Alexandria Williams
This essay was originally presented as a talk at an event at York University in January 2015, “Resisting White Supremacy, Colonialism and Racism on Campus.” The event, which predictably became the subject of contention, was co-organized by the Faculty of Environmental Studies’ ACE (Accessibility, Community and Equity) and Equity Committees, as part of the Transforming Violent Environments seminar series that students and faculty from these bodies were collectively co-ordinating that year. Alexandria’s talk highlighted student struggles against intersectional violence on campus and the university’s own anti-Black responses to sexual assaults on campus, which regularly includes racial profiling of Black students, staff, and faculty, and demonizing the surrounding Jane and Finch community, which the university plays an active role in gentrifying.
I am Black. This is obvious. I also identify as female. I am a hard femme. I have brown eyes and jet black hair. I am five foot seven and a quarter and I wear size ten shoes. I am the daughter of Elizabeth and Eugene Maybury, and I was born and raised on the island of Bermuda. I study theatre here at York University and I have been dancing professionally since I was fourteen. I went to an all-girls private school that had a majority of white students, while my mother worked three jobs putting herself through school. My grandmother’s name is Ann Pindar. She was one of the core creators of the Progressive Labour Party in Bermuda that fought to end segregation on the island. This became the first party to be elected to represent middle- to lower-income families on the island after a sixty-year conservative rule. My father was a member of the Black Panther Party and returned to Bermuda only to see all his work with the party set on fire. His only physical reminders of his membership are a picture and the scars on his body from fighting for what he believed in. My brother received a full scholarship to Atlanta A&T University. He holds the tennis record in Bermuda and was killed on May 9, 2009, while incarcerated in a New Jersey prison. He still is, and will always be, my best friend.
All these stories helped to create the person who stands in front of you. The stories that I am going to share today are from folks who don’t usually feel safe in academic spaces, who don’t feel safe sharing their stories and who, for the most part, have taken solace in being invisible. Today, I have been asked to talk about the militarization of campus security and the racial profiling that happens at York University. These practices constantly attack Black people and people of colour. I am going to speak from my experience, along with some brief scholarly facts. They are experiences that I have witnessed first-hand—and acted on. It is my hope that we can begin to understand that experience has a certain degree of precedence over theory.
My first real encounter with racial profiling by police was off campus. It was in the nearby neighbourhood that surrounds the university campus. I was driving a car that my mother had rented so that we could cover some ground while she was here visiting from Bermuda. We were coming home at night from Red Lobster (I love Red Lobster!), and as soon as we turned the corner from Sheppard Avenue to Sentinel Road, a cop car motioned for us to pull over. As the cops flashed their lights at us, two things flashed through my mind: Where on god’s earth did this cop car come from? And what have I done wrong? While I was trying to remain as calm as possible, my mom started to freak out. Neither my mom nor I are Canadian, so whenever we see the police we have an immediate fear of deportation, even if we have done nothing wrong. We know the power that they have over the lives of nonstatus people here.
The officer knocked on the glass and asked me to roll down my window: “Licence and registration, please.” “Good evening officer. Why was I pulled over?” “We have been looking for cars that have been trafficking drugs into the area. You and your car fit the description.” I’m really scared now. I don’t know why. All of a sudden a drive home from a great meal has turned into a night where I am being accused of trafficking drugs. “You’re from Bermuda?” “Yes.” “Why are you here?” “I attend York University.” “What are you studying?” “Theatre.” “Why did you choose Canada?” “They have a great program.” “Do you live around here?” “Yes, Sentinel and Finch.” “So if you live so close, why did you rent a car?”
I think this would be the perfect time to tell you that my mother is white passing. She has red hair and hazel eyes, and from the time I was a child and through my time in high school she was regularly questioned about her relationship to me. It never made sense to me, until this night. “Well, I am visiting her from Bermuda, I usually rent a car,” my mother chimed in. The officer pulled out his flashlight and shined it on my mom. “Oh, I am so sorry! I didn’t see you there. How are you this evening? How do you know this person?” “She’s my daughter. I usually come up to spend time with her.” “I am so sorry for the confusion, madam. Just a standard check, you can never be too sure. Have a great evening.”
As the officer handed me back my licence and returned to his car, my mother and I sat in disbelief. It was a key moment in our relationship, where she realized that she had white privilege, and we both realized that I did not. I got out of the car and asked her to drive. I was so shaken, scared, and angry. I didn’t know why. I knew that if my white-passing mother hadn’t been there with me, things might have ended differently. Wasn’t I worthy of a “good night” or a “hello,” like she was? And of being addressed respectfully rather than as “this person,” even though the cop knew my name?
I wanted to call my dad or my grandmother so they could help me understand what I had just gone through. Surely they would find this a story from a children’s book compared to their own novels of experience with racial prejudice. Still, I needed someone to explain this experience to me. I had been taught that history had happened so very long ago, and that we had passed that point.
