April 20, 2024

To : Gary Kinsman

Dear Gary,

Thank you for sharing your resignation letter. Your letter to Pride Toronto provides a historical accounting of the radical formation of Pride Toronto and your involvement in the labour and organizing that shaped Pride Toronto as grassroots and radical. Pride Toronto as we have witnessed throughout the years, has become more corporatized and homonationalist, investing in state and policing funding and support, and as you stated in your letter to pride Toronto and I quote here "refusal to address Canadian state --and your own sponsors—direct involvement in supporting the Zionist genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and increasingly in the occupied territories as well" makes it impossible for you to remain as a member.

I truly value your historical documentation of your activism in an organization that has become so alienated from its constituency to the point of endangering and supporting the violence and genocide of so many of us queers and trans, Palestinians, Arabs, Blacks, Jews, Two-spirited, Indigiqueer and racialized. What your letter to Pride Toronto does is it disrupts the social organization of forgetting and this is central to your recent Third Edition of The Regulation of Desire. I suggest that everyone should read it, particularly NPPC members. It's a huge text but worth every page.

The social organization of forgetting is particularly important to think about and to address in this moment as we are witnessing the escalation of police brutality and arrests here in the city against pro-Palestinian protesters the majority of which are Palestinians, Arabs, and Jews. It is true we are seeing this massive unleashing of police against protesters who are primarily Palestinians, Arabs, and Jews a group that have not experienced this kind of violence here in Toronto. It is seen as new but the violence by police towards Black and Indigenous people in this city has been quotidian in practice. Black people, have confronted, refused, and resisted these practices for decades, in the streets, in committee meetings, police service board meetings, series of reports on police brutality and accountability, civilian investigation units and more. We have run the gamut since the 70's of trying to stop police from killing us as Black people in this city. Instead, the stakes are raised to further threaten our liveability, more money, surveillance equipment, technology, horses, police etc. I was there for them all right from the beginning in the 70"s and still here.

I am saying all of this because I am concerned that Pro-Palestinian groups that are organizing are not paying attention to the history of policing in this city and the role that Black people and others have played in organizing against police violence. I was stunned at the last press conference that followed the horrendous police attacks and kettling of pro-Palestinian protesters where there was a demand for a civilian investigation into the police who unleashed the violence and kittling of protesters and for the mayor and the police Chief to hold them accountable. We know these actions by the police are sanctioned by the Chief and the Mayor. Black people in neighbourhoods in general don't want more accountability reports and apologies, they want the police gone from their lives - period. Been there, done that! Tactics such as the use of horses against protesters were used during the South African anti-apartheid movement in Toronto in the 80’. I remember in the early 1980's where about 200 of us were chased out of Queens Park by police on horseback. Stunned, I stood still as the horses started running towards me, until the voice of another student said run and I took haste in sheer terror, ending in a hole with the horses two front hoofs above my head. These and more were the same violent tactics used against Black protesters in the uprising on Yonge Street in 1992 and against G8 protesters that included kettling, mass arrests and charges of protesters.

My concern with historical forgetting, not knowing or wanting to know, is what happens to those who will still be living with the quotidian violence when the collective uprising in the West settles and this critical moment of global and students pro-Palestinian uprising is marked as an event, opposed to elements in the longue duree of struggle for freedom and liberation of Palestinians and for all oppressed peoples. I am saying all of this because the pro-Palestinian struggle is vastly critical in this moment and how we build from here onwards for liberated futures must ensure that we not ignore the history, labour knowledges, struggles of individuals and groups and the peoples whose lives still encounter the police stick, arrests, surveillance, and daily violence. The Haitian Anthropologist Ralph Trouillot tells us that the past is not the past. The past is also the present.

I am hoping that members here in NPPC will be able to connect with some of the progressive folks in the pro-Palestinian movement to begin conversations on building rapport with several Black activists particularly Black feminist activists and others with long histories of activism in this city against police brutality.

In Solidarity,

Beverly