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Here We Come
A podcast about the birth pangs of a new revolutionary movement. Hosted by Elad Nehorai.
Here We Come
How Liberals Forgot That Black Lives Matter
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Sandy Hudson has been making the same argument for over a decade. For years she was attacked for it. In 2020, suddenly everyone agreed. And then, just as suddenly, the same people decided it had all gone too far and moved on.
In this episode, host Elad Nehorai sits down with Sandy Hudson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto and author of Defund: Black Lives, Policing and Safety for All, to talk about what that whole arc felt like from the inside, and what it reveals about how people decide what they're willing to see.
They get into why abolition is more logical than the system we have, why 2020 proved that major change is possible when there's the will for it, and why so many people found it easier to look away than to act. Sandy also challenges assumptions most people never question. Why do we send armed officers to enforce transit fares instead of just making transit free? Why has policing failed to address problems like domestic violence despite decades of promises?
They also discuss the backlash against Black Lives Matter, the innocuous tweet that critics seized on to discredit the entire movement, and what it felt like to watch people search for reasons to stop listening.
About Sandy Hudson:
Sandy Hudson is a writer, activist, and the founder of Black Lives Matter Canada. She co-founded the Black Legal Action Centre and the Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism, holds a JD from UCLA School of Law, and co-hosts the podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics. She is the author of Defund: Black Lives, Policing, and Safety for All. Find her on Instagram at @sandymhudson and BlueSky at @sandela.
Book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/727367/defund-by-sandy-hudson/
Hi, I'm Alad Naharai and welcome to Here We Come. What happens when you live in a world that's broken? How do you handle that? I think those of us who are exposed to modern media and to movies tend to think there's some traumatic thing that happens, that a hero comes in and saves the day, or that we're all broken down and afraid and suffering. I've seen that in a community that I lived in that was fundamentally broken in many ways, where most people just found a way to live with it. They weren't even aware that things were broken, and in fact were themselves bought into the brokenness. It became a feature of their lives. And I would argue that the world we live in today in America in the mainstream is a version of that. A version where people have found a way to make brokenness either acceptable, tolerable, to not be aware of it, or to actually make it a feature of their lives. Because the truth is it's very hard to hold brokenness in you, to see that we're barreling towards climate change, that inequality is even deeper than a lot of us are aware of. It is very human to not want to have to face those things. We live in a country where it's very hard to live in community. When everyone is in cars and no one is in touch with their neighbors, by definition, you're likely to feel lonely unless you work to connect with others. Another feature of this looking away is that you actually become very disempowered. It's very hard to live in a world that's broken if you're not looking at how you can adjust to its brokenness. I'm about to have this conversation with Sandy Hudson, who is the founder of Black Lives Matter Canada. She's a person that has refused to look away in so many ways and has suffered because of it, and who also leads and changes things because of it. She's been there when no one was willing to look at the problem she was talking about. She was there when everyone was talking about it, and now she's back in a world where people are talking about it less. And she has a simple message. We can't look away. The world can change if we refuse to look away and if we commit to making the world a better place. I'm Alad Naharai, and welcome to Here We Come. So I'm excited to welcome Sandy Hudson of BLM Canada, writer, activist, podcaster. Welcome, Sandy.
SPEAKER_00Hey, thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_02So good to have you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It's nice to have you outside of Ethiopian food as well.
SPEAKER_00We have been eating a lot of Ethiopian food, and I really appreciate it. I think it's the best way to have intense conversation.
SPEAKER_02We've been doing that too. So we're like, let's do it on camera.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, let's do it on camera.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I feel like we have a lot to cover. We've been talking about a lot of existential intense things. But I think like I think the thing I would love to start with is the work that we've been focusing on in many ways is the experience black women have been having in America for I'm from Canada and I tend to think that the experiences are quite similar.
