Opinion | Covering Operation Metro Surge taught me that Black history isn’t linear

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I was in the basement of a North Side church in Minneapolis three weeks ago when I realized I’d been covering this story wrong.

Upstairs, a choir was rehearsing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” for a Black History Month program. Downstairs, a dozen East African men sat waiting for the rehearsal to end so they could leave in a group. They weren’t there for the music. They were there because moving alone through north Minneapolis had become too dangerous.

I’m a journalist. I was there to report. But I’m also Ethiopian American, which means half the men in that basement reminded me of my uncles. One of them asked if I was staying for the program. I said yes, even though I had another interview across town. I stayed because leaving alone felt wrong, for him, and for me.

That’s when I understood: I can’t report on this story from the outside, because I’m not on the outside.

For years, there’s been a quiet tension in north Minneapolis between the Old Guard, descendants of the Great Migration, rooted in African American resistance traditions, and the New Guard, recent immigrants from Somalia, Liberia, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Different languages. Different reference points. Different relationships to American Blackness.

Operation Metro Surge collapsed that gap in a month.

Now when I go to a Black History Month event, I see something I’ve never seen before: older Black American women walking young Somali men to their cars. University of Minnesota students, Black Student Union members who used to organize mixers, now coordinate mass movements so no one travels alone. The Capri Theater jazz tribute I covered last week had front rows filled with East African men who stayed until the very end, waiting for cover.

The community isn’t just coming together. It’s merging under pressure.

And I’m realizing that the story I thought I was covering, federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, is actually a story about what happens when two definitions of Blackness are forced to become one.

Here’s what makes it complicated: I’m supposed to maintain journalistic distance. I’m supposed to observe, not participate. But when a source asks me to stay because leaving in a group is safer, what do I do? When someone at a church program asks if I’m “one of us,” which “us” do they mean?

So the communities are learning what I’m learning: the categories we used to maintain, Old Guard, New Guard, African American, East African, don’t matter anymore. We’re all in the same basement now.

I think about this every time I sit down to write. How do I cover a story where my presence changes the dynamic? At that church, I wasn’t just a journalist. I was another body in the group, another person making it safer to leave. I was part of the tactic I was supposed to be documenting.

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the story isn’t just about what’s happening, it’s about who gets to tell it. And maybe being inside the story doesn’t disqualify me. Maybe it means I see things others miss.

Like the way the older Black woman at the church greeted the East African men with “welcome home” instead of “welcome.” Like the Oromo word I heard a student use during a BSU meeting, a word that means both resistance and return. Like the fact that Black History Month programming isn’t just cultural celebration anymore. It’s infrastructure.

In three weeks, February ends. The Black History Month banners come down. The programming stops. And the tactical cover these events provide disappears.

Maybe there isn’t a line anymore. Maybe that’s what Operation Metro Surge taught me.

Black history isn’t something that happened in the past. It’s happening right now, in church basements and film festivals and student union meetings. And it’s not linear. It’s not a story that moves from Old Guard to New Guard, from past to present. It’s a story that circles back, pulls forward, merges and splits.

I’m covering it. I’m also living it. And I’m starting to think that’s the only way to get it right.