By Malina Bacon

Just over 40 years old, on the north side of Indianapolis grabbing an iced latte before Monday’s first meeting, I was called – screamed at, actually – “NIGGER!!” at not even 9am. It was disappointing, to the say the least. But also shocking, not that it happened but how hostile it felt.

That was the first time I was called that word by an adult, as an adult. It was the day after Kamala’s acceptance of the 47th presidential nominee. The stranger guy who yelled was so angry at me. “What just happened?” I wondered. “Is this because of yesterday? What is about to happen? People had to deal with this when it was LEGAL?”

The tension that day felt like it did in 2020 (and how it feels now post-election). This time 4 years ago was the most shocking, dangerous and traumatic shared experience we’ve all encountered. For everyone alive, 2020 was a mass, unsolicited and unwelcome collaboration for our very survival. We were scared for our lives because of Covid-19! Colliding with that, all news everywhere – online and at the grocery store – focused on “social unrest.” For a long while, everything we were talking about and going to do for the foreseeable future as a society was to make cities equitable.

Is this the rubber band effect?

One of the ways we tried to get consciousness and funding to stick around in/after 2020, was to create GANGGANG which my husband Alan I launched in November of 2020. With strong supporters, we set out to make beauty, culture and equity central to the performance of cities, by activating the creative economy. We knew artists were the only ones that could possibly re-inspire cities, which would require significant truth-telling and major infrastructure.

There was much flair and funding that existed for a moment. Now in 2024, there’s a quiet realization that a practice of white power is maybe something the U.S doesn’t wholly want to lose.

My career lately has been to acknowledge power as the center of our cities and behaviors, and to offer love as an alternative. It’s been working well. GANGGANG has invested more than $7M into the arts industry and is making Indy a national leisure destination for culture. We’ve created new, full-time roles in the arts – jobs that didn’t exist before in the Indiana market. GANGGANG has edited the way philanthropy happens and generated a new narrative for the arts in central Indiana. It has influenced thinking, economic development, talent retention, real estate behaviors and sparked a cultural renaissance in Indianapolis.

GANGGANG is responsible for BUTTER Fine Art Fair and I Made Rock “N” Roll – two visible efforts that directly invest into authorship and economic justice in the arts. We know what we’re doing so well that we’re able to have confidence at a time like this. And more than confidence, narration, which you can do best when you know history and can see the future.

History requires absorbing the fundamental truth that racial hierarchy was constructed as a central operating system for the United States. That made everything that happens here truly about race.

A plan working only by way of diminishing others lacks the courage to do good. That’s what’s so limiting about anger. And it’s what’s so cowardly about power.

The word of the oppressor. Whew. I’ll give it to President Jefferson for final words. “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.”