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Described as “a tremendous leader, willing to grow and learn,” by one of her nominees, Tiffany is a powerhouse at the intersection of the All Black Lives Matter, LGBTQIA and the disabled peoples’ rights movements. “People don’t know that when they look at me that I am disabled. I flair up for days and sometimes I can’t get up. I physically can’t. Other days I feel like I could run a mile.” Tiffany was diagnosed with fibromyalgia when she was pregnant with her first son, and has been dealing with it since. Despite the pain, Tiffany kicked it into overdrive this last year, amplifying Black voices and building anti-racist culture in the suburbs around Rochester.
She’s been changing the discourse, for underrepresented groups, but the work she’s been doing has not been without backlash. People and hate groups have been angry enough to send her death threats and post her address online. “It’s disgusting. I’ve been getting attacked regularly. My youngest son has really bad anxiety, he says he’s afraid I’m going to die so I had to get a camera for my doorbell. It’s dangerous.” Despite the personal risks, Tiffany has been calling out racism where she sees it, calling in allies, holding food, clothing and bike drives, and hosting events, panels and organizing protests. She focuses on mutual aid, food sovereignty, anti-racist curriculum, and she advocates for mandatory anti-racist training at all levels of government, education and public facing positions. “She has been a bright light during a very dark year for so many,” said one nominee. “She is an unapologetic Black woman’s voice that is so needed in the suburbs.”
A little over a year ago, her activism shifted into full throttle.
“My tipping point was when George Floyd was murdered. My boys were the first who told me about it because my older two are on social media, and they got it on their Snapchat. We were watching the video together and crying. My youngest son kept asking me ‘Mom, why is he holding his knee on his neck like that? Mom? Why?’ and he had tears coming down his eyes.”
Tiffany didn’t have an answer.
“They looked completely depleted, they looked soulless, like someone had taken the light from their souls, and all I could see in that video was my brother or sons on that ground. I thought, ‘If I don’t do something, this is going to hit closer to home.’ People don’t care until it happens to them. It’s someone else’s issue, and it will never happen to them, but it can. It will.” Tiffany believes that empathy can be a powerful call to action. “When something shitty happens to someone else, just imagine that it happened to you, and ask yourself what you would need to make yourself whole or closer to whole again.” For Tiffany, that was activism. She started engaging in conversations in Fairport groups, but was censured and muted. “I tried to talk about the realness of structural anti-blackness in other groups, and they would delete my posts and tell me that the topic of race was too political. How is my Black life political?” She decided to create her own groups, founding Being Black in the Burbs and co-founding the Fairport Coalition for Justice and Equity.
“I created these groups so I could focus on anti-blackness and focus on education and anything the hell I wanted to and also so I could organize protests.” Organizing is Tiffany’s happy place and a calling. “I needed to protest, hit the pavement, and just do more. I knew it was not good for my soul to be sitting here, so I started protesting. And I’m thinking all these folks came from their suburban homes, me being one of them too, and we went and protested in Rochester, and came back to our suburban homes where it was peaceful and euphoric. I realized we need to be agents of change where we live too. That’s what Being Black in the Burbs is about, building anti-racist communities in the suburbs.” Tiffany’s work creating mutual aid programs is in part inspired by the community she grew up in.
“I grew up in the apartment complex in Perinton Pines. We had a community of mutual aid before the concept even existed. In that apartment complex we were our own, because we all had something in common which was poverty. We looked out for each other. My mom liked to feed whoever needed a meal, and if you liked her food she would cook you more. We grew up with a lot of kids who were mixed, so sometimes their parents didn’t know how to do their hair. Before holidays, my mom would stay up until two and three in the morning doing hair.”
Many of Tiffany’s friends were first generation immigrants. “In my friend group I was the minority, because I didn’t have an accent. My childhood friends, who I am still friends with to this day are Lao, Indian, Vietnamese, and Russian. We stood up for each other in school and out of school. Some of us had it harder than others, but we were our own little community. If somebody didn’t have money to go to the local pool, or the amusement park, we would figure out a way to get their money up. So it was those kinds of interactions, taking care of each other that inspires me and pushes me. It’s that kind of community that I want for everyone.” It’s a community model of care that she believes could be scaled up to any city and even globally with enough awareness and intention.
“I love my community. My community inspires me. I can point out the flaws and try to fix it and still love my community. That’s what people need to understand. People say I am trying to throw Fairport under the bus, but that’s not it at all. We all have flaws, nobody is perfect, but we need to get honest about what we can work on.”
When people say they can’t imagine a society without police, Tiffany can help put that idea in context. “I say ‘Look at the suburbs now. They are only there for traffic. It’s not over policed.’ The suburbs are a model of how well a community can thrive when people have their needs met. All of the high crime areas are over policed and the crime rates are still rising, so the police are not deterring any of the crime, they are inflaming it. If community members have their basic needs met, crimes will drop, and there would be no need for policing.
