Justice vs. ‘Just Us’: Should Black people care about ICE? – St. Louis American

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It’s June in El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula — the original, full name of Los Angeles, founded in 1781 by 44 settlers from Spanish Mexico, more than half of whom were of African descent. And a weekend in L.A., a.k.a. the Land of Pretty People, usually means young folks head out to see and be seen.
But last Friday evening, as the sun slipped behind the palm trees, I suggested my 21-year-old son and his girlfriend make a different kind of weekend plan.
“I highly recommend that you all stay inside tonight,” I texted. “And, in fact, as much as possible this weekend.”
My concern wasn’t abstract. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had conducted raids earlier that day, in the Fashion District, just east of downtown, not far from our home. The raid swept up more than 100 people, including labor leader David Huerta.
On social media — far from the spectacle of protesters marching onto the 101 Freeway with Mexican flags, far from the sound of the flash-bang grenades — plenty of African Americans were advising one another to stay home, too. But there was a different kind of logic behind the message: Not our monkey, not our circus.
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After decades of carrying the weight of America’s racial sins — after the so-called “92%” showed up for Kamala Harris at the polls in November — Black America decided that ICE agents tearing Brown families apart was a racial crisis that wasn’t our problem.
“Black people stay home, this is not your fight,” Patrick Jeanty Jr, an Atlantic City-based DJ, told his 117,000 Instagram followers. “This ain’t 1992 in LA. This ain’t 2020 Black Lives Matter. Black folks, 92% to 83%, we are on a break, leave us alone. Leave us alone.”
For some, that distance from the protests was a reaction to long-simmering tensions between the Black and Latino communities in general, and Latino anti-Blackness specifically.
Marlissa Collier, a Dallas-based writer and political commentator, grew up in South Central Los Angeles. On Threads, she wrote that her “heart aches for those impacted, and I’ll always stand in solidarity with the vulnerable.” But she has also “personally experienced the rampant anti-Blackness within the Latino community.”
“I think that our Latino cousins have to understand where we’re coming from,” Collier tells Word In Black. “Trust had been broken.”
She recalls her neighborhood’s transformation: It “was mostly Black at first, and then it became mostly Latino,” she says. Even though she’s faced racism elsewhere, and certainly from white people, she “experienced more racism at the hands of Latinos — a lot of whom are Mexican in Los Angeles.”
Brooklyn-born Tiffany Carlock, who goes by Candidly Tiff on Threads, wrote that Latinos “do have issues with anti-Blackness.”
“I totally get why Black folks are like that’s their problem to solve or they are gonna mind their business,” she wrote. “That doesn’t offend me cause I know it’s true as an Afro-Latina.”
Afro Latina civil rights lawyer Tanya Katerí Hernández, a Fordham Law professor, explored this dynamic in her 2022 book “Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias.” She argues that Latinos are often seen as racially diverse and welcoming, but they hide anti-Black attitudes.
Latinos, she wrote in the book, are “entangled with denigrating Blackness as a device for performing Whiteness.”
But Hernández also warned African Americans against withdrawing from the fight.
“The ICE racial profiling of Latinos as inherently undocumented includes many AfroLatinos,” Hernández says in an email. More than 90% of enslaved Africans who survived the Middle Passage, she says, were taken not to the American South, but to Latin America and the Caribbean.
That means ICE raids “can just as easily ensnare African Americans as the AfroLatinos who share a common appearance,” Hernández says. Black safety is endangered when “the machinery of racial profiling” runs unchecked.
“Accepting the denial of due process against Latinos won’t keep Black people safe,” she says. “Whether we like it or not, the assault on the humanity of those presumed undocumented, is a Black issue too.”
Elizabeth Booker Houston, a D.C.-based lawyer, comedian, and civil rights activist, agrees.
“African Americans should absolutely view what is happening with ICE — in LA and all over — as our issue,” Houston wrote in an email. She’s been using her nearly one million social media followers to amplify that message.
“Because it’s simply not right. It’s an injustice to a historically marginalized group of people,” she says.
Immigrants are often portrayed as Latino to score political points, particularly for audiences tuned in to Fox News. Booker Houston says, given that dynamic, it’s easy to forget “we have Black immigrants and Black people who are first-generation Americans right here in the U.S.”
Michael Bland, executive director of Black Men Vote, notes that Black people “have migrated here from Haiti, folks have migrated here from Western Africa.” That didn’t get much notice, though, with the political focus on Latin Americans and the southern U.S. border.
That changed when, during the 2024 presidential campaign, President Donald Trump demonized Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, alleging they were eating cats and dogs.
Zellie Imani, a New Jersey schoolteacher and community organizer, says in an email that what’s happening in Los Angeles is “a Black issue, not only because they are Black immigrants, but because state violence must be stopped. Not stopped only when the victim is Black.”
Some Black folks pointed to Latino support for Donald Trump in key states to justify a collective shrug from Black America.
“I think it hit people really in the gut specifically when they saw how Latino men and women voted,” says Collier, the Dallas writer.
But Booker Houston warns that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere: “A collective punishment because of the bad acts of a few is dangerous for all of us.”
Imani, the schoolteacher and activist, agrees that, in a crisis, politics should take a back seat.
“I don’t know if George Floyd voted. Or who he voted for. That never mattered to me,” Imani says. “What mattered was the injustice he experienced; the injustice others experienced, and [what] those in the future would experience if we don’t end state violence.”
On Monday, activist Bree Newsome Bass spent some time on X, busting myths about the Latino vote. “Latinos have voted majority Democrat in every one of the last 4 elections,” she posted, sharing exit poll data showing 52% of all Hispanic/Latino people voted for Kamala Harris in November, while 46% voted for Trump.
But like most voting blocs, Latinos are not a monolith.
“It’s true Latinos in many parts of the country especially in FL, TX, NV, PA and AZ voted for Trump and now their own people are being snatched up,” Carlock wrote on Threads. “But the Majority of Latinos in Los Angeles voted for Kamala.”
Nearly two-thirds of Mexican Americans voted for Harris, and just under 60% of Puerto Ricans did so — but only 40% of Cubans did so, according to American Society/Council of Americas data.
To defuse Black-Brown tensions, Booker Houston says engagement matters, and can take many forms.
It’s as easy as “sharing a post educating people about the dangers of the ICE raids,” she says. “It’s as simple as calling hotlines to report sightings of ICE in your area. It’s donating to immigrant support organizations if you can,” even if the focus is on certain migrant communities, like Haitians.
She adds one caveat: Don’t shame Black Americans who don’t agree.
“Shame is a strong motivator for inaction, not action,” she says. “This is especially true for a population that has already been beaten down over and over again.”
Bland adds that we also need to connect the dots — politically, locally, and nationally.
What we’ve seen in L.A. — especially considering Huerta, the local union president, “being locked up and detained for trying to, basically de-escalate conflict” is the same thing we saw just “a few weeks ago in Newark with Mayor Ras Baraka, who’s running for governor,” being arrested, Bland says. “This is the old trick out of a playbook,” — and “we cannot stand for that.”
Meanwhile, my son stayed away from the protests.
Maine-based antiracism activist Shay Stewart-Bouley painted the scenario I feared when I cautioned him to stay inside: an African American snatched by “masked men” and detained.
“They eventually realize you are a citizen but they run your background, decide you were ‘critical’ of the administration and you are a problem,” Stewart-Bouley wrote on Threads. “Next thing you know, you are locked up on bogus charges because you might be a homegrown problem. No due process. Maybe you get off months later, but your life is turned upside down.”
This article was orginally published here.

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