Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. This is a crucial conversation with one of the most important activists, organizers, and thinkers of our time, Brittany Packnett Cunningham. She is with us for this hour to help us look at Minnesota and understand the infrastructure and circumstances that have allowed Minnesota to become the beacon that it is for all of us right now.
Brittany's going to talk to us about what we need to do right now to not just sit and stare and marvel at Minnesota, but to become Minnesota in our own places so that when our moment comes and it will, we will be ready like they were.
And also Brittany's going to talk to us a lot about how for a lot of people, none of this is a surprise and how we might be able to rebuild now in a way that this does not happen again. How we break patterns, American patterns that keep us repeating the same old story in this country, how we write a new one finally by acknowledging the truth of the beginning. This is a gift.
Brittany Packnett Cunningham is an absolute gift. Let's get to it. Brittany Packnett Cunningham is a leader at the intersection of culture, justice, and policy. Brittany is the founder of the social impact agency Love and Power Works, host and executive producer of the news and justice podcast, Undistracted. A St.
Louis native, Brittany was instrumental in the coordination of the Ferguson protest following the 2014 police murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown. After George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis in 2020, Britney became one of the most visible national movement voices for policy, budget, and electoral change.
As the world watched the executions of Renee Good and Alex Preddy by ICE, both within 2.2 miles of where George Floyd was murdered. as well as the execution of Keith Porter Jr.
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Chapter 2: How has Minnesota become a beacon for resisting state violence?
by ICE in California, Brittany is leading us in connecting this police state violence, including the killings of Geraldo Lunes Campos, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceras, and Luis Beltran Yanez Cruz, and more than 50 other deaths in ICE detention toward a collective liberation. Brittany, you are so generous in sharing your voice today.
You are the voice we are looking to as well as those voices on the ground in Minnesota right now to help us to understand and connect this moment to decades and centuries of violence that we're experiencing in this country. We are recording this on Monday. January 26th. This episode will go up on Wednesday the 28th.
Where would you situate us in this moment where people will be hearing this on Wednesday? What do you most want people to know right now?
The thing I want people to know right now and always is that there's something for everybody to do. And I probably sound like a broken record about that if you engage with me on any platform. But that is so critically important to me that everybody understands that because it is easy to look on in horror from afar.
It doesn't feel good, but it's easier to do that than to decide to be incensed enough to take action. And we all have to be filled with enough rage or love or some mix of the two to do something and to do something every day. This is a moment where we have to understand that a singular act on a singular day is not enough.
This requires consistent action, consistent education, consistent community building, because we have to build momentum. Momentum is necessary to actually grow the kind of force we need to reverse what we're dealing with now.
And so, yeah, I want people to know that they can take action on pushing Governor Walz to institute a statewide eviction moratorium so that people who've had to shelter in place and hide out from ICE are not thrown out from their houses on February the 1st, thereby putting them at even more risk, both in sub-zero temperatures and of being abducted by ICE.
I want people to know that they can take action by calling their senators and making sure that they refuse to fund ICE through the DHS appropriations bill. that they call for Kristi Noem to be impeached, that they call for investigations of the murders of Rene Good, of Keith Porter Jr., of Alex Preddy, and of all of those who have died both in protest of ICE and in detention centers.
I want people to take action in following the organizers and leaders and organizations on the ground in Minneapolis, like Natives, like the Indigenous Food Lab, Minnesota 5051, like Georgia Fort, who's an incredible independent journalist who is on the ground and from there, like Nikima Armstrong, who her and Chantel were arrested for the protest.
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Chapter 3: What actions can individuals take to support their communities?
and organizing. It's not just that those massive protests just occur. Every city and state is not prepared like Minnesota was prepared because they have not been doing the everyday work of being parts of these groups so that when the call comes, people are trained, people are disciplined, people are connected, people know where to meet, people know where to go.
This is the result of the work that's day in and day out. not just, there's not some huge megaphone that somebody gets on and says, everybody go now. Right? So Brittany, talk to us about what people mean when they say, this is not just about posting and it's not just about protesting.
This is about getting involved with your local organizations who will prepare you for the moments like we're seeing in Minnesota.
