Name________________________
Journal #4 – Post-1965 Immigration & Social Movements in the 1960s-1970s
Take copious notes on these film clips and readings. Then, give thoughtful
responses to the following questions for each film/reading selection. For each
question, bring in analysis from our weekly readings.
“No Mas Bebes” (Film)
1. How did the doctors make sure they legally had ‘consent’ to sterilize the women?
2. What is the argument of the legal team representing the women, and how does it
differ from what the former Head of Gynecology (Dr. Quilligan) says?
3. Explain the patient interactions with doctors, and some of what the doctor’s
perceptions of these Mexican women was
4. How was “The Population Bomb” (book) influential for having children, and
population control?
5. How are the stories of Mexicans the same as the stories of Black women, and poor
white women, with regard to how they obtained ‘consent’ for sterilization?
1
6. What role does eugenics (think of what we have discussed earlier in this course) and
the “Burden” play in the sterilizations
7. What were the reactions of doctors who were residents at the time? Do they take
responsibility?
8. What is the responsibility of modern day physicians, understanding the lived
experiences of women of color who have been harmed historically?
“Latino Americans – Episode 4: The New Latinos”
9. Moreno in West Side Story and using her personal experience while acting on set
10. How were Puerto Rican ‘threats’ to society used to vilify the whole population in
America?
11. Literacy tests keeping people from voting
“The Women Behind White Power”
2
12. What roles did women play in maintaining segregation?
13. What is significant about the role of women in maintaining supremacy in the South?
14. How might the history be remembered now, if there is an equal focus on the role of
both men and women in the resistance against racial equality?
“Jackson Public Schools”
15. Comment on the students setting up students of color to feel unwelcome in class
16. What reasons might Black families be scared to send their children to integrated
schools?
17. How much was spent on students, based on race, in Jackson in 1962? How does that
affect the quality of education?
18. What hegemonic issues affect these schools modern day?
3
“What’s Your Emergency?”
19. How do the women making calls to the police justify their behavior, to themselves
and to the public upon the backlash? What is significant about that?
20. In what ways does this removal of Black bodies from space relate to the removal of
Indigenous bodes from space?
21. Comment on the direct racist language used by Duncan in her “hunting” video; why
is that ‘hunt’ culturally relevant to the experience of the victim’s ancestors?
“The Myth of the Model Minority”
22. Explain what the “model minority” stereotype is and why it’s harmful
23. How does the trope of the model minorities cause issue with other minorities? What
is the implication if you are not the “model”?
4
24. Describe what are considered advantages for people who emigrate from Asia to the
United States?
25. What type of issues do disadvantaged Southeast Asians face in America?
“The Emergence of Yellow Power”
26. How does Uyematsu say Asians have tried to transform themselves in the process of
Americanization?
27. Explain how she says Asians are stereotyped, and how they have responded to that
categorization
“The Cult of the Country Boy”
28. Describe what style Elvis embraced, and why it was important at the time
29. The role of American suburbia, and who belonged and who did not
5
30. Explain the imagery behind ‘trailer park’, ‘vermin’, and those labeled ‘trash’
31. What threat did integration pose for people like Hazel Bryan?
32. How does the southern stereotype lend to imagery surrounding the ‘trash’?
Jim Crow Guide, “Chapter 9” (Forced Labor)
33. Explain how much the forced laborer has to work, and analyze where the ideologies
of their work load stem from
34. Elaborate on the concept of ‘debt slavery’ and explain the issues with it
6
35. What role does forced labor take on the entire victimized family?
“I Am Not Your Negro” (Film)
36. What reason does Baldwin say is why Whites are preoccupied with the “Negro
problem”?
37. What does Baldwin say is the root of hatred for Black Men, and for White Men
38. Explain the double standard for heroism in America
39. What do you learn about the American sense of reality by entertainment on
television?
40. How has the American dream failed? How do you think it can be remedied?
7
CHAPTER
9
Copyright © 2011. University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved.
WHO ARE SUBJECT TO FORCED LABOUR
A DARK skin is just enough to deprive you of a job-and then get you
punished for being jobless.
Although there is nothing whatever in the u.s. Constitution
guaranteeing the right to work, all of the 48 states have so-called
vagrancy laws making it a criminal offence to be without work. This,
in spite of the fact that there is what the business community politely
refers to as a "normal float" of from three to five million unemployed
-a job shortage which increases periodically to as much as fifteen
million.
In practice, however, this seeming anomaly does not work a double
hardship on the great majority of fair-skinned Americans, inasmuch as
the vagrancy laws are enforced mainly against dark-skinned Americans
-Negroes, Mexican-Americans, American Indians, gipsies, and
others.
Part-time employment is not always regarded as a good excuse-in
some places you can be convicted of vagrancy unless you work more
than half of the time.
Of course if you can establish the fact that you have funds you may
loaf all you wish, as persons of means are specifically exempted by the
vagrancy laws.
In short, it is against the law to be unemployed and broke if you are
able-bodied and without means of support.
True, when the states of California and Florida during the depression
of the 1930S closed their borders to indigents, the Supreme Court
overruled them, saying: "The mere state of being without funds is a
Constitutional irrelevancy." This judicial observation has not been
brought to bear on vagrancy laws, however, which have indeed been
held Constitutional.
On their face, the laws of course say nothing about race. Moreover,
one must be on the lookout for police action undertaken without
regard to any law. In a great many places in the U.S.A.-especially
expensive resort and residential areas-the police operate what is
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JIM CROW GUIDE TO THE U.S.A.
popularly known as the "Hobo Express". Should you find yourself
broke and unemployed in such a place, and look it, you may be picked
up by the police and given a free ride to the city limits or county line,
where you will be deposited and warned not to return.
Negroes have composed a folksong about the omnipresent prospect
of being charged with vagrancy, which goes like this:
Standin' on the comer,
Waitin' for my brown;
First thing 1 knowed
1 was jailhouse bound.
1 asked Mr. Police
"Won't you tum me loose?"
1 said, "1 got no money,
But a good excuse."
Copyright © 2011. University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved.
And then 1 heard
Judge Pickett say,
"Forty-five dollarsOr take him away'"
Wish that mean old
Judge was dead,
And green grass growin'
All over his head'
Pursuits not Recognized
The crime of vagrancy is regarded as a continuing one, which means
you can be sent to jail over and over again on the same charge, just as
long as you remain broke and unemployed.
At the same time, the vagrancy laws list a variety of occupations and
avocations as being as bad or worse than unemployment.
Of course, if you are a person of wealth you may engage in any or
all of these pursuits, and be as idle as you wish, without fear of prosecution for vagrancy.
In most states the penalty for persons convicted of vagrancy is a
fine ranging from so to 100 dollars, and/or a 3o-day sentence, usually on
a public work gang. In Arkansas the law specifies that vagrancy fines
shall be worked out at the archaic rate of a dollar a day.
Throughout the South, vagrancy laws have taken the place of the
Kennedy, Stetson. Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A : The Laws, Customs and Etiquette Governing the Conduct of
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WHO ARE SUBJECT TO FORCED LABOUR
133
Black Codes enlarged by the white planters shortly after the Civil
War with a view to keeping Negroes in a state of semi-slavery.
These Black Codes imposed an annual head-tax which the white
planters frequently paid for delinquent Negroes, who were then
required to work it out.
Special laws rigidly bound Negro apprentices to their white "employers", and still other laws made the slightest deviation from a
labour contract-on the part of a Negro labourer, share-cropper, or
tenant farmer-prima facie evidence of fraud.
Federal anti-peonage laws enacted in 1875 to free the Indians of
New Mexico from peonage had the added effect of nullifying much of
the Black Codes.
Copyright © 2011. University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved.
Twenty Varieties of Vagrants
It was then that many Southern states resorted to vagrancy laws,
which they copied almost verbatim from New England states.
Unless you happen to be a very poor white share-cropper or
migratory farm-worker, you may well rejoice that most (not all) white
Americans have been emancipated from involuntary servitude. It was
not always thus. The historian J. B. McMaster has written of the white
European emigres who became indentured servants to pay for their
passage to America: "They became in the eyes of the law a slave and
in both the civil and criminal code were classed with the Negro slave
and the Indian . . . and might be flogged as often as the master or
mistress thought necessary." Contemporary observers of that period
opined that slavery was the natural condition of "proletarian whites
from Germany and Ireland". Nor were native-born whites entirely
exempt. A writer of 1793 recorded how some white parents in Pennsylvania were obliged to "sell and trade away their children like so
many head of cattle".
Nowadays, the vagrancy laws remain as a heritage from that bygone
era.
The Florida law is typically comprehensive, listing the following
varieties of vagrants (quote) :
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Rogues and vagabonds.
Idle or dissolute persons who go about begging.
Common gamblers.
Persons who use juggling, or unlawful games or plays.
Common pipers and fiddlers.
Common drunkards.
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JIM CROW GUIDE TO THE U. S. A.
7. Common night-walkers.
8. Thieves.
9. Pilferers.
10. Traders in stolen property.
II. Lewd, wanton, and lascivious persons.
12. Keepers of gambling places.
13. Common railers and brawlers.
14. Persons who neglect their calling or employment, or are without
reasonably continuous employment or regular income and who
have not sufficient property to sustain them and misspend what
they earn without providing for themselves or the support of
their families.
IS. Persons wandering or strolling about from place to place
without any lawful purpose or object.
