SAN FRANCISCO - 14 June, 1998: If California is indeed the petri dish of United States politics, as many have begun to assert, then the Statue of Liberty may lose its potency as an international symbol for the freedom of movement of people and ideas. With the recent passage of yet another anti-immigrant proposition by the California electorate this month, I have growing concerns about the human rights climate in this country.
The issue we are looking at in this issue, IMMIGRATION, is one that is close to my heart. I suspected when proposing it that the recent election here in California would go against bilingual education, but I had hoped for better.
More and more, it seems to me, we are sending the message that the Statue of Liberty has turned her back on the original promise of hope and opportunity for all people.
For the first four years that I lived here in San Francisco, I worked as a community organizer and immigrants' rights advocate. It was a role which called for a strange mix of political skills, social service acumen, and community organizing. I initially worked for the East African community here, primarily with Ethiopians and Eritreans. In the beginning, most of these people did not trust me because I am a black American.
Not many American blacks work in immigrant communities, as we have our own issues. You find Haitians, Jamaicans, a few Africans, but scant few African-Americans.
BUT THERE'S MORE, as a prominent Ethiopian educator, who is a professor at a college in Marin told me, "...When many of us were in the refugee camps, Rod, waiting for our visas, your[U.S.] State Department people warned us off African-Americans. They told us that you are criminals and drug-addicts, that you would go after our women.
"Then, when we arrive here, we see much the same on the television. Many of us are put in your poor neighborhoods. Very few people meet African-Americans like you, and none who care about Ethiopians and our situation."
I managed to overcome those barriers as I worked in the community, visited the peoples' homes, shared meals with them, escorted them through the social services maze, visited the schools their children attended to explain their history and culture to teachers and other students.
But, even before Prop. 187 reared its ugly head, it was clear to me that the best advocacy was human rights advocacy; the politics of identity needed to be supplanted by the politics of interest, and the concerns of all immigrants needed to coalesce. I began reaching out to the Pacific Islander, Asian and Latino communities, and my opposite numbers in their organizations. As I explained to one recalcitrant board member of the African organization later: "Prop 187 does not say, `Let's focus on Latino immigrants,' the wording of the law just says `immigrants.'"
What few of the people I worked with knew, for years, was that I had a special handle on the immigrant situation: my mother was a resident alien in this country for all the years of her marriage to my father. After he died, she left the United States. She had lived through more than three turbulent decades here, beginning in the late 1940s, and had remained convinced that America would never accept black people. In fact, my mother has often asserted that Americans hate black people, and has always encouraged me to leave this country, and exercise my option for Bermudian citizenship.....
But, that's not me. As Thomas Hart rightly asserted on our Vox Populi page a few weeks prior to this note, I don't believe we should leave an unsatisfactory situation, but rather that we must work, advocate, and agitate to correct it. I believe you'll find much of that spirit in the features of this edition of the magazine.
Despite the misguided railings of right-wing ideologues like Patrick Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and Pete Wilson, history has proven again and again in this most ethnically diverse of nations that IMMIGRATION is the rising tide which raises all boats. Every wave of immigration since my ancestors were kidnapped from Africa and brought here in chains has produced a subsequent wave of economic, social and artistic prosperity. Every single one.
The city in which I am proud to live is approximately 30% people of Asian descent, and 20% Latinos and Latinas. The building in which I live has three flats. On the top floor is a family of Russian immigrants. Below them is an Irish-Japanese family. In my own flat, there is a person of Irish descent, on person of Italian-Jewish descent, another person of Italian descent, and one of African descent. One of my roommates dates a woman of Chinese descent who loves to have people guess where she was born: Mozambique. Diversity does not threaten the social fabric, it makes it richer and deeper.
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PLANETARY MADNESS, StarChild.
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