CSotD: Mother of Exiles Sees Her Door Slammed Shut
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Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
We’ve all often heard the last four-and-a-half lines of Emma Lazarus’s poem, but the whole thing paints a more complete picture of how we viewed our place in the world in 1886, when “Liberty Enlightening the World,” the magnificent gift from France, was erected in New York harbor, welcoming immigrants to the United States.
Were we perfect? Hardly. The statue features a pile of broken chains at its feet, representing the abolition of slavery just over a decade earlier, but we’d passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and we were still breaking treaties and entering wars with our indigenous peoples. And freeing the slaves had not welcomed them into full participation in society.
Still, as Browning wrote, an artist should ignore both criticism and praise, working towards his own ideal, because “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?”
But lately, our arms have shortened.
Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, which allows the administration to turn back refugees at the border without hearing their pleas for asylum, may not quite be on a level with the Dred Scott decision that enshrined slavery, but Espinoza’s logic is correct in linking the two decisions and in linking Roger Taney with Samuel Alito.
Both decisions, and both men, represent a heartlessness that contrasts with what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
In Dred Scott v Sandford, Taney wrote that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” while Alito ignored clear evidence of the administration’s disdain for, and lies about, people from “shithole countries.”
It is like the way the conservative majority on the Court pretended not to recognize the racist basis of gerrymandering, as long as nobody specifically said that racism was their reason for redrawing districts.
Richard Pryor created an insightful pun about race, prisons and our justice system that has long outlived him: “You go down there lookin’ for justice, that’s what you find: Just us.”
It’s an aural pun, based on people pronouncing the word “just-uss” rather than “just-iss.”
Deering makes a similar but written pun that required emphasizing a single syllable, and his analysis not only describes the way the court empowered the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in its decision allowing deportation of Haitians and Somalis, but also fits with a previous SCOTUS decision allowing ICE to stop people on the street based on their apparent race.
Which, as you may recall, led to a workplace raid in which ICE reportedly detained several members of the Navajo Nation.
Arizona state Sen. Theresa Hatathlie subsequently “recommended Navajo tribal members carry a copy of their Certificate of Indian Blood with them and keep a digital copy on their phone.”
Good advice for anyone with dark skin.
Carry your papers at all times, and make sure they haven’t expired.
Anyway, we don’t have to worry about how people are treated in ICE custody, since they’ve changed their policies on reporting deaths specifically to keep us from worrying about how people are treated in ICE custody. As long as they’re released before they actually die.
The issues involved may not be clear to anyone who has not walked a mile in someone else’s shoes. It’s easy enough to believe that the system works, if you’ve never had to test it for yourself.
It is built for the default person, and the default is middleclass, white and reasonably well-educated, with a decent job and a nice place to live. If you fall more or less within that demographic, the system works well and you may not know how other people experience it, though these days it takes a certain intentional lack of curiosity.
It was not always thus.
In 1961, the non-fiction book, Black Like Me, was published, in which a white reporter stained his skin and went through the South to experience how Black people were treated. It sounds like a trivial stunt, but it was an awakening for those who hadn’t lived the life and walked the walk, and who grew up — intentionally or not — in a world of people who were like themselves.
I guess I shouldn’t have said “awakening,” since it’s now considered unpatriotic to be “woke.”
But prejudice does not have to be intentional and hostile. The word simply means to judge in advance, without evidence. And having decisions made by people with very limited, very similar social experiences leads to bad decisions, which is why diversity is also important.
Whoops. I said another bad word!
Maybe there’s another way to bring the folly, if not the injustice, of this America First/white supremacy movement to light.
It won’t matter whether stupid, gullible people fell for preposterous lies about Haitians eating pets if their resulting hostility strips entire communities of a significant portion of their workforce.
The same sort of thing might happen if stupid, gullible people fell for preposterous lies about vaccines, and a number of workers in their community fell victim to disease.
Like happened to our armed forces.
Maybe Justice Alito would be happy if it weren’t racism but stupidity that was knocking the props out from under our nation’s workforce.
So if we suddenly have nobody to pick produce or cut meat or work in our factories or clean motel rooms or groom lawns or watch our children or nurse our sick or build our houses, we’ll know it’s not because we hate people from shithole countries. It’s just our fear of anything and anyone strange and different.
(Maybe we can get white Afrikaner refugees to do all that necessary work.)
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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