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About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 9, 2015)
September 9, 2015 Page 7 O PINION Opinion articles do not necessarily represent the views of the Portland Observer. We welcome reader essays, photos and story ideas. Submit to news@portlandobserver.com. To my African-American Brothers and Sisters A love letter, I’ve long owed you R ONAULT LS C ATALINI (P OLO ) Salaam suadara saudara hitam manis (Peace, dear black sisters and brothers). This is the love letter I’ve long owed you. Long owed, because we’re living next to each other, sweating a workplace together, determinedly dreaming a kinder America for our children – but no one’s properly introduced us. Not the way our grandmas, yours and mine, always said good people do. I am a New American. And I’m pleased to meet you. Thank you African America, for having us in your neighborhood. Scholars call us “international migrants.” Evening news is full of our families’ desperation. Diplo- mats and lawyers argue endlessly over whether we’re refugees, or not. Politicians abbreviate our sor- row, and devaluate our ambition, by calling us “immigrants” – an unmentionable word, until some- RQH HOVH EULQJV LW RU XV XS ¿UVW Usually not in a nice way. This love letter is so late in ar- riving, because we arrive in your BY neighborhood shaken, badly. So- cial scientists say we suffer from profound dislocation, or traumatic discontinuities. Or both. Leaving cozy homes and ancestral home- lands, hurts. Killed or dis- appeared loved ones, hurts even more. We know, dear neighbors, that this your history too. And then trying to get inside America’s acceler- ated mainstream, hurts. We are humbled by your pain, by your elders’ and \RXUDQFHVWRUV¶SDLQ)URP-DPHV- town to Memphis to Ferguson. 400 years of pain. Early mornings, our working parents dash to catch their two- hour bus rides, while our elders rush to dress well their bright grandbabies, an expression of respect for their beloved teach- ers. We haste because we know our immigrant optimism will run out. Six to ten years we have, to integrate into America’s main- stream. Then we disintegrate culturally. First individually then communally. Then we’re done. Many of us bright and bold HQRXJK WR ÀHH RXU IDLOHG VWDWHV don’t do so well in super-accel- erated urban America. I mean no disrespect to that kind and creative America loved by ev- eryone, everywhere. Our elders still weep about the respect Yank soldier-boys gave our wives, sisters, and daughters – after free- ing us from Imperial -DSDQ¶V RFFXSDWLRQ army. Everyone still smiles about the thick Hershey bars they gave our kids. But because this is a love letter just between brown and black folks, asking to lay an honest foundation for our nascent UHODWLRQVKLS±OHWPHWHOO\RX8S close, many American institu- tions feel really heartless to us. Really loveless. To be clear, I’m talking about this nation’s educa- WLRQDO ¿QDQFLDO VRFLDO DQG ODZ enforcement, machinery – not about our tired neighbors, not our over-worked bus drivers or school teachers. This heartless machinery is bad, dear Black America, because in the absence of a deliberate re- lationship built on our agreements and differences, on our shared joys and sorrows, you and me will daily acquiesce to institutional- ly-conditioned narratives about each other. Clichés incapable of carrying your or our cultural com- plexity, our simple sincerity. These institutions are tough. After 150 years – after Presidents /LQFROQDQG-RKQVRQDQG2EDPD trying – the United States has still not integrated its black and white streams into a shared main- stream. Not even here, on the rich intersection of Rivers Willamette and Columbia. Here, so near our 3DFL¿F¶V JUDQG FORFNZLVH VZHHS of energetic commerce, ambi- tious peoples, and new ideas. You and me asking these staid institutions to do a better job of integrating our black and brown ethnic streams, is only asking for more heartbreak. The neighborhood and work ÀRRU UHODWLRQVKLSV QHFHVVDU\ IRU you and me to circumvent these systems don’t exist, yet. Not here. In fact, the opposite is true. New Americans quickly back away from black and white America’s living history. From a bitterness so rutted into this otherwise blessed continent’s face, that not D ORW RI$UDEV RU$VLDQV 3DFL¿F or Caribbean islanders, Spanish- or Russian-speakers, dare get near its edge. Cuts dark as Mar- tian canals. Scars clearly visible from space. I wish, suadara saudara hitam manis (dear black brothers and sisters) that our love affair were less rushed. But there’s a tecton- ic demographic shift rocking our shared continent. And given New America’s numbers and our am- bitions, we fear those staid sys- tems will simply squander even more treasury and more misery to contain our school kids, our workers, our voters, our prayers. We best start now, blending dreamers brought from our world- over, with African America’s sol- id moral authority. We will ask your enslaved ancestors to bless us with their dignity. We will ask your civil rights elders to include us in their Sunday mornings. We dream this might liberate all that American kindness and creativity sequestered somewhere deep in- side this grand continent. Please let us know your thoughts. Please let us get to work. Love, your new neighbor Ronault LS Catalani (Polo) is a longtime Portland activist and community lawyer. 