As is appropriate this week, I would like to give thanks. But rather than go on about the myriad things that I’m thankful for in my personal life, let me point out two recent news items that fill me with gratitude.
First, I’m happy that Hispanics continue to make progress in America. What’s the latest indicator that we’re moving on up? Well, for the first time in the 130-year history of the American Bar Association, a Latino will lead the organization.
Stephen Zack, who is Cuban-American, recently became president-elect of the top lawyers’ association in America. Zack says that his focus will be on civil rights, civic education, and (yikes!) immigration law. In honor of Zack’s achievement, I promise to lay off the lawyer jokes for a while… well, at least until the end of this post.
Another news story this week made me grateful in a different way. It made me thankful that I don’t live among idiots.
In my former hometown of New York City, a couple are suing the co-op board of their ritzy apartment building. The couple claims that the woman, a model, angered her fellow residents when she married the building’s former doorman. That may have been an unforgivable breach of class protocol, but according to the suit, what really set off the neighbors was that it meant “a Hispanic former porter” would be their peer.
Now I don’t know if the suit is valid, but the neighbors’ reaction certainly sounds suspicious. At the very least, you would think people would be happy with the news.
After all, it’s just a matter of time before some Hollywood producer swoops in and buys the rights to this cross-gender “Maid in Manhattan” fantasy and gives it a role-reversal “Pretty Woman” treatment (without the prostitution). That would make the building famous, and the people who live there would be celebrities by default. But apparently, they can’t let it go, because the guy is Latino.
Yes, it was quite a week to be grateful to be Hispanic.
First off, let me thank Carola for her comment on my last post.
As for the latest around here, I finally got around to reading “Freakonomics,” the bestseller from a few years ago. Like everyone else who read the book, I’m amazed at the bizarre factoids and surprising conclusions that it supplies. And it’s also convinced me never to buy a swimming pool for my backyard…
In any case, one of the sections in “Freakonomics” looks at a study done on that forgotten game show “The Weakest Link,” which is best known for supplying a short-lived catchphrase that I will refrain from repeating.
The “Freakonomics” authors were curious if data would uncover hidden racial prejudice or sexism among the contestants on the show. Their conclusion was that blacks and women were not discriminated against. They write, in a burst of set-you-up optimism, that “perhaps… discrimination was practically eradicated during the twentieth century, like polio.”
Wouldn’t that be most cool? Racism eradicated – with game shows like “The Weakest Link” serving as a mass-media, pop-culture Salk vaccine! How nifty keen is that?
Well, as you may have predicted, the story doesn’t end there. The authors point out that “the ‘Weakest Link’ voting data do indicate two kinds of contestants who are consistently discriminated against: the elderly and Hispanics.”
Somehow I knew this case study would end badly for us.
What the authors are saying is that my grandmother would have been eliminated from the show before the announcer finished his intro.
So why are Latinos and the elderly picked on? Well, the authors conclude that “all but the most insensitive people take pains to at least appear fair-minded, at least in public,” and that discrimination still pops up when aimed at “other groups that society doesn’t protect as well.”
In other words, white people will go out of their way to avoid looking like they’re picking on black people. But when it comes to, say, Hispanics, all bets are off.
The authors even pinpoint the form of bigotry aimed at Latinos. They say that “Hispanics suffer information-based discrimination,” which is when someone “believes that another type of person has poor skills, and acts accordingly.” The authors note that “other contestants seem to view the Hispanics as poor players, even when they are not.”
The prejudice against the elderly, in contrast, is “taste-based discrimination,” which is when someone “prefers to not interact with a particular type of other person.”
So the good news is that many Americans don’t get skived out at Hispanics the same way they do at, for example, old people. It’s just that they automatically think that we’re really, really stupid.
Well, that makes me feel better.
Regardless, the “Freakonomics” study creates a conundrum. It assumes that Latinos are a group that “society doesn’t protect as well.” This confuses me this because I have been told, repeatedly, that we live in a post-race society. Ergo, even the slightest suggestion that people are treated differently – or that some groups receive more societal protection or favoritism than others – is a roundhouse left to the legacy of MLK. At least, this is what I’ve heard from my conservative friends.
