The sky is milky-eye gray over Paramount, Los Angeles. LA has been hurting since the ICE raids started in January 2025, sobbing itself raw over the snatching of dishwashers and middle school kids, teachers and orange pickers. It is a Saturday in the part of June where heat-haze lifts off streets. The people have been gathering since Friday: at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, on the surrounding by-way streets, and the 101 Freeway.
On a street somewhere in Paramount, a young man wearing a yellow motorcycle helmet scoops up a river rock from a nearby pathway, and clutches it in his gloves. Half a mile away, the tangled smoke of tear-gas wreathes out of the asphalt like a living thing and a white ICE Tahoe cuts through the white smoke belting eighty. The man pitches backward, right shirt sleeve inching up slightly, takes aim and chucks the chunk of rock at the van’s windshield. Rock thunks into thick glass like a coin locking into a slot.
The arc of his dancer-skinny arm reveals brown skin. He is someone who might look like me under his helmet. He shouldn’t be out there. You shouldn’t be out there. I want to reach through the screen and snatch him into safety as three more ICE vehicles split the air to get past him. A white truck, a black Tahoe, a white one. With each flash of metal, there’s another kerchunk as the motorcycle-helmet wearing man throws rocks and chunky pieces of asphalt with everything he ever will be.
I read about the protests on Reddit. I thought that I would see a sea of white faces obscured by gas masks and disposable ones. A gently hissed fuck gets caught on camera and I’m enthralled again. The expletive drips from the window of another white Tahoe, its driver-side window a spiderweb of pelted glass.
It shouldn’t strike me that this man is brown like me. Life has drilled into me that I must avoid eye contact with police officers, side-step crowds of any color, and keep my silence on the not-so-peaceful truth of Martin Luther King Jr’s last act of faith: a permit for a concealed carry weapon. They may take your bodily autonomy away, make the line to vote longer than an eight hour and thirty minute work day, and renege you your right to water while standing in line to vote; but never willingly give of your one prized possession, your body, to this country and its people.
I want to think that this brown man received the same lessons and, in response, he’s risking his body for a country that would destroy him for selling hand-wrapped cigarettes on the street, sleeping in his own apartment, or walking through a neighborhood that is not his own in pursuit of gas station skittles. Fear reminds me that Sonya Massey dropped a pot of water, apologized and was shot in the face. That John McCloud was flat against the ground when deputies shot him in his spinal column. That Messiah Nantwi was surrounded by ten prison guards, handcuffed to a chair in his cell, and beaten with club, baton, and fist to death. Why resist when the inevitable sentence will be the destruction of your body?
There is not an easy answer to that question. My mind goes to memories: the time my family’s washing machine broke and we entered the world of laundromats and white-light lit shopping centers. One laundromat located in the dark underbelly of Prince George’s County had industrial washers the size of full apartment bathrooms and a closet-sized takeaway place attached to it by wood and mortar and brick. Glass thicker than 4C hair looked in on the place with its one curved bench, perpetually yellow countertop, and wall-length menu of food that probably came frozen. Six in the evening–dark on a school night, waiting for my clothes to dry, hungry for crinkle fries, I remember opening the door and it bucking against me. Inside was a Black woman on her knees before a Black man in a white plastic chair, his back to us, his jeans and belt dangling around his ankles. She made eye contact with me through the glass and turned a dark shade of plum. She stood up, made for the door, and shouted, “What you see?” like an incantation, all the colors of something dangerous on her voice.
Back then, I remember being terrified. Now, I believe I understand. When the world you know is a pulsing sphere of fear, eye contact means pulling up your fists and advancing toward a child ten years younger than you. She felt judged and refused to take that judgment kneeling. So, she advanced. I have found that shame manifests in this predictable pattern: anger, outrage, then backlash. Her shame speaks to the seventy-seventy million Trump voters still wrapped in the fever dream of the Obama years. It is in conversation with us all.
Struggle is not the full measure of Blackness, but in America, it is our daily wage.
The color of our skin is tied to zip codes through redlining, leading many to getting predatory reverse mortgages on the houses they hammered together with their own hands. In the 2008 recession, my parents exchanged our home for a basement-apartment that flooded every time it rained, and it rained a lot in Prince George’s County. Sweeping water from that basement-apartment at midnight meant struggle. In movies, music, and the written word of our most liberal minded, we are reminded that this is inherent in our country, if not our bones. It is the roads we drive, the neighborhoods we live in, and the homes we surrendered to the equity firms, the Fannie Maes and Freddie Macs, and investors who sucked up all. And now, as people are snatched from the sidewalk and stuffed into unmarked vans by masked white men, we are asked to struggle once more.
