Breaking News!!! OMG! WTF??? XYZ!

Brace yourselves...

Joe Arpaio arrests 'very few' non-Hispanics.

Shocking, right?

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What the Hell, Arizona?

Both houses of the Arizona state legislature have passed SB1070, a truly frightening piece of "immigration legislation":

Arizona's bill orders immigrants to carry their alien registration documents at all times and requires police to question people if there's reason to suspect they're in the United States illegally. It also targets those who hire illegal immigrant day laborers or knowingly transport them.

As a historian, I don't like to hear people say "If we don't learn history, we're doomed to repeat it." We learn history all the time, and still do much of the same, hateful stuff that's always been done.

In reading the provisons of the bill, I wondered, how different was it from the Geary Act of 1892:

The law required all Chinese residents of the United States to carry a resident permit, a sort of internal passport. Failure to carry the permit at all times was punishable by deportation or a year at hard labor.

or the 1954 INS-sponsored operation that

coordinated 1075 Border Patrol agents, along with state and local police agencies, to mount an aggressive crackdown, going as far as police sweeps of Mexican-American neighborhoods and random stops and ID checks of "Mexican-looking" people in a region with many Native Americans and native Hispanics

or, in Arizona's own more recent history, the actions of Joe Arpaio?

Historical comparisons are not the only things circulating in my mind, though. The point is this law codifies racial-profiling and harrassment and criminalization of Latino/as (because, really? what is likely to be the basis for "suspect[ing] they're in the United States illegally"?). Isabel Garcia, an Arizona legal defender, offered this description:

[T]his bill represents the most dangerous precedent in this country, violating all of our due process rights... We have not seen this kind of legislation since the Jim Crow laws. And targeting our communities, it is the single ... largest attack on our communities.

Latino/a* lawmakers are entreating Republican Governor Jan Brewer not to sign the bill into law for fear that it will "authorize discrimination."

Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce shrugged off those kinds of worries:

You know, this is amazing to me. We trust officers, we put guns on them, they make life and death decisions every day

The casual assertion that everyone lives in communities in which police and their decisions are respected and trusted?

Pri-vi-lege.
____________________________________________
*I sincerely hope Latino/a lawmakers are not standing alone in protest of this travesty.

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On Collective (and Selective) Memory

You know, I am not at all surprised by the fact that Virginia's Governor Robert McDonnell proclaimed April Confederate History Month. My (Louisiana) parish has done it before and I'm sure it's not an anomaly in the South.

But what gets me, what always gets me, when I see people loving on the Confederacy and declaring that their flags and memorials are all about heritage, is the selective, largely one-sided memory they have. The "Old South" may have been all moonlight and magnolias in their recollections, but there were four million or so people who, I'll bet, remembered it quite differently.

Encouraging people to remember the Confederacy includes encouraging them to remember that those states left the Union largely because of their fear that Abraham Lincoln would not just stop the expansion of slavery, but abolish it all together. Remember that these people were willing to go to war to protect their right to own and exploit other people. That dims the moonlight a little bit.

The irony is, it is "heritage" to remember the Confederacy, but we are never supposed to talk about slavery. McDonnell urges people to "to recognize how our history has led to our present," but when we talk about how slavery has very real effects on our present, that is dismissed. It ended a century and a half ago, after all, and to talk about it is to search for grievances and dwell on the past or however that argument goes. The proclamation itself makes no mention of slavery, just vague allusions to "a time very different than ours today." McDonnell himself suggested that slavery was not important enough to merit mention in a proclamation about remembering the Confederacy.

That is not the only contradiction in that proclamation:

all Virginians can appreciate the fact that when ultimately overwhelmed by the insurmountable numbers and resources of the Union Army, the surviving, imprisoned and injured Confederate soldiers gave their word and allegiance to the United States of America, and returned to their homes and families to rebuild their communities in peace

No, they didn't. They fought like hell to reinstate and then maintain their previous control over every aspect of southern life, at the cost of thousands of lives and the continued denial of the most basic civic rights.

And then, the admonition that "this defining chapter in Virginia’s history should not be forgotten," as if that has ever been a possibility. (Some) white southerners and their sympathizers have been busy since the end of the Civil War making sure we never forget their noble "Lost Cause" or how near-perfect the South was before the intrusion and unwarranted intervention of the North. Confederate flags haven't just been on people's bumper stickers or their back windows. They've flown over state capitol buildings and been woven into new flags. We are not in danger of forgetting "this defining chapter."

I think what we are in danger of forgetting--and I say this as a history teacher in Texas absolutely appalled at what the Texas Board of Education is doing to the social studies curriculum--is that not everyone has had the same experiences of every event in U.S. history and that those "defining chapters" have tended to be interpreted very differently by people forced into the margins of society. That doesn't make those interpretations any less valid or real or "American."

It is enraging and hurtful to me that people expect us to learn, to teach, to glorify history in a way that disappears us, our experiences and our contributions. The history of this nation is not composed solely of the experiences and opinions of the dominant group(s).

Neither should its collective memory be.

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Hey, This Seems Familiar

trigger warning

I have a new piece up at the Guardian's "Comment Is Free America" about that cartoon that depicts a scene after President Obama has raped the Statue of Liberty. I try to put that cartoon and so much of the related sentiment in historical perspective:

The juxtaposition of this cartoon and the violence/assassination threats [against Obama and his supporters] are significant, as well, in historical context. One of the primary reasons given for mob action that resulted in the death of black men in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the accusation that a black man had raped a white woman. The cartoonist has accused President Obama, figuratively, of that crime – say what you want about Liberty's greenish hue; women who historically represented the US, from Columbia to other depictions of Liberty, were white. Obama, according to the cartoonist, has violated this symbol of both white womanhood and America. This serves as more justification for retaliating violently against him.

Please check out the whole thing!

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Constance McMillen Wins... Sort Of

Late last night, via a friend's twitter post, I heard that a federal judge had decided that the Mississippi school district that canceled prom rather than allow Constance McMillen and her girlfriend to attend as a couple had violated McMillen's First Amendment rights.

