Last night the 3rd Police Precent building in Minneapolis burned. Social media is going to be full of folks trying to make sense of recent events in Minnesota.

After listing to the news this morning and walking the dog around the neighborhood, here are my thoughts:

We are hearing the term Systemic Racism a lot. So let's unpack that term. It is really horrible to face the reality that we have a cultural system in place that ends up getting black and brown folks killed at the hands of local police. That same system produces other effects and impacts; lousy housing, physical and mental health, economic inequity hit black and brown folks harder than most white folks. Roll all that heartache into a glacier of needless suffering and most white folks can't face it. We have a hard time recognizing that we could ever be personally culpable in something that evil. If we come to terms with being part of that monstrous system, then what?

Systemic Racism is a big and formidable monster. I think the enormity of the problem is why people with even a little bit of privilege feel a need to deny that they have a part to play in building a new system. It is hard to know where to start, what to do differently, or if you can even trust your own mind, knowing that racism has a grip on some dark corner of your mental real estate.

Let's face it. White folks can be really embarrassing sometimes. We can also be really dangerous to black and brown folks and extremely clueless at the same time. These are the same privileged people that need to find the resolve to face the monster and resist the temptation to rationalize the evil they have seen.

A culture and system that has the evil of racism baked into it is not going to somehow evolve into something better with the fullness of time. We cannot not be satisfied by doing work that results in a slightly less shitty system.

For something that runs this deep we need to build a radically different alternative on purpose. It will require a lot of work to push the needle from shitty, well past neutral, to something excellent and equitable. Can that be done in a generation? It is hard to commit to a task that will not be completed in your lifetime, but that does not mean we shouldn’t do it.

The pandemic and the Covid 19 Recession are presenting us with the opportunity to make a dramatic shift in building trust and equity in our local communities. It would be great if we could look to our political leadership for inspiration and meaningful guidance in this time, but that is unlikely. The work that needs doing is going to be at the scale of individuals, households, neighborhoods, and local communities.

I don't know what that work needs to be, but I am convinced that the scale and location of where that work needs to be done is extremely local. We will probably have to figure this out as we go, but change is only going to happen at the speed of building trust. Trust is built between individuals long before it is built between individuals and institutions.

Boarded up duplex in New Orleans

MAY 29, 2020