Communities of color seek common ground
BY AJAY SINGH
Today Staff Writer
As an African American — the first to ever write a weekly op-ed column in the Los Angeles Times — Erin Aubrey Kaplan has mixed feelings about one of today’s hot-button issues: immigration.
For one thing, Kaplan told a forum on campus June 8, the debate nearly always seems to focus on Latinos. “Blacks feel left out of the dialogue.” And although it’s important for both minority groups to build coalitions aimed at jointly redressing their grievances, “we also have to confront our different histories” and the fact that “blacks are being displaced,” she said, referring to a general sense that African Americans are losing their political and economic clout to Latinos.
Kaplan joined local activists and scholars in a symposium at Dodd Hall. Titled “Finding Common Ground: Communities of Color and Immigration in Los Angeles,” the event was co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics and the UCLA Yatra Collective, a group of mostly South Asian academics and activists.
As the issue of immigration continues to heighten tensions nationwide, the question of where communities of color stand on the issue has been raised.
Historically, immigration has revolved around the question of “who’s darker and who’s lighter,” said Karin Wang, vice president of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California. “The browner you are, the more likely you are to have your liberties taken away.”
The immigration debate leaves out Asians, too, Wang pointed out, because of their history. They were “explicitly excluded from official immigration policies” until the 1960s. That’s partly why “it’s a real struggle for us to come together and to agree on a common program,” she said. “People don’t understand how an Indian or a Chinese has a connection with African Americans and Latinos.”
The negative aspects of immigration obscure some important realities, especially in Los Angeles. “Many parts of L.A. are a multicultural mirror of transformations going on around the world,” observed Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda, associate professor of Chicano/a studies and the César E. Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction. According to a United Nations study, more than 200 million people live outside their homelands, and their economic contributions of more than $2.1 trillion annually make them the world’s third-largest economy.
But immigrants are often victims of xenophobia and racial prejudice. “There are enough divisions in society to make a salad bowl,” said Hamid Khan, a Pakistani immigrant who heads the South Asian Network (SAN). “We have to be careful not to get caught up in it.”
When four Caucasians were convicted in 1998 of a hate crime against three Indians and two Pakistanis in the L.A. suburb of Artesia, the assailants — three were under the age of 18 — were ordered to do community service.
To the judge’s surprise, Khan proposed they work at SAN. “The idea was to humanize the situation and make people connect with each other,” he said.
|
