A national Citizens Assembly is the best way to deliver success to the mass movement for police abolition | Here's why
Photo Credit: (Canadian Art / Google Images)
Written by: Harry Kopyto and Gordon Doctorow
#BLACKLIVESMATTER is born
For those who want to understand how the largest Black movement since the 1960s civil rights era came to birth in the U.S. and how it can succeed, we need to go back to July 13, 2013. This was the day when three young female Black American community organizers heard that George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin. Patrisse Cullor, who now lives in Toronto, Alicia Garza and Opal Tomati, were moved into action and founded an online community, #BlackLivesMatter. They focused on building militant, well-organized and visible street marches against racist police abuse and the killing of Black people in custody.
In 2014, BLM focused its fight for justice on the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and of Eric Garner in New York, two murdered Black citizens, the victims of police violence. The BLM-organized Freedom Ride, which brought over 500 youthful Blacks to Ferguson by buses from across the U.S. to protest Michael Brown’s killing was widely regarded as a dramatic sign of a new stage of Black resistance through non-violent civil disobedience. Within two years, 30 chapters of the group had sprouted across the U.S. with dozens more related local groups spawned through social media, thereby extending BLM's reach and presence internationally.
It was BLM chapters that are at the centre of the unprecedented major demonstrations against the choking of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis. It was BLM's slogans, "No Justice, No peace" and "I can't breathe" that mobilized hundreds of thousands in solidarity under its banner around the world. The movement did not arise in a vacuum. Its founders and leaders were part of a generation of young, Black women whose roots, antecedents and main influencers included: Black feminism, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Black Power movement, the LGBTQ movement, the civil rights movement and pan-Africanism.
Their politics are intersectional, as they have connected the dots between different forms of oppression unlike the way earlier radicalizations inspired large numbers around single issues only. They reject the paradigm of charismatic Black leaders seeking to win favour through appealing to white liberal institutions and political figures trapped by electoral compromises and conflicting interests. By the time BLM launched the George Floyd upsurge of protests, it had created deep roots in Black communities and universities, especially among women, youth, students, the marginalized and poor.
Explosion of Black anger against police killings
BLM has used their well-honed skills to sustain the Floyd protests for weeks. They also inspired often repeated marches and rallies in solidarity under the banner of their supporting chapters in: Canada, England, France, Denmark, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Germany, Switzerland Italy and numerous other countries. Many of these protests brought tens of thousands into the streets in these countries, which linked Floyd's death to gross racist killings by police directed against Africans, Arabs and undocumented immigrants in their own countries.
The massive explosion of Black anger took place in the middle of a pandemic that already kills Blacks two to three times as frequently as whites, as the poverty and overcrowded living conditions created by capitalism, act as vectors of transmission. In addition, health care workers, nurses, cleaners and transportation employees, all disproportionately Black, having been forced to work with greater potential exposure to a virus which bears the face of death.
Within Canada, the BLM protests quickly embraced support for Indigenous rights following police killings of two First Nations members in New Brunswick and the vicious RCMP assault of Indigenous Chief Allan Adam in Fort McMurray, Alberta in early June. So, what is behind the historic upsurge and continued escalation of this protest movement?
How can its energy be harnessed, while the conversation it has started about anti-Black and anti-Indigenous systemic racism be used to effect fundamental and lasting transformation?
One of the new and unexpected features of the current protest wave is the overwhelming support, both active and passive, that it has received from unprecedented numbers of white working-class people. The New York Times reports that U.S. voters switched to supporting Black Lives Matter in the first two weeks of June, a 28 per cent increase, by almost twice as much as it did in the last two years.
26 per cent of more white Americans now see racism as a "big problem" compared to 2015. This massive shift is part of a long term trend fueled significantly by a reaction against the misogynist and racist utterings of U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump has politicized millions of people, especially women, racialized people and the young. They already have a history of protests through the #MeToo movement, climate justice and Indigenous solidarity movements against Trump’s policies. This has had a strong spillover affect into Canada where Indigenous protests also rocked the country only weeks ago to protect Indigenous lands from rapacious resource extraction.
