Face It! You Can’t Change Society Without Addressing Racism
Growing up on the east side of St. Paul, Minnesota, Renee Zschokke was surrounded by racism, but didn’t even know it. Her crime-ridden neighborhood, enveloped in violence she fell victim to for a period of time, sparked a desire in her to pursue a career in criminal justice, in order to “lock up the bad guys.”
“I just wanted my communities to be safe,” she said.
But throughout her time in college and her job afterward as a state county employment counselor, Zschokke realized that crime isn’t so simple.
“If people aren’t granted housing and jobs, they just go back to doing what they have to do to survive,” she said. “It’s not as simple as coming down to the individual.”
As a counselor with limited resources for her clients, who are mostly black men, Zschokke said she wanted to do something to fight what she saw as structural racism. She realized that explicitly talking about race might be the missing key needed to resist these systematic barriers.
Talking openly about race has never been an easy way to organize for change, but Zschokke found an organization, TakeAction Minnesota, which is trying to do just that.
