This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

National chauvinism at the Nectarine Ballroom

This is the text of a letter RAIL sent to the Nectarine Ballroom, an Ann Arbor, MI dance club, a few days after the Nectarine turned away and used racist slurs against a group of Latino customers. RAIL encourages people angered by incidents like this one to work with us against national oppression and discrimination in all its forms, and to take up the overall struggle against imperialism. For more information, contact us at the addresses below.


Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist League (RAIL)
P.O. Box 3576
Ann Arbor, MI 48106-3576
e-mail: mim@mim.org




September 10, 1997

Nectarine Ballroom
516 W. Liberty Street
Ann Arbor, MI

Dear Nectarine Ballroom,

We heard about an incident outside your club on Saturday night September 6 in which one of your employees turned away some potential customers because they are Latino. We want to express our disgust that one of your employees would use slurs against customers and turn them away because of their nationality. We urge you to publicly apologize for this action and to make sure none of your employees do this in the future.

Because Amerika is a country in which different peoples live as different nations -- separated by economic and territorial circumstances as well as language and culture -- we do not expect that you will keep future employees from having such chauvinist sentiments. For all we know the management and ownership of the Nectarine feel the same way as the employee who told a group of potential customers to "go back to the fields." But we hope that some of you or your staff will recognize how wrong it is to support discrimination based on national origin and will work against this discrimination and the national inequalities which support it.

RAIL believes that for such incidents to stop completely, the system of imperialism would need to be eradicated. We live in a country established by settlers, who stole land from the Indigenous peoples and brought slaves with them for forced labor. Amerika continues to maintain military bases in the Philippines and other Third World countries, and to control the economies of countries outside U.$. borders through its military presence and capital investments. Internally, the white nation has a higher average income than the Black, Latino and First Nations, while these other groups are disproportionately represented in prisons.

RAIL works to educate people about the specifics of these various forms of oppression through documentary film showings, presentations, and our newspaper. We plan to write about this incident in our newspaper (previous issue enclosed) and hope you will be able to respond to this letter in time for us to include any comments you may have, including an apology.

In struggle,

RAIL


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