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There is a vigil and protest tonight in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, to mark the gang of seven white teenage boys murdered Marcello Lucero, because they wanted to go get a “a mexican.”  Marcello Lucero was, in fact, an immigrant from Ecuador.  Lucero, 37, was a gifted athlete who moved to America 16 years ago seeking a better life.

The seven racist white boys drove around searching for victims and found Lucero and another Ecuadorian man near the Long Island Railroad station. The white boys jumped out of the car and cornered the two men on the street, stabbing Lucero to death in a brutal attack.  The other man escaped and was able to idenfity the attackers.

The murder - lynching, even - of Lucero, follows months of racist, anti-immigration agitation by whites in Suffolk County.  The teens accused of the attack were all from Farmingville, the epicenter of anti-immigrant organizing on Long Island. Farmingville first gained national attention in 2000 when two young men abducted a pair of Mexican day laborers and beat them nearly to death.   Farmingville made headlines again a few years later when five high school students burned down the house of a Mexican family, who barely escaped with their lives.   That racists are unable to, or perhaps unwilling to, distinguish between someone who is Mexican and someone who is Ecuadoran, speaks to the vast well of ignorance that fuels white supremacy.  Yet, I wonder if it’s not time to revisit the acceptably white-liberal terms of “Latino” and “Hispanic” as they perhaps provide cover for better-educated versions of the same inability and unwillingness to distinguish between people of different cultural backgrounds (as the photo of this man’s t-shirt suggests).

The New York Times reports on this story today and does a decent job of describing some of the social context for this murder.  According to the Times,  the attack against Mr. Lucero, if not his murder, was foretold:

Some report being threatened and physically harassed in the streets, with bottles thrown at them and their car windows smashed during the night. Anti-immigrant epithets and racially motivated bullying are common in the hallways of the schools, children say. “They tell us to go get a green card, ‘Go back to your community!’ ” said Pamela Guncay, 14, an Ecuadorean-American born in the United States.

From my perspective, what’s most telling in the Times article are a couple of lines near the bottom, which read:

Since Mr. Lucero’s death, local officials have almost universally played down any suggestion that ethnic and racial tension had been prevalent in the community. Nonetheless, local, county and state officials have responded to the killing with various plans, including the introduction of sensitivity task forces, outreach programs in the Latino community and community forums.

This cognitive dissonance - and the actual distance -  between these two points of approaches to a racist murder suggest a great deal about where we are at this moment socially and culturally around racism.  In this instance, there is, in the present tense,  a racist murder committed by young white boys in the affluent, suburban, north-eastern U.S.  In response, “local officials” play down the idea that there is persistent racism in the community; one community leader even called it a “reminder” of the “saddest page in our history.”    At the same time, activists are pushing those same officials to respond to the racist murder in various ways.     This conflicted mix - of murderous, overt racism, along side denial of racism on the one hand, and pressure to act on the other hand - is characteristic of what we are faced with at this particular moment in the U.S. if we wish to address racism.

If you want to do something to get involved in the action in support of Lucero’s family and in solidarity against the racist murderers, organizers are asking that you do the following:

Please send this to everyone you know far and wide, including those in New York. Tell them you’re taking a stand with us. The second thing I ask is to visit our blog, www.longislandwins.com and leave messages of support for Marcello Lucero’s family and the people in New York who are coming to support them in this difficult time. Take pictures with signs of support. Show the Lucero family that there are loving and caring strangers in this world. Show Suffolk County politicians that the whole world is watching.

Racism, as it turns out, is not over.

The Denver Post’s Kim Mitchell did a brief but interesting story on a march by 800 people at the Democratic National Convention last week, one that got very little other media attention. These marchers were raising very important questions about the U.S. treatment of immigrants and the failure of the Obama campaign to raise the issue from an aggressively humanitarian and human rights perspective. Mitchell reports that their press statement said (h/t: Commondreams)

“This is Germany in the 1930s all over again! . . . The past seven years of the Bush regime have seen a dramatic escalation of attacks on immigrants on many fronts.”

Yet the marchers were also critical of the Barack Obama campaign:

“Obama has made no call to reverse this whole ugly program,” the statement says. “Stop the attacks on Immigrants! Stop the ICE raids! Stop the Criminal Bush Program!”

Interviews with protesters were revealing:

“We want to build bridges and not walls between our countries,” march organizer Rudy Gonzales said. “We want pathways to citizenship. We want to decriminalize immigration.” . . . Felipe Perez . . . said he is a first-generation citizen who lays tile for work, and that several members of his family were deported, including his aunt who was pregnant…. “We didn’t know what happened to her. Something has to be done to open our borders. I still have family members who come here to make a better life,” he said.

