 Thank you for showing up. I'm going to talk today a little bit about our history of immigration in this country and tie it into a discussion of where we are currently. But I want to start, those of you who have seen me do presentations before know that I like to ad-lib a lot. And I just kind of like to, you know, whatever's on the top of my head and go from there. But because of what we're observing this week and because of the importance of this, I did actually write some stuff down for once. If you like my tangents, I will probably wander off on one of those shortly. But I just want to start with some prepared comments because I think for the place that we're at in American history today, they are necessary. And as we're celebrating the life and legacy of Dr. King, it's really important to remember that for many of us, these are actually really dark times. Since the election in 2016, things have changed pretty drastically in America. We've seen a resurgence of white supremacy, of nativism and hatred in this country that threatens not only the accomplishments of Dr. King, but also our very identity as a nation. We tend to pride ourselves on being a melting pot, on being a country that welcomes people from around the world and out of this mosaic of cultures forges a unique identity. We are and always have been a country of immigrants. Yet some continue today to believe that this is a white nation. We've seen the march in Charlottesville, Virginia and around the country embolden by the hateful language of our president. But this is really nothing new. For the entirety of our history, some whites have claimed this country as theirs and theirs alone. They have sought to disenfranchise, terrorize and ban those who look, talk or practice differently than them. They have labeled us criminals, rapists, threats to racial purity and to the very safety and peace of the nation. But this has never been a white country. These are Native American lands before they were quote unquote discovered by Europeans. When Europeans came to this country, some of them brought with them African slaves, the ancestors to many in the black community. Mexicans lived and worked in the southwest long before it was part of the United States and our Asian brothers and sisters came here to work in the 19th century to lend their sweat and blood to this country even though they could not become citizens. This week as we reflect on Dr. King's legacy and race in America today, it's important to recognize that nativism and the nativism and racism that we see from this administration is nothing new. There is the tired cliche that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. And I fear this is what we're seeing today. For too long we have failed to acknowledge the continuing legacy of nativism, racism, slavery and segregation in this country. So now we're repeating it. Today I want to talk to you about that legacy and specifically about the treatment of immigrants because it's important for every American to know and also because we must understand and acknowledge our past if we actually want to break out of this cycle of hate. And so I'm going to cover a lot of history on immigration over the course of these next slides. If there's any questions along the way please feel free to raise your hand. I'm happy to answer them. But really what this talk is about is about how we've constructed immigrants in America because while we celebrate our immigrant legacy in this country a lot of this has been wrapped up in trying to keep people out. Trying to form an identity that excludes many. Today we talk about Muslims. We talk about Latinos. But in the past it was Catholics. It was the Irish. It was the Chinese or the Japanese. And so I'm going to run through this and I've included in these slides some historical cartoons because I think they helped to set the stage. And I want to lead off with some quotes or two passages from a speech that Barack Obama gave in 2010. He said, we define ourselves as a nation of immigrants a nation that welcomes those willing to embrace America's ideals and America's precepts. That's why millions of people ancestors to most of us braved hardship and great risk to come here. So they could be free to work and worship and live their lives in peace. The Asian immigrants who made their way to California's Angel Island. The Germans and Scandinavians who settled across the Midwest. The waves of the Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian and Jewish immigrants who leaned against that railing to catch that first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. This is the first part of our myth or our national identity as an immigrant country. Yet at the same time we're standing at the border today and we also recognize that being a nation of laws goes hand in hand with being a nation of immigrants. This too is our heritage. This too is important and the truth is we've often been wrestled with the politics of who is and who isn't allowed to enter this country. At times there has been fear and resentment directed towards newcomers particularly in periods of economic hardship and because these issues touch on deeply held convictions about who we are as a people about what it means to be an American these debates often elicit strong emotions. This was back in 2010 and things haven't changed much. If anything, we've seen a regression in this country. We've seen a stepping back and we've seen an emboldening of white supremacy and hatred. Our Latino brothers and sisters, our Muslim brothers and sisters live in America where they have to feel nervous about when they leave their house. They have to be worried including and I've had students in my