No Hablo Odio y Migracion (I Don’t Speak Hate and Migration): Romney, Giuliani Release Spanish Language TV Ads

As they prepare for what will surely be a highly contested primary in Florida, some Republican GOP candidates have produced and released Spanish language TV ads that should raise more than a few eyebrows and questions.

For example, how is it that the Mitt Romney whose English language ads are chock-full of immigration agents and tough talk against “illegal aliens” in this ad:

is the same Mitt Romney who approved this ad featuring his Spanish-speaking lauding his father as someone who shares the values held by Latinos:

Watching both ads makes one want to bilingually barf because the high dosage of hypocrisy contained in the ads far surpasses the tolerance levels suggested by the Surgeon General’s office.

And, for those of you adventurous types - the ones who like to flirt with deadly levels of toxicity and other dangers-, check out this Florida ad (think Cubano vote) by Rudolfo Giuliani, who invokes none other than the ever-cheery Gipper, Ronald Reagan, the genial President recently lauded by Barack Obama and who is responsible for more death, destruction and suffering in Latin America than any U.S. president in recent memory,

Missing from any of these bizarre commercials is any understanding that most Latinos watch television in both English and Spanish. This means that, unless the GOP-influencing, racist hate groups like FAIR are right about how Latinos are genetically predisposed to crime, illiteracy and parisitism, then these same Latino voters will likely see and hear the different messages coming out of the English and Spanish language sides of the candidate’s mouths.

Soy Roberto Lovato y yo apruebo este anuncio: Coman mucha mierda hipocritas, racistas hijos de su p……… (ad infinitum)

King Anniversary: Celebrating the “Failure” of Non-Violence?

Whether you end up agreeing with or absolutely loathing it, this piece from the UK Guardian will provide a provocative and quite different perspective on the MLK legacy we’ll all be meditating on this weekend.

Written by Jonathan Farley, a math professor who loves the work of anti-colonial revolutionary, Franz Fanon (as do I), the article (below), “I Have a Nightmare”, argues that the “aims and the character of the civil rights movement were flawed” and that the non-violent approach advocated by King and others may not have been what was best for accomplishing real change.

I’m putting this out there, not necessarily because I agree with it, but because it echoes an important part of the political milieu King inhabited; It says things that King surely had to contend with. More left-leaning veteran 60’s activist friends of mine have a somewhat similar take on the King movement, one we’re not so much as even supposed to say in polite company these days .

These friends argue that, were it not for the more militant forces of the black community in the 60’s, the non-violent civil rights movement might not have been as successful in gaining elite acceptance. Or, if you prefer, getting to where, in the words of the “first Black First Lady”, “Dr King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.” Whatever.

Say what you will about the article, it does say things that we’re not even given the option to even hear, much less discuss, which is why I wrote this piece.

While never stating outright that he supports armed struggle as one of several options for social change here in the U.S. (as did the Panthers and other groups in the 60’s), he does make some insightful, important points about who monopolizes violence and how we view them as when he says,

And despite our absolute hatred and fear of groups such as the Black Panther party because they refused to espouse non-violence, we have no problem honouring “heroes” such as General Colin Powell, who may have killed as many as 100,000 Iraqis during the Gulf war. Apparently it is evil to take up arms in defence of black people, as the Panthers did, but perfectly Christian behaviour to take up arms in defence of oil companies’ profits.

Why is it that the global and domestic violence of the state is O.K., while any attempt for countries, groups or individuals to defend themselves against uniformed agressors are greeted with denunciations followed by increased violence, which is, in turn, followed by official justifications for state violence? Just a thought.

So, when you’re digesting that hefty serving of official MLK propaganda (as opposed to more nuanced and informed perspectives on MLK, the movement and the legacy), think about what this piece says as it echoes things he surely heard and had to grapple with in his search for the holy grail of real change.

