From the death of a woman in Minnesota to federal immigration raids in North Carolina, resistance is an awful reminder of a society once governed by slavery.
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By Martin Henson
Beacon Media
I can imagine the scene: Locked shoulder to shoulder, frightened passengers sweat, as the ziptied, kidnapped victims of immigration enforcement.
The idea this could be me feels more real than it should as the federal immigration raids have hit close to home in recent weeks. Durham’s Avondale Drive, Raleigh’s Capital Boulevard and Charlotte’s Central Avenue were central sites of these roundups, streets that have now betrayed the safety of all who live there.
A quiet voice inside me reminds me that I am a “legal” citizen, with natural born citizenship, and I shouldn’t need to care— but chattel slavery was legal once. I fear that the time when the North Carolina General Assembly did not allow Black people to walk without a pass will come again.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal law enforcement evoke a shared racial terror in both Black and Latino communities, the type that reforms the state power responsible for slavery into immigration enforcement.
Back when white men were deputized to catch slaves, Black people lived in fear of being removed from their loved ones. The marauding bands of ICE agents exist to soothe a similar temperament, due to what sociologists call the “browning” of American society, which is becoming more diverse and has led to a lot of fear among many white people. I feel a connection between Black and Latino, two communities under siege by a system that loves our labor but hates our presence.
Last week, point-blank gunshots fired from an ICE agent to an unarmed mother and poet named Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota. Good’s death mirrors that of Heather Heyer, both dying in defense of communities of color.
All this as the Trump administration’s stated reason for these actions— that violent undocumented immigrants are ruining America — is based on fear and racism, not reality. 65 percent of people detained as of June had no criminal record, and around 90 percent had no convictions for a violent crime. Overall, undocumented immigrants have much lower crime rates than native-born Americans.
The search for “those who do not belong” is littered the collateral damage of those who dare to protest, record, observe or are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.. Some never come home.
I half-joked to a friend recently that Donald Trump might deport anyone, regardless of immigration status. I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable with the idea that I might become “Illegal,” pushing an uneasy comparison to slavery from my subconscious into conscious thought.
My thoughts muddle through this. I am safe, right? I am supposed to feel safe in my own home and my own country — right? As a Black man and a person who opposes the current regime, I don’t feel safe. Hearing about families in hiding creates a fearful sort of disgust in me. Even though I’ve never been a slave, the handcuffs I see on the detained victims of immigration enforcement seem more like the chains that survived the end of chattel slavery than the results of a border patrol sweep. The past lives in me. I feel like a spectator in the immigration fight, yet over 150 years ago, Black people in Durham were once in the same position as the Latino community, fearing their loved ones being ripped from them.
About 6 miles away from the Avondale Drive ICE sits the Stagville plantation, where in 1844, Paul Cameron forced 114 enslaved people to walk “the trek,” 500 miles from Durham to their new plantation in Alabama. Uprooted from their homes, split from their family, going to unknown destinations.
Prevailing ideas of human value refuse the distinction marking a slave’s journey from an immigrant’s search for new opportunities. Denial of land, employment, and safety makes kindred spirits of dissimilar causes. The dehumanizing justifications for exploitation, the replaceability of “cheap labor” and the promise of freedom bind different modes of resistance together.
This logic appears again today.
It is an impossible choice the oppressed must navigate: enslaved people chose between flee or die; immigrants choose to hide or leave.
This convergence on the land that I have come to know brings fear, but it also brings hope. Chattel slavery ended because my ancestors made it untenable. On this land, we have seen the horrors of stripping people away from their families. It is more than my body telling me that I should resist: it is the history of the land, and my ancestors telling me that an immigrant and my forefathers are caught in the same fate, and we should fight for the justice everyone deserves.
Martin Henson, who lives in Raleigh, is an advocate and executive director of BMEN Foundation, which convenes Black men to address issues in their lives and communities. See his work at MartinHSpeaks.com. This column is syndicated by Beacon Media and is available to republish for free on all platforms under Beacon Media’s guidelines.
