4 Search Results for "latinos"

• Separate and Unequal

  • From: ed goldberg
  • Description:

    When I was about 12 or 13, there was a big stink over Willie Mays attempting to buy a house in Westchester County, NY. Willie was well-paid for a ballplayer in those days, and could easily afford it.
    Alas, the neighbors rose up and demanded that no Negro should be allowed to purchase a house in their all-white enclave. And, they weren’t even ashamed to do it. They held press conferences to explain about property values. Racism had nothing to do with it, natch.
    I was a shocked and bewildered as my childhood mind could be. I would have paid money to have Mays live next door. I would have mowed his lawn, washed his car. A die-hard Dodger fan, I recognized that even though Mays played for the hated Giants, he was the greatest ballplayer of his generation, and the equivalent of Ruth or Dimaggio or Musial.
    This was beyond my understanding. The closest I could come to it was to recall the Rosenbergs, or the concentration camps, and think that this was some less-lethal version of that state of mind. (This humiliation was repeated when the Giants moved to San Francisco, and a similar problem arose when Mays tried to buy a house there. Jerks are everywhere.)
    Race has always been the great festering sore at the vitals of America. We are not unique in our prejudices, nor in our treatment of those we think of as “others.” We are just the first nation founded on the principle that “all men are created equal.” So, for us it has been rank hypocrisy from the founding of the republic. Just look at Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of our Constitution.
    Slave owners wanted their slaves counted for purposes of congressional representation. Not for inclusion as voters, of course, but to increase the number of votes slave states would have in congress. Sleazebags they were, and sleazebags they remain. Only their tactics have changed.
    Free states wanted only free inhabitants counted, so they compromised with three-fifths. In effect, our holy Constitution legitimizes the relegation of human beings of African descent as being worth 60% of a white. Shameful.
    By the time Mays was shut out of Whitey-ville, the Supreme Court had already decided Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954), that separate-but-equal (always nonsense) was inherently unequal. The civil rights era was begun. There are those who would proclaim that the battle has been won, you know: Mission Accomplished! But we are still experiencing aftershocks from that first explosion.
    Comes now Barack Obama. Whatever else you may think of Obama, he is certainly the embodiment of the American dilemma. Half-white, with a Kansas-born mother whose name, Stanley Ann, reflected her father’s desire for a male child. Half African, with a Kenyan father whose own father converted to Islam from Christianity. And, a stepfather from Indonesia who moved the family to Jakarta when Barack was a boy.
    Only in America, right? As Sammy Davis, Jr., once said about himself in the bad old days, “I’m half black, half Puerto Rican and Jewish. There isn’t a country club in America I can join.”
    Obama’s speech, recent at the time of this writing, addressing the problem of race, was vitally important. Race problems are not a Mission Accomplished. Not only are the lives of African-Americans still affected every day by the problems of racism, but the situation has become complicated by the influx of Latin-American and Asian immigrants. The great musical theater piece, “West Side Story,” was prescient in making the two warring tribes white and Puerto Rican, rather than black and white. Sure, it reflected New York at the time, but it also pointed out that things were in motion more than 50 years ago that we are dealing with now. (Just Google “zoot suit riots.”)
    I grew up in a home of first-and-second generation immigrants and their children. While I was never taught to hate others, my stepfather was an ignoramus and a bigot. Like almost every bigot I have ever encountered, he was hardly a model of what the ideal human should be.
    In fact, I can honestly trace the beginnings of my discomfort with prejudice to his example. If he did it, it was not to be admired or emulated. It worked for just about everything with him. Then there was the Mays incident. Then there were the news films of fat southern sheriffs, supported by crowds of white southerners with faces contorted from loathing, setting dogs on black kids who wanted only what the nation had promised them. Or spraying them with high-velocity fire hoses. Or pummeling them with billy clubs. Or dragging them into paddy wagons by the heels.
    By the time I left high school, where casual racism was endemic, I was ready to leave behind anti-Negro prejudice. I was a jazz fan, besotted by the likes of Horace Silver and Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie. I worshiped Silver, and followed him around from gig to gig when I could afford it.
    I read James Baldwin. I saw “Dutchman,” by Amiri Baraka, then LeRoi Jones. I had black friends, although I might have been a little patronizing. I hope not.
    But, the major intellectual impetus for the change was reading “Huckleberry Finn” when I was 21. I had read “Tom Sawyer” maybe 10 times before I was 12 years old. Huck was just Tom’s bad-boy sidekick.
    But, the book is one of my candidates for the Great American Novel. Not because it is written in high-flown language. It is not. Not for its sense of mission. It has none. But for its wrestling with the central dilemma of our national psyche, and defeating it in the most wonderful and satisfying way.
    Huck is on a raft on the Mississippi River with Jim, a runaway slave. Jim’s flight has been abetted at every turn by none other than Huck. We must recall that Huckleberry Finn was the no-account child of a vicious drunk and petty criminal, the lowest of “white trash.” Huck was brought up to think of blacks as property, not-quite human. Missouri in the 1840s was a slave state. If a slave could find his way north into Illinois, a free state, he was free de facto.
    So far, the trip upriver has been a kind of lark for Huck. But, as they get closer to Illinois, Huck begins to have pangs of “conscience.”
    He knows the woman who owns Jim. He writes a note, telling her where Jim is and how he can be recovered. He begins to feel righteous, as though his sins have been washed clean.
    Then, his natural, “anti-social,” outlaw ways reassert themselves. He thinks on how Jim has become his beloved friend, how Jim pines for his family. He thinks, “I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.”
    And, in the single most important act of defiance against a morally bankrupt culture in American fiction, he tears up the note, and says, “All right, then, I'll go to hell.”
    And I went right along with him. Forget Elvis. Forget James Dean in “Rebel Without A Cause.” Forget Marlon Brando in “The Wild One.” (What are you rebelling against, Johnny? Uh, whaddaya got?) This was no empty act of adolescent behavior. The consciousness that defined the 60s, the refusal to accept or support vile and immoral acts, of the government or society, and to define one’s own code of behavior, based on different values than the ones we had been force-fed in school–all this emanated from Huck’s act of saintly defiance. I still try to live up to that.
    About 10 years ago, I hosted a book discussion at our Central Library, with the announced title to be “Huckleberry Finn.” I got quite a few people in the room around the table. Predictably, there were a few, including an African-American woman, who objected to the use of the common term for a black person sprinkled throughout the book. She said that she didn’t want her children to be subjected to that word, and she even knew the exact number of times it was used in the book.
    I resisted the temptation to say, “Oh, so about half the number of an average gangsta rap CD.” I did say that this is what is known as a teachable moment. That the word was, and still is, the product of ignorance and prejudice, and that, if you don’t want to be called something by others, don’t use the word yourself.
    Alas, she was unconvinced. I may have changed a mind or two among the rest.
    When Barack Obama made that speech, the topic of race in America became available for discussion once again. Not hidden by fear, or good taste, or wishful thinking, but out there for all of us to see. We will improve by this discussion. We will hear black Latinos, Sikhs, Cambodians, Arab-Americans, people whose lives are under the radar for most of us, weigh in about their lives here in the land of the free.
    As someone once said, maybe Al Smith, “If there are any ills that democracy is suffering from today, they can only be cured by more democracy.” That may be happening, if we are luckier than we deserve.

