Shadows and Images

I’ve been discussing and re-reading my previous post, and realize that I may have left people with the wrong impression of my opinion. So here, in a more reasoned, and calm voice, let me clarify:

1. I did not mean to imply that I believed that all white Arizonans are racists. I know many white Arizonans reviled the law and spoke out loudly against it. What I did mean to say was that the supporters of the law are inordinately going to be those who do not feel the burden that it introduces, those who look, nominally, “American”, and therefore while I don’t believe that almost all white Arizonans supported the law, I do assume that almost every Arizonan who supported the law was white.
2. I did not mean to presume that I could ascribe motivations to everybody who supports the law – I don’t know them, they don’t know me. However, I do believe that regardless of motivations, support for that law is a prejudiced act. N.B. I am not saying that, a priori, all immigration reform law is prejudiced, just that supporting a law that places on people of dark skin the burden of proving their right to be where they are in a way that no segment of a free society should  be is prejudiced.
3. Despite not claiming to know all their motivations, based on the public statements of supporters of the law, I feel confident making these claims about their motivations as a group: a.) some percentage of them are openly racist (probably a small number), b.) some percentage of them are implicitly racist (people who think “looking American”, means looking white – probably a larger number), c.) some percentage of them are so removed from being a minority that they don’t realize the burden this puts on people not like them (probably a larger number), and d.) some percentage of them are other. It’s possible there is some “other” category for whom it will make no difference, but for those other lines of reasoning, I believe exposure to the minorities they are hurting can help them get past their wrong-headedness. Unfortunately, AZ Senate 1070 will have the opposite effect (which will delight people people in groups (a) and (b)) because the natural inclination of anybody exposed to this level of hostility will be to avoid it. There is a reason I included the quote from Kris Kobach at the beginning of my post – the important words he didn’t mention are “guilty” or “illegal”. The reality is that if you ratchet up the enforcement on anybody, including the innocent, they will leave. The fact that this law increases enforcement against those who are here legally but who look different doesn’t seem to bother him or other proponents of the law, and so they clearly have no problem with the result that they are driving away law-abiding brown people. I think anybody who thinks that’s okay should be inundated with law abiding brown people. I think that people so far removed from seeing that brown Americans get no worse treatment than any other Americans should maybe meet a few brown Americans.

So in conclusion – brown people, flock to Arizona – don’t flock away. The people there who have no prejudice against you won’t mind. We can only hope that the people there who do will have a little less.

“It’s not rocket science, you ratchet up the level of enforcement so people leave on their own.” – Kris Kobach co-author of AZ Senate Bill 1070 (source)

While we’re on the subject of institutional racism, a quick little note about Arizona and what I’ll call their “papers, please” law.

A lot of people have been talking about boycotting Arizona, and I’m all for that, monetarily, but I think that those of us of the swarthier complexions should perhaps stop short of what might be our natural inclination to avoid the state altogether. I know when I first heard that Arizona was making themselves poster children for discrimination, my first thought was “well, guess I won’t be going to Arizona any time soon”. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that this may actually be more of a reason to vacation in Arizona. The reasoning goes like this: the good (read: white) people of Arizona have voted for and supported a law that makes life more difficult for us fer’ners because clearly they want fewer of us around – they don’t mind making life more difficult for brown people because in the end, the fewer of us they have to deal with, the better. I’d rather not give them the satisfaction – I’m a legal immigrant (citizen, even) and I’m not going to be bullied out of your state because you don’t like people with my complexion. Brown people – any of you always wanted to see the Grand Canyon? Now’s the time. Let’s pack Arizona so full of mocha skin that anybody despairs who hoped that making the law more hostile to us would help keep the riff-raff out.

I may have linked to this before, but then, I realize that even on the internet, where there are archives of what I’ve said, I’m prone to repeating myself a lot. Anyway, watch this campaign ad for Alabama gubernatorial candidate Tim James:

This ad makes me feel physically uneasy, especially in light of the recent immigration law in Arizona. There will always be “love it or leave it”/”learn English” assholes, and there will always be politicians who give a wink and a nod to those voters, but this is pretty brazenly xenophobic.

If you see nothing wrong with the proposition outlined by this ad, consider: People need to take time to learn English. Even people who have put in the prior effort to learn English before they move here are probably not conversant enough to deal with the relatively technical language of a driver’s test. In order to learn English, one needs a class – it turns out that there are far more immigrants who want to learn English than there are adult ESL slots. Even ignoring that, in order to learn English, you need the means to pay for ongoing education. In many places, order to make a living you need to be independently mobile, which means a car. So now we have a problem – people need to get around in order to learn English, but there’s no way to do legally it without learning English.

So – will this lead to more people learning English and assimilating? Of course it won’t. It will lead to more people driving unlicensed. This means more people driving uninsured. This means more people driving cars they cannot get inspected because they aren’t legally allowed own them. This means fewer people aware of the rules of the road as they drive, which means more danger for all of us. It also means more foreign-looking (read: not white) people are criminals, which as the State government of Arizona has shown us, some people don’t mind too much. Now, this English-only DMV proposal falls short of making brown skin probable cause the way Arizona has, but it’s certainly in the same ballpark. The sad thing is that even while large swathes of the country are reviling Arizona’s new law, there are segments of the country, and clearly Tim James has pegged them as his people, who are driving pedal-to-floor into the bright, shiny racist future. I just hope they’re wearing their seat belts – there are a lot of unlicensed drivers down that road.