There are weeks when the news feels like weather; something that happens over there, something you brace for and then move through.

And then there are times when it lands in your body.

In the last few weeks, vigils have spread across the country after a federal immigration officer killed Renee Good. People are mourning, but they’re also organizing — and not just with signs and speeches. Some are choosing disruption. Some are choosing civil disobedience. They’re asking a blunt question: if systems can take a life in broad daylight and then argue about vocabulary, what exactly are we supposed to do with our grief?

Detroiters know what it means to be extracted from, written off, and still survive. And that makes these stories feel like different chapters of the same book— a book about power, and whose lives it’s allowed to break.

To help us read that book more clearly, Robyn Vincent spoke with Saqib Bhatti of the Action Center on Race and the Economy. His work traces the money behind public pain, and it asks what happens when communities confront the power brokers who, he says, are facilitating that pain.

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