In a fine diary called Into The Arms Of America supersoling describes his/her experiences and thoughts regarding the criminal difference between how the U.S. treats Haitian and Cuban refugees.
This diary got me to thinking, and I started a comment.
The comment grew and grew, and now it is a diary. The problem is INFINITELY larger than Haitians and Cubans.
Read on if you are interested.
Supersoling writes:
The REAL question here is how “we”…that is white, Western European-descended America…have EVER lived with ourselves.
We make a distinction between economic and political reasons for the desire (and indeed the survival-based necessity in most cases) to emigrate?
What BULLSHIT! Without the broadly accepted implicitly racist policies of America and its European forebears for 400+ years there would be no political or economic necessities FOR immigration. Certainly not the ones that exist today, for sure.
In one of his missives to the so-called free world, Osama bin Laden asks the magic question “By what measure of kindness are your killed considered innocents while ours are considered worthless? By what school [of thought] is your blood considered blood while our blood is water?”
Let us ask a further question.
Where is it written that the natural resources of the lands from which our millions of immigrants have escaped are insufficient to support their native populations? INCLUDING the massive immigrations of Celts and Italians at the end of the 19th century.
And the answer is that it is written in the implicit contract of racially based imperialism upon which the world dominance of Western European society has been based since the 1400s if not before.
How we can live with ourselves?
The real question is one that asks how or why anyone else can or would want to “live with us.”
Racism is America’s Original Sin.
The one that really dare not speak its name. Not its full name, anyway.
As in Niggerkikespicwopmickgookchinkjapragheadhunkyhonkywog.
With a further and equally criminal subdivision called BitchWhore.
And until it is fully expiated…and I mean fully, as in the universal and unremarkable recognition that indeed all men and women ARE born equal in terms of innate possibility across and throughout all races AND THE UNIVERSAL, REAL-TIME SOCIAL RECOGNITION OF SAID CONCEPT INCLUDING THE AVAILABILITY OF EQUAL HOUSING, EMPLOYMENT AND EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALL…until that happens (And I do not presently see even the REMOTEST of possibilities that something like that is in the works here. Precisely the opposite, truth be told. We are going BACKWARDS.), then all the rest of what we say and do is the sheerest bullshit.
There is a “Cuban lobby”? But no Haitian lobby?
Not QUITE true, supersoling.
I have been more than peripherally involved in so-called “Cuban” societies in the United States as an Afro-Cuban musician for nearly 40 years now, and the fact of the matter is that there is a WHITE Cuban lobby, a WHITE Cuban political and economic power base in this country that is totally regressive and almost as totally racist as any OTHER power base here. (“Racist” given the relatively more extensive sexual race mixing that went on in Cuba and indeed in the entire Spanish Empire than in ANY other European imperial system. Why? How? Damned if I know. Must be the legacy of the African conquerers of Spain. The general concept of “If you white, you alright. If you brown, stick aroun’. And if you black, step back.” exists in Cuban-American society just as it does in the REST of America. It’s just a little tanner and there’s a little more curl in its hair.)
Black Cubans? Again, the majority in that country, truth be told?
Nope.
Every time I am called to play a gig for some middle-class group of anti-Fidel Cubans…gigs that I literally cannot turn down any more than I can generally turn down the ones for racist pigs anywhere ELSE in this country be they Jews or Italians or Anglos or any OTHER subdivision of God’s apparently humorous attempt at creating humanity because if I did I would very simply soon be almost totally out of work…I am amazed to find that it is a 95% WHITE group of Cubans.
Duh.
And yet almost all of the Cuban MUSICIANS from whom I have learned how to play either directly or on record …people like Mongo Santamaria, Patato, Arsenio Rodriguez, Mario Bauza, Celia Cruz. Pedro Knight, Graciela, Cachao and Machito…are visibly AFRICAN in ascent. So once again, the workers, the creators are a racial minority and/or mix and the USERS are, once again as well, equally visibly Northern European.
OR, of course you can subscribe to the theory that “Them kneegrows SHO’ CAN SING AN’ DANCE, cain’t they, Mabel?”
Hmmmmmmmm…
America.
Love it or leave it.
So we stay.
Because going BACK to the raped lands of our forefathers is more often than not an almost total impossibility.
I will never forget my first bus trip through Mexico about 8 years ago.
Never EVER. I was traveling with a NYC-based latin band, and I must tell you, in all the years that I have been traveling this great earth I have NEVER seen such a depraved use of the land and its people. It would be a whole diary to tell you of my various adventures during that several weeks of touring, but I will describe one experience as a sort of précis of the others.
As we entered the area southeast of Guadalajara one late afternoon/early evening I was awakened from a sound sleep by this terrible stench. I opened my eyes to see a cloud of smog unlike anything that I have ever seen anywhere on earth.,..and this is from someone who lived in fucking Pittsburgh as a kid before they cleaned up/closed down the steel mills. It was a smell unlike anything in my memory. A combination of diesel emissions, industrial waste, rotted food and pure animal waste, and it had SUBSTANCE. You could FEEL it. It hugged the ground and made the sky dim with its particulate content, and it went on and on and on and on and on. A picture of olfactory hell in which several million people lived, breathed and went about their daily business. I will never, EVER forget that moment. I had walked down streets filled with open air butcher shops and fly-covered meats that stunk of rot in three continents before. I had seen the stunted trees and people of Bogota in their low oxygen/diesel fumed hell, and I had walked the streets of South American slums literally hundreds of times.
But THIS?
This was beyond forgiveness.
And THIS is why people flee their ancestral homelands.
Because they have been rendered literally unlivable by our export of the poisons that are necessary for our continued consumption of McDonalds burgers, jet plane contrails and SUV fuel.
An export the chickens of which are, just as Malcolm X said they would, coming home to roost in the form of global warming from which there will BE no emigration.
For ANY of us.
Our Original Sin is going to send us straight to hell if we do not do something about it.
Now.
Today.
And we are NOT doing anything about it.
Neither Republicans NOR Democrats.
Not really.
Need I say more?
I think not.
Ask not for whom the sky darkens.
It darkens for thee.
And let he who is without Original Sin throw the first stone.
Later…
AG