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
there’s a word of this comparison to illegal immigrants to the american civil rights movement: trivialization. yes, there are injustices meted out to illegal immigrants, but to place them in the context of what happened to black americans between their involuntary arrival to these shores, their delegitimization as citizens of the nation in which they were born, and their subjegation under apartheid in the south seems manifestly disrespectful.
this nation never entered into an implicit social contract with illegal immigrants. individuals & corporations do via capitalist transactions between consenting adults. this nation did promise to black americans, especially after the civil war, a fair go as equal citizens before the law in fact as well as spirit. it turned its back on that obligation. that was gross injustice. not only that, black americans fought in two wars and bled on behalf of this nation.
i could go on.
i think i am clear that on these message boards that my sympathies toward the plight of individual illegal immigrants is something i separate from my attitude toward the illegal immigration and immigrants as a class in relation to our constitutional republic, but the co-opting of the history of misery of black americans in the interests of what many admit openly is an economic justice movement beggars the imagination.
razib says above:
“there’s a word of this comparison to illegal immigrants to the american civil rights movement: trivialization.”
I think you men “equation” of the immigration protests with the civil rights movement, since one can “compare” any two things – a mouse and a lion, a daisy and an oak tree, Pluto and Jupiter — without it meaning one considers them equal .
I think the civil rights movement is not a chapter of history that is closed but an ongoing process in which African-Americans play a dominant and inspirational role as leaders and innovators in both the theory and practice of resistance to oppression and championing of the ideals of democracy being made real and universal.
The recent immigrants’ rights protests builds on the foundation laid by black struggle and would not be possible without it. Far from lessening the significance of the black civil rights movement, I think it is honoured and brought back to public consciousness by being associated with the current immigrants’ rights protests.
Too often whites will claim racism is a thing of the past by pointing to the civil rights movement of the 50′s & 60′s as having acccomplished all its goals, ended Jim Crow, and closed the story of the black struggle for equal rights. These people need to be reminded that the process is far from over, equality remains an unattained goal, and racism is still one of the greatest pathologies in the American social body. The immigrants’ rights protests provides a valuable opportunity to bring that fact back to the surface of public thought and debate.
In a short few decades, demographic projections predict that whites will be a numerical minority in the USA. This will give the country a change to finally wipe away the remaining barriers to equal rights for all, and one of the chief strategies of the ruling elite to prevent this will be to divide and conquer by pitting different non-white communities against each other, such as blacks vs. hispanic. We can’t allow this dissolution of solidarity to occur.
“Who am I to say that one group can own a phrase & another can’t? It’s the whole “holocaustâ€? 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
The term you are referring to is “genocide”, not “holocaust”.
From wikipedia.com -
– Since the late 19th century, “holocaust” has primarily been used to refer to disasters or catastrophes. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was first used to describe Hitler’s treatment of the Jews from as early as 1942, though it did not become a standard reference until the 1950s.
So yeah, I would say they do have a “corner market on the term”. Sorry.
And I dont know if I could call slavery a genocide either. And I really dont think I could equate this immigration mess to the civil rights movement. Why does everyone want to claim the title of “most repressed”?