class say this that they were worried about going out and walking on the street because people yell slurs at them as they're walking but this isn't the country that many of us believe that we should be and I think it's important to keep in mind that we have to be optimistic about where we can get together and so by looking back at this at this past by looking back at how we've characterized past generations of immigrants that can help us get a better sense of why we believe what we believe today because everything today is a product of our history and in 1755 Benjamin Franklin, one of the framers stated that a colony of aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our anglifying them will never adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion. Now this is a quote that you can change some of the words around and you can be talking about Mexicans today or Latino immigrants. In this case Benjamin Franklin was talking about Germans. He also didn't like the Dutch all that much either. And this is a bit of a historical oddity to many of us. I'm half Irish. I look back and I look at how Irish were characterized in the 19th century with the same kind of simian features that were used to caricature African-Americans during the same, during the period of slavery and segregation. It's kind of weird because my Irish family in terms of skin color there's some of the whitest folks I know and yet at one point they were considered to be of a lesser form of whiteness. There were debates in Congress about the danger to racial purity posed by the Irish and Italians and one of the ways that we get to where we are in terms of immigration is that as of 1790 the only way to become a citizen in this country was to be white and this wouldn't change for a really long time. This was part of shaping a deliberate shaping of America's cultural identity. An identity that at least for the framers and for many generations of political leaders who came after they wanted this to be an Anglo-Protestant country. They wanted those borders defended. This was how you built a nation. You chose a cultural identity and many of them believed it was hard if not impossible to actually truly be the nation of immigrants that we supposedly were because the myths that we have today existed then as well and there was a great deal of suspicion of the foreign born. If you go back in the congressional record they stated that people born in other countries in some cases no specific country but just people born in other countries were more likely to be criminals that they made up the majority of people in mental institutions. And this may have come in part from the British practice of transportation. If you haven't heard that term before it was what you do with a criminal population when you're a small relatively small comparatively speaking island country and you essentially put them on a boat and you send them somewhere else and for a while they sent them here. In particular people accused of religious crimes or ideological crimes. Anarchists for instance. After we stopped taking them where did they send them? Australia, right? Again another country that saw a genocide against a native population a claiming of native lands as lands of white settlers and a country that today continues to deal with that legacy. And beyond just the exclusion of non-whites from naturalization there was a deep suspicion of certain groups of individuals who were technically considered white. Because whiteness is usually taken to be synonymous with Caucasian. Anybody know what a Caucasian is? From the region of the Caucasus if you can trace your ancestry back to the region of the Caucasus you're technically a Caucasian. If you're a Latino you may be surprised to find out that you are Caucasian and therefore you're technically white. Although the Supreme Court took care of that in 1924 when they said well this whole thing's just made up anyway and you're not white unless other white people look at you and think you're white. And this was in response to a gentleman who challenged the categorization or the of him as non-white by saying that he was a Punjabi Sikh that he could trace his genetic or his ancestry back to Aryans. That Aryans were technically Caucasians and that therefore if white and Caucasian were synonymous he should be allowed to be a citizen. And the Supreme Court took a look at him and said no, you're definitely not what we're thinking of when we're thinking of white folks. So there was this tendency to classify certain groups during this period as of a lesser form of whiteness people of Irish ancestry Germans, Poles Italians and many of these individuals had the same negative stereotypes at that point in time associated with them that we still deploy against immigrants today. They take our jobs they break the law they're lazy. I mean really those same stereotypes kind of apply across racial groups and immigrant groups just depending on what historical time period we're talking about. But this tendency to see the Irish and other groups as of a lesser form of whiteness really spiked in the 1800s. And this is when you saw a real push to actually develop legal means of keeping these individuals outside of excluding them. And there was a party this later we now call them the know nothings. They first went by the Native American Party that became the American Party and then later today they're largely called the know nothings but they ran on an explicit platform of anti-immigrantism in the 1850s and anti-Catholicism if you go back and look at some of the congressional debates during this period some of the newspaper accounts some of the cartoons there was a fear that anybody who was