Worcester Speaks #1: Jenn Gaskin

“I'm a human being and humanity is important.”

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It’s been four years, and Worcester Sucks is finally ready to tackle the second half of its title! I’m kidding—Bill’s tireless efforts to investigate Worcester’s sundry failings are of course a labor of love. But responding to recent events doesn’t always leave time to appreciate the people working to make Worcester the place you know and love. Here you’ll find the first in a series of interviews with notable Worcesterites. The goal isn’t to promote upcoming events or offer yet another platform for the powerful, but to have substantive conversations with people who think seriously about the city and, in various ways, invest in its success. 

Our inaugural interviewee, Jennifer Gaskin, was generous with her time and candor. I’ve condensed and lightly edited a long, in-depth conversation for clarity. If you know someone who ought to appear in this space in the future, send us an email at billshaner@substack.com with the subject line “Worcester Speaks.” 

Liz: Where might people in Worcester know you from? 

Jennifer Gaskin: So most people know me from being the founder and president of the Worcester Caribbean American Carnival Association, which I started in 2012 with my husband. Both of our families are from the Caribbean, my husband from Trinidad, my family from Grenada. We participated for many, many years in the Boston Caribbean Carnival and when we moved out here to Worcester we realized that there was a Caribbean community out here, but we weren't really being represented or seen. I think it culminated with my daughter. I think she was in like first grade at Greenwood Elementary School. And she had said to her friends that she was going to Trinidad for school vacation, and she said nobody knew what Trinidad was.

And I understand you're also an admin of the Mutual Aid Worcester Group?

I am. I started moderating in 2020, the first year that the mutual aid group started. And it's actually been a really amazing experience, just really being able to witness the community show up for each other. 'Cause that's really all mutual aid is—it's “I have something that you may need,” and standing up for each other as a community. And it's also given me visibility into a lot of stuff that's going on in the community that I otherwise wouldn't necessarily be aware of because I'm not connected to those different aspects of the community. And it's actually made me, in my mind, a better member of the community and more aware and more empathetic.

I think, you know, one of the things that really came out in Mass during the pandemic was food instability, housing instability, all of those things. I try to walk every day, but I'm not as consistent as I'd like to be, but I usually walk the Blackstone walking trail. And during the pandemic, I watched so many people have tents back there and living back there. I know people, when they think about unhoused individuals, they think, you know, “you're a drug addict. You're this, you're that.” No, these were people who got up every day and went to work but could not afford to live anywhere. I watched them wash their clothes in the lake, wash themselves in the lake, walk, ride bikes, whatever it was that they needed to do to get to work, but at the end of the day, not even having enough money to be able to live somewhere. 

I'm a member of the group and I've seen some of the best in people and incredible generosity there and I wanted to ask: How do you think we cultivate more of that?

That’s a good question. I think it's about being more vocal, right? Because when I think about myself, I'm fortunate in the sense that I have a career. I'm fortunate in the sense that I'm a homeowner. I'm fortunate in the sense that I don't worry about where my meal is coming from or having a car or whatever. And I could very well just go about my life and not care about anyone else. But I think when people see that people like me or, you know, other people who are in those positions, are still raising our hand and saying, “Hey guys, like, do you know this is going on? Like, this is important. We need to have conversations about this.” Because I'm not saying it from the perspective of I'm living that life, but I'm saying it from the perspective of I'm a human being and humanity is important.

And basic things like food and a roof over your head and medical care should be rights that everybody has. And it shouldn't matter what your socioeconomic status is. Your race, your sex, whatever, none of that should matter. Even when you're in a position of privilege, it's more so your responsibility to speak up. And I think that that's how we foster that in the community: When you have everybody speaking up is when responses happen. You can use the example of George Floyd. And like I say to people, nobody could turn away because we were all locked in our house so nobody could turn away. We all had to watch that. We all had to experience that trauma. And the entire world woke up and said, wait a minute. Like, people were protesting in Europe. And that doesn't impact their life in Europe but they said, no, this is about humanity. 

