Uprooting Racism, Sowing Seeds of Solidarity

Uprooted is an opportunity to create a media project that highlights the breadth and scope of migrant communities and migrant justice issues. By collecting and curating media made by and for social movements, Uprooted aims to clearly articulate how migrant justice issues operate in and through different systems of oppression.

This compelling video produced by Rights Working Group and the Restore Fairness Campaign at Breakthrough* foregrounds the prevalence of racial profiling and how it affects different communities of color in the US. It allows us to see how a pregnant Latina woman jailed for not having a driver’s license is part of the same system of oppression that enables the TSA to humiliate and force Muslim women to remove their hijabs. This video draws the connection between a Kurdish American male who is pulled over and strip searched for driving in the ‘wrong neighborhood’ to the scores of black Americans who continue to be victims of racial profiling and police brutality.

This video fits well with Uprooted’s goal of creating an alternative to the mainstream media’s narrative of migration issues. By bringing together these diverse personal experiences of racial profiling, this video better enables us to envision interracial and interethnic alliances in the struggle for social justice. Racist, unconstitutional provisions, like Alabama’s HB 56 are spreading like wildfire throughout the US (see embedded map). It is crucial that we continue to form and fortify broader, more inclusive coalitions to combat the onslaught of anti-immigrant legislation that encourages racial profiling.

*The video was shot, directed and edited by Breakthrough.

A Nation of Poorly Educated Students?

In a post on peopleofcolororganize.com, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz deconstructs the myth of the United States as a “nation of immigrants.” For Dunbar-Ortiz, that myth sanitizes the fact that the United States as we know them began as a colonial enterprise. The first European men and women to settle this land were not “immigrants,” as there was no already-established nation to emigrate to, save for the nations of Native Americans already present. Those arrivals should, instead, be remembered as settlers that dehumanized and displaced millions of indigenous Americans while taking their land through a strategically administered combination of force and diplomacy.