"A few years ago, towards the end of the second Obama administration, a friend and her wife flew back to New York from a holiday in Mexico, landing for a connecting flight in South Carolina. At immigration, the officer looked from one to the other, asked their relation to one another and on receiving the reply, made a noise of disgust ugh. On the pretext that American citizens can't go through the same lane as a spouse on a green card (not true), he sent them to the back of the line, causing them to miss their connection."
"But that's not the point of the story. My friend is a white Australian who is generally conflict-averse; her wife is a Japanese-American who can stop traffic with a single, hard stare, and who teaches in the South Bronx, where many of her students have been harassed by law enforcement since the day they were born. As trouble got under way, my friend kicked off like a good'un, swearing and muttering sarcastically in the Australian style, while her wife shot her desperate, angry looks. Shut up. Shut Up. SHUT UP. I have been thinking about this incident a lot since the death last week of Renee Good, the Minnesota woman fatally shot by an ICE agent. The use of deadly force was justified on grounds of self-defence, according to the US administration. That explanation doesn't appear to be borne out by the videos, but the thing I also keep thinking about is the way in which, immediately prior to the shots being fired, Good and her wife, Becca, addressed the agent. You wanna come at us? says Becca, in the agent's general direction. I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy. When the officer approaches Good's open car window, she smiles, addresses him as dude and says mockingly: I'm not mad at you."
A pair of women were harassed by an immigration officer who expressed disgust and contrived a rule to send them to the back of the line, causing a missed connection. One partner reacted with sarcastic swearing while the other, shaped by students' and community members' lifelong harassment by law enforcement, urged silence. Renee Good, a Minnesota woman, was fatally shot by an ICE agent, with recorded exchanges showing Good and her wife taunting the officer — "You wanna come at us? ... I'm not mad at you." Sarcasm functioned as a stress response. Unequal civic protections and aggressive policing can turn verbal defiance into life-threatening encounters.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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