Leadership award winner calls for action
Yusra Khogali called on city to admit Toronto is still an ‘anti-Black city’
Yusra Khogali stood in line with the mayor of the city and raised her fist straight up in the air.
Standing at a microphone in the council chamber at city hall moments later, she called for a response: “Black lives, they matter here!” Those who came to support her seated in the public gallery shouted it back again and again.
Khogali, an artist who helped found the Black Lives Matter Toronto chapter, was one of two of the first recipients of the Pam McConnell Award for Young Women in Leadership Thursday night. In accepting the honour, she demanded the city do better to recognize “we are still living in an anti-Black city.”
“I’m really grateful and there’s an abundance of joy and thankfulness in my heart,” she said at the podium as Mayor John Tory and other city officials listened. “But I’m also recognizing that I’m getting this award on the premise that there’s work to be done. Because Black people are dying multiple deaths trying to survive in this city.”
The city is still consulting on carding, Khogali noted. “Street checks,” as police call them, have been found by data analyzed by the Star to have disproportionately targeted Black people.
“Black people are being brutalized for not being able to afford the TTC,” she said, referencing an incident where witnesses and video footage saw a teen grabbed and then restrained by both TTC and po- lice officers near St. Clair Ave. W. and Bathurst St. Black Lives Matter has pushed for justice in the case of the police shooting of Andrew Loku; camped outside police headquarters in 2016; and has recently been fighting to stop the deportation of former child refugee Abdoul Abdi, who the government has admitted to failing.
Tory prefaced the awards Thursday by giving a short speech, acknowledging both Khogali and winner Talisha Ramsaroop, who were selected by a panel that included McConnell’s daughter Heather Ann. Tory said he hoped both would run for public office and follow in McConnell’s footsteps by “advancing the interests in women in Toronto.”
“These were things that she did out of love as well as out of passion and commitment.”
Councillor Kristyn WongTam, who handed out the awards, thanked the winners for “making us uncomfortable.”
Khogali noted in her speech how difficult it is to be a Black woman taking a leadership role.
She said she doesn’t dream of one day ending up back in the council chamber.
“I’m not interested in running for public office,” she said. “What my goals are, are Black liberation.”