A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota

INTRODUCTION

Sun Yung Shin

You hold in your hand a book of visions. Memories. True stories. Shock. Grief. Dreams. Activism. Recognition. A call for us to listen and learn about one another’s real lives in Minnesota.

It is time for this book. It is always a good time for the truth, for those who have often been spoken for and about to speak for themselves. The voices in this anthology provide a forum: a multifaceted, dazzling view of life in the state beyond the stereotypes, under Minnesota Nice, and into the possibilities for our future.

People of color are the fastest growing segment of Minnesota’s population. But is Minnesota a state that understands race? What does it mean to be raced? Although race is not a biological or genetic reality, it nonetheless continues to be very real in terms of its influence on the lives of Indigenous people and people of color. What are those effects, and what do they mean for people’s lives?

This anthology begins to answer those questions, but it is not meant to address every aspect of race and culture in the state. Nor are the contributors meant, as a group, to represent or speak for every ethnicity and racial group in Minnesota. Not only would that be nearly impossible, it is not desirable. This is merely a small, but powerful, selection. As the first book of its kind in Minnesota, it is one wave in a larger movement toward equality. It is here that those in the minority stand in the majority, under the spotlight. Their stories are front and center. Please consider them on their own terms, and know that each author is but one individual. One essay by one Minnesotan connecting with another Minnesotan at a time, book in hand, words on the page.

These contributors may, however, speak with the collective, intergenerational wisdom (and grief, and loss, and strength, and joy) of one or more communities. All of us alive today are the product of our ancestors’ survival and regeneration. When we work for freedom, we stand on the shoulders, sacrifices, activism, reflection, self-knowledge, and persistence of those who come before us.

These writers have stepped forward and have been included here because they are established or emerging creative writers who have long been committed to writing and working creatively on issues of race, culture, and social justice. Struggling together toward a fair and vibrant civil society in Minnesota—a goal which must include the naming of and dismantling of racism. The writers are also activists and educators, and they fulfill many other roles in their/our communities. This is a book of stories, not of policy recommendations or ideologies, though at least one contributor has a master’s degree in public policy. This is not a book of theory or of research, though many have advanced degrees and several are professors. While these pieces are crafted with fine literary skill, it could be argued that this anthology is more in the spirit and lineage of oral tradition, of handing down knowledge and values through stories.

I love a good anthology because it can be like a circle—everyone is equal. Yes, there is an order from front to back, but it need not be read in that order. It is completely up to the reader, and no single voice carries more weight than another. This is a radical equality. Some of the contributors are well known nationally, and others are beginning their writing careers. No matter—you will find yourself entering the world of each essay fully, alive to the unique sensitivities, curiosity, emotions, and intelligence of its author.

It is hard to talk about race across racial lines. Race is ingrained in societal systems and institutions, conferring a system of advantages upon members of the dominant group. This means that people’s realities, their lived experiences, differ. Race is often invisible to those who benefit, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly. It is entirely visible to those who do not benefit.

No one wants to make an observation or share an injury regarding their race and have it be dismissed, misunderstood, mocked, or worse. No one wants to feel that they are participating, even passively, in the oppression or harm of others. No one wants to believe that inequality persists and limits children’s futures and abilities to fulfill their potential.

There are some hard truths, though, that we must understand and agree upon. Race was invented by white people, Europeans colonizing the globe, as a pseudoscientific justification for the subjugation of people of color. Race theory and racecraft were often paired with Christianization missions to subdue, convert, assimilate, or simply destroy Indigenous people, who were figured as heathens who needed saving and who were not worthy of the bountiful natural resources of the New World, of Africa, of Asia. Historians of race have researched, documented, and eloquently described this history. As too is the atrocity that was the mid-Atlantic slave trade and the vicious institution of chattel slavery as practiced in the American South. As too is the resulting legal abolition of slavery but the evolution of peonage and other systems that kept African Americans in bondage long after Emancipation and the end of the Civil War.