Another video: a brown woman with a sun-burst of miniature curls pleading with a line of national guardsmen. A dejected blue T-Rex suit sways around her hips like the long and stringy petals of a Medusa orchid. There’s a faceless wall of MARPAT green surrounding the black glass Metropolitan Detention Facility and she’s appealing to it, “What the hell is this?!” Her voice is tear-gas raw, “Look at you! Look at yourself! How do you sleep at night?” There’s a ritual going on here, one where she cradles her sign and takes three desperate steps toward the line of white men, black rifles wary at their sides. She agrees to two more and breaks, “What the hell is this?” The line of national guardsmen will swallow her, gnash her up and leave behind her body. This is why the person behind the camera reaches out with a wave of other hands to touch her shoulder and hold her stiff.
While fear makes me mosquito-sized, it makes her stormproof. I want to ask why.
These are images I cannot look away from. Here is another: after losing our family home to those soft-handed men who called it foreclosure, as if word could erase what they stole, we moved into my grandparent’s basement. Here, every rainy night was a battle. One rainy night out of many, old carpet sucking wet against our bare or sandaled feet, my father opens the front door and a torrent of rain snatches it from him. It’s dark as space outside and my brother rushes into the linoleum cut bathroom for a bucket. Water thrashes in the storm drain that’s a black-welled welcome mat on any other day. The sludge-dark water the only thing capable of catching light. My brother passes the bucket up to my father and he drops down, scrapes the water up and flings it over the high wall of brick separating us from the mud outside. My mother and I sweep water out of the living room with straw brooms. Come morning, the basement will smell like something old and forgotten.
I am lucky to have these memories. Turning away from the woman at the laundromat and running for the safety of my mom’s dented white mini-van, suffering the sticky swamp water between my toes as the sky burned orange and my wake-up alarm bled soft NPR; these are things that only the living can replay in response to a dark room and slowing heartbeat. Here too, I could turn to gentler things: a church friend named Mister Tootie giving my family gas after being stuck on the Baltimore freeway for three hours, how fresh-faced children greet me before I walk their teacher through a rousing game of tech support. I believe I have been able to experience these things because I have successfully protected my body by flattening myself into something small.
But America proves this to be false when a bevy of brown dishwashers at Buona Forchetta, a rich restaurant in a rich neighborhood, in the rich white town of South Park, can be snatched away from their sinks, shackled before an army of white people owning million dollar houses, and shuttled away to the black hole of an overcrowded detention facility. These brown people protected their bodies with the wet work of scrubbing their hands raw for fifteen dollars an hour and ten hours of work a day. Now, they are gone.
And a motorcycle-helmeted man hurls rocks in their memory.
Another image of the protests: an ICE officer clad in shell-like ballistic armor takes aim at a brown woman kneeling on the ground with a sign above her head. The rubber-wrapped steel rounds pelt her hair-line. She melts to the pavement. Two ICE officers collect her arms and drag her onto the sidewalk. One officer grips her shoulders, allowing her to sit up. The other holds a limp tourniquet. It flutters in the wind, a white flag of surrender. “You can’t call an ambulance?” People ask the officer. “You’re just going to leave her here?” The officer forces the tourniquet into the drop pouch heavy against his thigh. The woman bleeds rose-pink, her face painted in it. Her head bobbles like she doesn’t understand its weight. “You’re just going to leave her here?!” The protesters repeat.
The officer’s response should not surprise them, “You did this! This is what happens!” The three-point sling attached to his M16 is digging into the shoulder of his black ballistic armor, dragging the shoulder-attaching strap down. “This is your fault!”
The officer propping the brown woman up lets her droop to the pavement. The officers walk toward the street, rejoining the faceless line of dark blue aiming muzzles at the camera, at the people, at the bleeding brown woman with the drooping eyes.
Her head hangs low, chin grazing her chest.
It is as if we are honey sparkling golden at the bottom of a terracotta bowl meant to be drizzled as libation when the people seat a despot on their throne. 77,303,568 Americans voted for middle school staff barricading the entrances and exits of their school against ICE agents on graduation day. For ICE agents sprinting with everything they are after an eighty-six year old man, his skin loose as turkey-flesh, struggling his way to a bus stop past an intersection choked with the lives of working class people. For buildings tall as smoke stacks speckled with arrow-slit-sized rectangular windows, the yellow light in the highest story flashing with a broken man’s desperate signal to the crowd of people below. I want to think he saw someone he knew in that spectrum of speckled browns and star-kissed Blacks. Perhaps he was signaling to show them that he was alive. I exist and I need help.
For these people, the Trump Presidency is not an alarming directive. It is knowing your father cannot leave his home, or he will never return to it. And this feeling tugs at you during your workday of excel spreadsheets and meetings that feel very small in the face of knowing that lives are in jeopardy. That you might be next. And that will be enough to put your body in front of a faceless line of MARPAT, despite knowing in your bones that the state will not be satiated with one. Martyrdom and sacrifice will be demanded of you. It will not be right. And the faithful will tell you that if the honey is not poured and the pot is not broken, then their world cannot be remade. We should reject this.
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