I have a nightmare

To liken Barack Obama to Martin Luther King does him no favours: non-violence failed us
Jonathan Farley
Thursday January 17, 2008
The Guardian

As America prepares to celebrate Martin Luther King Day next week, black presidential candidate Barack Obama stands in a strong position to become the country’s 44th president. Some view Obama’s remarkable popularity as the realisation of King’s dream, the final victory of the civil rights movement. Others view it, their respect for Obama notwithstanding, as a testament to its remarkable failure.Both the aims and the character of the civil rights movement were flawed. One aim was clearly desegregration. But the movement should never have been about integration. It should have been about demanding the respect that is due to free human beings; about ending the physical, spiritual and economic violence that had been perpetrated against African-Americans since the end of the American civil war. What’s the value in begging for the right to spend money in a store owned by a racist who would rather kill you than serve you?

Lest we forget, integration was the death knell for black teachers and principals. Thousands lost their jobs. “The movement” moved us from the back of the bus into the unemployment line.

Almost 40 years after King’s death, we still haven’t reached the promised land. King lamented that, in 1963, only 9% of black students attended integrated schools. But, to give just one example, Atlanta’s Grove Park elementary school is now 99.99% black.

King complains in Why We Can’t Wait that “there were two and one-half times as many jobless Negroes as whites in 1963, and their median income was half that of the white man”. Black median income in 2003 was 62% that of whites, and the black unemployment rate in 2004 was 10.8%, 2.3 times the white rate. The numbers have barely changed.

Following Mahatma Gandhi, the chief characteristic of the civil rights movement was non-violence. In order to combat violent racists, King speaks of meeting “physical force with soul force”. One wonders how well it would work against, say, Hitler’s Panzer divisions. Civil rights marchers had to pledge to “observe with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy”, promising to “refrain from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart”. Said King: “Remember always that the non-violent movement in Birmingham seeks justice and reconciliation - not victory.” Not victory? Whose side was King on?

The riots that occurred in a hundred cities after King’s death were the ultimate testament to his failure. Black people never believed in non-violence after all. Despite our love affair with King, African-Americans are not a non-violent people. Black Americans kill 5,000 other black people every year. (Instead of urging us to love our enemies, King should have taught us to love ourselves.)

And despite our absolute hatred and fear of groups such as the Black Panther party because they refused to espouse non-violence, we have no problem honouring “heroes” such as General Colin Powell, who may have killed as many as 100,000 Iraqis during the Gulf war. Apparently it is evil to take up arms in defence of black people, as the Panthers did, but perfectly Christian behaviour to take up arms in defence of oil companies’ profits.

King’s many worshippers are fond of Gandhian quotes such as “If blood be shed, let it be our blood”. Which is fine if you are merely sacrificing yourself. But King was sending out women, children and old people to be beaten and blown up. Even at the time, as King notes, there were many who viewed this as monstrous. When those little girls were murdered in Birmingham, why should black people not have booted King out and hunted the killers down, like al-Qaida? As King himself said: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.”

King also needs a history lesson. He writes, in The Sword That Heals, that “non-violence in the form of boycotts and protests had confounded the British monarchy and laid the basis for freeing the colonies from unjust domination”. Yes, that, and colonial minutemen with rifles.

Which brings us to Obama, a black candidate who refuses even to say whether he supports reparations for slavery. One of the worst aspects of the King legacy is that, thanks to him, no African-American today is allowed to bring up racism, even in the most objective fashion, without severe repercussions. You will be instantly labelled a radical, a Black Panther (a bad thing), or a Mau Mau (a very bad thing) who wants to kill the white man. King has eliminated the possibility of other black people speaking out, people with other philosophies, who do not necessarily want to hug racists. Obama can succeed only insofar as he makes it plain that, like the British trade unionist Bill Morris, he is “not the black candidate”, that he can be counted on neither to be a champion for, nor to defend the rights of, black people.

Our love for King notwithstanding, if we are honest we will concede that King built nothing, and taught us only how to take a beating. As Gandhi said: “I have admitted my mistake. I thought our struggle was based on non-violence, whereas in reality it was no more than passive resistance, which is essentially a weapon of the weak.”

It is time we all admitted our mistake. A black King did not redeem us. And neither will a black president.

