"Not Our Fight; Or is It?"

I’ve been pondering how best to address the ‘not our fight’ argument many Black Americans are making to justify their absence from protesting the Trump regime, especially for its rabidly anti-immigrant posture.

 

My usual response is to cite the intersectional nature of struggle against authoritarianism and xenophobia, both of which are easily identifiable in the MAGA profile. The struggle is intersectional because the threat, though ideologically narrow (and  specifically motivated by Afrophobia), has a multifaceted enemies list. In fact, it is plurality itself that most threatens MAGA’s xenophobic core.

 

Predictably, the list is headed by cultural enemies or anything that threatens white Christian hegemony: immigrants and their champions, Judeo-Christian ‘deviants’ and Muslims, abortionists, feminists, and especially, critical race theorists. The list can easily be expanded to any partisan extolling the virtues of ecumenical modernism; for example, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion --shorthanded as “D.E.I..”-- has become a popular piñata for the right, filling in for the more syllabically challenging “affirmative action” as a perverse perpetrator of inequality. This is as if the two centuries-plus of slavery that produced African-Americans, or its damaging, ongoing legacy, never happened.

 

The reasoning that blindfolds MAGA to racism’s toll is also what motivates its animosity to ‘alien’ cultures. Karma has come to call for the sins of white supremacy, and the sinners ain’t ready to pay. And, as they have often done, they’ve convinced some victims to join their side, utilizing tried and true strategies that confuse the cause for the cure.

 

We’ve been maneuvered to believe, for example, that Black Americans are being deprived by accommodating illegal migrants, when in fact our deprivation far predates their arrival. And, quite frankly, many of our civic victories have come in concert with their struggle for resources, recognition, and civilized treatment. Cesar Chavez of the predominantly-Hispanic United Farm Workers and Martin Luther King were close compatriots whose struggles were complementary, though they never met. King wrote to Chavez, “Our separate struggles are really one -- a struggle for freedom, for dignity and for humanity.” What distinguished the Black struggle for civil rights, what gave it such moral power, was its unequivocal devotion to equal justice.

 

But what of the real issue of vocational displacement and tribal hostility posed by the entry of so many migrants into under-resourced Black communities? Certainly, those tensions can’t simply be waved away with arguments touting intersectionality or interracial unity. True. But neither should they be ignored as a strategy to extract additional social good from the government. For example, “Affirmative Action” was designed as a gesture of compensation for past racial discrimination, but white women benefited most. Still, in 1972, it got me hired at the Associated Press. The principle is the point.

 

And the principle is the justice of civil rights. Accordingly, that has been one of Black Americans’ proudest legacies: leading the fight for the civil rights of humanity. It was that legacy, for example, that inclined all justice-seekers to seek King’s imprimatur during his brief tenure as the apogee of global justice.

 

And Malcolm X, who some fashioned as King’s ideological rival, also gained international levity through his intersectionality. Cuba’s Castro met with Malcolm at Harlem’s Hotel Theresa and “shook-up the world.” He also hooked-up with Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and the PLO among others, while aligning with the anti-colonial principles of the multi-ethnic Bandung Conference.

 

In fact, Black intersectionality has always been among white America’s fiercest fears and they’ve done just about everything they could to avert it. Recently, they've been quite successful; listen to the chatter in many Black communities. This current explosion of American xenophobia (there’ve been several notable historical eruptions: the enslavement of Africans & their descendants -1619-1865, expropriation & genocide of Indigenous inhabitants - ongoing, Chinese Exclusion Act-1882, Expatriation Act - 1907, Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917, Johnson-Reed Act -1924, etc.) seems, perversely, to have attracted a large number of Black acolytes this time around.

 

Too bad and too sad.