Please don’t ever say “we” won’t do these jobs. An immigration raid left, in its wake, work.

By Fernando Quintero, Rocky Mountain

The line of applicants hoping to fill jobs vacated by undocumented workers taken away by immigration agents at the Swift & Co. meat-processing plant earlier this week was out the door Thursday.  Read more 

I am a fortunate Black American; I can honestly say that I’ve never had a problem finding employment when I try hard enough and look for it. Part of that has to do with the way I speak, and look, and the fact that the areas in which I’ve worked have usually been places in which ideas like “diversity” hold sway. But for many, many African-Americans, this is not the case. In response to this brave Alternet piece, Cyrus responds:

There are some lies that go down easy and some that are just brutally, shall we say, un-lubricated. One such yarn is that of black unemployment. For years Black males have been described as endangered, lazy, shiftless, more obsessed with flash and bling than with opportunity or substance, but … there is another side. When are we going to talk about the systematic discrimination that creates a forty percent unemployment rate for Black America? Why? Forty percent is higher than the unemployment rate for the depression. Black America has endured this for over a decade even in the middle of one of the greatest economic boom cycles to date.  Read more