Immigrant Acquiescence

Oftentimes when speaking about Self-Reparations I get questions or comments regarding immigrants and slavery reparations.  The exchange usually goes something like this: “my ancestors came to this country as immigrants and had nothing to do with slavery; it would be unfair and unjust to make me pay taxes toward slavery reparations just because I’m white.”  More often than not they are genuinely surprised to hear me express agreement with them.

When I remind them that Forty Million And A Tool is about SELF-reparations their expression turns from surprise to relief, with a hint of puzzlement, bordering on glee.  It was as if they got from me some sort of absolvement or cleansing of the hands for any culpability of immigrants for the plight of black people in America.  As they are about to leave, seemingly satisfied that they’ve made their case, I quietly ask them “where was the outcry?”  They look at me and ask “what?”  Then I say “you know, that protests against Jim Crow; surely the immigrants, as they yearned to breathe free, saw how black were treated in America.”  That’s when they realize that while they may have escaped the frying pan, they jumped dead into the fire.

You see, there was no outcry from the immigrants about our dehumanization; no mass protests against the lynching and the colored water fountain.  No marches, boycotts or work stoppages; not even a single sit-in.  And that’s just one side of the coin.  On the other side was the immediate recognition of how favored white skin was; how it represented a wide open race card to all the opportunity and prosperity that America had to offer.  Did they reject this favored status based on race?  Did they even wonder what kind of horrible place they’d come to that would treat a whole race of people with such inhumanity?  I don’t see it in the history books and I never hear it talked about by the descendants of white immigrants when they cite the proudest moments of immigrant character and fortitude in the New World.  It’s just not there.  Immigrants, for the most part, got down with the American program as it was being run.

Blacks were the doormat they stepped on in their march to prosperity, as America was firmly entrenched in Jim Crow laws.  Immigration through Ellis Island lasted from 1892 to 1954, the year Jim Crow allegedly suffered its first legal blow with Brown V. Board of Education.  So from 1892 until now those 129 years, though grueling and rife with challenges for immigrant families, were also 129 years of white privilege no matter the circumstance.  Looking at the current generations descending from those white immigrants, you’d have to say their grandparents and great-grandparents took full and complete advantage of the staunchly racist America they came to, turning a blind eye and deaf ear to the daily indignities heaped upon black humanity.  In their full acquiescence to a system that blatantly relegated others to last-class citizenship and abject poverty based solely on skin color their motto might as well have been “better you than me, nigger”.  And to add insult to injury many of these same descendants of white immigrants are getting their chance to re-institute Jim Crows laws (through their elected officials) with hundreds of voter suppression measures in state capitols all throughout the country right now.

So you tell me, are immigrants and their descendants in any way responsible for the plight of blacks in America?  I give it a resounding YES!  Their crime, however, falls more withing the realm of omission rather than the commission of slavery and for that small amount of complicity they benefited greatly.  Should their offspring now pay slavery reparations for it?  Emphatically not!  People should only pay for their own misdeeds.  Reparations, in any form, is our job now.