September 9, 2015
Page 7
O PINION
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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-
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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
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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
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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
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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
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close, many American institu-
tions feel really heartless to us.
Really loveless. To be clear, I’m
talking about this nation’s educa-
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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-
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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.
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Bevel, Ralph Abernathy, and
many other” key black lead-
ers from the 1960s, Smith said.
“But also the support of Walter
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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
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hospital’s president and were sub-
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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
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community after the strike be-
gan.”
The history of the labor move-
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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
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