Why are the historic black civil rights groups mostly MIA on the political mobilization of immigrants?
Earl Ofari Hutchinson paints the picture — and it ain’t pretty.
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March 31st, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Excellent link, Marc, and a thank you also to Hutchinson, who basically makes the same points that I have been making. A misinformed soul on here (I forget who, there have been more than a few here) poohed poohed my notion that there is a good deal of bigotry involved in the anti-immigration movment. The person (rather foolhardily) sniffed the largely irrelevant retort, “How do you account for the fact that blacks are against immigration?”
As Hutchinson explains, “Black fury over immigration has cemented an odd alliance between black anti-immigrant activists and GOP conservatives, fringe anti-illegal immigration groups and racially tinged America-first groups.”
It underscores a rather politically incorrect fact that few (if any) people on either the left or right will acknowledge: that people of color, including those in prominent positions of influence, are not immune from being ignorant of basic facts. The facts (as I have explained time and again) are undeniable: instead of fighting among each other (poor hispanics vs. poor blacks, poor whites vs. poor hispanics, poor whites vs. poor blacks to name some examples), the poor would do well to stop this childish game of scapegoating and unite their efforts against the elite power structure in this country.
It is a nasty truth, but one that will continue to remain in the margins, I am afraid.
March 31st, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Ah, I remember! It was reg. But, I feel vindicated now.
March 31st, 2006 at 1:19 pm
Ofari’s comparison of these demos to the March on Washington in 1963 is insulting and near insane. If anybody has to ask “Why?” go read Taylor Branch’s trilogy on American in the King era and get back to me. If there was an economic agenda as comprehensive and progressive as the one A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin put at the center of that event, I missed it. The demos weren’t coherent except as opposing any action that smacked of enforcing existing law and were as narrow in their promotion of an overtly ethnic agenda as anything I’ve seen from the Minutemen.
As for David C feeling “vindicated” that people of color can be ignorant , all I can say other than nod at the cliche is reaffirm the fact that so can lefties who refuse to see this issue as part of the negative reality of what’s happening to blacks at the bottom rung of the labor market. Illegal immigration may be one point of pressure among many die unemployed blacks, but it’s not a fiction. Most American employers of low-wage labor would rather hire the folks who marched under the flag of Mexico (how “progressive” and “internationalist”) than their black fellow citizens. And Vincente Fox has pretty much laid out the line on this issue from the “Latino” end. His racism is not exceptional and reaffirmed a lot of cultural notions about lazy blacks vs. hard-working immigrants that reactionaries like David Brooks revel in.
If anyone can’t figure out why blacks are undoubtedly less than pleased with a massive expansion of their opportunities to compete for scraps at the bottom of the barrel with a whole new set of poor folks drawn here for precisely that purpose, or has the gall to consider them “ignorant” for their attitudes, I’ve got some expletives for you to delete. You guys are, to varying degrees, siding with the Chamber of Commerce, for all of your “progressive” facades. And it ain’t pretty. Hutchinson is a bloviator who, not surprisingly for a moralizing pundit, didn’t deal credibly with a single material issue at stake for African-Americans in this debate.
March 31st, 2006 at 1:22 pm
“many die unemployed blacks,”
that “die” should have been “for” – hit the adjacent keys
March 31st, 2006 at 1:57 pm
I also have to say that abstract calls for “solidarity” and what poor folks would be better off doing than feeling pressured by the circumstances they actually find themselves come across like middle-class bullshit. I can sit here, quite comfortably, and pontificate about how poor people in Mexico would be “better off” or more politically astute if they organized to topple their own ruling classes than hightail it over the border to Phoenix, but it’s pretty goddam fatuous. As fatuous as telling black “inner-city” Americans with high unemployment, horrible schools and lousy access to social services that they are wrong to get upset over major demographic and population shifts created by the vagaries of a labor market being consciously gamed by “capitalists”, if I can use so crude a phrase, making their prospects even worse and that they should see this as an opportunity to end their “childishness” and adhere to the enlightened tenets of folks with progressive magazine subscriptions.
And you can scream at me for this one – it’s totally non-PC but it’s precisely the kind of perceptions I get from one wing of my family : given the history of this country, most black folk, not irrationally, see the huge influx of people from Mexico and Central America as another in the long line of immigrant groups with a predominantly European heritage who are destined to join the ranks of “white” people. They don’t have any illusions that this new set of facts is going to hasten the day – after 400 years of brutality, exclusion and injustice – when the country takes seriously the need to deal with the continuing marginalization of large numbers of black people.
March 31st, 2006 at 3:02 pm
It is reasonable for blacks, trapped in a zero-sum game paradigm, to be against other groups of poor people coming to the US.
And getting jobs.
Jobs that might have gone to blacks w/o illegal immigration — but also might well not exist.
But I don’t think blacks are gonna get too mad.
What are they gonna do, stop “slavishly” voting Dem? Stop supporting Teacher Union teachers who don’t teach? Ha!
When is US black culture going to take seriously the need to get educated (real HS reading and math), work hard (keep a job for a year), and avoid having babies out of wedlock (“getting married is too white”)? How many poor black men have kept even a McD’s job for a year?
In a real demographic sense, abortion (30% of US abortions are to black women) and non-black immigration mean the “large numbers of black people” are actually a smaller percentage of America, each year. Now down to 11% (?) and falling.
March 31st, 2006 at 3:07 pm
Oh, how nice it would be if we could make sense of the world in such monolithic terms. I know some blacks are supportive, some aren’t. Same for whites, Asians, Muslims and most other groups. And not to dissapoint anybody, but do you really believe the NAACP’s position matters anymore than the Jewish Federation’s? Or the Urban League’s? Or the Black Smaskus Caucus? More importantly, where are our legislators and congresssional representatives. Can’t we move beyond racial politics and lay blame where it belongs, on those silent and confused elected officials?
March 31st, 2006 at 3:28 pm
“Jobs that might have gone to blacks w/o illegal immigration — but also might well not exist.”
A non-trivial percentage of service economy jobs simply can’t be exported. In an increasingly globalized economy, manufacturing jobs are lost as a result of mobile capital (i.e., outsourcing and industry relocation), as are a number of white-collar industries (e.g., tech support). But agriculture, custdodial services, nursing jobs, etc., aren’t going anywhere*.
*Improved technology can render ag jobs obsolete, but this is the case regardless of the percentage of immigrants in the workforce. Furthermore, technology gains in agriculture can make U.S. companies even more competitive (cf., the bracero experiment in the tomato industry), whereas solely relying on immigrant labor would not (i.e., ag labor will always be cheaper somewhere else).
March 31st, 2006 at 4:08 pm
“Most American employers of low-wage labor would rather hire the folks who marched under the flag of Mexico (how “progressive†and “internationalistâ€) than their black fellow citizens.”
I never thought I’d find myself *defending* (with a definite asterisk) “American employers,” but I think that you are off of your rocker if you really believe that American businessmen are all a bunch of backwood racists. Racism has always been something embraced by two, and only two segments in society : (1) the hopelessly idiotic, and (2) the downtrodden. The businessmen who run this country certainly love racism as a divisive tool. After all, imagine if the poor whites and the poor blacks of red state America put aside their differences for just one month and directed that anger at the people who really pull the strings in this country?
There are a lot of bad racist trash,and I don’t doubt that in a country that still sees some horrible hate crimes still perpetrated in the 21st century, that you will continue to find too many business owners who will continue to deny blacks jobs based on the color of their skin.
But I would argue that this is more and more becoming the exception rather than the rule. For all of the talk about “blacks at the bottom rung of the labor market,” the truth is that people of all races are at the bottom of that ladder. In fact, if you look at predominantly white and formerly industrial rich towns all throughout the south, we see whites at the bottom of the ladder. Naturally, though, instead of putting responsibility for this where it should be – on those in the state-corporate pyramid who moved these factories elsewhere – the corporate owned print and electronic media instead serves up the same typical scapegoats for the lions: affirmative action, welfare mothers, liberals, etc. Heaven forbid should the elite power structure point the finger at themselves in broadcasting their propaganda.
I had the chance to attend a lecture last year given by the Grover Norquist, who is head of Americans for Tax Reform. Although this gentleman struck me as a microcosm of American business, he also struck me as being remarkably open minded. He is a student not only of Islam (he apparently has a wife of Arabic and Islamic origin), but he also is apparently an admirer of past civil rights leaders.
The wealthy who control Wall Street are not idiots, and they certainly are not downtrodden. What they are interested in is making an easy buck. They don’t mind walking all over poor blacks, but they are just as willing to walk all over poor whites and poor hispanics just the same.
Racism is bad, but doesn’t Classism represent more of a danger to poor blacks? All I have heard so far (although I haven’t been on here much) are blanket denials of the undeniable fact that neo-liberalism threatens the poor of all races far more than immigrants from Mexico.
March 31st, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Anyone can be denied a job for any reason any time by anyone irrespective of race.
March 31st, 2006 at 4:34 pm
“The demos weren’t coherent except as opposing any action that smacked of enforcing existing law and were as narrow in their promotion of an overtly ethnic agenda as anything I’ve seen from the Minutemen.”
