Racial Division Workshop

American immigrants of various races who want to fight for immigrant rights must collectively identify themselves under a “person of color” status, according to the publisher of ColorLines magazine, a publication covering race and politics in America. “We might not like the label, but we can’t afford to lose the racial analysis,” writes publisher Rinku Sen. Sen reflected in the article upon her apolitical childhood and the turning point in her journey to the fight for racial agendas, when she was told by a college friend “you’re not a minority, you’re a person of color.” Sen, of Indian origin, then wrote “I had to expand my identity in a way that tied me to Black people as part of their rebellion, not as the ringer that would suppress it. So I became a person of color.”

Two immigrants had told Sen recently that they did not like the label “people of color,” not enchanted with the prospect of working to define the “anti-immigrant” agenda or having to collaborate with people of other races on such a controversial issue. “It can be hard to accept,” she told them, “but a new context demands a new identity.” The new land of opportunity demands a different identity to succeed. Sen continued, “I don’t buy the argument that because immigrants don’t identify as people of color, they can’t get down with a racial analysis.”

The issues of racism and economic status are linked in this country, stated Sen at a recent speech she delivered at the “Take Back America” conference in D.C. Covering the topic of “Poverty and Politics” surrounding the Katrina disaster, Sen noted that “people of color” do worse financially than everyone else. There exists a hierarchy of racism here, exemplified by the “racial standards” of higher-end restaurants who employ white people in the front and “people of color” in harder labor at the back of the building.

However, though Sen lacked the time to deliver distinct statistics in support of her short speech, neither did she provide statistics or logical reasons for this “racial disparity” in America in her article.

Writer Roberto Lovato references his own story in ColorLines of fighting the “anti-child, anti-immigrant” California Proposition 187, to argue for a better-organized immigrants’ rights agenda. Proposition 187 was approved by California voters in 1994, and would have denied health care, welfare benefits, and education to illegal aliens in California had it not been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. Lovato cites the increased growth of immigrant prisons today as an example of immigrants being treated on a level with terrorists, in order to enforce America’s wartime agenda. Unless there is serious immigration reform, Lovato writes, the exploitation of immigrants will vastly increase, and their plight will “continue sliding into chaos and suffering imaginable only by those who have lived literal slavery.”

However, he fails to mention additional consequences of illegal immigration. Many immigrants are merely pawns under the political agendas of Capitol Hill, but many American citizens are also made vulnerable today. With a flood of illegal immigrants comes the flooding of the Social Security pool, additional taxes on the American taxpayer for “immigrants’ rights,” and neighborhood crime, especially from former gang members who illegally immigrate into the U.S. Yet Lovato criticizes the lack of outcry against “the deep undercurrent of white fear that undergirds much of the immigration debate.”

Moreover, illegal immigrants may be wrongly exploited by certain greedy corporations, because they have no legal support to protect them, but if a person breaks the law and sneaks into America, they do not possess American citizenship, and therefore are not entitled to legal benefits. This is not wrong.

Neither is it a logical solution for minorities to pin the blame on the “majority” for targeting people because of color or race, and then band together under a color-based agenda. This makes no sense.

Matt Hadro is an intern at the American Journalism Center a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.