The school district does not have to reinstate the prom, however. Parents have planned a private prom, instead.

The Clarion-Ledger article linked above noted that "all junior and senior students would be allowed to attend, although it was not clear whether same-sex couples would be allowed to attend together." On other sites, I read that McMillen was not invited to the private prom.

If that is the case, the school board wins, too. They relied on an old southern tactic I described in a piece I did for The Guardian's Comment Is Free:

The prom cancellation is reminiscent of tactics from at least a half-century ago: rather than integrate public pools, parks, and schools, southern municipalities often closed them. Sometimes, in lieu of closure, they turned over such accommodations to private enterprises. In defiance of school integration orders, they opened private schools and segregation academies. Such acts allowed them to continue de facto segregation long after de jure segregation was outlawed.

If you're so inclined, please go check out the whole piece!

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The Past Is Present

ETA: My best friend, who taught at our old high school, and my sister corrected me. The school did eventually sponsor off-campus proms, however, “tradition” meant that students quickly left (usually after taking pictures) to gather for their own separate (in terms of race) functions.

Dear Mississippians,

I find it amazing the type of symbolism with which y’all manage to imbue high school rituals like prom. I mean, some of you held on to racially segregated proms well into the 21st century—although some progress has been made there.*

Now I hear others of you would rather cancel prom than allow a lesbian couple to attend. This, just a few months after your execution of a flawless southern swoon at the idea of a high school senior challenging the norms reinforced by gendered clothing.

I don’t know if it’s nostalgia for the good ol’ school days. I don’t know if you're scared that Anita Bryant's predictions have come true and proponents of the radical homosexual agenda™, have infiltrated the schools and are recruiting your children.

But, really, stop. Time will not stand still. You cannot re-create your youth or what you envision as the glorious past through your children.

Your fellow southerner,

elle
_________________________________________
*My own Louisiana high school did not have integrated proms and, only shortly before its closing, did it stop the practice of having a homecoming court with one white and one black representative from each grade.

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Things of which I Am Tired

Number One: Racially-charged/racist incidents on/around campuses. See:

A) UCSD reacts to racial incidents

This began with the "Compton Cookout" party for which hosts "invited students to dress and act in a way that encouraged racial stereotypes, mocking Black History Month." Text of the invitation here, but it included helpful details like:

For guys: I expect all males to be rockin Jersey's, stuntin' up in ya White T (XXXL smallest size acceptable), anything FUBU, Ecko, Rockawear, High/low top Jordans or Dunks, Chains, Jorts, stunner shades, 59 50 hats, Tats, etc.

For girls: For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks-Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes... They also have short, nappy hair, and usually wear cheap weave... They... speak very loudly, while rolling their neck, and waving their finger in your face.

When overly-sensitive, politically correct, free speech stifling people [/snark] objected, a campus group called KOALA defended the party on the university's television station, and "one student used the 'N-word' to describe critics of the Cookout."

The university then held a teach-in, but students walked out, feeling that the method was ineffective for addressing or healing the problem or underlying issues like the dearth of black faculty or students.

Then, a student strung up a noose in the campus library. Students, again, demanded that campus officials effectively and actively address the incident.

Let's see what happens.

B) 2 MU students apologize for cotton ball incident The "incident" involved the students "scattering cotton balls outside the black culture center at the University of Missouri in Columbia."

C) A Towson University adjunct, Allen Zaruba, was fired for describing himself, in front of his class, as "a nigger on the corporate plantation."

Number Two: The disavowal of racist intent.

The noose-hanger says she had no racist motivation.

The two students at the University of Missouri in Columbia described their actions as "part of a series of foolish acts."

Zaruba pointed out that he serves in a prison ministry and that his stepfather was black. ("One of my best friends...") And it's not that I believe that Zaruba's intent was like the other two cases, but I resent that he fell back on that trope.

I just have more respect for people who own their shit. In what other context do the first two incidents make sense? Black people protest disrespect, lack of representation and support, and systemic racism, and a noose is hung? That's not even original. Cotton balls outside the BLACK CULTURE CENTER?!

Number Three: How quickly the comments on any post on any of these incidents turn to "This is PC gone mad/this is unfair because white people can't say/do what black people say/do!!!/Is this really a racist incident?" etc. Even in the f*cking Chronicle of Higher Education comments!

Really? Are those the primary issues? That some black people say the n-word or called someone cracker, so we must never protest incidents like these? That it's unfair that *everyone* can't bandy around the word "nigger?" Do you want to? Because if you do, I'm sure you already are.

I just want to fire off a snarky letter that begins with, "I am so sorry that our desire to work and study in less racially hostile environments inconveniences you!"

And to all my academic colleagues defending Zaruba on the basis of the "appropriateness" of his comparison:

Adjuncts are overworked and underpaid with little job security. The circumstances under which many work are appalling and I know that I'm fortunate to be on the tenure track.

But I can pretty much guarantee that being an adjunct is markedly different from being "a nigger on a plantation." For some reason, I'm pretty certain of that.

I am reminded of the exasperation my colleague, an Africanist, feels when people say they are working like a slave. Few of us can even imagine the reality (and horror) of that.

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I Don't Think "Bad" Is the Word They're Looking For...

Living with someone who loves reality TV has sparked many thoughts in my active mind...

Mm-kay... re: "The Bad Girls' Club,"

Given Amber's bi/homophobia ("How can you not know what you like?" "Unless you just like licking vagina, why would you be a lesbian?" "I don't understand [bisexuality]!"

and

Kate's racism ("I don't feel like going to a club and being hit on my black men... but I'm not racist." "I'm not racist, but I just prefer to have white friends.")

and Natalie's... everything...

why are these people on TV?

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One More Note on Chris Matthews and the Myth of Colorblindness

Via Maegan:

The scrubbing away of color is not what sets the US free from racism. Ending inequality based on race is.

You should read the whole thing.

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Please Know Something about That of Which You Speak

Thinking of getting that inked on my forehead so people stop saying stupid sh*t--to me, at least.

