At least 100 people marched in downtown Toronto to celebrate Emancipation Day and to call for an end to anti-Black racism in government institutions in Canada.

Emancipation Day, markedevery year on Aug. 1, commemorates the abolition of slavery across the British Empire.

Marchers called for an end to anti-Black racism in such areas aschild welfare, policing, the criminal justice system, arts and culture, education and health care.

Yvette Blackburn, a spokesperson for theGlobal Jamaica Diaspora Council, said people marchedto celebrate freedom but also to demand that real change take place to improve the lives of Black people.

"What is freedom? Freedom comes at a cost. And right now, it'sthe cost of the lives and the interactions that we, as Black people, have to deal with every day in society," Blackburn told reporters.

"With the push of anti-Black racismand the recognition of our value and our work, we must be here to walk on this day to say that changes have to be implemented so that we get rid of anti-Black racism and the institutional discrimination that has been happening."

The march began at the Children's Aid Society of Toronto, 30 Isabella St., and ended at the Ontario legislature.

Along the route, marchersstopped at a number of points, including the Toronto Police Service headquarters, 40 College St., and the Ontario education ministry, 438 University Ave.

"It is our children thatare being impacted at a greater rate, at being institutionalized, at being displaced from families, having to deal with the educational system. The bonds and chains are no longer holding us, however, we are still bridled by the fact of discrimination and racism that exists in the institutions and the systems. We have to break those," Blackburnsaid.

"By being here on Emancipation Day, it's to say thatwe need to look structurally into the frameworks of discriminationand racism that are impacting us across the board."

Blackburn said activists arecallingonPrime Minister Justin Trudeau to apologize to Black people in Canada for slavery.

"There's never been an apology issued. I think it's time. Emancipation should be everywhere," she said.

Bishop Ransford Jones, lead pastor at the Destiny Gospel Centre in Markham, said that Emancipation Day is a historic day in Canada.

"Today is a very significant day. It is a solemn day. It is a sacred day for the abolition of slavery," he told reporters during the march. "We have to come to ensure that we use ourfreedom of today toensure the freedom for people oftomorrow."

Jones said he wants his two young children to live in a fair, free and equitable society.

"The key messagetoday is that we want to ensure systemic institutionalized racism in Canada is dismantled so that all people can live free."

Jones added that the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which sparked street protests around the world,has led to a "greatawareness" and a new momentum against anti-Black racism.

"People are recognizing that the systems that have been entrenched over time donotservemarginalized, racialized, especially Black people. We want to ensure that those systemsare torn down and that things will change for the betterment of our people and society in general,"he added.

At a rally before the march, he told the crowd: "We are appealing to those in authority today that you must take your knees off people's necks and let them breathe in our spaces and in our places so we can all enjoy all this great country of Canada."

Jacqueline Edwards, president of Association of Black Law Enforcers, said Black people who work in law enforcement are trying to change the system from within. Edwards works for Correctional Service of Canada.

"We want the community to know that while there are problems within our systems, there are a number of us as well that are part of that system that arecarrying ourselves the right way and that are acknowledging the needfor change," Edwards said.

What is new in the anti-Black racism movement is the collaboration for change, not the recognition that change is necessary, she added.

"Everybody needs to take an active role in stomping out racism," she said.

Marchers chanted "No Justice, No Peace!" and "Peace on the left, justice on the right!" and "When Black lives are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!"

The Slavery Abolition Act received royal assent on Aug. 28, 1833 and the legislation cameinto force across the Empire and its colonies onAug. 1, 1834.

Since that time, Canadian communities have staged events to celebratethe abolition of slavery.

Organizations that supported Toronto'smarch are: A Different Booklist Cultural Centre, Black Artists' Networks In Dialogue, Black Health Alliance, Black Medical Students' Association at University of Toronto, CareMongering-TO, Destiny Gospel Centre, Global Jamaica Diaspora Council, Jamaican Canadian Association, Ma'at Legal Services, Ontario Alliance of Black School Educators, Unifor and Zero Gun Violence Movement.

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Marchers in Toronto call for end to systemic anti-Black racism on Emancipation Day - CBC.ca

AUGUST 7, 2020

JOURNALIST AND ESSAYIST Judith Levine is the author of several books, including Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (2002). Erica R. Meiners is professor of Education and Womens and Gender Studies at Northeastern Illinois University and the author of several books, most recently For the Children?: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State (2016). Levine and Meiners have now co-authored The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence (released by Verso in April), which draws on history, research, and interviews to advance an intersectional feminist approach toward accountability, sexual safety, and pleasure without injustice or punishment.

M. BUNA: You reject the idea of injustice to some as justice to others and make a case against outsourcing vengeance to the state while recognizing crime as a fickle and malleable political term. Why is it vital to use harm instead of crime, especially when addressing issues of accountability? How can we use restorative and transformative processes without erasing the complicated realities of people making choices in their interpersonal relationships?

