I grew up watching my mom, learning that if you simply speak truth at tables and rooms of power, you are considered dangerous. If you don’t keep information you are privileged to have from sitting at these tables to yourself, you will be blacklisted or marginalized.
As an environmental justice activist, I take political risks. I become a problem for the establishment. There is a government effort to keep the power, but there is also a community effort that is just as passionate, to build and gain power to protect the people.
—Roxxanne O’Brien
My mom moved to Minneapolis in 1987, when I was three. She came here for work. Minneapolis was second in the nation for education at the time, and they were looking for teachers of color. She taught Special Ed. We stayed with some families at first, before we found a place of our own. I don’t know how my mom did it, but she connected with community and they helped us out. It didn’t take her too long to get on her own feet.
We moved around a lot. North, Northeast, Powderhorn. I didn’t feel stressed as a child, but I didn’t feel grounded. I went to Grace Methodist preschool in North, Webster Open School in Northeast for kindergarten and first grade, Jefferson Spanish Immersion for second. Third grade I was at Maxfield Magnet in St. Paul, because my mom worked there. I moved on to Hall in North Mpls, for fourth grade, Pillsbury in Northeast for fifth and sixth, and Ramsey International for 7th. Ramsey was my favorite school because of the choir program. Mr. Moore was an amazing teacher. But I had issues with bullies there. I got into a fight with a girl. It shook me because I wasn’t a physical fighter. I didn’t go back to the school after the fight. I had a rough time going into puberty. Those regular tensions going into middle school really affected me. I was overwhelmed by friendships and people who weren’t my friends.
World Moving Fast in California
My mom decided it was time to go back to California. We stayed with Aunties in Long Beach for a month until my mom found a place and a job at a school out there. My cousins were supportive. I took care of my cousin’s kids and she put money in my pocket. But I missed friends from Minnesota. That was back when you had to pay for long distance calls. I’d wrack up phone bills talking to my friends. My mom also missed her community back in Minneapolis. Even with family, we felt isolated. And we missed my older sister, who was grown and married in Minnesota.
I got into teenage-hood, hanging around with gangs, skipping school. I didn’t have any males in my family and didn’t know what to look for in men. I was exploited — a young pretty girl with no-one to protect me. My mom was constantly working and I was a smart slick teenager. I’d tell her I was going to be with a friend…. I got pregnant at fourteen and had an abortion. I fell asleep during the procedure. When I woke up I heard women crying. It was a stressful turning point. I had to get away so I went to live with my sister in Minneapolis for the summer. At the end of the summer my friend’s mom drove a bunch of us from Minneapolis to Long Beach. It was an amazing trip, I’ll never forget. I’m still friends with those girls.
The world was moving really fast. I think it was that year I started to experience a lot of highs and lows in my body. Mom and I were fighting. I look back now, at what I put my mom through….
I was fortunate not to be left on the side of the road, murdered, because I got into a lot of risky things. I was hanging around adults who’d been incarcerated for robbing banks. I was sexually assaulted by grown men. I was too young to understand. I wasn’t into drugs, but I would drink alcohol with my friends. We were getting drunk. My mom was really worried about me, about the risks. One morning I woke up and there were these two white people, there to take me away to Utah.
High School Program in Utah
I was sent to this high school program in Provo Canyon for nine months. My mom found a way to get my insurance to pay for it. I would have been there longer if the insurance had held out. They were making a lot of money off of kids who just had regular teenage issues. Instead of changing our environment they tried to correct us. There were some kids who had been there for years.
The place was one step above prison. I learned how to make my bed with hospital corners and clean up my area. They locked us in there. Every day I was hatching plans to escape. There were only three black girls. We experienced a lot of racism. Anything we did was against the rules. We would dance together and synchronize and lose all our privileges. I got into trouble for saying “homegirl.” They thought that was gang language. I got good grades though, when I was there. I was able to focus on school.The only reason I left was they found out I had Graves disease and hyperthyroidism and my California insurance did not want to pay for all those expensive doctor appointments in Utah.
