Esteban Cardemil

The past few weeks has seen considerable attention to the issue of immigration reform, although much of it from a political angle. The emphasis has tended to be on the risks/gains to the Republican party if they cooperate with the Democrats on immigration reform. The primary risk of cooperation seems to be alienating the very conservative (tea-party) constituents who are against most of the immigration proposals, while the risk of scuttling any reform seems to be consigning the “Latino vote” to the Democratic Party forever more. Esther Cepeda, writing in the Washington Post, highlights the problems inherent in a political calculus of immigration reform that depends on unexamined assumptions of attitudes and voting patterns of Latinos. She highlights the variability in Latino attitudes, noting that less than 60% of Latinos believe that undocumented residents should be given a path to citizenship.

While the media’s focus on the political calculus is understandable, it is disappointing that more attention has not been given to the substantive implications of the different approaches. CNN recently published an interesting article examining immigration reform from the perspective of three different families. A common theme among the three stories was the pain of separation of families resulting from the immigration process. Humanizing the immigration experience is critical for allies of immigration reform, because it fights back against the stereotype held by many of undocumented workers as lazy, non-tax paying, welfare receiving leeches on society. Moreover, humanizing the immigration experience helps bring into stark awareness the logistical impossibilities of deporting 11 million individuals, many of whom have children who were born in the U.S. and so are U.S. citizens. if you begin from the standpoint that this is an impossibility, then the next step is to acknowledge that doing nothing is unacceptable. It is hard to believe that any but the most vocally anti-immigration would feel good about living in a country that prevents certain residents from receiving fundamental social services (e.g., health, education). These are fundamental civil (and indeed human) rights, and as a country, we should work hard to ensure that we can be proud of our policies.

Issues of race have been in the news quite a lot recently, as the media have been closely following the George Zimmerman trial (Trayvon Martin), as well as the fallout from celebrity chef Paula Deen’s revelation that she used the n-word at some point in her past. One racial element that appears in both stories is the use of racial language (i.e., n-word, cracker) and questions about who, when, and how the use of these words determines the extent to which they are offensive.

Kathleen Parker, writing for the Washington Post, makes the case that there are differences among these words, and that the historical legacies of society and language must be taken into consideration when evaluating how offensive particular words may be. She says:

For those needing a refresher course, here are just a few reasons why cracker doesn’t compare to the N-word. Cracker has never been used routinely to:

●Deny a white person a seat at a lunch counter.
●Systematically deny whites the right to vote.
●Deny a white person a seat near the front of a bus.
●Crack the skulls of peaceful white protesters marching for equality.
●Blow up a church and kill four little white girls.

Need more? Didn’t think so.

Cracker may be a pejorative in some circles. It may even be used to insult a white person. But it clearly lacks the grievous, historical freight of the other.

The point that Ms. Parker is making has to do with power and the way that power is unequally distributed in society. It is this power, as Beverly Tatum so eloquently noted, that differentiates among:

• Individual racial prejudice, whereby individuals harbor biased attitudes towards others based on their membership in a particular racial or ethnic groups
• Discrimination, whereby individuals or institutions engage in biased behavior towards others based on their membership in a particular racial or ethnic groups
• Racism, whereby individuals or institutions benefit from society’s inequities based on race and ethnicity and use these benefits and power to maintain these inequities in society

Thus, although there is always a lot of anguished soul-searching about whether someone is racist based upon one comment, more useful questions might be whether this person was prejudiced or discriminatory. Tatum makes the provocative claim that everyone who benefits from society’s racial inequities is therefore racist, and so  it is not really that useful to try to focus on particular individuals. Rather, we should be focusing on the institutions and society.