Archive for May, 2006

Today’s Freedom Riders? [out of ideas / Flickr]

These past few weeks, Britni Jackson has been refereeing a debate on her blog The Prisoner’s Wife about what to call the nascent immigrants’ rights movement, or what not to call it. Then the New York Times likened the protests to the Civil Rights movement; then TV news in California picked it up.

As you probably saw (reading through the comments) plenty of African-Americans aren’t ready to hand that term over to anyone else.

The Prisoner’s Wife, in an email to Open Source, 5/12/06

Unless they are being beaten for being in a country they did not ask to be taken to, hung from trees for merely existing, or trying to obtain the basic rights of all CITIZENS while being hosed down like rabid dogs, they are out of line for even suggesting this kind of correlation.

J, in a comment to the new civil rights movement?, The Prisoner’s Wife, 5/02/06

Who am I to say that one group can own a phrase & another can’t? It’s the whole “holocaust” debate. Some African-Americas have wondered why Jewish people have a corner market on the term. Isn’t Slavery (or any systematic distruction of a people) a holocaust? So i’m torn.

The Prisoner’s Wife, in an email to Open Source, 5/12/06

I think a lot of black folk may have mixed feelings about Mexicans because they feel that they are just another in a long line of immigrant groups who are ultimately going to get treated better than African Americans – I mean that’s been a pattern in America’s history – while black people have been in the US for the last 400/ 500 years, and basically built America, the immigrant groups (even illegal) are eventually considered as “better” than African Americans.

Ruminations of a Racial Realist, in a comment to the new civil rights movement?, The Prisoner’s Wife, 5/06/06

Once again, these follow up stories and second day angles introduced mostly by media for public discourse are so misguided. Is the issue really whether we call this a Civil Rights issue/movement?

[One thing] missing from this so-called discourse, is why so many are illegal…what does it take to come here legally?

I’m not suggesting that black folks should automatically be more sensitive to the cause, but why the hell do so many feel entitled to be so overtly racist about it! Damn. Anything to build ourselves up, I suppose.

So…Wise…Sista, in a comment to the new civil rights movement?, The Prisoner’s Wife, 5/03/06

The world is a bigger place than black America. Wasn’t Malcolm headed in that “we” need rights direction anyway? He was going global. No point fighting. If not black folk’s destiny, it’s the destiny of any would-be future struggle…if anything, let’s use this fight to remind black folks we still got some sh*t to march our a**es about too.

bygpowis, in a comment to the new civil rights movement?, The Prisoner’s Wife, 5/02/06