Awakening

There is a distinct silence that precedes a door being broken down. In Minneapolis during the winter of 2025–26, federal immigration agents arrived before the sun had a chance to rise fully, moving through quiet streets and pulling long‑time residents from their homes and workplaces. Lawyers argued that these raids relied on administrative warrants—paperwork signed by immigration officers rather than neutral judges—which authorize civil arrests but do not permit agents to force their way into private homes. Advocacy groups reminded residents that the Fourth Amendment and precedents such as Payton v. New York require a judicial warrant or exigent circumstances to enter a dwelling and that people may refuse entry when faced with an administrative warrant [1]. Yet the arrests continued and the city has started to respond with protests. The legal argument was about warrants, but the voice in the background was about something bigger: who is allowed to open the door, and who is allowed to say no?

That question can be heard across other stretches of uncomfortable silence in American life. A century earlier and 700 miles away, a district in Tulsa, Oklahoma known as Black Wall Street started to build the foundation of what drives certain fears and rhetoric even now. By 1921 the Greenwood neighborhood housed almost 200 Black‑owned businesses, professionals, several schools and a formidable hospital . Money circulated within that community routinely before it ever left. At the end of that May, white mobs and National Guard units spent multiple days burning 35 square blocks, destroying more than 1,000 homes and killing around 300 Black residents [2]. The survivors filed 193 compensation claims totaling more than $1.8 million, but insurers conveniently deflected by invoking riot clauses; the only successful payout was to a white gun‑shop owner whose weapons had been taken [3]. Greenwood’s residents rebuilt, only to see the majority of the their work be bulldozed decades later under government claimed urban renewal. The lesson has been clear: even when you play by the rules, the rules can be rewritten when it’s convenient for everyone but you; prosperity is tolerated until it threatens the person or people who hold the power. The logic that turned a thriving Black neighborhood into nothing also shows itself in other areas of class, labor, and policy.

The idea that you can follow the rules and still lose everything is not confined to race. In April 1914 striking coal miners and their families set up a tent colony in Ludlow, Colorado after being evicted from company provided housing. The Colorado National Guard attacked the camp and set fire to the tents, killing 21 people, including 11 children [4]. Twenty years before, a rally for an eight‑hour workday in Chicago’s Haymarket Square resulted in an explosion triggered by a bomb. In the chaos, police opened fire and eight labor activists, none who were proven to have thrown the bomb, were convicted—four were hanged [ 5]. These tragedies caused some reforms, but they also warned blue collar workers about the cost of challenging owners and governments. The warning has been repeated through the decades as unions weakened while wealth becomes increasingly concentrated. In 1983 about 20.1 percent of wage and salary workers—17.7 million people—were union members; by 2024 that number had fallen to 9.9 percent, with 14.3 million union members. The drop is even bigger in the private sector. Public‑sector workers are unionized at 32.2 percent, more than five times the rate for private‑sector workers (5.9 percent). There are about 7.0 million union members in the public sector and 7.2 million in the private sector; the highest unionization rates are found in education, professional training and library occupations (32.3 percent) and protective service occupations (29.6 percent). Unionized workers earn roughly 15 percent more per week than nonunion workers [6]. As collective bargaining fell, wealth just continued to become even more concentrated. By last year, the top 1 percent of households held about 31 percent of U.S. wealth while the bottom half held around 2.5 percent [ 7], and the average household in the top 10 percent had about $8.1 million in wealth compared with around $60,000 for households in the bottom half [8]. The ability for people to leave a bad job or start a business follows this trend. When unions become weaker and wealth concentrates, the people who hold the power regularly reach for other tools to make sure they are able to protect it. Ask yourself why the people who control the wealth are so willing to lay blame at the feet of people whose largest goal is to seek better?

