(NNPA)—Arizona Senate Bill 1070 gives law enforcement officers the right to stop, question, arrest and detain any person they suspect is in the United States illegally. What gives rise to such suspicion? Give the climate and the content in which the law has been passed, it might well be called the “detain suspected Mexicans” legislation.

Few of us should get comfortable, though, thinking the legislation targets Mexican Americans and not others. Giving law enforcement the right to stop based on suspicion is a license to harass folks who are “other,” and that may include African-Americans and other brown people. It isn’t likely that White folks are likely to be stopped, though perhaps they ought to be.

The federal appeals court, in a split decision, has ruled 6-5 that a sexual discrimination case against Wal-Mart can move forward as a class action suit. The case began in 2001 when six women claimed Wal-Mart paid women less than men, awarded smaller raises to women and provided fewer opportunities for promotions for women. Later, more than one million women signed on to become claimants in the case which is the largest employment discrimination case in this nation’s history.

The plaintiffs point out that, although 65-percent of Wal-Mart hourly employees are women, only 33-percent of its managers are women. Obviously, Wal-Mart does not want the case to proceed and has announced it will appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. Additionally, Wal-Mart maintains that the discrimination claims are based on individual decision making, not corporate.

My position on illegal immigration is very public—I do not support amnesty under any circumstances. So, with the new illegal immigration bill signed into law in Arizona and the volume of phone calls seeking my opinion, I have decided to share my thoughts on this issue.

But this time, I want to try a different approach. Those who are interested in my detailed views on illegal immigration can go to my website and read some of my previous columns of this subject. In this column, I will pose a series of questions and make some observations that will, hopefully stimulate a more reasoned debate on this issue.

I knew them both very well.  Ben Hooks was a Renaissance man.  He was a minister who pastored two churches for 30 years—one in Memphis and the other in Detroit.  He was a soldier during World War II. He was a lawyer who sat on the board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and became the head of the NAACP. He was appointed a judge in Memphis, and became the first African-American federal commissioner. Ben Hooks was an extraordinary man.