It wasn’t just 8 minutes and 46 seconds of one man’s knee on another man’s neck. It is every day that followed the year 1619, every lynching, filmed or unfilmed, every white person watching Black folks suffer. This is the real-time nightmare of racism in America. Minneapolis’ own red summer left us with a choice: fade into collective amnesia, or grab hold of the obligation we have before us.

Filmed September 12th, 2020 at the TEKBox at The Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts in Minneapolis. Sagirah Shahid is a Black Muslim poet, arts educator and performance artist. She was one of four poets selected by the City of Minneapolis to participate in "Nicollet Lanterns", a collaborative public arts project which transformed original poems into functional sculptural lanterns. Sagirah received a 2015 Loft Mentor Series Award in Poetry, a 2017 Minnesota Center for Book Arts mentorship award, and participated in the Twin Cities Media Alliance’s Our Space is Spoken For public arts and performance fellowship in 2018. Her debut collection of poetry "Surveillance of Joy" is forthcoming from Half Mystic Press. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx