Honest Discussion Regarding an Urgent Social Issue

The intense national debate on immigration raging across the United States has raised questions that everyone should feel concerned about.  One important question is this: How does rapidly-increasing immigration impact U.S. society?

Strangely quiet in the debate until recently have been the voices of the African American community.  As a man of Afro-Native American ethnicity, who has devoted much of the last 25 years to assisting the Latin American immigrant community to defend its basic human rights in the Washington, DC region, I will add my observations about how Latin American immigration affects African Americans, and how African Americans interact with the Latin community.

This commentary addresses racism from both communities, issues of crime, and the need to bring both the growing conflict, and the growing efforts at collaboration between the two communities into the open for an honest discussion. 

When mainstream pundits discuss issues of immigration in TV, radio and print news media, the impact of today’s massive wave of immigration (now 4 million persons per year, with 3 million of those being undocumented) on the African American community is rarely talked about.  As Black leaders begin to emerge, taking a wide range of stands on this issue, I wish to add my 25 years of human rights advocacy experience in the Latin American communities of the Washington, DC region, and my knowledge of racial dynamics across Latin America, to the debate.  The time is right to open an honest discussion about how all who live within the United States and the Americas can work to resolve the migration crisis in a way that does not trample on anyone’s human rights.

Where I’m Coming From

I am, first and foremost, a never-ending friend and member of the African American, Native American and Latino communities in the United States.  I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1960s and Montgomery County, Maryland during the 1970s.  While much of the U.S. was still living in racial segregation, my Cambridge neighborhood was a mix of African American, Haitian, Barbadian, Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Cape Verdean, Jewish and Anglo Americans.  We all played together and we all went to school together.  Our community was so ethnically diverse that when children fought and insulted each other (playfully), instead of using traditional insults, we would say ‘your nation!’

At the age of 22, in 1978, I was introduced to the Latin American community of Washington, DC by my interest in learning African traditional drumming.  That introduction has lead me to 28 years of close interaction with the many cultures, and the politics of the Latino immigrant community.  The Latino community’s friendliness and their relative lack of racial prejudice, which I first saw in my early 20s, allowed me to grow and flourish as a person for the first time in my life.

I can honestly say that, after growing up in environments where Black kids sometimes beat me up for being too light-skinned, and Irish kids at my local magnet school (who came from a far-away Irish ghetto) routinely beat me up, the lack of race consciousness in the Latino community was spiritually refreshing.  Latino willingness to celebrate African and Native cultures was eye-opening.

I have lived with families from several Latin countries.  I have been present when an immigration raid took away a Mexican family.  I have interceded to prevent attempted rapes, and to save the life of a Salvadoran housemate whose drunken husband beat her face into a completely dark purple mass of pulp.

Although my first perceptions were that race relations were better among Latin American immigrants, I have, over the past 25 years, seen that that is how things appear on the surface.  I have also seen the extreme sexism (machismo) that drives many Latino men to dominate women and girl children’s lives with acts of physical, psychological and sexual violence.  I have dedicated myself to acting to end these problems through human rights advocacy and personal action.  My web site, www.LibertadLatina.org, presents the Internet’s largest collection of factual analysis and news articles about the rapidly escalating crisis of ‘mass-gender-violence’ that women and girl children face all across Latin America, and within immigrant communities in every U.S. city, town and rural labor camp.

Like my Afro-Native American ancestors from Georgia and South Carolina (where Hernando DeSoto visited in 1540), my roots in multiple cultures allow me to speak, and hopefully negotiate between the parties when there is conflict.  Our cultures need to deal with these social issues with honesty and compassion.

An Overview of the Problem

To state the problem clearly, today's rapidly-growing and unending stream of immigration is causing many negative impacts in the U.S. in general, and in the African American community in particular. These effects have included increased competition for jobs and an inability to secure equal access to educational and social services resources that have taken decades for African Americans to negotiate from the larger society. 

Latin American countries are places where, because of corruption, money is not invested to provide for the well-being of each nation’s population.  There is no such thing as welfare, social security retirement, or food stamps anywhere in Latin America.  If you are poor, elderly or infirm, you just may die if you or your family members don’t migrate to a better place to live.  Latin America’s nations have gladly allowed the U.S. to become the welfare office for their poor citizens. 

Although the Latin American immigrant community understandably seeks work opportunities and freedom from poverty, repression and impunity across Latin America, U.S. society cannot displace its African American, White and other citizens (each group has up-to 500 years of roots in the U.S.), because wealthy corporations and uncaring lawmakers find it convenient to allow that injustice to occur.  Citizens can’t be marginalized because migrants will work for less.

An argument is often made by pro-immigration advocates who say that, “Latino immigrants take jobs that nobody else wants.”  That is only partially true.  It would be hard to make the argument that the 50% undocumented labor presence in the construction trades, at depressed wages, is not hurting working citizens.  Many unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled blue collar workers have in-fact lost their jobs.

While the pro-immigrant rights community justifiably demands an end to anti-Latino racism in the U.S., little if anything is ever said within the Latin American immigrant community, or in their public debates in the press, in regard to that community's own racial prejudices against African Americans.  Those sometimes-hostile sentiments affect the way in which the two communities interact, and make many recent immigrants act without remorse to actively seek to replace African Americans and other U.S. workers in the unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled labor force.  As recent immigrants without a sure footing in U.S. society, many newcomers are not averse to pushing native-born U.S. citizen competitors out of the way to assure that their particular group is ‘taken care of.’

As a long-time advocate for the human rights of women, children and people of color throughout the Americas, and especially in regard to Latin America, I seek an open and honest debate about these very real, but often hidden issues.  I hope to contribute to resolving these conflicts between two related communities who actually have much more in common than they may think.

 Overt Expressions of Anti-African American Racism in the Latin American Immigrant Community

Many Latin American immigrants and institutions express anti-African American racism in a variety of ways in daily life.  These currents of racial prejudice exist all across Latin America against African descendants.  Such attitudes, and negative actions related to those views, have migrated en-mass into the United States. 

Citizens from Latin American countries with very small African descendant communities often have the most arrogant and racist views of African Americans.  These realities show their ugly heads in the mass media, in educational settings, and in the form of blatant acts of open discrimination that are perpetrated against African Americans by certain arrogant Latin American immigrants who have hiring and firing authority in the U.S. workplace.

We can start with an examination of the mainstream Mexican-owned media in the U.S.  Afro-Latino activists have complained for years that almost NO Afro-Latino and certainly NO Indigenous men, women or children are ever represented on the two major TV networks, Univision and NBC subsidiary Telemundo.  Telemundo has changed ...a little... because a U.S. company like NBC has, we hope, institutionalized strong anti-discrimination policies.  A Mexican-based network such as Univision likely has no such self-motivated obligation.  I have been in contact with Afro-Latino activists for many years who have rallied to demand changes in this racial exclusion to little or no avail.

