Hey friends:
I got up at 5am on the morning after the vigil and wrote this piece. I was
holding it, not posting it right away because I wanted to wait until it felt
like the right time opened up to send it. Then I was off email for a bunch
of days and came back to see that Shannon had posted her piece here, that
there was a great conversation that happened as a result. I wanted to add to
the conversation what I had written early in the AM after the vigil.
In community,
Susan Raffo
This posting is a love letter.
I love Powderhorn Park. I have lived here for close to 20 years, my home
changing as I moved from rental space to rental space, each apartment
closely hugging the parks perimeter, until I ended up in the land of home
ownership, with a great big front porch that faces the park. I remember when
I first moved here, the story about the park was that it was a lovely place
to hang out in during the day but you had to be really careful at night.
There were lots of times back then when the park was really quiet on a
Sunday afternoon, only a few dog walkers visible.
Im told that that was an unusual low moment in the history of the park,
that what Ive seen over these past 20 years is more typical of this Park
across its history. These days, you can barely find space for a blanket on
hot Sunday afternoons, as families and friends spill in a picnic frenzy
across the grass, their smell of barbecues drifting into our open windows
and making us all hungry at home, even when weve just finished eating.
There is so much more to say here about Mayday, the Art Sled Rally, the
wildlife that feels like it is increasing as the lake becomes cleaner and
happier, community gardens, the indigenous water ceremony in the spring.
This is a powerful and glorious place to live.
When I heard about the assaults on Thanksgiving eve, I was sad but not
scared. The assaults were so random, so specific. I started reading some of
the conversation on the listserv, noticed when people were indignant or
frightened or rageful. Heard words about taking back the park and
conversations about violence and safety patrols and increased police
presence. I thought about the number of times, living across the street from
the park, I have seen police cars driving on the grass and stopping by
groups of young people or men, almost all of the time young people and men
of color. I remember last summer when I heard and saw a white police officer
yelling at a Black man, Are you listening to me when I talk to you? This is
my park. These are my streets. Do you understand that? And I thought, no, I
dont want more police in the park. I dont want this conversation to stay
so racially coded where most of the people on the list talking about our
park are white and we never quite describe who the them is that we are
taking the park back from, those people who dont feel like us.
When the statement about the assault was released by the woman assaulted,
this paragraph made my heart open up: I find it ironic to have had this
experience as I currently study nonviolence, restorative justice and the
healing of childhood trauma. I got to put my studies and my practice of
mindfulness into play as the incident unfolded. The whole time I made a
conscious choice to see the boys as human beings, not to see them as evil or
bad. I focus my attention not on the boys' actions but the pain behind
their actions. I see those boys as hurting, scared children who didn't get
the kind of nurture, love and care that they needed. I try to hold them now
in compassion and hope that they might get the support they need to
reconnect to their essential goodness. With the system of justice that we
currently use, I'm hopeless that will happen.
Thank you, I thought, feeling full of wonder. Thank you for taking this
opportunity, this moment in the public eye, to refuse to engage with us and
them, to recognize that there is a broader context here, that each of our
individual lives is impacted by the broader picture, and that justice that
implies policing and punitive response, the system of justice we currently
use, does not end violence but only increases it. Thank you for helping me
to learn, yet again and for the very first time, how to do this, live from
your heart and refuse to believe in retribution. And thank you for honoring
the help and support youve received, from community members and police
officers, honoring their kindness and attention, and still saying that
within this, the system of justice we currently use doesnt work. I
learned so much by what you wrote, remembered who I want to be and how much
learning I still have to do. Thank you.
This letter changed the meaning of the vigil and the celebration for me, as
it clearly did for so many. This is why we are gathering, I thought, this
proclamation of compassion and love. This is why we are standing.
I asked a number of different friends if they were going. Some were, some
werent. I started to notice, though, that the majority of people who told
me they werent going were friends of color. This is the conversation I had
with one of them:
Are you going? I asked.
