The Lynching of Abdirahman Abdi: A Story in Two Acts
Two white women sit across from each other in a radio studio. The host, Robyn Bresnahan, has brown hair that is parted to the side and falls on her shoulders in large soft curls. She is wearing a simple but elegant dress with thick red, navy and beige stripes, red lipstick and a bold white necklace. Her brows are furrowed during most of the interview, and she holds a blue ballpoint pen in her right hand, which she sometimes holds out or moves around, before adjoining it to her left hand, just in front of her chin.
The interviewee, President and CEO of Bridgehead Tracey Clark, is wearing a navy blue cotton t-shirt with an open neck. She has short and curly salt-and-pepper hair, and has nestled her eye-glasses on top of her head. Her shoulders are rounded somewhat: she is resting her elbows on the large, cluterred desk where she and the host are seated at opposite ends. She wears no makeup, but her face is periodically punctuated by emphatically raised brows, and a slightly downturned pinch of her lips, a somewhat apologetic or dismayed look. More so than the large microphones and the stark décor, the women’s stern faces indicate that they are having grownup talk.
Tracey Clark took to the airwaves last week, on August 5th, to “speak from the heart” about the death of Abdirahman Abdi, a Somali-Canadian man who was killed by the Ottawa police on July 24th 2016. She used her lengthy interview with Robyn Bresnahan on CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning not to denounce said killing, but rather to expound on the “real minimization of what“ the staff and customers in her store who called the officer who eventually killed Abdi “experienced.” She also spoke at length about “stories,” seeking perhaps to educate CBC listeners:
“I think that we always have patterns that are repeated and there are many stories. And you think about when you want to pick a movie, you want the good vs evil movie, or do I want the boy meets girl, or they meets they. In this incident, what is that story?”
I was glad that President and CEO of Bridgehead Tracey Clark brought up stories during this interview. I am a lover of stories. Narratives, tales, chronicles, even anecdotes. I like to think of myself as a professional reader. Stories are indeed all around us: the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell each other, the stories we tell each other about ourselves… Our families each have their own narratives, sometimes contested and muddled, communities have stories, they have gossip, sometimes legends, while nation states justify their presence and their power by disseminating accounts of their emergence, by creating histories and mythologies, and by speaking for those whose agency they seek to neutralize.
The biggest mistake, of course, is thinking that one is somehow “outside” of a given story, or worse that one has not “bought into” a given narrative over another. The biggest delusion is thinking that one isn’t playing a part, that one has not chosen a side when one is “speaking from the heart.” For what is more important still than what roles have been assigned, such as the “martyr” or the “villain,” as Clark says, is where each person’s interests lie, what is at stake for them.
What, for instance, might have been at stake for Matt Skof, president of the Ottawa Police Association, when he said on CBC Radio’s All In a Day: “To suggest that race was an issue in this, it’s inappropriate.” Why might Skof be “worried” that a conversation about state-sanctionned antiblack violence in Canada “is even occurring”?
The answers to those questions are self-evident. The police have no interest in acknowledging that their documented racial-profiling practices necessarily have an impact on how violence is unleashed on Black bodies in Canada. Violence is a practice – in the police’s case a discipline – that is learned, honed, and perfected every day, and whose primary target in North America (and elsewhere) is Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies, particularly those that seem disorderly, undisciplined.
White people want to believe that their innocence is what shields them from state violence and summary executions like Abdi’s. White people have no interest in shedding light on the ways in which racial violence itself informs their trust of law enforcement and their willful ignorance or indifference regarding the criminalization of Black bodies.
In her article “Let the Death of Abdirahman Abdi Be Last of its Kind,” Robyn Maynard, Black feminist writer, activist and educator, reminded us of the many Black men struggling with mental health who were killed by the police in recent years:
“O’Brien Christopher-Reid was shot eight times and killed in 2004, while in the midst of a mental health crisis. Reyal Jardine-Douglas, known by police to be suffering from mental illness, was killed in 2010. Michael Eligon was shot and killed while leaving a mental health facility in 2012. Ian Pryce, a 30-year-old with schizophrenia, was shot by the police in November 2013 while holding a pellet gun. Alain Magloire, a 41-year-old homeless man in the midst of mental distress, was shot to death by the Montreal police in 2013. In 2015, the police shot and killed Andrew Loku outside of his residence, a building leased by the Canadian Mental Health Association. None of the black men killed were armed with guns.”
Where is this story being told? Where is that Ottawa Morning segment? How many Black activists have sat in that radio studio with Robyn Bresnahan to discuss Adbi’s killing? Despite what some people’s interests might have them say or write, these Black deaths are the heart of the matter.
Every day white people are living out fantasies, mythologies, and racist narratives they have been told, and have been telling themselves and others about Black bodies. In fact, every day Black people themselves are struggling with racist stories they have been told, and have been telling themselves and others about Black people. Every day we are struggling because of the stories that are never told about Black people. The difference is that every day White people benefit from these silences, fantasies, mythologies, and narratives.
Let us get down to the nitty gritty now. President and CEO of Bridgehead Tracey Clark inserted herself into a discourse about racial justice and state violence to declare to an unflinching Robyn Bresnahan : “We’ve only ever had great experiences with the police as partners to help us keep the environment safe for people. And that’s true in this instance too.”
When exactly did Abdirahman Abdi cease to be a person? How exactly was his brutal killing a “great experience”? For whom? Is it that groping a woman has become an offense punishable by death and for which no trial is necessary?
It is true that when I initially saw flashes on social media denouncing the death of an unarmed black man at the hands of Ottawa police, I did not have the “whole story.” What I did see was the photograph in which he is wearing a white cotton t-shirt with a deep v-neck. His shoulders are slouched over slightly as he looks straight ahead at the camera, earphones tucked into his ears. I did hear there was a video, which I purposefully did not watch. I did not initially have the “whole story.” However, knowing now that staff and customers, like a chorus, called the police when Abdirahman Abdi groped a woman in a cafe, I certainly understand the story more fully. I understand, painfully, that it might be more accurate to say that Abdirahman Abdi was lynched.
In their “Statement on Sexual Violence & Police Brutality in the Case of Abdirahman Abdi,” Yamikani Msosa, of Sexual Assault Support Centre Ottawa, and Erin Leigh of the Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women, educate us on the ways in which the protection of women, especially white, but also racialized women, has been used historically (and to this day) as a pretence to justify racial violence. Msosa and Leigh insist that:
“The struggle to end gender-based violence and violence against women is not in opposition to the struggle to end racism and police brutality. Indeed, combatting racist violence is essential to building safer societies for all of us and to adequately supporting survivors. […] Better supports and responses were needed for those who called the police to Bridgehead and for Abdirahman Abdi. There needs to be resources and services separate from the police that people can turn to and that will not result in the escalation of violence. Survivors shouldn’t have to worry that reporting sexual violence will result in more violence. Racialized communities and people dealing with mental health issues shouldn’t have to worry that their interactions with police will result in death.”
Without a doubt, it is wise to be weary of what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a single story.” But of course, that requires that white people be aware that their story is almost always the “single story.” That requires that we actively disrupt the myth of a multicultural Canadian society devoid of racism, discrimination, and state-sanctioned racist violence.
