Between a rock and a hard place

 

We are told that a poll indicates that a majority of “registered voters” want the continuation of the CDC’s illegally deployed Title 42 to cover only asylum seekers on the southern border, and nowhere else. This is clearly racist on its face and it is an easy way for nativists and xenophobes to express their racism and lying through their teeth that it isn't about racism. As noted yesterday in context with the drug trade and it’s effects, this is like “accidentally” setting fire to a house because you left a cigarette burning in the garbage can, and then locking all the doors to keep the witnesses of your crime from escaping to tell anyone about it.

So as an addendum to yesterday’s post, it seems that most people in this country who regard themselves as “real” Americans—who unlike the 80 percent of Mexicans and Central Americans who have varying degrees of indigenous genes in themselves, are descended from invaders and “guests” unwanted and uninvited by the original native populations (and hence the “Reconquista” paranoia)—just don’t want to be confronted with their own hypocrisies. They know they need Hispanic migrant labor, yet they can’t abide the sight of them. I bet you 100 to one that people would “care” if the line of people outside the Salvation Army free food distribution center in Capitol Hill were all “Mexicans” and not all Southeast Asians who know a good deal if they can get away with it.

Speaking for myself, the world I live is like being between a rock and a hard place, between both white and black prejudice and stereotypes. While admittedly most people don’t dwell on their prejudices, there are the odd assholes for whom the “red flag” always go up when they see a brown-skinned  person, like making doubly or triply sure that their cars are locked, or following them around in a store, or just plain wondering what they are doing anywhere they are and making them feel “uncomfortable.”

For example, the post I talked about experiences I have had that can only be “explained” by ignorant prejudice (1), such as when a squad of police in Renton, who apparently believed that a short man with no facial hair, but looked ethnically “suspicious,” was the bank robber that a teller described as a 5-10 white male with a beard, or another incident described in this post  (2) when I was confronted by a white male who wanted to know what I did with the baby diapers he claimed to have seen me take. I could go on and on how instead of being disciplined for discriminatory conduct, racist people—if it is against a Hispanic—are “applauded” for their conduct.

Some behaviors are just too hard to take. I have been working in an office building for close to three years now, but there has been a revolving door of security guards. One night I was turning in my keys into a lock box when a black female security guard, who apparently was on her first day on the job, decided after having watched me on a security camera that I didn't "look" like I belonged there, and she didn't even stop to think that the only way I had access to either the room the lock box was in or the lock box itself was if I had keys or an access card, all which surely meant I had "business" there. But no, I must be an "illegal" and she rushed out of the security camera room and held the door shut so I couldn't get out. She excitedly called for backup, and when he arrived and saw who I was he felt obliged to apologize profusely for his partner's conduct--she was "new." I wasn't having any of that; I knew what she "saw."

This past Friday there were some real doozies. Every Friday I go down to the U-Haul where I rent a space to store all my video discs, either to drop some off or take some out. I mean, people there should know me by now after five years of doing this, right? On two occasions in the past six months I filed a complaint about someone setting off an ear-piercing siren from an alarm device located right wherever I was at the time that was clearly meant to intimidate me because I looked like a “Mexican,” and “Mexicans” can only be around for “bad” reasons.

This time there was no siren going off, but as I was leaving I noticed a black man behind me and a white man in front of me wearing all-black outfits that I assumed signified that they were “security” personnel, and who apparently were trying to corner me. They were still doing this as I walked outside, and having enough of that I asked the black man why he was following me, and Mr. Tough Guy told me to “get the fuck out of here.” I asked the white man in front of me what that guy’s problem was, and he was just as asinine, telling me “you are the problem.”

Well, I had enough of that. I demanded to see their manager, and the black guy couldn’t wait to get him outside to see this “Mexican” who “didn’t belong.” When the manager came out and took a look at me his face dropped to the ground, because he recognized me as the guy he had to send emails to in apology for the sirens episodes. “Him?” he said, making a small gesture with his hand for me to move on while he would have to “explain” to the two security guys trying to “justify” their behavior that you can’t just make negative judgments on a person just because you don’t like “Mexicans.”

