FBC – The "True" North

Len Carby and Richard Picart, two of the original members of the Federation of Black Canadians (FBC) steering committee, are suing me for $45,000 and $35,000 dollars respectively. In fairness, I sued them first, but Carby is also suing the Black single mom, who served my libel suit papers on him, for $35,000. He’s suing her for “falsifying” the document she served on him because she made a couple of mistakes that were quickly corrected. That’s right: Len Carby is suing a Black single mom for doing her job. And he hired a Black woman to help him – Shala McDonald, a paralegal with Okola Law which is owned by another Black woman, Stephanie Okola.

Carby’s law suit against me and the single mom are the latest in confirmed and alleged bad behaviour by former FBC steering committee members.

In my post, Tales from the Plantation #2, I talked about how I was on interchange with the FBC from January to May 2019. Shortly after starting, I began questioning behaviour I felt demonstrated a lack of transparency, competence and connection to community concerns. On May 27, the FBC terminated my interchange. In their email to my department announcing my termination, the FBC made 10 allegations against me including that I had “physically threatened my direct report” at the FBC, a completely false claim. Len Carby sent the email so I launched a $6700 libel suit against him. His $45,000 counter suit alleges that I libelled and slandered him, including calling him a house negro (which I did, but that’s not libel as it’s an opinion…with which Carby clearly disagrees).

On March 27, 2019, when I was working with the FBC, I noticed an item in the minutes from the last meeting about the FBC getting approval to use some funding they had gotten from the Michaelle Jean Foundation (MJF) to support the FBC’s membership growth. As Carby was in charge of finance at the time, and had asked me to work on an application for federal government funding, I asked him how much the MJF funding was. This was relevant because the federal funding application asked what other sources of funding we had.

After several evasive answers, in which he never told me the amount, Carby wrote:

“I suggest you think about these relentless emails. They amount to attempts at bullying and I will not have it. If you copy [your colleague] on any conversation that does not relate to anything he is working on, your email will be ignored. You have a reporting relationship with the FBC though (sic) me and your personal relationship with [your colleague] has nothing to do with that. I am clear with my instructions about the Funding (sic) application and you have everything you need to complete your work.”

He considered my request for transparency as bullying when, in fact, he was the one doing the bullying because he had the power, being my boss.

I called both Carby and Picart house negroes because, in my view, they were behaving like Samuel L. Jackson’s character Stephen in the movie Django Unchained. Stephen is one of plantation owner Calvin Candy’s house negroes. When Stephen realizes that former slave Django is trying to trick his master, he tells his master and gets Django captured and nearly killed. In one scene, with Django hanging upside down, naked in chains, Stephen tells him that they’re not going to castrate him because he would bleed out. Instead they’re going to send him to a work camp where he will be worked to death.

When Carby emailed my department, knowing what I said my white managers had done to me, he was, in my view, engaging in house negro activity like Stephen.

These days, to be considered house negro activity, the activity must benefit those doing it, it must harm the Black community or impede things that could help the community and the people must not reply to – or aggressively resist – questions of accountability.

The topic of house negroes was also raised in March 2021 during the Ontario Judicial Council’s second hearing into judicial misconduct of FBC founder and former Chair, Justice Donald McLeod, a long time friend of Carby. (McLeod was cleared of perjury allegations.)

Justice McLeod’s defence team raised the topic of house negroes on the last day of his 2nd hearing. They called Dr. Wendell Adjetey to testify as he had at McLeod’s first hearing. Adjetey is a McGill University historian who specializes in the post-Reconstruction United States, specializing on the African American experience. Like he did at McLeod’s first hearing, he gave a short outline of the history, and current state, of systemic anti-Black racism in Canada. However, this time, McLeod’s lawyers specifically asked him to explain the significance of the term house negro to the all-white panel. Adjetey then did so, but used the term house n-word instead. McLeod’s lawyers didn’t say why they asked him to do this.

Many folks in the Black community, especially supporters of Justice McLeod, say myself and others, like journalist and author Desmond Cole, shouldn’t write posts like this that “air our community’s dirty laundry in public”. They tell us we should “talk it out in private”.

Did Carby attempt to talk to the single Black mom before deciding to sue her for doing her job?

If Carby cares so much about the Black community and justice, has he asked his employer, the Royal Bank of Canada, why they weren’t among the more than 450 companies that originally signed the Black North Initiative pledge to work to remove corporate Canada’s anti-Black systemic barriers or why a petition was recently launched against RBC for “climate destruction and violation of Indigenous rights”?

People like Carby and Picart don’t want to air our dirty laundry in public or in private – because they’re the ones dirtying it.

We must praise our leaders when they do good and hold them accountable when they do wrong. And we must all realize that we all can step up to lead ourselves in big and small ways.

