Fear of a Brown Planet, Part Dos

Reading my city’s homicide blog has become a guilty pleasure for me, like collecting Coach bags and surfing for Internet porn. The listings, compiled weekly from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, are classified according to race and method of murder. Occasionally, the blog provides a snapshot of the victim’s life so as not to reduce him or her to just another faceless statistic. While I sympathize with the families of the departed, I still feel like a Peeping Tom gazing into other people’s pain.

I came across an entry a few days ago that shattered the window of my cyber voyeurism: the murder of 17-year-old Jamiel Shaw. Shaw was a high school MVP who was wooed by Stanford and Rutgers mere days before his death. His story had all the elements of an urban tragedy: a promising football star shot down right before he made it out of the hood, a killing that occurred three doors from his house, a mother on her second tour of duty in Iraq returning home to bury her son. Yet, one detail of this horrific crime infuriated me more than any other: Shaw’s assailants were Hispanic.

It’s hypocritical of me to ruminate on the interracial aspect of this murder because statistics show that 90 percent of black victims are killed by fellow blacks. Would I be as angry if Shaw were a garden-variety gangbanger caught in a hail of Crips gunfire, or if he were a Latino honor student ambushed by black thugs? Sadly, I wouldn’t. Maybe I have bought into the media hype of “ethnic cleansing" in Los Angeles, from the senseless killing of 14-year-old Cheryl Green — a black eighth grader who was gunned down by Hispanic gang members as she played with her friends — to Latino gangs like Florencia 13 and the Avenues who were involved in several high-profile racially motivated homicides. When I’m driving through certain areas of L.A. lined with bodegas y laundromats, I have an illogical fear of being targeted for my skin color. Sometimes I feel like the proverbial white woman who clutches her purse as a black guy walks past her on the sidewalk.

Maybe I’m guilty of racial fealty. Maybe I privilege the preservation and superiority of my own tribe above all others, and Shaw’s death — the good black kid on the road to success — deducts points from the ethnic scoreboard. Maybe I’ve allowed myself to get caught up in a wave of anti-Hispanic hysteria, which pushes the narrative that Latinos are hostile to African-Americans, won’t vote for a black presidential candidate and are taking all the good jobs.

Whatever the case, I've allowed my emotions to get the best of me. Right after I read about the running back’s violent death, I fired off an e-mail to Antonio Villaraigosa, the Latino mayor of Los Angeles. The angry missive began by accusing him of stumping across the country for Hillary Clinton to drum up Hispanic support for her campaign while black-and-brown conflict was escalating in his own backyard, and ended with the assumption that if a rash of black-on-brown crime occurred in Los Angeles, he’d be holding bilingual press conferences weekly. The e-mail was vitriolic, racist and a bit premature. As I sheepishly noted hours after hitting the send button, Mayor Villaraigosa attended a candlelight vigil for Shaw and said his murder may be prosecuted as a hate crime.

I don’t want to become that angry black chick with fears of a brown planet. I don't want to be that dysfunctional diva who panics at the sight of every newly erected bilingual billboard, who reduces every Hispanic – regardless of country of origin – to Mexican, who contemplates calling the cops on the homeowners across the street for blasting merengue from an ancient radio on their back porch, but who tolerates the deafening bass of My Chemical Romance emanating from the apartment of the college students next door, who fears driving south of Wilshire or east of Vermont, and who allows self-imposed perimeters to not only block out “aliens,” but to fence herself in.

Even in the midst of his anguish, Jamiel Shaw Sr. didn’t view his son as the casualty of a brewing race war. "I don't see it as black and brown," he said during an interview. "I see it as a gang problem."

I could take some notes from the elder Shaw and examine my own prejudices. Instead of viewing every injustice through a brown-and-black lens, I need to determine what I can do to promote tolerance and healing.

As of this writing, the homicide blog is featuring a snapshot of Antwan Cole, a 19-year-old black male who “loved people” and “was going places.” The former football player, who had dreams of becoming a sports commentator, was shot at a bus stop after his evening shift. Instead of scanning the ten or eleven paragraphs of his memorial to see if his assailants were Spanish-speaking, I can honor Cole’s life — as well as Shaw’s — by focusing on his legacy.

To donate to the Foundation for Jamiel Shaw II, contact the USC Federal Credit Union, University Park Campus, 1025 W 34th Street, King Hall, 2nd Floor MC 2280, Los Angeles, CA 90089. Phone: (213) 821-7100 and fax: (213) 821-7151.

If you have any information regarding the murder of Jamiel A. Shaw II, please contact the Los Angeles Police Department. The toll-free number is (877) LAWFULL. A reward is being offered.

