Photo by HELEN TANSEY

TORONTO PLAYWRIGHT ANDREA SCOTT started to wonder about the secret lives of her neighbours after watching the U.K. television film I am Slave, based on the true story of a modern-day captive. In the film, Arab militia snatch Mende Nazar from her Sudanese village and sell her into slavery; she eventually lands in England, where she continues her forced bondage. It made Scott question whether similar domestic servitude happened in Canada.

The result of these musings is her play Better Angels: A Parable. In it, Canadian employers strip the protagonist Akosua, a 28-year-old Ghanaian nanny, of her liberties bit by bit: first they take away her passport, then they confine her to the house, and finally they kill her only friend, a spider lodging in her room. But Akosua is not a compliant victim—eventually she frees herself (but no spoilers).

The play hit a chord with audiences and a jury selected it as the Best Production of 2015 at the Summerworks Festival in Toronto, after an eight-day run in August. Summerworks’ artistic producer Michael Rubenfeld praised Scott “for telling the story with wit, cohesion, and a fierce intelligence.” But that’s not all. Better Angels was also performed at the prestigious Athena Festival in Chicago in December. It was the only Canadian play in the festival. “To have people who don’t know me at all say ‘yes’ to my play is very validating,” says Scott.

Especially since her heroine defies racial stereotypes. “I’m a little tired of seeing African lives saved by whites,” says Scott, adding that many playwrights, particularly white ones, often show black women as weak. The strong-minded Akosua is meant to be an antidote to these biases. Scott wanted to create an African character who was empowered, stressing that a woman like Akosua is far from an anomaly in real life. “I have a lot of African friends who are just fine,” she says. “They are financially well-off and don’t need to be saved.”

Better Angels is Scott’s third play. She often returns to the same themes of social injustice and society’s false perceptions of black women. In Eating Pomegranates Naked, her second play, Scott confronted the stereotype of the black maternal figure. The heroine in Pomegranates is happily married but unapologetically childless. Scott hopes her plays will help audiences readjust their racial constructions. “I would really like for people to see women of color,” she says, “as people who have lives as valid as theirs.”

Scott has been writing since age seven, back when she scoured the dictionary for interesting words. As a young adult, she decided to focus on acting and went on to earn both an undergraduate and a master’s degree in drama at the University of Toronto. It wasn’t until 2009 that she took her childhood writing dream out of mothballs and wrote her first play, Damaged, about the life of a transgender woman.

Currently, Scott works 17-hour days and finds it hard to sleep because she has so many ideas. She is now working on a new play to be performed at Summerworks next year. Don’t Talk to Me Like I’m Your Wife weaves through time, flashing from France in 1917 through to 2016. The play chronicles the last 12 hours of the convicted spy Matahari, who was ultimately executed by a firing squad. It also examines the progression of slut shaming throughout history.

Since her award for Better Angels, Scott has also taught a playwriting workshop for high school students in Toronto at the Young Voices Conference held by the Toronto Public Library. She believes in the power of mentorship, particularly for racialized teens. “I would love to play that role to those who haven’t been allowed to be heard,” she says. “If I can start them off having confidence in their writing, I’m doing something good.”

Illustration by Samone Murphy

I don’t have much in common with Eminem, but I do empathize with these lyrics about his pre-rap battle jitters: “Palms sweaty, knees weak, arms heavy.” My body floods with this nerve-wracking discomfort in a space so many others navigate with ease: the rich world of academia. As a 23-year-old woman with extensive coursework in creative writing and a degree in health studies and gerontology, currently completing my master’s of environmental studies, however, I spend a lot of time wondering why I don’t fit in. After all, on paper at least, I have all the credentials. I have spoken at a variety of conferences on topics ranging from health to feminism to student leadership; I have taught inclusivity workshops at a university level; and I have been a teaching assistant.

