What is "new" is old

In its first season, the 70s television comedy Chico and the Man—the first, and from what I can tell, the only network sitcom set in a Hispanic neighborhood—was surprisingly the third highest rated show. What explained this? Were white American viewers suddenly “tolerant” enough to see Hispanics as fellow human beings?  In its pilot episode, you heard the curmudgeon garage owner—played by Jack Albertson (the grandfather in the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory)—say the following to Freddy Prinze’s Chico:

“Mexicans knew their place—in Mexico.”

“If their car breaks down, they just steal another one.”

“Get out of here and take your flies with you.”

“Everybody knows you people are lazy.”

“Don’t think, you haven’t got the equipment.”

After Chico leaves, “the man” starts spraying the air with insecticide.

I have recounted how I was once working a temp job at a warehouse when I overheard a white man tell a group of white and black employees ugly “jokes” about “Mexicans,” and I told him I though the “jokes” were racist. He responded by saying nobody there thought he was being racist, although I did note that no one was laughing with him either. I told him only one person was required to believe that what he was saying was racist, particularly the only person who looked “Mexican” there. After that he acted afraid I might actually file a complaint, but he needn’t worry about that; I was only viewed as a “troublemaker” who wasn’t a “real” American who had any right to complain about what a “real” American said about “my people.” Not long after that I was told my services were no longer needed. 

Thus we can surmise that the initial popularity of Chico was largely due to the fact that there was an audience for the ugly stereotypes about “Mexicans” as enunciated by the Albertson character. This was born out in the subsequent seasons, when the show took a dive in the ratings when the overt racism was toned down and then eliminated altogether after the 22-year-old Prinze’s suicide during the taping of the third season and a kid was brought in to replace him before the show was canceled after the fourth season. No similar show set in a Hispanic milieu ever replaced it, although there was a one-season cable series called American Family; but its white culture and feminist “sensibility” while pretending prejudice against Hispanics doesn’t exist was a real turn-off.  Only a one-disk, six-episode DVD of the Chico has seen the light of day, and only three or four times over the past several decades has it appeared in syndication.  That is  how much television “values” the 18 percent of its viewership that is Hispanic, and is very likely a reflection of a culture of prejudice against Hispanics in general in this country. 

It also demonstrates that there is nothing “new” about the ugly stereotyping of Hispanics, especially men—and Donald Trump is hardly the worst abuser, although as president he comes pretty close to it. And it doesn’t necessarily all come those espousing a white nationalist agenda, because not all racists are white. You can find this on street corner newsstands in Seattle in a Chinese propaganda newspaper called The Epoch Times. A recent issue had on its front page a story in which it claims that illegal immigrants are responsible for an “epidemic” of child sex crimes across the country, with a whole half page filled with shots of brown-skinned people. It did not obtain this information from any official law enforcement agency, but from a North Carolina-based anti-immigrant hate group “specializing” in compiling real and imagined crimes supposedly committed by illegal immigrants who are Hispanic, although who qualifies as an “illegal” apparently encompasses anyone who “looks” Hispanic, including the 47 million in this country who happen to be U.S. citizens. 

I’m sure most people in Seattle have no clue what The Epoch Times really is, save that its headlines seem to indicate support for right-wing causes  and frequent negative profiling of non-Asians. The paper is in fact the “official” mouthpiece of the Falun Gong, allegedly a persecuted religious group in China. In fact the Falun Gong, despite its claim to offer believers “clean” bodies and soul, is actually more interested in “cleansing” society of the “unclean,” or at least keeping them as far away as possible. In reality the Falun Gong is nothing more or less than a racist and homophobic cult group (you’ll have to research this beyond its Wiki page).   It believes in segregating the races into an apartheid-like state, bizarrely dividing these races not just into white, black and “yellow”—but Egyptians, Persians and Indians, most of whom are technically classified as at least a subset of Caucasian. 

But it gets worse: Falun Gong believes that interracial relationships between any of these “races” are against “nature” and produce impure, “mongrel” offspring, and that these offspring should be regarded as “outcasts” to be driven into the wilderness to prevent further mongrelism into a subspecies not entirely human (I’m not making this up).  The Falun Gong also believe that different races go to different “heavens” to prevent their “mixing” even in the afterlife; but for  mixed race “outcasts,” there is not even a designated “heaven” for them. Note that there is no “brown” race in Falun Gong terminology; Falun Gong feels perfectly free to apply to Hispanics the worst traits available,  since they are inherently of “mixed race,” and thus “outcasts.” This is all useful to remember whenever you see on an Epoch Times cover yet another anti-Hispanic immigrant hit piece.

