Minnesota is Everywhere: On Coming to Our Senses

For Keith, Alex, Renee, Heber, Victor, Parady, Luis, Luis, and Geraldo and For Liam

One of the refrains I have seen in the aftermath of the murder of Alex Pretti in Minnesota is the idea of believing what you see. For those of us who have watched the police murder Black people with impunity on camera for the better part of this century, it is clear this refrain is not necessarily being spoken to us. We are the people who coined phrases like “Don’t sleep,” and “Stay woke,” cultural commands, to see clearly, even in a world built on racist obfuscation of the facts. This is, however, in many ways, fairly new territory for white folks, this unrepentant murdering of a youngish white man, who was protecting a white woman, by federal agents because of their voracious need to devour Brown immigrant folk. So it is, they, these newly aware white folks, who are being told, seeing is believing.

But lest, Black folks, Brown folks, woke folks settle ourselves into the deep, worn and comfortable sofa of “I told you so,” we should attend to the ways this moment, this Trump moment, this artificially intelligent moment, this late capitalist moment, this fascist moment, this genocidal moment, has made all of us far less able to trust our senses.

In a culture of heavily edited soundbites and AI dupes of real people, so rarely are we able to trust what we see, and what we hear. In this era of rampant airborne pathogens, on the one hand, borne of a pathological political commitment to fossil fuels and environmental racism, and airborne pestilences on the other, left unchecked by a federal government that is immune only to truth and science, we cannot trust even the air we breathe. Shared breath is often a lethal proposition, even in a world that thinks Covid is over. In an era of deregulated foodstuffs and rampant conspiracism shaping national food policy, we cannot trust what we eat. What we taste.

We have all, in this culture, become gardeners, growing things on whatever little patches of land, and outdoor space, or in whatever indoor container gardens we can.

In a culture heavy with the weight of the sexual violence enacted by Jeffrey Epstein and his global network of predators, that apparently includes our President, and folks who seemed to aspire to move like these men, men like Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, unhealthy, non-consensual touch, has arisen as an inevitable fact of life for the vulnerable, for women and femmes, for queer and trans people. That our most public instances of unhealthy non-consensual touch these days involve police violently tackling and assaulting peaceful protestors, citizens and immigrants whatever their status, will only offend our senses, if we choose not to believe what we see.

This is an epistemic crisis, this collective inability to trust our senses. Yes, this crisis is just one more pile on in the heap of the polycrisis in which we find ourselves, but it deserves naming all the same. Empirical evidence, evidence that we can verify with our five senses, evidence with historical precedent, has always been the gold standard. And in fact, for folks like me, who teach the tradition of Black feminist epistemology, a tradition that helped me value the knowing that comes from the evidence of things not seen, too – prompts from my spirit, my intuition, from God, from ancestors– empirical evidence has often been a cudgel used against those of us who have had to activate, to discipline, to refine, to become students of other ways of knowing. Harriet Tubman saw a world, sensed a world, we couldn’t see. Moved toward that world as though it already existed and thank God she did.

But Black people, despite the spiritual proclivities many of us have, have never been opposed to the empirical. Not with proverbs like, “so-and-so thinks fat meat ain’t greasy,” and our collective derision for people who believe, “their shit don’t stink.” What we can taste, see, smell, touch, and hear is a baseline.

This moment is hyper-empirical in so many ways – all the things that in other eras, we have chosen not to see, all the ugliness, the endless war, the genocide, the abuse of the vulnerable, has become a mainstage Ted Talk for the masses. Our five senses are overwhelmed, hijacked by an attention economy whose bread and butter is eyes that stay glued to the screen. In this scenario, the only way to for the state to maintain forms of violence that it used to get away with it because so many of us were rarely looking at it, when we are now in a moment where all of us are looking at it, is to make us mistrust what we are seeing and hearing, and who is talking to us about it, altogether.

When Covid locked us in our houses for months, unable to spend time and share air with our neighbors, that singular, collective, traumatic event, eroded our social bonds of trust in ways no other event in several generations has done. It is in that world, where we cannot process what we are seeing or hearing in shared space together, that makes us vulnerable to exploitation.

This is why it mattered for Minnesotan protestors to come together shoulder to shoulder in defiance of the cold, in defiance of (the) ICE, to breathe shared air, to raise a collective breath, to demand an end to the abuse and mistreatment of immigrant folks and citizens alike. That collective show of force was met with violence, with the sacrificing of Alex Pretti’s life. What we cannot afford to do in the aftermath of his death, of Keith Porter’s death, of Renee Good’s death, of the deaths of Heber Sanchaz Dominguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Parady La, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Carceres, and Geraldo Lunas Campos, all killed by ICE in this calendar year, is to concede even one inch to the nonsensical, to the anti-sensical -- regime under which we are being governed.

We must commit to being ungovernable in these circumstances. In the wild, the thing that will save you is your ability to trust your senses. And make no mistake – these are the wilds of an empire in ruins. We must navigate these ruinous times together, make sense of them together, with other flesh and blood humans, that we can see, touch, sense, smell, and in only the most consensual of circumstances, taste.

The digital has made us believe that human relationships are fungible, disposable, expendable. Exploitation at the hands of the digital – which is to say algorithmic injustice -- reigns in a world where the human becomes an inherently unstable assemblage, capable only of causing harm or extracting emotional labor. In this way, digital exploitation is like unto spiritual exploitation which, itself reigns in a world, where our senses, and our good sense, have been set in opposition to the spiritual, rather than a conduit to it, a world where spiritual bypassing, allows us to escape from a world that sensually assaults us, rather than confront that world the bravery that comes from spiritual discipline.

We can only resist the thrust of this, by our insistence upon togetherness, safe and consensual, (and masked and vaccinated), togetherness.

So knit the hats, and in so doing, reclaim the pleasure of touch. Knit them, together, perhaps at a meeting of the town council, or in the public square at a protest. Call your electeds. Give the people money. Take your meds. Call a therapist. Host a potluck, and reclaim your taste. Take a nature walk, or burn some sage, and reclaim your sense of smell. Read all the books, give your eyes a resting place in beautiful or clarifying prose. Poetry.

Those that have ears to hear, let them hear. The music. The poetry. The podcast. The audiobook. The resistance.

We must not only come to our senses, but commit to not leaving them, or each other, behind. Do not leave them behind in the wake of digital artifice, broken trust, and these ferocious jaws of power come to eat us alive. Look closely, because you might discover that the roaring lion is merely a pussycat.

Feast with each other. Touch each other (with permission). Listen to each other. Savor each other. See each other. This is what love looks like. “It is our duty to love each other and protect each other.” Assata taught me. To love our neighbor. As ourselves. Palestinian Jesus taught me.

This is a moment to remember that we make the most sense together. Not apart. Come to your senses. And stay there.