Yet, every time I have to do one of these things or, worse, enter a classroom, anxiety rips at my seams. I drown in these academic spaces. I usually flounder for a bit, perform, gesticulate. I come out of whole courses gutted or beached, my insides left for the foraging of others within the institution. I know it’s because, as a woman of colour, I was never meant to thrive in many of these spaces. People like me are only truly welcome when our knowledge and lived experiences are there for others to forage. When, my peers can use me for their own curriculum vitae, proudly listing credentials like:
• Ally
• Culturally competent
• Intersectional feminist
• Trained in anti-oppression
• Applies social justice lenses
• And on and on

I want to love this list of buzzwords because in their simplest form they are meaningful and integral to an equitable society; good intentions exist at the core of this list. At the same time, I have a hesitancy to embrace them—especially when they have manifested into popular talking points for those in academia who are trying to stay relevant, employable, and in solidarity with social movements and interest groups. These conversations never carve away at how these “attributes” are too often attained by exploiting the narratives of communities, not through truly active and constant actions of solidarity. A seminar will not make a white person understand the totality of their privilege and a degree in social justice (yes, it’s a thing) will never trump lived experiences.

As more schools start to formalize social justice learning, those who have the mobility to attain a degree speak over myself and members of other minority groups engaging in advocacy work. I feel a gnawing hopeless despair when I see academia giving accolades, funding, clout, and respect to those who trade on outside knowledge, making a study of us—strangers penning dissertations on my community and others. How do we move forward with integrity within institutions that were never meant for us?

In September, I walked through a law school I was debating on applying to after I finish my master’s degree, scoping out its holistic application approach, hoping it translates onto the class composites. But nobody looks like me. I see a bunch of white men, followed by a block of white men and white women, and then just a few brown faces. Not many of them are women. Positionality makes us all see the deficit we relate to most. As much as I try to carve out space with other women in academia, I always come back to the nuances. Some women can be marginalized, yet more privileged than many others.

As much as I strive to knead at this sense of sisterhood in academia, white women are better positioned to shatter through the glass ceiling than many of us deemed “other.” We’re not all on escalators to the top; some us have to tediously climb up—exhaustion is inevitable and often so too is subsequent defeat. Academia could take a few pointers from the experiences shared on #solidarityisforwhitewomen.

I have two parents who did not finish high school, and university has been a never-ending struggle. My parents deeply value education, but can do little to help me navigate the system. When I had surgery in my first year of university, my parents didn’t know what advice to give. Where they come from, Morocco and Pakistan, a deferral even for medical reasons can result in expulsion. My parents also did not always understand extra-curricular activities, or the importance of presenting at conferences. They often do not understand my work and it breaks my heart.

I hesitate to explain that I craft papers to get the necessary marks for school funding. Or to say how, at home, we have shared labour and responsibilities rooted in cultural values. Many misunderstand when I say I have to help family; it is not a “choice” to sacrifice schoolwork but an obligation to those who lent a hand in giving me the life I have today. Explaining that I have filled out immigration applications and written letters for family is dismissed with “why can’t your parents/ aunt/uncle/cousin do that on their own?” Such tasks take time, but also energy. It is a learned social justice education. Not that I get to pad my curriculum vitae with the short-list of buzzwords.

To our detriment, we seldom talk about how we came to be at this place in academia—where some bodies seem meant to be in these concrete buildings and some do not. Too rarely do we talk about the racism and sexism that pervades these hallowed hallways. How, for instance, Oklahoma University’s SAE fraternity was recently filmed happily reciting a lynching chant filled with racial slurs. Or how, in September, posters for a White Student Union popped up around three Toronto university campuses. The latter group’s website features a mission statement to “promote and celebrate Western Civilization” and a bunch of other racist stuff. These groups should not be dismissed: the long history of exclusion still exists in present day. As much as institutions have worked to tweak and fine-tune panels on topics such as diversity, inclusion, and anti-oppression, these Band-Aid solutions miss the foundational problem that universities will discuss ally-ship, but not how we are accomplices to the system—talking about people who, thanks to systemic barriers, cannot be in the same classrooms.