The pandemic atomizes, in response society collectivizes
The traditional ingrained attitudes and outlooks of vast numbers of people in many countries have been shaken and partly delegitimized as they question politicians’ credibility which was already under a microscope. Governments have failed to protect them from unnecessary deaths and delayed safety measures and protective medical supplies because of COVID-19. Governments created massive economic and health care disasters through their failure to plan for the predicted pandemic. Then, they implemented Keynesian policies that contradicted their previously unassailable free market ideologies. This is resulting in a growing ideological void or, at least, a broad questioning of the political establishment whose masquerade of progressivism has already started to slip.
The New York Times reports that the majority in the U.S. support the BLM protests. A CNN poll found seven out of ten Americans now feel anger because of the state of their country. The extreme spike in support for the BLM among whites in the U.S. and also clearly in Canada currently hopefully signifies an impending break from the deeply ingrained racism in both countries’ histories. Without such a break, the white population can never hope to free itself as well from oppression and exploitation. Blacks and Indigenous Peoples now have a larger pool of allies for their causes than ever before.
Another feature reinforcing the potential of this minute of history for transformative change is the widespread and all-encompassing scope of the protests--both across the globe from South Africa to Hong Kong and within the U.S. and Canada where 700 protests and 60 protests respectively on one day alone swept through cities and towns, some of which had never seen street protests before, following the killing of George Floyd. 13,000 protestors were detained protesting Floyd’s murder and countless more gassed, clubbed and curfewed. Further, the fact that the protests have continued sporadically or even daily in some cities over weeks, shows that the changes in attitude go deep below the surface.
The impact of COVID-19 deaths and illnesses, terminations, isolation, income loss, a public health crisis because of cutbacks, financial and economic uncertainty and fear has transformed public consciousness in an entirely unimagined and unpredictable fashion. The repeated assaults and killings of Indigenous and Blacks following the Floyd murder on both sides of the border has only heightened the determination to effect drastic and fundamental change from below with the focus on policing institutions.
A pandemic that usually atomizes people has ironically given birth to a movement that collectivises people, which in turn became the crucible for an energized mass expression of resistance to violent racism and then, to systemic discrimination. As well, the acknowledgment that migrant agricultural workers, food deliverers, bus drivers, nurses, ER doctors, cleaners and stock shelvers are heroes has led to a rethinking of who and what is truly of value to society. The emphasis on collective sacrifices embedded in physical distancing and other anti-COVID-19 co-operative measures has placed social needs above individual interests in people’s conduct and thoughts.
It was natural for people who dealt with the affect of the pandemic through the lens of doing what is just and right should also regard the murder of George Floyd through the same lens. How can we care for each other with COVID-induced sacrifices while remaining silent as Floyd is murdered in front of our eyes? In fact, we live in a rare moment when an overarching sense of solidarity and justice defines the outlook of large numbers of people.
Defund the police and invest in communities!
There is an international public conversation that has taken over the agenda of the main corporate media in Canada, the U.S., Europe and many other countries on how to rein in police racist violence with suggestions that were anathema yesterday. Police abolition is being considered as a practical alternative in several cities as millions of whites realize that defunding/demilitarizing police will not compromise public safety There is a sudden rejection of the repeated lie that the problem is a few bad cops on the force and not a biased culture of racism in which Black communities are identified as the locus of crime and police are assigned to target them accordingly.
A new consensus is emerging that systemic or institutional racism exists throughout society and police forces need immediate and urgent changes if they are to continue to exist at all. BLM and Indigenous leaders call for demilitarization of the police and their defunding. They call for removal of responses to wellness and mental health emergency calls from police jurisdiction and the creation of a specialized non-lethal-armed health team rooted and responsible to the community better able and trained to deal with people in personal crisis . They point out how only a small fraction of police actually engage in preventing violent crime with most cops spending their time surveilling law-abiding citizens and handing out tickets and other work that could be done, if needed at all, better, safer and cheaper by others.
