one last thing. Yesterday, just for the record, Trump came out and said that he is not going to promise a peaceful transfer of power if he loses.

And so we can see how from the very highest levels of the government down to the street level fascists, this movement is sort of mobilizing, it's getting stronger. And it's just off the deep end into conspiracy theories. They don't understand Black Lives Matter. They don't have the empathy to understand Black Lives Matter. They don't understand Antifa. It's just a really convenient boogeyman. I mean, obviously, there's always been this attempt to tie Black liberation movements to the scariest left-wing movements and the civil. rights era, the Ku Klux Klan era. It was always tying, you know, civil rights together with

communism. And here today, what do we hear from the right? BLM is a Marxist movement. Anarchists are, you know, in every city, it's the same exact sort of playbook happening over and over again. It's just startling. Yeah. And I mean, I think that I agree with you that many people maybe are unaware because they're being fed so much, you know, so much false information. But I think it's also crucial to remember that behind this, the people who are funding this kind of of movement are often precisely not ignorant, precisely, I think, understand that a movement like Black Lives Matter, of course, is not any existential threat to white Americans living in the United States, but is a threat to a certain kind of dominant social order and all of its

brutalities, right? It does present a threat to the status quo, and I think that that threat is actually quite clearly understood if it's articulated under far more racist terms, but I think that it's being understood as a disruption of, you know, business as usual, which is, of course, mass, you know, mass killings in captivity of black people and working to actively prevent and to undermine that, you know, just to remember that what's being described as this populist rising fascist movement is in many ways, nothing of the sort if we look to like where that funding is often coming from, where the direction is often coming from. Absolutely. Yeah, that's an important part of the whole thing as well. So in the final chapter of your book titled

From Woke to Free, you sketch out a vision of where radical movements for abolition and anti-racism might go from here. None of us can be certain, obviously, but can you talk a little bit about that vision, its connection with movements for indigenous self-determination, and importantly, you know, whether or not you feel optimistic about the future on this continent. Sure. So first of all, I think that I'm still embarrassed by this title. I don't know that I would call something from woke to free if I were writing a book today. Definitely have dated myself with this title. I just have to say that. But so what I'm really trying to get at in the conclusion, this is really where I think the book is in all of its senses, always geared towards abolition. You know, the chapter

about anti-blackness and borders is geared towards the end of borders. The chapter on policing is geared toward the end of policing. The work on prison is about the end of prison, right? So throughout the text, it's an abolitionist text. But what I'm really trying to get at in the conclusion is bring together, you know, thinking with W.E. Du Bois, thinking with Angela Davis, about this concept of abolition democracy, about, you know, not only trying to end the enduring governing power of anti-blackness of racism in all of our state institutions in the criminal justice system and the child welfare system, but is also building towards new and more just kinds of institutions, right, to end the abolition of slavery's afterlives, but also to create

an emancipation truly a world based on more emancipatory ways of living. So some of the things that I point to in the book, for example, right, throughout, in this conclusion, are divesting from carcerns like police and prisons and moving towards, you know, a dramatic reinvestment in those kinds of landings, plus more into our communities. And that's something that, of course, you know, I think that especially this mass revolt, the black led revolt of this summer, I think, has really brought our society. It's really brought a lot of these frameworks that, of course, not just me, many, many other people for decades before me have been talking about this idea of abolitionist futures, right, of actually defunding as a move towards abolition as a way of divesting from

harmful and carceral ways of organizing life, including, of course, imperialism and the ways in which global capitalism, you know, is only possible because of the max exploitation of people in the global south, right? But I think that right now we're starting to see a much more popular understanding and I would say popular support for you know for building abolitionist futures so I feel optimistic and I don't feel optimistic and I can only really explain this in my in my two minds okay so firstly I think that the idea that we would be talking about defunding the police let alone something like abolition in the popular sphere was like inconceivable I would say inconceivable six months ago right let alone that you know in Canada now we're seeing over 50% of Canadians

some support for for defunding right so that's like an unimaginable culture shift that's showing us that people are beginning to understand the way that public safety is articulated by the state versus who is actually being kept unsafe by carcceral mechanisms by prisons by police like it's really showing a tide change in terms of I would say like popular understanding of the actual causes of violence in our society and that's something that I think we cannot underestimate that holds a power that we cannot underestimate. And I think it's also important to remember, though, that these popular shifts are not being accompanied at this time by the kind of major wins we would need to say that would have me be

optimistic in my two minds, right? So I'm incredibly optimistic about what that means for the public and what it means for this many young black people, young indigenous people to be organizing, to be out in the streets, to be working to get police out of schools all across the country, right? Like, that is so amazing. But at the same time, it's important to be aware of the way that, you know, this work is already being undermined by those in power. So there's been a really strong push towards defunding of the police, for example, in Toronto.

