As I paced around my tiny apartment, holding my phone to my ear (my favorite way to get my daily steps in), my dad recounted to me the recent goings-on in our hometown of Minneapolis. What differentiated this evening phone call from the hundreds of others, however, was the dystopian nature of these goings-on: more federal agents than metro police, talks of schools closing, people going missing, people terrified that each morning commute to the office could be their last.
Despite my mixed feelings about the city (like many early-20-somethings, I have an indescribable, origin-less beef with my hometown), one thing that felt constant throughout my life was its status as a relatively “safe” place. ICE has made it so that this is no longer the case.
“Walking in the City” — one of French theorist Michel de Certeau’s most well-known works — examines the urban city as a text, as something with an inherent argument. He first discusses how viewing pedestrians from above (in his case, from the World Trade Center) separates one from the city and allows them to more effectively understand the many happenings below. Secondly, he discusses how the act of walking in the city (yes, it’s an apt title), of existing within the chaos of crowds and traffic, can act as an argument in itself. The city’s very organization acts as a power structure. Streets were designed and named and implemented by urban planners with a given agenda for the city. However, those who walk through these streets are able to create their own unique paths within these given structures. As de Certeau writes: “There is a rhetoric of walking.” I may be extrapolating from the source material here, but I think within Minneapolis’ current sociopolitical climate, we can translate this quote more aptly into “Walking is rebellion.”
So what does it mean when the city is no longer safe to walk in? What’s the argument there? Has the agency of individuals living in Minneapolis — to make an argument of their own, to express dissent, to move freely about the city and, as de Certeau discusses, form their own paths despite the power structures that may be inhibiting them — disappeared?
Let’s start where de Certeau starts: at the top, looking down at the city. Minneapolis doesn’t have buildings as tall as the World Trade Center, but I’d say the public news sphere serves as a pretty decent metaphorical bird’s-eye view. Something I didn’t expect about my hometown making international headlines is that, to me, it always feels there is something being left out, something being forgotten. The world’s biggest newspapers are too busy to talk about public schools in outer-ring suburbs, seemingly so far from the conflict, blithely reporting about the potential for a temporary switch to remote learning in order to protect their students. You’re not going to get a “Breaking News” email every time someone’s basic human rights are being infringed upon. The mega-corporations behind every modern news outlet have bigger checks to sign. Fair enough.
What this does, though, is create a sense of comfortable distance between the conflict and the rest of the world. It creates an “us” and a “them.” We are high up, looking at the protests and murders below with a vivid and morbid curiosity. They are below, living in it. For us, the conflict ends when we close our emails, when we turn off the TV, when we go to work or school, when we utilize the privilege of our vantage point in the sky and decide to gaze upon more bucolic views. For them, the quotidian has become synonymous with uncertainty. As someone who now lives hundreds of miles from Minneapolis, and therefore somewhere between the current “us” and “them,” this distance brings an inexplicable rage and guilt. I constantly walk the tightrope of “I’m choosing to remain blissfully unaware” and “Why isn’t everyone talking about this all the time?”
This sense of distance, of course, is not new. We’ve witnessed it with the news of genocide in Palestine, natural disasters across the globe, and a myriad of other tragedies that — even if they happen in our own backyards — we hide from. And why wouldn’t we, when we can view it from a safe, cozy, suffocating distance?
De Certeau also takes into account the perspectives of the walkers below him. Because the city’s buildings block pedestrians’ views, they are unable to fully understand the “text” of the city. They can only see their own street or block, which inherently limits their perspective. This is where current events start to deviate from de Certeau’s assertions: Minnesotans are doing a damn good job at staying informed and widening their perspective. They’ve decided, together, to tear down any metaphorical buildings that stand in their way, brick by brick, with their bare hands. They do this, in reality, with whistles and encrypted messaging services. They do this by standing together, in true Minnesotan-community-values fashion, and standing up for their neighbors. By keeping other “walkers” (in this case, folks living in Minneapolis) informed, those that de Certeau argued had an immutably limited perspective are now scaling walls and climbing to heights of their own.
Now, a question that I don’t believe de Certeau endeavored to answer: What happens when you can no longer walk in the city? To be fair to de Certeau, I don’t think any of us ever thought we’d have to ask this question in a place like Minneapolis, much less try to find an answer. As ICE agents harass, assault, kidnap, and kill my neighbors for exercising their constitutional rights to protest and their human rights to exist outside their homes, I admit I feel less than optimistic. Somehow, ICE found a way to censor the text of an entire metropolitan area, to silence the arguments created and sustained by thousands of daily footsteps.
Despite the bleak reality, I have faith in my hometown. Or, rather, I have faith in my neighbors. We are lovely and stubborn and strong. We are Minnesota nice, but we’ve drawn a line in the sand (or, rather, in the snow). We will stand up for each other because it is right, because we still can. If we can’t walk in the city, perhaps we can walk around in our tiny apartments, phones to our ears, raising our voices louder and louder until they can hear it in the streets.
