Proposition 187 : Is Black-Latino Friction a Voting-Booth Issue? : Yes: The initiative is horrible legislation, but it’s still a focal point for legitimate African American resentments.

Is Proposition 187 being used as a campaign ploy? Absolutely! Should it be defeated? Absolutely! Will large numbers of African Americans vote for it, helping ensure its passage? Absolutely!

Why? Because the opponents of the ballot measure, including the 70,000 protesters who marched a week ago down streets named after Mexicans prominent in Los Angeles history, have ignored long-running tensions between the black and Latino communities. There is fighting in the high schools and prisons, a tenuous gang truce in Venice, a power struggle in Compton. Each of these problems has strained relations between two groups scrambling for the crumbs. Many black people don’t care that Proposition 187 is being financed by racist organizations and that minorities are being pitted against one another. If the initiative creates a McCarthyite police state, the attitude is, “So be it”.

Latino community leaders cannot have it both ways. They cannot expect the African American community to embrace their struggle while they disrespect ours. When studies came out about the lack of Latinos on television and in the news, many of the people interviewed focused more on the number of blacks on the air rather than the bigger problem of who holds the real positions of power. When accusations were made of Latino underrepresentation in U.S. Postal Service hiring, blacks were the focus of the attention, not the federal government. Attempts to rename Martin Luther King Hospital also was another example where Latinos have pitted themselves against African Americans. Now comes Proposition 187 and blacks are being told that they must join with their minority brothers to fight racism? For many, that’s a big pill to swallow.

While it must be conceded that Ronald Reagan’s voodoo economics is the true suspect responsible for tearing the social safety net apart, as Mexican author Carlos Fuentes correctly pointed out, this is a labor problem. Forty percent of African-American youth are unemployed. When the assertion is made that illegal immigrants do the jobs others wouldn’t do in the first place, the black community is offended. The fact is, when you look at large metropolitan cities around the country, it is black women who are doing the cleaning, or working for minuscule factory wages. It is the black man who is slinging the food, shining the shoes and selling the peanuts.

Many say Proposition 187 is not against illegals, it’s against children. For African Americans, their children are the driving force behind their support of the proposition. Joe Hicks, Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Los Angeles, recently discussed the initiative at an NAACP meeting. In articulating his reasons for joining other prominent African American leaders who are against 187, he spoke on how this immigration hysteria is really premised on bigotry, racism and scape-goating. But is it in fact hysteria, or like the march, a social movement to bring resolution to a deeper problem?

The Latino community wants to have their cake and eat it, too, and black people aren’t having it. Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina cannot accuse fellow Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke of being racist for trying to resolve the problem of day laborers, then ask Burke’s constituents to join hands with her and sing “Kumbaya” against Proposition 187. The $15 billion in federal aid this state receives due to the presence of illegal immigrants is still taxpayer money. And for those who insist on comparing African Americans with illegal immigrants, that only serves to further alienate potential allies.

I will be voting no on Proposition 187 because it truly is not the solution to the problems associated with immigration.

But unless opponents of the measure offer other African Americans more than what they’ve come up with, unless they deal with the issues tearing us apart, I will be in the minority, my place of origin.