Another issue that the study raises is whether the parsing of bigotry is even possible or relevant. If we categorize prejudice, can we combat it more effectively? Or is it all just shop talk for academics?
Assuming that discrimination comes in different flavors, can we tackle it with more education? After all, the majority culture is not creeped out by Latinos (as opposed to the universal disgust aimed at those icky old people), which implies that this type of prejudice is more analytical than emotional. As such, can we convince others that we’re not total morons, or is it a doomed enterprise, because minds are already made up? And isn’t the very attempt to persuade the majority culture of our worth a degrading endeavor?
Obviously, I don’t know the answer to these questions. Maybe I’m not smart enough. But I do know that, henceforth, I’ll do my best to avoid verifying the majority culture’s perceptions of Latinos. I will take great pains to not appear like a total ignoramus.
From now on, I vow to be all, like, intellectual… and stuff… yup.
Recently, I wrote about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, an incident that has resuscitated the issue of racial profiling. In that post, I said that I’ve had run-ins with the police, but they’ve been rare.
What I didn’t mention is that non-authority figures – like storeowners, next-door neighbors, fellow riders on the subway, and the like – also engage in racial profiling from time to time.
I was reminded of this last week when I stopped in a new wine shop that recently opened in my neighborhood. I thought it would be a good idea to support the local merchant (plus, I really like wine).
The only other person in the shop was the white, middle-aged woman behind the counter. I browsed under her suspicious glare for a moment before spotting the open bottle of red before her.
As you may know, many wine shops have free tastings to encourage people to buy. It was the standard set-up, complete with little plastic cups, so I asked, “Are you having a tasting?”
“No,” the woman said.
Then she grabbed the bottle and put it under the counter.
Now, this was odd. In fact, I could think of only three reasons why she would hide the wine from me.
The bottle was hers, and she gotten sloppy in concealing her day drinking. Naturally, stealing from the inventory and getting blitzed on the job is something you want to keep from the customers.
The bottle materialized from another dimension in some kind of time-space anomaly. The woman, an amateur scientist, recognized the cosmological implications, and instead of calling Stephen Hawking at once, she hid the bottle rather than acknowledge the frightening paradox that its existence posed.
The bottle was for a tasting. But she just didn’t like me.
I couldn’t decide which of these scenarios was true. So I just nodded and left. And of course, I didn’t buy anything.
Now, the shop is a brand-new establishment, locally owned and without the benefits of major corporate sponsorship. It is no doubt heavily in debt from start-up costs, and it has opened in the midst of a devastating recession. And it was not exactly crawling with customers. So why would an employee take even the slightest chance on offending one of the few people who walked through the doors (a person who was, until the moment of refusal, ready to buy something)?
Well, if it wasn’t scenario one or two, above, I can only figure that the woman thought, “We may be on the verge of financial ruin, but damn it, if we let in browsing Latinos (unemployed ones at that!), it will just be a matter of time before all kinds of riff-raff are shoplifting Chardonnays.”
Of course, you’ve heard the saga of Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor who was arrested in his own house for (depending upon your perspective) either
Being black
Being belligerent
I’ve never experienced Gates’ degree of police-sanctioned drama. Of course, like most males who are ethnic minorities, I’ve had some uncomfortable interactions with cops (go ahead, ask your minority friends; most of them will have a story or two). However, none of these scraps have risen above slight inconvenience or principled annoyance.
And I’m not in a hurry to condemn President Obama, although he clearly developed a chip in his legendary cool when he said that the cops “acted stupidly.” Let’s give him a break on that one.
At the very least, however, we can agree that an enormous misunderstanding took place in Cambridge, and that this communication breakdown had a lot to do with race. After all, it’s very unlikely that a white officer and a white homeowner would have such mutually high levels of distrust and suspicion that this scene could be replicated with Caucasians all around:
As I said, my negative experiences with cops have been limited to the occasional unprovoked traffic stop or snide question. I’ve certainly never been handcuffed in my own home by a gun-toting officer. But if I were in Gates’ position, where a cop busted in and accused me of burglarizing my own place, I would have an automatic out that the professor clearly does not.
