Sunday, December 16, 2012

"good job, Republican racist." @gop - Painting Latinos 'lazy'

source http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/16/1169436/-Painting-Latinos-lazy?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29


Never thought I'd find space in my heart to thank Ann Coulter for anything. Then she decided to label Latinos "the lazy underclass."

Good job, Republican racist.

Way to go ... right after an election where Latinos voted for Barack Obama in overwhelming numbers. You will be starting off a new year soon on the same old right-wing foot and frankly I'm elated. Not about your racism—which disgusts me, but keep on spewing what you really think about Latinos.  

Oh, a few of you think we will forget when your party attempts to push some token Hispanic surnamed person to the forefront (like Marco Rubio—the Krauthammer approach), but it won't work. The future of Latinos voting for Republicans will suffer a larger brown-out each year.  

Not only do we hear you use the "I" word all the time, we can add in the "L" word.  

No—Latinos are not lazy. Nor shiftless, nor any other pejoratives you can come up with to slur an entire demographic.  

There is a long history of racial/ethnic stereotyping of Latinos.

Hispanics have been portrayed by the media as lazy, unintelligent, greasy, criminal, and alien. Their contributions culturally, economically, and historically have never been properly documented or appreciated. Instead, Hispanics in general, and American Hispanics in particular, have been the victims of racist stereotyping in an unbroken string of images and portrayals that began with the battle over Mexican land in the Southwest as America expanded during the frontier era.
(Continue reading below the fold)

A steady diet of Latino hate is fed by Fox Spews, pundits and shock jocks, and is reenforced by pseudo intellectual racists like Charles Murray, who gets a platform from which to pontificate from major news venues. Of course Coulter cites him in her "El Tipping Pointo" piece.

Ummm ... sorry Miz Coulter, but Spanish for point is punto. Your language bigotry is duly noted. So is your use of yet another "I" word—"illegitimate," when discussing children and birthrates.

There are no illegitimate children.  

Of course Romney liked to throw his fluency with Spanish around too. Fail.

This isn't just about the last election cycle.

I haven't forgotten this comment that was made by equal opportunity bigot and prospective appointee Henrietta Holsman Fore during the Bush years. The difference between then and now is we, on the left, are doing a better job making sure these kind of statements are challenged and disseminated to our voters.

Bush's New USAID Nominee: Hispanics Are 'Lazy'

[...] in a letter to the college newspaper, Ms. Holsman reiterated her statement that she had trouble keeping black assembly-line workers from going "back to the street to earn more money" selling drugs

In her lecture, Ms. Holsman also said she had found Hispanic workers to be lazy, white workers resentful of having to work with machines, and Asians, while very productive, likely to move on to professional or management jobs.

We've come a long way from the percentages of Latino votes received by Republicans during the G.W. Bush years. Bueno. That downward trend shows no chance of reversing in the near future either. However this is no time for complacency. We also have to ensure that issues that have a major impact on Latino communities across the U.S. are dealt with by our party. Part of that process must be a drive to get more TeaPublicans out of the house in 2014. We must also highlight the official Republican Party Platform as it refers to latinos/immigration. We have to pass comprehensive immigration reform, the Dream Act, a jobs bill, and better education policies.  

I'm joyful that the Latino vote is increasing. Massive voter registration drives, and GOTV efforts are making a difference, and will continue to do so. But we have to pay closer attention to orchestrated voter disqualification of Latinos, which Greg Palast discusses in Latinos–too lazy to vote?

According to the New York Times, it's first and foremost the Latinos' "entrenched pattern of nonparticipation." In other words, they're just lazy, don't give a taco, and treasure their siesta more than their vote. Nowhere in the long, front-page article does the Times writer veer from the racial profile of Chicanos as unengaged if not hostile to registering to vote. If the Times checked the stats instead of relying on stereotypes from an old Cantinflas movie, it could have found from the detailed survey by the US Census Bureau that white voters are one-third more likely than Hispanic voters to say they don't register because of disinterest. Indeed, the statistical survey shows Hispanics the most committed of any ethnic group to attempting to register. While the Times article tediously quotes those Hispanics who say their vote won't make a difference, the Census shows that whites express that view twice as frequently as Hispanics. The biggest problem identified by Hispanic citizens themselves in registering is "difficulty in English." D'oh! The Times no piense de eso, los chingates.

But there's another explanation for the drop in Hispanic voter registration: Hispanics do register, by the millions—only to have their registration forms rejected, or, if they sneak onto the rolls, have their names purged. And The Times said nothing about the Purge'n General, Donetta Davidson, who removed one in five voters from the registry when she was Colorado's Secretary of State.

The Times, if their reporters weren't too lazy to check the facts, would find out that the majority of registration forms submitted by legal voters of color in California had been rejected. For several years, Hispanics have filled out the forms and the state has thrown them out. It was the Republican Secretary of State Bruce McPherson who rejected nearly half (42 percent) of new registrations out of hand in California, over fourteen thousand voters in LA County alone. (He didn't, by the way, bother to tell the voters. He wanted to make it a surprise on Election Day.) Only the County of Los Angeles questioned this alleged avalanche of phony voters. The county called each rejected voter and every one reached was in fact legit, but their names were input wrong by the state clerks or simply rejected as "suspicious" to the GOP official. (NB: Asians vote Democratic, and their registration rates are worse than for Hispanics.)

Racist demagogues, bloated with Hispanophobia, can be found throughout the U.S. I'll never forget my students' reactions, and discussion when I showed this trailer from 9500 Liberty in class.

rest at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/16/1169436/-Painting-Latinos-lazy?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29

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