Let's All Demonize Mexicans! YEAH!

Trick it out....
People act surprised when they find out I am not a Democrat.
I'm really not.
Read this.

Direct from The Black Commentator, a publication which I am so thankful for when issues like this come up.

After 9/11, I remember being so disgusted... as an African (American), as a Muslim.

As an African American Muslim.

Seeing Black folk so eager for the approval of white folks.
Negroes donning the colors of oppression               

Waving and wearing American flags as some perveted sign of "unity."
So happy to join in mutual hate of somebody else.

So glad to no longer be the most hated group in the United States.

If only for September, being an A-rab was worse than being a nigger.

It's so sad to see Black folk now doing the same thing. Joining the oppressor. For what? His approval?

Maybe now he'll let you date his daughters.
Maybe now he'll join YOU in YOUR fight.

I can picture it now.... Black folk and white folks, arm in arm, calling for an end to negative portrayals of Africans in TV, film and radio.
Black folk and white folks, together, united, collecting signatures to demand a recount in the Three Coon Mafia Oscar balloting.
Blacks and whites, together, united, protesting Fox News Channel, UPN and BET...

Keep waiting.
Read the article.
Comment.
This is serious.

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Last Week's BC cover story raised the subject of the relationship between African Americans and Latinos, blacks and browns.  We singled a particularly contemptible maneuver by Kasim Reed, a black DLC Georgia state legislator from Atlanta who tried to outdo Republican viciousness when it came to proposing punitive measures against immigrants.  Reed authored a bill which would imprison anyone convicted of using a false ID to get a job for five years.  Predictably, his proposal was embraced by leading white Georgia Democrats.

This is how Georgia's New Democrats hope to win white votes on the immigration issue.

Reed, who intends to run for mayor of Atlanta in 2009, is certainly not stupid enough to imagine that he is protecting black jobs.  All the measures to strip foreigners of civil and human rights, to marginalize them and make them fear jail or deportation at a moment's notice only make them more desirable employees.  When given a choice, employers always prefer a fearful, compliant work force with few or no rights to an aware one with enforceable rights.  Just having them around, even if an employer chooses not to hire them, effectively lowers everyone's wages. 

A reader named Gloria took exception to us.  She wrote

I totally disagree with you.  This is not a black, white or brown issue, it is not about race.  This is about legality, about respecting laws, sovereignty and borders.  If people want to come to the USA, or any other country for that matter, looking for a job and a decent living, they need to have a permit or visa to enter the country. Please do not twist the subject. 

Another reader put it even more baldly.  George Wilson wrote us this one sentence email.

How do Black Americans benefit from having illegal aliens in our country?

Good questions.  As African Americans we ought to understand better than anybody how white supremacy works and how language, which frames the way we all think, is a potent tool of oppression, or of liberation.  To start with, we need to purge the phrase "illegal aliens" from our vocabulary.  Anybody who uses it within earshot ought to be challenged promptly and publicly, just like you would in a case of the unauthorized use of the N-word. 

Aliens are from Jupiter.  White America defines people as "aliens" in order to justify treatment unfit for a member of the human family, just as our ancestors were once labeled "property," allowing "owners" to buy and sell us like cattle.  For those so unable to free their minds from the box of white racist legalism that they cannot part with the adjective "illegal," we should insist that they follow it with the correct noun that says what these folks really are.  Illegal persons.  Illegal people.  Illegal humans.

And if "illegal human" sounds ridiculous and evil, as it ought to in any civilized ear, it's only because white America's law on this score is evil and ridiculous. 

Another BC reader, Jo Mills made this contribution:

Brown people have played the role of opportunists - at our expense - for many years.  Statistics have shown that a huge steady flow of immigrants in your more populated cities always results in a loss of jobs for African Americans.  We must become our own advocates.  Immigrants chose this life.  African American descendants of slaves did not.  Let us take care of us first.

