(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. In April 2015, Canadian journalist Desmond Cole's piece, The Skin I'm In, was the cover story in Toronto's high-profile monthly magazine, Toronto Life. The article chronicled Cole's experiences with carding and police surveillance and gained immediate and sustained attention. In his newly released book, The Skin We're In, Cole writes that many white people express surprise that his stories of harassment and attention could be true. And he says that many black people were just a surprise that a magazine catering to the taste of Toronto's elite had printed the thing at all. The Skin We're In takes us through a year of black resistance and power. Desmond Cole is in Vancouver this week and he joins me in the studio to talk about his book, Hello Desmond. - Hi, Lorraine. - Now, I wanna start with the article about your personal experiences of carding because not long after it was published, you got what you call your proverbial big break. What happened there? - Well, I published that story in 2015 and it would go on to win three national magazine awards the following year, but shortly after it was published, I got approached by a book company saying, would you be interested in writing a book? And I had never really thought about that. It was not something that was on my radar and one offer turned into four. So I got a book agent and we met with all of these book companies and I signed a deal with Double Day to write the book that is now released. And it felt like a huge step for me as a freelancer at that time, I'm still a freelance journalist. I've still never had a full time job in the Canadian media landscape. But I was a grinder, you know? I was doing a lot of beat reporting at City Hall, a lot of committee work, you know, housing committees, social services committees and doing things that are not always the most glamorous in media, but that I was like really gratified doing. And so getting a book deal with a major book company, just, I don't know, it felt like such a dream and it still does. - And here you are on tour with the book, but also at the same time you got offered a weekly column in the Toronto Star. - Yes, that happened also in 2050. It was a very good year for me and I had pitched a piece to the Toronto Star, which they accepted and I worked with my editor at that time, Jordan Himmelfarb, a wonderful editor on a few more pieces. And then one day he contacted me and he said, do you want to come right for us regularly? And again, I was just like, yes, like, I absolutely do. And it was in 2015 in the fall that I started this column with the Toronto Star that ended infamously, but lasted for about a year and a half. - So tell us about the ending, what happened? - Well, you know, it was really interesting. When the Toronto Star hired me, they put my face on the cover of the newspaper the day that I debuted my column. And they were seemingly very proud that this black journalist and activist was now joining their ranks, but that didn't last. And it was only about eight months after I had been writing weekly for the newspaper that I got a call saying that the acting publisher, John Hondrick, you know, arguably the most powerful person in the company, wanted to meet with me. And you know, when you're like supervisor, you're not supervisor, you're like ultimate superior in the company, wants to meet with you as a lowly freelancer. You don't have a contract, you don't have a salary, you don't have benefits. You're scared. You don't think it's gonna be for a good thing. And unfortunately, it wasn't for a good thing 'cause John Hondrick took me out to lunch and then finally got to the point and said, you know, Desmond, you're writing about race too often. And this is a newspaper that literally recruited me on the strength of my commentary on race and social justice issues, now saying it's too much. I had to keep that to myself for another year. It was really hard to work under that condition and I tried to push back in that meeting, but I walked away feeling so disappointed and I kept my mouth shut for a year and kept writing, my column ended up getting cut from weekly to every other week. And then in April of 2017, I did what I have been doing for many years. I engaged in a public protest. That protest of me sitting in my chair at the police services board and refusing to leave because the police services board promised to end carding and then hadn't two years later, that event resulted in the Toronto Star calling me into their offices and telling me that I had broken the rules of the newspaper, that I couldn't be an activist and a columnist at the same time. Now remember, this is the newspaper that literally recruited me as such. And this is also the newspaper that has employed the likes of Naomi Klein, Craig and Mark Keelberger, Katherine Porter, Michelle Landsberg. And for all of these white columnists, there was no conflict with being an activist at the same time. But when I shut down that police board meeting, I suppose my black activism was getting too effective for the elites in this city. I don't think it's a secret that John Hondrick and John Tory, who's the mayor of our city and who's been on the police board for all the time he's been in office. It's not a secret that they are friends. And so I think that my disruption of police services probably prompted a call from one powerful white man to another and then I got the call to come in. And it didn't take me long. I quit after about 48 hours after being reprimanded by the star. They said, we're not gonna punish you. We just want you to know what the rules are. And I thought to myself, I can't work under these conditions. You're asking me to choose between like advocacy for my community and your twice a month column and I choose my community. - Did people who read your column understand why it was so important for you to take a stand against carding? - You know, black people really, really got it. They did. That was three years ago. And I still get people approaching me and saying, I'm proud of you for leaving the Toronto Star. And it's mostly black people who say this. And I think that they felt the importance of taking that stand because a lot of us as black people are facing regular discrimination in our workplaces and we can't say anything about it. So when somebody does and they end up paying the ultimate price of their job, it resonates with people who are in the same situation, but for one reason or another, it may not feel like they can speak up. But I really did that for the next generation of black journalists who are coming through now because the work conditions in our industry are already very bad. I was a freelancer. I didn't have a contract. I didn't have a salary. I didn't have benefits. The Toronto Star wanted my face and my blackness, but they didn't want to give me tenure. They didn't want to make my life comfortable for writing about these things that make them uncomfortable. So