Anti-Racist in Training

Sign at the George Floyd Memorial, August 2020

I’ll begin with a parable by David Foster Wallace, as told in a commencement address in 2005:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

This allegory, first spoken by David Foster Wallace at a commencement address in 2005, was referring to the important realities that exist all around us that are the hardest to see and talk about, that in the seemingly mundane work of “adulting,” we are choosing to make our lives important…or not important.

I would like to use the allegory to make a different statement:

All Americans are racists.

Someone first said this to me earlier this year as I attended the first of many rallies and protests in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd. I was taken aback and asked this person for an explanation. His short explanation? “We’re all swimming in the water.”

Our government was built on a basis of racism. When the founding fathers wrote “All men are created equal” they didn’t take “men” to mean all human beings, they truly meant all White men — women were not included in this statement, nor were Blacks or Native Americans. Women were not considered intelligent or unemotional enough to know what was best for them. The second were considered property, not capable of managing their own lives or living without a master. The third, Native Americans, were not included as belonging to the country because it was their country we would slowly annex to create our own over the next 100 years.

All subsequent systems were built out of this belief that White men were at the top of a racial and gender hierarchy. The banking system, justice system, healthcare system, the wrestling of state rights vs federal rights, all of it. It is all around us; so much so that as a White woman walking through this world, I never saw it.

“Oh yes,” you say, “But we’ve come so far, that’s ancient history now!”

Is it really?

In 2018, Wells Fargo was fined $3 billion for opening false accounts on behalf of its customers, taking out credit in their names falsely to “boost” reported earnings. While that was the action they were fined for, multiple cities across the United States have also sued Wells Fargo repeatedly for predatory lending practices, stating that Wells Fargo pushes BIPOC borrowers to take out riskier or more expensive loans than they should, costing many of them homeownership opportunities. Just this year the Trump administration stripped the Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity of their enforcement actions, making them impotent. Moving forward, if someone believes a bank is not being fair to them on the basis of gender, race, religion or other status, there is no longer an office with any power that can help them. 

Today, the United States comprises 5% of the global population but 25% of the world’s incarcerated population. Why is that? Do we really have that many criminals here in the “land of the free?” Do you know the difference between a White and a Black drug addict? A White drug addict goes to treatment — a Black drug addict goes to jail. When those White addicts end their treatment, they mostly go back about their lives, to their jobs, families and communities, while the Blacks who serve their sentence have lost some if not all of those things while they were away, and have lost the right to vote for their rest of their lives (in most states).

In 2018, when 65% of Florida voters emphatically voted “yes” to restore voting rights to convicted felons who had served their time, 33% of adult Black men seemingly had their voices restored to them. I say “seemingly” because even now, in 2020, the roll-out of this law has been stymied by a new wrinkle that now states that those felons must pay all fees and fines related to their convictions. The voice of the poor Black man is not yet being heard.  

In the United States, a Black baby is twice as likely to die by its first birthday as a White baby. Research published in 2018 determined that the reason for this gap isn’t the unhealthy behavior of Black mothers, which has been considered the underlying cause for 30 years. Instead, it points to the gap in access to healthcare for Black and White mothers, institutional racism and the increased stress that Black mothers suffer living in a racist society.

We are swimming in the water. And suddenly I see it all around me.

As Angela Davis says in Ava DuVernay’s stunning documentary, 13^th, “It is not enough to be a non-racist. We must become actively anti-racist.”

I am working on becoming anti-racist. It is not enough to quietly walk through this world, accepting my guaranteed freedom while they are being denied to others in my own country.

I am starting where I believe I can make the most difference — here in my own city. I am taking my lead from the voices of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) communities who have been telling us for years what they need to be safe, to feel the same security I feel as I move about this world. In their neighborhoods the police are a menace, harassing them and brutalizing them for decades, robbing many of their freedoms for low-level crimes that lawmakers wrote years ago for misleading purposes.

I no longer want to live in two Americas, one built for people who look like me and one built for those who don’t. I hope you’ll join me in this change.

From "Stay Well" to "Stay Safe"

A crowd gathers at 38th and Chicago where George Floyd was murdered, watching artists create a mural to honor his memory.

On Monday of this week a black man named George Floyd was pinned to the ground and a white police officer knelt on his neck with his full weight, asphyxiating him until he died. A crowd of people gathered and cried mercy on his behalf to deaf ears.

George had been accused of forging a $20 bill at a local grocery store. He was unarmed, was already in handcuffs and had been placed in the back of the squad car. He was then removed from the vehicle, placed on the ground and the officer placed his knee on his neck for nearly 9 minutes. George stopped moving at 3 minutes in. The officer didn't remove his weight from George's neck until after the ambulance showed up and the gurney rolled out.

The gross abuse of power was captured in a 10-minute video shot by a 17-year-old girl on the scene. I cannot imagine the horror she experienced as she watched a man lose his life through the lens of her phone.

We are on night three of what we expect to be protests and riots. The first night was bricks through car windshields, some minor damage. The next night an apartment complex under construction was burnt to the ground, as was the local Target and AutoZone. Other businesses were broken into and looted. Last night the 3rd Precinct building of the MPD was set on fire, along with a host of other businesses. Violence is spreading to St. Paul and the suburbs, and solidarity in other cities is resulting in protests in Los Angeles, Denver, New York and more. 

At first I was angry and frustrated why communities respond to injustice by looting and hurting business owners who live in their neighborhoods. But then I read a few things that made so much sense to me, this one makes it the easiest to understand:

"A riot is the language of the unheard." — Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 

This was first said in a speech on April 4, 1967 called "The Other America" given at Stanford University. He paraphrased this and used it in many interviews until his death exactly one year from when he first spoke them.

His full speech can be found here. It is disheartening that it is just as relevant today as it was when it was first delivered 53 years ago.

I read about the work of MPD150, which did a comprehensive study of the history of the Minneapolis Police Department over the past 150 years. Its roots in racism are deep, and its culture has not strayed far from those roots. Their comprehensive report, released in 2017, makes a powerful case for defunding the police department and diverting those dollars to community organizations that can help reduce poverty, address mental health and drug dependency and other issues that will make communities safer, thus reducing the need for police patrolling.

I also perused this sobering dataview produced by the Star Tribune of every death after a physical confrontation with police across Minnesota. They documented the race of the victim, of the officers, whether or not weapons were involved, and the final result of justice, be it charges or a conviction. It doesn't take long to see why George Floyd's unnecessary death is the final straw. 

Finally, I began learning from the Hampton Institute, a think tank in D.C. providing analyses on a variety of subjects affecting the working class. And they had this to say about the events in Minneapolis:

This event and the fallout has been the only talk of our home for a couple of days. The girls and I have talked about our society, white privilege, the history of oppression and what it would take to fix it all.  Today Marissa and I visited the corner where George was murdered to pay our respects and be with others who feel this loss upon more loss. We don't have answers. But blacks in this country have waited too long to no longer be oppressed, to not be killed for driving while black, jogging while black, shopping while black. 

I am using my voice to call our officials, speak out on social media, and support the fight for justice and the end of inequality. I'll be supporting local organizations as well which are working to fight for change by donating to Communities Against Police Brutality, Minneapolis FreedomFund, MPD150 and others.

Please, educate yourself by following the links in this article. Here's a listing of other resources:

"The Warmth of Other Suns," Isabel Wilkerson
"The New Jim Crow," Michelle Alexander
"I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness," Austin Channing Brown
"The Hate You Give," Angie Thomas
"Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," Matthew Desmond
"13th," and "When They See Us," documentaries by Ave DuVernay

Not. One. More.