“Don’t shoot,” I could say. “I’m actually Italian.”
As I mentioned in my previous post, my updates to the site may become more infrequent due to my upcoming move to California. It’s a lame excuse but a sincere one. So until I can be throughly witty, I’m going with short missives and videos, which is the blogger’s version of cutting and running.
Here is a clip of Stephen Colbert discussing Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing. It’s for everybody who thinks “neutral” is somehow equivalent with “white.”
And while we’re at it, check out the discussion at Stuff White People Do about this clip.
Thanks to everyone who commented on my last post (“Is Anyone Surprised?”). I appreciate the insights from Xey, Pprscribe, and Haysoos. Also, thanks to Jeremy for the support and Macon D for the tidbit that, despite his disclaimer, I did not actually know (he gives me too much credit).
But if the right wing’s reaction to the swine-flu outbreak was a depressing example of the disgust that many Americans hold for Latinos, what are we to make of the news out of Pennsylvania?
Last week, a jury in that state acquitted two teenagers of beating a man to death in a street brawl. The case apparently had too many contradictory versions of the truth, with multiple witnesses unable to clarify who did what to whom and why. The bottom line is that the teens were convicted of lesser charges and will more or less go on with their lives.
What has caught the eye of Hispanics and people interested in civil rights is that the town where the crime took place, Shenandoah, has a history of racial tension. The victim, Luis Ramirez, was a Mexican immigrant. The teens, as well as the other kids who earlier pled guilty to lesser charges, were white. They jury was all white.
It is impossible to escape the perception, therefore, that a mob of angry whites can beat a Latino to death right in the street without fear of being punished. Of course, those of us who weren’t at the trail (like me) can’t definitively say that this is a miscarriage of justice. But at the risk of getting all knee-jerky, I have to say that it appears highly suspicious.
Lawyers for the teens admitted that the kids were drunk and got into a fight with Ramirez, who was apparently walking down the street, minding his own business. Prosecutors said that the teens flung racial epithets at Ramirez, then followed up with kicks and punches.
The result was that Ramirez ended up with his brain leaking out of his head, and he died two days later. For no one to be seriously punished over such a crime can only mean one of two things:
A Latino man living in an economically depressed small town, where racial issues have flared in the past, inexplicably provoked a group of drunk white males to fight him. They had no choice but to defend themselves by kicking him in the head repeatedly. Or
It’s ok to bludgeon an immigrant to death.
The verdict would actually make more sense if the teens had been acquitted of all charges. In that case, the implication is that the boys had nothing to do with the fight or Ramirez’s death. Instead, by convicting them of a lesser charge (simple assault), the jury basically said, “Yeah, you walloped the guy, and he died, but we don’t think you should do time. It’s not like he was anybody important.”
The Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund is pressuring the Department of Justice to file federal charges against the teens. This, as you may recall, was the route that civil-rights groups took after the cops were acquitted in the Rodney King case.
Regardless of how it turns out this time, there is one big difference between the cases. Rodney King is still alive, and Luis Ramirez is not.
I have to give credit to right-wing extremists. They didn’t immediately turn the swine-flu epidemic into a xenophobic witch hunt against Hispanics.
They waited a few days.
Perhaps that was to gather their thoughts. Although if that is the case, I’m not sure why they bothered, because the empty, tired rants aimed at Latinos are shocking not for their offensiveness, but for their predictability.
A virus originates in Mexico, for reasons that scientists still cannot explain, but anonymous commentators have the answer: Because Latinos are dirty and “Mexicans are pigs!” (an actual posting to a conservative website).
Illegal immigrants are to blame, according to other wise sages, and will soon infect us all. Meanwhile, still other rational minds postulate that the outbreak is actually a terrorist attack, instigated by germ-warfare experts who are counting on Mexicans to infiltrate the country.
Actually, that last one gets bonus points for combining three right-wing obsessions (immigration, terrorist evil-doers, and conspiratorial plots) into a parfait of pure insanity.
