Our Rubik’s Cube of Race

IN HONOR OF GEORGE FLOYD ON JUNE 2, 2020 By Madi Lommen

Iwant to learn the colors and to solve the Rubik’s cube at the same time. That is what it feels like to process the death of George Floyd by a white police o cer on the streets where I grew up and all of the events that have unfolded since. My heart wants to cry, my head wants to know how to “fix” it, and my feet want to realize that solution—as if there is a solution to crime against humanity. As if there could ever be a solution that would bring George Floyd back to life.

I did not know George Floyd. I am not mourning his death like his family is. I am mourning how deeply ingrained racism is within the American justice system, still. What does that actually mean? It means that in the South, where confederate ags still cling to the doorsteps of rural homes, a Black person is eleven times more likely to end up on death row than a white person if the victim is white—twenty-two times more likely if the person is Black and the defendant is Black, too (Stevenson, 2012). It means that although Minnesota has the second highest graduation rate of public schools in the United States (Table 228, 2006), it also has a high achievement gap between white and non-white students.1 It means that I can live my life as a white person without knowing the statistics, but my Black friends cannot.

Growing up, I shi ed between “white suburbia” and “urban city kid” with relative ease. e loss of my parents’ business and an ugly divorce set my family back nancially, but for the rst memorable decade of my life, I lived without having to confront, at least in any chronic fashion, unwarranted prejudice. Instead of adding to the racial inequity that my friends of color faced, setbacks created a commonality between me and other kids at

165% of White students in grades four and eight achieved ‘pro ciency’ on the reading and math MCAs (Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments, the standardized test all public school students take across Minnesota) respectively, while only 31% and 29% of Black, 31% and 25% of Native and 32% and 35% of Hispanic students did, respectively (Grunewald and Nath, 2019).

school who were on scholarship or came from single-parent households, many of whom were also Black. I o en sat at the “Black lunch table,” the only one my college preparatory school tolerated. We got along, those classmates and I. None of us could keep up with the lives of our classmates, especially when it came to birthdays and vacations.

I distinctly remember one of those vacation periods at home, spring break of eighth grade. I was cra ing a banner that would decorate our school entrance for a special campaign that a friend, Jaila, and I were planning for the day we all returned to class. Jaila was African American, later my co-captain of the volleyball team, Homecoming Queen, and my best friend. She and I had planned a project to ght bullying. We were calling it REACH: Raising Expectations And Changing Hearts. We wrote a proposal, pitched in to the dean, and convinced teachers to cancel an entire day of class for students to engage in “team-building” exercises that would build relationships without ever mentioning the word “bullying.” We even made t-shirts, complete with an emblem of a water droplet falling into a pool to re ect that our campaign would inspire a “ripple e ect” of kindness.

at was nine years ago. Today, I live nine thousand miles away in Singapore under strict lockdown measures to contain the spread of coronavirus, whittling away at a book project that involves deciphering a twentieth-century scroll of Chinese calligraphy. Jaila works at a sports entertainment agency in Charlotte, soon to be Atlanta. I called Jaila on the fourth day of protesting in Minneapolis. We both treaded lightly: how are you? It was a simple question, but we both knew the answer was loaded with emotions words could not describe.

“I am…I am—”

“You are.”

“I am.”

In Just Mercy, a book about the injustices of the American criminal justice system, defense attorney Bryan Stevenson draws upon the European leader Vaclav Havel for inspiration on his especially tough days in prison: “When we were in Eastern Europe,” he quotes Havel saying, “we were dealing with all kinds of things, but mostly what we needed then was hope, an orientation of the spirit, a willingness to sometimes be in hopeless places and be a witness” (Stevenson, 2015).

When Jaila and I settled on our mere existence as our thencondition, we testi ed to a single polarizing fact: that we existed—the most basic of truths that George Floyd and too many others can no longer claim. Our existence now gives us the opportunity to be witnesses. It also gives us the opportunity to be more than witnesses; it grants us the opportunity to act.

