(In this post, I’m going to be talking about how the 287(g) program plays out here in Nashville, Tennessee, because that’s what I’m most familiar with. This stuff may be applicable in other communities–I suspect it is–but I’m not going to presume to know.)
Like many Southern cities, Nashville’s predominate racial make-up was white and black. Over the past fifteen years, the Hispanic population has grown immensely (an 800% increase) and there are now roughly 50,000 Hispanics in Nashville, which is about 10% of the population.
The 287(g) program, if you have not heard of it, gives some powers of immigration enforcement to the Sheriff’s office. So, if you are arrested in Nashville and they have reason to suspect that you might be an illegal immigrant, you are run through a Federal database and held for ICE and then deported.
When this program was presented to cities, it was sold as a way to make it easier to hold and deport dangerous criminals. It has become, as you might imagine, a way to terrorize ten percent of our neighbors. Our Sheriff even brags about having removed 5,000 illegal immigrants from our community in the two years we’ve had the 287(g) program, as if it’s perfectly fine and cause for pride that one man has the power to disappear one percent of a city’s population (or ten percent of any particular ethnicity).
But let’s step back a second. Because I think the old-school racism of 287(g) is so blatant that most people look past it.
I mean, if I told you that Nashville had a program to lower the number of brown people in our city, if I phrased it that way, you’d either think that I was making stuff up or that I lived in a place that had yet to hear of the 1960s.
But ICE doesn’t force cities to participate. Cities who have a need for it ask to participate and then have to get approval. Well, what exactly is this “need”? You can’t tell if a person is here illegally by looking at him. So, how, exactly, did Nashville decided that the number of illegal immigrants here was a problem that needed a solution in which we called in the Feds?
I hope you don’t feel like I’m insulting your intelligence by spelling this out, but we only needed 287(g) after the demographics of our city had changed so radically. In other words, the presence of all these brown people, speaking Spanish, was/is a “problem.”
That’s racist, obviously. But it goes further than that. This is a “problem” the community will know is solved if the community perceives there to be fewer brown people. Remember, you can’t tell if someone is here illegally by looking at him. So, how are you going to judge, as resident of our city, if 287(g) works? It has to seem that there are fewer brown people here.
It could not get any more old school racist than that–we perceive that the problem is that there are too many brown people, we come up with a program that allows us to justify to ourselves and to the rest of the country why we need to reduce the number of brown people in our community (in this case that many of them are here illegally and we just love America so much that we have to protect it from those illegal immigrants who want to come here and ruin things by getting jobs and giving their kids a good education), and then we start rounding up brown people and shipping them elsewhere.
Not all of us can admit this out-loud, even to ourselves, of course, because we want to believe that we are good people and not terrible racists who increase suffering in order to preserve our own comfort. See our beloved Sheriff Hall, whose baby our 287(g) program is. He spoke to the local chapter of the CCC, and his claim was that it never occurred to him that they might be racist (apparently we’re supposed to believe that no one in his office can use Google, or something).
It never occurred to him that the groups of white people who might be most enthusiastic about his program were racists?! It still boggles my mind and that happened last year.
But here’s my question, folks, which goes back to the title of the post. Can white privilege ever be exercised for good? Here we have a racist program, which is causing terrible havoc in our Hispanic community. People don’t want to call the police when crimes are committed because, if, say, they see their neighbor’s house getting broken into, they don’t want the cops to come and cart of their neighbor. Homes are disrupted, families torn apart. You can’t hear from the people in the community without feeling like, “Holy cow, this is terrible.”
Now, there are a lot of really good local organizations like TIRCC and, of course, the ACLU, and on and on who are working to mitigate the suffering caused by 287(g).
But the truth is that it’s a racist program.
Doesn’t that oblige the folks with the least to lose–white native-born citizens–to speak up the loudest?
You see what I’m saying? In a situation like this, the concerns of white, native-born citizens are privileged (shoot, do you think we’d even have this program if a bunch of white folks hadn’t been all “Oh my god, when I drive down Nolensville Road now, all the signs are in Spanish! Something must be done!”) and the voices of the people most affected by this are marginalized and criminalized.
I can speak out against 287(g) without fear because of my extreme privileged in this situation. And I think it’s because of my extreme privilege in this situation that what I say is heard, even if I get dismissed as being a liberal or a Yankee or whatever.
I feel a moral imperative to speak out, because my privilege gives me a way of being heard when my neighbor is not or cannot speak out.
But it reinforces this idea that the brown people in Nashville are not really participants, but just a “problem” for the white people to work out.
I don’t know. It’s pernicious, how racism works, how it forces you to be complicit in it, even in order to work against it.
(Look at the shape of this post, even, how there’s only so long I can look outward before I have to turn the subject back to me.
I’m embarrassed upon re-reading it that it’s so obvious, but I’m going to let it stand anyway, because that’s a side effect of white privilege and living in a racist society: it fucks you up. No use in getting defensive and pretending that it doesn’t. Or rewriting in order to mask it.)