There is a tremendous amount of scholarship, activism, education, and community work being done across the country and in Minnesota to help us recognize and dismantle racism. Because understanding race and racism is not merely about mapping the contours of the lives of people of color, this work also involves understanding whiteness and the maintenance of often invisible systems of white privilege. A great place to start learning that history is The History of White People by Dr. Nell Irvin Painter. White American scholars Robin DiAngelo, Joe Feagin, and many others are doing fascinating work on what they are calling white fragility and white racial frames, respectively.

This book, though, offers different insights. Most people of color in the United States have to think about race every day, multiple times a day. We are constantly negotiating our bodies and our selves, our identities, in a racialized society. How we look, and who our people are or are assumed to be, are relentlessly measured against a white ideal and mostly found inferior. We are nearly invisible—or painted negatively as criminals, victims, charity cases without history or agency—in the news, arts, literature, curricula, political platforms. We are the butts of jokes. We are racially profiled. We fear a backlash when anyone who looks like us or could be mistaken for us commits an infraction or crime. We know others may question our legitimacy to be in a specific space or job—or even to be in this country. We experience professional isolation. Those of us who are in the middle class or hold white-collar jobs are usually one of the few—or the only—people of color in the room, in the institution.

We also know there are many white people who work and have worked in solidarity with us. There are white people who see their liberation as tied to ours.

As residents of a state and territory that is wealthy in resources (Indigenous knowledge shared with early European traders; abundant waterways, forests, minerals, soil; hardworking immigrants in every generation) and has been an economic and quality-of-life success story in so many ways, Minnesotans cannot continue to bury the lede in the national conversation about us. Some progress has been made in Minnesota toward eliminating racial disparities, but things have gotten worse in some notable ways, including racial diversity among K-12 teachers, poverty rates for children of color, access to fresh food and exercise and play, declining real wages, and job security for the parents and caregivers of those children. The children of color growing up in Minnesota today are subject to those limiting beliefs, often unacknowledged and unbidden, held by those in charge of their education, health care, and physical safety in public and private spaces. Shortages of school counselors, teachers, mental health care providers, and so on impact most those with the least. People are advocating and mobilizing for their rights and for the rights of common people (not the owning class, the 1 percent) every day. People resist, build capacity personally and organizationally, and effect change.

One bedrock principle of a democracy is that there should be safeguards against tyranny of the majority. What is just and fair for the whole society must be enacted and upheld, not what always benefits the majority just because of numbers. Because minority groups everywhere are vulnerable, the U.S. Constitution guarantees the rights of the minority. Racism has been a tyrant in America and there is no excuse for its continued existence. To banish this tyrant, we need understanding. We need to peel back any convenient myths and stereotypes and be real with one another. In her now-famous and oft-quoted TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Nigerian American novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said, The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. None of us should have one story of what it means and is to be Indigenous, Black, Vietnamese, Guatemalan, Iranian, and so on. Whether in Minnesota or elsewhere. The footprint of the United States is too vast for any of us to set aside this responsibility and opportunity.

A society that systematically suppresses the stories and wisdom of certain groups cannot make the best decisions for a shared future. We need a future in this state that leaves no one out. We are interconnected, we are interdependent. In the long run, on our earth, we will thrive or fail together. Those of us who have not always had places at the table, so to speak, want to be heard and understood. Naturally, we all want to have a say in what happens to us and around us. This value, this commitment to free speech, is, of course, in the Bill of Rights, and it is a requirement for the flourishing and maintenance of any true democratic society.

In the transracial and transnational adoption community, some of us have adopted a motto, Nothing about us without us, Nihil de nobis, sine nobis, which was used widely in the United States, first by disability activists in the 1990s, and in Central Europe before that. In the introduction to an anthology I co-edited with Jane Jeong Trenka and Chinyere Oparah, Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, we explained that we transracial and transnational adoptees have long been subject to research that has objectified us and obscured our adult perspectives. Policies and laws, and media reportage, continue to proliferate without our input, although, through persistent and strategic activism, we are changing the dynamic. We are speaking for ourselves, are representing ourselves in media and in courts of law, and are no longer silent, invisible except as objects of study or as children complicit in kinship and child welfare discourse that silences us as adult agents. Despite conflicts, setbacks, and ongoing struggles, I have seen great progress and change, from margin to center. Like many of us, I believe in stories and in the bone-deep knowledge of those inside a certain experience, whether that is race, gender, dis/ability, family system, and so on.

