A few days ago on the bus a teenage female entered and took the seat right across from me. Seated behind her was a young black male. He bent forward toward her and said something that I couldn’t hear, but whatever it was it must have caused outrage, for the girl instantly rose up and started berating him about his assumption that she was a “Mexican.” She got up and found another seat, where she spent the next 30 minutes engaged in righteous indignation about how she’s supposed to know about tacos and if she had any drugs to sell, and let loose various vilifications in regard to his person, which he obviously found both surprising and uncomfortable; you never know when you’re going to encounter the “wrong” person to insult. She mentioned that she had talked about the horror stories “Mexican guys” told her about how people made insulting insinuations about them. This girl might “look” like a ‘Mexican,” but given her unaccented English she probably didn’t know a word of Spanish, and preferred to be known as what she is: an “American.”
Why should this be surprising? Because we have discovered that at least 70 million people in this country shared the negative stereotypes about “Mexicans” that comprised the foundation of Donald Trump’s appeal to a large segment of the population since the day he announced his candidacy in 2015--and even before that, set-up by the “birther” nonsense that suggested that Barack Obama was not a “real” American. Most people use the term “Mexican” in this country as a vaguely racist slur, so it shouldn’t be surprising that someone who was born and raised in this country but is subjected to various negative “ethnic” stereotypes would find it “offensive” to be so by ignorant people--especially by people who need to clean-up their own houses before they judge other people. When I observed the black male starting to loudly smack his fist into the palm of his other hand, I told him “You had to open your stupid mouth, so deal with it.”
I knew exactly how this girl was feeling. I used to think I was the “same” as everyone else, although in retrospect I wasn’t, and I should have been clued into that by the fact that nearly all the people I encountered in my youth were white, and few seemed to be interested in being my “friend.” One of my first memories was being held on the ground by a gang of white boys, stuffing grass in my mouth. People claimed I was running around with the “wrong” people. But I wasn’t “running around” with anybody--there wasn’t anybody to run around with; I was just reading the “wrong” books, like the Irving Wallace novel The Seven Minutes, which my mother used as another excuse to work out her frustrations.
But it wasn’t until I enlisted in the Army that I learned the “truth”: “Is that how you fold your socks, you Mexican?” I eventually rose to the rank of sergeant, and then earned a college degree, but I was still just a “Mexican” wherever I went or to whoever I encountered. I remember a black man sitting by me on the bus and asking me in a secretive tone if I had any "cream." I thought he was talking about cortisone cream and some other medication extract, and told where there was a drug store nearby to find some. He looked at his "brother" like I was putting him on. I had to do a google search to find out that "cream" was urban slang for meth; this incident didn't surprise me, because a lot of people have asked me if I had drugs to sell or knew who had. But like with that girl, when people start with the criminal stereotyping, they generally discover too late that they are talking to the "wrong" person.
Anyways, I would like to commend the Seattle Times for its recent reporting on the death of Marc Anthony Moreno--whose parents were immigrants from Mexico--in 2016; Moreno was found dead in an isolation cell in the Benton County Jail in Kennewick, Washington. In 2018, lawyers representing his family filed a civil rights lawsuit against Our Lady of the Lourdes Hospital and the Lourdes Counseling Center in Pasco and two employees, both women. The lawsuit stated that
Mr. Moreno, who was suffering from acute and well-documented mental illness throughout the period of his detention, died needlessly from dehydration while Defendants watched and failed to intervene, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Defendants’ unconstitutional actions and omissions include neglecting and ignoring Mr. Moreno’s serious mental health needs, failing to protect him from self-harm, failing to secure desperately-needed mental and physical health care for him, disregarding his obvious malnourishment and dehydration, permitting him to remain detained under inhumane conditions of confinement, otherwise forcing him to endure extreme and unnecessary mental, emotional and physical pain and suffering, and causing his death.
