Eisha Mason is Associate Regional Director for the Pacific Southwest Region of the American Friends Service Committee and co-founder of Soulforce Trainings. This article was first published at www.blackcommentator.com [5].
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I am waiting to board a train in San Diego when I notice a Border Patrol agent making his way down our line. He stops by each person who looks “Latino” and asks them to present their legal documents. As the people standing next to me rummage for their identity papers, I stand by, angry, embarrassed, and ashamed. In that moment, I don’t know what to say or do to protest.
My mind suddenly travels back in time. I “remember” what it must have been like during slavery for Black people who made it to the North. If they had no papers, they were doomed to live each day in fear. If they were “legalized” by free papers, they still always needed these documents, no matter who they were or how old they were or how long they had lived in their community. These papers were all that stood between them and being deported and returned to their slave status. My mind traveled across the ocean to South Africa, to a time not so long ago when the lives of African people in South Africa were controlled by the dreaded Pass Laws that made it compulsory to carry papers at all times. The person without the pass was considered “illegal” and he or she could be put in detention or sent to the rural government-created “homelands” for Blacks called bantustans. Much like proposed guest worker programs for immigrants, the South African Pass Laws Act specified where and when African citizens could travel, and how long they could stay.
My mind returns to the present. As the immigrant rights movement is building momentum nationwide, African Americans debate about where we should stand on immigration issues — shoulder to shoulder with immigrants, in direct opposition, or on the sidelines. I believe that if we look just under the surface, we can see that our Black and Brown fates are deeply intertwined.
As I learned from the video Rights on the Line about the phenomenon of the vigilante movement along the US-Mexico border, self-styled “Minutemen” are on “night patrol,” literally hunting the people trying to cross the border into the US. Dressed in their military garb, with flashlights, walkie-talkies and weapons, the militias freely wield the privilege and the power of race and their legal status. As I watched them rounding up frightened men and women, the hair on my arms rose. This time, too, I seemed to actually “remember” the plight of runaway slaves, the fear and desperation they felt as they were tracked and trapped by white militias and returned to a life where their labor was exploited and their lives were not in their control.
As the Black-Brown debate continues, I see that we have both been sources of cheap labor. First, Africans were the slaves required to perpetuate the globalized economics of the 1700s known as the Triangle Trade (slaves, sugar, and rum). Today, Latinos are the cheap labor required for maquiladoras south of the border, international agribusiness, and jobs at the lowest rungs of the US economy. Proposals for guest worker programs only perpetuate this model of workers without rights or protection. Black and Brown people have far more in common than we often realize.
Both Black and Brown are targets of the racism used to justify unjust political, economic, and social policy. Past and present, members of these exploited and marginalized communities are portrayed as different from and less than other Americans. The poison of racism continues to allow those who are privileged to feel morally justified as they exploit and dehumanize people who provide “cheap labor” and simultaneously blame them for their lot in life.
Both Black and Brown share common dreams of work with dignity, a better life for our families and our children. Isn’t that why slaves escaped to the North, and why freed slaves initiated the Northern Migration? Isn’t that why people from other countries risk their lives to reach the US today? We all desire the opportunity to build a life and to be respected and accepted members of the communities and country where we live.
Black and Brown are not each other’s adversaries; we are natural allies. The economic and political forces that doomed millions of Africans to servitude and later to second-class citizenship are the same forces responsible for unsustainable economic conditions in many foreign countries and the current migration of people to the US. They are the same forces responsible for conflict over jobs, wages, and economic opportunity in the US, a conflict that results in racism, discrimination, and repressive legislation.
Because issues of labor, immigration, and race are deeply enmeshed, we should be working together toward solutions that include all of us. We must protect the rights and dignity of individuals who have come to the US to work; raise labor standards and wages on both sides of the border through reform of international trade policy; protect local economies everywhere, rather than allow them to be overwhelmed by trade agreements favoring international corporations; and guarantee that every US worker has the right and the protection to form a labor union. We must organize!
The border patrol officer is gone. Boarding the train in San Diego, I remember the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “We are caught in an escapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Black faces…brown faces….human faces…. My heart feels what my mind already knows. The people from across the border are not the problem. A system of economic exploitation and racism is the problem. Rather than believing our interests are in conflict, Black and Brown must stand in unity and work together to transform this system. There is ultimately one movement — the movement for human dignity and opportunity — and I am a part of it.