It’s too bad Reg feels this way. Personally I’ve been boayed by the sight of hundred of thousands of people marching to demand legalisation, dignity and respect. The marches date back to an earlier tradition which hasnt really been mentioned too much. In 1968, Chicano students in East Los Angeles staged a historic walkout in their high schools to protest academic prejudice and dire school conditions. Students were forbidden from speaking Spanish in class or from using the restrooms during lunchtime. Schools taught a curriculum that largely ignored or denied Mexican-American history and Chicano students were steered toward menial labor and away from college by counselors and school officials. In March 1968, the students decided to take a stand against the injustice and staged walkouts in schools across L.A. Many date the modern Chicano movement to the walkouts when some 20,000 teenagers took to the streets. Not only is Reg’s perpective morally distasteful, but whats missing is the notion that foreign-born workers hold the potential to raise working-class wages through their own struggles for union organization. Immigrant workers have played a key role in advancing the labor movement historically, from the battle for the eight-hour day that led to the 1886 Haymarket Square massacre to the United Farm Workers, a self-organized movement that finally unionized California’s migrant farm workers in the 1960s. The ethnocentric comment coupled with the comparison to minutemen is not only silly but it badle misses the point. People experience class oprression and injustice through the lens of their identities. This is exactly the reason unions are smart enough to have banners and floats at porta rico pride festivals. We must look beyond wedge issues or “minority issues” and begin to pay attention to what these movements are advocating, imagining, building. After all, the analyses, theories, visions emerging from the black liberation movements, the Chicano and Asian American movements, the gay and lesbian movements, the women’s movements, may just free us all.
March 31st, 2006 at 4:34 pm
New Politics, Vol. X, No. 3
Immigration, African Americans, and Race Discourse
Stephen Steinberg
We believe this article begins an important conversation on the left. We will be publishing various responses to it in our next issue, along with a reply from Stephen Steinberg. In addition, this article will be published in the Winter issue of New Labor Forum, together with a different set of responses and a reply from Steinberg. We urge readers to follow this debate in both venues. — Eds.
In race talk the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African Americans.
— Toni Morrison, “On the Backs of Blacks”1
IN 1971, THE Amsterdam News, New York City’s oldest African-American newspaper, published a cartoon by Melvin Tapley that gave vent to a uniquely black ambivalence toward immigration. The cartoon portrayed a downtrodden black figure crouched on the ground, labeled “US Folks,” a double entendre for “us folks” and “U.S. folks.” A chain of other figures, representing Spanish Americans and the foreign born, climb on the back of the crouched black figure, to pluck fruit off the tree of opportunity. Tapley had no illusions about the struggles of these immigrant minorities. Although he portrays them as getting ahead on the backs of blacks, immigrants too must climb over the wall of prejudice, and they reach only the lowest branches on the tree of opportunity.
The accompanying editorial read as follows:
News from the Census Bureau that Spanish-speaking Americans are now able to earn higher incomes than Blacks will not come as a surprise to many of us.
Since our arrival here in 1619 as slaves, Black Americans have watched millions of European immigrants arrive and within a short time hold jobs and reach levels of incomes Blacks were not allowed to attain.
In fact, during the early part of the century the hordes of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, German, Scottish, Greek, Spanish, and other European immigrants frequently replaced Blacks as longshoremen, street-car motormen, construction workers, jockeys, blacksmiths, and able-bodied seamen. Outright, rank racism, and discrimination were the tools by which Blacks have been deprived of work over the decades.2
The cartoon and editorial reflect a long strand of black thought, which regards immigrants and immigration with an ambivalence verging on resentment and bitterness. This should come as no surprise. As Lawrence Fuchs reminds us: “In 1883, when Emma Lazarus, a daughter of immigrants, wrote the impassioned words �Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’ the Supreme Court undermined the last of the civil rights laws passed by Congress following the Civil War.”3 And 1965 — the year these rights were finally restored — also marked the beginning of a massive influx of immigrants from every part of the world who were thrust into competition with blacks for jobs and opportunity. The crowning irony is that most of these immigrants would not be here, but for the black protest movement that led to immigration reform abolishing the national origins quotas that had chocked off flow of immigrants from nations outside of northern and western Europe.
Let me throw down the gauntlet: my challenge is to think about immigration from the standpoint of this black figure, crouched on the ground as others pluck fruit off the tree of opportunity. Dare we also read the immigration literature — the celebratory narratives of immigrant progress and triumph against adversity — from the point of view of “the man farthest down,” to borrow a phrase from Booker T. Washington? It goes without saying that this is only one among many standpoints for thinking about immigration and immigration policy. My only contention is that it is one that must be considered, and that doing so is an intellectual and moral imperative.
To avoid misunderstanding, let me make clear from the outset what I am not saying. I am most definitely not calling into question the rights of immigrants. I am the grandson of immigrants, and the new immigrants have as much right to be here as I do, and to claim all of the rights of their adopted nationality. Nor am I blaming immigrants for the nation’s tragic failure to address the enduring legacy of slavery. On the other hand, immigrants cannot hide behind the refrain that “our ancestors didn’t own slaves,” or claim that, as recent arrivals, they are exonerated from America’s racial crimes. Indeed, immigrants are implicated in America’s race problem through the very act of immigration. Besides, when immigrants proudly embrace American citizenship and nationality, they not only take possession of American dreams and ideals, but they also acquire some heavy baggage: moral and political responsibility for the vestiges of slavery.
A Historical Perspective
THE CARTOON IN THE Amsterdam News is a reminder that the issue of immigration and its impact on African Americans must be seen in historical perspective. I first engaged this issue in 1971 when I conducted research on the impact of European immigration on African Americans. I began with the naïve question: why didn’t more southern blacks do what my grandparents had done when they left Russia and Poland: to flee persecution and seek refuge and opportunity in Northern cities that were undergoing an extraordinary economic expansion? At the end of the Civil War there were four million emancipated slaves, and as the British economist Brinley Thomas has written, “after the Civil War the best thing that could have happened to the black workers of the United States would have been a fair opportunity to contribute to satisfying the great demand for labour in the rapidly growing cities of the North and West.” This did not happen, however, and the social science literature was strangely unhelpful in explaining why this was the case. In An American Dilemma Gunnar Myrdal wrote of the period just after the Civil War: “There was enough industrial activity . . . in many of the smaller centers of the North to permit a significant immigration of Negroes. That Negroes have not migrated to these places is . . . a mystery.”4
Immigration is the most important single factor in dispelling this “mystery.” The North was able to satisfy its insatiable need for cheap labor through the immigration of some 25 million Europeans between 1880 and 1924. Blacks, on the other hand, were categorically excluded from the entire industrial sector, except for a few menial, dangerous, or backbreaking jobs that immigrants spurned. Note that the culprits in this drama were not Southern sheriffs and lynch mobs. Nor does blame go only to greedy capitalists who played one group off the other. Workers, through their unions, engaged in a combination of ethnic nepotism and blatant racism that reinforced black exclusion. In effect, the industrial revolution in the United States was “for whites only.” Here was a missed opportunity to integrate blacks into the industrial labor force during the critical early stages of industrialization, and the failure to do so, set the nation on a path of racial division and conflict that continues to this day.
The proof that European immigration was devastating to blacks is that as soon as immigration was cut off by the First World War, it triggered a massive migration of blacks to cities in the North and West, resulting in the most significant economic advance since the abolition of slavery. The relationship between immigration and race caught the attention of the New Republic, which in 1916 printed an editorial under the caption: “The Superfluous Negro.” The editorial began as follows: “The average Pole or Italian arriving at Ellis Island does not realize that he is the deadly foe of the native Negro . . . It is a silent conflict on a gigantic scale.”5
This is the question I put before you. Is history repeating itself? Has the influx of another 25 million immigrants since 1965 — not to mention millions more of undocumented workers — again made the Negro “superfluous,” undercutting black progress? Here was another missed opportunity to integrate blacks into the economic mainstream. Indeed, this new wave of immigration could not have come at a worse time since blacks were poised for progress during the post-civil-rights period, for four reasons:
*
Thanks to the civil rights movement, Congress had passed landmark civil rights legislation, not only ending second-class citizenship but also proscribing discrimination in employment (Title VII).
*
The black militancy of the 1970s kept up the pressure against employment discrimination. Affirmative action policy, ironically pioneered by the Nixon administration in response to grass- roots protest, drove a wedge into the wall of occupational segregation, resulting in the most extensive deracialization of labor markets since slavery.
*
Unlike the earlier period, blacks were concentrated in cities in the North and West, and thus proximate to urban job markets. Although it is often argued that blacks arrived at a time when the industries that had provided opportunity to earlier immigrants were in decline, the fact is that millions of new immigrants were rapidly absorbed into both the residual blue-collar sector and the expanding service industries.
*
After 1965, demographic trends favored blacks. The nation’s declining birth rate sharply reduced the number of workers, providing for a tight labor market that has always been the sine qua non of black employment. I remember that during the depth of the racial crisis in the 1970s, economists issued reassuring forecasts that, given the sharp decline in the birth rate, labor market conditions would improve for blacks around the turn of the century. But, alas, something happened on the way to the new millennium. The 1965 Hart-Cellar Act was passed, which would result in the influx of over 25 million legal immigrants over the next four decades. Not to mention millions of undocumented workers who gravitated to the same urban labor markets where blacks were concentrated.
Why did the United States open its door to millions of immigrants at a time that deindustrialization was generating unemployment? One answer, or so we are told, is that the huge upsurge of immigration was unanticipated when the Hart-Cellar act was passed in 1965. But even after immigration rose from a trickle to a flood, it came to be viewed as a blessing in disguise, which is to say, a conservative policy in liberal garb. I say this because the champions of mass immigration were not liberals, and certainly not ethnic activists, but free-market economists (now tagged as “neoliberals”) who saw mass immigration as a panacea for a variety of economic ills.
A notable example is Julian Simon who published a book in 1988 on The Economic Consequences of Immigration. Two years later Simon followed up with an article in The Public Interest, entitled “The case for Greatly Increased Immigration.” Simon argued:
1.
That the nation stood to gain technologically through the addition of “top scientific talent.” (Never mind that from the standpoint of the sending countries, this amounted to a brain drain.)
2.
That immigration was necessary to satisfy business’ demand for labor, given the declining birth rates that had sunk even below replacement levels. (One wonders if the legions of blacks without jobs were ever part of the calculus.)
3.