I came back home two days before my 16th birthday. I immediately went back to drinking. I was on medications, and I hadn’t drunk in nine months. I got so sick. After I got back home, we didn’t stay in California long. My mom was ready to return to Minnesota. I did make some life-long friends in California. I just went back with my kids and visited one of those friends.
Finding My Father
I found my father when I was twelve, but it was five more years before we met. I went to Texas for a week to visit him. I met my little sister — also named Roxxanne. My Dad is strange. He thought he would never see me again, so he named his next daughter after me. He hasn’t done much for me. Even the plane tickets to visit him were bought by his mother. I didn’t get to know his side of my family. My grandmother on that side is gone now. The family is pretty wealthy but my Dad is not. He never got it together. I don’t have much respect for him, because he has not made any effort to be in my life. The last time I talked to him, I told him I was going through a lot of stress and he told me to suck it up. I decided I didn’t need that kind of advice.
I have father issues I haven’t dealt with, but I keep moving forward in my life. I have enough to deal with. I don’t reach out to him, though I do think about him. He just had a birthday. I sent him a birthday message. He is the black sheep in his family. I feel like I am the black sheep in my family too.
Becoming A Parent
I started having kids at nineteen. I have three kids, fours years apart. When I was six months pregnant with the oldest, my mother kicked me out. I went to Harriet Tubman, because I had a restraining order against my baby’s dad. I was working at JCPenney, at a concession stand, a bingo hall. I began my ten year stint as a Personal Care Attendant. A lot for a nineteen year old. Family is important to me. And community. I teach my kids, it doesn’t mean you trust everyone in your family or your community, but building relationships is important. They have my mom. They visit her.
When I got pregnant a second time I found out I had more serious health issues. I was coming out of one fast life — my children’s father was on his way to prison. He was there for the birth, before becoming incarcerated.
Ambitions for Myself and the World
I got Section 8, entered college at MCTC. I wanted to learn about world religions. I took sign language. I wanted to learn every language. I wanted to learn how to help people. I felt like the world was shifting. I didn’t want to leave this world without being a supporter of the shift. I wanted to be able to speak and guide people. I didn’t want to just take up space on earth. I wanted to make sure I made everything count, and didn’t miss my opportunity to do great things. I thought college was the way to start that. I learned that wasn’t the case. Everything I needed to know was already in me, even if I didn’t learn all those different languages.
Lessons from my Mother in Community Activism
I grew up with community. My mom was a teacher and an organizer. There were a lot of meetings and gatherings with food and kids at my house, and fun, laughter, and support systems for parents. I grew up watching my mother in different movements. I remember marching on the campus when I was five years old, beside my mom. She was holding the hand of a friend who’d been raped on the UM campus. My mom was also a PCA, so I remember being at people’s houses, witnessing a mom whipping her girl’s ass because she was doing prostitution. I saw real shit growing up.
My mom had LGBTQ friends. She raised me in an open way, to be a free-thinker. She never made me adapt to any religion. She was feminist, she was pro-Black. She was a bookworm, really intelligent, always bringing home a coloring book or a book for me, always working and always going to school, so I think when I grew up I started to go back to that. Some of those things she instilled in me started to make sense, but the world that she was raising me to believe in, was not the world I grew up in. My world was full of conflict. Was it really the loving place she was telling me it was, or was it a nightmare?
The issues that I organize around are the things that affected me as a kid. I am trying to keep people from experiencing the pain I experienced. Sometimes people think I’m doing this for the community. They don’t realize this affects me too. I am advocating for myself, my kids and the community.