SPEAKER_00I've been living in America now for the last seven-ish years. They're similar, but they're distinct and particular. But as an activist who is a black woman, it's been weird to go through a period where at first you're like super hated for the work you're trying to do, for the shifts you're trying to make, for the changes that you are trying to inject into the culture. And then eventually, and I would say like that's the period between 2013, 2014-ish. And then eventually people start to get it. It's like 2016. People are like, all right, you know, we'll we'll do a little bit of a hands-up, don't shoot. We'll we'll start to take in some of what you're saying, but it's still fraught. You know, not everybody's on on board. And so you're you're still working, you're still trying to shift and make people see that there's huge injustices that are going on that need addressing. And then you've got a moment like 2020 where it feels very bizarre because all of a sudden, this stuff that you have been saying that that people have been dismissing out of hand for so long, talking about police abolition uh in in the culture, in like pop culture, uh all of a sudden, it was like this is worth discussion. And it felt like, oh my gosh, we got to use this moment. Like, let's do everything we can to get these discussions going and get more and more people educated. And how long will this moment last? Because, you know, anyone who's a student of history knows these moments don't last forever.
SPEAKER_02And now discovered that we certainly have.
SPEAKER_00And now it feels almost like that was a fever dream. Like, did it even happen? The pendulum swing has been so far in the other direction. It feels like people aren't even willing to acknowledge some of the ways that black women in particular right now are being targeted by the swing in culture, by the Trump administration. It is it's a very, very weird experience.
SPEAKER_02Like you're saying, this fever dream idea. It's been such a surreal experience for me having vivid memories of people saying stuff like, um, listen to black women, follow black women, you know, let them lead. So far on this podcast, I've railed more about liberal people than conservative people.
SPEAKER_00Welcome. Everyone gets here eventually.
SPEAKER_02What's happening? I'm just where are they? And I don't mean that, I mean that when we're saying like existential, like I don't understand how people were there and now it's it does feel like it never happened in a sense.
SPEAKER_00Well, one thing I will say is that it's impossible that it didn't happen, right? Like people learned some very, very incontre convenient truths in 2020 if they didn't know them before, right? If they were paying attention, they learned some things. You don't learn things and then f forget them. You know them. But people are turning away from them now. And that tells us something about where the culture is at. I think it also tells us something about how much the internet really influences our lives right now. Because, you know, I've been an activist for most of my adult life, so and I'm solidly elder millennial. So, you know, I I I have an experience of activism that is pre-Twitter and an experience of activism that is post-Twitter. There is a personal risk that you take if you engage in activism. I mean, we know this, right? But even the the casual, the casual engagement with an idea can be really flattened on the internet to you're either this or you're that. And people will make choices based on what risk level they think they're taking. And in a world where things are increasingly authoritarian and fascist, and also it feels like there's intense value judgment on people who might have questions about like, should we fund the should we give half of the budget for whatever city to the police? Why ask that question? I think that this is the calculus that people are doing. Why ask that question if that's going to affect if I can get a job or if that's going to potentially lead to me being lambasted online? And it's just like it doesn't have to be this way, and it shouldn't be this way. This isn't how societies, this isn't a healthy way to organize society by any measure.
SPEAKER_02Part of it is cultural, but I think part of it is algorithmic. Like we rush and we talk about the Iran war, and it's gonna be really intense. And soon, if the Iran war continues, we'll find something else. It'll still care. There will be people who still care, but we're not gonna hear about it as much. Gaza is still happening. There is still, I would argue, a genocide going on. You would argue correctly.
SPEAKER_01I guess the thing is those stories are still happening, right?
SPEAKER_02So I guess that's kind of my question. Is like, what has the story been for you this whole time when people aren't really paying attention?
