I’ve been thinking more about @BMKhaveiturway and what hurts is that he truly is “one of our own.” He’s from here. He’s ingrained in the Twin Cities community. Save for Manny Lagos, he’s the only public face of the team from the NASL days. I want him to succeed bc he’s one of us.
But it’s all of those things that make his choices (and let’s be clear, he’s choosing to do his own thing) both disappointing and totally in character. Brent is a stereotypical Minnesota bro, which glaringly reflects in how he sees being anti-racist.
Being anti-racist means listening to BIPOC communities in your peer groups. It means recognizing that your white voice carries less weight when saying what people ought to do. If your Black peers are saying Black Lives Matter, you should hear why they say that and not End Racism.
The benefit of the doubt I can extend to Brent is that he doesn’t get what it means to do what he’s doing. As a white Minnesotan, I get that we can feel like we’re doing enough by saying we oppose racism. We don’t burn crosses in peoples’ yards. We’re not Alabama.
But Minnesotan racism manifests in the ways that embody why we need to affirmatively say that Black lives do matter. It’s redlining people into segregated neighborhoods. It’s economic inequality. It’s the carcereal state. It’s the history of the neighborhood #MNUFC calls home.
It’s the systemic issues that made Jeronimo Yanez disregard Philando Castile’s human dignity, and it’s the same issues that put Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck. It’s the generations of evidence that suggest that Black lives haven’t mattered.
So when Brent sees his Black teammates pour their hearts into starting @BPCMLS, his choice to whitesplain about the problem being racism only—thus ignoring the inherited trauma that racism has caused—is an absolute personal failure. It’s a sign of the growth he needs to undergo.
I hope Brent Kallman is just ignorant. It’s better than being actively racist. But ignorance is par for the course here in Minnesota, and the ignorance of what racism means and does by whites is why we need to actively be anti-racist. It’s why we need to say Black Lives Matter.
