“More Than A Mere Label”: A Victory Against The Language Of Bigotry
As one of the world’s largest news outlets, the Associated Press’s linguistic mandates significantly shape the broader vernacular. So when the organization this week decided to stop using the term “illegal immigrant,” it was a big victory for objectivity and against the propagandistic language of bigotry.
Cautious AP executives did not frame it exactly that way. Instead, editor Kathleen Carroll portrayed the decision as one in defense of grammar, saying that the term “illegal” properly “describe(s) only an action” and that it is not an appropriate label to describe a human being.
“Illegal,” of course, has been used as more than a mere label — it has for years been used as an outright epithet by xenophobes. They abhor the notion of America becoming more diverse — and specifically, more non-white — and so they have tried to convert “illegal” into a word that specifically dehumanizes Latinos. Thus, as any honest person can admit, when Republican politicians and media blowhards decry “illegals,” they are pretending to be for a race-blind enforcement of immigration laws, but they are really signaling their hatred of Latino culture.
How can we be so sure that dog-whistle bigotry is the intent? It’s simple, really. Just listen to who is — and who is not — being called an “illegal.”
Almost nobody is uses the term to attack white immigrants from Europe or Canada who overstay their visas. Nobody uses the term to describe white people who break all sorts of criminal laws. Indeed, nobody called Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter an “illegal” upon revelations about his connection to a prostitution service, nor did anyone call Bernie Madoff an “illegal” for his Ponzi schemes.
Instead, the word is exclusively used to denigrate Latinos who entered the country without authorization. Coincidence? Hardly — especially because the term “illegal” is used to describe Latinos whose immigration status is not even a criminal matter.
Yes, as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie noted back in 2008, though “the whole phrase of ‘illegal immigrant’ connotes that the person, by just being here, is committing a crime,” in fact “being in this country without proper documentation is not a crime.”
If Christie runs for president in 2016, he will likely get flak for that comment from anti-immigrant Republicans. But he was 100 percent correct.
“‘Illegal presence’ as the offense is called, is not a violation of the U.S. criminal code,” notes the Newark Star-Ledger, adding that while it is “a violation of civil immigration laws (and) the federal government can impose civil penalties” a person “cannot be sent to prison for being here without authorization from immigration authorities.”
Recognizing these facts is not to condone unauthorized entry into the United States. But it is to note a telling discrepancy: Latinos with non-criminal immigration status are called “illegals” but white people committing decidedly criminal acts are not called the same. Worse, the term is used so often and in such blanket fashion against Latinos that it ends up implying a description of all people of Hispanic heritage, regardless of their immigration status.
What’s amazing is that Republican media voices, which so often invoke such incendiary language, simultaneously wonder why the Republican Party is failing to win the votes of people of color and consequently losing so many elections. Somehow, the GOP doesn’t understand what the Associated Press realized: Organizations — whether political parties, media outlets or businesses – can no longer expect to insult and slander people of color and still have a viable audience.
Those that do not realize that truth will inevitably find themselves as lonely and as marginalized as today’s GOP.
By: David Sirota, Creators.com, April 5, 2013
“The GOP’s Diversity Deserts”: A Party Chronically Hostile To “Otherness”
Well, that didn’t take long.
Just a week ago, the Republicans issued their much-ballyhooed “autopsy” on why they lost the presidential election last year and how they might remedy their problems.
They concluded that their principles were fine; the problem was how they presented those principles. Their witless wisdom is simply to tone down their rhetoric. They want to turn Teddy Roosevelt’s famous saying on its side: Talk softly but carry a big stigma.
The establishment Republicans’ push for a softer tone, however, is pure political scheming and has nothing to do with what most Republicans seem to fundamentally believe.
And many rank-and-file Republicans are adopting this two-faced tactic. A Pew Research Center report issued Thursday found that although most Republicans say that “illegal immigrants” should be allowed to stay in this country legally, most also believe that immigrants are a burden because they take jobs and health care, and they threaten American values.
Try as you may, you can’t build a philosophical facade like a movie set — convincing in appearance, but having no real structure behind it — and expect it to forever fool and never fall.
The true convictions of your heart will, eventually, be betrayed by the disobedience of your tongue.
Enter Don Young of Alaska, a Republican congressman for the past 40 years who this week used a racial slur so vile and insensitive that it was hard to remember what decade we were in.
