In New Orleans, I lived about a mile and a half from the Mississippi River. I’d hear the train at night. Across the tracks was an itty-bitty farm with a couple cows, chickens and goats, where my daddy used to get our eggs. Beyond the farm was a winding road and a green hill. Beyond the hill was a levee and the River.
In Minneapolis I ride my bike to the Mississippi all the time. I’ve started going so regularly a friend of mine called it my church. Sometimes I weep about not having had this kind of relationship with the River as a child.
— Irna Landrum
Wresting Nature from White Supremacy
I turn 40 this year. Home is a big question mark for me. I have lived in Minnesota seventeen years, but I always say home is New Orleans. Recently I have begun to think of my mother’s rural hometown–Vacherie, Louisiana—as mine.
About 5,0000 people live in Vacherie. A main feature of the town, are large plantations: Whitney, Laura, Oak Alley, and in the next Parish, Armant. Oak Alley is the biggest. It is set back from the road, and lined with gorgeous old southern oak trees. People travel far and wide to visit it. Whenever we visited my Aunt, I knew we were close, when we passed Oak Valley. There would be a charter bus in front and people with cameras clicking photos. Always a weird thing.
As a child I didn’t have any interest in visiting the plantations. From a young age I knew about chattel slavery. I had Black history in my church, in Vacation Bible School, and at this day camp I went to. I was raised with a political awareness of my Blackness.
Now I feel like I need to go. I have decided White Supremacy doesn’t get to steal from me the land where my grandmother was little. Her plantation was right by the Mississippi River. Laura and Armant are plantations my family lived on. My mother, born 1953, and my brother born 1971, both spent time on plantations. I was born in 1979, the first in that branch of the family who never lived on one.
We are a family that doesn’t talk about the past a whole lot. My grandmother died when I was 21. She was hard of hearing, grumpy, mean and impatient. Others in my family were deeply wounded by her hardness. When I knew her, she lived in a trailer on a back road. She was one of 9-10 children, most of whom were dead by the time I was born. I grew up with her and two Great Aunts–her sisters. They both had sharp tongues, but were known for sweet and tender dispositions. I wonder what happened to make my grandmother such a hard person. I need to go to the land and see if I can find out.
Growing up in New Orleans
I was born in the Charity Hospital of New Orleans—the big free hospital, which is no longer open. My parents met at Avondale Shipyards, in New Orleans metropolitan area, Jefferson Parish. One worked as a pipefitter and the other as a painter. My mom moved from Vacherie to Avondale to be with my Dad. I grew up with my mom and dad, and an older and younger brother.
I went to an elementary school that was pretty racially mixed, Black and White, with some Vietnamese kids, a few Latinos. We were all bussed. It wasn’t close enough for anybody to walk or bike. I was friends with three girls–my White friend Michelle, my Latina friend Maggie and my Vietnamese friend Vi. My mom called us the PUSH coalition.
I liked my own company and the company of my books. That stood out in my neighborhood. I tested pretty early into the gifted and talented program. There were no secrets about how they tracked us. We were in the same class, getting tracked.
In fifth grade I had this teacher who was very proud of his Irish heritage. He had a temper, but he liked to teach at a high level. That was good for me. We were reading The Tolkien Trilogy, Red Badge of Courage, Great Expectations. I got into YA fiction before it was in my age range.
By middle school, I was reading VC Andrews. I went through a Stephen King phase. In school we read books that had been made into movies and then got to watch the movies in class. An exception was Gone With The Wind, which we saw in class without reading. Over the summer I read all 1000 pages. I liked the way Scarlett O’hara defied gender conventions. She was not a person with a good reputation. That’s what stood out when I was thirteen.
The following summer I spent reading the Black classics, preparing to attend Xavier Prep, an all-girl, Black, Catholic blue ribbon high school. Dad had picked out Xavier Prep for me when I was seven. He had a massive stroke when I was in 8th grade. He was given only a year to live. He survived through my freshman year of college, but all through high school there were these medical bills piling up. That was the big feature of my high school years. I would tell my mom: “Just send me to public school!” but she would say, “Your dad wants you to go to Xavier Prep.” I was half covered by a scholarship. My older brother Gregory worked at Wendy’s for minimum wage and contributed to my tuition.
