ICE Raids, LA Protests, and The Future
We will not go quietly
Over the last week in Los Angeles, there’s been an uprising against escalating ICE raids that targeted workplaces such as day laborers in a Home Depot parking lot and workers at Ambiance Apparel. We all know this is a part of the Administration’s agenda.
But Los Angeles isn’t having it.
Once news of the raid got out, the sites were flooded with concerned family members and protestors who also took the streets from Downtown LA to the neighborhoods of Paramount and Compton. And, like they do, the police called to the scene turned violent against the protestors.
Predictably, the Trump Administration showed up with force by sending in National Guard troops without the consent of local and state leaders.
It has been days of protests since then showing that the people of Los Angeles—which has the largest Latinx population at in the United States, making up about half of the population of LA County—will not take fascism lying down.
To me, this is also a fight for the future. A fight for a non-dystopian future that is ruled by authoritarians but by people. In that, it is a fight to shape what kind of world we want to live in. That’s how I see any and all protests. It’s what we saw during 2020 in the unparalleled racial justice uprising across the United States. Of course, the cultural changes following were swiftly reversed when it didn’t seem to serve the companies who made the changes (alas, Target’s steep drop in sales after their public DEI turnaround is a cautionary tale). Yet, people—the majority I would like to say—are fighting for a future that they want and deserve. A future that all people can live a happy, healthy life in this country.
What we are seeing in the streets of Los Angeles, to me, makes me wonder what we are going to see in the future. The authoritarianism of this Administration is certainly unprecedented, but the tactics are familiar and not new at all. Across the history of the United States, we have seen failed government responses to many crises. It’s rooted in the “elite panic” usually perpetuated by the elite and, often, government entities.
Rebecca Solnit writes about this phenomenon in her book A Paradise Built in Hell. In almost every one of the disasters she covers from the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, elite panic gets in the way of the very real good that is happening through mutual aid and local and regional responses to disaster.
Take the overwhelming concern by residents in the wake of a disaster as well as during any kind of uprising of the concern for “looting.” I’ve seen, especially White folks who don’t even live in the city in question raise concerns about looting while they watch scenes from a protest or uprising take place, even people who claim to be sympathetic to a cause. For example, I can’t tell you the number of White liberals who I heard say something along the lines of “it’s terrible what they did to George Floyd and of course it’s wrong, but why do they have to loot?”
It’s the same post-disaster. There is an overwhelming concern of the elite that looting should be kept at bay post-disaster.
“Many would not consider property crimes significant when lives are at stake,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “and the term looting conflates the emergency requisitioning of supplies in a crisis without a cash economy with opportunistic stealing. Disaster schools now call this fear-driven overreaction elite panic.”
It’s the same reaction to racial justice uprisings where a focus on “looting” and private property usurps the real problem of systemic racial injustice. It’s all one and the same.
This is all to say that when we watch these protests on TV and we see the National Guard coming in and we see the violence—which, contrary to the way the media casts it is by and large perpetuated by law enforcement, not the protestors—we are seeing a fight for the future.
That fight for the future is at the heart of social protest and every single act of resistance is about that fight. So with that, keep on fighting.
Also, shout out to all the people in Los Angeles doing the work on the ground. Keep an eye out for my colleague’s
as they have a post coming reacting specifically to what is happening on the ground and what you can do. (I have inside intel because I work with them and worked on said post).