Catholic owed their allegiance not to the United States government but to who the Pope that this would give the Vatican influence in America and would in some way degrade our religious identity as a protestant nation. Now these stereotypes would shift a little bit eventually we became less afraid of Catholics although you can still find some academics on the right who claim that Latinos pose a threat to this country because Latinos tend to be Catholic and that we are going to fundamentally change American culture because we're going to bring Catholicism with us we're not afraid of the Pope anymore we supposedly have a cool Pope now that many people find a little less offensive and don't see him as trying to conquer America or anything like that but there is still that fear by some and this is represented this was a cartoon on the part of the know-nothing party you see the Irishmen and the German running off of the ballot box and again this was one of the fears in regards to these groups that were of a lesser form of whiteness because even though they were of a lesser form of whiteness what could they do they could vote right that's one of the reasons that you denied people the franchise right that's one of the reasons you denied people the right to vote is you take that right to vote away you ensure that they can't get any political power right that you ensure that even racists in your country don't go well man this is a close election I don't really like black people but they may be able to get me over that line so maybe I should just tamper down that segregation talk a little bit and reach out to some black churches which is something that we would actually see in the 19 part of the 1940s early 1950s but they could vote and so this was one of the reasons that a lot of these anti-immigrant groups wanted to see these individuals excluded because not only did they degrade America's racial character but they also potentially had political power and these anti-immigrant attitudes were really we didn't invent them America didn't invent racism these were European imports it was European thinkers German physiologists actually who first came up with this idea that you could divide people up into about like five different races and this was when classifying everything was kind of the thing and of course if you're German who are you going to say is at the top of that hierarchy you're going to say people look like me nobody looks in the mirror and is like I'm kind of fall somewhere in the middle I'm kind of average so I'll put people like me right there in the middle but Vietnamese people had just so much better looking than me they looked so much more aesthetically pleasing but this initially was an aesthetic classification this didn't denote anything about your intellectual or moral capacity but that would come later and that would come with eugenics ideas that you can measure parts of people's head and that would tell you whether they were musically inclined or moral or smart if you've ever seen that bust of a head with lines drawn all over it phrenology this idea that there was something more fundamental to race and that's something that we still have some belief in today I wouldn't recommend anybody visit the website Stormfront but if you ever want to get a snapshot of what racist people think take a look at some of those internet forums they're weird but it gives you an idea that some people still believe this that there's something fundamentally different based on nothing but the color of our skin which actually denotes nothing and actually genetically speaking there's greater variation within races than between races but we like to think of ourselves as in some way being fundamentally different and so these fears of Catholicism this notion of America as an Anglo-Protestant country made many believe that anyone not from this stock degraded the nation and here's an example of how the Irish are characterized this is from a British magazine and you can see the Simeon features ascribed to the Irishmen in a cage it says the Irish-American Dynamite Skunk and an American advocate of indiscriminate murder now keep in mind why were the Irish characterized in this way by the English what was going on they were colonized if you're Christian and you're claiming to be a good person what do you do when you go and take their land treat them as subjects give them no rights well you say they're in some way not really people they're in some way impure or they're less civilized and therefore they need our civilizing influence Europeans love that line we civilized them we came to America and we gave Native Americans our wonderful culture and therefore they should thank us we're sorry about the genocide and all and the broken treaties but man we gave you civilization the same thing they said the British said in India we raised them up and these were based on European concepts right this was based on this idea that the Irish were closer dates because you want to dehumanize the people who pose a threat to you and you want to dehumanize those that you're mistreating because that provides a justification and here in America we compared the Irish in some cases to African Americans this is from Harper's weekly which if you're looking for a whole bunch of old racist cartoons they're a great source of it they just got pages and pages of them this shows on one side of the scale you see African American from the south on the other side you see an Irishman from the north and they're balancing each other out the Irish were the problem of the north and the blacks were the problem of the south and a lot of the characteristics of the Irish were similar characteristics that were used