Those who hold power create labels and boxes for others to advance their own interests. 

During slavery, white slaveowners grouped those they enslaved into categories of “field slaves”, “overseers”, and “house slaves”. They deemed “house slaves” most docile, fit to be around women and children. They were given certain privileges that those who worked in the fields were denied. Those called “field slaves” were regarded as inferior, but even within that group, there was a hierarchy. Certain enslaved people were given more food or a slightly larger cabin in return for them controlling and directing other enslaved people. 

When convenient, the slaveowners emphasized these distinctions. They provided favors and privileges to those higher in the hierarchy to secure their cooperation. But in the final measure, they defined all of those who were enslaved as the same. Slaveowners denied all of them their freedom and their humanity. They labelled all of them “slaves”. 

Today, this same racist game manifests in the discourse about immigrants. We are told that immigration enforcement is about getting rid of “violent criminal illegal immigrants”. The unstated implication of this is that there are some undocumented immigrants who are more acceptable because they are not violent. And of course, people often make the distinction between undocumented immigrants – “illegal immigrants”, they are labelled – and those who came legally and “did things the right way”. 

Again, the powerful only employ those differences when they are useful. As ICE rolls into communities, they make no distinction between “violent criminal illegal immigrants” and others who are called simply “illegal immigrants”. Most of the people they round up have no history of violence and no offense beyond the act of entering without documents, but ICE officials and their apologists like to gloss over the distinction to treat both groups identically. We have also seen them sweep up Latine legal residents and US citizens in immigration raids. At that extreme point, the modus operandi for ICE is to grab anyone who is Brown and sort everyone out later. 

Both of these examples – the historical example of slavery and the current example of immigration – demonstrate how those in power shift these groups to their advantage, labelling some “good” in certain moments and retracting that judgment in others, always to further their own agendas. We must reject these labels. We don’t need to demonize people who are here to help their families, whose only “crime” was not being able to wait for our intentionally bloated and inefficient immigration system to act. People who commit crimes are addressed by our legal system. We don’t need to appropriate ICE to police them and target others in the process.

As in so many areas of our social and political life, our systems operate through punishment by default when what most people need is a little bit of support. Once we disregard the labels that only serve to divide us for the benefit of the wealthy elites, we can better advocate for the support that will benefit all of us.

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