Between Today and Tomorrow

I feel like it's always felt like that in this field of work. Folks know us for being a response to emergency situations, but even when we were having our standing programs it felt urgent for me.

I just feel like there's always just something. I just wake up and there's something. Is it family? Is it a mom that's gonna call me? There's something. So everything just feels like that's what keeps me alive and present — is just the urgency of it all right now and how it's always been for 6 years.

Overwhelming for sure, and really tender. It makes you have a level of commitment to those that don't have the same privilege as you too. I feel like Black women — we already know what disadvantages look like in terms of being a mother, having scarce resources, having to be strategic and survive under a lot of circumstances and systems. And then when you see peers of yours that have harsher circumstances, meaning their education, their ability to just do basic things, you have a level of commitment. You feel kind of committed to wanting their children to have experiences as your children.

I feel very thankful that there's trust in me and what we do because it's such a—I don't even want to say nerve-racking. I don't even know what the best word is to explain when you're going through town to town, trying to drop some things off and you just see marked cars everywhere and just all this surveillance.

Not to compare us in an animalistic way, but just to compare that instinct of how we can respond and feel that wartime posture, that attack. How do you expect us to navigate that, right? And, you know, I think mamas all turn into mama bears. Well, those who have the heart. Racially, there's differences there.

I honestly don't think there's much of a difference, because when we were camping outside for Philando Castile, they were doing the same things that they have been doing now.

The only difference is it's not local police doing it now, it's federal. Because I'm thinking about my experiences — when they came, they were tearing up our tents every day. They were taking our food, our water, anything that would even show visible occupation and resistance. They were incarcerating us, badgering us, pepper spraying us. So I don't know if there was any difference between them and what ICE has been doing, other than the fact that — and I guess this is probably gonna be seen as a hot take — the purpose of ICE was textbook to make it clear: oh, we're coming for rapists, we're coming for murderers.

To my core, I personally believe — as much as I'm working on my collective care and restoration — if you're an abuser, a repeated abuser, especially towards children or women, I don't have much grace for you. ICE could come, police could come. I'm not at that point yet.

But it was never about that.

That wartime posture was not about protecting people, because if folks were able to resist and protest and do what they needed to do without intervention, it would not have gotten to that point. And if it did, it'd be on the call of the people. But that intervention, that surveillance, that wartime posture did not make it at all about murderers and rapists. It made it clear — we still uphold this power, and there is no negotiation and there is no resistance to this.

In school systems and throughout families, we're a very unique city in that way, compared to other states I've been to. My sister lives in Texas and they don't have this type of positioning. They just open the door for them, they welcome them in — toxic shit like that. Whereas we have been such a unique area that shows we know our boundaries, our autonomy, and if you violate that, we don't care what law you're part of. But even then, they still have the violence and the pressure and the oppression to not let us even speak or operate to protect ourselves.

So to your point, I don't think there's a difference. They still have the same purpose: to uphold power and violence, and they can name it different ways, but as long as it's within that system, they're going to continue that violence.

Because during the time of Philando Castile, the shootings were targeted. You were pulled over or you were resisting an arrest, like with George. It was very targeted. But in this circumstance, with a mass group of people, they're literally using people as targets. That was definitely wild and different, because even when my mom and dad would protest, they weren't targeting people the way they truly are doing right now.

MPD is constantly making it clear that they're in a sticky situation because their funding has been severely cut. But as you see, they are constantly trying to bring that money back and fund it more and more. I remember watching something with Chief O'Hara. He said the reason why a certain area is the way it is right now is because they don't have enough police officers to surveil the area and keep it safe: increased addiction, violence, robberies, things like that. But the purpose of the funding getting cut was to divest into alternative systems. The problem is that when you divest into alternative systems, it's not going to work overnight. We're unpacking a lot. And so MPD is trying to figure out what that looks like now that they have such a "small budget" and no one wants to be a cop anymore. It's unfortunate that right now we do have to figure out the in-betweens of depending on that system while also creating our own alternatives. I just saw that REP closed down their hotline.

We used them many times because my sister does supportive housing for individuals with disabilities, ranging from disability to the housing crisis and everything in between. We have a site off of Lake and Bloomington, literally the heart of everything, and we used REP all the time. But more and more I was noticing that phone calls weren't being answered for crisis calls — the individuals that we would tell to call instead of police, because all of our clients were just going back to calling police.

My point in saying that is the systems that need to be built are struggling. We do have to depend on what's here now, but we also have to ask — how do we invest in organizations and efforts like that — because they're struggling. Why are they shutting down their hotline? They're closing it permanently, saying it's informed by capacity and the evolving needs of the community they serve. That's really unfortunate because we can't be dissolving after three or four years. From 2020 to now, I know very few organizations that have stayed. So many have left.

Because the discourse online also paralyzes us from making things actually move outside of the internet. Yes, increased awareness — but what are you doing with that increased awareness? We know MPD is just as violent. How are you participating in the alternative system so that we don't need MPD? And every time I ask that in the comments, someone argues me down — "Well, someone will do it." And I know they're thinking of a Black woman. You're thinking one of us.

It's a level of exhaust, for sure. It's like, dang — even communication with the families have to be different. We can't just use our phones. We use alternative encrypted systems. I can only trust family and friends to do deliveries and drop-offs because I don't know if folks can be trusted outside of that for these vulnerable communities.

It's just this positioning of heightened anxiety 24/7. More than we already have in our nervous systems. I feel like Black women—our nervous systems are already shot.

I'm more careful with what I say. I'm more aware of my surroundings. But I feel because Black folks have operated under surveillance for so long, this does not feel different to us. This is not anything that's like, "Oh, I gotta look out for a cop. I need a whistle." We've always known how to operate and move around these situations — incognito or straight in their face.

When you go over North and you walkin' or you driving through, ni**as will look at your car, be like, "Who are you?" We've been doing this, you know? Like... if your car looks unfamiliar? "Who are you?" The whole way through.

