Like Ghalib said about Dilli – a city I left 20 years ago to come to Minnesota as a PhD student – if the world is the body, Minneapolis is its soul. Yeh duniya mano jism, aur Minneapolis uski jaan. As the sun sets on the third straight week of sheltering at home from the racist campaign brought to our streets by our federal government, I am raising a toast to my city. To my neighbours, to artists, to parents, to libraries, to adult toy stores, to co-workers, to restaurants, to friends, to dog-walkers, to small businesses, to students, to teachers. 

Whatever your Big Media suggests about what is happening on our streets, what is happening on our streets is significantly worse. Our state has been invaded by one of the most financed armies in the world. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul – not at all big cities by any means – currently have about 2,300 highly insecure men with misogynist rage, military-grade gear, low comprehension, and in cosplay, getting to play out their mutant ninja fantasies in costume, using their guns, flash bangs, Long Range Acoustic Devices, and carcinogenic gas on ordinary people that face up to them with whistles in hand, speed, strategy, and resolve on their minds, songs in their hearts, and the fiercest love for their city and their neighbours. Among other things, this army goes knocking door to door, looking for people that look like me, that ‘sound like’ immigrants, whatever that means in this country of immigrants on stolen land. 

There are abandoned cars all over the place. At gas stations, with the nozzle still attached. In parking lots. Doors open, baby in car seat, driver taken. A woman in our neighbourhood went to take the trash out, and was abducted from the alleyway. Her six-year-old child went crying to their neighbour when mama didn't return for 30 minutes since he last saw her with a trash bag in hand. Another mother in a nearby suburb stepped out to heat her car before use (it is currently -36°C), and was accosted and abducted by six men in helmets, camouflage, and tactical gear, fit for killing at short range in a battlefield. A Bangladeshi woman (a US citizen) was driving to her doctor’s appointment, when she was intercepted by two cars packed with ‘law enforcement’ agents. Two agents screamed at her to drive ahead, and two others simultaneously ordered her to stop, so she tried to pull over, and within seconds, the window was smashed in her face, seat belt slashed, and she was pulled out of her car violently, to be arrested. At the detention centre, she heard herself being referred to as “a body.” 

‘Agents’ are promised a bonus for a certain number of arrests a day. Too many of us have been taken from our workplaces, cars, homes, parks, and restaurants. Many of us with brown skin are sheltering at home. This sometimes means that stepping out for a walk on our own streets has become a collective operation, with neighbourhood Signal groups signalling after checking on both ends of the block that it is safe to step out for two or six or 10 minutes. Our National Public Radio station ran a story about how the simple act of obtaining a menstrual pad for a pre-teen's first period turned into an underground operation involving a faith leader, multiple neighbours and a clandestine network of Minneapolis volunteers trying to manifest a pad. Don’t be fooled by the smart refrigerators: here we meet our survival needs through barter, mutual aid, and collective care.

I had a wild conversation with my child's class teacher the other day, who stopped by to drop off the school iPad as we transition into virtual learning for the foreseeable future – a future where it gets more and more unsafe to send kids to school. Schools in Minnesota are staying open while giving families the chance to learn online. I asked the teacher how many students in his class were pivoting to virtual school, and he reported: "only my students of colour." We looked around the room trying to find words to understand the import of this reality where only white kids will get to go to school and receive the educational, psychological, and social benefits of school. The silence that saturated the air in the room was oppressive, and the teacher finally punctured it with "I'm so sorry, we'll get through this." 

And yet, it is not hard to imagine that a nation founded on Indigenous genocide could engage in such violence. What we are witnessing is not the collapse of American democracy into something alien and evil. In some sense, it has always been this. My black friends will tell you that the routine police brutality they encounter when driving while black, barbecuing while black, playing pool while black, going to school while black, teaching while black, or dancing while black, is the American lineage of racial power and the mass spectacle of terror. It is no surprise that our friends and neighbours that are being unlawfully abducted from the streets today are being taken to a detention centre in St. Paul, Minnesota that has historically been a concentration camp used to imprison hundreds of Dakota people in the late 1800s. 

Standing at the confluence of the graceful Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, this detention centre is where we end up when we are picked up from our streets by fully masked agents. The practice has been to kidnap first and check paperwork later. A local newspaper reported recently that an immigrant woman with legal status was locked up for 26 hours inside a toilet with three men, and they shat and pissed and ate the one singular sandwich served, with hands and feet shackled, and in full view of each other. 

In three weeks, we have all become journalists, witnesses, and truth tellers. The revolutionary readiness with which regular people are responding to this brutality is unlocking a different kind of future. It reminds me of the grandmothers of Shaheen Bagh, the dissidents among the ‘comfort women’ in Korea, and the 'Free Breakfast for School Children' Black Panther Party programme. The more dehumanising the occupation gets, the more we see each other as fully human, worthy of love, protection, and justice. Since the killing of George Floyd in 2020, we have been organised as hyper local mutual resource networks. We patrol our individual blocks and neighbourhoods, blowing whistles, recording each other’s abductions, aiding each other with grocery deliveries, funds for rent and mortgage, legal fees, sky-miles, rides, human chains around schools and daycare centres, memorialising sites where our neighbours were executed, and keeping the volume up on telling the government that we are ungovernable. It is achingly beautiful to lend voice to a 2,000-strong chorus on the streets where we sing about the times. Each one of us sees oneself as part of a network with a radical role to play. This city has brought some of the most meaningful relationships and precious people into my life. Minneapolis will live in me long after I leave it. It has my heart. It is our beating heart.

Ritika Ganguly is a trans-disciplinary practitioner and entrepreneur born and bred in New Delhi, based in Minnesota. She is a composer and cultural anthropologist, and mostly an intentional human. She may be reached at ritika@wecollab.work.

This article went live on February ninth, two thousand twenty six, at twenty-three minutes past twelve at noon.

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