Black Vs. Brown: Nothing 'Minor' About Either 'Minority'

Michigan Chronicle › August 25, 2009

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Summary

"If you're Black, get back. If you're Brown, stick around. But if you're White, you're all right." So went the popular saying of the 1960s civil rights and Black power movements, which capsulized the feeling of social, political and economic disenfranchisement among African Americans.

This past October, just over 200 years since Black trader and pioneer Jean Baptiste Point DuSable became Chicago's founder and first settler, the institution that bears his name, the DuSable Museum of African American History joined forces with the city's National Museum of Mexican Art to host the second annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cesar Chavez Luncheon. In the names of two of this country's most celebrated Black and Hispanic civil rights crusaders, history was quietly made as a distinguished panel of experts came together for a discourse about the fusion of Black-Hispanic ideas and energies to confront issues of import to both cultures.

"Fear is change," [Joseph Nebolsky de Ochoa] told this writer. "For years, each group (African Americans and Latinos) has been fighting on so many fronts externally, but also internally among their own. This rhetoric continues. For example, we hear; 'you're not Black enough to understand being Black.' Or you're not Brown enough to be Brown/ At the DuSable-Mexican Fine Arts Museum event, there was serious debate about why Hispanics are supposedly 'taking jobs away' from African Americans. It was interesting to see folks begin to understand that nobody is taking jobs, but that the jobs in question are just no longer willingly accepted by African Americans.

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Black Vs. Brown: Nothing 'Minor' About Either 'Minority'

Well, by all indications, Brown ...

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