in discussing African Americans this is a cartoon from the latter, the mid part of the 19th century on Italians and this shows, it says regarding the Italian population there are nuisance to pedestrians they sleep in crowded apartments if you're Latino that probably sounds familiar their afternoons pleasant diversions is stabbing someone to death and then you see the way to dispose of them is something that we probably wouldn't advocate today but you essentially putting them into a cage and dropping them into the water and this again demonstrates where we were at the time in terms of thinking about immigrant groups and the thing that the Italians and the Irish had in common during this period is the Irish and Italians who were coming over were poor the Irish were fleeing the great famine and they were coming over and they were poor and they were looking for work and again this tends to be how we characterize these groups that's what we do to Latinos today people who are pursuing the same dream that brought many of our ancestors here we characterize their dream as somehow different and this wasn't just limited in the 19th century to whites or to whites of a lesser form of whiteness the actual first major piece of immigration legislation in this country that excluded people based on race was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and this declared all Chinese immigrants inadmissible you could not come here if you're a Chinese and you're already here if you left you could not come back and there was a reason for this the reason was the Chinese were no longer needed they came here and they provided a lot of assistance in particular in building the railroad from the east coast to the west coast once it was done they moved off to do other things and suddenly the narrative turned into they're taking our jobs they're putting good American men out of work we don't need them anymore the Chinese Exclusion Act didn't begin as some anti-immigrant measures do it didn't begin with congress or the president it actually began with labor agitation in the United States with labor unions saying Chinese are being brought in as strike breakers something that later says how Chavez would claim and while Chavez was a great civil rights leader for Latinos he was a great civil rights leader for native born Latinos or for legal Latinos but not necessarily so much for undocumented brothers and sisters we're still coming in pursuit of that same dream and the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first major act restricting immigration that wasn't just aimed at quote unquote undesirables and you can see here in this cartoon from the latter part of the 19th century that they're breaking strikes that they're begging that they're voting multiple times they're fighting that they drink that they loaf they're lazy now the curious thing about immigrants is we tend to hold two somewhat conflictual stereotypes about them one is that they're lazy and the other is that they're putting American workers out of jobs which really when you think about it doesn't make a lot of sense because if you're lazy you're probably not working all that hard therefore you're probably not really competing for jobs but we like this characterization this is the stereotype of the Latino leaning back under a tree with a big sombrero over his head and this is something similar that was used in regards to the Chinese and here we see a representation of the that second stereotype and it says what shall we do with our boys and you see the Chinese worker here has multiple hands because he's working so damn fast and all of these poor white American workers are just standing out there with no job and this really was used to demonize the Chinese this and they're corrupting our women which again was something that was very common in terms of both immigration and race they claim that women were being seduced into opium use taken advantage of by Chinese immigrants who ran these opium dens and again this is something that is not uncommon we would see this in regards to African Americans on multiple occasions and also continuing today in regards to the hyper sexualization of African American in particular men claims that they posed a threat to white women and this says Uncle Sam's farm in danger and again shows a wave of the Chinese here shown as locusts invading American lands and again this was very deliberate if you want to keep people out you have to scare people it's today saying that Islam is a religion of violence that Muslims are terrorists you scare people and you create a justification for keeping them outside your political system but also outside of your social system making them in some way fundamentally different fundamentally lesser than and so we have this basic tension in the United States of this our identity as a melting pot but also this question of how you forge an identity out of a melting pot and this is really in part because we're not the only nation to do so we're one of a handful of nations to do so to try to forge an identity that doesn't have a deep basis in the past where we're trying to forge an identity and say who are we and in some of my classes we do this exercise and we say what is American what is this thing that we expect immigrants to assimilate into in coming here because that's what we hear a lot in regards to immigrants they just don't assimilate what Americans do and you know what the bizarre thing is when we run through this list we don't really get anything we get cheeseburgers right here's your welcome to America kit it includes a bag of McDonald's we occasionally get NASCAR I don't know if I have any if there's any NASCAR fans in the room