So, not really, you know? I think if anything it just makes me annoyed that it took this for people to pay attention to what we've done, what we've tried to build, what we've tried to say, what our ancestors been trying to say. Fannie Lou Hamer would be laughing at ni**as, honestly. She would be laughing at every single person right now, like, "You're saying what right now? Right now? You're saying it now?"

In communities where there's different identity challenges that come with your race and how you show up in America, the way that our nervous systems generationally have been wired to endure, maintain and survive is different, because this is what we've been enforced for generations and generations and generations to try and live under. Whereas I feel like other communities, they come here and they learn the system and how to endure, whereas we have been forced to have to endure this. I think there's just a different posture in that way — if you are here generationally, those pressures of scarcity, of your needs being stripped away from you and your safety being stripped away from you — the nervous system is just wired differently.

It does have a lot of Black American peers seem insensitive. There's many people who are like "I don't want to hear this shit." They don't want to hear and it's coming off as being insensitive, and some absolutely are being insensitive to the situation. I do think also there's this understanding that our generations have been trying to unwire this posture for a long time, and so trying to be forced to feel it deeper than we've already been feeling it is also, I think, white as fuck and violent as fuck. You want us to feel more violence than we already feel. We feel this. We've been telling y'all.

And a matter of fact, most of us, when this shit was happening before any white folk felt more articulated to share what they're doing on the internet, we was already doing shit behind the scenes like coordinating efforts, practicing mutual aid in the clinics, in the birth centers. We didn't have to have a presence to make that known. We just do. However we articulate it is however we choose to do, but it doesn't mean work is not being done.

So I just feel like there's a point where folks are wanting to use their privilege, as we've been saying, for many years. However, the use of privilege has now been self-promoting into spokespersonship, which has also caused erasure. There are such loud voices of folks wanting to help that they're also forgetting that they have to be accountable.

If you said you were fundraising for some folks, you are accountable to also be transparent on where those funds went. And I don't want to sound like a police ass bitch. I also don't want to just go off the words of people wanting to be helpful, but then not be accountable all the way.

Because a lot of folks were like, "I'm doing this. I'm donating, I'm doing this, this fund's going —" I'm like... great! After that, we don't hear nothing. And these are big orgs and big voices, and I'm confused. So I'm just — y'all are kind of moving a little violent. Because how are you being accountable to the people that you're being a spokesperson for?

There's also been a level of erasure for the specific Black individuals impacted by the occupation enforcement, and that's not being spoken about. Now, I feel, again, when I'm thinking logically, it's understandable, because there was a very specific target towards a community outside of Black immigrants. However, it does make it seem that there wasn't an issue, that there wasn't also targeting happening towards them.

And so my main thing was, yes, helping everyone, but also making sure — for example, my children are half Ethiopian. Their church was horrified. None of them speak English, so they don't know. They don't wanna leave. They don't have systems other brown communities do. They don't have big markets that you can go and know that you've talked to someone that'll get you connected to something. They're freaking out. They don't know who to call because there's no translation services for them. Things like that.

In terms of a personal perspective, I'm actually gonna give a very transparent story. When this first started, we were getting flooded like bakeries. And it was a lot, and I was like, "We need to get a call."

I was working with a friend of mine who I was organizing work with, and they were just like, "I don't know if you should make a call, 'cause this is pretty risky." And I was like, "Well, what are we gonna do? These people are reaching out to us."

I was getting a lot of media inquiries. A huge company reached out and was like, "We want to know what's happening on the ground." And my friend was like, "You should not let them know what's happening on the ground in real time. You need to actually wait until you're done serving the vulnerable individuals." I was mad. I was like, "What do you mean? This could put me on the map. We are very underfunded. What do you mean I shouldn't let their 20 million plus audience —"

And they were like, "No, Zedé. If you're really thinking about the people, you would just think about what this would do to blow the scene up. 'Cause you're a part of a volunteer org that's running out the office. You have families coming in and out the office. If you let it known that you're helping these people, you're a target."

So I ended up doing the interview anonymously, and that was hard for me. But in retrospect, it was safer for the families, 'cause I wasn't about building a platform at that time. I was about helping families.

What I'm seeing other folks do? They're grabbing every opportunity. And so it's definitely a hard thing to accept when you're seeing people want to use you as a reliable source.

However, if it's really about the people, you would think: at what risk are you wanting to platform? How do you move during times like that?

That was very hard for me to digest, and I'm grateful that I had someone to give me that optic — another Black trans person. Those are important optics, because these white folks making platforms — you could tell they don't have nobody in their circle checking them.

How do you navigate visibility when the work itself is so under-resourced?

I'm all for — specifically Black folks — making it very clear what we're doing. However, it depends on the audience too, and we are dealing with a severe lack of funding.

That same mindset goes for people who are advocating to get funds for other people — that's not your money, that's not your resource. If you're gonna platform yourself, if you're going to utilize this time, this heightened crisis, this vulnerability to get people to trust you, you also need to carry that all the way through.

And to the point of being underfunded — if we didn't have our Amazon registry, we wouldn't get anything out. Or this sweet family who just donated all these clothes this morning — we wouldn't be able to do it without them. I think another important thing is to recognize that alternative systems have been created and they have been here. For you to platform yourself, try to reinvent the wheel, and take away from furthering shared work, shared labor, and shared collaboration is, I think, rooted in whiteness.

White folks have a way of gathering audiences, and they know that has a lot of privilege and power. I don't think that will ever change. I think it's more important that they gear and redirect that audience to those who are already doing the work, or who they're learning from. Because I'm not gonna act like I created anything new, but a lot of folks doing this work right now were asking me how to do it four years ago. Which is cool — again, you gotta take your ego out of it for the community. At the same time, you can see when motherf***ers are just regurgitating.

I would say the expectation to have the political clarity, context, and translation the way that they want it also provides a level of unnecessary stress — because whiteness also holds a lot of power in terms of resources. A lot of funders, a lot of folks who hold the resources that we know best how to distribute to our people. A lot of whiteness expects no nuance, no gray, no "this and" — it's either "that or." Those narratives make it very hard to try and operate in spaces like this.

