We aren’t all in the same boat

Recently I was on a panel discussing an issue that’s become an L.A. buzz phrase: black-brown relations.

It was a lively multicultural event that featured African drumming, a compelling photo exhibit of the African heritage in Mexico and an impressively diverse roster of panelists and participants. In inimitable L.A. fashion, a black man intoned a Hindu opening prayer while the crowd, mostly made up of African Americans and Latinos, was encouraged to join hands. But for all the good vibes, when my turn came to speak, I fought back anxiety and anger and said out loud what has become almost heretical in pro-coalition circles: We are not the same.

That blacks and Latinos -- or blacks and whites, or whites and Latinos -- are not the same is self-evident and shouldn’t be controversial at all. But the aggressive push for “minority” unity in recent years has made such an observation downright inflammatory, especially if the observation is made by a black person. At a similar meeting of black and Latino parents that I attended last year, a black father was met with silence when he pointed out that the office staff at his children’s school spoke mostly Spanish, not English; the silence got bigger when his initially neutral tone turned irate as he began listing more grievances about the school and about his South L.A. neighborhood, things that had gotten worse for him, not better. Though there was more than a bit of paranoia in the man’s comments, I empathized with his need to be heard. He was not against cooperation -- after all, he’d come to the meeting. But he understood that the need for cooperation was being driven by the growth of a Latino population with interests and expectations that, intentionally or not, were being layered over his own. His fear is not unreasonable.

For all the talk of equality, it is blacks who are expected to minimize their identity and self-interest to join a new ethnic order driven not really by philosophy but by real-world demographics that make Latino majorities in communities that were once majority black inevitable. The message is: Get with the program.

Many black people resist this not because they are anti-Latino (though that is always assumed) but because the program doesn’t sufficiently speak to their ongoing crises. The progressive party line is that blacks and Latinos are mired in the same economic conditions and must therefore join forces to fight the “divide and conquer” strategy employed by everything and everyone from school districts to corporate America against all people of color. This is not untrue.

But what’s also true is that black people are tired of being conflated with Latinos as poor people in the same boat, navigating the same rough waters of ghetto deprivation, traveling a similar historical arc up to and including their immigration to Southern California seeking respite from an oppressive life. It’s a good story that glosses over the instructive particulars of the black American experience that has always been, if not exactly uplifting, distinct and full of a certain moral power. An obvious difference is that black Americans are not immigrants at all but citizens who were denied full citizenship for well over 100 years.

Of course, there are points of intersection and opportunities for collaboration with Latinos. But what fuels the uneasiness of blacks of all classes is a sense that the lessons of their own unique experience are being abandoned -- starting with the lesson that color matters and that racial equality is a very unfinished business. They feel the effect of an aborted racial justice movement -- not economic justice -- that has left black people in pretty much the same place in society as they were 40 years ago: at the bottom. To be sure, the hard lines of segregation have come down and the middle class has grown exponentially. But as a recent Pew Research Center study on black Americans has shown, the black middle class is frailer than its white counterpart and not nearly as separated from its poorer brethren as it would like to think.

So when all this frustration comes up against the call for black-brown unity, excuse me if I don’t immediately answer. Unity is well and good, but it cannot stand if the required pieces don’t quite fit together.