Solidarity Schools Aim to Protect Black Voters and Immigrants

FEATURING AIMÉE-JOSIANE TWAGIRUMUKIZA - What do immigration, anti-Black racism, voting, and democracy have in common? It turns out, everything.

An increasing number of people exist in the intersections of race and immigration status, and at best, are being deliberately excluded from exercising their democratic rights, or, worse, are terrorized, jailed, deported, or even killed. But, in spite of little to no corporate media coverage of it, people are fighting back, defending themselves, and training others to do so in what are being called "Solidarity Schools." This Labor Day, the May Day Strong Coalition has launched a new wave of such schools.

Aimée-Josiane Twagirumukiza (they/them) is Director of Training at Midwest Academy, a training institute for progressive organizers. Twagirumukiza is also the board co-chair of the National Black Worker Center, a national organization uniting Black workers (employed, underemployed and unemployed) around the country to mobilize and provide resources needed to take on systems of oppression. They spoke with me about their own immigrant background and how people can get involved in the solidarity schools movement.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Let's first talk about yourself. You are one of these people who sits at this intersection, and I understand that you, as a person of Black immigrant origin, have faced a very direct impact to your voting rights. What is your story, and how is it representative of so many people who have similar backgrounds to yours? 

Aimée-Josiane Twagirumukiza: Yeah. So, Sonali, like many other immigrants in my generation, I came to the US as a child. My family received asylum here in the late '90s. And in 2012, living in Atlanta where I currently live, I finally got my citizenship and was able to vote for the first time. And a couple of years before that, I also became active in the immigrants' rights movement here in Georgia. And so two things really stand out for me. 

The first is that I always felt, even as a young adult, that there was something missing in how the immigrants' rights movement talked about Blackness and Black immigrants in particular. I'm from East Africa. I have a lot of friends and community members who are African and Caribbean, and we didn't really hear a lot of mainstream stories about Black immigrants. 

And there was also a lot of conversation in the immigrant rights movement, especially in the early 2000s, that pushed this language of criminalization that felt kind of anti-Black. You would hear things like, "Don't target us, we're not the real criminals," or, "We're not criminals." 

And the insinuation for a lot of Black folks was like, "Well, don't target non-Black immigrants because Black people are really the criminals," right? And it wasn't necessarily condemning criminalization, it was just condemning the criminalization of certain migrants. So I always felt a disconnect in that way.