I'm so glad you asked that. There are a million hot takes in this moment. Right.
Chapter 4: Why is this moment more dangerous than previous protests?
I tend to not be in the mood for hot takes when people need to get active. One of the hot takes we keep saying is, wow, I can't believe the revolution is happening in Minnesota. Right. I thought that was just a place, you know, like, you know, like people are nice. They go sledding. Right. You know, Midwestern charm.
The other hot take that I see a bunch of people giving is, well, they built the infrastructure in 2020. Both of those things are incorrect. Number one, Minnesota itself is an indigenous word. Indigenous people on the land that is now called Minnesota have been resisting for hundreds of years.
This is the 250th birthday, rather, of America, the country, but it is not the 250th birthday of Turtle Island. There were people here, there were strategies here, there were communities here, and those communities were
Chapter 5: How can we break the patterns of systemic oppression?
stood up. The land holds that memory. The people hold that memory. The language holds that memory. And indigenous people in what is now called Minnesota have been passing that on for generations. And so many of them are the ones holding the line right now, which is one of the reasons why we know that this was never about immigration, because why is ICE raiding indigenous spaces?
Why is ICE detaining people who were here before the people who ICE hired and their ancestors? The same is true with Black people, right? We know Nakima's name because she had been an organizer in that space for a long time. Robin Wansley, who's one of the city councilors in the Twin Cities, who has been one of the main ones pushing for this eviction moratorium, she's been organizing for years.
It is ahistorical to say that folks have just been doing this for the last three, four, five, six years. And when people bring that up, they're not being contrarian. They're not being rude. They're not being mean. They are doing the work of reminding us that if our fights are not inclusive, our solutions will not be inclusive.
If we are not intersectional now, then the world making we are doing, that world won't be inclusive either. We actually have to practice that stuff now. We have to build the muscle of intersectionality and inclusivity now. So when people tell you, hey, don't just remember Renee Good and Alex Preddy. Remember all of the other names that Amanda named and then some.
They're not doing it to get on your nerves. They're doing it because they want to make sure that all of us are included in the world that we have to build. Because when something's destroyed, something is built in its place. And we'll either do it by happenstance or we'll do it intentionally.
The other thing, though, Glennon, that your question is bringing to mind that I really, really want people to understand is that this is worse. And I actually don't think people are getting that. I think it is convenient to have nostalgia about... what you say you were doing in 2014 or 2015 or what you say you were doing in 2020, whether you were actually doing that is a different conversation.
But it's easy to have nostalgia about it and feel your activist adrenaline rising again and think that we're dealing with the same thing. As I've been reminding people, when we were on the streets in 2014 in Ferguson, we did not have a friendly local government, but we had a warm federal government. We had in President Obama somebody who wanted to assemble people to talk solutions.
Now, they might not have been the solutions that everybody agreed with. But there was an open door. There was a curiosity. There was a question to say, how can we figure this out and how can we figure it out together? Dealing with a warm democratic government is very different than dealing with authoritarians.
I would venture to say that dealing with George Bush, dealing with early 2000s Republicans is very different than what we're dealing with now. So if your activist adrenaline is raising up because of what you did to push back against the Iraq war, I need you to understand that it's different right now.
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Chapter 6: What historical context is essential for understanding current events?
And this moment is calling for way more courage from all of us. Activists are not just fearful for their jobs. They're fearful for their lives because they could go outside and end up like Alex Pretty or Renee Good or Keith Porter and not come home.
You're talking about this is not 2014 and sounds like the 1700s and the 1800s in the slave patrols. And I know that a lot of people are making that connection, but I think it's really important in this moment because there is what you said at the top where about, you know, saying all the people's names and including all of those people in what we're talking about is so important.
And I would love to like stay there for a second, because to me, this feels like the foundation on which we build our next steps.