Even when I know the coursework extensively and comprehensively, I walk into a space pondering its dynamics and all of the potential for harm. I daydream about how academia would work if we aimed for harm reduction in academic spaces with the clear knowledge that they are spaces where violence is inevitable. If we could preemptively equip professors and students with ways to combat micro-aggressions or conduct damage control. Where an entire academic system isn’t steeped in racism. I envision a future where when we discuss an identity on the margins we create a space where every student will learn. Because, right now, as it stands, when we have these discussions, it’s the most privileged amongst us who benefit, while the many students who are already marginalized are not able to learn.

It’s not as if the dominant academic culture doesn’t know these challenges exist. We often see tools, such as Peggy McIntosh’s famous “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” used in progressive classes. But bearing witness to such scenarios—in which open-minded dialogue about race, class, and intersections occurs—is a largely stagnant experience for those who face the oppression. The first time I heard McIntosh’s list, I was in a first-year social work class that I thought would be an exciting elective.

I cringed as it was read aloud, point by point. My professor seemed to relish in the instant revelations of white students, telling them about her own experience grappling with the list as an undergraduate student. What manifests is white people and model minorities learning, while the rest of us hold our breaths. After this particular class, white students dominated the conversation, expressing feelings of guilt and surprise. Three years later, in the first and only woman studies course I have ever taken, a white student brought up how every time she reads McIntosh’s list she cries. Guilt with little action does not do anything. Unpacking the list for people of colour and watching white people express their guilt over it always feels like an out-of-body experience.

The 50-point list, if you haven’t read it, touches on points of privilege like, “I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.” And, “I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.” Or, “I can choose blemish cover or bandages in ‘flesh’ colour and have them more or less match my skin.”

Many people of colour know these harsh points of privilege exist from as early as junior kindergarten, yet we pay the same amount of tuition to sit through classes, conferences, workshops, and training that all teach this list. It’s a list a white woman wrote, touted as a golden, comprehensive document—in itself about white privilege, and yet a white academic coined it, and gets the credit and monetary gain of its popularity as a teaching tool. Can we not use a racialized person’s work instead? Why are such attempts at diversity so blatantly half-hearted?

Whenever I get invited to be a token presenter at a university conference (usually on either religious identity, ethnicity, feminism, or all three), white people feel compelled to let me know they are “different,” how they “feel sorry for their people’s behaviour,” and how they “never thought about it that way.” Yet, would-be allies get very upset when people of colour or queer communities ask for identity-specific spaces. They don’t seem to understand we want to feel safer, that these safe spaces allow us to reach the heart of issues—like racial profiling—that we are all too familiar with. But we are not their specimens. They don’t get to use us as tools in anti-oppression training.

Currently, allies occupy opportunities that should belong to the “other.” But, I have hope for those working in solidarity with minorities. Diversifying more course syllabi is a start, but advancing equity in higher education also demands a few more actions. We need a critical generosity amongst peers and we need to create safe classrooms where we can have the much-needed difficult conversations.

Institutions that were not created for people of colour need to finally start consulting and listening to people of colour. We need to practice compassionate accountability and move away from an academic industrial
complex, toward a collective future. Emotional accountability to our peers is also vital. Often more privileged peers ask if they can “pick my brain,” but use my knowledge without credit, presenting it as their own. This invasive excavation of a life needs to stop. We need to strive for equitable learning environments.

How we all experience a space is different. Often defending our work becomes defending ourselves for many who are marginalized. For many it is never just an academic exercise. It is never just a project. We invest our stories, identities, and lives but also our communities. During my first master’s degree course this year, focusing on race, gender and the environment, a white man said his hope for the class was “to learn about white privilege.” I held my breath.

Denise Hansen examines the Black Lives Matter movement in Canada—and why there’s cause for anger and hope here, too

PROTESTS AND MARCHES AND SIT-INS have never really been my chosen course of social action. I can remember my dear family friend Kathy, a valiant social justice advocate, trying over the years to introduce my tender, elementary-aged sister and me to the world of social action. She’d drag us to women’s marches and tuition rallies but somehow, we always became so besieged by the noise and the cold (this is Canada, after all) that after a mere hour we’d end up at the nearest Tim Horton’s, clutching hot chocolates and talking through alternative ways we could create social change. Still today, I deeply admire the committed and resilient spirit of protestors (and my dear family friend for fearlessly trying to involve us in that world!) but have decided that for me, social justice is best pursued in other ways. So I write.
But that was before Michael Brown.

