Essay: Safe

A protest demanding the release of Mahmoud Khalil at Foley Square on March 10, 2025, in New York City. (David Dee Delgado / Getty Images)

Who is safe in the United States?

tl:dr no one (even if white people think they are. They’re safer than most of us; true. But really: no one.)

For a brief moment five years ago the playing field of safety seemed to level slightly. Those who’d never experienced the terror of the unknown ahead or curfews enforced at gunpoint that kept you at home, became as unmoored as the rest of us in Covid-19 lockdown.

But that playing field has never and will never be level and we understood that safety, like normal, was never meant for all of us.

An anarchist feminist worth her fire will tell you that the State–the Fascist Daddy State not the Nanny one that the right wing whine about–sells you safety in exchange for obedience and I don’t want to be protected, I want to be free. Besides, I don’t carry the currency of lies required for such transactions. Fascism tries to sell me a limited edition version in return for my vote. I know it’s as fake as the handbags on Canal Street.

What is safety?

tl:dr an illusion (even if it’s packaged to white people in the U.S. as “You are safer than everyone else as long as the people in charge look like you because they will guarantee that people who don’t look like you are less safe which will make you suffer the illusion that you are safe. That is especially the case with white women. Donald Trump, who has assaulted at least two dozen white women, has told women he is their protector whether they like it or not. He means white women, not the rest of us)

And when you look close enough, you conclude there is nothing to see because you are not a “terrorist,” a “terrorist sympathizer,” or a “gang member,” and therefore you must be safe. Because as Elon says, “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

“Mr. Khalil felt as though he was being kidnapped. He was reminded of prior experience fleeing arbitrary detention in Syria and forced disappearance of his friends in Syria in 2013. It was shortly after this that Mr. Khalil left Syria.”

So you don’t see that men in t-shirts and jeans, without a warrant, who refused to identify themselves abducted a man from his home, while threatening to also abduct his eight-month pregnant wife because she was filming the abduction and would not leave his side as they took him to an unmarked car. Or you look but you don’t see that it could happen to you because he does not look like you and he is Palestinian and is now a political prisoner in an immigration jail because he opposed Israel’s genocide in his homeland against people who look like him and whose bodies were shattered and incinerated by bombs your tax dollars financed.