This essay is published as part of Sixty’s Midwest Arts Writers Fellowship, a 6-month opportunity for writers to develop, refine, and publish writings on topics that are relevant to Indigenous, trans, queer, diasporic, and/or disabled artists and arts workers in our region. Each Fellow will publish two essays that reflect on the complexities of Midwest life and the artists who help define and articulate its culture. Read more writing by the Fellows here.

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“I didn’t think there were any Black people here.”

My family’s presence here has dated back almost 60 years. I speak to a friend whose great-grandmother settled here in the 1920s. This is a common sentiment, said to us Black Minnesotans, by Black folks who aren’t from here, who’ve moved here. This frustrates me, even though I understand.

When thinking of what it means to be Black—and an artist—in Minnesota, whiteness is distressingly often the point of departure. I am not the first to consider it like this. A line from Zora Neale Hurston’s How It Feels To Be Colored Me echoes in my head;

 “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” 

To be Black in Minnesota is to be thrown again and again, against this sharp white background. Our lives and our work, and the Black cultural arts practices that shaped me—West African drum and dance, jazz music, the four elements of hip hop—were and still are easily accessible by white folks who encounter Black culture here. Their encounterings oscillate between tentative acceptance, eager participation, and fetishistic facilitation. 

As Black artists in Minnesota, we are all too familiar with being one-of-one; the single Black person in a space, thrown against a sharp white background. Even worse is the feeling of being one of one, or few, in a space centered on/displaying/performing Black cultural arts. A placelessness then occurs in those spaces, and here in Minneapolis, there is an ambiguity that accompanies this lack of Black presence. Blackness is relegated to an “aesthetic experience exist[ing] apart, without ‘purpose,’ all but beyond history,” as described by Hal Foster. As Black folks and as artists in Minnesota, what follows this placelessness, naturally, is desire for justice: a desire to be seen and heard, and to see and hear ourselves represented. We are then predisposed to a “resistance expressiveness—a response to racial oppression, a speaking back to the dominant ideology, a correction of the willful errors of racist history”, as Kevin Quashie asserts in The Sovereignty of Quiet. 

In Minneapolis, the arts ecosystem has long been a batting cage where Black artists bounce between sharp white backgrounds, float nebulously amidst ambiguities, battling the pressure of resistant expressiveness. In a contemporary context, this is partially the effect of the 2020 uprising following the murder of George Floyd; where Black artists have been perpetually positioned in revolt, magical negroes for white folks racial reckonings. 

But 2020 was not Minneapolis’s first racial reckoning. 

The first documented Racial Reckoning in the city, to my knowledge, was the uprising of 1967. Spurred by the violent police handling of two Black girls in a spat at the Aquatennial Parade, Black Northsiders took to Plymouth Ave, destroyed Silver’s and Knox Food Markets and vandalized eight more businesses. For decades, North Minneapolis’ population was an intermingling of European immigrants and African Americans, who could evade restrictive housing covenants present in other neighborhoods. Plymouth Ave was a bustling thoroughfare, equipped with a pool hall, movie theater, and bowling alley. Yet in the late 60’s, tensions were present, as the majority of these businesses were maintained by Jewish community, who had been economically rewarded for their rapid assimilation to Americanized whiteness. All the while Black folks remained disenfranchised. The sentiment of many Black folks across America at that time was an echo the words of James Baldwin: 
“The Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man… The Jew profits from his status in America…America is the house of bondage for the Negro…What happens to the Negro here happens to him because he is an American.”

At the time Ward 5, where Plymouth Avenue was located, was under the jurisdiction of Jewish council member Joe Greenstein. With support from Mayor Arthur Naftalin, the Governor deployed the National Guard. In typical American fashion, the power of the institution was utilized to protect property: 600 soldiers were stationed across the city, the majority on Plymouth Ave, and others in primarily Black neighborhoods.  

The Northside community was already familiar with these inequities, but there was infrastructure in place to address them. A year before the long hot summer of 1967, a confrontation between Black teens and the white owner of Silver’s Food Market resulted in bricks being lodged, expletives being exchanged, and a police presence that once again prioritized the protection of property. A community meeting had followed that incident almost immediately, and residents had advocated for the establishment of The Way Opportunities Unlimited.

The Way was a community center and cultural hub for Black Northside youths established by leaders Syl and Gwyn Davis, with support from Mayor Naftalin, and an infusion of cash from oil magnate Raymond Plank. The center focused on civic engagement, employment, and the arts. Musicians Sonny Thompson, Andre Cymone and the Lewis Family utilized the back room of The Way to practice music and established the Minneapolis Sound, before they paved the road to Prince’s stardom. After the unrest of 1967, many businesses on Plymouth Ave vacated, and The Way’s programming became more radical; offering political education and space for organizing. 

