Last night I was busy fuming over some personal betrayals when I received a call from a colleague who told me that Jose O. Sucuzhanay, the Ecuadoran immigrant who, along with his brother, was severely beaten in Brooklyn on Sunday, had now been declared brain dead. Apparently, their attackers shouted anti-Latino and anti-gay epithets (making assumptions because they were walking with arms around each other) before assaulting them. I further learned that, according to reports, the perpetrators of this foolishness were believed to be African American.

And that’s when a different sense of betrayal overcame me—a betrayal by some of my fellow US African Americans who have allowed themselves to show hate toward immigrants. This type of malice insults the entirety of the Civil Rights Movement in which so many of our people and others worked for the rights of human beings.

Obviously, such wanton violence is tragic no matter the race or ethnicity of the perpetrator or victim. That anyone could snap into such unprovoked brutality is frightening. However, for blacks to demonstrate such cruelty against a group that we should be allying with in the struggle for justice is a particularly sad and telling warning that we, as people of color in this country, are being played against each other—and that native-born people are being played against immigrants.

Xenophobic groups such as FAIR, Numbers USA, the Minutemen, the Community Watchdog Project, and others are fueling anti-immigrant hate in our society, helping it become supercharged for this type of idiotic violence. The beating of Sucuzhanay, the killings of Marcello Lucero and Luis Ramirez, and other such incidents show that sparks are flying; if we don’t counter nativist anti-immigrant propaganda, this type of violence will become even more routine than it is now. Additionally, African Americans and other people of color must be particularly wary of nativist arguments that try to seduce us into blaming immigrants for challenges that we have already faced regardless of the immigration of recent years. Our history as oppressed peoples in this country should belie any claims of legitimacy in our showing malevolence toward current immigrants.

A part of the Sucuzhanay tragedy is the homophobia that is still all too rampant in our society, inciting people to everything from heterosexist policy to anti-gay violent crime such as that in Brooklyn on Sunday. This intersection of prejudice and homophobia is a dangerous mix—so much so that the NGO Forum of 2001’s groundbreaking World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance particularly noted the “high rates of physical, sexual and psychological violence in the public domain and in private life as well as hate crimes against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered persons, particularly in cases aggravated by other forms of discrimination.” (WCAR NGO Forum Declaration, #181) Eric Ward further comments that African Americans and the LGBT community must work together against this intersectional discrimination.

African Americans—and all people—should know better than what was demonstrated on that tragic Sunday morning in Brooklyn. If we are to build a truly inclusive, peaceful community, we must counter the anti-immigrant and homophobic hate that is promoted in our society, before it manifests itself into more senseless killings.