In another stark example, the Mexican / Mexican American lead ‘Aztlan’ movement based in Los Angeles and the Southwest has a vision of literally re-taking control of that region, and kicking out all Anglos and African-Americans, with the aim of re-uniting with Mexico.  They declare: "para la Raza, todo, para los demas, nada" (for our race, everything, for everyone else, nothing).

As an Afro-Native American, I can certainly say that a huge Native American claim exists for the Southwest that pre-dates any Mexican claim.  Any re-taking of the Southwest by Mexico would be... unacceptable for a number of reasons.

Within some parts of Latin American and Latino immigrant culture, there are strong strains of solidarity with the African-American community.  Certainly the Afro-centric cultures of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba reflect that view.  Racism also exists in those nations.  (Thousands of darker-skinned Haitian children, for example, are sold as slaves in the Dominican Republic.)

There is also a grotesque kissing-up to prejudiced currents in U.S. society that says: "let me take the job from that lazy Black man."  African Americans are not lazy, but more than a few Latino immigrants are willing to exploit racism by providing themselves as an alternative to the hiring of African American workers.

(As a computer professional for over 22 years, I see this discrimination in the consulting market too, but it is the Indian immigrant who happily offers to U.S. citizen managers the opportunity to replace Blacks in the workplace.  I have personally been pushed out of eight contract software professional positions by angry, hostile and arrogant immigrant software managers and co-workers from the country of India.  As many women as men have perpetrated these acts of impunity, which are 'normal' behaviors for them.  Some Indian immigrants also target Latino workers (especially women) for abuse in the U.S. workplace.  The elite Brahman disdain-for and mistreatment-of Hindu ‘‘untouchables’ has been transposed to justify mistreatment of both Black and Latino workers in the U.S.) 

The Impact of Ever-Increasing Immigration on Current Conflicts Between Our Communities

Whatever acts of racial prejudice are carried out by immigrants from across the world in the United States, the expected massive increases in the rates of immigration into the U.S. (66 to 100 million during the next 20 years, according to current estimates by the conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation) will increase the intensity of these social conflicts significantly.

In 1950, Latin America's population was 166 million.  Now in 2006, its population is 530 million.  In 2050, its population is predicted to grow to 800 million.  In the next 45 years, more people will be added to the population of Latin America than the total number of all of the persons alive in the U.S. today - 300 million.

Everyone cannot come to the U.S., yet pro-immigration activists advocate for the freedom to just that.  At what point will Latin America's individuals and political and religious institutions take responsibility for controlling Latin America's rapidly exploding birth rate?  Are persons in the United States responsible for footing the bill for that high birth rate?  Is the African American community, recently emerging from centuries of impoverishment itself, going to be responsible for bearing the burden of that overpopulation without having a say in the matter?

Rapid Latin American immigration has also caused stiff competition for access to labor markets among Latin American nationalities.  A Catholic social service center administrator from Maryland told me in the late 1990s that Colombian friends in New York City had reported that recent Mexican immigrants to New York were offering to work in local garment factories for $.60 cents per hour, motivated by the desire to gain market share by pushing out the Colombians.  Here in Maryland, a major fast food franchise owner, with restaurant assets in the tens of millions, routinely skims 5 to 7 hours of minimum wage labor hours from poor undocumented Latino workers when one of their stores doesn’t meet weekly budget goals.  These illegal practices occur across the low-wage economy.

African Americans employed in service sector and factory employment pay much of the price for these misdeeds through unemployment.  We cannot be competitive at what are literally slave wages offered by otherwise 'respectable' U.S. companies who have no qualms about breaking the law.  The U.S. government rarely enforces any of the laws that would apply in these cases of blatant labor exploitation, even when they know about them.

The U.S. also has some historical responsibility for the massive levels of poverty found in Latin America today.

For example, the United Fruit Company in the early 1900s paid off the dictator of Guatemala to send his troops into the lowland, fertile agricultural areas of the nations and force the then self-sufficient peasants off of their own land.  After that was accomplished, United Fruit owned all the profitable land, and even the nation's railroad.  In 1954 United Fruit and the U.S. CIA conspired to overthrow the democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, because he advocated giving some of United Fruit's land back to the peasants.

That coup-d'etat was followed by decades of dictatorship, and a genocidal civil war that lead to the deaths of over 200,000 innocent Mayan indigenous civilians in the 1980s.  Most women and girls in the conflict were raped by government forces.  Nobody ever went to jail for these crimes against humanity.  The long-term legacy of that criminal impunity shows up today in the form of the murders of 600 women per year (most of them raped and tortured); with very little in the way of police action to stop a violent crime wave that is now called "femicide."

Entire societies were stunted in their economic and social development during 'dirty wars in the 1970s and 80s, as dictators (often with U.S. corporate and government support) used long-standing traditions of corruption, violence and criminal impunity to exploit and impoverish their nation's disenfranchised populations (while they claimed to be fighting against Cold-War communism).

Today’s working citizens did not own United Fruit Company.  Yet the political and economic powers-that-be now favor unlimited immigration, knowing that the most negative impacts will be felt within Black and other working class communities. 

Those who have no problem with authorizing a high rate of immigration into the U.S. also apparently have little-to-no concern about immigration’s human impact.

Some leaders in the Latin American immigrant community are also aware of these social dynamics, and actively market immigrants as "replacements" for African Americans in social and labor niches across U.S. society.  For those community leaders who promote these divisions, the growing public opposition to uncontrolled, continuing migration into the U.S. comes as a surprise, because it goes against their perceptions that playing to the 'race card' was a successful strategy that sold Latin American immigrants as the "non-Black alternative."

Little is said in the immigration debate about the fact that the U.S. has left the Black-White conflict and the national legacy of racial prejudice largely unresolved, despite the existence of anti-discrimination laws on the books. 

Anti-discrimination laws that immigrants benefit-from today were actually designed to resolve issues of race prejudice against African Americans, dating from 500 years ago.  When recent immigrants jump ahead into the line (‘not respecting the line’ is a cultural practice common across Latin America), Black Americans are left scratching their heads in wondering what, if any discrimination a very recent immigrant has ever suffered, and why is that person eligible for receiving a benefit that was designed to correct long-standing issues of racial exclusion perpetrated by the larger society against African American citizens.

When recent immigrants are treated with relative equality in a variety of social and workplace environments where African Americans still face overt hostility, it is not a happy sight to watch.  I see that dynamic happen every day of my life.

It is unethical for immigrants to exploit that social reality for their own ends, knowing that African Americans will, as a result, be even further marginalized. 

Acts of Racism Toward People of African Ancestry Committed by Latin Americans and Members of the Latin American Immigrant Community

I have heard many dozens of racist and hateful comments from Latino immigrants in regard to African Americans during the past 25 years.  Some of those attitudes are driven by a desire to kiss-up to perceptions that going-along with racism in U.S. society will ingratiate them with some White Americans. 

The below examples are all anecdotal, but very real, true experiences that myself and people around me have experienced.  Certain nationalities deserve special attention in regard to their cultural biases against people of African descent.