In the mutual aid Facebook group, sometimes we also see suspicion or judgment—that perspective of “well, I didn't have it easy, but I got through it, therefore you just must not be working hard enough.” It’s a perspective that is really uncharitable and unkind. When you see that—or you mentioned the trauma of seeing what happened to George Floyd—how do you repair your spirit? I know that the idea of self-care has been co-opted to mean buying things—

It's like everything, right? Like it's, oh, you got a massage. That's self care.

I’m curious if that idea has resonance for you? Or, how do you repair your spirit?

[I want] to tackle the first part where you were talking about, like, the whole idea of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” foolishness. I remember there was a post, I don't even remember what the post was, what the person was asking for in Mutual Aid [Worcester], but I remember saying in that post, “do you guys realize that some people are too poor to work?” What does that mean? “I don't have the clothes. I can't wash myself. I'm not sleeping 'cause I live in a tent. I'm not eating.” How do you go to work? Or for example, even myself when I was a single mom–I had my son at 17 years old. How do you afford daycare? And to go to work, there was times that I was literally paying most of my paycheck to childcare. 

So how do you even get ahead in a situation like that, or this whole generation of children who literally, home ownership is like not even on the table for them, right? I think as far as self care for me, sometimes it's just disconnecting. We have a chat for the [Mutual Aid Worcester] moderators, and sometimes we're just like, “you know what guys? Like, I can't today.” Or if we go back to  the George Floyd conversation, I never watched [the footage] because I remember sitting one night watching 20/20 and they literally just showed little still clips. And I ended up under my covers, literally shaking with my covers over my head. So I knew self care for me in that moment was, “Jennifer, you're not gonna ever watch that video.” Right? Sometimes self care is just that simple as creating boundaries, right? Self care is disconnecting when you need to disconnect. Self care is saying that I'm not gonna have this conversation for whatever reason. Self care sometimes is just the fact that I get up and walk because I'm getting fresh air. I'm clearing my head, you know? Self-care could be my dog here laying on my bed with me. 

I don't know if you are aware, but my husband passed away in November, two days after Thanksgiving. And one of the things that him and I talked a lot about in the past two years is really, you know, cultivating your peace. And if something is not in line with your peace or is not in line with what you're looking to do or be or whatever, get rid of it. You're not obligated to anybody. And really, you know, as much as I grieve and I miss him, and all of those things, I am so grateful that I had somebody in my life that loved me enough to say, “Jennifer, you have to love yourself. You have to take care of yourself.” So now in my grief process, it's like, “Jennifer, you have to take care of yourself.” 

Because if I don't get up every day and face whatever it is in my day, then I'm not showing up for my children. I'm not showing up for my community. I'm not showing up for myself. 

So I have a follow-up question to all of this. You're clearly giving a lot to the community. When you say, I didn't watch the George Floyd video, like, you don't need to see it because you—

I already know. 

But that's not true for everyone. I'm imagining like really privileged white people saying, like, “well, I need to protect my peace.” 

Some people need to wake up. Some people need to watch that. When you say that, I think: I work in corporate America, and I have a really good relationship with my boss. And a lot of times we talk about our lives. She was one of the first people that I talked to the day that my husband passed away. And she was reflecting back on some of the conversations that her and I have had. So my husband was born in New York, but he moved to Trinidad at like two years old. And then he came back to the States in middle school. So when he came back to the states in middle school, you know, he had an accent. He was different, blah, blah, blah. So his way of fitting in was he went to the streets and he ended up being incarcerated for four and a half years. He went to prison at 19 years old to Walpole State Prison. You know what kind of people are in Walpole State Prison for a 19-year-old? And he did his four and a half years, he came out, we met, and he told me, “Jennifer, I'm never ever going back.” And I watched him turn his life around, but that wasn't an easy thing. I watched people tell him no over and over again. And even up until recently we would go out and people would just judge him based on how he looked. But to me, the way that you combat that, or the way that you get people to see you, is by showing up as yourself. He had tattoos, People would generally walk up to him and, you know, say to him like, “I can tell that you're an OG. I can see it by your swag.” But he owned that. That's not the only thing he was, you know what I mean? And he used to tease me and we would laugh 'cause my daughter would always say to him, “Daddy, you are not gangster.” And he is like, “Jennifer, that's what she's supposed to think of me. I'm her dad. That's it. That's all she's supposed to think of me, that I'm Daddy.” He still was authentic to who he was. And I think that that's how we force people with privilege to see us–by still showing up every day as who we are. 

