In a recent call with other Asian American Pacific Islander staff at the ACLU, we used an ice breaker to ask about peoples’ comfort foods. Everyone’s responses had me reflecting on the power of food long after I clicked “Leave Meeting.”

At their best, the kitchen and dinner table are sacred spaces with no place for judgment. Eating with one’s hands is not gawped at: we can relax into the artistry of constructing the Perfect Bite and lipping jasmine rice off our fingertips in a benediction to the hands that feed and support us. There is no pressure to apologize for the aroma of kimchi or the jaw-tingling piquancy of fish sauce. The microwave — and the leftover scents it produces — is no battleground.

But during COVID-19, we have lost a vital ingredient: people. Without that vital component of others to sit and share a meal with, authenticity feels substituted into submission. And, in being mindful of the privileges I hold, that “lost” applies to some of us outside of a rhetorical loss, and that grief over family members is another crushing burden some must carry on top of everything else.

In grappling with the initial shutdown, I turned to the grocery store as one of the last frontiers of “I can do this” in such a poorly managed catastrophe. It was one of the scarce ways to organically interact without the stiff choreography imposed by Zoom invites. Trips to the grocery store were a coping mechanism to fill this bereavement, to try getting something when nothing was the safest choice.

But even while more and more anti-AAPI assaults and killings make the news and surface on social media, I recognize a certain cruelty in backing my dad’s advice to my Filipino mother that avoiding trips to the grocery store is the safest choice. (At least, advising no trips without my white dad — and no, the layers in leaning on whiteness as a literal shield in this specific context is not lost on me, either.) Despite my mixed feelings, I have leaned into this advice because I, similarly to other AAPI people in the U.S. and in this very organization, am scared. I am desperate.

In a world where so much control has been ripped away, suggesting to my mom that she sequester herself and avoid leaving the house even for something as vital as grocery runs feels like the only thing I can do — even as I recognize the subtler violence in asking her to do this given how cooking is soul work for us both. Food has always been a shared medium for us. It appears in the earliest memory I have with her when I sweated out a fever as a small child: the perfume of smashed garlic cloves clung to her cool fingers as she pushed my hair from my forehead. “The garage is your dad’s kingdom,” she told me on a recent call while grinning knowingly at me over her glasses. “But the kitchen is mine.”

Telling her not to go to the grocery store for fear of violence because of her identity as a Filipina woman feels like a severance and another casualty of this pandemic to grieve. And I am mindful that while the terror that my mom gets home safely from the grocery store remains in the realm of anticipatory grief for me, Vilma Kari’s family cannot say the same.

I know I’m not alone in saying: I am exhausted. Acknowledging this shared reality is a conjugation drill in a pandemic dialect: I am exhausted. You are exhausted. We are exhausted.

In search of a palliative, I find myself returning to the words offered by Professor Anne A. Cheng in her recent New York Times opinion piece “What This Wave of Anti-Asian Violence Reveals About America.” Professor Cheng concludes:

“All we can do is to continue to tell our truths, to know, even just for ourselves, that we are here.”

I am terrified to admit this, but I will tell you one of my truths: I don’t know what the plan is. I don’t have a policy proposal, or a litigation strategy. But I know that I can do what I can in my day-to-day, and ask the important questions to those in my community: how are you doing? Can I get you something to eat?

And as for the rest of Professor Cheng’s quote, where is here? For myself, it’s standing in my kitchen with a knife in hand, chopping onions while letting myself fall into the dreamy nostalgia of muscle memory. It’s measuring out Datu Puti soy sauce, lime, sugar, garlic, and red pepper flake for sawsawan that I use with dumplings or scallion pancakes later in the week. Here demands presence in my hands to make a red chile marinade and connect with my roots as a mixed Filipina from New Mexico. Here means going back to food not just as an escape, but as a return to a site of power, self-affirmation, and community. And, ultimately, a place where we can all be free.

On May 3, 4, and 5, 1971, more than 13,000 people were arrested in Washington, D.C.—the largest mass arrest in U.S. history.

Many of them had come to Washington to demonstrate against the War in Vietnam. Some planned to block streets and bridges. The Nixon administration decided to be proactive, and arrest anyone who looked like they might try to do such a thing. (Most arrests were made by D.C. police, but the decisions were made right in the White House.) As a result, 7,000 people were arrested on May 3—including a few people who were blocking streets and bridges, and thousands of people who were demonstrating legally, or walking to school or work, or watching from the sidelines. Basically, if you were in downtown D.C., you were liable to be arrested—including undercover police officers who were arrested because other officers didn’t know the code word signifying “I’m a cop.”

More than 2,000 were arrested on May 4 while demonstrating on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the Justice Department, and on May 5 more than 1,200 were arrested on the Capitol steps, where they had been invited by Reps. Ron Dellums and Bella Abzug, who watched their audience arrested out from under them as they were addressing the crowd.

Normal arrest and booking procedures went out the window. The police kept hardly any records that would enable them to show the legal basis of an arrest—and for most people there was no legal basis. Thousands of arrestees were detained in outdoor fenced areas, and in the old D.C. Coliseum, where they slept on the floor. The court system was also thrown into chaos.

The D.C. Public Defender Service and the ACLU rushed to court to secure the immediate release of the detainees. Many were released fairly quickly, but those who refused to give their names or fingerprints were held, in some cases, for several days.

The ACLU-DC—then known as the ACLU of the National Capitol Area—quickly filed a class action seeking to have the arrest records of all 13,000 people expunged, except for the 79 who were actually convicted of crimes. That case succeeded, and the federal court issued an order providing that those people had never been arrested, only “detained,” and that they could deny, even under oath, that they had been arrested on those dates. That order remains a model for expungement orders in D.C. to this day.

Prosecutors selected eight of the people who had been arrested on the Capitol steps and brought them to trial in August 1972. After a 13-day trial it took the jury less than four hours (including lunch) to acquit all eight. Charges against the remaining arrestees were dropped soon afterwards.

The ACLU then filed three additional class actions seeking damages for people who had been falsely arrested and wrongfully detained on May 3, May 4, and May 5. Unfortunately, the courts found that the facts regarding the people arrested on May 3 and 4 were not sufficiently uniform to justify a class action. Nevertheless, scores of people who came forward and identified themselves were able to obtain compensation in settlements. The case on behalf of the Capitol Steps arrestees, called Dellums v. Powell, was certified as a class action, and after trial, the jury awarded the class members $12 million in damages (about $61 million in 2021 dollars), which was said to be the largest verdict in a case that didn’t involve a major corporation. But the court of appeals thought that was too high and sent the case back for a new trial on damages; the parties then settled for about $2 million (more than $10 million in 2021 dollars).

Rep. Dellums went on to become the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and after retiring from Congress was Mayor of Oakland, California from 2008 to 2011. Dellums v. Powell remains a landmark case about the ability to obtain monetary damages for violation of one’s First Amendment rights. ACLU-DC is relying on that precedent even now, in our class action lawsuit on behalf of people who were protesting peacefully in Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020, when scores of federal officers attacked peaceful protestors with tear gas, rubber bullets, and a baton charge prior to President Trump’s walk to St. John’s Church to stage a photo-op holding a Bible.