Listen to this
I have been watching the unfolding events in Minneapolis, Minnesota, related to the surge in Federal Immigration officers with both dismay and pride. I lived in Minneapolis for over a decade; my partner Kathy was born and raised in South St Paul just across the Mississippi river, and two of my sons and grandkids live there. For someone not born and raised there, I think I have a pretty good sense of the place and the people who live there. I know what it feels like to go out in subzero weather to shovel snow or go to work. I have experience with the various neighborhoods and the restaurants, grocery stores, bars, music venues, coffee shops, and other small businesses where people go to eat, have coffee, buy food, or seek entertainment. In other words, I have a strong connection to the twin cities as a place where people go about their daily lives.
A number of years ago, Chris Richardson and I co-edited a book called Habitus of the Hood. The central premise of the book was that portrayals of communities of color as spectacular sights of criminal and gang activity designated as the “hood,” erased the lived experience of people simply living their lives in those various neighborhoods. We used Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to emphasize the mundanity of daily life lived even in the most extreme situations. Habitus, in that sense, is the ways in which people have lived patterns of life that reflect generational commonalities of thought and behavior. These patterns are deeply inflected by their environment both physical and social. How we live collectively in a space such as a city neighborhood is reflective of the generational habitus of that space and the people within it. In that writing, we were pushing back against media portrayals of neighborhoods and communities of color that ignored the complexity of the lives lived there in order to to tell a story that demonized those communities as havens for criminals and addicts.
As I watch the events unfolding in Minnesota, I see the same discourse being reiterated by the President of the United States and his administration. I hear the same demonizing rhetoric that calls out entire immigrant communities as being "on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels". I see the erasure of the actual habitus of communities in Minneapolis/St Paul where the great majority of people, regardless of legal status are simply going about their lives trying to sustain a life.
The introduction of thousands of armed ICE agents dressed in military combat gear into the day to day lives of ordinary people trying to get by, is a massive rupture in the social fabric of communities and neighborhoods. And communities and neighborhoods have pushed back. They have refused the description of their immigrant neighbors that demonizes them and places them at risk for violent abduction from their homes, schools, churches, and workplaces. They have marched and demonstrated in the tens of thousands in subzero weather. They have used their cell phones to document what is happening, and they have supported their neighbors by providing food and support to those hiding from government agents. In response, they have been beaten, gassed, shot to death, abducted, and called terrorists.
When speaking to my friends and family who are there, they describe it as living in a war zone. They talk about the constant beat of helicopters overhead and armed government agents roaming the city abducting people at will, including U.S. citizens. There is the smell of tear gas in the air and massive demonstrations across the city. Everyone is waiting for the next horrific act, fearful that there is a looming disaster of violent confrontation just ahead that will justify the imposition of martial law and full-on violent resistance. The Black Panthers and the American Indian movement are remobilized and on the ground. The echoes of George Floyd from a mere six years ago still resonate across the cities. It is a time of extraordinary tension and ongoing violence on the part of the federal government. As New York Times columnist M. Gessen put it,
Please look at this list with me. Since early January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement expanded its operation in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., federal officers have: killed Renee Good, a white middle-class mother; menaced a pregnant immigration lawyer in her firm’s parking lot; detained numerous U.S. citizens, including one who was dragged out of his house in his underwear; smashed in the windows of cars and detained their occupants, including a U.S. citizen who was on her way to a medical appointment at a traumatic brain injury center; set off crowd-control grenades and a tear gas container next to a car that contained six children, including a 6-month-old; swept an airport, demanding to see people’s papers and arresting more than a dozen people who were working there; detained a 5-year-old. And now they have killed another U.S. citizen, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse with no criminal record. It seems he was white. The agents had him down on the ground, subdued, before they apparently fired at least 10 shots at point-blank range.
This horrific set of events could be well seen as an effort to terrify and subdue a population so that they will give up and quit fighting back. And yet, that has not been the case in Minneapolis or other cities across the U.S. where similar deployments of force have been deployed. Massive peaceful resistance has been ongoing. And I think the fact of this persistent assertion of community solidarity deserves at least as much attention as the brutal tactics of what has been called an occupation. The growing solidarity across all lines of social stratification is impressive. People of all races, sexualities, classes, ages, and genders have worked together to support one another. I would argue that the question of how this is happening is critical to forging new alliances that have the capacity to push back against the vicious attacks on decent treatment of all of our relations.