SPEAKER_00Okay, so let me come at this a couple of ways. Practically in 2020, before the murder of George Floyd, and I mean there were other things that happened in 2022. Ahmad Arbury, you know, there was a there was a lot that happened at the same time, plus the the pandemic. At the early part of 2020, it still felt like we were pulling people's attention to pay attention to what was going on in black communities vis-a-vis the police. Then 2020 happened, and I can't I can't tell you what it was like. Like it's it's it's kind of impossible to explain. I was being asked to speak to the media and to classrooms and to workplaces to explain all the time. And not just to explain, not like explain yourself, but like here we we've brought Sandy in to help us understand like the context of anti-black racism in insert workplace here or educational institution or city or what have you. And here she is to to explain this. It's really important that we understand and take action. Like that was the vibe. And um, honestly, I would wake up in the morning and I would have video calls, essentially, which were either media hits or these types of workshops, all day. All day. Like from, you know, I was trying to schedule them and like from place to place to place all day because I could be anywhere. It was the pandemic. All of a sudden we were on Zoom, and it was all day. And then I would go to bed, I would wake up the next day and do the same thing. And in between that, you know, we're providing support to family members who are going through it. We're still doing organizing work on the ground. We did other sorts of organizing initiatives because of the pandemic, like microgrants to black people in communities trying to get grants out. It was, and I was in law school at the time. It was like, it was wild. And knowing that things were going to change, I was like, I should write this down. So I wrote a book called Defund, where it was like all the actual arguments. It, you know, everybody wanted a memoir at the time. They were like, Can you write a memoir of your experiences? And I was like, I like, I'm sure that'll be important one day. But like what I really need people to understand is that this is abolition is like a cogent argument that makes sense for how we can organize our society. And so I did what I could to get a to sell a book so that I could write about it. And then as I was writing about it, when things started to die down, I could, you know, I'm I'm putting down all these arguments and I could feel the shift. I could feel the shift happen. All of a sudden, you know, the mainstream daily news podcasts were saying, well, defund the police went too far. Went too far where? What happened? Tell me. I want to know where did it go too far? Or, well, you know, the Black Lives Matter era. Or the dismissal As if it was like past tense. As if as if it's over. And the dismissal of all of the black women, black queer, and trans folks who really led this movement and the abandonment of these people, it's that has been very awful to watch. It's really there's a lot of sacrifice that one makes when you engage in in activism. And I don't think that anyone does that without knowing that. Uh, but it is it is hard to be on this side of it and see how it's affected so many people and to see the liberal classes really refusing the learnings that we had from this moment. Gosh, look at all the stuff that's going on with ice. It's the same thing, it's the same phenomenon. It's just focused on a broader target.
SPEAKER_02I don't know if I told you about this. I used to be part of the Hasidic world. It's part of my Oh, I did, yeah. You did. That's all I talk about. One of the things I found I I took with me from that was the experience of what happens when what's happening underneath is exposed to the mainstream. Like so when I'm talking, for example, I'm talking about sexual abuse being covered up, which is very common. Is very common. And that just has to do when you have a hierarchical society, especially in a patriarchal hierarchical society, it's just almost by definition, sexual abuse will be everywhere or be very common and hard to stop. And so when you bring that out, it's hard to argue with the implication that things need to really change. Not just change one thing. We can't just change a culture, we can't just change the way we the way we think about one thing. This means like you have to change the power structure, right? Many people don't want to do that. So what they find is ways to rationalize it. Like the victims are are exaggerating, right? Or the people are speaking up too much, they're taking things too far. You know, part of this is identity and how black women in particular were being targeted. But on the other hand, I think, in or in addition, I think what you helped to bring out, what so many other people helped bring out at the time, was the idea that abolitionism is really, at the very least, a much more logical, even let's say you disagree with it, is much more logical than a militaristic police state that we're building up and that we're funded that the federal government has funded a carceral state.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And and once you see it, you're called to act. You're called to do something about it. Right, exactly. That's what's happening right now, right? Like people are refusing to see. There's like a turning away because people don't want to act right now. I think that people got exhausted with the method of acting that was happening. Because let's be clear, like you are correct. People did not want to change the power structure. And so what did they turn to? EDI or DEI uh initiatives, which some were potentially helpful. I mean, a lot of it just really does embed itself quite well into a power structure that's able to be like, here's an addendum. We have a lunchtime where we can learn about race, and now that lunchtime is over, or you know, we'll hire one person to deal with issues of racism at our workplace. We're not gonna give them any money or any power, but if you have an issue, go talk to them and we have resolved what what there is to do. Obviously, people are gonna be frustrated by that because it's not it's not a true shift in power. So the people who are impacted by anti-black racism aren't seeing the change that we're calling for, and the people who are really just want the power structure to remain are like, well, why aren't you happy with this? Well, then I don't want to do anything about it anymore. So that is like a result of not getting to the heart of the matter. And the other thing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you should be grateful.