As a follow-up to Jeff Fecke’s excellent post on the creepily racist GOP response to Judge Maria Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, I wanted to point out Matt Yglesias’ post on Tom Tancredo equating La Raza with the KKK.
TANCREDO: If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case, which is, from my point of view anyway, nothing more than a Latino — it’s a counterpart — a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that’s going to convince me and a lot of other people that it’s got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is “All for the race. Nothing for the rest.” What does that tell you?
Okay, first, let’s look at the ridiculous phrasing of, “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses.” Sure, I get that what he’s saying is that La Raza is racist, and we’ll get to that in a minute, but the cavalier way in which he dismisses the “hoods and nooses” is interesting to me. The hoods and nooses are pretty damn vital to the conception of the KKK, aren’t they? It’s as if he thinks that the fact that the KKK was fucking murdering people regularly had nothing to do with why folks have a problem with them. It’s like saying, “The Republican Party is just the American Nazis without the antisemitism, the fascism, the desire for genocide, the Roman salute, the annexation of Poland, the speaking German, …”
As for whether La Raza is racist, or is actually, “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses,” Matt helpfully points out that not only is La Raza a mainstream (Incredibly mainstream, actually. My high school had a student chapter) Latin@ organization1 , Republican luminaries like John McCain and Mel Martinez have spoken to and received awards from the group, both with nary a peep.
It is unclear to me whether Tom Tancredo is saying that both John McCain (who delivered a keynote address to the group) and Mel Martinez were unfamiliar with the unsavory and racist associations of La Raza, or whether he was saying that it’s not out of character for Republicans to pal around with racist organizations. If it’s the first, that would be awfully surprising, and I guess we should expect to hear their denunciations of La Raza pretty quickly. If it’s the second … umm … points for honesty, I guess?
Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.
- And look, if there are people out there who really believe that La Raza is a racist hate group, I want to direct you to two great posts that came up the last time Republican were smearing Latin@ pride organizations, specifically, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or MEChA. They’re both from 2003. The first is Orcinus, here, which goes into some detail about the slogan “Por la Raza, todo. Fuera la Raza, nada.” The second is Ted Barlow @ Crooked Timber (Fun Fact: Ted Barlow used to play in a band, Greenhouse And The Tender Ju Ju Coins, with one of my college buddies.) talkign about some of the same sorts of things. Now both of these posts are about MEChA, but here’s the thing: MEChA is (as I understand it) more radical than La Raza. And it’s not a hate organization by a long shot. Calling either one the moral equivalent of the KKK demonstrates stunning contempt for Latin@ people everywhere. [↩]
Fine words from a guy with the Anglo-Saxon surname of Tancredo ….. I’d say TT the Crude is just asking for someone to start cracking Mafia jokes at him.
There is some serious hate whipped up among right-wingers toward La Raza. It’s a favorite whipping boy among commenters to SFGate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle’s online presence. If anyone dies in Oakland, the “thug” comments start coming out, and if anyone Latin@ does… pretty much anything, the La Raza references appear. It’s got the flavor of “activist judges” and “special rights” in terms of a dog whistle that utterly shuts down all rational discussion.
Well, yes.
Because they’re racists. Obvious racists.
I mean, I think this is a shitty electoral strategy, but if they’re really interested in never winning anything in California again, well … that’s awesome. Get down with your bad self, GOP.
—Myca
I had a long argument with a Republican recently who thought it was bad for Sotomayor to have published in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal. He didn’t actually know anything about the Journal beyond its having published that one speech of hers — didn’t know who or when it was founded, what was in its mission statement, nothing — but he felt comfortable in asserting that it was bad because it had the phrase “La Raza” in the title and it’s clearly improper for any group to use a noun that can describe any categorization for its particular group. That is, because “La Raza” translates to “the race,” and “race” is a word for any race and not just the Latino one, it is wrong to use The Race to refer to Latinos specifically.
He then brought out the standard conservative there’s-no-difference-between-the-majority-and-dominant-group-and-any-minority-and-subordinated-groups comparison of “Wouldn’t you be offended if someone started a law journal focusing on how the law affects white people called ‘The Berkeley People Law Journal?'”
Honestly, sometimes I despair of having conversations with conservatives on anything to do with race in America — we just start from such utterly different premises. Republicans believe that you can take anything they don’t like about minorities’ organizing for their rights, apply it to the majority, and sit back satisfied that clearly it must be wrong for the minority if it’s wrong for the majority, because there’s no relevant difference between the two.