And also this weird ass energy of proving you need it more, or you deserve it better, or this competition type of vibe that I don't necessarily play into, but I know peers of mine in the same spaces and work as me do — which creates this barrier of no collaboration between us. That makes me sad, because I think, yes, that is a product of whiteness. This competition: "I'm in my own silo lane and we can't merge because you can threaten my funding, or you can threaten my resource, or my opportunity" — is a product of whiteness, and it definitely shows up in this space.

I would say the expectation to speak louder in order for folks to really listen to what we're doing in terms of what happened with ICE — again, this competing type of energy. And I'm not competing with no bitch, especially no white person, because your lens and my lens will never be the same. And my lens, I feel, has more validity — because your lived experience is shadowed and protected and uplifted in this system.

So I think that there's a lot that plays here, and when I sit and think about it, I get annoyed — and then I get unproductive because I'm annoyed. I'm so irritated with the fact that this is how circumstances are in this white ass state, that if I let y'all piss me off, I won't help a damn family because I'm so irritated. So pushing through that irritation is also another form of labor.

Honestly, it's really hard to be hopeful. It's really, really hard to look forward to the day that we all care about seeing systems that serve us all. It's hard to look forward to that and everyone's like, "Yes, I want to be a part of this alternative system and this alternative form of care because I care about your children just like I care about my children." Awaiting that day seems like it'll never come.

But also on the flip side, when I look at my children, I'm like, "Oh, there's no other choice. There's no other way. This is gonna happen." Whether I'm a part of it or I uplift it because we dissolve at some point, we gotta make this shit work. There's no other way because I'll be damned that I'm no longer here and this world is worse for my children. I just don't see that happening. It's not gonna happen.

I think about this all the time in terms of personal accountability. I'm going to be starting this series where Black folks— we have tough conversations about personal accountability in public. Just how we have those tough conversations about what the white man has done to our communities, it's really important that we have these conversations of what we have in our power to control, which is how we respond and how we do better than what our parents did to us or what our children should experience. That side of hope makes me excited. Because I think there is beauty in the other side if we see it.

They look at me and they see me sobbing all the time. They see me burnt out, typing at 4 a.m. in the morning. I don't think I'll ever stop that because it's the only time I get work done, but just in terms of how we navigate and respond to joy and make it also an intentional effort too — that's something I'm really trying to do this year, and that's why with Seeds Worth Sowing, hopefully we'll be able to be ran and operated a majority by someone else. Let's hope — so that I can step back and really reset my nervous system and not feel — like I was saying earlier — that constant urgency that keeps me alive and present, but is also just making my health shot, my perception of this world shot, and my perception of community shot too.

I really don't want it to sour me. Because the way everyone else is experiencing the care that Seeds Worth Sowing is doing is not how I see it. I feel the pressure. I feel the responsibility. I feel the isolation. I feel the "hey, we need help" and hearing echo chambers. I feel bad and I don't want that to turn me sour into distasting the word, the concept, the idea of community, because then, like I said, who does that serve?

So I guess to your question, yes, I feel hopeful. I feel excited for the future and I also feel like there's a lot of work that I need to do to not allow the misery to override what we have to do.

I would say… actually allowing me to sit down and not be the first firefighter to put out the fire by offering to offset the tasks.

People see what's done, but the behind the scenes of operating things like this, the constant communication, the back and forth, making sure he's (Zedé's dad) got the funds to get the items, making sure the families are at home on time. Also, with the Nurturing Homes Project, making sure families are communicating with the event, what time it is, making sure the food is scheduled. All those little things—even social media.

Folks have skills and they have a lot of them. And do they want to offer it in the midst of a chaotic situation or organization that's small and very grassroots? Most of the time, no. Also, do I know how to ask for help? Most of the time, no. Because when I ask for help, it's not done in a way that I need it.

And I say that very self-righteous because I notice that when I do things, the outcome is just different. I think you would understand in terms of entrepreneurship or self-leading projects. When you do it, it's exactly the way that the audience receives it because you did it. Whereas when I trust someone else to do it, they don't carry and hold that vision the same way that I do, but also why should I expect them to when it's not your baby? But then also, we should. But they don't.

It sucks to say, it really does, because I am always trying. I am always trying to build, to ask for help, to be collaborative, to bridge that gavel, lack of support, and having someone come in and help. And it always just turns out in a way that doesn't serve me or adds more work for me.

To your question, what does support look like? Folks offering the specific skills if I'm calling it out? That's important. It doesn't often get translated that way, though. Most folks don't listen to callouts unless it's a crisis. But the ongoing momentum — they always fall off and dissolve and go back into the abyss and wait for another crisis.

Folks like crisis bullshit. They don't like momentum. They don't like sustainability. And then when you try and speak to the community about this, specifically like the leftist community — obviously I call myself a part of the left, but I find when I call out, "Y'all really don't want to sustain shit" — I am a problem — "Oh, you're just bottlenecking."

People don't understand to operate shit requires you to show up every day. You don't get to choose when to not come in. So if I'm seeing m***f***ers coming in and helping me just for two days or like not giving it their all and stuff like that, then of course I'm gonna have to pick it up. So how is that bottlenecking if you're not willing to support and carry on that momentum with me?

I understand, too, that — and this is why I say not everyone is meant to be responsible in that way and to steward because that is ableist of me to expect everyone to operate like how I operate. I shouldn't expect everyone to have the same skills or lived experience. Seeds Worth Sowing was founded in 2020, so we have 6 years in. That's a level of experience and failures of bullshit of issues, of challenges that we've had to navigate for years that other folks would come in and be like, "Girl, what the hell did you ask me to do?" So I don't want to expect people to see and do and understand, but I also don't expect to carry this alone.

How are you taking care of yourself? How are you maintaining your nervous system in the midst of this? What do your children need? When can a cleaner come and help clean your home? Those would be the questions I ask.

Right now, as a multidisciplinary artist, I'm focusing mainly on youth and creating spaces for young people to learn about the arts. And by way of learning about the arts, learning about our activists and giving them spaces to really think about and express what's happening in the world through a social justice lens.

