Dear White America (9 page)

Hence their entirely false claims that immigrants, especially those without documentation, are taking our jobs, or soaking up our tax money, and that if we just controlled the border our problems would be over. Forget that migrant flows stimulate consumer demand and actually pump
more
money into the economy—and thus help create jobs and tax revenues
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—or that closing the border to labor would do nothing to stimulate jobs in the United States, since companies could still take advantage of incentives to locate businesses overseas, or to invest capital there instead of at home.

More to the point, forget the real reasons for increased undocumented migration in the first place: namely, the desperation of low-income persons south of the border, who are struggling in part because of trade agreements initiated by the United States at the behest of corporate interests. Because of agreements like NAFTA, U.S. companies have been able to flood the Mexican market with agricultural goods from the United States (to the benefit of American farmers), which have driven down the price that Mexican farmers are able to garner for crops. This, in turn, causes many of those farmers to leave rural areas in Mexico for work in the cities, but finding the labor market there glutted, they move farther North to support their families—as any of us would do, were we in their shoes. In other words, to whatever extent migrants are crossing the border and thereby (ostensibly) taking other people's jobs, it is only because the economy of Mexico has been considerably undermined by the policies of
our country
.
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Pathologizing the migrants does nothing to address the real problem and merely serves to drive a wedge between different groups of struggling people, all of whom need better wages and living conditions.

Indeed, if it weren't for the extraordinarily weak labor protections afforded to migrant workers in the United States, companies here would not be nearly so willing or able to take advantage of their desperation. Migrant workers have virtually no rights at all, and certainly none of the protections afforded to native workers, such as minimum-wage protections, overtime benefits, occupational safety and health protections, or protections from racial discrimination. Unlike native-born workers, they have very little if any legal recourse if an employer cheats them out of pay, rendering the undocumented especially vulnerable to unscrupulous bosses. But notice, none of the voices complaining about the flow of so-called illegal immigrants have called for an extension of labor rights and protections to these workers, even though such moves would likely reduce the attractiveness of immigrant labor to profit-seeking business by making it harder for them to take advantage of immigrant desperation. If companies had to pay such workers the same as native-born and documented workers, they would likely hire far fewer of them. But none of the right-wing voices want an extension of labor protections for the undocumented. If anything, they would roll back such protections for all workers, because their concerns are racial, cultural and economic, and have nothing to do with the well-being of workers, white or otherwise.

So rather than address those core issues relevant to all workers in the hemisphere—especially the way global capital has played brown folks and black folks off against one another, and against most of us—we get scapegoating. So we have Arizona passing a law that essentially legalizes and even mandates racial and ethnic profiling by requiring that law officers stop and question anyone they might reasonably suspect is in the country illegally. Reasonable suspicion, of course, means whatever police
say
it means. Most anything can be interpreted as reasonably suspicious. So, for instance, if an officer sees Latinos speaking Spanish in a public place, or hanging out, speaking to someone in a parked vehicle, they might presume these people to be undocumented day laborers illegally looking for employment. Under the law, cracking down on such work is to be especially prioritized, so there is every reason to believe such indicators of suspicion would lead to widespread harassment of persons whose only real crime was being Spanish-speaking, brown-skinned and, from all appearances, working-class. Honestly now, do we really believe that white folks from European nations, speaking with accents, are going to be questioned under this law?

The truth is, the Arizona law (which is currently on hold pending judicial review) and almost all anti-immigrant hysteria is about race, no matter how loudly and unconvincingly those pushing the agenda try to deny it. I know that many of us claim this isn't true, that instead they merely seek to crack down on those who enter the nation without proper documentation. “If they would just come legally,” many insist, they would have no problem with immigration. But it's difficult to accept the veracity of the claim. After all, were it merely a matter of process there would be an easy solution, which I'm guessing most would be loath to support: we could just make coming to the nation legally as easy as filling out a postcard—perhaps even with one's fingerprint, just for the sake of argument—mailing it in and waiting a week for a background check, after which, assuming the check came back normal, the applicant would be legal. Voila! There would be hardly any more undocumented crossings—most everyone, after all, would be willing to wait seven days to do it safely and legally. But no one ever suggests this solution, or anything remotely like it, which seems clearly to indicate that the real problem is less about the distinction between documented and undocumented immigrants, and more about the mere fact of brown-skinned migration in the first place. Many of us simply don't want particular people, no matter the manner in which they come.

Of course, who can blame us for being nervous about the infusion of large numbers of Latinos? With the right insisting that the Ethnic Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District (which has dramatically boosted Latino graduation rates and the rates at which such students go to college)
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is teaching Chicanos and Chicanas to “hate white people,” one can understand our anxiety. If we teach
the truth
about U.S. history and the way that Latino and Latina folk have been marginalized by white supremacy, they may end up hating us; so we must end such classes, and rewrite the textbooks used across the nation—as has been proposed in Texas and Tennessee by conservative activists masquerading as history scholars—so as to minimize the discussions of racism and injustice perpetrated against people of color. We mustn't talk about such things, not because they aren't true, but because the truths they address are too incendiary to be entrusted to impressionable young people. Naturally, we will not likely apply the same concerns to teaching about 9/11—we will not, to be sure, refuse to speak of
that
in schools out of a concern that it might encourage some folks to hate Arabs or Muslims or both—but in the instant case, and with regard to Mexicans, ignorance is strength, and history a mere speed bump on the patriotic highway.

