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

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

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:

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.

We could go on and on, and BC will certainly revisit this subject again.  But readers are still writing us about Leutisha Stills' March 2 Guest Commentary, "Why is Tavis Smiling?" Brother Mal Dixon opines:

Kimberly Taylor attended Tavis's most recent State of the Black Union in Houston and had this to say:

Leonard Mitchell weighs in with these comments:

And finally, Joseph Anderson, a chronic late-night BC reader sent us this ringing endorsement:

Mr. Anderson caught the spirit of BC on this.  We ain't mad at Tavis for being a successful marketer.  We ain't the least bit confused either, about the difference between effective marketing and black leadership for social change.  Do send us your best, and your worst. We try to answer all our email, and print some in this space each week.

Contact Bruce Dixon at [email protected].