I think that I have had the privilege in this one city specifically to continue that work, and what's activated in me is:

And that's always been with me most of my life, because I've always understood the importance of passing down knowledge, passing down tradition.

I've also seen the natural resistance and resilience in passing down knowledge and passing down tradition. And right now I'm grieving because I have to let a lot of my elders go. I have to let them go.

There's no more room right now for the elders that don't get it, and I, as a Black woman, understand how this country is designed to break me down like I'm a literal mule—literally break me down.

And right now I have to politely allow for my elders to speak among themselves and let them go so that I can have more space and room to nurture myself and to really intentionally bring up not only my children, but the next generation of children and support moms right now. Like the young moms in my friend group — how am I having conversations with them and holding space for them?

Because COVID did a thing to us, right? There's not a lot of community. After COVID, everybody likes to be in their house and to themselves and the kids have felt that. And then how do we begin to connect the babies that didn't have that during their developmental time to community and give them a sense of belonging and help them kids see and feel everything.

I remember when my son was three — he'll be eight in May. I started reading The 1619 Project and Born on the Water because I started to think, "How am I going to talk about slavery with my Black son?" How am I going to do that? The most pivotal point in my life was learning Black history at Malcolm X College by a man from Ghana. He said, "I'm not going to start you at the Atlantic slave trade. I'm going to start you before so you can understand how valuable Africa is."

And we all had to study the resources that the land had in Africa — the palm oil, the gold, the diamonds, all of the things. And then he asked us, "What was the most precious asset in Africa?" And we started yelling out resources. The crops, the palm oil, this, this, this. And he said, "No, you're missing it." And we said, "What is it?" And he said:

Because the people could tend to the land and turn over the soil in a way that didn't deplete the land of its resources. If I would have heard that in first grade, in second grade, in sixth grade, in seventh —

So as I'm reading The 1619 Project to my son, before we get to the Atlantic slave trade, it talks about culture and the people and the song, and then it brings us through the tragedy, but then it brings us back to what we've become through that.

When talking to my family in Chicago during the surge there, and my son was there during that time because he lives in Chicago with his dad right now, I was calling his uncle. I was so worried. "Are they over there? Are they by the house? Are they by the school?" And he's like, "No, I'm gonna keep you updated." But they're kind of staying in one part of the city and he told me they were in the South Shore area. I had called my uncle and I said, "Hey, I heard ICE is over there. How are you doing?" He said:

And I was so disappointed.

What made you feel disappointed when he said that?

There is no staying out the way. How do we stay out the way of this when they raided that apartment building in Chicago? There were Black families in there too.

Black people are communal people, just like Indigenous people, just like Latinx people. Just like white people — more white people go into their culture and get out of whiteness, they learn we are communal. We are not individualistic.

That's why at these vigils you see Indigenous people doing their ritualistic dance. That's why when you are with Black folks, regardless of where we're from, what are we doing? We're cooking. Come eat. Come break bread. Let's have a conversation. No matter where we go in the world, no matter where we go in the diaspora, we do that communally. Let me feed you. Come sit down. Talk to me. Tell me what's going on. That is of us.

And through divide and conquer, white supremacy, systematic racism and oppression, what do you begin to see? "Oh, I'm glad it wasn't me. I'm glad it wasn't my family. Oh, I'm just gonna mind my business because if I don't mind my business, something's gonna happen to me."

And that's why I said I don't have room for my elders right now. I love them, but if you're 40, 50, 60 and you're saying "That ain't my business, that ain't my fight" — we're coming down to the wire.

I have to teach my kids about Black history. And when I say Black history, it's African history. Not just Black American but Caribbean history, Nigerian history.

The Liberian Uber driver, when I said, "Yeah, Black people went to Liberia and were a part of that civil war" — he looked so shocked at me. "How did you know that? How did you know Black American people were a part of that? Nobody talks about that, especially not a Black American."

I'm never of the mind of "oh no, just walk around with your passport" or "just walk around with your birth certificate, you'll be fine." I don't trust this administration. I don't trust this country. I don't even trust institutions.

The whole business as usual, as if we didn't just all experience trauma, blows me. Our mayor not being like, "Yo, y'all are not allowed to evict people right now. What's wrong with y'all?" We have watched two people get shot in the street. You don't want me to be human, you want to desensitize me. So whatever you do next, I don't even have the strength to fight back. That's what's happening right now.

Two people were shot. And it played on social media over and over and over and over again.

I follow so many news outlets. I don't know who to trust.

I'm reading article on article, source on source. I had to disconnect from social media for a little bit. Then I'm posting all this shit that I see, because I don't want my peers or my community to keep going on as business as usual. But I'm a single Black mama. I have to work. This economy is whooping my ass. But I can't stop.

They're cutting so much funding from education and the arts. Minneapolis has a very incompetent mayor. The youth are not okay. The young people are not okay. I had so many spaces in the Twin Cities when I was a child — spaces to be a young person.

How are we funding mutual aid right now? How are we funding youth programming right now? How are we making sure that the vulnerable people within the Twin Cities get the resources that they need?

I remember one time during the surge, St. Paul Police was in Minneapolis. I was getting off on 394 at that Dunwoody exit. And there's just a bunch of St. Paul Police cars. And I'm like, what are y'all doing over here? Hennepin County Sheriff's Department? Don't get me started.

I try to be as authentic as possible, regardless of what's happening in the moment. My father had a conversation with me about the increase of surveillance when I was really young. He used a Jill Scott song, "Watching Me," to talk to me about it, because I was very curious about the police camera that was placed on my block in Chicago in the early 2000s. My father told me there will be more cameras, more surveillance, more tracking the older you get. You can decide to watch what you say, watch what you do, be hyper-vigilant, be aware. But sometimes that won't even save you. Because you are Black.

And now, as a teacher, I tell students to lift their hand and I say, you have a unique fingerprint. Nobody else in the world shares your fingerprint. Your fingerprint is just as unique as your story.