BLM and its supporters call for a strategic review and drastic cuts to enormously inflated police budgets and the transfer of the saved resources to support youth and community programs, health, sports and and other facilities in vulnerable communities. For example, should the public be paying the salaries of the well over a dozen employees working in the public media office of the Toronto Police Service?
In Canada, the Indigenous community calls for declassifying the vast stores of information about RCMP internal disciplinary measures and their wrongdoings, and making this accessible to the public subject to narrow exemptions. Thus, it will be possible for the truth of the RCMP’s colonizing role to be exposed and their current racist practices deterred. Along with racialized groups, Indigenous leaders call for recording race-based data on arrests and public interaction. This would be done so that racist patterns of conduct by police forces can no longer be denied and informed solutions can be crafted.
Has COVID-19 muted the class struggle?
The passionate spirit of the BLM protests has challenged systemic discrimination in the fabric of capitalist society. It has made the need to overcome the racist institutional treatment that Black and Indigenous Peoples face as their daily lived experience an urgent one.
In employment, hiring, organizational culture, in health outcomes, in the criminal justice system and sentencing, in distribution of services, in education, in promotion: being Indigenous or racialized renders you a second-class citizen.
If you're Black, the fact that you were the graduating class valedictorian will do little to get you the job that you were educated for and hoped to get, yet was given to a less qualified white person. This is a major complaint of the young Black women and men marching in the streets, who work hard and dream of a career but end up stereotyped, unvalued, and too often even unemployed.
It is obvious that we cannot trust the political or economic system to change itself. The premiers of the two most populous provinces in Canada and the head of the RCMP entered the public conversation regarding racism, by denying the existence of systemic discrimination.
Despite their weak efforts to adjust their comments following widespread condemnation, are we to trust them to end practices which they claim they did not realize existed a moment earlier or still deny?
Shall we trust a government that planned to deport, at least until a public outcry, seasonal or temporary workers who risk their lives and catch the virus at work in a nursing home or farm? Prime Minister Trudeau liked to wear blackface and also refuses to release court-ordered compensation to victims of the residential school system, not an impressive resume for a supposedly anti-racist battler.
Some think COVID-19 has muted the class struggle as major corporations describe their starvation-waged employees as heroes. Hold your bets. It was revealed recently that an unlawful conspiracy existed between three major grocers to simultaneously withdraw the extra two dollars hourly paid their “essential workers” who continued to work under the same dangerous conditions.
Throughout the pandemic, workers have worked under dangerous conditions either to survive financially or to keep their jobs, while have been denied PPE. They have seen governments divert dozens of COVID-19 related work stoppages at various labour boards from hearings and are facilitating post-pandemic residential evictions. Disgustingly, they are also considering passing legislation to provide legal immunity to COVID-19 negligent Long Term Care facilities.
Black activists who courageously risked COVID-19 infection to protest, know they set off a storm of indignation at the cold and calculated murder of George Floyd that cannot be denied. Without the Black upsurge, there would not have been the same momentous awakening of the majority of North Americans and the world to the pervasiveness and perfidious nature of racism. Without the Black Lives Matter movement, there definitely would not have been the same passionate mobilization of youth resulting in the Black upsurge in the first place.
Even a small group that is focused on demands that express the deeply-felt needs of its constituency can have a gigantically outsized impact on society as a whole. BLM articulated the anguish and anger of racialized victims of police abuse at a rare moment when they were able to tap into a previously unexpected upsurge of solidarity that allowed the real issues to usurp the public agenda in a manner and with a rapidity no one could foresee.
That solidarity, of course, was nurtured by the public health crisis, the economic crisis and the climate crisis which together broke the routines in peoples’ lives and normalized big, bold state intervention that moments earlier could not be imagined and delegitimized Trudeau and Trump’s aversions to social spending in the name of austerity.
With systemic discrimination infecting every institution in capitalist society, the focus on overturning decades of racist and chauvinist practices is bound to attract even more allies among those who are also beginning to see themselves as victims of the same system. As Malcolm X proclaimed, “You can’t have capitalism without racism.” So, having arrived at this place, the question to ask is: where do we go from here?
