As we were preparing this issue for press, we learned of the verdict from the  Kentucky Attorney General: no criminal charges for the police officers who murdered Breonna Taylor as she slept peacefully on her own couch. While the AG may have followed the letter of the law (which I cannot assess, as I am not a legal expert), we know, on some basic level, that what happened was terribly unjust. What that tells us is that reform cannot stop with the police. The entire criminal justice system is implicated in Ms. Taylor’s murder.

And as I was finally letting myself finish up at midnight, I saw the news that the president, once again, refuses to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses.

And this, days after losing Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the diminutive superhero and early vanguard of our civil rights.

I don’t normally talk about national news in these columns, but the Northside does not exist in a bubble. And while a presidential election is a partisan topic, our democracy is not. We can’t pretend these are normal times.

It horrifies me that I had to write the piece I did on page 17 about navigating misinformation, forced complexity and possible voter intimidation in the 2020 Election. You’ll see that my language was subtle in that article, but the reality is that we need to be equipped for what may come in the next six weeks. I hope, pray, that I am just being an alarmist.

To add to this, so many of my colleagues who are also people of color are going through each day in a state of heightened pain and vulnerability as we encounter amplified messages that tell us we are not wanted here (our only home) and that our lives do not matter. As I do the work of trying to apply an
antiracist lens to the settings I find myself in — trying to articulate the visceral experience of systemic racism in a neat and tidy way that fits into our processes and decision-
making structures, trying to show up for that and speak to it, write about it, insert myself into spaces on behalf of people with less power, I am struck by how hard this is to do when we have so few real-world models of justice to turn to. 

This election is about more than partisan disagreement. It is a referendum on that commitment to justice: about what keeping children in cages says about us, about equal protection under the law, about the corruption consuming our democratic institutions, about the importance of truth-telling in civil society, about reinvesting in all Americans — our education, our healthcare, our infrastructure, our people — so that we don’t slide into an impoverished oligarchy, and about whether we are truly committed to the ideals we profess.  And so it’s entirely about the Northside. 

Please vote. The next time we publish the Northside News, we may not know who our president is, but how we respond to that may bring us closer to knowing ourselves.