Of course, that won't stop me from reading stupidity, things like, oh, say, this article by Paul Shirley. Shirley feels the need to tell us why he won't donate to Haiti relief efforts, and infuses his story with meaningful personal insights like:

I haven’t donated to the Haitian relief effort for the same reason that I don’t give money to homeless men on the street. Based on past experiences, I don’t think the guy with the sign that reads “Need You’re Help” is going to do anything constructive with the dollar I might give him. If I use history as my guide, I don’t think the people of Haiti will do much with my money either.

And historically clueless rhetoric flavored with a touch of social darwinism and a smidge of eugenics* such as:

Dear Haitians –

First of all, kudos on developing the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Your commitment to human rights, infrastructure, and birth control should be applauded.

As we prepare to assist you in this difficult time, a polite request: If it’s possible, could you not re-build your island home in the image of its predecessor? Could you not resort to the creation of flimsy shanty- and shack-towns? And could some of you maybe use a condom once in a while?

Sincerely,

The Rest of the World

Oh, Mr. Shirley, might I, in my boldness, point you to two brief observations? First from Kai:

It’s not just a natural disaster, it’s a disaster of the modern neo-colonial social order. Earthquakes need to happen, but this doesn’t need to happen. It’s a devastating unfolding of institutionalized racism. Not only rhetorical or interpersonal or representational aspects, but perhaps more importantly the vital economic, infrastructural, and human consequences of several centuries of the very gunships-n-slaves imperialism which generated the modern concept of race.

Then, from Summer:

Haiti was born of a slave rebellion. They didn't seek or wait for permission. No one wrote a speech declaring their freedom. They claimed it for themselves. They were their own saviors. Their own, I suppose, personal Jesus. (All those white men they killed, must have been a deal with the devil.) And so, Haiti couldn't survive or be successful. Haiti concerned Thomas Jefferson--and rightfully so. Can't have those kinds of examples floating around the Caribbean circa early 19th century. What kind of message would that send to other enslaved people on this side of the Middle Passage? Haiti fought the law and won. That couldn't have been good for business. So the powers meddled with the land until the seeds sprouted nothing but "flimsy" stalks, ushering in the refrain "Haiti is the most impoverished..." Straight dissonance to my ears. They treat it like a bastard child. Father France, Mother Africa, or something like that.

A flourishing Haiti is white supremacy's greatest fear. Haiti cannot survive. If Haiti endures, if it succeeds, then the slaves win, right? Haiti's continued endurance would prove that everything they've ever taught us is false. If we only understand Haiti as a perpetually impoverished nation, and have no comprehension of Haiti as symbol of black resistance and survival then what have we learned? We will have learned that Haiti is poor because its citizens are lazy, culturally backwards, wary of outsiders, lawless, lascivious. What we should know is that even in these dark days of desperation, Haiti has survived, despite even the most powerful acts of a most angry God and world powers that imagine themselves in His likeness.

They don't like the message, so they don't want Haiti to survive--but it will.

Haiti will survive, Paul Shirley, without your donation and in spite of your condescension and ignorance.
__________________________________
*Is that (the oh-so-new blend of social darwinism and eugenics) the flavor of the month or something???

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This Week in "Stuff elle can't f*cking believe!"

Item 1: Mark Krikorian posits that Haiti's suffering is the result of not having been colonized long enough. Haitians didn't have long enough to absorb civ-uhl-eye-zayshen from the French.

My guess is that Haiti's so screwed up because it wasn't colonized long enough. The ancestors of today's Haitians, like elsewhere in the Caribbean, experienced the dislocation of de-tribalization, which disrupted the natural ties of family and clan and ethnicity. They also suffered the brutality of sugar-plantation slavery, which was so deadly that the majority of slaves at the time of independence were African-born, because their predecessors hadn't lived long enough to reproduce.

But, unlike Jamaicans and Bajans and Guadeloupeans, et al., after experiencing the worst of tropical colonial slavery, the Haitians didn't stick around long enough to benefit from it. (Haiti became independent in 1804.). And by benefit I mean develop a local culture significantly shaped by the more-advanced civilization of the colonizers.

You notice this line: "the majority of slaves at the time of independence were African-born"--yep, no civilization at all.

Item 2: "South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer(R)Compares His State's Poor Children to 'Stray Animals'" and advises against feeding them, lest they reproduce:

My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better.

And y'all thought negative eugenics was a thing of the past!

h/t Nezua

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Notice

Dear World,

As has become my habit, I want to make an announcement without adding much commentary or history. After seeing this burning question on CNN's front page:

Is it ethical to vacation in Haiti now?

and seeing this article which positions Haiti as little more than a piece of territory over which the French and Americans can posture and prove who is more "powerful"

and reading another article about a recent spate of adoptions of Haitian "orphans" with little time given to find any extended family members, I would just like to remind you/us:

Haiti/Haitians do(es) not exist to facilitate opportunities to make you feel good about yourself.

If I were my former self, I suppose I could make some point about further marginalizing people by centering yourself and your desires or the historical precedent for abrogating the relationship between children of color and their families members for money, ego, and superiority complexes like racism and ethnocentrism. I might even reiterate Angela Davis's story of how armed guards are protecting tourists in Haiti from the pesky Haitians. But that ain't even me right now.

I have a feeling you're not listening anyway.

Love,
elle

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What's the Matter with Louisiana?

Been thinking about starting a new blog called "Dispatches from the South" or something so I can just post ridiculous and non-ridiculous shit I stumble across everyday.

Then I realized, I barely write here!!! Might as well post my observations here. So, continuing my critique of Louisianans who make me want to pull my eyelashes out, I present the following two items:

Interracial Couple Denied Marriage License in Louisiana

and

Sharon Hodges, 61,... was charged with simple battery and disturbing the peace with racial slurs Thursday.

Okay, I ain't gone lie...

My first thought when I saw the first article was, "I have to tell Kim!" but then, I wondered if that put her in the, "Hi, I'm elle and this is my best friend, Kim, worldwide spokesperson for all biracial people" position.