This kind of hatemongering goes back to the Middle Ages, when Jews became a convenient scapegoat for the Black Death. Since then, the Irish, Italians, Spaniards, gays, and many others have been blamed for nature’s occasional hissy fits with us.
As MSNBC points out, “It’s ‘the other,’ the group not seen as part of the nation, the one who threatens it in some way that gets blamed for the disease.”
So Mexicans, already accused of bringing down America’s economy and values, are now destroying our health as well.
Well, it’s clear what we have to do: Let’s focus all our fear and rage on Edgar Hernandez, the five-year-old Mexican boy who has been identified as Patient Zero in this outbreak. Just look at him. Who knows what vile plot he’ll unleash on us next…
First, thanks to Profe for his supportive comments on my last post. Second, thanks to my old friend, the Bitca (!), for springing up on the blog and reminding me why I love her. But for the record, Ms. Bitca, I don’t drink screwdrivers. I find them a bit girly.
Nevertheless, drinking heavily is well within my right. As I wrote in that post, I was recently laid off from my job of six years. It’s disgruntling to go from analyzing the plight of unemployed Latinos to becoming part of the story.
Again, I’m not worried about the future or in dire financial straits, for which I’m grateful. But naturally, I want to get the unemployment monkey off my back, if for no other reason than I would like to continue affording luxuries like, say, food and shelter. But as you might expect with an overly analytical blogger with lots more free time, I’ve pinpointed an additional frustration with this mess.
As a first-generation Latino, I feel an irrational need to get back on the payroll quickly so I can resume being a role model for my community. In some sectors of Hispanic society, I can achieve this lofty status, whether I want it or not, simply by getting a good-paying job and staying out of jail. I am aware of the hopes of my brethren urging me on, pushing me toward success as defined by the majority culture. For lack of any other goal, I want to be an outstanding, nonsterotypical member of society, an upper-middle-class big deal.
This is just the latest example of how ethnic minorities perceive the world in subtly different ways than white people do. I’ve written about this before. We tend to pinpoint clichés (e.g., being unemployed) and recoil from them like vampires catching a glimpse of sunlight. White people, in contrast, likely have the freedom to obsess exclusively on their individual problems, taking the occasional break to get angry that they didn’t invent YouTube (actually, I share that annoyance).
It’s a tricky balancing act, however. Because once I get that respectable white-collar job, I still have to be careful not to morph into The Man. But that’s the subject of another post, and in any case, it certainly is not an immediate danger.
That’s because the road to prosperity is closed for repairs, at least temporarily. But, of course, I will eventually get back on it.
Only once in my life have I thought, “This is a sitcom moment.”
It was the time I wound up on a stranger’s fire escape, peering through the window at a topless woman armed with knitting needles.
This is not an advisable position for anyone, especially for Latino males, who have been known to provoke white women to rush into traffic just by making eye-contact.
I was on the fire escape that evening because my girlfriend (now my wife) and I were celebrating one year of living in New York City. We had grabbed a bottle of cheap champagne and went up on the roof of our Manhattan apartment building, which offered a great view of the city.
Right after walking onto the roof, I turned to her and said, “Don’t let the door close because…” The words “it locks automatically” were subsumed beneath the sound of the door clicking shut.
So now we were trapped on the roof late at night, six stories up. It was obvious what we needed to do.
We drank the champagne.
With that accomplished, we began the perilous climb down the fire escape that led to a suitably grimy NYC alley. To say the descent was difficult is not an exaggeration. New Yorkers have such little space that fire escapes often become extensions of their apartments. So we had to sidestep around furniture, bike racks, and whole gardens clogging the metal stairs. If the building ever had a real fire, dozens of us would die in the impeded scramble to safety – either trampled to death by our neighbors because we couldn’t move quickly enough, or asphyxiated as we lay tangled in someone’s improbably located azalea bush.