Finding my Power to Advocate for Myself and my Community
I started to attend trainings. The first was —SPEAC — Sustainable Progress through Engaging Active Citizens — at Hope Community. They taught me about community organizing, about my power, about sharpening skills I already had in me. They asked, “When can you remember a time when you took leadership?” I answered: “When I was twelve, my older sister’s husband was taken into immigration. I remember her bawling and crying. She loved him. I was so sad for her and so angry. I didn’t know about immigration. But some way I figured out where he was, and I called down there and told them “You have my sister’s husband.” I started crying. I said, “You need to let him go.”
He was released that night.” I believed there was something I could do about it. When he was released, it made me feel good. I looked out for my sister.
I started to think about other times when I spoke up. I slowly learned about my power, thinking about those stories. I have always been someone who stands up. I get that from my mom. I was raised to challenge the dominant narratives, to challenge the system. Still, my family is afraid of my activism. They are not as bold as I am. They were afraid of all the attention I attract. At first my mom was afraid for me all the time, though she is beginning to let go of some of the fear, letting me be myself.I was one of those kids who was diagnosed with ADD, who wasn’t supposed to succeed. I have a really short attention span sometimes. I don’t flock to any specific issues. When issues come up and I am aware of what is happening, I join forces and build relationships
.I am still in collaboration with Hope Community. Chaka Mkali is one of my mentors. He was significant. Since SPEAC, I’ve done trainings with Isaiah. I was nominated to the Nexus Board and Commission’s Leadership Institute. I got a Bush Fellowship, served on the Northside Resident Redevelopment Council.I was on a roll. Part of the training to be a community organizer involved meeting with people with power and building relationships. I met with City Council people, went to neighborhood organizations,
Building Power on the Northside: Housing
My mom lost her house before the crisis hit and I wasn’t able to help her. I did try to hold the bank accountable. Wells Fargo never settled with her. My mom holds on to papers. She always says, “Keep notes. Create a paper trail.” She is a teacher. She is brilliant. If it can happen to her, foreclosure can happen to any of us.
I worked with NOC and Occupy Homes to hold banks accountable. The foreclosure crisis hit Minneapolis hard. Banks were abusing their powers, targeting people from poorer communities, older people, Black and Latino people. They would tell owners they were going to work with them, while in reality they were already moving toward foreclosure. People would think they were in a negotiating process for loan modification. There was dual tracking happening. The bank sent different people to negotiate with you so no-one was to blame. Meanwhile, behind your back there’s a sheriff’s sale. That is what happened to Rose McGee.
I worked with Occupy Homes to save Rose’s house. I faxed a letter to Obama. I called and cried, saying what are we supposed to do? People in foreclosure were getting sick. I was on triage, taking the calls of homeowners in crisis. I saw the burn out, the sadness. It opened my eyes to what the banks were doing to our communities.
Home Owner’s Bill Of Rights
I went to the Capital to push for a Statewide Homeowner’s Bill of Rights, as Obama’s Administration directed me. We worked at the county and city level on a Responsible Banking Ordinance. We got that through the city. We tried unsuccessfully, to get it passed by the County. Our local movement was connected to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC). We had a northside chapter, with Jewish Community Action as our fiscal agent. I met Dave Snyder and others who I still have a lot of respect for. We had a big coalition. I worked with NOC, Occupy Homes, Keith Ellison. There were many pastors in the coalition.
Rise and Fall of NCRC
Things started to speed up. A lot of people wanted to do this work. Organizations were popping up—NOC being one of them. We did have some chaos, infighting, organizations, competing for the same money. Some people seem to come out of nowhere. We wanted to reward banks who were investing in our communities and divest from those who were harmful. I don’t know if it made a difference. I don’t know if people are keeping the banks accountable. There is a lot of power in the Responsible Banks Ordinance, but people have to use it. It’s just sitting on the desk right now.
NCRC fell apart because the work got hard. We were all volunteers, struggling ourselves. People burnt out. I had family members telling me, what are you doing, going to another meeting? But I stayed on the work, and took care of my kids at the end of the day.
