.
.
Nothing is Boring, hosted by Esteban Gast and Ari Afsar, is out to prove that even the things we think are mundane can actually be FUN and INTERESTING. In this episode, Esteban and Ari dive into the history of the Immigration Act of 1965 to explore the connection between the Civil Rights Movement and the rights that immigrants have been granted in the US over the years.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:00
– Hey Ari.
00:01
– Hey, waddup Esteban.
00:02
– I just heard about this thing that I never learned.
00:04
We have to meet.
00:05
We have to hang out.
00:06
We have to talk about this. – Esteban.
00:07
– It’s wild.
00:10
– Hey, I am Ari Afser.
00:11
– And I’m Esteban Gast
00:12
and we are launching a show for SoulPancake
00:15
called “Nothing is Boring”.
00:17
It’s where we dive into issues we normally don’t talk about
00:19
and find magic in the mundane.
00:22
– And today we’re gonna talk about
00:23
how the black community
00:24
has historically stood in solidarity with minority groups
00:27
and immigrant communities.
00:28
But we’re gonna point out the obvious,
00:30
that we are not black.
00:31
So we’re not going to try and tell the story of BLM.
00:35
– What we did find though, is a bill.
00:38
A law that literally changed the course of our life
00:41
and directly relates to what’s happening
00:43
in the streets right now.
00:44
We had no idea that any of this existed.
00:48
This is “Nothing is Boring”. – “Nothing is Boring”.
00:58
– In 2000, my parents took a citizenship
01:00
through a naturalization test.
01:02
Naturalization always seems like a funny word to me.
01:04
Like you’re like, “Are those oranges naturalized?”
01:07
And you’re like, “Yeah, they’re GMO free.”
01:08
And you’re like, “Thanks.”
01:09
What?
01:10
It’s naturalized.
01:12
When my parents took this citizenship test,
01:14
they were asked,
01:15
“What movement tried to end racial discrimination?”
01:18
The correct answer is the civil rights movement.
01:20
Am I wrong to say that we were taught
01:22
that the civil rights movement happened
01:23
and then like everything was okay in terms of racism?
01:27
– Yeah, and apparently to become a United States citizen,
01:31
they do the same thing.
01:34
And that question is one of the few questions
01:36
on the 100-question test that deal with the issues of race
01:40
and culture identity.
01:42
To me, it’s interesting that in the US
01:44
we often think about history in silos.
01:46
– For example, my parents’ experience
01:48
in learning about the US was number one,
01:49
there was the civil rights movement.
01:51
Number two is my parents are sitting there
01:52
with the ability to become citizens,
01:54
but these two are totally unrelated.
01:56
I’m the son of two Colombian immigrants.
01:58
My father and my mother met and married in Columbia
02:00
only six weeks after they met each other.
02:02
And yeah, they’re still together.
02:06
They immigrated to the US in 1986
02:08
to go to graduate school in New Jersey.
02:09
We moved to Puerto Rico then we moved again to …
02:12
Bounce around Illinois, Chicagoland,
02:16
then um lived in Central Illinois,
02:17
then I lived in Panama
02:18
and now I live in LA.
02:19
Growing up, we went to Columbia, specifically, Bogota
02:23
as often as we could.
02:25
My parents officially became American citizens in 2000
02:28
after acing that test I told you about.
02:30
– I am a first generation biracial kid.
02:33
The daughter of a father from Bangladesh
02:35
and a fourth generation German-American mother,
02:38
but really just white.
02:39
My dad’s family is from the small village
02:41
in Okali, Bangladesh.
02:43
So on the other side of the world,
02:44
my mom grew up in South San Jose
02:46
and found herself getting her degree
02:48
at San Jose State University.
02:50
After getting his master’s in Detroit, Michigan,
02:53
my dad moved to San Jose
02:55
and they met at a bar
02:56
and here I am.
02:58
Can you picture our parents meeting?
03:00
– No, oh my gosh.
03:02
The thought of my dad going up to my mom and being like,
03:04
“Hey, how are you?
03:05
“It’s me, Louis.”
03:07
“Oh, it’s so good to meet you.”
03:09
is ridiculous.
03:10
– No, I don’t like it.
03:13
– I feel like- – I’m still getting
03:13
that visual out of my brain.
03:15
– I feel like our parents were born our parents.
03:19
– Yeah, my dad was born as a baby with glasses.
03:23
– Yeah.
03:24
– And wrinkles.
03:25
– Yeah, my dad was born as a baby,
03:27
glasses, wrinkles and the beard.
03:30
– Oh, beard.
03:31
– Now there’s this thing called
03:32
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965
03:36
which ended up overriding the 1924 law
03:39
called The National Origins Formula.
03:41
Which was designed to
03:42
preserve the ideal,
03:43
American Northwestern Europe homogeneity.
