Recap: Hypervisibility in Public Space

On Monday, November 2, 2020, Immony Mèn (Artist, Receipts), Syrus Marcus Ware (Artist, Radical Love), Justine Abigail Yu (Founder & Editor and Chief, Living Hyphen), Ravyn Wngz (Activist) and Kenya-Jade Pinto (Photographer/Filmmaker) gathered virtually to discuss hypervisibility and the contributions of the Safe in Public Space creative project partners. The panelists shared personal stories, reflected on their work, and conversed about the importance of documenting and displaying the lived experiences of BIPOC individuals and the notion of ‘proof’.

[Start of Talk]

Kenya-Jade:  [2:28] So, it seems as though people are trickling in and I think we can just get started. I am sure folks will continue to join us. I am super excited to be here, so I just want to thank The Bentway for inviting me and super privileged to be amongst these esteemed artists and panelists.

To give everyone a bit of context, my name is Kenya Jade-Pinto, I’m going to be your host for the next hour or so. Though I suspect if I do my job right, I won’t be doing much of the talking at all, at least that’s my goal, and you’ll be hearing from these incredible artists instead.

Now before we get started I want to start with one thing. Years ago, when I was still coming of age, my family left Kenya. My home, my beautiful, complicated, multifaceted country - and immigrated to Canada in search of a safer, stable place to live. I’ve since lived across Turtle island, first in Calgary, back to Canmore, and back to Calgary, and then Ottawa through my teens and into my adulthood.  And for the last 3 years or so I have been privileged to call Toronto home. To be frank, Toronto is the first place I have lived since leaving Mombasa where I have felt seen in all of my intersectionalities.

But I also acknowledge that as a settler here, my visibility, my feeling seen in my communities and my safety - comes at the cost of colonization, which has subjected and continues to subject Indigenous communities to unimaginable horrors. So, wherever you are today, I encourage you to take a moment to reflect on the space you call home as well as the original peoples of this land and acknowledge and thank them for stewarding this place before you or I ever got here this.

The Bentway’s work takes place on the treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit and the traditional territory of the Huron Wendat, the Haudenoasuahen, the Metis and many other Indigenous nations. We acknowledge Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit, Tkaronto, the place in the water where the trees are standing, is home to many diverse Indigenous peoples and we recognize them as past, present and future caretakers of this land. And speaking of The Bentway, let me give you a little context. The Bentway reimagines how we build, experience, activate and value public space together. This work is anchored by a new and growing site located under Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway which is operated by The Bentway Conservancy as a platform for creative practice, public art and connected urban life. As a new model for public space in Toronto and a forum for public engagement, The Bentway continues to evolve amidst the changing landscape of the city, developing opportunities and partnerships that address key issues of our time.

So, couple of housekeeping items: this talk includes captions for accessibility. A recording and a transcript of the talk will be available in the days to come at www.safeinpublicspace.com. If you have any questions for panelists, you can submit them via the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. We encourage you to use this function but please make sure your questions are respectful, honour the work and the lived experiences of the panelists and the ideas shared today. Are you guys, is everyone getting tired of hearing my voice? Not too much longer.

 [6:05] I do want to introduce you to the incredible human beings joining me today. I’ll start with Ravyn. Ravyn is an African, Bermudian, Mohawk, 2-Spirit, queer and transcendent individual. Ravyn works to change hierarchical mainstream arts and dance spaces by centering disability justice and advocating of representations of marginalized LGBTTIQQ2S communities. Ravyn is a co-founder of a ILL NANA/DiverseCity Dance Company, a queer multiracial dance company that provides affirming accessible dance education to all LGBTTIQQ2S communities. Ravyn is the artistic director of a OVA- Outrageous Victorious Africans Collective a dance/theatre collective that share the contemporary voices of African/Black and queer self-Identified storytellers. Ravyn is committed to eradicating all forms of anti-Black racism, supporting Black healing and liberating Black communities through their work.

