Agenda Packets - 2024/07/08 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Coleman: I want to say this: Blackness is complicated. It's not just color. It's also what class you are, where you live, what you look like, where you work. I have a colleague who lives in St. Paul, who told me [last week] that the police were outside her house in riot gear with bullhorns telling them to stay inside and not come out of the house. Where I live, in the Nokomis neighborhood, that wasn't happening at all. Would that ever have happened to Mr. Floyd if he was in my neighborhood? I would argue that this is how segregation works in Minneapolis or Minnesota: It re -inscribes the racial stereotypes, because it keeps peaceful people isolated, so that not only are they the other, but then I'm convinced they're the other, because I never see them where I live. When that police officer was doing that to Floyd, yes, he should be held accountable, but he could not get away with his actions if other people were not complicit in allowing him to do that. When people are othered, you can watch a man kill in front of your face and literally not see it. You can be in a room with different people, and based upon your skin color, your geography, where you grew up, where you live, you're going to see something completely different. This is a symptom of a bigger systemic disease. We need to get justice for Mr. Floyd — but we got a big problem, because [Chauvin] couldn't get away with what he did if we didn't have a culture that perpetuated that type of action and made it possible. Green: George Floyd's death is not a turning point in policing. Right after the passage of the black suffrage law in Minnesota [in 1868], there was an article that appeared in the newspaper of note saying that in police court, we have a lot of "unsavories," and they used the n-word. It was an example of — and a reflection — of the disproportionate arrests of African Americans. We're talking about a small population, and yet per capita, more blacks were arrested for crimes for which white people who committed the same crimes were not arrested for. Then you also have a series of incidents where cops were especially brutal to African Americans who were detained or who they were seeking to arrest. Again, we're talking 19th century, but to read the events of those arrests, you might as well be looking at what just happened on 38th and Chicago. And of course, the message conveyed there is that these cops are doing their job because the African American is a threat to social order. And that the cops are given the license to manhandle, and to be abusive of the "black miscreants." That sensibility has been in Minnesota, just beneath the surface, since the Civil War. Bergin: There is a lot we can learn from movements of the past, and I think it's kind of urgent, in fact, because what we need to get to is the community -building that follows. We had unrest in Minneapolis in the late 1960s, as many Northern cities did. And now we can see what resulted: Some spaces and places and people never healed. And then — there's the paradox again — there were also really really powerful outcomes that were black -led in solidarity with others. After the Northside riots in'67, white businessmen and others, together with black leadership said, "what can we do?" And they formed this organization called the Metropolitan Economic Development Association — an incubator that helps to educate and hopefully launch minority- and women -owned businesses. That organization is still here today, still helping diverse businesses get off the ground and supporting them. It is an outgrowth of the disruptions of the late 60s