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BIGOTRYâS STING LINKS BLACKS, IMMIGRANTS
Mary Mogan Edwards
Todayâs celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr.âs legacy might make the civil-rights movement of the 1960s seem like a matter of history, but people caught in a modern-day struggle feel a connection to those who looked to King for leadership 40 years ago. They are people routinely held up by airport authorities, glared at by strangers or rejected by employers, in part because they are Muslim, foreign or look like one or both. And they have a new respect for black Americansâ complaints of racism...
| Y'know, formerly I could look at a Muslim and just see a person. Then Osama bin Laden declared war on us and killed almost 3000 of us in New York and Washington. Now, no matter how multicultural I might want to be, I see Muslims in a new light. And it might be a bad thing. I'm sure the nice Somali lady who works at the convenience store has no intention of doing terrible things. I'm sure that the Moroccan guy on the third floor at work is nothing but a competent programmer. I'm sure the Arabian guy who's the mechanic at the Shell station's just another hard-working American. But I'm not totally sure anymore. It was't Norwegians who hijacked the planes. It wasn't Lutherans who crashed them into the Twin Towers. |
Arab-Americans and others with perceived Middle Eastern ties "are finding out what it feels like to face racial profiling," said U.S. Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who spoke Thursday as part of Ohio State Universityâs observance of the King holiday. Jackson, an Illinois Democrat, is a son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a civil-rights leader.
| He's the legitimate scion, right? |
King would have found common cause with todayâs targets of anti-Muslim bigotry, the younger Jackson said.
| Always assuming he hadn't been flying out of Boston on September 11th, 2001, of course... |
He added, however, that King would have expanded the issue â as he did with black civil rights â to one of broader moral significance for all Americans. "He would have made the case that unborn and uncounted Americans will reap the hostility of the whole world, brought on by these policies," Jackson said.
| How about the dead Americans, Jesse Jr.? What do they reap? |
Christine Ballengee-Morris, the director of Ohio Stateâs Multicultural Center, spent the 2002-03 academic year talking with students about how different cultural groups in America are getting along in the era of homeland security and the Patriot Act. Ballengee-Morris has seen black students and Muslims looking at one another in a new light...
| You mean she's seen the black guys looking at the guys with turbans and wondering if the guys with turbans were going to explode? I can understand that. |
Muslims and Arabs in America are more likely now to join blacks in the continuing push for equality, said Asma Mobin-Uddin, vice president of the Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "We are more aware of it now because we have become the potential victims," she said. Some "feel bad that we werenât more active before. We might have seen discrimination, we might have been outraged by it, but we might not have been moved to take extra steps against it."
| But not moved enough to take strong action against the guys with the automatic weapons. How many has CAIR turned in? I think the numbers approximately... ummm... zero. |
An alliance between the black and immigrant communities would please lawyer Byron Potts, who would stand to make a lot of money from class action suits has represented blacks in civil-rights cases. "I think it should bridge the gap (between the groups)," he said. "Historically, when people come over here, they try to distance themselves from African-Americans. They know how African-Americans are treated." Blacks should return the empathy to immigrants and Arab-Americans, he said, because the struggle that King led continues. "Weâre still on the list," he said of blacks. "We need to form an
allegiance and become partners."
| Sounds like our enemy is looking for potential allies. Divide and conquer and all that stuff. But it wasn't blacks who flew the planes into the buildings, either. |
I remind all posters that articles should be either hard news or commentary that expands our understanding on the mechanism and goals of terrorism.
Please edit all postings for length. Cut the parts that repeat what everybody knows by now because we've seen it so many times before. Try and keep them short and punchy. People try to read this stuff, y'know.
I will delete pure opinion pieces and such purely political hit pieces that bore me. This is because Rantburg concerns itself with the War on Terror. If you want to post Bush hit pieces, go to Indymedia. If you disagree with what Bush does, kindly confine yourself to the comments portion of real articles and take your lumps.
Please do not feed the trolls! I end up leaving troll pieces with a lot of comments because the comments are funnier than the posted article.
If you're a troll, please don't post and then comment on your post under another name. It's tacky.
Thank you,
The Management |
Posted by: Cheddarhead 2004-01-20 |
