Minneapolis (USA), July 7, GNA – If you are a black person then the story of how geography and racial luck assigned you to that category began in the mid 1450s; it began in 1452 when Portuguese King Afonso V, divinely inspired by Pope Nicholas’s Papal Bull Dum Diversas ordered Pagans and Saracens to be consigned to perpetual servitude.
In his book “Stamped From The Beginning” the Boston University Academic, Professor Ibram X Kendi goes further to name Gomez Eanes de Zurara as the man who was commissioned by the king to document an imaginary European perception of the African in his racist travelogue, “The Chronicle Of The Discovery and Conquest of Guinea”.
Someone, not African, began this evil idiocy.
What Zurara created was a supremacist worldview and a seminal work that more than anything became the foundational dogma for the conquests of other lands and the dominance of other people.
It is the justification Don Diego de D’Azambuja needed to bring his men to the shores of Edina in January of 1482. It is the reason why there was Colonialism, and chattel slavery before that. It is the enduring force that will reach into the future to pull along modern day right wing racists to their current perch in every black person’s history and nightmares. It inspired 19th Century Eugenicists that tried to use pseudoscience to confirm an imagined inferiority of the black person, and it inspired the 13th Amendment codification in the American constitution of the Black person as 3/5 of a human.
Zurara invented race.
Before that you were just a boy from Kwahu Pepease, a Chaga girl from the foothills of the Kilimanjaro on the Serengeti, a Yoruba man from Ijebu Ode, a Mandinka granddad, a Xhosa grandma and an Amharic auntie.
But I digress.
I am a storyteller and out of my league so I will leave history to its rightful practitioners and recount a sad outgrowth of a racialized world and one of its laughable absurdities.
So let’s jump some five and a half centuries from the 1450s into a trite story set in the heart of Minnesota in 2001. Yep, the same boring, progressive and civilized Minnesota that triggered a global uproar in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.
It is early spring and at the wide bend where the Mississippi wraps itself in a sweeping swoosh around the northern edge of Brooklyn Park as if to separate the multiracial community from Fridley, the maple, ash and elm trees were especially luxuriant with their sprouting foliage in the breeze. The old river by which the trees stood sentry was hurriedly carting off the last chunks of ice that choked its path the winter before.
There, a pair of squirrels were bounding about haltingly but playfully in tail-tugging between one of the benches by the river bank and a large Elm tree.
The besotted rodents did not see Wisseh Tolbert inching stealthily close to them on his elbows like a Seal Team 6 soldier priming for a Taliban. With a springing move forward Wisseh swung his homemade net at the foot of the bench; his right hand was already committed to the hunt so his left hand held the tip of the net while at the same time wringing the neck of the bigger of the two squirrels. Its squirrel days were over.
Wisseh giggled softly but triumphantly as he dropped the limp rodent into an ice chest he hid behind a large Ash tree a few steps away from the scene of his daytime hunt. He was a recent arrival from Liberia, and in his retelling of the story he picked the taste for Opro when he spent a year in The Ivory Coast, and didn’t understand why his friends in his Brooklyn Park neighborhood didn’t see squirrel as a delicacy.
So for several days until he found a job at the Procter and Gamble factory, he would sneak into the wooded banks of the Mississippi for a tasty barbecue appointment with the bushy-tailed rodents. It went on, and on, and on until…..
Until this breezy spring day when the waft of burning animal fur and fat caught the attention of Officer Johnson who was resting in his squad car a mile downstream on the same side of the river bank. The old cop could see the faint outline of smoke in the distance and wondered why anyone would barbecue in an underbrush so far away from one of the designated pavilions.
A few minutes later Wisseh felt a gentle tap on the back of his left shoulder and in that instant heard the distinct voice of what sounded like someone with authority “Sir, slowly lay on the floor and obey my commands at all times” It must have felt like a small moment of belated karmic justice for the squirrel. Wisseh spent two nights at the Brooklyn Park Police precinct wondering why it required someone to bail him for killing a squirrel. A squirrel? In the end his one man riverside picnic was a transgression that emptied him of $1500. Money he didn’t have.