The night it was announced that a St. Louis County grand jury had decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, I was in bed under the covers, glued to the light of my phone, slowly scrolling through news report upon news report, tears falling down my face at the same pace. I fell asleep that night feeling emotionally shattered, and like nothing mattered. It was an indescribable feeling of despair with society that I had never experienced before.

The same week I, along with hundreds of other Torontonians, converged at the U.S. Consulate General in downtown Toronto to express anger and frustration with the non-indictment decision and to protest the systemic oppression black communities both in America and here at home continue to face at the hands of police and the state. At the end of the rally, organizers asked us to turn to the person next to us, take our hand, place it on their back, and say the words “I got your back.” I biked home that cold November night feeling everything but what I had felt earlier that week. The protest made me feel that I, my community: we mattered.
I think there comes a time in every black person’s life where the straw simply breaks. You take it and you take it, and you take it and you see your family take it and your friends take it, and people you don’t even know take it, until one day the load becomes too much. For millions of people, that day came with the events surrounding Michael Brown and Ferguson. A year after Brown’s death and the #BlackLivesMatter protests (unofficially) began, I wanted to find out how far the Black Lives Matter movement had come in turning hearts and minds—in America and here at home—to the supposedly revolutionary idea that black life does, in fact, matter.
Does my black life matter more now, one year later?

PEOPLE OFTEN QUESTION what it was about the Michael Brown shooting that spurred millions of people around the world, black and otherwise, to pay heed to the unjust policing practises afforded to black communities in America. After all, since Trayvon Martin’s death in February 2012 and before Michael Brown’s death in August 2014,countless unarmed people of colour have been killed by police in the
U.S. These are just some of the names of black individuals that were killed by police or vigilantes only one month after Trayvon Martin died: Raymond Allen (age 34), Dante Prince (age 25), Nehemiah Dillard (age 29), Wendall Allen (age 20), Shereese Francis (age 30), Rekia Boyd (age 22), Kendrec McDade (age 19), and Ervin Jefferson (age 18).

“The community response set things off, the way people in Ferguson decided to rise up and come together as a community,” says 25-year-old Tiffany Smith, explaining what galvanized America around Michael Brown. “That really showed all of us that we could do the same.” Seeing the courage of the Ferguson community to come together and revolt spread action like wildfire across the U.S., she adds. She herself has been part of the Black Lives Matter movement since it began last year, protesting and organizing in Atlanta, Georgia.

After Brown’s death, protestors flooded the streets of Ferguson and other cities across America. When the first report came out of Ferguson that police tear-gassed peaceful protestors, the community, understandably, retaliated. In response, President Barack Obama addressed the nation and urged an “open and transparent investigation” into Brown’s death while calling for calm and restraint. But then Officer Darren Wilson’s name was released. National protests intensified, calling for police reform and the immediate arrest of Wilson. A state of emergency was declared in Ferguson. Every night as I turned on the news, I knew I was watching a revolution unfold before me.

As protests strengthened, the Black Lives Freedom Rides—organized by the same three women who began the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag—reportedly brought more than 500 activists from around the country and Canada to Ferguson to join thousands others for Labour Day actions and protests. Highways were stopped, football and baseball games and symphonies were disrupted, Walmarts were shut down, and hundreds of protestors staged die-ins in cities across the country. Black Lives Matter made its way into my conversation circles with friends, colleagues, and people on the street. I felt like a kid in a candy store when the subject came up. For the first time, I was discussing race relations—no! I was discussing anti-black racism!—with people I had known for years. Please, please, please let us hold on to this moment a little while longer, I thought.

In November, with the nation bracing for the Michael Brown grand jury decision, the city of Ferguson became a military war zone with police outfitted in riot gear, body armour, tear gas, and other militarized crowd control items. When the devastatingly predictable nonindictment decision was announced, thousands of people rallied to protest the verdict in more than 170 cities across America and massive protests were launched, shutting down malls and highways to boycott Black Friday.