· Jonathan David Farley is a former Martin Luther King Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lattice@caltech.edu

Presidential Candidates Take the ‘Social’ Out of ‘Change’

Presidential Candidates Take the ‘Social’ Out of ‘Change’

New America Media, Commentary, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Jan 16, 2008

Editor’s Note: Presidential candidates now clamor for change, and many invoke Martin Luther King, Jr. for their own political benefit, but lost in the debate is the social movement of change, notes NAM contributing editor Roberto Lovato.

The spirit of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. still seems to stir serious controversy among politicians. But, as we’re witnessing with the latest racial politics pushing the primary process, the King icon is also being used to build the fortunes and legacies of these politicians, especially those who would be president.

Despite a racial controversy involving a newsletter bearing Ron Paul’s name that called King a “world-class adulterer” and “pro-communist philanderer,” the Republican candidate plans to launch a new and likely record-breaking multimillion dollar “super Tuesday” fundraising campaign on Jan. 21, Martin Luther King, Jr., day; Mitt Romney mentioned seeing King only to later “clarify” that he never actually saw him; Rudy Giuliani regularly makes references to King in speeches, books and security consulting engagements that earned the former New York mayor the millions of dollars that were, until recently, paying for his campaign. And Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are in the midst of a fierce battle over the MLK legacy to see who deserves to win the black vote.

Lost in the bickering over and celebrations of King as an individual is any notion of the social movement that defined King and an entire generation. Similarly, the mind-numbing mantra of “change” mouthed ad infinitum by all of today’s presidential candidates would have us believe that they, not we, are the arbiters of change. The King anniversary appears to provide candidates an opportunity to remind us that they have a monopoly on “change.”

The most recent electoral banter around King takes place within the collective amnesia about his views, especially his later views focusing on issues dogging us to this day: racism and poverty, prisoners and war. To the detriment of our political process, we forget that King’s views came about at least in part as a response to a black political milieu defined not just by white racism, but by the wealth of spirited action and the intellectual perspective provided by millions of people, thousands of organizations and other, less-requited political stars – Angela Davis, the Black Panthers and their combination of service and calls to militancy; Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and their own brand of self-determination; Stokely Carmichael and the more militant students of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. These and many others influenced and pressured King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1960s.

As the harried run toward this year’s King celebrations and the South Carolina primary continues, the practically propagandistic repetitions and variations of words and phrases like “change,” “hope,” “content of character”, “I have a dream” and other King-isms are coded and distributed for mass consumption like Coca-Cola. Coke is, in fact, the main corporate sponsor of a gigantic new civil rights museum located just a shout from Ebenezer Baptist Church and King’s birthplace in Atlanta.

Nowhere is this denial of the “social” in “change” better exemplified than in statements made by Hillary Clinton, who said last week, “Dr King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.” Few among the pundits noted how Clinton’s framing of the issue deleted the social component of change. Instead, the media, pundits and even community leaders are engaged in a heated discussion about what the candidates believe: whether it was King, the individual, or Johnson, the individual, who “realized” the dream.

This climate has benefited Barack Obama, who speaks more skillfully than any other candidate to a still mostly white electorate that is largely unwilling to deal collectively with issues of race and racism beyond the platitudes one hears during official celebrations of King. Obama’s King-like cadences and charisma give us that semi-religious feeling that goes with being part of a social change movement -only without a social change movement.

In critical ways, the lack of the “social” in our discussions of “change” allows us to gloss over crucial differences between Obama the candidate and King, the leader of the Poor People’s Campaign. When asked how he would like to be remembered after his death, King said, “I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison.”

Like his competitors, Obama spends most of his time making speeches packed with calls for tax cuts and other proposals targeting the crumbling bastion of individualism: the “middle class.” He spends little to no time at rallies dealing with those most devastated by the lack of change: working class people, especially young people like those fueling the Jena Six movement. As he and the other candidates vie to be the inheritors of the King legacy, those who would be King say not a word about forcing “change” in a prison industry that predicts the value of its stock based on the future school performance of black and Latino third graders.