03:48
♪ This was eugenics, people ♪
03:52
♪ This was eugenic ♪
03:55
– During the civil rights movement, a period of time
03:57
that looks a lot like today,
03:59
The National Origins Formula,
04:00
that horrible 1924 law,
04:02
came under attack for being racist and rightfully so.
04:06
♪ This was eugenics people ♪
04:09
Good call, land of the free.
04:11
– And because this civil rights movement
04:13
brought racial discrimination to our nation’s forefront,
04:16
Congress abolished the race-based immigration quota system
04:19
and replaced it with a system that prioritized refugees,
04:23
people with special skills
04:24
and people with family members in the US.
04:27
It also made it illegal to discriminate
04:29
the issuance of immigration visas
04:30
on the basis of race, sex, nationality,
04:33
place of birth or residence.
04:36
– Why were we taught this act in school?
04:39
Like, why is it on the citizenship test?
04:41
Why wasn’t it talked about in my family?
04:44
It’s kind of like, “You wanna come to this country?”
04:46
Well you have a lot of people to thank,
04:47
but you first have to thank your black activists
04:49
and community members
04:50
because they made it all possible.
04:52
– ‘Cause how connected was this bill
04:54
to the civil rights act?
04:56
– The vice president, at the time said,
04:58
“We have removed all elements
05:00
“of second class citizenship from our laws
05:03
“by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
05:05
So we must, in 1965, remove all elements
05:08
of our immigration law
05:09
which suggests that there are second class people.
05:13
Okay, I lied.
05:14
Wanna see that implementation really happen?
05:15
– By the way, when the vice president says we,
05:18
he really means we, the people,
05:20
more specifically the people who brought change
05:22
by marching and protesting and demanding better laws.
05:27
– So what’s happened recently?
05:29
– I don’t …
05:30
Actually no, I remember something.
05:31
– Oh, me too.
05:33
– Okay, wait, I’ll go first.
05:35
– Okay go first. – No, you go first.
05:36
Okay, perfect.
05:37
– Go.
05:38
– I remember in 2010, Arizona had this immigration law
05:40
that, basically, made racial profiling okay.
05:43
I remember thinking at the time,
05:45
this is straight up racism.
05:47
They had legally could stop anyone
05:49
who looked Latin ex in Arizona.
05:51
I just went back and was reading about that case
05:53
and I found out that the NAACP,
05:55
a prominent civil rights organization,
05:57
was one of the first to challenge this law.
05:59
– Even more recently, we saw the Muslim travel ban in 2017
06:02
and the NAACP was right there showing up stating,
06:06
“Just as we fight
06:07
“against voter suppression and police brutality,
06:09
“the NAACP continues to stand against discrimination
06:13
“based on racial identity, ethnicity,
06:15
“national origin, or religion.
06:18
“We know that actions that rely on unfounded assumptions
06:20
“about the dangerousness,
06:21
“will always come at the expense
06:24
“of the most vulnerable populations.”
06:25
♪ We are connected people ♪
06:29
♪ If we learn our history ♪
06:33
– The Illinois Black Panther party leader, Fred Hampton,
06:35
said, “We’re going to fight racism with solidarity.”
06:38
Solidarity is technically, the unity of feeling or action,
06:41
especially among individuals with a common interest.
06:44
The thing is if you’ve benefited
06:46
from an immigration system in the US,
06:47
you don’t have to search far for a common interest
06:50
with the issues that Fred Hampton
06:51
was speaking out against then
06:53
and literally millions are speaking out against today.
06:56
– By the way that 1965 bill is far from perfect
06:59
and clearly has implementation issues,
07:01
but Esteban and I discovered that
07:02
most marginalized, cultural and immigrant communities
07:05
are already connected
07:06
if we dive into the history.
07:08
And so much of the progress of these communities
07:10
is often led by the black community and activists.
07:13
– I didn’t know any of this.
07:17
This is more than the silos that I was taught
07:19
in history class
07:19
or the silos that my parents were tested on
07:21
when they were becoming citizens.
07:23
– So when we look at the history of progress in the US
07:27
and we dive into the, so-called, boring issues
07:29
of how one law led to another law,
07:30
which led to another law,
07:31
which led to another,
07:32
which led to another,
07:33
let’s discover the full history.
07:35
We stand for BLM because black lives matter
07:38
and we also stand for BLM
07:39
because we have ancestral solidarity in our blood.
07:43
So find out where you fit into this fight
07:46
because we all do.
07:48
This is “Nothing as Boring”.
07:49
♪ We are connected people ♪
07:53
♪ If we learn our history ♪
07:57
♪ We are connected people ♪
08:00
♪ If we learn our history ♪
—
This post was previously published on YouTube and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
—
***
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want to join our calls on a regular basis, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
Talk to you soon.
—
Photo credit: Screenshot from video