"Brown is the New Black:" Juan Crow and the Erasure of Black Suffering

• In Event: Southern Metrics of Dissent: A Transdisciplinary Analysis of Black and Brown Resistance, Coalitions, and Justice in the Shadow of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South

Abstract

This paper examines how Alabama activists, journalists, and lawmakers deployed the memory of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement in the struggle against HB56. More specifically it looks at the use of the term “Juan Crow” to describe the southern anti-immigrant legislation.
As a result it is centrally concerned with the mobilization of the legacy of black suffering for movements not centered on blackness. This paper is, therefore, also about the terms under which solidarity can be achieved.

I argue that the mobilization of the Jim Crow era in service of immigrants-rights groups poses three problems: first, it is historically inaccurate and misunderstands the history of Latinxs in the South; second, as a result of this historical misunderstanding it regionalizes anti-immigrant legislation that is better understood as part of a post-9/11 and post-Great Recession national move toward xenophobia and surveillance; and third, it participates in our nation’s historical dispossession of blackness by erasing the enduring effects of Jim Crow as well as flattening important distinctions between the two regimes of racial control. While the legalistic structures of Jim Crow may have largely been dismantled the contemporary attack on voting rights legislation, introduction of voter ID laws, and the expansion of school choice bring some of Jim Crow’s most pernicious effects back to the fore. Additionally, many of the economic and social elements of Jim Crow have left lasting marks on the south that, without reparative relief, will likely not change. How then, can we talk about Juan Crow as replacing a system that is still so omnipresent. Therefore, a term designed to draw historical linkages and unite black and brown activists can also have the corollary effect of expanding historical distance between the “past” of Jim Crow and the “present” of Juan Crow.

Author

• Cecilia Marquez, New York University