CBS Evening News marked the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark Supreme Court ruling that abolished illegal segregation, by comparing the struggles of African Americans to those of illegal immigrants. I’ll tell you, it’s hard to wrap your head around such a comparison.
The station aired a segment centered around achievements of migrants and refugees, with Pilar Mejia, the Director of Cultural Innovation, highlighting the importance of each individual, regardless of their linguistic skills. Students from over 40 countries have been enrolled under this drive. According to Mejia, if not for this program, the families could have stayed stuck in dire situations in their home countries.
The piece also profiles the first-ever African-American school superintendent of the district, while lauding her reformative contribution to the community. While this was a wonderful feature, it’s what followed that throws you off track.
The hardships faced by those who choose to enter the U.S. outside the legal immigration process are being equated with the ghastly horrors of slavery and the post-Reconstruction regime inflicted on the descendants of the enslaved. There’s no comparison between Jim Crow and illegal immigration, no matter how hard the left-leaning faction or CBS’s Janet Shamlian tries to paint it that way. Bringing up such comparisons in a news broadcast is a blatant insult to history and to basic human decency.
The original report carried an extensive transcript of the aired report on CBS Evening News on Thursday, May 17th, 2024. It started with President Biden’s meeting with two original plaintiffs of Brown v. Board of Education case, thereby setting the stage for the discussion. It went on to introduce Tiffany Anderson, currently managing the Topeka Schools and following the precedent set by the Supreme Court’s decision, with a focus on her innovative and impactful approach to help needy students.
But those substantial efforts are somewhat overshadowed by the utterly unnecessary comparison between illegal immigration and the fight against racial segregation. A one-off reformative, innovative program doesn’t equate the struggles of illegal immigrants with the persecution of black Americans over centuries.
To end, the CBS report seems to have had noble intentions, but the skewed comparison only distorts the very principles of the monumental Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Such erroneous correlations do nothing but insult our history, disrespect the resilience of the African-American community, and undermine the gravity of their struggles.
