'These are our communities. We live here.' Communities hit by racism have the answers

Louisville is in a crisis of trauma and extreme stigmatization of Black and brown communities. We are in this place, not for the first time. We experienced an ideological battle between calls to defund police in favor of community safety systems and calls to increase policing. Meanwhile, our police don’t listen to community advocates, but look to federal agencies such as the local FBI office. All this hides the problems that cause violence. 

Gun violence occurs everywhere. But when it happens in white communities, it’s usually understood that more police is not the answer. Calls for more policing in Black Louisville distract citizens from the real problem: people do not have homes, basic sustenance or access to health care. People are forced to live disconnected from their families by conditions akin to slavery. They are overworked just to survive. Meanwhile, police budgets go up and up. What do our tax dollars buy? Police cannot solve the crisis before us. 

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Metro District 4 Councilman Jecorey Arthur says, “... We won’t end physical violence until we end political violence. ” In marginalized communities where people struggle for mere existence, love and trust are often an afterthought. Restorative justice is a path to healing of hurt and harm. Our communities are under-resourced to navigate and benefit from underfunded restorative processes. Preventative measures that do not involve profiling, surveillance and evermore incarceration are needed without delay. If we want change, we must fund robust restorative justice in JCPS and the community at large. 

Black Lives Matter Louisville and Carebears believe we have a collective responsibility to keep each other safe, and that the persons most affected by community violence should have the biggest say in how to respond. We will hold the work needed until all of us are free. Holding the work means educating the community on how to create a system, one step at a time, that actually keeps us safe. Right now, that looks like educational series about gun ownership and safety and our legal rights in interactions with law enforcement. In and around our collective, community safety might also look like training in wound care, the provision of post-incarceration support and mental health advocacy and service referrals. 

Powerbuilding, not demands for safety from outside, keep the community safe.

We cannot continue to move at the speed of crisis. To build, we move at the speed of trust. Trust is foreign to many of us experiencing harm in the damage of our city. So when we set our demands, we name what must change immediately. We detail what we want to happen for us and how we want that done. 

Communities impacted by systemic and historical racism have the answers. But when resources are stolen from the community, despair can turn inwards. Fighting outwards takes resources. Change at the structural level is exhaustive, but necessary. This need is evident in the movements that center around the “least” of us, those of us most vulnerable at the margins. 

We recently lost a child waiting at a bus stop to go to school. By all accounts he was everything we ask a young man to be, and yet he was taken from us. His mother was engaged in his life, and she carefully built a home for her family. He was still taken from us. Our Chief of Police Ericka Shields opines from this that we require a police force in our schools. Why is this shameless opportunism even countenanced? Violent policing of Black people is all that we know. 

Where are you? Where do you sit? These are our communities. We live here. Our children, elders, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins and neighbors live here. We love them. 

Again from Councilman Arthur—“we must turn anger into advocacy.” We must demand what we once requested in budget hearings and letters to the mayor and other elected officials. Advocacy is dead without action and tactics to support our desired outcomes of liberated and healthy community members. 

Poet Nikki Giovanni wrote, “there are those who testified that the problem wasn’t the conditions/ but the people talking about them/ they took away band so the boys started scratching they took away/ gym so the boys started break dancing the boys started rapping/ cause they gave them the guns and the drugs, but not the schools and/ libraries…” Our children cry out for basic resources to counteract guns and drugs, resources taken for granted in more privileged communities. 

We all reside here in Louisville—let’s fix it. We got us.

“By bridging the divides and building relationships with one another, we can dedicate ourselves to strategic, smart investments—meaning resources directed toward our stability and well-being, like health care and housing, education and living-wage jobs. This is where real safety begins,” — Zach Norris, Defund Fear.

Chanelle Helm is co-organizer of Black Lives Matter Louisville