Swine Flu: The Other White Fear

Well, technically the global pandemic of swine flu has scared just about everyone on the planet, not just “whites.” And not all “whites” have the intolerant and racist views that Hispanics/Mexicans are to blame for everything wrong with America from the Mortgage Crisis to the Swine Flu. But I have noticed a disturbing trend in the media and in society at large in America today: fear mongering.

What amounts to racist hate speech is being passed off as serious discussions on immigration, national security and disease control by so-called “respected” political pundits and common every day people. But to me it looks like a bunch of B.S. Essentially, it is nothing more than McCarthy style propaganda to scapegoat this generation of Hispanics for the ills of our times.

Hispanics have been prominently featured in connection with many topics of news in the past years and presently, but these have not been positive stories. The stories are usually about:

-Hispanic immigrants taking American jobs
-Hispanic immigrants illegally crossing the boarder
-Hispanic immigrants using welfare and social services which negatively impact the economy
-The possibility of terroristic Hispanic immigrants affecting national security
-Hispanic immigrants as the focus of drug wars
-Hispanic immigrants burdening our healthcare system
-Hispanic immigrants bringing Swine flu and possibly other deadly diseases, and so on.

In fact it seems the new fad is to try and link any and all American disasters and national woes to Hispanics in a twisted game of 2 degrees of separation. Hispanics have essentially become the equivalent of Kevin Bacon in connection to the ills of American society.

It is much simpler for all of us to use Hispanics as scapegoats for everything that scares us today in America. It keeps us from looking too deeply below the surface of these health, economic and social problems. We can even tell ourselves that, “If only the Hispanics were gone, things would be like this or that.” But sadly, deporting, isolating, or even exterminating Hispanics will not fix America’s problems. Just as efforts to exterminate Native Americans, Jews, Armenians, or Rwandan’s have failed; so will the efforts of this era to eliminate Hispanics from American society fail.

The only real effect of the efforts to demonize Hispanics is that society is more frequently marginalizing, stereotyping, discriminating and attacking them/us. The stereotyped or discriminatory attacks against Hispanics are becoming more open and common place in society and media.

Boston talk radio host Jay Severin was suspended after calling Mexican immigrants “criminalians” during a discussion of swine flu and saying that emergency rooms had become “essentially condos for Mexicans.” It has become acceptable to talk about Mexicans or Hispanics in derogatory terms publicly.

An anonymous poster ranting on the “prison planet” forum, part of radio host and columnist Alex Jones’ Web site wrote: “This disgusting blight is because MEXICANS ARE PIGS!”

The stories of Hispanics that are attacked or killed have risen on the news. Recently a Mexican immigrant walking with a white woman was accosted with racial epithets, assaulted and killed by a group of high school students. They were acquitted of murder and charged with simple assault despite eye witness testimony from a retired police officer and a pending investigation by Department of Justice. And the list goes on…

History will judge harshly the human rights violations of today. Even though we may not see beyond the prejudice of our present, the future generations will see clearly what happened to Hispanics in America during these trying times. Luckily or, perhaps, hopefully we won’t be around anymore to feel ashamed of our country’s intolerant and hateful behavior.