But you don’t have to be from the lunatic fringe to self-servingly engage in passing ugly stereotypes as “truth.” Two white feminist “researchers” were the source of Trump’s 2016 campaign-opening claim that all Hispanic men are “rapists,” based on no official crime data but on the usual “survey” with questions that invited a certain outcome that was useful to both the agenda of gender victim advocates and for female illegal migrants seeking entry into the country, in the belief that providing the answers the “researchers” wanted to hear would give them better chance for legal entry into the country. 

But let’s be honest here—the hypocrisy of this is nonstop. Trump has been endlessly accused by various women of sexual transgressions, but that wasn’t enough to keep 53 percent of white women from getting him elected, or persuade any of the alleged victims to actually lodge criminal complaints against him.  E. Jean Carroll—who has made a career demonizing men in her “advice” column and is the author of What Do We Need Men For (which of course never mentions things like the comfort of the structures she lives and works in, and the technology she uses to spew her misandry through)—appeared on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell to talk about her sexual assault charge against Trump. No, she wouldn’t be pursuing charges against him just like all the other women who have accused him have not, but Carroll “justifies” her cowardliness (and thus questionable credibility) by fanning the flames of ugly racist stereotype: “I would find it disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock down there without any protection.”

Forget that there is no actual evidence that this going on. Who by default is doing all this “raping”? Well of course Hispanic males, who are thus stereotyped as sexual predators. Last November I recounted how I stumbled across a court case file in an office of the Seattle branch of the state Attorney General's "Special Victims" department, which revealed the state's continuing effort to keep imprisoned an innocent man. One Luis Garcia was charged with rape solely on the testimony of an accuser who later admitted that she never had any contact with Garcia of a sexual nature, which prosecutors were fully aware of; she apparently at the time had second thoughts about accusing her own boyfriend, and in order not to be accused of lying she found another victim to accuse. A judge vacated the case against Garcia after he had already served three years in prison, when Garcia's attorney at the time advised him to plead guilty to a lesser charge. The judge agreed with Garcia's new attorney  that the state had violated his civil and due process rights by skirting the statute of limitations by "inventing" a fictitious commission date in which to try him at all. The state still insisted on retrying him until his attorney simply filed a motion for dismissal of all charges, upon which the state was forced to ask for the same, since they had no case at all against Garcia..

Assumptions are easy to make; the media has made much of sexual assaults and “disappearances” of Native American women, and the media allows the assumption that the perpetrators are all Native American men. Yet independent crime studies on Native American shows that Native American men also have significant incidences of being victims of domestic violence and “disappearances.”  Research has also shown that—particularly in areas where reservations are located in or near commercial mining operations—most of the perpetrators of sexual assault are in fact non-Native American men. As I pointed out before, there is in fact no evidence that Carroll’s “round the clock” raping is going on, and this is another case where white female gender activists use racist stereotype to “advance” their cause. Remember comedian Amy Schumer’s “joke” about Hispanic men and preferring her sex to be “consensual.” Schumer’s defense was that she is a white feminist who  thus can’t be guilty of racism and besides, other people think her racist “jokes” are funny; but that is like Trump claiming that his attacks against four minority women lawmakers are not racist because many people “agree” with his racist tropes.  The movie Schumer appeared in following defense of herself, Snatched, was attacked by many reviewers as an exercise in ugly anti-Hispanic stereotyping.  It hasn’t stopped there: Jennifer Garner “starred” in a box office flop called Peppermint, in which a white female—after the usual contrived heinous crime of her young daughter becoming collateral damage by Hispanic drug dealers—comes back years later as yet another white female exacting superhuman vengeance; reviewers regarded the film as “ignorant” and racist in its one-dimensional portrayal of Hispanics. We’ve gone a long way from John Cassavetes’ Gloria, starring his wife Gena Rowlands, who portrayed a “superhero” who didn’t  have fake powers or an arsenal of weaponry at her disposal to protect a 6-yesr-old Puerto Rican kid from mob killers.

