Building Community as Common+Unity
I was not prepared to write this as my June message. But being prepared is a luxury not afforded to many of our neighbors. Life lived in fear and uncertainty is a traumatic toll that is far too common for brown, black, people of color and indigenous people. It's been the privilege of people who like me as white, to have these times come and go. Something, perhaps we can wait out, or in the best of times, can prepare for and shield ourselves. While I have experienced the trauma of loss and death, and I have experienced the shame of poverty, these experiences have not been magnified by systems that oppressed or sought to injure me personally. I have had the privilege of being lifted by my community, held up and carried when I needed it the most. For that I am both grateful and aware in my complicity in not doing enough to make that same level of support available to all people period. So, while I have held these experiences in common - I must speak up more loudly for those who do not receive the same support - to create the unity in community.
Pre-Covid-19 I had extended my services and support to our council member, Andrea Jenkins, to help grow the business efforts within the city’s planning for 38 Thrive – a community driven plan for investing in the 38thStreet Corridor. As a cultural corridor, this area is perhaps one of starkest pictures of east-west divide in our city in such a short distance. The freeway’s placement as a means of creating that divide is well documented. The city’s ugly history of red-lining is well documented in creating the stark disparities. The task at hand of removing these disparities has been made even more visible with the location of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police officers at 38th and Chicago.
And as I shared with our council member’s office last Saturday, Covid-19 may have been an obstacle to my action on building business support with our neighbors and communities on the east side of 35w, but it also is a reflection of my privilege to “let it wait.”
The nearly nine minutes that George Floyd suffered under the knee of an officer meant to protect and serve him came after a business staff member’s call regarding a possible counterfeit bill. I am a businessperson. Butter Bakery has been passed counterfeits. I do worry about counterfeits. I have never expected that by calling a police officer onto the scene that deadly force would be used for a counterfeit bill. I do now. I will ask my staff to be better prepared for these situations to assure no one is injured for mistakenly (or not) shorting my business of cash.
The fear and worry I felt overnight on Friday and Saturday for safety of my business on Nicollet Avenue and the residents who live above it, including my own staff, must be my wake-up call to the daily fear and worry that follows our brown, black, people of color and indigenous people every day. If I am to be the community builder I’ve set out to be, if Butter is going to be the community building business it pledges to be, we must struggle alongside our neighbors to make the changes that reduce and eventually eliminate that fear.
As I sat outside my boarded business Saturday, interacting with the peaceful protestors of the afternoon event on Nicollet Avenue, a friendly, loving black man offered me a wrist band, “be a part of the US group? It’s free.” United Struggle. I received the gift, knowing it wasn’t free, it connected me to him and our common goals. The cost of unity is indeed a debt that a country based on white supremacy owes: for stolen lands, stolen lives, stolen labor, stolen cultures. It will be OUR struggle to repay it. It is OUR path ahead. May it be a path that takes the work and efforts of Butter Bakery Café, down the block, across the highway and along 38th Street to Chicago Avenue where I can, with the many others, offer our tribute to George Floyd.