I’m standing on the roof of an office building in Chinatown peering into the bowels of what will be the world’s tallest prison: a 40-floor monstrosity that will turn this densely populated, low-income neighbourhood into a construction site for at least the next three years.
Across the skyline, there are clusters of people on every rooftop, tiny colourful dots. I have cardboard safety glasses on – we all do, because New York City is on the path of the solar eclipse and we all want to watch it: for hope, for renewal, for cosmic wonder.
New Yorkers in prison wanted to watch the eclipse too.
From 2pm to 5pm on April 8, every incarcerated person in DOCC’s custody will be locked in their housing units, and for those in the 23 prisons that are in the path of totality, all family visits will be canceled that day…
came the memo: a system-wide lockdown forcing everyone indoors.
No hope for you.
I arrived in this country in a gale of icy wind two months ago today. Since then, two people here have set themselves on fire in protest and died: the first an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force born in 1998 – so a boy, just a boy – out front of the Israeli embassy, declaring he would no longer be complicit in a genocide. In the footage, you can see an officer point a gun at Aaron Bushnell while he screams, “Free Palestine!” over and over, dying slowly.
The second was just last week: a man out the front of Trump’s hush money trial in Manhattan who wrote a manifesto decrying capitalism, post-truth America, Biden and Trump. (He may not have connected all the dots correctly – and you can bet that’s all the headlines have focused on – but the desperation of his protest is as devastating as it is undeniable.)
In those same two months, a bridge covered in cars collapsed into the Patapsco River in Baltimore when it was rammed by a cargo ship, killing Latinx migrant workers (who will almost certainly be the ones to rebuild it); a motion to ban the biggest source of pro-Palestine news in the U.S. passed in Congress; and a Boeing employee-cum-whistleblower was found dead in his car with a gun in his hand after giving damning evidence in court about the company’s production standards.
“Self-inflicted,” the authorities announced.
There’s no way, claim all who knew him.
“How do we keep hope…” a man in the audience at an event titled, ‘Women, Resistance, Revolution’ asks the panelists – but then he’s crying so much he can’t get the words out.
“How do we keep hope when the state violence is this powerful?”
“10 years ago, when I moved to the U.S. and went to a Palestine protest, I was one of five people,” comes the response from speaker Suchitra Vijayan. “Now look. Hope is radical.”
Hope is radical and this city is full of it.
I see it in the dish of Plan B on the counter at my local bookstore. ‘Free if you need / Gracias si lo nececitas‘ reads the sign.
I hear it when I walk past a man on the street and he whispers “¿Social, social, social?” to my Latino lover.
“¿Cuánto?” (Out of curiosity only.)
“Ochenta.” (It’s $80 to buy a Social Security number.)
I feel it when I stand at the gates of Columbia University in a growing swell of chanters after the faculty suspended students for protesting the school’s genocidal investments – then called the NYPD to arrest them all for trespassing on campus, as they were technically no longer enrolled.
(As you can see in this video message sent to American college students and shared by CNN, the children of Gaza feel it too.)
“Two [people]! That’s it!” stresses Dr. Regina Jennings, imploring the listening audience to get organised.
I’m at an event called ‘Comrade Sisters: Conversations With Veteran Women of the Black Panther Party’, and she’s talking about Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who founded the BPP in 1966. Regina became part of the East Oakland Chapter two years later.
“Once we saw what they were doing, how could we not join?”
Hope is radical, and this city is full of it.