SOMETHING MUST CHANGE. When US citizens already suffering from a terrible loss are attacked by other citizens en masse, and for nothing more than having Spanish names, it makes me feel like the past has reared up; days of Civil Rights era struggle, days of anti-Greaser hate, days of Los Vatos Locos and the dangerous fabled Pachuco. La Lucha Sigue.
WE TALK HERE OFTEN about the climate of hate against Latin@s fomented by a confluence of factors from the detention industry to right wing radio to pandering (or racist politicians) to the efforts of hate groups like VDARE and FAIR….
A CLASS ACT, these anti-immigrant Minuteman types. Whether it’s being thieves and deceiving those they raise money from, or kicking down doors and shooting little girls and their families, Minutemen brigades are hard at work defending their diseased sense of reality from the world.
THIS IS TOO OFTEN, AN UNIMAGINATIVE AND CRUEL WORLD. Not that world which creation brings forth on her own (though we know not all things Natural are kind), but that which we fashion with the often half-benumbed hands of US culture.
NO GROUP OF PEOPLE IS “ALL BAD,” por supuesto! But some groups feel the need to defend themselves from the charge. And some would never dream of explaining a damn thing to anyone.
THE WIRES ARE ABLAZE with a coincidence of timing in President Obama’s appointing a “border czar” and the discovery of massive weaponry in the hands of a Mexicana who was photographed by AP cameras looking extremely well-stocked and defiant.
WE CAN NO LONGER IGNORE the war crimes that trail our national steps like a raging family of ghosts. Either we refute and condemn these horrific deeds through actions that bring justice, or we are become them.
IT MUST BE FRUSTRATING FOR ICE when they are reminded that there are laws that protect the vulnerable. After all, moving about under the radar of mainstream concern, it must be easy for them to feel unbound, unchecked, all-powerful, and unstoppable. But perhaps we see signs now that the honeybucket period is ending.
IN THIS DAY we can claim that electing a black man as POTUS means we are enlightened. At the same time, cartoonists and political commentators act as if their thinking process exists back in the 1950s or some place they can speak and write with impunity without considering racial context, oppression, or histories of violence. This inconsistency exists in the service of reinforcing and continuing racism.
THE WORLD IS ALIGHT (and Twitter, too) with talk of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama, and it has all caught me a bit off rhythm. Not that I don’t think it’s fantastic and exciting, of course it is. History is clearly being etched across our slate, and it’s amazing. Yet—
FOR EPISODE THREE of the XOLAGRAFIK Diaries (my new vlog series) I am putting out a call for your webcam/video (or audio) submissions/additions/contributions.
HOWARD ZINN: With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question anymore of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once-fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed, embrace of the idea…
A HATE CRIME is made possible by many actors, not just one ugly mind and hand. You have the actual perpetrator of the act, the immediate culture that encourages and approves of this behavior, the legislation that provides a moral/legal underpinning for certain views, and those who craft the legislation. All will soon be held accountable.
THE OTHERING that is responsible for the violence leveled on Latinos and Asians and Muslims and African Americans and Gays and Women and Transgendered people by those who do not understand and who do not wish to understand themselves or others is the same in a few very important ways.
ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS: I understand why looking at that family and imagining them in the White House makes us imagine we might finally be at home. But I have to resist that feeling. If I pretend that home is something that the state can give me in the form of a good-looking “first family” without stopping its economic, invasive, nativist violence, then I deny us all the home in the making that I believe in today and every day.
House of Nezua
the XOLAGRAFIK theater!
