Reflections on the Minneapolis Uprising and Anti-Racist Parenting by Erin Dyke

Today’s blog post comes from Erin Dyke. Erin is an assistant professor of curriculum studies in the School for Teaching and Curriculum Leadership at Oklahoma State University. Her research focuses on pedagogies of social movement spaces; social justice, abolitionist, and decolonial movements in education; and gender/sexuality and education.

Lately I have been thinking about Minneapolis, my former home, and the rage for justice burning in my old neighborhood and city.

Last week, I read Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl with my 5- and 3-year-olds. For those of you who don’t know the story, a community of diggers (foxes, badgers, bunnies, and weasels) lives nearby three power-hungry farmers, Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, who can’t stand the thought that Mr. Fox regularly steals an inconsequential amount of food out of their massive stores to survive. The farmers team up in their rage-filled desire for retribution to decimate the diggers’ neighborhood with their machines, try to terrorize them out of their holes to gleefully kill them, babies and all. (It’s pretty intense). After Mr. Fox and his family nearly starve to death, he, his children, and Badger dig tunnels into the storerooms of each farmer, stealing food to joyfully feast on after their famine. By the end of the book, they’ve completely swindled the swindlers, building an underground, self-sustaining interspecies community on the excesses of Bunce, Boggis, and Bean.

I’ve been thinking lately about this moment in the story that sort of captured us as we read it together.

From chapter 14, “Badger Has Doubts”:

Suddenly Badger said, ‘Doesn’t this worry you just a tiny bit, Foxy?’

‘Worry me?’ said Mr. Fox. ‘What?’

‘All this … this stealing.’

Mr. Fox stopped digging and stared at Badger as though he had gone completely dotty.

‘My dear old furry frump,’ he said, ‘do you know anyone in the whole world who wouldn’t swipe a few chickens if his children were starving to death?’

There was a short silence while Badger thought deeply about this.

‘You are far too respectable,’ said Mr. Fox.

‘There’s nothing wrong with being respectable,’ Badger said.

‘Look,’ said Mr. Fox, ‘Boggis and Bunce and Bean are out to kill us. You realize that, I hope?’

‘I do, Foxy, I do indeed,’ said the gentle Badger.

‘But we’re not going to stoop to their level. We don’t want to kill them.’

‘I should hope not, indeed,’ said Badger.

‘We wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Mr. Fox. ‘We shall simply take a little food here and there to keep us and our families alive. Right?’

‘I suppose we’ll have to,’ said Badger.

‘If they want to be horrible, let them,’ said Mr. Fox. ‘We down here are decent peace-loving people.’

Badger laid his head on one side and smiled at Mr. Fox. ‘Foxy,’ he said, ‘I love you.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr. Fox. ‘And now let’s get on with the digging.’

By the end of the book, Gus worked hard to stammer out a single, burning question: “Why didn’t the farmers want to share their food?”

It was getting close to bed time by then, so we talked a little about power (wielding power over, building power with). Gus already understands to some extent that there are people in this world who accumulate and hoard power over, unwilling to share it. Our conversations about gender, race, and class are often fraught, sometimes resisted, percolate, then brought up for earnest thinking through at random moments. Just when I think Gus has come to some epiphany about what he thinks, he’ll catch me off guard to challenge the movement and openness of our conversations. In those moments when he gives me a pained look and spontaneously declares, “I don’t like pink or purple,” or “my teachers told me the American flag is good [end of story].” Often, it is in these quiet moments at night, while we’re reading, that Gus is the most open, questioning, insightful. Ultimately, I think I wrapped up our conversation with something like, “That’s a really good question, Gus,” trying to mark it for him as something without a neat, certain answer, one that we need to keep trying to understand and understand our own relations to.

So much of what white, middle class people are officially taught about power and race in our families and in our schools is so far from reality. I wonder if the riot-shaming responses to the uprising in Minneapolis (and now everywhere) also consider how those looted Targets are, as locals know, owned by a corporation (headquartered in Minneapolis) that has a long relationship with partnering with and expanding police surveillance and activity in the city? Or, that real estate developers have been bent on gentrifying historically mixed race and mixed income neighborhoods on the Southside, edging out affordable housing, bringing in expensive grocery stores and restaurants that so many feel unwelcome at and can’t afford? Or, how about the burned down chain fast food restaurants that use complex algorithms for just-in-time scheduling that keep workers’ lives so precarious and destabilized, and they pay workers such low wages they often rely on SNAP to get by? Or the liquor stores that profit off of misery, most of which are also some of the most miserable, antiunion places to work? Do they also think of how the police periodically bulldoze so many people’s tent homes and community along Hiawatha, gleefully demolishing all their earthly belongings just before they head home to clink too many beers and watch Vikings’ games in their garages with the bros? Do they remember that up until the killing of George Floyd, Chauvin was honored with recognitions and medals of valor for his previous record of police violence?

Whose city is Minneapolis? How are race and racism wielded to mask and justify the long histories of actions of the power/capital hoarders? The ways in which the fevered whitening fantasies of the city’s elite (or mostly actually people who live nowhere near the city limits, maybe not even in the state) are protected and forced upon the people who make the city in the first place – protected and forced on them by the MPD, whose union leader is a known white supremacist, whose force is composed of 95% suburbanites who don’t reside in the city they police and operates with effectually no accountability to elected officials? Do they consider that the people of the city, led by Black community leaders and organizations and young people, have risen up time and again to protest anti-black police brutality – the murders of Terrance Franklin, Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, and so many others, even occupying the 4th precinct for weeks to demand justice and a change to the status quo, shutting down highways during rush hour, the Mall of America, the state fair, and on and on — what has changed?

I’m with all the people in my former hometown right now, who are asking – in action and in community – questions like Gus’s: Why don’t the power/capital hoarders want to share when they have more than enough? So what if George Floyd supposedly bought something at a convenience store with a counterfeit $20. My feeling is that people should steal it all, they should burn it down. I also know many lives have been and will continue to be wounded, traumatized, and harassed in the days, weeks, months, and years to come as the MPD and corporate hoarders seek restitution for what little power/capital was stolen back … a theft-prevention effort with eyes to the future.

This moment helps me to rededicate myself to keep studying this question and all its tendrils – in action and community. Minneapolis was burning for so many already. Burn Target to the ground. Could something more loving grow from its ashes? Maybe a place where people could feed their babies for free rather than shelves of outrageously-priced formula locked in cages with electronic theft-detectors strapped tightly around each container?