With this incident, all of the instances of racism, micro-aggression, misogynoir, ableism, and queer-phobia I had lived through rushed through my head. I was angry, confused, and scared, and was becoming jaded. I understood that profiling happened to Black people. But somehow, I did not understand how it could have happened to me. I mean, my family had fought for equality, right?
I started to read Frantz Fanon, bell hooks and Malcolm, I watched videos of Mandela and Assata, and I began to sit in the York United Black Student Alliance office just to listen to the Black geniuses who hung out there. I dove into Black Tumblr, explored queer spaces in Toronto, and turned to my elders. I felt as if I was starving and I needed to feed myself. I got more and more involved in organizing. I kept reading and talking to others, trying to figure out what being Black meant and trying to understand why was it was so fucking hard. Eventually all of this talking, listening, and reading placed me in a position to become president of YUBSA. I was able to create a positive space for Black folks to relax, de-stress, and basically just feel like they belong at York University. As the second female president of YUBSA, I made it a point in my role to talk openly about cases of misogynoir and queer-phobia in order to make a space where women (including trans-feminine people) and Black folk from queer and trans communities would feel safe on a campus that doesn’t really allow them to. This is especially true for Black queer women, who are left to feel invisible.
I want to make clear that I am not saying that the Black community at York University or the Black community at large is queer-phobic. Rather, I am saying that it is especially and inherently unsafe for Black trans and queer folk to feel safe anywhere. Heteronormativity is dependent on the erasure of the identities and lived experiences of Black trans and queer folk and centralizes white lives in all spheres, from the economic to the social and political. York University is no different from the outside world. At York, as in the wider society of which it is a microcosm, there is a need for Black trans and queer folk to have safe spaces.
Meanwhile, nontrans women on York campuses get a constant reminder that this campus is not safe for us and that rape culture is alive and well. Every three weeks or so we get email reminders. To my masculine-of-centre folks: you may know these as security bulletins, but if you identify as a woman you call them reminders. Nothing ever really gets done about the cause of these reminders—other than the random security forums organized by the university or the “No Means No” posters hanging in the women’s bathrooms, whose real purpose seems to be to remind you that if you don’t say “No” when you are sexually assaulted, your assailant has the protection of the law and cannot be charged for their indiscretions.
The militarization of campus is paraded under the proactive stance of eliminating rape culture on campus. However, both the definition of sexual assault and the responses to it serve white supremacy more than they serve survivors. They do not include the routine assault of Black trans people—including trans men who have reported being sexually assaulted on campus. These trans men have been forced to live with their traumatic experiences without the help of campus counselling service, as there aren’t any counsellors who are trans aware or sensitive enough to help a trans person of colour in a world that refuses to accept trans people’s existence. Meanwhile, I literally cannot find any statistics of violent attacks on trans women, and we know that this is not due to lack of incidents. Think about that.
Then there are responses like the following. One week, according to York, there was a “huge spike in sexual assaults and criminal disturbances” on campus. To respond to this “spike,” the next day they increased the security presence. As I entered the university, I saw two to five cops on every corner of the campus. It’s not like I haven’t seen such a reaction before. I was quite aware of the university’s demonstrative response to crime on campus: let the cops show their face, have a forum, and then it’s back to life as usual. This time, however, there was a certain urgency in the cops’ stature. This wasn’t the usual performance; they were given a task and they were going to enforce it. After my own interactions with them, I immediately felt unsafe. I knew that they were not here to protect me, as I am definitely not part of the demographic of women who need to be protected—and by this I mean white, cis, and straight. I watched them ask Black men and women to empty their pockets and open their bags. I watched them ask them to show their student ID. I heard them say repeatedly: “You do not look like you go to school here.”
Here’s the greatest feat of white supremacy—even as a radicalized person who just witnessed this with my own eyes, I still could not believe it. Even as I watched the white and brown men walk by without being stopped, I still tried to justify these actions. I still wanted to believe that York was a place where a post-racial reality exists. Two years earlier, I had witnessed the word “Niggas” spray-painted on YUBSA’s door on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and the university’s lack of response. I knew that every time I go into the York General Store they follow me around like a pig smells shit (despite numerous complaints to them), and I knew that racial profiling happens on this campus. I knew that the only time the university will acknowledge Black people or queer people is when it tries to use our faces for its marketing campaigns—when a cameraman shouts “3, 2, 1!” I knew that the curriculum and what we are learning is systematically oppressive towards Black people and people of colour. That it virtually ignores African and Indigenous cultures and histories (which should be mandatory for all students since they are learning on stolen land) or, when it doesn’t, packages them for “teaching” (or rather cultural appropriation) by white academics. Even so, I still wanted to believe that they wouldn’t be this blatantly obvious with their anti-Black racism.
After witnessing the police searching Black bodies entering campus, I ran to YUBSA to ask my executive committee to come with me to follow these cops around. Our team’s conversation had a lot more “The fuck!” and “They won’t let us be great” phrases than I can share here. We needed more evidence. We followed the cops for over two hours. Two hours. We saw two cops asking Black men and women to show their student ID—not once or twice but over twenty times—asking them “Do you go to school here, and if so what are you studying?” while white people and other racialized people walked right past. Sometimes these other students stood by and watched.
