Arizona

Boycott Arizona. Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine has organized The Sound Strike and I urge you to join. It’s a coalition of artists and friends who refuse to play or visit Arizona until the state repeals its egregious immigration law. In effect, if someone is stopped by the police for any reason in Arizona, they must prove that they are citizens of the United States. In principle it appears reasonable, but in reality it is racial profiling at its worst.

The federal government determines immigration policy, not individual states. And it is the job of the federal government to enforce it. Selective implementation of immigration laws by local law enforcement can only lead to abuse. Racial profiling has to rear its ugly head. White people will not have to prove that they are citizens. Only people of colour will have to suffer the indignity of proving their legality. If they cannot, they must be detained by the local police for federal authorities.

Worst case scenarios are obvious as we all have read and seen examples of racist cops in books and film. But let’s take a best case scenario. An Hispanic woman, a citizen of the United States, is stopped for a minor traffic violation. She has left her license in another purse. Instead of merely receiving a ticket for driving without a license, she will be subjugated to the humiliation of being detained or arrested if according to the statute “reasonable suspicion exits that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States”. In other words, her skin colour as she is “undocumented”. A white woman would only have received a citation.

The federal government must amend our current immigration policy to make it fair and unbiased. And then they must allocate the resources to enforce it. But in the meantime we cannot have individual states requiring local police to have citizens to “show me your papers”. The Arizona state law turns federal law into one of bigotry and racism. Although it is true that Arizona bares more of the brunt of undocumented people than most states, it does not give the state the right to selectively abuse people.

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It is not for naught that this is happening in Arizona. One of the last states to approve Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, it is another desperate gasp on the part of white people who cannot accept that soon they will not be in the majority. Senator John McCain voted against the creation of the holiday until he was forced to change his position. This is also the state where in the film Borat, citizens sang along to the song “Throw the Jew Down the Well.” We are a nation of colour and the laws must be fair and equitable to all. We are also a nation of immigrants and now most of our immigrants are non-white. Laws like this one are subtly but insidiously fascist and racist.

Arizona is one of my favorite states, from the Painted Desert to the Red Rocks. I have visited it frequently as I love the diversity of the terrain and its varied climate. It is a regular stop when we visit our wolf at the Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary in New Mexico. Now we will no longer contribute to Arizona’s local economy. The last boycott of Arizona took place in 1990 when the state refused to acknowledge Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Even the National Football League participated in the boycott by moving the Super Bowl out of Arizona until the state honoured the holiday. Today many local United States cities, citizens, and organizations have joined in the boycott of Arizona. (It is worth noting that the Tea Party opposes the boycott and supports the Arizona law.) Please go to the website and sign the petition. The struggle for our civil rights has been too arduous to allow one state to begin to move us back into another century. To even allow for the potential of the rights of any minority to be violated is untenable. Boycott Arizona!