This story originally appeared in print in the 2020 Vol. 5 issue of Louisville Magazine.
On June 16, Louisville Magazine opened its office to a handful of the city’s Black leaders for a socially distanced, intergenerational discussion about racism, the protests, Gen Z, police brutality, reparations and so much more. Including, of course, Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Black woman and ER technician who was shot and killed by LMPD officers in her apartment on March 13, and whose death led to the Metro Council’s unanimous vote on June 11 to ban controversial no-knock warrants.
Cassia Herron, who writes for the magazine and chairs the nonprofit Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, and Ricky L. Jones, director of the Pan-African Studies Department at the University of Louisville and host of his namesake radio show, asked questions along with Louisville Magazine editor Josh Moss, though Herron and Jones became part of the dialogue as much as they helped guide it.
About halfway through, Charles Booker, the Kentucky state senator whose profile had been soaring during the protests and who hadn’t yet lost his Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate, had to leave to do an interview with CNN. The other participants were:
*Jecorey Arthur, a musician, Simmons College professor and, since this conversation happened, winner of the Democratic primary for the Metro Council seat that represents his home neighborhood, Russell. He’s running unopposed in the fall, meaning the 28-year-old will become the youngest person ever elected to Metro Council.
*Quintez Brown, raised in west Louisville, is a junior political science major at U of L. He writes for the Courier-Journal and plans to teach and continue writing upon graduation.
*Hannah Drake is a writer and poet. As a cultural strategist for IDEAS xLab, she is working on a piece of artwork titled “The (Un)Known Project,” which will include a bench along the Ohio River and footprints on the sidewalk. “For Black men, women and children — unknown names of the enslaved,” Drake says. “At the narrowest point of the river, which is in the West End, if the river was low you could walk across to Indiana. If they would catch Black people, they would kill them and put them in the river and cover their bodies with limestone as a deterrent. The bench will be made out of limestone to bring awareness to that fact.”
*Brianna Harlan, raised in west Louisville, is a mixed-media artist and community organizer, whom Jones referred to as “the quote machine.” Harlan created an augmented-reality monument for Breonna Taylor called “She Ascends,” and she is challenging inequities in Louisville’s arts institutions.
The discussion went on for more than two and a half hours. The following are non-chronological excerpts from the conversation, edited for length and clarity.
“The younger people have dealt with this for so much of their lives. My daughter is 24, and she said, ‘I’ve been protesting a long time.’ OK. A long time, Bri? OK. You know, she Rosa.”
(Laughter.)
“Stop it!”
“A good portion of her young life has been spent protesting and dealing with this. And she’s to the point where she says, ‘My kids will not be doing this.’”
“I was 14 during the Ferguson protests in 2014, and I really didn’t know too much about America’s history and racial structure back then. But that really opened my eyes to things.”
“Y’all wild. Y’all gonna tear it all down.”
“When people talk about the communication gap between older people and the young generation, I think there’s a communication gap between Gen Z and millennials. I feel like our generation don’t even listen to millennials sometimes. We grew up in the Obama era. We see their generation as kinda like having a break. Like, y’all had a chance to do something. And then y’all let Trayvon get killed. We tired. We’re not gonna let that happen. We want to change now. I feel like we’re honestly the generation that’s the last generation to be messed with.”
“And I see it in my students at Simmons, who are mostly Gen Z. They are growing up where — I need to go somewhere? I can hit Lyft or hit Uber. I need some food? They get everything, that immediate gratification. So their patience, I think, is a lot thinner than everybody else’s.”
“Y’all have been immersed in this constant state of overt war. Countries were at war with one another for centuries in Europe. You had whole generations that knew nothing but that war. And it created different types of human beings, psychologically. What has this done to people in your generation?”
“I was doing the scroll on social media, and it said, ‘Let this not lead you into despair; let it radicalize you.’ And I think that that is what it has done, because there’s only so long that you can just — you know, that breaking point happens. We’re having it as a city. But I think as young people, we have had to have it as individuals earlier, with that breaking point. Once you step into and claim your own power, you don’t have to answer to anybody else’s. They want us to continue to engage their power. Or my power has to have a seat at a table with their power. Fuck they table! I don’t need their seat. I’m building on my own in a way that I will never have to answer to anybody else. That is my plan.”
“I’m in a survival state. We don’t have time to sit back and wait for the next leader.”
“We’ve been surviving for a long time. We got to get out of that survival mentality. You deserve more, all of us deserve more. We not here just to survive anymore. We want to thrive.”
