A Song for the Shackled
Adding a Rousing Reminder that We’re All in This Together to the Trump-Era Resistance Playlist
“None of us are free, if one of us is chained, none of us are free” — Solomon Burke, written by Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, and Brenda Russell
There is a song that has been running in a loop in my head over the last week, a song by Solomon Burke from 2002 that speaks to the moment1, to the images that are running in their own loops night after night on the news. It is a song of anger and hope and unity, a song that cuts through the muck of our politics and asks of us, demands of us, that we see that we are all a part of the same world and that we live and die together, that our freedoms are interdependent.
“None of us are free, none of us are free, none of us are free, if one of us is chained, none of us are free.”
I hear the song and I see the images: (None of us are free.) Men and women shackled. (One of us is chained.) Walked in single file and loaded onto military transports. (None of us are free.)
Most of these prisoners are from Latin America, from Guatemala and Colombia and Venezuela. Most are here without legal authorizations and most, despite the proclamations of President Donald Trump and his administration, are not criminals. But they are being rounded up. They are being placed in chains, forced to return to the countries from which they fled.
There is fear in their eyes. Fear in these immigrant communities.
“All the Hispanic people are staying home,” a worker at ShopRite told me this morning. She was Hispanic, was commenting on why the store seemed relatively empty. “They’re scared I guess.”
I’ve talked with dozens of activists and immigrants in the months since Trump’s election, and nearly all predicted what we are witnessing — both the raids and the fear that is paralyzing many, causing them to stay home, to keep their children home.
They have a right to their fear, because we have failed them. We steal their labor —- they get paid a pittance for drudge work that might not get done if not for them — and we treat them like criminals.
"All of them, because they illegally broke our nation's laws, and therefore, they are criminals as far as this administration goes," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday.
They have been stripped of their humanity, made into totems. Erase them and we will be set free, we’ve been told, these parasitical immigrants. This is Trump’s vision, his answer to a decline driven by worship of the dollar, of profit, of an economic system that creates wealth disparities and is driving us to environmental collapse and pushing people from their homes. These are not so much migrants as refugees, even if many do not meet the legal definition.
And these refugees are people. They have jobs and families, and emotional lives. There are criminals among them, as there are criminals who are natural born citizens. But rather than ask why they are fleeing from their homeland, we treat them as threats. Lock them in shackles.
“None of us is free, if one of us is chained, none of is free.”
It is so much theater.
The reality, as ABC reported, is that many who have been deported committed no actual crime, aside from entering the United States or overstaying a visa once here. Nearly all are being transported in chains as if they are violent offenders or war criminals.
Lesly Ramírez, who was deported to Guatemala in shackles on a military flight,
said that her handcuffs were tight and hurt her hands. While the migrants were provided food on the plane, she said it was difficult to eat with their cuffed hands chained to their waists. Authorities on the plane removed them only shortly before landing, she said.
Ramírez, 35, a single mother of two, had climbed the border fence and had been walking in the U.S. for two hours before the Border Patrol picked her up on Friday.
“We’re all human beings," she said. "We were going to work, we’re not criminals.”
Burke’s song reminds us of this, inspires us. And it should soften our hearts of stone, allow us to see these demonized others, who we live alongside of and rely on as our brethren. As long as we see them as other, treat them as other, place them in chains, then as Burke sings, none of us are free.
The song had somehow slipped under my radar when it was released, so I am grateful to Greg Kot and Sound Opinions for featuring it as a Desert Island Jukebox pick. Listen to the episode for more about the song.