“But what does asking poor, black families to stop shopping on Black Friday do?” my American friend asked me one day, referring to the Black Friday shopping boycotts. “These are the same families that, because of generations of systemic racism and oppression and as a result, limited financial means and economic wealth, are just trying to save a couple of dollars on their kids’ Christmas presents.” She made a good point. We talked for hours more about protest, boycott, and its place in revolution.

Then in December, another injustice made it to news broadcast. It was announced that a New York grand jury would not indict police officer Daniel Pantaleo for the death of Eric Garner, a 350-or-sopound, asthmatic, married father of six, who was harassed, mobbed, and eventually died at the hands of police via chokehold for selling cigarettes. I was getting ready for work the morning I heard the news. Listening to the audio of Garner desperately plead for his life is something that will stay with me forever. Shaken, I turned the radio off halfway through the audio, only able to muster up the courage to watch the full video a couple of days later.

The Garner non-indictment announcement incited a surge of protests in New York City and across the nation. Basketball teams donned “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts at games; a Black Lives Matter protest filled the Mall of America; and black congressional staffers walked out of Congress staging a powerful “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protest. I felt a strange sense of relief when incidents of police violence were still making the evening news and daily newspapers. How strange it is to feel relief when black people—my community—were still the victims of violence and death at the hands of police. But I guess I was just relieved that the struggle still mattered enough to popular media.

With the start of 2015, the most powerful image: a diverse crowd of over 50,000 people marched through New York City. Titled the Millions March NYC, it brought together people of all races, ages, and backgrounds to protest ongoing state-sanctioned violence against black communities. Thousands upon thousands of people protesting anti-black racism; these were images I had never seen in Canada, outside of school textbooks during Black History Month. Then in Baltimore this spring, more outrage as people poured into the streets after 25-year-old Freddie Gray died in police custody after being illegally arrested and detained.

In so many ways, it has been a defining and transformative movement highlighting North America’s fractured race relations and broken criminal justice system. In just one year, the movement has been able to bring international awareness to the systemic dehumanization of blackness that occurs at the hands of the state, most visibly by the police, every day, every hour, and every minute. Similar in size and scope to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Black Lives Matter has brought race relations and the heartbreaking understanding of how disposable black life is in America to the fore.

Even in places as far away as Australia, Japan, Palestine, the U.K., Cuba, and the West Indies, Black Lives Matter has mobilized people not just to take to the streets in solidarity but also, and more importantly, has mobilized international communities to examine their own practises of policing, race relations, and anti-black racism. Outside of the important conversations it has sparked, Black Lives Matter has seen successes in the policy arena too. In less than one year the movement has seen seven bills aimed at police regulation and accountability introduced to Congress including the Jury Reform Act, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, the Right to Know Act, and the End Racial Profiling Act. A federal civil rights investigation has been launched in the death of Eric Garner and its subsequent grand jury decision. The U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation into the conduct of the Ferguson Police Department and found that the force regularly engaged in conduct that violated the constitutional rights of its black residents (the Department of Justice is now investigating police conduct in other U.S. cities including Baltimore, North Charleston, Cleveland, Albuquerque, and St. Louis).

In August 2014, a petition to create the Michael Brown law, which requires all state, county, and local police to wear a body camera, received well over 100,000 signatures (the threshold required for the Obama administration to respond). The petition also spurred the NYPD to equip police officers with body cameras for a three-month pilot program, have 7,000 body cameras supplied to the LAPD over a two-year period, and have President Obama propose a plan that includes funding over 50,000 body cameras for American law enforcement. The Death in Custody Reporting Act was signed into law and we saw rightful police indictments retained in the deaths of Rekia Boyd, Levar Jones, Bernard Bailey, as well as six police officers indicted in the death of Freddie Gray.

On the grassroots level too, Black Lives Matter has triumphed. Protestors have been able to create and distribute resource toolkits for organizing protests and other actions; nationwide, conferences have been hosted; conference calls regularly occur between groups across the country to share actions and next steps; and Black Lives Matter organizers named 2015 the Year of Resistance. Taken together, we are seeing how, in just one year, grassroots community work can directly shape and inform public policy work.

