Thread: La Raza: 'Here They Go Again, Tom Tancredo, Mark Krikorian'

Please see first "Reply" for an opinion piece by Mark Krikorian on this subject, although it is dated July 29, 2009.

Janet Murgia
President and CEO NCLR
(National Council of La Raza)
Posted August 5, 2009 09:22 AM

THERE THEY GO AGAIN:TOM TANCREDO, MARK KRIKORIAN & THE POLITICS OF HATE & FEAR

There they go again.

Like Energizer bunnies, former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo and pal Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) keep banging the same old tired drum in a desperate attempt to discredit our voice prior to the national debate over immigration.

Tancredo's most recent complaint involves Supreme Court justice nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor and her membership in NCLR, the nation's largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization. He says this implicates her as a Mexican separatist who wants to take back the American southwest for Mexico.

Please. Can it get any more absurd?

Scraping together a series of thin assertions and associations that have long ago been answered (and answered and answered) on NCLR's website, (click on "The Truth about NCLR"), Tancredo fashions a radical straw man for himself to rail against in his endless pursuit of an anti-immigration agenda he has championed for years.

That he gets people to listen to this nonsense is what we find amazing.

Krikorian of CIS joined in yesterday trying to give Tancredo's rant some credence by harping on the term "La Raza," as in "The National Council of La Raza." Both Tancredo and CIS claim this term translates pejoratively into "The Race" instead of "the people" or "the community" as we use it (not unlike the way the Navajo use the term "the Dine"). Instead of quoting the man who coined the term, former Mexico Secretary of Education José Vasconcelos, who spoke of "La Raza Cósmica" as an ethnicity that welcomes diversity, CIS quotes others who claim a more sinister agenda is afoot.

How about quoting us? It's our name. We know what it means. We're happy to share.

But no. That's not where they are on this. Tancredo's latest missive states:

"Designated minority victim groups are free to promote their anti-white racist agenda, while any whites who fight back are playing 'racial politics.'"

The politics of hate and fear are not new to our country. We've seen them before. We know what they look like. Right now, they look a lot like Tom Tancredo and Mark Krikorian.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janet-mur ... 51584.html

The Cosmic Race
By Mark Krikorian, July 29, 2009

The National Council of La Raza has just wrapped up its annual conference in Chicago. While I think Tom Tancredo was engaging in hyperbole when he described La Raza as "a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses" (that describes instead MEChA and the Brown Berets), there's more to the comparison than people might realize.

La Raza's attempt to explain away their name as meaning "the people" or "the community" instead of "the race" notes correctly, and approvingly, that the phrase was coined by former Mexican secretary of education Jose Vasconcelos in the 1920s as "La Raza Cosmica." But maybe they didn't look closely enough at the theoretical underpinnings of the concept. Here's what Guillermo Lux and Maurilio Vigil wrote about it in Aztlan: Essays on the Chicano Homeland:

The concept of La Raza can be traced to the ideas and writings of Jose Vasconcelos, the Mexican theorist who developed the theory of la raza cosmica (the cosmic or super race) at least partially as a minority reaction to the Nordic notions of racial superiority. Vasconelos developed a systematic theory which argued that climatic and geographic conditions and mixture of Spanish and Indian races created a superior race. The concept of La Raza connotes that the mestizo is a distinct race and not Caucasian, as is technically the case.

In other words, La Raza really is the Master Race, but rather than based on notions of racial purity, La Raza's inherent, biological superiority is based on its hybridity, on the mixing in Latin America of, in Vasconcelos's words, "the black, the Indian, the Mongol, and the white." La Raza tries to whitewash (you should pardon the expression) this by writing that "this is an inclusive concept, meaning that Hispanics share with all other peoples of the world a common heritage and destiny." Not really; what it really means is that Hispanics, and specifically Mestizos, are superior to those of us unfortunate enough not to be part of the cosmic race.

So, "der Nationalrat des Volkes" is not so far off after all.

http://www.cis.org/Krikorian/MeaningOfLaRaza

The Huff Post won't let me log in. Guess they didn't like my previous replies and have blocked my account.

As usual anyone who differs in opinion is wrong on every issue....well LaRaza call your self what you want, your actions speak louder than your name ever will, and your actions say it all..

Go Tancredo!!!

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-165964.html


Tom Tancredo sits in for Peter Boyles, KHOW in Denver

I wish Tancredo would have his permanent OWN show and not just be a "fill in".