  • Blog post
  • 1 year ago
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• Race is not that big an issue.

  • From: Josh Norris
  • Description:

    I am a second generation British American. I have never refered to myself as "British American" I am an American first and my lineage is basically just a part of my gene pool and nothing more. I am proud of my family but where they come from is irrelevant. I cant understand why Obama's racial back ground is even a topic of discussion. However, it is on the plate, so here are my 2 cents. Does anyone else realize that Obama is just as much white as he is black? You 1/2 and 1/2. So why are we going on and on about 1/2 of the man? I could care less where his father was from. He was raised in America...you know he is an American. All this African American crap is a joke. Why are we so concerned where his father is from? Who cares. I dont think that his Dad is running for President...is he? NO So why make such a big deal over nothing. There may be some people out there who will not vote for him, due to this fact, but who are they? Latino, White, Asian, Black. My point is that blacks are only 15% of our population, I think Latinos are 34% and the rest is unknown to me. So where is all this hatred for blacks? America has spoken and that should quite all the whining from so called "African" Americans. Why are the blacks so wrapped up in where their people came from. I highly doubt that there are many blacks that are true African. Even if they were why do they care about it so much? If people were to look back at the history of slavery they would see that Africans have played their part in enslaving other races too. You dont hear those people whining about that. Its history and nobody alive actually did it. The current state of black America is a direct reflection of their own doing. I work for a black man and I'm white. I have never heard him whine about racism and we live in the South. He owns his own business and he made it happen with hard work. His customers could care less what color he is. By the way his customers are usually latino and white. GET OVER IT already. You are who you are. You can make a place for your self or cry about your precieved lack of opportunity. The latinos and asians have passed up the blacks 10 fold. With hard work. Dont forget all the other people in this country....Indians, Hatians, Mexicans. All I am saying is that be an American first. If you love your lineage so much, then go back there and be in that country. Im not going back to Britan because I'm American. I really dont care where my grand father is from. Please respond I would love to have a discussion with a decendant of an African.

  • Blog post
  • 1 year ago
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• An Immigrant on Immigration

  • From: alambrinides
  • Description:

    I am a legal immigrant and now a US citizen. Conflating illegal immigration with legal immigration and just say immigration is dishonest. Illegally here is against the law, pure and simple and makes a mockery of our sovereignty as a country. I am not racist nor a hater because I can make my point rationally and logically. Those hurling those cheap epithets are precisely bigots who cannot win this argument using reason and logic.

    The level of infantile, adolescent, emotions surrounding the topic of illegal immigration is insane and very dangerous for this country (it’s mean, don’t be so harsh, separating the children, Gestapo etc etc).

    If it weren't for those numbers which are totally getting out of control and clearly affecting our budgets (just look at California) and our social fabric we would still be looking the other way. That coupled with the clear militancy of some socio ethnocentric interests pushing a demographic hegemony agenda and who are not ashamed to even ask the question of parity of their language with English (see 2 democratic presidential debates co-hosted by Univision). This is rubbing the entire US citizenry the wrong way up (and that includes Hispanic US Citizens). Being bilingual is a good thing for individuals but crazy for a nation.

    I don’t care if my country, the United States, is made up of 50% of Latinos as long as they are Americans first.

    What Americans object to is: 1) dishonesty in language, 2) rewarding law breaking, 3) attempts at changing this country into another and yes pressing 1 for English. With all due respect to Latinos, their needs are NOT more special than needs of other immigrant group.

    Welcome to all legal immigrants (not millions of low skilled – we have millions of our own already). Welcome to your new country, assimilate by enriching our culture with your flavors and speak English, the language that unites us all.

    A Greek/French American.

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  • 1 year ago
  • Views: 266
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• Treat Immigrants as Americans

  • From: Cecilia Munoz
  • Description:
    I want a candidate who communicates with us as a family, knows who we are and what we face.
  • 1 year ago
  • Views: 1600