So, I decided that it would be fun to just half-heartedly pick apart this racist Justice of the Peace's (he should not bear any title with the word "Justice" in it, IMHO) (il)logic:

"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Keith Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday.

He is talking using terms like, "mixing the races."



He apparently believes that somewhere, there is a "pure" race. He is prefacing his sentence with, "I'm not a racist..." He seems totally unaware or unaccepting of the notion of race as a political, social, and economic construct. Yes, Mr. Bardwell, you are a racist. He then says,

"I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."

Really, is he using the "I have a (fill-in-the-blank) friend!" argument? And is there anything more telling than, "They use my bathroom?" He compares his racial "tolerance" to the Jim Crow Era and has decided he his suitably progressive? Progressive enough that he's wiling to allow black people in his house and take the risk of getting our cooties!

[I]t is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long...

[snip]

[Bardwell] came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

"There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage," Bardwell said. "I think those children suffer and I won't help put them through it."

I don't know divorce statistics, I really don't. But I don't think the rate of staying-togetherness is impressive for many marriages these days, regardless of the racial background of the partners. If the rate of divorce is higher for interracial couples, I can't imagine why, given the welcoming and supportive social climate evidenced by people like Bardwell.

Also, this theory that people do not "accept" biracial children? First, let me state that I understand CLEARLY the difference between conceiving children in a consensual, loving relationship and conceiving them in a sexually exploitative system like slavery. But I have to point out that biracial children have a long history of being part of "black" families, because of the realities of the lives of enslaved women. Not "accepted," as if the effort to love them is always complicated and must be consciously undertaken.* It's as if Bardwell has been enjoying some of that "tragic mulatto" literature on the side.**

There is nothing that makes biracial children inherently prone to "suffering." Of course, I cannot personally speak to the experiences of biracial children and I know there are issues living in this society as a biracial person. But much of that is the byproduct of living in a highly racialized country, where we've understood race, for so long, as a binary, and are obsessed with making people fit one category or another. Louisiana is a perfect example; it wasn't that long ago that the state proved it's dedication to the one-drop rule.

Then, finally,

If he did an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.

"I try to treat everyone equally," he said.

No, you don't. if you're marrying some people and not marrying others, you are not treating everyone equally.

And, if I'm not mistaken, this is an elected position in Louisiana.

As to that second article,

A West Monroe police affidavit said Hodges claimed a woman cut in front of her at Walmart's return desk, and the woman's daughter lunged at her.

[snip]

The woman's daughter admitted to lunging at Hodges after she used a racial epithet.

I would ask, in whose mind does it make sense that the reaction to cutting line is slinging racial slurs, but I think this says it all:

[W]itnesses heard Hodges yell a racial epithet at the woman and say, "You will respect your elders, especially since I'm white."

_____________________________
*I am not trying to dismiss the fact that there was undoubtedly resentment and struggles as enslaved women and men dealt with slaveowners' sexual violence.

** Since he depends on his perspective as a Louisianan, let me throw in mine. Lately, when I go home, every time I enter a store, I see white grandparents or godparents or aunts and uncles (and I partly assume the relationships and partly know for sure, because people ask them, "Who is this you got with you?") with biracial children all the time. Why do I even note it? Because that was NOT something I saw growing up there.

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On Brisenia Flores

When I was working on my dissertation, I had to read quite a bit of “immigration” literature for my last chapter. One of the books I remember most was John Higham’s Strangers in the Land, because so many others referenced his assertion that throughout U.S. history, nativism and xenophobia have ebbed and flowed.

I remember that, because as I’ve said before, I think we are caught in a peak period and it seems we have been for well over a decade now.

But having the historical perspective to see it as part of a pattern, to know that it might recede some day, does not make it any less painful to live through, especially as we bear witness to the beating deaths of Luis Ramirez and Jose Sucuzhañay, the disrespect shown to the memory and family of Ana Fernandez,

And the murder of nine-year-old Brisenia Flores.

I heard about Brisenia Flores a few weeks ago, from the Sanctuary, VivirLatino, and via Twitter. She and her father were murdered, and her mother was shot, in their home, in the middle of the night, by people "associated" with the Minuteman Project.

I have been unable to get the words together to write about this child, because of all the thoughts racing through my mind:

Racists still come to our homes and murder us in the middle of the night.
Still.

This reinforces for people of color how tenuous the safety of our children is.
Still.

We live in a white supremacist patriarchy that claims to value a certain family structure while violently disrupting that structure in families of color.
Still.

How long are people going to deny the violence that permeates so much right-wing extremism? What do we expect from people fed on a constant diet of "us vs. them" and "retain-our-privilege-at-all-cost?" Why aren’t more of us repulsed that it’s cloaked in the language of love for “God and country?”

Beyond all the symbolic things, a nine-year-old child and her father were killed because of hatred. Even then, we can’t talk about that without feeling the need to air the murderers’ opinion that Raul Flores, Jr., Brisenia’s father, sold drugs.*

As if the Minutemen need justification to act violently against a Latin@ family and community. As Maegan notes:

The goal [of Shawna Forde and Gunny Bush] wasn’t to observe, document and report as Jim Gilchrist, the leader of the Minuteman Project, has said in trying to distance himself from his associates charged with two counts of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree burglary and one count of aggravated assault. The goal was to use violence against a family viewed as expendable to help further their cause of using violence against those viewed as expendable.

__________________________________
*I have not read anything that backs the truth of that claim, and yet the NYT juxtaposes it with the local Sheriff’s observation that “there is ample drug activity between here and the border.” Now, he doesn’t say that Raul Flores, Jr., is connected to it, but that quote is somehow relevant when talking about the murder of a Latino man who lived near the border.

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I Didn't Know "Rest In Peace" Came with a Citizenship Requirement!

ETA: A new note at the bottom

Do you ever just sit back and wonder who and what we are becoming?

When the DC metrorail crash occurred earlier this week, nine people lost their lives. When the list of the names of the dead was released, it contained the name of Ana Fernandez, a mother of six.

While the family has been "grateful for the genuine expressions of sympathy," they did not expect another effect.

Ana Fernandez's image and name have prompted hateful, harrassing calls from people demanding to know her immigration status.