Gregory served in the Dad’s Club at my high school, and completed all the required parent volunteer hours. I played the alto saxophone. The High school band in New Orleans is an elite institution. Band members are as popular as football players. We perform for Mardi Gras in marches that are six miles long. People liked watching the Xavier Prep band: a hundred girls united. My brother marched with us, carrying a drum when a girl got tired.
Gregory has been an adult for a long time. He is my favorite person. I have seen him cry two times: at my dad’s funeral, and when I went away to college. My dad couldn’t make the trip, so my brother stayed behind to take care of him. They were all weeping when I walked out the door.
HBCU in Virginia
I always knew I was expected to go to college. That was my role, to lift the family out of poverty. A lot of pressure for a child. I was diagnosed with migraines at age seven….
I applied to five colleges, including Georgetown University. I wanted to go there because I was planning to be Speaker of the House, or some shit like that. I got accepted everywhere, but Georgetown would not give me a scholarship. I was offered full scholarships everywhere else. Hampton University, a historically Black College in Hampton, Virginia, had recruited at my school. I was seventeen years old. When I was choosing schools, the Hampton deadlines were earliest, so I chose Hampton.
I majored in Political Science. In New Orleans there was a political scientist who was always on the news, breaking it down. I had been watching elections since I was twelve, when there was a governor’s contest between Edwin Edwards, a crook, and David Duke, the klansman. I was deeply concerned about who our governor was going to be. There was a push to get Black people to support the crook. In the 1996 election, I was in a mock debate. By sixteen I was already well versed on the issues.
Hampton has a reputation for being assimilationist. They have been in the news lately for their hair and dress codes. You couldn’t have dreadlocks in the Business School. The President owns a Pepsi bottling franchise. We had a freshman curfew that could be imposed on the entire dorm if there was one infraction. I didn’t have the freedom I thought I would have when I went off to college.
But there was also a lot to love. It was on the water. We had an international staff. There was a freshman step show in which we competed, representing our dorms. I went to every football game, mostly to watch the band. I did so much theater that people thought I was a major. I was assistant director for our production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula—a tale of good and evil. It left me fascinated with vampires for a long time. The theater director, Mr. Patton, chose me as his stage manager because, he said,“People like being around you.”
I worked on a lot of political campaigns. The dean of our college was running for mayor of Hampton. I worked on her campaign, and with the NAACP on voter registration. The 2000 election was the first I voted in. We were up all night, to see who won. That was devastating.
When I graduated from college I returned back home. I began paying more attention to local politics. Being a college-educated person in a place where not many people have degrees, everyone thinks you know everything. I often found myself explaining things to my elders. There was a woman who wanted to fight the school suspension of her daughter. The teacher had a teacher union rep, and she wanted a rep too, so she asked me. I was there to make sure they didn’t talk over her head.
I ran for school board rep, because this community coalition thought I should. There was a member they wanted unseated, who always ran unopposed. I wasn’t interested in it, but I said, alright, put me down. I withdrew my name from the race at the last minute because of a leader of the coalition, a man with a good reputation who was supposed to be mentoring me through the process, was sexually harassing the shit out of me—at 22. He wanted me to feel like I owed him something.
I needed a job. I did some teaching at the high school I graduated from. I was not qualified or good at teaching. But I was smart. Black people think if you are smart you can do anything. I was a good mentor to the girls; that was it.
Getting to Minneapolis
I knew this family who had a childcare center not far from my house. They were opening up another center in St. Paul. They offered to train me if I moved to Minnesota.
I lived for a few months in Champlin before moving into a house the family owned in North Minneapolis, with the children of this family. My whole social, spiritual and work life was dependent on this one family. The childcare center was in Brooklyn Park. The kids in the center were mostly Black, even if their parents were not. Lots of biracial kids. One of my first impressions of Minnesota: there were so many interracial couples.