When Moreno’s psychosis reemerged, his family took him to Our Lady of the Lourdes Hospital, which discharged him a few days later. He was then sent to the Lourdes Counseling Center, which refused to admit him. They recommended that he be taken to a crisis response clinic. The Times reported that
In March 2016, after an 18-year-old in Pasco started hearing voices, his family turned to a county-run mental health clinic for those in crisis as a last resort to get him treatment. Marc Moreno had a long history of mental illness when he arrived at the Benton County Crisis Response Unit…A counselor there soon observed Moreno “was not oriented to time or place and was unable to understand basic questions,” the lawsuit says. “He stated that he was talking to angels. At one point he began hitting himself in the face repeatedly.”
But Moreno didn’t get treated at the clinic. Instead, someone there called the police. Responding officers arrested him on misdemeanor warrants for driving with a suspended license and failing to transfer a vehicle title within 45 days. Moreno was booked into the Benton County Jail on March 3. Eight days later, he was found dead on the floor of his cell. His official cause of death: cardiac arrhythmia and dehydration. “Marc Moreno literally died of thirst,” said Edwin Budge, whose Seattle law firm represented Moreno’s family. “Something like that should never happen in an American jail.”
According to Kennewick Police Lt. Aaron Clem, police were called
“for a person who was being aggressive to staff members. Usually, if our officers encounter someone who’s in crisis on the street, (the clinic is) who we’d be calling,” Clem said. “But they were calling us.” When officers learned Moreno already had been discharged from an inpatient care hospital only a few days earlier, “they didn’t have that many other options available,” Clem said.“From the officers’ perspective, (they see) he’s got warrants for his arrest,” Clem said. “If we can’t get him some place where he’s safe and secure without hurting himself, then maybe we can get him some help at the jail, which has mental health professionals.”
Remember that the excuse police were using to jail Moreno was for driving with a suspended license and failing to transfer a vehicle title in time, which are not exactly "violent" crimes. Clem claimed that they were "really" only arresting Moreno to get him the help that the three previous institutions he was taken to refused to give him the help he needed--except that the “help” he was provided at the jail would force Benton County to pay Moreno’s family $1.2 million in an out-of-court settlement. The Times notes the kind of “help” Moreno was receiving at the jail:
Later, after he was booked into jail, officers put Moreno into an isolation cell with ‘no bed, no toilet no sink and no access to drinking water,’ the suit states. Over the next few days, a contracted social worker occasionally asked Moreno questions through the cell’s door. The suit says she documented he was ‘unable to engage with her, that he was naked, rolling on the floor, talking to the wall, playing with his feces or engaging in other bizarre behavior.’”
But a jail nurse didn’t check on Moreno for a full week after his booking. By then, jail logs showed Moreno hadn’t eaten or ingested any fluids for at least four days, according to the suit. Still, the nurse didn’t follow policies to check or treat him, the suit alleges.“Instead, after seeing Marc lying naked on the floor, she walked away and continued her day, failing to take any steps to get him the care he urgently needed,” the lawsuit says. The next day, March 11, jail staff found Moreno dead in his cell. An autopsy recorded his weight at 179 pounds — 38 pounds less than when he was booked.
But the conditions that led to the death of Moreno was only half the story: “In early June, a federal court entered a liability judgment against the jail contractors because they’d intentionally destroyed emails and other potentially damning records — what a judge called a stunning “obstruction of the truth.” The case was so egregious that in order to assuage U.S. District Court Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson’s wrath, The Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital and Lourdes Counseling Center were compelled to agree to a $4.5 million settlement for making no effort to provide Moreno any treatment, on top of previously agreed settlement with Benton County.
What made this story so outrageous--yet so typical--is that in my mind the actions of all those involved in “treating” Moreno provided him all the “treatment” any "Mexican" male “deserved” as a social “problem” that can only be “solved” by tossing him aside and ignoring him until he “goes away.” Moreno was a U.S. citizen but he was not a "real" American, and no one felt he should have been "treated" as one. When I say that my reasons for wanting Trump out is different from that of whites and blacks, this is what I mean.
No comments:
Post a Comment