Hispanic Fanatic

Here in Los Angeles, we’re relieved that police have arrested the thug who beat up a San Francisco Giants fan outside Dodger stadium (yes, I know the suspect is innocent until proven guilty, but let’s just say for the sake of this post that he did it).

As you may recall, on Opening Day in LA, a man dressed in Giants regalia, Bryan Stow, was jumped by a pair of angry Dodger fans, who beat him into a coma from which he may never wake up.

These boosters of the local team were supposedly pissed that a San Franciscan was on their turf. The real reason, of course, is that they were moronic hoodlums.

Because the main assailant was described as a Latino, Hispanics had time to brace ourselves for this latest ethnic embarrassment. Indeed, the suspect, Giovanni Ramirez, is described as “a stocky 31-year-old with a head shaved bald” who is a “documented member of [a] street gang,” and has “at least three prior felony convictions.”

In other words, he’s a cliché. But he’s a particularly lethal one.

I’ve written before about the frustration that Latinos feel whenever a Hispanic person commits a high-profile crime.

It’s an unpleasant sensation that doesn’t afflict members of the majority culture. For example, I doubt many white people cringed when Jared Loughner’s race was revealed (although we all winced upon discovering how easy it was for a psychotic to get a gun in this country).

Ramirez is just the latest living stereotype to make us all look bad. He’s one of the reasons why people frequently conjure up imaginary Latino assailants when they’re trying to conceal their own criminal behavior.

Recently, for example, a Canadian man named Robert Spearing lied to his wife about having tickets for Oprah Winfrey’s star-studded, mega-hyped, our-messiah-is-ascending final show.

Who knows why Spearing told this blatant fib to his spouse, but regardless, they drove all the way to Chicago before the guy realized, “Shit, I better make up some reason why I don’t have tickets.”

So “just before showtime, Spearing — bleeding from the forehead and his hands badly scraped — filed a report with cops claiming he had been mugged and the tickets stolen. He said two men — one African American, one Hispanic — had attacked him on the street.”

I suppose this can be viewed as an egalitarian approach to ethnic profiling. It wasn’t two black guys or two Latinos — it was one of each!

Of course, the cops quickly uncovered the fraud. Perhaps they realized that if anybody was going to be mugging people for Oprah tickets, it wasn’t going to be two guys (of any race). It was going to be distraught suburban women clutching copies of O and shrieking about Dr. Oz.

With hope, both Ramirez and Spearing will get their comeuppance. Their penalties will look very different, and their crimes don’t compare. But they share a mindset: They both believe that Latino men equal violence.

The fact that one of them is Hispanic just makes it all the more pathetic.

Recently, I received some hate mail from a white supremacist (see previous post). It’s a rare, but not unprecedented occurrence.

Her sentiments were ignorant and bizarre, of course. And clearly, they in no way reflect the opinion of most Americans. I wondered, however, how many individuals would agree with one of her statements, which was that white people are being oppressed.

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It’s been a while since I shared the contents of my reader correspondence with you. I’m not talking about the comments that my posts receive. You can see those for yourself on this site, on the Huffington Post, at Being Latino magazine, or at whichever outlet is running my rant.

No, I’m talking about the emails that I get from readers who simply don’t want to be confined to the comments section. These emails usually offer praise, issue constructive criticism, or request help with some Latino-centric cause. All of those are legitimate reasons to reach out to a blogger.

But some of my readers’ emails get my attention for very different reasons. They are so colorful that it makes me wish I could be on their holiday card mailing list.

For example, there was the person who insisted that, because I was not an illegal immigrant, I had no right to blog about illegal immigration. The writer then went on to slam undocumented individuals as parasites on society and subhuman scum. The writer added, almost as an postscript, “By the way, I’m illegal myself.”

I set aside the Freudian implications of his self-loathing and moved on to read missives from right-wingers who insisted that I was a delusional idiot. One angry man disputed my conclusion that Latinos were poised to become a political force. The writer said, “Hispanics just aren’t smart enough to get organized.”

Well then, I guess the Republican Party has nothing to worry about.

But lest you think it is only social conservatives who hate me, let me point out that one furious leftist accused me of painting the Hispanic community in a bad light. The writer said that he was “going to do some digging” and expose me as a fraud. I’m indeed curious what his digging will uncover (maybe I’m secretly Italian!).

But my favorite email is one that I received in response to my piece about tribalism. The writer began her email with the ultimate rhetorical question:

“Are you retarded?”

Without waiting for my response, the writer pointed out that “White people took over this country fair and square. It’s not our fault we had the will, adventurous spirit, and superior weaponry to expand our territories.”

Clearly, this was a fresh perspective on history, as was the writer’s insistence that slavery was “a small price to pay for blacks getting to live around whites.”

However, the writer added that white people are not perfect. Apparently, they made a mistake putting Native Americans on reservations instead of “killing or deporting all the Indians after we kicked their asses.” The writer then asked, “Why do whites suffer the curse of compassion?”

That is indeed a stumper. But the writer apparently isn’t letting the mistakes of the past hunt her. She advised me that I “better shut the hell up and listen with respect when you are in a nation that was created by whites.”

She summed up her correspondence with the assertion that “this entire goddamn country is ours from sea to shining sea” before signing off with the identifier “White Woman.”

Although I thank everyone for taking the time to write in with his or her thoughts, I have to admit that White Woman made the most vivid impression.

Yes, it looks like I have a new pen pal.

