My name is LeRoi Newbold I'm a steering committee member of Black Lives Matter
Toronto and I'm a teacher at the Afrocentric Alternative School in the TDSB.
I started organizing with Black Lives Matter about two years ago and a
lot of us came to the work for reasons that are very personal in terms of our
own experiences with police violence and state violenc. I came to it wanting to
work on those issues but also wanting to improve the quality of life for black
people. I also came to it because of my work in education and
wanting to improve the quality of education for black kids here. I'm the
founder of Black Lives Matter Freedom School and so that's one of the
most important projects to me are Black Lives Matter. In terms of concrete
changes that I've seen through Black Lives Matters Toronto's work there have
been some changes policy wise with policing. This year the Special
Investigations Unit which is the unit that's in charge of reviewing cases
where police acts with excessive force or where police kill members of
community they release their first report to the public that they've ever
released which was for the case of Andrew Loku so it's making some
changes in terms of police accountability in Canada. In the United
States these are things that always happen when there's police murder you
always find out the names of the officers you always have reports
released but in Canada we don't yet so those are some of the tangible changes.
I think that Black Lives Matter has also opened up a space for radical
black organizing in a different way that has explicitly, or like very vocally
queer and trans leadership. The work that I do with community organizing and the
work that I do in my classroom is very parallel the issues that I work on with
Black Lives Matter my children talk about we talk about things that they're
experienced hearing about and experiencing in terms
of community policing their reactions to what they see in the news. We talked
about strategies for resistance things that they believe should change in
things that they want to change. We talk about them as having personal
power and political power and being able to participate in the movement. For me I
hope that it lets them imagine themselves as powerful when I was
growing up I was always taught that if you want to change something you should
work yourself up to a position of power and then in that way you cannot enact
change I think as black people in Canada it's not always realistic and it's not
always possible to wait till you get to that point. The state that we're in as
black people in Canada is a state of urgency I believe and I think it's
important for kids to know that they have power now even as children that
they can analyze media that they can you know that they can resist as well.
I noticed that kids are very motivated by justice so even how kids talk about
things being not fair. My kids have done political accidents in the past last
year or a couple years ago when the Enbridge Pipeline was being built they
learned about the Enbridge Pipeline and the fact that it was going through many
of their communities and many black communities in Toronto and they decided
that they wanted to do a protest outside of the Afrosentric School. They contacted
media and they did that action and they learned lots of different chants but
mainly they just kept repeating in "shame on Enbridge and shame on Enbridge". In Freedom
School this summer the children organized their own action as well. They
learned about Mutulu Shakur who was somebody who did acupuncture during the
Black Liberation Movement and used acupuncture as a way of improving health
and quality of life for his community in New York. They learned about him and the
fact that he's incarcerated they really wanted to do an action to
respond to that so they had their own action in front of the US Consulate. They
booked all like the accessibility the ASL the food they made sure that tokens
would provide it for people and they learned strategies for how to react and
organize. I think that it lets them see that they can participate not only visa
vie electoral politics but that community organizing works and that you
can get responses that way. They had responses from media when they've done
actions at times my class has written to political prisoners and they've always
gotten responses so I think that it teaches them that they can engage and
that they can be on a level with adults in terms of being able to articulate
themselves and engage. With Black Lives Matter freedom school we were really
inspired to do it by the Black Panther Party school, the Oakland Community
School. The Oakland Community School was part of a 28-point
platform that was called the survival program so the purpose of it was to
provide services to the black community for free that would allow them to free
up their time to focus on other things so they had the school they had a free
breakfast program they had programs where people could get clothing and
shoes for free and Freedom School is similar the program was free we provided
food and busing and the idea was that parents will have more time to focus on
participated in the movement or participated in political activities and
many of the parents who have children in Freedom School become involved in the
movement Black Lives Matter. The Afrocentric School is a pilot
project that's demonstrating that failure of black children within the
Toronto District School Board isn't a cultural issue it's not a cultural
deficit issue or anything to do with children and their families. It is a
pedagogical issue so the Afrocentric School is intended to demonstrate that
using different kinds of pedagogy using curriculum that the kids can relate to
that engages them will have an impact on their success,
whether they're successful. And it has demonstrated that black kids can be
successful. Teaching kids to organize allows them to demand a better education
system and it allows them to look critically at education. Our students
have connected two kids in Attawapiskat and kids in First Nation school and
they've drawn a lot of parallels between issues with different communities and
education. We encourage them to reflect on whether their experiences are fair
and whether their experiences are positive and what they didn't like about
being in part of a certain classroom or school and what they would like to see
change . One, feel what you're feeling, dream of other possibilities, connect
with other people in your community around issues that are important to you,
strategize and act and I think that for people who want to work in solidarity or
want to work as allies the steps are a lot to do with listening and challenging
yourself and challenging your assumptions interrogating your own
belief systems. Don't underestimate your students and underestimate children
they're capable of complex thought, they're capable of
critical engagement, they're powerful. Take the time to know your community,
know the community that you work in to understand the educational experiences
of parents in that community and how it's going to impact your teaching and
the students learning. Understanding the context of parents and children in your
community and adjusting yourself to that as an educator can help you increase
engagement and make connections. People know their own communities best they've
grown up in their communities they've resisted in their communities they've
organized in their communities and less talking more listening. Amplify the
voices that are directly affected by issues and support them with the
resources. And I think that just talking to people and learning about histories
of the many ways that we've been connected goes a long way in terms of
solidarity building.
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