As Pride season in Canada and the USA is winding down, we’re also closing the season of criticizing Pride festivals. Beyond people bemoaning corporate sponsorships, there are accusations Pride is mostly a safe space for white LGB people. People of colour and trans-individuals want Pride to be more inclusive. Some requests include modifying or eliminating the presence of police or military forces in parades (due to a history of racial profiling and mistreatment). As well, Pride organizations are being petitioned to include increased organization membership of, and events for, people of colour and trans individuals. Of course, some of the more conservative segments of our community are annoyed by these pushes.
In Edmonton, such a conversation between the Edmonton Pride Festival Society (EPFS) board members and groups representing queer people of colour (of late, represented by Shades of Colour YEG and Rarica Now) has been going on since a protest briefly interrupted the 2018 parade. Some progress was occurring over the last year.
Sadly, this April the society pulled the plug on the 2019 Parade and Festival after a very contentious meeting between the two groups. Both sides blamed each other – I’ll include some links at the end of this article*, so you can decide. If you read the links and especially watch the Raw footage video of the meeting from April 4th, it’s not pretty for either group.
As a community organization, EPFS should have displayed a greater degree of professional behavior. Instead they provided a vague excuse which passive-aggressively pointed the finger at Shades of Colour: "In light of the current political and social environment, it has been determined that any attempt to host a Festival will not be successful." Buried in all this? A member on the society’s board of directors informed Shades of Colour (and Global News) the cancellation of Pride would have occurred anyhow due to lack of volunteers and funding.
I reached out to both groups and only Shades of Colour provided a statement after I reassured them would be neutral compared to the Postmedia network:
Neutral isn’t good enough though. Neutral continues to let the dominant narrative prevail, because conservative media isn’t being neutral. Conservative media slanders us. So, any media we engage in has to be on our side, otherwise people continue to call QTIBPOC terrorists and extremists when we were literally making a speech.
You’re right, middle class whites got scared of a bunch of brown and Black folks trying to make a speech. The pride festival hasn’t gotten death threats the way we have. Not in the same way. Not in the, "this brown trans body feels seen everywhere he goes", not in the constantly wondering if everyone hates me for trying to hold up an entire community who have nowhere else…
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