Opinion | White parents, are we doing enough?

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A friend once told me that morality is not what you learn in church or in school but the moment your soul plants a flag on the earth. Last week, Renee Good died planting her flag. This week, friends in Minneapolis have been detained by federal agents planting theirs.

My neighbor Lisa’s flag is planted in front of the Spanish immersion day care her son attends and whose sidewalk she now patrols daily. “It’s the least I can do,” she texted me, and then dropped a link to a GoFundMe for her son’s teacher, who is currently detained by ICE.

Renee Good was a white mom. Lisa is a white mom. I’m a white mom, too, with two tiny girls, and before Operation Metro Surge, the closest I’d come to state violence was protesting at the Third Precinct in broad daylight after George Floyd’s murder. In other words: not that close.

This changed last week, not only with Good’s murder, but when a beloved teacher at my toddler’s day care whom I’ll call Maria had a near-miss with ICE. Maria, who cooks lunch for the kids five days a week. Maria, who coos, “Hola, mami!” to my baby. The idea that Maria — Maria! — is “illegal” or “criminal” or “fraudulent” is so laughable it’s like saying politicians hear you when you talk at the TV.

And yet here we are. ICE is targeting Spanish immersion day cares like ours across the Twin Cities, or at least including them in its pell-mell reign of terror. (I could opine at length about the insanity of targeting lawfully employed and underpaid caregivers of mostly white kids, but if I did I’d never stop.)

For six days, the cooperation and goodwill among us day care parents was a point of pride and a source of solace as ICE targeted Somali families on my block and as the Trump administration lied about Good’s murder despite evidence to the contrary. We, a motley crew of south Minneapolis hipsters, artists, teachers and white-collar professionals, had accidentally found ourselves on the front lines of a constitutional crisis and managed, despite or because of the pressure, to rise to the occasion. “You drop your kid off at day care to stand outside in the cold [to watch for ICE],” said Jeremy Meckler, whose 4-year-old attends a Spanish immersion school a few miles from mine. “And the teachers bring out breakfast.”

But the clock kept ticking, as clocks will, and soon our utopia began to fray, as utopias will. Our Signal group’s primary point of contention — argued, in classic millennial fashion, via chat room — became and remains how extensive a role we parents can and should play in keeping our kids’ teachers safe. (Though it shouldn’t be anybody’s business, they’re all documented noncitizens.) This fault line divided our parent group into two camps: one, people who, like me, support an indefinite closure of our little day care for the maximum safety of both kids and staff and are willing to put their time and finances on the line to make this happen; and two, people who do not.

Not that the parents in the latter camp would put it this way, of course. Their points are endless and, at times, compelling. It’s patronizing, maybe, to advocate for closure if the owner and staff wished to be open. It’s extreme, maybe, to close the doors if we’d raised money for taxis and kept up regular parent patrols. It’s annoying, definitely, to find child care alternatives while still paying for day care, and anyway whistles and car horns seem to work.

Plus there are health problems to manage, and full-time jobs to think of, and that most American of bromides, individual freedom. These parents implicitly concluded that radical collective action was undesired and unwarranted and explicitly concluded that each day care family was responsible for assessing and assuming their own risk and would ultimately do what was best for them.

But as a fellow parent Hannah Wydeven told me in exasperation, “No, you don’t need to do what’s best for your family. You need to do what’s best for THEIR families.” Meaning our kids’ teachers. She added, “And you think the best thing you can do for your kid is to send them to school so they can see their favorite teacher be abducted?”

I understand there are other, less radical measures we mostly white parents can take to support our teachers beyond advocating for a total closure. I also want you to understand that I don’t consider myself a radical: I prefer oat milk and equanimity in my daily life. That said, these are radical circumstances, brought on by radical government officials, and I don’t see any way forward except to respond in a radical fashion.

For me, this means that whistles, GoFundMe efforts and sidewalk patrols aren’t enough. This means rolling up my sleeves and taking care of my kids full-time, and maybe taking care of other people’s kids full-time, for free, so their parents can work while we continue to write checks for a shuttered day care and staff we can’t afford to lose. It means giving money to give my kid’s teachers a cushion and writing this piece in the middle of the night because I have no other time to do it, and I can’t live with myself if I don’t.

And this, I suppose, is what my friend meant that day when she talked about morality as the soul planting a flag on the earth. History looks kindly upon those who inconvenience themselves at some cost for the sake of society’s most vulnerable members, and it is merciless to those who don’t. History is also happening here in Minneapolis, whether we white parents like it or not.

My hope is that together we can galvanize each other toward the most creative and courageous solutions to the impossible problems we face and lay waste to passivity and the path of least resistance. If we can’t do that, at least history will have a record of my failure, and I will be able to look Maria and her fellow teachers in the eyes — if they’re still here when this is over — and tell them I did everything I could.