Just weeks later, I learned of three North Minneapolis teens dying in a car rollover after a high speed chase with police. This was the same day the cop who murdered George Floyd was bailed out of jail for a million dollars and allowed to leave the state. People were rightfully protesting his release, two people were shot, one killed, and then right as my partner and I started trying to watch the Vice Presidential debate, we heard maybe forty gunshots coming from different areas close by, cars racing and squealing past our house, some screaming, and then sirens. My body’s immediate reaction was a surge of adrenaline, cold clammy hands, shaking, and feeling that sadly familiar and primal fight or flight response.
Because I’m allowed the privilege of having an incredible therapist, I was able to think about what she would say in that moment, closed my eyes, and reminded myself that no one was coming after me. Because I’m a white woman in a country where my appearance does not pose a direct threat to my physical safety. After I was able to calm my body some, my partner and I processed things together and I became more and more angry because it occurred to me how so many People of Color live every day in fear with these feelings, no therapy to help them process, and that this tragedy and the dozens of gunshots we heard later the same day would be portrayed by the media as what happens without enough police- taking no other factors into account.
Since the beginning of the summer I’ve seen at least six articles, from both local and national news sources, describing Minneapolis as a lawless city where criminals run unchecked and where citizens (of North Minneapolis in particular) are being “terrorized” and are “under siege.” Each of these articles have stated that the reason for the increased crime is lack of police and defunding of their resources. None of these “news” pieces mentioned that a lot of this crime involves children who have been out of school for months due to a worldwide pandemic. They didn’t mention that many of these kids don’t have secure homes or dependable adults in their lives, so are either unable to stay at home, or a home doesn’t necessarily exist for them at all. These kids quite literally have nowhere to be and not only that, but they are also absorbing the tension, anger, and outrage of those around them regarding the continued police murders of people who look like they do while society refuses to hold those cops accountable. Not to mention, the amounts of unemployment caused by the pandemic which has added another level of desperation and wretchedness (also unmentioned by media outlets). Because they’re kids, their brains are not yet fully developed or functional, so many of them are unable to identify why they’re feeling such huge and overwhelming emotions, how to deal with them, or where to put all the intense energy they undoubtedly absorb from all angles, every day. Teenagers experience such hormonal irregularities and surges of intense emotion just being teenagers. Add everything else currently happening in the world and country to that, in addition to peer pressure, trauma effects, and the strong need to prove themselves to one another, and there is the perfect recipe for violence and crime. It quite literally has nothing at all to do with the amount of police available to respond to it.
Of course not all of the crime happening here right now is perpetrated by kids, but the vast majority being committed by adults cannot be attributed to their, “taking advantage of less police.” For one, there are still police all over the place, and two, children grow up into adults who also suffer from lifelong effects of the trauma surrounding oppression, poverty, racism, and violence while rarely being afforded the tools to deal with those effects safely and healthily. Human beings under constant stress, living beneath unjust systems which do not afford them the resources necessary to recognize, acknowledge, and heal, are often unable to see the forest through the trees. Through no fault of their own, large populations of people in the United States are unable to identify their own actions as sources of trauma for not only those around them, but for themselves. If this country’s systems weren’t built to function this way, didn’t disproportionately affect People of Color, and if we each had all we needed (absolutely possible), there would be no reason for anyone to carjack, steal, sell drugs, shoot one another, etc. It’s unfair to blame the very much increased amount of crime in Minneapolis on lack of police or on defunding and not consider the hundreds of years of oppression, racism, multigenerational trauma, and inequality that is coming to a head at the same time as a worldwide pandemic. Not just unfair, but completely biased and untrue. As I’ve stated, police can be seen often in all areas of the metro, and people feeling as if their presence is not as prolific as it once was is simply those same people recognizing the increase in crime while also refusing to acknowledge why that increase has taken place.