And yet we have the mayor, you know, recommitting to investing significantly more money in John Tori, sorry, putting significantly more money into things like body cameras, right? Even though this is explicitly something that, you know, many people in this movement have been clear is not the kind of racial justice that we need. So I think that when we look to the people who are in power, we're actually in many ways seeing like a tightening of, you know, of these carceral methods of control. In Ontario, for example, Doug Ford, the provincial minister, is, you know, investing $500 million more dollars into into new jails, right? So much as we're seeing this really important tide shift in popular thinking and popular imagination, we're not seeing that trans, you know, I would not expect the institutions to. transform themselves, right? So of course, we don't expect the police to defund themselves. But I just think

we shouldn't be so overly optimistic that we transfer, you know, our very real excitement with the kind of cultural shift that we've created because now this really needs, you know, that the work needs to, like we all need to be doing everything that we can to try to turn that into a more transformational shift in the institutional life of our societies, right? So it's a complicated optimism that I have. But I do believe, you know, as Maryam Caba says, that hope is a discipline. And I think particularly right now, it's very much about, you know, maintaining a very disciplined hope that we can continue what I think has been a massive transformation within a lot of our population and continue to push for these games, although that will probably be like a much more of a long slog

than, you know, this summer of protests, which has enabled this, right? Yeah, I think that's incredibly important to show that disparity between the popular cultural and social shift and then the still entrenched refusal to do anything about it. For example, a lot of liberals in the face of these uprisings around the country here are saying vote, vote, vote, as if, you know, I many people have pointed this out, but it's like in these cities where this is happening, oftentimes there's Democratic mayors, Democratic city councils, Democratic governors, Biden himself has pledged to put more money into policing, and he is coming out chastising. Not the, not the system for not holding accountable Breonna Taylor's killers, but the protest for going out and being violent, which, means anything other than completely peaceful, you know, defanged sort of protest with signs, nothing beyond that. You know, even if a trash can gets tipped over, we're going to call that violence.

But, you know, Biden doesn't have it in himself to, instead of focusing his chastising towards the people, forcing it towards the system. So you can see that the system is trying to re-entrench this. It's trying to, in a lot of ways, co-opt to the energy and funnel it back into the maintenance of the system, which is something we always see with radical and revolutionary movements. But I am also, I'm heartened by the multiracial dimensions of these movements, the sort of cultural shift, social shift in many white people's understanding it's, God damn, it sure is late, but it's better late than never. And you're seeing that movement a little bit, which is nice. One thing you mentioned in this chapter is the necessity of black leadership.

And I think you would both agree black and indigenous leadership when it comes to these movements precisely because they're actually invested in confronting these structures of white. supremacy. And when you have movements and organizations, even ostensibly radical and revolutionary ones, led fundamentally by white people, you just don't get that experience and that all-encompassing view that it really, that it takes to push past these barriers. Absolutely. And, you know, one thing that I maybe would have made more clear, again, if I could rewrite this book in 2020, which also just to be clear that, you know, by leadership, I'm really not talking about some kind of top-down, like, figureheads of the leader, figureheads of movements or leaders in this particular way. because I think we can see the harms of that, because I think that, you know,

collective organizing has always been, you know, one of the really strongest ways to advance things, right? But leadership in terms of, you know, mass organizations of black people, of those people who are out in the street of, you know, the incarcerated people who have been undertaking hunger strikes, you know, of the black migrants, for example, who were on hunger stark in the Laval Immigration Detention Center, right? So, I mean, this kind of leadership really in a grassroots sense, I think, is so vital for us to really take lead from at this time.

