[An earlier version of this article was first published in Waging Nonviolence]
Friend,
I was leading the afternoon session in a room of Black clergy. I had been planning to announce happier news that our boycott pressure Avelo forced them out of the deportation business. (Since writing this piece, Spotify has announced it, too, has buckled to the boycott and is no longer showing ICE ads.)
But the breaking news overshadowed it. I told them that an ICE observer in Minneapolis had been shot. They gasped. Somehow, the gasp was the first moment I realized we’re collectively holding a traumatic story.
I didn’t have many details. I did not yet know her name: Renee Nicole Good. Or that she was a mother of a kid just about my daughter’s age. I didn’t know Renee’s mother’s description of her daughter as “loving, forgiving and affectionate.” I didn’t know of the donation page to support Renee’s now orphaned son and wife.
All I knew was that she was killed. I said so. Another audible gasp.
My hands both tightened into fists. My heart rate increased. My breath paused and only lightly inhaled. The gasps reminded me of the same gasps from an audience when Robert Kennedy told an audience that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed. It’s a moment I’m too young to remember, but we are muscle memory from our ancestors and passed-down stories. My eyesight blurred.
I had a room of wise elders. One of the healers was holding her hand to her chest, stretching her arms up, and visibly and audibly breathing in and out. So I publicly asked her: “Remind us, what do we do when we hear about traumas?”
Our bodies tense, she said. They react to the trauma as if it happened to us. It helps to note in our minds and bodies that, in this moment, this did not happen to us. We let the experience move through us. We feel the emotions that arise.
“Do not push any emotions away, that’s dangerous. You cannot pretend it didn’t happen or distance,” she said. Even before making meaning of things, she encouraged us to take a second to hold our hand on our hearts and take some breaths.
We took three large breaths together as one. And then we moved into planning.
That moment of adrenaline — spurred by the atrocity — is the body preparing for fast movement. It is a safety mechanism to get our body ready to run to safety.
But after that initial adrenaline moves out of our systems, our nervous system can stay hyper-activated. Our body-mind may stay locked, unable to process clearly because we’re still anxiously looking for anything that’s a threat — even if it’s merely a friend trying to support us but not quite saying the right thing. We sense danger everywhere. In that hyper-activated state none of us can do our best thinking, best grieving, or best planning. Later that day, I needed to swim, hike, slowly exhale — anything to reset my parasympathetic nervous system.
If you are looking for other ways to do this, these can be helpful prompts: Put your feet flat on the floor and press down. Name five things you can see, three you can hear, one you can touch. Hold a friend’s hand. Connect with Nature. Note past griefs and pain that arises naturally.
And then act.
I am not attempting here to be suggestive of what people should do. But I want to remind us about some options and some things not to do.
It is the choices of this hateful, vile regime that brought us to this point. And it is the conditions — not merely the individual officer — that got us here. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey rightly described any spin that the agent was acting in self-defense: “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly: that is bullshit.”
Reports say in the last four months, immigration officers have shot at nine people. Thirty-two people have now died in ICE custody. And Trump meanwhile is saying he wants to explode the military budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.
So how do movements respond?
For one, it’s helpful to just recall that we live in a land of great diversity. Our communities hold different rituals. When in 2012 a gunman killed six congregants in a Sikh temple, the community responded with a candlelight vigil. After the shooting at the Pulse Nightclub, the LGBTQ community put up “Love Wins” signs, murals and memes alongside collective mourning nights. After the Charleston church shooting in 2015, folks held prayer vigils.
The point is there will be a myriad of responses. And just as much, there will be multiple responses emotionally, too. Some of us will react with quiet internal processing. Some will need space away to make meaning. Others will find healing in public defiance, anger and fury at the injustice. Public grief. Sadness. Confusion. Exhaustion. All these different emotional responses need to be honored — though any one action does not have to encompass all of them.
One mistake is when we try to police emotions. Gov. Walz was fully correct that this murder is “totally predictable, totally avoidable.” But him asking people to “remain calm” misses some of the mark — anger at injustice is always justified.
That’s a lesson ACT UP gave us. Facing annihilation in the face of government inaction to the AIDS epidemic, they turned their rageful grief into public action. Famously, people asked for their cremated remains to be parts of actions — tossed illegally onto the White House lawn as a testament to the violence of the government turning its back on its people.
ACT UP poignantly showed we can remain fierce, angry, righteous and persuasive — giving our anger direction so that it doesn’t go inwards or turn into other misdirected violence. Demanding “calm” from people in pain misses the point — the task is not to extinguish anger, but to channel it in defense of life. But the strategic point remains: We should not cede ground by stooping to their use of violence. We are the people saying no more violence, kidnappings or harassment — Trump and his regime are the ones defending murder as justified and kidnappings as safety.
Under the harshest phases of apartheid in South Africa, funerals were one of the few public spaces left. Funerals were long outside parades with songs and chants mixed with tears and declarations of resistance. Large throngs followed the procession of carried caskets. (The violence was so intense during that phase, that the white regime regularly killed people during the funerals, resulting in a rapid-escalation of violence that intended to overwhelm the system.) What persisted was sustained public grief to keep weaving the community together.
Emmett Till was another moment of public death, that became a movement reckoning moment. After white racists tortured him, his family shared his mangled body in an open casket funeral. Lines stretched around the city to bear witness. Emmett Till’s family — his mother in particular, as I recall — was adamant on this point. She wanted the world to see what they did to her baby.
The impact was not an immediate end of racist policy in the U.S. (This is a reminder to assess our actions fairly.) But it was transformative. The great civil rights documentary “Eyes on the Prize” opens with this moment because that family’s brave decision shook this country. Grief, made public, can remake worlds and undo the spells conjured by an unjust system.
As I write, people are showing great bravery. They are going into the streets. They have organized vigils across the country: New York, Chicago, Phoenix, Duluth, Columbus, and an estimated 10,000 in Minneapolis at the site where Renee was killed. They are sharing in their grief and rage, their love of human life and celebration of those who are defending it.
People are calling this as a moment to Abolish ICE — and to remove these lawless federal agencies. People are swiftly organizing national actions on Saturday connecting the raw violence of kidnapping and killing in Venezuela with the violence of kidnapping and killing residents here. You can find other vigils to join here.
People inside the Department of Homeland Security are allegedly leaking how the agents violated their own training. As untrained as they are, they are also carrying out perfectly their aim and intent: terrorize marginalized communities.
These federal agents need to go. States need to move in and swiftly arrest these terrorizing agents. Funding needs to be cut to these rogue various federal agencies that are running amok and Kristi Noem and others should be impeached.
We, the people, will continue to stand up — continue to breathe — and continue to take action together.
In solidarity and love,
- Daniel Hunter, Choose Democracy
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