What’s Still Going On?

joie
Feb 3
13 min read

Whats Going On. One of my most favorite revolutionary albums released in 1971.

Fort George, 3:45 AM, February 2, 2026

I'm walking to the A train at 3:45 AM, and I love this time of day.

Love the quiet.

Love that Fort George is still sleeping, that the world hasn't demanded anything from me yet.

The slush and ice on the ground. Recycling bags waiting to be picked up, scattering in the wind across my path. I'm thinking about how life works similarly.

One minute everything seems clear, visible, solid—and then an unseen patch of ice appears.

Or was it always there?

Did I just refuse to see it? That's what I can't stop thinking about.

The dangers we inherited. The systems built centuries ago that we walk through every single day, not even realizing we're about to fall until we do.

I get on the A train heading downtown. And what I see—it breaks me every time. It hardens me.

Mostly Black and brown people. Homeless. Dealing with mental illness. Sleeping on seats. And other heading to work. We’re all trying to stay warm in this brutal cold. The weather. And life.

I can read the hardship on their faces. The lines of worry. Is this the day I don't make it home?

What are their lives like? I wonder.

We all want the same basic things: to survive, to take care of the people we love, to know that we matter.

How do we live in a country with all this abundance and allow people to exist like this?

How is that even possible?

90% of Americans are either immigrants or the children and grandchildren of immigrants.

The people we call illegal? They pay $11.74 billion in taxes every year. They generate over $2 trillion for this economy. But we treat them like criminals.

We raid their homes. We shoot them.

I put my headphones in. Push play to my Marvin Gaye playlist I curated yesterday specifically for my commute. Marvin's voice takes over:

What's Going On (January 20, 1971)
Save the Children (1971)
Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology) (1971)
Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler) (1971)
I'm Going Home (1971)
Trouble Man (1972)

It dawns on me the correlation between Marvin’s songs and how 55 years later, what Marvin was singing about is still happening. Worse, actually.

I think about Ralph Ellison invisibility in Invisible Man (1952):

"I am an invisible man...I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."

74 years later, we're still invisible. Still fighting to be seen.

What's Going On: 1971 vs. 2026

What's Going On (January 20, 1971)

When Marvin asked "What's going on?" in 1971, he was naming the daily brutality most people refused to see. Police killing us. Poverty crushing us. A war we didn't start killing our brothers. The earth dying while nobody paid attention. 55 years later, I've watched us compile receipts. Names. Videos. Spreadsheets of death.

The Numbers

6.1% of U.S. population: Black males
24.9% of police killings: Black males
2015-2024: 6,600 people killed by police
1.1% of population: Native American ancestry alone
28% of population: immigrants or their descendants

The Names—Because They Matter

Eric Garner, July 17, 2014, Age 43: He was selling loose cigarettes. Daniel Pantaleo put him in a chokehold that was illegal—they teach you that in the academy. "I can't breathe." He said it 11 times. His body failed him. He died on the pavement. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide. Nobody was indicted. But his family got a check: $5.9 million. That's what his death was worth.

Michael Brown, August 9, 2014, Age 18: Just 18. Shot six times by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The narrative changed a hundred times. His hands were up. His hands weren't up. He charged. He ran. The grand jury decided none of it mattered. No charges filed.

Tamir Rice, November 22, 2014, Age 12: Twelve years old. A child. Playing with a toy gun in a park in Cleveland. The 911 dispatcher knew it was probably fake. Wrote it down. The two police officers responding? Never got that information. Within two seconds of arriving—two seconds—one of them shot him. He died in the hospital the next day. When I think about him, I think about a boy who would never grow up. Never fall in love. Never know what he could have been.

Breonna Taylor, March 13, 2020, Age 26: A nurse. Working hard. Living her life. And three police officers raided her apartment at night with a no-knock warrant. They didn't announce themselves. Her boyfriend, thinking someone was breaking in, fired one shot. The police responded with bullets. Lots of them. Eight hit Breonna. They found no drugs in that apartment. No evidence of anything illegal. But Breonna was dead. The officers were acquitted. Her mother got a settlement: $12 million. Still dead though.

George Floyd, May 25, 2020, Age 46: We all watched that video. Nine minutes. His knee on George's neck. "I can't breathe." The same words Eric Garner said. George saying "Momma." Asking for his dead mother while a man pressed the life out of him. That one—at least we got a conviction. Derek Chauvin is serving 22 years. Three other officers convicted on federal charges. But George is still dead.

Philando Castile, July 6, 2016, Age 32: Shot five times during traffic stop after informing officer of legal firearm. Officer acquitted.

Bobby Hutton, April 6, 1968, Age 17: A kid. Just 17 years old. He believed in something—believed in the Black Panther Party and their Ten-Point Program. Believed he could make a difference in his community. Two days after they murdered Martin Luther King Jr., he was in a basement in Oakland with Eldridge Cleaver when police started shooting. After 90 minutes, tear gas forced them to surrender. Bobby came out with his hands up. Unarmed. And they shot him 12 times. His funeral drew 1,500 people. Marlon Brando showed up to eulogize him. His death changed everything—made the Panthers national. Made people finally understand that this wasn't about bad cops. This was about a system designed to kill us.

