Medcalf: The anti-racism book club meets Thursday in Minneapolis. Join us!
I do not have the solutions.
Just ideas and proposals and asks and words in this urgent moment. Is that enough? I'm not sure.
But I want better for the next generation and I want to do my part to help. Action only yields lasting change, however, if it is rooted in knowledge and dialogue and community. While I am not naive enough to believe my work in the Star Tribune alone will achieve those goals in this region, I know The Mary Ann Key Club — in partnership with Hennepin County Library, Friends of the Hennepin County Library and the Star Tribune — is an extension of that ambition.
And I believe our book club's first in-person gathering at 7 p.m. Thursday at Pohlad Hall in Central Library in Minneapolis, which will focus on Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower," is substantive.
Our panel will feature three incredible Black women who all live in Minnesota. Shannon Gibney, our moderator, is an award-winning teacher, writer and author, who has written, "The Girl I am, Was, and Never Will Be," a speculative memoir of transracial adoption. Maya Washington is a Twin Cities native and filmmaker, actor, writer, poet and the new artistic director for Youth Performance Company in St. Paul. And JaNaé Bates is the communications director for both Yes 4 Minneapolis, the initiative to change policing in the city, and Isaiah MN, a collection of faith leaders across denominations and religions fighting for racial and economic equity.
This event, our fourth panel event, is proof we are still talking.
But the silence worries me.
I still see George Floyd's body on the street in Minneapolis. Sometimes, it's just a passing thought. Sometimes it's in my nightmares. It feels as if many decided to move on — tiptoeing past his memory, toward a place of comfort that could soon forget him.
To some, it's easier that way. If his murder is our past, then our concern about its impact on the future becomes less urgent. We can focus on today and today alone and leave the next steps to another generation.
That negligence is the focus of Butler's book. Lauren Olamina, the book's protagonist, is in the middle of chaos. Rather than focus on the normal hurdles of adolescence, she is asked to organize, unite, thrive, protect, fight, carry and move toward new places, spiritually and physically. But her most impressive asset is her ability to survive. Because after the world around her has collapsed — due to climate change, violence, drugs and other destructive forces — she must simply live.
That's the only way there can be a new beginning for her and those who follow her.
I think this book is relevant to our journey here. We can either build or tear down. I'm not convinced "the answer" is a singular task or effort. I believe it's a commitment.
In "Nothing Personal," James Baldwin perfectly identifies our ability to reinvent ourselves, to change, to move and to discover.
"This terror has something to do with that irreducible gap between the self one invents — the self one takes oneself as being, which is, however and by definition, a provisional self — and the undiscoverable self which always has the power to blow the provisional self to bits," he said. "It is perfectly possible — indeed, it is far from uncommon — to go to bed one night, or wake up one morning, or simply walk through a door one has known all one's life, and discover, between inhaling and exhaling, that the self one has sewn together with such effort is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what raw material will one build a self again? The lives of men — and therefore, of nations — to an extent literally unimaginable, depend on how vividly this question lives in the mind."
People often ask about the feedback I get for these columns. Well, if you read the comments, it's not difficult to guess. But I hold onto the hope of those who continue to ask themselves if this community can reinvent itself two years after Floyd's murder. They tell me stories about their changes and their journeys. They tell me who they've been, and most importantly, who they want to become.
In this book, Lauren is battling through unconscionable circumstances. She is a teenager. She has experienced unbearable loss. And she is repeatedly asked to quit. But Lauren, through a flawed progression, decides there is something new — something worthy — available to the survivors.
This book club is named after my ancestor, Mary Ann Key. I sometimes wonder how she kept going. When she was Lauren's age, she was a slave on plantations in Georgia and Alabama.
I have to believe she dreamt of a future for her children and descendants she could not grasp or understand.
Butler had her own vision of what the world could become when she wrote "Parable of the Sower" in 1993. I do not think our greatest trials today, unfortunately, would surprise her.
On Thursday, three Black women will discuss her book, its most pressing ideas and its collective impact on their lives.
I look forward to seeing you all at Central Library, where we might not identify every solution but we may continue to ask the right questions.
Myron Medcalf is a local columnist for the Star Tribune and a national writer and radio host for ESPN. His column typically appears in print on Sundays twice a month and also online.
