I’ve thought a lot about what I might write this week. I was glad to see so many of you out at Take Back the Night. Some of you also wrote about how the march, and especially its location, raised questions and caused some discomfort.
The issue of where to hold the march is always a dilemma. As one speaker afterwards recalled, Take Back the Night used to happen at the UofA. As you might imagine, the participants were mostly young and white. For many years, Edmonton did not have a Take Back the Night, and when it was resuscitated 7 or 8 years ago, the march began at City Hall and weaved through many empty downtown streets. The demographics of the participants were much the same as when it was held at UofA.
I know that the decision to move to The Avenue was made after a lot of debate about the politics of location. Behind this decision was be the best of intentions -- to make the march less white and less middle class. The first year it was at this location, the route was a big rectangle stretching down 118 Ave and then moving into residential streets behind. I felt uncomfortable walking those residential streets yelling “Whose streets? My streets,” when these streets were not mine. I also felt sad that a march that arose to protest the ways in which rape restricts our mobility was so rule abiding, confined to sidewalks and back streets, because this was what the police would allow. The politics of race and class, of space and access to justice were all deeply implicated in these choices.
The issue of where to hold the march is always a dilemma. As one speaker afterwards recalled, Take Back the Night used to happen at the UofA. As you might imagine, the participants were mostly young and white. For many years, Edmonton did not have a Take Back the Night, and when it was resuscitated 7 or 8 years ago, the march began at City Hall and weaved through many empty downtown streets. The demographics of the participants were much the same as when it was held at UofA.
I know that the decision to move to The Avenue was made after a lot of debate about the politics of location. Behind this decision was be the best of intentions -- to make the march less white and less middle class. The first year it was at this location, the route was a big rectangle stretching down 118 Ave and then moving into residential streets behind. I felt uncomfortable walking those residential streets yelling “Whose streets? My streets,” when these streets were not mine. I also felt sad that a march that arose to protest the ways in which rape restricts our mobility was so rule abiding, confined to sidewalks and back streets, because this was what the police would allow. The politics of race and class, of space and access to justice were all deeply implicated in these choices.
Edmonton
is a city strictly divided by race and class. Colonization marks the social geography of
Western Canadian cities, creating boundaries between white middle-class
spaces, ruled by norms of universal justice, and the racialized spaces of the
inner city, which, as Sherene Razack has argued, are constructed as zones of naturally occurring violence. Edmonton is an
epicenter in the national tragedy of missing and murdered Aboriginal women and
yet, the routine violence that is enacted on the bodies of Aboriginal women
nearly escapes register.
When Take Back the Night is held at 118 Ave, we all forced to grapple with how we are all implicated in this social geography, to engage in a process of "unmapping." This is always uncomfortable; but discomfort can be politically and analytically productive. The politics of having Take Back the Night on 118 Ave will never be unproblematic. And perhaps the organizers should reconsider the location. As I was walking, I suggested to a friend that having the march Jasper Ave would make a much more public statement about sexual violence in this city. At the same time, the kinds of community building that happened at this event this year would be lost.
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