And you know, I will never debate or argue with somebody who is willfully ignorant. If you just wanna be ignorant, you just wanna be a racist, you don't want to hear, like, I'm not gonna have that conversation with you. But if a person literally just doesn't know and wants to have a conversation, then I'm going to have that conversation. And, you know, like I was saying about my boss, like she's a white woman. Privileged, never really had interactions in the inner city or whatever. But when I talk to her and tell her my story, it opens her eyes. Like she’s said to me on many occasions, “Jennifer, I know it's not me, but I'm embarrassed by what you're saying to me.”So I think it's really just continuing to show up authentically, continuing to tell our stories, continuing to force people to, to deal with who we are. And honestly, who we are is inclusive of the trauma. Like, you can't separate our story. And when I say our story, Black people's story. Like you can't separate our story from the legacy of slavery. You can't separate my story as a Black woman from that. 

I did a TED Talk last year and I talked about how only a very small percentage of enslaved Africans came to the United States. But at the time of Emancipation Proclamation, there was like 10 times the amount of enslaved Africans here on the continent from them basically breeding Black women. They made it legal to rape Black women and have children, children who were born into slavery. And on the flip side, in the Caribbean, enslaved Africans’ lifespan was only seven years. So they just kept importing the slave into the Caribbean. But at the end, when emancipation came, there was only a small number. Even though the majority of the enslaved Africans went to the Caribbean and South America. At the end of the day, they had a fraction of what was here in the United States. So the brutality of it, you can't separate that. You carry that, you carry that trauma in your body. My ancestors carried it. I carry it. So you can never separate that conversation. So when people say, “oh, well that was like however many years ago.” No, it really wasn't because there's actually people who've died in the past, you know, 20 years that were enslaved. Maybe as children, but still. 

I feel like a lot of white people who are very privileged are frankly choosing not to see because it's everywhere. It's all around you. And you're choosing not to see. So I feel like a lot of it is putting yourself in their face. You're gonna see me.

That's a great transition to a question I had about an amazing line in the intro of your book, The Exit: Living with Urban Joy. You wrote, “When Black people celebrate white people go mad because they do not feel Black people are entitled to celebrate.” And I know from my upbringing that a lot of white people are really suspicious of joy. And I wanted to ask why you think that is? What's radical about joy?

Like I said, you can't separate a story from slavery, right? When in slavery, we couldn't even beat drums. Like, they didn't want us beating drums, they didn't want us dancing, they didn't want us congregating. They didn't want any of that. Because if we were doing that, we weren't working the fields. Because they brought people from all different places. We couldn't communicate a lot of time through language. So we communicated through dance and song and by connecting, you know, spiritually and culturally. So they block that. So now when we do it, it's like, “oh my God, what are they up to? Are they over there congregating to, you know, overthrow the slave master?” Like that mindset is still there. That if we are congregating somewhere, that there's some trouble brewing.

If you take the [Worcester Caribbean American Festival] for example, every single year it’s some foolishness about something that happened. You know, two years ago the parks department came about public intoxication. Are you kidding me? Have you been to St. Patrick's Day? What in the world? Even last year I got into—I shouldn't say I got into because I had probably two exchanges with the person because clearly they were ignorant. So I was like, I'm not going on with this. But [they were] essentially saying, “oh, well, when you have events like this, what does, what does that mean? Like “when Brown people come outside, when you have events like this, it basically cultivates violence.” Because people are congregating, that means that we have to be violent. And guess what? We are not. We are not. And frankly that is the part that I think bothers them the most. 

