I wrote of the slave patrols of our history and the modern times where the highest court in the land has ruled that you can be stopped for “looking immigrant.”

He’d be told he “fit the description.” He was in someplace that “people like him” congregated. Or you weren’t congregating, which was justification for stopping you and asking you where you were going. Moving too fast, you were fleeing, and subject to violent detention. Not moving fast enough, disrespecting them, subject to violent detention.

He wasn’t so ignorant as to think that the police would help him. The police grew from the same racist roots, now part of the same racist system. His skin color allowed them to judge without knowing him. Yet for some, their own skin color meant they were just buying time before the system was turned back on them.

Read it in Public Square

This piece started from a similar space as my piece “Does anyone win when children are bombed?” Taking two different periods of history and revealing the lines connecting the dots in an attempt to slip through people’s defenses who would ignore the modern piece if I presented it directly.

But there was, and is, something particularly perverse about people cheering on, or participating in the targeting of “the other” when it’s so clearly obvious that they are on the list of those who will be othered next. But if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu, and the white supremacists need a never ending target of hate and blame. I’ve got bad news for you if you think they’ll look past your skin color when they run out of the current “other.”