Racism In America: Brown is the new Black

 WIth the election of Barack Obama in November 2008, the United States took huge strides to erase its history of racism against minorities.  Countries around the world celebrated the election as evidence that perhaps the United States had finally grown up.

However, since the election of Barack Obama it has become more and more apparent that the United States is not as enlightened as we all hoped.  The President and his policies have been continuously protested by many who simply do not like the fact that the United States has a black President.  But under the surface, a new form of racism has taken root.  To put it simply, the United States has declared war on any person who happens to be brown. 

At the end of the Civil War, most southern states passed laws that frustrated the very freedoms granted to African Americans by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.  These laws included that African Americans had to carry papers showing their citizenship to the United States and if they did not have proper papers, they could be arrested on the spot.

Now carrying papers is nothing new to the world.  In the former communist Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, and the Eastern Bloc countries, citizens were forced to carry papers wherever they went to show citizenship or religious affiliation.  During the Cold War, the United States railed against these policies as the antitheses of freedom and liberty.

Well, the old Soviet Union has come to America.  Not in health care or energy policy, but in a law passed by the State of Arizona.  The laws mandates that any illegal immigrant found in Arizona can be arrested on the spot, unless they have the proper paperwork.  And to ensure that this law is vigorous enforced, anybody looking suspicious, meaning Brown, can be stopped and harassed by the cops, whether they are doing anything wrong or not.  So basically if you happen to be a brown person in Arizona, you must have proof of citizenship or legal immigrant status.  If not, then you can be detained and even deported.  And because the Arizona legislature doesn't believethat law enforcement can be trusted to "properly" enforce the law, individual citizens have been granted the right to sue their local police departments for their failure to enforce the law.  This law is so outside the realm of reality that Tom Tancredo, a long time anti-immigration advocate in Congress and perhaps the most vocal and vigilent anti-mexican member of Congress, stated that the Arizona law goes too far.

In America today, if you are Muslim, Hispanic, or just well tanned like George Hamilton, you are automatically suspect. If you are brown, it is now longer your right to board an airplane, drive a car or go to a hospital. What is a bleeding Mexican to do? The law in Arizona is only the start. Oh, by the way, African Americans are not off the hook either as it obvious that America's original sin is alive and well today.

I want my country back. I want the United States back where ignorance and fear do not dictate public policy. Where leaders actually lead and not just lets mobs dictate their opinions. The law in Arizona simply legitimizes and codifies hate. It deputises the "minutemen." In short, the law in Arizona does what the Jim Crow laws did after the Civil War, only it goes as far as to honor today's version of the KKK.