Syrus Marcus Ware is an assistant professor at the School of the Arts at McMaster University. He is a Vanier scholar, a visual artist, activist, curator, and educator. Syrus uses painting, installations and performance to explore social justice frameworks and Black activist culture. And he’s shown widely galleries and festivals across Canada. He is a core team member of Black Lives Matter – Toronto, co-founder of Black Lives Matter – Canada, a part of the performance disability art collective and an ABD PhD candidate at York Univeristy in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. His ongoing curatorial work includes “That’s So Gay” at the Gladstone Hotel and “Blackness Yes” Blockarama. He is the co-editor of the best-selling “Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada”. Syrus’ work, “Radical Love”, is a multimedia installation that centers Black and Afro-Indigenous trans women and non-binary people, creating monuments to trans lives and their survival. Thank you for joining us you two.

 [8:09] Justine Abigail Yu, she is the founder and editor in chief of “Living Hyphen”, an emerging magazine that explores the experiences of hyphenated Canadians, that is individuals who call Canada home but who have roots in often faraway places. She is an award-winning writing workshop facilitator whose work with “Living Hyphen” has been featured on national and local media outlets including CTV National News, CBC, Metro Morning, Radio Canada International, CBC Ontario Morning, CityTV Breakfast Television and City News. She’s a fierce advocate for equity and anti-oppression whose mission is to stir the conscience and spur social change.

Immony Men is an artist, educator and community-based researcher. He is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD U and co-director of the Public Visualization Lab, OCAD U, York University and Ryerson. As an artist, Immony has exhibited nationally and internationally and has been awarded municipal, provincial and federal arts council grants to support his work. His practice takes the form of interactive installations, interdisciplinary performances, social artworks, and community-based research projects.

[9:34] Public Visualization Studio’s “Receipts” is a multimodal interface that receives, anonymizes and archives testimonies to anti-Asian regression in the public space. And both of these installations “Receipts” and “Radical Love are currently part of The Bentway’s growing Safe in Public Space initiative, which aims to broaden the definition of public safety, addressing new public health challenges presented by COVID, as well as systemic inequities, to build a new shared social contract for public space. And you, dear watchers, can view both installations on site at The Bentway from now until November 11th and follow the growing online platform of essays, talks, images and so much more at www.safeinpublicspace.com! That is it for me, pretty much. Thank you all for joining us and thank you to the artists and contributors for being part of this discussion.

[10:39] This is going to be an unconventional talk. I am not necessarily going moderate necessarily. I mean I will, a little bit. But what we are really going to do is have bit of a fluid conversation. And I think what I will do is start it off... I’ll ask a question, and then we’ll let our speakers talk a little about their work organically and ask questions of one another. So, I will get started.

My first question is for Syrus. When I saw your work, I was moved by the fact that you felt it necessary to have it live in the dark, after dark, at night, glowed up, and take up space in that way. It made me think about what our cities are like after dark, and how people are impacted by the dark. I was thinking in the context as me as a woman how the city scape changes, how my positionality in a city scape changes. So I was wondering if you could share a little bit about why you chose to have that work be so big and bold at night and how you see it sort of interplaying in the cityscape that way.

Syrus: [12:02] Yeah absolutely. I did a lot of research to prepare for this project. I knew I wanted to do a project to explore the experiences of Black, and Trans, and Indigenous non-binary people in public space because I knew that for so many of us it just such a contested thing for us to exist in public spaces, so I knew I wanted that as a focus but I didn’t want to assume what that experience was like. So I interviewed a lot of people.

One of the things that came from the conversation was about how temporality affected safety. In some cases, being out in the day, afforded a certain kind of safety. But for many of the people I spoke to, including you Ravyn, this experience of being out at 2PM was much more dangerous than the experience of being out at 2AM because of the presence of people, which shows where the problem is, right? That we have such deep rooted, embedded transphobia in our society that is so pervasive in how people flex in public space that the sort of general transphobic attacks that are just built into the shove, or the look, or the threat of danger that trans people experience when they’re walking through the city, is so prevalent at 2PM with the proximity of so many people.

