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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.

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.

The June 26, 2008 issue of the Integration Report (useful website here) has a disturbing, but predicable story on what is going on in Seattle public schools since our right-wing Supreme Court (in effect, an undemocratic legislature with no oversight) handed down its June 2007 Seattle/Louisville Supreme Court decision that makes it very difficult to use racial characteristics in student assignment plans aimed at reducing school segregation:

Today Seattle schools boast a diverse and multiracial student population. Black and Asian American students make up 22% of public school enrollment. The fastest growing group – Latino students – comprises 12% of the student population.12 However, nearly one-third of Seattle’s schools are considered racially imbalanced, with student populations that disproportionately reflect the district-wide racial/ethnic enrollment. Twenty schools are comprised of student populations that are over 90% nonwhite.

The reason is past and present racial discrimination:

These patterns reflect housing segregation fostered by restrictive covenants and discriminatory lending practices. The boundary lines of the Seattle school district yield a long, narrow geographic space dotted by several lakes and bordering a bay on the western side. Many of the predominately white schools are located in the northern and western portions of the district, while schools with majority nonwhite populations are clustered in eastern and downtown areas.

The price we pay for our still-apartheid, racialized society is great, and includes major racial isolation, as  social science data clearly indicate. I pointed to some of this research in a recent article (”Legacies of Brown: Success and Failure in Social Science Research on Racism,” in Commemorating Brown, edited by Glenn Adams et. al., American Psychological Association 2008):

Desegregated schools with large numbers of white children are more likely to have adequate media centers, computers, and other technology, as well as newer buildings, more classes for advanced students, and more teachers with substantial experience (Mickelson, 2003). When schools are desegregated, white officials typically spend more money on schools; when they resegregate, the opposite usually happens. In addition, children of color educated in desegregated settings generally have much better entrée into job and other important information networks (Orfield & Eaton, 1996). Black young people educated in desegregated public schools are more likely than similar students from segregated schools to attend desegregated colleges, work in desegregated employment settings, and acquire friends from other racial groups (Braddock & Eitle, n.d.).

The savvy Integration Report closes with this sad overview:

Seattle’s lack of policy response to resegregation trends in the district over the course of the past year is perhaps reflective of community ambivalence towards school integration. Busing ended in Seattle over 15 years ago, and school district leadership has failed to take a strong stand against resegregation patterns in the intervening time…. As we approach the one year anniversary of the Seattle/Louisville decision, the resegregation occurring in Seattle underscores the challenge of creating or maintaining integrated schools against the backdrop of residential segregation and judicially imposed limitations on attempts to combat school segregation.

Administrators and Supreme Court Justices now routinely, with little public questioning, operate out of the old white racial frame — and usually act to protect white group interests. Clearly, we need to do some major reform of our very undemocratic Supreme Court, the only one of its kind in the Western world. It now has several reactionary lawyers dictating both moral and political policies on racial remedy matters. In addition, a massive new civil rights movement in this country, one committed to real desegregation, is the only way out of this dilemma, in my opinion.

The UCLA Chicano Network has a nice summary of the holiday Cinco de Mayo, which is celebrated in Mexican American communities (one such celebration in California last year, pictured right, photo credit) and not yet much outside those communities:

Cinco de Mayo is a date of great importance for the Mexican and Chicano communities. It marks the victory of the Mexican Army over the French at the Battle of Puebla. Although the Mexican army was eventually defeated, the “Batalla de Puebla” came to represent a symbol of Mexican unity and patriotism. . . . Cinco de Mayo’s history has its roots in the French Occupation of Mexico. The French occupation took shape in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. With this war, Mexico entered a period of national crisis during the 1850’s. Years of not only fighting the Americans but also a Civil War, had left Mexico devastated and bankrupt. On July 17, 1861, President Benito Juarez issued a moratorium in which all foreign debt payments would be suspended for a brief period of two years, with the promise that after this period, payments would resume.


The English, Spanish and French refused to allow president Juarez to do this, and instead decided to invade Mexico and get payments by whatever means necessary. The Spanish and English eventually withdrew, but the French refused to leave. Their intention was to create an Empire in Mexico under Napoleon III. Some have argued that the true French occupation was a response to growing American power and to the Monroe Doctrine (America for the Americans). Napoleon III believed that if the United States was allowed to prosper indiscriminately, it would eventually become a power in and of itself.


In 1862, the French army began its advance. Under General Ignacio Zaragoza, 5,000 ill-equipped Mestizo and Zapotec Indians defeated the French army in what came to be known as the “Batalla de Puebla” on the fifth of May.

Clearly, it was a substantially indigenous army that defeated the mighty Europeans, an early and clear counter-colonialism event. This is an event that all who support self-determination for indigenous peoples and full human rights for all peoples should remember and honor.


The UCLA network account also makes some interesting observations about how this day is differentially celebrated in Mexico and the United States:

In the United States, the “Batalla de Puebla” came to be known as simply “5 de Mayo” and unfortunately, many people wrongly equate it with Mexican Independence which was on September 16, 1810, nearly a fifty year difference. Over, the years Cinco de Mayo has become very commercialized and many people see this holiday as a time for fun and dance. Oddly enough, Cinco de Mayo has become more of Chicano holiday than a Mexican one. Cinco de Mayo is celebrated on a much larger scale here in the United States than it is in Mexico. People of Mexican descent in the United States celebrate this significant day by having parades, mariachi music, folklorico dancing and other types of festive activities.

In my view, this is a good holiday for all those Americans who are opposed to colonialism and imperial invasions to celebrate.

The following article is embedded with many issues (i.e., No Child Left Behind, institutional racism, racial backlashing, and etc.) that are important and ….. Continue Reading »

I have recently been reading an important new book, Manifest Destinies, (New York University Press, 2007) by University of New Mexico law professor, Laura E. Gómez , who shows that in the early period after the U.S. conquest of northern Mexico, from about the late 1840s to the 1880s or so, the New Mexico territory had political control substantially shared by the Anglo intruders and established Mexican elite. Because they wanted statehood, which was delayed for decades because the territory was not predominantly white, the local Anglo elite developed a “progressive” racist view that saw the Mexican elite as somewhat inferior to Anglo Americans but still as European and “Spanish” (when in fact they were mixed-race, and substantially Indian in ancestry) and thus as “white enough” to be citizens and to play a political role. (Whites outside the territory, including in Congress, still saw the Mexican elite as not white and as fully inferior in the usual white racist framing of Americans of color .)


Serving in the territorial legislature, the Mexican elites thus came to play an interstitial, coordinating-political, and thus oppressive role between the Anglo whites and the very oppressed Indian populations (and, later, enslaved and free African Americans brought by new Anglo colonists). The Mexican elite defined themselves as white rights-holders and tried to accent their whiteness to relate to the more powerful Anglo whites, even to the point of shifting from an antislavery view to a proslavery view after the U.S. invasion of the area. (Some in the Mexican elite also held Indian slaves.)


Her analysis shows the important impacts (then, as now) of the dominant white racist frame coming in from outside what was once northern Mexico. It may also help in understanding the fluctuating accents on whiteness and non-whiteness in some parts of the Mexican American population since that time, especially in the middle and upper classes, to the present day. Gómez concludes her book by assessing this contemporary relevance:

“At least a small slice of that relevance concerns the twenty-first-century legacy of Mexican Americans’ history as off-white—sometimes defined as legally white, almost always defined as socially non-white.” (p. 149)

And, to that I would add, defined as socially non-white by whites who held the social power to create and enforce such definitions. Gómez has given us an important new insight into the white racist frame.