That wasn’t the end of it. Later I walked down to a bus stop where there was another black man, maybe around 50. He had something he had to get off his chest: “Why don’t you get a job?”. You know I just hate it when people who need to make sure their own “houses” are clean make ignorant judgments about other people, and it was obvious that the "you" he was talking about was the “Mexican" he thought he was looking at. Isn’t it odd how people complain that “Mexicans” are taking everyone’s job, yet they are also too lazy to work?  I told him to shut his stupid mouth and some other things as he tried in vain to compensate for his ignorance, and the conversation was continued on the bus until he realized he had forgotten his glasses and had to get off at the next stop.

It’s tough existing between a rock and hard place, especially when you served seven years in the military and have a college degree and ignorant bigots see something completely different. You read about stories like this and wonder how come nobody talks about them: The lynching of Mexican-Americans in Texas and other Western states, the 1918 Porvenir massacre, the “repatriation” of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent during the Great Depression, and the 2006 Hamilton Ave. massacre in Indianapolis. Also in 2006, a Hispanic youth in Spring, TX was punched unconscious by two white supremacists, stripped naked, was kicked with steel-toed boots, had a patio umbrella pole thrust up his rectum, had a swastika carved into his chest, and bleach was poured into his body to “hide” his injuries and left outside for 10 hours before someone “noticed.” The victim, despite a partial recovery, later committed suicide.

And there was the 2008 murder of a Mexican immigrant in Shenandoah, PA who one local resident claimed wouldn’t have been killed if he “wasn’t here.” The 2017 shooting that targeted only Hispanic shoppers at a Thornton, CO Walmart is still called a “random” act by police and prosecutors.  There was the 2018 kidnapping, rape and murder of a 13-year-old Hispanic girl in Lumberton, NC. And of course the El Paso mass shooting, or even the Orlando mass shooting, where almost all of the victims were Hispanic. Because these cases don’t raise any national media attention for being evidence of a pattern of hate crimes against Hispanics, nobody has to be too concerned about their own hate.  

Last month a white woman named Sherri Papini of Redding, CA—after a rather lengthy investigation—was arrested and charged with planning and carrying out her own disappearance in 2016, staging her own “injuries” to fool police, lying about being kidnapped, and defrauding the state. This is a case that bears certain similarities to the 2014 film Gone Girl for people who think that film is pure “fiction”—and Papini may even have used the film’s plot points to plan her own disappearance. Papini disappeared “mysteriously” in November 2016, supposedly when out for a jog and leaving behind her personal effects and not having picked up her children after school. Her husband reported the disappearance and was an immediate suspect despite passing a lie detector test.

After a “frantic” three week search covering several states, Papini was found—or allowed herself to be found. According to an Associated Press story, Papini was found running down a street in Yolo, CA 150 miles from Redding with a swollen nose, wearing “a chain restraint around her waist and one arm along with other bindings around her other wrist and each ankle when she was found alongside Interstate 5 nearly 150 miles from her home.” She had bruises on her body, and ‘ligature marks on her wrists and ankles, and burns on her left forearm. Her blonde hair had been cut to shoulder length and she had a blurred ‘brand’ burned into her right shoulder, authorities said at the time.” Investigators determined that all these effects were performed by Papini herself.

The only thing Papini didn’t follow through from the film was killing a former boyfriend, who she contacted and had him drive her to his home in Orange County; his cousin stated that he had seen Papini in that home unrestrained. The boyfriend then drove her back to Northern California after media attention to the case seemed to take things beyond what she intended. After the “gone girl” was “found,” her story was believed and she was paid $30,000 from a state “victim” fund, and a “GoFundMe” campaign raised almost $50,000 more.

Unlike what happened to the "gone girl" in the film, Papini was actually found out and charged with crimes. So what was Papini’s “story”? She claimed that she had been “kidnapped” at “gunpoint” by two Hispanic women, and had even provided descriptions of the two women to FBI agents. But investigators determined that this couldn’t possibly be true when she was in fact 600 miles away with the former boyfriend. Sean Ragan, an agent at the FBI field office in Sacramento, said "we are relieved that the community is not endangered by unknown, violent kidnappers.”

That’s right, if you need “violent kidnappers,” even “Mexican women" will do if you need a "believable" lie that will incite whole cities to feel "endangered."