Definitely. Yeah, and we're definitely seeing that. I mean, the Black Lives Matter movement started from, I think it was black women, but also queer women. You see black folks in these communities leading, these marches, these uprisings. So there's an organic leadership already there. It's about how, you know, how far can we take this thing? And then the last thing I just wanted to say is on top of all of this, building autonomy in communities. you know, especially with this pandemic, we see that the state, it can always be there to beat protesters. It can always be there to kill black folks, but it can't be there when it comes to handling a pandemic. It's not there when it comes to making sure you have health care or

employment. I mean, we're six, seven months into this pandemic here in the U.S. We've only got $1,200, a one-time payment. And so realizing that the state is only here to keep you in line and not here to help you should produce, and it is producing autonomous organizing in communities to making sure people are fed, people are getting medicine, people are getting taken care of. And I think that's going to continue to grow as people see that the state is not actually here to help. And I think that's a positive development, and we need a lot more of that. Thank you so much, Robin, for coming on and talking to me about these issues. I learned a lot from this book.

I'm the sort of, you know, ignorant American that doesn't understand Canadian history and stuff, so I learned so much from this book and from talking with you. Before I let you go, can you maybe give some organizations that you would recommend to people in Canada that people might want to get involved with or at least donate to, and then importantly, where listeners can find you and your book online. Sure. I mean, if I could recommend that everybody donate to one place today, there is just a really wonderful black trans woman, Moka Dawkins, and there's a fundraiser right now because

she's somebody who has been targeted, you know, with state captivity who spent time inside, you know, because of something very much related to self-defense. And there's like a large, there's a large movement of people who are working right now in support of her. And there's a GoFundMe to help her sort of get set up in her new life as she just recently was held again in a police station. And there is a large protest organized by a great organization in Toronto called Not Another Black Life that protested outside of the police station until Mocha was released. And I would just love anybody that could to donate to the GoFundMe. It's M-O-K-A-D-W-K-I-N-S, Mocha-D-O-K-N-S, M-K-A-D-O-K-N-S, M-K-A-D-O-K-K-N-S, so that's where if I could have everybody send their support to, it would be that today. In terms of really great organizing happening on the ground, I mean, I would say that, oh, too much to list.

I think that one really great website if people want to learn about, for example, the movement to defund the police is what I was telling you that I'd sort of helped put together with many others with Black Lives Matter Toronto, which is defund the police.org. I think that's a really helpful source of information as well. And if people want to find my book online, you can buy it at all of the main evil corporate chains. So you can also get it at, you can have it ordered into independent bookstores. I believe with the U.S. In the U.S., it has its distribution through Columbia Press. And my website is www. Robin Maynard.com where you can find my writing, anything else that I may or may not be involved in.

Beautiful. And I will link to as much of that as I can in the show notes so people can easily find the book, find your website. Reach out to you if they have any other questions and definitely donate to that GoFund me, which I will do personally right after we end this conversation. So thank you, Robin, again, so much for coming on. The book, again, is Policing Black Lives, State Violence in Canada, from slavery to the present. And we at Rev Left are here for you. If you ever do anything else, you want to come back on, talk about anything.

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I love the smack against who back to get some more. Masterclasses for the acid chapter's Blacker than before Whatever this Those miles that you have traveled Or a lesson All lesson Those trials that you have battled Or a blessing

Be mindful there's no prize Without investment Don't be blinded by the stress When it's your time And that's redemption And that's refreshing Check clear bills paid celebrate Fridge food kids good

Celebrate Celebrate Woke up sunshine And celebrate Celebrate celebrate Celebrate celebrate Celebrate Check clear bills paid

Celebrate celebrate Fridge food kids good Merry up sunshine and celebrate. Celebrate. Celebrate. People we going to shine, we go shine, y'all. Freedom for your mind, freedom for your mind, y'all. Just leave a little time, sleep a little time. Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate, celebrate.

People, we going to shine through these hellish days. Freedom for your mind through a celebration. Sleep a little time for the celebration. Celebrate Celebrate Celebrate Our people We're going to shine

Through these hellish days Freedom for your mind Through a celebration Just leave a little time For the celebration Celebrate Celebrate Celebrate

Our people we're going to shine Through these hellish days Freedom for your mind Through a celebration Just leave a little time For the celebration Celebrate Celebrate

Celebrate Celebrate Celebrate Our people we're going to shine through these hellish days Readin for your mind through a celebration Just leave a little time for the celebration Celebrate

Celebrate Celebrate Celebrate Celebrate Celebrate Celebrate Celebrating Celebrate

Celebrate Celebrate Celebrate. Celebrate. Massad Turner. Achilles soul. Grown folks. Celebrate.

Celebrate. Celebrate. Celebrate.