Nikki’s Journey: How the Complexities of Race and Place Inform a Program Officer’s Justice Journey

Lived experience is a powerful teacher—and it can help us be better listeners and partners.

On occasion, because of my worldview and the work I do, I’ve been called a “bleeding heart.” Those who’ve leveled the accusation seem to view it as an insult, or at least a blind spot. But I prefer to take a cue from the wise novelist and essayist Toni Morrison, who wrote: “No more apologies for a bleeding heart when the opposite is no heart at all. Danger of losing our humanity must be met with more humanity.” Exactly.

The negative sense of the label “bleeding heart” irks me. It implies that work that pursues justice in its fullest sense is tied to white guilt rather than—as I view it—pursuit of a love for all humanity and a vision of freedom and liberation for everyone.

The Foundation’s grantmaking approach honors diverse worldviews and lived experiences.

That process begins by examining how our own views and experiences shape how we perceive others’ unique perspectives.

Still, I’m leery of centering myself, a person who identifies as a white, cisgender woman. One of the lessons from a racial justice workshop at the Foundation is how continually centering whiteness perpetuates the injustices our grantee partners are trying to change. A practical, first step toward reversing that is consciously de-centering myself to make space for all at the table.

On the other hand, white allyship is crucial.

Allyship is also an aspiration. It’s a description earned through action. I try to be an ally by being selective about when to speak up—and then making sure what I say is an authentic expression of solidarity and understanding because silence can also cause harm.

Our recently updated mission statement challenges us to stand alongside changemakers—to be consistently, usefully present as allies and advocates in addition to providing vital funding. At a recent conference, nonprofit leaders repeatedly mentioned wanting to look behind them and see supporters amplifying their message.

Some of the grantee partners I work with have expressed the importance of white voices in the conversation so we can all heal from the wounds of centuries of inequities fueled by the social construct of whiteness (which privileges those of European descent over the global majority, a collective term for non-white people of Native American, African, Asian, Latin American, and Arab descent who make up the majority of the world population).

From that perspective, it’s important for white individuals to express solidarity and gain momentum toward positive change.

As a white woman in a biracial marriage and the mother of two, I have a distinctive perspective on racial injustice.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the April 2021 killing of Daunte Wright (we issued a statement on it when it happened) just a couple of miles from my family’s home in Brooklyn Park, MN, a suburb of the Twin Cities where I’ve lived almost my entire life.

Like Daunte’s family, mine is biracial. My son was the same age as Daunte, 20, when Daunte was killed by a Brooklyn Center, MN, police officer. My son drives around with these little fuzzy dice hanging from his rearview mirror, a gift from his dad, who has a set of big fuzzy dice hanging from his mirror. Accounts differ on this, but many believe the pretext for pulling Daunte over was an air freshener dangling from his rearview mirror. The similarities between their mirror hangings so disturbed my son’s employer that she urged him to take the dice off.

Daunte did all the things we trained my son to do if he’s pulled over, including call a parent so we can help monitor what’s happening. Still, Daunte was killed that day. Such a profoundly unjust event in a place so familiar, even mundane, to me and my family.

It’s inspired a lot of reflection around our ties to this place and the complexities of race here in Brooklyn Park and, more broadly, the Twin Cities.

After three decades together, my husband and I are seeing many of the same challenges through our children’s eyes.

My husband I met when we were 16 years old in the early 1990s. Our kids have asked what it was like to be an interracial couple at that time. And, honestly, we had a lot of hate spewed our way back then and over the years.

Perhaps that’s not such a surprise. When you think about it, 1990 was less than 25 years removed from Loving v. Virginia, a landmark 1967 civil rights case in which the US Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits laws that ban interracial marriage.

My husband and I have walked the world together for 33 years. And now we’re witnessing our children watch some of the same injustices play out—e.g., a traffic-stop murder, essentially around the corner, of a Black peer—even in a cultural moment that may appear more advanced.

I think I’ve always been drawn to looking at change through a systemic lens.

Brooklyn Park has always been more diverse than most places in the Twin Cities. That’s why we chose to raise our family here. People around the Twin Cities have a lot of negative perceptions about Brooklyn Park, which are likely rooted in racism.

But it’s where I lived, went to school, fell in love. That dissonance between my hometown’s reputation and my many positive experiences of it really shaped my worldview. Even when I went to college—to a homogenous, white-centered school in Iowa—I was angling for diversity. I was part of Students Taking on Prejudice before Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) was on anyone’s lips.

We would bring in these sort-of drama groups to enact certain scenarios and try and teach our fellow students about microaggressions and other topics. I was studying sociology, which looks at systems. Once you pick up that lens, you can’t stop seeing the world as interacting systems—and that perspective, alongside my lived experience in an interracial family, remains central to how I view my work at the Foundation today.

Since the Foundation has been on its JEDI journey and current grantmaking approach, we’ve been focused on saying our values out loud—wearing our hearts on our sleeves, so to speak. And that feels right.

Part of our JEDI work has been locating the reasons we’re drawn to and stay with this work—i.e., our why.

JEDI work is important to me for very personal reasons. I certainly care deeply about the Foundation’s priority communities, our grantee partners, and humanity in the larger sense. And I want to make this world more inclusive for my kids. In many ways, they’ve always just been my why. I suspect many of you reading this feel the same.

One of the topics we’ve been exploring in our JEDI work is being really clear on our why so we can stay grounded in the work. Hopefully that rootedness then helps us build meaningful relationships beyond each grant, and those deeper relationships nourish trust that helps us be better, more responsive partners to our grantee organizations. That, in turn, helps them best serve their communities.