The reckoning

Valerie Fitzgerald

We are coming up on five years since Mr. George Floyd was murdered at Cup Foods by a police officer. Memories of that time carry a strong emotional charge: the daily COVID-19 briefings from Governor Walz and Commissioner Jan Malcolm and then, the daily briefings about the unrest following Mr. Floyd’s murder. The curfew alarm, the Blackhawk helicopters, the explosions through the night, sleeping with the light on to make sure I could move quickly if I had to.
Senator Patricia Torres Ray posted on Facebook through the night, advocating for her constituents. Unicorn Riot provided live video as unrest took place on Lake Street and throughout the Twin Cities. Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights lawyer and activist, led peaceful protests.
I first saw Ms. Armstrong on the news show Almanac in 2015, when she was president of the Minneapolis NAACP. She appeared to comment on the police killing of Jamar Clark.
When Mr. Clark was killed, the Hennepin County Attorney determined that “the officers acted in accordance with Minnesota Statutes authorizing deadly force” (quoting from the Wikipedia entry about Mr. Clark). Ms. Armstrong countered that systemic racism resulted in Black Americans, especially men, being targeted and subsequently killed during routine interactions with police.
At the time, I was in the habit of believing what I saw on the news. Ms. Armstrong’s argument created doubt and cognitive dissonance. I compartmentalized my troubled feelings. When the protests stopped being reported in the press, I felt that my life went back to normal. I knew the problem had not gone away, but I could ignore it.
For the next five years, when I felt troubled by high profile reports of police killings of Black men and women, I filed those feelings away in my subconscious so I could keep functioning. In 2020, with Mr. Floyd’s death and the pandemic, my ability to ignore cognitive dissonance began to disintegrate. Two people in particular helped me to begin unpacking all that compartmentalized material in my brain.
2020 was the year I started reading Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters From An American. Heather is a history professor at Boston College. On March 7, 2020, she wrote, “It seems to me that, historically, we have swung between two extremes. When our lack of government oversight of the economy leads to the rise of extremely wealthy people who take over our political system and use it to promote their own interests, a crisis lays bare the misuse of the government for the rich. Americans then rise up and insist on an active government that protects the equality of opportunity on which our democracy depends. Three times before now, we have played out this pattern.” Those three times were the 1850s-60s, leading to the Civil War; the early 20th century, when Theodore Roosevelt regulated business; and the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal helped people like my parents survive the Great Depression.
I also read Resmaa Menakem’s book, "My Grandmother’s Hands." Resmaa is a somatic trauma therapist who spent much of his career in Minnesota. He wrote, “Throughout the United States history as a nation, White bodies have colonized, oppressed, brutalized, and murdered Black and Native ones. But well before the United States began, powerful White bodies colonized, oppressed, brutalized, and murdered other, less powerful White ones.”
Both Resmaa and Heather wrote about the cruelty involved in slavery, but they also wrote about how a wealthy, powerful minority persuaded less affluent Whites that slavery was justified because light-skinned people of European descent were inherently superior to darker skinned people.
For example, I grew up believing there was the potential for financial success if I worked hard enough, yet it always seemed like I struggled financially. Some leaders explained financial struggles like mine by blaming immigrants, or Black people or Jewish people or some other group that didn’t deserve to succeed. These people, they said, were taking jobs from Americans like me and robbing us of our opportunity for wealth.
I didn’t consciously agree with that sentiment, but the part of my brain that compartmentalized racial violence held onto a vague, wordless fear. That fear found expression in July of 2022, when I took a two-day online course from Resmaa called Foundations of Somatic Abolitionism.
Resmaa taught about White supremacy as a trauma response. He asked us, the White participants, to describe what happened when our trauma response is activated by discussions of race and racism. I answered, “A sense that I have to be able to survive in the world and I don’t want to give up the survival skills I have now. A sense that if I let go of my place in the hierarchy, I will never get it back; fear of economic instability, being old and homeless and alone. Fear of losing friends and family, of being disliked.”
I finally heard the voice of all those troubled feelings I had filed away in my subconscious over the years. I began to think about how my great grandparents learned to be White when they came to the U.S. throughout the 1800s, and how my parents passed down those lessons to me.
Resmaa wrote, “Race has its own unique charge, texture, weight, and speed. The ability to hold and work with the energies isn’t inborn. It needs to be acquired through effort and practice.” For me, whiteness has gone from something that was invisible, to something I was ashamed of, to something I finally accept as a reality that needs to be dealt with.
This is the first of four columns that document my racial reckoning. For me, this process started with learning the history involved in separating humans by race. Next, I placed my own family’s immigrant experience into a broader historical perspective. Finally, I looked at how the world has changed during my own lifetime. This writing is simply one woman’s perspective on learning to see and accept whiteness in my own identity.
Valerie Fitzgerald is a clinical counselor who has worked in mental health care since 2011. She resides in Howe.