but it does seem like a fundamentally American thing to want to watch cars drive around in circles but we don't come up with anything well they don't celebrate our hollet yes they do well they um I got nothing cause I can't say well it's because their skin's a little too dark or because they're not white cause that would make me a racist so I'm going to try to say it's because they want to assimilate they retain some of their culture oh man I saw this this protest about DACA and man they were waving the Mexican flag how un-American has anybody here ever been to a St. Patrick's Day Parade there's Irish flags everywhere and there's those flags are being waved by people who are like 160th Irish and yet we go oh that's cool no they're just celebrating their heritage it's all good but man if a Latino does it oh they hate America they don't really want to be Americans right we're held to a different standard if you're white you can celebrate your ethnic heritage all you want hell you can wave the Confederate battle flag around and we'll go oh well you know what they're just misunderstood if you're somebody who wants to celebrate your ethnic heritage and you happen to be a Latino or Asian right or from the Middle East we go oh that's nah sorry that's not American and so we have this tendency to classify our nationalite to form a national identity in a way that really sets up just in us versus them we know we're American because we're not those folks that we're keeping outside we're not those people who are identifying as being un-American and in nineteen ah sorry nineteen ah eighteen ninety four we have the found the forming of the immigration restriction league and this was a group that really focused on limiting the number of Jews and southern eastern Europeans who could come to this country and the way they wanted to do it was a literacy test and they would eventually get that literacy test and then they would realize that a lot of the people who were coming actually passed that literacy test and so then they were a little bit upset because they just assumed they were all illiterate and then they and then that would lead to a further piece of legislation but the immigration restriction league really pushed for an end to immigration from these countries that we're seeing as being less than pure and again a lot of this had to do with things like they're taking our jobs right this is this says the inevitable result to the American working man of indiscriminate immigration they come here and they're poor they're taking bread and whatever that lump of yellow stuff is I'm assuming butter but that's a hell of a lot of butter but they're taking that from the tables of hard working men we are talking in my class today about the Freedmen's Bureau it was set up following the Civil War to help former slaves transition to freedom we had a cartoon about the Freedmen's Bureau too and it was the same deal white men working out in the fields with the lazy negro leaning there just collecting those welfare checks essentially and this is the same thing we were saying with many of these immigrants from southern eastern Europe they're poor they're coming here and keep in mind back then we didn't have welfare there was no social safety net in America back in those days if you wound up pouring down on your luck you better hope your family likes you or you have some really nice friends because otherwise you're relying on charitable organizations which are pretty hit and miss especially during economic downturns and this is another cartoon from the latter part of the 19th century and it says the greatest fear of the period that Uncle Sam will be swallowed by foreigners and so this shows on one end an Irishman on the other end a Chinaman and they're both gobbling up poor Uncle Sam and then probably because the Irishman is kind of sort of white then the Chinaman eats him too but gets a variation on his hat for some reason but the problems with this did not go unrecognized by other immigrant groups the problem the fact that Chinese immigration I mean sorry Chinese restriction was likely to lead to the restriction of other groups this didn't go unnoticed this is another cartoon from the period and it says what color is to be tabooed next Fritz meant to be a German to Pat at the Yankee Congress can keep the yellow man out what's to hinder them from calling us green from calling us out too and this is actually um a little predictive of where things would go because of course after the successful restriction of Chinese immigrants restrictionists in this country were emboldened the gentleman's agreement of 1907 between the United States and Japan denied Japanese immigrants who wanted to come here to work visas the 1917 immigration act gave the immigration restriction league as I mentioned their literacy test and it also created the Asiatic Bard Zone which essentially barred people from anywhere in Asia from immigrating to the United States legally and this shows that during the period early 1900s I think 1903 and this says direct from the slums of Europe daily this is another anti-Italian cartoon and you can see them swimming out of the boat characterized as rats with hats that say mafia anarchist again this idea that we are being flooded with foreigners who posed a cultural threat to our nation and while the literacy test was meant to keep these individuals out it didn't work because as I mentioned too many people were passing it and so what we got was the immigration act of 1924 also known as the Johnson-Reed Act sometimes referred to as the National Quotas Act and this set up a quota system for immigration and this was specifically targeted at southern and eastern Europeans