Northeast News
April 6, 2016

Dear Editor,

Mr. Bushnell recently mentioned being called racist for “an editorial that never once mentioned race.” This highlights a key gap in understanding racism today.

Waking up white, we don’t realize that race exists whether we name it explicitly or not, because we can usually navigate the world without facing barriers because of our skin color. We believe that race is an “issue” only when we interact with people of color, or when someone explicitly brings up race. Because of white fragility, we avoid mentioning race, believing that if we ignore it, we will all get along better.

Thus, the most common modern-day collaboration with racism is colorblind silence. For example, your silence on Donald Trump’s explicit racism and xenophobia, which has profound implications for Northeast’s diverse populations, has loudly communicated your support. However, racism can also be communicated with a wink and a nod, using coded language that denigrates people of color. When writing about black males, one of your favorite terms is “thug” (used in at least eight different Bunny editorials since 2014). In September 2013, you casually referred to “refugee dumping,” implying that people who are refugees are trash.

Additionally, racism today uses inflammatory language to portray all anti-racist or anti-hate protest groups as violent, irrational outsiders. “Violent mob” is one of your go-to terms for minimizing and dismissing a mostly local, mostly peaceful group with a few aggressive agitators. If you ever showed up to one of these events for some on-the-ground news-hounding, you might see several well-rooted and thoughtful Northeast residents passionately and peacefully voicing our concerns.

Sincerely,

Chris Homiak

Northeast Resident

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Publisher’s note

The term “immigrant dumping” used by the letter writer is taken out of context. The term, as used by the publisher in the 2013 editorial, is used to describe what the Don Bosco Center previously did when “sponsoring” immigrant refugees from third world countries. In the early 1990’s, it came to the attention of Northeast neighborhood organizations that Don Bosco was literally dumping immigrant families, sometimes upwards of 15 or 20 people in small, run-down apartments in Northeast with little or no accountability and zero instruction to the newly settled refugees on assimilation or how modern conveniences, such as indoor plumbing, functioned. The most egregious occasion being when a Sudanese family was picked up at the airport late on a Friday night and carted off to a building near Maple Boulevard where they were unceremoniously dumped in a two bedroom apartment with no water, heat or furnishings and left to fend for themselves until Monday morning.

Neighborhood Associations demanded accountability from Don Bosco and Executive Director Lou Rose on how refugees were being resettled into the Northeast, as well as where they were being settled.

For the record, had these neighborhood associations, namely Scarritt Renaissance and Pendleton Heights, not stepped up and acted in the defense of the “dumped” refugees, the practice would have continued unabated, standards for improvement would not have been set and assimilation classes would not have been implemented by sponsoring organizations who were, up to that point, in the refugee resettlement business for the hefty cash it provided.

Rose was later released by his Board of Directors for a variety of actions, immigrant dumping included. Don Bosco is no longer involved in refugee resettlement.