And even last year with the shooting, the shooting didn't happen at the event. The shooting wasn't even connected to the event. The shooting happened across the street. And there was just this rush to connect it to the event. No, that had nothing to do with anything that was going on. That has to do with the fact that we have inner city violence and gun violence on our streets and that we need to address it. That doesn't have anything to do with Black or Brown people congregating in one place. But the immediate response is to somehow connect it to that. But that comes from this idea that when we are congregating, we're somehow plotting to do something. When we really, for carnival, it's about celebration. It's about the joy of our culture. And frankly, it's about releasing all of the stress and anxiety and crap that we deal with on a daily basis. Let us have one day that we can dance and enjoy and have a good freaking time.

One year we had a birthday party in my backyard for my husband. [We had] music, we're cooking, we're having a good time, everybody's having a great time. My white neighbor called the police. 

“These people are having a barbecue.”

Oh my god. And they said, oh, our music, it was the music, it was a sound. And the police officer said, “I didn't even hear your music when I pulled up.” 

So in March, Bill did a post asking if there’s any point in doing politics in Worcester. This was after the school committee and city council elections. He was asking, like, is this a pretend democracy and is participating in it just wearing out good people? I’m curious if you have thoughts on this question. 

I could definitely see that perspective. And I can say probably right after that I probably felt that way too. But at the end of the day, if we do nothing, then we are saying we're comfortable. There's a Zora Neil Hurston quote–I'm gonna paraphrase it 'cause I don't remember exactly–essentially she says, if somebody is hurting you and you don't tell them, if you don't say anything about them hurting you, then they're gonna think you like it. Right? So if we say, oh, forget it, throw our hands up and don’t engage in the process, then we are saying we are okay with it, and we're clearly not okay with it.

And I get it because you do get worn down. I went back and spoke at the city council and I said, “I was here last year. Like, why am I here? You know, almost a year to the day, speaking again on you guys being discriminatory. Like, why am I, why do I have to keep coming here and having this same freaking conversation?” But guess what, if I have to go back again, I'm gonna go back again.

I think for Worcester, the problem is that people show up to a certain point, but it's usually the same people who keep showing up. And if you're going to talk the talk, you have to do the action. And what happened with the election this past election cycle is there was a lot of talking, but clearly people didn't show up at the polls because after we had a debrief session at The Village and one of the women in attendance mentioned that if, in every municipality in Massachusetts, if every woman and person of color voted, we could unseat every person or vote in every person that we wanted. Right? So that means that there was a lot of talking and not a lot of action at the polls. So the people who need to be held accountable are the people who didn't show up at the polls. And like I tell people all the time, people died for our right to vote, whether you are a woman, a person of color, somebody died for your right to vote. So I don't care if I'm voting for the flavor of the ice cream, I'm gonna go vote because somebody gave their life so that I could do that.

This is a real tone shift to the positive, but what is one thing that you’d guarantee about Worcester would never change?

We are a city, right? But there's also kind of a feel that we are a town, right? There's community, there's connection, there's, you know, engagement. I think that shouldn't change. That shouldn't change. We should always feel connected to each other. We should always feel like, you know, we're a community. I grew up in Boston in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s. Like, it wasn't an easy place to live, but the neighborhood that we lived in was a community. Everybody looked out for everybody. We knew each other. People knew your parents. Like we had a community within the city. And I think that that's something that I see in little pockets here at Worcester. And I think that is something that we should continue to cultivate and grow and, and that should always be part of the fabric of the city.

Yeah, that's good. Is there anything else on your mind these days that you'd like to talk about?

I think there's been a lot of conversations around, you know, the political structure here in the city. I think for me, I think we need to be looking more at solutions, right? I think the conversations that we need to be having need to be solution based, right? There's a problem. How are we solving the problem? 'cause what I think is exhausting is that we keep discussing the problem and dissecting the problem and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Like, when are we gonna start talking about solutions? When are we gonna talk about moving forward? When is, you know, when do we, to your point, turn the negative into positive, right? Like, why is Bill able to write for years this column and only focus on [Worcester] sucking? Like, why is there still so much material around it sucking? Like at what point are we gonna turn the corner and start talking about solutions and start talking about how we make a change? 

If you know of a cool Worcester person we should interview someone for this column, drop us a line at billshaner@substack.com.