Where black and brown collide
9th August 2007
Economist. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
One reason blacks and Latinos have failed to form an alliance is philosophical. The black civil-rights struggle, in the South at least, was mostly about asserting legal rights and demolishing barriers to voting by those who were, in theory, already enfranchised. The Latino struggle is quite different. Its goal is often the selective or non-enforcement of the law, particularly on immigration. A common demand, for example, is for local police not to co-operate with federal immigration agents. And, whereas blacks in the 1960s demanded power in proportion to their numbers as adult citizens, Hispanics want rather more.