On March 20, 2010 Tavis Smiley held a roundtable discussion with leading activists, intellectuals and clergy of the African American community. I was looking forward to watching the program and thus being inspired by the likes of Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson and others. However, not long into the event, activist Dorothy Wright Tillman began to proffer inaccurate and inflammatory assessments of the Latina/o community. Despite the fact that she is a left-leaning civil rights activist, her rhetoric was as damaging and ill informed as some of the speeches I have recently heard coming from the mouth of Sarah Palin. Allow me to share one of the similarities between Dorothy’s speech and that of Sarah Palin:
When you look at our community, our communities are being gentrified. People are being spread out all over the place to keep moving, but you be quiet.”
She single handedly placed all the problems of gentrification at the feet of Latina/os. I was struck by her apparent lack of knowledge about the problem of gentrification being faced in urban areas by all marginalized communities. Are not Latinos/as, Asians and poor Whites being displaced at the same rate as blacks? With Cornel West cheering her on and the silent complicity of Micheal Eric Dyson and Jesse Jackson, she continued her inflammatory rhetoric by lambasting educational opportunities for Latinas/os. She states,
The President of the United States has a Department of Education for Hispanics. We need a Department of Education for Black people too. I am not knocking them.”
When she stated “I am not knocking them” my assumption was that this statement was not genuine, and I was left feeling that she knew full well how the average listener would react to such a comment. This is comparable to Sarah Palin suggesting that her use of the term “reloading” was not intended to connect and fuel the violent reactions of many gun carrying conservatives. Do Dorothy Wright Tillman and the other members of the panel truly believe that this sort of rhetoric does not cause anti-Latina/o sentiments within the African American community? When referring to (but refusing to name) the Puerto Rican Adolfo Carrion Jr., White House Director of Urban Policy, Tillman states:
And he has someone over there, when he talks about urban affairs where most of your urban cities, Detroit, Gary, Chicago, Ohio, Philadelphia, are Black people, he puts a Latino, Hispanic, over there, never even put a Black to balance that out. Are we not supposed to talk about that?”
If we continue to operate under the amoral politics of numbers/majorities, then we are definitely in trouble. True justice will never occur. If a justice based on numbers is what she is advocating for with the apparent consent of West, Dyson, Smiley, Farrakhan, Jackson and others then Latinas/os would be more deserving being an overwhelming majority among minorities! Her rationale for this diatribe seems to have been that only African Americans came to this country involuntarily and are the only group that have experienced enslavement. She either lacks basic knowledge of the histories of immigration or has intentionally dismissed the facts in an effort to fuel the fires of her ethnocentrism. Does she really believe that blacks from all over the Caribbean and Latin America arrived to the shores of the Americas on Cruise Liners or via Jet Blue? Did Puerto Ricans choose to come to the United States or did the United States first invade the Island in 1898? Did Mexicans choose to come to United States or did the U.S. locate itself in what historically had been huge Mexican territories? As stated by Angelo Falcon, Director of NLIP: “Later in the discussion, Tillman discussed how President Obama ignores the Congressional Black Caucus but listens to Hispanic politicians like Congressman Luis Gutierrez. Throughout her remarks she referred to no other racial-ethnic group to describe how Blacks are being marginalized today. No one at the roundtable challenged the divisive nature of these comparisons.”
We need to begin sincere and loving conversations about coalition building rather than attacking other oppressed communities who are simply trying to survive. This requires informed, nuanced conversations rather than hateful rhetoric.
Dr. Cruz – I appreciated your response to Tillman’s comments. I too heard Tillman’s comments and was appalled by the vitriolic rhetoric that was received with laughter and (albeit silent but obvious) amens. As a bi-cultural, Black, English speaking, unaccented South American I often “pass” as an African American and am witness to the them versus us comments of many African Americans. I have heard comments ranging from “they’re taking our jobs” to “why don’t they get back on the boat and go home.” When I remark that I’m the “they” that’s being talked about the response is usually “We don’t mean you – you’re different.” Well I’m not different. None of us are. We – all who are poor, scraping to get by, terrified of losing our jobs, living in the lie of the American Dream – are all the same. When will we realize that the mental and physical colonization and violence of poor people writ large knows no boundaries?! Martin Luther King Jr. stated “The dispossessed of this nation—the poor, both white and Negro-live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against the injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.” Can we take seriously King’s prophetic call to reject the artificially constructed boundaries that divide us and organize to build a new and unsettling force? Maybe the first step rests on our refusal to allow divisive remarks to go unchallenged.
Which “mambo” fosters harmony on the dance floor? If I could attend a social mambo dance venue in the heart of Harlem, NY and dance in harmony with European Whites, American Blacks, European Blacks, Caribbean Blacks (Spanish and English) Asians, Latin@’s, and Gays to celebrate the beauty of Afro Rhythms’ found in the musical genre of “Son, Salsa, Cha-Cha, and Boogaloo,” why can’t I also dance in harmony and celebrate my rights as a United States Citizen to ascertain all the opportunities accessible to me in public policies? Is it the language, traditions, or cultural norms that continue to exclude my voice (Afro-DiaspoRican women) on the round table of discussions that propose to speak to my everyday reality of systemic oppression and domination? Is it a lack “critical consciousness (conscientizacāo),” the classic educational liberating terminology phrased by Paulo Freire, the legendary Brazilian multi-cultural educator, an educational process that fosters critical consciousness as the motor of cultural emancipation? Or is it subtle internal racism and classism that shamefully continues to place one group over the other, in the name of what, social justice? Or are we arguing for claims of the “majority” amongst the “majority minority” because one group has (perceived) to suffer more than another as a result of systemic oppression manifested in slavery, racism, classism, sexism, or colonization? The “majority” amongst the “minority majority” that has suffered and continues to suffer the most get’s all the privileges of having the leading voice in Congress, Legislation, and Public Policies in the U.S.? Was Freire precise on how he identified the plight of the oppressed in the United States society? He argues:
What is it, then, that blocks oppressed Americans from controlling their own social destiny? Is it the lack of certain skills, or the inability to manipulate the law to their own ends, as the dominant classes do with impunity? Is it faulty ideology or the inability to organize locally beyond mere self-interest? Or is it because the psychic boundaries between oppressors and oppressed in the United States are so fuzzy? Do most Americans recognize themselves as either oppressed or oppressors, or do they see themselves as inert beneficiaries, and thereby passive connivers in impersonal structures of oppression (Freire 2007, ix-x)?
Dr. Cruz, I propose that we revisit our political and religious ideologies as public/religious intellectuals to challenge the “status quo,” and move towards a world where we can all dance in harmony to the mambo of equal social justice. In the meanwhile, I will continue to enjoy dancing in harmony the “mambo,” in the heart of Harlem, celebrating the diversity and uniqueness of the human spirit. I will be waiting for an invite to the grand mambo dance where political and religious activists/intellectuals of all ethnic groups gather to celebrate the diversity and uniqueness of our beauty as human beings working towards a society that embraces “true liberation” over domination.
Correction on my name: Maritza Ortiz Cruz