I renewed my passport last month. The passport renewal process in this country is so maniacally shady—you have to mail a check or money order with your current passport to a P.O. Box and just hope that the spam-looking email from [email protected] that says “Application Status: Approved” isn’t lying to you. And the apparently inherent shadiness takes on a more sinister valence with the current administration.

I spent the weeks between mailing in my application and receiving my new passport just simmering in silent dread. The thing is, I also have an active passport from a country that was on Trump’s 2020 travel ban list,1 and I feel very justified in thinking this State Department would use that fact as a pretext to slow-roll my renewal process, deny my application outright, or concoct some reason for me to go to a government office in person so I could be snatched up by ICE. Because documentation clearly doesn’t actually matter to this administration. The rule of law doesn’t matter to them, either. They are defining laws and legitimacy purely on white nationalist vibes right now.

Which is part of why I feel like I’m losing my goddamn mind reading multiple posts from people—Black people, specifically—saying “this is not our fight.”

The “this” in question being protests in Los Angeles, and more and more cities, against the mounting ICE raids and subsequent deployment of the National Guard and the Marines against said protestors.

I hate to spend time constructing a logical argument against a wholly illogical and bad faith position, but I suppose I have time today. Because first of all, what was your fight, Janet? Voting for Kamala Harris? Defending Meghan’s right to own Le Creuset? Wearing a Black Panther Party “People’s Free Food Program” t-shirt? What? What are you counting as a fight that has you so tired, now that fascism is erupting across the country, that you feel justified in sitting this one out? And what fight could you possibly be saving yourself for?

Second of all, how much reality do you need to ignore in order to legitimately believe that mass deportation, criminalization of free speech, and aggressive militarization is not and will never be your fight? How have you managed to convince yourself that your position in this country is so secure that what the government does has nothing to do with you? You cannot ignore how this country has always talked about Black people as though we’re subhuman. You cannot ignore how completely conditional our safety has always been. You cannot believe that a government that snatches students off the street for writing op-eds and illegally sends residents to foreign prisons for allegedly having tattoos —a government led by two men who shamelessly and mercilessly propagated dehumanizing lies about Haitian immigrants so they could lay the groundwork for deporting them—will draw the line at you for any reason.

And I’m not going to hold your hand as I say this. I’m going to hold myself back from slapping your face as I say this: You have not found the One Weird Trick that will exempt you from fascist violence. You have just found a way to dehumanize yourself for them in advance, by divesting yourself of basic human empathy. Your lack of empathy will not save you. It will only doom you faster.

You have to understand, for your own sake as well as all of ours, that it’s not just faceless, nameless others whose lives are at stake. It’s not just Latinos who voted for Trump who are getting what they voted for. This is happening to all of us. All of our lives are at stake. Our ability to live in any semblance of a society is at stake. It is your responsibility to see what’s happening, and to care about it, and to do something. You don’t have to march in the streets to call yourself fighting, but you cannot knowingly “sit this one out” and call yourself anything but a coward.