Where do we go from here?
Systemic change can only come from the bottom up. Until now, the politicians used to look the other way giving police a wide berth. This is their system that they are now asked to reform, but putting lipstick on a pig does not mean that it’s no longer a pig. They have been exceptionalizing police brutality while mouthing empty platitudes for so long that they would have to start by condemning themselves for their inaction--not likely. Still, the capitalist system is flexible and has the resources, information channels and experience through its political representatives to masquerade as “progressives” and saviors while doing the bidding of Corporate Canada.
The same media outlets, corporate image-makers and do-nothing politicians who stood in silence as racialized and Indigenous Peoples were subjected to racist stereotypes for centuries now speak sweet words of support and contrition while still leaving the structures of discrimination intact. It will take more than the obvious, token window-dressing changes like rebranding Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix to quell the smoldering embers of outrage and indignation.
This is especially so now. Black and Indigenous Peoples are the first victims of the coronavirus-pandemic. Systemic change requires the majority to want to make it happen. It also requires a deep thirst for justice which we have just witnessed. But the U.S. has only 2.9 million Indigenous residents and 47.4 million Black residents, 1.6 per cent and 13.4 per cent of the population respectively. In Canada, the figures are 1.7 million Indigenous people and 1.2 million Black people, 4.9 per cent and 3.5 per cent respectively.
They need large numbers of allies outside their communities to support them actively. This is to achieve the transformational change in systemic racist practices that history has so far been mostly resistant to.
Uprooting entrenched, centuries-old racist practices which have metastasized into the public realm, will only result from joint efforts linking these oppressed communities with the vast numbers of newly won supporters on an ongoing basis. With their bold and proven determination in both Canada and the U.S., and the active sympathy of their allies, these communities can consolidate their resources to achieve their goals. Our next step is to reinforce what we have achieved, to build connections, to activate links and horizontal cross-organization structures that can exert their presence and maintain continuity and coordination during the ups and downs between street protests and Indigenous land protests.
Assembly of United Forces Needed to Democratically Frame Demands and Develop a Cross-Country Action Plan
Although the current zeitgeist offers new openings, we need to think of ways to consolidate our forces and prepare for the long term and protracted struggle necessary to succeed. BLM acted until now ordinarily through largely non-hierarchical, autonomous chapters working on local campaigns without a co-ordinating leadership and a central direction. This suited its emphasis on focusing primarily in mobilizing the Black community in response to specific racist police killings.
Having now taken central stage in a protest whose scope and ambitions render earlier ones incomparably more limited, our present grand perspective requires us to achieve unity through an all-encompassing plan of action. This means that our strategy has to change from one that is reactive to instances of police abuse to a proactive one in which we will need to initiate national and international campaigns. These can involve the millions of newly awakened supporters coming to our side. We can start the process by listening to each other and democratically deciding on tactics and demands, that will unite the largest numbers and gain the greatest support.
We need to find a way of exchanging our ideas on how systemic racism can be eliminated in our own voices. Not through parliamentarians, paid and bought experts, opaque procedures, corporate lawyers, manipulated commissions, self-interested bureaucrats with their hidden agendas or newspaper pundits. We need to develop a space where we can discuss and learn from each other’s experience directly without interpreters.
The present public conversation is mediated by media industry giants who are themselves systemically racist. They are tied to the corporate elites that have benefitted historically by dividing working people on the basis of race, gender and in every other way they think they can get away with.
Corporate media is part of the problem, not the solution. Those folks who have stood silent until now are not ones we can trust to control or define our conversations. We need a democratic, inclusive and respectful multilogue free from legislative wheeling and dealing, unprincipled political deals, pressures from power brokers and lobbyists and opaque procedures that result in delays and sellouts.
We need to seize the moment. There will be and already are pressures to divert and divide the anti-racist and Indigenous movements by co-option, electioneering, and promises to bring jobs to impoverished Indigenous communities. All the more reason to develop channels for democratic discussion and debate within the broader movement, while involving all its constituents. We can then come together in a dramatic display of unity in support of those democratically determined demands. Then we can all join in a co-ordinated plan of action to implement those demands.