In an interview Thursday with an Alaska radio station, Young reminisced about his family’s employment of Mexican farm workers:
“My father had a ranch. We used to hire 50 to 60 wetbacks to pick tomatoes. You know, it takes two people to pick the same tomatoes now. It’s all done by machine.”
The casual reference dripped with an inculcated insensitivity.
The same day, Young’s office issued a statement, which should in no way be misconstrued as an apology.
“During a sit-down interview with Ketchikan Public Radio this week, I used a term that was commonly used during my days growing up on a farm in Central California,” Young said in the statement. “I know that this term is not used in the same way nowadays and I meant no disrespect.”
No disrespect? Only a man drained of empathy could even make such a claim.
It wasn’t until Friday, after demands from Republican leaders like John Boehner and John McCain, that Young issued a real apology. But the damage may have already been done. These kinds of statements cement an image of a callous party moving contrary to public consciousness.
The question must be asked: Why do so many insensitive comments come from these Republicans?
One reason may well be their proximity problem.
Too many House Republican districts are isolated in naturally homogeneous areas or gerrymandered ghettos, so elected officials there rarely hear — or see — the great and growing diversity of this country and the infusion of energy and ideas and art with which it enriches us. These districts produce representatives unaccountable to the confluence. And this will likely be the case for the next decade.
For instance, according to the Census Bureau, about 6 percent of Alaska’s population is Hispanic and just 3 percent is black. And Alaska is among the most Republican states in the union, according to a Gallup report issued last year.
Too many House Republicans have districts dominated by narrow, single-note, ideology-driven constituencies that see an ever expanding “them” threatening the heritage of a slowly shrinking “us.”
This defensive posture is what so poisons the Republicans’ presidential ambitions. Instead of embracing change, Republicans want to suspend or in some cases reverse it. But the principle articulated by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus rings true: the only thing constant is change.
With the exception of a few districts, a map of the areas in this country with the fewest minorities looks strikingly similar to a map of the areas from which Congressional Republicans hail.
In fact, although this is the most diverse Congress in history, not one of the blacks or Asians in the House is a Republican. Only about a sixth of the Hispanics are Republicans, and fewer than a third of the women are.
The Republican Party has a severe minority problem. People like Don Young only serve to illustrate and amplify it. Young is another unfortunate poster child for a party fighting an image of being chronically hostile to “otherness.” No disrespect.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 29, 2013
“At Stake, The Core Of The GOP”: How Conservatives Might Hurt Republicans On Immigration
Us. Them.
There is quite a lot of posturing about who will introduce what part of comprehensive immigration reform (CIR), 2013-style. It seems an article of faith that Republicans will take the lead on several initiatives, because they know that a bill associated with President Obama will be too much for them to sell to their base, and because party leaders genuinely want to take the issue off the front burner.
But how is this supposed to work?
GOP strategists and the establishment certainly understand that the party has a problem with Hispanics. And yes, the inability of Congress to pass immigration reform has contributed to the idea that Republicans don’t want it.
But the real thing that’s turned off Hispanics has nothing to do with legislation or even enforcement. (If enforcement was correlated with political adulation, President Obama would be in trouble with Latinos. He is not.)
What mattered is what the party stood for at its core: What it expects of others and what it expects of everyone else. And the core of the Republican Party today does not believe that the immigration reform approach now championed by its own leaders is right for the country or fair to Americans who already live here.
And for Republicans who are looking to shake up the party, immigration remains a fabulous issue. Fabulous. A conservative revolt is inevitable, I think. The talk show vocalists of the base just hate the idea that de-facto amnesty will depend upon President Obama’s enforcement initiatives. They hate the fact that the GOP leadership has bought into the (Democratic/media) idea that undocumented Latinos need and want government subsidies and sanction for their crime. They don’t believe that Hispanics will shift toward the GOP anyway, unless the GOP truly focuses on the things that conservatives like to essentialize about Hispanics: They’re family-oriented, religious, entrepreneurial.
But they recognize that Marco Rubio is the best voice the party has right now, and it’s still January of 2013.
Give it time.
Is it fair to magnetize U.S. borders and give businesses a cheap supply of new labor at the expense of Americans who are looking for jobs? Will the tax base really broaden because most new immigrants won’t make enough money to pay federal income taxes?
