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On June 27th, Sophia Rashid, a Muslim woman, took her four-year old daughter out to eat in Stillwater, a town on the St Croix River about 20 miles east of St. Paul. Stillwater has two main industries: bars & entertainment - and the Stillwater state prison. The prison, where human beings are forced to work at twelve cents an hour and face punishing medical neglect during the pandemic, is a breeding ground for both multi-racial solidarity against state-sponsored slavery - and segregation and white supremacy. That night downtown Stillwater would be made unsafe by bikers with ties to a white supremacist prison gang - sparking a strong reaction from Stillwater workers and residents.

The horrendous murder of George Floyd - and the powerful Uprising that followed, inspired action from some Twin Cities workers. On June 16th, workers at the Seward Co-op Grocery store on East Franklin Ave staged a brief walk-out in the parking lot to demand Justice for George Floyd and the abolition of the police department.  

During the opening months of the COVID 19 pandemic, frontline healthcare workers at St Paul's United Hospital (part of the Allina Health system) took measures to protect themselves, their families and the public they serve. These efforts were vehemently opposed by management. Among other positions they took, management insisted workers use their personal scrubs instead of the scrubs readily available at the hospital and used by doctors, physician assistants and some nurses.

Fellow educators and I encountered many former and current students in the street at the end of May fighting for justice, and now our workplaces are bringing in so-called experts from everywhere but Minneapolis to introduce us to the ABC’s of identity and privilege. These paid hacks are not the leaders we should be turning to.

With the economy spiraling in the pandemic, we face a looming evictions crisis, with not enough aid for the thousands already houseless. Somewhere between 20-50% of Minnesota households are facing potential eviction from missed rents - held back only by emergency protections that Walz has kept in place, for now. 

In the wake of the George Floyd Uprising, many neighborhoods began to organize themselves. Mass meetings were held in parks across the city. In most places the main concern was community safety - and in many neighborhoods this was reduced to typical and reactionary concern for the property of homeowners. But in several neighborhoods, there was serious conversations about fighting racism, not relying on the cops, and allying with the protest movement.

Reforming and regulating the police is not what we want. We can do much better than prolonging the life of this doomed, repressive institution, but to do better, we need to plan how to do better.

You probably have things on your phone you wouldn’t want a fascist or a cop to see: comrades’ contact information, loved ones’ addresses, logged-in social media accounts, and text messages, to name a few. While you can’t make it impossible for them to get into your phone, you can make it a pain. With every security measure you add, you make it more difficult for police/fascists to get your data.