So, what do we know? Minneapolis resident Steve Gagner put it this way, “I’ve been telling people, if you want to really be prepared for stuff like this that’s going on in Minneapolis right now, you need to know your neighbors,” He made the comment in a coffee shop close to his home near where some of the most horrific events have occurred. While he commented, the owner of the shop was,
running around directing pickups and drop-offs of boxed groceries and household necessities stacked by the door: donations for the thousands of immigrant families, undocumented and otherwise, that were known to be hiding out in their homes across the metro area for fear of arrest.
I have written many times in this column about the necessity for collective action to push back against the encroaching dystopia that would create a world of greed, power, and subjugation. What is happening in Minneapolis and other places around the country is a very good example of what we can accomplish if we care for one another in the most concrete aspects of our daily existence. Of course, there is always a cost to such resistance. Dominant systems seldom relinquish their authority willingly and will resort to extreme violence to sustain their system of governance. The cost can be extraordinarily high.
For those of us in CYC, there is always the question of what impact does all of this have on the children. The influx of federal agents has included assaults on schools including the use of tear gas and beatings. Schools across the city were closed after the first couple of times this happened. In the schools in the suburbs around the cities that stayed open, teachers began to train students in how to stay safe in the event of the “soldiers” coming into their school. Teachers and volunteers would wear colored vests to identify themselves as safe adults children could run to for safety. Children were told not to run to the “soldiers.”
As the occupation continued, immigrant children stopped coming to school and their classmates began to ask hard questions about where their friends has gone. It was not lost on them that their missing school mates were all brown. African-America children who are U.S. citizens became frightened that they would become targets of the “soldiers” because of their skin color. As reported in the New York Times,
parents of elementary-school-age children found themselves suddenly having to explain why parents were standing guard against federal agents around the school property and why their Latino classmates were staying home, their latent politics had been supercharged by a very parental mix of fear and fury.
Interviewing one of these parents brought the following response,
I asked her how she discussed what was happening with her own children. “We’re lying to them all the time,” she said. “‘You are not in danger.’ I don’t think they are, but we can’t guarantee that. Because they” — ICE — “are not following the rules. We’re white, but who knows? You look at them wrong, and they’re going to smash your window.”
Of course, children in war zones, refugee camps, occupied territories, or neighborhoods subject to police violence is a global phenomenon. All across the planet, there are parents, friends, neighbors and teachers trying to protect and comfort terrified children. For some communities, this has been going on for many generations. In Minneapolis, the Indigenous community has been raising their children under conditions of occupation for hundreds of years. As Rachel Dionne-Thunder from the Indigenous Protector movement put it, “As Native people, we’re pretty accustomed to fighting the federal government going back 530 years since they landed with their ships. It just so happens that everyone else is waking up to it.” Communities of color have also been the target of police violence for generations as well. And now that the violence is spreading to the white community, there is an awakening and the possibility of new alliances that might begin to acknowledge the scope and depth of colonial and capitalist violence. In the meantime, what is happening to the children?
I would suggest that for those of us working with and thinking about young people, the stakes are very high. There is an entire generation of children and youth living under brutal conditions of violence and attempted subjugation. Certainly, they can see the ways in which the adults in their lives are resisting and refusing the occupation of their lands and cities. But what will be their response? What role will they see for themselves as they grow into the next generation? Without a doubt a significant number of children and youth are being radicalized by conditions where they live.
In our field of CYC we often talk about the importance of “life space” in the development of young people. Generally, we limit our thinking to the life spaces we create in our programs or perhaps the life spaces of the schools or homes where we work. But what about the life space of Minneapolis, or Gaza, or Tehran, or anywhere else being reconfigured by the violent upheaval that is the birthing pains of global capitalism as an ever more totalizing system of domination and control. What happens to the children under such conditions and what role do we have as adults and child and youth care workers in shaping the future through our work with young people. To the degree we take no accountability for this emerging world, the radicalizing effects of occupation will shape the life worlds of children in ways we cannot imagine. To the degree we begin to wake up to the fact that we in CYC may have an important role to play in collaborating with the next generation to birth an alternative world, perhaps we stand a chance. The question is open. What will we do?