I've read a lot of what you've said about it and Austin Channing Brown about, you know, the reason it's important to be able to truly hear what Black people are saying, the deep disappointment and grief when they hear white people say, how did we just suddenly arrive here? What is happening here?
is because it reveals that we have not acknowledged and heard and grieved what Black people have been saying that they have been experiencing and what they have been experiencing for generations. That is the extrajudicial, the state-sponsored and endorsed killing of their people
And then the cover up like we saw with Renee and with Alex and with Keith of, well, they were bad or they had this was there was a reason that we killed them and get on our side real quick. That that has been happening for generations. It's so important that we just stay there for a second because it is grief that we have to acknowledge. And it is also so fundamental because if we don't.
tie this moment to all of those moments. The solution that we come to the other side with, a proposed solution that only helps us, the white people who have just recently found themselves to be disturbed by this, And doesn't help everyone. And it's actually not going to be a solution because we're going to need all of us to do it together. So can we just talk about that right now?
And then can we talk about the parallels and the state sponsored killings over the history of our nation? Because it is what this is about. This is not new. And the comparing it to Nazi Germany is not correct because Nazi Germany actually studied the U.S. South. And to create their Nuremberg laws, they based it on Jim Crow.
They based it on, you know, one drop and our Asian Exclusion Act and our miscegenation laws. That was based on us. So if you're if you're talking about that, you're talking about us. And until we're talking about the right thing, we can't solve the right thing.
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Chapter 7: What role does community organizing play in creating change?
This is not the America I have ever known. When did we become this country? And then once again, black people have to raise their hands and say, hi, we've always been this country. Once again, us and indigenous people have to exhaust ourselves to say, have you have you picked up a book? If you've been following any of us for any amount of time, we told you this.
The hard thing for people to realize. is that if we had listened to Black people in the first place, we wouldn't be here. And this is actually what I want people to sit with. Because a whole lot of people bought a whole lot of listen to Black women totes in 2015 and in 2020 and wore them and then didn't do it. And I mean that very literally.
I mean, if everybody had listened to the 92% of Black women who voted for Kamala Harris, we literally wouldn't be in this situation. And you can have critique of her. That's fine. We should all have critique of politicians. But what we can't do is allow the flattening that happened across the public square that said that they were both the same continue.
Because this woman is not sending ICE to pull people out of their cars. She's not sending a paramilitary force in the streets to kill a Veterans Affairs nurse. She's not doing it. Right.
So very literally, had we listened to black people and been willing to vote for the black woman instead of walking around and saying, oh, America will never elect a black woman, becoming somebody who made America elect a black woman because you voted for her and you got your neighbors to vote for her. You got your friends to vote for her. If you had done that, we wouldn't be here.
And now I'm watching people do the same thing to Jasmine Crockett. We say we need the Democrats to win back the Senate. We say, well, Jasmine can't win because Beto didn't win. And Beto is a friend of mine. But people are then simultaneously comparing James Tallarico to Beto. But Beto didn't win. So what makes you think that James is going to be Jasmine? But because you lack the
political and social imagination to see a Black woman win a statewide seat in the state of Texas, you have now become the obstruction. You have now become the thing that has declared the self-fulfilling prophecy. Because once you say a Black woman can't win, then other people say, well, then there's no point in me trying. And now you've created the future that you determined was impossible.
You've proven your own point, even though your point didn't have to be proven that way. So we're making the same mistakes again, because we're not even willing to learn from recent history. If we had listened to Black people, Confederates would have been tried for treason. If we had listened to Black people... People who redlined communities would not have been allowed to own future property.
If we had listened to Black people, reconstruction would have led to a flourishing of the land and of the economy for everybody instead of getting what we got with Jim Crow, which killed the economy in the South because half the people couldn't participate in it. If we had listened to Black people, we would never have elected a wannabe dictator the first time, let alone the second time.
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Chapter 8: How can we build a more inclusive future together?
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When we look at Minnesota, we are so amazed at what they're able to do. And I think we think that if ICE invaded any of our communities, that might just spontaneously happen, that we might have. And I'm thankful. I'm thankful. I think it was like
It was a beautiful thing for the world to see this in Minnesota, to see the rising up, to see what is possible, to expand our imaginations of what could be. And yet they are very differently situated than a lot of communities may be if that happens.
So, I mean, I'm just thinking about the history of Minnesota in terms of the kind of intersectional groups and the different working groups that have been literally hundreds of years in the making in that area with their history of, you know, the strikes that led to where, you know,
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