March 8, 2020
Testimony of Minor Child
My moms don’t want to even carry their phones with them, let alone turn them on. I say, what if there’s an emergency, what if an immigrant attacks you or something? Mums says there are no immigrants anymore, they’re all in the camps, and Mama always adds that I should say “illegal immigrant.” But I still see posts about how white women who go out alone are just sluts asking to be attacked. It’s all the bots talk about online, protecting white women, and Mums looks kinda white, so I worry about her. When I tell her that she shouldn’t go out alone because people will think she’s a slut, she looks at Mama and presses her lips together and glares at me. But she doesn’t say that’s sexist anymore, because that’s one of the words you can’t use in public. Public is anywhere there’s a phone, to tell the truth.
My moms make me leave my phone in a box on the front porch with theirs, and I can only use it outside the house. Mama says the phones are tracking us for the government and record what we say and where we go. They won’t even use a phone to check the time. In the kitchen, we got this wind-up clock that I can’t even read, like the speedometer on a car. When we’re out shopping, they’re always asking me what time it is.
And, yeah, yeah, I suppose the machines are tracking us, but I say that’s not the government, that’s the machines. It’s for our protection, and it catches the bad actors and the paid troublemakers. Plus, my phone is my proof that I have a right to be here, because the vigilantes might think I’m Mexican or Muslim or one of the other M-words. They make a lot of those kind of mistakes, but being a vigilante means you never gotta apologize.
I got stopped a lot last year when I hit my teens, but I never got beat up bad. Mama told me that she thought my clothes were getting me stopped, not my skin. And it seems to be true. As long as I dress like a girly white girl and act quiet when I’m on the street, the vigilantes leave me alone. It’s not like they’re fooled about who I am or care what I really think, they just want me to look like I know they’re watching me. When me and my girlfriends get together at home, we all bring jeans and makeup, and dress any way we want to. We don’t get too loud, though. No music: the new folks upstairs don’t like our music at all, and if the neighbors complained, the cops would come, and they know that, those folks. Our other neighbors would never call the cops on us, but these new white folks would do it.
I worry about the cops, and I try real hard not to get noticed by them. They size you up pretty careful, and their default is that every kid who’s not white has a gun and they need to protect themselves. They shoot you, it’s self-defense, and they kill you, there’s no video.
My moms keep me real close to the house unless they’re with me, not so much because of the cops, but because of the Child Reclamation people. They just snatch kids right off the sidewalk, sometimes—kidnap them. It’s not right, it’s not even completely legal, but it happens, and once it happens, you’re in their system for a long time.
The hardest part for my moms is they are registered abominations—well, that’s what my moms call it. They got married like fifteen years ago, right when it was legal, and everything was fine until after the Trump year. When the laws changed, my moms had to go to court to keep me, and they won—some people did at the beginning of the AT era, you know. The social worker argued that I was too old for the CRD to take away, plus I was Mama’s birth child. (And yes, my moms call the CRD “the crud.”) She was a fighter, that social worker. She fought for every client’s child to stay with their family, and in my case she won. She was a good woman, my moms say. Passed on last year, after her arrest.
Well, thank you for listening. I sure hope you can approve our application.