Hate Breeds Hate: The “Sport” of “Beaner Hopping”

The facts that continue to come out about the hate murder of Ecuadoran (legal) immigrant Marcello Lucero send chills up the spine of anyone with a conscience.  It initially was reported that the defendants had begun their hate-filled escapades with the statement:  “Let’s go find some Mexicans.”” But it gets worse.  Here is the latest from the N.Y. Times:

“Every now and then, perhaps once a week, seven young friends got together in their hamlet of Medford, on eastern Long Island, to hunt down, and hurt, Hispanic men. They made a sport of it, calling their victims “beaners,” a reference to the staple Hispanic dish of rice and beans, prosecutors said on Thursday.”

And the story gets even worse.  The teens apparently viewed their hate crimes as the “sport” of “beaner hopping.”

We have previously reported on the FBI data documenting the increase in hate crimes against Latinos,  As I have contended in talking with the press, the increase in hate crimes appears tied to the heated, at times hateful, public debate regarding immigration, which has included the “scapegoating” of immigrants and Latinos for various social ills. ” It hardly seems mere coincidence that hate crimes against Latinos are on the rise at the same time there has been an (over)heated debate about immigration and immigrants at the local level.

Consider the context surrounding the hate murder of Marcello Lucero.  In Long Island, the County Executive had been railing against undocumented immigrants for months. Tempers flared and a young man was killed. In Shenendoah, PA earlier this year, a young Mexican immigrant man (in public with a white woman) was killed. Recall that tempers flared with passage of the anti-immigrant ordinance (which a court enjoined) in Hazleton, PA, (for an example of the hate directed at “illegal aliens” in a speech in Hazleton, listen to William Gheen of ALIPAC), another rural PA town.

KJ