As economic options shrink, the state often turns to punishment. Every year police in America shoot and kill more than 1,100 people, and Black Americans—about 14 percent of the population—are nearly three times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by on‑duty law enforcement officers [9]. From 2001 to 2010 there were more than 8.2 million marijuana arrests, 88 percent of them for simple possession, again Black individuals were nearly 3.7 times as likely as their white counterparts to be arrested [10]. Together, America’s federal, state and local criminal legal systems hold almost 2 million people in state prisons, federal prisons, local jails, juvenile facilities, immigration detention and other institutions, and the system‑wide cost of incarceration is at least $182 billion every year [11]. Those costs rise even more when court fees, supervision, deportation flights, and private profits are included. Entire industries like bail‑bond companies, prison contractors, data brokers, and more, practically depend on fear as a business model. When executive orders are used as a means diminish personal rights, administrative warrants are leveraged like criminal warrants, and the infrastructure of punishment is always at the ready, the line between keeping order and preserving power becomes blurry. But in order to justify that system, we the people have to believe certain narratives.

Fear works the best when it is packaged in story. In early 2024, researchers found that 10 percent of Americans identify as outright Christian nationalism supporters and another 20 percent as sympathizers [12]. The posture is less about personal faith and more about claiming that the United States, with all of our religious freedoms, belongs to a particular religious identity and should thus reflect that identity in law. The freedom to restrict freedoms. Propaganda and disinformation fuel similar projects in other areas. A RAND Corporation research brief on the environment of information surrounding Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine found that Kremlin narratives focused on “denazification” and other dehumanizing stereotypes; the messages were broad but generated minimal engagement [13]. Taiwan’s national security bureau documented more than 500 000 messages generated by Chinese operatives using generative AI to cause division on the island and spark mistrust [14]. Fear is a flexible type of currency, traded across borders and repackaged for local consumption wherever it’s needed. Even humanitarian statistics regularly become part of the narrative. Millions of Ukrainians have been displaced by the war—about 3.7 million people are still internally displaced with another 6.9 million having become refugees. Roughly 12.7 million Ukrainians still need humanitarian aid and the United Nations reports that 13 percent of the country’s housing stock (around 2.5 million homes) has been damaged or destroyed [15]. When we read these numbers though, do we see human beings or do we only see the “others”? Because truthfully, the narrative we choose determines which lives we focus on and which ones we get to ignore. Whether you insert Palestinians, Jews, Haitians, Mexicans, or anyone else into the blank, the mechanism stays the same: over time, a small group decides whose lives can be treated as disposable, wraps that decision in a fear-laced story, and sells it to the rest of us as “reason.”

A story has become a choice about whose pain counts. On January 6th, 2021, Ashli Babbitt was shot by a Capitol police officer when she attempted to climb through a barricaded window during an insurrection. Far‑right media sites near immediately adopted her as a martyr; going as far as calling her “the white man’s George Floyd” and co‑opting slogans like “Say her name,” according to an Anti‑Defamation League report [16]. Federal prosecutors later decided there wasn’t enough evidence to charge the officer who shot her [17]. This month, immigration agents in Minneapolis killed Renee Good after she allegedly tried to drive away during a raid. The agents, including the one who fire the shots, are on video leaving the scene shortly after. Her death has caused local protests but nowhere near the national action it deserves [18]. Why is one life turned into a symbol while another is treated as a statistic? Whose pain becomes a movement, and whose is allowed to disappear into the news cycle? When we choose which deaths to remember, we shape who feels they belong, and who learns that their suffering is invisible.

Russia framed its invasion of Ukraine as a  mission to eliminate Nazis, turning civilians into enemy combatants in the eyes of potential supporters [19]; China’s misinformation campaigns attempt to portray Taiwan’s autonomy as an offense that justifies coercion [20]. These narratives are not effective because the words are true, but because they trigger a fear of disorder and promise to make something great again. The specifics change, but the structure is familiar every single time: define an enemy, inflate the threat and present yourself as the only solution. When we see administrative warrants used to force open doors in Minneapolis, Chicago, Charlotte, or what is now a growing list of U.S cities, or we watch a historically Black neighborhood be erased under the promise of “renewal,” we are seeing a domestic version of the same logic. The tools may be different; the pattern is the same.