The moment conservatives make immigration into a 2014 election issue, insisting that their candidates either disavow what they voted on in 2013 or promise to repeal it is the moment that the party’s attempt to make amends with Hispanics gets put on hold.
An enterprising 2016 presidential candidate (Sen. Ted Cruz? Sarah Palin?) could step in to represent this part of the party.
Truth be told, I don’t know how Republicans solve their “Latino” problem anytime soon. It is manifold and multi-causal. But the coming “us versus them” backlash will not be helpful.
By: Marc Ambinder, The Week, January 30, 2013
“Can You Say “Whig’s”: The Only Thing For Republicans To Fear Is Never Getting Elected Again
Ah, bipartisanship. Can you smell it? Well it’s in the air again, as a group of eight senators (for the love of god, can we not call them a “gang”?), four Democrats and four Republicans, unveiled a proposal for immigration reform. It includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants (an even faster one for seasonal agricultural workers, because what, do you expect native-born Americans to spend 10 hours a day bending over in the hot sun?), measures to improve the legal immigration system, and efforts to attract skilled immigrants. The proposal also stipulates that the path to citizenship would only happen after the implementation of stricter border enforcement, but one of the great unacknowledged developments of recent years is that border enforcement is far more vigorous than it used to be. We’ve got more Border Patrol agents making more arrests, and Barack Obama has deported people much faster than George W. Bush did (there were more than 400,000 deportations in 2012, a new record).
Immigration reform is looking rather likely to pass through Congress, and there’s one reason: fear. Republicans are terrified that unless they do something to reverse their abysmal performance among Latino voters in the last election, they could go the way of the Whigs. So even though most of them don’t really want to do it, enough of them could grit their teeth and vote yes on a comprehensive immigration reform package.
And that’s how bipartisanship happens: not when everyone realizes that they love their country more than they love their party, or when the cries of the public for comity in Congress become too loud, or even when a problem gets too big (as it happens, after years of steady increases, the number of undocumented immigrants has been stagnant since the Great Recession hit, mostly because there were fewer available jobs drawing immigrants here). Bipartisanship happens when preferences and raw political interest align to give both parties something they want or think they need. The Democrats have long wanted comprehensive immigration reform, and the Republicans now see it in their interest.
By: Paul Waldman and Jamie Fuller, The American Prospect, January 28, 2013
“Dishonest Introspection”: Mitt Romney’s Sneering Farewell To The “47 Percent”
Trying to explain away his decisive, sweeping, and very expensive rout to his disappointed supporters—those one-percent Republicans—Mitt Romney offered a new version of the discredited “47 percent” argument that was so ruinous in its original form. In a Wednesday afternoon conference call, the defeated Republican nominee told donors and fundraisers that President Obama had won by lavishing generous “gifts” upon certain groups, including young voters, African-Americans, and Latinos.
“With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift,” said Romney, after apologizing for losing what he called a “very close” election that he lost by more than 100 electoral votes and no less than three percent of the popular vote (as indicated in “The Ass-Whuppin’ Cometh” by James Carville and Stan Greenberg).
“Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008… Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group.”
It’s amusing that at this late date, the Republican who distanced himself from health care reform — and constantly vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act even though he knew that would be bad policy — claims that Obamacare helped Obama to win.
Now, before dispensing with Romney for good — as most Americans (including many Republicans) are understandably eager to do — it is worth noting that these churlish excuses to his donors represent the ultimate falsification, not only of his campaign, but of his own character.
Recall how he disowned the “47 percent” remarks when he realized how damaging they were to his chances for victory, telling Sean Hannity on Fox News that what he had been caught saying at a $50,000-a-plate Boca Raton fundraising event was “just completely wrong.” That mea culpa was factually accurate, of course – as we have discovered again lately with the news that so many food stamp recipients reliably vote Republican.
But as a matter of feelings rather than facts, Romney evidently cannot stop himself from sneering at society’s struggling people and the politicians who seek to improve their lives. It is not as if the donors he was addressing don’t want “gifts” from government – such as the big new tax breaks that Romney had promised them, the huge increases in defense spending that would swell their profits, or the various individual corporate favors that they regard as their very own “entitlements.” Just don’t expect that kind of honest introspection from Romney or his crowd.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, November 15, 2012
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