Teresa:
"I completely agree on the meritocracy angle. The fear isn't that immigrants will be lazy underachievers who just want to mooch off our social services. It's that they'll work harder, for longer hours, for less pay. Down the road a ways they'll be forming their own old-boys networks, giving each other their business and hot tips, instead of humbly petitioning members of the xenophobes' own old-boy networks to hire them on the cheap."
One point to remember: Within US continental borders, blacks are the permanent strangers, even through their ancestral ties to this country can match those of a DAR.
If there is any noticeable anti-immigrant bias among blacks, even toward those of African-continental descent, is it because blacks have been continually suppressed in forming old-boy networks that aren't broken apart by covenants and lynching, during Jim Crow days, and the movement of vice into their communities, either by zoning or collusion.
This theory, of course, does not explain how middle-class blacks allow themselves the luxury of hating immigrants -- perhaps it is because of the centuries' long frustration with seeing every other immigrant group be told that the way it will assimilate is to understand and maintain the inferior status blacks have culturally, in the precincts of American power that matter.
Perhaps it is the unspoken truth that any old-boy network is just a more polite version of organized crime -- back-door negotiations, kickbacks, recommendations divorced from meritocratic standards, influence-peddling with authorities, all done in homes and clubs, with fewer bullets than those networks that start out earning profit through vice alone. From English to Irish to Jewish to Italian to Colombian to Korean to Russian networks, sooner or later the vice-connected aspects peeled off into their own thing, and the people who profited from them either went to jail, to the grave, or to the bank, to invest their ill-gotten gains into their kids' college funds. Police throughout most of this country's history never got reprimanded for beating up a black person, or for destroying his property -- that constant oppression made sustaining fortunes over generations very, very hard.
That means, in the game of immigration/nativist hatred, we shouldn't hate the players -- we should hate those who rig the game in the first place, and those who make the profits from those they hate enough to exploit.
Mishalak: Negro, *please*.
Denver is the thin veneer over a Front Range of grandchildren of Klu-Kluxing, gay-purging (are you proud of Sen. Allard *introducing* the gay marriage amendment in Congress?), gas-guzzling, double-talking conservatives that only tolerate progressives and minorities because they bring in, yes, the better cooking and culture.
These are people who still kinda forget that blacks and hispanics made up a lot of the cowboy force on the plains; that gold and greed made the city work within an oligarchy of families until very recently (Mayor McNichols, anyone?); and that even though Denver wasn't the South, blacks and hispanics were considered The Help within my relatively short lifetime.
And before you tell me to moderate my remarks, get inside my head and tell me how I should feel when a woman just barely within retirement age lectures the entire Safeway checkout line on how Corky Gonzales, Cesar Chavez and those damn Mexicans were nothing but a bunch of Communists, reporting directly to Fidel, which she did shortly after the MayDay walkouts. Then tell me how I avoided punching her, or at least telling her it was an insult to mention the illegality of collective action to a checkout cashier affiliated with one of the few unions in this area to threaten and carry out a strike, when negotiations were getting dicey. This man had a job with some security, because working people of all colors stuck their neck out.... tell me how I avoided violence, cause I don't know how I managed it....
I love Denver, but see it aright, OK?
Cheezit -- if we didn't have immigrants come by regularly to the States, we'd be eating snackfoods and industrial waste.
Oh, we do, already. But still, different pairs of eyes (with different recipes and seeds from home) stop this country from wilting as a monoculture.
The TeeVee folx turn out great AFD stuff, every year.
The 24 article is to die for.
I think I stopped at buying six, just because I'm waiting for warmer weather to wear them without coats. Completely satisfied with indiashop1, reasonably satisfied with other merchants (tunic lining makes a difference). When on a cruise, the first salwar kameez completely ruled; able to deal with ocean breezes and air conditioning, but roomy enough to do a forward roll in. (Don't ask...)
My salwar kameez came yesterday, and it is devoon. Exact fit, wonderful fabrics, faster shipment than I get from a US mail order firm (8 days!), way cheaper and better than some tacky dress from Lane Bryant. Will buy another once I see a fabric I like.
Indiashop1 rocks.
Go. Try!
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