I dont think I can stomach it. That womans letter was so beautiful and it
would be too hard to have that message ignored, she replied.
What do you mean! Thats why were gathering. Thats what has changed this
event, that letter.
Just watch, Susan. Its not going to be different. It rarely is. I hope Im
wrong and then you can tell me about it, but that message is not what is
going to happen at the vigil. Its going to be more language about safety
and taking back the park.
I knew she was wrong. I knew it so absolutely, wandering across the street
to join the people standing around fire pits, music playing. I knew that
this night would be different.
But she was right. Those parts of the public statements that were a gift,
that asked us to be bigger than our fears, our assumptions and our rage,
those parts were left out. And instead, we were told to meet our neighbors,
to form committees and, yes, to take back our park. And we did it while we
were celebrating, while we were doing something different from shaking our
signs out of rage and fear, but still, within that celebration, the message
was not quite the same.
Let me stop here for a minute and be clear: I did not step up to help
organize the vigil. It is easy to critique something after the huge amount
of work that someone has put into that event, pulling details together
quickly in the best way that they can. I am grateful for the hours of
creativity and fierce love that went into the organizing of last nights
event, grateful that my daughter got to dance around bonfires with her
friends on a cold dark winters night and feel powerful and free. I am
grateful, honestly grateful, not just saying it here to appease anyone so
that you'll read my words, but honestly and deeply grateful which is why
I am writing. This letter is offered as an act of love, in the same spirit
as the statement released by the woman assaulted. This is shared as an
offering, as a call out that says, hello, my neighbors. I learned a lot last
night with you, I am so excited that this is where I live, that on my
neighborhood listserv I can actually conceive of posting this piece, and I
want to keep on learning with you.
As the spoken part of the program ended, a white friend was leaving. I
stopped to say hello and she was upset. I just stood next to two white men
having a conversation about how much the park has gone downhill with all of
the immigrants moving in, that the park is more polluted, more trashed. And
how annoying it is to go to the post office and have to deal with a slow
line because people who cant speak English are holding things up. This is
the conversation they decided to have on this night of celebration and love.
I just cant take this tonight. And she left.
When I got home last night, I saw that another friend, this time of color,
had posted a piece on her experience in the park, the racism directed to her
and her partner as they held their baby and stood at the side, watching the
event. She tied this experience to other acts of racism she has experienced
in the park, and how conflicted she feels about this neighborhood that she
also loves.
We have so much work to do.
It is a good thing to know our neighbors. But knowing our neighbors is not
just about knowing each others names and bringing casseroles when they are
sick, although that is good and powerful medicine. It is more than that. It
is deeper than that. It is about knowing the context of our lives and
deciding to stand in solidarity with each other; recognizing that there are
a whole host of things that each of us is ignorant of, the complexities of
each others lives and behaviors and choices and struggles. It is about not
only asking questions and making statements, but wondering what isnt being
asked and what isnt being stated because of who is on stage and who isnt
on stage. Really knowing our neighbors is about accepting the fact that our
stories about the Park, our glorious experiences and celebrations, arent
necessarily shared in the same way by everyone we are living near. And that
some of our fierceness about our glory might actually be getting in the way
of a deeper honest conversation about our struggles.
This is not about race. This is all about race. Last night there were many
of people, white and of color, who felt moved by the vigil and grateful for
the space to stand in community on a cold winters night. Last night there
were a lot of people who didnt come because last night felt like it wasnt
about them. Maybe, like my friend, they felt cautious about being hurt yet
again by what was being said or not said in framing the vigil. Maybe
they knew that safety patrols or increased police presence in the park would
make some of us feel safer but would make others feel more at risk. Maybe
they didnt come because they recognized that within the warmth and the
celebration, there was the potential of these moments of coldness; these
moments that said you really arent welcome here. This isnt about you.