Now, where The Way used to reside, lies the site of the Minneapolis 4th Police precinct. Black folks had been blindsided by a sharp, white background. Elder Mahmoud El-Khati, a pillar in The Way’s operations, remarks “that’s more than symbolic, that’s erasure.”

In November of 2015, after the killing of Jamar Clark by Minneapolis police, we flickered as shadows against graffiti sprawl on the exterior walls of the 4th precinct. We sipped tea and rotated blunts around a campfire, telling sensationalized stories of protests past to keep morale high. For 18 days, the revolution had been stationed six blocks from my childhood home, equipped with free meals and winter clothes, political education and direct action, stories and songs. I skipped my PSEO classes at Minneapolis College to join the youth ranks of the then formally recognized Black Lives Matter Minneapolis chapter in their occupation of the 4th precinct, demanding for evidence to be released and prosecution of involved officers. I basked in the glow of Black presence and power as we interrogated city council members, tweeted frontline updates and memed the mayor. I, amongst several other 17-year olds, blocked traffic on 94W one night. We were zip tied by police in riot gear and transported by chartered Metro Transit buses—the same ones I rode to class every day—to the juvenile detention center in downtown Minneapolis. We were separated by our assumed genders, questioned about our upbringings; and for the few hours before our parents heard our one phone call and came to retrieve us, we were chastised by staff on “making the right choices in life.”

Had they only known that decades earlier my grandmother, the esteemed educator and artist Beverly Cottman, had also been arrested too, for participating in protests advocating for the integration of amusement parks and cafeterias in Missouri. She too had been corralled into a cell and made to phone a relative for her release. I was already on the right side of history. 

When she arrived in Minnesota in the late sixties, my grandma traded sit-ins and arrests for working the desk and answering phone calls at the local chapters of the NAACP and Urban League. She later transitioned to full time public education, while enrolling my mom in a private Montessori from elementary to eighth grade. At one point, my mother and her classmates participated in a picketing of Honeywell corporation; due to Honeywell’s production of military technology. My grandfather, Bill Cottman, was employed in Honeywell’s temperature control and home security division. My mother’s actions catalyzed a conversation between her and my grandparents, who wanted to make sure she wasn’t simply following the crowd and that she knew the scope of the issue she was advocating for. Later, she would join her high school peers protesting apartheid rule in South Africa.

On the Northside—home to the largest population of Black folks in Minneapolis, fraught with a legacy of disenfranchisement and upheaval—I was raised by my mother in the Homewood neighborhood, by Theodore Wirth Park. Less than a block away were my grandparents, who had renovated an abandoned house in 1998, the year I was born. The violence I witnessed—a fist fight between grown men by the park, a home down the block set on fire to claim insurance, some gunshots some nights—was few and far in between. The same could not be said for those who lived in the less-gentrifiable neighborhoods north of Broadway and Lowry Aves. 

I spent a substantial chunk of my time at school on the southside attending Lake Country Montessori school on 38th St., where we didn’t sit at desks and called teachers by their first names. There, I spent my time completing self-initiated projects on Civil Rights leaders, performing musicals, and feeding llamas and chickens at the school’s farm in Wisconsin. There, I was mistaken for my mom by teachers, micro-aggressed by classmates, and once told I should be a slave on the playground. The majority of my peers were white, from wealthy neighborhoods like Kenwood—where Frank B. Wilderson, originator of Afropessimism, grew up.  

Outside of school, I was constructing a poster-board presentation on the medicinal uses of the baobab tree and practicing capoeira at Imhotep Science Academy, a Kemetic-based youth enrichment program, led by family friends. Over the summers, I was on clarinet learning jazz standards at the Black-founded Walker West Music Academy in St. Paul, and in dance and spoken word workshops at Intermedia Arts on Nicollet and 28th. 

As bell hooks says, “class often overdetermines our relation to art”—my education, early experiences, and formative creative pursuits can be attributed heavily to the material and financial stability of my grandparents, who worked for decades, enabling my mother and I with access to abundant art practices not easily available to most Black folks. Still, I saw the ways in which my family shared this wealth of creativity and knowledge, through cultivating and sustaining cherished rituals of artistic placemaking both traditional and experimental, multigenerational and multidisciplinary, in collaboration with those with shared values who were Black and also non-Black. I was raised to see the value in Black folks organizing and making art, not in constant revolt or resistance, but as a perpetual practice of ancestral + cultural veneration, self-expression, and community building.

