The Immigration Fight is More Than Black and White

The other day, I tweeted a link to a post calling for a “Day Without Mexicans,” a rally to protest Arizona’s anti-immigrant laws. In response, my pal Sunnykins — who’s Asian-American — responded [edited for clarity]:

Why does this country only have room for binaries? Black vs White. Mexican vs American. My family immigrated too.

I had no answer. But it’s a really good question to ask when other U.S. towns are becoming emboldened by Arizona’s actions

I could recount the histories of immigration of various racial and ethnic communities on the lands snatched from First Nation peoples — but other authors have done better jobs and have more space than I do. For example, as Dr. Vijay Prashad writes, reflecting on the real — and media-perpetuated — tensions between blacks in the U.S. and other immigrant groups of color: "Since blackness is reviled in the United States, why would an immigrant, of whatever skin color, want to associate with those who are racially oppressed, particularly when the transit into the United States promises the dream of gold and glory?"

In other words, here in the U.S., immigrants of color fall into the historical black/white binary, and often feel they need to “choose sides” and “cast their lot” with either African- Americans or whites.

Why does this black/white binary in the first place? First of all, it plays nicely into our basic human, Manichaeist tendency to see good vs. evil (light=good versus darkness=bad) — a tendency that's been systematically enforced in some European cultures (think Christianity) and further ingrained by U.S. popular culture (in which the equation looks something like this: light=”white”=good vs. dark=”of color”=bad).

Thanks to this internecine fight for crumbs, some people of color engage in “Oppression Olympics” (or some other form of kyriarchy) as part of the effort to legitimize their own ethnic group's history, struggles and pain. Others, though, haven taken those very same forces and found solidarity with other groups' fights for equality and dignity — and formed political coalitions to further the broad progress of people of color. (For example, Sunnykins mentioned Chuck D’s activism on the Voting Rights Act in 2006. The rapper/activist recently spoke up about Arizona’s new laws and its effect on Latinos.)

Here in the U.S., we can't afford to get stuck in questions over whose blues are worse, or who gets to play the seemingly appealing — but ultimately damaging — role of the “model minority.” As Father Martin Niemöller cautions in his famous statement, "First they came for the Jews," we can't stay detached from each other's fights. People of color — blacks, Latinos, Asian-Pacific Islander Americans and mixed-race people — need to form ties of solidarity across a spectrum of issues, including immigration. We’ve done it before. We're capable of doing it again.

More than ever in the face of laws like Arizona's, we need to do so — now.

Photo Credit: Arasmus