Mihret Sibhat
On the evening of June 12, I had the privilege of attending a presentation by Dr. Jelani Cobb at East Side Freedom Library. I wanted to hear about the state of the struggle for racial justice from an esteemed author who has dedicated his career to thinking and writing about the issue. I was also hoping to learn something I didn’t know before, and I got so much of that: how enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of emancipation two and a half years after the proclamation; the extent of Abraham Lincoln’s racism; how the census has always been used in this country to perpetuate systemic racism; and much more.
Dr. Cobb did more than teach me new things. He brought together disparate lessons I had gathered over the years from my experiences of being a queer black immigrant who was once undocumented: that the question of racial justice is fundamentally tied to issues like immigration; that the suffering of others, such as immigrants, is connected to or is even a harbinger of everyone else’s; and that most, if not all, forms of oppression are interconnected because the underlying formulas sustaining them are the same across time and space.
I heard Dr. Cobb’s speech as an attack on binaries (us vs. them) when it comes to thinking about oppression. “Us vs. them” assumes a fundamental disconnect between the oppressed and the “non-oppressed.” And that assumption itself is built on another: that the “non-oppressed” are safe from harmful policies targeting the oppressed. Through a series of historical examples, Dr. Cobb replaced these misguided assumptions with the realization that : a) freedom is precarious and any sense of safety we feel as others endure injustice is ultimately like a house built on
sand; and b) the precarity of freedom puts us all in the same boat, i.e. we are not as disconnected as we think we are.
He began with a criticism of most Americans’ perception that Juneteenth is an African American holiday. Although African Americans were the ones enslaved, everyone was diminished by the institution of slavery because it was an aberration on American democracy, on our stated ideals about equality. The Emancipation Proclamation was a declaration that we would (or at least try to) uplift ourselves out of that diminished state by aligning our actions with the ideals enshrined in our constitution. So, if we were all uplifted by the Emancipation Proclamation, why should Juneteenth be a holiday just for African Americans?
Dr. Cobb further illuminated this folly in “us vs. them” by telling a personal story about his encounter with a Trump-supporting African American man who believed Mexican immigrants should be sent back to where they came from. Dr. Cobb told the man about how, before the Emancipation Proclamation in the U.S., many enslaved people in the American south fled to Mexico, and that some of the Mexican immigrants here today are their descendants. In other words, “they” are really “us” and we are all ultimately Mexican immigrants.
But we are also related in less direct ways, through our shared experiences of similar forms of oppression across time and space. For example: Dr. Cobb drew parallels between how lynching was used to terrorize African Americans away from political participation, and how proposals to add a citizenship question to the census today are attempts to discourage participation by black and brown undocumented immigrants, leading to an undercount of those populations. And since the census is used by the government to allocate resources, undercounts in some communities mean less funds for schools, roads, etc. for those communities. That is why, according to Dr. Cobb, “the question about voter suppression and the question about immigration aren’t separate questions.”
But nothing made his argument t more palpable for me than the image brought forth by a phrase he mentioned in passing — “the rolling line of freedom.” During the Civil War, the status of some enslaved people went back and forth between emancipation and enslavement multiple times in a matter of a month depending on the line of battle, i.e. on whether the north gained or lost a given area. This hit close to home because as a former undocumented immigrant, my American citizenship has never given me total peace: I fear that someday someone might knock on my door and take it all away for a reason only they know.
Perhaps part of this fear is due to my background: I grew up under successive repressive regimes in a small Ethiopian town where one form of oppression gave way to another. After a new regime put an end to the persecution my family endured for belonging to a religious minority, I continued to face various forms of abuse for being a boyish girl who preferred playing soccer to learning how to be a “proper girl.” There was respite from all that when I came to the U.S., but then other stuff popped up: at first, there was the depression and endless obstacles that came with being an undocumented immigrant. And now, I am a black immigrant lesbian with a “hard to pronounce” name that I have often tried to anglicize on my resume because I felt it might be holding me back. In other words, most of my life has been a long lesson in how the line of freedom is always shifting.
Although the rolling line of freedom manifested itself in a more compressed period of time for those enslaved people during the Civil War, the underlying truth remains the same: freedom isn’t a fixed truth like the blueness of the sky; it’s always rolling away from or towards somebody. And even for those of us who feel safe now, someday that somebody could be us. That is why ICE agents have been detaining American citizens. That is why, tomorrow, they might feel the need to force all of us to prove our citizenships because how else are they going to prove that an undocumented immigrant is undocumented?
The racist and xenophobic policies we are contending with today—voter suppression, anti-immigration policies, etc.—are motivated by the desire to silence and/or reduce the influences of a certain kind of electorate: the kind of electorate that might vote for less war and more education; less divisions and more diversity; less inequality and more equitable distribution of resources; less exploitation and more fairness; etc. If you, like me, belong to that electorate, you can be sure that you are on the same list as undocumented immigrants despite your possession of qualities (race, religion, gender, national origin, etc.) that might be giving you a false sense of safety.
There’s an Ethiopian tale about a frog who was enjoying a swim in a pond when she noticed a distant house on fire. “None of my business,” she said to herself and continued her swim, until the people trying to put out the fire came to the pond in search of water. And before she knew it, she was in one of the buckets. Fortunately for most of us, we’re neither frogs nor helpless. We’re in a position to go to that burning house and help out with putting out the fire before its impact reaches us.
That means different things for each of us. And if figuring out our roles sometimes feels like a struggle, perhaps we can start at libraries. Paraphrasing Dr. Cobb, libraries are reservoirs of knowledge about people who faced similar challenges in the past as we do today; reservoirs of knowledge about how those people responded to those challenges. In other words, libraries are reservoirs of inspiration.
Mihret Sibhat