Why so many ethnic Black Americans are sitting out anti-ICE protests

After the Civil War, the U.S. Constitution was amended to include the children of slaves, ensuring they would remain freedmen in the nation their ancestors built on their backs and bodies for over three centuries.

Ethnic Black Americans, or “foundational Black Americans,” are the first birthright citizens in the history of America and one of the oldest ethnic groups in the country.

Civil Rights Movement focused on expanding rights for all

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

The ethnic Black American and/or the American Indian were the first peoples sacrificed to “make America great.”

We were also the first group to fight voraciously — and win, constitutionally — some form of moral justice, which we then expanded and demanded for all oppressed people who touched the shores of our nation.

And yet — we are not, and have never been, immigrants. While others chose the American Dream, we were the involuntary fuel used to propel America into a first-world superpower. Our enslavement was a canonizing trauma that resulted in a unique American ethnogenesis: the ethnic Black American — an involuntary martyrdom of millions that created modern-day America.

The foundational Black American has fought in every American conflict, from the first life sacrificed by Crispus Attucks in the Revolutionary War to the Civil War and the 1.2 million Black soldiers who turned the tide of World War II.

Credit: Ric Watkins / AJC

Credit: Ric Watkins / AJC

The benevolence of our historical intent has been repurposed. The Black American moral footprint in America was never intended for our community to be used as expendable pawns in a proxy war between political parties.

The hard-earned resources we fought to access and willingly shared are the very ones from which we are promptly removed.

We fight for scholarships for all, just to be cut out of them. We march to secure jobs for all demographics, just to be removed from them. We fight for people of color, women and immigrants of all nations to be represented, just for our own representation to be erased — by the very people we fought for.

So, it has become a source of national “shock” to witness ethnic Black Americans declaring across social media that they will not serve as the moral compass for immigrant rights movements. For Republicans and Democrats alike, the expectation was always that the ethnic Black American would fight for the oppressed. But the shock itself proves the problem. It reveals a deep-seated belief that Black bodies are a public utility — expendable foot soldiers in a proxy war between two parties where our own benefits are never upheld. Now, a disoriented nation attempts to navigate a landscape it no longer recognizes.

While we may sympathize with the removal of immigrants and the brutality with which it is being accomplished, many of us have chosen to sit this one out. The reason is layered, woven into America’s subtle proxy war — a war where ethnic Black American sacrifice, once a beacon of hope to all, has shifted into naïve martyrdom, and the fruits of our blood sacrifice are repeatedly eaten by others.

Other people of color did not share goals of equality

For decades, we operated under the illusion of “Black and brown” unity. We viewed those arriving at our borders as allies, only to realize many were not escaping oppression for all so much as seeking entry into the existing American hierarchy. One where oppression is acceptable, as long as the severity of the oppression excludes them.

We were forced to confront the reality that for many immigrant groups and “people of color” — Hispanic, Arab, South/North Asian and members of the Caribbean and African diaspora — American assimilation often requires the adoption of anti-ethnic Black American-ness.

And, as nonimmigrants, we never understood that to chase the “American Dream” meant to distance oneself and even denounce those who fought for this dream to include all people.

When our community voiced these concerns, we were told the ethnic erasure was our ethical failings. We were told simply to “work harder” (as though enslavement for centuries wasn’t enough), other groups were more educated, or we were labeled “lazy or criminals”— by the very groups we shared limited resources with. These disingenuous narratives were abhorrently false and rooted in a desire for immigrants to progress over us and vie for white adjacency:

While we are asked to protest ICE, nearly 30% of its agents and half of the Border Patrol are Latino — a shift reflected in their voting support for Donald Trump. We have watched “people of color” who climbed the ladder we built become architects of our erasure: dismantling Affirmative Action, speaking against our specific reparations and, as revealed in the 2022 Los Angeles City Council audio, using white supremacist talking points to neutralize Black political power.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

The ‘big tent’ is a failure. We are in the FAFO era.

Political parties have treated the ethnic Black American loyalty as a subsidy for everyone else’s agenda. Our kindness, mistaken for weakness. Our compassion, used for proxy wars that benefited everyone except us. We are now in the FAFO era (defined as F--- Around, Find Out).

We have forcibly pushed America into a better moral nation for over five centuries. However, we never intended that moral inclusion to exclude our specific agenda as an ethnic group.

We understood our natural power to move the American needle; we simply chose to share it out of compassion, not out of foolish martyrdom.

Until more Americans, old and new, begin to understand our historical American significance in their groups’ advancement, foundational Black Americans will be at the cookout planning our own moves instead of front-lining someone else’s proxy war.

K. Finch is a pioneer in educational initiatives, community-driven real estate developer and grassroots advocate. She is based in metro Atlanta and Chicago.