Colombia

Certainly most Latin American societies have a strong, anti-Black racist streak. Colombia’s wealthy elite have particular problems in dealing with race.

One TV show in Colombia was censured by an international human rights organization because it was so overtly and hatefully anti-Black. 

A family friend from Bogotá, who counts three medical doctors among her children, told me during her time living with us, about the dynamics of racism among Bogotá's white elites (known as arribistas or the 'upper-crust').  One of her sons is in medical practice in Colombia with a partner who is Afro-Colombian.  Apparently, NO Afro-Colombian person is allowed to attend any medical school in that nation.  This Afro-Colombian physician had to go to Cuba to get his medical education.

Our friend also told me that NO Afro-Colombian is ever allowed to receive officer training in the Colombian Navy.  Yet the United States Government, using tax dollars from Black, White and other citizens, provides billions of dollars in aid to a society that openly discriminates against Afro-Colombians in all walks of life.

Fifteen years ago, when I worked a part-time job in my local public library, a Colombian woman from Medellin engaged on a regular basis in treating African Americans with hostility.  White library users were treated with total respect.

My next door neighbor, his wife and his adult son are all Colombian immigrants.  They are very big about flying the U.S. flag on holidays.  The son, who is about 30 now, never said one word to me, despite my repeated polite attempts to engage him in conversation.  Three days after 9-11-2001, he was walking from his car to his entrance and called me the “N” word under his breath.  The next day I told him that if I ever heard that from him again, he would find out who I am.

Another Latino immigrant who lives across the street from me (nationality unknown) responded to my effort to say hello to him with a cold, racist stare.

By comparison, other Latino neighbors are completely friendly.

Chile

A former almost-brother-in-law, the son of an Afro-Haitian diplomat who was very dark-skinned (and who went on to run all Haitian government computer services after getting his advanced education in Washington, DC), told me that his time living in Chile, during his father's tour of duty at their embassy, was the worst time of his life.  The anti-Black racism of Chileans was overt and aggressive.  Other Chileans have told me openly of the racism that they traditionally grew up with in Chile.

When a Black jury in a federal criminal case in Washington, DC awarded damages to families of the victims of a Chilean government ordered car bomb that killed former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier on the city's Embassy Row (Massachusetts Avenue), the president (dictator) of Chile, General Agosto Pinochet, openly made remarks that he would comply with a decision by a bunch of Blacks in Washington.  (The U.S. government later seized a Chilean commercial airliner as payment for this judgment.)

Costa Rica

A Black coworker who grew up in Costa Rica told me that the racism there was pure hell.  When he married a mestiza (mixed Native and Spanish) woman from Honduras, his wife’s family did not accept him, because he was Black.

Cuban-Americans

On Latin American popular TV talk shows such as Univision Network’s The Cristina Show, seen by more viewers than The Oprah Show, I have personally observed Miami’s majority white Cuban community make racist jokes without shame.  Since seeing this spectacle on TV during the late 1990s, I have never again watched another segment of Cristina Saralegui's otherwise great show.

One of my aunts, who is a New York professional woman of dark complexion, traveled to Miami several years ago.  She reported to me that she and other African-Americans, waiting in line to buy items at a retail store, were not attended to by the store's White Cuban clerks.  The same clerks did wait on White Latino customers.  My aunt turned to the local African American persons in line and said "How can you stand to live like this!"  My own theory is that the racist culture of the 1950s and 1960s U.S. South, into which the Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro came, was compatible with Cuban concepts of machismo and racial superiority.  

As a musician who has performed professionally over 600 times with 27 Latin American performing groups in the Washington, DC region, I can recall that the first group I played with, (La Orquesta de) Tulio Arias, a white Cuban immigrant band leader and one of my many mentors, would, unknown to me at the time, sometimes not call me to perform because they were performing (during the 1980s) at whites-only, racially segregated Elks Club events in nearby Virginia.

It must also be recalled that one of Fidel Castro's first acts after taking control of Cuba in 1958 was to repeal the previous, Batista-era ban on allowing Black Cubans (who are 60% of the population) to use the nation's public beaches!

See the writings of Dr. Carlos Moore, and Dr. Miguel de la Torre (Black and White Cuban scholars, respectively), for additional information on the racial dynamics of Cuba and how racism and sexism mix in the ‘code’ of machismo.

The Dominican Republic

A former girlfriend from the Dominican Republic, a largely Black country, told me about how only people of color with “good (non-curly) hair” were allowed to be admitted to her local Catholic school 30 years ago.

Ecuador

During 2001 I worked in the Boston, Massachusetts area, where I am from.  Large numbers of Latin American residents live in the area.  Many, including Ecuadorian friends of mine, have great friendships with African Americans.

During a lunchtime visit to a Burger King in the city of Framingham, Massachusetts, I was waiting in line to order.  An Ecuadorian man in his 30s was talking to two women co-workers, one of whom was his manager.  He began to look at me, and, assuming that I did not speak Spanish, he said, “I can see it now, I would just like to piss all over him (he said this in a derogatory, not a sexual context).  His manager tried to warn him that he should shut up, mostly because she could sense that I was in fact bilingual.  I spoke to this arrogant creep with a lot more respect that he had shown to me with his racist banter.

A documentary about life in the Pacific Coast region of Ecuador, which has a large population of African peoples who still live a traditional African lifestyle, included several interviews with villagers.  One villager interviewed indicated that White Ecuadorians only gave up using leather whips on Black people in 1960.

Mexico

President Fox uttered a racist statement during 2005, saying that “Mexican immigrants take jobs that not even Blacks want.”  That declaration was highly offensive to the African American community. 

President Fox added fuel to the fire by praising the Mexican federal postal service’s efforts to print a series of stamps of a 1940’s racist stereotype of Africans called “Memin Pinguin.”  Although the issue received a lot of mainstream U.S. press coverage, almost no coverage was given to statements by leaders of Mexico’s southwest coastal (Acapulco) region Afro-Mexican community, who declared that, contrary to President Fox's public assertions, anti-Black racism was alive and well in Mexico.  The community’s view was that, indeed, Memim Pinguin was a racially offensive stereotype for Afro-Mexicans.

President Fox exploited the issue of the printing of this racially objectionable postal stamp to needle the U.S. for reacting so strongly to his “not even Blacks” statement.  Now, he gripes about U.S. prejudice against Mexican immigrants (a valid complaint, but quite hypocritical).

See: http://chadfbrown.blogspot.com/2005/07/memin-pinguin.html

During the 1990s mainstream press articles circulated a story that police in Acapulco actively chased Afro-Mexicans away from local tourism beaches.

During 2005, I took my family to buy Mexican breads and pastries in Baltimore’s Latino community.  As we sat in my car sampling what we had just bought, Mexican guys stood on the street, starting at me, grabbing their crotches in a typical gang stance, and generally letting me know that I, as a Black man, was “in their turf, and I should therefore leave.”

