Compulsory Safety, Continued: What Black Rural Families Are Building Now

School has begun in Minnesota. For many families, this is a season of excitement. For Black rural families, it is also a season of hyper vigilance.

When I wrote “Compulsory Safety” for Minnesota Women’s Press in the spring, I named the truth that Black rural children have never had safety designed for them in our public schools. I wrote about my own childhood in Ironton, where integration arrived not with policy but through individual Black families simply entering systems that were unprepared to protect us. I wrote about the predictable patterns of racial harm that Black rural children endure, and the absence of community‑based educational protection.

Since that commentary was published, the urgency has only deepened.

In July, I was interviewed by AMPERS radio following the deaths by suicide of two children in the Brainerd Lakes area. That conversation reflected the weight rural Black youth are carrying — the isolation, racial harassment, bullying, invisibility, and the absence of culturally grounded support.

These are not abstract concerns. They are life‑and‑death conditions.

I created the nonprofit Onyx Collective to build supportive networking for Black families in predominately white rural communities in Minnesota.

This summer, I traveled 100 miles each way to accompany a Black parent to three meetings at their child’s school district to talk about repeated racial harassment and physical violence. Other members of the Onyx Collective also showed up as witnesses and concerned community members. We need more community support like this from more people.

I am not naming the school district or the parent, because anonymity is part of safety. But the pattern is familiar, and experienced around the state:

• Racial slurs hurled
• Cornering and physical harm in hallways
• Staff who may have witnessed incidents but did not follow reporting procedures
• Administrators unaware of staff promises and commitments to the parent to address the situation
• Administrators who thought they’d addressed the issue by explaining to the victim what the harmful words meant, extracting an apology from the child causing harm, and encouraging the children to basically hug it out.

Here is another reality: After the verbal attack was addressed in a meeting with the dean, the very next school day the bullied child was cornered, held by a second child, and hit by the same child the dean had talked to. The child who had “apologized” for the verbal attack had retaliated by orchestrating a physical attack with immediate escalation.

The parent did everything right. They advocated, documented, and asked for help. And still things escalated and their child was physically harmed.

That parent’s advocacy eventually resulted in an initial safety plan from school administrators that was neither protective nor proactive. Over the summer, we helped the school revise it, adding clarity by naming names and embedding timelines and accountability.

This is not a story about one school district, however. It is a story about what happens when education systems in rural Minnesota are not designed with Black children in mind — and what Black rural families are doing about it after decades of ineffective solutions or inaction by administrators.

Over the past few months, I have been contacted by parents of Black children from across the state. These children have endured racial harassment, isolation, and physical violence. These families have been told to be patient, to trust the system, and to wait.

Families are done waiting for systems to learn how to protect children. Soon, Black rural families will meet with Attorney General Keith Ellison to share their experiences and their demands for safety. They will speak as part of a statewide collective. They will call for statewide intervention and structural accountability.

Next Steps

Onyx Collective will continue to stand in solidarity with families while also offering culturally specific learning opportunities.

Collective action in rural Minnesota looks like parents refusing to be silenced. It looks like families supporting one another across county lines. It looks like an infrastructure for Onyx Collective that did not exist one year ago. It looks like safety as a communal practice. It looks like offerings for us, by us, and about us.

As the new school year begins, Black rural families demand:

• safety that is proactive,
• systems that prevent harm,
• data that allows patterns to become visible,
• restorative processes that protect the child who experiences harm,
• bus routes that are safe and monitored,
• accountable educators and staff who understand that racial harm is not interpersonal conflict — it is violence,
• school districts that design alongside us

Learning doesn’t happen when safety is compromised and unaddressed. Surviving the school day cannot be a child’s primary objective.

This is not a radical ask. It is the most basic of demands: safety, belonging, and the freedom to learn.

Through collective action we will ensure that another school year does not pass without structured interventions that lead to structural change. We’ve seen and shared the patterns, we recognize the harms, and now we must build and create a learning ecosystem where the children thrive by design.

Join us by learning more and reaching out.

onyxcollectivemn.com

centering the needs of Black rural Minnesotans for cultural connection, radical welcome, and wellbeing

• September 26, we will host a Fall Mobile Resilience Hub in Fergus Falls — a fun resilience retreat.
• October 24, a LIT (Learn-It-Together) Lab kicks off. This is a community learning laboratory for educational resilience and lifetime learning. It is an intergenerational, culturally grounded space where Black rural families, youth, elders, creatives, and educators collaboratively study, design, learn and grow together. Rooted in collective care and cooperative action, LIT Labs confront the harms Black children experience in rural schools by building our own learning environments, strengthening community capacity, and generating sustainable models for Black rural educational thriving.

To support more community-based social justice-in-action stories like this: