Facing Us | Who Here Are the Dangerous?

In a continuation of events, El Salvador has offered to take Americans deemed criminals into their jail system.

News sources like CNN report that the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, “has offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals in custody in our country, including those of US citizenship and legal residents”.

It is worth questioning what makes a person dangerous enough to warrant deportation.

The notion is ambiguous enough, and the definition varies depending on who you are talking to to leave a virtual chasm for interpretation. To me, a dangerous person would be a rapist or someone who is a serial sexual assaulter, a child molester, a serial killer, someone who commits hate crimes against the most vulnerable populations with impunity, or someone who beats or abuses their family members. This is just to name a few. But time and time again, we see people who are guilty of these things celebrated, protected and in positions of power.

To others, a dangerous person can be an activist.

Martin Luther King JR was considered by the FBI in 1963 to be “the most dangerous Negro”. In 1962, the U.S. believed Nelson Mandela to be “the most dangerous communist”, he was added to the terrorist list in the 1980s. It was not until 2008 that the U.S. government no longer considered Mandela a terrorist, and he was not removed from said lists until 2013. Similarly, Angela Davis and Malcom X were at some time considered to be enemies of the state.

Depending on the person you are speaking to, a “dangerous” person can either do bodily or systematic harm to others—especially when there are no protections in place that say otherwise—or challenge the system that refuses to acknowledge and protect those human beings who have a right to exist, to protection, and to dignity.

More often than not, laws are a few steps behind the reality of what is morally right and just.

This variation leaves room for dangerous consequences. The potential consequences should be a surprise to no one since it is a case of history repeating itself.

But in case it is somehow unclear, ask yourself:

• Were the people who shepherded escaped slaves through the underground railroad acting against the system and/or the law?
• Were the people who hid and helped Jews during the Nazi Germany deportations acting against the system and/or law?

At the end of the day, our systems are meant to protect and perpetuate the structures that currently stand, and those structures as they stand are not built to protect everyone. We can never truly understand the perspectives of people who are not like us. That is the value of inviting different perspectives in, so that the structures that we build can truly serve all of us.