“That report that came out about Ferguson of how black folks are over-policed,” says Smith, who believes that Black Lives Matter has highlighted the importance of data and the power of information. “That report would have never come out if people weren’t in the streets.”

Rick Jones is lawyer and a founding member of the Neighbourhood Defender Service of Harlem. The NDS is a community-based public defence practice which provides legal representation to residents of Harlem and other historically underserved and over-policed communities in north Manhattan where it’s not uncommon for some of his clients to be stopped by police two to three times a week. Jones agrees that what Black Lives Matter has done best is bridge the worlds of policy and protest (although he’s not sure it’s yet been successful). In his own work, he notes that the action that Black Lives Matter in New York City did to protest Stop-and-Frisk on the streets concretely helped in highlighting the work NDS and other practices did around
Stop-and-Frisk litigation at the policy level.

When I ask Jones how the Black Lives Matter movement has impacted the work NDS does, he tells me, “We’ve been able to help our clients understand that the constitution applies to them, to help them understand that it’s not okay for the police to just throw you up against the wall and go through your pockets for no reason.” This is important work, he stresses, adding that when generational oppression is present—“granddad was oppressed and dad was oppressed and now son is oppressed”—this education becomes a lot more difficult. Even in a country like America where race is talked about often, making the connection between people’s personal struggles to systemic injustices becomes hard because racism has been the status quo for so many generations.

Even harder is asking these same communities to act and expose themselves to a system (police, etc.) that has wronged them in the first place. Black Lives Matter is so remarkable because it has done both: made the link between individual disenfranchisement and systemic oppression and convinced affected communities the fight is worth it. Yet, then, what happens in a place like Canada where race and anti-black racism is almost never talked about? How has Black Lives Matter permeated the Canadian landscape? Has it at all?

ONE YEAR POST-FERGUSON Black Lives Matter has been instrumental in providing Canadian justice organizations and black groups legitimacy when speaking out about how our own black communities are treated by law enforcement. The protests and marches and sit-ins we saw planned by Black Lives Matter organizers across Canada came about not just to show solidarity for black men and women in America who contend with a racist criminal justice system, but also to protest and rally around the racial profiling, suspicion, and institutional anti-blackness that is present in Canadian policing practices.

“In Canada, we maintain a kind of smugness so that when we talk about police and black communities, often we revert to experiences going on in the States,” says Anthony Morgan, a lawyer at the African Canadian Legal Clinic, a not-for-profit organization that advocates for and represents African-Canadians in a number of legal forums. Morgan asserts that the movement has created space to acknowledge how Canada’s black communities experience policing institutions and practises. To him, Black Lives Matter has allowed Canada to critically assess the Special Investigator’s Unit (SIU.), a civilian law enforcement agency that conducts independent investigations to determine whether a criminal offence took place whenever police officers become involved in incidents when someone has been seriously injured, dies, or alleges sexual assault.

Morgan says Black Lives Matter has also allowed us to critically assess the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD), an independent civilian oversight agency that receives, manages, and oversees all complaints about police in Ontario. And it has especially engaged people in critically assessing the issue of carding, the practise whereby Toronto police officers stop, question, and collect information on people without arresting them.

While black communities make up only 8.3 percent of Toronto’s population, they accounted for 25 percent of the cards filled out between 2008 and mid-2011. Research shows that in each of Toronto’s 72 patrol zones, blacks are more likely than whites to be stopped and carded and the likelihood increases in areas that are predominantly white. This in Canada’s most multicultural city and a global beacon of what a post-racial society looks like.

Morgan adds that the Black Lives Matter movement has also been effective in raising awareness about the SIU and how many times it has exonerated a police officer who has killed a civilian. Black people are overrepresented in these encounters as well. Jermaine Carby, a black Toronto man, was shot and killed by police last year after being pulled over by police for unknown reasons. Rather than providing answers and support to the Carby family, the SIU is still withholding the suspect officer’s name and details of the incident. “What systems do we have here in Canada that try and justify or explain the killing, harassment, and violence black civilians experience at the hands of police?” asks Morgan. “These are important questions that we’ve finally been able to get at.”

