Black Lives Matter Toronto co-founder Sandy Hudson asks, hypothetically, what her life would have looked like had she never been an activist – had she never felt compelled to confront discrimination and fight for her space and the safety of her community.
“If racism wasn’t an impact on any of our lives, who would we all be,” Hudson continues on a Zoom call. “What would we have had the opportunity to do? How would you know us differently?”
Hudson asks these questions as she discusses her body of work, from organizing student union and BLM TO rallies, such as the one that shut down the 2016 Pride Parade, to her role as a producer involved with two new projects at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival: Leslie Norville’s anthology series Black Life: Untold Stories and the short film Aftercare. Hudson is most recognized for her work as an activist who speaks on injustices committed toward marginalized communities. She is less widely known for her creative side.
Activism was never the plan for Hudson. Before she got involved with student politics, fighting for equitable access to education and BLM, Hudson would travel with a choir, perform in musical theatre and even had a role in a CBC Christmas Special once. She had always been a storyteller. But the truth for any would-be artist, storyteller or even college student from a marginalized background is that confronting unjust obstacles becomes part of the labour hoisted upon them.
She recalls Toni Morrison’s 1975 speech at Portland State University. “The very serious function of racism is distraction,” Morrison said. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”
Hudson doesn’t see her activism as a distraction from her storytelling. Rather she sees them as entwined. “The strongest ways we can change people’s minds and move culture forward is by telling different stories,” she says.
Hudson is speaking from her apartment in Los Angeles, where she recently completed a law degree while working with BLM TO, nurturing their permanent 10,000-square-foot “artivist” (that is, “artist” and “activist”) space in Toronto, the Wildseed Centre, and writing a book tentatively titled Defund: Black Lives, Policing, and Safety for All.
Hudson is currently in a transition period. She’s helping prepare the next generation to continue BLM TO’s work as she pours more of her energy into film and television. She recently launched the production company, Above the Palace, alongside filmmaker Anubha Momin and Hudson’s activist co-conspirator Rodney Diverlus. Their first film out the gate is Momin’s Aftercare.
The short stars Maika Harper (Mohawk Girls) and Sofia Banzhaf (Closet Monster) as a former babysitter and the woman she used to care for as a child, respectively, meeting by chance after a decade – an encounter fraught with miscommunication and complicated by identity and socioeconomic gaps.
Aftercare is a prime example of what Above The Palace will be about: telling the stories about people often left off-screen while, much like its creators, refusing to fit into any narrowly prescribed boxes. These boxes, Hudson says, can be a challenge when an industry – where white creators seem to have carte blanche to any story they want – expects Black artist to only tell Black stories, and how such expectations are replicated in funding structures meant to support BIPOC creatives.
“They actually want you to be very singular,” she says, explaining that funds earmarked for a) Black, b) South Asian or c) Indigenous storytellers were not available for a film like Aftercare since they were d) All of the above. “We were just too diverse!”
That collaboration across communities will continue in Above The Palace’s impending slate. There’s a rom-com called Come By Seldom about an aspiring Parisian-trained Bangladeshi chef feeling doubly-othered during a placement on Fogo Island, where he develops a relationship with a local fisherwoman. Queen City is a generational dramedy series about a Bangladeshi mother and her newly divorced millennial daughter.
Above The Palace is also partnering with Samanta Krishnapillai, the founder behind the Instagram account On Canada Project, to develop an unscripted series called The Parallel. The show will be an extension of the social media channel, expanding cultural and political news though a millennial lens while challenging the way such stories are typically told in traditional media.
There will, of course, be more projects in line with Hudson and Diverlus’s work with BLM TO. Hudson emphasizes that her work in that space has always been about storytelling, too, whether it’s at Wildseed, which will nurture Black voices, or taking radical action to affect change, as they did when shutting down Pride, which, Hudson says, they planned like a stage play.
At the 2016 event, BLM TO had its members in co-ordinated costumes, dressed in Black with gold accents. They had their list of demands ready, including the removal of police participation from Pride festivities so that all communities could feel safe. They staged scenes that produced some of the most iconic imagery in Toronto’s recent history, such as the photos of BLM TO’s Alexandria Williams, one hand balled in a fist while the other hoists a megaphone.
“I don’t know anyone who can look at that and not see the storytelling,” says Hudson, who was also wielding a megaphone on that day. “I think part of the effectiveness of our approach was because it is so artistic.”
Special to The Globe and Mail