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Update: Hundreds gather at Kamloops Black Lives Matter demonstration at Riverside Park before marching to RCMP detachment

Victor Kaisar
Jun 4, 2020 | 12:26 PM


Update: Hundreds gather at Kamloops Black Lives Matter demonstration at Riverside Park before marching to RCMP detachment

UPDATED – A peaceful protest in Kamloops showing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement saw hundreds of people attend, despite organizers cancelling the event an hour before it was supposed to happen.

Many demonstrators gathered near the Rotary Bandshell at the park, armed with chants and signs, while maintaining social distancing.

Alisa Hopkins was one of many people who spoke out against racial injustice, noting that event though the event was cancelled, ‘racism cannot be cancelled.’

“I lived in America, I know what that is like [down there]. I am from a bi-racial family. I have seen all sides of this. I saw how they started at my parents when we lived there growing up,” she told the crowd gathered at Riverside Park.

“We moved to Salmon Arm and we were told when we found anyone else of colour, ‘well, isn’t that nice that you’re keeping all of the little coloured children together? Do you know what that feels like to be told things repeatedly?'”

Hopkins added these kinds of injustices against people of colour have been happening in both Canada and the United States for years.

“And if it is the first time for you to hear these problems, we see you, we feel you and we want you to understand that nothing comes from a place of hate,” she added. It is a place of frustration.”

Speaking to NL News following the protest, Leslie Carty says people around the world are unhappy with how people of colour are being treated.

“You can’t just cancel racism because that’s not how it works. When we heard [the event] was cancelled, we just came anyway because I mean its not cancelled because how can you just cancel it? Like I mean, this is going on all over the world,” he said.

“People are unhappy with the situation getting murdered at the hands of law enforcement for no other reason but because of the way they look. A lot of people think that racism isn’t a thing in Canada, but it is. I’m 57 years old and I’ve lived it my whole life.”

He recalled an experience from when he was 10 years ago, while growing up in a largely white Toronto neighbourhood. It was recess he noted when another student came up to him and said, ‘what are you doing here, [n-word]?’

Carty admitted that both of them were sent to the hospital after he beat that kid up a bit. The other student, he says, was sent back to class after a short lecture, but Carty noted that he had to stay back, recalling that the principal had a leather strap on his desk.

“I tried to explain what that boy said to me… he didn’t want to hear it,” Carty told the crowd, noting that while the principal never used the leather strap, he made his life miserable following that incident.

“That’s racism.”

He also spoke about an incident in Kamloops from March 2018, when he says he was racially profiled and held at gunpoint in his own backyard by a police officer, who believed he was breaking into a shed.

Carty says he had got off work early that day, and went to check on a bike in the shed, but struggled to get in. He said an RCMP officer saw him, assumed it was a break-in, and ran over, demanding that he leave the shed.

“Was I shot? No. Did it mess me up? For sure. Is it resolved? Hell, no,” he said, in a facebook post, noting that he is still not satisfied with how his complaint is being handled. “Two years and still waiting for answers — real answers. So I’m done being quiet, done waiting, done being the elephant in the room. Just done. And blessed my name wasn’t added to the list on March 21, 2018.”

Back at Riverside Park, others spoke to what people can do to keep the conversation going in Kamloops and elsewhere.

“We don’t need to see hashtags trend our pain, this is pain that we go through everyday,” said Ellora Sundhu. “So please we have to do better, not just on social media and online but in our communities.”

The peaceful protest began around Noon and made its way to the Kamloops RCMP detachment downtown a few blocks away, before dispersing just before 3 p.m.

“It’s been such an exhausting week. In the beginning of it, I wasn’t really talking, I wasn’t really saying anything, I was very hurt. I was in a lot of pain and I’ve been in that pain for a very long time,” Sundhu added. “So I guess me coming up and kind of shaking and saying my words is kind of my therapy.”

All through the protest and subsequent march, people of all ages and races in the crowd shouted words of encouragement. They even began reading aloud the names of people of colour – both in Canada and the United States – who have died at the hands of police, and people in the crowd repeated those names out loud.

The protest was one of many being organized across North America in the wake of the May 25 death of George Floyd, at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on his neck, while Floyd was being arrested.

“Regardless of what George did before, it doesn’t matter. Nobody should die that way with a man kneeling on his throat, while he pleaded for his mum,” Carty told NL News. “The officer who did that does not have a human soul. That was the breaking point for me this week.”

 

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