🟧 On Minneapolis
Emily Chang on her hometown's protest, community, and American spirit.
Dear One Thing readers: Kyle is on parental leave, about which more soon. In the meantime, Emily Chang continues her streak writing for us, this time on the Twin Cities’ civic rebellion against ICE, as experienced by her family and friends there. It is not this newsletter’s usual subject, but as Emily writes in this powerful essay, it’s hard to think about anything else in this moment.
When I try to write about what’s happening in Minneapolis, I feel an emergency brake turning on in my mind. The words come out slow. My brain operates at half speed, maybe slower. Why? Maybe because I haven’t lived there in nearly ten years, that it feels like I don’t have the right to publicly “comment” on anything, even though my family still lives there, and my brother has witnessed unfathomable grief on our familiar streets. I grew up in Woodbury, Minnesota, twenty minutes away from Minneapolis’ rumbling soul, for twenty years and studied neuroscience and communications at the University of Minnesota, in the heart of where the major protests are happening. This is the state my parents immigrated to from Taiwan. It’s the state that raised me, and a state that I know well to stand up for strangers and fight for warmth when it’s dead cold. Especially on days like today.
But this isn’t a public “comment,” this is a report of numerous stories I have heard from close family and friends — a few out of thousands of stories, which now need to be told.
Beyond even the protests, shootings, vigils, and government messaging, this moment in the city is a living nightmare. Hundreds of legal minority immigrants are disappearing, and our local communities are bending over backwards to support each other. ICE is operating in what seems like a completely rogue manner, going after anyone who looks “foreign” and putting trackers under their cars, detaining legal citizens without waiting to see their IDs, taking families away in school parking lots, and shooting people in cold blood, including but by no means limited to Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
What this means is that you get a new generation of kids who aren’t white that are staying home from school because they’re afraid to go to school. It doesn’t matter if they’re citizens or not, because immigration is evidently not the primary concern of ICE. Legal citizens who have been detained are being dropped off miles away from home in below freezing weather, often without personal belongings, a phone, or an ID. Many have not returned home. It reminds me of the recent horror film Weapons, in which an entire class of elementary school children disappear one day, as the film follows the grief and aftermath of the events. It may be a horror movie about a witch, but it’s far tamer than the real-life horror experienced today.
My brother in Minneapolis sees immigrant businesses brandishing their legal paperwork on their storefront windows, begging ICE to stay away. He witnesses teachers rising up to take care of parentless children. Farmers, city people, parents, grandparents, children arriving at protests with all of their hearts. Minnesota is famously blue amidst a very red Midwest, largely due to Twin Cities voters. Rural and suburban areas are generally very conservative, and when ICE entered the town of Willmar, Minnesota, their people stood up, too. This is beyond liberalism and conservatism; ICE is a moral failure.
The world has seen how Minnesotans show up for each other in that stunning image of the protest by the US Bank Stadium. In -8 degree weather, we Minnesotans fought for ourselves with non-violent force, drowning the street with our voices and no-nonsense spirit. Minnesotans see evil and they act accordingly. It’s really that simple. The protest photo made me cry. I haven’t lived in the city in nearly ten years, but when I saw the sheer size of the crowd, I just thought to myself: Of course. That’s us. Why should I have feared anything different, that the entire country was hopeless? The Trumpian ideology wants to tell us that, that society is a struggle to dominate and the only strength is oppression. But we know otherwise.
The crowd was so large that, as Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic, it “proves MAGA wrong… the federal surge into Minneapolis reflects a series of mistaken MAGA assumptions. The first is the belief that diverse communities aren’t possible…” Serwer writes that the Twin Cities’ residents “do not share the narcissism of being capable of loving only those who are exactly like them.” What I find so ironic about ICE is just how un-American they are, when they are meant to be defending some mistaken idea of American identity.
I love the American spirit. It is optimism, forwardness, bravery, confidence, and spunk. Americans are loud. Minnesotans have an ineffable sense of integrity. It is baked into the culture. Combine those two things and you get a concoction ICE cannot defeat. Watching this from afar has clarified something that will stay with me long after the news cycle moves on. It won’t be the statements or articles or more chatter about protests. It will be the people who kept showing up for each other, without needing to be seen.
Emily Chang is a creative director, writer, and photographer in Manhattan. You can read her Substack here.
Beautiful, heartbreaking, hopeful. Thank you for sharing this glimpse.