During the Black Civil Rights Revolution of the sixties, rights were fought for by Black youth under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King and others. The result were many including the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, Affirmative Action, integrated schools, the right to vote, the right to buy a house wherever you could afford it, and even the right to marry anyone you wanted to. The list could go on and on and the argument could go on and on about whether all of the changes were good. But at the close of the day, Black Americans were better off than they were before the 1960’s. There were more opportunities than there were before. But like all opportunities you have to get prepared, identify the opportunity, show up and take advantage of them.

On the tails of the Black Civil Rights Revolution came rights for Latinos, then called Chicano Americans, largely influenced by the works of Cesar Chavez and the farm workers movement. Today, there seems to be a conflict between Black and Brown people. The question is whether the conflict is real, staged, or imagined. It is real when a Latino gets a job, becomes the supervisor and, in the name of increasing the number of Latino workers at the job, trumps up a reason to terminate a Black worker to bring in another Latino worker. The next question is whether the Latino has coattails that could benefit Black workers as well as Latinos?

Don’t forget there are Black Africans and Black West Indians from the Caribbean who are seeking to get into this country and must be judged and affected by whatever policies come out of the Latino Revolution. Need we answer the question of how many white Canadians and Europeans are in this country illegally and why there is no uproar about them. Why are the racists building a fence on the Canadian border? Oh, maybe I just answered that question. They are white.

The conflict is imagined when people who have no skills and are not really looking for a job complain that the Mexican takes their job when the job they take is one that Black workers won’t do. My philosophy is that until you get the job you want, you take the job you can get. Anything is better than begging or stealing. As a note: there have been five burglaries at my small business location in the past two years, so I know that somebody would rather steal than work.

The conflict is real when the Latino will work for less than minimum wage, thus driving down the rate of pay for everybody. It is staged or created when the corporations don’t get punished for hiring immigrants for less than minimum wage like they did in slavery times.

Watching the young Mexican and Latino’s last week as they filled the streets in protest for the policies of the American Conservative and Racist Bush administration, I saw opportunities and power and coattails for Blacks to grab hold to. The young Mexicans were born and raised here, so the question is where do they belong? Lest we forget the same man who is yelling for the Mexicans to go back to Mexico once cried for Blacks to go back to Africa. The same conservatives who want Mexicans to stop crossing the border to take jobs are sending jobs to India by the ton. The same conservatives who want to deny Mexicans and other Latinos the right to go to school once denied Blacks the right to read.

Make no mistake about it. The situation is a complicated one, but based on a simple fact. Mexicans and other immigrants see America as a land of opportunity and most people in their right minds will go where the opportunities are. And why not? Didn’t the Europeans see this as a land of opportunity and come and kill off all of the native American Indians so they could have the opportunities? When Blacks migrated from the south to the north, there were opportunities, and there was resistance. And still we came from the cotton fields to the factories.

The question for Blacks is what are you doing to make sure that this is still the land of opportunity for you? Three words come to mind: preparation, education and entrepreneurship. If you engage these three things and help the Mexicans get the minimum wage increase here in America and get Mexico to increase their wages and improve their employment policies that have resulted in the mass migration north, then life will be better for all. In the meantime we should embrace and practice the unity demonstrated by the Latinos in the face of the Bush racist policies.