So I was very interested in what it would mean for a trans person to be out at 2AM perhaps because that’s when they felt safest, and what would they encounter in public space and what would be safer for them when they’re out at that time of night. So something that would sort of light up would be interesting and something that would be this beacon of celebration of their existence. By the way, we’ve expected you, and here we are celebrating you. You were anticipated in our landscape and we want you here. It was this attempt at offering something for the many folks who perhaps leave a lot of their public time to the wee hours because of safety.

Kenya-Jade: [14:25] That’s a really great point, and I think something a lot of folks might not have reflected in their personal experiences if you’re not a trans person or if different type experience in the day versus at night.

Justine, I wonder if you can share a little bit about your experience kind of within this project and how you were able to contribute. I think there is a lot of learning that can come from your experience as well. 

Justine: [15:01] Yeah, I think it is really interesting Syrus you mention that. I think as a woman, I think this might have been what you were alluding to Kenya-Jade, I always have been more prepared or thinking about my safety or conscious of my safety at night. But actually, this summer I experienced racial harassment in broad daylight, and this is how I connected with “Receipts”, with Immony. Sharing my experience in broad daylight in a park in Toronto and I was just reading my book and a woman came up to me and told me I was trespassing and continued to basically, shout racial slurs and telling me that all Chinese people should go to jail. I have experienced that anti-Asian racism or hatred that I’ve heard so much about on the news. And it was at a time that I really didn’t expect it, being in daylight.

That is giving me a lot of pause to think about because always my expectation has been danger at night as a woman. But actually, the hyper visibility of my skin in broad daylight, really pushed that to the forefront especially during this time, during this climate of such tensions.

So yeah, that has given me a lot of pause to think about. That is how I came to be involved in “Receipts” and in this project as a whole.

Kenya-Jade: Thank you, and Immony I wonder if you can give a little bit of context about “Receipts” generally and what you were able to learn from the project.

Immony: [17:01] Yeah so “Receipts” came together because we like, in addition to the direct health impacts of COVID-19, we were also experiencing parallel shadow pandemics of racial discrimination, and violence, and housing precarities and homelessness, and negative effects of isolation. These occurrences affected different communities, diverse communities in different ways. And the focus that comes close to home is that of Asian identity and, because I am a Cambodian refugee and also I work at OCAD university where I am always thinking about the wellness and the safety and the health of students and faculty and administration.

Obviously in a bunch of these meetings where we’re talking about re-entry, and we’re talking about what are we going to do with teaching and teaching online, and this urgency to get back into a classroom. Every meeting I would bring up this issue that was so clear for me in terms of the safety of bodies moving between spaces and the spaces that we can’t design or can’t control and what will happen. Like are we going to be accountable for our community if we are pushing for a quicker re-entry? Can we allow agency or provide an option for students, faculty and administration to choose when they would go back? And yeah, so I repeated this several times in different meetings, faculty-wide and program-wide. 

And while I was doing this I was working with collaborators and also repeating these sentiments and going to workshops about the anti-Asian sentiments that’s emerging because of the shadow pandemic. And also talking to folks within my community - the artist community, and skaters too, because I have been doing that for like 20 years - so talking a lot, and through that I spoke to my collective and we talked about perhaps starting this platform that uses computer vision and text to speech, so computer vision and AI, that protects identity that offers a different type of recording after events have occurred. One that protects immigration status, one that protects relationships with family members and with professional networks. One that anonymizes oral testimonies while aestheticizing, to address notions of, to address this sentiment that you get through being dehumanized through the sharing of your experience and also to respond to disbelief and doubt that those occurrences do happen in public space and to re-inscribe the language and the weight of the words within that type of setting.

So, so yeah. So that is how it kind of came together. And the folks at Public Visualization Lab were very generous in supporting and listening. And I was also on a lot of boards – Facebook message boards – that were connected to mutual aid, in terms of responding to anti-Asian sentiments and occurrences in Quebec as I am from Montreal. And the support network fed into this project and that’s how I found Justine’s story.

 
Kenya-Jade: [21:35] Thank you, thank you for sharing. Any questions from any of you all before I continue?

Justine: Can I jump in?

I don’t know if it’s so much a question if it’s a response to what you were saying Immony and these two installations that are up now. What really struck me was one, with “Receipts”, the anonymity of it and how powerful that was because… I guess in that experience, the aftermath of being racially harassed this summer, I took it upon myself to share my video. I documented it. I videotaped the whole encounter. I shared it on my social media and shared it with media outlets and things like that and it became viral and it just brought up so many questions for me about the fact that I am in a position of privilege where I feel comfortable enough to share an experience that was so, for me personally maybe not physically violent but emotionally violent. And thinking about how many people may not be in that level of comfort to share this. And I have “Living Hyphen” which is this community that I feel accountable to or responsible for, and I felt responsibility to speak up because of this. But there are so many other people who don't. Who aren’t in that position.

[23:13] And also looking at “Radical Love”, where you talk about Syrus, the questioning of the safety in public spaces of these marginalized groups, but also in a way that is framed according to their terms. Where the images that you use are really beautiful and joyful and not perpetuating this idea of or this stereotype that we have of “the victim.” I don’t know what that conception is supposed to look like but I think it really turns it on its head and that’s what I love about that.

Again, this is not a question, more of a response- but I guess something I have been thinking about is how do we get beyond this rush to document? I recognize how important for us to document this to document this and show proof of our experiences but at the same time I have had to rewatch it. I have had to rewatch my personal experience plus so many other Black, Indigenous, people of colour’s experiences of racism. And at what point do we stop? And just believe these stories? When will verbal testimony be enough? I don’t know if anyone has an answer.

Syrus: [24:35] I have been thinking a lot about audience and who we are making our work for. And in a call like this where we were asked to think about public space and public safety more broadly. I made a decision that my audience was going to be us, it was going to be racialized trans people. We know the stories, we know the horror, we know it. I interviewed people and I included it in my proposal for people who didn’t know it. But we know it. We already know it. So we know it.

I wanted instead, what I was going to offer us was something about celebration and love, that was about honouring. Think about what has happened this summer. These monuments to slavery and colonialism that are getting celebrated everywhere, that are dreadful and should be taken down.

I thought, what if we created monuments for people who are actually deserving of our respect and admiration, these folks who are often unsung heroes, folks leading the way? So all of you, Ravyn I would love to hear from you, you are all doing such incredible work to make the city better for all of us. When you make the world safer for Black trans women you are making the world safer for everyone. And you’re doing so much work to try to make the world safer for all of us. Why not celebrate you 12 feet tall and lit up? As beacons of hope in the middle of the night.

Ravyn: [26:17] Yeah I can add a little bit on to that. Thanks everyone for sharing. When Syrus came to me and asked me about safety in public space I was excited because Syrus always finds the most hopeful, joyous, and Afrofuturist way of pulling out content and creating. But also this was an opportunity for me to imagine something different. To step into this science fiction so to speak. To thinking about what would feel good and what would feel safe as opposed to how do you protect yourself, how do you combat it, how do we show up for each other? Like Justine just asked - how much is too much is this intake of constant trauma? How do we not get desensitized to seeing it over and over again? There’s a way that it can break people down, it can make people feel defeated and like not enough is changing. But also it allows people to see what is happening in the world.

I feel like COVID-19 and this virus, pandemic and these elections this year have all shown us that what was already here – what was already existing, how people were already surviving in a world that is unfair and layered. And I get asked so many questions now about what do you think about how COVID has affected trans people and the health industry? And I was like well, it hasn’t changed. You are just aware that there is discrepancy for what we have and what other folks have.

