Dispatch from a City in Flames — Seeking Silence in Minneapolis: Day 5
Elexis Trinity
There’s a lesson you only learn if you live in a good winter place — and it’s this: There is no such thing as silence in spring. Growing up in southern California, with its perpetual boredom of 70-degree sameness, I never noticed. But I am not in California now; I am in my own backyard having a coffee in a usually quiet residential area of the historic south Minneapolis neighborhood Uptown, made famous by Prince — and the decibel of life is hard to ignore. All around me the world has burst into a symphony of color and sound, signaling that the long Minnesota winters are a death of a temporary kind, part of a seasonal cycle around which humans have built our lives and adapted our cultures for as far back at least as recorded history extends. My backyard, bursting with signs of resurgent life, and this year – spring, in anno dominicae abandoment, MMXX – are no exception.
There’s no such thing as silence in spring.
Sitting here with the sun hot on my back, attempting a moment of silence, I am struck by the obtrusive whirring of helicopters overhead, discordant against the chirruping of seasonal ornithine guests occupying the trees which overhang the sprawling yard and the alley into which a long tangled line of verdant bushes and vines extend. A large ant crawls over the rise of my bare foot in the grass. They get so big this time of year. Beyond the overgrown garden path to the front yard, scores of my neighbors are walking in the same direction, sandwiches and water bottles in hand, many in couples or small household groups, most of them still masked-up and keeping to social distancing’s meter/6-foot spacing recommendations.
They are pouring into areas of our neighborhood damaged by fire and conflict, which have borne witness to centuries of systemic racism – unjust policing, inequitable living, working and educational conditions – to clean up the streets after the fourth night of protests, pain, long-withheld rage. Many of my neighbors are in solidarity with protesters; some of them are protesters themselves. I’ve come to think of them as the dayshift and the nightshift. The tearing down and the building up. The recognition of anger and also of ownership, of responsibility for our neighborhood, our community, our state. Others decry the madness of the way our city and our protests have been represented across the country and the amount of destruction caused by out-of-town agitators.
We have seen our neighbors come together across surface differences for peaceful, bipartisan vigils in honor of the life of George Floyd, bearing demands for justice for his murder which was also committed in our neighborhood, in broad daylight, on camera—like so many others before him. Many Minneapolitans have pointed out that the violence being perpetrated by white supremacist counter-protesters on our local businesses, affordable housing and other targets of rage and unrest are being misrepresented as the work of young black and brown protesters. Indeed, Governor Walz himself has reported that 80% of those arrested for rioting in our neighborhood are from out of town – not locals torn with pain and anger, but rabble rousers only here for the fires and the looting and the chaos.
And that is a dissonance that is hard to reconcile for all those struggling with real pain and anger in the face of what has happened, and their courageous efforts managing to hold space for peaceful resistance and honorable agitation for justice. It’s the fifth day of protests, the afternoon after an 8 p.m. curfew failed to contain the burning of the area near 31st and Nicollet. The cops of the 5th precinct declined to leave their building, as the 3rd precinct cops had done the night before when the police building burned. National Guard troops on the ground have been increased from 500 to thousands according to the New York Times. Judging by the ceaseless buzzing of the helicopters above my head, they are not alone.
The word on the street is that the out-of-town mobs who have been taking advantage of the unrest to act violently are going to be patrolling our residential neighborhoods tonight with weapons to spread terror, as communities in neighborhoods across Minneapolis prepare to stand ground and protect their businesses and homes. There’s a chance that the FBI and the military police may be deployed. Some people are leaving town. Lots of people – especially the most vulnerable who live along the Lake Street corridor and elsewhere likely to be central in the ongoing unrest – aren’t able to leave. My family discussed the possibility of escaping to Texas to be with family if we needed to—but one of my sisters with whom I live, an “essential person,” was recently exposed to COVID-19 and has to self-quarantine for 14 days, because she is also young and healthy and unlikely to be tested or treated. And really, what could the doctors do anyway for someone without symptoms right now? But still, it complicates things.
While I am in solidarity with peaceful protesters and continue to demand justice for George Floyd and prosecution of all four of the cops who participated in his killing in addition to serious redress to the system of violence, police brutality and race-based injustice that allowed this to happen – yet again – I am also dazed by pain and grief and distressed with fear and anxiety. My husband is black. My teenage brother is black. I am too. Yesterday we walked around our neighborhood an hour before the curfew went into effect and watched neighbors and small business owners boarding up the shops along Hennepin and Lake and Lagoon.
And now I am here, sitting in the sun in my own backyard, feeling, on top of all of that, grateful for the resources and support to which I have access. Much of that access, I know, is due to my own privilege – my education, my social class, my able-bodied status and so on. But none of that will protect me or my family from the price of being black, and free, in America. Even the Amy Coopers of this world highlight the degree to which our Ivy League degrees (my husband and I met during our undergrad days at Brown) and professional success (we are lucky enough to be among the 40% of people who can still work our professional jobs from home) don’t fully shield us from harassment, violence and disruption.
Today, surrounded by the greening of my overgrown yard in spring – juicy, full-of-life, spring – punctuated by the sounds of preparations for violence and coordinated efforts toward repairing our community, I sit outside in my neighborhood in Minneapolis for a few silent minutes – and it feels like it isn’t enough silence. For George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. For all my brothers and sisters killed by the police, by the authorities of this country before them. For the immigrant and community-owned businesses that have been burned to the ground by counter-protesters. For any of us. And the helicopters overhead have syncopated with the birds, but all I can hear is the music of my community peacefully chanting:
I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I (still) can’t breathe.
And the rhythms of the city’s – and the state’s and the nation’s – authorities preparing to respond with force. And the marching of my neighbors to repair, protect, and demand change.
Elexis Trinity is a community-based researcher and project director at a nonprofit social capital incubator in Minneapolis. They recently earned a master’s degree in human rights from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, joining the much-written-about COVID class of 2020, and are spending the year organizing conversations about the future of health and wellbeing in the US. They hope you have enough toilet paper. @elexistrinity