THE SUCCESS OF BLACK LIVES MATTER has had as much to do with its origins as its message. Here is a movement that began as grassroots in nature, had its origins in female leaders and youth, lacked centralized leadership, and used social media as an organizing tool. By virtue of all these characteristics, the movement has wildly succeeded. Black Lives Matter has also wildly succeeded because of its universal message— Black Lives Matter. It’s not only a powerful message, but one that is easily understandable and irrefutably cannot be denied. “One of the realities of protest movements is that unless those who are protesting frame their protest in a way that is not threatening and that is easily understood by the very society that is oppressing them, the protests don’t go anywhere,” explains Ken Coates, Canada Research Chair of Regional Innovation and author of #IdleNoMore: And the Remaking of Canada. In his book, Coates argues that the basic assertion of #IdleNoMore as aboriginal people engaging with their identity and feeling empowered to be a part of the future of Canada was a success in its own right.

“It’s hard for governments and the public at large,” he adds, “to ignore movements that start off with an assertion that cannot be rejected.”

The Black Lives Matter movement has worked in much the same way. Protestors have found a concept that no sensible person can reject. In this way, when government or policing institutions don’t deny that black lives matter, they at the same time are forced to question why then they continue to over-police and over-criminalize black communities; or why they continue to use poor, black populations as revenue tools; or in Toronto, why they continue to unduly target young black men in carding stops (though the city’s mayor recently vowed to end the practice). If black lives matter, why continue to apply these unjust practises to black communities? With three simple words, the Black Lives Matter movement has exposed the hypocrisies and, thus, has been able to rally for change.

“The protestors won as soon as they started organizing,” explains Coates who says that Black Lives Matter protests have spurred a similar paradigm of revolution to Idle No More, where people were equally as excited about being aboriginal and showing their country that aboriginal people were alive, engaged, vibrant as they were ready to assert their presence. “In the same way, Black Lives Matter is as much a conversation among African Americans as it is with African- Americans and the rest of the American population,” he adds. “And that part is really powerful.”

Arguably, the greatest success of the Black Lives Matter movement is that it has made people excited about being black again—a feeling we haven’t seen since the 1960s in America, or in Canada, ever. One year later, Black Lives Matter is and continues to be a powerful assertion of black identity and confidence whereby black communities, especially young black people, have found their voice, realized the future of their communities lay in their hands, and have demanded public attention in this regard. “Black folks who may have not thought about their lives as something that mattered are now reminded,” says Smith, who adds that when Michael Brown was killed, it opened up a new space for young, black activists who saw their involvement in the movement as an act of necessity. “For me being a part of this movement is about my livelihood. I felt like how can I not be a part of this? Black Lives Matter encompasses all of my lived experience: as a black person, as a woman, as a queer person. For me, Black Lives Matter has been this constant reminder that I do matter.”

Popular media feeds us so much bad news coming out of the black community: our crime rates, our lack of involvement in the economic, social, or political dimensions of the wider (whiter) society. In the face of one of these bad news pieces —the excessive violence and death of black individuals at the hands of police—Black Lives Matter has, in Lauryn Hill’s words, turned a negative into a positive picture. It has reminded black people of the simple notion that we do matter. In just one year, the movement has turned the tragic and violent death of Michael Brown into a sense of shared identity and purpose for millions of black people across America, here at home, and across the world.

I remember that cold, November night biking home from a Black Lives Matter protest feeling like I, my community: we mattered. Many gains have been made by Black Lives Matter, but even if the movement does have a long way to go in reforming policy, transforming the school-to-prison pipeline and creating equal opportunities for black populations across social, economic, and political dimensions, thanks to Black Lives Matter, I know my life matters. More than I did last year. And millions more do too.

I matter. A simple and most powerful revolution. If this is just one year in, the Black Lives Matter revolution has only just begun.