All periods of change are probably also periods of denial, as contending forces push and pull to dominate.
I do not mean to sound pretentious or profound, because the observation seems commonplace as
I write this, having just returned from rallying in Arizona against SB 1070, the anti-immigrant, racial-profiling bill, and meeting with big bank-foreclosure victims there, to my home in New Orleans and to the headlines about the Gulf of Mexico oil-gushing disaster destroying marine life and livelihoods.
Twenty thousand rallied and marched in Phoenix to demand that President Obama stand in the way of Governor Brewer’s implementation of SB 1070. We did so loudly, though in silence if you judge by the coverage in the New York Times or my hometown rag the Times-Picayune. Governor Brewer claims there is language in the act barring racial profiling. When I read this and see her, I see Governor Ross Barnett from Mississippi and Governor George Wallace from Alabama blocking the school house doors, and I hear them saying that they meant no harm and loved their darker citizens but that they had issues with Washington and the federal government. Governor Brewer is claiming, along with other me-too politicians, that she means no harm and is simply trying to send a message to Washington.
These are wink-and-nod denials of the reality faced daily by Latinos in Arizona and elsewhere in the border states. In three days in Phoenix I experienced the racial profiling first hand on two occasions in the company of companeros and companeras. In a car in Glendale we were stopped and all asked for ID, ostensibly because of a crack in a passenger window, so the Kevlar-vested cop could make sure the car “was not stolen.” The experience for me was no different than being pulled over by a New Orleans cop as a teenager after a football game, because Edgar Taplin, one of my teammates and friends, was in the car, and my public high school had been the first in the city to be integrated. At the heart of such rousting is nothing more or less than racism, and the hope that we will trip up and pay a huge, permanent, and potentially fatal price in a sick game of gotcha with powers that we do not understand and cannot convince to stop. Change is going to come as more of these situations become personal, and Governor Brewer may be sitting in her office chair at the state capitol rather than standing in front of the border bridges, but the “school house” door is shutting the same way. Make no mistake about that.
I read in the same way President Obama's apology forthe government handling of the British Petroleum oil spill disaster in the Gulf. At the heart of it is his recognition that the government was wrong – he was wrong – to depend on BP to fix the mess and to parrot their response, hoping, praying, and pretending that it was effective. I could not escape feeling as though I were hearing another verse of the same song, as I sat in Phoenix with foreclosure victims being robbed of citizen wealth and security by Bank of America, Wells Fargo, GMAC, CitiMortgage, and others, even after they had qualified for loan modifications and after they had been approved for the federal HAMP relief. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the failure of the foreclosure prevention and loan modification programs over the eighteen months of the Obama Administration is again the fact that the government is letting the banks run the program, just as it is allowing BP to clean up its disaster. The ones who broke it cannot be the same people in charge of fixing it. The Treasury Department is investing seventy-five billion dollars in loan modifications, and then is essentially allowing the banks who created the housing disaster to administer the cleanup. I do not really care if we get an apology, but I do want change here!