I've read through all the congressional debate on this and this was their goal was to prevent southern and eastern Europeans from coming here they kept immigration at 150,000 and they kept the quotas at 2% of the foreign born present in 1890 so each country got a quota each European country sorry not every country in the world if you're from countries that were classified as being non-white you were just lumped together into a racial category and oddly enough the people lumped into the kind of catch-all Asian category they still couldn't legally immigrate here but they were given a cap anyway in case there was somebody in that country who was an Asian who wanted to come to the United States but 2% of the foreign born as of 1890 anybody want to guess why 1890 you run a census every 10 years this is 1924 why would they pick the census of 1890 because higher numbers of good immigrants lower numbers of bad immigrants right so that was a way of tweaking the quotas to ensure that you were getting the people that you wanted to get that you were setting the quotas as low as you could for these countries that you wanted to keep out and it just excluded all of those ineligible for citizenship and for my Asian brothers and sisters you wouldn't actually be able to naturalize in this country until the 1950s this wasn't something this wasn't one of those historical blips that was so far in the past we tend to think of things in that way but 1952 that's within a generation right and one of the things that we have to keep in mind when we're talking about history or when we're talking about the civil rights movement is one generation is nothing right one generation doesn't change anything so with the restriction of European immigrants which is relatively successful congress next turned to Mexicans Mexican immigration in the southwest had been seen largely as being a response to labor demands immigration officials on the southwest border largely saw Mexicans as coming in when their work was needed and then leaving when their work was no longer needed it was essentially an unregulated free flow of immigration across the southern border now that began to change in the 1920s this notion that we should allow people just to kind of walk back and forth whenever they wanted to that began to shift and part of this was around the growing chorus amongst politicians that there was quote-unquote a mexican problem and this is from the Fullerton Daily News in 1924 you see the immigration official doing nothing while the mexican peon and it says ignorance and disregard for law crosses in the united states without inspection and mexican immigrants of course are if you say let's talk about immigration what are we talking about today we're talking mostly about Mexicans for the most part Latino immigrants broadly but now if you're talking about immigration that's for the most part what you're talking about that's what people take that word to mean we're talking about illegal immigrants and the curious thing was for a long period of this nation's history they were an illegal they crossed back and forth when there was work they came in when there was no work they didn't come in and in 1929 we began to try to restrict mexican immigration the first was through administrative means charging people a head tax to come into this country and especially poor mexicans could not pay that head tax so the idea was that they wouldn't come in we also subjected them to delousing babs before entering because there was a perception that mexican immigrants were dirty were diseased we didn't do this to canadians by the way and in 1929 there was a senate bill 5094 that for the first time legally criminalized undocumented immigration it declared the first instance of it was a misdemeanor and the second time it was a felony and if it was a felony that meant that you could never legally immigrate to this country with a felony charge on your record the border patrol was also formed in 1924 and it wasn't really to patrol the borders of the united states it was to patrol the border of the united states which remains our primary focus in this country there were illegal european immigrants coming in through canada we weren't really worried about them we were worried about the southern border and that was the focus of the border patrol during this period and continues to be the focus of the border patrol today in 1929 we also entered the period of the great depression what remains the biggest economic downturn in us history and as a result of that the desire to get mexicans out increased so this spurred a program of mexican repatriation and the idea with this was you threaten them with deportation you threaten them with neighborhood and workplace raids and they'll go home and then he did estimates vary between 500,000 and 750,000 about 20% of the mexican population the united states returned during this period went back to mexico they weren't all undocumented many of them were legal but couldn't prove that they were legally here and therefore they went back rather than face potential fines if they were believed to be here illegally and this is something that we're actually seeing today donald trump's immigration raids they're not going to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country but what they're meant to do is create a climate of fear to hopefully convince some of those immigrants to return home on their own because again we couldn't actually afford to deport 11 million people nor would we like the optics of putting people in boxcars to have them taken back to mexico especially considering what we like to believe about ourselves as a country and there are also historical parallels to the