This is the pace of institutional change in a city that is still majority white - liberal, but not liberal enough to alter the racial power dynamics in any significant way. This is the culture of a place with some of the worst racial disparities in income, homeownership and housing access, incarceration, employment, education, and health care in the nation. This is, for all intents and purposes, the place I have chosen to call home. It is the place I am raising my family. The place whose opportunities and contradictions I struggle with every day. And as my son grows more and more into the Black man he is destined to become, he will, too. The thing that depresses me about this inevitably long fight is not even the exhaustingly slow pace of bureaucratic change, but the distance between the racial reality of some of my white friends and neighbors, and mine. Though they may only say it privately to other white folks and City employees as they contemplate an increase in shootings, car-jackings, drug use and petty crime in our neighborhoods during a pandemic, many of them really do feel safer in their bodies with more police, continued police funding, and little accountability. This is something so far away from my daily lived experience in my own body, and caretaking my son’s, that it is almost unfathomable. The durability of racist practices within institutions, even and especially those that identify as “anti-racist” is depressing, as well. What is hopeful, though, is that the term “defunding the police” is now firmly ensconced in the American lexicon - something I could not have dreamed of even a year ago. Many people don’t agree with the concept of defunding the police, but they nevertheless have to consider it as a possible strategy to ending police violence in the wider public discourse. We can’t bring anything into being that we can’t imagine, and we can’t deeply imagine what we can’t articulate. Words matter.
What gives me the most hope, however, is my son. We live about 13 blocks from where George Floyd was killed, and when I suggested that he and his sister and I go down to the memorial at 38th and Chicago this summer to pay our respects and be with the people, he was initially reluctant. And I understood: Why would you want to go to the spot where a man was killed in cold blood? But we went, and he marveled at the murals and artwork of all kinds on the streets and buildings, approached two men drumming to discover how they were doing it, kibitzed with some kids in the street. “Nothing will happen to those cops who killed him,” Boisey told me after he learned of the murder. My first thought was that I was raising him right. My second thought was that I have to keep on showing and exploring all the various ways of fighting.
And that sometimes, loving and fighting are the same thing.
Shannon Gibney authored the essay “Fear of a Black Mother,” which begins the best-selling anthology A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016; Sun Yung Shin, ed.). She is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color (Carolrhoda Lab, 2015), and Dream Country (Dutton, 2018) young adult novels that won Minnesota Book Awards in 2016 and 2019. Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis College, where she teaches writing. A Bush Artist and McKnight Writing Fellow, her new novel, Botched, explores themes of transracial adoption through speculative memoir (Dutton, 2022).
This work is generously funded by a lead grant from the Otto Bremer Trust, with additional support from HealthPartners.
Racism Unveiled is a multimedia storytelling initiative diving into complex systems of oppression that directly affect the daily lives of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in Minnesota. Learn more at RacismUnveiled.org
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