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The recent article about Lawrence’s Indigenous Community Center has been to me just the latest devastation of living in the year 2025. I wasn’t on the board, but as a Black urban gardener, poet, and educator who tries to be in solidarity with intersectional movements for justice, I felt it was my duty to learn and volunteer with them, and I loved my time at ICC and honestly don’t have any painful memories associated with it.
But in my brief 45 years of life, I have been at the center and periphery of national and local coalitions that crumbled due to mistrust and dishonesty. From Solidarity, to the Occupy Movement, from the ECM Student Advisory Board, to EPICENTER (East-side People’s Intercultural Center), to the Black Lives Matter Movement, it feels like all of our work ends in broken relationships and disillusionment. It’s a heartbreak every time. But somehow, this article about ICC is hitting me differently.
I think back to my time in Oakland, California, when Occupy Oakland was going at full speed. We had shut down the Port of Oakland, a huge victory, and every General Assembly seemed to get bigger than the last. The police were out with their riot gear, sound cannons, smoke bombs, helicopters, but no one was letting up. But then, whispers began. “So and so might actually be a Fed. How do we know we can trust them?” Plainclothes cops were showing up. Soon, no one trusted anyone else. At that point, city planners coalesced and shut the whole thing down.
But before they did, I started to wonder what the mass protests were really about. It started to feel like just a show. Performative for some; an excuse to break things for others. Thankfully, I found a teacher, Grace Lee Boggs, a 90-plus-year-old Chinese American activist-philosopher from Detroit. I raised money to make a journey to a gathering she was holding for activists in Detroit, and it changed my life. Grace always told us that we were the leaders we had been waiting for, and would often open a sit-down with the same question, the question I’ve been asking myself ever since: “What time is it on the clock of the world?”
Today, like every day of my life, Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) like myself are under attack, both figuratively and literally. Palestinians and now Iranians are being bombed and starved out of existence. Refugees are being deported and detained in Black sites around the world for having the wrong skin color and speaking the wrong language. Indigenous folks go missing while authorities choose to ignore it. DEI dog whistles go up at every turn. It seems we are on the precipice of losing decades of civil rights protections, even in our own liberal college town. This feels like the time, now more than ever, to follow our BIPOC leaders.
The BIPOC leaders in this community put on free festivals that feed children for free. We collect and distribute free food and clothing. We create farms and cookouts. We free innocent prisoners. We document, through words and images, what is needed for survival. We share our culture, our music, our art, our poetry, that has been passed down from our ancestors. We do all this, all while we worry we’re not good enough. All while we stare self-hatred and self-doubt in the mirror. All while we get paid less than our counterparts. All while we lose our jobs and our communities. I’m tired of losing communities. I don’t think it should be that way.
Our communities should not have to rest on one or two people. But what’s more, the fracturing has to end. BIPOC communities are not unique to the fracturing trend, but our minority status in Kansas exacerbates it. Grace Lee Boggs was needed at the time of Occupy, but I look to a new teacher now, adrienne maree brown, a Black, mix-raced, queer woman also in Detroit. adrienne has come out decidedly against cancel culture and instead promotes healing justice.
In order for healing justice to be effective, we need not just the accountability of cancel culture, but the empathy that understands that we are all traumatized by the white supremacist capitalistic patriarchy.
Because of this fracturing, I no longer have been able to call myself an activist. Instead, I choose the label of an artivist, one who tries to address social justice through poetry and the education of young people about what really matters: love and healing.
What I’m advocating for here is not letting people off the hook, but for community organizations that understand that our personal and societal healing must be central to our work. BIPOC folks need to be able to tell both who hurt us and who we have hurt without the fear of being ostracized. Not out of some sense of false equivalency, but because the world needs us, Lawrence needs us. Ashe.
About the writer
Brother Tai Amri Spann-Ryan (he/him), of Lawrence, is from the Lenni-Lenape land of New Jersey, just outside of Philadelphia, and is a lifelong learner and a lifelong educator. He was raised in a Quaker household with a mother who was a high school music teacher and a father who was a history teacher and school administrator. He studied Writing & Poetics at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, theology at Pacific School of Religion, in Berkeley, California, and has a Master of Science in Education with a focus on Curriculum and Instruction from KU. He has worked as a teaching assistant at Raintree Montessori, as a co-lead preschool teacher at Hilltop Child Development Center, as an English & Language Arts teacher in Topeka Public Schools, and is currently a lead teacher at Prairie Moon Waldorf School. He is Lawrence’s 2016 Langston Hughes Poetry Award recipient and is a co-founder of the collaborative group B.L.A.C.K. (Black Literature and Arts Collective of Kansas) Lawrence, where he organizes events and readings. He is currently working on converting his collection of poems, beautiful ashe: memoirs of a sweet black boy & other poems, into an audiobook. For more information, please see his website, taiamri.com.
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