CHUCK D CALLS FOR BOYCOTT OF ARIZONA

From the Huffington Post:

"By the Time I Get to Arizona" -- This Discrimination Must Stop

The Arizona immigration bill -- which Governor Jan Brewer has decided to sign into law -- is racist, deceitful, and reflects some of the most mean-spirited politics against immigrants that the country has ever seen. The power that this law gives to police to detain people that they suspect to be undocumented brings racial profiling to a new low.

And

In 1991 Public Enemy wrote a song criticizing Arizona officials (including John McCain and Fife Symington) for rejecting the federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The same politics written about in "By the Time I Get to Arizona" are alive and well in Arizona today, but this time the target is Brown people.

These actions must stop. We are issuing a call to action, urging fellow musicians, artists, athletes, performers, academics and production companies to refuse to work in Arizona until officials not only overturn this bill, but recognize the human rights of immigrants.

More here.

You know, it's not a bad thing to be concerned with illegal immigration. My take is that the jobs taken by people who are in this country illegally ought to go to actual citizens. At a fair wage. That is, the presence of illegal workers tends to depress wages, which is exactly why we have an illegal immigration problem: businesses love to exploit workers who can't go to the authorities when they're being fucked around. Penalize employers who hire illegal immigrants, and you effectively end the problem of illegal immigration.

But that's not going to happen because our leaders' sympathies lie with exploitative businessmen, rather than with working class Americans. Instead, policy is crafted in such a way as to punish people who risk life and limb to come here just to make a living. That is, the United States both exploits and oppresses the most vulnerable of workers in the land. Usually, those workers are not white.

I don't see how a law that mandates police detaining people they "suspect" as being illegal can possibly be enforced in a way that is not racist. I'm from Texas, and have interacted with countless Latinos throughout my life, most of them citizens, or here legally, but some of them definitely here illegally: at a glance, I cannot tell the difference between a legal Latino and an illegal Latino. So I ask, what the hell constitutes reasonable "suspicion" of illegal status? Is it clothing? Is it speaking in Spanish? Is it skin color? Is it the kind of work one does?

This is waaaay fucked up. They're going to bust people for not speaking the right language, for wearing second hand clothing, for doing physical labor. For not being white. It was super lame when Arizona held out against the federal MLK Day law back in the 90s, but this is beyond shocking.

I have virtually no connections with Arizona, myself, but I lend my rhetorical support to anybody who joins this boycott, which is very likely to happen--Chuck D is but one of many prominent voices calling for it. And if history repeats, such a boycott stands a good chance of succeeding. After all, Arizona may have elected a racist and xenophobic majority to its legislature, but it doesn't want to be a pariah state. I mean, they did eventually approve the MLK holiday.

Anyway, here's Public Enemy's "By the Time I get to Arizona":



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