News and views from SA Canada
2016 2016-08Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 10 →
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website: http://socialistaction.ca The Canadian Press discussion on the massive, violent 1981 police bath house raid, the response to which was pivotal to the growth and development of the movement in Toronto and elsewhere. As veteran gay activist Tim McCaskell pointed out, the raid brought together the gay and Black communities in opposition to police oppres sion.
Lemona Johnson, widow of killer cop victim Albert Johnson, spoke at the second of the mass rallies or ganized by the Right to Privacy Committee (RTPC) in 1981. McCaskell said, “Often forgotten is the RTPC’s involvement, along with Black and South Asian groups and the Law Union of Ontario, in the establishment of CIRPA, the Citizens Independent Review of Police Ac tions, Toronto’s first citizen watchdog of police.”
Unfortunately, these alliances withered because of the emergence of a largely white, privileged LGBT self-appointed “leadership,” more interested in being assimilated into the dominant society than in fighting oppression.
As Rinaldo Walcott wrote in NOW magazine, “Police presence in the parade obscures the work that still needs to be accomplished and whitewashes our his tory with them,” and “To remove police floats is not to act against inclusion, but rather, to say that inclusion matters and must be earned.”
Walcott’s piece demolishes the reconciliation-and-