Notes: Former FBC Chair Dahabo Ahmed-Omer is now Executive Director of the Black North Initiative. My comments apply only to former FBC steering committee members not current ones or staff.

Sometime after this was posted, the Black North Initiative removed all trace of the Pledge or who signed it from their website.

Update – On Oct. 18, 2021, Carby served me with an amended claim in which he revised his claim against Ms. Hylton to $11,017.

Don’t judge people on their character…judge them on their actions (all of them)

I spent most of the last two weeks glued to the Ontario Judicial Council (OJC) hearing into a second complaint about the conduct of Federation of Black Canadians founder and former chair, Justice Donald McLeod. McLeod is facing claims, still unproven, of perjury, political lobbying and giving legal advice – all stuff judges aren’t supposed to do. McLeod’s defence, by both his legal team and his supporters on social media, can be summed up as, “Justice McLeod is a great guy and didn’t do any of this bad stuff or, if he did, it was for good intentions because, like we said, he’s a great guy.”

The problem with this is that it focuses on what McLeod is instead of what he does (or allegedly did), and discussions about what someone is often offer only two choices: good or bad. People’s defenders spend time giving examples to prove their guy (or girl) is good while their opponents do the opposite. The argument is that, if the person is bad, they deserve whatever happened to them and if they’re good they don’t.

One of the most recent, and most horrible, examples of this was comments by Black conservative commentator Candace Owens in videos like I DO NOT support George Floyd! And here’s why. In this video Owens says she doesn’t “support George Floyd” because she doesn’t support “turning criminals into heroes”. Meaning she doesn’t support turning “bad guys” into “good guys” just because something bad happens to them. She doesn’t say Floyd deserved to be killed. In fact, she says, “What I’m saying is not any defence for Derek Chauvin [the cop who killed Floyd]. I hope that he gets the justice he deserves and that the family of George Floyd deserves justice.” However, she also says:

“The Black community is unique. Not every Black American is a criminal, not every Black American is committing crimes, but we are unique in that we are the only people that fight and scream and demand support and justice for the people in our community that are up to no good.”

The implication is clear: Floyd was a bad guy who had gotten “up to no good” too many times and, therefore, doesn’t deserve the global outpouring of rage that followed his death.

One of the main problems with this “good or bad” thinking is that it only requires tarring someone with one bad act, real or implied, to label them as all bad. That’s why the term “known to police” in media reports about Black men is a problem. The person could be “known” simply because they got carded once but it’s enough to label them as “bad”, and deserving of their fate, in too many readers’ minds.

This same thing is used in reverse.

When COVID first hit, our group supported a young Black man who had been confronted by Ottawa school board trustee Donna Blackburn. During the confrontation Blackburn made some racially charged remarks and was eventually sanctioned by her fellow trustees for acts of anti-Black racism. In her defence, several of Blackburn’s supporters brought up that she has a Black daughter, suggesting that she, therefore, “couldn’t be racist.” (We countered that idea by saying Blackburn could have committed the racist acts in the morning then read a bed time story to her Black daughter at night – but that wouldn’t make her earlier actions any less racist.)

Another example of this was the July 2020 coverage of the heavily armed white man who drove his truck through the gate of the Governor General’s residence where Prime Minister Trudeau and his family live.

In the initial CBC story, Corey Hurren was described as an active member of the military who serves as a Canadian Ranger. It said he ran a meat products business called GrindHouse Fine Foods. It mentioned he was past president of his local Lion’s Club, an active volunteer in his community of Bowsman, north-west of Winnipeg, and that his group of Rangers were on call to be part of the military’s assistance with the COVID-19 response. In other words, Curren was a nice guy just having a really bad day – and was treated accordingly by the RCMP officers who apprehended him that day “without incident” and took him into custody for questioning.

Donald McLeod’s defenders, like Justice for Justice McLeod, want the OJC review panel, and us, to believe that McLeod is a good guy who did everything for the community and that his critics are bad people who misconstrued his actions and landed him, unfairly, in front of the OJC once again. They cite all the great work he’s done with programs he helped start, like the 100 Strong Foundation which aims to produce strong, ambitious leaders by changing the narrative of African-Canadian boys. They gloss over the facts that are the basis of the charges and, instead, stick to one narrative: he’s doing great stuff so he obviously couldn’t have done the bad stuff.

But this reasoning ignores the simple truth: people do good and bad things and deserve praise for the good stuff and to be held accountable for the bad stuff. McLeod’s supporters only want to praise his good deeds and vilify those who try to hold him accountable for his bad ones.

But, as McLeod’s second hearing shows: if we don’t hold our leaders accountable for the bad things they may have done, eventually someone else will, and the result won’t be good for anyone in our community.