This Abolitionist Pride March occurs in a number of contexts of escalating policing and carceral injustice as well as our continuing refusal of and resistance to policing and prisons. Today as we march through the streets of downtown Tkaronto we remember our empowering histories of resistance to the police and oppression as well as charting ways forward for our current struggles for liveable queer and trans futures without police and prisons.
Last week we refused with a resounding NO that resonated and reverberated across the country to the apology from the Chief of Police for the escalating racist and vicious attacks against Black, Indigenous, 2SLGBTQ, poor, unhoused, and disabled people in this city. We did not ask for Chief Ramer's half-assed apology, an insult no doubt, as we continue to push for defunding and abolishing the police. What we demand and say YES to is the liveability of our lives!
Just across from us in City Hall John Tory and his supporters continue to use the police and private security to viciously attack the encampments of unhoused people, including Indigenous, Black and overlapping groups of queer and trans people. This is the same John Tory that Pride Toronto has asked us to “join with.” We refuse to join with John Tory and instead say House the Homeless, Feed the Poor, Kick John Tory out the door!
Pride Toronto also hosted Doug Ford at its dignatories breakfast despite his regime being anti-queer and anti-trans, very pro-police, anti-worker, and being responsible for social murder in the continuing pandemic and in its war against the poor, against people with disabilities, those on social assistance and those who are unhoused. Ford has a strategy for expanding the police who are already a major threat to Black, Indigenous and racialized people and making the police central co-ordinators of social agencies and policies. Our response of refusal needs to include the repeal of Bill 251 and the broader strategy it is part of which attacks migrant sex workers and Black, Indigenous, racialized young people.
We must rebel against this. Ford was recently “re-elected” and his racist, pro-police, anti-sex worker, anti-poor and anti-disabled people’s agenda is all too clear. We cannot wait four years. We need community based mass movement organizing and coalitions right now engaged in mass and direct actions that take direction from Black, Indigenous and racialized activists to disrupt and obstruct this government. We will be delivering this message to Queen’s Park..
The Black reckoning in this city in tandem with the global uprising against police brutality and killings of Black, Indigenous, and racialized people in North America mobilized communities to organize and demand the defunding and abolishing of police. What we have witnessed in the years that followed during the pandemic, is expanded policing, the reassertion of settler colonialist attacks on land and water defenders and Land Back movements, and brutality against Black and racialized activists. Despite this despairing impact, there has been a movement of resurgence and refusal such as in the No Pride in Genocide organizing in 2021 and in the ongoing activism of NPPC and others, to defund and abolish police and prisons.
The police are being expanded to be used against us. We see the use of police to intimidate organizers and shut down or curtail organizations. This includes Black activists and Indigenous land and water defenders. In Toronto part of the police and private security attacks on the encampments and their supporters was to destroy and weaken encampment solidarity organizing.
Part of the expansion/militarization of policing is to prepare for our resistance/rebellions/refusals as they try to put our movements and organizing down and as rebellions grow against their imposition of racialized austerity measures. At the same time we see the differential way they address white supremacist/fascist organizing who they have allowed to grow as a major threat to Black, Indigenous, and queer and trans people.
In the US the neoliberal right-wing has launched major attacks on trans young people and have now broadened this into attacks on all queer young people and they wish to prohibit any contact between queer and trans adults and young people. This is having an impact here as well. On top of this they have just launched a major assault on reproductive justice and the rights of all those who can get pregnant, which will have a differential impact on Black, Indigenous and racialized people. We take this up further at the US consulate.
In this context mainstream LGBT+ groups like Pride Toronto are again collaborating with the police and employing private security forces. We have heard reports in the last few days of Black, Indigenous, and other queer and trans people being made to feeling unsafe at Pride Toronto events because of the major police and private security presence. They would rather ally with the police than with those most affected by police violence including Black, Indigenous and racialized communities/and queer and trans people. Instead, Abolitionists rely on our own community-based marshals to create actual community safety showing how we can organize our own safety without police and prisons.
This is assisted by the form of organization taken up by groups like Pride Toronto which replicate corporate forms of organizing, with Executive Directors, Boards of Directors who are responsible to the corporation and not the membership and communities. Along with this is a reliance on corporate and state funding. If you go to the Pride Toronto festival area the TD logo is everywhere – it really does seem to be TD Pride – a nightmare image with the very same TD involved in attacks on Indigenous people and funding climate destruction.
The continuing pandemic inflicts eugenic and racist practises against many in our communities but the return to 'normal' politics pushed by mainstream groups is meant to define disabled, ageing, Black, racialized people and others as 'disposable' and 'expendable.' In response both locally and globally we affirm that no one is disposable/expendable including calling for ending vaccine and treatment apartheid. We also need to reject returning to 'normal' white middle class ableist LGBT+ politics which forgets all we have learned from the global uprising against anti-Black racism and the police in 2020 and No Pride in Genocide in 2021/22. It also means viewing our struggles as intertwined with the struggles of the Palestinian people against Israeli Apartheid.
The continuing pandemic inflicts eugenic and racist practises against many in our communities but the return to 'normal' politics pushed by mainstream groups is meant to define disabled, ageing, Black, racialized people and others as 'disposable' and 'expendable.' In response both locally and globally we affirm that no one is disposable/expendable including calling for ending vaccine and treatment apartheid. We also need to reject returning to 'normal' white middle class ableist LGBT+ politics which forgets all we have learned from the global uprising against anti-Black racism and the police in 2020 and No Pride in Genocide in 2021/22. It also means viewing our struggles as intertwined with the struggles of the Palestinian people against Israeli Apartheid.
For all these reasons we need to move beyond limited rights-based politics which are about integrating us into racist, sexist, heterosexist, ableist, class-based institutions and to adopt an abolitionist politics based on defunding and abolishing policing, carceral and disciplinary institutions right now and on building our own alternatives that create real community safety and address people's social needs. This is how we collectively make liveable futures. Today is an important start to this project.