Wisseh would always recount his only interaction with American justice when he was drunk. He would have this subdued smile that is only betrayed by a regretful head shake and a short heavy sigh that always, without fail, trails off into a long complain about the how the $1500 court fine punctured his plans to date a girl he describes as prettier than Beyoncé. I found that pointless; but I suspected the comparison was more to embellish his pride of dating someone beautiful than an emphasis on the humiliation of being arrested for killing a squirrel. “My brother, these people like animals so don’t mess with their animals” is the way story always begins and ends.
The revelatory value of Wisseh’s story was lost on me until the night after George Floyd’s death when the mentally numbing footage of Officer Chauvin’s knee digging into Floyd’s neck topped the headline loop on the nightly news. There are laws to protect animals in this country, but a cop could kill a Black person at will without fear of any retribution?
I watched in a strange mixture of bemusement, sadness and anger as suburbs of the Minneapolis burned. “This is not the city I know”, I mused horrifyingly to myself.
But I should know, because the kindling for the flames that torched some 1500 properties has long been smoldering beneath this troubling duality of living in a state that self-congratulates itself as one of the most liberal places in America but also one with some of the widest social achievements and demographic gaps in the country.
Minnesota has a long history of providing some of the vertical and horizontal lumber for the scaffolding that helped in building the structures of Whiteness and racializing spaces in America. Away from the spotlight, and from the roars and musketry of the Civil War in 1862, legions of White Settlers turned a Mdewakanton Dakota rebellion over food ration and annuity into one of the worst massacres in Indigenous American history. Little Crow and his band of Dakota Tribesmen lost about a thousand people from the ensuing war and a further 38 were hanged on the orders of Abraham Lincoln. Little Crow, the Dakotan Chief who led the rebellion was killed in 1863 and scalped for public display until 1970.
In reaction to a Black lawyer buying a house in a White neighborhood in 1909 in Minneapolis, White property owners across the city adopted restrictive residential laws known as racial covenants to stop non-Whites from buying properties in certain areas of the city.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota are on course to uncover over 30,000 of these restrictive deeds across the metro area of Minneapolis-St.Paul. Even though the practice is no longer enforceable after the passing of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, it already laid the foundation for the maintenance and transfer of generational wealth for White families.
Today the wealth gap between the average White and Black family is $47,000. And because the location of good schools depends on the value of houses in districts, the wealth gap in Minnesota translates into the widest achievement gap in primary and secondary education in America.
The Fair Housing Act itself allowed banks to continue from where private individuals left off. Today, redlining and other mortgage discriminatory practices by American banks continue to disproportionately deny housing loans to potential Black home owners by a of factor of 10:1. So the accumulation of White wealth occurs at the same intensity as the parallel dispossession of Black wealth. This was the running theme that cruelly inspired the massacre of Black people in Wilmington in 1898, Tulsa in 1921 and Rosewood in 1923 when White lynch mobs threatened by a growing Black wealth decimated that Black population.
Major freeways like Interstates 35 and 94 built in the Minneapolis-St Paul area were purposefully detoured through and destroyed neighborhoods that were predominantly Black.
So the current racial reckoning burning the illusion of America may have been triggered by Officer Chauvin callously murdering George Floyd in front of a convenient store in a multi-racial community in Minneapolis, but the kindling has always been there. About 14 unarmed civilians have been killed by the Minneapolis police since 2000, and in the only instance that an officer was convicted it was a Somalian-American officer who had killed a White Australian-American in the Southside neighborhood of the city. Sadly the city is used to this.
So I have no idea where Minnesota or America writ large goes from here, and as I nibble on that question I get this distress induced metallic taste in my mouth at the thought of getting pulled over by a White cop. And like the traffic stop scenario, should Black people just freeze and obey orders in a groveling diffidence to a racialized system, or should they require cops to shed that proxy representation of White Supremacy and just be human?
I am an Akwapim boy weaned on Presbyterian meekness in preparation for the promise of inheriting the world in my after-life so as I cowardly tuned off the the TV on the unfolding riots in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s death, I was left with this tear-jerking image of my niece Jada bravely telling a peaceful protest crowd “I am 14 years and I don’t have to sit home and worry if dad (my brother) will safely come home when he goes out.
I teared up and, in that moment, remembered Wisseh’s story. Maybe he was right; here a squirrel’s life matters more.
GNA