That was around the time I got a Bush fellowship—2013. A lot of people say the Bush fellowship has to be specific, I told them, “I want to inspire at-risk people to come up with our own solutions.” I had a plan for myself, to take care of myself, save myself. I did what I said I would do as far as community. Though NCRC ended, the relationships continued and we started to work in separate groups on uplifting our communities.
Northside Residents Redevelopment Council
NRRC is an organization that has been around since 1969. It came after the uprisings on Plymouth Avenue and has been a major Black organization in Minneapolis since the ’70s. It is supposed to create opportunities for economic development and housing. By the time I got to it, it was in bankruptcy. NRRC used to own the building where UROC is now. For a while after the uprising, 40% of Plymouth was Black owned. The Way was in the building where the 4th precinct is now. It was supposed to be a major tool for the Black community. Ironically when I joined the board there were 4-5 white men on it, including Raymond Dehn. That is how I met him. The other men — I don’t remember their names, they were the opposition. They were part of an organization from the Highland area of old victorian home mansions — a neighborhood organization that is 99% white. Whenever there was a proposal for housing, or to build the Black community, they were against it. One was the husband of Linda Higgins, of the Metropolitan Commission, so they knew about proposals and they selectively shared information. They hired a Black man as Executive Director.
Classism in the Board Rooms
I’m going to tell you — classism is classism and capitalism is capitalism. I was starting to learn about politics and I didn’t care for it too much. All this stalling and Robert Rules of Order. I had learned about organizing, from Black people, Indigenous People, Brown people, even poor white people who understood what was going down. Now I was in a room with people who seemed like they were just trying to line their pockets or keep the power.
I was waiting for an organizer position with NRRC but when they finally offered it to me I turned it down. I disrupted my last meeting with them. I wrote a long letter about what I thought was happening. We left each other.
Barb Johnson
I had a one on one with Barb Johnson. I didn’t have much history with the City Councilwoman until around 2013 when I realized how much power over the political direction of the city she had, as council president. I tried to talk to her, to see if we had common interests. People have the same common interests — caring for their families. But we have a tale of two cities in Minneapolis. There are the white neighborhoods and the People of Color neighborhoods. Barb Johnson was definitely for her own community, the people that she grew up with and the elders who were her mentors. Her mother and her cousin all held powerful positions on the City Council. Her political standpoints were really close to Republican, even though she ran as a Democrat. I think the party affiliation in her family did switch. I think people sometimes hide behind political parties to cover up their individual unethical dealings.
It was the same day as a Bush Foundation Connect, and everyone told me, skip Barb and go to the BushCON, but I decided to meet with Barb. We met at the Banana Blossom on Lowry. She ordered for both of us some noodle Bun chicken stuff. It was delicious. I still order it to this day because of her. We were having this decent conversation until we started talking about violence and mental health. She said something about how people with mental illness shouldn’t have babies. She said poverty breeds mental illness. It wasn’t the point, but the way she said it that bothered me. I brought up white supremacy, as a cause of mental illness. Her face turned red. She didn’t feel like that was an issue in the neighborhood. She actually got up and walked out. To think that she held that seat for 20 years and couldn’t talk about white supremacy.
Getting involved with Environmental Justice
I was talking to Karen Monahan. I met her through Keith Ellison and Raymond Dehn as I was getting interested in Environmental Justice and electoral politics. I was interested in being on MN Pollution Control Board, but around 2015 they destroyed that board. People in my community were putting a lot of pressure on that board then. There were seats opening up. I thought maybe I could do more work on that board because they are the board who allow or reject permits. Majority of the time they were permit givers, rather than a protection agency. Karen Monahan suggested I would have more power on the Citizens Environmental Advisory Committee. I liked the idea. I had never heard of it before. I applied. I asked Keith if he would be a reference and Andrea Jenkins. I got the spot, as the representative for the 4th ward.