January 2026: Federal Agents Killing Citizens in Minneapolis

Renée Nicole Macklin Good, January 7, 2026, Age 37: A U.S. citizen. Sitting in her car on an icy street in Minneapolis. Trying to move her vehicle. Three federal agents surrounded her. According to the videos that bystanders captured—videos that Reuters, BBC, Wall Street Journal all verified—she was attempting a simple maneuver on slippery pavement. One agent opened fire. Three bullets. Renée was dead.

The federal government said she "attempted to run over" the agent. The videos showed something different. A woman in a car on ice. That's it. Bruce Springsteen was so angry about it that he released a song called "Streets of Minneapolis" less than three weeks later. Think about that. A world-famous musician felt so moved by the injustice that he wrote and recorded a song about it.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti, January 24, 2026, Age 37: A nurse. Works in the VA hospital taking care of veterans. Wanted to document what was happening to his community. He was filming agents. Standing between a woman and an agent who'd pushed her down. Directing traffic to keep people safe. Border Patrol agents surrounded him. Pepper-sprayed him. Wrestled him to the ground. Then they shot him. Multiple times. Dead.

They said he was armed. Video evidence showed an agent removing a firearm from his waist literally one second before they killed him. He was holding a phone. That was his weapon. That was dangerous enough.

Operation Metro Surge: 3,000 federal agents deployed to Minneapolis in January 2026. Governor Walz said the real purpose wasn't immigration enforcement. It was retribution. A military occupation. Terrorizing a city.

Save the Children: Education as a Battlefield

Save the Children (1971)

School funding is tied to property taxes. Redlining laws kept Black families out of wealthy neighborhoods for decades. Even now, even after redlining was officially banned in 1974, those neighborhoods are still segregated. Those schools are still funded differently. Those children are still getting a different education. I think about the school my sister went to versus the one my cousin attended in a wealthier district. Same city. Different worlds.

Michelle Obama on Education

In Becoming (2018), Michelle Obama writes: "Education was the only currency that mattered...It was the one thing no one could take away from you...my value wasn't determined by someone else's limited imagination."

But most Black and brown children don't have parents who can create those conditions. Can't move to the right neighborhood. Can't afford private school. They get what the system gives them. And the system is designed to sort them, to track them, to eventually incarcerate them.

The data tells the story:

38% of Black students attend college-prep high schools vs. 52% of white students
Black boys arrested in schools at 5x the rate of white boys
49% of Black men arrested by age 23 vs. 38% of white men
26-27 point gap in reading between white and Black fourth graders
Achievement gap unchanged since 1971

The school-to-prison pipeline is intentional. School resource officers criminalize childhood. The result: a generation primed for incarceration.

Inner City Blues: Violence and Generational Trauma

Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler) (1971)

"Makes me wanna holler, how they do my life...this ain't living, this ain't living."

When I hear those words, I feel them in my chest. The rage. The exhaustion of it all. Violence comes in so many forms that most people don't even recognize it as violence. Bullets, yes. But also: the poverty that forces your mother to work three jobs. The pollution that sends your child to the hospital with asthma attacks. The way a school counselor looks at you and tells you that college "might not be for everyone like you." The way a police car making a routine stop becomes a moment where you're convinced your life might end.

And underneath all of it: the trauma. The inherited, cellular memory of it all.

The Science of Trauma

Scientists at Mount Sinai School of Medicine found something that haunts me: trauma is epigenetic. It's written into DNA. It's passed down. Holocaust survivors' children had different stress hormone profiles. That means their parents' trauma literally changed their biology, changed them before they were even born.

Black Americans carry the trauma of 246 years of slavery, followed by 100 years of Jim Crow. It's in our bodies. Psychologist Harriet McAdoo's research shows that parents living with the stress of racism become hypervigilant. Then they pass that hypervigilance to their children. A child grows up learning: the world isn't safe. Trust no one. Your existence is viewed as a threat.

This isn't weakness. This is survival. And it shows up everywhere. Higher rates of hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, maternal mortality. Depression, anxiety, PTSD. Substance abuse. Suicide. Interpersonal violence. A body that's been coded for survival mode, living that way permanently.

Viola Davis on Poverty and Survival

I read Viola Davis's autobiography Finding Me. She writes about sleeping in cars with her family. About her mother holding a knife while her children slept, ready to fight if anyone tried to hurt them. About going to school hungry. About being ashamed. Being afraid.

She writes: "I learned early that the world didn't care about me. That my life was disposable."

And yet Viola escaped. Through talent, through luck, through sheer determination. But how many Viola Davises never make it? How many die in cars with their mothers while the system tells them they're the problem?

Gaslighting and Suppression

What makes all of this unbearable is the systematic gaslighting that accompanies it. We're told racism is over. We're told if we just work hard enough, we'll make it. We're told our anger is unjustified, that we're overreacting. We're told the police are here to protect us—even as they shoot us in the streets.

When victims are told their experience didn't happen, that they're imagining it, they internalize shame. They stop speaking. They stop resisting. They accept that they deserve what's happening.