16. Habitual loafers.
17. Idle and disorderly persons.
18. Persons neglecting all lawful business and habitually spending
their time by frequenting houses of ill fame, gaming houses,
or tippling shops.
19. Persons able to work but habitually living upon the earnings of
their wives or minor children.
20. All able-bodied, male persons over the age of 18 years who are
without means of support and remain in idleness.
Ifyou fall into one or more of the above categories-and particularly
if in addition you are nonwhite-you might be charged with vagrancy
almost anywhere in the U.S.A. as the laws of the various states are
very similar.
In a few states, however, there are variations worthy of note.
In South Carolina, the following categories are added to the more
common forms of vagrancy:
I. All suspicious persons going about the country, swapping and
bartering horses (without producing a certificate ofhis or their good
character signed by a magistrate of the county from which said
person last came).
2. All persons who, occupying or being in possession of some
piece of land, shall not cultivate such a quantity thereof as shall be
deemed by the magistrate to be necessary for the maintenance of
himself and his family.
3. All persons representing publicly for gain or reward. without
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WHO ARB SUBJBCT TO FORCBD LABOUR
I3S
being fully licensed, any play, comedy, tragedy, interlude or farce,
or other entertainment of the stage, or any part thereof.
4. All sturdy beggars.
In Virginia, the vagrancy law is also aimed at:
I. All persons who shall unlawfully return into any county or
corporation whence they have been legally removed.
2. All persons who shall come from any place without this
Commonwealth to any place within it and shall be found loitering
and residing therein, and shall follow no labor, trade, occupation, or
business, and have no visible means of subsistence, and can give no
reasonable account of themselves or their business in such place.
Are you sure you can give a reasonable account of yourself?
Copyright © 2011. University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved.
Debt Slavery
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment
for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist
within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction",
says the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Sounds good, but look out!
"Peonage or debt slavery has by no means disappeared from our
land", the Georgia Baptist Convention warned more than half a
century later. "There are more white people involved in this diabolical
practice than there were slaveholders. There are more Negroes held
by these debt-slavers than were actually owned as slaves before the war
between the states. The method is the only thing that has changed."
The modem method consists on the one hand of the companyowned commissary-a common feature of the turpentine and lumber
camps of the South and the cotton plantations of the South and Southwest. In these establishments, commonly referred to as "robbersaries",
the "employees" are obliged to obtain their food and other basic
necessities of life at exorbitant prices which keep them perpetually
in debt and preclude their receiving cash wages for their work. At the
same time, this private enterprise system has the support of lawenforcement agencies, who bring to bear the vagrancy and so-called
fraud laws, so that the only escape for the debt slave is into a prison
camp or convict work gang.
True, the Thirteenth Amendment and the Federal anti-peonage law
have been in existence more than three-quarters of a century. Also
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136
JIM CROW GUIDB TO THB U.S.A.
true, the Supreme Court bas ruled that "The state must respect the
Constitutional and statutory command that it may not make a failure
to labor in discharge of a debt any part of a crime. It may not directly
or indirectly command involuntary servitude, even if it was voluntarily contracted for."
But, like many another basic law and court ruling, these have been
rendered virtual dead letters through the reluctance of u.s. law
enforcement agencies to institute criminal prosecutions under them.
Only once or twice in each decade, when some spectacular case finds
its way into the public eye, does the Justice Department stir itself in
this field. Even then the effect is limited to the individual case concerned, leaving the system itself unaffected.
In 19SI the United Nations established an Ad Hoc Committee on
Porced Labour, consisting of three members. Such a Committee was
proposed by America, the U.N. rejecting a Soviet counter-proposal
for a broad committee representative of the organized labour movement of the world. The three-man Committee proceeded to hold
hearings, taking volumes of testimony relative to conditions in
communist countries.
In reply to a Committee questionnaire, the U.s. State Department
declared: "The United States Constitution and laws contain effective
safeguards against the existence of such forced labor. The United
States, therefore, has no penal or administrative laws, regulations, or
administrative rules or practices pertinent to the Committee's in.. "
qwnes.
The Committee accepted this assertion at face value, together with
similar representations received from certain other countries having
colonial possessions in Africa, Asia, and South America. A hearing was
held, however, in New York for the announced purpose of taking
testimony relative to conditions in the Western Hemisphere. When it
was further announced that the hearing was about to be adjourned for
lack of any evidence, the author of this present work felt moved to
send the Committee an offer of evidence. The offer was publicly made,
and accepted.
Although the author had lived all his life in a region where forced
labour camps abound, he set out with a magnetoband recorder to
penetrate the camps and bring out fresh evidence.
Getting into the camps was not easy; it was necessary to tell the
bosses that the purpose of the expedition was to record folksongs. But
when the songs had been recorded and the bosses had gone away, the
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WHO ARE SUBJECT TO FORCED LABOUR
137
real business began. Upon being told the purpose of the interviews,
the debt slaves spoke freely into the microphone.
"They can't do no more than kill us," a turpentine worker at Fruit
Cove, Florida, said. "I have heard a few of the old men say the only
way out is to die out, but 1 have also heard it said that the truth shall
make you free!"
The sordid tales unfolded hour after hour on to the tonebandlynching, flogging, rape, the castor-oil treatment. There was scarcdy
a man or woman who had not personally fdt the bosses' lash.
With such horrors associated with life in the slave labour camps, one
may wonder how it is that people are forced into them. The principal
factor is starvation. The fact that Negroes are "last hired and first
fired" serves to drive many unemployed workers into sdling themsdves and their families into slavery. Inflation in the slave market has
led to cash advances as high as 500 dollars being offered to some
skilled workers. Ordinarily, however, 25 dollars or less will do the trick.
The professional "labor recruiter" is in many respects a twentiethcentury counterpart of the slave-traders of old. Turpentine camp
operators, for example, pay recruiters something like 5 dollars per head
for every single man, and 10 dollars for each family brought in.
Joe Hall, who operates a fleet of seven trucks in which he transports
hundreds of Negro men, women, and children back and forth between
Florida and Pennsylvania as the harvest demands, is a typical labour
recruiter. In this traffic he has the active co-operation of the U.S.
Employment Service. He tells this agency that he charges no transportation fees-and then proceeds to assess each worker 10 dollars.
Obtaining recruits by painting rosy word pictures of the wages to be
earned, he generally pays only half of the promised rate, works them
under a gun, houses them in a barn, and feeds them on beans after
assessing them 5 dollars per week for board. When his workers seek
to escape, as they did at Ulysses, Pennsylvania, K.K.K. fiery crosses
are burned. When this fails to work, Hall has the escapees arrested.
"Don't you know they can't make you work against your will in
satisfaction of a debt?" the author asked a group of forced labourers at
Mandarin, Florida.
"They do do it," was their bitter reply.
The alternative to working out a debt with the company or planter
is to work it out with the county prison-to "chain-gang it". From
the workers' point of view, there is not much choice. Though the
chain-gang sentence at "hard labor" may be at the rate of as little as
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138
JIM CROW GUIDE TO THE U.S.A.
one day for each 50 cents he is said to owe, at least the worker knows
there will eventually be an end of it, whereas the private "employer"
may conspire to keep him perpetually in bondage.
Comer-stone of the forced labour system is the company commissary. There are some 4,200 members ofthe National Industrial Stores
Association, and their commissaries do a 1,000,000,000 dollar business
every year. Symbolic of the compulsion to buy and the compulsion to
pay is the toe of a lynched Negro, kept as a "souvenir" on a commissary
counter near Hendersonville, North Carolina. Asked whether he
would personally take part in the lynching of a Negro, the manager
replied slowly, "No, no. I wouldn't-not unless he owed me money."
The fare afforded by the commissary is extremely limited, consisting
of a few canned goods, meal, flour, dried beans, and salted or smoked
pork fat. Fresh vegetables, meat, fruit, eggs, milk and butter are virtually
unheard o£ One Negro turpentine worker at Kansas City, Florida,
when asked how often fresh meat was available in his camp, replied,
"Neither weekly nor yearly." Another, relatively lucky, said that his
camp at Moniak, Georgia, offered the workers a choice each weekend
of "pig ears, pig tails, or pig feet". Needless to say, such a diet gives
rise to all kinds of dietary diseases, such as rickets and pellagra.
Medical attention is almost never available in the camps, the workers
being forced to rely upon home remedies and self-medication.
In many camps the bosses will not tolerate any degree of illness as
an excuse for not working. At the lumber mill camp operated by
McDuffie Stallworth at Pineapple, Alabama, any worker who complains of illness is forcibly given two bottles of castor oil-and made
to work, anyway. Childbearing almost never takes place in a hospital
and only rarely is there a doctor in attendance-the woman is lucky
if she can obtain the services of a midwife. The death-rate among both
mothers and infants at childbirth is many times higher among these
workers than with the American population generally.
Home life in the slave labour camps is a living hell. The companyowned shacks almost always have leaky roofs; if there are any windows
at all, they are protected neither by screens nor glass. Sometimes the
cracks in the walls are so large that, as one worker described it, "You
can see almost as much of the outside from inside the house as you
could if you went out the door." Migratory farm workers frequently
are forced to live in even worse "housing", constructed of pieces of tin
and cardboard cartons. Flies and vermin of all sorts spread diseases,
which take a heavy toll.