The day before yesterday some of the neighborhood boys who stop by regularly to chat with us, popped in and talked with my partner. One of them told her that one of the boys who was killed in the rollover was his brother and then proceeded to share with her some very graphic and horrifying details of his death. With a completely straight face and calm demeanor, he shared things about his own brother’s violent passing that no child should ever hear, even about a complete stranger.
This kid, at maybe ten years old and even prior to this horrible incident, has experienced so much trauma that relating the vivid and devastating specifics of his own brother’s death, unprovoked, to a veritable stranger, did not phase him at all. His little body and brain have become so accustomed to experiencing trauma that it has been established as his baseline, his normal. Because of the lack of resources around trauma care in this country, and the vilification of those who come from marginalized and systematically oppressed groups, this kid is already set up, through no fault of his own, to follow in similar footsteps and/or at the very least, live a life unknowingly governed by trauma effects. Most of these kids are offered little or no community support (part of why we often hang with neighborhood kids and share things they might need with them), and little or no access to qualified therapists and other mental health and social service professionals. Their minds and bodies continue to develop despite it all, and as they do, they not only experience racism (more trauma), but often also poverty and its effects (trauma), violence (trauma), and every other difficult thing that comes along with being BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) in this country. I won’t pretend to understand even half of that as a white woman, but I have learned through decades of therapy and by living through my own trauma, how to recognize its effects and identify them as such.
The community in which we live has welcomed us with genuine kindness, offers of help, and palpable warmth that I can honestly say I have not experienced from neighbors in any other home I’ve had in Minneapolis. We take daily walks with our dog, and neighbors down every block say hello, wave, ask us how we’re doing, offer beverages, etc. These are good people and it is obvious every single day.
Despite all of the positive feelings that come from our neighbors, it is still commonplace to hear gunshots, reckless driving, and impassioned, loud conversations. When we first moved in last Fall, we noticed more activity in the area than our previous place in North, but it was nowhere near the way it has been these last several months.
In fact, about three days ago, I was sitting in my car, parked on the street outside our house, getting ready to go to the grocery store. I was looking at my phone trying to pick music, had all of my windows down, and just as a neighbor’s car was driving by to the East, a very new and enormous white Ford pickup which had been going West, stopped abruptly and I heard a man yelling. He was wearing thick work gloves and ran after the green car, tried to grab it, yelled something about “money motherfucker,” and then right next to my open car window shot a gun into the green car, turned around, ran back to his truck, and took off. My neighbor got out of his car and yelled, “What the fuck man! You really gonna shoot at me, for what!?” His passenger, a woman, got out and walked over to their house telling the driver that, “he better get that motherfucker.” I got out of my car, in a state of shock, the green car turned around and left, I thought to go after the truck, but actually as I later discovered, he had just pulled back into his driveway. When the cops showed up about thrity seconds later, they asked me to relay to them what happened, I pointed out the .45 shell lying in the street, and talked with them a little about how things have been for them lately. One of the cops was white, as are my partner and I, but the neighbor in the green car, the shooter in the white truck, and the other cop were all Black. The younger Black cop went about tagging and bagging the shell, took pictures, responded to base, etc, while the older white cop talked with me and my partner who had come outside. I purposely tried to address my questions to the Black cop, but he did not seem interested in talking with me and the white cop was very chatty. It made me wonder if this was just their dynamic, or had something to do with race and/or rank. Regardless, the white cop told us that there has been so much gun violence and so many shots reported that crime rates are higher than Chicago right now and that they are pretty constantly responding to Shot Spotter reports of shots fired. He explained the Shot Spotter technology, which is pretty high tech and finally gave me an explanation for those gray boxes that are mounted on a lot of light poles and stop lights around here. He said, “This just needs to stop,” and told us about how one of the local missions had a “no questions asked” gun surrender event at which only one weapon was brought in after an entire day. He agreed when I said that people are so stressed and angry and outraged with everything happening that they are ready to lose it at the drop of a hat. He also said there have been a whole lot of “crimes of opportunity,” and seemed like a pretty decent and genuine human being which I must admit surprised me considering that this was the first positive interaction I’ve had with a police person since about 2004. (I was 19 and pulled over on the side of the road writing down a thought, when the local old man cop in Cushing, MN came out to make sure I was okay, told me to take my time getting my thoughts out, and then said, “I’ll be just up the road if you need me.”)