Still, I reached the bottom level of the fire escape, where I saw that I had two options. I could drop the remaining fifteen feet into a pitch-black alley that was strewn with trash (my imagination insisted that broken syringes and rusty metal pipes glistened in the dim light) and then I would have to hobble on my twisted, gashed ankles to the end of the alley and climb a tall fence topped with razor wire.
Or I could simply knock on my neighbor’s window. The woman, with whom I had a nodding acquaintance from sharing the occasional elevator, was home but had not noticed my presence on her fire escape.
I peered into my neighbor’s apartment. Then I turned and told my girlfriend that she would have to tap on the window.
“She’s lying on the couch and wearing only panties,” I said. “I don’t think she wants a brown-skinned guy knocking on her window in the middle of the night and demanding to be let in.”
My girlfriend acknowledged this logic. So she approached the window while I retreated up a flight to safety.
“And she’s knitting, with big needles,” I said as my final piece of advice.
A moment later, after what was surely the most awkward request my girlfriend has ever made of a stranger, the window opened. I climbed back to the roof, arriving just as my girlfriend opened the door to let me back in.
“My feet barely hit the floor of her apartment,” my girlfriend said. “That woman just grabbed me and pushed me toward the lobby.”
But we were saved.
Because the whole thing was such a sitcom premise, I thought about pitching the incident as the pilot episode of “The Wacky Latino,” a heartwarming, life-affirming, knee-slapping show about the adventures of a klutzy Hispanic. But then I remembered that there are no shows about Hispanics on television, and I abandoned the idea.
Sure enough, a year or so later, an episode of “Friends” had a subplot where Ross and Joey get trapped on the roof and have to shimmy down the fire escape. When I saw it, I said two things to my girlfriend: They stole our plot, and our version was funnier (no topless female knitters appeared on that show).
And now that I think about it, I feel doubly ripped off because two white males co-opted a moment that rightfully belonged to a Latino male and a white female. There is clearly no end to the oppressive hegemony.
In any case, even a decade later, I still have no answer to the question that haunts me to this day: Who the fuck knits while topless?
Latinos are still coming down off our post-election high. After all, the mainstream media anointed us a crucial voting block in President-elect Obama’s victory.
Well, the good news keeps flooding in. As evidence of our newfound clout, we can now say that we’re number one in a very important sociological category:
Hispanics are officially the top victims of hate crimes that are “motivated by ethnicity or national origin,” as the FBI puts it.
Thank you. We couldn’t have done it without you… well, not you, per se. But we couldn’t have done it without that small percentage of racial supremacists out there (which is most certainly not you, otherwise you would not be reading this).
Just how overwhelming is the Latino presence on the hate-crime index? According to the FBI, Hispanics made up almost two-thirds (61.6 percent) of victims in this category – so in your face, Asian Americans!
Now the first disclaimer to this enlightening statistic is that blacks are still number one in the racial category – remember, race and ethnicity are often two different things. Also, the statistics only cover through 2007, so it’s possible that some other ethnic group has surpassed us as objections of scorn in the last year.
But I doubt it.
Recently, we heard about a group of teenage boys in upstate New York who, according to police, wanted “to find Latinos and to assault them. They were actively seeking victims.” The guys succeeded, killing an Ecuadorian immigrant who made the mistake of walking down their side of the street. At a court hearing for the lynch mob, a prosecutor quoted the leader of the thugs as saying, “Let’s go find some Mexicans to fuck up.”
This apparently is a worthwhile goal in some parts of America.
One might ask why there is so much hatred of Hispanics. I don’t know… maybe it has something to do with the psychotic level of rage focused on Latino immigrants, most of which has a basis in xenophobic fears that have been jacked up by demagogues looking to score cheap political points.
Actually, I’m sure that’s all just a coincidence.
Regardless, I’m surprised that we’re still the favorites. In this post-9/11 world, I thought Middle Easterners were the primary objects of fear and loathing. But it wasn’t a very long ride at the top for the Abduls and Muhammads of America.
Irrational fears that every Muslim is a terrorist have been supplanted in these tough economic times. Now we’re back to the irrational fear that a Latino is going to steal your job.
It proves that in dark days, some Americans find comfort in returning to the classics.