Northern South America

Having been married to a Latina immigrant woman from northern South America for 22 years, I have also seen these racist attitudes among my own in-laws.  Other Latina friends married or in relationships with African Americans have faced the same issues of racial hostility from their in-laws. 

There is a widespread concept in Latino communities, especially from South and Central America, of “mejorando la raza” (improving one’s race).  This ignorant and racist concept dictates that Latin Americans should always find someone lighter in skin tone than themselves (if they are not White already)… to marry.  That means that if you are of African or Indigenous ancestry, and if you have been brought up to believe in this garbage, you actively try to marry someone lighter skinned, and more European-looking than yourself.  My Mother-in-Law used to be fond of making comments such as, “my granddaughter has gotten worse” – meaning that her skin had gotten darker during the Summer. 

New Jersey

My family and I have traveled frequently in the past to Bergen, New Jersey, a huge Latino community just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, New York.  We can find dozens of restaurants from my wife’s home country, and the food is good.  As I walked around Bergen, I got the ‘vibe’ from some Latinos, and also from a white American policemen, that, I, as an African American, should not be in that neighborhood and I should therefore leave.  During one trip, a group of Latino youth in their teens actually insulted me and told me not to come back.

Florida

During a trip to Orlando, Florida in 2000, I experienced a number of hostile acts from Latinos.  One young man, eating near us in a family style restaurant, suggested to his mother and other relatives (speaking in Spanish), that I should perform fellatio on him.  My wife had to detain me from ‘verbally’ responding!

California

During a recent working trip to Oakland, California, I stood at a bus stop where a group of 15 Latino guys were standing around drinking strong coffee, talking about Christianity and waiting to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.  One of them yelled out to me, “Get out of here!”

Maryland

During Christmastime in 2004 I went with friends to a Salvadoran restaurant.  The cooks could see that I was present.  I was the only non-Latino in the restaurant, and the only person of African descent.  The cooks, showing some visible discomfort delayed serving my order for half an hour beyond what anyone else in the restaurant experienced.  (In 1996 I went through a similar experience of ‘illegal denial of food service’ at a predominantly White Denny’s restaurant.)

Racism against people of African, and (even worse) against persons of indigenous ancestry is pandemic across Latin America.  It is unacceptable that these attitudes, and the many acts of impunity and gender, social and labor discrimination that are associated with them, continue to be allowed to flourish in U.S. society without an open and emphatic demand that those practices change and end.  This impunity often hides behind a language barrier, making the acts of discrimination and crime almost invisible to the public, the press and the courts.

Immigration is acceptable.  Converting the U.S. into a mirror image of the racially hostile and sexist environment that exists in most of Latin America is... unacceptable.  The fact that most Latin Americans deny that racial prejudice is a problem raises concerns from experts in the field such as Dr. Carlos Moore, an Afro-Cuban scholar.  Increased immigration from Latin America is a potential source of increased racial conflict largely because of their denial of the issue.  I agree.  Racism is a Trojan Horse that will migrate to the U.S. en-mass over time.

Violence between the African American and Latin American communities

In some communities in the United States, African Americans have received new immigrants with hostility and violence.  Here are a few examples that I have seen:

• A former girlfriend, who’s Honduran family bought a row house in a lower working class community in Washington, DC, had every member of their household (about 8 adults) robbed and/or beaten by local thugs. 
• As a former worker in the local Latin American Youth Center, also in Washington, DC, I used to see, 27 years ago, African American middle school boys openly throw empty glass bottles across a street at Latina high school girls after the local schools let out.  This occurred frequently. 
• I was once playing Afro-Cuban drumming (rumba) on the Latino community’s main drag (Colombia Road) in DC, and saw an older Black teen walk by a Central American immigrant at about 8 PM on a busy street, and punch him in the face for no reason, knocking him out cold.
• In another incident, my own Latina step-daughter was chased around for several hours at 2 AM in a well-off suburban community by a car-load of young Black men bent on doing no-good (obviously intent on rape). 
• A young Salvadoran woman I worked with witnessed the kidnapping from a bus stop (at night) of another young Latina, by three Black men.  The victim was later found raped and murdered.  The Salvadoran woman and her husband, both witnesses to the kidnapping, refused to testify for fear of their lives.
• A Salvadoran man I know was shot four times by a young African-American man, although his wounds were slight from the .22 caliber handgun.  Before that incident I used to hear his father talk about carrying around a handgun while he lived in that Washington, DC neighborhood.  I no longer consider him to be a racist for carrying a gun in Columbia Heights.
• A Latino community center director serving pre-teen and teenage girls of all races, but mostly Latinas, wrote me a letter in 1999 explaining how Latino gangs were raping local girls, from the age of 9 up, in Washington, DC’s poor Latino neighborhoods, with impunity.  Latino gang members would then intimidate family members with violence if they reported the rapes to police.  This advocate for girls was especially incensed that the Metropolitan Police Department and the public school system (majority African American institutions) showed a complete lack of interest in helping these victims.  This activist later helped to form a local task force to assist girls of all races with preventing and responding to this impunity.
• In the city of Langley Park, the largest Latino community in Maryland, a Peruvian friend once witnessed a minor auto accident in a parking lot, between a Latino driver and an African American driver.  According to my friend, the African American driver was at fault.  Upon calling a police officer to the scene, the officer heard only the African American driver’s account of the problem, because the Latino driver did not speak English.  The Latino driver was arrested by the police officer.
• The same Peruvian friend went to a gas station in Langley Park, MD at night, and paid for his gas through the cashier’s window with a $50 dollar bill.  Instead of giving my friend his $40.00 in change, the African, or African American attendant passed a ten dollar bill back through the window, and dared my friend to do anything about it.
• Also in Langley Park, a Salvadoran woman, who I had done workplace discrimination advocacy work for, told me an interesting story.  She said that on her street, she witnessed a Latino man being stopped by two Black police officers for having expired 30 day tags on his car.  The Latino driver explained to the officers that the permanent license tags had not been mailed to him yet.  A number of Latino drug dealers were standing on the street nearby, and began to throw rocks at the two police officers, who hid behind their car doors to avoid being hit.  According to the witness, the officers, being extremely angry at that point, decided to take revenge by arresting the driver they had stopped.  This driver filed a civil suit, but neither the witness I talked to, nor any other Latino witness on that street was willing to come forward, because of fear of deportation.
• In Washington, DC, a Salvadoran friend who is a lay pastor at his Evangelical church (a former co-worker) told me about how both he and his brother were held up at gunpoint by young African American men. 
• The same lay pastor told me that he witnessed a traffic accident in Washington, DC, where an African American man was at fault and a Latino driver’s car was hit.  The policeman who arrived on the scene was not bilingual, and proceeded to cite the Latino driver for a traffic violation.
• The same lay pastor told me that a member of his church who is Latino had his apartment trashed and property destroyed because police had the wrong address for a drug raid.  An officer told him not to report the event, or the police “could” plant drugs in his apartment.  He kept his mouth shut.
• My wife’s car was rear-ended by an immigrant woman from India (who later wiggled out of any liability for the accident by lying).  Upon calling a young African-American woman agent at Nationwide Insurance several times, the agent treated my wife (who is Latina) with disrespect.  The agent returned no phone calls to my wife until a White American male relative left a message for the agent.  THEN the agent called back.