After the officers left, my partner and I walked down the alley a bit because I was pretty sure that’s where I’d seen the green car before, and we discovered the driver standing next to the car smoking a cigarette and looking at his phone. I asked if he was okay and told him that was a terrifying thing that just happened. He looked at me like he almost wasn’t sure what I was talking about, then said, “Yeah.” I asked if he knew what it was about, and he said that he and his girl were on their way to do laundry (we could see it all piled in the back seat) when that white pickup came flying down the alley very fast as they were pulling out of their driveway. He turned East, the truck turned West and all of a sudden he was being shot at. He said he had no idea who the man was or what he was talking about and that it had to have been mistaken identity because something similar had happened another time he’d been driving that car. He said all of this to me perfectly calmly without any real inflection in his voice and with a straight face. It reminded me of the kiddo telling us about his brother and further broke my heart. If we weren’t still in the midst of a pandemic, I would have asked to hug him.
That night, I heard ten more shots in the distance while I watched TV. When I went up to bed and was lying there in between asleep and awake, my mind told me there was a loud crack of gunfire right next to my head and I was jerked awake, eyes wide, to find myself safely in bed with my partner sleeping next to me. The following day I could not get the occurence out of my head and decided to leave some garden veggies and a card for the neighbor who had been the actual victim of it all. When I walked over to set the bag on his car, he and his girl were sitting inside. I handed it to them and just told him I’d been thinking of the two of them since and was hoping they were okay. They both told me thank you with smiles and I walked back across the street to my house.
What’s really been haunting me about it all, is the ease with which that man hopped out of his car and shot a gun at someone without even knowing for sure it was the person he was after. That this couple have had something similar happen to them before, and that their reactions to an occurrence so incredibly upsetting were as calm as they were. As if things like this happening are common and don’t necessarily affect their day to day activities. As if trauma is so prevalent that even reacting to new instances of it feels unnecessary.
I assume that I can relate to this because of my personal history of complex compound trauma and working hard with a mental health professional to deal with those effects in healthy ways. But actually, this is not the same. It’s not the same because the intergenerational trauma active in my family and genes, does not include slavery, racism, nonstop viliification from every aspect of media and society, brutality from my own government institutions which are supposed to keep me safe, and four hundred years of oppression that is all now being denied by huge populations of people. Denial from the same groups who suggest BIPOC should, “move on already,” and, “just get over it,” since no one alive today owned slaves. They are correct in that slavery in the United States, as it was hundreds of years ago, no longer exists, but a new framework has taken hold in the form of millions of people struggling to make ends meet while functioning beneath the weight of centuries of trauma, pain, and struggle. Keeping so many of us so focused on acquiring enough to pay rent, eat, own a running vehicle, raise children, and survive day to day, that we don’t even realize we are all enslaved. Keeping our minds diverted by political and celebrity drama, unending media gibberish, twenty four hour fear-mongering news reports, and social media platforms where it is entirely possible to not only see myriad mistruths, but also to cloister a person’s concept of reality into one which supports a single (usually warped) view of the world.
Many BIPOC literally have no choice but to merely survive while our entire country’s systems function just as they were constructed to; building wealth for white men on the backs of the impoverished and oppressed while effectively convincing citizens that they are to blame for their own lack of opportunity.
We can’t build a foundation for success with Jello, and we can’t pull ourselves up via bootstraps that don’t exist.
This country must evolve and old ways of thinking must change, or we will all fail and we will all fall.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” -Jiddu Krishnamurti
