Medcalf: Why I wanted to allow people to post comments on my column

I always think about the horse.

It's a horse I only knew through family tales about those tough years in the Jim Crow South. On the farm where my grandfather was a sharecropper, a white man who owned the property patrolled the land on a tall horse and made sure everyone knew he had the power. If my grandfather had not already felt inferior, the daily presence of that imposing image reinforced who he was as a Black man.

My father saw it, too. To this day, it's not easy for him to look people eye-to-eye. Growing up 100 miles from where Emmett Till was murdered, on land he knew his family would never own, he was a little boy who was told to follow a simple rule: Never stare at a white person, if you want to live.

The generational trauma I have fought to overcome in my life is attached to that horse. It's the reason I do not shrink in predominantly white spaces. I am fearless in ways my father and grandfather could not have been in 1950s Mississippi. I say what I feel. I say what I think. I say what I believe, while also acknowledging the malleability of our perspectives. What I know today could change tomorrow.

But we all should have the opportunity to express ourselves, even when those views are polarizing — assuming those views do not aim to incite violence or other forms of harm. That's why I told the Star Tribune to keep the comments open on every column I write. At the beginning, there were conversations about eliminating the comments section on each piece because we knew how some people might respond to commentary around social justice, discrimination and racism. But I didn't think that was fair. I also wanted people to see the toxicity that lingers here for themselves.

With the exception of a handful of columns I've written over the last two years, comments have always been allowed. The comments don't move me, either way. Not the good or the bad.

Over the last few years, however, a group of critics have assembled in the comments.

That's fine. Their collective response and complaint seems to be this: They think I just repeat myself every time I write. I'm banging the same old drum, they say. Maybe they're right.

But that drum is my life. And that percussive sound is the rhythm of injustice and its offspring that cannot be ignored. Hell, my platform at the Star Tribune signifies the challenges within these structural institutions. I am the first Black person to have this role at the paper.

If you polled other newspapers, TV networks, radio stations and digital publications around the country and asked, "How many of your BIPOC employees are offered a platform to tell you how they feel?" you would find that only a few folks who look like me have been granted this opportunity.

With this platform, my ambition is to encourage dialogue in a place that's more comfortable with politically correct banter over coffee than real conversation about issues that affect marginalized communities.

When I read the comments on some of these columns and they minimize the urgency of the moment and significance of the issues so many of us hope to address in this community, I think about the identities of these folks. They are the people who live next door to us. They work with us. They teach our children. They approve our loans at the bank. And they sit next to us on the light rail or at the park or on the adjacent treadmill at the gym.

I only have a request for those people: Please talk to someone who has experienced these hurdles.

Ask those folks how the murder of George Floyd made them feel. Ask them about Daunte Wright. Ask them about Philando. Ask them about living in Minnesota when you don't look like most of the folks around you.

I just hope people are talking. Not because of my columns but because of the opportunity I believe we've been afforded to progress. I don't think you can do that without considering alternate perspectives and experiences that might differ from your own.

I understand the risk at a time when anonymity has intensified the audacity people display in those public comment spaces. While the negativity is amplified sometimes, it doesn't change the challenge, our present that I hope becomes our past.

I don't know if I'll ever feel comfortable around horses. A friend of mine has 200 acres in Arkansas, and his horses just roam the land. On a trip there five years ago, he asked me to get out of the golf cart and pet those horses. I declined.

Maybe I just don't know enough about them. Or maybe that image of that man looking down at my father and grandfather every day on a farm in Mississippi clouded my understanding of those animals.

I'm not sure. But I know that man on that horse on that farm, where my father was raised in the South, had an impact on me. I also know it's the inspiration for this column I'm grateful to write.

I'm just trying to look you in the eye and tell you how I feel.

Myron Medcalf is a local columnist for the Star Tribune and a national writer and radio host for ESPN. His column appears in print on Sundays twice a month and also online.