And so in this time period of where you had to reckon with all the parts of ourselves, the ways we participate in other people’s dehumanization, and the ways we might not have been aware of what people were facing on a daily basis. I think is a really powerful project and I am really excited to continue this conversation through all the questions and ideas. That was on top of my brain around this whole period of time.

Kenya-Jade: [29:07] Thank you for sharing that.

I want to pick up on a couple of things I heard. Ravyn, I really like that you said about how these issues have always been there. I think in the early days of this pandemic that COVID was this great equalizer and how we were all in this together. And then pretty quickly we learned, oh we’re not, then something’s wrong, not everyone has the same experience of this pandemic and so I think you’ve raised some really important points about this as well.

Syrus, you were talking about how you were really thinking about your audience when creating this project. I love what you said about this is for us, the Black trans community. I think there are so many projects now in the arts that I’m seeing more and more of as a BIPOC person, where we are making this for us. We are not explaining; we’re not putting in parentheses. Oh for everyone else, here’s the inside joke. Here’s the parenthesis information you need to know the context that you need to know to get our experience. We are not doing that. We are saying these are our experiences and they can sit by themselves. And if you don’t come to this experience you can’t come to this installation with that knowledge then Google is a free tool.

So, how, I am wondering in knowing all of this, where do you see the next stage of this work, or this type of work? Where does Radical Love go from here?

Syrus: [30:48] I think first of all yes, this idea that we have an opportunity to imagine a future world through our actions. So if we are saying we want to centralize BIPOC queer and trans leadership, then we need to do that. We need to make our work, we need to put our work out there. And if the other organizations and the other contexts don’t have the right folks on staff or in leadership to be able to interpret our work or understand our work because they have not done their work of building relationships with the East Asian or South Asian community, or the Black and the Afro-Indigenous community, or whatever, then that is their loss.

We are starting to pre-figure these communities that we want to live in in the future, we’re starting to live in them now. We’re making work for ourselves. We are making work for us, by us and I think there is something powerful about that. To me this project is also about trying to reimagine our cities. As we try to pre-figure these communities we’re trying to live in, what would our cities need to look like for the people we depicted in these works to be considered inherently valuable? What would need to change in order for our lives to be considered expected, planned for, celebrated, honoured, loved, in these communities? So you wouldn’t, Justine, ever have the kind of experience you had. That none of us would. That Ravyn would feel as safe walking at 2PM as she did at 2AM.

[32:46] What would need to change for our lives to be considered inherently valuable? I know that a lot of what would need to change would be the way that we have structured our societies around these hierarchies, so we’ve created these cityscapes that are rooted in class hierarchies. So we’ve grouped ourselves in these class pockets around racial lines. We have shut out entire populations from being part of community dialogues, homeless and houseless folks, street involved, folks who are disenfranchised and removed from our conversations. All of that would need to change.

Even the conceptualization of safety for who? So when we think about what a safe community in the future would look like, it necessarily wouldn’t have the police if we’re thinking about a safe community for racialized people, particularly for Black and Indigenous, but for all racialized people. It wouldn’t have the police. If we’re thinking about a safe community for white people - probably it would involve police because their job is to erase racialized people and trans people and disabled people from the cityscape to make room for white people to live. So it just depends safety first, if we’re imagining safety for us, it’s going to look beautiful and radically different, and it will be rooted in radical love. So Che Guevara, the idea that the revolution should be guided by love and how that it shouldn’t be such a radical notion.

If we root our communities in radical love, if we root our communities in a world where we are inherently valuable, what do they look like? What do they sound like? What do they taste like? What do they smell like? How are they laid out? Who lives here? What does resource sharing look like? We can start to try to plan for those things. I think radical love is a proposition. It’s a proposition to think about getting involved in building these worlds we say want to live in in 2025 and 2030. Let’s start building it together.

