From TheRoot.com:
At last week’s immigration march on Washington, tens of thousands of immigrants and activists rallied around the Capitol Building, calling for legislation that would afford legal status to the millions of illegal immigrants living and working within the United States. While official crowd estimates for such events are notoriously unreliable, the New York Times noted that “the demonstrators filled five lengthy blocks of the Washington Mall.”
Many, if not most, of the rally attendees wielded protest signs–both homemade and professionally manufactured–or wore T-shirts emblazoned with slogans like “Change takes courage” and “Illegals are humans.” Still others carried flags–American, Mexican, Brazilian, French, and almost everything in between. And while it seemed as if practically everyone had a unique way of showing their support for reform, they also had one very notable similarity: The crowd was overwhelmingly Latino, with chants of “Libertad ahora!” filling the air as frequently as “Freedom now!”
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To be sure, knowing the statistics–76 percent of America’s illegal immigrants are Hispanic, according to the Pew Hispanic Center–a majority Latino presence was to be expected. And according to the Population Reference Bureau, in 2005, there were only 2,815,000 foreign-born blacks in America (compared to nearly 18 million foreign-born Hispanics). But in Washington, D.C., estimated to be the home of more than 150,000 Ethiopian immigrants and their descendants, the lack of black protesters was downright odd. Ultimately, it raised an important question to consider in the days leading up to the Obama administration’s grapple with America’s immigration problems: Why don’t black immigrants have an affinity for the reform movement?
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