Nothing, of course, serves to inflate uncritical nationalistic hubris like nostalgia, nor does anything else so perfectly play to white fears concerning a changing nation, and it is this commodity, nostalgic reverence for the America of old, in which the right consistently traffics. From Glenn Beck's nightly television paeans to the “good old days” of “innocence” long since ravaged by the forces of liberal darkness to Pat Buchanan's lament that “traditional Americans” (wonder what
they
look like?) are losing “their” country,
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we are regularly subjected to the insistence that somehow the nation has lost its way, and that the changes afoot are to the detriment of all that “real Americans” should hold dear.

The nostalgia project has two components, equally important for rallying the angry and disaffected among us to a political cause: first, the Pollyanna-like glorification of the nation's past, and second, the sanitizing of whatever parts of that past might strike a discordant note of contradiction in the retelling of the national narrative.

On the glorification front, consider the words of presidential candidate and conservative favorite Michele Bachmann, who recently bragged about growing up in “John Wayne's America,” and whose comments suggested a longing for a return to those days.
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Or Glenn Beck, who serves as the would-be conductor on the train back to Pleasantville, and who in 2009 became weepy at two classic commercials played during his television show: commercials that make him especially wistful for those good old days about which he is so emotional.
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One in particular is worth noting: a Kodak spot from 1975 featuring the song “Times of Your Life,” by Paul Anka, piped over old Super-8 footage of families from the 1950s and 1960s. No question, it was an effective and touching ad. But in the hands of Beck, it became something else. Rather than seeing the spot as what it was (an emotion-laden manipulation intended to sell products and make Kodak a lot of money), Beck presented it as a literal nod to national unity and togetherness. While acknowledging that “America has always had her problems”—the typical, obscenely understated way in which white conservatives tend to gloss over things like apartheid and institutionalized racial supremacy—Beck insisted that once upon a time (like back in the days represented by that commercial) “we used to be united on some basic things.”

“Do you remember how that felt?” Beck queried his viewers. “Do you remember what life was like?” he continued. And then, in his crowning challenge, he speculated that if a politician promised he could take us back to those “simpler times,” when the flowers presumably smelled better, the skies were bluer and even one's tears tasted like molasses (presuming for a minute that one would ever have occasion to cry in a place as blissful as this), we would all “do it in a heartbeat.” “Wouldn't ya?” he added with the “aw shucks” earnestness that has become his hallmark.

All of which suggests that Beck doesn't actually remember much, or perhaps never learned much, about those days. What unity could he possibly be speaking about, after all? Would it be the unity of the 1950s, which led our parents and grandparents to so gladly embrace the 
Brown v. Board of Education
decision, requiring the desegregation of previously all-white schools? The unity that prompted our forebears, in the wake of that ruling, to all rush to the local florist, purchase bouquets and hand them out to black children as a welcome to their new educational environs?

Perhaps he meant the unity that led Montgomery, Alabama, bus operators to help Ms. Rosa Parks to her seat up front and chastise that one unruly white guy who, owing to his own mistaken assumptions that the town was something 
other
than unified behind the notion of civil rights, thought blacks were still supposed to be relegated to the back of the bus?

Or the unity that in 1963 led every single white person in America to attend the March on Washington to demand the passage of civil rights legislation, which, oddly, was going to be passed anyway on a unanimous vote, seeing as how everyone was unified behind “some basic things,” like equal rights for all.

Come to think of it, perhaps he meant the part where everyone loved Dr. King, and so the FBI never spied on him, and when he condemned the slaughter in Vietnam by saying that the United States had become the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” everyone applauded his courage, since they had all said it before themselves.
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And of course it was really great how no one ever killed him, because all were so united in their admiration.

To proclaim that America was 
ever
unified, at least behind much of anything important, is to ignore the whole of the national experience. Even during World War Two, arguably the most unified period in our national life, black veterans viewed the campaign against European fascism and Japanese imperialism differently. But it is doubtful that Beck or his listeners have ever heard of the “Double-V” (for victory) campaign, which saw the war effort as existing on both foreign and domestic fronts: in Europe, in Asia
and
at home, against the racial oppression to which veterans of color were being subjected and would continue to be subjected even after their triumphant return.

And while our people chose as heroes soldiers like Audie Murphy or draft-dodging but oh-so-masculine actors like Michele Bachmann's John Wayne—who actually got out of service to allow for the furtherance of his movie career
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—black folks cleaved to an entirely different set of role models: from the Tuskegee airmen (about whom most of us knew little for more than a generation), to the martyrs of the civil rights movement, white and of color: people like the Reverend George Lee, Vernon Dahmer, Medgar Evers, Wharlest Jackson, Herbert Lee, Sammy Younge Jr., Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, Harriette Moore, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Lamar Smith, James Reeb, William Moore, Jonathan Daniels and Viola Liuzzo, among others. That few of us have even heard these names (and that the history books used for teaching all Americans rarely mention them) suggests that, as with Beck, the culture in general would rather gloss over the evidence of disunity that has marked us from the beginning, would prefer to fabricate a commonality of purpose and vision that has never existed anywhere within the borders of the nation we call home.