Hispanic Fanatic

Yes, I’m as guilty as any other white-collar worker of bitching about office politics, inane corporate policies, and clueless colleagues who walked straight out of Dilbert.

But at least there is a pretty good likelihood that I will not get killed at my desk. Of course, my odds would be better if I weren’t Hispanic.

That’s because a recent study found that Latino workers are 18 percent more likely to be killed on the job than workers of any other racial/ethnic group.

So it’s bad enough we Latinos have a tougher time getting a job in the first place. Now it looks like once we are gainfully employed, we have to punch in next to the Grim Reaper.

Why is this? Well, the chief reason is because Hispanics are heavily represented in the construction and landscape industries. And those are dangerous gigs.

It’s even more lethal if you are an immigrant worker, who experience the highest risk of death on the job. Those would be the same immigrant workers who are, you know, destroying America by stealing jobs and launching crime sprees and raping people nonstop (at least in Donald Trump’s world).

In any case, the report is even more troubling because it shows that the number of people who die while working continues to decline each year… but not if they’re Hispanic.

It makes you wonder about a system that exploits undocumented workers, puts them at an increased risk of death, and then, quite literally, adds insult to injury by blaming them for every possible social ill (even though there is rarely any data that validates this viewpoint).

I would go on about this grotesquery, but I’m getting a little nervous about working at my computer, being Latino and all.

So if you need to talk to me, I’ll be cowering under my desk.

Not too long ago, I wrote about the Empowerment Experiment. This social movement was started by African Americans who want to help black-owned business thrive. I asked whether Latinos should consider undertaking a similar project, or if it was all just racial politics.

Regardless, in that post, I wrote about how Latinos’ economic power lags behind that of African Americans. It’s not just that blacks do better than Hispanics statistically. It’s that black-owned businesses and entrepreneurs seem commonplace, while identifying Latinos in positions of authority is a little trickier.

For example, what is the largest Hispanic-owned business in the United States? Unless you work for it (or took a few minutes to google the question) you probably don’t know that, according to Hispanic Business.com, the biggest Latino-run organization is the Brightstar Corporation.

In addition to holding a spiffy, optimistic name, this company “is a solution provider and value-added distribution and manufacturing services company.” No, I don’t know what that Dilbert-inspired corporate doublespeak means either.

I was going to suggest that we all buy Brightstar products or employ Brightstar consultants or use Brightstar for all our networking/culinary/communications/porn-access/whatever needs. But like I said, I can’t tell what the company actually does. I just know that it’s big. For all I know, they manufacture toilet seats.

But isn’t it great to see that Latinos can create a mystifying corporate identity and spew business jargon that is just as vague and uninspiring as white America can? Yes, it’s a brand new day.