People came from around the country to protest U.S. immigration policies:

The Rev. Ron Stief, of Washington, D.C., helped organize . . . . “There is no issue more important than how we care for immigrants,” he said. “The way that families cannot be united is a problem as well as the way people have been criminalized and end up in jail.”

Even our more liberal political candidates do not seem to be able to do an honest assessment of immigration, for fear of losing voters. The humanitarian crisis here is huge and well-documented, yet nativism seems to still be lurking over every US politician’s shoulder. Does one still have to be nativistic to win state-wide or national political office these days, as has been the case for more than a century in this country?

Democracy Now reports on a story of anti-Mexican violence that is part of the growing violence we are seeing in this “liberty and justice” country against immigrants of color. This is likely one more predictable result of the increasingly xenophobic and racist verbal attacks on Latino immigrants we have seen over the last few years–much of it coming from extremist members of Congress and the media, as well as private vigilante-type groups.

The headline on the story runs as this:

“Friend of Mexican Immigrant Beaten to Death in Pennsylvania Gives Eyewitness Account of Attack”

And the account of the white attack on an immigrant is thus:

Luis Ramirez, a twenty-five-year-old Mexican immigrant, was beaten to death last week by a group of teenagers in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. He was walking home last Saturday night when six white high school students brutally beat him while yelling racial slurs. Despite eyewitness testimony, no charges have been filed. . . . Ramirez came to the United States six years ago. He was the father of two children.

A Mexican American friend of the man attacked was interviewed on the phone by Democracy Now and reported that this anti-Mexican attack stuff was not new:

But there are times when there are racial slurs. I mean, with my husband, I’ve been with him four years, and like, I’m telling you, there are many times that I’ve heard people scream racial slurs to him. You know, like I was pregnant with my son, and they told me, “What’s that in your belly? Another person I’m going to have to pay for? Another Mexican on welfare?” Like stuff like that. It’s disgusting.

Once again, we see the ways in which the old white racial frame negatively views Americans of color, and indeed accents negative images, emotions, and epithets for groups such as new Mexican immigrants. Right out of old anti-Mexican parts of that conventional racial frame, the racist slurs being yelled in these several cases become motivation for the violence.

Colorlines has a very good story by Caroline Kim and Jenna Loyd (“Is Riding the Bus a Ticket to Jail?”) on racial profiling of bus riders and others who travel and use public accommodations in the United States. The USA has become something close to a police state not only for black Americans, who have faced this problem for nearly 400 years, but now for everyone who does not look white. The story indicates that reports by the Detainment Task Force, a Northern New York group, has found that Border Patrol agents in upstate New York cities–Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo–now routinely engage in racial profiling by questioning only those

who appear to be Mexican, Central American, South Asian, Asian, Afro-Caribbean, or Middle Eastern. Border Patrol officials deny that the agency racially profiles….But common understandings of race in the U.S. fuse nationality and ethnicity so that some groups are permanently deemed to be “foreign.”

Yet, none of the people interviewed for their report noticed that blond-haired or blue-eyed white travelers were being stopped by the Border Patrol. The authors discuss next a legal U.S. resident:

The story of Tomas, who is from Guatemala, illustrates the ways in which law enforcement’s use of racial profiling—and the collaboration of local law enforcement with Border Patrol agents—impedes people’s ability to travel. In July 2007, Tomas and his friend Salvador were driving to a doctor’s appointment. As they pulled out of the toll plaza … in Syracuse, a state trooper stopped them. Tomas has a valid U.S. driver’s license and a properly registered vehicle. The state trooper gave no indication of why he had stopped the vehicle, but he did ask Tomas and Salvador about their immigration status and then called Border Patrol agents. “The police officer stopped us because we have Hispanic faces,” Tomas said.

DWH, “driving while Hispanic,” is a apparently crime in the United States. The article continues:

Last October he was traveling to Syracuse on Greyhound when Border Patrol agents boarded the bus at the Rochester bus station. “The Border Patrol agents questioned all the Hispanic, Middle Eastern and Asian passengers,” he recalled. “They did not question any of the white passengers except some women who were wearing veils. Border Patrol had dogs with them and checked the whole bus.”

If you are a person of color, traveling by bus now can be like traveling in the Germany of World War II, with uniformed police checking for identification papers just like Nazi German agents on trains and buses in the old Hollywood movies. I remember dozens of those movies well, when I was a kid. They were supposed to teach us how bad authoritarian regimes were.

