NCLR Calls for an End to Coded Hate Speech Bashing Latina/os/Immigrants

The N.Y. Times blog reports that the head of the country’s largest Latino civil rights organization called on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News to stop providing a forum for pundits who consistently disparage Latina/o immigrants. The National Council of La Raza (NCLR) also asked Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee to renounce the endorsement of Jim Gilchrist, a co-founder of the Minuteman Project.

Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington on Thursday, Janet Murguia, the NCLR president, said that anti-Latino remarks on the leading cable news networks are insulting. “It’s personal, it’s intolerable, and it has to end,” she said.

Besides contacting network executives and the Huckabee campaign, the NCLR has created a website to illustrate how disparaging language negatively affects race relations in America.  The site, We Can Stop the Hate, has a page on the use of code words in the immigration debate.  it includes the following:

When people acting as “experts” or “commentators” on the immigration debate demonize Latino immigrants, either legal or illegal, as a dangerous threat to American society or as subhuman and inherently inferior, they follow a tragic historical pattern which, time and again, has led to extreme civil rights abuses in American history. Such labels are used to justify extreme action, sometimes even genocide, since the people using those labels claim that the “larger public interest” is at risk. Further, if a group is widely accepted as “inhuman” or “inferior,” it allows the rest of society to suspend its normal standards of right and wrong in judging actions taken against the target group.

Race and Ethnicity

A remarkable number of commentators on immigration make explicitly race-based appeals, often accompanied by ethnic slurs or stereotypes.

War and Invasion

It is increasingly common for mainstream commentators to refer to the current immigration phenomenon as a “war” in which the U.S. is being “invaded.” Frequent television commentator Pat Buchanan often spaks of an “invasion” of “illegal aliens.”

Conquest

A variant of this militaristic theme are references to “La Reconquista,” an antiquated metaphor used by Chicano scholars in the 1960s to refer to a mythical “Aztlán,” in the Southwest. Although it is difficult to find anyone in the Latino community outside of a few student groups or fringe groups that have ever espoused this idea, it appears to be gaining far more attention and notoriety in the context of the current immigration debate than it ever did as a scholarly doctrine.

Disease

References to Latino immigrants riddled with dangerous diseases are frequent.

Criminality

Many commentators inaccurately suggest that immigrants in general, and Latino immigrants in particular, have a higher proclivity to commit crime.  CNN’s Glenn Beck suggests that Mexicans come from an inherently lawless culture.

Economics and Welfare

There are numerous references in the debate to allegations that immigrants “steal jobs” from Americans and create other adverse economic consequences.

KJ