Next Door neighbors.
How can I help my neighbors when the ICE vans come?
My Next Door is blowing up with alerts, and not the usual “Have You Seen Fluffy?” sort.
“ICE seen at X and Y streets.”
“ICE rounding up at the school.”
“ICE just took __ taco stand owner.”
Unidentified masked marauders are rounding up hardworking, tax-paying NON-criminals from my neighborhood while I go about my business. Not because I don’t care. But because I have no idea what to do.
Except to confront my privilege. I can walk into a grocery store, a post office, or a doctor’s office without fear of being questioned, harassed, or detained — solely because of the color of my skin.
Not because I’m a citizen — plenty of U.S. citizens have been rounded up.
Not because I have no criminal record — plenty of law-abiding people sit in detention centers.
But because of my lily white skin — a simple genetic fluke, a mutation producing less melanin than darker skins, the glorification of which I’ve never understood.
This skin, so prized, is the reason tanning beds thrive despite the cancer risks.
It demands obsessive slatherings of sunscreen at the faintest hint of sun.
It requires Botox and fillers to conceal its relentless tendency to wrinkle and sag.
Tell me again: what makes white skin so great?
Meanwhile, some other folks with my skin color cheer the construction of Alligator Alcatraz, a hastily erected, bare bones immigrant detention center. It not only lacks sufficient sanitation and other basic human provisions but sits poised to destroy sensitive habitat and sacred tribal lands. All for what? To make scapegoats of the most vulnerable, all because the changing world no longer tilts in their favor.
This isn’t justice. It’s mob mentality vengeance.
Not that I haven’t enjoyed some moments of schadenfreude. I’ve been known to savor the downfall of some high-and-mighty laid low. I am Fierce Shirley’s daughter after all. She once argued with a motorcycle cop who had given her a citation based on his “eyeballing” her speed — he had no radar gun. She knew her speed and she was irate. She called him every name in the book.
A week later, that same police officer suffered severe injuries after a motorcycle accident. “He deserved it,” she claimed. “But mom he was badly injured!” I protested. “He should not have given me that ticket,” she replied with a steely gaze.
I inherited her strong sense of injustice, and a part of me wishes she was here to mete out some instant karma. Why do awful people with money and power seem to get away with saying and doing whatever awful thing comes to mind anymore? Feisty Shirley would have something to say about that.
She isn’t here to advise me anymore, and these days, I’m choosing compassion to be my guide. I’ll post an offer to deliver food or medicine to anyone in my Buy Nothing group who fears leaving the house. Maybe it’s not the kind of justice Mom would’ve served up, but it will keep me from going numb, normalizing the horrific inhumanity, simply because I don’t know what to do.
