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Sunday, July 09, 2006

American Bigots
Posted by Jill | 7:19 AM
Last night I was looking at a web site run by our local community gadfly, looking for information on the love letters everyone in town received from the tax collector yesterday as a result of our recent revaluation. This is a fellow who's clearly a wee tad unhinged, but performs a valuable public service with this site.

I'm well aware of how white my town is (96%). There are a few black families scattered around town, and a few Asian families, but were it not for the ubiquitous SUVs, the recent spate of McMansions being built to replace tear-downs, and the additions designed to put McMansion costumes on 1950's Cape Cod and ranch houses, one would often think one had been transported back to 1959.

One of our neighboring towns is somewhat more diverse, but does have what's quaintly referred to as a "black section" -- a neighborhood of homes that sell for upwards of $400,000; hardly the "blighted neighborhood" that some of the more ignorant denizens of the area who have never ventured therein seem to think it is.

One local resident recently posted a comment on this site complaining about the preponderance of Latinos at a local park. And lo and behold, it is as if a rock had been moved to reveal the maggots beneath. A sample from the poster's spew:

The grassy area to the right looked like warm ups for the World Cup, and not team USA either unless they're all some kind of latinos. As we walked around, aside from a small softball game going on, NOBODY spoke English. Spanish, spanish, spanish. Up close to the playground and litter was everywhere. The kids were throwing candy wrappers on the ground and their mothers weren't telling them to pick them up. They had water bottles and threw them on the ground when they were done. Boy, I never would have thought I'd see this in this part of Bergen. I mean years ago they would bus people into Van Saun, but then at the end of the day, usually a weekend, they would leave and the park would get back to normal...where the hell did all these people come from ? Are they renting rooms or houses along ****** Road, or are they coming from ***** Rd ? It was very disheartening to see that park today. We'd better wake up or one day we're going to wake up and hear that not much English is being spoken around Emerson anymore. I'm glad I don't live in ************. The people there should be furious.


Where does one begin with a sentiment like this? Language has been a huge issue in this county, largely in the towns closer to New York City that have seen an influx in Koreans in recent years, to the point that many shops in some towns post their signs in only Korean. But in the case of this individual, people speaking Spanish amongst themselves during a weekend outing opens the door to a vast stereotyping of everyone who is not an Anglo-Saxon-appearing Caucasian. It's especially amusing that this person believes only Latino children drop candy wrappers and water bottles on the ground. Anyone who has ever visited the strip mall in my 96% white town knows that no one has a patent on littering. As for the assumptions about where the "offending" people live, guess what -- those are streets in what's quaintly referred to as "the black section."

I wonder if this person uses a lawn service....or has had a new roof put on his house recently?

Because hatred of the "other" isn't limited to the Spanish-speaking, though Latinos seem to be the trigger point for these screeds in the aftermath of the shameful Republican exploitation of immigration as a campaign issue.

This particular piece of spew led of course into all the Usual Suspects of racist diatribe -- Prof. Leonard Jeffries, who's been out of the news for nearly two decades; Paterson drug dealers, even the apocryphal Reaganesque "welfare queen":

A black woman with really long, painted nails with the studs on them, lowering her talons into her Gucci bag to pull out FOOD STAMPS to pay for groceries, which she then loads into a white Caddy, a new one at that, and pulls away.
Just what happened at Shop Rite last week. What I want to know is what's up with that ? Her bag was nicer than mine and so was her car, and yet SHE had food stamps and I didn't. I guess welfare pays real good these days !


Aside from the fact that the poster of this comment has never heard of "designer knockoffs" and no self-respecting upwardly-mobile person has driven a Cadillac in years, the use of food stamps in Bergen County isn't all that unusual in an age of reduced incomes and high cost of living.

But when Americans are frightened about terrorism, about job insecurity, about skyrocketing property taxes (mine "only" increased by $700/year in this revaluation, far less than I'd expected), reduced pensions, an unstable stock market that holds their retirement funds, and a generally bleak future, it's far easier to blame dark-skinned people than to look at the corporatists in Washington who are the REAL villains in America's reduced horizons.

This fear and loathing of Latinos has been legitimazed by the immigration debates and has been absorbed into the general fear of terrorism. The recent Miami arrests of seven Haitian kooks who mused on blowing up the Sears Tower has expanded the bigotry to black Americans.

This mindset can be summed up by one particularly loathsome comment from an "elite" white resident of Bergen County on the aforementioned public web site:

The ELITE communities ... are populated by the best and the brightest, mostly WHITE families. These are the doctors, lawyers, engineers, the ACTUAL "prospective home buyers" who are paying from a half-million to upwards of one million to live near FELLOW ELITES. There are asian and indian families here as well, but these families assimilate into the upscale white society within which they live. These values are not racist at all. Should elite whites be apologetic for such ? Certainly not. This has nothing to do with hate and everything to do with choice. I hate no one and resent accusations of such. As an AMERICAN, I have the right to choose my neighborhood and my neighbors, and I choose to live among elite whites...It's not the white families who destroy real estate values. It's the black and mexican ones. This is documented fact for which no one owes an explanation save for members of these groups.


As I wrote yesterday, I grew up in Westfield, NJ -- a town in which most of the African-Americans and Jews lived on the south side and the fringes of town, and the so-called "real Americans" who went to good Christian churches like the Big White Presbyterian church in the center of town, lived in the stately old Colonials on the north side. It's appalling that some 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, racists are not only still denying that they are racist even as they spew their sweeping generalizations, but that racist scapegoating is still alive and well -- and still being exploited by those who actually DO bear the responsibility for the economic uncertainty that triggers Americans' anxiety.
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