Unity in the Diaspora: A Call for Collective Black Solidarity — A Follow-up Q&A with Attorney and Immigration Policy Advocate Breanne Palmer
I’m linking to and reposting Part 2 of an interview between me and one of my former movement homes, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights! Questions are by Oprah Cunningham, Strategic Communications Associate.
We connected with Breanne Palmer, attorney and immigration policy advocate, to follow up on our discussion about the impact of anti-Blackness on U.S. immigration policy and discuss the need for solidarity between Black immigrants and Black Americans. We explored how collective action is essential to resisting systemic oppression and ensuring a more just immigration system.
Q: Why is solidarity between Black immigrants and Black Americans essential in resisting systemic oppression?
A: If we don’t express and live up to the ideals of solidarity between our shared communities, we’re not going to be able to resist systemic oppression. There’s no world in which Black Americans achieve any type of liberation without Black immigrants, and there is definitely not a world in which Black immigrants can achieve any type of reprieve from anti-immigrant sentiment and racism without Black Americans.
Black American history has always included Black immigrants. We’ve always shared spaces, we’ve shared movements, we’ve shared communities. Because of segregation, we have been in community with one another since the time of American enslavement to the Harlem Renaissance, to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and beyond, and there have always been Black immigrants as part of these essential movements towards liberation and more progressive futures.
If you think of the great heroes of these movements like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael a/k/a Kwame Ture, Shirley Chisholm, many of the Harlem Renaissance poets, writers, and activists, we would consider them to be Black American heroes. But they also all have a Black immigrant background, whether it’s through their parents or themselves. Collaboration between our communities has led to progress that we are still fighting to retain and defend. It’s important not to silo ourselves. Separating ourselves and differentiating ourselves from one another is not going to work. That enforces the idea that there’s not enough to go around. We have to get to the future together. We have to work together, because anti-Blackness does not differentiate between Black Americans and Black immigrants in a way that could allow one of those two groups to get ahead. Not at all. We have to study our history to understand where we’ve already collaborated and make sure that we move forward together. Anti-immigrant actions affect Black Americans, just like anti-Black racism affects Black immigrants.
Q: Why do you think Black immigrants or Black Americans might want to lean more into those silos?
A: I’ll say for Black Americans, I can understand wanting to be protective of the history of Black folks in the United States. The history includes rising out of enslavement, fighting for emancipation, and the full assertion of rights and privileges as U.S. citizens. I think that makes sense. But, as I said, Black immigrants have always been a part of those movements and part of that history. On the other hand, I can see why it would be easy for some Black immigrants to think, “Okay, I’m coming to the United States, and I want to prove that I’m worthy of being here, so I’m going to buy into stereotypes about what Black people are like here in the U.S. I’m going to make myself look different, and somehow, that will curry favor with the White gaze.” But that doesn’t work. You as a Black immigrant can’t escape anti-Blackness by trying to distance yourself from American ideas of Blackness. It’s inescapable.
Something very dangerous that has been happening in recent years, especially on the internet, is that conservative groups are appealing to Black Americans by claiming that immigration is a direct threat to the achievements that Black Americans have made in the United States. Their argument goes, “Immigrants are coming to take your jobs. They’re coming to undo all of the hard work that your ancestors put in to ensure you have the rights that you have,” and unfortunately, it seems to be gaining popularity. But those talking points are disingenuous at best because the presence of immigrants in the United States is not what is stopping the fight for reparations or the fight for racial justice. If immigration were to halt entirely, if there were no more immigrants of any race coming to the United States, Black Americans would still not be given what they are owed by our government and by our different presidential administrations. That’s not happening. So it’s an insidious and perverse attempt to appeal to the traumatic history of oppression of Black Americans to try and turn them against other groups who are also vulnerable.
Q: What can we do—individually and as a community—to push back against anti-Blackness in the U.S. immigration system?
A: Compared to about 10 years ago, there are now so many more Black immigrant organizations working on policy, advocacy, and communications to amplify Black immigrants’ voices and ensure that the immigrant justice movement confronts anti-Blackness. We’ve also seen a lot of development and progress with legacy civil rights organizations that may have thought that immigration was not a Black issue, when it very much is. They’ve also been working more closely with Black immigrant organizations or speaking up when there are explicitly anti-Black, anti-immigrant flash points in the news. We can encourage and support those organizations and those moments of collaboration and solidarity. We can also have more nuanced conversations within Black communities to bridge gaps between Black immigrant experiences and Black American experiences.
Confronting stereotypes we may hold about one another and confronting internalized anti-Blackness and internalized fear of the “other” is really important for us — to make those efforts to create a community that is more integrated and understands that although we have different experiences, we are all subject to the same types of harms. So how do we navigate those harms together and not apart?
Q: Is there anything else I haven’t asked today that you think is important to highlight?
I think many people think about Black immigration as a more modern phenomenon from the 1960s onward. There’s this idea that there just weren’t many Black immigrants present in the United States in large numbers before the 1960s and 1970s, and that’s not necessarily true. The PBS Great Migration docuseries talks about Black immigrants coming through Ellis Island, which is traditionally understood to be an entry point for European and perhaps Asian immigrants, but not explicitly for Black immigrants. However, Black immigrants came to the United States at Ellis Island before the 20th century. The docuseries also talks about the presence and academic exchange of Black immigrants and Black American students at HBCUs in the early 20th century. So many of those academic exchanges at HBCUs that invited Black immigrant students from other countries to come here and study resulted in this robust class of well-educated radical Black leaders who operated within the United States. These leaders then also went back to their home nations in Africa and the Caribbean and often started liberation and independence movements to topple European colonialism.
The historical exchange between Black Americans and Black immigrants has changed the world in so many ways. It’s produced incredible achievements. And so I hope that people, if they didn’t know about it, learn about it or explore that further. There’s been overlap throughout our history. We need to keep that spirit alive — that spirit of what we’ve done together and should continue doing together.
