BIPOC Stockholm Syndrome (ROUND 1)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Nose Rest Day
*Let us workshop this satire about how white supremacy so fucks with our minds that it has even good whites, the SJW allies, fight to keep undocumented BIPOCs in the very country bent on their torture.
*Rough, very rough
BIPOC Stockholm Syndrome
Countless nonwhites sneak into the country ever year—jumping, scurrying, toward perceived warmth. Healthy and moral in color but failing to realize their burrowing endpoint is the very epicenter of white supremacy, behold these beautiful people. Climbing and slipping down border fences, tibial fractures upon landing; cutting through wire and crawling through gaps, back scratched into the lockjaw of tetanus; crossing deserts on foot for days of rationing water in bottle caps, kidneys throbbing with electrolyte imbalance and lips cracking into bloody fissures as children ask “¿Cuándo, mami?”; walking through heat that buckles the body and cold that stiffens it at night, sometimes even to the point of tissue death; trusting currents they cannot read as they setting out on overloaded rafts that seem too janky to call “boats,” chemical burns caused by gasoline mixing with seawater on the holey floor; hiding in the backs of trucks, in trunks, in cargo spaces without air or light or certainty as if they were no more than Amistad cargo who could be dumped any minute—how much braver can these people get, already having been born in a world where white is right?
Brown bodies endure hell for a lie. Paying smugglers everything they have and then some, indebting themselves before they even arrive; moving at night like bugs across a sleeping mammal and resting in ditches and abandoned structures by day, waterlogged feet resulting in nerve damage and decay; navigating terrain they have never seen, guided by fragments of directions given by the tongue of a coyote whose pay was getting to lick “somethin young”; risking theft, abandonment, extortion along the way; splitting from family members in the chaos and hoping to reunite later; carrying what little they can (documents, photos, phone numbers) in waterproof ziplock, knowing even that might be lost; running when told to run, hiding when told to hide, waiting when told to wait, often without explanation; turning back and trying again, again, again with flea resilience—behold how much hell they put themselves through, the law be damned just like their rotator cuffs. Behold how they chase something that looks like nourishment from a distance, that looks like hydration for the thirsty, but what is no more than seawater in truth.
If all that were not tragic enough, what do they do after they make it inside the racist trap? Any non-bigot who knows the US’s true colors will break down in tears just to contemplate what they do. These precious people, beautiful BIPOC victims of a world whose whiteness now reaches into the very agarwood of Borneo jungles—yes, they put themselves through more hell just to stay: hitching to safe-haven cities or learning what stores do not ID or using the laundromat as a hub for information rather than just a place to wash clothes.
But that is just Hollywood romance in comparison to reality. It gets way worse: working under the table for small family-owned businesses (like construction, landscaping, cleaning, or agriculture who pay via cash or CashApp) in hope that they neon safety vest and weed whacker will make them become no more than background noise to immigration combs whose teeth can also be found in neighbors whispering on WhatsApp); finding reliable community surrogates and vouching proxies who will sign leases or insurance applications to avoid background checks and who will call the police on their behalf if they ever need to report a crime; staying hypervigilent when it comes to complying with local laws (like ensuring no broken taillights or cracked windshields, following speed limits and keeping tags up to date); building a paper trail of prosocial conduct (like paying taxes with an individual taxpayer number, enrolling children in school, participating in census counts, maintaining consistent utility bills) that can factor into legal defense to avoid deportation.
That alone would make most of us crack. But the deal, like a Ronco infomercial, gets much crazier: enduring exploitative trade-offs like accepting lower pay, longer hours, or more dangerous work because pushing back increases risk of targeting by immigration authorities; code-switching when it comes to language and behavior to avoid “reasonable suspicion,” an obsessive effort of social blendign that involves not only abstainign from screams of “Vatos Locos” or group songs of “La Cucaracha” but also keeping a change of “office-casual” clothing in the vehicle so as not to drive around work-worn clothing that might increase the chance of being profiled); living with restricted movement (avoiding highways, airports, or even certain neighborhoods) and planning routes based not on efficiency but on perceived safety; building parallel systems of trust, essentially an entire shadow infrastructure (relying on word-of-mouth networks for jobs, housing, services, and warnings); managing digital invisibility, which involves not just avoiding social media where personal information or locations could be tracked by authorities but also limiting photos, tags, geolocation, and even other people’s posts that could expose them.
Wait, there is more—much more. They must dig deeper than any white person, stewed in their privilege, could ever imagine: absorbing everyday humiliation, insults and unfair treatment, since escalation carries risk; sustaining long-term uncertainty in an insane clash of continuing to plan for the future (schooling, work, family) while knowing any plan can collapse suddenly; choosing not to seek medical care even when seriously ill and so relying on home remedies or informal clinics because the risk of exposure outweighs the risk to their health; rehearsing “disappearance routines” in which they memorize what to do if stopped, detained, or questioned (what names to use, who to call, what not to say); carrying their life in fragments such keeping important documents hidden, distributed, or ready to move at a moment’s notice in case they need to abscond at once; maintaining emergency exit plans such as having go-bags, backup housing options, or pre-arranged places to stay if a raid, eviction, or sudden displacement happens; sitting the child down and explaining that Tia Rosa will take care of her if anything happens and then, the next morning, kissing her forehead with a pause to memorize the smell of her skin in case it is the last time.
It is a life of permanent lateral glide, of sub-surface hustle beneath the incessant comb. And yet these poor souls, so hypnotized into thinking this country is good for them, refuse to leave, in fact, with such flea tenacity that they swim away—through alleys and utility corridors, under bushes and Home Depot shelves, up fire escapes and chimneys, between parked vans and train cars, over hedges and fences, behind shower curtains and doors, inside restaurant refrigerators and laundry chutes—nearly every time ICE, today’s gestapo, part the hair of cities and towns, neighborhoods and homes.
It is self-destructive. It is as sad in the same way as is seeing a team spend hours rescuing a pig from a ditch only for it, scurrying in fear, to run right back in. These poor souls, so hypnotized to think that this country has long declared open season on anyone with any hint of brown (and now under Orange reign pays out bounty rewards for every head), will wriggle and writhe between manhunt fingers, slipping away from the squeeze like a bar of prison soap. Indeed, many have enmeshed themselves in immigrant enclaves where businesses and neighbors are not only ready to provide early warnings about immigration-control activity and do practice run-throughs of how to behave if stopped but that put the undocumented in touch with immigration attorneys that can use bureaucratic loopholes and leverage the immense immigration court backlog to prolong their stay. What is worse of all is that the undocumented spread the hypnosis to their own children like roach poison.
America’s racism is so masterfully devilish that it has all of us confused. What else explains why we, the very people who march in hate against Amerikkka, march in demand—often in the very same breath, on the very same protest sign—that the BIPOC people who sneaked into this country, a trap, get to stay? What else makes us go so far, in fact, that we fight even for legislation to stop any force from getting them out of this hellhole?
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