they kept me at an arm's length. And I'm thinking to myself, what does it mean if I can be made such a token out of by this newspaper, but that, you know, they don't want to commit to me? This doesn't bode well for the next generation of black journalists who might be inspired by my work and do similar things. So I thought I'm going to leave and they're going to see that if they don't learn how to treat us better, we're not going to be their Negroes, as it were. - So black people could see why you took that stand and we're in solidarity with it. What about white people? - In general, I think that those who followed my career and maybe who have similar politics were sympathetic, but I really actually think that even those who don't like me didn't know what to make of my departure because I chose to leave. I wasn't fired, right? I walked away from the most broad platform, the biggest platform I've ever had in my journalism career outside of this book now. And so I think that for a lot of people who don't necessarily sympathize, they were just mad that I was getting any attention at all, but it shook up the journalism industry as a whole, that departure, and I think it got people talking, which was what I wanted. - Now you talked about other white journalists who are progressive journalists who were also activist, people like Naomi Klein. But in general, do you think that's a valid argument to say, and I'm sort of asking this naively because obviously I don't believe this either, but that journalism and activism are not a compatible mix. - So I guess when people say this, my response to them is what is the purpose of journalism? Like we have so accepted that journalism is this corporate professional pursuit that doesn't have an interest or a goal. And for me, I don't want that kind of journalism. So what is the purpose of journalism if not to, as has been said, to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, right? That's the point of journalism. It's to tell stories about people who are the underdog, who are struggling, who are suffering, who are downtrodden, and to uplift them to give them and their situation's dignity. That's the point of journalism. It is not to report facts as though you don't have an investment in them as if we're not in a human pursuit here. But people hide behind that because they don't want to take a stand and they don't want to have to defend their journalism. You know what? When people sit in a newsroom every day and they say this leads, this goes second, oh, and that thing we're not even covering that today, these are political decisions that people are making. God's not beaming down the news to anyone. So the idea that we could all be engaging in this objective pursuit of journalism is nonsense. I believe in facts just as much as everybody else. My book is replete with facts and with sources. I believe in accuracy and in integrity in journalism. I just don't believe that your journalism comes from a so-called neutral position. Bishop Desmond Tutu said, if you are neutral in a situation of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. And I agree. - Now police harassment and violence come up over and over again in the book from carding to beatings to shooting deaths. Could you talk about the fight over school resource officers? Who are they and what do they do? - School resource officers in Toronto are police officers who are specifically stationed within our schools. The PR explanation for why they are there is that they are there to build relationships with young people. It's fascinating how the police really need to build relationships with young black kids especially, but not with like rich white private school kids and that even though there's guns and drugs and violence in their schools, no one ever suggests that, and I say private, but these are public school kids, but even in the richer areas of Toronto, no public school replete with like rich white kids has cops in it. They designed this program to put into disadvantaged black and brown communities in Toronto, that was where these cops were for the majority part stationed. And we learned things that like, these cops had a relationship with the border service where they were meeting weekly with the border service. So one of the things they've been doing in our schools is reporting undocumented students to the border so that they and their parents can be deported from this country. This isn't a country that says that everybody has the right to get an education, whether they have status or not, but we don't really believe that. So I document how groups for 10 years fought against that program and ultimately in the public board got rid of the SRO program. Unfortunately, the desire to police these communities is so strong that even though the TESB got rid of this program, they're still now trying to find ways to bring cops in the side door, do coaching and do other programming. And we don't have guidance counselors in a lot of our schools. We don't have public health nurses in a lot of our schools or other resources that kids actually need, but we have cops. So it speaks for itself. - So staying with the topic of police, I wanna ask you about Black Lives Matter Toronto and their challenge to Toronto Pride over the actions of the police and Black Lives Matter here also challenged Pride here. What were Black Lives Matter Toronto asking Pride organizers to do? - Thank you for asking that question. When they demonstrated in 2016 and stopped the Pride parade, Black Lives Matter Toronto unveiled a scroll with nine demands written on it. Just for anybody in the media who didn't feel like having to do their own work that day, they said here are what we're asking for. We're asking for better funding for American Sign Language in this celebration. We're asking for performers at Pride to be paid better. We're asking for the South Asian stage that used to be a part of Pride, but was defunded to be funded once again. We're asking for more Black and Indigenous people to be part of Pride's leadership and executive. And they were also asking for the police floats and booths to be removed. But because our so-called objective journalists took personal offense to anybody saying the police shouldn't be at Pride, they only covered that one demand out of nine. And in my book, I go back through history to talk about the decades of work that Black queer and trans people have been doing to say we belong in this celebration. We are part of this celebration. You need to recognize us as Black, queer and trans people. It didn't start with Pride in 2016 and readers need to know that. - It's interesting. I mean, that issue for me is always like a real key one because I think what you hear sometimes from queer organizers is like, well, we want everybody to support us and police support us, but what is that missing in that analysis? Like, let's feel good and have a rainbow party of everybody's voices. - Yeah, we can have a rainbow party. We