This is what's been done to us. The systematic gaslighting of an entire people designed to keep us compliant, silent, self-blaming. And the suppression of resistance? It takes many forms. COINTELPRO—the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program from 1956 to 1971—literally infiltrated Black liberation movements to destroy them. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's stated goal: prevent the rise of a "Black Messiah." They assassinated Fred Hampton. They imprisoned Mumia Abu-Jamal. They destroyed lives.

The 2026 killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti sent a message: "This is what happens when you resist. When you film us. When you stand with the oppressed."

People understand that message. And yet they resist anyway. Because the alternative is death—maybe not literal death today, but death of the spirit.

Mercy, Mercy Me: Environmental Racism and Collective Pain

Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology) (1971)

"How much more abuse from man can she stand?"

Marvin was singing about ecology in 1971 when nobody else was talking about it. When environmentalism was something fringe people did. He understood something that America still doesn't want to face: the destruction isn't random. It's targeted. It's dumped on us.

The Poison

I think about neighborhoods I've visited. South Los Angeles—73% Latino, 20% Black. The air pollution there is 71% higher than the state average. Children with chronic asthma. Adults with respiratory disease.

Then there's places like Cancer Alley in Louisiana. A 90-mile stretch of petrochemical facilities, refineries, chemical plants—all clustered in predominantly Black communities. The cancer rates are among the highest in the nation. Not because of genetics. Because corporations decided to put their poison where it wouldn't affect white, wealthy people.

Angela Davis on Capitalism

Angela Davis wrote about this—the way capitalism extracts wealth while externalizing cost. The companies make billions. The communities die. She writes: "The system is designed to extract wealth from our communities while leaving the poison behind. They take the resources. They leave the waste."

This is intentional. In the 1960s, highways were built directly through Black neighborhoods—destroying communities and creating pollution corridors. Zoning laws ensured industrial facilities went near Black and brown areas. Redlining meant we were trapped. We couldn't leave even if we wanted to.

These weren't accidents. They were policy.

I'm Going Home: Community as Resistance

I'm Going Home (1971)

When Marvin sings about going home, I think he means community. The people who know you. Who love you without condition. Who understand your struggle because they're living it too.

The Black Church and Community

I think about the Black churches in this country—Abyssinian Baptist in Harlem (founded 1808), Metropolitan AME in Washington D.C. (founded 1838). Places where enslaved people gathered in secret to pray, to organize, to resist. Where they started the freedom struggle. These churches became sanctuaries. Hubs of organizing, community care, spiritual sustenance.

They still do that work. Still feed the hungry. Still raise bail. Still say the names of the dead.

The Warmth of Community

There is nothing like being in a room full of your people. The smell of barbecue. Children laughing who haven't yet learned to be afraid. Aunties cooking in kitchens barely big enough to turn around in. Uncles telling stories about survival, about joy in the midst of struggle. Music always. And so much food, made from nothing, transformed into nourishment and love.

These gatherings aren't frivolous. They're revolutionary. Acts of resistance against a system that wants us isolated, divided, afraid. When we gather, we remind each other that we're worthy of love. That we matter. That our survival is sacred.

Shared Trauma, Shared Healing

Psychologist Bessel van der Kolk shows that trauma heals through community. Through witnessing. Through being seen. When Black and brown people come together and share our survival stories, we heal each other. We learn we're not alone. That our trauma isn't our fault. That healing is possible.

The community garden building food in a food desert. The block party. The march. The vigil. All of it matters because it says: we care for each other. We will survive this together.

Overcoming Collective Anxiety

Our anxiety is rational. We know the statistics. We know the names. We know that being in the wrong place at the wrong time can be fatal. That sleeping in your apartment can get you killed. That filming injustice makes you a target.

Yet we still show up. Still gather. Still love each other. Still build.

That's where hope comes from. Not from denial. Not from pretending things are fine. But from continuing to love each other, to care for each other, to build community despite everything.

Trouble Man: Federal Violence and Occupation

Trouble Man (1972)

When 3,000 federal agents occupied Minneapolis in January 2026, it wasn't immigration enforcement. It was war. Against whom? Against people who dared to resist. Against people of color. Against democracy itself.

Governor Walz called it what it was: retribution. A military occupation dressed up as law enforcement.

And when people resisted—when they filmed, when they protested, when they stood in solidarity—the government killed them. Renée Good. Alex Pretti. The message was sent: resist and die.

People understood. And they continued to resist anyway.

What Now?

Ralph Ellison's invisible man eventually decided he couldn't stay in the underground. He had to emerge. Had to make contributions to society as a complex, full human being. Had to force the world to see him.

That's what we do. Every single day.

We educate our children ourselves when institutions betray them. We heal each other when the healthcare system abandons us. We protect each other when police threaten us. We organize for political power so we can force this system to serve us. We build economic alternatives. We gather. We cook. We sing. We tell stories. We remember those who died. We celebrate those who lived. We commit to those who come after us.

Fifty-five years after Marvin asked "What's Going On?"—74 years after Ralph Ellison wrote about invisibility—we're fighting the same battles.

But we're still fighting.

And that matters more than anything.