Black Lives Matter cover just awful
I know you are a leftist magazine, but Toronto is the most tolerant, multicultural city on earth. To say “Be careful, Toronto, your racism is showing” on your cover (NOW, July 14-20) is deeply insulting to everyone who lives here. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Black, white, Latino all live together in reasonable harmony until you start dividing us by pointing out every difference between us, creating racism. That’s what you are doing.
And don’t regress into your “you don’t even know you’re racist” thought-policing. Just think for a minute about the social narrative you are constructing. It’s deplorable.
Loraine Mohar, Toronto
BLM backlash was disgusting, Toronto
I just wanted to write this email in support of BLM-TO because I feel race relations in the city are a lie. It is a mask of displacement, classism and anti-Blackness encouraged by the media, City Hall and corporate interests. As a straight Black woman, I felt the backlash caused by BLM’s Pride protest was sexist, abusive and encouraged by many. Disgusting. Many citizens need to read our Canadian Charter Of Rights And Freedoms and apply it.
Tanya B., Toronto
Blacks, Queers have much to offer
Five thought-provoking articles this week, by Rinaldo Walcott, Alok Mukherjee, Jonathan Goldsbie, Tim McCaskell and especially Septembre Anderson, bring to mind the notion that we are dealing with a false dichotomy.
Both BLM-TO and Pride have much to offer each other. There are disagreements, as there are bound to be, in this thoroughly diversified city. Such disagreement is our starting point.
To honour the painful and difficult experiences others before us underwent, we are in a good position to find common ground and move forward.
Colin Anthony, Toronto
Capital B for Blacks, but no W for whites
In accordance with current politically correct practice, the mid-sentence capitalized “Black” appears about 48 times in your Black Lives Matter cover package (NOW, July 14-20).
The same issue, however, accords only traditional lower-case adjectival-initial status to white and gay people. Is this someone’s idea of equality?
David Townson, Toronto
Black Lives-bashing
I would like to call into question Septembre Anderson’s objective in her piece Why BLM-TO Doesn’t Speak For Me (NOW, July 14-20). The piece is highly subjective and devoid of any real context beyond what appears to be her opinion.
She claims BLM-TO “keep an eye on news and social media to mobilize on trending issues,” and that “they’re letting the white supremacy dictate the activism and decide what issues are worth mobilizing around.”
Black Lives Matter is a reactionary movement mobilized to put a very Black face to otherwise dismissive if not outright racist media attention. To chastise them for those very actions and paint them as media hogs is flawed. Could they be better organized? Certainly. But Anderson does herself a disservice. Her opinion, though well-written, comes across as BLM-TO-bashing.
Guy Pierre-Jacques, Toronto
Revisionist history on Stonewall
Re Pride And Progress, by Janaya Khan (NOW, July 7-13). Khan, who I witnessed at Pride blame the Orlando massacre on “toxic masculinity” instead of on the actual cause, a Muslim with a submachine gun, took time out of her recollections of police harassment to renew the classic queer/trans*/LGBT blood libel against Stonewall. As she put it in her article, Stonewall was “the riot led by transwomen and queer people of colour against police brutality in 1969 New York.”
Many participants in the Stonewall riot are still alive. They, and all historians, and all available documentation (like photographs), conclusively show that most attendees were white gay males that it was illegal to appear in public in clothing of the opposite sex in New York State in 1969 and that no “transwomen” were involved whatsoever. (At best, a subgroup of participants were effeminate gay males and drag queens.)
Black Lives Matter has a solid case against the Toronto police. But its queer and trans leaders have no cause to mislead gay men and lesbians or anyone else.
Joe Clark, Toronto
“White male privilege” rush
As a heroin addict for most of my 20s, I became aware of a phenomenon known as an “anticipatory high.”
While waiting for my dealer to call me back, the dead silence of the wait, that always interminable 11 minutes, would explode gloriously to the buzzing of my phone. His number, lighting up in calm yet frozen LED algorithm across my Android’s screen, would fill me with a kind of lurid excitement and buzz long before anything had made its way into my bloodstream.
So I have to wonder – when your writers realize there’s space in their article for the word “misogyny” or “white male privilege,” do they feel that same rush?
Jesse Gilmour, Toronto
Noel Gallagher rant and rave
Always enjoy Noel Gallagher interviews (NOW, July 7-13), although I have never once heard his bon mots referred to as rants. Not once. I’ve also watched many enjoyable interviews with Noel. Not once have I ever seen him raise his voice. My guess is you’ve got your Gallaghers mixed up.
NW, Toronto
Wrong way on Yonge
Re Killing Yonge Street, by Robert Allsopp (NOW, July 7-13). Allsopp is, well, wrong. The modern-day Yonge strip between College and Bloor never really had the “street-related” intimacy of Little Italy or Queen West. The road itself is too wide, the traffic too fast. Little on it is amenable to the magnificent restoration/repurposing that the decrepit backpackers’ hostel on the corner of King and Spadina recently underwent, for example. Requiring all buildings on Yonge to “generate social interaction” is nice in theory but ignores facts on the ground. Highlighting niceties of the strip’s 100-year-old facades may be all we can ask for. If that’s architectural “taxidermy,” so be it. Better to recapture a street’s original visual personality than just abandon and demolish.
Ian Scott, Toronto