can have it sponsored by a bank, right? We can have a party that places corporate visibility at the center of a parade that's supposed to be about queer and trans rights. No problem, if that's what you want. But a lot of us are saying that's not what we want. And I think it's very important that people understand in the couple of months after Black Lives Matter Toronto demonstrated against police brutality in queer communities, there was a revelation about an undercover police operation. This is in late 2016 after the demonstration called Project Marie. Project Marie was a project by the Toronto Police to go undercover into a park where men go to meet each other and to pose as men trying to meet one another and then to arrest men who were trying to solicit sex. And this happened to dozens of men who got charges in late 2016 just to prove the point that Black Lives Matter Toronto had been trying to make that you can have cozy relationships with cops and you can squirt each other with water guns, but it's not going to stop them from going into the community and trying to harass men who are queer and trying to meet each other because there are no safe spaces to do that. The discrimination continues and I don't see the value of celebrating with people who won't stop hurting you. - In your chapter about the education system, you quote, Tanahasi Coates who says racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is more often a broad sympathy towards some and broader skepticism towards others. Can you explain how that plays out in the school system? - Yeah, in that chapter, I tell the stories of two Black moms who have different circumstances, but both of whom are fighting discrimination in the school system and end up getting swept into these very public battles because of racism that they as Black women and their children, Black children are facing. And I think that what's very valuable about that Tanahasi Coates quote is that, for example, one of these incidents involved a six-year-old Black girl being handcuffed in her school by two police officers. She's a 48-pound, six-year-old grade one Black student who was treated in such a disgusting manner that could never be justified. But when the public heard about this story, there seemed to be this reflexive, well, what did the child do to deserve being chained by the police? And I think that race grafts onto that very closely because if it was a white child, these questions wouldn't have been being asked. People's outrage would have been visceral. But what people do is they go to the head when it happens to a Black person and they say, let's think really hard because there must be an explanation. I hear Black people crying racism, so I must be able to find a different explanation for why this happened. So this sympathy is with the police officers and not with the six-year-old who had this horrific experience that she has to live with with the rest of her life. And another story in that chapter, a Black mother, a Black parent, is referred to as the N-word by a white school board trustee. And then the trustee refuses to resign for three months and once again, this plays out very publicly. And there's humongous public sympathy for this white school board trustee who called a Black woman the N-word. And these explanations for why she should get to keep her job. I think in Canada, that Ta-Nehisi quotes quote is particularly relevant because we are always trying to downplay our racism here and say that it's worse somewhere else. And that's why I think that it's a very descriptive and important quote. - Do you think most white or non-racialized Canadians would recognize the Canada that you described in the book? - They don't want to. They close their eyes. They don't recognize it, not because it's not available to them. Like, I'm not here looking at anything different from anybody else. White Canadians refuse to see the country around them. They need mythology. They need stories. They need the Mountie to be a happy, smiley, harmless character when really Mounties are at Unistoten camp being directed to shoot to kill. Canadians don't want to see the realities that are around them. And they want the reality of Black people in our prisons, Black people overpopulating the child welfare system, Black people disproportionately getting kicked out of school. They want that to either not be discussed or to be our own fault when it is discussed. The purpose of our activism as Black people is to make our situation so visible that white people can no longer ignore it. That's really what Black Lives Matter, I think has done so effectively. And it's a credo that I try to live by as well. People have to be interrupted sometimes as we've seen in the news recently before they will actually listen. They don't like to be interrupted, but when we try talking, when we try organizing with petitions and meetings, people don't seem to get the picture. So sometimes something more is required. What are your hopes for the book? I want this book to be in schools. I want students, the next generation of young people, to read this book, to get a snapshot of what their country has been like recently for Black people, but also the history. So when I talk about the history of Black queer and trans organizing in Pride, when I talk about the history of immigration to this country for Black people, I want students and young people in particular to see that this is historical. It didn't appear yesterday. It didn't leak up from the United States. Your country has been exporting white supremacy as Canada for literally centuries now. One really simple example is that the past law system in South Africa, where Black people had to have a card on them at all times to show where they were going, was taken directly from a past law system developed against indigenous people, Métis people in Manitoba. So I want people to know their history because that grounding will help them better understand why Canada looks the way it is today and give us a path forward. Well, congratulations and thank you for the book. And I wish you a really good tour. It's been great talking to you today. You too, thanks so much. I've been speaking with journalist, radio host, and activist Desmond Cole. His new book, The Skin We're In, has just been published by Double Day Canada. (upbeat music) The Red Eye Collective is based in Vancouver. You can check us out at co-opradio.org/redeye. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
From now until January 11, Writers Talking - a series of eight conversations from our archives.
In his first book, The Skin We're In, journalist and activist Desmond Cole challenged the complacency of people who believe Canada is a post-racial nation. He chronicled one year in the struggle against racism in this country. In March 2020, Desmond Cole joined Lorraine Chisholm in the Coop Radio studios for a lively and engaging conversation about the realities that Black people face every day in Canada.