ERICA R. MEINERS: The deliberate use of harm instead of crime is just one move toward being more specific and useful. Its not the full answer, of course, but the criminal legal system makes available language like victim, offender (violent and nonviolent), crime, sex offender and these are more than simply words. They are weighted, never neutral, and frame acts and consequences. These criminal legal terms dont help us understand a thicket of important questions: What happened? What histories/genealogies led to a particular act? What relationships are at stake? And, most importantly, how can we collectively work to respond to the situation hold the person/s who have done harm accountable, and also work to meet the needs of the person who has been harmed? How do we ensure this harm doesnt happen again? The language that transformative justice and community accountability movements center makes things more complicated because relationships between people, and the harm they may cause, are complicated. Getting away from the criminal legal system and its obfuscating language is a move in the direction of working to build stronger and safer communities.

With the current push to craft new legal norms that police sexual encounters, and to add new forms of conduct (dating deception, revenge porn, stealthing) to the list of criminalized sexual behaviors, how do we determine who qualifies for the sex offender label in the first place?

JUDITH LEVINE: Sex offender is a capacious category, encompassing anyone from a flasher to a consensual teen lover to a rapist wielding a lethal weapon. Its not just vague; its dehumanizing: it uses a criminal conviction as an identity. The definitions of sex crimes change with history and politics, and thats happening now. #MeToo exposed the myriad ways that men (its mostly men) can be sexually nasty and violent toward (mostly) women. Along with debates about how to address sexual assault on campus, #MeToo widened the conversation about what to call different acts and what constitutes an offense. Where does misunderstanding turn to misconduct and where does misconduct cross the line to violence? Should we always #BelieveWomen or assume innocence until proof of guilt or should we look for other, more nuanced descriptions of harm? And then what?

The carceral (law and order) feminist approach is twofold: raise the legal standard for non-consent from no means no (stop when the other person indicates shes not into it) to yes means yes (dont start until a partner gives enthusiastic consent), which will lead to criminalizing a growing list of aggressive sex-related acts. But labeling more people as sex offenders or worse, predators will not help harm-doers understand the consequences of their actions or yield real accountability. We need to challenge a masculinist might makes right culture, not ask the state to punish more people.

The Sex Offender Registration Act wields the fantasy of the innocent child (almost always white, heteronormative, and asexual) in need of protection to enforce the registrants social death. By contrast, nonwhite bodies are seen as in need of correction, not protection children/teens of color are more likely to get listed as juvenile sex offenders and youth with sexual behavior problems. How are categories of guilt and innocence ultimately used against the most vulnerable already deemed not worthy of protection?

MEINERS: In this political moment again a young black man, Ahmaud Arbery, who was jogging in a white neighborhood, was viewed as suspicious, guilty, thus justifying lethal white self-defense. Nonwhite youths are aged up by white adults and not seen as innocent: a 10-year-old black girl is viewed by a white adult as a culpable 15-year-old. Organizations like Survived and Punished and Love and Protect support and fight alongside the many women particularly low-income, transgender, and/or nonwhite who are criminalized, never given the benefit of any innocence, and automatically assumed to be the perpetrator when they attempt to defend themselves against interpersonal or state violence. Queer folks, people who are HIV positive, and sex workers are always marked as predatory, particularly sexually. These examples and too many more remind us that guilt and innocence, far from being static and neutral, are malleable and weaponized against many people. Our criminal legal system requires that we invest in these terms guilt and innocence as if this social landscape doesnt exist.

When it comes to people with sex-related convictions, repaying ones debt to society takes the form of a period of civil commitment while being referred to as patients. What interests are invested in the medicalization of sexual violence, sometimes also disguised as a multidisciplinary collaboration between healers and jailers?

LEVINE: Actually, civil commitment is not repaying ones debt to society. The indefinite detention of a sex offender in a locked psychiatric facility happens after he completes a prison sentence putatively to prevent him from committing another offense. Civil commitment is the most extreme facet of the sex offender regime, which also includes long sentences, registration, and the restrictions that go along with them. But the whole regime is based on the same disproven idea that people who commit sex-related offenses suffer from a unique and incurable psychological illness. The medicalization and criminalization of sexual deviance goes back centuries. As recently as the 1960s, homosexuals were subjected to cruel cures and incarceration. The diagnosis that allows a state to civilly commit someone was invented in 1990: a sexually violent predator is defined as someone with a mental abnormality that predisposes him to sexual violence. But if this patient is incurable by definition, they are never well enough to be released, and most never are. Condemned by the American Psychiatric Association as the misuse of psychiatry for punitive purposes, civil commitment is preventive detention.