People are in survival mode, and they need to survive. It may not be right, but you can’t judge the things people do to survive. My apartment complex in the Pines did not have that survival instinct kick in, because we took care of each other. If we put resources into community programs that focus on meeting the basic needs of its citizens, crimes will fall.”
It’s not just Rochester that can benefit from a collective embrace, but the world. Lately, Tiffany has been listening to Angela Davis’s books on tape, “She is my hero,” says Tiffany. Davis’s philosophies have helped inform Tiffany’s perspective on how destructive racism can be for all people of all races who exist in the lower socioeconomic brackets. She believes racism only benefits the rich and that this and other social constructs only serve to divide the working class and ensure the wealthy continue to hold onto power.
“I think the middle class right now is being wiped. It’s just going to be the poor and rich. We can’t even address that because there’s so much racism. And it’s intentional and it’s to keep us divided, because if the poor alone were on the same page, we would have all the power to make movements and changes. But that’s the thing, can we get over racism? That’s what my journey is right now.”
Similar to racism, Tiffany believes homophobia is a construct rooted in white supremacy and introduced through Christianity to control and divide people. “Black people have to be on the same page and not be homophobic, and not transphobic. We have to unlearn the parts of Black culture that are rooted in white supremacy. It took me 37 years to come out and say ‘I’m queer,’ and I’m 38. This is my first pride being openly queer. I never put any boundaries on love. Last week, my cousin told me if I got married, she wouldn’t come to my wedding.
I have to take a look at people telling me I’m going to go to hell for choosing to be myself. The most violent wars we’ve ever had were religious wars started by Christians and Catholics, killing people in the name of God. I can’t subscribe to that. I still believe in a higher power, but my God is not male. I find it funny that women are the ones that can produce, but a man made the woman? And you’re taught in Black culture never to question God, so I’m gonna question y’all then,” she says laughing.
“The issues that we have here in America, whether with homelessness, ableism, racism, homophobia; Angela Davis sees these as worldly issues. It’s happening in Palestine, it’s happening in Africa, it’s happening in China. Exploitation and oppression are global, so we need for this movement to be international. We have to make those connections and bring them there. People need to start thinking globally about our movements. The bigger we can get it, the more we can make out of it.”
Tiffany’s hope for ending racism and building supportive community structures is anchored in the future. “People aren’t born racist. I think the only way to end racism is by raising our kids better than the generation before them. That’s why I focus on education and getting the message to kids to be anti-racists. They have the power to eradicate this themselves. They don’t have the mindset of their parents, grandparents and so on and so on. I’ve got to focus on this next generation because if we don’t, racism will always curse us.”
The one thing that scares Tiffany is the pushback teachers are seeing to exclude Black Americans from American history, cutting out mentions of slavery, civil rights, Jim Crow, redlining, the KKK and racism (to the minimal extent in which they are even mentioned). The idea that teaching all of American history, about all Americans is somehow not patriotic feels like a dangerous path to go down. “The school board debate about removing Critical Race Theory (CRT) curriculum scares me. When you are messing with my kids, and you’re messing with other folks’ kids, you are messing with the future.”
To underscore the importance of addressing racism not just in textbooks, but in our school hallways, Tiffany organized an event where several Black students who came through the Fairport school system spoke about their experiences to the school board. “They talked about the aggressions they experienced on a yearly basis from kindergarten all the way through graduation, and I was the oldest sitting at that table at 37. The video is here on our Being Black in the Burbs Facebook group page. The superintendent was in tears by the end and was shocked. She didn’t have any idea what these kids experienced every day in their school system. They wanted to speak, but it is traumatizing to have to give your lived experience of racism. That was the only event I’ve done like this, and it will probably be the only one, because I don’t like triggering folks. We had tears on that stage. Folks telling about how horrible it was, how little they felt.”
“One of the things that parents keep saying in PTA meetings is ‘My kids don’t want to learn about racism.’ I think about all those kids at that event, and how I’ve been experiencing racism in this place since I was 5 years old. If we are living it, the least your kids can do is learn about it. They can learn not to be racist. I get a lot of feedback from hate groups out there that say, ‘You’re trying to radicalize our kids and make them little activists!’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I want these kids to learn how to be radically honest, radically inclusive, and radically loving. Yes, that’s the one thing you got right.'”
You can find Being Black in the Burbs or the Fairport Coalition for Justice and Equity on Facebook. Join Tiffany in her fight for the future. Support Tiffany’s work today by making a donation:
“Everything that comes in goes back out. We don’t get paid for this work, but it’s work that feels good. It’s about solidarity. Our meetings have a lot of laughter. We want people who want to be here, who have some kind of a passion for social and racial justice. People need to rest sometimes for a week or a month. We honor that, because we aren’t machines, we can’t just keep producing things. We all need that.”
mailing address P.O. BOX 10011, Rochester, NY 14610 • info540westmain@gmail.com