I
grew up in the sho’ nuff ‘hood’ in Avondale, Cincinnati Ohio in the 1960s, but
I made my career as a college professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham,
Washington. The university has a few hundred African American students in a
student body of roughly 15,000. The city is approaching 100,000 in population,
but with an African American population (that they can count) of around 1,500.
You could double that if you figure for the biracial population who are part
African American. But there ain’t no ‘hood’ in Bellingham Washington.
I
have been active in my community around multiracial democratic issues since
Jesse Jackson’s call for a Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s. But I haven’t been
in the middle of debates abut race and politics in African American communities
for many years. My brother Kevin lives in St. Petersburg Florida, a city of a
quarter of a million people with a sizeable Black community.
Over
the decades Kevin and I have shared notes in our conversations about race and
community activism. Kevin is a Muslim, having converted to Islam a couple of
decades ago. He is an indispensable purveyor of perspectives from Black
communities on the political issues of our times.
Since
Trump’s return to the presidency, we have had spirited exchanges over two
issues: the decline in Black male support for Kamala Harris from the levels
previous Democratic presidential candidates received; and what the posture of
the Black community should be as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
cracks down on immigrants across the country. It is the issue of the ICE
crackdown that I want to address today.
President
Trump’s aggressive anti-immigrant stance
is the cornerstone of his MAGA agenda. Concerns of a ’great replacement’ of
White people as the US population approaches a majority of people of color have
aggravated White nationalist since Barack Obama came out of nowhere to win the
presidency in 2008. Some moderate White assimilationist have also voiced
concerns that the values of Western civilization are under assault as
non-Europeans become the majority of the population. Many African Americans
also dislike immigrants because they view them as ‘replacing” Black people in
the economy. Taken together, that was enough to make immigration the second
most important issue in the 2024 election behind inflation.[1]
Latino
support for Kamala Harris tanked compared to previous elections. Whereas Biden
got 65% of the Latino vote in 2020. Harris gained only 56% of them in 2024; and
she garnered only 44% of the Latino male vote. These numbers have prompted a
wave of attacks on Latinos in Black social media (some of it real and some it
fake). Accusations that Latinos are not
to be trusted anymore and that Black folks must steel ourselves to go it alone
in this irretrievably anti-Black society have been rife.
ICE,
Customs and Border Protection and the Border Patrol have cracked down in places
where Latinos work and shop, and where their kids go to school. In our
conversations my brother has shared the view from the ‘Black Street’ that
Latinos have bever been there for us in
the Jim Crow era, the civil rights movement or more recently in the Black Lives
Matter movement. So why should we step up in support of them now?
Mexican American Labor History
African
Americans and others will know well the history of our enslavement, the Jim Crow
experience after slavery and our continuing struggles for racial justice and
equity since the 1960s. Since slavery we have been a stigmatized minority
always on the defensive just to survive.
But
let me just talk about Mexican Americans, the largest of the Latino groups in
this country. The saga begins with the loss of half of Mexico’s territory to
the US in the Mexican War (1846-48). In order to consolidate their gains American
settlers visited a reign of terror upon Mexicans in the conquered areas
including wholesale land dispossession.
Yet
the US needed labor to make the newly acquired lands economically viable.
Mexicans toiled not only in the fields, but in ranching, mining and in the
building of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Those from south of the border were contracted
to come north and make the economy work.
But
when the Great Depression came approximately one million Mexican workers were
deported to make way for White workers. When the need for labor to supply US
troops in World War Two occurred, the Bracero Program brought in
thousands of Mexican workers starting in 1942. But in 1954 when recession hit
the economy after the Korean War the US imposed Operation Wetback.
Mexicans were rounded up and jailed ’herded into trucks and trains, then
shipped back to Mexico.’[2] Over a million people were
subjected to those forced removals - sound familiar? However, when the economy
picked up again the Bracero Program was restarted.
Mexican
Americans might exclaim ‘y’all wasn’t there for us when we were experiencing
those mass deportations! They would be
right, because we were too busy trying to defend our communities and build our
movement for civil rights and social justice.
But
Mexican Americans were also gettin’ busy forging a civil rights movement of
their own across the 20th century. Ever heard of Cesar Chavez and
Dolores Huerta and the heroic struggle in the 1960s to build the United
Farmworkers of America? The UFW won the first union contract for farm workers
in US history in 1966.
