The conversation surrounding “white privilege” are often about what it gets a white person, but a white priest just showed us what it also protects you from. Pastor Kenny Callaghan was protesting near his Minneapolis church when ICE agents detained him and placed him in the back of an SUV last week. But it wasn’t the detainment that has many folks side-eyeing, it’s what the priest claims the ICE agents told them before letting him go that should absolutely terrify any person of color.
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Pastor Kenny Callaghan of All God’s Children Metropolitan Community Church told local news station Fox 9 Minneapolis that after he heard a myriad of whistles and car horns nearby the morning of Jan. 7, he realized something was happening. He said he grabbed his own whistles, moved toward the chaos on Portland Avenue and took pictures. That’s when, according to Pastor Callaghan, all hell broke loose.
He recalled, as ICE agents surrounded a “brown-skinned woman,” he “welled up in energy, even more energy than I had” in an attempt to divert the agents’ attention. He screamed for him to be arrested instead while declaring, “We are not afraid!” along with the crowd.
Pastor Callaghan alleged, “Before I knew it, they were putting handcuffs on my arms and they asked me, ‘Are you afraid now?’’ He courageously answered: “No, I am not,” and alleged agents “pointed a gun in my face.”
As he was detained for about 30 minutes, he described an alleged, chilling comment made by an ICE agent— one that didn’t settle with him until later.
After allegedly asking him multiple times whether he was scared, agents allegedly “came back and they said, ‘Are you afraid yet? ‘ and I said ‘no,’ and then they said, ‘Well, you’re white. You wouldn’t be fun anyway. Get out of the car.’” Wow. The pastor concluded the alleged statement “shocked” him because, “It was then that I knew that this staging that these ICE raids are really about fear and intimidation.”
His cuffs were removed and he was free to leave, but Pastor Callaghan said the interaction left him shaken. “Now I was confronted with the fact that these ICE agents that are supposed to be keeping my neighborhood safe were actually there for sport,” he said.
Despite his interaction with ICE, Pastor Callaghan told Fox 9 it’s in his DNA to “speak up for marginalized people.” He says he’s committed to “speaking up for people who are being intimidated and targeted for intimidation,” and “would do it again in a heartbeat.”
The Minnesota pastor’s allegations is a stark reminder that the same system that allegedly saw a white priest as “no fun” just might view Black and brown bodies as the ultimate playground for overreach and abuse.
The alleged comment suggests that for ICE, the “fun” is found in the power dynamic of targeting those who lack the protection of a Roman collar; especially in Minneapolis, where the wounds of police brutality (George Floyd) and the death of Renee Good are still raw. If some federal agents feel comfortable enough to vocalize who would be “fun” to detain, we may have moved past the era of “implicit bias” and straight into the territory of documented state terror.
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