How We Can Win: Race, History and Changing the Money Game That's Rigged

HOW CAN WE WIN?

In 2019, I put out a call to action to my community. I made a Facebook event for a neighborhood cleanup where I was living in Bankhead, a community on the west side of Atlanta. Oddly enough the area was named after actress Tallulah Bankhead’s grandfather, John H. Bankhead, an Alabama Confederate war hero and US senator. But if the name rings familiar to you, it’s probably because of the song Bankhead Bounce by Diamond and D-Roc, and you may even know the dance of the same name. I didn’t grow up there like T.I. (I was born up in Bankhead, y’all remember me) but for many years I called it home. The Facebook invitation read:

The family-friendly event will begin at 9:00 a.m. Meet at the corner of Joseph E. Boone and Westchester on Atlanta’s Westside. Practice stewardship with your child. Picking up litter is a fun, simple, free activity that can have instant results for your child and your community. In two hours, we can make two blocks cleaner, free of litter, and a nice place for the residents to come home to.

As I walk through my community, I see wrappers, Popsicle sticks, newspapers and every kind of disposable on the street, sidewalk and gathered at gates or fences throughout the community. Even on a beautiful art installation we have. If you live here, you might get familiar with seeing trash. If you are visiting, you ask the question … why? Well, your initial response to that question may not be a correct analysis or it may not tell the whole story. So, as a resident here in Bankhead, I’m choosing to clean up my neighborhood, and I hope you’ll take two hours out of your time to help me. I will supply any cleaning needs, including gloves.

Environment is a place where humans as well as plants and animals live. Keeping it clean and neat is our responsibility. It is necessary to keep our environment clean because we get fresh air, reduce pollution, etc. An unclean environment leads to a bad condition of a society, arrival of diseases, and much more.

Four people showed up. Four. I had hoped that not just people who lived in the community but people who were from the community would care enough to participate in making sure our environment was livable. It was important to me because I understood the effect our environment has on us psychologically and physically. I wanted this to be the first step in taking back our community. I didn’t want to wait for gentrification to finally be the reason for a beautification effort. I had done the work. I had reached out to the city and gotten a big dumpster, and I had partnered with an organization that gave us all the cleaning supplies we needed. Four people. We did the best we could, and we got some things clean. But in that two-hour time, we barely finished three blocks, and needless to say, I was disappointed.

Fast-forward six months, after George Floyd’s death at the hands of the police. Protests had begun all over the country, and my friend Brandi, an Air Force veteran, and I decided that we should join the front lines of the protest because we noticed, in the news coverage, that there were a lot of young people, but we weren’t seeing our age—Gen X—out in the street. We’re both mothers, so we know what that energy is, and we felt like it would be easy for things to get derailed out there with all those young people, the anger and the media. We knew the way most of us are raised in the African American community, people are less likely to make destructive decisions in front of someone like an aunt, an uncle or someone their parents’ age.

The first night we went out, we noticed strategically placed bricks that everybody was talking about. Images of piles of bricks at the sites of protests across the country had been posted on social media: from a suburb of Minneapolis to Tacoma, Washington, and San Francisco. Fact-checkers later claimed these were left by construction crews for building in the area and it was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. We saw a young man pick up a brick, and I just walked over to him and tapped him on his arm. He put the brick down. We were right in thinking that while most young people were out there for a good reason, with no aunties and uncles on the street, young anger was going to be the driving force to determine what happened. So Brandi and I decided to be the aunties at the front line who made it less likely a brick would get thrown or that there would be property damage. We made it our business to be at the protests as our way of protecting the kids from their wilder instincts.

I’m an activist. I’ve spent a lot of time protesting. I marched with John Lewis, right after the killing of Mike Brown. I marched with the Justice for Georgia mothers—particularly one mother I’m very close to, Monteria Robinson, after her son Jamarion Robinson was killed. So showing up for the issues that matter wasn’t new for me.

After a few days of being on the front lines that June, a filmmaker named David Jones asked me to do some man-on-the-street interviews with him for his documentary. He had been at the protests, but in different places than I was. On this day, there was a protest planned for later, but we went out early to do our man-on-the-street interviews because people were outside, ahead of time, setting up signs. There was one young woman who was making a beautiful flower art installation in honor of George Floyd and what was happening in the civil unrest, so we interviewed her. We were in downtown Atlanta, and we started at a corner where the CNN Center is located. The College Football Hall of Fame is on the opposite corner, and there are a lot of high-end restaurants in the area.

I noticed a bunch of middle-aged Black people—aunties and uncles I had not seen in the street (except for Brandi and me)—cleaning up. When I asked them who gave them the cleaning materials, they told me they’d bought them out of pocket. They had supplies to remove the graffiti and were sweeping up glass and boarding up broken windows. When I asked if they lived in downtown, most said no. They had seen that downtown and Buckhead, another upscale neighborhood, had been damaged, and they had taken it upon themselves to clean up. Historically, when there’s civil unrest, the destruction happens in the communities where people live. In response to George Floyd’s death, people had taken their anger downtown where protests had been coordinated. There had been looting and rioting, and these Black aunties and uncles had decided it was their job to clean up. To clean up property they did not own.