That immigrants helped to pay for the social security pensions of the burgeoning number of retirees. (A recent article in the New York Times reported that in 2002 illegal immigrants paid $6.4 billion in Social Security taxes for benefits that they would never receive.)
4.
That immigration boosted the image of the United States abroad (read: immigrants fit nicely into various foreign policy agendas).
Granted, there were some strident voices on the right, like Peter Brimlow, whose book Alien Nation was an anti-immigrant screed in the worst nativist tradition. Simon’s book, in contrast, advanced a respectable economic case for mass immigration, and it received rhapsodic reviews in the National Review, Forbes, Business Week, The Spectator, and Barron’s National Business and Fiscal Weekly.
Other cheerleaders of “greatly increased immigration” contended that immigration lowered inflation (never mind that it does this by depressing wages!). Others argued that immigrants lowered the deficit by propping up domestic manufacturing, and generating economic activity through “enclave economies” (never mind that this amounts the creation of a sub-proletariat of immigrant workers!). Still others exulted that immigrants provided the energy and spirit to renew the fading American spirit of enterprise and innovation (never mind that it amounted to disinvestment in black labor, whose family roots go back to the beginning of the nation!). Quite a pile of expectation to pile on the plate of an uprooted immigrant struggling to make ends meet.
The question of the impact of the new immigration on African Americans has not entirely escaped the attention of immigration scholars. Indeed, Simon reassured readers that “a good-sized body of competent recent research shows that immigration does not exacerbate unemployment, even among directly competing groups.”6 Much the same conclusion was reached in a 1998 edited volume published by the Russell Sage Foundation entitled Help or Hindrance? The Economic Implications of Immigration for African Americans.7 In their introduction, the editors answer their own question by stating that immigration is neither a help (who ever said that?) nor a hindrance, and concluded that immigration “appears to have exerted small negative effects on the economic situations of African Americans.” Somebody should tell our crouched black figure that he can get up and grab the fruit off the tree of opportunity! This is precisely the message that emerges from the immigration literature, where immigrant virtues are extolled and invidious comparisons are made to blacks who are portrayed as culturally deficient and lacking the pluck that has allowed immigrants to pursue opportunity.
How is it that these econometricians arrive at a conclusion that defies common sense? Just consider the fact that the ten major gateway cities — Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Washington, Houston, San Diego, Boston, and Dallas — are all cities of high black concentration, with notoriously high rates of employment and underemployment. Just imagine the opposite scenario, if immigration had remained at the level that existed in 1965 — at 292,000 immigrants annually, compared to just over one million last year. Clearly, the tight labor markets would have provided incentives for employers to lower their racist barriers, to hire and train black workers, and if necessary, to improve wages and conditions to make even these marginal jobs attractive to native workers. Consider the difference this would have made in a city like Chicago where, according to a recent study, 45 percent of black men between 20 and 24 are out of school and out of work.
Defining Racism Out of Existence
ONE PROBLEM WITH THESE econometric studies is that they are methodologically flawed. In an article on “Immigration and African Americans,” two economists, Steven Shulman and Robert C. Smith identify several reasons that “the findings of negligible impact should not be taken at face value.”8 For one thing, immigration may have negative effects on low-wage workers and positive effects on high-wage workers, thus canceling each other out. For another thing, most studies are based on comparisons of employment rates and incomes of blacks in cities with high and low immigrant populations, and find little or no difference. However, immigrants flock to cities where the local economies are expanding and labor is in demand, and we do not know what the result would have been, absent immigration. In Los Angeles, for example, the massive influx of Asians and Latinos has actually triggered an exodus of blacks out of the city.
Another problem is that econometric studies are based on massive aggregates. A dramatically different picture emerges if one examines trends in particular industries or job sectors where immigrants have made inroads, often displacing blacks from job niches where they had a foothold. The standard cant among immigration scholars is that immigrants take jobs spurned by native workers, including blacks. This logic may pertain to some notoriously undesirable jobs — in sweatshops, for example. But as we know, immigrants have made inroads into such coveted job sectors as construction, the health-care industries, building maintenance, hotels and restaurants, transportation, and even in government service (which has long been a main staple of black employment). Even in low-wage jobs — in fast food restaurants, for example — black youth have come under severe competition with immigrants.
Several recent studies based on interviews with employers have provided direct evidence that employers prefer immigrants to blacks. This would appear to provide ironclad proof of employer racism. “Don’t jump to conclusions,” has been the common refrain of the authors of these studies. (Specifically, I refer to studies of employer preferences by Philip Moss & Chris Tilly, Roger Waldinger and Michael I. Lichter, and William Julius Wilson.9) Despite their liberal stripes, these researchers uncritically accept the declarations of employers at face value, and in doing so, effectively ratify the self-serving rationalizations that employers put forward to camouflage their racism. The accuracy of employer claims — that blacks are less reliable and efficient workers, that they lack “soft skills,” that they have an “attitude” that antagonizes whites — are never subjected to critical scrutiny, much less put to an empirical test. Indeed, Moss and Tilly acknowledge, “We have no independent information about the people or neighborhoods that the employers told as about.” Similarly, Waldinger and Lichter concede: “Absent direct observation, one can at best hazard questionable inferences about the correspondence between employers’ view and the world.” But inserting a caveat does not compensate for the fact that black workers — their qualifications, their experiences, and their viewpoint — are rendered “beyond the scope” of their studies. As a result, we never hear from “the man farthest down,” who is not only crouched on the ground but also reduced to silence.
Let us give the employers and these researchers the benefit of considerable doubt. What if it were proved that on the whole immigrants make better workers, or that these employers, driven primarily by self-interest, make hiring decisions based on past experience? Does that warrant their preference for immigrant workers over blacks? Most definitely not! To counter this line of argument, I retrieved my dusty copy of Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice, published in 1954. Allport defines prejudice as follows:
Ethnic prejudice is an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he is a member of that group. The net effect of prejudice, thus defined, is to place the object of prejudice at some disadvantage not merited by his own misconduct.10
Employers who make their hiring decisions on the basis of what group a person belongs to, rather than on individual merits, are engaged in patent acts of prejudice. This is a case of racial profiling, or what Dinesh D’Souza, in The End of Racism, unapologetically calls “rational discrimination” or what Joleen Kirshenman and Kathryn Neckerman call “statistical discrimination.”11 But as Allport reminds us, to deny someone access to a job on the basis of group affiliation is the very essence of prejudice! It is strange and regrettable when so-called race experts do not recognize racism when it is staring them in the face. Or engage in a sophism that defines racism out of existence.
For example, take a recent article by Nelson Lim, a research associate at RAND Corporation, entitled “On the Back of Blacks? Immigrants and the Fortunes of African Americans.”12 Lim wants to know why it is that immigrants have higher employment rates than blacks, and he cites three factors: 1) the enclave economy, which he describes as “a giant hiring hall for immigrants”; 2) network hiring, the practice whereby employers bypass formal hiring mechanisms and rely on referrals from current workers; and 3) social capital, the supposition that immigrants have the requisite abilities and work habits that blacks lack. Note that the r-word — “racism” — that figured so prominently in the editorial in the Amsterdam News (remember, the editors railed against “outright, rank racism and discrimination”) is absent from his explanatory schema. Upon closer examination, however, the three explanatory factors that Lim invokes to explain why employers prefer immigrants to blacks can be seen as little more than circumlocutions for racism. Let me explain:
*
By its very nature, the much-ballyhooed ethnic economy is a racist structure whose hiring practices are in massive violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Ethnic nepotism and racial exclusion are two sides of the same coin.
*
Network hiring is a device that employers use to prevent blacks from even getting their foot in the door. This is racism, plain and simple! It is a working-class variant of “the old-boy network” that affirmative action was designed to counteract. In other words, network hiring is a mechanism of discrimination, and indeed one that employers use precisely because it insulates them from allegations of racism since they are not directly implicated in the recruitment of workers.
*
The concept of “social capital” presumes that immigrants have traits that blacks lack. When employers use these prejudgments as the basis of hiring decisions, they are engaged in acts of prejudice. I fear that Lim has committed the fallacy I alluded to earlier: in this case, using the concept of “social capital” as a smoke screen for shifting the blame for discrimination from employers who actually make hiring decisions to hapless blacks who are denied employment. This illogical argument is advanced even though no evidence is proffered to validate the supposition that there are not black workers in abundance who have precisely the traits that are ascribed to immigrants and who could be readily hired, but for the prejudgments of employers.
The profound impact of immigration on the fortunes of blacks is evident in Waldinger and Lichter’s study of Los Angeles, based on case studies of six industries: department stores, furniture manufacturing, hospitals, hotels, printing, and restaurants. In all six industries, there has been a major decline of whites between 1970 and 1990 and a corresponding influx of Latinos and Asians. In only two of these industries — printing and department stores — did blacks increase their representation. In hospitals, where blacks had established a foothold in 1970, their percentage remained the same, despite an 85 percent increase in the total work force. In furniture manufacturing, hotels, and eating establishments, the black percentage in the work force actually declined.
On the face of itself, this would seem to provide incontrovertible evidence that immigrants displace blacks from jobs, or at a minimum, preempt their access to jobs in the expanding service sector. This is not Waldinger and Lichter’s conclusion, however. In a section again entitled “On the Back of Blacks?” they downplay the role of “rank, outright racism and discrimination,” and emphasize the role of labor market mechanisms — “network hiring,” the “capture” of occupational niches by particular ethnic groups, and employer “preferences” which, like the other writers just cited, they construe not as naked bigotry, but as responses to perceived and actual deficiencies of black workers.
