Thread: Fox's remarks reflect Mexico's racial attitudes

This is and older article (2005), but it makes some fairly important points. This article makes me feel as though the discrimination in Mexico is being transferred to this country because apparently that is all they know. I don't think some of these folks understand the difference between race and nationality.
Citizens in every country are entitled to benefits and rights in their own country , non citizens are not.
Mexico has no right to demand that its citizens be allowed to over run another country and demand that it's citizens be bestowed the same rights and social monetary benefits or that country's citizens. All the while Mexico is stuffing the money in it's pockets. This is all about money, every bit of it.
I personally do not agree with the world citizens chant that I am hearing from the South, I think it is just a defensive argument to stall and get as much as can be gotten. I personally do not like to be colonized on my dollar.

http://www.azcentral.com/specials/sp...co-race19.html
Fox's remarks reflect Mexico's racial attitudes

Laurence Iliff and Lennox Samuels
Dallas Morning News
May. 19, 2005 12:00 AM


MEXICO CITY - President Vicente Fox's controversial comment about Blacks in the United States is typical of a Mexico that fails to recognize its own racist attitudes, even as skin tone and economic success move in near lockstep, analysts said Tuesday.

In the official census, Mexicans of African descent are not even counted as a distinct group. White Mexicans dominate TV programs and advertising. Most politicians have light brown skin or are white like Fox, whose mother is from Spain.

"Racism is very deeply ingrained here, but no one accepts (that fact)," said Sergio Aguayo, a longtime human rights activist. "What Fox said was part of the language of all Mexicans. The paradigm of beauty is white skin and blue eyes." advertisement




Of Mexico's 105 million people, 80 percent are mestizo (a mixture of Spanish and Indian descent), 10 percent are Indian and 10 percent are White, according to the polling firm MUND Americas.

What Fox said was: "There is no doubt that Mexican men and women, full of dignity, drive and a capacity for work, are doing the jobs that not even Blacks want to do there, in the United States."

Fox was speaking before a group of U.S. frozen-food processors in the Pacific Coast resort of Puerto Vallarta.

The president's remarks may have been impolitic, but they were based on the truth, said Robert Smith, a political science professor at San Francisco State University.

He said Fox was alluding to the fact that Black Americans are among the lowest-paid people in the United States and that "even they" would not accept certain jobs at those wages.

"I think the president may have spoken a little inelegantly, but the substance of his statement was correct," Smith said. "The massive number of immigrants has depressed the wages of low-wage workers, who historically have been disproportionately African-American."

Fox's words caused little outrage in Mexico, mostly because Mexicans are used to such talk.

"This is something he could say to me, something he could say privately, but not something a politician should say publicly," said Jorge Anorve Zapata, an elementary school teacher and African-Mexican from the Pacific Coast state of Guerrero.

"Of course it's racist, but the racism is implicit; it's like a joke," Anorve said. "He said it in an unconscious way, but he should not have said it."

In a country where there are virtually no prominent Black citizens, many Mexicans are accustomed to references to Black people that most Americans would consider offensive. For example, they often refer to dark-skinned people as negritos or "little black people." If challenged, they defend the term as an endearment.

In the cinema, on television, in magazines and on billboards, models are overwhelmingly White. Indian or dark-skinned people are routinely consigned to supporting roles.

Only one president of Mexico, Benito Juarez, in office from 1858 to 1872, has been full-blooded Indian. And one president, Vicente Guerrero, who served briefly in 1829, is believed to have had African blood.

Mexico imported slaves from Africa and has African-Mexican communities in Guerrero, Oaxaca and Veracruz states. Anorve helps organize an "Encounter of Black Mexico" every year.

But to many Mexicans, "we are invisible," Anorve said. There has been more focus in the past decade on Indian rights, he added, but not much recognition of Black Mexicans. "It's like we are moving in slow motion on this subject."

So what we are experiencing is like a crazy person who thinks that everyone is crazy but them?