And between laughter and tears, I say, Yes. Yes. And Future slips a ring onto my finger, a simple rose gold band.
And just like that, we are engaged.
Days later while we are still in Toronto, I wake one morning in excruciating pain. I can barely move, let alone stand. A stabbing feeling radiates from my pelvic area and completely debilitates me. Future rushes me to a clinic, where I receive the best health care I’ve ever gotten. When you go to the ER in the United States, the first place you are sent to is billing. In Canada I am sent, upon arrival, to a midwife, who examines me and does an ultrasound and assures me that the baby is okay. My fees are waived under the immigrant waiver fee—or something like that. I can hardly believe it. We learn, though, that what I do have is something called pelvic flooring disorder and that most of the pain will be alleviated with a belly belt. Future and I decide to fly back to LA and our apartment earlier than we’d planned.
At the airport we are sent to two different lines because our passports are different, our citizenship is different. I am wheeled through security, where I wait and wait for Future, who doesn’t show up, and I am panicking. Finally, after several calls, I get through to them.
They won’t let me in the country, Future says. I’ve been held back and questioned. That’s why I couldn’t call you.
It’s hard to explain what some kinds of defeat feel like, how encompassing, how cruel, how hard to come back from. I am sitting in a wheelchair, unable to walk, six months pregnant now, and the person I love and rely upon most, the person I am engaged to, is being kept from me. Future is my consistency during my pregnancy, a pregnancy in which so little has been consistent. Not money. Not a home.
I want to break down but that is also not an option. I turn to the person who works for the airport who is helping me. Wheel me back, I say. Please, I say. And they do.
We are not going home. At least not yet. We get in a cab and go back to Future’s friend’s house because that’s where they’d been staying as we were making the full transition to the United States. Days later, I head back to my country of borders and walls. A country without my Future.
Carla picks me up from the airport and takes me to the apartment Future and I rented, which now feels immeasurably empty. She buys the belly brace to help alleviate the agony the pelvic flooring has left me in. Immediately, 80 percent of my pain is gone and it feels like I blink three times and my team has surrounded me to secure me during the weeks I will have to spend without Future. My friends Aura and Mesa show up, of course Carla and Tanya, my friend Noni comes through and so do dream and my mom. They cook for me and care for me and hold me down not only physically but also as we work with immigration lawyers to pull together the exorbitant amount of paperwork needed to bring my Future home to me.
Three weeks later, Future is on a plane, and after hours of harassment at the border, harassment that goes on for so long that they miss their flight and we have to buy a whole new ticket, we are together.
* * *
In February 2016, in the presence of our ancestors and 20 of our family and friends, in Malibu, California, at an Airbnb we had rented out and in my ninth month of pregnancy, Future and I are married.
We’d planned on marrying, of course, but the horrors with immigration at the airport sped up our decision. dream hampton officiates the wedding for us, and Future’s brother and also their sister, their twin, are there. Carla and Merv and Tanya and Noni bear witness to our vows, as do Future’s closest friends from Toronto: Allix and Anu, and Future’s best friend, Matt. Among those gathered in the crowd is Mark Anthony, my family forever, my cherished friend. He takes me in his arms.
I am so happy for you, he says, and in the background the waves of the mighty Pacific waters crash against a new shoreline.
Three and a half weeks later, at midnight on March 21, I go into labor a day early. I call my midwives and family and I stay at home and labor for 15 hours, 16. And then I stop dilating.
I know my baby is breech and I have a doctor on call who does breech home births. But then the contracting stops. Don’t worry about it, my doctor and my midwife say. Just go to sleep. Let’s see what happens.
The next morning when I awaken I am still not contracting. My mother and Future are there with me and as much as I want my baby to be born at home, I also know we have no choice. We rush to the hospital and on March 22 at 1:00 in the afternoon, my Shine is born. Future is there throughout the C-section, there at the birth: one precious thing we’d fought for has at least come to pass. I am in a world of pain after the birth—the doctors refuse to give me as much pain medication as I need—but I cannot stop staring at Shine, our own Black Future.
* * *
We are in the hospital together for four nights and five days, and finally I am told we can go home. Mom comes home with me and stays with us for the first two nights and we marvel: This baby is so gentle, so sweet, rarely crying. I want to hold him forever in my arms, keep him safe from the world, run away to a place where only love lives. I am a mother now, and like any mother, as vulnerable as I’ve ever been but as strong as I’ve ever been, as well. We, Future and I, make a family decision two weeks after Shine is born. In Toronto, BLM has occupied the police station. They are calling for charges to be brought against the cops who killed Andrew Loku, an immigrant from the Sudan, a father of five, a man without a gun. Future helped create our team in Toronto, helped lead them. I feel like I have to be there, they say to me.
I do, too, I say, Shine in my arms.
And after that, Future leaves for three weeks, heads into one battlefield as I remain in LA with our baby, at the ready, on still another one.
16
WHEN THEY CALL YOU A TERRORIST
If you hear the dogs, keep going.
If you see the torches in the woods, keep going.
If there’s shouting after you, keep going.
Don’t ever stop. Keep going.
If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.