Obviously, Latin American immigrants who go through these types of experiences do not have a positive view of African Americans.  Many Latino immigrants have also suffered similar treatment from White Americans.  Latino on Latino crime is also a very large problem.

• During the early 1980s, when my wife and I were dating, a White American man got out of a car and attempted to grab her and force her into his car.  This act of attempted kidnapping and rape followed a pattern that had been seen elsewhere in the region.  Because she was undocumented at the time, we did not report this event to police. 
• When my stepson came to Maryland from South America in the mid 1980’s, a carload of White teenagers stopped near a bus stop where he and my wife were waiting for a bus.  They were aggressively verbally harassed.

Sexual predators and other violent criminals from all races actively target Latin American immigrants because their undocumented status will ‘keep them quiet.’

Crime in the Latin American immigrant community is also severe.  Gang violence and sexist impunity have created hundreds of thousands of cases or rape, child rape and sexual demands targeting poor Latina and other women in the modern U.S. workplace.  Latino immigrant communities also drive much of the demand for women and children kidnapped in Latin America and forced to be prostitutes in every city, town and migrant labor camp in the U.S.  A cultural code of silence within the Latin American community that prevents reporting crime, and a fear of deportation aid and abet the actions of the huge criminal element that today subjects Latin Americans and Latin American immigrants in the U.S. to terror.

My web site, www.LibertadLatina.org, is devoted to documenting these harsh but very real issues.  The cases are too numerous to describe here.  Suffice it to say that I have more than 1,200 factual documents describing the incredibly high rate of sexual harassment, rape, forced prostitution and kidnapping into sex trafficking that Latin American and Indigenous women face from many thousands of men who act with total impunity.  Corruption and intimidation cover up these crimes.

It is my sense that the anti-African American racism that many immigrants, especially elite immigrants, bring with them into the U.S. is separate from the racism that comes from the very small percentage of Latin American immigrants who are victims of African American crime.  The fact that racial exclusion still exists on the major Spanish language networks is one clear sign that the elites in the Latino community have a powerful and negative influence in regard to issues of race in the U.S.

The Impact of Expanded Immigration on Race Relations in the United States

If Latino immigration from countries with a history of strong anti-Black racist sentiments expands to 66 or 100 million people during the next 20 years, as analysts have predicted under the new U.S. Senate Immigration Bill, African-American people will increasingly be subjected to the harsh and aggressive forms of racism and lawless impunity that are commonplace in Latin America. 

The bar for women's rights, which are extensively trampled today in Latin America (millions of women and children are forced to work in prostitution, and many are enslaved), will also be lowered in the United States.  That process has already happened as sex traffickers bring many thousands of enslaved women and underage girls into the U.S. to 'service' the large male immigrant population.  Many of those men have no sense of remorse whatsoever about paying for 20 minutes of sex with a 14 year-old girl who was kidnapped from Mexico or Central America, and is beaten and raped every single day of her now-shortened life.

Carol Bellamy, Executive Director of the UNICEF during the 1990s and early 2000s, presented a speech on the crisis of impunity facing all of Latin America.  Presented on International Women's Day in 1999, the Executive Director's statement included the following description of the rampant level of impunity that exists in sexual exploitation in the region.  That level of exploitation can be said to be a marker for impunity in racist action as well.

On International Women’s Day, designated by the United Nations as UN Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace, UNICEF, in support of the United Nations’ campaign for the eradication of violence against women, calls on society in Latin American and Caribbean to eradicate violence against women and children. Violence is a problem that still remains largely hidden from the public eye; and most countries in the region have only scarce systematic information on the scope of it.

Society’s silence is the main accomplice in allowing widespread impunity. Latin America and the Caribbean face enormous challenges in the prelude to the twenty-first century. The region will have to bring out into the open this increasingly disturbing reality; and it will have to struggle against the high degree to which society tolerates or practices inconceivable forms of aggression against the most vulnerable individuals in society. In commemorating International Women’s Day, Executive Director of UNICEF Carol Bellamy said that "it is everywhere, among rich and poor -- at home, in school, in the workplace and in the community. Yet on the eve of the 21st century, the vast scale of this outrage is still not widely acknowledged, nor even truly understood".

Recent studies indicate that no less than six million children and adolescents in Latin America and the Caribbean are subjected to severe aggression, and that 80,000 of these die each year as a result of violence unleashed in their own families. Sexual harassment, maltreatment, child labor, violence in the home and sexual exploitation occur with such frequency that they can be considered a daily phenomenon.

- Carol Bellamy

Former Executive Director, UNICEF

On March 8, 1999 (International Women's Day

Bogotá, Colombia

The conditions of social injustice that Carol Bellamy accurately described in 1999 have not improved, they have gotten much worse.  These realities are one of the strongest motives for women to leave Latin America seeking not only income, but safety in the U.S.  I consider the United States to have a special moral responsibility to remain available as a refuge for women and children who are facing what is literally a 'gender-hostile environment’ across all of Latin America.

Before massive-immigration is approved and allowed to happen legally, U.S. society will have to discover mechanisms to control and stop the effects (in the U.S.) of the rampant 'racism and sexism with impunity' that today dominates in every region of Latin America, creating what is literally a human catastrophe. 

U.S. citizens, Black, White, Latino and Asian, have no obligation to lower the bar on human rights, and allow an expansion of the blatant and open prejudices that racially exclusive Latino media, and some Latino cultural practices are allowing to take hold in every corner of the U.S. today.  All citizens deserve a place at the table when decisions are made about what level of increased impunity we will accept as a result of importing these often hidden social problems.

Everyone in the Latin American immigrant community in the U.S. knows that these human rights abuses exist in their communities.  I have knocked on the doors of Latino leaders for over a decade seeking to have them engage in the fight against the exploitation of women and children, with little positive response.

These issues are rarely, if ever raised during public and legislative debate about immigration.  While pro-immigration organizations may not want to see such an open discussion, citizens have a right to decide what to do about these concerns.

Opening Up the Debate on Immigration to All People in the United States

The extensive debates taking place today have included little consideration of the powerful impact that massive immigration has in the African-American community.

This commentary encourages all parties to open up that honest dialog.  African Americans certainly deserve a place at the table in national media and legislative debate about these issues.

The issue is being further explored by a growing number of African American organizations.  A majority of African Americans, including the author, strongly support the Latin American immigrant community and have strong ties to it.  However, we must address the real impact of immigration on the Black community.  We will not hide our heads in the sand as our community members loose jobs and dignity.  We will also not condone impunity in U.S. society.

