Paper Thin
Good Morning Tom, Sybil, and Jay!
We have a holiday coming up this weekend, guys… Happy Father’s Day Tom and Jay!
I hope you guys have a wonderful day…
And remember, we’ve got a twofer this weekend…
That’s right, this weekend we also celebrate Juneteenth, the day 145 years ago when word finally made its way all the way down to Texas that slavery was no longer the law of the land…
It was on June 19th1865 that Union soldiers finally arrived at Galveston, Texas with news that the Civil War had ended and that enslaved Africans in the region were free…
This was a full two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which had little impact on Texas because there were no Union troops in the area to enforce the measure until the 1865 surrender of the Confederacy…
Yep, black folks down there got the word real late…
So it could be said, Sybil, that Juneteenth is the only holiday that officially celebrates CP time…
Better late than never, right…?
But I want to put something in perspective today… Think about this for a moment…
Way back in the 19th Century –before Juneteenth– down in Texas, people of color were stopped when traveling away from the plantation and told to produce their papers showing that they’d been given permission to move about…
Even if they had the correct papers, they were commonly harassed by authorities…
Sadly, here in the year 2010 –in so-called ‘post racial America’– the state of Texas is currently considering following Arizona’s lead and introducing legislation to allow Texas authorities to once again, stop, potentially harass, and ask people of color for their papers…
Talk about back to the future, Jay…
…and speaking of going back, Tom, as I said before those of us who think these disturbing legal measures don’t pertain to us as black folks best think again…
First off, a substantial number of Latinos are black… the term Latino does not refer to a racial category… Latinos, of course, can be both black and white and a whole lot are black…
Second, when has racial profiling not affected us? How many of you really believe that cops with bad intentions are going to try and decipher a difference between black and brown before demanding our papers or harassing us…?
And, most importantly, why would anyone feel it is actually okay to legalize –a century and a half after the end of slavery—a process by which people of color on the streets of our nation could be stopped and asked for their papers…???
Please, stop the madness… No matter how you feel about immigration, this is definitely not the right answer… In fact, it is a serious threat to all Americans and our civil liberties…
So as we celebrate the spirit of Juneteenth and the belated emancipation of those deep in the South 145 years ago, let’s make sure we are not guilty today as people of color of throwing ourselves back to a time where folks could stop us and ask us for our papers…
Because the line between freedom and security is about as thin as the line between black and brown…
Paper thin…
You can go to the website of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights at “http://www.civilrights.org” and find out more about promoting a more equitable policy of immigration reform for our nation.
And this weekend, as you pay tribute to the concept of freedom, keep this World War II-era quote attributed to a German pastor in mind:
“THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. THEN THEY CAME for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. THEN THEY CAME for me, and, by that time, no one was left to speak up.”
Until Next Time, this is Stephanie in Love and Hope.
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