The Most Well Connected Poorman in America: “These are Dark-Skinned People, Not … Like You and Me” | The Defenders Online

“These are Dark-Skinned People, Not … Like You and Me”

Posted By The Editors | October 15th, 2010 | Category: Feature | No Comments »

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By Lee A. Daniels

These are dark-skinned people, not … like you and me.”

There you have it. Brief and to the point. The words sound so familiar, so American.

But they weren’t spoken by an American. They were spoken by the vice mayor of Milan, Italy, Riccardo De Corato. When he recently told a Washington Post reporter that “These are dark-skinned people, not Europeans like you and me,” he was justifying Milan authorities’ following the European fashion of the moment: trying to push the oppressed, nomadic Romani people outside of its borders.

Throughout Europe, local and national governments have been razing the small and large ramshackle camps where Romani, who are often derisively called Gypsies, tend to congregate. The Romani, many of whom are profoundly uneducated and chronically unemployed, are increasingly being deported on charges of vagrancy and criminal activity; while immigration laws are being tightened to justify more expulsions.

The predicament of the Romani in Europe is in many ways unique. Jack Greenberg, a Columbia law professor and a former Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, has studied their plight extensively and enumerated the vast differences that exist between their experiences in Europe and that of black Americans and other Americans of color in the U.S.

Reading Milan Vice Mayor De Corato’s comments, one can’t help but think of the furious debate over illegal immigration that’s erupted again in this country, focusing focused almost exclusively on undocumented immigrants from Latin America. And, as in Europe, surveys show Americans expressing increasing antipathy toward Muslims, even those who are American citizens.

Albeit the proper concerns about maintaining control of immigration, it’s undeniable that a significant proportion of the charges and actions have been deeply infected with racist sentiment. From wild, and incorrect, assertions that Latino immigrants have fueled an explosion of crime, to recently enacted state laws that would certify police racial profiling, to proposals to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment, which grants automatic citizenship to all children born in the U.S. regardless of their parents’ status, the lexicon of bigotry provides the common thread. Wherever such words, whether overt or coded, are used, they have one purpose: to assert that the targets of the bigotry can be treated inhumanely because they’re “not like you and me.”

And no matter the manner in which that sentiment is expressed, it’s an assertion decent people should condemn in the strongest terms.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.