My mom curated Black Choreographers’ evenings. My grandmother told traditional stories from around the African diaspora at libraries and community events, led literary art workshops across the state and tours at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. My grandfather wrote poetry, took photographs, and tinkered with visual art and projection softwares in his basement studio. The white noise of my childhood was a hum of names and places— Roy McBride and J. Otis Powell; The Ways Ensemble, The Heart Of The Beast; Kirk Washington Jr., Tish Jones, Roger and DeAnna Cummings; The Old Arizona, The Southern Theater;  Laurie Carlos; Seitu and Soyini, Dr. Josie Johnson, Junauda, Jayanthi; Bedlam Lowertown, Studio Z, Pillsbury House, Pangea World Theater.

In the early 2000’s, the Northside would celebrate Juneteenth at Theodore Wirth Park, where families ate funnel cakes and BBQ along Glenwood Avenue, canoed on Wirth Lake and my mom and I performed with Voice of Culture. Every July, at FLOW Northside Arts Crawl, Broadway would be closed to cars, and Northsiders sold paintings, handmade jewelry, and streetwear along the avenue. Some years, my grandfather and I broadcast our radio show “Mostly Jazz” remote from K’s Market and Deli on Emerson, where he hung his photographs. At Freedom Square across from the Capri Theater, my peers put on pop up shows and youth sold self-grown produce at the West Broadway Farmers market. My mother Kenna coordinated the final years of the festival, and coordinated a roller rink at Juxtaposition Arts’ skate plaza and the North Commons tennis court.

Like the earth around us, this ecosystem—our network of arts and culture entities, our culture bearers, our creatives—has suffered.

FLOW Northside Arts Crawl is no more, gradually replaced by Open Streets, a city-wide corporate initiative that’s gone unfunded. We have lost crucial platforms for artistic radicals and risk takers —Intermedia Arts, Patrick’s Cabaret—to a local economy that is increasingly art averse and profit driven. Juneteenth is now an aesthetic experience beyond history, a whitewashed celebration of “freedom” that neglects to thoroughly acknowledge America’s failure in enforcing the 13th amendment. Some of the most prolific—Kirk Washington Jr., Laurie Carlos, Mother Zulu, my grandparents Bill and Beverly Cottman, to name a few—are no longer living.

I am still grieving. In many ways up until this point, grief has submitted me to silence, self-harm, suppression. Grief has occupied my body for a long while.  

We have made grief a space to occupy in Minneapolis, as a response to the killings of Black men at the hands of police: Jamar Clark and the 4th precinct, Philando Castile and the Governor’s Mansion, George Floyd and (now) George Floyd Square. Grief has been a burning building, broken glass and bricks, murals and monuments.

White folks have stewed in this grief and anger and responded with hopelessness and guilt. I am reminded of the words of Audre Lorde, from Uses of Anger that “guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of actions,” and that “it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.” Their guilt did not end racialized violence, heal its victims, or finish holding those complicit accountable. White folks’ guilt and Black folks’ grief did not result in abolishing the police, or an improvement in quality of life for Black residents, or in the establishment of arts and political education center, or in any truly impactful policy changes.

In an immediate failure of the public promise to defund by the city council, police funding increased. While local Black youths suffered the physical, legal, and mental ramifications of frontline action, white folks threw their money at nonprofits and put up Black Lives Matter signs in their yards. Grandiose displays of performative allyship were performed by entities with histories of neglecting to attend to Minneapolis’ Black population. Black life mattered only when it was killed, tear gassed, rubber bulleted, and brutalized, on camera. Resources, funding and opportunity flowed only with blood.

In coping with this grief, some Black folks have posited it as their ticket to freedom. Political philosopher and academic Joy James’ book, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities, the essay reaching beyond black faces in high places summarizes the ways in which Black death has become a profitable sector of the economy: 

“Violence from historical slave ships to contemporary administrators enabled accumulation through Black loss. One can monetize Black suffering. . . refashioning narratives and traumas into marketable writing and lecturing, fashion wear. . .nonprofit sector jobs, punditry and podcasts. Black misery is profitable for racists and anti-racists alike. Yet, Black street-active or imprisoned activists—whose heads are most likely to be cracked open by violent cops, guards and white supremacists—take the greatest risks for transformative justice and reap the smallest percentage of monetary gains. . .”

