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In Georgia where both Republicans and some right-wing Democrats like State Senator Kasim Reed of Atlanta proposed state level measures which echoed and exceeded the petty viciousness of congressional Republicans, similar proposals still live on.  Reed sent us a letter defending his indefensible position which we will print in next week's BC, but the issue is too important not to revisit now.

How should black people view the wave of immigrant labor that has undeniably impacted us?  How do we make sense of the current anti-immigrant hysteria?  Can African Americans benefit from following the lead of Lou Dobbs and Senator Reed, blaming and scapegoating immigrants for lowering wages?  Or do we help our people best when we stand up for a living wage and dignity for everybody?  While the answer seems clear enough to us, some BC readers are not so sure.

Y. Denise asks:

Denise raises an unrealistic but oft-heard complaint about small retail immigrant business people that needs answering.  Why don't those small businesses in our community hire more of us? 

In the first place, hours are long and income is low for most startup small businesses, and most fail within a year of startup.  Job One is just staying in business.  For immigrant business people, Job Two is to hire their own families.  Family work is cheap, sometimes for mere room and board.  The business owned by a family or close friend is also the prime place to land for newly arrived relatives and close friends with limited language skills and sometimes with no papers.  For small operations with low profit margins, hiring an American who expects to get paid a living wage and on time can be a huge additional expense.  And if you do it, you'll have to explain to the extended family why that spot is not available for your sister-in-law or cousin Isaac.  Job Three is to send money home, because of course everybody back in the old country imagines you're rich.  You're in America, after all. 

Given all this, it just ain't realistic to suppose small immigrant retail businesses will hire a lot of their American neighbors.  Some.  But not a lot.  We need to get over that expectation.

Denise seems to imagine immigrants hate and “undercut” us.  With all due respect, we suspect she may be projecting in the first instance and misdirected in the second.  There are many voices in the ears of immigrants.  White America teaches everybody to hate and fear black folks, and immigrants bring along their own helpful baggage as well.  Cultures across the planet have ancient traditions that put lighter skinned people higher on the social pecking order than darker ones.  Dark skinned Mexicans and Indians – the ones from India – are socialized to hate themselves, much the same as we are. 

But immigrants bring other stuff to the American table, too.  In the countries they hail from there are traditions of working class militancy and solidarity deeper and more widespread than anything here, and traditions of broad left wing social movements tougher and more enduring than we see here in the U.S.  In Mexico, Nigeria, Indonesia and Brazil, in South Korea and Colombia, farm, factory and service workers join unions by the millions and fight for their own rights, often at great personal cost. 

These are traditions that black America can use and learn from,  traditions that will raise all our standards of living if we choose to adopt them.  But they can't be put into play as long as immigrants don't have the same right to live, to organize, to bargain collectively and to strike that every one of us has.  Immigrant labor only “undercuts” the wages of black Americans when immigrants can be threatened with jail or deportation for standing up to their employers.  Their fight has everything to do with us.  If black America refuses to make common cause with them, we cut our own throats. 

Two weeks ago, Guest Commentator Rhone Fraser compared the white liberal “moderates” of the King era, who were more interested in order than in justice, to the spineless “moderate” Democratic office holders and candidates of today, prompting this response from reader Jack Harrington:

Actually, we think Jack is confusing the kind of whites and others who attend meetings and demonstrations against the war, and would vote for antiwar, progressive and pro-impeachment candidates if only they could find any, with the white Democratic political class themselves.  

It is worth noting that Americans do presently enjoy the freedom to get out here and get organized, if not the democratic access to media that would make their efforts much more effective.  Nobody's knocking at our doors and disappearing us in the middle of the night for calling or attending neighborhood meetings, or reading the wrong library books, and unless you're in the military, nobody censors your email and web usage.  It's up to us to use the freedoms we do have to fight for more of them, and for more people.

Ivan, a BC reader in Washington state knows a little about that:

And let us not forget the black moderates of the Congressional Black Caucus, neutered by the presence of a handful of DLC and open right wingers, refusing to take any stand as a caucus in the absence of unanimity.  Well, almost any stand.  Cynthia McKinney certainly thinks she should get her seniority back, and isn't ashamed to say so.  But in this case, the CBC's silent majority speaks volumes. 

BC reader  Randy Short recalls how in 2002, a congressman from North Carolina called Cynthia McKinney the b-word, and wonders what would happen if that epithet were directed elsewhere. 

Cynthia McKinney deserves to have her committee seat and seniority returned.  

Finally, in the March 16 BC ThinkPiece, Derek Smith expertly deconstructed the movie Crash, winner of this year's academy award for best picture.  Smith detailed how the heralded “honesty and complexity” of the film, praised in many quarters for being a complex and unsparing portrait of race relations in the US, amounted to merely humanizing its flawed white characters while trivializing its flawed black ones.

In so doing, Smith explained to at least one BC reader the source of his unspoken misgivings about the movie.  Reader T. Burroughs writes:

Another reader had already found some of the necessary language to describe his misgivings.  From Jon Nelson we heard:

We at BC have also learned to take wake up calls and good advice from wherever we can get it.  Send yours to [email protected].