Photograph Source: Basel Yazouri – CC BY 2.0

“What are you going to do now, pull a baby out of your bag?”

The guard’s voice echoed through the marble halls of Capitol Hill, his words hitting me like a physical blow. Not just because of their callousness, but because I had indeed come carrying images of babies–Palestinian children murdered in Gaza, photographs and stories tucked in my tote bag that I believed any human with a heart would see and demand action.

It was January 2025. Biden was still in office. I stood with other seasoned professionals in the Capitol Hill lobby, planning our day of advocacy for Palestine. The space towered above us with its high ceilings and white marble floors, a black metal monument rising like an arrow, pointing upward toward some unreachable justice.

We were a quiet crowd when four or five guards approached. One of them — short, stocky, visibly angry– began shouting as if shooing away a herd of animals: “This is your first warning. If you do not disperse, I will arrest all of you!” We shuffled slightly, exchanging quizzical glances, unsure what had triggered such fury. Then came the line that would haunt me: “What are you going to do now, pull a baby out of your bag?”

In seven words, this guard had unknowingly exposed the mechanism by which an entire society can watch children starve on their screens and remain unmoved. His mockery revealed something deeper than individual cruelty; it exposed what the Dominican Sociologist called the “coloniality of power”—a global system that determines whose children matter, whose tears move us, whose deaths register as loss. It is a system based on racial hierarchy and empowered by economic interest, mainstream media that manufactures consent (to use Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s framework), and by the principle that might make right.

The Logic of Disposable Children

The officer’s statement reveals what Quijano identified as the enduring colonial logic that organizes our world. Though formal colonialism ended, its organizing principle, racial hierarchy, persists in determining human worth. Europeans created racial categories during colonization, not as biological facts, but as what Quijano calls “mental constructions” to justify why it was acceptable to enslave, kill, or dispossess certain populations while granting full humanity to others.

This isn’t abstract theory. When Winston Churchill defended Zionist settlement during the 1937 Palestine Royal Commission hearings, he made the racial logic explicit: “I do not admit that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia, by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race… has come in and taken their place.”

The guard’s question operates within this same framework. Palestinian children exist at the bottom of a hierarchy that renders them fundamentally different from other children. They are what Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon called inhabitants of the “zone of non-being” — not marginalized humans, but beings positioned outside the category of human altogether.

I carried those photographs to Capitol Hill because a Palestinian network to which I belong had launched what we thought would be an undeniable campaign: protecting Palestinian children. Surely, we reasoned, when Americans saw what was being done to children — children — they would demand accountability. We armed ourselves with the Leahy Law, which prohibits U.S. military assistance to foreign forces that commit gross violations of human rights. We brought documentation of systematic torture, of night raids, of children shot while playing.

We were doing what Palestinians are perpetually forced to do: ask to be treated like the rest of humanity. The guard’s mockery was a brutal reminder of what we’re truly up against. Palestinian poet and activist Mohammad El Kurd has written scathingly about the impossible performance Palestinians are forced to undertake—the demand to be “perfect victims”: docile, depoliticized, stripped of religious identity, and severed from any connection to resistance. We must present ourselves as helpless rather than resilient, individual rather than collective, grateful rather than dignified. In this colonial logic, children represent the ultimate “perfect victim”—innocent, non-threatening, deserving of universal sympathy. Yet the guard’s mockery reveals the bankruptcy of even this strategy. When Palestinian children—the most unassailable subjects for empathy—can be dismissed with such casual cruelty, it exposes the illogical logic El Kurd........

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