Do they translate that into, I put my fingerprint in Apple every day? No. And I don't want to be the conspiracy theory teacher, because it's like, oh, Eshay is losing her mind. But there's going to be more — even with TikTok, randomly in the middle of the ICE surge, upgrading their terms and conditions. We see you. That ain't slick. They've embedded AI into this whole technology field.

What it does is it takes our patterns. Sociologists, psychologists will tell you that we all have a natural pattern. I am a theater artist. When I meet people, I am immediately noticing their patterns. Does their eye twitch, does their foot move, does their hand move, how do they say a thing? If I'm doing that as a theater artist naturally, if you had a background in psychiatry, sociology, any study of people, and then you put AI on top of that to keep all the data that I have watched and observed over time— I know you down to your fingerprint.

Even when we get off this call, you gon' literally open up your app and there's going to be something about Donald Trump there. Star Tribune might pop up. The show Paradise — I don't know if you've watched it, but when you watch Paradise, all of this is going to make sense. They have to track personality types, patterns, who's likely to revolt, what we know, what we don't know, what we're curious about, how to keep us in the consumer loop. And we just feed the thing. I'm guilty of this. I'm not judging anybody. We all feed the thing.

I drive an EV. I literally charge my car through my window right now. Everybody's like, gas prices — and I come home and I plug my car up. Charging the EVs is hell. I was calling them slave catcher cars to my friend. She was cracking up. She's like, why are you calling them that? And I'm like, I can't even get to Canada in this EV. When I stop to charge it on a fast charger, it takes two hours. On a fast charger? Where am I running to in this car? Where am I going? I was like, I need to hit the border — on some Handmaid's Tale situation. I couldn't even get there.

That's literally how I be thinking. I started running the cord through my window because I need to keep this thing charged. I don't know what's finna go down.

When the murder of George Floyd happened, I stayed on 17th and 3rd. Mateo had just turned two. And they were like, oh, the KKK is going around burning stuff. I packed my baby up so fast in the middle of the night and drove to Hopkins and stayed with my mom. She was like, get out the city, get out the city! I was so glad that I had a car. Throughout the entire pandemic, I worked and my son went to daycare, so we never quarantined aside from that first month. We were on the bus, and I had just got a car. And we are driving through Minneapolis and I'm just crying. What the fuck? I can't even believe this is my life right now. This is happening in 2020.

So here I am in the car with my son, my brother, and my sister, in the middle of the chaos, and I have to turn back around. It was getting apocalyptic. The world as we know it is ending today.

Because the North — for my family specifically, my great grandmother migrated from Georgia up to Chicago. That's hope. And then my grandmother's children all ended up either on crack or heroin, so she raised all of her grandkids. My mom said, this is no longer a place of hope and opportunity for us. Let's go to Minnesota. So Minnesota has always been a place of hope and opportunity for my family. To see the Lake Street I grew up on, taking the 21 bus up and down, with the police department burning, people running around — do we move up now? Do we go to Canada now? Where do we go now? We've moved from Georgia. We've moved from Chicago.

This is such a nuanced question for me because of my name. I've been received differently by a lot of different Black folks a part of the diaspora — no matter whether you're from Africa, from the Caribbean, from Europe, America.

People are like, "You can't be Black American." And I'm like, "Yeah, I am" — and I'm never offended. But it's always odd for me when people ask, "Where are you from?" And I'm like, "I'm from Chicago." "Well, no, where's your parents from?" "They're from Chicago." "And they gave you a name like that? Where are your parents' parents from?" I'm like, "I don't know, they were slaves many, many years ago."

And then people say, "In my country" or "In my language, this is what your name means." I had one Uber driver from Liberia tell me I should do the 23andMe to figure out what part of Africa I'm from. And so I've been a bystander in the Diaspora Wars, watching it and trying to correct people. When I was younger, I was a part of that — where we made fun of how dark a kid was. And I always had a curiosity: why does it matter? Regardless of whether you're African or African American, why does this distinction matter so much? We are proud people—globally, we are proud people.

If you look at anything that we do, we are very proud people. "I'm Somali." "I'm Kenyan." "I'm from the West Coast." "I'm from LA." "I'm from Brazil." Afro anything is very proud, very bold, very — "this is who I am" — which is to our benefit. But where it hurts us is when we start to do the thing that white supremacy taught us, which is to say, "I'm more than you because I am this thing. I'm better than you because I am this thing." Difference don't make you better or worse. You're just different.

And then first generation African babies grow up side by side with Black American children. And they're like, "I can't hang out with y'all?" First generation African children start experiencing systematic racism. Now you're being called Black American — you're not even Black American. You start to experience certain things and then you're trying to take that back to your parents and say, "Hey, we cannot be talking about Black American people like this. They have dealt with the wrong drugs, they have dealt with food apartheid, they have dealt with so many systemic things that are not on the surface."

You literally would not know unless you are doing deep history or research, or you are friends with somebody that can clearly articulate what's going on, or you are just so empathic and observant. It is so embedded in the fabric of America that sometimes you have to be close enough to it to see what it's made of.

And then Black American people feel like, "Hey, you won't talk about me. You have been connected to your roots and your language and all the things all these years." We're missing something. We're not whole — they took us. But because we don't start at Africa, we learn about the transatlantic slave trade and we don't understand how they ripped Africa apart, how they colonized parts of Africa, how they engaged some of our ancestors and our people inside of Africa. That is history we don't talk about K through 12.

In the United States, we're so hyper focused on the transatlantic slave trade to America, but we don't talk about it to South America. We don't talk about it across Europe, across Asia. We went everywhere. We didn't just come here.

My mom says that Brantley women are alpha women—we're strong, we're independent, and we don't need a man for anything. And my great-grandma always said "potawipski gypsy." She taught me how to hold my first gun when I was a little kid. It wasn't a big gun; it was like a little .22. She said, "Man put their hands on you, knock them upside their head."

I'm teaching them that joy is in them; it is not outside of them, that strength is in them; it is not outside. Resilience is inside of them; it is not outside of them. I'm teaching my daughter that her "no" means no and that she doesn't have to do anything to earn the space and boundaries she needs.