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. You should be grateful for this little pittance that I've given you. The other thing that I think, the other response that we get is, well, what do you want us to do? Right? Like that, what do you want? What is the res resolution? What's the solution? And then you, you know, you come and you're like, it's abolition. They're like, that doesn't mean anything. What does it mean? And then, like in my case, you like write a book and you're like, here are 7,000 arguments as to why this this makes sense, right? Like that this isn't just um, as Obama called it at the time, a snappy slogan. This is like a very well-thought-out argument that people have been having for years and is worth listen and is worth listening to. And then you get, well, like, how are we ever gonna implement it? Like, what is it gonna look like on a on a municipal level, on a state level, and a national? Like, we don't know, like what are until you figure out the parameters and the goalposts just keep moving and moving. Meanwhile, for anything else, whether we're talking about the way policing exists today, did when policing was implemented at first in the late 1700s, the the kind of policing that we see today, did someone have a blueprint that looks like what policing is today? No, of course not. Like for no policy would we ever imagine that because we have political renewal year over year over year so that we can shift and change things and make things better or worse depending on what we want. And for some reason, when it comes to anti-black racism or issues of injustice that people really need to come at the power structure to resolve, all of a sudden it's like, well, you gotta have the whole thing figured out from top to bottom perfectly before I will even consider talking to you, which is outrageous and a lie and a sleight of hand that people I think really need to recognize for what it is. We're allowed to to try a thing and then to correct it and correct it and correct it until it becomes more um what we need for our society. And I mean, I don't, is that an argument we even really need to have today? Look at what the government is doing. They have no plans for anything, and yet here we are, you know, saying, ah, yeah, that taking out the the leader of Venezuela, that's not an act of war. That was a police mission. What are you talking about? Iran, that war is over. It just started. No, it's it's not whatever. Like, there's no plans for anything that they're doing. They're flying. We deserve for the the justice that we're trying to bring forth for our communities. We deserve a chance. We deserve to try it. And we have never tried the things that so many people over the years have said. Like, this is how you fix this.
SPEAKER_02I'm convinced.
SPEAKER_00Thanks.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I was really struck by what you said, especially the idea of like this is the implications that you have to do something, right? Like the implication is also your life is gonna change.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_02But I think the just even the idea of your life changing, I think scares people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02When it's not their fight, you know, or how they see it as their fight.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I mean, for the I mean when it comes to policing in black communities in particular, like society writ large has this idea that they've got like personal heroes on speed dial. You know, you call 911, the hero shows up and like takes care of them. Even though most people in America will not have interactions with police, they don't know what those interactions are like at all, it's the idea that that is what police do and that's how it operates, which is a fiction. It's not real. That's not what actually happens. And so they're using that fiction and the fact that they don't see police in their communities to say, well, what's gonna happen when I need my personal hero? You can't take away my personal hero, even if my personal hero is the thing that is making your communities the most unsafe and that is causing urgent violence in your communities that I don't want to see. And so that that dissonance, I think, is part of what we're dealing with right now, with people turning away, because it's like, well, I don't want to lose my personal hero, and I also don't want to feel like I'm part of justifying this unjust situation. And rather than like turning to this, rather than saying our lives matter enough, we are inherently valuable, so we must resolve this situation. Uh, we get, you know, Ezra Klein saying, like, oh, that went too far. You get these uh the mainstream liberal figures who uh just dismiss it without logic attached to that dismissal. It's it's like it's just you're just supposed to accept that was weird. 2020, what a strange time. As though what, none of us have the intelligence to understand what we're talking about? Come on.
SPEAKER_02I think 2020 was fascinating because people were forced to stay home, because they were given money, like just given money to live, given some forms, limited forms of free healthcare. And they were able to collectively push for remote work, for example. All of a sudden, we were just thrown into this situation where all of our assumptions got thrown out the window because we had to live in a situation where we could no longer live lives based on those assumptions.
SPEAKER_00All of a sudden, socialism was possible.