So powerful are these reified labor market “forces” in sifting workers along different occupational trajectories that, according to Waldinger and Lichter, “relatively few African-American workers are even trying to compete with immigrants in the latter’s industrial and occupational concentrations.”13 This is their explanation of why, several decades after the passage of Title VII, blacks in Los Angeles constitute 2 percent of the workforce in furniture manufacturing, 4 percent in eating and drinking establishments, 5 percent in printing, 7 percent in hotels, 13 percent in department stores, and 17 percent in hospitals (note that these are aggregate figures that obscure racial stratification within these occupational domains). Small wonder that, after the Rodney King verdict, rampaging mobs vented their rage on immigrant-owned businesses.14 Small wonder that since the 1990s there has been a “reverse migration” of tens of thousands of Los Angeles blacks to various parts of the South. Indeed, nothing better epitomizes the extent to which African-American destiny is linked to immigration. Just as the cutoff of European immigration by the First World War provided a catalyst for the first major migration to cities in the North and West, the resumption of mass immigration after 1965 has led to the first reverse migration back to the South.
Immigration and Race Discourse
EARLIER I ALLUDED TO a tendency in the immigration literature to explain away the negative impact of immigration on African Americans, either by pretending that there are no significant negative effects or by defining “racism” out of existence, or by shifting the blame onto blacks themselves. There is another longstanding discourse based on invidious comparisons between immigrants and blacks. In the popular idiom, the question takes the form, “We made it, why haven’t they?” When these comparisons were made between European immigrants and blacks, it was always possible to contend that blacks alone encountered racism. Now that most immigrants are nominally “people of color,” the question takes a new and pernicious twist: if Asians and Latinos — and now the clincher, if West Indians can make it — why can’t African Americans? Doesn’t this prove that racism is not an insurmountable barrier?
Having dismissed “racism” as a factor, these writers then leap to the conclusion that in contrast to immigrants, African Americans are saddled with defective cultural systems — weak families, disorganized communities, dysfunctional subcultures — that prevent them from climbing the tree of success. Thomas Sowell was the first to advance this proposition, and Dinesh D’Souza has given it its most explicit and unapologetic expression. The notion that blacks have only themselves to blame for their problems is emblazoned in the title of John McWhorter’s recent book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. But this logic is also found, albeit in more circumspect language, in the work of such liberal scholars as John Ogbu and Mary Waters, both of whom extol immigrant culture and then use it as the basis for making invidious comparisons to the cultural practices of African Americans.
In his study of a high school in San Jose, California, Ogbu sought to explain why immigrant children have better academic outcomes than African Americans. Drawing a distinction between immigrant minorities and caste-like minorities, he speculated that African Americans, isolated for generations by segregation and poverty, developed an “oppositional culture” that disparaged learning as “acting white.” With this theoretical sleight of hand, he shifted attention away from institutional racism and the racist barriers that continue to impede black access to jobs and opportunities, placing them at a disadvantage even to recent immigrants and even within the schools that both groups share. His totally unsubstantiated claim that black youth spurn educational achievement as “acting white” has been projected as a general theory of the racial gap in academic achievement and test scores, thus absolving societal institutions of blame for the scandalous inequalities along racial lines in educational resources and opportunity.15
Mary Waters also contrasts behavior and incomes of immigrants and African Americans, with that same pernicious twist since her subjects are Caribbean immigrants. Note that it is not Waters, but her West Indian subjects, along with their white managers, who insist that Caribbean immigrants are more reliable and productive workers, and are relatively free of those defensive and resentful attitudes that put whites off. As with other studies of employer preferences, however, Waters does not subject these claims to critical examination or to empirical validation. Indeed, her own data indicate that the small number of black workers at American Food, the catering firm that was the principal site for her research, had logged in more years than their foreign-born counterparts.
Waters ascribes to immigrants a tendency to compare “their own hard-working, planning, friendly, upward-striving selves with the lazy, welfare-dependent, unfriendly, bitter black Americans.”16 But she commits this fallacy herself, through a failure to explore the social class factors that underlie the ostensibly “cultural” differences between the two groups. Waters seems oblivious to the fact that the West Indians who arrive in New York are a product of selective migration, and that many of them enjoyed middle-class status in their countries of origin even though they are forced to take jobs that, in many cases, amount to downward mobility. Besides, one would think from Waters’ account (and the pronouncements of her subjects) that Caribbean youth are all paragons of disciplined and achieving students, and there is none of the disorder — school crime, drugs, shattered families, dropouts — that are so rife in African-American communities. By overlooking selective migration, Waters ends up comparing social class “apples” and “oranges,” and it matters little that the “apples” are native sons and the “oranges” are imported from the tropics.
Indeed, Black Identities is a virtual catalog of the victim-blaming constructions that permeate the immigration canon. Waters embraces 1) Waldinger’s concept of “network hiring” to explain why African Americans are relatively absent in the workplace; 2) Ogbu’s distinction between “voluntary and involuntary minorities” to explain why, compared to West Indians, African Americans have a “chip on their shoulder,” 3) Ruben Rumbaut’s contention that immigrants and their children do worse the longer they stay in the United States, allegedly because they lose touch with the achievement ideology and positive culture that were part of their homeland cultures; and 4) Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou’s concept of “segmented assimilation,” which holds that immigrants who live in close proximity to African Americans adopt their “adversarial stance” toward white society, including a devaluation on education “as a vehicle of advancement.” Stated another way, the children of West Indian immigrants run the risk of assimilating “the wrong way,” forsaking the rich and positive cultures of their parents for the aberrant culture of African Americans.
This last item deserves special attention, because it comes close to the main theme of Waters’ narrative. Think about what is being said here. In effect, African Americans are blamed not only for their own misery, but also for subverting the uplifting cultures of immigrants and thus condemning their children to live on the fringes. Stripped of its rhetorical gloss, we have here a theory of racial contamination, different only in that it is cultural rather than physical contamination that is to be feared.
Again, Waters may plead that she is merely reporting on fears expressed by her West Indian subjects, but what she forgets is that these same fears are commonly expressed by African-American parents, as Mary Patillo-McCoy found in her study of a mixed-income neighborhood in Chicago. Waters’ persistent error is her failure to explore the social class underpinnings of the conflict between West Indians and African Americans, even though this conflict is commonly (mis)understood in terms of a West Indian/African American binary. As we know, deep poverty engenders similar cultural responses in poor Asian and Latino communities, with or without the presence of African Americans. And for that matter, in poor white communities as well, as Jay MacLoed shows brilliantly in Ain’t No Making It.
Despite disclaimers to the contrary, the message that emerges from the canon of immigration scholarship is clear: if only African Americans had the cultural virtues, the perseverance, and the pluck of immigrants — if only they were not saddled with self-deprecating and anti-intellectual subcultures — if only they could get rid of that defiant and surly “attitude” that whites abhor — if only they would stop seeing themselves as “victims” and stop whining about racism — then they too could climb the tree of opportunity. Or at least pluck the fruit off the lowest branches.
Needless to say, none of the writers whom I have criticized above are oblivious to racism. How could they be? Indeed, they uncover mounds of racism in their empirical research. Rather, the problem is that, with a theoretical sleight of hand, societal racism morphs into culture. According to this line of reasoning, racism — that is, past racism — engenders a host of cultural distortions among African Americans who develop an “adversarial culture,” lack “social capital,” are “obsessed” with race and racism, have problems of “self-presentation,” and so and so forth, all leading to the erudite conclusion that it is because of these “cultural” traits that black workers are not hired. What we have here is a new iteration of the discredited culture-of-poverty thesis that shifts the focus away from the societal racism to the putative cultural practices of blacks themselves. On this reasoning, even employers who admit that they do not hire blacks are exonerated of racism, since they are seen as merely responding to the damage that racism has wrought in the cultural practices of African Americans. Totally obscured in this explanatory schema is the persistent role of “outright, rank racism and discrimination,” to again quote the unvarnished language of the editorial in the Amsterdam News. Thus, with this incredible inversion of logic, blacks are blamed for the racist acts of employers!
A second way that immigrants have impacted on race policy and discourse pertains to the fateful shift from “affirmative action” to “diversity.” Affirmative action policy was forged in the cauldron of the black protest movement. However, a nation that had no trouble using all the powers of the state to oppress blacks as a people balked when it came to giving preferential treatment on the basis of group affiliation. This, the sophists claimed with glee, violated the cardinal rule of the civil rights protest movement: that a person should be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin.
Thus, even at their inception, affirmative action programs were targeted ambiguously for “minorities and women.” As it turns out, the primary beneficiaries were upper-middle-class white woman who gained access to the professions and corporate business. Predictably, other “minorities” with historical grievances — Asians and Latinos — began crowding under the meager umbrella of affirmative action. I do not blame them for doing so: I am only saying that it made a difference, and that it derailed affirmative action from its original objective. After the Bakke decision in 1978, which proscribed “quotas” for specific groups but sanctioned “diversity” as a goal in college admissions, affirmative action programs were no longer governed by the logic of reparations, which is to say, as a remedy for past injustices. Clearly, this turn of events worked to the benefit of immigrants and to the detriment of blacks.
A third way that immigration has impacted on race discourse is that social scientists and government officials puzzled about how to classify these new immigrants who were not white, but then again, were not black either. Immigrant leaders and advocacy groups, too, had to locate themselves on the nation’s cognitive map. As the exponents of “whiteness studies” have shown, old immigrants, beginning with the Irish, actively sought to disassociate themselves from blacks, lest they be lumped together with these racial pariahs. Clearly, new immigrants were even more “at risk,” given their conspicuous racial differences. The result has been a proliferation of books and conferences with titles like “beyond black and white” (over 15,000 hits on Google); “neither black nor white” (14,000 hits); and “in-between people — race” (800 hits). From the standpoint of Asians and Latinos, this is an entirely understandable and, I suppose, unassailable development. On the other hand, the extension of race beyond the binary of black and white, the admission of permutations in the middle, has deflected attention away from the unique and unresolved problems of race qua African Americans. The result is that the nation congratulates itself on its “diversity” and celebrates its “multiculturalism,” while the problems of African Americans continue to fester from neglect.
