Riot Woman
by Eleanor C. Whitney
an excerpt from the memoir published by Microcosm Publishing | September 14, 2021
"ON SOLIDARITY, SHOWING UP, AND SURVIVAL"
With a group of neighbors I approached the brutalist skyscraper in Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan. We waited in long lines to enter, shuffling past gruff guards who barked instructions as we placed our belongings on belts to be x-rayed and we passed through metal detectors.
We were there to accompany Mr. Chen, a neighbor of ours from Sunset Park, Brooklyn and an immigrant from China targeted during a raid by agents at a warehouse where he worked. The sole caretaker of his clinically depressed teenage son, the spectre of deportation loomed both impossible, terrifying, and all too close.
Having cleared the security checkpoint, the lobby ceiling soared above us as we clacked across the marble floor. An elevator whisked us to the 9th story, deep into the building where drop ceilings hovered just above our heads, cramped and dark. A space both ornate and stale, designed to intimidate.
Outside the waiting room for Immigration and Customs Enforcement hearings, Sherry, our group leader spoke directly to the guard, informing him that we were friends and neighbors of Mr. Chen here to accompany him to his hearing. The guard would not let us in. Sherry continued to push, finally convincing them to allow his interpreter and son to accompany him. A system designed to isolate, to confuse.
A steady parade of people walked by us, as we stood resolute, silent, behind Sherry. They moved hesitantly, heads bowed, into that room, where they may or may not come out, where they may or may not be deported. African, Central American, Eastern European, Arab, Asian, South Asian. Nervously clutching documents, holding small children, their best shirts pressed. Nothing, I thought, lays politics and privilege as bare as this.
As a white, middle class person, a US citizen, a “professional,” I rarely encounter the structures of bureaucracy and authority that are daily realities for so many. My life does not have the shadow of deportation, police violence, or surveillance hanging over it. I am not required to navigate a system of byzantine, ever shifting laws informed by legacies of colonialism and contemporary racism which are often omnipresent in the lives of immigrants and communities of color in the United States.
I thought about my time at a liberal arts college, also in lower Manhattan, where I sat in a circle of desks with my classmates, discussing power and privilege. We explored what allyship meant as we analyzed the texts of James Baldwin, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Frantz Fanon. We talked about solidarity versus sympathy, and the difference between acting on behalf of and acting with.
While I deeply believed in the importance of doing the intellectual work to become, as I said at the time, “a non-shitty white person,” I was never fully able to move beyond books and discussions. What Freire defined as “praxis,” the melding of theory with action, seemed elusive to me.
Under this administration, I am finding this praxis in the form of viewing my privilege as a responsibility and using it to protect and stand up for those more vulnerable than me. I think often about what James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, “It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”
Our humanity and our communities are bound together, whether we have papers or not. Yet my friends, my neighbors live with a daily, pressing fear that I can only begin to imagine in this country that I have always been told has been mine.
With a group of neighbors I approached the brutalist skyscraper in Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan. We waited in long lines to enter, shuffling past gruff guards who barked instructions as we placed our belongings on belts to be x-rayed and we passed through metal detectors.
We were there to accompany Mr. Chen, a neighbor of ours from Sunset Park, Brooklyn and an immigrant from China targeted during a raid by agents at a warehouse where he worked. The sole caretaker of his clinically depressed teenage son, the spectre of deportation loomed both impossible, terrifying, and all too close.
Having cleared the security checkpoint, the lobby ceiling soared above us as we clacked across the marble floor. An elevator whisked us to the 9th story, deep into the building where drop ceilings hovered just above our heads, cramped and dark. A space both ornate and stale, designed to intimidate.
Outside the waiting room for Immigration and Customs Enforcement hearings, Sherry, our group leader spoke directly to the guard, informing him that we were friends and neighbors of Mr. Chen here to accompany him to his hearing. The guard would not let us in. Sherry continued to push, finally convincing them to allow his interpreter and son to accompany him. A system designed to isolate, to confuse.
A steady parade of people walked by us, as we stood resolute, silent, behind Sherry. They moved hesitantly, heads bowed, into that room, where they may or may not come out, where they may or may not be deported. African, Central American, Eastern European, Arab, Asian, South Asian. Nervously clutching documents, holding small children, their best shirts pressed. Nothing, I thought, lays politics and privilege as bare as this.