Kennedy, Stetson. Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A : The Laws, Customs and Etiquette Governing the Conduct of
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WHO ARB SUBJBCT TO FORCED LABOUR
139
In the slave labour camps the mandatory work day lasts from "can
to can't"-from "can see to can't see", or in other words, from before
dawn until dark. It is one of the woman's duties to wake her husband,
feed him, and have him ready to go to work at the appointed hour. If
she fails in this, the penalties are often severe. For example, it is the
custom of Murray Holloway, the woods-rider for the Cordele
Turpentine Company at Cordele, Georgia, to ride through the Negro
quarters about 4.30 every moming, shouting for the workers to
clamber upon his truck to be driven into the woods. If a Manis not ready
when called, Holloway may beat the man, and his wife too. For
instance, he beat Cleo adom for not having given her husband
breakfast soon enough, and when her husband Joe protested, Holloway
knocked him unconscious with a club.
The work, too, is often hazardous. In the turpentine industry, for
example, the American operators finally adopted a technique developed by the Soviet Union for increasing the flow of sap by spraying
the tree gashes with sulphuric acid. But in the U.S.A., no protection
from the acid is provided for the workers who apply it.
In St.John's County, Florida, the author came across a worker who
is called "Red Eye" because the acid has nearly destroyed his eyesight.
"We even have to buy our own soda to put on our acid bums," he
declared.
It is often the woman's lot to be left with her children as "hostages",
since virtually the only real route to escape from the bondage of debtslavery is for the husband to run away under cover of darkness, leaving
his family and possessions behind as "security" to be held until such
time as he may be able to procure a bona-fiJe job which will enable him.
to save enough money to payoff whatever amount the planter asserts
the family owes him.
Sometimes the bosses call upon the sheriff or police to bring back
runaway slave labourers. At Cross City, Florida, the author heard a
boss telephone the sheriff and order him to post guards on all the roads
leading out of the area to block the escape of a Negro who had left
camp allegedly owing I S dollars.
At this same camp, a worker told how the boss had killed workers
for owing as little as S dollars, "and you would have to die, because
he would kill you and make the other hands bury you out in the
woods."
Most often, the bosses strap pistols on their belts and go after
runaways themselves. The authorities not only do not interfere in this
Kennedy, Stetson. Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A : The Laws, Customs and Etiquette Governing the Conduct of
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140
JIM CROW GUIDE TO THE U.S.A.
procedure, but obligingly grant the bosses permits to carry pistols.
When this sort of "free enterprise" fails to "get its man", the bosses
call on the hooded Ku Klux Klan for assistance in recapturing the
runaways and terrorizing the rest of the workers.
There is nothing at all subtle about the handling of runaways. For
instance, when James Wiggins and his wife ran away from the plantation of J. S. Decker at Clarksdale, Mississippi, where they had been
forced to work in the fields under a gun, they were brought back in
chains and offered for sale for 175 dollars. Similarly, a lumber-mill
operator of Lauderdale County, Mississippi, kept one of his Negro
workers shackled to his bunk with a log-chain around his neck each
night, to prevent him from running out on an alleged 2o-dollar debt.
Here are just a few of the typical cases brought to light by the author.
Charles Andrews dubbed with a pine-knot while another boss
pointed a pistol at him. His offence: trying to escape from a labour
camp near Bunnell, Florida.
Roy Jackson given a "pistol whipping" by the boss of a turpentine
camp at Cordele, Georgia. His offence: picking up a shirt which he
thought had been discarded.
Robert Graves, sawmill worker of Pineapple, Alabama, tied over a
barrel and the "blood knocked out" with a piece of sawmill belt. His
offence: leaving work to report, as ordered, to a military draft board.
James Day, worker who escaped from the turpentine camp of
William Belote at Moniak, Georgia. Day was forced to leave behind
his four small children as hostages for a 200-dollar debt he was falsely
said to owe. He appealed to the u.S. District Attomeyand the F.B.I. in
Macon, to no avail. When he £ina1ly went into court to claim possession
of his kidnapped children, he was thrown into jail on a charge of
having abandoned them! The sheriff, accompanied by boss Belote,
offered to release Day and forget about the alleged debt if Day would
agree to go back to work at the turpentine camp.
James Alford, who left his wife and two children as hostages for an
alleged 3a-dollar debt at the camp ofColonel Dorsey at Cordele, Georgia.
Colonel Dorsey jailed Alford's wife for refusing to tell where her
husband had gone. Alford, who had found a job in Florida with a view
to paying the 30 dollars andredaiming his wife and children, heard of the
arrest and so returned to Cordele. Upon arrival he was jailed on a
charge of vagrancy, even though he had proof of employment. In
court he was sentenced to pay a fine of ISO dollars or serve 12 months
at hard labour on the chain-gang.
Kennedy, Stetson. Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A : The Laws, Customs and Etiquette Governing the Conduct of
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WHO ARE SUBJECT TO FORCED LABOUR
141
Copyright © 2011. University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved.
"You will jwt have to shoot me or electrocute me or do what you
will," Alford told the judge, "but I can't serve 12 months becawe I
have a wife and two children to take care o£"
Colonel Dorsey and another white boss were in court, bidding for
the privilege of paying Alford's fine in order to secure a slave labourer.
The other man carried a paper bag full of money, but the judge
awarded Alford to Colonel Dorsey, with orders to work out the full
amount of 180 dollars on Dorsey's plantation.
George Messenger and his wife Katherine, elderly white sharecroppers of Pensacola, Florida, were sentenced to seven years at hard
labour in the Florida State Penitentiary for non-payment of an alleged
$232.76 grocery debt contracted by their son-in-law. Their three
young daughters were taken from them, placed in orphanages, and
offered for adoption.
Not content with the total exploitation of their slave labourers
economically, many planters seek also to exploit their women slaves
sexually. One of the most notorious cases was that in which a 3o-man
K.K.K. firing squad executed two Negro war veterans, George
Dorsey and Roger Malcolm and their wives, because one of the women
had refused to sleep with the white planter for whom they were forced
to share-crop.
Many women are also held as domestic servants. Dora Jones, a
57-year-old Negro woman, testified that she had been forced to serve
as maid to a white couple for 29 years without pay. In another case,
Zenovia Selles, a 23-year-old Puerto Rican girl, was found crying on
the streets of New York. She told of being brought in from Puerto
Rico to work for an American family as a maid, and after three months
had not been given any payment for her labour. In still another case,
Albert S. Johnson, owner of a 2,00o-acre cotton plantation at Helena,
Arkansas, was charged by his common-law wife Dosha Moon with
forcing her and her three daughters to work for him under penalty
of beating and death. And when Essie Lee Wright, a Negro girl, sought
to escape from Johnson's plantation in a truck, Johnson shot the tyres
off the truck, explaining to the authorities that she was "obligated to
work for him".
Such was the picture of domestic forced labour as the author found
and recorded it. He was forced to conclude that at least one and a half
million native-born Americans, exclusive of their families, were
currently being held in forced labour. It was also discovered that ever
Kennedy, Stetson. Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A : The Laws, Customs and Etiquette Governing the Conduct of
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142
JIM CROW GUIDB TO THB U.S.A.
since the outbreak of World War II, the u.s. Government, at the
behest of American planters, has permitted the importation of millions
of farm-workers from nearby colonial and semi-colonial areas. The
bulk of these are the so-called Mexican "wetbacks", so named because
they swim across the Rio Grande River to enter the U.S.A. illegally,
while U.S. border police look the other way. The President's Commission on Migratory Labour, in its Report issued in 1951, conceded
that the great majority of these Mexican nationals are peonized
on American plantations, with the connivance of governmental
agencies.
"Wetbacks who are without funds to pay the smuggler for bringing
them in or to pay the trucker-contractor who furnishes transportation
from the boundary to the farm are frequently sold from one exploiter
to the next", this Report confesses. "For example, the smuggler will
offer to bring a specified number of wetbacks across the river for such
an amount as ten or fifteen dollars per man. The smuggler with his
party in tow will be met by the trucker, who will then buy the wetback
party by paying off the smuggler. The trucker, in tum, will have a
deal to deliver the workers to farm employers at an agreed-upon price
per head.
"Once on the U.S. side of the border and on the farm numerous
devices are employed to keep the wetback on the job. His pay, or some
portion thereof, is frequently held back. The wetback is a hungry
human being. He is a fugitive, and it is as a fugitive that he lives.
Under the constant threat of apprehension and deportation, he cannot
protest, no matter how unjustly he is treated."
The next largest group of imported forced labourers consists of
Negroes from the British West Indies. During the period from 1943 to
1950, a total of 93,178 of these were brought in with the sanction of
the U.S. Government. Besides these, there were about 10,000 Puerto
Ricans who are working on U.S. farms under contracts sanctioned by
the U.S. Government; and many more have been imported and
peonized while the Government turned its back.
Just as the planters must generally payout so much per head to
acquire wetbacks, they must also post surety bonds with the U.S.
Immigration Service in importing contract labour. The bond required is 100 dollars for each Jamaican, 50 dollars for each Bahaman,
and 25 dollars for each Mexican. At least a third of the Mexicans
who have been brought in under contract have escaped from the
plantations to which they were assigned, and in such cases the
Kennedy, Stetson. Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A : The Laws, Customs and Etiquette Governing the Conduct of
Nonwhites and Other Minorities As Second-Class Citizens, University of Alabama Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.
Created from ucsd on 2017-12-24 12:07:10.
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WHO ARE SUBJECT TO FORCED LABOUR
I43
planters must forfeit the bonds, which therefore are tantamount to
being the purchase price of the workers.