In response, we planned an action with the help of various student-led and community-led organizations on campus, including the York Centre for Women and Trans People, OPIRG York, the Access Centre, the Black Action Defence Committee, and Justice is Not Colour Blind. We asked men and women in the Black community here on campus to tell us their stories of their interactions with the police by coming into the space and sharing via email or our Facebook page.
They did. We got more stories than we thought we would. Some told of being asked questions by police, while others told of being physically searched. The people who spoke up were different ages, heights and shades—and all were genuinely scared. Scared. On a campus where they were paying big money to “learn,” they were again the visible targets. There is no word to describe the feeling of being invisible until you are being hunted. There is nothing to prepare you for that form of hypervisibility.
YUBSA and our allies went to the York security forum on November 27, 2012, to bring the issue of racial profiling to York’s administration. We carried the action to Vari Hall. We demonstrated and made some noise. We had to abruptly bring it to an end when I was told by a member of the administration that if I did not move the action outside of Vari Hall, YUBSA would be sanctioned financially. I was told that the sanction of a York community service group could be to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars. I didn’t know how true this was, but I could not risk chancing it. We moved the action outside in the blistering cold, held hands, sang, and ended it. This action led to the creation of the group Cops Off Campus, an amalgamation of various service groups who were a part of the initial action against racial profiling on campus. We did some great work together. The coalition has now lost some of its fire after several of its members, myself included, have been individually sanctioned by the university and told to shut up or be kicked out.
Let’s fast forward to 2015. Students were greeted in September with an increase in security personnel equipped with new vests and cars. York has created a stronger and a more visible security presence who walk around our campuses and have gone as far as detaining people at an undisclosed location. I have heard of such an incident anecdotally, from witnessing students who tried to get their fellow student out of this “custody.” Needless to say, the new security force is getting their direction from the same university that ordered police officers to empty the pockets and search the bodies of young Black students.
York University has played an active role in the policing of Black bodies on this campus and in gentrifying our surrounding neighbourhoods. The militarization of campus is a reflection of the ongoing gentrification of York’s surrounding community of Jane and Finch by the university. The Oxford English Dictionary describes the act of militarizing in the following way: “To give (something, especially an organization) a military character. To equip or supply a place with soldiers and other military resources.” This definition describes precisely the increasing power of York security on campus and their influence on the surrounding community. York is situated in a “priority area”1 named Jane and Finch, in a city where Black people are carded by the police 252:1 and the population of Black males incarcerated in prison in Toronto has increased by 90 percent.2 Forty percent of the Black population lives below the poverty line, and 15 percent of the poor Black community in Toronto lives in Jane and Finch. These communities use the campus to access resources, service groups, emergency services, workshops, and keynote speakers from Black activist communities that would not be accessible otherwise and are currently becoming inaccessible as a result of policing and gentrification. This is reflected in the recent rebranding of the Jane and Finch community as “University Heights.” As part of this rebranding, York is participating in the construction of a subway station on campus, which has already raised rent prices and food prices and has forced three Black families on my floor to move out of my building this past year alone. The militarization of the campus is part of an anti-Black capitalist system that protects white cis people whom York deems as “normalized” and hence worthy consumers, and polices and displaces Black folk who are in its way.
Let’s consider some statistics.
In the fiscal year of 2011–12—the same year that the security forum brought up the issue of racial profiling—the following issues were reported: four sexual assaults on campus, nineteen cases of general harassment, thirteen cases of robbery, and one case of stolen property. In contrast, in the fiscal year of 2013–14, reports included thirteen cases of sexual assault, twenty-two cases of general harassment, eight cases of robbery, and one case of stolen property. This means that since York has begun to militarize their campus security, so-called crime has increased by more than 50 percent. So what are they really preventing? Who are they protecting?
It is important that we are clear who is most affected by white supremacy on campus and how. On the very day of our action at Vari Hall, and at the exact time, a white man sexually assaulted a woman on our campus. The only response we heard from the university was the reminder—excuse me, the security bulletin—released via email to all students. There was no surge of cops on the premises the next day. No one asked the white men on campus to “empty their pockets because they don’t look like they belong here.” Furthermore, let us remember that it is Black people who are the prime targets here. After the security bulletin incident, white and non-Black racialized people were once again able to walk right past police officers who were profiling Black students.
This is my story. I hope that the memories that I have shared reflect the realities and lived experiences of Black, queer, and disabled folks on campus. The signs of suffocation, isolation, and trauma are visible. Look through the halls of this fine institution: an institution that we fund and where we learn. Look at the security guards who walk the halls with bulletproof vests and gloves. Look at the flags lining Finch Street that read “University Heights” on pristine white fabric. These signs tell us that we who are not white, able-bodied, cisgendered, straight, and privileged are, and will continue to be, a threat to the university’s idea of academic normalcy. This is where our vulnerability lies. Above all, it is also where our power lies. And as ancestor Huey Newton stated, “All power to the people.”