Nicole Nfonoyim-Hara: Tending to the fires here at home
“A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity.”
- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967
This is America in 2020. This is Minnesota in 2020. And the tragedy is that we have been here before.
I struggle now to say things that have not already been said ad nauseum by the prophetic and masterful voices of those that have borne painful and passionate witness to a profound well of black rage, so vast and so righteous. A rage rooted deep in this nation’s gravest original sin—racism. I pace my home in the dead of night, texting beloved ones between manic scrolls of news feeds and updates from organizations in the Twin Cities working to organize supplies and medics, legal aid, and bail outs. I scan my book shelves for a balm in the words of black and brown writers and activists, clinging to them like some holy text to keep me moored in this storm whose clouds have darkened our skies for centuries. But this time their words, ringing from sixty years ago, just feed the rage. A rage I, like all black people, have been taught to control and choke back till you’re left carrying generations on your broken back like a Sisyphean boulder. All for a chance that you won’t get killed in cold blood, while a nation denies the reason you are dying. All for a fool’s chance to survive black life in America.
The events of the last week have had everything to do with George Floyd. For it has never been about one single act of violence or one individual call for justice. We are part of a body system, an intricate organism. And to separate George Floyd’s death from recent events like the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, “Central Park Amy’s” chillingly lucid weaponizing of her white privilege, and perhaps, especially the Covid-19 pandemic that has disproportionately sickened, killed, and economically destabilized Native, brown, and black communities across this nation is to miss the point entirely. It is to once again commit a fatal error (for, yes, we are indeed talking about real flesh and blood, breath and bone, LIVES on the line). An error that Americans blunder into in a sated torpor daily—and have been since the founding of this nation we call home. The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted us all across lines of difference. Yet what was made abundantly clear from the earliest days of the crisis is how all the injustices that separate us by class, creed, and color on our best days, are grossly amplified on our darkest nights. Truth is, we have let the pandemic of racism and white supremacy accelerated by classism, ravage this nation for hundreds of years.
Our country rages for a reason. A marginalized community cries out for justice for a reason.
As the nation burns and rages and our very own Twin Cities roil in the wake of a horrifying act of police brutality, it would behoove us in our local communities to take stock, to ask ourselves the hardest questions about what our own role in all this might be. Here in Rochester, where might the glowing red embers of our own little fires be? Where might they be in our school district, in our city governance, in our justice system, in our civil society, and in our world-class healthcare institution? We know the sparks are flying here in our own city. We have the data and reports, the lukewarm diversity initiatives, the countless equity committees and specialists, the realities and lived experience of our communities of color.
There are municipal policies and statutes and violence interruption programs that can work to make law enforcement more transparent, more just, and more compassionate. This is nothing new. Let us continue to commit to those relentlessly across political and ideological divides. There are insidious practices that must be ended so that educational disparities across racial and class lines in our district are eliminated once and for all. There is a culture of true allyship and social justice that can foster inclusive and lasting representation in our local governance and civil society. This may look like interrogating our boards and who is on them, asking why certain sectors of our community are not at the table and taking a step back to ask: “who is setting that table, anyway?” It may mean redesigning community programming that may not actually be serving the needs of those most likely to be left on the margins. It could even mean relinquishing power altogether (gasp) to make critical space for those voices and skills of marginalized people we so desperately need. It means living out racial justice, social justice, healthcare justice, economic justice, and restorative justice, instead of evoking vague platitudes of diversity, inclusion, and equity. We cannot clutch our pearls every time a black community member speaks the truth to unready ears nor can we silence efforts to reform, to innovate, or to change, by evoking civility, respectability, and rules about “the way things are done here” and who does them.
There are those who have been on the front lines of this messy work in our community for decades, saying the same things I have just said over and over again. Systemic white supremacy silences. We are a community that is quick to celebrate the good, the peaceful, and the ways in which we are working hard to build an inclusive community. But we know there is a tale of two Rochesters, just as in any other city. We must confront this fact bravely and fiercely, today. Our silence will not protect us.