Ravyn: [34:53] I feel it’s about the truth as well. There’s so many of us when everyone was putting out the we are all in this together thing, knew it wasn’t true… knew it wasn’t true in our heart of hearts, wanted it to be true but actually have lived lives where we understand that that is an impossibility until we recognize that we’re on stolen land that we’re having elections on stolen land that we’re still celebrating Thanksgiving and all these other traditions and holidays, memorial days, all these days that celebrate the disenfranchisement of people around the world.

I feel that radical love gives us an opportunity for us to sit with ourselves and our discomfort. Like this year, 2020. Like 20/20 vision. Opening up yourself to see everything that is happening around you, the world you’re actually living in the people you impact and affect, like the climate, the environment. 

There are people using their art as activism in ways that was happening during the Black Renaissance. Art is used as aa weapon almost – as a hammer, to make people understand what a possible future is, what is actually happening, and to challenge people to step more in line with being in better relationships to each other. It allows us to have this radical commitment to conflict and to working through it as opposed to finding ways of skirting around it. Actually finding ways to deal with each other.

Kenya-Jade: [36:47] Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. As you were talking about asking these big questions, what does our future look like? What do we want it to look like? How do we create scenarios that allow for this collective future that we say we want?

Syrus, you’ve touched on a couple of those things and we are having these larger discussions in our culture right now generally, about abolishing the police and thinking about a radical new structural way of thinking of how we organize our cities, and what are the frameworks we rely upon to support the people who live in these spaces. I wonder, and this is a big question, I wonder if anyone on this panel has any thoughts about the big pillars of what’s next when thinking about our cities and restructuring our cities for safety and for true collaboration and true co-living with one another?

Ravyn: [38:01] I can start. Being here in Tkaronto, Toronto for those who know it by that name, Dish with One Spoon – there are ways Indigenous folks figured out how to get along with each other long before colonization, long before white supremacy had a way in how we relate to each other. I am a firm believer in this principle of sankofa. The picture of sankofa is one where the bird the feet are forward but the head is looking backwards. You are aware of the past, of everything that happened before but also moving forward, understanding you can only move forward once you have reckoned with the past. There are so many ways that Canada specifically has been allowed to get away with its participation in slavery and enslavement, its continued participation in those things, participation in wars, regime changes. All the ways Indigenous people have been dehumanized, by pipelines being run through gravesites.

We are in a time period where all that needs to come into question, our comforts with what we, like having lights in our homes. Are we okay losing that so Indigenous people can live their lives freely on their land? Those things are where I hope we are going in all the conversations, in all the lead ups. I think we need to start listening to people who have been talking all this time. There is a huge thing in activist communities where people say I am speaking for as opposed to speaking with. I have been given the opportunity to speak up in relationship to these general people, but when we only pick out one or two or three amidst the millions of different voices and experiences… then you get to expand what truth is. What experience is. If you’re only speaking to a fraction of people in your social bubble. So that’s what I hope, that we break social bubbles and capitalism.

Kenya-Jade: [40:36] Snaps for sure.

Syrus: I think this idea that comes from disability justice is we take care of each other. This gets threaded through abolitionist work. I’ve been an abolitionist for 25 years. And I have been involved with this work on Turtle Island for 25 years. The idea that we take care of each other, we don’t need police to take care of us. They’re not keeping our communities safe or more secure. They are not reducing conflict, crisis, and harm. They’re not doing that. We do that. We take care of each other. It comes from this notion of disability justice where BIPOC people came together and said we pod map, we do mutual aid, we practice taking care of each other, we root our work in that.

I think one of the pillars going forward is one where we radically recentre our idea of taking care of each other. What would it mean to take care of people you don’t know? What would it mean to reach out across difference? As Audre Lord encourages us to do. And to be part of someone’s pod and to support them through difficult times? What would it mean to be involved in resolving a conflict in a community you aren’t a part of? As a way of building networks of care.

