Before I started this blog I was
posting commentary on other people’s blogs. I was banned from posting on Thom Hartmann’s site,
not because I was upsetting people with right-wing conspiracy theory stuff, but
because I was critiquing the hypocrisy of so-called “progressives” who
were deploying the usual racist working-class “populism,” principally against
Hispanic immigrants, which to me is the “Achilles’ Heel” of the left. What
particularly angered me was that Hispanics were always being talked about in the media; people seem to think
that since even the near 50 million in this country who are U.S. citizens are
not “real” Americans—despite the fact that the large majority have the “blood”
of the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere in them—they have no “rights” that
many do not feel bound to respect, such as being allowed to speak for
themselves in the media.
Anyways, I was looking for
something on an old external hard drive when I noticed I had saved a Word file
from 2009 on it, a commentary I wrote a year before I started this blog. I don’t
remember if I posted it at all anywhere because of its length; maybe I
just saved it somewhere so as not to waste the thought. It concerned one Larry
Whitten, who had a problem that many people seem to share. This “hotelier” from
Virginia had taken over a hotel in Taos, New Mexico—a small community of mostly
Latinos (the term I used then) and white unconventionals and eccentrics—apparently unaware of its long
history as a haven for Spanish culture (kind of like northern Wisconsin being a
hide-out for Scandinavian culture). It
seems that Whitten was having a difficult time adjusting to the fact that the
long-time Latino residents did not like being treated like trained dogs or
monkeys, and were perfectly capable of grasping concepts like self- respect,
self-knowledge, and the capacity to think.
Whitten claimed, among other
petty complaints, that it was too “tough” for white people to pronounce Spanish
names like “Marcos,” so he required the Latino employees to “Anglicize” their
names. Frankly, Spanish names are much easier to pronounce than many European
and Asian/Indian names (hell, even some native Irish names), so it is likely
that Whitten was simply putting his Southern racial prejudices to work. He also
ordered his Latino employees to refrain from speaking Spanish in his presence.
Why? Because this paranoid bigot thought they might be saying bad things about
him (and probably deserved to be); funny how nobody is worried about the nasty things
speakers of various Asian and European tongues might be saying (I’ve
been working around Vietnamese speakers for the past three years, but it doesn’t
bother me one bit because I like to keep to myself anyways). I suspect that the way some
people treat Latinos, they just want to “silence” dissent.
Second-generation Latinos who are
born in this country are no different than any other—they will likely have
“Anglicized” first names, and English will be their “native” language. Yet a snap
poll showed how stereotyping principally informs non-Latino attitudes: 43 percent of respondents thought that Latinos
should be forced to change their
names if an employer demands it. “This is America,” fulminated someone in the
comment section. Another whined that customer
service phone operators in places like India should change their names too (as
if that will improve service), but with all these made-up names parents give their
kids these days in this country
(especially the ones with apostrophes in incomprehensible positions), it
comes down yet again to the habit of targeting Latinos for popular punishment.
As an aside (again from the 2009
doodling), I was watching an episode of CNN’s “Latinos in America” special,
concerning racial and ethnic identification; it turned my stomach watching the “Latinas”
on the segment attempting to distance themselves from any “racial” aspect of their
heritage. Apparently this programming favors the Latina point of view over that
of the Latino male, probably because the latter are less “accommodating” to
the white point of view than the women. I could tell, but not just because the
segments focused mainly on the Latina feminist perspective that itself promoted racism and division; during the discussion, there was a cut to a
Spanish-language video featuring at the time New York Jets quarterback Mark
Sanchez; the camera then cut to host Soledad O’Brien’s reaction—one of
undisguised hostility. Why? Because she was off-put because she doesn’t speak
Spanish herself, or because she is one of those white man’s strumpets who feels
that a Latino male is simply not “good enough” for the likes of her? While a Latino
California congressman (off-camera because all the Latinas had to have their
faces on screen) was speaking, there was a cut to O’Brien’s scowling mug, and
after he was done she jumped in out-of-turn to make an annoying buffoon out of
herself trying to prove how much more superior her opinion was.
After a racist e-mail from a
viewer suggested that Latinos would refer to themselves as such because they’re
“embarrassed” to be called “Mexican” or “Cuban” or whatever (maybe it is
because many non-Latinos use those terms as racial slurs), actor John Leguizamo
did a Chicano activist impression, which solicited another cut to an O’Brien
stare of hostility, followed by her huffy married-to-a-white-man defense of
herself. Cuban-American and former MTV "VJ" Daisy Fuentes also was apparently uncomfortable with
Leguizamo’s unfriendly attitude toward bigots—not surprising, since the
toughest thing she has ever had to do to fit into the Anglo-Nordic world is fitting
in her skin-tight clothes. Given societal prejudices and gender hypocrisy, it
should come as no surprise that Latino males do have a more unfavorable view of
bigotry and bigots than do Latinas. I have observed that the sexual stereotypes
that negatively affect Latino males are the same ones that Latinas try with
varying degrees of success to use to “hook” Anglo males; just yesterday (the yesterday yesterday) I viewed
in Kent a 50ish white male together with a Latina half his age (and maybe
younger) hanging on him like a wet rag, with a smug “look what I got”
expression. Me? I’m a soldier, not a strumpet.
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