But there is something else that needs to be said, and let me be blunt. Immigrants have a political debt to pay to African Americans whose protest movement led to the immigration reform that allowed them to come here in the first place. Furthermore, thanks to the black protest movement, these immigrants entered a nation with a drastically improved climate of tolerance, and with policies in place that reduced their exposure to the scourge of bigotry and opened up avenues of opportunity that previously did not exist for people of color.
March 31st, 2006 at 4:36 pm
A GI Bill For Everybody
Adolph Reed, Jr.
Dissent/FALL 2001 /VOLUME 48, NUMBER 4
What if education were available without tuition charges to every resident meeting admissions criteria, as a right, at any public, post-secondary educational institution in the United States? Is this idea feasible? Is there potential public support for it? What would be its likely effects if implemented? What would such a commitment cost? How could those costs be met? These questions are not on the radar screen of American public discourse today. In fact, they are virtually unthinkable in the current consensus that sets the boundaries of acceptable policy debate.
Yet paying for higher education is a major concern for most Americans. In 2000, polls indicated that respondents included education, along with the economy, as one of the two highest priority issues in choosing a presidential candidate. Although much of this expressed concern is centered on the quality of pre-collegiate schooling, Americans are also worried about access to post-secondary education. Legitimately so, for post-secondary education is increasingly a prerequisite for effective labor force participation, for any hope of a relatively secure, decent job. If that is the case, shouldn’t society have an obligation to provide universal access to such an essential social good? Why should we accept a putative consensus that preempts consideration of an issue so important to so many Americans?
Universal access to higher education is not entirely unprecedented in recent American history. The most dramatic approximation to it was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the GI Bill, under which a generation of Second World War veterans received what was usually full tuition support and stipends (up to nearly $12,000 per year in 1994 dollars) to attend post-secondary educational institutions. By 1952, the federal government had spent $7 billion (nearly $39 billion in 1994 dollars) on sending veterans to college. This amounted to 1.3 percent of total federal expenditures ($521.8 billion) during that period. A 1988 report by a congressional subcommittee on education and health estimated that 40 percent of those who attended college under the GI Bill would not otherwise have done so. The report also found that each dollar spent educating that 40 percent produced a $6.90 return (more than $267 billion in 1994 dollars) in national output due to extra education and increased federal tax revenues from the extra income the beneficiaries earned.
The dynamics set in motion by the GI Bill had broad, positive ramifications for the country as a whole, extending far beyond the direct beneficiaries. Not only did the latter benefit from increased income, occupational and employment opportunities, and personal growth and enrichment; these benefits extended intergenerationally, making for greater opportunities for their children and families, which contributed to a general expansion in college enrollments through the 1970s, far outstripping population growth. Enrollments increased by nearly 21 percent between 1950-1960 and nearly 167 percent between 1960-1970. In 1950, for example, 1.7 percent of the total U.S. population were enrolled in colleges and universities; by 1975, the figure had risen steadily to 5.2 percent. This growth also fueled a dramatic expansion of colleges and universities. Bulging enrollments led to substantial enlargement of physical plant and capacities at existing institutions. Increased demand for higher education also prompted creation of new institutions, many of them public campuses in urban and under-served rural areas that brought higher education physically within reach of new segments of society. The Bureau of the Census counted 1,708 institutions of higher education in 1940 and 1,959 in 1960; by 1981, the number had risen to more than 3,200. All this expansion in turn stimulated construction and other employment opportunities, ranging from faculties and staff to support services and the commercial sector. It also dramatically democratized college and university life and broadened and deepened the intellectual life of campuses and academic disciplines. Michael J. Bennett writes movingly of the GI Bill’s democratizing cultural and intellectual effects in When Dreams Came True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America.
Of course, factors other than public tuition support contributed significantly to the postwar explosion in higher education. Among them were the general economic prosperity of the period; the rising wages, benefits, and job security available to many unionized workers as part of the Fordist capital/labor accord that prevailed at least in the industrial sector through the 1960s; and the perceived need to invest in education sparked by the Soviet Union’s launching of Sputnik in 1957. After 1965, the Vietnam War no doubt also contributed to increased college attendance, insofar as student deferments from conscription made enrollment more attractive to draft-age males.
And the expansion, particularly in cities, was often a mixed blessing. To the extent that new construction for higher education was linked to urban renewal schemes, it frequently came with the unacknowledged cost of destroying inner-city neighborhoods. Any overall cost-benefit analysis would have to account for the social losses of such dislocation, which included seriously disrupting the lives of people already precariously situated financially, severing ties to place and social networks, intensifying pressures on affordable housing, and exacerbating racial inequalities. (As Martin Anderson noted in The Federal Bulldozer, more than two-thirds of those displaced nationally for urban renewal site clearance and construction through the early 1960s were black or Puerto Rican.) Nevertheless, expanded access to higher education almost certainly has had substantially democratizing effects in the general population and in the long-term, even among the racial groups whose stigmatized status and segregated living arrangements made many of them particularly vulnerable to victimization by the redevelopment juggernaut.
The history of the City University of New York provides a local, but instructive illustration of the general social benefits that result from removing financial constraint from access to higher education. The free tuition policy in effect in the CUNY system until the 1970s also brought higher education within reach for tens of thousands of people for whom it would otherwise have been no more than an unrealizable dream. In addition to the impressively lengthy roster of prominent public officials, academics, and others who took advantage of that access, exponentially more people were able to translate it into more secure and rewarding jobs than would otherwise have been attainable.
Similarly, many states responded to increased demand for higher education by expanding and rationalizing public systems to facilitate access, often by enlarging and integrating community college, regional, and state university tiers in ways that enabled students to move fluidly from one level to another as their accomplishment and interests warranted. For decades, the California system was a model of this kind of egalitarian access and fluidity. The aftermath of Proposition 13 (the 1978 California ballot initiative that radically cut property taxes and imposed draconian restrictions on subsequent increases) and the constrained revenue base resulting from tax revolt politics has reduced this mobility within the California system since the early 1980s. However, graduate admission records underscore its persistence: applicants from California still commonly display transcripts that mark the journey from community to state college and then to the university system.
Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating during the 1980s, costs of attending colleges and universities rose nationally, and sources of federal grant-in-aid support decreased relative to need. Aggregate tuition and fees at all kinds of institutions of higher education (private and public) rose from slightly more than $5 billion in 1970 to more than $55 billion in 1996. When adjusted for inflation, this amounts to a 170 percent increase, which was nearly two and a half times greater than the rate of growth in aggregate enrollments over that period (while real wages remained flat, or even declined, during that time). Meanwhile, in 1970 federal grants covered only 2.7 percent of total tuition and fees, but that was at a point when such costs, especially for in-state students at public institutions, were generally low and more easily manageable. By 1980, increasing concerns about rising costs had prompted increased government aid-covering more than 23 percent of tuition and fees nationally, though this increase hardly kept pace with increased costs. By 1996, such grants had declined and covered less than 12 percent of total tuition and fees. This retrenchment was partly the result of intentional rightist strategies to rein in what was perceived as a source of “adversarial culture” in universities and an expression of the corporate-led attack on social wage benefits of all sorts that might weaken labor discipline.
Increasingly, college attendance for all except the wealthy has become contingent on qualification for interest-carrying student loans. This filters out many potential students who either cannot afford the encumbrance of loan indebtedness or cannot qualify for loans. More students are prevented from completing degree programs because they exhaust the sums for which they qualify before satisfying the requirements. Still more take much longer to complete their courses of study than they otherwise would because they have to take off time to work. Still more are pressured by their debt burdens to pursue courses of study, or even subsequent lines of employment, outside their interests in hopes of earning enough to pay off their loans.
This state of affairs is inimical to a decent and just society. It imposes unacceptable, though typically unacknowledged, human costs in terms of social waste and unfulfilled potential, and it perverts the values of higher education. Moreover, it is unnecessary. A 1999 report from the US Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics indicates that in 1996 tuition and fee revenues at all two-year and four-year degree-awarding public educational institutions totaled just over $23 billion. This is a relatively small sum, equivalent to roughly 2 percent of current federal budgets. Even if increased access were to double the number of students attending colleges and universities and double the annual tuition demand to $46 billion, that would still be a sum easily absorbed within current budgets. Even potential increases in other forms of federal aid to students, such as Pell Grants for non-tuition expenses, would not prohibitively increase the total cost. The expenditure commitments could be absorbed easily by restoring minimal tax justice; for instance, simply closing corporate tax shelter loopholes introduced since 1990 would generate an estimated $60 billion annually.
One of the most regrettable and self-defeating developments within progressive policy circles during the last two decades has been an atrophy of practical, programmatic vision. This is especially true with respect to those policy areas that lie in the domain of social wage provision-for example, health care, education, affordable housing, income support, old-age security, civil rights, and labor rights. This has been one of Reaganism’s subtler, but more far-reaching victories. By seizing the political initiative and setting the terms of public debate, the right has so demoralized us and put us so completely on the defensive politically that we often seem capable of struggling only to minimize losses or, at best, to press for minimally incremental, often concessionary reforms. The result is that we have been unable effectively to counter the right wing’s fundamental proposition that government has little or no responsibility for securing the general welfare and providing access to opportunities for the enhancement of the lives of the general population. We seem to have lost the ability or the will to articulate policies for making the society as just and democratic as it should be; instead, we have become increasingly focused on trying to secure what we think might actually be attainable within a policy universe dominated by the right’s denial of the efficacy of public action.
