After the Black American Leadership Alliance (BALA) organized “March For Jobs” rally against amnesty for illegal aliens, forces on the institutional left banded together on Monday in an attempt to smear the organization and event as racist.
The National Immigration Forum (NIF), which as Breitbart News has already detailed is an organization largely funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros, hosted a press call with mainstream media outlets to “reject attempts from organizers to provoke tensions between African Americans, Latinos, and immigrants.”
The Center for American Progress (CAP) helped organize the call. CAP Action Fund Senior Fellow Sam Fulwood joined it, according to a press release, as did far left-wing group the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy’s director Colette Pinchon Battle. Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) vice chair Rep. Yvette Clark joined the call too.
The Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy’s Colette Battle led the way in attacking the protestors according to Breitbart News’ Michael Patrick Leahy, who was on the call.
“BALA is just one of the many groups used as front groups for these hate groups,” Battle said. “BALA is led by a few folks who have questionable reach into the African-American community.
“Once you begin you believe you are less equal,” Battle added. “Today we see members of BALA are standing with nativists. We see black Americans standing with groups who are known to be minutemen and nativists.”
At another point in the call, Battle argued that BALA “maintains a racial hierarchy.”
“There’s another piece to structural racism,” Battle said. “It helps to generate differences among people of color.”
According to leftwing researchers from the Aspen Institute, the term “Structural Racism” means, in the United States, “the normalization and legitimization of an array of dynamics – historical, cultural, institutional and interpersonal – that routinely advantage whites while producing cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color. It is a system of hierarchy and inequity, primarily characterized by white supremacy – the preferential treatment, privilege and power for white people at the expense of Black, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Arab and other racially oppressed people.”
The focus of the BALA and the March For Jobs was hardly upholding “structural racism”; organizers wanted to expose how an amnesty would, as the several members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights have explained, “disproportionately harm” America’s black community.
Michelle Cottle of the Daily Beast launched a similar preemptive attack against BALA before the rally, in which she wrote that BALA “is merely the latest in a series of minority front groups providing anti-immigration extremists cover from charges of racism.”
“Cottle assumes that African-Americans hold homogenous, identical views,” BALA founder Leah Durant, a former Department of Justice immigration attorney who now also serves as the executive director of Progressives for Immigration Reform, said, responding to Cottle. “Although it may come as a shock to Cottle, African-Americans are individuals capable of holding ideas that differ from one another … and other members of the human race for that matter.
Later in her response, Durant wrote that Cottle “seeks to perpetuate the myth of Tea Party racism to distract the public from its ‘limited government’ message in the same way she attempts to distract the public from the Black American Leadership Alliance’s message that job-killing amnesty proposals under consideration by Congress threaten all Americans, and in particular African-Americans.
“Our coalition partners may not see eye to eye on other issues, but we are united on stopping Congress from imposing a second mass amnesty on America, which will only encourage more illegal immigration,” Durant wrote.
Durant added, “It is no surprise to hear the that the pro-amnesty/open borders proponents are loosely hurling accusations of racism again. That is standard fare for them. It is becoming such a frequent refrain to all rational arguments against illegal immigration that it has lost all meaning. When that is always the response to any logical argument that disagrees with them, you have to question whether there are any real arguments on the other side. It is not racist to stand up for the sovereignty of your nation or to require that our country’s laws be obeyed. You have to ponder whether those who criticize these values really love this country and want the best for it. The critics who make these charges of racism so quickly are clearly not familiar with the principles of America’s most revered African American leaders like WEB DuBois, Frederick Douglas, A. Philip Randolph, and most recently Barbara Jordan. These real leaders in the black community understood the harm that illegal immigration would have on black American workers, and they strongly opposed it. They believed…. These great black leaders were referenced yesterday from the podium. Would our critics say these leaders also ‘have questionable reach into the African-American community’? Let me guess – I suppose they would say these four were all racists too. No racists, black or white, spoke from the podium or organized the event. It was a true coalition of white and black, Democrat and Republican, progressives and conservatives, all coming together for the good of American jobs. Unlike the pro-amnesty crowd, we welcome all people to join in the fight to kill this awful piece of legislation. Us racist? I think they do protest too much.”