Of course, the struggle for justice never ends. We will not dismantle racism and then be done. Power will always seek to justify, defend, and maintain itself, in all its manifestations. That is the struggle for survival. Adapt, or perish, whether as an individual or as a group. We are facing this challenge on our planet today. As we seek justice—and survival of our, and many other, species—we must acknowledge the importance of our identities, which often flow from the positions into which we are born and the positions into which we are placed by the powers that be.

Our identities are also made out of our innate material. Our genes, our physical inheritances, our intergenerational embodied memories. Our identities in society are intersectional—profoundly overlapping and complicated. This is not a new concept, and it is one that must always be addressed when we are parsing out threads of meaning and powerful constructs such as race and the realities that racialized policies and relationships engender and maintain. None of us is just one thing, and each axis is dynamic and interacts with the others. No one is white and also not, for example, a woman, or a member of the LGBTQ or gender-nonconforming community, or poor, or rich, or disabled, or Muslim, or Buddhist, or atheist, or a member of any other in/voluntary category that may carry with it advantages and disadvantages.

Race is certainly not always the most important dimension of our identities, but in Minnesota, and in the United States, it is undeniably important. Too often, in a split second, it can become a life-or-death matter. It can determine much of our destinies, our movements, our opportunities, our vulnerabilities. It has determined who has been taken from their families and sent to assimilationist and abusive boarding schools, who has been allowed to work and for how long, who has been allowed to live in certain neighborhoods, who is stopped and frisked, who has access to financing and opportunity and good education and safety. The structures built in the past live with us, just as systems we build now will exist after us.

So what does racial progress look like? An elimination of differences? Certainly not. We will have to co-create the future. A future not of tolerance but of a kind of pluralism that thrives because of fairness, a fairness that comes from a truth and reconciliation process that leaves no people’s stories untold. This may or may not be progress, depending on where you stand. I’ve been reminded many times that Indigenous people and nations do not as a whole want social progress, do not want new laws and new policies. They want broken treaties to be revisited and finally upheld. They want stolen lands and resources returned. They want their legal sovereignty and rights upheld, as do all nations and peoples. Indigenous peoples have and can and do speak for themselves, so I will stop there, but it is a good reminder that there is radical diversity within the world of people who are non-white.

But that term—non-white—is offensive language to many. Non-white both ignores the radical diversity among people and defines people in the negative. Interracial and interethnic conflict and enmity among non-whites can and does exist in U.S. communities and in countries and regions beyond the borders of the United States. And it must be said that the term people of color, which I am using in this introduction for consistency, is a politicized category, not all purpose, not embraced by all, useful in some contexts but not in others, and will no doubt eventually be replaced entirely by one or more new terms.

Language is charged. Language is self-representation. Language is one of the sets of DNA of a culture. (While all of the essays in this anthology are in English, I want us to keep in mind that the United States has no official language. This is significant, an opening, a kind of flexibility.) What we call each other can show respect or disrespect. In this introduction I have chosen to use Indigenous rather than a variety of other terms that can depend on context because that is what the contributors used in their essays. Contributors have decided for themselves about the capitalization of B/black and W/white.

Culture is human nature. We created the culture of racism and we can unmake it, we can transform old ways into new and better ways. We can recall old ways that worked well and bring them into the present. We have choices. As the centenarian civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs liked to say, everything changes and we can’t get stuck in old ideas. Racism is an old idea. A tradition that harms children is not worth conserving or continuing. Life is wealth and relationships are wealth. Domination, subjugation, exploitation, and the luxury of looking away is a poverty of the soul. But we have choices. We can learn and grow.