Recently, I wrote a post that received more, shall we say…passionate comments than usual. The article was about the Kansas politician who cracked the truly hilarious, knee-slapping joke about gunning down undocumented people like vermin.

In any case, among the hundreds of comments were people who said I was right, people who said I was wrong, and people who said I was a race-baiting hatemonger bent on destroying America.

And of course, there were the predictable, and rather sad comments of “Why can’t we all just love one another?” I assume that such individuals were issuing a plea for racial harmony that has eluded humankind for millennia. Well, it’s either that or they were using “love” as a euphemism while trying to organize an intercontinental orgy, and they stumbled into the wrong forum.

But of all the comments, one in particular caught my eye. The comment was, “My in-laws came from Mexico, and now just a generation later, they are fully assimilated and blend in. Except for being a little darker, you would never know where they were from.”

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As President Bush once famously asked, “Is our children learning?”

Well, in everybody’s favorite state — Arizona — the answer seems to be a resounding no… assuming of course, that we’re talking about Latino kids.

Recently, during a legislative debate in Phoenix, a Republican state representative “stirred up gasps and anger” when she read a letter aloud from one of her constituents.

The letter writer, a substitute teacher named Tony Hill, claimed that he taught in a classroom where his students “were almost all Hispanic and a couple of Black children.” Hill wrote that the students boycotted the Pledge of Allegiance, called him a racist, refused to do their assignments, and even tore apart their textbooks.

Hill summarized his experience by writing that “Most of the Hispanic students do not want to be educated but rather be gang members and gangsters. They hate America and are determined to reclaim this area for Mexico.”

No, it’s not exactly Stand and Deliver.

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I’m sure you’ve heard the news that Hispanics now make up a record percentage of the American population. The U.S. Census says that one out of every six residents is Latino. Furthermore, in a “surprising show of growth, Hispanics accounted for more than half of the U.S. population increase over the last decade.”

Yes, Latinos are the chief reason that America has avoided a population decline.

However, not everyone is grateful, or particularly thrilled, about this fact. In fact, quite a few Americans are angry, anxious, or just plain freaked out over the ascendency of Hispanics in the United States.

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I once took a freelance gig editing a book about conspiracy theories. It was an encyclopedia of crazy shit like Mkultra and the Bavarian Illuminati and Area 51.

The book was a highly entertaining read, but it didn’t exactly keep me up at night. I just don’t believe humans are competent enough to pull off fake moon landings and shadow governments and the like. So I’m not prone to yelling, “Conspiracy!” and attributing sinister motives to shadowy figures.

But it’s not a conspiracy to say that Hispanics and African Americans have long been played off one another. And the reason for this is clear: It maintains the status quo.

After all, if America’s two largest ethnic minorities are busy fighting each other, they have little energy to combat the power structures that hinder their mutual growth.

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Recently, I wrote about the low-level celebrity who confused me with the valet at a parking ramp.

While out having drinks, I retold the story to a couple of friends who, inexplicably, had not read it on the blog (yet they all claimed that they read my posts religiously… hmmm). In any case, we talked about whether the celebrity’s mistake rose to the level of racial profiling.

We never came to a definitive conclusion, because the topic soon drifted into a more concrete example of judging someone by the color of his skin. I’m talking about the TSA’s habit of stopping people like me for multiple wandings and the occasional frisking at airports. I’ve written before about this, but my friends all had theories on why the TSA is convinced that I’m the next Mohamed Atta.

“It’s because you look like somebody,” Friend One said. “There must be a guy on the terror watch list who looks exactly like you. It’s just bad luck.”

“No,” Friend Two said. “It’s because you look like everybody. You’re like the standard angry traveler with a bad attitude. They want to make an example out of you for going through the line with a scowl.”

“You’re both wrong,” Friend Three said. “It’s because you look like nobody. You’re still an exotic mix compared with most people who fly. So TSA thinks you could be a Muslim extremist, or a MS-13 gang member, or a yakuza for all they know. You could be something bad because nobody else in line resembles you.”

I thanked them for their insights. I finally had an answer on why I have to allow an extra fifteen minutes for airport security whenever I fly.

It’s because I look like somebody… or I look like everybody…  or I look like nobody.

So there you have it. That certainly clears things up.

But just as I achieved this level of enlightenment, Friend Four spoke up.

“It’s because you look brown,” she said. “That’s it.”

Damn, I had never even considered that.

By now, you’ve heard all about the Kansas legislator who said it was a fine idea to hire gunmen to fly around in helicopters and shoot undocumented immigrants. Republican Virgil Peck made what he calls a “joke” during a public hearing on how to control the feral-pig population (like you, I was unaware that this was a huge problem in Kansas).

In any case, Peck has apologized for comparing immigrants to hogs, and while he was at it, for advocating that the state just start executing people it doesn’t like.

Of course, Peck’s comments are not in the smallest way indicative of the GOP’s hatred for Hispanics. As conservatives are quick to point out, that is all a liberal-media myth, and the Republican Party truly loves Hispanics. After all, you only joke about slaughtering people like vermin if you really respect them.

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I never get tired of writing about Hispanic culture. But I have to admit that certain related topics have started to wear on me. Check that — one subject has pummeled me into stunned disbelief and ulcer-causing frustration.

Yes, once again, I have to grit my teeth and pound the word “Arizona” into the keyboard. It wasn’t enough that the state passed SB 1070, the most overtly Latino-hostile piece of legislation in modern history. Nor was Arizona satisfied when it banned ethnic studies in high schools, under the guise that kids who learned about Cesar Chavez would get riled up and burn down Tucson.

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