Letter From Minnesota: “did they really take a 4 yo too the other night?”

Before George Floyd was murdered, I lived a few blocks down 38th from the site of his death, and I would walk with my stepdaughter to the Bancroft food forest. We’d pick whatever we could carry—cherries, plums, pears. She called it the meadow. 

Once, my stepson showed me how to hunt for Pokemon there, holding up my phone until an animated creature came into view. He explained that a stranger had already claimed the street corner we were standing on, that we’d have to battle if we wanted it. Later, he and I made up new names for every flower by the Catholic school, even though we already knew the names of them.

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I am white. While I lived in Powderhorn, I was a substitute teacher at a 99 percent Latino charter school. I taught Drama. Sometimes we played a storytelling game. The game went like this: Once upon a time—Unfortunately—Fortunately—and then it alternated until we gave up, or until the ending was happy.

Sometimes, one of the 7th grade boys would say—in response to a consequence for breaking some rule—is it because I’m Mexican? And he knew he could count on his friends—and me!—to laugh, because that was such an unlikely, and therefore offensive, and therefore reassuring, trickster question.

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I thought of those boys when two teen Target employees, Jonathan and Christian, working the drive-up in Richfield—who didn’t reply when ICE agents spoke to them—were suddenly tackled, handcuffed, and shoved in a car. They are both citizens. One had his passport in his back pocket. One was crying in the car. One was dumped out in the parking lot, bleeding. Or that’s the version that I heard.

Fortunately, they were both citizens.

Unfortunately, they were still kidnapped.

Fortunately, they were released.

Unfortunately, they were bleeding.

And I thought of all the teens I’ve known, when future reports of ICE run-ins with adolescents in freezing temperatures this past month would include details like pajama pants or thrown so violently her flip-flops came off in the snow. 

The story would always be something like “she was carrying proof of citizenship, and the agent didn’t even look at it.”

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This week, in the group chat, a friend asked, When did this all start feeling unhinged? I feel like things escalated fast. 

Looking back through my phone, I felt each neighbor’s bewildered question all over again in my body:

Did they really take a 4 yo too the other night?

Have they decided to send the troops in or still on standby?

Renee was shot on Jan 7th, I wrote.

I wrote, once she died nothing was the same.

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And suddenly, the Hmong administrative assistant—a citizen—was asking me to walk me to her car. And the office cleaning lady—a citizen—was telling me the Mexican grocery store was closed. And the Somali Uber driver was saying they’d just detained two drivers at the airport from the West Indies.

Renee was shot on January 7th. I worked on creative writing syllabi. Once she died nothing was the same. I brought my students clementines. The mayor said fuck. I placed two lighter weights and one heavy one at the top of my mat. A father was kidnapped in his thin bathrobe.

One minute, I was in a packed church on a Saturday in a blizzard, practicing Spanish phrases in unison: No firme nada!, and the next, I was checking my coat for my passport to go two blocks.

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One day, I walked downstairs and there was a printout in my apartment building’s entryway of some photocopied judicial warrants. Over them, in red marker: KNOW YOUR RIGHTS.

Two days after that, a fellow tenant texted me: I’m pleasantly surprised that they left the sign up.

The next day, an ICE memo leaked; agents had been informed that they could now forcibly enter homes and make arrests with administrative warrants alone.

Later that day, the printout was gone.

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I was sixteen when a stranger assaulted me on a street corner, one summer, touching me lewdly and aggressively while no one around us did anything to intervene. I remember his tongue in my mouth and his hands on my breasts, but what I remember most is that I said No.

I said it a few times, and it didn’t do what I’d been taught that it would do. It was like remembering a spell, in an emergency, and being so relieved to recite it right, only to watch with nausea as the villain wasn’t even slowed.

I am literally a US citizen! You can hear in Christian’s voice that he still thinks there must be a misunderstanding.

I’m not mad at you. You can hear in Renee’s voice that she still thinks she can talk the shooter down.

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There was a tweet that said what Renee Good and Alex Pretti didn’t realize is that they were no longer interacting inside of the normative state.

I am thinking of Louis Althusser, who says that we “hail” (greet, summon) one another and as we do so we ascribe identities to each other, mediated through ideology.

I was thinking of him when I read last fall that in El Fasher, in western Sudan, a man was shot and killed immediately after recognizing and calling out to an old neighbor of his, now in the paramilitary RSF.

For our greeting to be echoed and recognized as kin-to-kin, such that it would disarm, we must be operating inside the same ideology of kinship.

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EVERYONE IS WELCOME HERE… EXCEPT ICE the new adapted Minnesota door signs say.

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Joan Didion says “a place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest […] wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, […] remakes it in his own image.”

I think a place belongs to itself.

I think we belong—with effort, with grief, with complexity—with gratitude, rage, and regret—forever to each other.