All Alaskans deserve freedom and safety

Our communities and our country are coming apart over competing beliefs about which Americans have the right to live with both freedom and safety. The question we all need to consider is: Why do we think we have to choose? Why must ensuring the safety and freedom of some Americans be paid for by others giving up their safety and freedom?

I’ve spent good chunks of my adult life in the remote community of McCarthy, about 300 miles from Anchorage, where I grew up and still live. McCarthy is a mostly white community of around 75 year-round residents. As the weeks unfolded since George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, I’ve read posts from some of my neighbors there asking why anyone would support someone with a criminal record; others stated that white privilege doesn’t exist. 

More recently, at McCarthy’s July 4 celebration, which many residents boycotted to avoid spreading COVID-19, one of my longtime friends used his role as M.C. to promote the message of a Florida sheriff warning any demonstrators that wanted to come to his county that they would be met with force to restore what he considers “law and order.”

Here in Anchorage, the Assembly just endured days of testimony related to homelessness that revealed widespread racist beliefs and support for racist policies among many Anchorage residents. 

When I think about the people celebrated in McCarthy history, the “renegades” are fondly remembered. There was a protracted conflict in the 1990s when half the town wanted vehicle access and the other half wanted to restrict it. A group of neighbors repeatedly removed barriers from a state-owned bridge using blowtorches, come-alongs and minor explosives, causing thousands of dollars of damage. 

When my neighbors took these actions, I don’t think they feared a strong police response, and none of them were arrested or feared physical harm; none had to pay for the damage to the bridge. What if instead, and for a much more minor offense, in George Floyd’s case a dispute over $20, one of these neighbors was brutally killed by police while they watched, powerless to stop it? What if when that group of neighbors came to remove the bollards on the bridge, they met a team of officers who were empowered to use lethal means to protect it? How would the McCarthy community, or any other majority-white community or neighborhood, have responded?

In our country, that is a privilege: the freedom to make your own choices, without fearing the consequences, and to depend on the laws and those who enforce them to keep you safe. It is a privilege to only imagine George Floyd’s experience and not fear living it, or fear your children will live it.

Our nation’s history has consistently offered this privilege of freedom and safety to white Americans, and not to Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, or other people of color. 

The ancestors of many Black Americans were enslaved by the ancestors of many white Americans for 250 years; for 100 years after that, Black Americans lived under laws that segregated them from white Americans and ruled where they lived, where their children went to school, what jobs they could have, where they could eat and from which water fountain they could drink. 

During that time, the violence, rape and public murder of Black Americans that had been legal during slavery continued and was tolerated, condoned and enforced. So many Black American families left their farms and homes to escape these laws and the violence that enforced them that history books call it “the Great Migration.” Most families received no compensation for the land and farms they left behind; generational wealth these families never got to pass down to their children and grandchildren.

For Indigenous people in North America, white settlers came into their villages, farms, roadways and irrigation systems and forcibly took them over, beginning in the 1600′s. Here in Alaska, beginning in the 1700′s Russians waged war on villages and Tribes along coastal Alaska and forced Alaska Native men onto ships that hunted sea otters to the brink of extinction. During the 1918 flu pandemic, in many Alaska Native villages, two-thirds of the adults died. Imagine that happening now, here in Anchorage.

In the valley where McCarthy sits, white miners found the richest deposit of copper on Earth in the early 1900s. The Guggenheims and the J.P. Morgans of the world made so much money from mining this copper in the early 1900s, they were able to build giant copper mines in South America that continue to generate wealth today. The Ahtna people who knew of this deposit for generations, who mined, collected and smelted copper from this same area, received no compensation when those mining stakes were claimed. Their descendants received no financial inheritance from the enormous wealth it generated for these white American families. 

Dena’ina people today remember their grandparents who lived in the areas now called Bootlegger’s Cove and Westchester Lagoon in Anchorage, some of the most valuable real estate in town, who were removed from their land without any compensation to build the embankment for the Alaska Railroad. Others recount their grandparents’ fish camps that existed for centuries on the land that is now Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson; no compensation was given, or permission asked for removing them from these lands. The descendants of those grandparents received no financial inheritance. At the same time, the U.S. and Alaska state governments made land available, mostly to white settlers, through the Homesteading Act. Ask yourself how many Alaskans you know who have made a living, a retirement, and a legacy for their children and grandchildren from subdividing and selling these original homesteads.

It has been 52 years since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered for asking our country to afford Black Americans the same safety and freedoms that white Americans have enjoyed for the past 400 years. They are still fighting for them today. George Floyd’s murder, Breonna Taylor being shot eight times by police who mistakenly entered her apartment on a no-knock warrant, the fact that Black Americans are imprisoned at nearly six times the rate of white Americans, these demonstrate that freedom and safety are still privileges much more commonly enjoyed by white Americans. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. We do not need to choose the freedom and safety of some Americans and Alaskans over others. We can now choose to change the patterns our history has laid down in our communities. 

We have enacted policies and practices that still allow white Americans to enjoy safety and freedom at the expense of others. We see the legacy of this history all around us in racial disparities in so many measures of safety and wellbeing. These disparities are not the coincidental result of many different individual choices and actions; they are the visible result of a history of policies and practices that subtly and unsubtly provided safety and freedom to some more than to others. 

So, what do we do? 

First, we name it. We acknowledge the endless accumulation of data and history that show that racial disparities exist all around us and provide evidence that we are not all equally safe and free in our communities. 

Second, we all decide to no longer tolerate these disparities. We agree that all of us want similar things: the privilege to enjoy safety and freedom, to protect one’s family, to be gainfully employed, to expect that the laws and police will treat you fairly, to protest laws without fearing for your life, and to pass down your family’s culture and legacy to your children and grandchildren. We all want this.

Third, we intentionally work together with organizations led by people who are Black, Indigenous and People of Color to look at all areas of our communities and identify where we can change policies and practices so that we can all enjoy safety and freedom, so that it is not a privilege but a basic right. And we invest in making those changes and maintain that investment until the disparities are gone.

It is actually simpler than we might think. We do not lack the information to know what we need to do, or where we need to work, nor do we lack resources. Right now, the only thing we lack is the explicit agreement that what we all want can and should be attained by all, and not only by a few.

Thea Agnew Bemben is an Anchorage resident, parent and business owner, as well as a settler on Dena’ina and Ahtna lands. She is a member of the Alaska Black Caucus’ Allies for Change.

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