Leave Those Children Alone!
Statement from Carl Dix and Travis Morales
July 10, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On July 2, more than 100 people waving American flags, screaming “Go back home,” and “Not our children. Not our problem,” blocked Homeland Security buses bringing 140 Central American refugee children and mothers to a Border Patrol processing center in Murrieta, California. This was a scene quite in keeping with America's traditions. First, like modern day slave catchers, the government rounds up tens of thousands of hungry, desperate children at the border in Texas, then, these flag waving Made in America, 4th of July celebrating racists are unleashed.
"Not our children. Not our problem."??? FUCK YOU!!! The poverty, oppression and violence that these children are fleeing, the great majority unaccompanied by their parents or any adult, are a direct result of U.S. domination and barbarity unleashed on the people to maintain that domination in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. In Guatemala, over 200,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians, were murdered by the U.S. backed, trained and armed death squad government from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s. Just in the early 1980’s, more than 600 villages in the highlands of Guatemala, populated by Mayan Indian peoples, were systematically destroyed by the Guatemalan army. In El Salvador from 1979 until 1992, another U.S. backed, trained and armed death squad government slaughtered over 75,000. Throughout Central America, people labor for sub-survival wages on plantations owned by U.S. agribusiness and in sweatshops making clothes for export to the U.S. All this has created the conditions of poverty, desperation, and gang violence from which these children are fleeing. Don’t tell us, “Not our problem”!
It could've been a crowd of whites whipping themselves up into a frenzy getting ready to hang a Black person back in the days of Jim Crow segregation and lynch mob terror. Or a mob of southern whites straining to get to and brutally beat freedom riders or civil rights workers 50 years ago. It's very fitting that the American flag, that red, white and blue rag, was being waved over this ugly scene, since that flag has flown over the horrendous crimes America has been inflicting on humanity since its 2 original sins—the genocide against the native inhabitants of this land and the dragging of millions of African people to these shores in slave chains.
Displaying a classic American mixture of arrogance and ignorance, these racists saw no problem in yelling about “Defend Our Borders” as they stood on land that had been stolen from Mexico.
There were 2 sides on the scene in Murrieta. A smaller crowd of people were there, welcoming the mothers and children from Central America who were fleeing the poverty and violence that US domination has inflicted on their homelands. This side of things must be greatly strengthened. These refugees are caught between the modern day slave chasers of the US Border Patrol and Homeland Security and racist, flag waving mobs that would make the Ku Klux Klan proud.
Rounding up these children, putting them in concentration camps, and deporting them is wrong. It is illegitimate. It is immoral. Five decades ago people confronted a wrong, illegitimate, and immoral system of Jim Crow segregation in the South. In the face of outrageous, inhumane injustice, people stood up and said NO MORE! They got on buses, heading South; they walked into whites-only lunch counters knowing that violent racists would be waiting, eager to brutally punish them for defying white supremacist traditions.
During Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, 800 mostly young people went down South to register Black people to vote in the face of arrests, beatings and murders. Though small in number they focused national and international attention and outrage on the apartheid treatment of Black people in the South where even trying to register to vote could get a Black person lynched. In the face of violence, organized in many cases by local and state authorities, these civil rights workers had major societal impact, opening the eyes of millions, and bringing many more to demand the end of Jim Crow. (Watch "Freedom Summer" on PBS at http://video.pbs.org/video/2365275337/)
Today in the face of equally horrific outrages—more than 2 million people, more than 60% of them Black or Latino, warehoused in prisons; 80,000 of these people subjected to the torture of solitary confinement; police unleashed to murder and brutally beat people without fear of being punished; AND thousands of children being rounded up at the border by the modern day slave catchers of La Migra and met by howling mobs. We must stand up and say: NO MORE!
Right now, we must in a loud voice demand: Leave Those Children Alone! Welcome, Support Families Fleeing "Made in USA" Poverty and Violence in Central America! And we must demand the following: 1) All the youths and children who make it to the U.S. must be treated humanely and compassionately. 2) They must be put in caring, loving environments, and whenever possible, they must be reunited with family members as soon as possible. 3) They must be given all necessary medical treatment. 4) They must be provided with education. And, 5) They must never be deported.
And we must do this as part of building up to the Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration, Police Terror, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation in October. If you burn with anger at the sight of what's going down at the border, if you wonder what can be done about it, join us in acting now and building up to a powerful October that can be the beginning of the end for mass incarceration and all its consequences.
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Carl Dix is a long time revolutionary leader and representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party. He was one of the Fort Lewis 6, U.S. GI's who refused to go to Vietnam in 1970. He served 2 years in the Leavenworth Military Penitentiary for this stand. Carl is a co-founder of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network. Carl and Cornel West issued the Call for the October Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration.
Travis Morales has been a revolutionary communist for almost four decades, many years in his home state of Texas. In 1978, he faced 140 years in prison, charged with felony riot, accused of leading the Moody Park Rebellion against the Houston police murder of José Campos Torres. Currently, Travis is the coordinator of the immigration task force for the October Month of Resistance to Mass Incarceration.
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