HARRIET TUBMAN
On November 8, 2016, we are in downtown LA at an election-night gathering. It’s being hosted by Lynne Lyman and asha, who have brought me into the campaign to legalize marijuana in the state. They are determined to include the voices and opinions of the communities most impacted by the drug war. It’s not just the destination, Lynne says to me, it’s also the journey, and this has to be a victory owned by community.
Marijuana is the first point of contact so many young people have with police, contact that often sends them spiraling deeper into the claws of the prison industrial complex. In California, marijuana is the fourth leading cause of deportation, and every night in LA County 500 people sit in the jail simply for possessing it. It’s ridiculous and the legalization law I have worked to support will mean that no child will ever go to prison for marijuana again, that people with a marijuana conviction will not be automatically kept from participating in the marketplace, and that 50 million dollars a year from tax revenue generated by its legal sale will be invested in communities harmed by the drug war. And after months of pushing and canvassing and working to get the word and the vote out, months when our poll numbers dipped down, but then started trending up in the final two weeks, by 8:00 P.M. on election day, it’s clear that we’re going to win and take one more tool out of the arsenal that is used to incarcerate and criminalize mostly young Black and Brown people.
But it also looks like Donald Trump is going to win the presidency, and as the night wears on, we realize this is exactly what is about to happen. A man who openly campaigned on bigotry, white supremacy and misogyny is about to be elevated to one of the most powerful positions in the world. I slide down a wall in the corner of the room. asha brings us drinks and takes a long swig of water. She and Lynne have to hold it and us together; they still have to announce our victory and, at the stroke of midnight, celebrate the first person, Ingrid Archie, to file to have her record for a marijuana conviction expunged, because the law makes that possible, to
o. We tried to think of everything, tried to undo as much injustice as we could in this single piece of legislation, Proposition 64. And we have done it but it feels like everything else has gone straight to hell. How will we survive a Trump presidency? How will we ever protect the people we need to protect? And what about my own child? My own little Shine? Despondent, Future and I leave the gathering and head home to consider the tomorrow we personally, along with our community, will face while Opal holds space with the undocumented families she fights for daily and Alicia remains steadfast, unbowed and ready for battle. She is in full-on planning mode.
It takes me longer to get there. There are moments in each of the days and weeks that follow the election where I cannot stop the tears from pushing, the fear from rising up like bile in my throat. But I am not crying for myself. I am crying for our families still living in poverty. I am terrified for Monte and all the people like him whose health care is at risk. I am crying because for the first time in my life as an organizer, I actually feel helpless. On November 9, there was nothing I could do to stop this man from being president.
And then I get angry. Because we’ve tried so hard. Ninety-six percent of Black women tried so hard in voting against him. And not only did this country not elect Clinton, it elected a person who publicly supported sexual assault, a man once accused of rape by his daughter Ivanka’s mother. I am angry with the Democratic Party for not knowing that there could have been and should have been a better candidate and angry that a better campaign—a campaign that honored the journey, that included community in real and transformative ways—was not launched. I am angry I didn’t realize—or accept at a cellular level—how wedded to racism and misogyny average Americans are. I am angry at my own naiveté. Our own naiveté. There was a real and substantive difference between these two candidates and we didn’t take that seriously enough. Hell, I hadn’t believed Trump would even beat the Bush legacy candidate, and then that candidate was one of the first he knocked out.
But in the wake of the election, it is important that I look in the mirror, that we all do. His campaign and election has put all of our lives even more at risk. In 2016, hate crimes in the United States rose 6 percent in 25 of the largest cities. And we, Black people, were the most common target of them, with hate crimes directed at us disproportionately, at nearly 30 percent, according to FBI statistics.
Clinton had a universe of faults but under her administration we likely wouldn’t have seen married people being picked up and separated by border patrol. Health care, including Planned Parenthood, which is the only access to prenatal and gynecological health care many poor women have at all, wouldn’t be at risk. The Paris Climate Accord wouldn’t have been tossed out. We wouldn’t be going the other way on mass incarceration, prison privatization and the drug war. We wouldn’t be facing the rebirth of the old Jim Crow.
Which is not to say that a Clinton presidency would have meant peace and justice for all. It wouldn’t have. She would have still pushed an agenda that elevated the American Empire in terrible ways. But the loss of even the most compromising of agreements, accords and legislation means that we are starting from negative numbers. It means that we can’t focus on pushing for something far better than the ACA—like single-payer health care—but that we have to fight for even the most basic of rights.
At home, Future is looking at me, at America, sideways. They can’t understand how we allowed this to happen. We have multiple discussions about the slave-era Electoral College, which privileges a minority of people when it comes to electing a person to the highest office in the land. We very seriously broach the idea of moving to Toronto, which a year before had elected not only Trump’s polar opposite, Justin Trudeau, but a person far, far better than the candidate the Democratic party put up.
Because along with the horrors our communities face, we, as organizers, face real and imminent threats. As soon as he is inaugurated, Trump not only removes any vestige of the nods toward human rights that Obama had erected, but he says very specifically that he will have zero tolerance for we who are demanding police and law enforcement accountability, that his administration will be “a law and order administration … [and end the] dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America.”
