I See Justice, You See Injustice

This Friday night I'm putting up a mini-roundup to kick off the first weekend of 2009.  It's a celebration! (I must be getting old if I'm spending my weekends this way.)

AirTran Airways racially profiled a Muslim family traveling for the holidays, kicking them off a flight based on unfounded suspicions of other passengers, then defended its actions in the press.  The airline decided to deboard the entire plane and delay the flight, causing who knows how many missed connections, even after the FBI had specifically cleared the family.  This must be some of that famous business sense that has made the U.S. airline, auto, and banking industries such world beaters.</snark>

I won't be flying AirTran in the future.

On a brighter note, the Washington Post has a story covering the pro-migrant blog Anti-BVBL, which I've still not figured out how to add to my feed list. 

(Note to Anti-BVBL: please add an RSS button to your blog!)  They have become a local political force in Prince William County in reaction to the punitive anti-immigrant law that passed there in 2007.

And lastly, Marie-Theresa Hernández applies some empathy to the question of why many working people resent immigrants.

Why are people so angry? Because they think they are being shafted. They think something they deserve is going to someone less American - One of my friends who is most angry was a single Mom for years, really struggled but raised her daughter well and has worked for the same company for over 20 years. She is respected at her job and has made a good life for herself (she is second generation Texan). But those years that she was on her own make it hard for her to have sympathy for someone else.

I'd add that people feel this way in part because the information they see on cable news or hear on talk radio is stilted in one direction.  If you never saw the Washington Post series on deaths in detention, if you never read Lawrence Downes's editorials in the NY Times, if you never visit the Sanctuary, then you might entirely miss the line of reasoning that favors immigration.

But I think the main reason the "injustice" receptors get triggered for so many people when the subject of immigration is raised is because of the clean, black and white conceptual lines that Americans are taught from an early age to draw between our nation and others.  As a legal matter, some people are U.S. citizens and others are not.  It's a stark division that is officially sanctioned and daily justified in thousands of ways, from widespread support of the military project to recitation of the pledge of allegiance to hate crimes perpetrated against perceived outsiders.  Until nationalism and patriotism are challenged on their own terms, nativism will always find a secure place in American public life.