“I’m in a mindset of liberation now. A lot of people talk about equality. When Obama came in, the conversation was around equality and equity. But I really think it’s more about liberation, about thriving, about being free. They try to put us in this box — like, we gotta have a job, wear a suit and tie. What if I don’t want to? What if I don’t like a suit?”
“That’s survival. We don’t want that.”
“I want to be able to wear my hair as I like to. I want to be able to listen to what I want to, talk how I want to.”
“Anything that tries to make our Blackness smaller is the enemy, is a threat, and we have zero tolerance for that.”
“I got all of this recognition, all these awards, because I was performing with orchestras. But I was the only Black person onstage. Every single orchestra I performed with across the country. I got all this love because I got my master’s degree at age 22, but where I’m from the rate for master’s degrees is zero percent. It didn’t matter. Me being a teacher didn’t matter because Black men represent two percent of the teaching field. Your individual uplift does not equal collective uplift.
“Millennials are the generation of aspiration. We are the same age as the Migos, Lil Uzi Vert, all of these rappers that glorify a life that’s really fabricated. We come from the Black Panther generation, where there’s this sense of fantasticalism — I made that word up — where we look at these milestones that are really transactional, and they’re not transformational. And we get lost in the sauce, and we’re still not free. We are far from it. It don’t matter how many TARCs we get with murals of (the late Louisville civil-rights activist) Louis Coleman Jr. We don’t own Russell. And when they dumped that billion dollars into our community, it ain’t going into our pockets; it’s going into the property. And in a lot of cases, we are going to be moved out from that property. Over the course of time, I have learned as a millennial, as a 28-year-old, that all of this perceived progression is not progression whatsoever.
“And I’ll end with my favorite quote of all time by my spiritual brother, Malcolm X, who said, ‘We have not seen progress. If you stick a knife nine inches in my back, pull it out six, that’s not progress. Even if you pull the knife all the way out, that’s not progress. It’s only once you begin to heal the wound do we see progress.’ We haven’t pulled the knife out, we haven’t healed the wound. In a lot of cases, we won’t even acknowledge that the knife is there.”
David McAtee was killed by the National Guard at his barbecue stand in west Louisville on June 1 as law enforcement broke up a gathering at a nearby gas station at the intersection of 26th Street and Broadway. Officers involved either did not wear body cameras or failed to turn them on, violating LMPD policy and resulting in the firing of former chief Steve Conrad (who had already announced he’d be retiring). The mayor’s office released footage taken from the barbecue stand’s cameras. An interior shot shows McAtee from behind, standing in a doorway, his right arm obscured, before collapsing inside the building, dropping what appears to be a firearm. McAtee’s body was still on the scene the following day as protesters gathered.
“I was in New York when all the protests broke out. And I came home because I saw my community in pain. I saw streets that I passed every day, ’cause I grew up between my nana’s house and my mom’s house. Every day, passing 26th and Broadway, stopping to get McDonald’s, stopping to go grab some groceries so my mom could cook. I never imagined it being like how the people were in Ferguson. I never imagined seeing these things happen in the places I grew up, to the people I grew up with.”
“I told the mayor, ‘You brought that to David McAtee.’ The people down in the West End didn’t have anything to do with what was going on downtown. But in typical fashion, you brought that to them. And I told the governor before the National Guard arrived: ‘You are making the wrong move. Because undoubtedly they are going to kill somebody Black.’ And sure enough, that happened. And Black people always know. We can always smell the rain coming. We’re always going to sound the alarm. America just keeps hitting the snooze button over and over and over again. So I tell, essentially, white people, ‘Don’t ask for whom the bell tolls; it’s tolling for you. It’s been tolling for you, and you refuse to hear it.’ And now here we are. So fuck your Omni. Fuck your Target. Fuck your Oxmoor Mall. I don’t care about any of that. None of it. If they don’t arrest, charge and convict these officers and the whole bitch burns, I don’t care, as long as people stay out of the West End.”
“Hannah called me and was like, ‘They killed a brother last night.’ And we went down to 26th and Broadway, and we were crowd control, and we were traffic control. And we were really managing the response of people’s grief and anger and pain. And we watched and looked at these officers across the street, and folks were singing and bringing people water. We were making calls to the governor’s office and to the mayor’s office, like, ‘Hey, these officers need to be leaving the streets, ’cause we don’t know how long we’re gonna be able to manage.’”
“I was standing in the street at 26th and Broadway, and everybody’s angry. You should be angry. One of the things, for me as a leader, is saying, ‘First of all, what I’m not gonna do is try to dismiss your pain and go right to: Well, let’s protect property.’ That angers me in my soul because that means, once again, you are not seeing us as human beings.
