Systems Change Will Be Within Us
Jaleel knows what's up
Minneapolis was burning.
Those of us living here felt the ground shifting under our feet daily — our first experience of an earthquake, since Minnesota doesn’t experience tectonic shifts. Everything we thought was “reality” was literally going up in flames.
There was fear in the air, almost palpable.
There was anger too.
More than anything, the air hummed. There was a kind of ever-present vibration, filled with that fear and that anger, along with expectation and anxiety and hope and violence and solidarity and self-protection and love and care… and anarchy.
During the summer of 2020, Minneapolis was due for a reckoning.
I remember writing that within just a few hours of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. And before long, those words were on many peoples’ lips, and the seismic reckoning was spreading globally.
At its epicenter, there we were.
Bewildered.
Shouting.
Helping.
Protecting.
Demanding.
Gathering.
Being in community in a way we never had before.
Jaleel Stallings was driving through the city one night, at the height of this reckoning, on his way to join and support a community protest. As he stopped with friends in a parking lot, trying to find their way through a maze of roadblocks to get through the city, an unmarked van approached with its lights off. He heard a loud bang, felt an impact in his body, and then there was a burning sensation in his chest. Deep inside, he knew he was under attack.
Jaleel is a Black man.
By that point during Minneapolis’ uprising and unrest, the level of anarchy had grown. The mayor was showing up in the early morning on TV, looking haggard and having no idea how to answer reporters’ questions, quite apparently having no grasp on what was happening in his city. He and the governor were trading barbs and accusations about who was supposed to be doing what — who was ultimately accountable for one confounding situation after the next. Anchors and reporters broadcast their of-the-moment thoughts, mostly unable to mask their most-human feelings, all day and late into the night, in a nearly un-ending string of live-TV moments.
Word of this state of affairs, and what was happening in Minneapolis, had traveled — and bad actors from far-flung parts had traveled here to sow violence and chaos.
The problem with a time like this is you do not know what to believe. You don’t know who knows the truth. You don’t know who to listen to.
We were hearing from many sources at the time that many (most?) of the bad actors in town were white supremacists keen on a chance to charge into the Race War they had been jonesing and preparing for.
You need this context, to take in Jaleel’s story.
After he was attacked, he fired his gun at the unmarked van, which he understood to be the source of the ammo that had hit him.
As it turns out, the van was full of Minneapolis police officers.
When Jaleel realized this, he immediately dropped his gun, got down on the ground, and gave himself up.
(I want you to consider, with me, what that must have felt like for him, given the fact that the Minneapolis Police Department has a long and well-known history of terrorizing and killing Black men, which of course was a big reason for the scale of the violence and unrest in the city at that very moment. And that history had come to a head, in many ways, when four Minneapolis cops slowly, dispassionately murdered George Floyd on the corner of 38th and Chicago, unwittingly setting off the quake that would reverberate far beyond here.)
How did those cops respond to him surrendering?
They brutally beat him.
Then wrote up false reports of what happened.
And then he was charged with attempted murder.
Can you believe it?
Especially that something like this could happen smack-dab in the middle of a massive global reckoning that was happening now because Minneapolis cops had murdered a Black man… again?
Anyway.
I’m telling you this story so that you can understand more fully the context of Jaleel’s perspective — because it’s his perspective that I want you to take in.
Recently interviewed by the Washington Post, he said this:
And isn’t that the truth?
I agree, Jaleel.
This is my perspective, too.
And that is a big reason why I started this project. Why I want to build a community here committed to transformation. Why I’m done thinking of systems change as “out there” and not “in here.”
People are people.
Humans are always — always — gonna human.
And “systems” in our human societies are human-dependent. They are created by them in the first place, and they would not exist at all without them. Humans are the very substance of these systems.
And humans are always going to be their human selves, no matter what a law or DEI training or HR policy says.
To truly change how systems are, we must go deeper.
We must reach into the roots of who we are.
Remember: we are not humans doings. Or human goings.
We are human beings.
If we want to see anything made by, of, and for humans change, we must address and create that change at the level of our beings.
At the roots of who we are.
Only when we do that can true transformation in the world we see around us happen — because it will be reverberating out from who we are.
Focusing on changing external markers, guidelines, structures, governance, and the like is, in truth, tinkering around the edges.
The core — the center — of reality is within us.
So.
If we want to transform our reality from the violent, loudly acrimonious, poverty-filled, unjust, inequitable, uncaring, fractured world around us — if we’d like to see less racism and sexism and other bias, more justice, more equity, more peace, more love and care in this world — that change has to start within us.
When we want to change how things are… we need to change how we are.
Any other approach is a fool’s errand.
Wanna spin wheels?
Wanna bang our heads against a wall?
Then let’s keep focusing on the externals.
Wanna truly see change?
You know what to do.
Go deeper.
Go within.
Join us here at For the Love of Humanity, as that’s what we’re going to be all about. That’s what we’ll focus on here.
Together.