SPEAKER_02Right. I think that was really fascinating because it was this that was the paradigm shift kind of forced onto people, right? Like like you said, it's like all of a sudden socialism in a very limited if you you could even think of it as a small form, but baby socialism. Baby socialism. But for that very brief moment for some people, their lives were better. Yeah. We were hearing about my life is better with COVID, being stuck at home, not being able to interact with others, but I am able to not worry about XYZ or one thing in particular, which is a society in which you need money in order to be alive, to have dignity, to have a home. The logic of it made a lot of sense, and I think the question is how we bring people along. Let's take, for example, climate change. You have this very large, scary, real problem. The inevitable answer has to be you need a big answer to the big problem. You need a big solution to the big problem. Even among the left, I think we have trouble really saying this entire life we're leading needs to be I don't want to say upended because I feel like that makes it sound like there's nothing after, right? It makes it sound like chaos. I think that's the way people would love us to talk about it, to say, oh, you just need your life to be upended. But the truth is your life is being upended by climate change, by militarism. Why is ICE able to flourish now? I think constantly about how if 2020 had gone differently, if Biden had not talked about crime constantly, I just can't imagine we would be where we are with ICE right now, where people can just be kidnapped from their homes. That didn't come out of nowhere, right? How do we get people to really see that this is an opportunity? Like your life, you do not want your children growing up in a world with climate change. You do not want your children growing up in a world where militarism or where people are treated systemically differently based on who they are. You know, imagine what you know. I remember Patrice Cullers, I saw a video of her kind of describing abolition, and she was saying it wasn't just about removing things. Like she's like, imagine what you could spend your money on if you weren't spending it on XYZ. We started doing some work together recently, and when I'm attached to stuff like your work and to folks in your orbit and to Patrice when I've worked with her, I immediately get this sense of what this life could be. I struggle with how we get other people to see that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think it's one of the big lies, too, that COVID revealed for people. One of the things that feels like such a big betrayal by moderates and liberals is that they tell everyone that everything is so complex. Like you can't work on this because it's so complex, like we gotta do this and that and that. And then you've got someone like you know, Mom Donnie who comes in and is like, let's do childcare. It's like we've been talking about this forever, like, let me just make it happen. Like, oh, wait, it's actually not that complex. You've got a pandemic, like a global pandemic, where what a huge problem. Like they could have responded to that with, well, this is so complex, we can't change anywhere anything. But all of a sudden it revealed, it revealed to people actually, we can do things quickly if we want to. You know, there is money for quickly, uh, even if there's not a huge plan, if there's the will. But there's this idea that these these issues, whether it's climate change or anti-black racism, policing, whatever it is, that these problems are too big to address. But like any problem, you know, that is huge, it's made up of of a whole bunch of smaller issues that you could you could deal with immediately if you wanted to. There's all sorts of people who have figured this out, you know, like we the reality is our society does need to change. We are heading the the way that it is organized, we are in a place where everybody seems to be struggling, and everybody seems to be talking about that all the time, right? Like people are stressed out, they're like their mental health is like not doing well. We're looking around at how everything is organized and feeling like we have no power over it. Every time we s we want to tackle something, someone tells us that it's too hard and it's impossible or whatever. And all of that is a lie. Like it's all a lie. We can we can make measurable differences by shifting things in our community. Like a like a small example is one of the things that I I find so like like outrageously frustrating about policing and the ways that it operates. It's like there are just so many, there are so many, what's the word, contradictions. It's like okay, so we say that we need to police our transit systems, right? Why? Because people might try to ride the bus or the train without paying, and we can't let them do that. That's awful and bad. And so we must have police there with guns and with the power to destroy and and kill these people just in case they try to ride the transit system to go somewhere without paying. And we have a society where we expect people to go places every day, either school or work. That's an expectation. You must travel every day. And we have a public system, but you have to pay for it. And if you don't pay for it, I'm gonna have a police person there to make sure. I mean, this isn't about safety, right? Like we're told policing is about safety, it's it's more about social control. To make sure that you pay your fare. Okay. So, and then you have like these rising transit costs and people struggle to pay the fare. And of course, in a world where people are living paycheck to paycheck and have to make decisions about whether or not they're gonna buy food this month or um or ride the transit, some people are inevitably gonna try to ride transit without paying. How much money are we spending on the police to police transit? Could we instead make transit free instead of paying for those police? And then all of a sudden, you don't have that as a crime anymore. People are able to travel because we expect them to travel. And there's no there's no way to have like the crime of fair evasion where police are harassing mostly black people all the time all over North America for this for this thing. And it's like the money is there, it's with the police. Why don't we just shift that? Put it over here, let people ride transit for free because they need to. Like, that's a huge contradiction. And it's like someone will take a look at the problem of policing and be like, it's too big, it's too complex. And it's like, here's here's a ready solution for an issue right now. Let's do that. Like, there are small things that we can do to shift the way power operates in our society. And the ability to break things down and think about them in that way is far more useful than this turning away, and ah, that was just a ridiculous idea, you know. Like we can do these things and it makes sense. And I truly believe that there is going to be a future where we look back and be like, it is unreal that we took so much from the public purse during this timeline, took so much from the public purse, and whittled down government to really just being a place to fund policing while people were starving, struggling, um, and uh really uh having a tough time making ends meet. Like what a weird way to organize things.