This failure of progressive policy vision is understandable. Activist and advocacy groups that have faced the brunt of the endlessly escalating right-wing assault are necessarily forced into a defensive mode as their often already precariously situated constituencies have been its prime targets. However, the only way to turn the tide of the right’s war against the social gains won in the middle half of the twentieth century is to present clearly-and generate public discussion around-an affirmative policy agenda that addresses people’s most basic concerns and is a practical expression of a different view of public responsibility and governmental capacity. We need to shift the terms of public debate, to break the stranglehold of Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing mantra that the late Daniel Singer summed up pithily as TINA-There Is No Alternative-to the unrestrained action of market forces. This task does not contradict or override the more immediate struggles to preserve past gains that have been under concerted attack, such as commitments to racial and gender justice, social security for the elderly, and governmental provision of quality public services. Indeed, it is a necessary complement to them. The only way to preserve those gains is to challenge the arguments used in attacking them.
We need a clear voice that seeks to shift the terms of public debate by reasserting the principles of social solidarity and public responsibility that have become increasingly marginalized during the past two decades. This means focusing on objectives that speak to people’s immediate, everyday concerns-even if these lie beyond today’s political horizon and cannot reasonably be expected to bear fruit within less than several election cycles. Objectives such as universal health care and universal access to higher education are practically realizable if political will can be generated to implement them. How can we generate that will? We have to open a broad policy discussion that begins with the question, What would American public policy look like and how would our institutions operate if their first priority were to meet the most important concerns of the vast majority of the population?
This majority is not currently included among those that define the parameters of policy debate; they have not participated in calculating the supposed limits of feasibility and practicality that narrow the political horizon. Yet, as Michael Zweig has argued persuasively in The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret, they are the American demos, the democratic base. The left’s most vital task, therefore, is to encourage a truly popular discussion about national priorities and the means to fulfill them. Not only do poll data indicate that education is already a broadly shared concern; in our own lives and in our interactions with others, we all recognize the strain that paying for higher education imposes throughout the population. So it makes sense to argue that significant potential exists for building grassroots support for realistic strategies that would make access to higher education available to all Americans, so far as interest and ability can take them.
In the comparably critical area of health care, the Maine legislature’s passage of a single-payer bill, signed into law by the governor, is the most dramatic recent indication of openness within the public to policy strategies that break sharply with neoliberal orthodoxy. In last year’s elections, single-payer ballot initiatives won by at least 60 percent majorities in non-binding referenda in six legislative districts across Massachusetts and in Alachua County, Florida (where the initiative received more votes than any presidential candidate). These are admittedly modest victories, but they at least reinforce a suspicion that popular sentiment can be cultivated in support of policies that address broadly shared needs in just and egalitarian ways, without subordinating them to market theology. The key ingredient missing from left politics at this juncture in the United States is a concerted strategy for building popular constituencies to pursue objectives that resonate with people’s concerns and harnessing those objectives to a social vision that lies outside the limits defined by current elite consensus.
That is in large measure how the right was able to change the terms of political debate in the first place, though the vision around which it articulates those concerns is largely a scam. After Barry Goldwater was swamped by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, militants of the right embarked on a strategic, long-term campaign that was largely grassroots-based. They realized that their push had been premature; the Johnson landslide showed them that it was necessary to take a step back and try to create a popular constituency for their political agenda. They pursued this objective by doing several things that we have consistently failed to do since the high period of civil rights and antiwar activism in the 1960s. They mobilized activists at the local level around issue-based campaigns that challenged the prevailing axes of incrementalist policy debate-for instance, for school prayer and tax cuts, against abortion, affirmative action, the Equal Rights Amendment, and school busing. They identified and cultivated bases of support around each of these issues and worked to knit them together into a coherent movement.
This is the stuff of social-movement building. For too long now progressives have operated as if we already have the mobilized constituencies that we need. The governing consensus in national politics indicates that we don’t. This is one of the strategic limitations of the domestic mobilization to challenge the World Trade Organization and other neoliberal globalization initiatives. While a focus on mounting highly visible international protests is understandable and perhaps necessary, by themselves those actions do little to deepen popular awareness of the dynamics and dangers that activists wish to combat. To that extent, these mobilizations may be self-limiting in scope and effectiveness.
Their continued success requires planting roots within the broader population. Most Americans, however, have at most inchoate and incoherent views of the stakes of economic globalization; the interpretation of this process for popular discourse remains-at least outside the ranks of already committed progressives and attentive union members-the province of corporate media and its sound-bite analyses. It is past time for us to learn the same lesson that the right learned after Goldwater’s defeat.
A common objection to this comparison is that the right succeeded because it plays to people’s fears, which are supposedly easier to mobilize around than more abstract, less emotionally charged political programs. But the concrete fears that most people experience most acutely connect much more immediately with the programs of the left: for example, fear of job loss and declining living standards, lack of access to adequate health care, affordable housing, and quality education. Another objection, largely a smear by smug neoliberals, is that the left proposes no new ideas and offers only opposition without clear, practical alternatives. But the right galvanizes its ranks largely around opposition to abortion, taxation, civil rights, immigration, and social spending. And what ideas are more shopworn in American politics than racism, nativism, and unrestrained property rights? Indeed, the right persists in presenting itself as an opposition movement even as it consolidates its dominance of the political landscape under the mantra of bipartisanship.
It is only by taking up the challenge of building a coherent movement, creating and cultivating popular support for a long-term struggle focused on everyday needs-what are sometimes described as “practical utopias”-that it will be possible to redefine the terms of national policy debate. Removal of financial constraint on access to higher education could be such an initiative. It could appeal immediately to students, parents, university faculty and staff, and the organizations that represent them. It also has a natural and historic base in the labor movement, and not only among unions that represent workers in the education sector. Free public education was one of the two main demands of the earliest American unions, along with the shorter work week.
Despite the right’s attempts to characterize public support for higher education as an upper-middle-class giveaway, this is an issue that has resonance throughout the population. The “Joe Sixpack” imagery that drives so much disingenuous right-wing populism is simply bogus. Interest in educating oneself and one’s children-for both instrumental reasons related to employment and noninstrumental reasons related to intellectual curiosity and self-fulfillment-is not by any means the exclusive property of the upper middle class. It is a condescending caricature that other working people do not have similar aspirations. Indeed, an element of this issue’s appeal is its broad resonance within the population; it has the potential to cut across the familiar lines of division by race, gender, age, inner city, and suburb that the right has successfully exploited and intensified over the past two decades.
The Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute, a nonprofit educational organization associated with the Labor Party, will put out a call this fall for a grassroots campaign to make higher education universally accessible to all academically qualifying potential students. (Accessibility also should require adequate remedial and developmental support for borderline admits and easy movement from community college through university on the basis of interest and demonstrated ability.)
This could be the beginning of a significant popular movement-on the order of earlier agitation for black Americans’ civil rights, for the eight-hour day, or for old-age assistance-that helps to redefine the terms of national political debate. As those earlier movements did, it could also achieve its own objectives and, in the process, expand the foundation of American democracy.
Adolph Reed, Jr., is professor of political science on the Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science at the New School for Social Research, a member of the Interim National Council of the Labor Party, and serves on the board of Public Citizen, Inc. His most recent book is Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene.
March 31st, 2006 at 4:37 pm
And thanks to all my Chicano friends who fought side-by-side with us to spare Tookie. And Antonio, how moving of you to show up for Rosa’s funeral–even if you couldn’t find an honorable way to pay your plane ticket.
March 31st, 2006 at 4:38 pm
“Anyone can be denied a job for any reason any time by anyone irrespective of race.”
If this is the face modern day liberalism, then god have mercy on us all. Im glad to have seen that Marc Cooper has caught on to the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of this serial commentator
March 31st, 2006 at 4:51 pm
What exactly would be the point in not voting Democrat? Unless you are already rich voting Republican makes no sense at all. Democratic primaies on the other hand . . . Also the demonization of Teachers Unions never ceases to amaze me if Teachers really were unfairly compensated you would think that it would be a very popular profession.
March 31st, 2006 at 5:06 pm
David – without going into a long riff, employers want to hire illegal immigrants not because of racism, per se, but because they are, in general, more eager to work for lower wages and aren’t in a particularly good position to assert their rights on the job or push for adherence to labor laws. This is pretty elementary. But if you don’t think that the David Brooks mentality which lauds the cultural values they associate with Latinos and considers poor blacks socially dysfunctional isn’t operating bigtime, you’re kidding yourself. We can debate the degree to which this reflects real problems and real marginalization, the causes and the fairness of the perceptions, but it’s not something I’m dreaming up.
Also, Grover Norquist is open minded if you like wide open markets and wide open markets like any good laissez faire capitalist. His admiration for civil rights leaders certainly couldn’t include Martin Luther King Jr., who was explicitly social democratic, nor A. Phillip Randolph who was a lifelong socialist in the Norman Thomas mold, or the radicals of SNCC. I think that he admires the fake Martin Luther King who resides on postage stamps and such – and gets constantly quoted selectively by shady characters like Shelby Steele, the Thernstroms, Linda Chavez and John McWhorter who shill for right wing think tanks. I didn’t know his wife was Muslim, but I do know he took a lot of flack for associating, politicking and fundraising with some dubious Islamic groups in the wake of 9/11.
March 31st, 2006 at 5:10 pm
that should have said “wide open markets and wide open borders like any good laissez faire capitalist”
March 31st, 2006 at 5:14 pm
It happens every day sis. However defference goe to the exotic types. Blacks and caucasions are so old world.
March 31st, 2006 at 5:19 pm
“Bobby Feller”‘s first post contains this nugget that sums up part of what I couldn’t say nearly as clearly.
In race talk the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African Americans.
— Toni Morrison, “On the Backs of Blacksâ€
The whole post is too goddam long and it’s followed by another interesting but very long piece by Adolph Reed that might have better been excerpted, but if you skipped most of these magazine articles posted as “comment” – as any person not suffering from OCD might be inclined to do – please at least read the last four paragraphs of the first piece he put up.