6KRXOGHUWR6KRXOGHURQ5DFLDO-XVWLFHDQG:RUNHU5LJKWV Our victories won and yet to be won BY I SAIAH J. P OOLE Rick Smith hosts a daily radio talk show based in Car- lisle, Penn., which bills itself as the place “where working peo- ple come to talk.” Smith makes it his business to know the pulse of the labor move- ment. But he admits to one area where his knowledge was un- FRPIRUWDEO\ WKLQ WKH WLHV EH- tween the labor and civil rights movements. “My knowledge of the civil rights era was extremely lim- ited,” he said in a recent inter- view. “Basically Lincoln freed the slaves, Rosa Parks was tired, and Martin Luther King made it all better.” With both income inequality and racial inequities taking cen- ter stage in the political debate this year, Smith decided to use this summer to take his show on the road to learn about the histor- ic intersections of the civil rights and worker rights struggles. His “People’s Tour” took him through key battlegrounds in the South where civil rights and labor leaders stood shoulder to shoulder — through North and South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. In time for Labor Day, he posted the interviews online at TheRickSmithShow.com. To- gether they offer a rich audio library of victories won and yet to be won. ³:H OHDUQHG DERXW -DPHV 2U- DQJH)UHG6KXWWOHVZRUWK-DPHV Bevel, Ralph Abernathy, and many other” key black lead- ers from the 1960s, Smith said. “But also the support of Walter 5HXWKHU DQG -DPHV 5 +RIID´ white union leaders who played a key role in linking their move- ments to civil rights. One leg of Smith’s tour took him to the Rosa Parks Museum at Troy University in Montgom- ery, Ala. “The story of Rosa Parks is a perfect example of the labor and civil rights movements working together,” Smith explains, re- calling Parks’ training in work- er organizing at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. “The training she received led to her being the face of desegregating the bus system in Montgomery.” Smith says a high point of the tour was his time talking with the workers from the 1969 Medical College Hospital strike in Charles- ton, S.C. That strike began when a group of African-American nurses VWDJHGDVLWLQDWWKHRI¿FHRIWKH hospital’s president and were sub- VHTXHQWO\¿UHG King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, participated in the strike, drawing national attention. The action furthered the work King himself was doing with Memphis sanitation laborers and the Amer- ican Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees when he was assassinated in 1968. “Hearing their stories rein- forced my belief that it is real- ly all about community,” Smith said. “That strike had a little bit of everything. The prior two years of organizing by workers after six workers were unjustly ¿UHGWKHFRPLQJWRJHWKHURIWKH community after the strike be- gan.” The history of the labor move- PHQWLVDOVR¿OOHGZLWKQXPHURXV points of tension with the move- ment for racial justice, ranging from the battles against racial discrimination in the steel indus- try after World War II to today’s face-offs between police unions and Black Lives Matter activists over shootings of unarmed black people. Smith, who says he grew up in the projects in Cleveland, doesn’t dismiss those tensions. But he’s hoping workers across racial lines will focus on the sto- ries of successful collaborations that led to societal change. “In every city we visited, and with every story we heard, the call for equality, justice, fair- ness, dignity, and respect did not have a white face or a black face or a brown face,” he said. “It was the face of working people try- ing to live the American promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Isaiah J. Poole is the online communications director at Campaign for America’s Future. Distributed by OtherWords.org. The Law Offices of Patrick John Sweeney, P.C. Patrick John Sweeney Attorney at Law 1549 SE Ladd, Portland, Oregon Portland: Hillsoboro: Facsimile: (503) 244-2080 (503) 244-2081 (503) 244-2084 Email: Sweeney@PDXLawyer.com