SPEAKER_02I almost like can't uh handle it in the sense of the world is like it's not good, right? That's my articulate we it's so obvious that the way things are built and the way things are working is a a catastrophic failure. And it's get failing more, more and more.
SPEAKER_00I mean, it's it's good for Elon, though. Good for Jeff. Good answer.
SPEAKER_02Now we're getting real.
SPEAKER_00I have to say apologies to Mr. Klein at the end of this. But it's good for some people, right?
SPEAKER_02The thing that the right got right, they felt an emotion that something was very wrong, and they just did they went towards a very bad simplistic narrative. But they were able to do so much more than a lot of us were able to do because there were fewer roadblocks for them to break down of people telling them to chill. But I feel like so many people on every spectrum just have that feeling of something is wrong. And I and I just think so many people are living like that, and or so many people are living like that, and at the verge of going broke, and at the verge of losing their home, and at the verge of not being able to pay for their kids to eat, you know. How could you not dream of something more? You know?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's like what you're describing, I feel like, is is that in most people will have had this experience. If you're if you're some a worker somewhere, and then the boss who like doesn't really understand what you do, but is like telling you, we're making this change because it's good for you. And like everyone sits around the lunch table and is like, that guy is has no idea what he's talking about, and it's just like so frustrating. That experience is everywhere, you know, like black people understand something about white supremacy that white folks could never because we're we're we're here experiencing it. And you know, it would be a good idea to like listen to us every once in a while about like what the experience is and like how to tackle it and like how to shift power because we understand it in a way that people who benefited from it cannot. And same thing when it comes to like the political class, which is now overlapping with like the elite and very wealthy classes, and they're you know, coming up with solutions for things that don't really impact people. And so you can have someone like uh Pam Bondi talking about have you seen the Dow Jones or whatever that doesn't have an impact on someone who is struggling uh to afford their medical bills because they they got into uh a car accident and now their entire lives are upended, right? Like the the people who are entrusted with making the world work don't understand how the world is broken because the world works for them. Or they're paid not to and or they're paid not to understand because the world works for them. It works for them. And so it really feels like you know, we're in this spinning hamster wheel where we're all getting had, we're all getting exploited because we are, you know, because that is what is exactly happening.
SPEAKER_02There is another reason that people do not want the abolitionist message to get out, because it's not just about black people, it's about the fact that the society's broken, and when you correct this thing, society's gonna get a lot better. One of the messages of the abolitionist movement is that is addressing so much of this stuff, like the stuff that motivated the right, like in the sense of this suffering or this existential linkston weirdness and this concern that things are really big and problematic and the world is broken. If people really understood the message, it wasn't just about defund the police, but it was about that, and it wasn't only about that. Part of what was, among other things, so dangerous about dangerous to those people. You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and you know, like defund the police is a mechanism, it is a it is the way that you achieve abolition. And abolition is saying, like part of the whole thing is it's like, what are we doing when we're policing? Like we're attempting to resolve conflict. That's the most charitable read of what policing is. Like, truly, it's a form of social control. You're just you're you're trying to control people in terms of space, in terms of behavior, in terms of like it is a way to use violence to box people in. That's what it is. But what the what the world sees is okay, so we're we're trying to resolve these conflicts, and like the the response of like abolition is impossible or we can't defund or whatever, is because people think that the way that we're approaching resolving conflict, which is through punishment, is is the way to resolve conflict. Like at the end of the day, like that's I think this part of the central, I mean, in addition to like anti-black racism and and more irrational um uh beliefs, that is part of the central conflict. And what abolition is saying is that is actually not resolving these conflicts. Like, if one of our conflicts, one of the most common conflicts that we have in our society is domestic violence or gender-based violence in a domestic context. If policing worked, I mean, I have to laugh when I say that because it's like one, it's something like less than a quarter of domestic violence issues are even reported to police. So fail right away, right? Like we are not addressing that issue. I think we should address that issue. It's a pretty major issue, but we're just trudging along not addressing that issue. Okay. So that's I mean, that is an issue that the people who discount abolitionism would say, uh, yeah. And I would, and I would hear this directly, would