Silly Negroes.

About one month before hundreds of thousands rallied for “immigrant rights” -- a term that may apply to those who’ve entered the country legally, but quite problematic when applied to the ones who haven’t -- a black man stood in front of a church in Baltimore.

He held up a pair of handcuffs and told the crowd of mostly Hispanic immigrants that “if we have to take on local government, local government get ready to fight. If we have to break the law to help, we’re willing to go to jail for the family.”

The man was the Rev. J.L. Carter. The law he referred to was the proposed U.S. Senate legislation that would have made illegal immigrants felons and made helping them a crime.

I can only guess at what Carter meant by “family.” The “human family,” perhaps. Or the family of Christians. Whatever he meant, as a black man he shouldn’t necessarily assume that other “people of color” are cool with us because we’re cool with them.

Syndicated columnist Larry Elder wrote that Mexican cops who stop black Mexicans make them sing the Mexican national anthem to prove they’re citizens of the country. I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that Marcus Garvey had Universal Negro Improvement Association chapters in several Spanish-speaking countries. The organization’s newspaper, Negro World, was published in English and Spanish.

Garvey didn’t establish UNIA chapters in those countries and have his newspaper printed in Spanish because Latinos, as “people of color,” were natural allies and friends of the Negro. He did those things precisely because they weren’t.

So when a J.L. Carter or any other black person makes a stand for the rights of illegal immigrants, the overwhelming majority of whom are Hispanic, I say more power to him. But I’m a quid pro quo kind of guy. Before I’d take a stand like that, I’d ask our potential Hispanic/Latino allies what they plan to do for us.

If the attacks by Latino inmates on black inmates at several Los Angeles County jail facilities the past few months are any indication, the answer is apparent: Not a damned thing.

I wrote about that situation in a previous BlackAmericaWeb.com column. I haven’t heard of one Hispanic/Latino leader condemning those attacks. Most black leaders themselves have been alarmingly silent about the matter.

Most news media have conducted a blackout of the attacks, which some said have spilled over into the streets. In fact, the only television references I’ve heard about the situation are from the cop show “The Shield” and from Black Eyed Peas member Will.I.Am, who made a reference to it at the Soul Train Music Awards Show.

“There’s some stuff going on between blacks and Mexicans in Los Angeles,” Will.I.Am said. “We’ve got to end that.”

How much of the “stuff” is caused by Latinos who entered the country illegally is something we may never know (The Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee Website says that “over half of the Latino population in California jails are illegal aliens.”). But what we should know, if we studied our history, if indeed we cherish Black History Month as much as we claim we do, is this: Large numbers of immigrants to the United States have usually had an adverse economic impact on black folks.

Frederick Douglass referred more than once to how Irish immigration led to the loss of jobs among black folks, as well as a rise in racism. The East St. Louis race riot of 1917 and the Chicago race riot of 1919 were extreme cases of mainly white-on-black violence. The whites were mostly immigrants or children of immigrants.

Black folks should think about things like racial strife and job competition when considering what impact illegal immigration will have on us. Does anyone really believe what Mexican President Vicente Fox said about illegal immigrants doing work “even” black folks wouldn’t do?

That may be true of some jobs, although I’d still like to know where Fox got that “even” stuff. But I’ve seen Latinos doing work -- in hotels and as janitors -- that black folks are still doing. I’ve been on buses as early as five or six in the morning that were filled with black folks going to some low-wage job somewhere.

We need to take a long, hard look at illegal immigration before deciding where we stand on the issue, which isn’t as black and white -- or brown -- as it appears.