Inspiring rally for immigrants' rights in Queens NY

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Did anyone from the list spend the day at the New York rally to support the
Immigrant Freedom Ride in Queens' Flushing Meadow? I wasn't able to spend
much time there but it looked like an enormous outpouring of working
people -- an enormous number of Latinos but also Africans, Koreans, Arabs
and others under attack.  It seemed to me that  it was much over 100,000 and
the organizers claimed it was 500,000.  I had no opportunity to get the kind
of view that would allow me to judge that.

It was a vast outpouring from the New York metropolitan area, and Queens in
particular.  To put it mildly, Queens ain't just Rosedale and Howard Beach
anymore!  A big majority working class and very nationalistic (the working
class has always been the mass base of intense nationalism among the
oppressed peoples).

The platform seemed very pro-Democratic party, projecting a protective
"America, America" view of immigration -- on the positive side, there was
some great music --  but the crowd was made up of
immigrants who were proud of themselves and their cultures and national
origins, not primarily proud of America.  Another good negative about the
platform -- noone called for blindness to color or deafness to different
languages and accents.

(I have hated the "color blind" mantra since my high school days in the
1950s when it was -- in those backward times -- the  antiracist mantra of
the liberals and racial "moderates." Martin Luther King used it once or
twice but he outgrew it, and the Black nationality outgrew it a lot faster
than he did. Malcolm X, of course, would never touch it with a ten foot
pole, before or after his stint in the Nation of Islam.)

This action seems like a tremendous blow to the anti-immigrant
discrimination and repression,  to the Patriot Act -- which in terms of its
practical impact on the US population has so far been primarily an
anti-immigrant measure -- and, by weakening the government and ruling class
in general, to the war drive. I hope somebody can offer more detail.
Fred Feldman


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