“We also know, through the course of our history, that major change often came because folks stood up and fought back — even physically. So we cannot act like the only way change is going to happen is by us sitting at the table and talking calmly. I mean, that’s a great thing to aspire for, and I’m continuing to work to build coalitions so that we can do those things. But we can’t be surprised if folks want to just flip the whole table over. And so my response to folks is like: ‘Look, you mad. And y’all talking real loud. And if you going to run at those officers, I’m gon’ run first. We have every bit of reason to be mad, and we are hurt, and we are dying — and if somebody hurts your family, you fight. And so if you need to fight right now, then I’m going to. But there’s another way to fight as well. And I’m not going to put one over the other. I’m just going to give you both the options, and let’s see what we can do.’
“But the officers were holding their weapons. This was like out of a movie. This scene, I was like, ‘Man, somebody is gonna write about this.’ Broadway was like the chasm. And on one side were folks almost demanding revolution. And the other side is essentially protecting the status quo with one of ours” — McAtee’s body — “on the other side of the lines. And we could see him.”
“But we couldn’t touch him.”
“And you just knew that if somebody just snapped their finger a certain way that this whole city would be different right now. I went over to the officers, and I’m like, ‘First of all, why are you holding weapons? What are you here for? Why are y’all lined up like this? What’s this posture about?’ And they were like, essentially, ‘Well, we can’t put our weapons down because we can’t be left defenseless.’ Like, ‘Defenseless against whom? If you’re protecting one of ours, then why would you think you need to be prepared to attack us? Show us that you belong to us, ’cause we pay for you. Put your weapons down.’ And they were like, ‘Well, this is above my pay grade.’ And I was like, ‘Well, I’m about to call the mayor.’ I was like, ‘You’re screwing this up.’”
“We made some calls!”
“The mayor, the governor.”
“Metro Council.”
“Eventually the word got back to them to put their weapons down. I don’t take peace in that. But it was a moment of opportunity. It wasn’t like we was cool. But we came together and resolved and it was like, ‘OK, we’re still here.’ It was one of the most powerful moments I have ever experienced.”
“Amy McGrath (who beat Booker in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate and will face Mitch McConnell in the fall), I think what she misses, and Black people have to continuously put it on the forefront, is: Racism and white supremacy are also global pandemics. People think that white supremacy is just Ku Klux Klan folks marching around in hoods, or white nationalists in Charlottesville marching around protecting Confederate statues. White supremacy is expressed in so many ways. White supremacy is expressed in the halls of power, where mayors, senators, presidents can simply ignore Black voices. White supremacy is police officers killing Black people and nobody says anything. White supremacy is Black children being homeless and starving. White supremacy is a K-12 curriculum that never mentions Black people, that paints them out of history, and they only learn about Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr. And surface stuff about them! All of those are manifestations of white supremacy.”
“I said this to Amy McGrath: ‘You and all your excuses.’ Like, ‘Oh, you know, I’m at home with my family.’ And then she says, ‘Well, you know, it is a pandemic.’” (During a Democratic primary debate on KET, McGrath stated that she had not attended any of the recent protests. She said, “We’re in the middle of a pandemic. So we also have to look at: Is that the place to be right now?”) “I was offended as a Black person. None of us forgot it’s a pandemic. We know what we’re risking. We know that we are putting our very bodies on the line to be in these streets. But we are willing to take the risk to get justice — not just for Breonna, but for Black people. So for someone who wants to be senator to minimize it, like we all forgot it’s a pandemic, is ludicrous. Black people have been fighting two pandemics. We don’t have the luxury of sitting at home saying, ‘You know what? I’m just going to worry about the coronavirus.’”
“There are national campaigns right now around defunding the police, and there’s a lot of distortion about what that means.”
“I don’t see how there’s that much distortion. Like, it literally says: Defund the police. It really can’t get more specific than that. The demand is, we want to take money away from the police. What do we do with that money? We want to see less officers. We want to see less money in their budget. I know one part of the demand is to cut all police departments by half, and cut all their budgets by half. But most importantly, it’s: You can’t reform that institution. Defunding the police is our first step toward dismantling everything that was rooted in slavery. Because they’re the original slave catchers. When Black people try to liberate themselves and become free, you had the police to stop them and put them back in their place. So defunding the police to me means kind of like funding our revolution by defunding our oppression.”
On June 25, Metro Council signed off on a budget that, according to a C-J story, “won’t ‘defund’ police…but will tweak how the agency spends part of its budget.”
“You’re trying to reform something that was built from slavery. Make it make sense! You cannot reform that. What you have to do is dismantle it, start all over again.”
“You can’t edit the devil into god.”
“Say that again, honey! One more time!”
