Reverend Al Sharpton addresses the media denouncing Arizona's controversial immigration bill during a news conference. (AP)
Why is the Rev. Al Sharpton butting his nose into Arizona’s business?
Listening to Sharpton’s comments about Arizona’s new law that gives law enforcement officers at the state and local level the authority to question suspected illegal immigrants about their immigration status, you’d think he lived there. He went into a snit because Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio took the law seriously and rounded up a mess of illegal immigrants during one neighborhood sweep.
Dig these comments, taken from a news story on the Web site Reuters.com:
“I am first calling for the resignation and removal of Sheriff Arpaio. Harassment based on color is nothing short of racial profiling, which many of us helped fight to make against the law. Arpaio needs to be confronted. He needs to be removed. We also need to suspend the law that he is using. We must stand with our brown brothers and sisters.”
In the words of that great American, the immortal Sweet Sweetback: Where you get that “we” stuff, Rev. Al?
And what’s this stuff about “We must stand with our brown brothers and sisters?” Do our brown brothers and sisters stand with us? Well, the ones in Los Angeles certainly don’t.
Rev. Al probably didn’t get this memo, but he shouldn’t fret. Apparently much of black America didn’t get it either. Our “brown brothers and sisters” in L.A. have been at war with black folks for at least the past four or five years. Few of us talk about it. None of our so-called leaders do.
To be fair to Sharpton, he did go to Los Angeles in September of 2005 to visit Jefferson High School, where our brown brothers and sisters weren’t feeling their black kinfolk. The sentiment must have been mutual, because fights had broken out between Latinos and blacks the previous April.
According to a story called “War of a Different Color” from the Web site StreetGangs.com, Sharpton visited Jefferson along with Christine Chavez and Najee Ali. The story, written by Annette Stark, revealed that Sharpton, Chavez and Ali formed the Latino-African-American Leadership Alliance, and that the three “had the foresight to suggest that mounting black-brown tensions in this city could lead to an all-out race war.”
So Sharpton knew the scope of the problem in 2005. And he certainly knew it in December of 2006, when one or more of our “brown brothers” in L.A. shot and killed Cheryl Greene, a 14-year-old black girl.
In the fall of 2007, Sharpton made it his business to be in Jena, Louisiana protesting the fate of the so-called Jena Six. He tells us he’s headed to Arizona to “stand with our brown brothers and sisters.” But when Cheryl Greene’s family needed the reverend to stand with them, the brother was nowhere to be found.
Now, I’m not saying Sharpton shouldn’t go to Arizona. If he feels that passionately about the Arizona law, perhaps he should. (For the record, I’m very much for the law. My reading of American history says that a huge influx of non-black immigrants into the country is usually very bad news for black folks. Guess Rev. Al read some different history books.)
But even Sharpton has heard of the Latin phrase “quid pro quo.” It means “something for something.” If black folks “stand with our brown brothers and sisters” in Arizona, what are they going to do for us?
Historically, some of our brown brothers and sisters have stood with whites, not us. I can’t believe Sharpton hasn’t read George Jackson’s "Soledad Brother." He either hasn’t read it, or read it and glossed over Jackson’s observation in a June 1970 letter to his lawyer about the situation in a .....
No comments:
Post a Comment