The loss of jobs, and the social conflict in schools and other social settings caused by massive immigrant into Los Angeles and other major population centers has had a very real and negative impact on the African-American community that all parties must acknowledge. 

It is not morally right that some immigrants offer to replace Black people because some in the dominant culture are willing to collaborate in exploiting existing racial divides between White and Black.  African Americans and other ethnicities are NOT replaceable components in U.S. society, to be switched out of the nation's proverbial 'car body' as if we were 30 million burnt-out car batteries.

Many economists and corporate executives appear eager to flood the U.S. with foreign workers while our own economy is unstable.  Let’s first allow the best and the brightest foreign economists and executives to replace them at their jobs.

If Latin America, and the U.S. Latin American immigrant community truly have no problem with race, and if they really believe in the principle of free migration, let’s propose allowing Sudanese, Somali and Congolese migrants to travel to Latin America and replace all of the Latin American migrants who have come to the U.S., leaving their home towns almost abandoned.  Hard working Africans living in poverty certainly could benefit from that opportunity.  If pro U.S. immigration advocates object to that idea, I would like to know their reasoning.

The bottom line is that Latin America’s poor and middle classes are suffering through a tragic human rights and economic crisis.  They need our help.  So do people in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.  So do millions of U.S. citizens suffering from unemployment, underemployment, job displacement by aggressive H1-B and L-1 migrant workers from India, outsourcing, and the mass-closings of U.S. factories.

Past U.S. immigration policy has encouraged an assumption among Latin Americans that the U.S. border would always be open.  That, together with the Latin American concept that there is a ‘right’ to immigrate, and a ‘right’ to experience the American Dream have caused generations of Latin Americans, and immigrants in the U.S., to ‘bet the farm’ that the U.S. will always be there to be their escape route from conditions of severe poverty and corrupt impunity.  The word ‘America’ in the Latin American context means the entire western hemisphere.  So to Latin Americans, “the American Dream” implies a right to migrate to where that dream is… the United States.  Today’s immigration debate challenges, for the first time, those assumptions and that sense of entitlement.

There is also a sense of arrogance among some (but not all) persons in Latin America in regard to U.S. immigration.  In addition to a sense of entitlement, they believe that U.S. citizens don’t deserve to keep the U.S. to themselves.  In 1995, while conversing with a group of housewives in South America, the hostess stated: “Those dumb Americans, we’re just going to walk right over them.”

I personally know an entire family of South American immigrants who paid bribes to U.S. embassy staff in one country to come to the U.S.  In another case, a coyote (people smuggler) paid-off a U.S. customs inspector in Texas to allow two people to pass through the border station into the U.S. without visas.  In another case, the person simply engaged in a fake marriage to become ‘legal.’  All of these persons today openly express disdain for African Americans, and in some cases, Americans in general.  Their attitudes can only be called racist arrogance.

My compassion and love for the Latin American and immigrant communities and people runs very deep.  I cannot, however, condone racist and sexist impunity by what is hopefully a minority of immigrants who openly apply those ideas in the U.S.

A significant subset of the immigrant population includes a criminal element that is used to operating in Latin America without fear of prosecution.  Official corruption allows such persons to commit violent acts uncontested.  When such persons arrive in the U.S. as immigrants, they continue to commit crime, and typically express disdain for U.S. laws. 

One marker of this trend is the fact that Operation Predator, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations to catch and deport child sex offenders, has arrested more than 7,500 persons as of April 2006.  More than 85% of arrests are of foreign national sex offenders.  Approximately 40% of these are lawful permanent resident immigrants.  An additional 40% are undocumented persons. Those deported represent predators from more than 100 nations, not only Latin America.  Those arrested often are surprised, because they know that they can commit such crimes in almost any Latin American nation without worry.

A number of undocumented migrants have committed murders in the U.S. and then run back over the border to Mexico and Central America (where police will not touch them). U.S. law enforcement officers have been among the victims.  This fact causes deep-seated anger among law-abiding U.S. citizens of all races.

The solution to the current immigration crisis must lie in ending impunity, and reforming corrupt governments and economic systems.  Mass migration into the United States is not the answer.  Those undocumented migrants who are here now do deserve our help.  That position is supported by most U.S. citizens, Black, White and others.  Among that group are many immigrants who originally came to the U.S. as war refugees from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua.

The Spring, 2006 U.S. House immigration reform proposal, that would have made felons out of the existing undocumented immigrant population was racially offensive.  Naturally, Latin American immigrants took to the streets to protest it.

While I agree that current undocumented migrants should have the right to become legal workers, citizenship deserves further debate.  The pro-immigration movement is asking the population of the U.S. to agree to have its internal politics forever changed by immigrants from Latin America who effectively forced their way into the country.  Granting citizenship will generate never-ending conflict from citizens who understand that point and are offended by that fact.

Undocumented immigration has already skewed U.S. politics by allotting more congressional seats to states with large immigrant populations, actively taking representation away from states with lower rates of immigration.  (The U.S. Constitution requires congressional apportionment based on total population.  This causes the undocumented population to be counted in the division of the nation’s 435 elected House members between the states.  Should people in Michigan feel good about loosing votes to California because of this process?)

Current estimates that the recent U.S. Senate immigration reform bill will allow 60 to 100 million new migrants to come to the U.S. during the next 20 years.

Any immigration reform package that allows such marked increases in the rate of immigration (bringing with it an unending flow of family reunification migrants), without the consent of the U.S. population, will also generate conflict.  That wave of new immigrants will necessarily displace even more of this nation’s citizens in employment, housing, schooling and national political voice. 

The wishes of the nation’s citizens must be the primary voice heard by law-makers in this debate.  Congress exists to work for them.

If the politicians and corporate leaders in the U.S. made a deal to allow today’s uncontrolled immigration in exchange for allowing the NAFTA and CAFTA trade agreements to raid Latin American economies (thus creating waves of new poor – 40 million in Mexico’s case)… let those profiteers foot the bill for that damage.

It is up to each and every one of us to take this dialog in a direction that acknowledges the needs of the immigrant community AND U.S. citizens.  Your contribution to the dialog and decision-making also needs to be heard!

...In the interests of building an honest conversation that includes African American's and women's human rights issues at the heart of the 2006 U.S. immigration debate...

- Chuck Goolsby

Founder and Coordinator

www.LibertadLatina.org

The web's largest source of

factual information on women

and children's human rights in

Latin America and its Diaspora.

Since March, 2001

Chuck@LibertadLatina.org

See also:

Added May 25, 2006

Colombia - Brazil 

Doctor Maricel Mena López, an Afro-

Colombian theologian now living in Brazil

Dr. Maricel Mena Lopez, a 37-year-old Colombian woman, was the youngest in a family of eight brothers and sisters.  She traveled to brazil to study education and religious science.  Today she is a professor of Old Testament Studies at the Upper Theology School in Sao Leopoldo (Saint Leopold,Brazil).