One of the pillars we will see is this idea of radically relating to each other in much better ways than we currently do. That relationality is what I see threated to in speculative fiction – that’s what I read and pour over in Octavia’s work I see it on Octavia’s work – How are they handling conflict? How are they handling things that come up? What we see is this radical care, rooting everything in care.

Kenya-Jade: [42:37] I want to pick on Immony a bit. 

Before we jumped on this call we talked about your work. In many ways you are doing this work and this care. A lot of us are starting to think about this in a more meaningful way. But I wonder Immony if you could share how your work has been rooted in caring for communities you are a part of and how it has taken different shapes and forms? I know not everyone here did and certainly not everyone who is watching at home.

Immony: [43:19] I learned this from my parents in my community. The Cambodian community in Montreal – we were onboarded through a settlement program in Ottawa and there was a high density of Cambodians in that particular community. We started to share information, share knowledge about how to survive. How do we get work, how do we mobilize, and this was always around food, usually on the floor, on this plastic knitted mat. We spoke our language, and we shared work together. So a lot of the work within the Cambodian community in Montreal is around textiles and assembling textile. So you would drop off a bag of clothes and sew with each other, and cook with each other, and eat together and then you would get information.

What I have started to do within my community at OCAD is to do these events around food and around sharing knowledge and experience around resilience and transformation and different forms of liberation and criticality around what we are doing. And I learned that from my parents. And I am finding other spaces where I am gaining information and knowledge from them of how do we shape a space and community of care?

Justine: [45:14] I could add - I think something I have seen this year more than any others in the general mainstream space is this recognition of the solidarities we need to form across Asian communities, Black communities, Indigenous communities; everything, everyone. I don’t think I have seen that kind of dialogue more than I have this year. Even with this initiative at The Bentway, having “Receipts” next to “Radical Love” is powerful, to see how all of our oppressions or experiences may be unique to our culture or identities but still linked to one another. I thought this was a powerful piece as well in terms of building the future we want, I think that is one of the critical pieces.

At least for the Asian population, I will always speak for my own experience and what I’ve seen in my own communities, this recognition of how we are a part of this white supremacist system as model minorities and how we are contributing to this system. Having these installations side by side is a powerful piece to reckon with that and I think we need to have more of these conversations. I am a Filipinx Canadian and I need to speak to my community about how we have contributed to anti-Blackness, because we have, and I think recognizing that and speaking about it and trying to untangle all of this is critical in building the futures that we want.

Kenya-Jade: [47:12] Snaps for sure on that one. I know that for a lot of us we have been having hard conversations – probably conversations we should have had a long time ago, in this time. It is a privilege to have those hard conversations during this time with the people closest to us.

Justine, I remember reading about your experiences as well and how you talked about how there is never a right way to respond and how you received a lot of affirmation where people were being congratulatory about how you responded to that incident. I wonder if you can give us a little bit more context about that and what you think about it looking back.

Justine: [48:08] Yeah so when I posted and shared, I took action because this person told me she was a teacher, which I found to be extremely dangerous if you harbour those racist beliefs and you are in front of a classroom teaching in Toronto of all places. And I received feedback about how strong and powerful I am and how great of an example I have set. Which, yes, but I recognize my privilege in doing so.

I received a lot of emails and DMs from other Asian folks who expressed their own experiences of racial harassment and racism and how they were unable to speak it out loud and a lot expressing remorse, guilt, regret, and maybe even anger for not speaking up. I don’t know. That part made me a little sad in the sense that we take that responsibility on. And yeah, I just received so many comments about how mine was the right way to respond. You need to speak up against racism and hold people to account.

I don’t know. There are so many positions and very unique circumstances of individuals that do not allow for that. I just happened to be in a position where as an example, I am a freelancer. I don’t work in a specific place where I might be afraid to speak out because it might hurt that company. There are so many circumstances that don’t allow people to speak, to make people afraid to speak up because of the repercussions of that.

