In the winter here, it’s not unusual to see a car on the side of I-35. Minneapolis is the first place I’ve ever lived that, when I described a recent-ish car accident I was in, multiple people said, “Now, you live here.” The first time I heard someone say it, I was too grumpy to laugh. The second time, I had my oh-it-feels-good-to-laugh-again moment. Now, the empty cars along the highway, on residential streets, at gas stations with their doors open, make people wait to see if anyone’s coming back or if another person has been taken.
My neighborhood is mostly quiet. It’s often quiet-ish in January. Snow, ice storms, and negative-twenty windchill do that. The elementary school in the neighborhood doesn’t let students go outside for recess, and the park nearby is far more popular for pickleball and the splash pool in warmer months than it is for the temporary skating rink in the winter. It’s a park where my Muslim neighbors and members of a nearby mosque will gather for Eid, all dressed in white. Sometimes here, even in this predominantly white neighborhood, I’ve heard whistles or frantic honking or a helicopter’s rhythms overhead. I sometimes walk over to the coffee shop when I’m home alone and feel, somehow, that making my own coffee and meals is too big a task. My husband doesn’t want me walking alone anymore.
We’re the kind of couple that, despite having been together for a long time now, likes to walk arm in arm and talk. It’s a pleasure for me to be anywhere with him and talking, talking, talking. The few times we’ve been out since Operation Metro Surge started, he sometimes has a grip on the back of my coat, which he’s never done before, or when we’ve held hands, I’ve had to say, “It’s too tight.” He doesn’t talk as much; he’s too busy looking around to see who might be noticing me. Throughout this time, people have told me over and over to be safe: ICE is regularly questioning people of color about their citizenship, sometimes detaining them.
It’s not like I haven’t been racially profiled before. This is America, baby. I’ve had cops see me in a car with white people and pull us over, thinking that they’ve just made a prostitution bust. I’ve been followed in stores, from upscale boutiques to Walmarts. When an A/V equipment library I managed at a university was robbed multiple times, one of the police officers asked me several questions that were far different from the questions my colleagues received. I’ve been in cars with other Black people and pulled over for all sorts of minor offenses to be questioned and bullied and threatened. I’ve experienced the microaggression of people telling me to my face that different accomplishments are because of DEI’s “great-grandfather”: affirmative action. But here, people are disappearing as part of that racial profiling. I’ve always been able to go home, to find a way to try to build myself back into functionality, toward tricking myself into believing that I am safe, that I am equal, that I am fine.
Since the “alleged” murder of Renée Nicole Macklin Good, a seventeen-year-old boy has been detained from his job at Target and brutally beaten by ICE, and Alex Pretti was “allegedly” murdered while attempting to help a woman who was thrown to the ground. Three members of the Oglala Sioux Nation have been indefinitely detained to try to force the nation to make deals with the United States. Agents have flash-banged a baby in a car. They have threatened and taken middle schoolers. The federal government claims it has made thousands of arrests since it was “deployed here.” In the North and Northeast neighborhoods, agents patrol the streets. Friends and colleagues who live in Powderhorn Park talk about the whistles, the yells, the whirring of helicopter blades, the sounds of cars that got stuck in the snow by people who don’t know how to drive in it. The dumb despot we’re calling the president has talked about radicalized wine moms as a threat to our communities. High schoolers are walking out of classes in protest or opting into remote learning to stay safe. People are having guns pointed at their heads for legal observing, for protesting, for not being white, for being white, and “looking gay.”
There’s a video that people keep sharing of an ICE officer slipping on the ice and then firing his gun, a white shot against a dark night. Many people find the video hilarious. Look at these incompetents! For a lot of us here, it’s even more sobering. They’re walking around in treadless boots with their gun safeties off. A friend and I agree that we know it’s the least of our concerns right now, but we hate that video. It feels like, for a significant number of people sharing it and commenting on it, it’s permitting people to think things aren’t that bad here.
When I go to therapy, I often have nothing to say when I’m processing and considering how I actually feel and wishing for better words than the ones I grasp for, like “evil” or “rancid” or “despair.” My therapist is excellent; someone—and I’m not being hyperbolic here—who has saved my life. I wonder, when I look at their face on our Google Meet, how they’re getting through so many of these appointments, when clients like me admit it’s harder and harder to understand the point of living when people are like this.
I’ve spent most of my adult life attempting to cultivate a spirit of optimism. I don’t naturally believe in good or that people will learn how to care about other people. There are multiple people on this planet that could end child hunger and instead choose the immoral luxury of buying a superyacht instead. “Fuck them kids” is their culture.
The thing that radicalized me against capitalism was the realization that capitalism will always teach you to value money over people. Money—not art, not love, not generosity, not friendship—is the only measure of life according to the way so many of us live in this country. Intellectually, I understand that if you don’t keep exercising your brain to hold two opposing opinions at once, it’s easy to fall into the trap that because wealth gives you power, because you have things and access, well, what even is community? There is no society of care, and life can easily be molded into having the shape and effect of the vast Herbalife pyramid. Exploit, Befriend, Exploit.
Here we are in Minneapolis donating food, we are donating games and books and art supplies to kids who can’t go outside or visit their friends, we are donating coats, we are donating meals, we are donating time, we are donating the same fifty dollars back and forth, we are donating whistles, we are learning how to make a functional community when it’s our own government disrupting our lives. The International Institute is telling immigrant and refugee families to do the legal work of creating a delegation of parental authority. My phone buzzes, and someone else I know has seen an abduction. Another neighborhood has been tear-gassed. Online, people argue semantics. They soothe themselves with petty arguments where they all seem to agree in slightly different ways about the need to abolish or reform, whether this is influenced by the Gestapo or by Jim Crow–era tactics, and how social progress works in America. When I see these comments online, I think, Whatever you need to feel like you have some control. I wish I could still sustain myself in the land of theorizing.
Before all this, I’d been thinking about curses a lot. I don’t really believe in them—in the US, the curses we tend to talk about seem rooted in weird and often racist beliefs about others. Someone is different, we wronged them, they proved that they were not human by pointing a curse down on us. And yet for the past two years before this, I started to wonder if someone had cursed me. I don’t want to do a list here, but in that time period, more than five hundred yellowjackets had built a nest in our house’s siding and were chewing on the drywall. They flew out dramatically at my husband and our meanest cat. Their larvae fell out after we opted for the “good poison” because the earth-friendly poison would not kill them. I spent too much of my life pulling them out of my thick hair.
While doing novel research in Osaka, I went to Katsuoji. I went to see all the Daruma dolls, to climb the stone steps in the light March rain, and to change my luck. A group of Italian influencers was furious with me for walking through their video while on my way to the end of a bridge to pray and give money. I clasped my hands and asked the universe to help me continue living and to continue caring and being generous with other people. Now, at night when I can’t sleep, I think the truest curses are xenophobia, greed, and racism. It sometimes feels too small among all the other things I could ask for, but it’s so urgent right now, so I pray and pray to stay openhearted.
Let’s believe in good,
Megan