My personal response was, "Does it matter?"

Have we really sunk so low that we comb through the details of tragedies, looking for things that make us feel "suspicious?"

Have brown skin and a Spanish surname become enough to arouse that suspicion and make us act in heartless, disturbingly inhuman ways? (That question is rhetorical, of course).

Ana Fernandez's family is having to balance their grief with this sudden demand to explain:

Ana's sister said the accusations aren't true.

"Right now, the whole family is in pain. She was here legally, and all her children are legal. They were born here."

They're also having to defend themselves against the stereotypes of lazy immigrants who come here to "live off" others. Fernandez's sister said:

"We all work, OK? And we're going to get through this."

And from one of her children:

"She was always working -- working two jobs. She did whatever she had to to take care of us," said Evelyn Fernandez, her oldest daughter, who is enrolled in a GED program. "She was a strong woman. She never needed anyone to help her."

For the record, I'd like to repeat that Fernandez's family reports that she did have legal status and all her children were born here.*

For the record, large numbers of people with Spanish surnames and brown skin have been in the United States for 160 years now** and in places that would become part of the United States for generations before--at some point, New Spain extended from one coast to another across the southern portion of what is now the United States.

Given that, inferring anything "suspicious" from the appearance and name of Ana Fernandez is not only desperate, it doesn't necessarily make sense.

Except, I guess, in a place fully ensconced and invested in its latest wave of nativism.

H/T Maegan
________________________________
*I've gone back and forth about writing that, because what I'm trying to say is that the accusations are unfounded, but what I worry it sounds like is, "Because they've met this arbitrary citizenship standard, they have a right to grieve and be treated with respect." Her family should be allowed to grieve in peace and she should be treated with dignity in her death whatever her/their immigration status is.

**I dated that from the Mexican Cession, forgetting to reference the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, that had the effect of bringing significant parts of New Spain (including Florida) into the U.S., as well.

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One of These Things Is Not Like the Other...

Remember the Loud and Clear post? Consider this an addendum.

Yesterday, the Nixon Library made "more than 150 hours of tape and 30,000 pages of documents" public, much of it online.

One of the things revealed is that, while Nixon didn't make a public statement about Roe v. Wade, he had mixed feelings about the decision. He worried, like so many concerned trolls citizens, that the ability to fuck without one of the biggest "penalties"* would turn women into loose, sex-crazed sluts, thereby unraveling the fabric of the United States:

Nixon worried that greater access to abortions would foster “permissiveness,” and said that “it breaks the family.”

But he did recognize that sometimes, women might need abortions (emphasis mine):

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding, “Or a rape.”

Because apparently, a white woman having consensual sex with and becoming pregnant by a black man is equivalent to/"just as tragic as" being raped and becoming pregnant. I put it in these terms, not because black women didn't/don't have children with white men, but because this is the combination that has always been seen as "tragic." White southern men, for example, spent many of the early years of the "New South" warning about such relationships and trying to ensure, violently, that they didn't occur.

The newly released recordings also document Nixon's anti-Semitism (as recordings before have done):

The tapes also include a phone call from February 1973 between Nixon and the evangelist Billy Graham, during which Mr. Graham complained that Jewish-American leaders were opposing efforts to promote evangelical Christianity, like Campus Crusade. The two men agreed that the Jewish leaders risked setting off anti-Semitic sentiment.

“What I really think is deep down in this country, there is a lot of anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up,” Nixon said.

At another point he said: “It may be they have a death wish. You know that’s been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.”

It's funny how Republican leaders for the last 50 years or so have been accusing racial/ethnic/religious minorities of "stirring things up" and provoking the attacks on themselves by demanding to be seen, heard, counted. It's the height of privilege-- and evidence of a sad lack of empathy--to view someone's struggle for rights as an inconvenience to your own life and the source of your righteous indignation.

And as to the part I emphasized, note that he is speaking, what, one generation after the Holocaust? I don't even have flippant analysis for that--he was just an asshole.
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* Meaning forced pregnancy and childbirth

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Loud and Clear

So E Pluribus Unum thinks more African Americans are not Republicans because we don’t listen to them. He suggests to us,

“how about listening? How about listening to what Republicans have to say, instead of what the Democrats say we say? How about listening to what we have to say before booing us out of the building?”

I’d like to argue that we hear very well what you’re saying. The historian in me would like to point out how long we’ve been hearing it.

In the late 60s, when Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon* were both positioning themselves as law and order candidates, with illegality shaped by the fact that the dominant group often criminalizes what they fear, don't like or don't understand in marginalized communities, and lack of order being defined largely as previously disfranchised people pressing for their rights, we heard you.

When Richard Nixon tried to slow down school desegregation, when one of his strategists heralded the use of the Southern Strategy, we heard you.

In the late 1970s, when Ronald Reagan waxed poetically about fictional welfare queens—giving proof, you believed, to your long held beliefs that African Americans were promiscuous frauds who did not want to work—and “strapping young bucks” using food stamps to buy something other than dry beans (poor PoC, in keeping with their sackcloth and ashes attire, should never eat delicacies like steak, especially when white people were eating hamburger!!! Think about all the attention paid to Pres. Obama's "elitist" eating habits), we heard you.

And re: food stamps, welfare, public education—as you’ve engaged in rhetoric over the last, oh, million years, that equates “taxpayers” solely with white people and “taxpayers’ burdens” with PoC, we heard you.

When your hero opened his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, MS, site of the brutal murders of three civil right workers not even two decades before, talking about poor people’s "dependency" and states’ rights, we heard you.

By the way, I’m not sure if states’ right is supposed to be some sort of sooper sekrit kode, but, fyi, we knew what it meant in the 1850s and 60s; we knew what it meant in the 1950s and 60s, we knew what it meant in 1980 and we know what it means now.

When he was elected president and tried to secure tax exempt status for Bob Jones University, supported South Africa’s apartheid government as an anti-communist measure, slashed social programs that assisted the most vulnerable Americans, saw the annual income of the bottom 20% drop, hired aides who reveled in what you thought were the subtleties of the Southern Strategy, we heard you.