I just hated - it is complicated right? On the one hand I am proud of speaking up, but on the other, I hope it doesn’t say that everyone who hasn’t spoken up is doing the wrong thing. It doesn’t take into consideration so many of other people’s lived experiences. When you are in that moment it is so hard to think about how to respond properly. I just happened to be really plugged into social media. I just happened to know how to share this information, but not a lot of people do. I want to be cautious about what we tell people who don’t feel comfortable or safe even, back to safety, about speaking up.

Ravyn: [51:18] I feel like this idea of respectability - if you are just respectable enough, nice enough… everything all Black and POCs are told to do growing up to survive in this world. If you are just, just, just. We know this has not saved so many lives. Even in our own families, there are people affected in multiple ways. If we take respectability out of the way we ask people to respond to violence as opposed to talking about that violence, it allows the person who perpetuates that violence to walk away. You have to be responsible for how you responded to the harm and the question becomes what happens to that person who doled it out to you?

[52:10] And that is what abolition is. How does that person get the care and community to shift that harmful behaviour? As opposed to us finding a way to navigate around it. As femmes, trans folks, people of colour - you are always trying to find ways to design yourself around or navigate yourself through violence. That is why I am a burlesque performer too. Trying to find ways to use glamour and fashion or whatever to get people to pay attention or take you seriously. For me it is about recognizing our collective humanity and elevating that so we stop lateral and intersectional harm. I got that too.

I did a speech this summer and it went viral. Everyone talked about the way I said it. Like, oh, I said it calmly. No, I said it soft. That is how my voice is. If I am screaming it, crying it, making art about it, it all has to have the same weight. So we have to think about who is being left out of the conversation when verbal language isn’t the way that they share. That in itself is ableist. We are talking about a revolution where everyone has space, sovereignty, resurgence, liberation. We have to make it for everyone so everyone is sitting around that global village table.

Kenya-Jade: [54:43] Snaps. I am mindful - we have 5 minutes left and I want to make sure we have questions before everyone heads off to their next Zoom on Monday. I am going to pop into the Q&A box to see if we have questions. If you do, please ask. We will be logging off soon here.

Justine: I will mention, Ravyn, to your point about what happens to the person who doled this out to you. I have been thinking about this a lot. She is one person. As we see in Receipts, this is not unique. I want to know what are the systemic forces that have led this woman to think this way. At the end of the day, she probably hates Asian people even more. There is nothing in place that allowed her to grow from this experience. That, to me, is scary. And how do we - I guess that is the question with safety or hyper visibility, how do we do that? And all of us, all of you are doing this work already, I hope we can see more of it.

Syrus: [56:14] And yeah having “Receipts” and “Radical Love” side by side, and having this conversation today, and continuing to have them, and the ways we can show up for each other, and interrupt white supremacy as it is happening, I think that is a radical way forward. We are starting to build coalitions. And build, dare I say, armies, of people ready to fight against white supremacy. Ready to do the work, where we are getting to after we win - starting to plan and imagine what is possibility.

I think our communities coming together more and more is one of the ways forward. I think having creative ways and ways to bridge the similarities and differences is important. Audre Lorde said we have to find a way to relate across differences. And we are going to win. We are going to do this.

Kenya-Jade: [57:37] I think that’s a beautiful note to cap things off here. What it means for our communities to stand together, but also physically to have these two side by side at The Bentway is a beautiful thing folks can check out until November 11th.

Again, I want to thank everyone here for joining us and thank you for your time and for sharing these stories which are personal and deeply embedded to you. It is not always easy, but it is generous and so so appreciated.

For folks at home, please check out what The Bentway is up to and know Radical Love and Receipts will be at The Bentway until November 11th.

That is it from us here. Thank you so much. I think we can do a round of snaps to close us out right? Thank you, thank you, thank you. And I believe this will be shared on The Bentway’s website as well.

Syrus: All power to the people.

Justine: Thanks Kenya-Jade for moderating!

Kenya-Jade: Of course!

[End of talk]