On Memorial Day, George Floyd was murdered at the hands of the Minneapolis Police. This horrible act of brutal injustice happened at the corner of 38th and Chicago Avenue, in the Powderhorn neighborhood of Minneapolis. Our city. Our neighborhood. Our home.
Many of you have reached out to ask if we’re okay. We appreciate your concern, but things are not okay here. And they never have been.
What’s happening in our neighborhood is emblematic of what’s happening in every neighborhood in the nation. American society has been built upon the land, labor, and lives of BIPOC through more than four centuries of genocide, slavery, segregation, discrimination, and the criminalization of people we now call our friends and neighbors. Too many of us have turned a blind eye to this systemic injustice, not because we didn’t believe it was happening, but simply because we could. We could choose to believe that it didn’t affect us; that we weren’t benefitting from it; that we weren’t participating in it.
That has to stop.
Walking Shadow is committed to doing the work to confront and dismantle racism and white supremacy. It’s critically important that we — as individual artists and as a company — start by examining our own complacency and privilege. That is the only place to start.
If you are white, if you haven’t engaged in this work before, we call on you to start along with us. Start with yourself, embrace the discomfort of acknowledging racism and white supremacy, and speak out against them. Support financially where you can. Listen to and amplify the voices of our BIPOC friends and neighbors as they speak their truth.
Maybe you feel overwhelmed. Maybe you don’t know what to do. That’s okay. A key part of theater is collaboration, and fortunately other people have already been doing work that we can collaborate on. We are thankful for all the effort that people before us have done to create and curate these resources so we can share them with you.
To get started, check out this list of anti-racism resources for a variety of articles, videos, movies, podcasts and books you can watch/read, many of them right now, online!
MPR has assembled a list of local Black-led arts organizations. Support them!
Support Black Lives Matter.
Learn about and support efforts to move away from policing as we know it toward community-led safety initiatives at Reclaim the Block.
Reclaim the Block is also actively maintaining a list of organizations doing good work to consider donating to. (They’re adding new organizations in need, and removing those whose needs have been met so that resources can be spread effectively.)
This is hard work, and it needs to be done. Together.
Walking Shadow Theatre Company
John Heimbuch, David Pisa, Amy Rummenie