And then, according to the Colorlines article, it happened again in another place:

A separate incident occurred in December when Tomas was at the Syracuse bus station with another friend. They were speaking to each other in Spanish as they approached the ticket counter where a Border Patrol agent was stationed. “As soon as the Border Patrol agent heard us speaking Spanish, he asked me for my papers,” he said.

The oldest European language in North America, Spanish, is now a signal to Border Patrol agents to do racial profiling, which some/many do with impunity.

Are such warrant-less searches and asking for identification illegal? They are if there is no probable cause to do so. A recent ACLU lawsuit reported by the National Immigration Law Center makes this clear:

The Rhode Island Affiliate of the ACLU has filed a federal lawsuit against the Rhode Island State Police, challenging the legality of the detention and transporting to immigration officials of 14 Guatemalan nationals who were stopped in a van on I-95 on July 11, 2006, after the driver changed lanes without using a turn signal. The lawsuit … argues that the actions by the state police violated the state’s Racial Profiling Prevention Act, as well as the driver’s and passengers’ constitutional rights to be free from discrimination and from unreasonable searches and seizures.

. . . the state trooper who stopped the van first confirmed that the driver’s registration and license were valid and that he had no criminal record. The trooper nevertheless opened the vehicle’s doors and, with the driver interpreting, asked all the passengers to also present their IDs. When some did not produce any, the trooper asked them if they had any documents demonstrating that they were U.S. citizens, and no one was able to produce any. Ultimately, the trooper advised the passengers that they all would be escorted to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Providence…. he instructed the driver that if any passenger attempted to escape from the van en route to Providence, the passenger would be shot. The suit argues that the defendants “knew or should have known that the search, seizure and detention of the Plaintiffs were without reasonable or probable cause and were therefore unlawful under the circumstances.”

Skin color and language are not adequate reasons for requesting identification or for search, seizure, and detention in a “free” country with a Bill of Rights. One can apparently be shot for holding too close to the Bill of Rights’ fourth amendment, which reads thus:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

European and US news outlets, including BBC News are  reporting that famous French film star, Brigitte Bardot (now 73, but a legend in the 1960s-1970s), has been fined yet again by a French court for violating laws against writing and speaking in ways that attack racial groups.  The BBC reports that she was fined for

inciting racial hatred. She was prosecuted over a letter published on her website that complained Muslims were “destroying our country by imposing their ways.” It is the fifth time Ms Bardot been convicted over her controversial remarks about Islam and its followers. The fine - equivalent to $23,000 - related to a letter she wrote in December 2006 to the then Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, which was published on her website, in which she deplored the slaughter of animals for the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.

As a prominent animal rights activist, she has also allied herself with those who vigorously oppose the Muslim immigrants to France:

She said she was “tired of being led by the nose by this population that is destroying us, destroying our country by imposing its acts.”

In 2004, again according to BBC News, she was fined substantially for what was terms a “race hate” book, her book A Cry in Silence:

The charges against Bardot, 69, related to her best-seller, A Cry In The Silence, in which she said she “opposed the Islamisation of France.” Last month the former actress apologised in court, and said: “I never knowingly wanted to hurt anybody.” In her book she wrote about issues such as racial mixing, immigration, the role of women in politics and Islam. The book also contained a section attacking what she called the mixing of genes and praised previous generations who, she said, had given their lives to push out invaders.

For her anti-immigrant and anti-gene-mixing writings, she angered French anti-racism groups, and they started legal proceedings against her. She lost and the court ruled that:

“Madame Bardot presents Muslims as barbaric and cruel invaders, responsible for terrorist acts and eager to dominate the French to the extent of wanting to exterminate them.” It awarded a symbolic one euro in damages to France’s anti-racism movement MRAP and to the League for Human Rights who brought the case to court. The court also ordered a 5,000 euro fine against the head of Bardot’s publishing house, Le Rocher, and ordered both to pay for advertisements in two newspapers announcing their convictions.

Reports note too that her husband is Bernard d’Ormal, who has been an adviser to the French racist-extremist group, the “Front National” party.