Maricel and one of her sisters were the only family members who were able to study, thanks to the efforts of her mother, a White Colombian woman who had five children in her first marriage.  A seamstress, Maricel’s mother ended up raising eight children by herself, living in a house with two rooms… a living room and a kitchen.

Maricel learned about discrimination firsthand at a young age.  Her mother’s family never accepted her mother’s Black children.

Dr. Maricel Mena Lopez…

“White feminism is elitist.  It thrives in an elite, white academic world, because it was the middle class who had access to education.  They focused on their own concerns as if they were universal, valid for all women, including Black and Indigenous women.”

“In Latin America feminism has many diverse characteristics.  Many feminists in the region do not come from the middle class.  The feminist movement is racially diverse here.  It was important to struggle hard to achieve that result, so that the voices of Black and Indigenous (Native Latin American) women would be heard.  And that is what we want to achieve.  White feminists continue to never see Black women as being protagonists.  Only themselves.”

"Indigenous feminism does also exist.  It is not yet well developed because Indigenous women have had less access to education."

 “I would say that [Black feminism in Latin America] addresses three concerns: sexism, classism and racism.  Black women are exposed to a triple discrimination in society.  Middle class white women only suffer sexism.  Poor women suffer classism and sexism.  Black women face, in addition, another element, which is racism." 

"In Colombian society racism is stronger than it is in Brazil.  Black neighborhoods live in a form of "Apartheid."  A Black person can only gain employment with difficulty."

From: I Am Black and Beautiful  (In Spanish).

An Interview with Dr. Maricel Mena Lopez

Agencia Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Comunicación (ALC)

The Latin American and Caribbean Communication Agency

A project of the Latin American Lutheran Churches United in Communication

August 27, 2004

Added May 25, 2006

Latin America - United States

The Subtle Racism of Latin America

Carlos Moore sees a disguised racism permeating Latin American society, invented by Arabs in the Iberian Peninsula.

UCLA International Institute's report on a lecture given by Dr. Moore at the Institute on June 2, 2003.

Afro-Cuban scholar Dr. Carlos Moore

 While many believe that Arab and Latin American societies have a better track record in regard to race than the United States, Dr. Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's Universidade do Estado da Bahia, contends that this impression is wrong. Moore, a black man raised in pre-Castro Cuba, believes that while these societies may look color blind on the surface, race actually dominates every aspect of social and political life.

Moore is best known for his book Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (CAAS, 1989), and African Presence in the Americas, co-edited with Shawna Moore and Tanya R. Sanders (Africa World Press, 1996).

- Anson Musselman

UCLA International Institute

June 2, 2003

Added May 25, 2006

United States

Abuse In Latin America Growing

Child sex abuse and prostitution are rising in Latin America and children are most threatened in Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Cuba, United nations officials said Wednesday... "Poverty and race ... are decisive. It is mainly poor, black women who suffer the worst abuse'.' 

Reuters, 1997.

Added May 25, 2006

United States

Rising Black-Latino Clash On Jobs

 "In this era of mass immigration, no group has benefited less or been harmed more than the African-American population," says Vernon Briggs, a Cornell University professor who researches immigration policy and the American labor force.

…Today, the black community is split over how to address immigration. The NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights generally support the immigrant marches. They're against exposing all illegal immigrants to felony charges as outlined in a bill passed by the US House in December. A California Field Poll in April found that 82 percent of blacks instead support a US Senate measure, which would give undocumented workers currently in the US for more than five years the opportunity of citizenship.

But a vocal subset of blacks has a different view. Choose Black America, a coalition of business, academic, and community leaders, formed this week to advocate for stronger border security and not allow illegal immigrants to become citizens.

In April, a band of protesters marched in front of the office of Rep. Maxine Waters (news, bio, voting record) (D) of California because she, along with the Rev. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, supports citizenship for illegal immigrants. Blacks also have "singed the phone lines at black radio talk shows with anti-immigrant tirades" and "bombarded black newspapers with letters blasting illegal immigrants," says Hutchinson.

"It's definitely one of the hottest topics on talk radio I've ever seen," says Greg Johnson, marketing director of KJLH, a leading black radio station in Los Angeles. The majority of callers favor more conservative enforcement solutions to immigration, but the station is getting callers on all sides, he says.

- Daniel B. Wood
Christian Science Monitor

May 25, 2006

Added May 25, 2006

United States

Mexico Welcomed Fugitive Slaves And African American Job-Seekers: New Perspectives On The Immigration Debate

 There are of course, many angles from which to view the escalating immigration debate. Mexican immigrants, who constitute the largest share of the undocumented, have a unique history with the African population inside the United States. As the Black community weighs-in on this very contentious issue, it becomes necessary for us (both black and brown) to review the history that we share.

Ron Wilkins is a former member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and is presently a professor in the Department of Africana Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

- Professor Ron Wilkins

April 23, 2006

Added May 25, 2006

United States

Black Americans Oppose Illegal Alien Amnesty; Urge Passage of Enforcement Only Bill in the Senate

Amnesty Will Hurt All Americans and Blacks the Most, Contends New Coalition Choose Black America

 Washington, - As the U.S. Senate, with the backing of President Bush, rushes to complete work on a bill that grants amnesty to tens of millions of illegal aliens and opens the doors to millions more "guest workers," a new coalition of African American leaders is calling the proposal a "disaster for all Americans that will hit black citizens the hardest."

- PRNewswire

April 22, 2006

Added May 25, 2006

Cuba, Latin America, United States

About Machismo

"I am a recovering macho, a product of an oppressive society, a society where gender, race and class domination do not exist in isolated compartments, nor are they neatly relegated to uniform categories of repression. They are created in the space where they interact and conflict with each other, a space I will call machismo. The understanding of machismo requires a full consideration of sexism, heterosexism, racism, ethnocentrism and classism. All forms of oppression are identical in their attempt to domesticate the Other. The sexist, who sees women playing a lesser productive role than men, transfers upon the non-elite male Other effeminate characteristics, placing him in a feminine space for "easy mounting."

- Dr. Miguel de la Torre

A White Cuban-American

Baptist Theologian and Ethicist

June 2, 2003

More About Machismo 

June 2, 2003

The Americas

 The crisis facing women & children of African Ancestry in the Americas: the Caribbean; Latin America; the United States and Canada

LibertadLatina.org

Mexico

 The Mexican government's sale of the racially offensive cartoon character Memin Pinguin as a commemorative stamp is an outrageous sign that top Mexican officials still refuse to deal with the country's racism. But it's just that a sign. Racism goes much deeper in the country. Even while Mexican writers and politicians rail in articles against American racism, many Mexicans are quick to boast of differences in skin color among their own family members.

