By Leah Asmelash, CNN
MINNEAPOLIS (CNN) — In January 2025, Junauda Petrus warned, in her inaugural poem as poet laureate of Minneapolis, of residents “getting snatched in the night,” and celebrated a city of “neighbors who traded plates of food….so we could all taste where each other was from.”
The poem, “Ritual on How to Love Minneapolis Again,” has been circulating anew after the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in the midst of a Trump administration immigration crackdown.
Petrus read the poem this past fall at an elementary school poetry workshop. Afterward, a young boy with a blond mullet, who’d impressed her by speaking up in class, came up to her and told her, “This is a loooooong poem.” She told the boy’s mother and her wife “Y’all’s kid is hilarious.” The boy looked just like his mother, Petrus said. That was how she met Renee Good.
Petrus spoke with CNN about how her hometown is building off a history of Minnesota pride and building off a legacy.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What was going through your mind as you were first starting to draft “Ritual on How to Love Minneapolis Again?”
I really was like, what is the Minneapolis I know? And I know Minneapolis as a kid who grew up in the ’90s from an immigrant family, a working poor immigrant family, that had friends from all over, that got to learn a lot through those communities, that got to learn a lot about whiteness, because this is also such a white place.
Even with the diversity, there’s still a lot of ways that I think white folks here could also be like, “Oh, well, we’re not the South” and pat themselves on the back. I think we’re seeing this in complexity here. When ICE killed Renee Good, Jacob Frey, our mayor, was like, you know, “f**k ICE, get the f**k out” or whatever the f**k. He was cursing his little chest out.
And I think a lot of people who were friends of mine from outside of Minneapolis, were like, “Oh, my God, your mayor seems like about that life.” Then he went on to backpedal. Not saying, “abolish ICE,” not also questioning the way that his particular Minneapolis Police Department has done similar violence against Black and brown people forever.
It sounds like part of what you’re saying is the side of Minneapolis that people are seeing right now exists, but it also has its limits. Minneapolis is not all kumbaya all the time.
How I would phrase that instead, is that there’s been a lot of work that’s been done for the last decade —- and I would say even further than that —- particularly around policing in this city. What we’re seeing of white folks right now has been the investment of a lot of labor of folks of color, of having certain kinds of dialogues and whatnot.
Politicians gonna politic. Who’s showing up right now, it’s people who are committed. It’s people who have been doing this work, both inside and outside of themselves, for years. There’s people who are in genuine community with people of color as white people. There’s a lot of white friends who are like, “Stay yo ass at home. I’ll bring your groceries.”
But a lot of that is actually, not just “Oh, we’re these good white people that knew how to be good.” This has been decades of political history. Look up Paul Wellstone. There’s a lot of people who are connected with deep-rooted, deep-seated organizing legacies and practices.
People have been organizing around ICE for a while. Minneapolis didn’t just start resisting ICE, like there was all of these other