I was not on the frontlines during the uprising of 2020. After being arrested in 2015, then tear gassed and rubber bulleted in 2016, my capacity for frontline activism was almost nonexistent. I had been doing low-stakes organizing prior to the uprising, hosting meals and workshops for Black queer folks as part of the Arts and Culture squad of Black Visions Collective (BLVC): made up of activists from the formal Black Lives Matter Minneapolis chapter, who wanted to focus their efforts more on a queer and diaspora-inclusive liberatory praxis. “If you build a movement industry on top of Black death and trauma, make sure you are not building on a graveyard. There are new bones, old bones, and corpse bones,” says Joy James.

During the riots, BLVC had come under scrutiny from community activists—a few of whom I knew and had grown up organizing with—with demands to redistribute the $26+ million dollars they’d quickly raised from donations riding the momentum of international attention. I had developed my own critiques regarding their lack of transparency and skewed priorities during the unrest; information regarding the raised funds had been intentionally obscured from members of the org, leadership’s boundaries were blurred, and efforts seemed focused more on lobbying policy rather than supporting frontliners. I quit before the end of the summer, feeling ashamed and betrayed, yet affirmed in my decision. Joy James writes:

“I will stand in defense of any persecuted group; all such groups have the right to self defense. It doesn’t mean that they are all ethical and stable and disciplined against manipulation and opportunism. If somebody’s paying for your movement—they are not doing it for Black freedom…”

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It is nearing the end of 2024 as a write this. I am juggling ideas about masking in my mind: the physical face masks, the act of masking neurodivergence, masking truth.   

The list of reasons why I struggle with masking is less important than the list of reasons stating why I should be masking. I am surrounded by friends who mask, who do not shame me for not masking. I feel extreme anxiety when I am not masked in certain spaces. Yet I still struggle. 

I think about which masks we as a society have chosen to reject, and which masks we willingly wear. 

I think about how it has been an active choice to mask my feelings of displeasure and indignance at the state of my city, to swallow tyrannies, to accept ambivalences. I think of bell hooks, again, and her essay Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination:

“The eagerness with which contemporary society does away with racism, replacing this recognition with evocations of pluralism and diversity that further mask reality, is a response to the terror.”

I think of my discomfort with the murals that went up during the 2020 uprising that were painted by non-Black folks. Some businesses that were known for being racist and discriminatory boarded up their windows with artwork containing depoliticized platitudes of peace and progress, to avoid being vandalized. I think of my frustration with how popular the term “BIPOC” has become, this one-size-fits-all acronym, a labeling, ranking, and filing of our oppression. The ways in which our hypervisibility as Black folks has been, in the words of Frank B. Wilderson, “weaponized by our allies to incarcerate Black demands, kill Black desire, and soothe the psyches of everyone but us.”

I think of the whiteness that we are continuously thrown against here, and how some stick and melt themselves into it—embodying, perpetuating, performing [for] whiteness. Out of safety? Out of survival? bell hooks says that:

“This contradictory longing to possess the reality of [whiteness], even though that reality is one that wounds and negates, is expressive of the desire to understand the mystery, to know intimately through imitation, as though such knowing worn like an amulet, a mask, will ward away the evil, the terror.” 

This calls me to Nathan Huggins’ Harlem Renaissance, as quoted in Kevin Quashie’s Sovereignty of Quiet:

“So essential has been the negro personality to the white American psyche that black theatrical masks had become, by the twentieth century, a standard way for whites to explore dimensions fo themselves that seemed impossible through their own personae’.” 

Blackness can be a mask, or an amulet, a charm to soothe the psyche. I think of how my city has made Blackness an aesthetic to be embodied, what Quashie describes as “an idiom of rebellion and hipness, representing what is cool and edgy, even radical and vulgar,” a brand to be marketed, devoid of any critical considerations or interrogations of power. 

I am perturbed at how this aestheticization of Blackness manifests in the local arts ecosystem, in the “scene”. How certain local purveyors and producers of progressive Black music and performance seem to be unbothered by who performs or presents Black American culture, by who is seen playing the music, who is paid to play it; unbothered by the politics of inequity and performativity. 

I am reminded of “Carbon Sound”, created by Minnesota Public Radio, a virtual stream and blog highlighting Black music locally and beyond. The moniker of “Carbon” presents an eerie simile: Black music as a chemical element, extracted from the earth and pressurized into a luxury product, diamonds. There are numerous essays profiling popular Black artists—some in which rap lyrics are satirically analyzed—written by a white woman. A performance by legacy artist Cornbread Harris is promoted alongside an 8-hour set by an established white promoter and several dance nights put on by non-Black DJs. Looking back further reveals promotions of a show featuring “Lil Darkie,” who appears to be non-Black, branded by a blackface-adjacent caricature. The “breadth, depth and beauty of Black cultural expression” that Carbon Sound intends to platform via DJ mixes is represented by almost 50% non-Black DJs. 