say, uh, well, what are you gonna do in in issues of domestic violence when a woman is being harmed by her husband? And it's like, like, listen to yourself, what do we do now? What do we do now? Very often people will will uh call and in the best of those situations, in the way that people imagine it working out, right? Like maybe someone is removed from the home, and this is rare, right? Like that doesn't always happen. Maybe someone is removed from the from the home for a limited period of time and then brought back out into society upset. Did we resolve the conflict? No, we did not. But if we were to tackle the power imbalance that is embedded in that relationship in which someone feels like they are unable to leave a situation because of finances, maybe because of how expensive housing is, because of um no ability to find childcare in the case of an emergency, right? Like these are all little incremental things that we could be dealing with that would reduce our reliance on police. Not to mention we have to tackle why does it get to a point of violence against uh uh an intimate partnership? Can we deal with what's going on there? Is it lack of access to education? Is it too much work? Is it not enough access to leisure? Is it um a sense of belonging and well-being? All of those things we could tackle. Not with police, though. Police have nothing to do with that. Prisons have nothing to do with that. Abolitionists want to resolve that problem. And the folks who say that it's not possible think that the way to resolve it is to get somebody behind bars. Well, my gosh, we've been doing that for a long time, and it's not resolving these problems. Some of the most common problems in our society. Like we, I'm willing to bet you know people who've been through something like this. I know people who have been through something like this. It is worth it to address those issues, but we don't. We don't, and we accept it because of the way we marginalize and devalue the people who are harmed the most in our society. It's fine that those those women have to deal with this. They they can call their personal hero, and their personal hero will come and and maybe deal with the problem.
SPEAKER_02There is a point at which it's helpful in for cognitively, I think, for people to not believe certain people exist, right? Like as if they're an illusion or at the very least, there's something that you just don't have to look at. And I think homeless people are kind of the typification of that, right? Where you're literally exposed to it, but we pay a lot not to solve it, right? But to remove them, like to push them somewhere else. One of my favorite writers is a sociologist named Philip Slater, and he came up with this idea called the toilet effect. And the idea was anything that we have trouble dealing with, we treat it like you can put it in the toilet and flush and it's gone. So he was saying, Why do we not have intergenerational connection in America? Because we struggle with dealing with older people, we put them far away from us. Anyone really who's disabled in some way, we put far away from us. Anyone who's struggling mentally, let's put them somewhere. Like this idea is like, at a certain point, we're gonna sanitize our society enough from these people. I don't even have to think it exists.
SPEAKER_00That is what policing and prisons are. Like they're they are our current social strategy for a lack of affordable housing. That's what it is, right? Because what is what is the result of a lack of affordable housing? In part, the result is is homelessness. And what do we do? We say it's illegal to be on the street and on the public uh street, even though you have nowhere else to go. We we don't fund shelter systems, we don't fund all this other stuff that would be useful, it's illegal to be here. So then you police them, and the police arrest them and take them to jail, right? Like that's what what we do with excess humans, which is I think how we have to understand that that's how society is is viewing people, is they police them and we put them away so we don't see them. Or where where we have the option to say, let's not spend money on policing them. Let's spend money on making sure that there's affordable housing. It just feels like it's a no-brainer. Let's like actually solve the problem. No, we're not gonna solve the problem. Uh, that would be bad for the landlords. So, you know, we'll we'll do this instead. And the other thing I would say, what you just said made me think of going back to black women. I think that there's a there's a reason. I think one of the reasons that people I'm gonna tell I'm gonna say what I need to say with a story. I when I was doing when I was doing a lot of the activism related to setting up Black Lives Matter in Canada in around 2014, 2015, 2016, you get to this point where you realize like you you have the argument, right? Like there there is no one uh who I've never felt like I've been in a debate with anybody. And I mean the media set up debates between me and police chiefs, right? Like it was like there's never been a debate that I've lost on this issue. Like, and so you get to a point where you realize, oh yeah, I'm right, but also everybody knows it on some level. Like once they engage with the issue, they're like, oh yeah, that's right. And they're like constantly scanning, looking for a way that we could be wrong, but we're not. And I think that feels very shitty to people from hearing that from people that they don't expect to, especially if they've expected to win an argument against you. Like I feel like part of if they feel superior to you.
SPEAKER_02They want to feel superior.