The one thing they taught me without teaching me is that I don't have to be afraid of her power, because a lot of the time we see mothers be proud of their daughters for knowing and being firm, and then when they get older, it's like me and my mom fought, my mom and my grandma fought, my grandma and my great-grandma fought. But a passive thing I learned from that was that I don't have to be afraid of her power or her sureness.

I want to cheer that on as much as possible because the world is going to try to take that from her. People are going to say, "Are you sure you know who you are? Are you sure you know what you want to do? Are you sure?" Because when they get you questioning, they can breed confusion, and I always want to be a safe space for her.

And my son is the same way. He's very like, "Nope. I'm not doing that."

I was raised to not take my trauma and make it who I am, and my father taught me to blaze my own trail if I don't see one. I stay behind my kids 100%, ten toes down.

Right now I am intentionally trying to find ways to restore my intuition and my spiritual practice. As a Christian, I believe in Jesus — how am I praying? Praying for the world, praying for Palestine, praying for the Congo, praying for Iran. Just honestly praying and getting in my word, but then also EFT tapping — emotional freedom tapping — and trying not to make my body the enemy, because the brain does a fantastic job of protecting us.

In the time of survival you become a floating head. You disconnect from the body because you have to survive — your amygdala is activated. You're literally in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. And I'm really practicing right now trying not to escape from my body, trying to stay centered, grounded, and clear, so when there is a time to actually escape, I have my bag packed and I am ready.

If my bag is not packed, I can get it ready. I can drop down into that militant, "this is what it is now" mindset. 'Cause right now, in the pause of the terrorism on Minnesota — because that's what we are in, a pause. Something else is going to happen. I believe we're being terrorized by our government. But in the pause, it's important that I don't let my eyes and my ears lead me, but my intuition. It was intuition that had us braiding seeds into our hair before we were enslaved Africans. That was intuition. It was intuition that got Harriet through the Underground Railroad. Malcolm X's life is pure intuition. Divinity. His life is an example of that.

So right now I'm like —

That's really what I'm working on right now in this pause. So I'm intentionally slowing down. I'm making my no mean no and my yes mean yes. My son is supposed to come up for the summer, and I plan to take my kids to Duluth with no cell phones. We go out, we got a cabin — no iPads, no TVs. We color, we craft, we read. We detox. They're only eight and four, so they're going to be losing it — there ain't no iPad, no TV, what do you mean no TV? What do you mean?! But I touched grass at four and at eight. I climbed trees, scraped my knee, dissected worms. I was walking to the corner store as little as Ava at four years old, with my little wallet quarters in my little crown bag that my great-grandma gave me, looking both ways across the street — just to go get me some hot Cheetos and cheese.

What happens when we take the screens away? How does agency feel in the body? What is happening? What can we explore? Why get antsy when I'm not on Instagram for a little bit? Why get worried about the world when I don't know what's going on?

Holding me in my ebbs and flows. People believe that because I'm an artist, I'm always responsive to what's going on in the world. And sometimes I am trying to understand the difference between responsive and reactive — especially with my ADHD. I'm crying alone about these things. We're talking about these things, but there's a missing embodiment and practice and movement that's missing for me. And I still have to manage a household. So some days people might see me and be like, damn, Eshay, you're doing it. And I'm like, one day at a time. And if you hear me say one day at a time, I am not doing it. I am on my last of my last.

That's from my dad — when he had cancer, he said, when I leave, just take it one day at a time. So instead of saying I'm bad, I just say I'm taking it one day at a time. Which means I don't even have enough energy to have hope for tomorrow — I'm just trying to get through the day.

And so I need to be held in my nuances and my ebbs and flows. I need to not be required to produce perfection as a Black woman right now. That's what I need. That's what support looks like. Take me as I am.

I would ask the next mom: what part of this history that's happening now do they want their grandkids to know about?

That's a really good question. That's a hard question. I think someone that's emotionally exhausted, physically exhausted.

And I think because of how I've always been on high alert and just on the go for the entirety of my life, my body has gotten to this point where it's very exhausted. I've always been tired, but I think because I'm getting to a point in my life where I'm becoming more financially stable and becoming the consistent breadwinner within my family, my body has not gotten time to fully rest. I think sometimes when folks talk about this idea of Black folks getting rest and Black women getting rest, they see it as this time for healing. But when your body has always been on the go and then you finally stop, it actually becomes so dangerous when you abruptly get time to physically stop and relax.

And so now because I've gotten some time over the past year to somewhat relax, to take some time for myself, my body is not used to that. It's not used to having agency, not used to being able to be slow and not be on high alert. Now I'm feeling the repercussions of not being on the go.

Creatively, it feels like I'm getting the chance to be not even teenage Lucina, but five-year-old Lucina getting the chance to be creative and to love the creative part of my brain. It's just exciting, and it makes me think about what would have happened if my people weren't targeted back home, because people in my family are artists, they're painters, they're dancers, they're seamstresses. Getting to embody all the things that they lost is exciting.

I think this period makes me remember that things can abruptly be stripped away from you. You can plan all these things, you can get all these degrees and try to set everything up in a way for your community to be successful, but things can still be stripped away in the blink of an eye. So why not find different ways to live, whatever that means.

But when you've consistently been around death since you were a child, before you even got to this country, and you see how people forget you — especially if you are a Black woman, especially when you're fat and dark skinned — you are recognized for a split second, and then when you die, folks literally move on — compared to if it was a Black man that had died.

I think of Sandra Bland. I think of Breonna Taylor because of seeing all these different Black women passing away from stress most recently. Not even a police shooting, but the system finding different ways to literally kill you. I'm just like…I need to force myself to find ways to live and have fun with the people I care about and that does not include me caretaking for my community. Whether it's me going back to painting, me going back to taking photographs, doing projects, gossiping on the phone with my closest friends — I think that's where I'm at right now.

When they were murdered, especially Renee Good, there were the usual folks who were blaming her for her own death — "she should have done this, should have done that." But in regard to blaming her partner or blaming her, you didn't even see that within white liberal spaces.

