Hyphenated America
by G. Murphy Donovan (July 2016)
“It’s always good to be underestimated.” – Donald Trump
Trump is especially vulnerable because he is not one of the usual suspects, neither a career politician, nor career “activist,” nor a card carrying member of the American Bar. Pardon any redundancy.
dependency as just another career choice; and various micro-cultures that use skin color, gender, religion, or sexual proclivities to define their special or hyphenated status. Any variety of victims seems to work.
The hyphenated American is partial to simplistic adjectives like black, brown, or white to characterize the “other.” Parsing with adjectives of color is now a common form of democratic racism.
So far, the Trump campaign has been saved by the wisdom of crowds, ordinary Americans who don’t work for the government or live off handouts. Cops, firemen, and the military are worthy government exceptions too. Elites have little affection for men and women in uniforms of any sort. You may have noticed that press and politicos now have police in the crosshairs as if the thin blue line, not urban punk culture or Muslim terror, is the real threat.
If American politicos learn nothing else from the Brexit vote in England, they should learn not to patronize the flat hats, folks who dig ditches, fix plumbing, and mend fences. Democracy always contains the potential for a revolution without guns.
Attitudes, images, and opinions about Trump now seem to be coalescing around two issues, race and immigration. Truth be told, they are two sides of the same coin with a host of subordinate issues like national security and financial Armageddon.
We should note that Barack Hussein Obama had a golden opportunity to address the American racial divide for seven plus years. He did not! Indeed, Obama’s half-assed tenure may, in part, be a function of defining himself by halves, as a “black” American, a reality that can never be more than half true. Indeed, disingenuous skin color parsing at the White House is a now a benchmark for the national edition of politically correct racism. Identity politics and bigotry are brothers from the same sorry mother – especially when mom is “white.”
Trump is an outspoken opponent of open borders, a policy that might alter the hegiras of illegal Mexicans and hostile Muslims alike. Immigration has been an open wound for decades, but only Trump has made novel, if not radical, suggestions for new policy. For this he is labeled a “racist.”
Ethnic authenticity in Spanish speaking South America is factually limited to the indigenous or Native Americans. Ironically, colonial abuses like slavery and genocide are imports from Spain and Europe, not necessarily native pathologies. Withal, pale skin is still a social asset, and whiter is customarily thought to be better in the Spanish speaking third world.
If ideology matters, it was Mexico and South America that welcomed the human detritus of totalitarian Communism and National Socialism at the end of the last century. Trotsky was a Mexican favorite. The so-called Hispanic world provided refuge for some of the worst genocidal bigots fleeing Europe before and after WWII.
Melanin parsing and religious bigotry among Latino/Latina elites is traditional. Racial parsing in the Americas is home grown tradition reinforced by the church and the descendants of European colonists, often successful “Latinos/Latinas” like Gonzalo Curiel and Sonia Sotomayor in the United States.
to return the American southwest and California to Mexico.
Cutting California loose might have some merit, while retuning Mexico to Spain might make more sense these days rather than ceding the entire American southwest to Mexico.
Beyond La Raza affiliations, Justice Sotomayor cemented her place in the skin game by claiming that a “Latina” brought sensitivities to the bench that might be absent in “white males.” Ms. Sotomayor is clearly a captive of the “Latin” myth too, complemented by sexism and white fright. No surprise that the “first Latina” justice trashed her white male colleagues while visiting UC Berkley. If Sotomayor were truly the “wise Latina,” she might limit her trash talk to chambers.
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If you are on the bench and think of yourself, or others, as gifted by adjective or hyphen, best keep it to yourself.
Gonzalo Curiel has roots in a hyphenated barrio too. As a student, Gonzalo was a member of a race predicated college fraternity. Indeed, at a time when he had hair, the aspiring jurist curated an afro and pledged the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, a “black,” Greek house with a skin predicate and a toxic history of brutal pledge hazing. Judge Curiel is also a founding member of an affiliated Kappa race based alumni association. That history is now augmented by memberships or affiliations, like Sotomayor, with various “La Raza” legal groups.
If you follow the news, La Raza is the group that flies the Mexican flag, not the stars and stripes, during parades, protests, demonstrations, or riots.
Beyond language, Sotomayor and Curiel have a profession in common. They are both lawyers, the real nexus of Trump’s complaint.
Lawyers, like journalists are universally reviled, with approval rates in single digits. “If it bleeds, it leads” is the core ethic for media types just as billing hours are the lodestar for lawyers.
If “race” and gender politics now play an essential role in judicial appointments, how do identity politics not play a part once an appointment has been made? The American judiciary has the right, maybe even an obligation, to be as partisan and corrupt as any other American institution.
For hyphenated Americans, especially misandrist racists, Donald Trump is the great white whale of American politics, a symbolic phantasm that must be harpooned – and destroyed.
The “browning” of America may be inevitable, but identity politics, the melanin ethic, is enlightened in the same sense that open borders is cultural progress. When a white, should we say pink, chap like Donald Trump comes before a California bench, the accused knows better than to expect an O.J. Simpson outcome. No jurisdiction plays the skin game better than the Left Coast.
The only thing worse than being too dark, in many so-called Hispanic subcultures, is being too white.
As a successful, white, male, heterosexual who opposes open borders with Mexico, Donald Trump has every reason to question the impartiality of a hyphenated-American jurist with life-long ties to a de facto, if not de jure, “black” fraternity and more recent ties to a macho Mexican malapropos like La Raza.
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G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of national security.
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