To the planters, labour is labour-they are interested only in getting
the work done as cheaply as possible. As the Manager of the California
Beet-growers' Association told the President's Commission : "We
have used great numbers of the so-called stoop labor class of labor
throughout the years. We have gone through the whole gamut. We
have used Chinamen, Japs, Hindus, Filipinos, Mexican nationals.
Mexican wetbacks if you please, American Indians, Negroes. Bahamans, prisoners of war, and what-have-you. We have always been
willing to take any kind of labor that we could get when we needed
them."
And a big cotton-planter of Arkansas told the Commission: "Cotton
is a slave crop, and nobody is going to pick it that does not have to.
Now the Texas-Mexicans have found out they can get other kinds of
work, and so the Mexican wetback is about the only reservoir of
labor that we know of."
(In I957. California planters prevailed upon the u.s. Government
to import Japanese farm-labourers under three-year contracts. One of
these, Keizo Koshigeta, reported in a letter to the Tokyo Asahi Shim bun
in I958: "I have been in California for one year now as a farmlabourer, and there has been trouble which we never anticipated at the
time we left Japan. The trouble has been over income tax, transfers to
other farms, and individual activities . . . we are among the lowestpaid workers in the United States ... our net pay comes to less than
40 cents an hour. Even when we want to transfer to another farm
which pays a gross rate of $r.IO instead of 75 cents per hour, we cannot
do so of our own free will. We would like the authorities concerned
to give adequate consideration to these points in preparation for the
short-term farm labourers who are scheduled to come to the U.S.A.
this Spring." In his letter Koshigeta added that every time the Japanese
Consul-General in San Francisco visited the labour camp he said,
"The difference in political and economic power between Japan and
the United States is the reason why everything cannot be done just
as you want it to be, but we would like you to endure them if you
come up against some hardships.")
Another major group caught in the toils of forced labour are the
migratory farm-workers who make their way across the face of the
American continent each year in their efforts to eke out a living from
seasonal employment. Physical as well as legalistic and psychological
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144
JIM CROW GUIDE TO THE U.S.A.
coercion is employed to force many migratory workers to "stay put"
or "move on" at the dictate of the planters, aided and abetted in many
instances by governmental authorities. Just as the substitution of wage
slavery for chattel slavery relieved the former slave-owning class of
responsibility for the upkeep of their labourers, so has the substitution
of migratory labour for resident farm labour served the same end.
The living conditions of these workers are so bad as to defy description. The dismal scenes portrayed of the great Oklahoma "Dust
Bowl" migrations to California during the 1930S in John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath have not disappeared in the least. On the contrary,
a probe by the Colorado State Commission in 1950, and subsequent
investigations by the Federal Government, have found that in many
respects conditions have worsened.
At the bottom of their plight is the land hunger which especially
affiicts the segregated territory. Throughout the Black Belt of the
South, where Negroes are in the majority, 73 per cent of all families
own no land. In the Red River Bottoms the proportion rises to 80 per
cent, and in the Delta Region 90 per cent of all families are landless.
The United Nations, after extensive surveys, has listed the southern
region of the U.S.A. as one of the "backward and underfed" areas of
the world. Even during the relatively prosperous wartime boom year
oEI943, thirty million of the South's people were underfed, according
to a survey of the National Research Council. Anaemia due to iron
deficiency in the diet, and generally aggravated by intestinal worm
infestations, is extremely common. Hookworm infestation reaches
100 per cent of the population of some rural Florida counties. In
Tennessee 50 per cent of the entire farm population suffers from
vitamin A deficiency.
Returning to his home, the author set about transcribing the recorded
interviews and compiling his other data into a Memorandum, which
was delivered to the U.N. Committee on September 15, 1952. At the
same time, he asked that he be permitted to testify before the final
hearings scheduled to be held in Geneva, Switzerland, and to bring
some American forced labourers with him. The Committee agreed
to hear him, but said it was "not keen about interviewing forced
labourers in person, but preferred to hear experts".
The author was given ten days to get to Geneva, at his own expense
(all previous witnesses had had their expenses paid, including a liberal
per diem allowance). Before testifying, the author was questioned
Kennedy, Stetson. Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A : The Laws, Customs and Etiquette Governing the Conduct of
Nonwhites and Other Minorities As Second-Class Citizens, University of Alabama Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.
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WHO ARB SUBJBCT TO FORCBD LABOUR
14S
privately by the Committee's Secretary, Manfred Simon, who r&marked: "Of course, the U.S. Government does all it can to eliminate
forced labour."
The line of questioning pursued by the Committee Chairman,
Sir Ramaswami Mudaliar of India, further revealed the group's
orientation.
"How can you say that Mexicans are held in forced labour in the
U.S.A., when they sign their work contracts voluntarily?" he d&manded.
"Since time immemorial," the author replied, "men have been
forced by economic pressures to sell themselves and their families into
slavery, and in my estimation this only makes the slavery the more
despicable !"
Not finding such replies to his liking, Sir Ramaswami soon instructed the author to make his prepared statement.
"Forced laborers in the U.S.A. are not prisoners of war or persons
convicted of some crime against the state, but rather are 'guilty' only
of belonging to some vulnerable racial, economic, national, or occupational group," the author pointed out. "Moreover, their labor is not
dedicated to the public welfare, but is exploited purely for private
profit.
"However, the Government's having given a free hand to the private
exploiters of forced labor does not in any wise mitigate the fact that
the system could not function without the overt collaboration and
covert sanction of Government at all levels-local, state, and national.
If the U.N. Committee is to do justice, it must recognize that in the
U.S.A. those laws which constitute the legalistic framework for the
forced labor system are cleverly cloaked in other guises. Besides the
compulsory military service act, immigration laws, and fraud laws,
there are the vagrancy laws, labor recruiting laws, and laws dealing
with contracts. In the absence of such 'enabling legislation', the
exploiters of forced labor would be obliged to rely entirely, rather than
partly as at present, upon such extra-legal instruments of coercion as
the club, lash, and pistol.
"The Federal Government as represented by its legislative, judicial,
and law enforcement branches-Congress, Supreme Court, and
Department ofJustice-is charged under the Constitution and Federal
law with the responsibility of stamping out forced labor. But the
Government makes a practice of not practising the enforcement of
these laws, and consequently what the State Department claims are
Kennedy, Stetson. Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A : The Laws, Customs and Etiquette Governing the Conduct of
Nonwhites and Other Minorities As Second-Class Citizens, University of Alabama Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.
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146
JIM CROW GUIDE TO THE U.S.A.
•effective safeguards' are rendered dead letters and mere scraps of
paper.
"Painful though my role may be, I consider it my patriotic duty to
do what I can to bring the healing heat of world opinion to bear upon
the cancerous growth of forced labor that afflicts my homeland. I do
not see how the United States can enjoy either sdf-respect or the
respect of the community of nations if such things are kept hidden.
"For the benefit of any who take stock in such things, let me say
that two of my forebears-William Williams and Arthur Middleton
-signed the American Declaration of Independence. In the exercise
of much the same right to disavow tyranny, I here and now declare
my independence from those powers in American life who have
usurped the democratic prerogatives of the people and who are
responsible for such evils as forced labor in our land. In so doing I am
confident that I speak for the great bulk of the American people who
believe in liberty and justice for all.
"In conclusion, I wish only to ask, on behalf of all the forced
laborers in the U.S.A., that the Committee remove the gag which has
kept them in silence, by transmitting their pleas to the General Assembly of the United Nations so that the world may hear andjudge."
With that, the author was summarily dismissed by Sir Ramaswami.
In its official Press release issued later that day, the Committee suppressed the author's statement. In mark.ed contrast, the Committee
had issued voluminous accounts of charges levelled by previous
witnesses, against certain other countries. It was not too surprising,
therefore, that when the Committee issued its 62I-page Report, a mere
handful of pages were devoted to charges against the U.S.A. The
documentary evidence contained in the author's Memorandum and
statement had all been consigned to the waste-paper basket!
"All of Mr. Kennedy's allegations are general charges and do not
appear to be supported by any proof", the State Department sanctimoniously concluded the Committee's Report.
In 1956 the Soviet Union announced the liquidation of its labour
camps, and by 1957, when the International Labour Organization, in
association with the United Nations, drafted an agreement against forced
labour, an indictment of debt slavery was prominently included, and
the United States felt obliged to sign on the dotted line.
Kennedy, Stetson. Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A : The Laws, Customs and Etiquette Governing the Conduct of
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Created from ucsd on 2017-12-24 12:07:10.
The Emergence of Yellow Power
Amy Uyematsu
Asian Americans can no longer afford to watch the black‐and‐white struggle from the
sidelines. They have their own cause to fight, since they are also victims–with less visible
scars–of the white institutionalized racism. A yellow movement has been set into motion by
the black power movement. Addressing itself to the unique problems of Asian Americans,
this "yellow power" movement is relevant to the black power movement in that both are
part of the Third World struggle to liberate all colored people.
The yellow power movement has been motivated largely by the problem of self‐identity in
Asian Americans. The psychological focus of this movement is vital, for Asian Americans
suffer the critical mental crises of having "integrated" into American society–
No person can be healthy, complete, and mature if he must deny a part of
himself; this is what "integration" has required so far.‐Stokely Carmichael &
Charles V. Hamilton
The Asian Americans' current position in America is not viewed as a social problem.