It hasn’t helped that this country has gone in reverse in regard to how Hispanics are portrayed in popular media—from laidback sloths spending their time taking “fiestas,” to “spitfires” to briefly in the 1950s entering the social conscience as victims of prejudice (Man From Del Rio, Giant, Trial and 12 Angry Men) and fighters for justice (“Zorro” and “The Cisco Kid” on television) before being reduced to gardeners and maids and then to sex fiends and violent drug criminals. Despite the fact that the 70s was known for its socially-conscious television programing, it was not so when it came to Hispanics, as Chico and the Man was as noted the only primetime  series’ that even pretended to portray Hispanic “culture.” One of the few American films that bothered to examine the plight of migrants was an independent production made a shoe-string budget in 1983 called El Norte, about a brother and sister fleeing violence in Guatemala, only to find that America wasn’t the paradise that was portrayed in home and garden magazines; Roger Ebert likened the film to a modern day Grapes of Wrath. But all too frequently they have been portrayed in the media more like feral animals than human beings. Hollywood has done next to nothing to educate the public on the Hispanic experience in this country; a recent study found that only 3 percent of speaking roles in the 100 top grossing films over a period of time featured Hispanic actors, and although several Euro-elite Mexican directors (such as Guillermo del Toro, who looks more Irish than Mexican) have found success in the U.S., they have done nothing to advance the Hispanic presence in film, preferring to work with white actors. And anyone familiar with Spanish language television can't help but to observe how everyone looks so European.

The news media should pick up the slack on educating the public, but not only has it allowed the Hispanic community to continue to be "mysterious" or "strange" to non-Hispanics, it has only belatedly discovered that there is a “problem.” I respect MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, but when he expressed “surprise” that it has taken people so long to realize that Trump really is a racist, he was visibly miffed for a moment when a Hispanic guest had to remind him that the reason for this was largely because those—especially  Hispanics, who represent 18 percent of the population not including the undocumented—being targeted have been rendered voiceless by the mainstream media in the face of years of racist attacks against them. Another factor is that both blacks and whites have perpetuated the myth that Hispanics are an “ethnicity” and not a “race,” thus they cannot be the victims of racism. Ignored is the fact that most Hispanics are mixed race (like, say, Barack Obama), and the indigenous peoples most are “mixed” with are clearly not of the “white” race. The very small percentage of “pure” Euro-elite Hispanics are also guilty of perpetuating the myth because of their own racism, not wanting to be “lumped in” with those “inferior” indigenous and African races. And let's go further than that: by the same "logic," isn't the term "American" an "ethnicity"?

We saw this deliberate denial of anti-Hispanic racism in the Thornton, Colorado shooting when a white man—who according to his Hispanic neighbors was often seen parading about with a rifle, openly threatening them—went into a Walmart and shot to death three Hispanics. Police merely called it a “random” shooting, and the story disappeared in the mainstream media almost as soon as it was reported. Yet as the Southern Poverty Law Center and a few others noted, the only thing “random” about this shooting were the Hispanic victims chosen by the killer; otherwise it should have been called what it was—a hate crime against Hispanics, just as the Orlando mass shooting actually was. 

No matter the evidence, the media just plods along. USA Today just published a story about the increase in mass shootings in the past 10 years; nowhere does it mention that this increase coincided with the election of a black president and only increased further with the election of an openly racist white president. Let’s stop with the BS; Trump  only “respects” Tiger Woods because he is a far superior golfer than Trump can ever dream of being, and Woods made his money on his own talent, not feasting with the Silver Spoon; if Woods was openly critical of Trump’s policies, you know he would be on Trump’s racist shit list quick enough. The so-called “Tea Party” emerged the day after Barack Obama’s election and despite all the despicable, ignorant, paranoid views by “common” people you heard at their rallies, the media simply refused to admit the truth; in fact it was just another code name for a succession of white nationalist  groups since at least the so-called “American” or Know Nothing Party in the mid-19^th century. 

Instead of the truth, we recently heard of an enraged racist Louisiana police officer who posted that Rep. Cortez-Acasio should be shot because she allegedly suggested that military personnel are overpaid; it turns out that the she never said that. The fake news story was published by a right-wing “satirical” publication, but it is “interesting” how some people (that officer wasn’t the only one “fooled”) are so easily persuaded to believe such things; one recent study revealed that people who get their information from Fox News are the least educated on current events, with those who follow NPR the most educated.  But then again, ignorance of people  or groups that accusers do not even bother to know is a common trait in this country; in his book Columbine, author Dave Cullen discovered that Eric Harris and Dylan Kiebold had a relatively active social life with their own group of friends who happened to like playing video games (there was no “trench coat mafia”), but because  a few students thought they were “loners,” “weirdos” and “outcasts” the mainstream media ran with this and everyone assumed it was true—and by extension, anyone who is labeled a “loner,” “weird” or an “outcast” is stereotyped as someone who is “dangerous.” 

