Late post on the Light for Liberty vigil in Columbia.

Video of the speech I gave at the Lights for Liberty candlelight vigil in front of the Boone County jail in Columbia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jOB0yE8NNQ&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR1fmFPNFbYojqWQe0hdKFb3k1_oWwAJKmh8_Ih9zszv_9YB2dMHijVjZcs


The text is below.

Yeah so, there is the stench.

There is the government official telling lawmakers that children don’t need soap, or sleep.

Yeah so, there are the bodies piled up like animals. 

There’s a visiting doctor talking about “a human dog pound.” 

Yeah so, there’s the people sleeping on concrete floors under 24-hour light in the cold.

There are the children taking care of toddlers with no diapers.

There are the seven migrant children who died in United States’ custody in less than a year.

Yes, and there we are, and we cry out in outrage, us the people who care, and believe that as human beings with a moral conscience we are responsible for the welfare other human beings, even if they are not family, or familiar, and that their plight is our plight.

We’re here, we the people who care, because we are shocked, and we’re angry. 

We’re angry at the way this administration has made immigration the focus of its hateful and hypocritical policies and is responsible for this infamy, these human rights abuses, this national shame, this stain on our great country.

This great country that made postcards out of lynchings, as the writer Mikki Kendall wrote in a tweet last week. 

She was talking about the photograph showing twenty-five-year-old Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his toddler daughter, Valeria, washed up dead on the banks of the Rio Grande near Brownsville, TX, in a last embrace. She was talking about why she thought the picture of dead brown bodies would not move the people of this country to do anything, much less restorative collective actions.

Because we are a nation of immigrants and we’re putting them in cages. 

And this latest crisis is just that: the latest crisis in an immigration debacle that has been going on for a long time under Democrat and Republican leadership alike, and is just another facet of the institutional racism, xenophobia and fear that this country was built on. 

But just in case you were not outraged enough yet, there’s also the corruption and outright profiteering from cruelty and abuse: the surge in immigrant detention has been a major new source of profits for the private-prison-industry, which is directly linked to the Republican party, and our president.

We are putting them in cages when they are brown, or black.

We are putting them in cages when they look like the “other,” and we need to be convinced that this “other” is as fully human as we are. 

Yes?

And a lot of white, conservative men are getting richer.

We are a nation of immigrants and we’re putting them in filthy cages, when they are brown or black.

We are a nation of laws and ethics, and we are disproportionately killing people when they are brown or black.Or transgender, or gay, or anywhere outside of the heteronormative safety box we’ve built.

Transgender women of color now make up 4 out of 5 of all transgender homicides, according to The Human Rights Campaign. 

And L.G.B.T. migrants of color are especially at risk, needless to say. 

On June 1st a 25-year-old transgender woman from El Salvador died after being released from ICE custody. 

Her name was Johana “Joa” Medina. She was fleeing one of the most dangerous countries on earth for a transgender person, or any person. 

We are not that much better, apparently.

We are a nation of immigrants and we’re putting them in cages.

Sometimes they die before we do that. 

And we show their dead brown bodies in photographs, and argue that it will help focus our attention on migration to our nation and the humanitarian crisis at the southern border and help us empathize towards these “others.” 

The immigration journalist Tina Vasquez, herself the child of a Mexican father who came to this country undocumented and still carries his story of fear and hope and shame buried and burning, wrote in an essay last week about the photograph of Óscar Ramírez and his daughter, 

and argued that we would never put a photograph of the dead body of a white victim of mass shootings all over our social media feeds.

We only do that when those bodies are brown, or black. 

The latest atrocities at immigration detention facilities are the latest atrocities that our institutions have on their hands, and they have a lot of them.

The body of Michael Brown, laying on the street in the Missouri summer heat.

The body of Óscar Ramírez and his daughter Valeria, washed up on the Rio Grande banks.

The body of eight-year-old Felipe Alonzo, who died in our government’s custody on Christmas Eve of last year. 

The body of Eric Garner put in a chokehold on a Staten Island sidewalk until he died. 

The body of Jakelin Maquin, who died in our government’s custody on December 8th, 2018, when she was seven.

A week ago we celebrated Independence’s Day, with fireworks and family cookouts and a military parade in the capital, and we applauded the spirit of our constitution, with its rights and responsibilities, and its basic principles.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

We hold these truths to be self-evident. 

Do we? 

Do we hold these truths to be self-evident, when we put people in cages? 

Do we hold these truths to be self-evident, when we lock up men, women and children in detention facilities that fit the very definition of concentration camps?

Do we hold these truths to be self-evident, when we separate children from their families? 

Do we hold these truths to be self-evident, when there’s no escaping the reality that the institutional racism that lurks at the bottom of this country’s history is still at work in every corner of it today, compounding the ills of social and economic injustice, xenophobia, homophobia, and environmental devastation?

Ours is a nation of promise, and humanist ideals. 

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Emma Lazarus, as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

Lights for Liberty.

As we come together here today to protest the inhumane conditions faced by migrants in our country, we also need to stop and look at ourselves, and question what and who we are as a nation, we the people who hold these truths to be self-evident, we the people who hold that light of hope high when we call ourselves Americans. 

In 1776 “all men” who were created equal were white men. 

Have we changed that much since?

Do we hold these truths to be self-evident, for everybody?

No matter the color of their skin, 

the tongues they speak, 

the gender non-gender they embody, 

the means they have, 

the gods they worship, 

the sexuality they live, 

where they come from?

This is a crisis deliberately created by this administration for political gains. 

The vast majority of the masses of people being detained at the border in conditions reminiscent of concentration camps are not there because of lack of funding or because they broke the law, 

but because this administration has made a practice of limiting the number of asylum seekers, in a policy that is aimed at predominantly brown and black people fleeing economic despair and some of the most violent regions in the world. 

Manufacture a crisis, then blame the victims. 

Win elections on the back of hate, and blame.

The victims are voiceless. 

And brown.

We are a nation of immigrants, built with the blood and sweat of African slaves, on land stolen from Native American tribes. 

Brown people, black people, beautiful people, beautiful land, stolen land, stolen lives. 

And now this.

The warehousing of brown bodies.

No soap. No sleep. No drinking water. 

Filth. Stench. 

The horror.

Deliberate. Calculated. 

The dream we once had for our country is now being turned into a nightmare, and it’s neither a surprise nor a betrayal coming from our government, but the continuation of a long tradition of racism and xenophobia, the flip side to our collective promise of hope and courage, that light in the harbor.

But we hold these truths to be self-evident.

So I want to believe, as President Obama did, that we can, 

that our promise will be emboldened again, 

that our dream will be awakened again, 

that our dignity and our spirit and our generosity will break through again, 

that those ideals will shine bright again.

I want to believe in the nation that we are, 

diverse and strong in its diversity, 

plural and proud of its plurality, 

one in its humanity.