English Other Government / Politics

Hello everyone,

From the book Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman.

“I grew up in New Jersey and became totally consumed with racial justice in my late teens,” Samuels told me over coffee one morning in downtown Minneapolis. “My father and mother came from the Jim Crow South and were the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers, and they came north for the same reason immigrants come to America—to find a better life and opportunity that the South could not provide.” Her father joined the longshoreman’s union and went from low income to middle class and then later moved the family from the equivalent of North Minneapolis to St. Louis Park, or from Newark to Scotch Plains, thanks to fair housing legislation passed in 1968. When she would give vent to her passion to struggle against racial injustice growing up, Samuels recalled, “my father used to say to me, ‘Sandy, when you find that country that’s better than this one, you tell me and we’ll go live there together . . .’ I always got stumped by that.”

Speaking of Minneapolis, she said: “We have some great disparities in this community—‘Minnesota nice’ tried to cover up a lot of racism.” But, “while I can tell you a story of real disparities and how there was structural racism in Minneapolis—historical and present-day—that has gotten us to where we are, I can also tell you that today we have a business community like no other business community.” Today, “people are stepping up and saying, ‘This cannot happen on our watch . . .’ It is game on.” Working with Itasca members and other business leaders, said Samuels, “we are trying to be there for each other. That is what we lost in our country or never really had. We all share a vision that ***we are not going out like this*** and we are not going to let our kids go out like this.”

While Samuels is buoyed by the financial support and the partner-ships with groups such as Itasca, she knows that the Northside of Minneapolis cannot be transformed without attention to systemic racism that still needs fixing. She also knows that that fixing will not be transformative unless the area’s largely African American families take their future into their own hands as well.

What does "we are not going out like this" mean inthis particular context?

I asked this question on (https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/we-are-not-going-out... another forum, but the only person who answered so far wasn't very sure because of lack of context (you canonly quote 4 sentences when asking questions on Wordreference).

Thank you.