Realistically, if you’ve read this far, one of a few things is true:

1. You disagree with me. You think this is exaggerated, that we’re not edging toward anything dangerous, and you kept reading to see how far I’d take it. Fair. But then answer this honestly: at what point did you decide the facts stopped counting? When the law got inconvenient? When the numbers came from sources you’d cite in any other argument? If you can watch the evidence stack up and still call it “nothing,” what exactly are you defending, and who is it really for?

2. You were curious. You wanted to understand. For that, I mean it, thank you. History doesn’t repeat because it’s inevitable. It repeats because we get bored, we get comfortable, we get tired, and we let someone else write the story for us. The research is not hidden. The record is not new. It’s just easier than ever to verify, and harder than ever to pretend you didn’t know.

3. You agree with me. Then let these numbers do what they’re supposed to do: make you angry, make you awake, make you impossible to silence. And no, I will not condone violence for violence’s sake. For:

We have to do more. They deserved, and we still deserve, a world and country where we aren’t pawns, talking points, or things to prove for men with egos too fragile to tolerate our freedom. For them, for the others, and for everyone who came before us, we fight. Both feet on the line, by any means necessary, we must fight.

References

1. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/us/445/573/

2. https://www.kansascityfed.org/oklahomacity/oklahoma-economist/oklahoma-economist-the-past-present-and-future-of-black-wall-street/

3. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-true-costs-of-the-tulsa-race-massacre/

4. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/war-in-the-coalfields-the-ludlow-massacre-and-its-impact-on-the-eight-hour-workday.htm

5. https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/haymarket-riot

6. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.htm

7. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134

8. https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2024/dec/state-us-household-wealth

9. https://everytownresearch.org/report/gun-violence-and-the-police/

10. https://www.aclu.org/report/waronmarijuana-black-and-white-report

11. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html

12. https://prri.org/research/christian-nationalism-across-all-50-states-insights-from-prris-2024-american-values-atlas/

13. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10092.html

14. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-says-china-using-generative-ai-ramp-up-disinformation-divide-island-2025-04-08/

15. https://www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/ukraine/

16. https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/far-right-extremists-memorialize-martyr-ashli-babbitt

17. https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/department-justice-closes-investigation-death-ashli-babbitt

18. https://apnews.com/article/ice-shooting-minneapolis-minnesota-9aa822670b705c89906f2c699f1d16c5

19. https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn/disinformation-roulette-the-kremlins-year-of-lies-to-justify-an-unjustifiable-war/

20. https://www.iiss.org/publications/strategic-dossiers/asia-pacific-regional-security-assessment-2024/chapter-5/

21. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution#:~:text=Nazi Germany committed mass murder,people during World War II

22. https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki#:~:text=,to 80%2C000 died in Nagasaki

23. https://usafacts.org/articles/the-latest-government-data-on-school-shootings/#:~:text=How many people have died,in school shootings

24. https://www.sapr.mil/Portals/156/FY22_Annual_Report.pdf#:~:text=received 8%2C942 reports of sexual,A reporting

25. https://www.thetrevorproject.org/research-briefs/estimate-of-how-often-lgbtq-youth-attempt-suicide-in-the-u-s/#:~:text=The Trevor Project’s 2021 National,between the ages of 13–24

26. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html

27. https://news.va.gov/137221/va-2024-suicide-prevention-annual-report/#:~:text=,6 were among other Veterans

28. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-has-israels-gaza-offensive-killed-2025-10-07/#:~:text=CAIRO%2FGENEVA%2C Oct 7 (Reuters) ,under the age of 18

29. https://www.splcenter.org/civil-rights-martyrs/?utm_source=chatgpt.com