As of this writing, three of the organizers from Ferguson, DeAndre Joshua, Darren Seals and Edward Crawford, have all been found shot dead in their cars. The cars of two of the young men, DeAndre and Darren, were burned, which destroyed forensic evidence, and Edward’s death was ruled a suicide—even as he had just started a new job and had secured a new apartment, hardly the action of someone looking to die.
Alicia, Opal and I have been sued by a right-winger who claims we instigated riots. Under Obama—because the lawsuit was filed while 44 was in office—we were not worried. Under 45 and Jeff Sessions, we are not so sure what will happen.
So yes, yes it is a terrifying time, as an organizer, as a new mother and as the wife of an immigrant living in a Queer relationship, to be in this nation. And I say that to Future. And then I say, I can’t leave the work here.
Future agrees.
We, Alicia, Opal and I, helped build a vibrant, national network of brave organizers and we can’t abandon ship. I can’t abandon ship. We are all doing work in our locales, and top of my own list in LA County is stopping the building of a $3.5 billion jail. When I am at my most terrified for my family, for my new baby, in the end what makes me stay is us.
We are a forgotten generation. Worse, we are a generation that has been written off. We’ve been written off by the drug war. We’ve been written off by the war on gangs. We’ve been written off by mass incarceration and criminalization. We’ve been written off by broken public schools and we’ve been written off by gentrification that keeps us out of the very neighborhoods we’ve helped build. We actually don’t give a fuck about shiny, polished candidates. We care about justice. We care about bold leaders and actions. We care about human rights and common decency. So there is no other place for me to be but here, where I can continue to help bring that into existence.
I know that it was organizers who pulled us out of chattel slavery and Jim Crow, and it is organizers who are pulling us out of their twenty-first-century progeny, including racist and deadly policing practices. And I know that if we do what we are called to do, curate events and conversations that lead to actions that lead to decisions about how we should and would live, we will win.
Since Black Lives Matter was born in 2013 we have done some incredible work. We have built a decentralized movement that encourages and supports local leaders to name and claim the work that is needed in order to make their communities more just. This is monumentally difficult in a world that has made even activism a celebrity pursuit. But we have more than 20 chapters across the United States, in Canada and the UK, all autonomous but all connected and coordinated. We have centered and amplified the voices of those not only made most vulnerable but most unheard, even as they are on the front lines at every hour and in every space: Black women—all Black women.
We have created space for us to finally be unapologetic about who we are and what we need to be actually free, not partially free. We have made it so that we can stand in our unedited truth. Our presence in the streets was the bullhorn needed to underscore the push for Obama to use his clemency powers. He left office with the smallest federal prison population in a generation, something he was not originally on track to do. We demand that the ongoing push for police accountability be at last taken seriously. So many have called for it before us and we stand on their shoulders and yell so loudly it can no longer be ignored. We make everyday people feel part of a push for change. People like Sandra Bland. We open the doors and ask people who have not been paid attention to to join us. And we have brought healing to our movement, the ideas and practices that demonstrate that as we seek to care for communities, we must also care for ourselves.
Even still, there is so much work to do as we push to fight this presidency and stop its
Jim Crow–era aggressions. We are working collaboratively to create sustainable rapid response networks to violence and ICE raids. But we are also deeply committed to building Black political power and supporting bold leadership like Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s in Jackson, Mississippi, and Stacey Abrams’s in Georgia. We are committed to working closely with Jessica Byrd of Three Point Strategies, the Washington, DC–based consulting firm that works at the intersection of electoral politics and social justice. We can elect Black women to office who are committed to advancing human-centered agendas, leaders who understand and honor the truth that real leadership must be earned, not appointed. Or stolen. Or arrogant.
Across our network, we are devoted to pushing for and realizing bail reform and, perhaps closest to my own heart, we are envisioning and creating a new movement culture in which we care for the humanity of the people we’re fighting for and with.
Recognizing that we are working with—and many of us are, ourselves—some of the most traumatized people in the United States, the BLM network has health and wellness directors dedicated to ending toxicity in our own organizations. We have a responsibility to do better by people than simply telling them at the point of burnout to go rest and renew and then come back to the same toxicity that depleted them. We, Black people, die younger and more frequently from diseases we can avoid, and given that the rest of our culture seems hell-bent on attacking our immune systems, we have to do better. What kind of food are we serving at conferences? Are we providing time throughout the workday to get people up and moving? Are our organizations paying the least while demanding the most from people we know are too committed to say no or ask for more, to ask for what they need and deserve? Are we including restorative practices in our organizations so that when we struggle with one another, we don’t devolve into petty gossip or backbiting—or outright lies? Are we creating through lines for different levels of skill sets, the ones that are brought to us by people who have been forced to live in cages for 10 years, 20 years? Are we pushing ourselves in each conversation we have to really imagine the world we want to live in, rather than beginning with the compromise position? Are we calling for the abolition of prisons, knowing that in so doing, we are also calling for real and comprehensive health care, including mental health care? Knowing that it means that food security and housing security—hell, clean damn water—must be a given, as restorative justice practices must be too?
When They Call You a Terrorist Page 19