Many Mexicans refer to dark skinned persons, both Mexican, and non-Mexican, as negritos or little Black people. This is not seen as racially offensive, but rather as a term of affection even endearment. A popular afternoon telenovela (soap opera) has a comedian in Blackface chasing madly after light complexioned actresses in skimpy outfits. Ads have featured Blacks in Afros, Black face, and distorted features. The most popular screen stars in film and on TV, and the models featured on magazines and billboards, are white or fair skinned with sandy or blond hair. That's the standard of beauty, culture, and sophistication that's held up as the penultimate standard to emulate, and that standard is unabashedly commercialized, and peddled as top commodities in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Mexican President Vicente Fox and most of Mexico's past presidents, top officials, business leaders, educators, and government leaders, for instance, are light skinned or Castellan Spanish. They routinely boast that they can trace their bloodlines to Spain (Fox's mother is from Spain).

- Earl Ofari Hutchinson

IMDiversity.com

2006

California, USA

Ethnic Media Try To Defuse Ethnic Tensions In L.A.

 LOS ANGELES - Aug 26, 2005 - Black and Latino media are training the spotlight on the state of relations between blacks and Latinos in this increasingly Hispanic city, in an effort to defuse sensationalism in the coverage of thorny problems between the two communities.

It has been a bumpy ride for race relations in recent months. Last April, fights broke out between more than 100 black and Latino students at Jefferson High School in South Central Los Angeles, the latest in a series of brawls that took place in schools in the area, including the Crenshaw, Manual Arts and Jordan high schools.

In July, African American victims of a spate of freeway shootings identified their assailants as Latinos, prompting rumors that Latino gang members were targeting blacks at random. "Whether or not that's true -- and I don't think it is -- it speaks to relations between blacks and Latinos in the inner city," says Andre Herndon, editor of The Wave Newspapers.

- Elena Shore and Donal Brown

Pacific News Service

August 26, 2005

California, USA

Store Shooting Brings More Calls for Black-Brown Unity

 South Los Angeles - In an effort to quell more brown-on-black violence - most recently a 16-year-old girl wounded allegedly by a Latino gang member - some area activists have called for an immediate cease-fire and neighborhood unity.

The 16-year-old [African American] girl was shot in the leg by an occupant in a passing car [of Latino youth] last Friday as she was getting out of a vehicle to console the mother of [African Americans] Courtney Whaley, 17, who with William Armistead, 23, was killed by a Latino storeowner at the Super Discount Store, 6728 S. San Pedro St. on Sept. 25.

“To my understanding, [the girl is] doing well,” said activist Najee Ali.

The store owner, Rovidio “Ruben” Espana, has been charged with murder in connection with the shooting deaths of Whaley and Armistead.

Ali added that even though Espana allegedly shot the two unarmed victims, the shooting was not racially motivated.

“No matter what happened [on Sept. 25], it was not a black against Latino issue,” Ali said. “It’s a right-and-wrong thing, first and foremost.” He also called on Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to become more involved in the black/Latino issue. “Certainly, blacks and Latinos have to get along.”

-         Gene Johnson, Jr.,

 Wave Newspapers

United States, Mexico

Mexican President Fox Blew it with NAACP Snub

 A plainly chagrined NAACP chairman Julian Bond lashed out at Mexican President Vicente Fox for flatly turning down the NAACP's invite to address its annual convention that opened this week. Fox begged off with the standard politician's duck and dodge excuse of a scheduling conflict.

Fox didn't bother. His no show at the convention could be chalked up in part to ethnic callousness, and perhaps in bigger part to a belief that now that Hispanics have become a growing economic and political force in the United States, there is no need to engage in dialogue with Black organizations. If that's the case, Fox is wrong, dead wrong. His blunder in dragging Blacks into the debate on illegal immigration, his passionate defense of a Mexican racist commemorative stamp, his arrogant knock at Black activists for protesting the stamp, and the tense and in some cases violent clashes between Blacks and Latinos in some American cities, are urgent reasons to engage in that dialogue.

- Earl Ofari Hutchinson

IMDiversity.com

2006

United States

Racial Tirade Gets Man Two Days In Jail

 A Washington state man stormed from a Yamhill County courtroom Thursday, furious at getting a two-day jail term for threatening to kill a black state trooper, calling him a "nigger" and telling him, "Well, you're black; you should be used to it."

Manuel Thomas Diaz, 52, of Vancouver, was sentenced to two days of jail time, two years of probation, 100 hours of community service and a $100 fine after pleading guilty to one count of second-degree intimidation.

Trooper Phil Richardson stopped Diaz in September 2004 on suspicion of drunk driving. "I'm no closer to being drunk than you are to being white," Diaz told Richardson.

After flunking a set of field sobriety tests, Diaz was hauled to jail for a blood alcohol test. And he continued his racial tirade there, records show.

"No wonder whites hate blacks," he said. "I should go north to Portland and kill me two of you."

Facing Judge Cal Tichenor in court, Diaz took an apologetic tack.

"I did get upset," he told Tichenor. "I don't want to make no excuses for myself.

"My mother had just died. I had to take care of my dad. I had this lady to take care of (pointing to his ex-wife, dependent on a wheelchair from a bout with cancer).

Tichenor then asked Diaz, "Did you serve any time in jail on this?" And Diaz said he had not.

Deputy District Attorney Will Lathrop recommended 20 days, but Tichenor settled for two.

"Two days in jail?" Diaz said, incredulous.

"Shhh. Shhh," court-appointed attorney Charles Lisle whispered to his client.

"I think it's sad you're sending me to jail," Diaz told Tichenor, who ignored him.

Diaz continued to mutter about the jail time component, but failed to raise the judge's ire. Then he stormed from the courtroom, leaving his ex-wife behind to maneuver her wheelchair through the heavy double-doors on her own.

Out in the safety of the hall, Diaz vented his feelings about Judge Tichenor more emphatically.

"What a jerk," he said. "It's a bunch of crap. Two days in jail!"

-         Katie Willson
The News-Register - Oregon

-         May 27, 2006

United States

Sexual Predators Arrested: More Than 7,500 As Of April 2006

 Operation Predator is a comprehensive initiative designed to protect young people from alien smugglers, human traffickers, child pornographers and other predatory criminals.

This operation brings to bear the broadest range of law enforcement authorities in the federal government to target those who exploit young people. Children are one of the most important and vulnerable assets to America's homeland. ICE will do everything in its power to protect them.

Operation Predator draws on the full spectrum of intelligence, investigative, cyber and detention and removal functions of ICE to target those who exploit children. In a way unachievable before the creation of Homeland Security, ICE is coordinating once-fragmented resources into a united campaign again child predators.

Under Operation Predator, ICE is taking several new steps to identify, investigate and remove child predators from America’s streets.

Removal:

• ICE is targeting for removal fugitive criminal aliens with sex offense histories.
• ICE is identifying alien sex offender inmates before release from prison.
• ICE is partnering with foreign governments.

Results:

• More than 85% of arrests are of foreign national sex offenders.
• Approximately 40% of these are lawful permanent residents.
• Approximately 40% of these are illegal aliens.
• Nationwide, approximately 42% of those foreign nationals arrested have been deported to date.
• Represent predators from more than 100 nations.

- U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

April, 2006