Anti-Muslim racist framing by this political party and by prominent whites like Bardot has spread rapidly across European countries and is also quite strong on the racist right in the United States, as a quick look at numerous arch-conservative US websites will reveal. With some types of racism being forced, at least to some modest degree, backstage among whites, it seems that those who wish to can more openly attack Muslims and Africans in Europe and Latin Americans in the US, especially the impoverished immigrants. In the United States Bardot could continue such racist commentaries with no fear of punishment, since we allow very harmful racist stuff perpetrated by those at the top of the racial hierarchy to hide behind extreme absolutist interpretations of the First Amendment in the United States. We have criticized this absolutist defense of racist speech by powerful whites here before, and Bardot’s case shows what some countries with more advanced human rights laws than our relatively backward country can do to at least reduce overt hate speech by those with power who are targeting those who are relatively powerless.

Friday, May 23, 2008 marks the 12th day of xenophobic attacks in the greater Johannesburg area in South Africa. As it stands, over 40 people are dead, hundreds, if not thousands, are injured, over 15,000 have been (photo credit) displaced from their homes, and at least 400 have been arrested (see the Mail and Guardian and The Sowetan newspapers for more). The victims are primarily Zimbabweans, Mozambicans and Malawians, although many of the assaults have involved native South Africans as well. Much of the targeting has been based on rumors about the citizenship of victims; the use of random identifiers such as accents or skin shade are frequently, and inaccurately employed (see here). To an outsider such as myself, it is unfathomable to see such obscene black-on-black violence in a country that has prided itself on a relatively peaceful government transition. South Africa to me represents hope. These attacks, however, have been in the making for years. Although the Apartheid government placed black Africans on the lowest rung of the populace and subjected them to tremendous violence and hardships, it also sent a very clear message that South African blacks were better than those from other countries. When the government transitioned, despite changes in immigration laws, police and immigration officials’ misconduct reified the prior government’s xenophobic sentiment . As the years have gone on, the press has also become a significant contributor to xenophobia. Past research suggests that media reports can have significant impact on subsequent activities as we are seeing here. A series of studies by the Southern African Migration Project reveals that the majority of newspaper articles which mention immigrants do so in a flagrantly negative way. Foreign nationals are frequently referred to, among other things, as “aliens”, “job-stealers”, and “criminals.” These public displays of xenophobia have served to reinforce anti-immigrant sentiments among those whose lives have seen little improvement over the years.


Although it is unclear at this point who specifically instigated these attacks in terms of organization and leadership, the source of strain, coupled with the type of outside support from police and news agencies referred to above, has led to a distinct profile of perpetrator: young males living in the poorest of poor situations within impoverished towns. There are several sociological theories and empirical studies that explain why this particular demographic is responsible such as competition theory and relative deprivation, but the level of organization involved here has led many, including myself, to suspect a third-party sponsor. These attacks are organized; the perpetrators are armed (frequently with guns), have distinct, although often incorrect targets and the spatial diffusion of this is unlike what we generally see in a riot. That is, outbreaks of violence and destruction are occurring in physically discrete areas, yet most of what we have seen in academic analyses suggest that the spread of this sort of collective action is generally contiguous.


At this point, the national government’s response has come far too late. Mbeki has finally ordered military reinforcement for the police who quite clearly, have little control over the situation. (photo: sea turtle) I only hope that these attacks are stamped out soon. As many here have pointed out, those responsible have turned their backs on the countries that hosted and aided South African exiles who furthered the anti-apartheid movement. What is left for social scientists such as myself to do, is unfurl the long-term and immediate stimuli of this violence. Although strain theories can help explain the long-term impetus, it cannot account for the timing or location of the attacks.


~ Maya Beasley, PhD
University of Connecticut

         The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Spring 2008 newsletter has numerous articles on the growing attacks on Latinos in the United States. The lead story is about how anti-immigrant nativism has fueled the growth in racist groups targeting Americans of color. They estimate that there are now about 844 U.S. “hate groups,” with an additional 300 anti-immigrant groups that are not part of that total. Of the latter they estimate that about half are “nativist extremist” groups.

          A second frontpage story in this newsletter is about a SPLC lawsuit against one Klan group (IKA) for violent attacks on a teenager that the white Klan attackers thought was an “illegal immigrant”: 

The Southern Poverty Law Center today filed suit against the nation’s second-largest Klan group and five Klansmen, saying two members were on a recruiting mission for the group in July 2006 when they savagely beat a teenage boy at a county fair in Kentucky. The lawsuit claims that as part of an official recruiting drive organized by the leadership of the Imperial Klans of America (IKA), several members went to the Meade County Fairgrounds in Brandenburg, Ky., to hand out business cards and flyers advertising a “white-only” IKA function. Unprovoked, two of the Klansmen at the fair began harassing a 16-year-old boy of Panamanian descent, calling him a “spic,” according to the lawsuit. The boy, who stands 5-foot-3 and weighs just 150 pounds, was beaten to the ground and kicked by the Klansmen, one of whom is 6-foot-5 and 300 pounds. The beating left the boy with two cracked ribs, a broken left forearm, multiple cuts and bruises and jaw injuries requiring extensive dental repair. 