As we decide, during these times of continued crisis, on whom to vote for and what to do beyond the ballot box once they get elected, we might do well to recall the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., social change agent: “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering,
and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”

Not one dedicated individual, but many.

Obama, Clinton “Step Back” From Race Flap - But Still Silent Abour Racism

Today’s AP tells us that Dem candidates Clinton and Obama have decided to “step back” from the race bickering around the legacy of Dr. Mr. Luther King. According to the AP, “Democratic presidential rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama stepped back from a controversy over race Monday night, agreeing that a prolonged clash over civil rights could harm their party’s overall drive to win the White House.”

Now, we all know that this has a lot to do with the much-anticipated South Carolina primary. Touted as the “first black primary”, the voting in Southern Carolilna, a state with a significant African American electorate, will, indeed be determinate in the horse race we call elections. An, so, both camps have played the race card in their own way, Clinton through her husband, who called the Obama campaign a “fairy tale” and Obama through surrogates nailing Clinton.

Lost in the haze of such offensively simplistic approaches to race by the media and pols is the racism rising in the south and across the country; You know, the kind we find exhibited in things like the “noose” and Imus incidents as well as in the more disguised racism of the immigration debate.

The issues and candidates have been thoroughly vetted and racialized. Talk of them “stepping back” rings pretty hollow at this point. Candidates should be foregrounding and yelling at the top of their voices about the racial crisis ravaging the country, but they don’t. Instead, they use race in its more coded, but equally noxious forms found for, example, in the vote or support for the Border Wall of Shame on the part of all the leading Democratic and Republican candidates.

Mark my words: there’ll be no “stepping back” from electoral racism, the political gift that keeps on giving.

More on this real soon.

Iowa Race Results: Obama, Huckabee and the “Colorblind” Electorate

 

Iowa Results: Race Invisibility or Invisible Race?

New America Media, Commentary, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Jan 04, 2008

Editor’s Note: The victory of Barack Obama in the Democratic caucus in one of the country’s whitest states has been hailed by pundits as a sign that the country is moving beyond the old rhetoric around race. But race might just be becoming invisible, now identified by symbols such as “illegal immigrant,” the cornerstone of the campaign of Iowa’s other winner, Republican Mike Huckabee, writes NAM contributor Roberto Lovato.

As news broke of Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa, one of the country’s whitest states, political pundits of all stripes quickly told us that we were witnessing a historic shift: the end of race and racism as campaign issues. Even CNN’s dour conservative political analyst Bill Bennett waxed multiculti as he proclaimed that Obama “taught” African Americans that race wasn’t an issue they needed in order to succeed in politics. Though enthusiastic about the Obama victory, Bennett’s more jocular colleague Jack Cafferty was not quite ready to intone a full-throated Kumbaya. But he did declare that the Illinois
senator’s win “gives him currency in a state where the color of his skin may be an issue.”

NBC’s Tom Brokaw credited the Mike Huckabee victory in the Republican caucus to “his defense against illegal immigration,” an issue not viewed in racial terms by white voters. On all parts of the political and media spectrum, pundits and politicos are interpreting the Iowa results to mean that we inhabit a color-blind electoral system.

While watching a black man win the vote of an overwhelmingly white electorate is especially welcome in such racially-charged times as ours, and while the victory of a poor (at least in terms of electoral cash) populist preacher over the preferred Republican candidates of corporate America is refreshing, we are hardly entering the age of race invisibility in politics.

Instead, Iowa points us towards the age of invisible race politics.

To his credit, Barack Obama has carefully cultivated an image as a “change” candidate who takes the higher ground, one that talks about race – but not racism. Iowa confirms that, in doing so, he can make even the whitest electorate feel like it’s voting to overcome the catastrophic legacy of racial discrimination, like the Oprah viewer that gives himself or herself a racial pat on the back for really, truly liking her show.

“[Obama] is being consumed as the embodiment of color blindness,” political theorist Angela Davis told the Nation magazine recently, adding that “it’s the notion that we have moved beyond racism by not taking race into account. That’s what makes him conceivable as a presidential candidate. He’s become the model of diversity in this period…a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference. The change that brings no change.”