denial of refugee status for many muslim immigrants in the pre world war two period and we typically forget this in the pre world war two period we refused entry to jews who were fleeing the beginnings of the holocaust we didn't get involved in world war two until the bombing of pearl harbor we didn't get involved because we were concerned that jews were being killed in massive numbers on a scale that was impossible to ignore we only cared when japan made the mistake of bombing us we denied an frank's family asylum here and she became one of the most well known faces of the holocaust she was killed and all of those deaths they lie on our national conscience because we could have done something different we could have taken them in and we chose not to not because of anything to do with the individuals but because of the terrorism in this country during that period of time again something that we're seeing today as we deny syrian refugees the ability to come here and be safe and we claim it's because of we don't vet them closely enough or they could be terrorists when they're fleeing the very people that we're supposedly fighting and they're saying we want to come there so we can be safe and a lot of people have died because european countries have refused again because of the religion of the individuals and also because of the color of their skin if syria was a christ a white christian country we'd be accepting them in droves and some of the rhetoric of our current president also comes out of this period america first this was something that was used to keep us out of world war two while the holocaust was happening when we knew about what was happening there america first this is something that we say today we need to put the jobs and the health and the welfare of americans before the health and welfare of refugees and this is and some people many of you maybe well i'm assuming all of you have heard of dr seuss right many also well many don't know that he also did a lot of political cartoons and this is and the wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones but those are foreign children and it really didn't matter and again here we are today saying the same thing those are foreign kids it doesn't matter if they die horribly and if they die in a way that's preventable well we could do something about it because you know what well they're not really our problem and a student i don't remember which student but a student sent me this after one of my classes and this is on the left well on the left 1939 the jewish family looking for refuge and then on the right in 2015 the muslim family looking for refuge again where we are repeating the errors of our past and in 20 30 40 years we'll look back on this period with shame with the same kind of shame that we have now in regards to denying all of those families all of those people safe harbor in the united states people who would be alive today who would have grandchildren maybe great grandchildren who could have become we don't know what but instead we left them we left them to the nazis and today we're leaving them to civil conflict to isis and after world war two we continue to demonize mexican immigrants we launched operation back in 1954 a mass deportation program that i believe our current president actually somewhat referenced during one at one point but this had the goal of deporting 1 million immigrants again using drawing on tactics that were very similar to those used during mexican repatriation and all of this ties back to and this is going to be the like 400th time my students have seen this slide and this all ties back to what roger smith calls the tradition of a scriptive hierarchy in america this notion that true americans in some way are in some way chosen by god history or nature to possess something special something that makes us unique and something that justifies treating others as second-class citizens and this is usually tied to race this is usually tied to gender and sometimes this is tied to class but it's a way of justifying it it was a way in which we justified the taking of native lands manifest destiny god wanted us to have this country and today we've also privatized the incarceration of immigrants the private prison industry represented by geogroup the corrections corporation of america who just changed their name to something that sounds less evil slightly less evil they make a profit now out of warehousing black and brown bodies immigration detention the contracts they got for immigration detention saved those companies from bankruptcy in the early 2000s and now they sit at the table and help to craft immigration policy in this country they help to ensure that we see more people thrown into detention facilities that are run for profit and as a result of being run for profit that means that they cut corners the guards are under trained there was actually a lawsuit against geogroup because they were making prisoners clean their own cells cook their food and they weren't paying them or they were paying them with things from commissary and today those same groups sit at the table with lawmakers and help to craft policy in the same way that they helped to craft our drug policy in the united states which has resulted in the disproportionate incarceration of african-americans and latinos while states like washington celebrate legalization of things like marijuana and in other states people are still sitting out mandatory minimum sentences 15, 20, 30 years for something that now would be legal in washington why is marijuana legal now why now because everybody smokes seriously that's what it is you can't classify it anymore as a black thing or a mexican thing