WTF??? Like RATM sayz "Fear is your only God", a little out of context but still, a good stand alone quote...

it works fine, i think.

Now, why on earth would she think that this photo makes her look like a hateful person? Clearly, this is the first time she's gotten a chance to step outside and see her true self in action. Sometimes, I'm embarrassed to have the skin tone I do...

Sorry lady, it makes you look that way because thats what happen, period.

you'd think that realizing they were just as ready to hate one of their "own"—a legal, working american citizen—as one of the ALIENZ, these racists would suddenly realize they are dehumanizing Latinos/Hispanics/Migrantes and wearing blinders and that's why pictures like this can exist and embarrass them. they are reducing the entire massive and complicated nexus of realities of migrating humans and NAFTA's effects and farmer's plights and worker's issues and women/mother-child/family crises being brought about by Hutto/deportation/raids etc to a "GO BACK TO WHERE YOU BROWNIES CAME FROM" non-philosophy. Go back to where you came from. That's the ironic part, eh? These migrations across imaginary political lines have been happening for longer than the concept of "The United States of America" has existed, even.

and so these haters are ready to bury anybody under the fear and loathing that is eating at them. friend and foe alike. individual essence, pains, dreams, rights—these are washed away in a white torrent of greed and fear. and all they can say is "i'm not a hateful person." but then again, why not? we live in a time of perverted words, of orwellian linguistics. and what does it mean to hate when the law backs up that hate anyway?

"what does it mean to hate when the law backs up that hate anyway?"

Creepy and excellent point.

Also, why does it take a photograph for someone to "see" evidence of what they're doing? Could the expression on the student's face in the older picture of hate mongering be any clearer? How can you physically be that close to someone and see exactly the effects of what you're doing in that someone's eyes, and not come to a dead stop of "oh my god wtf am I doing?" if you're "not a hateful person"?? Just because the man in the picture with Hauptmann doesn't also look like he's about to cry doesn't mean Hauptmann wouldn't have been able to recognize how scary it is to get surrounded, yelled at, and then need a police escort out of a place. I don't care if she ever actually recreated that scene with actual aliens from outer space, never mind someone she didn't know was a US citizen (passports required for hate-free zones!) - it's fucking hateful.

And I'm sorry I swear sometimes/often in my posts. I notice not a lot of other people do, which I think is neat, I just have, uh, sort of a compulsion.

seriously...stop and think about it. how terrifying would it be to have a mob of furious people SURROUND you and yell at you to GET OUT OF THE COUNTRY.

???

not town...or the room, the entire nation! a mob of people around you! i mean just imagine that actually happening to you.

does anyone even really think this could happen to someone if hate wasn't the vibe running through those people mobbing? okay, so dont say you're a "hateful" person. i mean what does that mean? i dont care if you call yourself "mother theresa the twoth," but if you end up in a mob screaming a brown person out of the country who has every right to be here....then maybe labels, or how you are appearing in media isn't your biggest worry. or shouldn't be. of course, how she is portrayed is, according to the quotes selected by the reporter, her biggeset concern. why not what she just put someone through?

"I just want people to obey the law" she says. and the cops holding her back clearly have the same concern.

oh, and joan, you're free to swear. as long as it's not at someone else here. ;) i get very heated by these things, and i swear at times myself because it is, just as they say, "strong" language. sometimes it feels right. sometimes i need it to blow the vent off, toxins build up when you have to consider such overwhelming and frustrating realities...

some places don't like it. but you can take your shoes off at mi casa.

as far as other people, i think they do not do it if they would rather not. people know here they can. and i'm not sure i'd want everybody swearing up the joint. i might have to pass out spittoons or something.