The disconnect between stereotype and reality is especially ironic considering scenes of children as young as mere infants being “stored” in deplorable concentration camp-like conditions—you know, the kind that Democratic lawmakers Reps. Pressley, Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez and Omar descried, which prompted Trump to begin his ongoing attack on them as “racist” and “un-American” and who should “go back” to their own “crime-infested countries.” The stench of hypocrisy emanates from people like his daughter Ivanka Trump, whose female empowerment campaign has next to no credibility given that she was born into privilege and self-entitlement and has the conceit not to recognize the fact; on The View the self-involved nature of this “empowerment” was demonstrated when she admitted that putting asylum-seeking children in cages sleeping on concrete floors  and with barely even the most basic necessities to sustain life or health was of no interest to her, since she is "not president of all women's issues." She thinks she is the “president” of what, exactly? Let’s pray that her constant whining about women not having sufficient “voice” in world doesn’t mean she has any future plans outside a jail cell where she likely belongs--both she and her husband are suspected of abusing their security clearances for personal business and financial gain.

The sad fact is that what is “new” is old. It is astonishing how many people still insist that Trump is not a racist despite a history of it that goes back even before the Trump Organization was sued by the Nixon Justice Department for discrimination against non-whites in its housing units. Trump’s German grandfather immigrated to the U.S. to escape military service, and his father Fred Trump managed to avoid military service in World War II; the latter, however, did march with the KKK, and it stands to reason he sympathized with at least some Nazi racial beliefs. In fact, folk singer Woody Guthrie, who briefly resided in the Trump-run Beach Haven community housing project, penned the following in response to the elder Trump’s racism:

I suppose

Old Man Trump knows

Just how much

Racial Hate

he stirred up

In the bloodpot of human hearts

When he drawed

That color line

Here at his

Eighteen hundred family project

And:

Beach Haven ain't my home!

I just cain't pay this rent!
My money's dpwn the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No,no,no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!

It is absurd to believe that Fred Trump’s racist attitudes didn’t  “rub off” on his son—just as it is absurd to believe that Trump’s racism isn’t “rubbing off” on and giving comfort to his millions of racist supporters. Trump may not display his racism openly to all blacks; after all, Tiger Woods is a much better golfer than he is, and Woods has made his money off his superior talent, not from having the good fortune of being born with the silver spoon planted firmly in his mouth and “building” on—and sometimes breaking down, given his many bankruptcies that he and his Fox News friends never mention—the real estate empire his father bequeathed to him. 

Naturally, some period would prefer that a problem would simply “disappear,” such as in keeping people out. Thus “merit” has  become  just another code word to justify race-based immigration policy, although just because you do data entry on a computer at work doesn’t necessarily mean you have “tech” skills, because that would mean that virtually everyone in this country regardless of educational attainment has some level of “tech” skills. The Pew Foundation claims that by 2050 Asian groups will outnumber Hispanics (and blacks, for that matter) as the largest minority group in America. What does this mean? South Asians (Indians) are increasing their stranglehold on the convenience store and motel ownership market and quite openly practice hiring discrimination in those businesses. What’s next? Where I currently work there is major entertainment company that has an electronic billboard where it advertises the anniversaries of current employees; those who have worked 10 or more years all have Caucasian names, and about 80 percent of those who have 5 or less years have Asian or Indian names. Thus an immigration system based on an arbitrary definition of “merit” may find white people who the Indian-owned company Infosys (like many “tech” companies in this country) referred to as “stupid Americans”—the only “qualified” ones are the ones who attended “elite” tech schools like MIT or Stanford, no one else need apply—perhaps in time will be forced  into “dirty” jobs because not enough of them will be as “qualified” for the “tech” jobs as Asians and Indians. Hispanics are thus not the "enemy" of white hegemony.

