Rosario Dawson: ICE Raids ‘Part of Larger White Nationalist Narrative’

Actress Rosario Dawson, the girlfriend of Democrat presidential hopeful Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), claims in an op-ed that illegal immigration raids by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with hate crimes, “operate as part of a larger white nationalist narrative.”

“The story that the current administration repeats ad nauseam is about a ‘violent invasion’ of immigrant hordes — the exact same words used by the gunman who targeted our Latino community and shot down 22 innocent people in El Paso last month,” Dawson wrote. “The stories we tell—on cable TV, in movies and music, at our own dinner tables—have real-life consequences for people that we all know and love.”

“ICE raids and hate crimes don’t happen in a vacuum,” Rosario Dawson added. “They operate as part of a larger white nationalist narrative, a continuation of manifest destiny-thinking remixed for the age of Twitter.

The Zombieland: Double Tap star believes that type of thinking is a “colonial disease.”

Dawson also stated the topic of immigration is more than a “political crisis” and considered it to be more of an issue of humanity, saying “we” could change the conversation by “changing” the material we produce and consume.

“Now, more than ever, we need to tell honest, nuanced stories about the 47 million immigrants and refugees living here in the U.S.,” Dawson stated before she discussed her new production titled The North Pole, which takes on the topic of immigration.

In closing, Dawson noted:

To counter this country’s intensifying culture of dehumanization—not just towards immigrants but against black folks, Muslims, indigenous people, women, LGBTQ peoples, basically everyone under threat of patriarchy and colonialism—we need stories that do more than simply replay our pain and trauma for the camera.

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