George Floyd’s murder is just as inextricably linked to a long national history of racialized violence and policing as it is linked to how that history gets internalized, carved into institutions, coded into policies, enacted in practices and individual actions, and localized day after day such that previous misconduct claims against Chauvin were ignored and dismissed, such that the state of Minnesota lays claim to having one of the largest gaps in racial equity in the nation. Six years ago when the nation was once again on fire in the wake of the shooting death of unarmed black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, it became clear that decades of underrepresentation and lack of diversity in governance and law enforcement exacerbated injustices to a breaking point for the Ferguson community. These are the root systems we must uncover and excise here at home if we are to survive this moment with any hope of redemption and healing and learn anything from it.
White Americans, white Minnesotans, white allies know what they must do. Some have been woke, others are awakening abruptly, and still others never will. It is the former two, who must step up and say “no more” for it is an active and deliberate choice to remain silent. During the civil rights era and more recently during the 2015 Black Lives Matter demonstrations, white allies were often placed on the front line to use their privilege. We could fill whole libraries with the history, the theories and the tactics, the reading lists, the anti-racism toolkits, the white studies and ethnic studies scholarship, and the how-tos on how to take responsibility, how to stand up and speak up, how to end this once and for all. It has always been readily available. It is high time to wield those tools and privilege without hesitation.
In 1970, a group of aboriginal rights activists from Queensland, Australia stated “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, let us work together.” These words echo the writings of black writer and activist, James Baldwin who urged white America to face the fact that the horror of racism was a collective inheritance that shackled us all in a vicious generational cycle of violence and oppression. Still, Baldwin was always crystal clear that this has never been a black problem and the onus of dismantling white supremacy lies with white America. In 1961, Baldwin wrote, “Any real change implies the break-up of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.” White people, ask yourselves (not black people) what you are going to do about the monster you created and nurtured.
To our Native brothers and sisters, our brown accomplices and allies at home and abroad, my greatest hope is that this will be yet another opportunity for us to see the long thread of connection that has always knit us together in struggle and that should bind us in seeking justice.
Thus far, I have been evoking the “we”, as I do believe we are all united against injustice and we must stand together or fall divided. I am also a black woman of privilege* who has made a lifelong commitment to hacking that privilege in the service of my people. To black folk in our city: you are beloved and strong. Self-care is an act of resistance and revolution in a nation that would see us dead for walking, jogging, driving, seeking help, playing, bird watching, sleeping in our own homes. Let us be tender to ourselves and extend grace to each other—to those who are out there in the streets (however we choose to show up) and those who are anxious and fatigued at home, those clutching their babies and loved ones close, and those fighting daily to heal our community. We don’t have to teach anyone, explain or defend ourselves or a movement, or hide the pain and anger away. We will hold each other as we always do in spite of it all. It is what we do. But it is okay to be broke down and exhausted. If we are to survive this, we must take care, lean on one another, and seek help with the same radical vulnerability that has been the true cornerstone of our magical resilience as a people.
Nicole Nfonoyim-Hara is a Rochester-based writer and anthropologist committed to community building, advocacy, and storytelling toward social justice. She is creator of the Rochester Racial Justice Toolkit.
Author’s Note: Moments like this have a way of flattening things to mere black and white. It is critical now more than ever to interrogate our own unique positionalities with radical transparency. I am a black woman of African and South Asian ancestry, born outside the U.S. and raised in NYC by West African and Afro-Latinx parents who are both physicians. While ancestors of mine were likely brought to this country in chains, my parents arrived on planes in the 70s and 80s and went through a process of “becoming black” and being racialized in the U.S. We must keep firmly centered the reality that the struggles we see today in our country are rooted in the experience of the descendants of enslaved Africans who have called the U.S. home for centuries and who built this country brick by brick, industry by industry through their enslaved labor and oppression. This does not mean that these struggles do not resonate or connect deeply with other black and brown communities nationwide and worldwide. Anti-black racism does not readily distinguish the diversity within black communities. My privilege has protected me in some ways, and in key ways it has not. That privilege calls me to share these words so that others may not be burdened yet again with having to explain, teach, inform, and re-live trauma in the midst of all this. I am but one voice. We have the capacity to hold these complex truths and should for we are vast and contain multitudes.