The section of your book called Fractured Resistance draws attention to several reformist and radical alternatives to the prison-industrial complex, as its manifested in the legal regime of sex offenses, showing their common points and contradictions. Can you say a bit about these alternatives, including the (un)likely alliances that might allow for the building of futures based on intersectional solidarity?

LEVINE: The landscape of movements addressing sexual violence and/or fighting for the rights of people accused and convicted of sex-related offenses is complex. Some feminists want to lock up more rapists while others would abolish prisons and address violence with non-criminal, restorative practices. There are wives and mothers working on behalf of men on the registry who are wary of all feminists; there are straight and queer men challenging ideologies of masculinity; there are antiracist prison abolitionists and more. Sometimes theyre in conflict for instance, when the coalition to restore voting rights to Floridians with felonies excluded sex offenders in order to get more support. Sometimes there are unexpected alliances, as when street-based sex workers, almost all low-income women and transwomen of color, joined with middle-class gay men to defeat a New Orleans ordinance to make crimes against nature i.e., sodomy in public places an offense requiring registration as a sex offender. A Harlem group organizing for nonviolent communities works with parishioners and clergy to confront sexual abuse within church congregations while helping to sustain survivor-supportive faith communities. Most recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, those demanding the release of folks from prisons and jails to protect their health and lives have joined registered citizens in calling for suspensions of in-person registration and housing and internet restrictions, as well as release of the civilly committed.

You write: The carceral state is the carceral state, whether surrounded by razor wire or covered in ivy. The abolition movement seeks solutions for the interpersonal, social, economic, and political issues bound up in sex offenses, without defending prison on the one hand or merely advocating decarceration on the other. You advance abolition feminism as a way to rethink safety beyond prison and police, to confront sexual harm, and to end state violence. What does this political consciousness call for in terms of a paradigm shift away from current thoughts and practices?

MEINERS: Paradigm is the right word. This is long-haul collective work that we have to do every day. Abolition is about dismantling racist systems that dont make us safer public registries, policing, and prisons; but, just as centrally, abolition has always been the daily work to build, to experiment, to try to make our communities safer. Far from utopian, movements are doing this work right now, at the level of policy, and also at much more intimate registers and everything in between. For example, I flag the many ongoing campaigns and organizations that seek to divest from policing, or to halt new jail constructions, and instead to demand these public resources go to free, affirming, and community-controlled health care. (Shout out to Dignity and Power Now, Critical Resistance, and so many other grassroots groups that defeated the proposed new 4,000-bed jail in Los Angeles!) Divesting from these carceral sites is crucial, and yet, also in this moment, many, many organizations are offering workshops, webinars, and more on how to address interpersonal harm in your relationships without calling the police. And none of this work will be effective without, concurrently, challenging the interlocking -isms white supremacy, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, for example that provide the oxygen for our punishing systems. While everything is urgent, because the state is killing people, we recognize that we cannot reduce this paradigm shift to a checklist. This is slow work, sometimes experimental, going on at multiple registers.

Going against a social order based on domination, employing transformative possibilities to eliminate the cops in our heads and our hearts (as Paula Rojas put it in her 2007 book, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded), and increasing the self-determination and autonomy of individuals and communities all these important goals connect up to a major, overarching issue: the status of the state (carceral or not) as the ultimate power structure. Is working with the state and its formations an option for you or not?

LEVINE: Ive struggled with this question as a restorative justice (RJ) volunteer at the community justice center in a small town in Vermont, where I live half-time. RJ in Vermont is part of the criminal legal system. I had to sign a contract as an employee of the Department of Corrections. The cases we get are referred by the local police, some of whom grew up in town; sometimes it feels as if an old high school grudge is being played out. Or we get kids whove been arrested for stupid pranks at school. Many of our folks face deep mental health challenges and almost all are poor or of color, in a town thats almost 100 percent white. I feel were collaborating in the criminalization of misbehavior, turning a blind eye to possible police misconduct, and being used as a band-aid for huge injustices and inequalities. Still, the CJC helps people get jobs and services. Many of our cases are pre-charge, so if the person completes the process, theres no indictment or criminal record. The alternative can be juvenile detention or jail. And of course, when it works, RJ helps harm-doers take accountability and harmed people to feel heard and involved; and it introduces another way of thinking about crime. Ive lowered my expectations to keeping a few people out of prison while I continue to work for transformation and justice through writing and activism.

