Who Gets to Belong?

On a January morning in Minneapolis, a woman stood up for her neighbours.

Renée Nicole Good had already dropped her child at school when she noticed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers operating in her neighbourhood.

Families were anxious. Children were present. So she did what many people instinctively do when something feels wrong: she stayed close, she watched, she tried to protect the people around her.

Her neighbours were ethnic minorities. Many were immigrants. Some were simply perceived to be. Renée was white, a U.S. citizen, a mother of three, and yet she was killed by an ICE officer while attempting to leave the scene.

Her wife would later say, plainly: “We had whistles. They had guns.” That detail matters. Because Renée did not die because she crossed a border. She died because she crossed a line that power does not like to be crossed: the line where ordinary people refuse to accept that some lives are more disposable than others.

Her death exposed something brutal and often unspoken: the mentality that decides who belongs does not stop with migrants. It never has. Across the world, Black and brown people know this instinctively. We have always understood that when society becomes obsessed with “sending people back where they came from,” the definition of where you came from is both elastic and dangerous. It stretches. It bends and shifts. It eventually lands on people who were born here, raised here, shaped here. It lands on people who are from here. In Britain, this is not theoretical.

Generations of diaspora have been told to “go home” in the very streets where they learned to ride bikes, went to school, paid taxes, buried grandparents.

The Windrush scandal made explicit what many already knew: belonging, when issued and policed by the state, is conditional. And it is enforced. Sometimes quietly, sometimes violently, by institutions that claim neutrality while disproportionately harming certain communities. That is why the story of Renée Good does not belong to America alone. It sits alongside other names, other places, other moments when authority met ordinary life with force instead of care.

It echoes in Brazil’s favelas, where police killings are routine and racialised. It echoes in France’s banlieues, where young Black and Arab men are stopped, searched, and sometimes killed for existing in public space.

It echoes in Nigeria during End SARS, in Australia with Aboriginal deaths in custody, and in Britain, where the name Clinton McCurbin still demands to be spoken aloud.

Nearly four decades ago, McCurbin, a young Black British man, died after being restrained by police inside a Wolverhampton department store. His death shocked the community. There was grief. There were questions. There were protests. There were promises. And then there was silence.

Today, campaigners are calling for a blue plaque to mark his life and death. Not as provocation. Not as protest theatre. But as recognition. A blue plaque says something deceptively simple: this person lived here. It fixes memory into place. It refuses erasure. Erasure is often the final act of brutality.

What connects McCurbin and Good is not sameness of circumstance, but sameness of outcome: lives lost at the intersection of authority, suspicion, and a refusal to see people as fully human.

In both cases, communities were left carrying grief, and the unsettling awareness that systems designed to “maintain order” can, when unchecked, destroy the very fabric of communal trust.

In the UK, initiatives like Operation Raise the Flag, which placed national flags across towns under the language of ‘pride’ revealed how symbolism can unsettle as much as it reassures.

For many Black and mixed-race Britons, those flags did not feel like pride. They felt like a warning. A reminder that national identity is often imagined narrowly, and enforced socially long before it is enforced legally. Flags, borders, raids, stop-and-search, they all communicate the same question, over and over again: Are you really supposed to be here? For the global diaspora, this question is exhausting because it never goes away.

It follows people across generations, passports, accents, and achievements. You can be born somewhere and still be treated as provisional. You can defend your neighbours and still be met with lethal force.

You can live a whole life and still be denied a plaque that says you mattered. This is why remembrance matters. This is why blue plaques matter. This is why stories like Clinton McCurbin’s must be told carefully, honestly, and without racial gatekeeping. For Black and brown communities across the world, communities long familiar with being told to move along, quieten down, go back, that worldview has never been abstract. It has always been personal.

The question now is whether we continue to accept it as inevitable, or whether we finally insist that home is not something granted by power, but something built, lived, and defended together.