We still hear you downplay all that as you to try to canonize the man.

Emboldened by your successful Southern Strategy, you produced lovely ads like the Willie Horton one—support Michael Dukakis and you support scary! violent! black! men!—and Jesse Helms’s “Hands” ad—because no way could a PoC ever be equally or more qualified than a white person and plus, you’d convinced everyone that affirmative action was nothing more than unfair quotas (that's why Bush I had to veto that Civil Rights Act!) that were unnecessary since racism and sexism were things of the past (and your other beloved meme—figments of PoC’s and women’s imaginations). We definitely heard both of those.

You vowed to launch a culture war, in which all of us non-WASP-heterosexual-men were to forsake our cultures, heritage, languages, selves to support the idea that the real U.S. history (and the real U.S.) was one characterized by consensus, that since “Western Civilization” was man’s (yes, man’s) greatest achievement, the ends justified the means—the means being the systematic murder, assault, and oppression of millions of us. Nevermind that your winning the war was predicated on our silence and our invisibility. Yes, we heard you.

We heard you when you made your Contract on with America, vowing “to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement” even as it was becoming obvious how the so-called War on Drugs, with its harsh sentences and sentencing differentials, was disproportionately affecting our communities and feeding us into the emerging prison-industrial complex and when it has long been known that “law enforcement’s” role in our communities is markedly different from the one they play in white communities.

Also in that contract, you promised to encourage “personal responsibility” (which you get to define) by “cut[ting] spending for welfare programs, and enact[ing] a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements” because, damn poor working mothers, they shouldn’t be having sex or babies anyway and because you really believed the lie that most women on welfare didn’t work.** You didn’t give a damn about how those women and children survived “after welfare” as long as you could glowingly report that the state’s caseload was reduced.*** We heard that, too.

And Lord, George W. Bush. When he campaigned at Bob Jones University in 2000, when it still banned interracial dating, we heard you.

We heard you, during Hurricane Katrina, when people were left to suffer, he was clueless, and you all were going on and on about how many people, with little money and no means of transport, should’ve magically gotten out before! The response to Katrina was not proof of egregiously unresolved issues of race and class, not evidence of what has always been a narrow definition of who is “deserving” of help in this country; it was proof of too much government dependency (as you’ve been arguing for forever!).

When his administration tried to downplay a Bureau of Justice statistics report that “found that minority drivers were three times as likely to have their vehicles searched during traffic stops as white drivers,” we heard you.

Other gems from this very century? We heard Trent Lott's plaintive yearning for the victory of the States' Rights (**sigh** here we go again) Democratic Party who left the plain old Democratic Party because of a civil rights' plank in the party platform and a desire to preserve the "southern" way of life (euphemism for segregation).

And you hit poor Harold Ford, Jr with a double whammy, warning Tennesseans to be wary of the African-descended (wherein Africa roughly = uncivilized jungle) guy who might engage in sex with a white woman! Now that one, we're tired of hearing.

And now, so many of you back claims that the first black President is not really American. In your feeble-mindedness, you posit that it is literal—searching for birth certificates and calling him Kenyan. You don’t seem to grasp that what is bothering you is mostly figurative—you live in a country where citizenship and who is “really” American has usually been the domain of whites. Having a black man occupy the highest office in the land is mind-boggling. So when you have your Tea Parties, demanding “your” country back, as if the rest of us are not American, when you hold up signs invoking slavery and images of monkeys, we hear that too.

When you are such navel gazers that you believe your party doesn’t appeal to us because we, African Americans, don’t value freedom, we hear you.

But mostly, E Pluribus Unum, when you write screeds that invite me to check off a racism bingo card—black people are emotional, sensitive, vain, childlike/easily led, angry, unapproachable, ungrateful, unable to recognize their best interests, looking for handouts or special benefits, illogical (and those are just a few of the tropes you recycled and spat forward)—we hear you.

When the comments of said problematic post further tokenize/exceptionalize black people—“Alas, there are a few intrepid, noble savages; we call them black conservatives,” we hear you.

The many African Americans who believe, like me, the words of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, “Nobody’s free, ‘til everybody’s free,” also hear other things.

We heard you positing building a fence and criminalizing people because you are selfish enough to believe that trade can flow across borders, largely to our benefit, but labor will not follow.

We hear of your exploiting them and tossing them aside, dehumanizing them by making words like “illegal” a noun, casting them as a threat to our economic well-being, our culture (which, despite your self-deception, has never been singular), and our health.

We hear you fighting to continue the deprivation of civil rights for members of LGBTQI communities and continuing to vilify and dehumanize them as well. We hear your rhetoric as members of those communities and as allies.

We hear you—and black women hear you acutely—as you continue to try to define, in the words of Stephanie Shaw, “what a woman ought to be and do” including what we “ought” to do with our own bodies.

So, I suggest you listen, if you want to figure out how to approach the “unapproachable” black strawman monolith you've constructed. This list is in no way exhaustive, and in fact, really only details a fraction of my issues with the Republican Party:

1. Acknowledge and remedy the fact that your party’s strong in the old Confederacy for a reason. Where I’m from, the Republican Party is a refuge for racists. You can dismiss that however much you want, but I’m not the only black woman who sees that.

2. Acknowledge and remedy the fact that a portion of your party’s platform rests upon “misogyny, homophobia, [and] transphobia,” as well.

3. Realize that your glorification of the individual (and the lie that successful people primarily pull themselves up, with no help, by their bootstraps) may not play well in communities with a more community-oriented ethos.

4. Stop pretending that only conservative white people value self-help and entrepreneurship.

5. Recognize why some of us are not as wary of a government that intervenes as you are—and, no, it’s not because we all secretly long to laze about on “taxpayers’ (wink, wink) hard earned money.” You know some other occasions when the government intervened? During the 1870s when the Klan was terrorizing and slaughtering us. During the 1960s, when, despite previous efforts and laws, it was federal officials who had to register us to vote in many southern locations.

