I guess people think I'm conservative?

*Context before you read: I'm a born and raised Minnesotan. If you've seen Minnesota in headlines for years, connected to moments of heightened political unrest, it’s truly better to hear from a local. And more specifically, from an organizer's perspective, which isn't usually the one making the headlines. I've lived in a lot of different parts of this state: the suburbs, parts of the metro area where predominantly Black folks are populated (northside, parts of southside), and even rurally, since I have a farm about an hour and a half up north from the Twin Cities. All of that has shaped my lens in ways that matter for the position I'm about to lay out.

There was a moment when I realized no one was coming to help solve the issues in our communities, and at first that realization was just discouraging. Wow. Just like my ancestors, I thought. Will we ever see the day our wellbeing, our safety, our conditions are actually prioritized? Will we always be the ones left disadvantaged? That feeling sat heavy inside of me for a longgggg time.

But then I asked myself something. How could this feeling of defeat be so prevalent in me, when many of my ancestors were so determined, generation after generation, to not let “defeat” be the last word? People like Fannie Lou Hamer, who may never be named or considered by the systems that failed them, didn’t settle for defeat in their community. How many thriving neighborhoods were never documented, never recorded anywhere official, but thrived anyway simply because the neighbors made sure they did. And that’s when it hit me… Many didn’t wait on anyone coming to save them. They built alternatively anyway.

That’s really this whole essay, if I’m honest. The system will not meet our needs the way community can. I didn’t arrive at that all at once, though. I want to walk through how I got there.

In 2016, when Philando Castile was murdered, I was seventeen, sleeping in the streets, protesting against a killing that felt like the system working exactly as it was built to work. That was my frustration, out loud, in the only way I knew how to express it at the time. I was young and new to organizing, new to injustice work, and marching and storming spaces saying this is wrong felt like the most sense I could make of what I was feeling. I did that from 2016 until 2019 and while I know many people have their qualms around protesting, I believe that