(The teenager is a US citizen.) These frontpage stories clearly show that anti-Latino oppression is very serious today, as it has been now for more than a century, and is finally getting some attention in the United States, although much of it still remains off the radar for the traditional news media and congressional policymakers.

        Latino demographic growth and voters do seem to be of more interest to those traditional media these days, but these media often pick up on nativist and white supremacist lines of argument about undocumented immigrants to the United States and about other Latino issues. There is also growing social science research on Latinos that these media almost always neglect to examine.

(Note too: This spring 2008 issue of the SPLC newsletter also deals with abused Asian-Indian workers brought to New Orleans for clean-up work and on continuing efforts to deal with brutal prison conditions for African Americans and others in Mississippi. It is a good source of information on racial matters these days.)�

Xicanopwr.com has a nice summary of the flap over an Absolut Vodka ad (image from here), one made by a major European company. The ad:

shows a historical map of the Mexico before Texas’ Independence and the Mexico-US War of 1846-48 had occurred. The offending map showed when the American Southwest - Texas, California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and part of Wyoming - as we know it, belonged to Mexico. It was not until the signing of “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo” that not only ended the war, but also defined our present-day borders. The ad was created by TBWA’s Mexican advertising firm Teran/TBWA. A year ago, Absolut vodka’s embarked in a new campaign strategy, breaking away from the old bottle series. The new Absolut World campaign invites the consumers to imagine their idea of a perfect world; a world that possibly wouldn’t take place but only “in an Absolut World.” The ad was solely geared toward the Mexican market.

This ad has stirred up a hornet’s nest on the anti-immigration sites and among nativist groups, as xicanopwr continues:

This all began when conservative columnist Michelle Malkin decided to use the ad to whip up anti-Mexican sentiment by dubbing the ad “Absolut Reconquista.” Soon after, the US media outlets noticed the ad. The outrage by the nativist over this ad has caused inspired an anti-immigrantion, FIRE Coalition, to start anti-Absolut website called AbsolutlyNot.com. The group also created a new web ad depicting an “Absolut World” as today’s borders with a giant fence between the US and Mexico. The nativist group is also asking people to boycott Absolut Vodka and is demanded that person who approved an ad be fired.

There is considerable anti-immigrant nativism here, as well as an ignorance about US history and how our imperialistic map got that way. The fact that most (especially white) Americans do not know, or prefer to forget, their brutal and imperialistic history in regard to Mexico makes it easier to rationalize these nativist attacks on an ad with an accurate map of what was once northern Mexico.


In April 1846 President James Polk, seeking to gain “all Mexico” (as he and other U.S. imperialists said), sent U.S. troops into an area (“Texas”) recently taken by force from Mexico, and then on into an area of the borderlands he knew Mexicans had long treated as sovereign territory. Polk intentionally provoked a border clash between U.S. and Mexican troops, an incident that enabled him to claim, falsely, that Mexico had started a war. Later historians have linked this trumped-up war to the imperialist and racist notion that the U.S. had a right to move into Mexican territory as part of its “manifest destiny” to rule over “lesser” peoples.


This imperialist notion rationalized the desire of many European American invaders for unjust enrichment in the form of land. Indeed, the border area where the first skirmish took place soon became the home for very large Anglo cattle ranches. In 1845 jingoistic journalist John O’Sullivan coined the “manifest destiny” phrase, when he wrote in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review that:

“Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

Together with many other European Americans, O’Sullivan argued that the U.S. government had a mandate to take the U.S. way of life to “backward” peoples such as Mexicans and Native Americans.


However, ironically, during and after the Mexican-American war some white southerners were concerned that too many of these mixed-race people might be brought into the United States. During congressional debates over annexing Mexican territory, prominent Senator John C. Calhoun argued that the U.S. had never:

“incorporated into the Union any but the Caucasian race. . . . Ours is a government of the white man. . . . in the whole history of man . . . there is no instance whatever of any civilized colored race, of any shade, being found equal to the establishment and maintenance of free government.”

