Where Do You Draw Your Resistance Line in the Sand?
Today, in the United States of America, our president and his executive departments pursue policies and implement or rescind regulations that single out and marginalize migrants-of-color, making their lives miserable, and we as individuals have to decide when and how to resist. Whether splitting up asylum-seeking families, reversing protections under DACA, eliminating the path to citizenship for those serving in the U.S. military, threatening the revocation of naturalized citizenship, choosing not to renew the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Salvadorans, Haitians, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans, and stopping H-1B visa extensions to highly skilled foreign workers and not permitting their spouses to be granted visas, the Trump administration is making blatant and relentless efforts to end immigration from what he calls “shithole countries,” and through deportations, reduce the number of people of color already here. This is an embarrassment to me, and I believe an embarrassment to the majority of my fellow citizens. Is this the kind of country we want to live in, and if not, what can we do about it?
We now live in a time where there are checkpoints on our roads and Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) agents are boarding trains and buses and conducting random searches for undocumented migrants. There are sweeps at workplaces looking for undocumented people, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are lying in wait at locations where the undocumented are likely to congregate, such as border crossings, schools, churches, hospitals, and courts. When found, these people, who are just trying to live their lives, are brutally separated from their families and thrown into a harsh detention system more geared toward oppression and discouraging detainees from ever returning to the U.S., if they should be so lucky as to survive deportation to their home countries where they will encounter what they were originally fleeing from: abusive ex-boyfriends and husbands, murderous gangs, or general chaos.
This marginalization and oppression of people of color in the United States today is comparable to the treatment of the Jews and other so-called “undesirables” at the hands of Nazi Germany, if not in degree, then in substance. During World War II my family members in Poland were called vermin and forced into the Warsaw ghetto. A couple of years later my great-grandparents and great aunts and uncles and their children were rounded up by storm troopers in the early morning hours, forced onto wagons, and taken to the Warsaw detention center, before being loaded onto cattle cars bound for Auschwitz and Treblinka. They were forcibly separated at the camps, with some sent to immediate gassing and incineration in crematoriums. Others were forced to live in deplorable conditions, fed inedible food at starvation levels, and forced to work until their deaths. Thirty-two members of my family died this way.
I suspect many readers are thinking the situations are not comparable, that I am merely being hyperbolic, and exaggerating the similarities. “This is America. We are not Nazis, and this situation is nothing like the Holocaust,” I can hear them say. “We do not live in a totalitarian country, and our leaders are not despots.” But the ever-present life-sucking oppression people of color in this country face is almost identical to what my relatives faced under the Nazis, and while we might not have gas chambers and crematoria, is it a matter of degree, or just a matter of time? Could we already be on the slippery slope to becoming what we say we abhor? After all, authoritarianism is rarely, if ever, imposed in one fell swoop, but is instead a creeping phenomenon, like death by a thousand cuts. If that is happening here, will we look back in a few years and say, “That was when we should have drawn the line”?
In our country we hold a few truths to be self-evident. We agree that as a nation our people have a right not to have their stuff stolen, their dignity assailed, or their wellbeing threatened. This applies equally to all of us, regardless of the color of one’s skin, and we should not be discarding these values in our treatment of noncitizens. Otherwise where has our humanity gone? Therefore, our current situation begs the question, do we as individuals have an obligation to prevent such behavior? I know the commonly-held belief is that there are authorities to deal with breaches of these fundamental rights, and that we should turn to them for help. But what happens when the authorities are the perpetrators? What do we do then?
If the institutions and the authorities meant to uphold these rules are captured by the regime, we are faced with the choice of trying to stop this dissolution of norms from happening, or stepping back, averting our eyes, and letting it happen; all the while praying it won’t be directed at us.
Assuming we can answer questions of determination (Is “it” happening?), questions of frequency of occurrence (Has “it” happened once, or is it a pattern of occurrences?), questions of severity (Is “it” bad enough to act?), how bad does it have to get for us to do something? In other words, where do we draw the line in the sand that says, “This is too much?” When do we say, “Enough is enough?” Maybe we’ll know the time has arrived when we see it. Or maybe we will recognize the moment too late, and we’ll look back and say, “That was when we should have drawn the line.” Put differently, and referring back to the anecdote of death by a thousand cuts, do we think we should draw the line at the 59thcut, or the 394th? Or maybe it is okay to wait until the 897thcut, except, of course, if you are one of those being cut.
And if our leaders and institutions have failed us, and we’re blindly trying to find our way back to our societal norms, what means do we have at our disposal to get there? What if the “blue wave” doesn’t materialize? What if it does, but the election results are not honored? What are our options, especially if our leaders and institutions refuse to return to the status quo ante? Historically we have turned to legislation and litigation, but what if those institutions and mechanisms are co-opted and not available to us? What’s left?
Consider what you would do if you see someone verbally threatening to strike another person. You might try to persuade them not to. But what if you see someone raising their hand to strike another person? You are then faced with a choice: watch helplessly, intercede, or join the oppressor. Let the person be hit, or physically use your body to deflect or absorb the blow, or worse yet, join in with those doing the hitting. These are the choices we have when our government and institutions turn against subgroups of the populace, which is no different than turning against all of us.
In retrospect, I wish the Polish people had asked themselves the questions I asked above and had concluded it was their responsibility to act by putting themselves between the Nazis and the Jews. If they had, my family would be bigger today. But some Poles did not think about the issues, some no doubt thought about the issues, but chose not to act due to their privilege or because of potential threats to their livelihoods or wellbeing, and yet others thought the Jews really were deserving of their fate. Heroism does not come easily to most of us. Despite our desire to believe that heroism is the norm, our everyday experience says otherwise. We desperately wish it were not so. We’d like to believe we are good, but good requires taking positive action, not passive indifference. As Cynthia Ozick wrote in her prologue to the book “Rescuers” (Gay Block and Malka Drucker, Holmes & Meier, 1992):
“For the victims on their way to the chimneys, there is scarcely anything to choose between a thug with an uplifted truncheon and the decent citizen who will not lift up his eyes.”
And so, I ask again, at what point do those of us lucky enough not to be the targets of the regime have a moral duty to act? Is the situation bad enough yet? Do people have to die, or is being rounded up, separated from their families, and deported sufficient grounds to act? At what point do we say, “It’s happening here”? And if we decide that now is the time to act, what do we do? What happens if we try a peaceful course of corrective action and it fails, or is insufficient? Do we escalate our protests, going from civil disobedience, to more overt types of protest such as Cacerolazo (the banging of pots and pans in the streets) as South American mothers did? Is putting our bodies between oppressors and the oppressed acceptable? Is violence ever permissible if our nonviolent protestations have failed?
These are hard questions, and you will note I don’t have answers, just inklings of where this should go. In the meantime, I implore you to think about these issues now, because we must begin a dialogue on where our lines are as individuals and as a nation. Figure out where you draw your lines, and then decide what steps you will take if your lines are crossed. We have the benefit of hindsight — we should use it.
Originally published at weintercede.net on August 6, 2018.