6. De-center for a sec. Just look at your party from the point of view of someone from a marginalized community. Prepare yourself by purchasing Dramamine before hand, though.

7. Don’t ever, ever again write racist bullshit such as this.

(crossposted)
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I am not writing this to position the Democratic Party as the site of some sort of racial utopia.

*I think Humphrey pegged Nixon adroitly here

** Many studies done around the time of 1996's so called welfare reform, demonstrated that most mothers who received welfare worked.

*** And yes, I do criticize the Democratic President who signed the 1996 PRWORA.

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Officer Jack Sparrow?

**Updated**

Do the police in Tenaha, TX, "shake down" drivers, particularly drivers of color, in what one attorney calls "a piracy operation?"

Roderick Daniels was traveling through East Texas in October 2007 when, he says, he was the victim of a highway robbery.

The Tennessee man says he was ordered to pull his car over and surrender his jewelry and $8,500 in cash that he had with him to buy a new car.

But Daniels couldn't go to the police to report the incident.

The men who stopped him were the police.

This story caught my attention because my family and I routinely travel through Tenaha on our way to and from Louisiana. I have my own stories about East Texas police:

My experiences with the police have included:

My father and I being pulled over while I was an undergraduate, separated, and questioned. We were in Texas, our car had Louisiana plates, and the cops admitted they suspected drug trafficking.

Similarly, I was tailed closely by a cop for a while in a small East Texas town who didn't turn on his lights, initially. He was following me so closely that I put on my signal and got into the next lane. Then he turned on his lights--said I was supposed to wait until I'd traveled at least so many feet after turning on my signal to switch lanes. The problem, again, was my Louisiana plates in a Texas town. He wanted to know where I lived currently, where I was traveling to, and why. I answered, simply because I didn't know if I was allowed not to answer and I had no intention of disappearing in East Texas.

More recently (several weeks ago), my sister and her fiance were pulled over in East Texas after meeting me in Houston. Her description:

The cop pulled out behind us and trailed us for five minutes before turning on his lights. He made [my fiance] get out and come to the back of the car and made me stay in. He shined the light directly in my baby's face, woke him up, and wouldn't move the light. Of course, he started crying and I was digging for the insurance papers and wanted to cry myself.

He kept asking the same questions over and over, trying to find inconsistencies. Then he asked for permission to search the car. I told him yes because he wouldn't find anything and offered to show him all my prescription medicines. When he realized we were telling the same story, he didn't want to search the car anymore. I'll be honest, I definitely felt like it was racial profiling--he saw a black man who didn't live there, driving through town late at night. But, I threw him off by agreeing to let him search the car.

My sister's experience and one of mine occurred in Diboll, TX, 70 miles from Tenaha.

There seems to be some element of racial-profiling in the Tenaha cases, as well.

[Attorney David] Guillory, who practices in nearby Nacogdoches, Texas, estimates authorities in Tenaha seized $3 million between 2006 and 2008, and in about 150 cases -- virtually all of which involved African-American or Latino motorists -- the seizures were improper.

Emphasis mine.

You might wonder, if the stops seem suspect, why people sign waivers forfeiting their property. There is of course the very immediate fear of what can happen to you, particularly as a person of color being pulled over in a rural town by the police. Then there are the threats. According to the article, the officers routinely threaten people with jail time and the loss of their children.*

Of course, town officials deny all wrongdoing. I scoffed while reading that. Stops like this are often the result of the so-called war on drugs. You know, the "war" that disproportionately targets people of color and takes away their liberty, property, and rights. It feeds into racial-profiling which 1) encourages cops to conduct searches of people of color and their vehicles more often when they are stopped (and treat them more harshly) 2) perpetuates the stereotype that all African Americans and Latin@s with large sums of cash must be drug dealers or doing something illegal 3)justifies the intense focus on communities of color which contributes to the disproportionate numer of arrests and convictions.**

I also scoffed because the racial disparities in arrests and convictions, and the concurrent violation of PoC's rights, have been particularly well-documented in small Texas towns.

We'll see how this plays out, though I can already here the faint cries of the coming, "It's the damn outsiders trying to make something racial outta this!"

H/T Bint via Twitter

(cross-posted)
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*This is a particularly salient threat--the state intervenes disproportionately in families of color, a fact partially attributable to both racism and classism--as Dorothy Roberts said in Shattered Bonds, "the public child welfare system equates poverty with neglect," (p 25).

**For statistics about the claims I made in this paragraph, I referred to a fact sheet I put together for my class's discussion of the prison industrial complex. The fact sheet was culled from these sources.

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History (?) Lessons

So, I want to tell you a story.

Seems a young man of color was in a part of the U.S. where he was unwelcome, perceived as an outsider.

He allegedly engaged in actions deemed transgressive by local "citizens."

So, white men dutifully took it upon themselves to teach him a lesson and ended up beating him to death.

The local citizenry was annoyed by the national attention--felt like people were playing up the racial angle.*

An all-white jury later acquitted the white men of murder charges. The woman closest to him, who felt she knew what the verdicts would be, left the courtroom before they were read.

People gloated that the justice system worked!

You know this story, right?

Only, I'm not talking about him.

I'm talking about him.

Fifty-three years between their deaths, and still these similarities stood out to me.

Dr. King once said something to the effect of the arc of history** is long, but it bends towards justice.

Right now, I'm just stuck on how achingly long it is.

(cross-posted)
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* On local residents' reactions

**I've also heard "moral universe" in the place of history.

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A New Meme: Please Get One

ETA please see Nezua's post at The Sanctuary

I'm preparing to be whipped into a frenzy about the breakout of a mutated strain of swine flu. What I wasn't prepared for was how quickly the "blame the dirty, diseased immigrants" meme would take hold. This, despite the facts that 1)the source of the outbreak could be a CAFO in Mexico owned by our very own Smithfield Farms and 2)"the US was already looking into cases within our own currently designated borders," as noted by Nezua.

But those facts mean nothing to more rabid right-wingers. From Media Matters:

During the April 24 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage stated: "Make no mistake about it: Illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico."*

[snip]

"[C]ould this be a terrorist attack through Mexico? Could our dear friends in the radical Islamic countries have concocted this virus..."