Medaria Arradondo, the Chief of Minneapolis Police, responded to questioning on the pending punishment of the three police officers present alongside Derek Chauvin, the white police officer responsible for George Floyd’s death, in an interview last week by saying that those who are complicit in injustice take the side of the oppressor (“Floyd’s Family Asks Police,” 2020). Knowingly or unknowingly, he was quoting the cleric and activist, Desmond Tutu: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

I agree. Still, my ngers hesitate to shi the Rubik’s cube. Just because I see some colors, wouldn’t it be better to learn them all rst? At what point in uncertainty, in other words, do we act? I am struggling with this particularly in the context of social media. While I recognize that posting stories can build awareness, I also question whom those stories reach. Take it from the Bible or just common sense: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you?” (Luke 6:32, New International Version). It is harder to love those with whom you disagree. Social media enables us to feign activism by advocating our beliefs to like-minded followers without confronting those who hold opposing beliefs. Would not that uncomfortable conversation with your white, veteran uncle who occasionally makes racist comments be more e ective than double taps on Instagram from people who already like you?

is is not to say we should not speak up when injustice prevails. Rather, I have settled on three thoughts to consider as a starting point when doing so. First, the medium through which we choose to voice our opinions itself is an implicit statement about how we want people to engage and what types of responses we wish to receive. Are we—am I—willing to risk a family feud by talking politics at our next gathering? I still believe that a face-to-face conversation can be the most intense, but also the most powerful, method of productive change.

Second, when we do post digital stories on our social media, let them truly be that: stories. Seeing the destruction

of my home city this week, I cannot help but think of the lives of people impacted by fires caused intentionally or not during the riots. In part, this is because I joined the American Red Cross in 2016 as a responder on the Minneapolis Disaster Action Team (DAT). My main responsibility in the four years since has been to guide families displaced by house fires through immediate next-steps after their house has burned down. I am often the first point of contact after firefighters and see firsthand how devastated some families are, sometimes losing pets. I have even met people at the hospital, although thank God, no lives have been lost on any of my cases thus far. When fires broke out at the protests last week, the flames displaced thirty residents in an affordable housing complex, many of whom were struggling within the same fallible systems rioters set out to expose. How do these residents feel? Hearing their stories may shed light bright enough to change our perspective on how and when protesting becomes counterproductive.

ird, we have a choice whether or not we compound polarization. When we use rhetoric like, “we have no leadership” and “shoot the white folk” (heard at a rally in Minneapolis on ursday, May 28, 2020), we blanket complex situations that exacerbate (or excuse) political polarization (Carlson, 2020). Indeed, some of the loudest voices with the widest audience (e.g., Trump, Limbaugh) have done more to separate than to unite our country (“Rush Limbaugh Denies White Privilege,” 2020). At the same time, however, there are leaders, many of whom are local, who have demonstrated tenacity and compassion: Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota (whatever your views on his coronavirus policies, he condemned looting as a distraction from real racial problems with little-disputed clairvoyance) (“Governor Tim Walz”, 2020); Phil Hansen, CEO of the American Red Cross Minnesotan Region; Justin Simmons, free safety for the Colorado Broncos; Frederique Schmidt and Mauri Friestleben of Minneapolis schools... I am grateful to these people for their “Vaclav Havel” type hope during this time.

Jaila and I disagreed on something when we talked about the riots. “If they would just do what we asked and convict the four policemen,” she said on the phone, using “we” to invoke either all protestors or all Black Americans, I wasn’t sure which, “then there wouldn’t need to be any more riots. No justice, no peace.”

I thought otherwise. is is bigger now than the charges of four policemen. People have usurped the peaceful protests with other agendas, however well-intentioned, that undermine the real reason people ought to protest: an innocent Black man died at the hands of the very body that was supposed to protect him. I said as much, but my mind ventured further: “No justice, no peace.”

Last night, I got on my knees, and I asked to hear God through the noise. His answer shook me: there is no “justice” for a life wrongly taken. George Floyd’s family will decide for themselves what they need to heal. For me, another’s punishment does not assuage the pain of losing a loved one, at least not completely. I am not saying that the o cers should not be punished; they should be. What I am saying is that punishment alone will not solve the Rubik’s cube that is our puzzle of interconnected sociopolitics.

“Many seek an audience with a ruler, but it is from the Lord that one gets justice” (Proverbs 29:26, New International Version).

Besides, who am I to judge? Christianity tells me that my sin murdered an innocent man named Jesus. And how did he repay me? He granted me eternal life. It is my responsibility to realize justice only insofar as I vote for representatives who ensure a legal system neither favors nor discriminates. e rest is up to local authorities, and spiritually, up to God, if you choose to believe. It is my responsibility whole-heartedly, however, to build a society in which people of all colors can have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is my responsibility to learn the Rubik’s cube. And it is my responsibility to turn and to twist to see all its colors, even if I make mistakes in the process.

When Jaila and I were about to hang up, she told me about the end of a saga in Finland, her transition to North Carolina, how Mom and Grandma were.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too.”

Those three words were enough to give me the courage I will need for all the mistakes I will make in twisting and turning our Rubik’s cube. ■

MADI LOMMEN is an undergraduate student om Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, now studying at Yale-NUS College (‘20) in Singapore.