Oh yes, there will be a price to pay for “merit-based” immigration based on prejudicial attitudes--ironic given the racial, class and "caste" prejudices the "favored" immigrants bring to and many continue to practice in this supposedly "egalitarian" country. Some people claim that the tech “shortage” is a manufactured problem, because many Indians simply dislike working with Americans for cultural reasons (customer service personnel in India reportedly dislike taking calls from Americans because they are always “demanding” and “angry”), and won’t hire them, or in the name of “harmony” their employers prefer to hire them.  Amazon has backed out of a lease agreement in an office building currently under construction in Seattle; it is reportedly now subleasing the property to Oracle—which like Google and Microsoft has an Indian CEO, and has been under scrutiny for discriminating against non-Indians in its current hiring process, with 98 percent of its H1-B hires from India. So when white people realize too late that they’ve given away the store, all their “white nationalism” will have bought them is trying to convince themselves that “meritless” jobs have merit after all when they have to do them. “Merit,” after all,  is in the eye of the beholder; I see no “merit” in the fact that 3 years after it began, an Indian in-house  construction of a curry house and meeting hall in Kent still isn’t anywhere near finished, while a much larger residential/commercial project a few blocks away is making steady progress with its mostly Hispanic workforce—which, by the way, has attracted enough interest from Kent police to “warrant” a few visits from its toy drones. I was walking to a nearby laundromat when one of them took an “interest” in me; when I pulled out my phone to record its presence, it zipped away in the direction of the downtown police station. 

I personally find few “friends” in the fight against all this bigotry. There are no demographics "innocent" of bigotry. .Laine Lawless, a former “high priestess” of some lesbian pagan group called the “Sisterhood of the Moon,"was,  according to the Southern Poverty Law Center in a report ten years ago, a full-time anti-Hispanic immigrant fanatic, and collaborated with Arizona neo-Nazis, suggesting ways to harass anyone who might be “suspected” of being illegal, such as

• Steal the money from any illegal walking into a bank or check cashing place.
• Make every illegal alien feel the heat of being a person without status. … I hear the rednecks in the South are beating up illegals as the textile mills have closed. Use your imagination.
• Discourage Spanish-speaking children from going to school. Be creative.
• Create an anonymous propaganda campaign warning that any further illegal immigrants will be shot, maimed or seriously messed-up upon crossing the border. This should be fairly easy to do, considering the hysteria of the Spanish language press, and how they view the Minutemen as racists & vigilantes.

White, black, male, female—it doesn’t matter; they all have their “grievances” against Hispanics. I was particularly offended when I was watching two black women on MSNBC talking about “aggrieved white men” being solely guilty of racist acts, yet time and time again racist behavior and verbal attacks by white women against Hispanics and blacks is caught on video—and, lest we forget, 53 percent of white women voted for Trump in 2016, and many of those voters remain committed to ignorance. But to be fair, black women are not particularly innocent either—climbing through McDonalds drive-through windows to attack employees, shoving an elderly man off a bus in Las Vegas after he admonished her for verbally assaulting other passengers, causing him to strike his head on the pavement and die hours later of brain injuries. Even “Latinas” who are more than willing to sell out any pride in their heritage by offering themselves to Anglo men like wet rags in the quest of phony social status perpetuate negative stereotypes that will impact their own sons.

The Greek philosopher and cynic Diogenes famously walked the streets of Athens with a lantern in broad daylight, searching for an “honest” man; it is not clear if he ever found such a person. If he walked the streets today, would he have any more success? If he found that person, would anyone take him seriously? The Chicago Sun-Times editorial board had this to say after another mass shooting, this time in Aurora, IL:

 “We had intended to write about Trump’s fake emergency today. That was our plan. We thought we would make the obvious point that it’s hard to believe there’s an emergency along the border when the president has been whining for his wall for two years, has all his facts wrong and offhandedly acknowledged on Friday — after declaring the emergency — that he “didn’t need” to do so. But now we have another mass shooting. Not along the border, but in Aurora. The dishonesty of our national conversation — the manufactured fear of immigrants when the real and present danger is our own violent society and the stupidity of our gun laws — could not be in starker relief.” 

On the website ProPublica, Ginger Thompson quoted a border agent tasked with guarding migrant children wondering why an outsiders investigating the McAllen, TX detention center was “yelling” to someone on her phone about the “crisis” she had just observed; the person on the other side of the line didn’t care: “If they did, this wouldn’t be happening.” Isn’t that the truth? After all, it wasn't that long ago that the nation was "outraged" by child separations on the border, and Trump signed that executive order ending it, right? Today, child separation is not only a going concern, but it has expanded and conditions in which they live have worsened. If children start dying in greater numbers than they are now, what will we start hearing? The same thing a female resident of Shenandoah, PA said of Luis Ramirez, an immigrant who died after several players from the high school football team repeatedly kicked him in the head? "If he wasn't here, it wouldn't have happened."