As a white, middle class person, a US citizen, a “professional,” I rarely encounter the structures of bureaucracy and authority that are daily realities for so many. My life does not have the shadow of deportation, police violence, or surveillance hanging over it. I am not required to navigate a system of byzantine, ever shifting laws informed by legacies of colonialism and contemporary racism which are often omnipresent in the lives of immigrants and communities of color in the United States.
I thought about my time at a liberal arts college, also in lower Manhattan, where I sat in a circle of desks with my classmates, discussing power and privilege. We explored what allyship meant as we analyzed the texts of James Baldwin, bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Frantz Fanon. We talked about solidarity versus sympathy, and the difference between acting on behalf of and acting with.
While I deeply believed in the importance of doing the intellectual work to become, as I said at the time, “a non-shitty white person,” I was never fully able to move beyond books and discussions. What Freire defined as “praxis,” the melding of theory with action, seemed elusive to me.
Under this administration, I am finding this praxis in the form of viewing my privilege as a responsibility and using it to protect and stand up for those more vulnerable than me. I think often about what James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, “It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”
Our humanity and our communities are bound together, whether we have papers or not. Yet my friends, my neighbors live with a daily, pressing fear that I can only begin to imagine in this country that I have always been told has been mine.
The petty cruelty and calculated evil of this administration is astounding, yet unsurprising. We are a society built on slavery and the exploitation of immigrant labor. We still slaughter people for driving or breathing while black, and intensively profile activists of color, so of course a militarized, bureaucratized force comes after immigrants. It was something I had known as fact for many years, but this was the first time I witnessed it so close at hand.
My neighbors and I were reticently waiting in the Federal Building’s formica and fiberboard cafeteria when we got the news that Mr. Chen was released from his hearing and told to come back in six months. Six months to continue to work, to care for his son, to worry, to build a legal case. A breath of hope, but also an unanswered question.
Rebecca Solnit, in her small black book of the resistance, Hope in the Dark, declared that hope is action. Hope is also a form of faith—to be hopeful you must be patient, but you must act strategically and decisively in the present. It may be uncertain when and how, but faith shows the walls can, will, and must come tumbling down.
I know that’s how change happens—in bits and pieces, imperfectly. I’m trying to accept that as I want to rip Federal Plaza and all the apparatus of deportation and imprisonment, apart at its concrete and rebar foundation.
I’m working to center myself in action and movement, collaborating with my neighbors to host free legal clinics, know your rights dinners for immigrant families, and to elect pro-immigrant local representatives. I’m challenging myself to embrace flexibility as needs and situations change, pushing myself to do what is necessary in the moment, while a small voice nags at me, “Is this enough?” To survive during these times it’s essential to simultaneously hold on to two distinct possibilities: of facing the system and ourselves where we are now, and imagining what could be.
I’m not sure what will happen to Mr. Chen when he goes back for his ICE check in a few months. But I know that if he wants community support, we’ll be there. And I know that when I am called to support immigrants across the city I will be there. And it is both frustrating and empowering to know that sometimes the best you can do is to keep showing up.
My neighbors and I were reticently waiting in the Federal Building’s formica and fiberboard cafeteria when we got the news that Mr. Chen was released from his hearing and told to come back in six months. Six months to continue to work, to care for his son, to worry, to build a legal case. A breath of hope, but also an unanswered question.
Rebecca Solnit, in her small black book of the resistance, Hope in the Dark, declared that hope is action. Hope is also a form of faith—to be hopeful you must be patient, but you must act strategically and decisively in the present. It may be uncertain when and how, but faith shows the walls can, will, and must come tumbling down.
I know that’s how change happens—in bits and pieces, imperfectly. I’m trying to accept that as I want to rip Federal Plaza and all the apparatus of deportation and imprisonment, apart at its concrete and rebar foundation.
I’m working to center myself in action and movement, collaborating with my neighbors to host free legal clinics, know your rights dinners for immigrant families, and to elect pro-immigrant local representatives. I’m challenging myself to embrace flexibility as needs and situations change, pushing myself to do what is necessary in the moment, while a small voice nags at me, “Is this enough?” To survive during these times it’s essential to simultaneously hold on to two distinct possibilities: of facing the system and ourselves where we are now, and imagining what could be.
I’m not sure what will happen to Mr. Chen when he goes back for his ICE check in a few months. But I know that if he wants community support, we’ll be there. And I know that when I am called to support immigrants across the city I will be there. And it is both frustrating and empowering to know that sometimes the best you can do is to keep showing up.