And thinking about when Dolal Idd was murdered and MPD went into his family's home. His little brother was autistic, and they handcuffed the family. They were blaming a dead person who was just executed by the state and then blaming the family for their reaction - without the family even knowing what had happened to their loved one, and their reaction to having a bunch of strangers in their home, having them zip tied.

Seeing the ways in which white folks were so distraught, the centering of whiteness because of the two murders that had happened — while at that same time a Black man had been murdered by an ICE agent, a Black woman had been murdered — the erasure in that moment…it felt like you were being gaslit because Black folks had to tiptoe around conversations about policing and what was happening, especially in Minnesota.

Because the way we wanted to react — if you reacted on Threads, on Twitter, on Instagram, folks would literally tell you in the most midwestern way to shut the fuck up and that the system is trying to pit us against each other. Alex Pretti and Renee Good's murders were still rooted in anti-Blackness, still rooted in white supremacy, but still centering whiteness for white people in Minnesota. You just felt like you were being gaslit by some of these folks.

We don't get the option of developing consciousness later in life. But whiteness allows these folks to develop a consciousness at 50, 60 years old. It allows them to make mistakes — and by mistakes, I mean putting people who are far more vulnerable than them at risk of being surveilled in the most dangerous way possible.

I have three main jobs. Running Atlas of Blackness is one, and that's a whole different ball game when it comes to looking at what was happening here in Minnesota, especially in regards to how it impacted Black mothers who are foster youth, and fosters, and formerly incarcerated folks. But in regards to being a therapist, seeing how a lot of the mothers' stress manifested in the micromanaging of their children, and then going to work as a special education school social worker and seeing how, when you micromanage your child at home, how it manifests within the classroom for those kids — and having to hold both truths, and having grace with mothers and parents who are just emotionally exhausted and are scared for the safety of their children, and also not knowing how to express that they're scared for the safety of their children.

As a therapist, if I'm doing family therapy… if I have therapy clients who are teenagers and I have to meet with their parents, I have to be very careful of how I'm having conversations with those young people around their valid response to the micromanaging and surveillance from their parents — while they're also being surveilled at school and being surveilled outside of their homes. And then also trying to get them to understand why the surveillance, the conversation that their parents — which their mothers are having with them — feels like surveillance without dismissing that what they're going through is actual harm as well from the hands of their mothers who are just fearful that their children are gonna be harmed once they leave.

I'll even add Isak Aden and Daunte Wright. I think what's interesting is, I always laugh sometimes when I hear Black folks — especially Black folks who are American — who have citizenship — even some Africans who've been here a long time, is this idea that Blackness is even allowed to be legal within this land. That your Blackness won't strip you away from citizenship. Even when we talk about Dolal Idd, the separation between Dolal Idd, Isak Aden, versus Winston Smith, Daunte Wright, George Floyd. I always find it so interesting when I hear Black people talk about how these things are not their fight.

Sometimes our removal from that access is death by the hands of the system, and it doesn't matter who ends up doing it. It doesn't matter if you're murdered by your neighbor, it doesn't matter if it's an ATF agent, or an ICE agent. When the system wants to strip away your rights, it can do it by any means necessary.

It's the idea that because of the different color of the badges doing the killing, therefore it is some separate type of issue. The same folks who are anti-Black in our schools are also the same folks who are becoming ICE agents as well. My foster mom literally saw someone she used to work with as a correctional officer, on the streets as an ICE agent. So the same folks are harassing and harming people within our prison system are also ICE agents.

How folks interact with Blackness within schools, Blackness within therapy settings, Blackness on the streets, is literally the same. And sometimes the violence happens to be the one that's writing your case report. The police officer is the one writing the case report, and that includes someone like myself. Our badges look very different. It could literally end up destroying someone's life if we're not consistently checking how we move.

I think as a society, we're wanting to have clarity in everything. I think for a lot of the social workers in the district, it wasn't about giving clarity to the families and the youth that we work with because ICE and immigration itself is based around not being clear. It's based around confusion.

So you can never actually fully explain chaos to families because there's no way to really clarify what's happening around them. What I felt my job was, was making sure that folks were able to function within chaos and function as much as possible without having answers.

We're consistently craving answers to things, we're craving having some type of form of clarity. That's why it's so easy for these AI systems like ChatGPT to consume us, right? That's why it's so easy for us to be consistently on TikTok, because we're always searching for some type of answer or clarity or some type of knowledge.

But white supremacy does not offer you that. And because you don't have access to it, it's purposefully trying to make you ill. 'Cause when you don't have answers to things, your body starts to worry. When you don't know what's coming up next, your body starts to worry and it starts to manifest into different forms of illnesses. Chronic pain, chronic diseases.

One of the things that I noticed was that non-Black kids who were impacted by the ICE raids could go online and wouldn't be judged by any of the administration or teachers. But Black children — whether they had immigration issues, or family who were refugees or immigrants, or were just Black American youth, period — could not go online or do virtual learning without suspicion from the administration that followed along with that.

It was just so interesting to really watch, and how so many — even Black teachers — would be like, Why is that kid taking time off from school? While those questions were never asked to any of the non-Black students who were going virtual. And they wouldn't ask that to the kids themselves, they wouldn't ask that to their parents, but it would come up in conversations. You could also tell by how they were naming which kid was going to be online — because they made lists.

You have these mothers — these Black mothers — who are taking their kids out of school for safety, and then you have the administration questioning it. But that's never a thing for non-Black kids. And then you see how it manifests: if a non-Black kid is not coming onto their Zoom or Google Meets call for class, it's because they're stressed because of what's happening in the world. When Black kids don't come onto it, it's because they went online just to avoid school — because they avoid school even when they're in school.

I think a lot of it comes from them blaming everything already on ICE being here because of Blackness, because of fraud, and the association with that. The school I work at, most of the Black students are Somali, and so the dismissiveness of Black students being impacted—even Black staff being impacted—because the Black refugee staff and Black staff here were not actually checked in on—the rationale behind that is that ICE is here originally to deal with y'all; now, because of y'all's issues of fraud, it's impacting everyone else and our poor non-Black students.

