A Quote by Opal Tometi
Being in the immigrant rights space, I've heard a lot of transactional talk with questions like, 'When will black people show up for immigrants?'
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I am the executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, which is the country's only national immigrant rights organization for black immigrants and African Americans. Being the daughter of Nigerian immigrants really drove me to do this type of work.
At the end of the day, these are issues that need to be discussed: femicides, among other things - immigrant rights, women's' rights, indigenous people's rights, animal rights, Mother Earth's rights. If we don't talk about these topics, then we have no place in democracy. It won't exist. Democracy isn't just voting; it's relegating your rights.
I feel like I have so many amazing opportunities because of my immigrant mother, my immigrant grandparents. There are so many of us who do come from immigrants - even some people who support Trump's travel ban. I think we need to take a step back and realize what the real issues are - it's not being from different places or being different.
Of course, everyone in the New World is an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants, and immigrants have built America and continue to do so. Legal or illegal, they are almost universally good people who work to better their lot and that of their children.
I think many of the ideas that opened up in the '60s got implemented in the '70s and that certain minority voices that were not being heard in the '60s, like women and gay people, were being heard in the '70s. Black Civil Rights had also found its foothold, and those ideas were also very pertinent.
I felt like it was a courageous show [Black-ish] from the beginning. We are a black family - we're not a family that happens to be black. But the show is not even about us being black. The show is about us being a family. That is groundbreaking - on TV, the black characters either happen to be black or they're the "black character," where everything they say is about being black. I think that's the genius.
Hard-working immigrant workers in this country deserve a real path to citizenship as a part of comprehensive immigration reform...We will continue to work with the immigrant rights community and our allies in Congress to devise a truly comprehensive model that places immigrant and workers' rights at the head of the line.
Donald Trump is not an immigrant basher. His mother was a legal immigrant. His wife is a legal immigrant. He employs legal immigrants. He just likes his immigrants to be legal.
A lot of times, we talk about black people as if being black is all they are. They get up, go to work... and are as complex and interesting and variable as any other group of people. We don't often capture that or write about it.
A lot of people of color and the Black Lives Matter movement will talk about what's really happening, but it seems like you can't get the black president to say something that's obvious about what's happening to black people in this country.
You're not a Black man. You're a human being in God's eyes. So when you sit down to talk to someone and you talk to them in really intelligent terms, you ask difficult questions, there's a militancy that's assigned to you without you asking for it, because you are simply judged by what you look like. If you're a white person asking the same questions, you'd be one of these CNN guys and say how brilliant he is. That doesn't work for you, because this is the world we live in.
Some black women hug me and walk away. A lot of black men talk about dating white women and how they've been there, too. People open up about their racial experiences. I feel like I'm a walking therapy session. It's quite intense. But it means a lot to people.
People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy.
I don't want people to leave the show being upset. So if I am trying to do a new joke, and sometimes I will talk about things like gun control or hostile massacre and I notice people being upset I will change the direction.
A lot of people forget that Americans are immigrants. People are forgetting that, to where people have this attitude, 'We're Americans, go back to your country. Go back. This is a free country.' I always heard that growing up. I always heard that.
The ones I love most are the people who the flaws show. I like doing characters that we see the total person. If people get afraid to show the flaws because they think, "Oh, then nobody will like them," then you end up with a lot of products, and everybody wants to be frigging heroic all the time - not what people are trapped in every day, like your skirt being in your panties after you walk out of the bathroom. Being human. Sometimes when people are drawn to your work, they're drawn because they recognize themselves or their loved ones or their neighbor in it.
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