Having achieved middle‐class incomes while presenting no real threat in numbers to
the white majority, the main body of Asian Americans (namely, the Japanese and the
Chinese) have received the token acceptance of white America.
Precisely because Asian Americans have become economically secure, do they face
serious identity problems. Fully committed to a system that subordinates them on
the basis of non‐whiteness, Asian Americans still try to gain complete acceptance by
denying their yellowness. They have become white in every respect but color.
However, the subtle but prevailing racial prejudice that "yellows" experience
restricts them to the margins of the white world. Asian Americans have assumed
white identities, that is, the values and attitudes of the majority of Americans. Now
they are beginning to realize that this nation is a "White democracy" and that yellow
people have a mistaken identity.
Within the past two years, the "yellow power" movement has developed as a direct
outgrowth of the "black power" movement. The "black power" movement caused
many Asian Americans to question themselves. "Yellow power" is just now at the
stage of "an articulated mood rather than a program‐disillusionment and alienation
from white America and independence, race pride, and self‐respect." Yellow
consciousness is the immediate goal of concerned Asian Americans.
In the process of Americanization, Asians have tried to transform themselves into
white men‐both mentally and physically. Mentally, they have adjusted to the white
man's culture by giving up their own languages, customs, histories, and cultural
values. They have adopted the "American way of life" only to discover that this is not
enough.
Next, they have rejected their physical heritages, resulting in extreme self‐hatred.
Yellow people share with the blacks the desire to look white. Just as blacks wish to be
light‐complected with thin lips and unkinky hair, "yellows" want to be tall with long
legs and large eyes. The self‐hatred is also evident in the yellow male's obsession
with unobtainable white women, and in the yellow female's attempt to gain male
approval by aping white beauty standards. Yellow females have their own "conking"
techniques‐they use "peroxide, foam rubber, and scotch tape to give them light hair,
large breasts, and double‐lidded eyes."
The "Black is Beautiful" cry among black Americans has instilled a new awareness in
Asian Americans to be proud of their physical and cultural heritages. Yellow power
advocates self‐acceptance as the first step toward strengthening personalities of Asian
Americans ....
The problem of self‐identity in Asian Americans also requires the removal of
stereotypes. The yellow people in America seem to be silent citizens. They are
stereotyped as being passive, accommodating, and unemotional. Unfortunately, this
description is fairly accurate, for Asian Americans have accepted these stereotypes and
are becoming true to them.
The silent, passive image of Asian Americans is understood not in terms of their
cultural backgrounds, but by the fact that they are scared. The earliest Asians in
America were Chinese immigrants who began settling in large numbers on the West
Coast from 1850 through 1880. They were subjected to extreme white racism, ranging
from economic subordination, to the denial of rights of naturalization, to physical
violence. During the height of anti‐Chinese mob action of the 1880's, whites were
"stoning the Chinese in the streets; cutting off their queues, wrecking their shops and
laundries." The worst outbreak took place in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885, when
twenty‐eight Chinese residents were murdered. Perhaps, surviving Asians learned to
live in silence, for even if "the victims of such attacks tried to go to court to win
protection, they could not hope to get a hearing. The phrase 'not a Chinaman's chance'
had a grim and bitter reality."
Racist treatment of "yellows" still existed during World War II, with the unjustifiable
internment of 110,000 Japanese into detention camps. When Japanese Americans were
ordered to leave their homes and possessions behind within short notice, they
cooperated with resignation and did not even voice opposition ....
Today the Asian Americans are still scared. Their passive behavior serves to keep
national attention on the black people. By being as inconspicuous as possible, they
keep pressure off of themselves at the expense of the blacks. Asian Americans have
formed an uneasy alliance with white Americans to keep the blacks down. They close
their eyes to the latent white racism toward them which has never changed.
Frightened "yellows" allow the white public to use the "silent Oriental" stereotype
against the black protest: The presence of twenty million blacks in America poses an
actual physical threat to the white system. Fearful whites tell militant blacks that the
acceptable criterion for behavior is exemplified in the quiet, passive Asian American.
The yellow power movement envisages a new role for Asian Americans:
It is a rejection of the passive Oriental stereotype and symbolizes the birth of a
new Asian‐one who will recognize and deal with injustices. The shout of Yellow
power, symbolic of our new direction, is reverberating in the quiet corridors of
the Asian community.
What's Your Emergency?: White Women and the Policing of Public Space
Author(s): Justin Louis Mann
Source: Feminist Studies , Vol. 44, No. 3 (2018), pp. 766-775
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.15767/feministstudies.44.3.0766
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Justin LOUIS Mann
What’s Your Emergency?:
White Women
and the Policing of Public Space
On Tuesday, May 29, 2018, Starbucks closed eight thousand stores so
that its nearly one hundred seventy-five thousand employees could
undergo racial bias training. The company scheduled the training after
a Philadelphia store manager, a white woman with a history of calling
the police on black customers, called 9-1-1 on Rashon Nelson and Donte
Robinson. The arrest sparked outrage when video of the incident was
posted on social media (Melissa DePino, a customer in the coffee house
at the time, filmed the arrest and posted the video to Twitter where it
was shared four million times in forty-eight hours). Although different
from the types of police encounters that have dominated news reports —
encounters that often end in the murder of black people — this episode,
and the many others like it that have come to light in the months since,
is equally important to understanding contemporary race relations in
the United States. Here and in other incidents in which white people,
especially white women, make false reports to the police accusing black
people of criminal activity where none is present, gender often plays a
pivotal role in producing notions of fear and safety. In this essay, I am
most interested in how discourses of security and rights enable and sublimate racism, encouraging white women to call the police on black
people. The implications of such acts are magnified in a context where
police encounters often end in the violent death of innocent “suspects.”
766
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News and Views
767
I also want to consider the unique response engendered by social media,
in which accusers are lampooned and turned into memes.
In the time since Nelson and Robinson were arrested, numerous
other incidents in which police were called on innocent black people
have been reported in the press. Although recounting all of these incidents would be impossible — especially because we might imagine that
each story that garners media attention eclipses countless others that
do not— a few examples reveal a compelling set of consistencies. At Yale
University and more recently at Smith College, white female students
called police on black students who were using common areas to study
or sleep. A white woman called the police on Kelly Fyffe-Marshall, Donisha Prendergast, and Komi-Oluwa Olafimihan as they moved out of
their Airbnb, and former Obama-administration staffer Darren Marten
was questioned by police while he moved into his apartment in New
York City. In Pennsylvania, a white man called the police on five black
women while they golfed. His complaint: the women were playing too
slowly.1 A woman in Oakland called the police on two black men who
were barbequing in a public park in Lake Merritt. This incident was also
filmed and posted to the internet where it went viral, with viewers dubbing the woman #BBQBecky. Her image was also digitally edited so
that she appears standing behind Martin Luther King on the steps of
1.
See Cleve R. Wootson, Jr., “A Black Yale Student Fell Asleep in Her Dorm’s
Common Room. A White Student Called Police,” The Washington Post, May
2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2018/05/10/ablack-yale-student-fell-asleep-in-her-dorms-common-room-a-white-studentcalled-police/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e7cac4497128; “‘All I Did Was Be
Black’: Someone Called the Police on a Student Lying on a Dorm Couch,”
The Washington Post, August 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news
/grade-point/wp/2018/08/05/all-i-did-was-be-black-someone-called-the-policeon-a-student-lying-on-a-dorm-couch/?utm_term=.d0f1afbe4e75; Patricia
Mesachio, “Bob Marley’s Granddaughter Donisha Prendergast Demands
Police Protocol Changes After Airbnb Run-In,” Billboard, May 2018, https://
www.billboard.com/articles/news/8455886/bob-marley-granddaughter-donisha-prendergast-airbnb; Julica Jacobo and Erica Y King, “‘Profiling Is Real’:
Former Obama Staffer Mistaken as Burglar While Moving into New York
City Apartment,” ABC News, May 2018, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics
/profiling-real-obama-staffer-mistaken-burglar-moving-york/story?id=54877597;
Christina Caron, “5 Black Women Were Told to Golf Faster. Then the Club
Called the Police,” The New York Times, April 2018, https://www.nytimes.com
/2018/04/25/us/black-women-golfers-york.html.
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768
News and Views
the Lincoln Memorial, peering through the window of the Oval Office
at President Obama taking a phone call, and popping up in Wakanda.2
More recently, a woman in San Francisco nicknamed #PermitPatty was
recorded making a 9-1-1 call to report an eight-year-old black girl for
selling water. She complained that the girl did not have a permit. The
list is alarmingly long. Indeed, from California to New York, from gyms
to parks, from department stores to universities, it feels like it is open
season on black people.
I want to linger over #PermitPatty and #BBQBecky, two figures who
have risen to iconic status. “Becky” and “Patty,” whose real names are Jennifer Schulte and Allison Ettel respectively, typified the kind of racism
that saturated the false reports listed above. They were also unique in
that they enabled a humoristic stance in the response from black critics. These women achieved the status of internet infamy, becoming cartoon caricatures of a mode of white femininity obsessed with eliminating black people from public space in the name of rule-following.3 In
this, they typify the “exceptional citizen[-ship]” that Inderpal Grewal
describes in Saving the Security State. In fact, they exemplify “exceptional citizens’” desires “to access and maintain the privileges of whiteness to become exceptional and sovereign.” 4 As Grewal notes, women
play a unique role in the machinations of exceptional citizenship, fusing
a race-blind regard for equal opportunity with the ambitions of a whitesupremacist security state. While this may be true for the many women
who work in the defense and intelligence sectors, as Grewal describes,
other noncredentialed women living in American cities during this age of
“white return” also seek to express their desire for police power through
the emergency calls they make to police. To my eye, Becky and Patty
advance the agenda of US empire in the gentrifying neighborhoods
2.