Mexicans should not be made villains, but I do want African Americans to take care of their own business before using the little fight we have left to solve anyone else's problems.  As a people, we have still not concentrated or harnessed enough energy to take care of our share of problems.  Mass incarceration.  Mass and historically unequaled unemployment, drugs, fractured families, loss of the support systems and networks, self hate and lack of pride enough to build for self, and so on.  We have enough to keep us busy.  When we finish working these out, we can go to the table of coalescence as a positive and not a negative pull of energy.  I see none of the immigrants or their descendants rushing to help us deal with these problems.  Instead, they appear to take advantage of them!

The idea that black unemployment in the U.S. is "historically unequaled" and the notion that immigrants choose to come here and cause labor market problems for African Americans betray a breathtaking ignorance of human motivation and of the way the global economy works.  In recent decades we have seen the US government openly aid and encourage manufacturing and service industry to shut down facilities and factories here and move them first to Mexico, then to the lowest wage overseas hellhole available.  At the same time, billions of our tax dollars are paid in agricultural subsidies to agribusiness companies like ADM and Cargill, which dump their goods into Haiti, Mexico, Central America, Africa and Asia killing the market for locally grown stuff and driving farmers off the land and into the cities where there are no jobs, no health care, no futures.  Unemployment rates in Kingston, Jamaica or Dakar, Senegal are much higher than any experienced in black America.  A few of their daughters find work in the sweatshops. The rest stand around, hustle or starve, or emigrate.  Not exactly "choices" as we understand that word.

Tens of thousands walk half the length of Africa every month trying to get to Europe. Can you imagine crossing the Sahara on foot? Chinese pay a couple year's wages in advance to be packed into shipping crates that might or might not arrive here. Some others walk from Guatemala and Chiapas, from Oaxaca and Michoacan.  If these sound like "choices" to you, here are some additional clues. 

In the mostly non-union hotel industry in Atlanta where I live, employers like Marriott, Hyatt and Westin a generation ago put their white workers up front as doormen and desk clerks and kept African Americans in the back as kitchen help and housekeepers.  Nowadays a few blacks can make concierge and desk help, but if you're African American don't even think of applying for a job in the kitchen, or housekeeping either at many hotels.  The first shift in a kitchen might be Filipino, the second Somalis, and the third Mexicans.  Three floors of housekeeping will be Ethiopians, and another three floors will be Jamaicans and Haitians.  Are these immigrant workers "opportunists"?  Is it their idea to carve up the work like that?  Or do employers do that for reasons of their own?  Is it to the disadvantage of black workers?  Certainly. 

We have been on the bottom as long as there's been an America.  Now the globalized labor market is forcing us to share that bottom with other unfortunate folks.  Should we rail against the Mexicans?  Should we gripe about the Jamaicans, organize against the Filipinos and Arabs?  Lou Dobbs would want us to.  Employers would like that, and Republicans too.  Even some Democrats.  But we cannot escape the bottom by making common cause with the folks who put us down here.

Finally, black America does not have the luxury of turning  inward to solve problems like mass incarceration and the HIV-AIDS epidemic first while all this other stuff waits.  The world simply doesn't work that way.  It will take a broad popular movement to challenge the nation's social policy of mass incarceration, a movement rooted in and led from our black communities.  But since mass incarceration of blacks is the social policy of the whole nation, such a movement will have to somehow gain widespread traction outside our communities as well.  Likewise, solutions to the crises in black housing, health care, family life and education may start in our communities but must ultimately involve the redirection of the whole society's energies to solve.  Even our so-called "internal problems" are not ours alone, nor are their solutions.

As bad as our situation is, we have the longest experience of American white supremacy of anyone save local Native Americans.  We are numerous, self aware, and despite our internal differences, we possess a degree of relative political clarity and cohesion found nowhere else in American society.  Like it or not, this is a burning house and we are stuck with the role of first responders.  Somebody has to lead the fight against these fires, and black America may be better equipped than anyone.  The issues on the table now are all on the table now, and none of them will wait.