March 31st, 2006 at 5:44 pm
“Personally I’ve been boayed by the sight of hundred of thousands of people marching to demand legalisation, dignity and respect.”
I have NOT been. Make no mistake, I sympathize with those trying to escape from Mexico, which is a horrible place to live largely because of the U.S.’s unique bastardized version of “free market capitalism,” and in some ways I feel that it is fair, especially given Adam Smith’s maxim that “Where capital goes, labor too should be able to follow.”
But just imagine the changes that could be brought about in Mexico if those hundreds of thousands marched on Mexico City and protested its own government. Their anger, much like the anger of too many middle and lower class Americans, is misdirected.
March 31st, 2006 at 5:45 pm
If you’ve got the stamina, that first article from “New Politics” is excellent in unpacking this issue at a level of seriousness and rigor generally absent from scattershot comments – like mine.
March 31st, 2006 at 7:29 pm
“Black leaders also cast a nervous glance over their shoulder at the shrill chorus of anger rising from many African-Americans, especially the black poor, of whom a significant number flatly oppose illegal immigrant rights. But illegal immigration is not the prime reason so many poor young blacks are on the streets, and why some turn to gangs, guns and drug dealing to get ahead. A shrinking economy, sharp state and federal government cuts in and elimination of job and skills training programs, failing public schools, a soaring black prison population and employment discrimination are the prime causes of the poverty crisis in many inner city black neighborhoods. The recent studies by Princeton, Columbia and Harvard researchers on the dreary plight of young black males reconfirmed that chronic unemployment has turned thousands of young black males into America’s job untouchables. ”
Yes, why should African-American civil rights groups defend a “slave labor” illegal immigration program, invented to benefit the corrupt “corporatocracy‖a program designed to further economically destroy the African-American community.
It is ironic that even in New Orleans where African-Americans were the most victimized by Katrina; they were then doubly victimized by the local job market, when contractors hired illegal immigrants rather than African-Americans, whom they would have to pay at a higher pay scale.
Here is a little essay that I recently put together describing these inequities:
POVERTY RATHER THAN LOTTERY!
An all-voluntary military is nothing more than an economic draft, where desperate kids have few choices and conscription is based on poverty rather than lottery. These kids come from small towns and poor inner cities, all they want is a “shot†at a better life, what they all have in common is one thing—the promise of a free education and a second chance.
African-Americans make up just 12 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 47 percent of the country’s prison population. As of June 2002 the total number of individuals incarcerated was 2,019,234. This population consisted of 818,900 African-American males, 637,700 White males, and 68,000 Hispanic males.
The incarceration rate for African-American males was 4,810 per 100,000 compared to 649 per 100,000 White males. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, for every 100,000 people in the U.S., 3,535 African Americans were incarcerated, compared to 462 Whites and 1,177 Hispanics. One in 10 African-American males between the ages of 25 and 29 were incarcerated in state or federal prisons by the end of 2001. In the U.S., approximately one in four (23 percent) African-American males ages 20-29 are either in prison, jail, on probation or parole on any given day.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice. Nearly one in three African-American males born in 2001 will go to prison during his lifetime. In 2001, 16.6 percent of African-American males had been incarcerated at some point in their life, compared to 2.6 percent of White males and 7.7 percent of Hispanic males. Young African-American males are twice as likely to die and 27 times more likely to go to jail as young White males.
Since the beginning of this all-volunteer military, African-Americans have enlisted for service in the armed forces at much higher levels. After reaching a high of 28 percent in 1979, black enlistment levels hovered around 20 percent until 2000. But the past five years have seen a drop in overall African American enlistment levels. Black enlistment rates in the Army and the Marines have declined since 2000. These trends spell trouble for the Army, which has depended on blacks to meet its recruiting goals.
Since 2001, the military has especially targeted Latinos in the Southwest. This includes both Chicanos born in the US and Mexican immigrants. The immigration issue is used as both a threat and a promise by recruiters who are even recruiting in Mexico, both near the border and in the interior of Mexico—the most desperate and poor are used as cannon fodder to enrich war profiteers.
So as a result, a new phenomena is occurring– 21,880 new soldiers recruited in 2005 were admitted under waivers—these are recruits who are incapable of meeting so-called “normal standards.†These waivers represent a 42 percent increase since the pre-Iraq year of 2000. Equally significant, is the Army’s liberal use of “moral waivers,” which are issued to recruits who have committed criminal offenses. Officially, the Pentagon states that most waivers issued on moral grounds are for minor infractions like traffic tickets. Yet many of the offenses are more serious in nature—so isn’t interesting that the prisons are primarily dominated by poor African-Americans, and when the military needs to fulfill their quotas they grant waivers to poor African-American males who are only left with TWO CHOICES– JAIL or IRAQ!
ECONOMIC DRAFT: WE’LL TAKE YOU, WHAT ELSE WILL YOU DO?
Young adults with limited opportunities who do not have access to well-paying jobs, and financial aid to attend college are especially susceptible to the enticements of recruitment. Those who sign up in the National Guard need the monthly payments to supplement their income and some were under the false impression that they would stay in their state, perhaps helping out with civil disasters and doing their one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer—similar to what George Bush did, after his father used his high level connections to ensure that, Georgie Boy, would stay in Texas during the Vietnam War. Now, however, the National Guard and Reserve units have been activated, and are deployed to Iraq.
ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH; TWICE IS NOT ENOUGH—WILL THREE TIMES BE A CHARM?
Military obligations that was supposed to end are NOW NOT ENDING, soldiers are being retained under a new strategy called “STOP-LOSS DRAFTâ€â€”it’s basically a method of protracting military service, so instead of finishing your tour of duty, you are reassigned for four or five additional tours—STOP-LOSS, NEED I SAY MORE.
Stop Loss is now being challenged by a lawsuit as involuntary servitude—I can’t imagine why.
Inexperienced kids are especially susceptible to a recruiter’s sales pitch—because they want to believe the impossible–the “recruitment business†is a $2.5 billion a year industry. Recruiters’ are experts and are trained to misrepresent realities by outright lying and false promises—they need to meet their quotas, just like every other salesman.
IT DOESN’T AFFECT ME!
If Middle-class and affluent children were dragged into Iraq and Afghanistan, political consciousness would be raised at lightening speed–self-interest has a way of sparking enlightenment. The draft is a “volatile issue†and politicians are clever they know what issues to avoid – they know that the price of a skilled army is much too high—civil rebellion and the memories of the Vietnam War are still ever-present. But is it fair, to ask the poor and working-class to fight a war, only to make war profiteers rich?
When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.” — Jean-Paul Sartre
THE BIG MOUTH PUNDITS WHO ONLY TALK ABOUT WAR, BUT NEVER SERVED!
• George Will, did not serve
• Chris Matthews, Mediawhore, did not serve.
• Bill O’Reilly did not serve
• Paul Gigot, did not serve.
• Bill Bennett, Did not serve
• Pat Buchanan, did not serve
• Rush Limbaugh, did not serve ])
• Michael Savage (aka Michael Alan Weiner) – did not serve
• Pat Robertson – claimed during 1986 campaign to be a “combat veteran.” –He was a Liquor Officer.
• Bill Kristol, did not serve
• Sean Hannity, did not serve.
• Kenneth Starr, did not serve
• Antonin Scalia, did not serve
• Clarence Thomas, did not serve
• Ralph Reed, did not serve
• Michael Medved, did not serve
• Charlie Daniels, did not serve
• Ted Nugent, did not serve
March 31st, 2006 at 7:36 pm
If “brevity is the soul of wit,” then many commenters here are witless. I’m getting carpal tunnel syndrome from excessive scrolling with the mouse.
March 31st, 2006 at 7:50 pm
never thought I’d find myself *defending* (with a definite asterisk) “American employers,†but I think that you are off of your rocker if you really believe that American businessmen are all a bunch of backwood racists. Racism has always been something embraced by two, and only two segments in society : (1) the hopelessly idiotic, and (2) the downtrodden. The businessmen who run this country certainly love racism as a divisive tool. After all, imagine if the poor whites and the poor blacks of red state America put aside their differences for just one month and directed that anger at the people who really pull the strings in this country?
Cummings doesn’t be so provincial—there are many affluent intellectuals who are also racist, “the idiotic and the downtrodden,†do not have a monopoly on this mentality. If I recall, the Nazis’ executed their victims while listening to opera and classical music.
March 31st, 2006 at 7:58 pm
Eleanore there were no Democrats in that list. We didn’t all serve. Okay I didn’t, but I was called up with #16 and went to the physical. Lucky for me I was trained by Arlo Guthrie and knew just what to do. Woody I’m told I’ve been monoplying the conversations here. Hard to believe with the plethora of Jack Kerouac-esque screed scolls that have to be measured with a yardstick to appreciate, but there you have it: Perception is everything.
March 31st, 2006 at 7:58 pm
Woody,
Here is a brief message–place your wrist in a splint and go read a book!
April 1st, 2006 at 6:45 am
Everyone take five and read Leonard Pitts on fear of change:
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/leonard_pitts/14228181.htm
“… the country is changing. I just disagree that change is to be feared. If human history tells us anything, it tells us human beings are not static. Language is fluid, culture shifts and populations move, driven by war and famine, pulled by opportunity and hope. Yes, it is jarring when you go to places you used to know and find that now everybody habla español. But so what?”
April 1st, 2006 at 7:24 am
Eleanore, alternatively, I could do like some commenters here and switch the mouse to my left hand…for whatever reason they do that.
April 1st, 2006 at 8:20 am
The question Austin is what is it changing into? And when was it that sovereign borders were not respected?
April 1st, 2006 at 9:13 am
Woody, I usually scroll with the key, and reserve mouse scrolling for short distances.