Oh, give him a break. La Raza, MEChA, the fictitious groups that believe in Aztlan…all of them look the same. amirite?
/tancredo
Seriously, this is of a piece with the “don’t pronounce Sonia Sotomayor’s last name like it actually is pronounced, lest we give into the brown menace” argument. The racist right simply can’t help themselves — first a black president, now a Latina justice…little by little, those people are taking jobs that rightfully belong to good, God-fearing white men. And they just can’t handle it.
I really didn’t think it could get worse than when Obama was running.
Post racial my ass.
The only way they can get away with this is that people don’t really know anything about La Raza. Tancredo would probably not attempt to make the same claim about the NAACP, not because it would be any more ridiculous, but because it would mark him as a racist lunatic. Unfortunately, most people probably haven’t heard of La Raza outside of racist lunatics ranting about it.
Appreciate the link to the old Ted Barlow post. Of all the people who’ve left the blogosphere behind, he’s one of the ones I miss the most.
Karl Rove has heard of National Council of La Raza — he was a speaker at their 2006 conference. I guess La Raza is on that thin line where it’s respectable enough for Bush’s Deputy Chief of Staff to make a speech praising them for their work in the Latino community, but not quite respectable enough for a Democratic Supreme Court nominee to be a member. That’s a flea’s tightrope, that is.
UPDATE: A Kos diarist notes that Bush and McCain also have spoken to La Raza. A baby flea’s tightrope.
MomTFH Writes:
May 29th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
I really didn’t think it could get worse than when Obama was running.
Post racial my ass.
I agree with this sentiment completely.
I’ve tried to talk to conservatives I know about what they mean exactly by ‘post racial’, as you really can’t say that racism is over. It’s absolutely not and trying to pretend that it is is a waste of everyone’s time.
When I manage to pin them down, they usually say that they don’t think the system itself is inherently racist any more. They admit that people in charge within said system are racist and that that provides a barrier to minorities, but they seem pretty convinced that it’s not the same as the system itself being racist.
I’m not sure how the distinction helps anyone, really. :\
A little historical trivia, for those who might not know:
The term La Raza has its origins in a utopian essay called La Raza Cósmica – the cosmic race – written in 1925 by a Mexican intellectual. He felt that the people of Latin America, being a combination of all the races of the world, would transcend the old divisions and boundaries and usher in a new era of peace and co-existence.
What we call Columbus Day is marked in Mexico as Día de la Raza, recognizing that the arrival of Columbus in the Americas kicked off the encounter that led to the creation of “La Raza Cósmica.”
One town near me has a Sottish Festival every year, complete with a border collie sheep herding contest. Nobody tell Tancredo, I wouldn’t want the FBI to show up to check the fleas on the dogs for terrorist tendencies.
Alice, it isn’t a distinction. The systemic racism in our society is made up of a cumulative effect of a bunch of individual bigots. The “system” itself does not exist other than as an amalgamation of people. People like, say, G. Gordon Liddy.
MomTFH,
I wonder if by “system” Alice’s conservative friends mean that racism is not legally permissible anymore. For example, if I lived in a house with a restrictive covenant in 1945 and I wanted to sell it to a black person, my racist neighbors could sue me and stop me from selling it to that black person. If I live in such a house in 2009, my neighbors can be just as racist but they can’t go to court to stop me. The most they can do within the law is be rude and unfriendly to their new black neighbor. That can be a difference between systemic and individual racism. However, I tend to think of systemic racism more as you do, as the amalgamated effects of discrimination where no individual act was illegal but all taken together create a significant burden on African Americans (and other PoC, but it still looks to me like the worst is borne by non-immigrant black people, for various reasons).
PG and MomTFH,
I think you’re both right – in that they consider the system to be the laws and, as such, something separate from the people in power. They really love saying stuff like ‘see, the system can’t be racist anymore because we have a black president!!!!one!!!!1!!!’
But you’re also right in that laws don’t really mean anything without people enforcing them, and that’s where the racism comes in. It doesn’t help that I live in a very white rural section of the northwestern USA, so these conservatives really don’t have a leg to stand on in terms of experience with this sort of issue. I’ll bring that up next time I have this discussion with ’em.