Looking for a Cut Card
When a million immigrants flooded the streets of Los Angeles, and a quarter as many thronged into the customary protest space in Washington, D.C., I had three feelings. I was proud, appreciative but also envious. And my feelings reminded me of the reasons that we develop ethnic studies programs, institutional memory and connections among people of color.
Here was my pride — they took our language. Took it and appropriated it as if it were uniquely theirs. They took Dr. Martin Luther King, who never exclusively belonged to Black folk anyway, and used his words and his energy. They took the playwright Douglas Turner Ward, and appropriated the themes of his play “Day of Absence” when they said they would no longer be invisible. It is as if African-American people had passed a baton and Latinos had picked it up. Since we’d not seen that kind of energy, excitement and “street heat” in decades, those of us who had invested in that heat from the beginning could feel nothing but pride.
And then I felt appreciation for the folks who, legal or illegal, took it to the streets. This was not a convenient march, not a Saturday thing, when folk were off work. It happened on a Monday, on a weekday, and I didn’t see many of the folks out there wearing Dunbar’s mask, you know, the one that “grins and lies that hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.” In other words, the folks who marched and rallied, really marched and rallied. They missed work, got in people’s faces, told their stories and told them with exuberance. You had to appreciate that.
But then, I have to say that I was jealous. Plain old envious and jealous. I identified the “cut card” that our Latino brothers and sisters were dealt when a silly U.S. Congress proposed that anyone who was illegally in the United States was a felon. That would have made more than 11 million people criminals. We don’t say they are felons when they are cutting our lawns, cleaning our homes or watching our kids. How do they get to be felons when a group of mostly White men meet and make wrong-headed decisions? That was the line someone drew in the sand, and it was a galvanizing line, a line that too many Hispanic immigrants said they could not swallow.
But where is the cut card for African-Americans? We have fools who call Black women leaders “ghetto sluts” and “hos” and we want to parse it, have erudite conversations about their free speech rights. We have organizations fighting diversity, and we want to talk about the merits of the level playing field without looking at the outcomes. We have a young Black woman accusing some members of the Duke University lacrosse team of rape, and reporters who refer to the woman as a stripper, as if she has no other identity, not a student at North Carolina Central, not a mother, not a worker. We discuss all this, but there is no cut card, no galvanizing statement, no lightening rod that will bring Black people out and bring us together.