“First of all, police don’t even understand the law they’re sworn to protect. They get six months (of training), where a lawyer has to go for years. So if they can’t even understand the law, which is their whole job, and their only tool for defending that law is violence, how can they understand social services, mental illness? How can they understand cultural differences in forms of expression, all of these things that lead to violence? And they say, ‘Well, we felt under threat,’ and they can use that as a blanket excuse. Defunding the police is saying, ‘Well, if you can’t even understand the law, we’re not going to give you the power to also take care of all of these other things that you use as an excuse to do violence against us.’”
“They found that money in four weeks, but we can’t find the money in 400 years.”
“What y’all saying reminds me of that Toni Morrison interview where she’s basically like, ‘If you can only stand tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.’ White people have a serious problem, and they need to start thinking about what they can do about it. Take me out of it. Quit asking me.”
“I just talked to one of the wealthiest people in the state. The next time we talk, I will share, ‘I’m not applying for your $20,000 grants. We want shares in your company.’ That’s the difference in the conversation between now and what’s happened before. Folks used to be OK with a law that was passed. But that no-knock ordinance was passed, and I remember how beautiful it was to see these hundreds of people being able to watch a Metro Council meeting together. This is what democracy looks like for me. Right before COVID, you see a Metro Council meeting — there’s nobody in the chambers, nobody’s paying attention. All of a sudden, there’s dead Black bodies and folks are flooding the streets and folks are paying attention. And they’re gonna be on the streets. It’s not enough for an ordinance here or a law here, or for us to elect a judge. We want it all.”
“I’m glad that (no-knock) law passed, but I’m not satisfied. I believe the police department and other issues in Louisville are like the head of the hydra. You get rid of the police chief and then two more things pop back, right? The only way to do it is to cut off the complete head, and the complete head here in Kentucky is white supremacy.”
“Jecorey tweeted one day—”
“Uh-oh.”
“You tweeted, ‘I love our political and social education happening right now. What have you learned lately?’ So I’m gonna pitch that to y’all. What have you learned in these last few weeks?”
“I’ve learned that a fad fades, and a trend is the way the world will be over time. And I see clearly a lot of this new awareness is a fad, and it will fade. But I’m hoping that some things that stick are the trend, the way the world should just be going. Like with legalizing weed — people thought that was a fad; that’s just the trend now. Eventually it’ll be legal in every city, every state, because that’s the trend. And I hope that the people in power don’t miss what I hope is a trend toward justice. That enough is truly enough.”
“People, specifically white people, have not been listening as much as I thought maybe they had been. I turned 28 on May 19th, Malcolm X’s birthday. And I’ve traveled the world. I’ve been in so many spaces I never imagined being in — and in a lot of cases I shouldn’t have been in, just because of where I’m from. And it don’t matter if I’m rapping about — or even teaching about — gentrification and slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and all of the other piles of oppression that we have been underneath. It was almost like nobody was listening as long as it was packaged as a song.”
“I learned how to watch how power moves, and how it oppresses us and tries to repress our movements. I noticed this tweet that was like, ‘Republicans are fascists, but Democrats are too, with just a better PR team.’ And I’ve definitely seen that these past weeks. Even the most progressive Democratic leaders, Black Democrats, Black Democrat mayors, are just really failing people. They’re really trying to protect this system. And it’s just very scary to see. Who do we trust when it comes to the political establishment? Who do we look to as leaders? Because a lot of these leaders will really kill us and tear gas us and then blame us for it. We’re really at war. And they know how to win.”
“This is a quote from a historian named George Wright. He says, ‘These white leaders did not fear Blacks because they remember Blacks as being loyal and passive slaves. They were convinced that once they made the rules of their new order known, the Blacks would do as commanded.’ He said this in 1985, after letting it be known that, post-Civil War, all of the journalists, all the lawyers, all the realtors, the merchants — everyone who ran and operated the city were former rebels, former Confederates. And how many of those people still exist?
“Even as we sit in this office space — and I love Louisville Magazine — but how many Black employees do y’all got?” (Arthur is right. Though Louisville Magazine works with a diverse group of contributing writers, photographers and artists, the magazine has five full-time employees — three in editorial — and all are white.) “You’re telling the stories and the narratives of people without representation at the actual company level itself. We don’t have wealth in this city. We don’t have ownership. And that has a lot to do with what we’re dealing with now.
“We named our airport Muhammad Ali International Airport. And I had a meeting at the Ali Center, Louisville Magazine hosted the event, and we were talking about it. And I said, ‘How many of y’all have been in the airport?’ Most of them raised their hand. I said, ‘OK, Muhammad Ali is from a neighborhood where 45 percent of the kids live in poverty who will never step foot in that airport.’ And he was afraid flying! He didn’t even like flying! So we try to whitewash.”