3.
4.
See Malinda Janay, “These Hysterical Memes of the Becky Who Hates Black
Barbecues Deserve Some Kind of Twitter Award,” Blavity, May 2018, https://
blavity.com/these-hysterical-memes-of-the-becky-who-hates-black-barbecuesdeserve-some-kind-of-twitter-award.
In Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad (New York: Doubleday, 2017),
Fiona, the white Irish maid, evokes the same sensibility. Fiona reports the
white family protecting the escaped slave Cora, ostensibly to raise her own
social position.
Inderpal Grewal, Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First-Century America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 4.
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News and Views
769
of America’s inner cities.5 That is, the general and pervasive specter of
black criminality underwrites Becky’s and Patty’s fears and makes their
calls to police appear reasonable and fair-minded. It leaves some, myself
included, asking “what’s your emergency?”
In the course of their responses to critics, both in the moment
and after the fact, they reject the notion that blackness contributed to
their decisions to call the police in any way. Indeed, both attempted to
explain their antiblackness through the language of the public good, language that ultimately invokes the rule of law as its justification. In so
doing, they frame racialized conceptions of safety and risk in supposedly colorblind terms. In Becky and Patty, we see the true contour of
securitized femininity in the contemporary moment. See-somethingsay-something logic enshrouds white women like Becky and Patty in a
purportedly colorblind veil of rule following, enabling them to carry out
the work of white supremacy by insisting that black people are always
already worthy of suspicion. Their problem, as they themselves claim,
is with their victims’ disregard for the regulations governing the use of
public space — barbequing in a zone where children might get hurt or
selling water bottles on a hot day without a permit. They justify their
emergency calls through what I would term prophetic mental gymnastics foreseeing their own victimization or, notably, the victimization of
(white) children. (In Patty’s case, the victimization of Jordan Rodgers,
the eight-year-old girl on whom she called the police, seems not to have
concerned her). In short, Becky and Patty purport to act in the public’s best interest, ensuring the preservation of a pristine, and implicitly
white, public order predicated on the oppression of black people.
The orderly world Becky and Patty seek in their recourse to regulations is saturated with white claims to public space. The ties between race,
property, and rights have long been a central object of inquiry for critical
race theorists, especially for black feminist critics of the law. As Cheryl
Harris explains in her foundational 1993 article “Whiteness as Property,”
5.
Both Michelle Alexander and Elizabeth K. Hinton describe the growth of
domestic security regimes that developed out of the War on Drugs. See
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); and Elizabeth K. Hinton, From
the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
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“In ways so embedded that it is rarely apparent, the set of assumptions,
privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white have
become a valuable asset that whites sought to protect.” 6 For Harris, it
is almost impossible to disentangle notions of property and ownership
from the legacy of racial domination that preconditioned their existence.
Through various legal mechanisms, notably the sexual abuse of black
women, “Whiteness became the characteristic, the attribute, the property of free human beings.” 7 Similar forces, she notes, allowed for the
legal dispossession and removal of native peoples from land they had
inhabited for generations. Together, these two capacities invested whiteness with the essential characteristics of property and disallowed black
and native people from enjoying the privileges conferred by property
rights. Read with this theory in mind and with an eye toward contributions to black feminist legal and social theory, from Patricia J. Williams’s crucial discussion of rights and need in The Alchemy of Race and
Rights to Jennifer C. Nash’s recent work on black female sexuality and
waste, the policing of public space by white people, especially by caricaturized white women, renders black people toxic, despoiling public
property, and thus worthy of removal.8
The practice of policing public space has strong ties to the democratization of surveillance that has been a key feature of the War on Terror.
Especially in contemporary cities, the fear of terrorism and crime deputizes
everyday (white, female) citizens as surveillance officers. As scholars such
as Grewal, Amy Kaplan, and Melani McAlister have shown, the language
of “women’s rights” has produced the white female subject as a model citizen for right-less brown and black women in Africa, the Middle East,
and Asia. White women simultaneously bolster the imperial ambitions
of Western powers, leading to dispossession and disenfranchisement of
6.
7.
8.
Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June
1993): 1713.
Ibid., 1721.
See Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Jennifer C. Nash,
“Black Anality,” GLQ 20, no. 4 (2014): 439–60. Indeed the relationship of
black people, especially black women, to legal categories of rights and rightlessness forms the foundations of black feminist legal theory. See also, Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black
Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and
Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1, art. 8 (1989).
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771
the brown and black women who supposedly engender humanitarian
concern. At home “security moms” serve the essential role of bolstering the
state’s surveillance functions in the name of a tranquil domestic, a word
that should register both the public nation and the private home.9 The
see-something-say-something logic of the War on Terror/War on Drugs
invites civilians to perform the surveillance functions of the state and
ensures an endless war abroad. This logic has important implications
when we consider that the practices of civilian policing, or vigilantism
as it might (rightly) be identified in other contexts, began in the service
of protecting white American women from black and native men. As
Grewal notes, “In the period of Jim Crow, white women’s safety was used
to justify the lynching or imprisonment of black men.” 10 White women
are thus understood as always already victimized and as perfectly pure
and chaste. Vigilantism thus works in the service of preserving female
purity and chastity while simultaneously exacting vengeance on the
apparently corrupting forces of black presence. In the context of twenty-first-century US cities in the grip of white return and gentrification,
this means removing black (and brown) people from the neighborhoods
they were sequestered into in the era of white flight. White people who
self-segregated out of urban centers, such as San Francisco, Oakland, or
Philadelphia, seek the elimination of black people and culture from their
parks, street corners, and doorsteps. They use the police as a private
army, marshalled to cull those deemed undesirable from their neighborhoods. In short, they have declared open season on black people.
The recourse to law and order is subtler here than in the recent
political rallies in Indiana and West Virginia. This is, therefore, not a
partisan problem, but a problem of uninterrogated racism. For example, in her insipid mea culpa, Allison Etell describes Jordan Rodgers as
“screaming” and “yelling” and claims that Rodgers disrupted Etell while
she was working from home. Etell, we might imagine, was disrupted in
the course of managing her online marijuana oil business, by the shouts
9. See Grewal, Saving the Security State, 118–43
10. Ibid., 127. See also Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US
Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East
since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Simone Browne,
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
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of young girl trying to earn some money, like many other kids who sell
lemonade and other iced beverages on hot days. Etell likely would have
preferred the pigtailed-respectability of cul-de-sacs and hand-made
signs to the hawking of cold water on an urban street. Etell’s ludicrous
request that her victim produce a permit overtly invokes the rule of law
in order to justify her racism. In a world in which police interactions
with black people — especially children — end in fatalities, emergency
calls for innocuous violations may end in death. Perhaps activist Shaun
King put it best when he tweeted the following in response to the video
of Etell’s 9-1-1 call: “They want police to kill us. The girl was causing no
harm. They know what happens when they call the police. This is evil.” 11
Humor in Response to “Spirit Murder”
King’s alarm is not misplaced. The seemingly banal cases in which white
people use the public-serving police as a private security force reveal the
insidious contours of whiteness (and, in these cases, white-womanhood)
in the contemporary moment. It is, unfortunately, remarkable that these
encounters ended without the kind of violence that claimed the lives of
Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, and too many others gunned
down in the course of living their lives. Yet, because these encounters
reflect a different kind of violence, violence that is closer to what Patricia Williams calls “spirit murder,” there seems to be more room for creative protest.12 Such protests have included the public outing of these
figures, many of whom have lost jobs and friends because of their behavior. While I am concerned about the implications of sharing personal
information about white victimizers (which uncomfortably evokes
the tactics of misogynist white supremacist internet trolls), I want to
consider the unique capacity of humor to combat this form of spirit
murder. 13 Social media, especially “black Twitter”— a loose association
of black activists, culture-makers, intellectuals, and everyday figures —
has enabled the comedic rejection of Becky, Patty, and others. The viral
sharing of stories of public-space policing by white people, especially
11. Shaun King, Twitter post, June 23, 2018, 10:36 AM, https://goo.gl/qhmXn5.
12. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 73.
13. This practice, known as doxxing, has been widely used by antifeminist and
racist internet denizens who use personal information to attack progressive public figures.
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white women, enables the elaboration of extended networks of care-givers who share support and empower victims to recontextualize these
events. The characterization of white women alarmists through a
hashtag is especially interesting; the memification of Becky and Patty
lays bare the one-dimensionality of their fears, while it also provides
an outlet for what might otherwise be incapacitating feelings of anger
and sadness. As Glenda Carpio suggests, humor, such as those memes
lampooning Becky and Patty, “pillories the ideologies and practices that
supported slavery, and that, in different incarnations, continue to support racist practices.” 14 Becky’s inscription onto the image of the historic March on Washington, for example, juxtaposes the pervasive distaste for black people against the narrative of racial harmony following
the Civil Rights Movement. Becky (and contemporary white supremacy
by extension) appears as both a socio-cultural relic of a bygone racial
order and an indicator of the recalcitrance of white supremacy despite
the apparent victories of legal civil rights. Put differently, the object of
humor — that is, the thing we object to as out-of-joint— is juxtaposed
against its latent or implicit target. Becky’s opposition to racial progress becomes foregrounded, both metaphorically and positionally, when
she is inscribed over the historic photo. Her disdain for black presence
in public places cannot hide behind the veneer of public decency. She
is a joke not only because her prejudice is incongruous with the narrative of racial progress (a narrative we should constantly question, to be
sure), but also because of its diminutive stakes. Such a meme simultaneously signals the gravity of white women’s disdain and its fecklessness. Depictions of these figures as humorous memes highlight the
absurdity of their behavior and, in so doing, bring the implicit assumptions of black criminality and white property and propriety to the fore.