I did not help organize last nights event. I know the amount of details and
work it takes to pull something off like what happened. I deeply believe in
the importance of stepping forward as a community, warts and all, rather
than hanging back out of concern for not getting it right. Last night was a
gift, a huge effort made by the organizers. It was a gift to stand in a
place of celebration rather than fear and rage. It was a gift to be out on a
cold winters night, surrounded by fire and music, and to feel the ground
below my feet. It was a gift for a lot of different reasons. For me, one of
the reasons was this one: an opportunity to join you in discussion and
learning about these things:
1. How does racism and white privilege continue to impact community
moments like this one so that, even as we are creating glory and
celebration, white-led organizing committees are also sending out other
messages that we might or might not be aware of, messages that make
assumptions or exclude or directly hurt other members of our community?
2. How do we find the spaces in a neighborhood like this, where our
beliefs and values and expectations are not all the same, to have authentic
and deepening conversations about social and political power and its affect
on neighborhood organizing?
I believe that this work is about healing and not healing in some
witchy-whoo-whoo way of just figuring out how to be nice to each other. I
mean healing in the biggest way; healing as something that decides to take
into account generations of trauma and generations of power, that recognizes
that no single moment exists separate from the histories swirling around
each of our bodies and that all healing work includes pain and struggle, not
just warmth and celebration. It is about recognizing that each of us were
raised to see some things and to not see others, that this is what helps us
feel safe, and that within the context of race, those of us raised white
were raised to not only ignore the extant of our own privilege, but to also
find ways to defend and justify the things we believe to be true, sometimes
politely and sometimes violently. Like white noise, our privilege and the
way that it defends itself is like a constant whirring in our ears, blocking
out any information that doesn't seem to fit.
Together, we live on colonized land. The attempted genocide of indigenous
people, the institution of slavery and the pressure for each new generation
of immigrants and refugees to assimilate to a particular US way of being is
part of that colonization. Colonization has traumatic impact for all who are
affected by it. But within the cycle of violence that is colonization, some
of us deal with that trauma by taking power as the perpetrators. This is the
role of whiteness. Within the violence that is colonization, those of us
raised white have to look at the ways in which our hearts, our minds and our
bodies have been taught to close down to the broader effect of our actions
intentional and not.
This is about more than race. Here, in the Twin Cities at this moment in
history, this is also all about race. This is about privilege and power and
how much the winner gets to define the story. Those of us raised white have
work to do together, work on ourselves and work in community with other
white folks to shift and end the patterns of privilege that keep getting in
the way of being fully the kind of community we long for. And this is work
we do with compassion for each other, recognizing that this whiteness is a
sickness, an illness that we carry, that anything that prevents us from
connecting fully to the humanity in another person is not a place of
wellness and health. I have as much work to do as anyone else. I am most
definitely not immune.
Here is what I am not saying: all that white folks have to do is figure out
our stuff around white privilege and violence will go away. Violence is so
multilayered, about so many different things. There are lots of feeders that
cause violence. White privilege and its relationship to white supremacy are
part of it. Organizing against them is part of it. I wasn't able to attend
the community meeting after the vigil, but I'll be at the next one. I'll be
there, open hearted and ready to learn with and from all who show up.
I love living here. I love knowing that I can walk into the park and feel
like I have stepped away from the city, that I am likely to run into someone
I know and that when I say hello to someone I dont know, they are likely to
say hello back. There is nothing we struggle with here that isnt struggled
with in any other neighborhood around the country. Here is where I continue
to be hopeful about this community: that we can take the incredible creative
energy that makes living here such a gift, and turn it within as deeply as
possible. I am grateful for everyone of you doing just that, and how much I
learn from and with you.
I want everyone I love who lives in the park and those I have never met
to go to an event like the one last night, confident that they are there
safe and strong as who they are and that if someone were to say or do
something violent or dismissive, a whole host of neighbors would have their
back without a second thought.
Susan Raffo
Northeast corner of the Park.