Reaction to illegal immigrants in receiving communities is in many ways, if not most, akin to that evinced by the migration in the post World War II years of African Americans from the South and, here in the Northeast, Puerto Ricans from the Commonwealth. These were internal migrations of people with the full rights (at least on paper) of citizenship. Both Black Americans and Puerto Ricans had the right to live wherever they wished. The story of what happened to hundreds of American cities in the North as a result of those migrations has yet to be told in full. “Block busting”, “white flight”, urban insurrections, riots, the era of “Burn, baby, burn!” have left a legacy that includes vistas of the South Bronx and East New York in Brooklyn resembling firebombed Dresden. Things are seemingly a lot calmer now. The era of the Black Panthers is over. There is no Bobby Seale or Stokely Carmichael or Malcom X to stir up discontent, no call to arms except in the lyrics of rap singers who, if they become violent, seem only to turn on one another. The objective conditions of many Black Americans have improved dramatically. Black Americans and the Latinos (mostly Puerto Ricans) who grew up alongside them are certainly not as invisible as they were in the pre-Civil Rights era that writers like Ralph Ellison and Piri Thomas describe in their writing. Few Black or Latino children would recognize the U.S. cultural landscape of the era before the Civil Rights movement. They would immediately sense the absence of Black and Latino newscasters, television personalities, and politicians; they would sense that there were far fewer sports figures and entertainers in the public eye; but they would also sense the absence in their everyday life of Blacks and Latinos in all the myriad jobs—in banks, in offices, in shops, delivering the mail, putting out fires or walking a neighborhood beat—whose presence we now take for granted but who are in fact present only as the result of a long struggle. Yes, for these reasons and many more, things are a lot calmer now. But the rioting that took place in Los Angeles as recently as the 1990s is a reminder that we are never far from a rekindling of the violence that was for a period of time so common in this country. Things are a lot calmer now. This in spite of the fact that U.S. citizens who happen to be black or brown suffer high unemployment, poor schools, inferior housing, a culture of violence, an illegitimate birth rate of 75% and far less aggregate wealth. Large cities broadcast news stories from their Black and Latino communities every night, stories out of housing projects and poor neighborhoods, stories chronicling the bleak symptoms of an unfinished revolution in the “post”-Civil War, post-Civil Rights Era America.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Eyes on the Prize II
Reaction to illegal immigrants in receiving communities is in many ways, if not most, akin to that evinced by the migration in the post World War II years of African Americans from the South and, here in the Northeast, Puerto Ricans from the Commonwealth. These were internal migrations of people with the full rights (at least on paper) of citizenship. Both Black Americans and Puerto Ricans had the right to live wherever they wished. The story of what happened to hundreds of American cities in the North as a result of those migrations has yet to be told in full. “Block busting”, “white flight”, urban insurrections, riots, the era of “Burn, baby, burn!” have left a legacy that includes vistas of the South Bronx and East New York in Brooklyn resembling firebombed Dresden. Things are seemingly a lot calmer now. The era of the Black Panthers is over. There is no Bobby Seale or Stokely Carmichael or Malcom X to stir up discontent, no call to arms except in the lyrics of rap singers who, if they become violent, seem only to turn on one another. The objective conditions of many Black Americans have improved dramatically. Black Americans and the Latinos (mostly Puerto Ricans) who grew up alongside them are certainly not as invisible as they were in the pre-Civil Rights era that writers like Ralph Ellison and Piri Thomas describe in their writing. Few Black or Latino children would recognize the U.S. cultural landscape of the era before the Civil Rights movement. They would immediately sense the absence of Black and Latino newscasters, television personalities, and politicians; they would sense that there were far fewer sports figures and entertainers in the public eye; but they would also sense the absence in their everyday life of Blacks and Latinos in all the myriad jobs—in banks, in offices, in shops, delivering the mail, putting out fires or walking a neighborhood beat—whose presence we now take for granted but who are in fact present only as the result of a long struggle. Yes, for these reasons and many more, things are a lot calmer now. But the rioting that took place in Los Angeles as recently as the 1990s is a reminder that we are never far from a rekindling of the violence that was for a period of time so common in this country. Things are a lot calmer now. This in spite of the fact that U.S. citizens who happen to be black or brown suffer high unemployment, poor schools, inferior housing, a culture of violence, an illegitimate birth rate of 75% and far less aggregate wealth. Large cities broadcast news stories from their Black and Latino communities every night, stories out of housing projects and poor neighborhoods, stories chronicling the bleak symptoms of an unfinished revolution in the “post”-Civil War, post-Civil Rights Era America.
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How is America today on ‘The Chessboard’ of human race?
Middle class blacks have advanced in the full spectrum of Bishops, Rook, Knights, and into higher wage positions across the US labor. Urban cities marketplace is in the post civil rights ear of the late 1960s. Of course want-a-be kings, and queens of today are the Colin Powell and Obama types - the patron saints of civil rights are MLK in America and Nelson Mandela of South Africa. To post on your a blogsite dark image of American destruction may be a blatant attempt to consciously or unconsciously color prescient confrontations remaining? (http://sedentarythought.blogspot.com/ )
We can never return to the white slaveholders and West African abolitionary days – it is over for than one hundred years plus. We continue in race reconciliation and in our modern global pluralism of major US cities and towns we have tested and tired institutions for keeping the temperature of this debate on a low and acceptable cultural evolution and progression.
I would suggest for a contemporaneous image to post on this issue is the morning news casters in NYC and the ethnic, racial balancing let alone the gender and gender bending in your face reconstitution a living testimony to higher national harmony and continued purgation for early western colonial global inferior methods of ruling prescriptions of territorial greed and dominance. The issue of Civil Rights is ultimately Human Rights and its continued guidance of its progress, so in this light I commend your efforts and righteous diligence going ever forward and higher.
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