“The artistic process is taken for granted…it is no more than the supplied vehicle in which experience is placed so that it may arrive safely at a kind of cultural terminus,” says John Berger. At the hands of our own people, Black American music and cultural expression in particular has morphed into this vehicle, for any passenger to ride, towards cultural relevance. 

I think of how a former friend, an East African woman, used my Blackness as a vehicle for her arrival at a cultural terminus. My rituals and relationships were envied, my cultural context contorted for clout. My presence provided reputational legitimacy, my eagerness to nurture and sustain a Black queer ecosystem without fear of objectification, intimidation, or invisibilization—and the labor I put in behind that vision—fodder to establish a career. How this former friend continued on, unbothered by the potential of harm enacted by institutions and individuals, unperturbed by evoking aesthetics of Blackness and queerness for commodification.

I am reminded, again, of bell hooks, in Talking Art As The Spirit Moves Us:

“A major dilemma faced by all marginal groups suffering exploitation or oppression in this culture…is the struggle to resolve, in a constructive way, the tension between reformist work that aims to change the status quo so that we have access to the privileges accorded the dominant group and the more radical project of resistance that seeks to dismantle or transform the existing structure. All too often the price of the ticket for inclusion is that we are subordinated in new and different ways.”

I then think of these dilemmas being illustrated in real time with the arrival of Afropunk festival to Minneapolis in 2022. What many artists saw as an opportunity for exposure and recognition, I believed to be an opportunity for a company to capitalize on a vulnerable Black community after a time of grief and discord, as a way to redeem their image as an organization. Afropunk had a documented track record of questionable behavior pre-COVID, which included aggression towards queer attendees, mistreatment of employees, and wage theft. 

In Minneapolis the festival was poorly produced—beginning with a houseless encampment being cleared for the festival site. A few artists—some of whom were my friends and collaborators—were unprofessionally offered meager stipends, then ignored after attempting to negotiate. A meeting of Black artists was arranged—documented via Instagram Live, but not archived—where concerns about equity were dismissed by performers who accepted their bookings and chose not to advocate on behalf of their Black queer peers. A “solution sessions” event sponsored by Target was held with Mayor Jacob Frey in attendance, who had been highly criticized during the uprising for antagonizing the movement. Performers were met with tech difficulties and festival attendees passed out, due to the record breaking heat and lack of adequate accommodations. Carbon Sound covered the event, yet neglected to feature the perspectives of disgraced artists.  

While the festival ended up giving away a large amount of free tickets to combat the controversy, a portion of Minneapolis’ Black community was also comfortable paying $70 after taxes for the “ultimate celebration of black joy”. In the words of James Spooner, creator of the Afropunk, “Capitalism doesn’t support grassroots communities, and at a certain juncture, it has to sell out the people it was made to grow. The community, the true heart, those who really need [affinity spaces] get totally screwed.” Afropunk has not returned to Minneapolis since.

In 2020, I sat on a virtual panel with my grandfather and other activists and artists of color, discussing what it meant to be a good ancestor. I often think of his words, his interpretation of generational power as the ability to say “no”, and to act out that “no.” 

“‘Yes’ can be acquiescence, as opposed to ‘no’ being a form of resistance and going in the direction you have decided is the best direction for you,” he said.

So, what is it like to be Black and an artist in Minneapolis? If I speak?

I have learned what it’s like to feel placeless, even amongst skinfolk, in the nooks and niches we’ve carved for ourselves against this sharp, white background. 

I have learned that often, we are forced to see each other only in death and discord. That we choose aesthetic extraction and tokenization, offering “gestures of collaboration and complicity,” rather than critical considerations and rejection. 

And I have learned to say “no.” 

I do not accept ambiguities, I will not acquiesce to white supremacy or cultural commodification. I commit to using my tongue, my tunes and tales, in the words of Audre Lorde, to “scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it”.  

I do not want a place at the table where only some of us can sit, where others set it and serve it.

I want to sit in an unbroken circle on solid ground, in conversation, curious about the vastness of our values. I want to give our elders their flowers, now. I need my Black queer community safe and supported, not only valued but cherished. I am trying to be so fucking for real—for my blood, my chosen family, my lovers and my haters—about where we’re at, and where the directions we pursue. 

And in the spirit of the adinkra concept Sankofa—a symbol I’ve tattooed on my chest—I am not afraid to go back and find out. 

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