The South Chicagoan
From Guanajuato and Jalisco to Chicago and beyond
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Nativists want to make “La Raza” Sotomayor’s version of Obama’s “Bill Ayers”
It does not surprise me that people will pop out of the woodwork who are determined to “bring down” the Supreme Court candidacy of appeals court judge Sonia So
tomayor.
I think they realize the partisan political math is not in their favor and she is likely to become the ninth justice on the high court when it reconvenes in October. But they are determined to dredge up her ethnic background in ways that are meant to make it appear to be a negative.
IF ANYTHING, THEY hope to get at President Barack Obama and Democrats by claiming these are the kind of people that non-conservative elective officials will give the country. I believe they are delusional to think they can feed a diet of nativist rhetoric to the American public, and that it will be swallowed on Election Days of the future.
I use the word nativist in this instance because that is what I have heard during the past few days in the tone of the trash talk being used against the lady from the Bronx who rose to a federal judicial post (which I’m sure these people believe former President George H.W. Bush should have given to a “more qualified” white male).
It was early Thursday that a group calling itself the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC dredged up the fact that Sotomayor (of Puerto Rican ethnic background, although born in New York City) has been a supporter of the National Council of La Raza.
That group with Mexican-American origins has long been a target for criticism from bigots who want to distract attention from their own bigoted views.
LATER IN THE day, the loudmouth former member of Congress from Colorado, Tom Tancredo, did an interview with CNN where he characterized La Raza as, “the KKK without the hoods or nooses.”
We’re likely to start hearing a lot of rhetoric about the 1960s origins of La Raza, which originally did have members who touted the notion that the Southwestern United States and what is now northern Mexico were a nation of sorts populated by what we would now call Latinos.
They’re going to try to demonize anything connected to La Raza the same way they tried to dredge up the names “Bill Ayers” and “Weatherman” against Obama when he ran for president last year.
Let’s be honest. Many of the people most offended by Ayers last year will be the biggest trash-talkers this year when it comes to La Raza.
PEOPLE WITH COMMON sense saw that any Ayers connection to Obama wasn’t that significant, and that Ayers’ so-called controversial activities were in the past. If they show the same level of sense this year, they will see through this level of nonsense.
Because that is what it is. Tancredo, the man who when he was a member of Congress was often known for his nativist rants (such as walling Brownsville, Texas, off from the rest of the United States), is merely adding to his historic record of political trash talk. Obituary writers across the nation had to update their pre-written stories of his death to add his latest stupid line.
Because that is what such a comparison is. I have never heard of La Raza going out and killing white people in the southwest (although I have heard of groups of white people in the southwest terrorizing Latinos, although they never came up with such a dramatic symbol for themselves as the lit cross of the Klan).
In fact, much of the La Raza bashing seems to be based on the group’s name.
LA RAZA, IN English, is The Race.
It was a phrase that gained currency in those same ‘60’s circles among Latinos (the kind who called themselves Chicanos and grew bushy afros that their now bald heads reminisce fondly about) who were politically active.
It pushed the idea that people we now refer to as Latinos were not merely subgroups of other races or some sort of mutt mixture of a batch of races – we were “a race” of people in and of ourselves.
Latinos, just as much a full-fledged group as Anglos, African-Americans, Asians or anyone else. It was as much about expressing pride in oneself than anything else. It was definitely about rebuting the people who would spew rhetoric meant to make Latinos think less of themselves for not fitting into someone else’s warped ideal of what U.S. society should look like.
AS FOR THOSE people who try to portray white supremacist (white racist, white pride, or whatever silly label they try to use) groups as merely being the same in expressing pride in being Anglo, I’d argue that I have never heard of the National Council of La Raza pushing for laws meant to hold back non-Latinos.
If anything, the political measures that La Raza lobbies for are proposals that are meant to prevent other groups from approving laws to hold back Latinos.
And that, in many ways, is the bottom line. Sotomayor could become a vote on the Supreme Court against any political attempts to push measures meant to harm the interests of the fast-growing segment of the U.S. population.
If that is what their problem with Sotomayor truly is, then Tancredo’s absurd comments this week ought to be taken as the ultimate endorsement – to which the Senate ought to respond by confirming her appointment as quickly as possible.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: The people who today criticize the National Council of La Raza (http://www.nclr.org/section/about/history) are the spiritual descendants of those people who 45 years ago used to call Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a “communist.”
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