Racism continues to divide us as a nation as we have too often failed, collectively, to address the issues of the past and to seek truth in the present. Many readers may notice that Americans are having more, and more urgent, conversations—and many highly visible public demonstrations—about race in this country, as there is a renewed critical mass of citizens and groups and leaders who are unafraid to speak the truth about these disparities and about the very real suffering of and harsh punishments meted out to certain communities and groups.

These essays are offered as contributions to that conversation. They are intended to enlarge our understanding of, and deepen our connections to, one another. These writers are here to feed our spirits, if we let them. As readers and listeners we have an important job to do, a powerful and empowering attitude to assume: Tell me the truth of the matter. When I don’t understand, I will not protest or judge or correct, I will simply listen harder. I am here to recognize you as my fellow human being with a story.

The contributors have given us a splendid gift, the gift of touching another human being’s inner reality, behind masks and veils and politeness. They are bringing us generously into their experiences, experiences that shape Minnesota, experiences that we must understand if we are to come together in real relationships across sometimes very difficult borders. We can read their stories and leave each one with a deeper, more complex understanding of how race and culture are lived in Minnesota—and better prepared for the conversations and changes ahead.

The tragic story of American racism has continued to unfold in Minnesota and across the country as we put the final touches on this book. We cannot list all the names of all the people of color and Indigenous people, in our community and elsewhere, who have suffered and died because of the violent, hate-filled, or grossly negligent actions of individuals whose culpability is being evaluated as I write—and no doubt as you read. Good people of all backgrounds want those individuals to be brought to justice. We want our society to be utterly transformed.

Activists and artists and cultural and community workers and people of conscience continue to organize, struggle, and sacrifice in order to right the historical wrongs in our society. Racism, like any deeply embedded system of privilege, won’t be dismantled in one fell swoop. But good people need to take action continuously, and I would say daily, until it is dismantled. Because lives are at stake, every day: on sidewalks, in doctor’s offices, in the waiting room of the bank, and most importantly, in classrooms.

I believe we can do it. I know I am not alone in this conviction.

People of color and Indigenous people know with a specific, agonizing intimacy that racism was constructed and upheld by white society (in spaces such as the police precinct, the courtroom, school board meetings, newsrooms, Hollywood studios, mortgage loan offices, and everywhere power has resided in America) in order to confer unearned advantages on white people. It’s really as simple as that. It’s not a law of nature. It’s culture. It’s something we made, invented, maintained. Since it was made, like a vast machine, it can be unmade, and it must. We—that is to say, good people—are not asking that every bias and prejudice be rooted out and destroyed or transformed; we are not the thought police. We want truth to see the light of day; we want a fair system.

Niceness is not fairness.

Peace (or the absence of open conflict) is not justice.

Comfort is not guaranteed.

Until we dismantle this system, we will insist, in words and actions: Change is necessary. We offer this book to speed that change.

FEAR OF A BLACK MOTHER

Shannon Gibney

Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color, a young adult novel. Her writing has appeared in Al Jazeera America, The Crisis, Gawker, and other venues. A Bush Artist and McKnight Writing Fellow, she lives with her husband and children in Minneapolis.

My family and I stroll into the co-op on a Saturday night, looking for some fresh fruit, milk, and meat. The grocery is a seven-minute drive from our house, and its patrons reflect the solidly middle-class, hippie character of the neighborhood right next to ours. The co-op skews a bit whiter than the South Minneapolis communities it is part of, mostly because so many people of color are priced out by its high-quality, organic products.

Over there, I say, pointing to a large bushel of peaches to the right of the entrance.

My husband and I start heading toward the succulent fruits, but our two-and-a-half-year-old son, inspired by his ongoing quest for refined sugar, heads in the exact opposite direction. On the other side of the checkout lines sits a quiet, fastidiously organized, delicious paradise of pie and cake slices of every variety, made only from the finest ingredients, individually packed in plastic containers. My son knows this because on the way out of the store, my husband and I often can’t resist admiring the delicate confections and, on occasion, buying one