I had just moved from the 5th to the 4th ward. I was happy I was in this powerful ward. My Representative was Blong Yang, not Barb Johnson. I was mayoral-appointed. I didn’t have to come in through Barb. But she was the overseer of my application two years later.
Dead Ends and New Paths in Environmental Justice Work
The City Council was getting word of changes I was adding to agreements with electricity companies for a City Partnership. As the only Black woman on the Board, I came in with real hope. During the process I became emotionally drained. I felt like they were wasting my time. The city talks about how they can’t find people of color to sit on these boards, or vote, or participate in the process, but when we get there, there is such a big fight with them, over history, over what governmental responsibility is, over who can have what. People have already determined who deserves resources and who doesn’t without looking at the whole story. I find myself having to educate white people; white people crying, leaving the room because they don’t want to have a conversation about racism and what equity would look like.
I do my best to be as sincere and as un-egotistical as possible in these rooms. I genuinely just want things to be better for us. I want to do something and not just sit in a room following agendas and checking boxes. I found allies. Shalini Gupta. I loved her. I work with her still. We would work together in the meeting — like playing a little tennis game. I would say something and she would toss it back crafting a resolution to focus on equity work. We got a unanimous vote because nobody wanted to look like they were against it. They could not believe that some people of color came into the room and made things happen in just one day.
When I got on the board I was clear on my application that I wanted to focus on environmental justice. I got a lot of push back from white people who were far removed from environmental racism, and classism. They would say they didn’t have any power. I’d feel like, then what are you here for? Could you move out of the way? I brought up HERC — the garbage burner. That was a political no-no. Nobody wanted to have a conversation about it. Four years on the board and it never came up unless I brought it up. There was a guy in the room who worked for the County. We had Excel, Center Point, the Park Board, each holding a voting seat. There was somebody who works on wind, who had a company, and someone from the water department.
I’m scheduled to go talk to that Community Environment Board about the Upper Harbor Terminal. This is the kind of thing they are interested in: development, not environmental justice.
Juxtaposition Arts
The world will tell you are stupid if you don’t obey the process and the language. I grew up feeling like that. Roger and Diana of Juxtaposition Arts, recognized something in me before many people did. They valued me and they fed and nurtured what they saw in me.
I have been coming around this organization since I was thirteen, working with them since I was 21. When I was young and struggling with school, Roger would give me drops of knowledge and advice, in a youthful way that I could relate to. He told me “Go get your GED!”
I have done documentaries with Juxta, including one with TPT: Speak your Mind. We interviewed community members at the bus stops, talking about transit and about how we were interacting with each other. Juxta has always reached out to me when it comes to community engagement. Now when I work with them, they continue to value me as a person, which is very different from many jobs. I am grateful I have this opportunity, and sad that many people don’t. We give our best when people take care of us.
Tactical Urbanism
Today I do a teaching lab with Juxta about five hours a week. They know I don’t have the physical ability to work like able-bodied people do. I work with the kids on a visionary level. I work with kids, ages 15-21, identifying their community values. We check in when the kids come in, “Say one word about how you are feeling today.”We do something called tactical urbanism: creating spaces where there normally wouldn’t be one. Helping uplift spaces with little changes: adding benches, playing games. In New York City they put up chess tables — that is tactical urbanism.
We have been doing things like playing dominoes as a way of engaging people in the neighborhood. I’m the domino queen. That is literally part of my job, to sit outside and engage people through dominoes. We have this bike, it is purple and plays music. It can carry all of our activity stuff. We have a button maker, markers, chalk and a bubble machine sits on top of it. There’s lights.
We started this lab about five-six years ago. It is a job for the kids. They get paid $10-$11 an hour to do contemporary art, graphic design, and environmental design. My son is doing it. Their job is to use art as a tool of engagement in the community. We have clients who hire us to use our skills to conduct surveys. One of the clients who hired us, is the Upper Harbor Terminal Project.