Supporters of transformative change should be able to speak directly to each other through local grassroots assemblies open to all. They will debate, amend and vote on all their options in a transparent process and choose representatives to meet and plan unified actions. A representative assembly can advance and vote on the vision of a fair and just recovery, a reset of society based on real equality in all institutions. There are traditions of citizen’s assemblies, popular assemblies, constituent assemblies and similar expressions of democratic will, that can be adapted to our purposes.
All those supporting Black Lives Matter should be asked to strengthen our ties so that our struggle can project unified action: to defund/demilitarize the police, stop the criminalization of protest, eliminate structural bias throughout the judicial system including in sentencing, purge symbols of colonialism and pro-slavery from our public spaces, support restitution of funds initially divested from oppressed peoples, and systematically eliminate all practices that divide and discriminate against people without reasonable cause.
A democratically selected administrative centre representing the engaged forces can be mandated to take united front actions, escalating as needed, until our goals are achieved. To achieve a real change requires the BLM movement to coordinate its agenda with as many of the supporters that it has in the labour movement, the student movement, the cultural and sports institutions, other racialized communities, with Indigenous Peoples, with the climate justice movement with Hispanics, LGBTQ+ members, and with women’s organizations among others.
Feelings are raw and justice is in the air
Cross-country assemblies, delegated to represent everyone who wants to be heard, can raise issues that are too complex for full discussions on social media and not likely to be scrutinized fairly in the dominant media outlets. Should we call for municipally elected independent, empowered civilian review boards representing victims of police abuse as well as others to rein in the police? How do we de-carcerate the jails, or maybe even abolish them along with defunding and demilitarizing the police, of non-violent inmates who need housing, education and employment instead of being criminalized by a white justice system?
Indigenous, Inuit and Metis representatives can use a Citizen’s Assembly to testify as to what we can do to advance their land, sovereignty and national rights and gain control of their policing and resources instead of being subjected to yet more government commissions and empty platitudes by a federal government that administers a colonial Indian Act.. Can we grant economic restitution to these disinvested communities during this time of extreme income inequality to give them back what was stolen from them? How best to screen for unconscious bias in institutions, provide training and quotas for those now excluded or underrepresented in senior positions?
How do we overcome cosmetic diversity and tokenism from being used to derail and distract from the structural change needed to ensure substantive equality? It may not be possible to do away with prisons and police completely without upending capitalism but fighting to permanently replace them with well-supported social services, community care networks, and mechanisms for accountability can do much to protect vulnerable individuals.
It can make the domestic and interpersonal health of all persons a collective responsibility which can be shared with an open heart rather than stern judgment of an individual’s personal failures. A modified Citizens’ Assembly can review evidenced-based witnesses dealing with the practicality of such transformative justice and strategies to attain it.
The scope of justice we seek requires cross-country actions that are not one-shot affairs. That is why an assembly needs to elect an administrative body to promote common demands and to ensure that those who are most victimized are heard first It can also mobilize the base to support, as part of its intersectional outlook, others needing solidarity.
The concept of an assembly is suggested as one means of unifying the movements to debate and adopt key demands in a sustained, centrally co-ordinated cross-country and international campaign in unison with the millions who sympathize with BLM. However, whatever means are chosen to do so, we are now in a moment when feelings are raw and justice is in the air. The impact of the pandemic has shown how quickly society can change to do what’s right. Let’s show that also applies to the fight against racist police forces and systemic injustice.
Gordon Doctorow is a member of the Courage Coalition, New Democrats for Leap, and former chair of the NDP Left Caucus and the NDP Antiwar Committee. Before retirement he was a branch president in the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation and co-editor of the District 12 Newsletter.
Harry Kopyto is a member of Courage and New Democrats for Leap living in Toronto. He recently retired after working as a legal advocate/lawyer since 1974, specializing in human rights cases and civil and criminal legal actions against police abuse.
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