Louis Farrakhan, pictured somewhere in some year
Farrakhan has my back
I don't know an awful lot about Louis Farrakhan, but from what little I do know about him, I like him and I think he's a pretty smart guy.
From The Associated Press today:
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan said Mexican President Vicente Fox was right to say that Mexican immigrants take jobs "that not even blacks want."
Although Fox was sharply criticized for his remarks by some black leaders, Farrakhan said [yesterday] that blacks do not want to go to farms and pick fruit because they already "picked enough cotton."
"Why are you so foolishly sensitive when somebody is telling you the truth?" he asked the crowd at Mercy Memorial Baptist Church. He said blacks and Latinos should form an alliance to correct differences and animosity between the two communities. [Emphasis mine.]
Civil rights leaders including Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton have called on Fox to apologize for the remark. Fox has said he was commenting on the contributions that Mexicans make to the United States, and did not mean any offense.
Farrakhan, who spearheaded the 1995 Million Man March that drew hundreds of thousands of people to Washington, D.C., was in Milwaukee to promote the Millions More Movement, which has scheduled a rally Oct. 15 on the National Mall. The march is billed as a more inclusive successor to the Million Man March. This time, organizers have encouraged women and gays to attend.
Here is an abridged version of what I wrote on May 15, 2005 about Fox's controversial statement, which he had made a couple of days earlier. Those sentences that especially jibe with what Farrakhan said yesterday I have put in bold.
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 [May 13, 2005] 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....
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.
...[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....
At any rate, ... 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....
9:26:18 PM 
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