Despite the oppressive reality that any of these encounters might have
ended more violently, sarcasm, hyperbole, caricature, and various other
forms of ridicule bolster feelings of solidarity of black social media users
and therefore complement other forms of public expression that enjoin
people in their various acts of resistance. The hashtags #BBQBecky and
#PermitPatty name the absurdity of suspicion that led to the encounter
14. Glenda Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7.
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and suture that absurdity to a stereotypical white woman. They are rendered as cartoons, two-dimensional, and stock, simple in their animosity and opprobrium.
I conclude with a final incident, one that might, at first blush, appear
distinct from what I have outlined above. In early June 2018, a SnapChat video depicting Tabitha Duncan and two white, male companions
went viral. Duncan, a white waitress and US Air Force enlisted reservist from Missouri, and the two men are shown drinking beer on a dark
country road. Duncan smiles at the camera as a male voice offscreen
asks, “Are we going nigger hunting today or what?” “We’re going nigger
hunting,” another man, this time on screen, replies. “You get them niggers,” Duncan responds, smiling into the camera and sipping her beer.15
Duncan bolsters the predatory and potentially murderous intentions
of her white male companions. She poses and grins, flirting with the
camera and the men around her as they set out, ostensibly to find black
men or women to insult, torment, assault, or kill. In this way, she exemplifies the feminized security figure that Grewal describes. It is easy to
dismiss Duncan as extraneous rather than endogenous to the system of
racism that produces Becky and Patty. Duncan’s use of the taboo n-word,
and its repetition in the discourse, suggests an easy acknowledgement
of racism that Becky and Patty disavow. I would imagine that the latter
would object to the use of such language in polite conversation. Yet, it
is important to consider these two discrete forms of racism as linked in
a shared project of seeking out, finding, and ultimately removing black
people from white space. To me, these figures are cut from the same
cloth. Duncan names the desire Becky and Patty have: to hunt black
people, bring them to heel, to see them in chains or perhaps, worse, dead.
Duncan, Becky, Patty, the Starbucks manager, and the Yale graduate student are all engaged in the current phase of “nigger hunting.” With its
roots in earlier modes of antiblack violence, contemporary pursuits are
dominated by an explicit disavowal that race contributes at all to the
desire to maintain an orderly world. Duncan’s candid racism serves as
15. Although the video has been taken down, it can be seen on the Facebook
page for Real STL News. See also Breanna Edwards, “Missouri Waitress
Fired Over ‘N-Word Hunting’ Video Swears She Isn’t Racist, Claims to
Have Black Friends,” The Root, June 12, 2018, https://www.theroot.com
/missouri-waitress-fired-after-n-word-hunting-video-swea-1826765082.
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an important indicator, showing us the hateful forces animating these
desires. Truly evading the venatic ambitions of figures like Duncan, or
Patty and Becky for that matter, may ultimately be impossible. Yet, the
capacity of certain forms of social discourse to mock and cajole the
forces of oppression shouldn’t be overlooked or understated. Turning
figures such as Betty, Patty, and maybe even Duncan, from poachers to
punchlines is an important life-giving practice, one we should enthusiastically embrace.
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Name
Journal #3 – American Involvement in Latin America & Domestic Climate
During WWII
Take copious notes on these film clips and readings. Then, give thoughtful
responses to the following questions for each film/reading selection. For each
question, bring in analysis from our weekly readings.
“The Storm that Swept Mexico” – first 15 min
1. What are the “two Mexico’s”?
Because Mexico is such a big country that is very widespread, there is are many
differences between the north and south alone, both politically, socially and sometimes
culturally. Often, there would be clashes between those who believed that foreign trade
and investment would benefit the country and those who thought that Mexico was
better off as a fully independent nation. There is also a large number of indigenous
people in Mexico and there is a history of huge systemic racism in the country as many
wanted to suppress these populations. The oppressive nature of the Mexican
government, as well s the extremely poor and cruel working conditions, eventually
forced the country into a revolution.
There is also the question of industrialization. Northern Mexico would see the railroads
and the mining industry (things that were often invested in and bought by Americans)
as progress and a way of moving forward, whereas the small regions in the southern
parts of Mexico would feel as if they were being ignored and left behind. From this we
can see the divisive nature of the two Mexicos.
2. Porfirio Diaz
Porfirio Diaz was a former general who was elected President of Mexico, serving seven
terms in the role which lasted about 30 years. His people were incredibly divisive in
their opinion of him, with some seeing his as a saint and peace maker and others
believing he was a traitor who sold their country out to foreigners. Whatever one’s
opinion of him, however, there is little to no doubt that his presidency was highly
tyrannical, as their goals were achieved through a combination of repression and
consensus. His “progressive dictatorship” mainly “worked to promote railroad
construction, to force reluctant peasants and indigenous groups to work on rural
estates, to repress popular organizing, and in other ways to benefit the dominant elites”
(History, Facts & Mexican Revolution, n.d).
He continued to rule Mexico with an iron fist until 1911, usually not seeing any
opposition every time he was “re-elected”. Though the country maintained an air of
1
constitutionalism, Diaz’s Mexico was most certainly a dictatorship. His cientificos
dominated the administration and were the true intellectuals behind the success of his
government, thought their own personal wealth and affinity for foreign investment
made them, and by extension Diaz, extremely unpopular among the people. His
presidency ultimately ended when he was 80, as revolutions were sparked amid
growing discontent and Diaz was forced to flee into exile.
3. What do the cientificos think is Mexico’s biggest problem?
The elitist cientificos believed, largely due to their racist ideals, that the biggest problem
Mexico faced was largely due to their “Indian problem”. In other words, the many
indigenous people living and working within Mexico. These people were largely
marginalized as a result, and they were treated like second class citizens, often being
repressed due to their heritage.
4. Who did Mexico look toward for artistic influence during the Porfiriato?
Because Diaz wanted Mexico to be a modern nation (hence his slogan; “order, peace and
progress” and therefore, they turned towards Europe for their artistic inspiration. This
is what led the administration to push for city wide industrialization; promoting the
building of railroads and factories to generate trade and electricity. They would also
turn towards foreign investors within Europe such as Britain and France, who they
knew had a great deal of interest in the oil mines that could be found in Mexico at the
time.
5. What are haciendas, and what control did they have in the economy
The haciendas were a group of large, self-sufficient estates that generated much of the
wealth of Mexico, but that wealth mainly found itself in the hands of those who owned
these estates. These owners would have total power over those worked the lands and
the richest were often found in the Southern states of Mexico. The hacendados, as the
owners tended to be called, were able to make vests amount of money by exploiting the
workers on the lands. “The system was designed to keep people that were in debt
working on a piece of land. People working on haciendas were made to stay there as
long as possible using various means” (World Atlas, June 2020). The hacienda system
was usually built up in the form of a social society, inspired by the paternalistic societies
in Europe, with the landlords at the top and the workers sitting tragically at the bottom.
6. Describe the working conditions of the Mexican rural poor
Many of the haciendas were sugar plantations that had extremely poor working
conditions. The workers were often beaten and whipped into working, not being
allowed to work. They were also paid extremely low rages, often making only 25 cents
per day which was not nearly enough for them to support themselves and their families.
Nevertheless, because the hacienda system actively worked to keep their laborers in
debt, these workers could not afford to leave the land. In fact, many workers were
2
natives or indigenous people whose land had been stolen from them by the very people
they were working for.
7. How did the working conditions of many Mexicans reflect what we have discussed
about the Black codes, American slavery, and immigrants working in the U.S.
The oppressive nature of the Mexican Government at the time draws many parallels
between American slavery, Black codes and immigrant workers in the United States.
Much like in Mexico, many US citizens did not trust the foreigners who were coming
into their country, despite their tendency to preach “the American dream”. Many
European workers moving to the United States, particularly Irish or Italians, found
themselves working in extremely poor working conditions and would often find
themselves exploited by their employees. Though they didn’t have the hacienda system,
there is little doubt that many people in the rural cities such as New York and Chicago
most certainly suffered poor working conditions, similar to those in which the Mexican
workers were struggling with. America, like Mexico, was keen to industrialize rapidly in
the form of factories, railroads and trade, which meant that a lot of people were
struggling to keep up.
In terms of Black Codes, which were “restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of
African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force” (HISTORY,
January 2021), this sounds extremely similar to the haciendas which definitely set out
to do similar things to their workers. Like the indigenous people that were exploited in
order to keep them working on the land, the Black Codes enabled business owners and
landlords to ensure that the newly freed African-American Slaves were unable to gain
economic independence and therefore would have no choice but to work for them with
very little wages and extremely poor working conditions. The parallels between the two
are extremely similar in that regards. This form of debt peonage was extremely
common in both the USA and Mexico throughout the early 20th Century, and those who
exploited them stood to earn a great deal of money from doing so.