You know, yesterday I woke up with a strange thought in my head, a poem of sorts and I wrote it down.. Since its a bit stream of consciousness, I won't try to translate it for you, I will let you decide what it means if anything.

that young white girl in the black and white photo of little rock's integration apologized years later to the black girl. she said she was young and dumb and following her racist community blindly. now, as adults, they are close friends (yes, nezua, it is true. i saw it with my own eyes--on oprah...).

maybe this current white woman will one day see the light...

ah, that's interesting, luisa...boy, she'd be just the person to be talking to the media. i'm glad she was on oprah. i wish she were on every show.

its' not the individual women i'm worried about. it's that we are replaying so many horrors at once, and we can do it and think of ourselves as honorable and righteous and law-abiding. they are but symbols of a greater less-visible mass.

Nez:

I see it every single day. Yesterday, an otherwise very polite and considerate young man went off on a rant about how the last truck he had driven when he was doing Long Haul was the first that his company had purchased after the manufacturer had moved their production to Mexico. He said the truck was NFG because those "Mexicans just don't give a fuck about the quality of their work". I told him that I thought it far more likely that the people who put the truck together were hard workers who had been improperly trained, equipped or managed--in order to let someone in management put some cash in their pocket. I didn't think to tell him it might have been the anglo who lives just across the border and commutes in.

I'm in upstate NY and the Border Patrol is all over this area. It feels like being in one of the southern border states. There are a fair number of migrant workers here for farm work and plenty of menial wage workers. I wish I could say the people who got their hatin' on are ignorant, in bred, trailer trash, meth labbin' pit bull owners. The truth is that a lot of them are very middle-class. It's sad, so sad.

yeah, democommie. i guess that's the worst part. to find out that everyday average people keep these things in their minds. you don't have to travel to extremes. i know this, i've seen it myself, oh yeah.

all the veneer is being worn and shorn away. i see these "minutemen" rallies now with the older folks with their signs (STOP ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION or ADIOS ILLEGALS or NO ILLEGAL ALIENS) and i think to myself...they've just found an acceptable outlet for the racism that "has not been allowed" to be indulged in for years now. i know i'm supposed to see something else, but i peep those signs and those angry (or worse yet, happy) faces, and to me the letters spell STOP MEXICANS FROM BEING IN AMERICA and ADIOS MEXICANS and NO MORE MEXICANS. the word "illegal" and the word "alien" are simply the politically correct term for their racism. it's like that movie? Redstate, I think its called? when average america is allowed to say whatever it likes with no fear of being judged, we see how what's up. most of it is just underground, but seething. it's being fed too much.

i think a lot of it began (well a long, long time ago but was aggravated and metastasized) on 9/11. that's when we voted in fear to rule over all reason and kindness and american ideal, and re-jigged "American Ideal" to consist of platitudes that Yogi Berra would be proud of and bullying and fear and war. and it's been spreading since. the Other is our bogeyman, and we see him everywhere. except in our own breast. which is why a million metal detectors will never keep us safe as long as we believe we "now live in a post 9/11 world" and use that weird idea to let military might and policing and torture and wiretapping and fear of Other, and force, rule. it's all tying together, all our collective frailties and failings, our absence of any real philosophy in this culture leaves gaps that war jingles settle into, xenophobia flowers within, that TV soudnbytes preempt, that leaves room for whatever our overlords deign to feed us through the state-supined media, that are a fertile bed for the same propaganda i've heard since i was old enough to hold my hand over my heart.

but i think even without 9/11, this would still have happened. all this racism against Mexicans, and in turn against any Latino-looking people/Hispanicly-named people, it's just been triggered. by the GOP thinking immigrants will vote Democrat, by the old racist bastards who fear a land that looks different than their hallucinations of 1950, by the census numbers, and by the Latino culture and spanish tongue filtering into the united states. it's like the American Ideal had a secret clause written in invisible spinach ink: that all this poetic brotherhood and amber waves of grain crap, this poor huddled masses and dreams of immigrants crap will be retracted should the darkie percentage rise above 40%. and then we go back to Sherman's "the only good indian is a dead indian" type of dichotomous racist outlook on america's makeup.

sad is right, my friend. how i wish the crap they push on us didn't sell so well, wasn't so happily lapped up by so many.

i appreciate your example, thanks.