you're a good little college student johnny he shouldn't be thrown in jail for 15 years for slinging some weed on the side he's a good kid he has a bright future ahead of him now little johnny was an inner city african-american oh no throw his ass in jail for as long as you can because man he's scary super predators to quote hillary clinton who then wondered why the black community wasn't overly enthusiastic about voting for her and so i want to end just by talking a little bit about where we go because this is i know there's a lot of depressing stuff i tried to introduce at least a few little laugh moments here and there but it's not particularly upbeat but the one thing that i have a lot of hope in is that this moment that we're in right now inspires us to see the fight of one group as our fight as martin luther king did with cesar chavez and he wrote a telegram to cesar chavez in 1966 and in that telegram he said as brothers in the fight for equality i extend the hand of fellowship and goodwill and i wish continuing success to you and your members the fight for equality must be fought on many fronts in the urban slums in the sweatshops of the factories and fields our separate struggles are really one a struggle for freedom for dignity and humanity and that's what i hope we take out of this moment that we're in right now that there's no difference between us that we have to stand together because that's the only way that we're actually going to start to not erase our past because we shouldn't want to erase it but that's the way that we move together towards our future towards realizing our national myths towards truly becoming that melting pot that we claim to be and so i will stop i promise in just one second i also wrote up a brief closing state so as i've covered in these last couple slides from the very founding of this nation we've looked on immigrants with suspicion we've accused them of taking American jobs, have claimed that there are threats to our culture and to our very safety and at the same time we've too often been divided in our response and we truly want to fight white supremacy we have to do so together we must realize that an injustice against one of us isn't injustice against us all the fight of our Syrian brothers and sisters is my fight too despite the fact that I'm not Syrian and I'm not Muslim the fight of our African American brothers and sisters is mine too despite the fact that I'm not African American Martin Luther King saw this as did Malcolm X as did Cesar Chavez as did Fred Hampton we are stronger together and can only prevail if we actually realize that and to our white brothers and sisters they also have to realize that in far too many cases your silence is deafening I've taught a lot of classes on race and politics I've given a lot of talks at this point and one thing in reaching out to the white community that I just must stress is that you have to confront this with us no more laughing at racial jokes no more not having those uncomfortable confrontations with your racist family members or your friends who maybe send you an email with a racist cartoon if you want to be an ally you have to stand together with us you have to face that same discomfort that anyone a racial minority faces every single day of their life you have to stand up because if you don't we don't break out of this cycle of hate those stereotypes are maintained within the white community they're okay right because somebody laughed at your joke because your racist uncle Joe well he can go off about how you know he's worried about that black family that moved into his neighborhood or he's worried about those Latinos taking his job but this also goes beyond race and beyond our borders we have to see that the fight of oppressed people everywhere is our fight and this is also something that the great civil rights leaders recognized because institutionalized racism isn't just a problem in America it's a problem globally and it's entrenched in the institutions that today dictate global trade loans as a man we also have to stand with our sisters we're seeing an awakening in the United States that I think is really important right now we're seeing a lot of discussions about sexual harassment about misogyny about unequal pay and as men we have to stand behind not just the women in our lives but the women in this country as they fight for greater justice we also have to stand with our LGBTQ family we have to realize that their fight is our fight too that transphobia homophobia that we have to stand up to those things as well because again their fight is our fight and that's the only way that we move forward and this administration really is based on nothing more than an edifice of hate what we've seen the president do is nothing more than try to undo every single thing that was done by his predecessor the first black president and I believe and I do believe that we'll come out of this stronger I believe that this administration is helping us realize our common cause our shared humanity and our shared interests regardless of our race, gender sexuality or gender identity and I believe that we'll do all that we need to do to win this and I believe that we'll face a brighter future because we're being forced to confront our past and we'll meet the hate that we see in America we'll meet it in the schools we'll meet it in the state houses and if necessary we'll meet it in the streets and we'll win because there's never been a white country this has always been our country if you look around this room this is America and this is my America and we need to move forward together to realize that and I believe we will so thank you I'm happy to take any questions