The parallels that occur with slavery can be drawn from the way in which the workers
and the slaves in America were treated by their “masters” and the conditions in which
they lived. Though the workers in Mexico were paid, it was an extremely small amount
and was barely any better than the lack of pay suffered by the African slaves. On both
sides, workers were beaten and whipped if they were seen relaxing or not working.
There were also patrols of “enforcers” who would regularly inspect the workers and
administer punishment should any resistance be met. The debt peonage keeping the
Mexican workers on the land basically ensured that these workers were slaves in all but
name.
8. Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy in Latin America
President Taft’s “Dollar Diplomacy” is essentially what helped Diaz’s administration in
Nicaragua to overthrow Zelaya’s. This brand of foreign policy grew primarily “out of
Pres. Theodore Roosevelt’s peaceful intervention in the Dominican Republic, where U.S.
3
loans had been exchanged for the right to choose the Dominican head of customs”
(Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d). However, this led to much resentment from the people
and the U.S military eventually had to intervene.
During President Taft’s first year in office, the Mexican Revolution threatened US
corporate interests, and therefore the Dollar Diplomacy was created a way in which
these interests could be protected. In 1912, Mexico planned to allow the Japanese
government to purchase lands in Baja California which prompted the Taft
administration use Dollar Diplomacy to prevent anyone purchasing land in the Western
Hemisphere, particularly out of fear that the Japanese would use the land given to them
by Mexico to build a naval base.
All in all, the Dollar Diplomacy did more harm to the US than good and only furthered
much of Latin America’s distrust of the United States.
9. Importance of the strike in Cananea, Mexico
The strike occurred as a result of the Cananea mine owner’s plan to "eliminate the jobs
of 700 of its 2070 blue-collar employees” (Corpwatch, 1999). They demanded better
working conditions as well as an increase in pay, which was rejected. This resulted in a
march of some 3,000 people, which was met with hoses and gunfire, resulting in the
death of three people and ultimately inciting a riot. Many American interventionists
were involved, although they were ordered to leave by train as a result of the violence.
Many people believed that the riots were incited by malcontents who were opposed to
the Diaz government. In many ways, the strike resulted in a sort of domino effect as the
Rio Bianco strike that occurred the following year took place as a result of the Cananea
strike. Ultimately, the strike would be a major factor that would lead to the Mexican
Revolution and the downfall of the Diaz administration in 1911.
“Harvest of Empire”
10. What are some of the reasons that so many Latin Americans migrate(d) to the United
States?
While there is a certain assumption that Latin Americans, and other immigrants from
across the world, come to America to fulfil the “American Dream”, in other words that
they believe they can build a life for themselves and their family and rise through the
social hierarchy and truly achieve success. However, there is also another side to that
story that many people living in the US can easily forget about Latin America which is
that life there can be extremely difficult for people. “Poverty, political instability and
recurring financial crises often conspire to make Latin American life more challenging
than in the U.S., a wealthy country with lots of job opportunities” (HuffPost UK, August
2015). There is also the unfortunate fact that the United States has historically made life
in Latin America hard for people. They have invaded Cuba numerous times, as well as
4
the Dominican Republic which they occupied for 8 years and they overthrew the
Guatemala elected government which ushered in decades of several civil war. This is to
name but a few ways in which the United States has made life incredibly difficult for the
Latin American populations which has in turn led to the extreme immigrations of Latin
Americans in the USA.
11. Guatemala – why would the U.S. want to overthrow the Arbenz government? What
threat did he pose?
At the time in which the Arbenz government was overthrown, the United States
government lived in constant fear of the uprising and spread of communism. They were
more than prepared to make every effort to prevent this from happening and therefore,
the peaceful transfer of power to the Arbenz government in Guatemala was of serious
concern to the United States as they were making a great deal of effort towards land
reform and redistribution towards the landless masses. This effort “resulted in the
powerful American-owned United Fruit Company losing many acres of land, U.S.
officials began to believe that communism was at work in Guatemala” (History, July
2020). Therefore, President Eisenhower understandably gave the CIA the task to help
this government be overthrown, in order to stop the rise and spread of communism.
12. Where do the indigenous and Maya-descended people fit into the social structure of
Guatemala? What parallels can you draw for how they were treated, to how groups in
the U.S. have been treated?
Mayan descendants make ups the majority of indigenous people in Guatemala at
present, with 21 different Mayan communities making up 51% of the national
population. They live in constant fear of death threats and abductions, despite frequent
attempts to promote tolerance and peace. The free expression of the Man religion,
language and culture was agreed to be promoted in the 1996 peace accords, however
there is an undeniable lack of political will to enforce these laws. To this day, they still
fall towards the lower echelons of Guatemalan society and they have an extreme lack of
political support for their civil rights and status. Discrimination continues to run
rampant and is largely ignored. There are many parallels between the Mayan people to
how the Native Americans are treated, as their culture is often ignored and subdued
rather than celebrated and promoted as they should be.
13. El Salvador – What are some things that happened to the citizens deemed “the enemy”
in the country?
The citizens within El Salvador who are considered enemies of the state were often put
to death, tortured or else imprisoned as a result of their outspoken. Villages were
surrounded, families were separated, women were raped and even children were hung
from trees. Raids would occur frequently and acts of extreme terror were occurring on
a frequent basis, resulting in the deaths of thousands. During the civil war in El
Salvador, over 30,000 people were killed.
5
14. Who is Bishop Romero? What was his platform and what happened to him because of
it?
Bishop Romero, or Saint Oscar Romero, was an individual who was an outspoken critic
of government armed forces, right-wing groups and left-wing guerrilla soldiers during
the civil war in El Salvador. “Although Romero had been considered a conservative
before his appointment as archbishop in 1977, he denounced the regime of dictator
Gen. Carlos Humberto Romero (no relation). The archbishop also refused to support the
right-wing military-civilian junta that replaced the deposed dictator" (Encyclopedia
Britannica, March 2021). He would constantly defend the poor and the victims of the
war which brought many death threats to his door. He was assassinated by an unnamed
killer in 1980, though the UN concluded that his assassin was a member of a right-wing
extremist group. He undoubtedly angered many people on both sides of the war and
therefore his death was almost inevitable given how many enemies he made during his
lifetime.
15. What is the School of the Americas, and what role does it play in U.S. foreign
engagement?
The School of the Americas was founded in 1946 as a Spanish-speaking U.S Army
training facility that would train Latin American soldiers. The school has an abundance
of controversies that concern their graduates abusing the human rights, as they have
been constantly trained in horrific tactics. The role that the SOA has played in foreign
engagement in the past was primarily to “spread democracy” (in other words,
exterminate any threat of communism) which gave them the right to kill, torture and
abuse political opponents that were in any fashion labeled as potentially communist.
Their core role was to counter insurgents and ensure that the right governments stayed
in power.
16. What is your opinion on the low numbers of migrants allowed to migrate to the U.S.
from El Salvador, given what happened in their country? Explain your position.
In my opinion, the United States government owe the people of El Salvador every piece
of protection, sanctuary and asylum that the United States can afford. The USA played a
vital role in the troubles that still face El Salvador today and the fact that they deny
entry to migrants who are fleeing the troubles that the US themselves created for them
is disgusting. More than anything else, the United States owes El Salvador an apology
for all those who died as a result of US meddling in the affairs of their country. In their
constant witch-hunting of Communism, and the arrogant attitudes held by American
government in regards to controlling Latin American regions, they have unwittingly
contributed to countless crimes against humanity.
17. Mexico – What are some issues faced by migrants crossing the US/Mexico border?
In the wake of the Trump administration’s extreme policies towards immigration,
migrants who are attempting to cross the US/Mexican border are faced with a number
6
of challenges. Many migrants die frequently attempting to cross the border, in what
former President Trump repeatedly referred to as an “invasion”. Most migrants are
seeking asylum as a result of poor living conditions in their own countries and if they
are denied entry, they are often killed. The reason they are trying to get into the US is,
more often than not, to survive and protect their families. They risk arrest, deportation,
rough travel, poor health and separation by Border Control in order to flee the dangers
they face at home. "In fiscal year 2018, 92,959 people were deemed to have made
claims of credible fear" and asked for asylum at the border” (BBC News, July 2019). This
undoubtedly signifies an extreme rise in violence in Mexico in recent years.
18. How did NAFTA affect Mexican citizens?
NAFTA attempted to boost Mexican farm exports to the United States with success,
tripling their exports since the pact was made. This has resulted in hundreds of
thousands of auto manufacturing jobs and an increase of productivity in Mexico, as well
as lowered consumer prices. As a result of NAFTA, Mexico’s protectionist economy has
become one of the most open in trade. Hard reforms have been made, trade has been
liberalized and public debt has been significantly reduced (which in term has stabilized
inflation). However, they poverty has remained and unemployment has also risen
significantly, which has in turn led to more people attempting to cross the borders into
the United States. Therefore, there are both pros and cons to NAFTA’s effects on
Mexican citizens.
19. Given the nature of media coverage of illegal immigration, how does this documentary
counter that narrative that is commonly seen through our media outlets?
The United States of America has often, especially under right-wing governments and
significantly during the Trump administration, preached that illegal immigration is a
plague in the United States and that evil Latin Americans are crossing the borders
bringing crime, drugs and diseases with them, as well as stealing the jobs of hard
working Americans. This documentary points out a pivotal fact that is often left out of
news coverage of the “migrant invasion”; that is that the United States is more than
responsible for the extreme rise in Latin American immigration. They have had a lo...
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