Everyone who talks about the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa is making sure to mention Mia Love, the first black woman in Utah to become mayor and, if the GOP gets their wish, she will become the first black Republican woman in Congress if she can defeat Democrat Jim Matheson in the November elections. That’s all nice and dandy, but if she does win, I have no intentions of attending any victory celebrations.

At a time when attendees at the RNC convention felt that it would be OK to say “this is how we feed animals” while throwing peanuts at a Black employee from CNN, you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not fooled by the true face of many in the GOP just because a black woman was put on stage and applauded in front of the camera’s.

Mia Love is black–at least as defined by American racial standards–but she is not ‘black’ like the vast majority of black Americans. Just like Barack Obama is not black like the majority of black people, either. Obama was raised by a white mother, his white grandparents, and his Indonesian step-father, while traveling across continents. Mia Love is the progeny of Haitian immigrants who came to America in the 70’s, two years before Mia was born. Neither Barack Obama nor Mia Love has lived the experience that the vast majority who were born and raised in this country had to contend with. Most black people in this country do not have a white mother, nor are most blacks the children of immigrants.

According to Love, her family has a real rags-to-riches story: her family immigrated here with “$10 in their pockets and a hard work ethic that allowed them to raise a family and not be a burden on others”. How nice. But I have a few questions: Were Mia’s parents legal or illegal immigrants? What did her mother and father do for a living? Love’s recalls both of her parents “working hard to earn a living” and her father sometimes taking on a second job cleaning toilets. IF that ain’t a work ethic, I don’t know what is. It’s a good thing that there were black people getting hosed down in the streets and thrown in jail for sitting at segregated lunch counters less than 20 years before Mia’s parents came to America. Otherwise there is little chance that Mia’s parents’ hard work would have been enough to pay for Mia to attend college.

In “Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare”, authors Francis Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward present convincing evidence the game really has changed, you need more than hard work and staying off the dole to keep afloat nowadays:

In the 1960’s, the minimum wage was sufficient to lift a three person family with a fully employed worker of poverty; by 1990, such a family fell short of the poverty line by more than $2,000….the proportions of those newly hired who got pensions fell from 43 to 38 percent between 1979 and 1990, and new hires who got health benefits dropped from 23 to 15 percent over the decade…cuts in health and pension benefits continued into the 1990’s.

America is not the same nation today as it was in 1975 when Mia Love was born. Working hard today does not net the same benefits as it did in the 1970’s when Mia’s parents arrived. In 1960, 10 percent of blacks were middle-class versus 44 percent of whites. So not only do black people (and really, all poor people) have to work harder today for less money and fewer benefits than their predecessors, but blacks as a whole were starting further behind the finish line than white people as a whole. Knowing all of these facts, you will have to excuse me for not falling for Mia’s “all you need to get by in America is hard work”-theory.

And does it occur to anyone, most important of all Mia, that if her parents were able to come here from Haiti then by definition her parents were exceptionally privileged; certainly more privileged than the vast majority of Haitians who most definitely cannot afford to come to America, no matter how hard they seem to work in Haiti. The world is full of hard-working poor people. Mia’s parents are just some of the lucky few who were able to reach these shores and make a life for themselves while the unlucky are still waiting for a visa or toiling for too little money to be able to even afford a visa.

Immigrant blacks, whether those from the Caribbean or African nations or elsewhere, tend to be from the upper-classes of the societies from which they immigrate. This is a selection bias. America is no longer taking the tired, the poor, and the wretched refuse from the teeming shores of other nations, and hasn’t been for some time. US immigration policy is geared toward taking the best of the best from other nations; these are the people who are allowed to immigrate legally. Yes, poor people get across the borders too–most often from Mexico. Poor Mexicans came here to work because they are not able to find work in their home country and because the US has historically encouraged low wage workers to come here (e.g., the Bracero program) to work in agriculture doing the work Americans supposedly won’t do. Americans would do the work, just not for the wages that Mexican guest workers would. Those who from the upper-crust of Mexican society have the option of staying in Mexico to enjoy their success. Poor workers from countries other than Mexico normally do not end up here; these people end up in the closest country that they can gain access too, which is normally one of the country’s with which is shares a border. The people who can afford to pay for a plane ticket, gain access to a visa application, and have a legitimate reason for the US to let them in are not the poorest of the poor from their respective country. Thus, America gets the upper-crest from the rest of the world, with the exception of Mexico. So those who immigrate have no right to look down on the poor of America, anymore than they would look down on the poor from their own country.

Mia says the America she came to know was “centered in personal responsibility and filled with the American dream.” Unfortunately that isn’t the America that the vast majority of native-born blacks who were born before Mia’s generation were given access to. And it isn’t the America that the black people who had peanuts thrown at them while she was speaking on the RNC stage were given access to. Until Mia Love, and the people think like her, realize that the America she came to know is not the America that everyone came to know and was raised in, her words will ring hollow.

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Jamila Akil is a senior editor at Beyond Black and White. Follow her on Twitter @jamilaakil or email her at [email protected].