“We all watched the video of George Floyd. And to see a man cry out to his dead mother hurts. But I feel I have to bear witness to that. I don’t know why I feel compelled about it, but I want to say, ‘I saw you. I acknowledged you. I know that you were here.’ So they won’t be unknown.”
“I’m gonna say something real millennial. But reading the Harry Potter books—”
“I’m a Slytherin.”
“Me too!”
“So am I!”
“When I joined band, I used to take my drumsticks and act like they were wands. And my siblings, we would act like we were at Hogwarts. I loved Harry Potter. Now, J.K. Rowling’s been saying some reckless stuff lately, so…. But reading the Harry Potter books was not as exciting for me as watching some of those films, because it almost felt like the films made it real. But I said that to say this: When it comes to the videos, my aunt and my grandmother raised me, and my aunt’s father was shot and killed by police in the ’80s. So I knew this as a toddler learning about: Where’s your daddy at? Her father was killed by police. Around age seven or eight, my aunt gets pulled over by police. And the first thing she says when he walks to the window, she puts her hands out the window and says, ‘Please don’t shoot me.’
“And then I’m 11 years old, 2004. Michael Newby, my 19-year-old cousin who I barely even knew because I had just met my father the year before, was shot in the back and killed by a police officer. I didn’t have the videos when I was a toddler or when I was seven or eight or when I was 11. But now we got ’em, and watching them makes them a reality that I didn’t really have, just like reading those books. You can imagine it all day long, but when you see it, visually, when you hear it, it makes it a lot more real.”
“Like 2015, those are the first times I remember watching police kill Black people on camera. I feel like I was immersed in it. I’ve always seen it. I was always sharing it. But five years later, I’ve kind of got comfortable with it. There’s so many videos in the past five years that I don’t take that time anymore to share it and disperse it. After these past couple weeks, though, I’ve kinda gone back to my 2014.”
“You said something interesting, Quintez. You said over time you got comfortable with it almost. And I think a lot of people have, which is a really fascinating thing to me. People started saying these are like Black snuff films. This is a kind of new dynamic. For my generation, the big thing for us was ’91 with Rodney King. And you see Los Angeles police just beating Rodney King mercilessly. Rodney King lived, but you just see him flailing and just trying to get away. I mean, he’s struggling for his life. It is clear that he thinks they are going to kill him. How dysfunctional, how violent, how barbaric is a society where any sector of a society normalizes seeing this death on video? Have we considered that?”
“I don’t watch them. I don’t think that I’m strong enough. I read the story so that I can move forward with the information. But I can’t hear that man call out for his mama. I can’t do that. Sometimes I watch them by accident. I come across them and I can’t look away. But I do not ever intentionally sit down and watch these videos. That’s when I have to go to people like Hannah, because I will read about what happened, but I will not listen to it. It’s too much, I think, to hold. And at this point I have to disassociate when I hear my own name. And I did call her (Drake’s daughter, Brianna Wright).”
“Did you? I’ve been wondering.”
“I called Hannah’s Brianna, because, at this point, when I hear my own name, I have to keep myself from this fight-or-flight mode, like this panic. And so I called her Brianna, and I was like, ‘I wanted to check in with you because I don’t know who else to talk to about it.’ And she said, ‘I haven’t talked to anybody either, because it’s a hard thing to explain.’ And I also think it may be why my mom has stayed completely clear of all protest. And Breonna Taylor is the same age — she was the same age. We were born in the same year. We both grew up in the West End. It’s so close that when I hear my name now, sometimes I think that I’m dying, and I have to remind myself that I’m not, that no one’s talking about me. But they kind of are.”
“My lord.”
“The multi-generational, multi-dimensional trauma that exists from being Black, specifically a Black American who descends from slavery, who has been here since 1619 — it’s overwhelming. There’s so much. So, so, so, so, so much. I can’t even put it into words. And people are quick to write off how significant our descendance from slavery is. Dr. King’s final book before he was killed talked about us being descendants of slaves. And I know that we aspire to be more. I know that we are more. But when you look at our current condition in the United States of America, it’s almost like it’s neo-slavery today. Slavery was never abolished. They just called it something else.”
“The White House is still standing to this day, the railroads ’til this day. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, they did it and it all fell apart.’ To this day you benefit from it.”
“Damn, we built the richest, most powerful country in the world. We did that.”
“That we descended from enslaved people is not a point of shame for me. I think it gives such a resilience and a power and humility. Such a close-to-godliness. And we didn’t do shit wrong. Why should I be ashamed?”
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