In his view, as well as well as that of other whites, the “colored and mixed-breed” Mexicans were unacceptable in the “free” United States. Thus, the first Mexican residents of the United States did not immigrate, but were brought into the new nation by violent conquest during the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. With the end of the Mexican-American war came the incorporation of more than a hundred thousand Mexicans. They were forcibly absorbed into the expanding U.S. empire, which now encompassed a large portion of what was northern Mexico. White politicians and economic entrepreneurs sought to dominate the entire continent. In this they were very successful. Indeed, it is the European Americans who today are “aliens”–the descendants of invading “aliens” who took over northern Mexico by force. (For references on much of this history, see, among numerous places, here.)

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is one of Arizona’s wonders, right up there with the Grand Canyon. A Google search on Arpaio returns 329,000 hits, including articles in Madrid’s El Mundo, the London Times and the Johannesburg Star.   Arpaio owes his notoriety to a series of shenanigans he has committed in his capacity as Sheriff.   Two of his better known feats involved resurrecting the chain gang (going so far as to boast of having the only female chain gang in history), housing inmates in tents, and forcing them to wear pink underwear.   And, more than two-thirds of those in the Maricopa county jail are pre-trial detainees, so are not convicted of any crime and presumably innocent; but, that is not the way Arpaio treats the inmates in his custody.


Arpaio has found a new cause célèbre that will score high with many voters: the so-called “illegal” problem.   The latest episode of “illegal” persecution is taking place just outside Pruitt’s furniture store in Phoenix, even as I write this.   Latin American day workers congregate in some parts of town looking for work. After the Phoenix police moved them out of a Home Depot, they dispersed to areas in close proximity, including the area near Pruitt’s. Pruitt’s owner hired off-duty Phoenix Police officers to “protect” customers from day laborers. When Phoenix authorities put an end to this, Arpaio jumped into the fray with alacrity. He had 160 officers deputized as federal immigration agents.
A New York Times reporter who witnessed Arpaio’s deputies in action wrote:

“They’ll pull a car over for a traffic infraction, then check everyone’s papers. They say they act on reasonable suspicion only — if they see a shirt or shoes like those worn south of the border or hear Spanish. They say it isn’t profiling.”

While Arpaio, who loves the limelight, is basking in the attention he is receiving, Latin Americans are suffering the consequences of his sham. Members of a Latino congregation in a nearby Lutheran Church no longer drive to services, they walk. They fear Sheriff Joe, their pastor said.


Arpaio’s parents were immigrants from Naples. There was a time when Italians were not considered white in the United States. They worked in unsanitary and dangerous places that killed them disproportionately. Some were lynched in Florida and Louisiana. Their pain and suffering was deplorable. The Italian immigrants were human beings who deserved better, as do the Mexican day laborers in Maricopa County.  A piece of paper has no bearing on it.

~ José A. Cobas
Program in Sociology
School of Social and Family Dynamics
Arizona State University

In the past couple of days there have been a couple of interesting, and strikingly disparate, instances of journalists addressing the issue of racism in the news.

First, there’s the story about Andy Rooney’s dislike of baseball, which apparently, he attributes to Latinos playing the game. According to this report (and lots of others), Rooney said, “I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me….They’re apparently very good but they haven’t caught my interest.” Very nice. And, not exactly an apology, but Rooney later acknowledged, “Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have said it. It’s a name that seems common in baseball now. I certainly didn’t think of it in any derogatory sense.”

Then, in contrast to Rooney’s racism, there is Bernard Shaw of CNN, who notes the kinds of struggles to combat racism that journalists face, in an interview with Television Week:

TELEVISION WEEK question: “What is the state of diversity in the newsroom today?”

BERNARD SHAW: “Proponents of diversity should never be pleased with the level of staffing, be it African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans … proponents should never be pleased. There is an ingrained resistance in the minds of people who control to people who are different. That is natural because of the way this country evolved historically.

“The battle is never won. We taught our children, our son and daughter, that the battle is never won. Each generation fights the same battle, only it becomes more subtle, more sophisticated, but it’s still a war. The battle is to help this great nation achieve the promise, that’s all.

“Look at the immigration battle right now. We have about 13 million people who have been living in this country for years, raising their children, educating them, and there’s actually an argument about whether they should be here. They are here, and they are a vital part of the American fabric.

“The battle is never won. There are some people who still believe that people of color are not needed in this country. And yet people of color have been the essence of this country since its beginning. So there’s a great education requirement, and all of us are educators and we’re going to make this country work.”

Bernie Shaw gets it right when he says that the battle is never won in the news room or in the streets, and Andy Rooney seems to make his point even more relevant.