Minneapolis City Council Meeting
Upper Harbor Terminal Project
UHTP is between Dowling and Lowry on the westside of the Mississippi River. The project includes housing and economic development along the river. Funding is allocated to fix damaged infrastructure: lighting, pipes, and streets.
If they had a community approach to the housing, and development I would support it, but I can’t support the project as it is. It didn’t take me long to get angry about it. I wasn’t afraid to call it environmental racism. I stopped collaborating with them and reentered the conversation as a community organizer, to push for changes.
This land is sacred Indigenous Dakota land. Spirit Island is not far away. That is one of the stories constantly missing from the development discussion of Upper Harbor Terminal. Reparations to the Dakota is not in the plans. The city colonizers took over the waterfalls which are the power of a community. They took the most precious of resources to build the city. This is how Minneapolis became a booming city, rich with the flour mills around the river. Now they have their hands in the cookie jar again, trying to get that last grab. No one is paying attention to the history of displacement, exploitation and terrorism. There’s blood on this land. That is what is most relevant to me.
Now everyone wants access to it. The community who live there have not had access to it at all. Black people in North Minneapolis have not had the opportunity to experience their natural resources. We have not been able to get close to the river because of the industry polluting the area, exploiting our air, water and soil, and blocking our access.
If I was in Charge of a Harber Development Project
It would look like a process with Indigenous tribes and Black people and Jewish people who stayed in North Minneapolis and Hmong people and Latino people and poor white people. It would look like a process that we continue to push and lead, that opens up the door for more healing in our communities, more agriculture based on indigenous principles, more community access for organizing and building green economies.
The time is now. We have this amazing opportunity to take an entire area, and clean it up, build housing for low-income people and cultures who have been displaced and gentrified. I would create policies that would protect our ownership and our rights to justice within our communities. Justice to me is about healing, telling the truth about our history, our goals and dreams moving forward together.
Alternatives to Policing
I am scared of the police. They have come to my windows, they have chased people on my block, they harm my children by playing cops and robbers in my neighborhood. They are extremely disrespectful, brutal, inappropriate and sometimes I feel as if many are mentally unstable. I fear for my life when I do this work.
I know you are not doing anything if you don’t have enemies. When you have enemies you have to take precautions for your family. I have been willing to speak up against police. Just recently a police officer maced kids at my son’s school. I went up to six police officers while they were talking and giggling by their cop cars after the incident, and told them they had no right to be in our neighborhoods using chemical warfare against teenagers and children. I said they would not do that to their kids in their suburbs. The cop said those suburban kids would not be in the streets fighting and I said no, they would just go in and shoot up the whole school. I refuse to allow the police to tell us a false narrative and act out their war video games on us.
Retaliation by Police
I feel some retaliation. I was delivered a ticket for disorderly conduct for my son, eight days after an incident at the school. Normally it would just be a child problem, but now the kids and parents are being incriminated so this School Resource Officer can cover his ass. They know I made complaints at the School Board, the police station, and alerted community activists and politicians. They are probably finding me a glitch in their agenda, keeping them from being able to do whatever they want to do.
While chasing a man on my block last December, the police totaled the back-end of my car. I was going through so much, watching my car get towed, receiving a bill for my car. My car was auctioned two weeks later. I had to fill out all this paperwork. Losing a car five days before Christmas was really hard. I was still paying on that car. I got a repo. That was six days after I was arrested for observing a police pursuit. I was taking down badge numbers.
They have been harassing me and my community. I’m not following them, their bullshit is following me.
Most recently they came to my daughter’s window. There is no justification for that behavior. They are not the dog catcher. Why would they be at my house at 1:00 in the morning, knocking on my daughter’s windows? My daughters are eleven and seven. They asked my daughters if anyone was home.
I feel as though they are waiting to catch me up. Activists around the Jamar Clark murder have had their breaks cut. I worry about them doing that to my car. I have an activist friend in the NAACP whose car just blew up. My breaks keep falling apart every two months. I am trying not to be paranoid, but I’m also trying to be vigilant and pay attention.
