IMMIGRATION, GLOBAL VIEW: As Paris Burns: Unfinished Thoughts on Race, Class, and Immigration

As Paris Burns: Unfinished Thoughts about Race, Class, and Immigration.

In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us. Thich Nhat Hang—Vietnamese monk, activist and writer Writing about her years in Paris, Maya Angelou related a conversation she had with someone who claimed that racism did not exist in France, because the French never engaged in the slave trade. Incredulous at the native’s lack of historical consciousness, Angelou replied, “What about Haiti? What about Martinique? ” France, of course, profited mightily from slave plantations in its Caribbean colonies. The fruits of Haitian slave labor sweetened French coffers in the 18th century. Cheap Caribbean-grown sugar, mixed with succulent French grapes, produced the finest wines in the world, and sipping these liquors during long afternoon lunches became synonymous with being quintessentially French. Unlike in the United States, French slave plantations were located far from the European continent. This made it easier for the French people to harbor the illusion that their society was free of the racism so blatant in the U.S. South where Maya Angelou grew up. At the same time many French people believed the false notion that there was such a thing as a homogenous French (white) culture; that must be protected. It is such an idea that helped nurture the seeds of racism, manifested in oppressive conditions experienced by French citizens of non-European heritage living in Paris suburbs today Angelou’s experience reminds me of conversations I have had with white Minnesotans about my move from North Carolina to the Midwest. “It’s really racist in the South, isn’t it?” they would ask. Often they would follow with an aside that seemed relevant to them about “those black single mothers who come up from Chicago to take advantage of our welfare system” or “those Mexicans who cross the border in order to break the law and take our jobs,” or “those Indians who use treaty rights to gain special favors.” I had never heard the term “I’ve been Jewed” before moving to Minneapolis. It was a favorite at the grocery store where I worked in Dinkytown, used whenever someone shortchanged the cashier. While shocked and personally insulted, at the time I was still using “gypped” to connote the same thing, totally unconscious of the racist origins of that term. What all these deeply racist comments indicate is that people feel that they are being cheated. When resources are tight, humans look for those who are different from them to blame. We tell ourselves that we belong. We harbor this illusion that our lives would be better if the “other” were removed. Today racism is on the rise, and its origins are in the global economy which continues, not unlike the Atlantic slave trade that produced wealth for France and the United States hundreds of years ago. Like the French Angelou encountered, many of us use geography to remove ourselves from the scene of the crime while reaping its benefits. Sweatshops produce products that consumers thousands of miles away can enjoy without seeing the slavelike conditions sewn into the fibers of their shirts. On the other hand, try as so many of us do to find a NIMBY (not in my backyard!) haven, a home, a neighborhood, a suburb, a vacation spot, we cannot shield ourselves from the gross injustices and devastating fallout of this system of global capitalism. That is what the white population of Paris is discovering today. As disenfranchised children of North African immigrants demand to be seen and accounted for, middle and upper class French today are confronting a legacy of racism that is centuries old and decades new. But let us not get carried away picking on the French. Immigration is a global phenomenon, as is the racism that attends it. Our global economy is based on having a cheap labor force that can be moved from place to place to do the dirtiest work. For nearly 400 years Europeans forcibly removed Africans to the Americas to produce labor-intensive plantation crops. In the United States, European and Asian immigrants were recruited to build railroads in the 19th century. North Africans provided a cheap labor force to rebuild war-torn Europe in the 1950s. Mexicans have been recruited since the beginning of the 20th century to work in factories and farms from Texas to Minnesota. Today immigrants from all over Asia and the Middle East are recruited to work in war-torn Iraq. Even Louisiana is looking south to find cheap labor to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. Immigrant labor is more attractive than native labor for employers because: 1. When you remove people from their homes they are more easily exploited. 2. The local population, resentful of the competition for labor, will shun the new arrival, rather than invite them into their unions, especially if they are from a different ethnic group whose life-ways can be demonized. 3. Language and cultural barriers will make it difficult for them to organize and understand their rights. 4. It is easier to hire and fire foreign workers, which mitigates against organizing. The often temporary nature of the employment makes it difficult for workers to commit to organizing in the new place. The system of immigrant labor works because there are rich countries and poor countries and the system depends on the perpetuation of internal class distinctions based on race. In turn, it feeds on and multiplies inequalities. And it happens everywhere. Not just in white-dominated societies like France and the United States. In the Caribbean region there is a spiral of oppression that begins, at the outer edge, with Haiti. Haitians working in the Dominican Republic, Nicaraguans working in Costa Rica, and Guatemalans working in southern Mexico are all experiencing virulent racism in their host communities and hyper-exploitation in the workplace. Race, class, and nationality are one as Dominicans, Costa Ricans, and Mexicans distinguish themselves as “whiter” than the immigrant workers, thereby perpetuating the legacy of indigenous conquest and Atlantic slave trade. If Haiti is at the outer edge of this immigration spiral, the United States is at the center. We are indeed in the belly of the beast. What do we do? Here are some unfinished thoughts. When Camilo Mejia (the young soldier who went to jail rather than return to Iraq) was in the Twin Cities in November he talked about the intense solidarity that develops between comrades on a platoon. It is this solidarity that is essential to keep an army fighting. Mejia described this bond as “greater than the bonds of family.” That is a profound thing to say. Also, when questioned, Mejia downplayed the idea that the army particularly discriminated against Latinos, saying that class was the most important distinction and poor whites were equally its victims. Although there are many stories of racism, I have also heard people talk wistfully of the interracial solidarity that develops in the army. Some people, whites included, actually experience the army as a haven from the racial divisions that poison civilian society, even as they propagate new racist ideas about the “enemies” in order to make them killable. Can we create such a bond in our own communities? Can we stop the endless search for bigger backyard fences and start building interracial solidarity in our neighborhoods? To do so, the focus of our protest needs to be not just on the ugly manifestations of racism by people who feel put upon, but on the giant crimes of corporations who use immigrant labor and race/class distinction to keep us from working together. In the Twin Cities the potential of solidarity in our increasingly racially mixed neighborhoods is powerful. And it is happening—in some unions, some classrooms, some religious institutions, and community groups. The army has a system of building platoon solidarity that seems to fill a basic human need for profound connection, in ways that few other experiences do. Maybe we need to borrow a page from their book and build our own bonds of solidarity, name our own comrades, define our own adversaries, but in order to pursue an infinitely more worthy mission than killing.