When I asked them why, one person told me, This is not the way we handle things. A woman added, I don’t want them to think we’re all like this. Them, meaning white people. You can see why I would be upset, right? I plan a community cleanup in a Black neighborhood, and my people won’t show up for that, but they will come downtown and spend their time, money and labor to clean up damage they didn’t do, so they look better to people they don’t know? This is what slavery looks like in the twenty-first century. They wanted to show massa they was the good Black folks. It’s appropriate that we stand for our rights and stand against police brutality, but some Black people are so concerned by the white gaze—what we look like to white people as they regard us—that they would try to undo the effects of the real and righteous anger the rioters expressed. But standing there, listening to people my age, who look like me, speak their concern about the white gaze and the way we respond to our own oppression, it made me mad. They seemed more concerned about the white man’s property than they were about their brother—dead on the street.

Two years before, I’d stood on that same corner, after walking miles holding up the autopsy photo of Jamarion Robinson, a college student with mental health issues. Jamarion had been killed by police when they fired seventy-six rounds into his body, while serving a warrant for a crime Jamarion did not commit. I already had an emotional association with the place where I was standing. And I could not for the life of me understand how Black folks could be so concerned about the white gaze that they would spend their own money to clean up spaces where, historically, we haven’t even been welcomed. Jamarion Robinson was dead, George Floyd was dead and these people were more concerned about buildings that are insured, that can be replaced and that they don’t own. The police have gone rogue and are killing us, but qualified immunity protects the police from prosecution, and we keep dying. But they were worried about buildings?

How crazy is it that it took the whole world falling to a pandemic for a wide range of Americans to react and take action? It took us having to endure watching a man press his knee on another man’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds for the world to wake up to the atrocities that Black people have been living since our arrival in this country? If you are Black in America, none of this is new to you. And yet, some people were more concerned about property, as if we haven’t been shown over and over again that the social contract is void when it comes to us. That was the most ridiculous bullshit I had ever heard in my life. It set me off, and I started talking. David turned on his camera, and if you’ve seen the video How Can We Win? you know that this is what poured out of me:

So, I’ve been seeing a lot of things—talking and people making commentary. Interestingly enough, the ones I’ve noticed that have been making the commentary are wealthy Black people—making the commentary that you should not be rioting, you should not be looting, you should not be tearing up your own communities. And then, there’s been the argument of the other side that we should be hitting them in the pocket, we should be focusing on the blackout days when we don’t spend money. But, you know, I feel like we should do both. And I feel like I support both. And I will tell you why I support both. I support both because when you have a civil unrest like this, there are three types of people in the streets: There are the protesters, there are the rioters and there are the looters. The protesters are there because they actually care about what is happening in the community, they want to raise their voices and they’re there strictly to protest. You have the rioters, who are angry, who are anarchists, who really just want to fuck shit up, and that is what they are going to do regardless. And then you have the looters. And the looters almost exclusively are just there to do that: to loot. And now, people are like, What did you gain? What did you get from looting?

I think that as long as we are focusing on the what, we’re not focusing on the why, and that is my issue with that. As long as we are focusing on what they are doing, we are not focusing on why they are doing. Some people are like, Well, those aren’t people who are legitimately angry about what’s happening. Those are people who just want to get stuff. Okay, well then, let’s go with that; let’s say that’s what it is. Let’s ask ourselves why, in this country, in 2020, the financial gap between poor Blacks and the rest of world is at such a distance that people feel like that their only hope and only opportunity to get some of the things that we flaunt and flash in front of them all the time is to walk through a broken glass window and get it. They are so hopeless that getting that necklace, getting that TV, getting that change, getting that bag, getting that phone, whatever it is that they are going to get, is that in that moment when the riots happen and they are presented with an opportunity of looting, that is their only opportunity to get it. We need to be questioning that why. Why are people that poor? Why are people that broke? Why are people that food insecure? That clothing insecure? That they feel like their only shot—that they’re shooting their shot by walking through a broken glass window to get what they need. And then people want to talk about, Well, there are plenty of people who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and got it on their own. Why can’t they do that?

Let me explain something about economics in America. (And I’m so glad that as a child I got an opportunity to spend time at PUSH, where they taught me this.) It’s that we must never forget that economics was the reason that Black people were brought to this country. We came to do the agricultural work in the South and the textile work in the North. Do you understand that? That is what we came to do. We came to do the agricultural work in the South and the textile work in the North. Now, if I right now—if I right now decided that I wanted to play Monopoly with you, and for four hundred rounds of playing Monopoly, I didn’t allow you to have any money. I didn’t allow you to have anything on the board. I didn’t allow for you to have anything, and then we played another fifty rounds of Monopoly, and everything that you gained and you earned while you were playing that round of Monopoly was taken from you. That was Tulsa. That was Rosewood. Those are places where we built Black economic wealth. Where we were self-sufficient. Where we owned our stores. Where we owned our property. And they burned them to the ground. So that’s four hundred and fifty years, so for four hundred rounds of Monopoly, you don’t get to play at all. Not only do you not get to play; you have to play on the behalf of the person that you’re playing against. You have to play and make money and earn wealth for them, and then you have to turn it over to them. So then for fifty years you finally get a little bit, and you’re allowed to play, and every time that they don’t like the way that you’re playing or that you’re catching up or that you’re doing something to be self-sufficient, they burn your game. They burn your cards. They burn your Monopoly money. And then, finally, after release and the onset of that, they allow you to play, and they say, Okay, now you catch up. At this point the only way you’re going to catch up in the game is if the person shares the wealth. Correct? But what if every time you share the wealth, then there is psychological warfare against you to say: "Oh, you’re an equal opportunity