It was interesting to watch Obama deliver the most memorable and moving caucus victory speech in memory, one that included King-like intonations and references to the activists who “marched through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause” in the 1960s. Such inspired, impassioned pleas follow a campaign trail-tested rhetoric in which racism such as that surrounding the Jena Six case remains a largely unspoken part of Obama’s speeches and policy platforms. He appears to be more comfortable getting choked up when speaking about the fight against the racist past than he does during those few times he talks about the racist present.

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee also did his part to promote invisible race politics. The GOP underdog did so in no small part thanks to the issue of immigration, a very racial electoral wedge that many voters believe has nothing to do with race.

By focusing on “illegals,” “illegal aliens” and other racial codes, Huckabee and other Republican candidates get to ride the juggernaut of anti-immigrant, anti-Latino sentiment gripping the country - without appearing racist. Pundits have even taken to calling the immigration issue the “New Willie Horton,” in reference to how, during the 1988 presidential race, a political advertisement deployed by George H.W. Bush against Democratic rival Michael Dukakis featured a black man convicted of murder who raped a woman after being furloughed. Many African Americans and others deemed the Horton ads a thinly veiled appeal to anti-black sentiment in the electorate.

Latino leaders and editorials in Spanish-language newspapers have denounced Huckabee for openly touting the endorsement of Jim Gilchrist, one of the co-founders of the anti-immigrant Minutemen, an organization denounced as a racist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and others. In an election that will witness the largest Latino voter participation in history, how well the veil of legality hides the racial aspects embedded in the immigration issue may determine the fate of Republican candidates like Huckabee.

Regardless of the outcome of this year’s election, the success of Barack Obama and the immigration politics of Mike Huckabee signal clearly that we are well on our way to a new era in race and politics. Obama’s story and his echoes of King make us feel good about ourselves and God knows this country desperately needs that. The question we need to ask is: “Are we willing to push him to talk seriously about those echoes of the racial past in the present that he so skillfully avoids?” And as far as Republicans like Huckabee, we have to ask, “How long are we willing to accept their unskillful use of the racist appeals inherent in their rants about immigrants and immigration issues?” Failure to ask these and other questions will leave us vulnerable to the silent poison of invisible race politics.

Something We Must Learn From the Brits: Drop the “War on Terror” Gibberish

We begin this Feliz Ano Nuevo, Happy New Year with a focus on language, the language of war, the war of language. Here’s a bit of good news from where you least expect it.

This recent story from (of all places) Military.com describes how the British government has deleted the phrase “War on Terror” from its official government communications. According to the December 28 story, ” The words “war on terror” will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country’s chief prosecutor said”.

Describing the rationale behind this important linguistic shift, Sir Ken Macdonald, Britain’s Director of Public Prosecutions, said ‘We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language.”

Imagine living in a country where the top lawyer in the land says “We resist the language of war” or one where a top government official describes violent activities like the 9-11 bombings not as the acts of “terrorists” requiring the deployment of ships, missiles, troops and other expensive (and largely unnecessary and ultimately and tragically wasted) resources but of members of”death cult” requiring police actions.

Imagine.

Britain Drops ‘War on Terror’ Label

Daily Mail | December 28, 2007

Military.com

The words “war on terror” will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country’s chief prosecutor said Dec. 27.Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless “death cult.”

The Director of Public Prosecutions said: ‘We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language.”

London is not a battlefield, he said.

“The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers,” Macdonald said. “They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way.”

His remarks signal a change in emphasis across Whitehall, where the “war on terror” language has officially been ditched.

Officials were concerned it could act as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda, which is determined to manufacture a battle between Islam and the West.

The term “Islamic terrorist” will also no longer be used. Officials believe it is unhelpful because it appears to directly link the religion to terrorist atrocities.

In an interview with BBC Radio’s World at One, Macdonald made a fresh attack on plans to extend beyond 28 days the length of time a terror suspect can be held without trial.

He said that the evidence had shown that the existing limit was working well and he accused ministers of legislating on the basis of ‘hypotheticals’.