ABOVE: Tyasha Harrison. Photo by @Liljesphotography.com, Jes Ryan.

As part of Groundwork’s ongoing series of equity interviews, we have invited Tyasha Harrison to share thoughts for Black History Month. Tyasha is a founding member of Northern Michigan E3 (Educate, Elevate, Engage), The Up North Anti-racism Task Force. As told to Jeff Smith.

 
Black History Month this year comes at a pivotal time for our country, and it’s leading me to think about the notion of resilience. 
 
The founding of Northern Michigan E3 also came at a pivotal time. It was founded during Covid and after the murder of George Floyd. It was a period when we were trying to put on the first ever Black Lives Matter event in this part of Michigan.
 
I knew I wanted to do something, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was. As a mom who has four children, and three of them are boys, I felt like I was at a loss about how to protect them or fight for them. A group of us decided to put on a peaceful protest, and we were abiding by the guidelines and wanted to have it outdoors at Open Space. 
 
But it so happened that other groups in opposition were trying to intimidate us. There were some folks who wanted to have a right-to-carry rally at the same time, so there’d be a group of white men and women walking around Traverse City with their guns openly carried as we were having a peaceful protest. There was even a Facebook movement about it, where a gentleman was trying to get people to have the rally at the same time just to intimidate us and cause confusion and fear. And that was a big time of realizing resilience within myself.
 
People who cared for me were reaching out, voicing that you should do this or that. Saying, “This might be a good time for you to just stay home.” And I was like, well, that’s exactly what they want us to do. This is a peaceful protest about the killing of unarmed black women, black men, black children. And it’s giving a voice to the black people and community, saying that we are here, and we have experienced x, y, and z, and we want to be in community together.

It was a pivotal moment for me because I decided I am not going to let people I’ve never met intimidate me and prevent me from telling my story and intimidate me from showing my children what it looks like to be resilient. What it looks like to be proud of who you are, and also recognize the experiences that you’ve had. That is something that I always carry with me.

After we founded E3, families would reach out to us about how their child has been treated in school because of being black or being of color. And you take on a lot of that trauma. It was … it was really hard. I learned that part of resilience for me as a black woman is to have rest, having that time where I am completely acknowledging that there are things happening in this world that … whether I can control them or not … I am going to rest. I’m going to save my mind and I’m going to save my body, because I have to. You know, it’s really important and primal. I feel that we all have to have that type of feeling where you can only take so much, and you have to reset yourself. Not saying that fighting is over, but there’s some times that you just have to take a pause, and you have to find different ways of advocating not only for the community, but for yourself.

Historically, you can also find the evidence that black women are the birthers of all nations. You know, we all come from a certain part of the world. And I think that black women are the connection of all things. I think that we, over many years and through our ancestors, we have done and performed resilience without even realizing that we’re doing that. We have kept families alive. We fought for other people’s rights when we didn’t have our own rights. And yet, for me, that Malcolm X statement will never fade: “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman.”

I talk to my mother and my sister quite often, who both work for the government in D.C., and we have days and moments where we’re like, you know, we just have to, we have to take a pause, because we as a collective have done everything that we needed to do to protect ourselves and protect our neighbors and to protect our children.

What I see happening in D.C. now, it can be hurtful. All these rollbacks are happening, and now you have these events in our life being attacked, like Black History Month and Juneteenth and Women’s History Month and Disability Month and Native American Heritage, Asian American Heritage, and Pride Month … all things where it’s only affecting the marginalized groups of people. In my opinion it’s meant to incite chaos, right? 

At a certain point we all have to wake up and realize that for this whole thing to work, this world is up to us. It’s on us to keep going. We have to continue to fight for each other. 

I think as black women, historically, we always fought for other people to have what they need. And I think it’s time for others to show up for us in a very deliberate, intentional way, whatever that looks like for people. That will always be my thing that I say to my children, that I say to my husband. I say, “You know, how are you going to show up for people who are tired of fighting?”

Am I optimistic that people will show up? I think that feeling changes every day. I definitely work in an environment where I feel like the people I work with are of like minds and that they would fight for me. And I’ve seen it happen in real time. But then there are times when I look around in my community, and I see certain things, and I don’t know.
 
I’m optimistic that eventually everybody will understand what that means, because at this point in our world, no matter who you know, these changes affect everybody. Whether it’s DEI programs or these remembrance holidays being rolled back, or all the other changes. It affects everybody. 
 
I feel strongly about diversity, equity, and inclusion, because I think it’s so important on so many levels. But there’s something I want to point out about that work. At the top of that data for who it benefits the most, it benefits white women the most. Black women and black men are probably sixth or eighth in that lineup of data. So not only do you have black women and black men fighting for this initiative, it benefits five lines of people before it actually trickles down to us. And we’re still advocating for those people to have equity and to have inclusion. To have the same amount of pay in their workplace, to have your school have grants, and for your school to acknowledge other heritages, honor their months of recognition, and we’re at the bottom. 
 
So I just feel like a lot of people don’t realize that it’s not just black people that we’re hurting with DEI rollbacks and big companies deciding that it’s not going to work for them anymore. They’re hurting their majority base. They’re hurting at the top. They’re hurting women, white women, they’re hurting Hispanics. They’re hurting disabled members of our community. And then we’re kind of at the bottom, but we’re still going to fight for it, because everybody needs that.
 
I think it’s something that was brought to light definitely after George Floyd and COVID and realizing that Black history is American history, a lot of things would not be able to be a part of this world if it wasn’t created or fought for by People of Color.

I think a lot of people have this negative connotation of what DEI represents, and what it actually represents is everybody you know. It benefits every single person, every single child, every single queer youth, people in welfare, people that live in mansions, people living in trailer parks, everyone. So we can come to that start point. We shouldn’t be fighting against each other. We should be helping each other, because we all need each other. 
 
If they’re going to get rid of Black History Month and Juneteenth, you know, as a black, as a black person, as a mother raising black children and children that celebrate Pride, you can’t take that away from us. You can on a federal level, if you feel like that makes your guys feel good. But we celebrate that every day, because we live in these bodies every day, right? You may take it off a calendar, but it’s still gonna happen. We’re still gonna celebrate it. We’re still gonna have events for students to honor Black History Month. We’re gonna because we do that every day anyway. And so I just hope that, if anything, when people read this and connect to it, take a pause, take a rest, find what your resilience is, so you are able to continue to be aware. You are able to continue to fight for people who don’t look like you and that do look like you, because that’s what they want, is to continue to separate everybody.