I began going to an Evangelical Church with the family. It was a large congregation—1,000 people—in Brooklyn Center. They didn’t have a choir, they had a worship team. They didn’t have an organist, they had a full band and a projector screen with lyrics on it. They had chairs instead of pews. The pastor would say, “We are going to pray in our heavenly language” and they all started praying in tongues! I’d never seen anything like it.
It was a mixed-race church. The two pastors were White. The parishioners were White and Black, with a sprinkling of Native folks and a good number of Nigerians and Liberians. People always thought I was from Africa. I was like—have you never seen dark-skinned Black people before? I figured out that White folks were trying to exceptionalize me as a Black person,“You’re not regular Black.”
The Church I went to in New Orleans was Black Baptist. My family was very religious. We went to church three times a week. I did my first public speaking in church. I memorized things, wrote my own addresses. The first one rhymed. The vibe at my home church was like the church at the end of the Color Purple. There were five or so big families. When I was fourteen the church split. So then we were even smaller and dustier. We’d sing slow spirituals. The pastor came over for dinner on Sundays.
I came up to Minneapolis just a few weeks before Paul Wellstone died. I remember that rippling through my new community, but I didn’t know why. The politics of that church was so conservative, but they were also the people who took care of me.
I found there was something in the mysticism of the theology that I liked–but then they believed everything that was not about Jesus, was witchcraft…
I went to Israel with the Church. It was my first time out of the country. I realized that all over the world, the people on the bottom were Black. Racism was a global thing. They tried to tell me it was OK for these brown people to be suffering because they were Muslim.
I had taken up with a poet. We were having a love affair. We had a threesome. I went to church the next morning without going home. I sat in the back of the church and did not feel guilty. It was delightful.
My boss found out about the poet. I didn’t lie or pretend to be sorry. I was grown. She threatened my employment. She prayed for my deliverance. The church had a service to deliver me from sin. I was supposed to tell them about every sexual partner, every fornication and they would cast them out. One woman said she would cast out my lesbianism—I thought, How does she know? She must have holy ghost magic…. Later I found out it was gaydar.
This lesbian with a buzz cut came to the church with her partner. They prayed over the couple to cast out their demons and convert. They told them they could not live together anymore. The partner moved next door.
I think in the English language we have insufficient words for love and relationships. We do break up with friends. I had a make-up break up relationship with a woman at the Church.
I broke up with the Church in 2007, after a wedding I went to with a boyfriend. I was in the wedding, going up the aisle, and people were gossiping about my relationship. That was it.
I moved to the southside and went to this church over on Lake Street not far from my house–Christ Church International. There was a book that had come out about the epidemic of unchurched youth. One of the reasons was that youth felt churches cared about winning souls and not about them. Another reason was homophobia, and another was conservative politics. So this church was trying to address these issues, though it was still a conservative congregation. I got sucked into the leadership. They were a mixed congregation of young Black and African people and older White people. The homophobia in the church was more casual.
I fell deeply in love with a woman. I invited my pastor into a conversation about it, sent him an email on national coming out day, 2011 or 2012. I said, “I don’t need counseling. What I want to know is I can still be your parishioner and your friend.” He did not respond. I stopped going.
That was the last church that I was a member.
Daily Kos
I was in a nasty depression. My friend said that some of my sadness was that I was an artist and I wasn’t behaving like one. She invited me to her house in Tampa.
I had gotten involved in local politics after a meeting with Melvin Carter, when he was a city councilperson. I was on one of the civic engagement councils in the Rondo and Summit area, working on community policing and leveraging power for folks of color. I worked there from 2006 – December 2013.
In 2015 a friend pushed me to apply to the Givens Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Writers. I got into their six-month program. It was amazing to have my writing respected by people I respected. We recently had a reading, just so we could get back together.
Soon after that, I applied for the Kairos Fellowship. The application was long. I started it, but then wrote in and said, “I don’t have time to complete all the steps. “The director wrote back, “How about if I give you an extension?” She gave me two or three extensions. Now that director is one of my best friends.
Kairos was looking to create more pathways for people of color to do digital political organizing. People have to be hired by an organization to be included in the fellowship. Then Kairos provides a ton of support for fellows, hoping to keep them in that organization and in the field.
I was hired by Daily Kos in 2016. I work on the internet. We report the news and give you something to do about it. We have a content division and an activism department. I work in the activism department as a Campaign Director. We run campaigns with the Daily Kos Liberation League. We run campaigns within the news cycle and the election cycle, but we also work long-term with marginalized communities on voting rights and mass incarceration. We are the social justice track.
My major campaign in 2018-2019 had been census 2020, getting appropriations for that, making sure there is not a citizenship question. Some of my other big fights have been health care. My boss saw that I had written on social media about how Obama Care is the reason my mother is alive; and he put me on the Health care campaign.
I’ve started dipping my toes into the move to end cash bail. My colleagues have worked on ending the death penalty, private detention, denying the Queens Headquarter site to Amazon, and a no-tech for ICE campaign, targeting companies like Amazon that provide tech to ICE.
And we do it all on the internet. We live in all parts of the country. Our headquarters are in Oakland California. We make most of our decisions based on metrics. I hate that part. That is why I am glad I have colleagues who love it.
Most of my colleagues are White. It’s very important to have people of color in these spaces. I once wrote about Jordan Davis, son of Lucy McBath who was murdered by the police. I asked readers to resist the urge to talk about what a good kid he was, because no kid deserves to die at the hands of the police. My colleagues kept on coming up with titles that would pull White heart strings. I said, “I need to see that you actually read what I wrote.”
It’s hard. You want people to read your work, and at the same time, be able to decenter whiteness. I fight the hierarchy of click-bait, but no matter how hard I work to decenter Trump, he is the topic that gets the most readers….
I have been a leader in our organization’s diversity and equity work. I create a weekly alternative version of our Daily Kos Recommended Email, which a digest of high-traffic stories. My Daily Kos Liberation League, shares important stories focused on social justice that may get buried in the wall-to-wall Trump coverage. In August, to commemorate Black August, I focused on mass incarceration and detention. During Pride, I did a lot of LGBTQ content, and one week focused just on Trans issues. I don’t rely on traffic to measure worthiness, because what I am doing is filling gaps—what is more important than Trump’s latest tweets.
I also work with Kairos to choose and mentor new fellows. Sometimes what I am doing is getting the organization to slow down a bit, to realize that if you want to invest in folks of color you have to take the time. We have big ideas about developing new technologies and metrics that promote equity. Technology is racist. Snapchat, for example, lightens the skin color of people of color. And “value neutral” metrics are racist. They can easily replicate systems that serve primarily upper middle class White people. We are trying to reshape digital organizing.
Florida’s Amendment 4
I worked with the Coalition in Florida to pass Amendment 4—restoring voting rights for former felons. From an organizing perspective, we wanted to talk about Florida as a swing state, how it would shift the balance of power if we re-enfranchised people, flipping Florida to blue. But the coalition in Florida—led by impacted people—had a bi-partisan message. They called their coalition Second Chances. From my perspective, they should not have lost the first chance. It was a learning experience—thinking about when it is important to have a strong message, and when it is important to have a winning strategy. Sometimes I get frustrated with milquetoast messages—and this was the most milquetoast message.
We didn’t drive the narrative, but we got the outcome. A million people now eligible to vote. If we hadn’t followed the lead of those who were impacted, we might not have won. When, afterward, the legislature moved to create a poll tax, we were instructed by the coalition not to use the term “poll tax.” Too incendiary. They did not want to talk about it as a racial justice issue because they wanted White retirees to vote with them.
Daily Kos has a list of 3 million people. We can give groups a real boost. But we have become aware, we need to follow the lead of those on the ground.
Because Daily Kos is a news platform, I have written 25 stories, though that is not my job. We send small teams to cover events. I participated in a small team, to cover the She the People presidential forum, focused on women of color and women of color issues.
The organization sent a small team to North Dakota to report on indigenous voting disenfranchisement on reservations. We raised about 750,000 dollars for that campaign.
Stacy Abrams’ Campaign
It was harder to sell the organization on the idea of sending a team of Black women to Georgia to cover the Stacy Abrams campaign. Once the North Dakota trip happened we asked again. They couldn’t say no.
Kos endorses candidates and raise money for them. We don’t usually endorse during primaries, but the Black women on staff pushed hard for us to endorse Stacy Abrams in the primary for the gubernatorial race in Georgia. She was poised to make history as the first Black woman governor of Georgia, and the first in the United States. But she was at an initial disadvantage in the primary, and we needed bold action to boost her campaign.
We had raised a million dollars for a White man, John Ossof in a Georgia Congressional district that had been a GOP stronghold. Our community was less enthusiastic about Abrams, even though she came within striking distance of returning Georgia to Democrats.
As Black women on staff, we made sure we had constant coverage of her campaign. We knew it was going to be a huge story no matter what happened. The fact that Kemp never resigned from secretary of state before running for governor meant that voter suppression would be a huge issue.
I went to Georgia with a small group of other Black women, days before the election. I met with Nse Ufot, Executive Director of the New Georgia Project, registering voters. We had the stories we wanted to write in our heads. We wanted to talk about voter suppression, but when we got there people in Georgia just wanted to talk about Stacy Abrams. The tactical precision of the campaign was awe inspiring. They were focused on registering new voters. Abrams talked about not shrinking her Blackness.
On election day, New Georgia Project, a civic engagement organization Abrams founded, now headed by Nse Ufot, had bands, food, people on call, to help people stay in line to vote.
Nse developed an app so people could easily look at candidates’ voting records. They taught people about the importance of the Secretary of State position. Now they are having a contest to create video games to teach people about the civic process.
Jon Ossoff lost the Congressional seat. Now there is a Black woman in that seat. Lucy McBath. McBath’s son was killed by a white man who thought his music was too loud. She ran for Congress and won. I actually did an on-camera interview with Jon Ossoff. He was a delight. He wanted to make sure people did not attribute Lucy McBeth’s victory to him.
I did a report-back on the Abrams campaign here in Minneapolis, and created a podcast that has been widely circulated. We may be doing more of that.
Writing on the Horizon
I am working with Daily Kos’s nonprofit affiliate, Prism, to clean up my own writing skills. I will be doing a storytelling workshop with CANDO. People keep telling me I should write a book. Friends are conspiring, finding cottages for me to write in, and suggesting people in publishing I should work with, so I can write a memoir, about a queer, Black, lefty, who loves god.
A Black woman who is writing about Black women in the midwest, asked me to be a contributor to her book. When people talk about the heartland they are never talking about us…
And I want to write about how we claim the natural environment from White Supremacy—for us.
A few years ago I tried to take my family on a walk in a nature preserve. We drove down a boulevard of trees. My nieces kept saying. “Are we close?” I said, “Yes baby, we are close.” I turned off the road and it suddenly got very quiet, lush and green. There was some sun peaking through the leaves. It felt so good to me. I felt my chest opening up.
I turned and looked at my mother, a 65 year old Black women, one of the first to be bused to desegregate the schools, a woman who experienced a level of racism that I never have. She looked terrified. I said “Let’s just try it.” She said, “No. We have to go.”
The long history of lynching has made the woods a place of terror for my mom.
On a more recent visit to New Orleans, I took my nieces to the river. It was hot. There is a hill to the top of the levee and a paved path on top. They were complaining: “I’m so hot and tired!” I said, “Let’s race to the top.”
What kid does not like a good race?
When we got to the top, there was the River. We sat down on the concrete wall. It was their first time seeing it, not from a bridge. It was a beautiful thing, watching their faces go from exhaustion to delight.