April 1st, 2006 at 10:14 am
“And when was it that sovereign borders were not respected?”
In response to yet another round of surefire Yorksie idiocy I’ll quote Roberto Martinez, a longtime immigrant rights campaigner
“I’ve been doing border work for 15 years but I’ve been involved in Chicano rights, civil rights, for 25 years. It’s always been a part of my life. I grew up, as I mentioned before, fighting for my rights, to be treated equally, which we don’t feel we have. In fact we call ourselves Chicanos precisely because it’s a political term, because we were neither Mexican nor treated as U.S. citizens. Our rights were never respected. We had to create our own identity. Because people like me, fifth or sixth generation, weren’t born in Mexico. My great, great grandparents came from Texas and they lived there before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed. In other words like we say a lot “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” Our rights were never respected.
They broke the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo right from day one. Lands were taken away, people were chased into Mexico. There were massacres of Mexicans in the U.S. back in the turn of the century. One of the biggest massacres was in Norias in south Texas in 1915 where over 300 Mexican U.S. citizens were massacred by Texas Rangers in retaliation for something that happened somewhere else. It’s in the history books.
There’s always been persecution of Mexicans in the U.S. since even before 1848. As settlers swept across the country they took away land, took over mines, took over everything. We basically ended up, our people, my great grandparents, more like indentured servants working for people on the land that they used to own. It was taken away from them by fraud, by deceit, or by legal means. My great grandparents and grandparents weren’t allowed to go to school. They didn’t want them to learn how to do math or speak English, and defend themselves.
We basically went through what the African Americans went through. There were signs up until the 1950s and `60s on restaurants I’ve seen them. Regular metal signs printed in shops said “No Mexicans or dogs allowed”. Those existed way into the `60s. Segregation of schools existed up until the 1960s. Mexican schools and white schools.. We have our history.
In California the campaigns have come in cycles. The ’30s, the ’40s, the ’50s, the ’60s — whenever they are looking for scape goats to explain all the social and economic problems, unemployment. It has continued straight through the ’90s.
For example with Operation Wetback in the ’60s the debate started again. Back then in the ’60s and ’70s the INS Commissioner, Chapman, an ex-Marine Commandant , began publicizing “massive invasions of illegals into the United States, estimated at 8 to 12 million in the U.S.” He called on Congress for 200,000 troops for border patrol, equal to the amount of troops in the U.S., to be put on the border. This debate led to the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 – Simpson-Mazzoli.
And here we go again in the 1990s , the same thing. Every ten years. And the Mexicans are the scape goats. Where it’s all going to end? Who knows? We may end up with 10,000 troops on the border, on top of the 10,000 Border Patrol agents. On top of the local police. We could very well see occupied cities at the beginning of the next century.”
April 1st, 2006 at 10:44 am
THE BIG MOUTH PUNDITS WHO ONLY TALK ABOUT WAR, BUT NEVER SERVED!
• Pat Buchanan, did not serve
• Rush Limbaugh, did not serve
You are being unfair. Buchanan had a bad knee, and Limbaugh had an infected pimple on his rear end.
April 1st, 2006 at 10:48 am
Eleanore,
The nazis were different types of racists. Different category althogether.
April 1st, 2006 at 10:51 am
“This debate led to the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 – Simpson-Mazzoli.”
Wasn’t Simpson-Mazzoli a predecessor to IRCA, which was effectively an amnesty bill – along with the “promise” of more controls on employers, which never materialized. Aren’t we seeing a re-run of this with McCain-Kennedy, PLUS the employer-friendly “guest-worker” provision.
Frankly, I’ve had it with any discussion of illegal immigration that simply resorts to the idea that borders are meaningless, that it’s all about ethnicity or “nativism”, that Latinos aren’t welcome as immigrants, that this is a “civil rights” issue, etc. etc. It’s about internal labor markets. Either you control them or you don’t. It’s also about the concept of citizneship and nationality. It means something or it doesn’t. All of the appeals to the unfairness of the Mexican American war, racism against Latinos or whatever can’t change the essence of the issue as it exists in the real terms of this debate. As for racism, the truth is that Latinos are currently being generically touted by the folks any self-respecting leftist like Ahmed would consider the ruling class as just what the doctor ordered to help bring America back from the brink of decadence – a welcome antidote to lazy, dysfunctional, tiresome you-know-who.
April 1st, 2006 at 11:02 am
You’re right, Rich. That’s better . Thanks.
Sorry that I don’t have a lot to say on this particular topic. However, I might throw some wood on the fire by saying that many civil rights leaders gave up any reserve for the proper application of the term “civil rights” when they embraced the homosexual movement and awarded to a lifestyle and political agenda the same significance as and claim to rights as applied to a person’s race.
In the first instance, I think that civil rights “leaders” saw an ally to their cause while in the latter they see a competitor for influence. That could explain their complacency in the Mexican illegal immigration problem.
April 1st, 2006 at 11:22 am
“Frankly, I’ve had it with any discussion of illegal immigration that simply resorts to the idea that borders are meaningless, that it’s all about ethnicity or “nativismâ€, that Latinos aren’t welcome as immigrants, that this is a “civil rights†issue, etc. etc.”
Exactly. The borders evolved and were fought for. So until we go “occupy” Mexico City and call it Texas-south only a wild radical would propose such out of context examples of the same old tired racist bait. Of course when that’s the only note in your personal samba well, what else is there?
April 1st, 2006 at 11:26 am
“surefire Yorksie idiocy”
Could someone explain to me how this isn’t an example of abusive namecalling?
April 1st, 2006 at 11:50 am
I’m against giving back the Alamo. I wonder if these Alamo toy soldiers will become popular: http://www.prestostore.com/cgi-bin/store.pl?ref=clausewitz50&pd=44150&rdf=fr
April 1st, 2006 at 12:09 pm
What ? No dead Texans ? That’s no fun.
April 1st, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Incidentally, Woody, I found this one which might be useful to you in flogging some of your arguments here.
http://www.prestostore.com/cgi-bin/store.pl?ref=clausewitz50&ct=13438&pd=87954&rdf=fr
April 1st, 2006 at 12:14 pm
woefully off topic but Billy bragg’s new song is almost brilliant
http://tinyurl.com/rfvbx
April 1st, 2006 at 12:26 pm
Reg that joke was almost brilliant too.
April 1st, 2006 at 12:35 pm
I do what I can to relieve the poor bastards who congregate here from the tedium of my rants.
April 1st, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Amed:
Great post. Thank you for pointing out that Mexican-Americans have a long and deep history in the United States, one that predates the Pilgrims, and one that is erased from the national consciousness.
Little known fact: Mexican-Americans have fought in every US military conflict since the US Revolution. But we did’t see any Mexican-Americans in any of those WWII movies Hollywood released a few years ago. We didn’t see any Mexican-Americans mentioned in Tom Brokaw’s book, “The Greatest Generation.” We didn’t see any Mexican-Americans mentioned in the book “Medal of Honor” (forward by Mike Wallace). Why not? Mexican-Americans have been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for service in WWI, WWII, Vietnam and Korea.
Funny how cities and states with Spanish names are considered American, but American people with Spanish surnames are always considered foreign. It’s the foreignization of Mexican-Americans.
The media is especially guilty of this. Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante is a third generation Californian, and was the only native Californian in Governor’s race. Yet during the Governor’s race, the media wrongly referred to him as an “immigrant” or the “son of immigrants.” They were foreignizing Bustamate, an American by birth, while calling Arnold, an immigrant from Austria, the great “American” success story.
The NY Times made the same mistake with Villaraigosa. When he became mayor they said that Califiornia now had two immigrants in prominent positions of power and compared him to Arnold.
Like Bustamate, Villaraigosa is a native Californian. His mother’s side of the family has been in Los Angeles for 100 years. The NY Times, the so-called paper of record, couldn’t even get this right. Or refused to get it right.
http://www.azteca.net/cmhlatino/
theforty/index.html
April 1st, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Yeah this is just so sad. My dad has a Silver Star from WWII, yet hasn’t been written about in any of the books. Even by Ernest Hemingway who was with him. No doubt this is just racist bias against fifth generation Franco-Americans. It’s an open and shut case.
April 1st, 2006 at 3:11 pm
That’s a good one, reg. Maybe with all the abuse that I take from this site, this might describe me better: http://www.prestostore.com/cgi-bin/store.pl?ref=clausewitz50&ct=ALL&pd=251497&rdf=fr&recview=61
—–
Julie wrote: Little known fact: Mexican-Americans have fought in every US military conflict since the US Revolution.
They also fought in the Texas War for Independence. Even Pee Wee Herman remembers the Alamo.
I did check your link to the site honoring the 39 Latino decendents who won the Medal of Honor. Those men certainly deserve credit for their valor, and I’m as grateful to them for their service and sacrifices as I am to any other person who won that medal.
I think that you’re being a little tough on prejudices by Americans against people of Mexican decent. For example, you just can’t have a book covering every ethnic, national, or religious group for a specific topic. It would be a foot thick.
I’m going to make up for any slight and eat tomorrow at that famous Mexican restaurant, Taco Bell. (Do you really want credit for that?)
April 1st, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Nope.
I’ve made my point. The information is out there, and your attempts to belittle my comments won’t change that.
April 1st, 2006 at 6:37 pm
I wasn’t trying to belittle your comments…really. Maybe you’re being a little too sensitive about something important to you. Don’t look for the worst in others.
April 2nd, 2006 at 1:39 am
Julia I appreaciate your compliment but I’m Ahmed not Amed. As for Yorksie you’re pretty much covered in the same stuff you use to smear others so your complaints of abuse are not only whiny, they’re hollow too
April 2nd, 2006 at 11:34 am
Well as I recall it was you that started down that road ameddie so caveat emptor.
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