I think the targeting of some of their Somali students and their other Black students, they rationalize it as, this was the consequence towards your behavior. That's how I perceived it because of how folks interact with them and how these schools already surveil their Black students—especially their Black Muslim students, and especially at the school I work at. They surveil their every moment. They surveil what time they do prayer; they surveil how they're doing prayer; they surveil Black students with their phones out because their phones are not allowed out in school.

But they don't do the same thing for the non-Black kids who are out in the hallway. But for a lot of the staff, those kids that are out in the hallway, they're supposed to be there. But when the Black students are out in the hallways avoiding their classes, they're not supposed to be there. They're doing that to be disruptive.

When you have a bunch of Black kids being "disruptive," my question then is: why are your Black students refusing to participate within your community? If that school space is their community, and they refuse to participate within classroom settings except a couple, that should tell you that's not their community. That space is not safe enough for them, and those classrooms are not safe enough for them, when you only have about three or four Black teachers in your school.

I think a lot of them didn't care about what was happening to Black kids, especially Somali youth, because I feel like they felt like those kids' families were being protected anyway, because the ones who were being harmed according to the media weren't the Black folks.

Minnesotan politicians — Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives — are very much aware that in order to get things passed here in Minnesota, you have to create some form of fear. And the fear looks very different here than creating fear in New York or Chicago or Boston because our population here is very monoracial. Black folks who are Muslim, who are poor, who are visibly Black — and they're concentrated as well.

For Black Americans who live in Minnesota, they're concentrated in certain areas, especially St. Paul or certain parts of Minneapolis. These two political extremes are very much aware that their bill cannot be centered around surveilling Black folks because they'll get pushback. But their bills can be centered around protecting whiteness, protecting children. And they're not talking about protecting the marginalized children who are in these Minneapolis schools. They're talking about — if we have this bill, we can protect kids who go to schools like Annunciation. We can protect our rich, privileged students.

These two extremes of the political spectrum know they can't pass this bill if it looks like they're targeting a certain demographic. But this bill can be passed if they're talking about protecting children and gun violence. If you look back to CVE, the way that folks got CVE to be successful in Minnesota was: we're not targeting this specific demographic, we're trying to protect them from people who want to target them. And so you were able to get buy-in from people within their own community, from Somali organizations, from foundations to distribute funds to Somali businesses so they could surveil each other without the system looking like they were causing any harm or targeting anyone.

And with the Star Tribune and different news entities talking about Black folks and this idea of gun violence associated with them — we can't target them that way. But what we can do is use a tragedy that happened and get white privileged parents whose children were put in harm's way to back a bill — something that they would not actually be okay with having within their own school. But then they can say these people are backing this. You cannot go against parents who lost their children. You cannot go against parents who almost lost their kids. What politician wants to go against a parent at Annunciation School saying my kid was almost murdered by gun violence and say, absolutely not, we don't want to surveil our own people? Who's going to do that?

So now you have the best spokespeople — these distraught parents who are literally experiencing PTSD, these children who are literally experiencing PTSD, and these community members who had to go on lockdown because of that shooting. But at the same time, there were shootings that happened that were not considered attempted mass shootings — and that was over North. Because when shootings like that happen over North and in areas where there's a majority Black population, it's not considered a mass shooting. Instead it's associated with some form of gang activity associated with poverty.

CVE was successful for a while until the Somali community said, you got us messed up, and they started organizing against their own people to bring awareness to CVE. Our politicians have learned how to surveil better and how to do it in a way where it doesn't look like these two political entities — the Democrats and Republicans — are working together to strategically find ways to surveil Black children in schools.

And I truly believe that unless people are fully able to understand how the targeting of Somali children in Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts worked in 2014-2016, folks will not be able to stop this bill. They will not be able to organize against bills like these, because if this bill is not successful, these two political entities are going to find a different way to bring a different bill up. It's going to happen, but unless people are able to fully understand how the surveillance and targeting of Somali youth was able to be successful in schools, they will not be able to stop the targeting of Black children - especially Black American children who live in North Minneapolis.

That they were able to learn that each of us have rage in us that a lot of us weren't able to express, but for them, society has not allowed them the privilege to express any of their emotions, their rage, their sadness. I hope the spaces that I created allowed them to be complex, allowed them to be rageful, allowed them to be depressed, allowed them to be happy within the same day if it called for it.

I think the big thing for me is if I had access to stability. We make jokes a lot, like we just did — "you know, sometimes money does buy happiness." But having access to stability is the biggest support that would solve so much of my problems right now. It would allow me to not have to be in an alert state consistently, and would allow me to be able to pause and deal with the consequences of pausing. Because once you pause, your body goes into this very distraught state, and then by the time your body starts to release all of the hormones that are balancing you, you have to go back to being on alert and go back to working.

But if I had stability — which would look like my org being fully funded and me being able to also be an artist — I would then be able to pause, to rest, and then deal with the physical and emotional consequences of resting and the 20-plus years of not actually being able to rest.

What are the consequences of finally allowing yourself a moment of rest, and then having that rest cut short? When you're forced back into survival mode, does that interruption make things harder than if you had never stopped at all?

It's very dangerous because then your body gets used to that pause. It's like a person having frostbite who has been left in the cold for so long, and now you are abruptly bringing them into warmth and expecting no reaction from their body. You're expecting their body to be able to defrost. But in reality, that frostbite can end up getting worse because of that abrupt shock. Instead of wrapping them, slowly bringing them somewhere warm gradually—putting something on their hands, that slow buildup to full body warmth—your brain is only then getting used to "oh, I'm actually more warm, I'm actually relaxing."

I see the same thing with this idea of self-care. Folks think taking two or three days off is going to reset their body, when your body has been on alert every day of your life and you're 37 years old. You're telling me you're 30 years old, but your body is actually that of a 50-year-old because of how hypervigilant you've had to be. You have a bunch of stress knots in your neck and your shoulders, and you're thinking two days is "rest" — but you're not actually resting, because your body is already thinking "okay, I have to go back to this in two more days, three more days." Even a two-week break isn't enough.