Your Thoughts Re:Tavis Smiley Can’t Say Black these Days Without Adding Latino? (679 hits)

Many blacks think Latinos and African-Americans have some kind of brotherhood thing or an alliance going on, says Gregory Kane.

Are You Jumping On Black and Brown Bandwagon,Too?

This past May 5, the five white guys who attended Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, California decided to rock their American-ness. They wore T-shirts with an American flag emblem. An assiatnt vice principal demanded that they turn their shirts inside out. He felt the display of the American flag might inspire violent attacks on the quintet from Mexican-American students.

By the way, that assistant vice-principal’s name is Miguel Rodriguez.

The students were given a choice of either complying with Rodriguez’s request or being sent home. They chose the latter.

Now, some in BlackAmericaWeb.com’s readership – specifically those misguided black folks who think Latinos and African-Americans have some kind of brotherhood thing or an alliance going on – will be quick to jump on the Mexican-American/Cinco de Mayo bandwagon.

(I’ll repeat this for the umpteenth time: the African-American-Latino “brotherhood/alliance thing” applies to black folks and Puerto Ricans only. It might apply to black folks and Dominicans, but the black folks in question had better not be Haitian.)

Before you hop on that bandwagon, I urge you to Google the words “Los Angeles,” “black students,” “school” and “Cinco de Mayo.” Click on the You Tube item “thayoungboy22’s Channel.” Beneath that, you’ll see the words “Black/Brown conflict at Inglewood High School erupted after a Cinco de Mayo event near Los Angeles.”

The video is a news item about that black-brown conflict. It was a riot, complete with fisticuffs, bats and bottles that started after black students walked out of a Cinco de Mayo assembly at the school. In the video, black students said they simply reciprocated the gesture the brown students had made in February, when they walked of the Black History Month assembly.

According to the news clips, similar incidents occurred at two other Los Angeles high schools: Jordan and Manual Arts. What’s significant about the incidents are that they happened in 1990. In that 20-year span, things have gotten worse.

Yet nobody speaks up for our children the way pro-immigrant organizations do for immigrant children. As a result, our children are getting the equivalent of half a day of school. Why should our children be deprived?”

Why should they have to go through what one black girl described in McGrath’s article - that she’d just been “jumped by a bunch of (bleeping) Mexicans”? Because black folks have been asleep at the switch on this one.


Some of us follow Tavis Smiley’s lead. Smiley can’t say the word “black” these days without sticking “and Latino” behind it. Others of us are concerned about mean, old, white, racist Republicans. The blacker-than-thou crowd is too obsessed with its mission to ferret out Uncle Toms, house Negroes and sellouts to so much as grunt a syllable of protest about what’s happening in Los Angeles, and still others are fretting about Willie Lynch.

Why do the words of some white man who never existed cause us more concern than the very real danger of brown-on-black violence and racism in Los Angeles, which, as McGrath pointed out, is the result of unchecked illegal immigration?


http://www.blackamericaweb.com/?q=articles... Posted By: Jen Fad
Thursday, June 17th 2010 at 2:58PM
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