Safety for Women Without Police
We need an alternative to police. I am working with people on a new accountability system for our community. A lot of people say, “Don’t call the police,” but what’s the alternative? Domestic violence is 80% of the calls at night on the Northside. We need a neighborhood security system. How do we deal with the violence that we internalize within our communities, from a system that is beating our men at night, fondling them to look for drugs in their underwear, searching people’s cars illegally…
We have been speaking up about how the police treat us for forever. No-one believes a story unless someone from outside of the community tells it. Here I am speaking up about how the police are treating us and even my voice is not valued. They don’t value Black voices and they don’t value women.
Perspective
I’m 35 now. I’m in the middle of a lot of the work that I started seven years ago. I’m known as an environmental justice person, but I’m just a mom that wants fresh air for my children. I’m known for being an advocate. I wish people would see me as the mother who wants what we all say we want for our kids. We want them to be healthy! We want them to have opportunities. This should be a fight everybody can get behind.
I do feel like I’m not from this planet sometimes. Living in a twilight zone. People tell me to be careful. I feel like, if you think I’m being unsafe by speaking out, why don’t you join me so this is a community effort? I don’t think I’m doing anything different from what any other freedom fighter or revolutionary has done. I grew up watching my mom, learning that if you simply speak truth at tables and rooms of power, you are considered dangerous. If you don’t keep some of this information that you are privileged to have from sitting at these tables to yourself, you will also be blacklisted or marginalized.
Take a political risk. Become a problem for the establishment. There is a government effort to keep the power, but there is also a community effort that is just as passionate, building power and gaining power to protect the people.
I am in the battle. I understand that there are costs. No good deeds go unpunished. I have a guilty conscious and won’t be silent. If I witness injustice I have to say something. It tears me up inside, so I have learned to speak my mind. I don’t want to regret not speaking up. I have fears. I worry about making enemies — political, industrial, and policing enemies, but I’ve been through too much trauma and stress not to fight back. I can’t let somebody bully me, or my community. They will try to make us feel like it’s our fault. I watch other people watching. I can’t watch and not speak up.
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After the Murder of George Floyd and Minneapolis Uprising
Before the Uprising, racism was still a taboo word. You couldn’t call it out without white folks falling apart— but I did anyway. Even when my own people told me that white people won’t listen—that they are skilled in pulling and dragging you down—I still did it. I felt the urgency to argue and challenge and agitate white folks in my neighborhood; to force them to listen by calling out their hypocrisy and giving them a dose of our pain. They can’t stand to hear our anger and frustration. They just want us to shut up and take it.
This is why the Uprising happened. People were tired and angry of holding onto oppression and stress and white supremacy. It was like a bomb waiting to explode.
I knew in my heart that there we would be another Uprising. I saw it coming. Because of the ways in which the the powers oppressed our communities.
The first night of the Uprising— before it hit the Northside—I went with Stephanie Gasca over to South towards the 3rd precinct. That was before it was burnt down by white agitators and some validly-hurt younger people.
Since the Uprising, my organizing and activist life has sped up. The initiatives I was moving slowly on, have suddenly prioritized themselves. I had been working on environmental justice issues, which has a strong component of protecting people from bodily harm. Our focus is on protecting the earth and each other. We were already talking about holistic solutions to climate chaos, police brutality, racism, capitalism, toxins, healing… these are all part of our work. So the Uprising just created a greater urgency.
Organizing is the work some of us do behind and in front of the scenes. It’s about building the relationships with people, and holding those responsible for the exploitation of our communities. It’s also about building a new community system to protect each other. Laying out that system requires us to be accountable to each other because the white supremacist patriarchal system won’t retreat on its own.
We can’t wait until another person is killed, to act.
Minneapolis Interview Project Explained