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.