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We Must Stop the Hate
By Levi Herrera-Lopez, Director, Mano a Mano Fam. Ctr.
02/05/09, Salem, OR

Being in Jackson, Mississippi, for me was like traveling back in time, to an age the country is tying to, but must never forget.

I spent the first week of December 2008 in that far off world for a national gathering of Latino community organizations, hoping to learn from African Americans and their struggle for Civil Rights. As I attended workshops and listened to various speakers, a theme began to resonate in my mind, and that theme was, “We Must Stop the Hate”.

The gathering attendees and I heard from Mississippi State Representative Jim Evans, and of the very real and very literal life and death struggle his father made just to be among the first African Americans in their State to be registered to vote in the 1940s.

We heard from Bill Chandler, a White man who is now an advocate of immigrant rights, and how as a child in the 1950s he witnessed first hand the mass deportations of Mexicans, U.S. Citizen and Immigrant alike, in Los Angeles, CA. We heard from the African American elders who today still sing, “I ain’t gonna let fear hold me down,” as they walk arm in arm with Latinos and other people of Color on the streets of Mississippi.

And at the same time we heard of how even today, in the good old 21st Century, both the KKK and the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) of Mississippi publicly advocate against Immigrants and their rights. In case you didn’t know, the CCC is the direct descendant of the infamous and racist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s.

And as I heard this I began to think, “We Must Stop the Hate here in…” But even before I could finish that sentence, I heard stories of parents being abducted, of children being placed in strange homes, of Fear and Hatred being legalized from Coast to shining Coast of this great nation. And I was kindly reminded that even here, in my own backyard in progressive Oregon, there some those who, not unlike the CCC, have active ties to known hate groups across the nation, and of how it has been made okay in the public discourse to speak of certain groups as something less than human, be they people of color or of a different sexual preference.

And as that theme, “We Must Stop the Hate”, kept resonating down through every bone in my body, I was reminded that “It” always starts by making the “Other” less than human and that injustice is always allowed to happened by people of kind and good hearts who make the choice to do nothing.

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