I'm in upstate NY and the Border Patrol is all over this area.

Damn... about time. The 9/11 terrorists came in from Canada, not Mexico. I grew up in the Finger Lakes, and now live on the Mexican/U.S. border, so welcome to my world... and expect BP and other police to start DEMANDING your papers everywhere in between.

As I recall, a lot of us in that part of the world are naturally "brown" anyway (Sicilians, Syrians, and Puerto Ricans made up about half my little hometown's population). I'm not that old, and grew up hearing Italian and Arabic and Spanish on the streets, and it never occurred to me until later that people saw this as abnormal, let alone a threat.

What's scary is that people like Ms. Haupmann aren't unusual. She's buying into this idea that "aliens = threat and brown = alien". At least she's embarrassed, and -- if she has a brain in her head -- she'll think. Maybe her neighbors will think too.

that's nuts about upstate new york. border patrol??? man. i spent some years there myself. but i never even remember seeing a damn mexican american, let alone a mexican from mexico. then again, it is a big area, "upstate new york."

yeah she's embarrassed. about how she looks to others. here' hoping it travels deeper, into how she's thinking about the issue in the first place.

A little gem from my favorite Flash political animator:

Hordes Redux

Apparently the screaming woman , Pamela Hauptman is a neo nazi who posts at StormfRONT. Very, very scary stuff.

what?? well. at least she's not "hateful."

"I wish I could say the people who got their hatin' on are ignorant, in bred, trailer trash, meth labbin' pit bull owners. The truth is that a lot of them are very middle-class. It's sad, so sad."

"yeah, democommie. i guess that's the worst part. to find out that everyday average people keep these things in their minds. you don't have to travel to extremes"

Democommie & Nezua,
This part of your conversation made me a little uncomfortable. The images that you use Democommie are the stereotypes of poor white Americans. I don't think poor & white equals racist. And I don't think being born into and working ones' way into the middle class or higher means that one is less likely to spew hate speech. In fact, I've got several whitey friends who come from poor & working class backgrounds that are definitely down for the Brown. This is because they relate to the economic injustice experienced by p.o.c. in this country more than they relate to the white middle class who are (usually) born into privilege.
In my experiences doing racial justice organizing, I find it easier to struggle with and trust white folks who come from lower income backgrounds because they automatically have some lived understanding of oppression being (or having been) poor in this country. In this arena, it's the middle class folks who are "ignorant".
I'm not trying to say that there isn't a scary stronghold of white supremacy in poor white america. It's alive and well here in the Northwest as Nezua has posted about. I guess my point is that racism crosses class background. I mean, isn't Sensenbrenner an heir to the Kimberly Clark toilet paper fortune? Poor racist whites = scary. Middle class racist whites who smile in your face while thinking hateful things = scary. Extraordinarily wealthy & powerful racist whites who hold political office = really scary.

no, you are so right, K. racism is not reserved for the heavy-meth areas, like so much of Oregon. it sure is alive and strong here. but there is no doubt that it is not exclusive to the poor. i guess it didnt raise any flags to me because i do live around meth using, pit-bull owning peoples...that is exactly so much of the racist population in the PNW. but that sure doesnt mean that racism isnt alive and strong in the middle class or the rich. or that every single meth user is racist, nor every poor person.

If Pamela Hauptman posts at StormFront, she's hateful, all right. It's interesting how so many of the neocons/neo-Nazis/fascists/Christian Identity folks, etc., purport to be about "heritage" and not about "hate." Unfortunately, the heritage to which they relate most, apparently, IS hate. Where's the disconnect, I wonder, that they don't see it themselves? I honestly believe that Hauptman honestly believes she's not hateful. Now, that's scary.