[snip]

"How do you protect yourself? What can you do? I'll tell you what I'm going to do, and I don't give a damn if you don't like what I'm going to say. I'm going to have no contact anywhere with an illegal alien, and that starts in the restaurants."

During the April 27 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Neal Boortz asked: "[W]hat better way to sneak a virus into this country than give it to Mexicans? Right? I mean, one out of every 10 people born in Mexico is already living up here, and the rest are trying to get here... ."

In an April 25 blog post... syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin suggested that the outbreak was due to the United States' "uncontrolled immigration... 9/11 didn't convince the open-borders zealots to put down their race cards and confront reality. Maybe the threat of their sons or daughters contracting a deadly virus spread from south of the border to their Manhattan prep schools* will."

"Mexican@s & Latinos already had a hell of a time w/all the hate," Nezua wrote on Twitter.** This flu outbreak gives right wing pundits an opportunity to ramp it up.

Early signs of what the outcome could be? Already, this flu is being framed as "more of one or another kind of Mexicanicky “spillover.” At Vivir Latino, Maegan suggested that, "swine flu is the new racial profiling," pointing to this summary of Homeland Security Secreatary Napolitano's instructions:

Secretary Janet Napolitano also said border agents have been directed to begin passive surveillance of travelers from affected countries, with instructions to isolate anyone who appears actively ill with suspected influenza.

Then there is the story of Israeli Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman's suggestion that the flue be renamed the "Mexican Flu." The CDC has advised against non-essential travel to Mexico--and while I can understand how that might be practical, I cannot help thinking how this advisory will be perceived in a country where Mexico is constructed as hopeless, corrupt, and inadequate.

Reading Maegan's and Nez's tweets on this made me reflect on the long history within the U.S. of categorizing "undesirable" immigrants as dirty and diseased. They were undesirable, of course, because of their racial/ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious differences from the WASP-y mainstream. In the 19th century, much of the anti-immigrant sentiment focused on the Irish and Asians (particularly the Chinese); in the early 20th century, "undesirable" expanded to include the "new" immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, the disabled, and most Asians.

Part of characterizing these immigrants as undesirable was claiming, in no uncertain terms, that they represented a danger to Americans and the "American way of life." For example, here is George Frederick Keller's (in)famous depiction of what the Statue of Liberty's counterpart in San Francisco Bay might look like:



And I borrowed this from here a while ago to show my students:



A few years ago, I wrote briefly about some works that talk about the old "immigrants carry filth and disease" meme:

American citizens tend to impose their own standards of housekeeping and "cleanliness" on immigrants and judge them deficient. Nayan Shah, for example, posits that Americans considered San Francisco’s Chinatown dirty, overcrowded, and unacceptable. From there, Chinese were cast as health hazards, rife with disease and in need of police and medical supervision. Taking this cue, some African Americans in San Francisco complained that, “on the streets of the Chinese section of town… one could find filth actually personified and the stench which arises and penetrates the olfactory nerves is something perfectly horrible.”

Mexican immigrants, too, became a perceived threat to American health and hygiene. According to Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna, the porosity of the border worried U.S. health officials in the early twentieth century. In response to a typhus epidemic in Mexico’s interior in 1915, the U.S. Public Health Service quarantined Mexican immigrants and treated them as if they were “vermin-infested.” Along the border, Mexican immigrants were subjected to invasive, humiliating examinations before they were "certified" disease free. That quarantine extended until the late 1930s, long after the epidemic had passed, a testament to the American perception of Mexicans as infectious germ carriers.***

And now, the "new" immigrants of the 21st century--so labeled because they came largely after 1965 and because, more recently, they are traveling to new settlement areas****--are facing the same attacks. Of course, part of the reason is that they share the label of "undesirable" that I defined above. This is a distinction that, as Liss convincincly argues, is becoming synonymous with "immigrant":

In between the disparate uses and meanings of "immigrant" and "ex-pat" (expatriate) falls everything that underlines the racism, classism, and xenophobia of the immigration debate in America.

White, (relatively) wealthy, and English-speaking immigrants are ex-pats, with intramural rugby leagues and dues-drawing pub clubs and summer festivals set to the distant trill of bagpipes.

Non-white, poor, and non-natively English-speaking immigrants are just immigrants.

Ex-pats are presumed to have come to America after a revelation that their countries, in which any white person would be happy to live, are nonetheless not as good as America.

Immigrants are presumed to have come to America because their countries are shit-holes.

Ex-pats are romantic and adventurous, with wonderful accents and charming slang.

Immigrants are dirty and desperate, with the nefarious intent of getting their stupid language on all our signs.

John Higham posited that nativism ebbs and flows, and we seem to be at a high period (and seem to have been frozen here for well over a decade). Given that, the fact that anti-immigrant sentiment tends to rise during periods of economic hardship, and the long-standing practice of associating certain immigrants with germs and disease, I don't expect the right-wing attacks to stop.

That doesn't make them any less disturbing, however.

(cross-posted)

Many thanks to Nezua, Maegan, and Liss, for pointing me to links and for their own words which helped me work through my thoughts.

h/t Jill and The America's Voice Blog, whose posts I also consulted.
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*According to Media Matters, "Officials think they [some NYC high school students] started getting sick after some students returned from the spring break trip to Cancun." Thus the disease was brought to NY by returning tourists, not immigrants.

**Deeky expands on that sentiment here.

***Discussed works:
Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

Arnold Shankman, “Black on Yellow: Afro-Americans View Chinese Americans 1850-1935,” Phylon 39, no. 1 (1978): 3.

Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern, “The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society,” The Millbank Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2002): 765.

Similar characterizations were made of Slovak immigrants, M. Mark Stolarik, “From Field to Factory: the Historiography of Slovak Immigration to the United States,” International Migration Review 10, no. 1 (1976): 96-97.

****Most of my knowledge of new settlement areas comes from my work studying the poultry processing industry, so I'll point you to the works of William Kandel, Emilio Parrado, and Leon Fink.

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