Black-Brown Solidarity During the
Civil Rights Movement
Across the
same period that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) was chipping away at segregation in public education in the federal
courts the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) was doing the same.[3] In fact we begin to see
evidence of embryonic Black-Brown solidarity in the Mendez v. Westminster
case before the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California in 1946. It was
a K-12 school desegregation case. The NAACP, which had been focusing on higher
education cases, filed an amicus (friend of the court) brief in Mendez.
LULAC won in Mendez. That success at the K-12 level fostered a
rethinking of the NAACP’s legal strategy which eventuated in filing the five
cases that were taken together in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
Kansas.
Many of us
know of the heroic role played by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) in fighting the Jim Crow system in the South in the 1960s. You
may know that SNCC, though seen as a Black civil rights organization, included
many White members. SNCC was a student organization found on university
campuses all over the country.
The saga
of Black and White students trained in non-violent civil disobedience before
going south to challenge segregation is well-chronicled. But do we know about
Elizabeth Martinez and Maria Varela, two young Mexican American women who were
SNCC supporters up north and went south for the Freedom Summer of 1964? They each
played prominent roles in the Black liberation movement. When SNNC transformed
into a Black Power organization in 1966 Marinez and Varela took their
experience and skills into the emerging Chicano movement which, in ways similar
to SNCC, was aspiring for ‘Brown Power.’ [4]
Along the
same vein, I was recently listening to an interview with Mahmoud Mamdani, the
father of New York’s new democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani. The elder
Mamdani is a highly regarded scholar at Columbia University. He joined SNCC
when he was an exchange student at the University of Pittsburgh and was
arrested in the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Mamdani was born in
India, grew up in Uganda, and experienced the expulsion of Indians there in the
1970s. So he understood racial repression when he saw it.[5]
From Race to Class and Multiracial
Solidarity
I didn’t
have the time to research more evidence for Brown support for Black struggles
over the generations, but I’m guessing these examples are just the tip of the
iceberg. We do, however, know that Martin Luther King had embarked upon the
‘Poor People’s Campaign’ when he was assassinated in 1968. He was recognizing
that racial oppression is also economic oppression, and that people of all races suffered class
exploitation in the capitalist system.
As he
moved around the country to galvanize the ‘Poor People’s Campaign’ King met
Chavez and Huerta of the Farmworkers Union and several other prominent Mexican
American leaders.[6]
He heard them and was working his way toward a movement for ‘economic justice
in a multiracial America.’ Many of us think economic elites in very dark places
feared King’s skill as a messenger and the potency of his message and decided
he had to be liquidated.
King was melding the many racial grievances about poverty
and oppression with a cross racial discourse on class and economic deprivation.
Jesse Jackson was expert at weaving race and class together in his conception
of the Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s. After listening to Zohran Mamdani’s
inaugural address in New York, I think he is the best of this new generation of
left populist at delivering the same message.
African American political scientist Michael Dawson
introduced the concept of ‘linked fate’ to explain why middle and upper-class African
Americans vote in large percentages for Democratic candidates despite their affluence.
His answer: the level of ferocity of racial oppression imposed upon African
Americans induced a sense of group solidarity that transcended class
distinctions.[7] I have
shown here how the level of oppression visited upon Mexican Americans
especially, has at times been ferocious.
People of all races joined the Black Lives Matter
protests after the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. That widespread interracial
solidarity (including some White people) offers hope of a burgeoning ethic of
linked fate across racial and class lines in ways that MLK and Jesse Jackson
envisioned. Today African Americans cannot afford to sit on the sidelines, because
after the systemic racist juggernaut finishes steamrolling Brown immigrants,
guess who’s next?[8]
[1]
Andrew Author, “The Inflation and Immigration Election,” Center for
Immigration Studies, https://cis.org/Arthur/Inflation-and-Immigration-Election-2024
[3] Vaca, N.C. (2004). The Presumed
Alliance. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers.
[4] Elizabeth Martinez, https://snccdigital.org/people/elizabeth-betita-martinez-sutherland/; Maria Varela, https://snccdigital.org/people/maria-varela/
[5] Mamdani, Mahmood (28 April 2007). "The Asian question again: A reflection". New Vision (Uganda).
[6] King also met with Indigenous and
White Americans during his crusade.
[7] Dawson Michael C. Behind the
mule: Race and class in African American politics. Princeton University
Press; 1994.
[8] Trump has no love for Black People
either. One has only to observe the way Trump has singled out African American
public officials like New York Attorney Letitia James, or Federal Reserve Board
member Lisa Cook; or the early data showing that Black women have the
demographic most affected by the massive firings in the federal government, https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/black-women-face-record-job-layoffs-under-trump/ar-AA1M8d1D
.
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