Associated Press photo
Mexico President Vicente Fox, shown in a photo from last week, is taking heat for having remarked to a group of business people in Puerto Vallarta on Friday, "There's no doubt that the Mexican men and women -- full of dignity, willpower and a capacity for work -- are doing the work that not even blacks want to do in the United States."
It's not 'racist' if it's true
It's interesting how political correctness has replaced any real discussion of race relations in the United States. Bring up race in almost any context and you're accused of being "racist." Ironically, the purpose of this ploy is to keep racial inequity firmly in place in the United States by making the topic of race taboo.
Mexico President Vicente Fox is the latest victim of P.C. police brutality.
This is from Reuters:
MEXICO CITY -- Mexican President Vincente Fox's office said [yesterday] his comments were misinterpreted as racist when he said that Mexican migrants do jobs in the United States "that not even blacks want to do."
In a Friday speech, Fox had criticized the latest anti-immigration measures in the United States and defended the role of undocumented Mexican workers north of the border.
"There is no doubt that Mexicans, filled with dignity, willingness and ability to work, are doing jobs that not even blacks want to do there in the United States," he told a group of Texas business people meeting in Mexico. [The Associated Press gives the slightly different version of Fox's remarks under his photo above. I am not sure whether Fox was speaking Spanish or English when he made the remarks; if he was speaking Spanish, the slight differences between the two English versions of his remarks would be due to people translating from Spanish to English a little differently.]
[Fox's] comment was published and broadcast by local and international media, and Fox said in a statement from his office that he regretted that some had interpreted his words as racist.
"President Vicente Fox expresses his enormous respect for minorities whatever their racial, ethnic and religious origin and that is why he regrets and disagrees with interpretations that yesterday's comments were racist," his office said.
"Their purpose was none other than to make clear the importance that Mexican workers have in the development and progress of U.S. society," the statement said.
Mexico has been seeking an accord with Washington for years to make it easier for millions of illegal Mexican immigrants to live and work in the United States.
Hopes were raised early last year when President Bush proosed a temporary worker program but it has become bogged down in Congress.
A key partner in U.S. border security, Mexico said it plans to formally protest new U.S. controls on foreign-born people expected, including tougher rules to obtain drivers' licenses and plans to extend a fence on the border between California and Mexico to stop illegal immigrants.
To me, a racist statement is a statement that implies that one racial group is inherently and globally inferior to another racial group. (I know that people have other definitions of the term "racism," but that's my personal definition.)
How Fox's statement was racist, using my personal definition, eludes me.
The historical fact is that blacks were, for generations, consigned to the hardest and most unpleasant work that there was to do in the United States, and that over the decades, while blacks certainly don't have job parity with whites, blacks have had at least some success climbing the career ladder.
Blacks, having lived in the United States for generations, are, in my observation, fully Americanized. Blacks still are not fully socially equal with whites, even in 2005, but it's pretty indisputable that they are fully Americanized.
Being fully Americanized and not having just arrived here yesterday, there are certain things that blacks (quite understandably) won't tolerate, certain things that Mexican nationals, as the new kids on the block, so to speak, will and do tolerate.
I can give you a concrete example.
My first job with the state of California was in an office building of more than 20 stories in downtown Sacramento. The building takes up an entire city block and is like a little city within itself.
The only people I ever saw cleaning that building were Latinos, most, if not all of them, from Mexico. As most of them spoke Spanish and only limited English, I surmise that few of them had been in the United States for very long.
What shocked me about the Latino janitors was that where they and the mostly white office staff were concerned, it was as though the Latino janitors were ghosts that the office staff couldn't see, kind of like in that Nicole Kidman movie, "The Others." I saw little to no interaction between the janitors and the office staff in the hallways.
I always acknowledged the janitors' presence, at least with a smile. They were always friendly in return, but they did not initiate often, probably because, with their limited English and their limited amount of time in the United States, they were intimidated, or at least were aware of their status within the social pecking order: The bottom rung.
One day I remarked to a black co-worker of mine how sad I thought it was that there were two classes of people in the city-building, the office workers and the Latino janitors, and that there was little to no contact between the two. If any of my co-workers could understand the plight of the Latino janitors, I figured, it would be my black co-worker.
Boy, was I mistaken: She made a curt, heartless statement that if the Latinos wanted to be over here and had to do shit work in order to be here (I paraphrase), well, then, so be it.
(Don't call me "racist" for having thought that my black co-worker would have felt the Latino janitors' pain. I was guilty of having made an assumption, not of racism, God damn it.)
I don't assert that my former black co-worker's opinion is representative of most or even of many other blacks' opinion. But my black co-worker's statement came to mind after I read the news item above.
At least in Sacramento, where I live, the social pecking order, if I had to identify it, would be whites on top, blacks in the middle (with the poorest ones on the bottom), and Latino non-citizens on the bottom. (I would classify most Asians as being on top and in the middle, and would classify some citizen Latinos as being on top, but most citizen Latinos as being in the middle.)
If I'm correct -- and I think that I am -- it's not "racist" to point out the social hierarchy, but is just describing what is.
And that, I think, is all that that Vicente Fox was doing: Describing the reality of the social order of the United States of America -- or at least the social order of a big chunk of the United States of America (California, Texas, Arizona, etc.) -- something that those who live outside of the United States seem to be a helluva lot better at doing than do American citizens, especially white ones.
Of course, because he had the gall to bring up race, Fox has been attacked, including by Jesse Jackson, who seems to have been reduced, after his character and credibility took a direct hit when it was revealed that his mistress had his baby, to opportunist "outraged" social commentator.
According to the Associated Press, Jackson told CNN that Fox's comments were "unwitting, unnecessary and inappropriate" and that Fox "should not confuse the need for sound legal immigration policy between the two countries, which is important, and the border disputes between the two countries, with a spurious comparison." (I looked "spurious" up in my dictionary, and it's probably a word that Jackson should never utter, because the first definition that my dictionary gives for it is "of illegitimate birth"...)
I have to wonder how much of Jackson's motivation in making his comments was to maintain the status quo, the pecking that order I described above. Better for blacks to be in the middle than at the bottom, right?
At any rate, I wish that Jackson would stop sharing his "wisdom" with us like he did in the Terri Schiavo case -- as I said then, doesn't he have an intern to screw? -- and I think it's detrimental for the racial groups on the lower rungs of the social ladder to fight each other for whitey's scraps, because while those groups are fighting each other, whitey keeps his perch atop the pecking order. (That's something that has long bothered me about the labor movement: The labor movement fights for more table scraps from the rich, when it should focus on overthrowing the rich altogether.)
12:42:10 PM 
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