Daryl Fears has a David v. Goliath (“So far, Goliath has trounced David in every battle”), workers of the world unite, pro-union article in today’s Washington Post about the efforts of the the United Food and Commercial Workers to “overcome the distrust between black and Latino workers” at the Smithfield meatpacking plant.
In places the article is dramatically overstated. For example:
Union officials hope their combined forces could be a power in North Carolina’s Cape Fear region, where tens of thousands of illegal Central American immigrants seeking meatpacking jobs have joined hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class black people who struggle to get by. But the United Food and Commercial Workers union is finding it hard to overcome the deep wariness and suspicion between the groups in its quest to unite them.
Tens of thousands of illegal Central Americans and hundreds of thousands of poor blacks in the Cape Fear Region? According to a local paper, the entire population of what it calls the “Cape Fear region” is considerably less:
the population in New Hanover, Brunswick and Pender counties combined has nearly doubled – going from 161,510 in 1980 to 311,549 this year
And Bladen County, home of the Smithfield plant, had a population of 32,278 in 2000.
But, facts aside, the article does present an interesting picture of the difficulties of uniting blacks and Latinos, given what Fears describes as the “vast cultural divide between immigrants who illegally enter the country seeking work and African Americans who worry that immigrants will take over their jobs, communities and local political power.” These tensions are not limited to meatpackers in North Carolina.
In Tifton, Ga., where immigrants replaced poor black and white farmworkers, five black men were arrested last year in connection with the slayings of six Mexican immigrants.
After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who is black, asked, “How do I make sure New Orleans is not overrun with Mexican workers?” He was concerned because immigrants poured into the city to work low-wage construction jobs.
And in Dallas, black school-board members have charged that their Latino colleagues hire job candidates primarily because of ethnicity.
Wait a minute. Charged? Hasn’t anyone told these “black school-board members” that liberals, civil rights organizations, and the Democratic Party from top to bottom — all of whom claim to speak for blacks — all vociferously support hiring and college admissions based on ethnicity and race?
Could it be that blacks see nothing wrong with race-based hiring but think that ethnicity-based hiring violates some principle, while Latinos think the same thing but in reverse?
Who knows, maybe some day someone will notice that “diversity” is divisive. Stranger things have happened, such as liberals abandoning the principle they long supported holding that Americans should be treated without regard to race, religion, or ethnicity.
That is a sad story. I wish we could realize that if we, as minorities unite, we could gain so much power. We are pitted against each other by design.
It would be great to live in a world where race didn’t matter, but lets be realistic, it does. I don’t think that is ever going to change so why not just accept that and try to do the best we can in giving everyone equal opportunities.