SPEAKER_00Especially if they feel superior to you. So there's this like desperation for a reason to look away. There's a desperation for like what is the thing that I can point to that. makes it that I can just ignore you out of hand. And in in 2016 in Black Lives Matter, Toronto, there was a journalist who like went through every single one of the tweets that we, any of us who were involved that they could find. We never published a roster of our names or anything like that because we were trying to be careful, but they they knew who some of us were and went through all of our tweets trying to find something to to discount us. And it they found a tweet in which uh one of our our folks said something fully innocuous. It was just like but they like in the innocuous text it was like use the term used the word Allah and so it was like it was something like please Allah don't don't let me uh lose my temper on these people today something like that. And they were like it was like big news it was like oh look at what they said like is this are these people do they hate us? Like what is this about? Like it was such it was like such an intensely Islamophobic, intensely anti-black response and it became the thing like I got so many calls that day and that they found this and you know just the day before a black man had been murdered in Montreal and we were trying to get the media to to pay attention to this to this issue and they murdered by police I should have said in Montreal and we were trying to get the media to pay attention and it was like pulling teeth to get them to report on it. But all of a sudden it was like oh this tweet this tweet this tweet like even saying it sounds outrageous. But at the time everyone took it so seriously and I remember like the cognitive dissonance of it and realizing oh they just want a reason to say we don't have to pay attention to you anymore. Because for so long it had been well there's we're having these arguments and oh my God, you're winning the arguments you're winning the arguments you're winning the arguments. Well here's a reason I don't have to listen to you you tweeted something I didn't like once and I think that also happened after 2020. People looked for reasons why they could discount what people who were abolitionists were saying looked for reasons to discount the BLM movement. Like it had nothing to do with the arguments that we were making but it also had everything to do with the fact that people didn't want to be tolls. They didn't want to to to to reckon with the fact that oh man I was wrong about this thing and these these folks who I've never expected to be right about this thing because they're in a position that isn't like equal to me. Gosh like they're right about this thing. Is there another reason I can discount them? Can I look for that? And like the it it feels like when I when I'm standing across from those people when I'm experiencing it coming at me it feels like almost like they are relieved to have found something that allows them to dismiss me.
SPEAKER_02I want to thank you for sitting down with me I think it was interesting because like as you know like we had kind of an idea of where we're gonna go in this discussion and then as I'm noticing when we talk it's like we get into the ideas a lot which I love. I love that and I'm so grateful that you spoke about that. And I also want to dig more into emotion about about the not not emotion about the actual experiences of what happened during Black Lives Matter I think I just think it's so important. I think so many people don't know it. So that's me trying to sell you on having you again because that was that was an invitation is what you're saying.
SPEAKER_00Hey if there's Ethiopian food involved in between no absolutely and I think I will say also just to that like I I appreciate you thinking about us those of us who've been involved and are involved and are a part of bringing forth this new world right like who are bringing forth a new world like that's what we're doing. I appreciate you really seeing the humanity in us because I think that people forget that we're people a lot and you know I can imagine there's I have so much to say about these time periods. And I I know that the next time we talk it'll be very very emotional because there are things that I'm even afraid to say but I think need to be said and deserve to be said uh because it's a I think it's a it's a pretty unique experience what many of us have gone through and we've learned a lot and hopefully that helps us as we continue to bring a across this new world but I think it'll be useful for people to hear about what that was like well thank you so much for coming this was wonderful. Thank you for having me this was great.
SPEAKER_02Before we leave I'd love to hear you know how people can find you let's get people to hear your voice.
SPEAKER_00Oh thanks well unfortunately I've got like I really am not very optimistic about the internet so I'm not super active on any of these things but every once in a while you can see me say something on Blue Sky which is at Sandala so that's spelt S-A-N-D-E-L-A. It's very Jewish Sandala I did grow up in quite a Jewish area of Toronto and as a kid people constantly called me Sandela my name is Sandra Sandy so Sandela is my nickname and so you can find me there on Blue Sky on Twitter as well although you will never catch me tweeting so long as the guy who's the head of Twitter is the guy who's the head of Twitter. I'm most active on Instagram where you can find me at Sandy Hudson uh and uh and I've got a oh yes and I've got a podcast just called Sandy and Nora Talk Politics if you're interested in Canadian politics it's a Canadian focused show and uh and I've got a book out called Defund Black Lives Policing and Safety for All that if you're interested in some of the things that I spoke about today you can find all the arguments in there.
SPEAKER_02Awesome well thank you so much for coming thank you for having me