MEINERS: As I write with the current privilege of employment at a public university, I see my work for now as the both/and. Both working inside some of the worst institutions in the carceral state (including prisons), and actively supporting and funneling resources to movements, networks, and organizations that are trying to organize and build outside the carceral state. We cant yet cede the terrain of these punitive public institutions prisons, jails, schools in part because so many of our people are contained within them and dont have the luxury to leave! In the prison with many to keep us in check and accountable we try to be in it but not of it. All of this work is by necessity collective, and while community brings new opportunities for some joy and for the transformative possibilities of mutual aid, collectivity is essential to engender rigor in the negotiation of any tricky inside/outside work. Institutions are seductive and they co-opt and absorb all of our radical collective demands! While this is my pathway partially shaped by where I am grounded now and the movements and communities I am accountable to this is not a universal prescription. Right now, we need people working across all sites insurgents and builders, transformative justice practitioners, and people who can siphon resources and free others!

M. Buna is a freelance writer.

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A Better World Is Not a Place, But a Practice: A Conversation with Judith Levine and Erica R. Meiners - lareviewofbooks

By Amb. Aashna Kanhai with Aparaajita Pandey

Suriname witnessed its national elections this year, as Chandrikapersad Chan Santokhi takes his place as the President, the country looks forward to a new era of politics and prosperity. The elections of Suriname cannot be dethatched from the multi-ethnic history and politics of the country. As the Indian Origin, Afro- origin, Javanese- origin, and indigenous Amerindians make up the population of the country; its politics is bound to be influenced by the history of the people. As Suriname welcomed their new President, it did not go amiss that Chan Santokhi belongs to the Indo- Surinamese community.

When the Prime Minister of India recently mentioned to his countrymen, the oath-taking ceremony of the President of the Republic of Suriname, it is interesting to see how a quite natural and almost unnoticed detail of reciting a hymn from the Rig Veda caught international attention. In Suriname, a country with a multi-ethnic and multi-religious population, almost 36 % is of Indian Origin and official ceremonies usually are accompanied by blessings. The official language of this country is Dutch.

After more than 300 years of colonization, Suriname gained independence in 1975 from The Netherlands. The Amerindians are the first inhabitants. Slaves from West Africa were brought as early as 1667. Fleeing the inhumane conditions of slavery, the community of maroons established itself in the interiors and the dense Amazon Rainforest.

After the abolition of slavery, the colonizer introduced indentured laborers from British India and between 1873-1914, a total of 34000 Indians were shipped from mainly the U.P. Region to work on the sugar plantations in Suriname, for an initial contract of five years, with an option to return to India. In 1890, the indentured laborers were brought in from Java under similar conditions as the British Indians.

The majority of the Indian Indentured labourers had opted to stay in Suriname and receive one hectare of land. The economic rise of the second generation of the British Indians was caused by high prices of crops during the First World War and resulting in the fact that they could send their children to schools just like the free afro community. Of course, most schools were run by Christian Missionary organizations. The multi-ethnic reality emerged as post World War II, the emergence of Political Parties based on ethnicity and the right to vote was introduced in 1948, for all men, followed by internal independence from the colonizer in 1954.

Like in other parts of the Caribbean with Persons of Indian Origin, post decolonization politics were dominated by ethnicity, yet in Suriname bipolarity in this regard has not been the case, as the Javanese community introduced multi polarity. The PIO (Persons of Indian Origin) and the Persons of Afro Origin, were the major political players. During the independence, a massive exodus took place of PIOs to The Netherlands, making use of the option to leave, as a fear of the Afro dominance in government, post-independence was there. Fraternization politics were practised by leaders from the Afro- and PIO political parties, attempting to bring these two ethnic groups closer to each other and giving way to a future alliance of their parties for greater electoral gain.

Marking another change was the emergence of nationalist and more beyond ethnicity political movements, after the military regime of 1980-1987. Political awareness in the maroon community emerged especially after the war in the interior, in the 1980s and the discovery of large reserves of gold in the late 1990s by multinationals in the interior splurged growth of political parties led by leaders of Maroon descent, prompting the electorate that the Maroon community could no longer see itself as a backward group of Suriname.

In times where left and right are not so far from each other, the phenomenon of coalitions is the rule rather than the exception and exceptional Suriname, is no exception.

The recent elections in Suriname faced not only the challenge of the COVID -19 pandemic, yet the result was showing a massive growth of the party established during the decolonization by the PIO community. The dynamics of the growth of this party is best explained through its changes in name. It started as the United Hindustani Party (Verenigde Hindustaanse Partij, VHP) and transformed today to the United Reform Party (Verenigde Hervormings Partij).

As Suriname sets out to begin a new chapter in their politics, the country is hopeful about progress and prosperity. With the discovery of considerable crude oil reserves off the shore Suriname and an already established presence of ExxonMobil, the Surinamese population is looking towards its new administration to usher in the era of prosperity in the country.

(Amb Aashna Kanhai is the Ambassador of Suriname to India and Aparaajita Pandey is Asst. Professor at Amity University and a Doctoral Candidate at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Views expressed are personal).

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Elections in Suriname; The rise of the PIOs - The Financial Express