Fear of a Brown Planet:
Blacks and Immigration Reform

“I’ve been wonderin’ why
People livin’ in fear
Of my shade (Or my hi-top fade)
I’m not the one that’s runnin’
But they got me on the run
Treat me like I have a gun
All I got is genes and chromosomes
Consider me Black to the bone…”

- Public Enemy
“Fear of a Black Planet”

When Chuck D. rapped the above lyrics with his trademark fist-in-the-air inflection, he was not only affirming his blackness, but also rhythmically rebelling against police brutality, racism and the disenfranchisement of African-Americans. It was 1990. The socially conscious hip-hop movement boldly ushered in a brand of nationalism that appealed to young blacks who otherwise felt powerless. It was hip to be as visible as an Afro pick and just as defiant. Red, black and green medallions abounded, sentences were peppered with Malcolm X rhetoric, and tee shirts gleefully proclaimed, “It’s a Black Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand!” The revolution thrived on the majority culture’s perceived fear of empowered minorities, and it declared to the world that blacks were on the come-up and would no longer be marginalized.

The recent Latino-led protests over immigration reform are tinged with the same bravado of that hip-hop movement. Mexican flags and culturally conscious tees like “I’m in my homeland” and “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us” at the marches signify that brown folks are no longer trying to get in where they fit in. Like blacks, they are affirming their identity and broadcasting their disenchantment with a society that seeks to criminalize and dehumanize them.

So, I wonder why as an African American, a member of a fellow oppressed group, I don’t feel solidarity with the struggle of mi hermanos and hermanas. I try to pinpoint the emotion I feel when faced with the televised spirit of la raza, the sea of chanting, protesting, marching, Latinos.

I’m ashamed to admit that it is fear.

I wrestle with this because it’s not like I’m some xenophobic, ultra-conservative, border-patrol fanatic. I consider myself conscious (semi, some would say), have friends of all races, have dated Mexicans and know that the struggle for human rights is not “their” struggle, but our struggle. And yet, I can’t shake this feeling of uneasiness when I see Latino students leaping over schoolyard fences to join protests and watch brown crowds shutting down traffic on the 110 freeway.

Sadly enough, I’m not alone. An observant blogger at slate.com mused over the lack of black faces at the 500,000-strong protest in Los Angeles, and also the silence of black leaders on immigration reform. Author and political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson explores this growing sentiment (resentment?) in his three-part article “Why So Many Blacks Fear Illegal Immigrants.” In the piece, Mr. Hutchinson observes that black frustration with immigration is nothing new. In 1994, nearly fifty percent of African Americans backed Proposition 187, a measure that denied public services to undocumented immigrants. He also points out that in California, Blacks have significantly supported anti-bilingual ballot measures.

Is it that we fear competition, and these political moves are our way of keeping Latinos in their “place”? I don’t belong to that frustrated black chorus accusing illegal immigrants of taking “our jobs.” By and large, Hakeem is not cleaning toilets, washing cars, slaving over a stove or engaged in other menial tasks. Hector is. Besides, many of the posts I’ve been reading in support of tightening our borders are from middle- to upper-class blacks who are liberal in their politics. It’s distressing to admit that we can be just as biased and intolerant as the majority culture can be.

I wonder if rising black-and-brown tension over immigration reform is simply masking an unspoken, perceived threat of African-Americans being supplanted as the “default” minority in America? After all, statistics remind us that Latinos now outnumber blacks in this country. Advertisers are going after their dollars, politicians are going after their votes and the entertainment industry is capitalizing on their culture. Do we hesitate to link arms with our Spanish-speaking brothers and sisters and sing “We Shall Overcome” for fear of contributing to the “Latinoization” of America? Do we fear that it will no longer be a black thing, but a brown thing – from hip-hop to ‘hood films to Capitol Hill?

These are difficult questions, and I don’t have any easy or quippy answers. What I do know is this: As members of historically-disadvantaged groups, Latinos and blacks can each relate to feelings of displacement and an outside fear of our respective cultures. As much as we scorn the American nightmare, we're all hustling to achieve the American dream. We want better lives for our families, better jobs, and an acknowledgement of our individual contributions to this country. Border control should start with eradicating la linea that separates us.

In “Fear of a Black Planet,” Chuck D. also raps: All I want is peace and love/On this planet/(Ain't that how God planned it?) This admission almost seems like a non-sequiter considering the defiance and separatism inferred from the previous verses. And that’s really a metaphor for the dialogue on anti-illegal alien legislation going on in the black community. As compassionate, conscious folk, I really believe that we seek to build bridges with other minorities, and yet we still want to maintain our identity and nationalism in this patchwork quilt that is America. I wonder if we will ever get to a point in the discussion where it’s not a black thing or a brown thing, just an us thing? Now that would be revolutionary.