On Wednesday, in speaking with UNICEF’s Claudia González Romo during the annual Hispanicize conference in Miami, Reverend Jesse Jackson spoke on how Latino people should be fighting back against the Trump administration, especially with regards to building the border wall.
In particular, Jackson criticized Latino-owned firms that had submitted proposals to the Department of Homeland Security for jobs building the wall, likening the idea of Latinos helping President Donald Trump build his wall to “blacks building slave ships.”
“If they were going to build slave ships to take blacks back to Africa, I hope blacks would not try to get the contracts to build the slave ships,” Jackson said, according to USA Today.
Jackson also told the Miami Herald that the whole point of the wall “symbolizes something very ugly” that is meant to “demean” people who are different. He added that if Latinos help to build the wall, “that’s choosing dollars over dignity.”
He went on to say that the size of the Latino population in the United States meant nothing without unity and organization and organized communities of color to come together in resistance, saying that “sometimes suffering is the common cord” which can bind our communities together.