Dear White man...

[kpete]

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS TO MARCH IN L.A. TODAY
by Steve O @ 7:21 am
They will be protesting a bill passed in December by the House of Representatives. The bill was sponsered by ::shocker:: Republican James Sensenbrenner and would make it a federal crime, instead of a civil offense, for undocumented workers to live in the country. http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2006-03-25T013042Z_01_N24276125_RTRUKOC_0_US-RIGHTS-IMMIGRATION-MARCH.xml&rpc=22




Dear White man,

I wonder if the Indians thought this way when you landed at Plymouth Rock. See what happens when you don’t have tough border security–you end up with all these foreigners cutting down your trees, scalping your heads, raping your women, providing you with blankets laced with smallpox and generally being a complete and total nuisance.

Sincerely,

Fucked Indian

http://www.teambio.org/category/contributors/politics/

[mdmc]

1. proudly

R / :kick:

[Retired AF Dem]

2. OMG

I'm a single white guy and I'm the cause of all the worlds problems.

[kpete]

6. No, I married a white guy

We love you too....

[ClayZ]

8. "We are all grandchildren now!"

Told to me by a "Medicine Man"!

[flamingyouth]

16. I had a prof in college who actually told a guy in class that.

She taught an entry-level sociology class.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

21. Heck, I've read it

right here on DU. Whites are the most violent race, yada, yada.

Racism works in all directions.

[noiretextatique]

33. not in america

the truth is a bitter pill, but it is long past time that americans swallow it. there is a long and inglorius history in this country of whites oppressing people of color in this country, and it is NOT "racist" to state that truth. it is historical (and present) FACT.
what is ingenuous and off-topic is pretending that it didn't happen, or insinuating that the mere discussion of what did happen (and continues to happen) somehow oppresses all white people who weren't actively participating. that pretense is simply self-serving denial, which is historically and intellectually bankrupt whining, and the chief privelege of being white in america.

[Critters2]

35. Admitting you have a problem is step 1

;)

[helderheid]

3. rec'd

[ClayZ]

4. K and R

:kick:

[FreakinDJ]

5. Welcome to the WEDGE ISSUE of 06 / 08 Elections

Dear Dems

We are going to lose on this one

Sorry to be so blunt.

[ClayZ]

7. Keep asking everyone where their Great Great Great Grandparents

came from!!!!

What a bunch of hypocrites! GAWD... I am beginning to think "STUPID" and "MEAN" is in their water!

And they all have WELCOME mats on their front porches!

[proud2BlibKansan]

10. I can remember hearing the same thing about Civil Rights in the 60s

[High Plains]

17. This is an issue that is splitting Republicans.

The punisher xenophobic nativist brigade is lined up behind the Sensenbrenner House bill, which has already passed. The corporate crew lines up behind Bush's guest worker program.

Ted Kennedy and John McCain (sorry) have a better, more human and progressive bill. Democrats should line up behind that. Increased enforcement, but also an amnesty for hard-working undocumented.

[Cleita]

26. Thank you. It's really a matter of respect for these workers

as human beings. After all, we who have European blood in us came in here as illegal immigrants initially, and legally by permission of the illegals.

I really hate this blame the victim rhetoric that everyone is falling for. The rich have no intention of stopping immigration. They have too much cheap labor to gain from it. The bill is only a palaver to appeal to the racism of those who oppose immigration and will create a criminal underclass of people who only want to work and have a better life.

[Critters2]

36. Bluntness is appropriate when you're right

[Cleita]

9. I don't get what you're saying.

Are you saying we should close our borders so that the immigrants don't cut our trees down, etc.? Considering that most of the immigrants are Native Americans isn't that a little hypocritical?

[radio4progressives]

12. huh?

:wtf: "most immigrants are Native Americans" ??????

did you make a typo/boo boo?

[_testify_]

13. many immigrants from Mexico have Native North American blood

no doubt about that.

[Name removed]

15. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Bad Thoughts]

37. Mestizos

Mexicans annexed by the US in 1847 mixed frequently with the native populations. Many who have immigrated since then have come from the poorest parts of Mexico where mixing between Europeans and Indians was less prevalent--they have been the losers of land reforms and the creation of agricultural enterprise in Mexico.

[BlooInBloo]

14. Are you high?

Um, being brown skinned and being Native American aren't the same thing. They just aren't.

There aren't a lot more "native mexicans" (dunno if there's another name for the group - sorry) than there are Native Americans.

I would guesstimate that the "average" Mexican is no more than 1/2 native - anyone out there with better knowledge?

[High Plains]

19. It's la raza cosmica, vato.

About 10 or 15% of Mexicans are pure-blooded Indians. Maybe 5% are pure-blooded Europeans (yes, there are blonde and even red-headed Mexicans). Maybe 1% have African blood. All the rest are mixed race, Indian and European.

If you go to Mexico City, you will be struck by the essentially monochromatic color of the population. Almost everybody is brown.

[Cleita]

23. The immigrants who come here are rural and mostly

from areas that still speak their native indian language. They are mostly native American. I wish someone actually did a meaningful study about this because it would throw a different light on the problem.

[BlooInBloo]

24. !vale - gracias para los numeros mejores!

[Cleita]

25. If you go to my mother's country, Chile, you will see the same

thing as many Europeans immigrated there as well over the centuries. The thing is that those aren't the immigrants you are seeing in this country working in the fields and restaurants.

My roomate in high school was the daughter of the Mayor of Sonora, Mexico, very European looking, impeccable Spanish and she immigrated when she married her very rich husband and lives in Beverly Hills now. I'm sure there isn't a drop of Indian blood in her.

The restaurants cater to her as a customer. She is not hired as a worker. The workers are a different class and are mostly from rural Mexico or other countries in Central America.

Go to your library and rent a copy of "El Norte" about a Mayan brother and sister who immigrate to Los Angeles. They were escaping being killed by their government in Guatemala but must pretend that they are Mexican to get along. It's a very eye opening movie about immigration although it's about thirty years old.

[Cleita]

22. Yes, me.

Having worked in the restaurant business in Los Angles, for the last twenty years of my working life I worked with many so-called Spanish speaking workers. Since I speak Spanish I was often called upon as an interpreter. I found that I too had something of a problem communicating with the workers.

It turns out after talking to them that Spanish was their second language too. Their first language was the native language of their village or area of Mexico or Central America that they came from. Also, I read statistics that most mestizos are only a quarter European.

Your upper classes who stand a good chance of being mostly European don't work in restaurants chopping onions and washing dishes. Most likely they own them. So we are dealing with an underclass that is below another underclass.

[radio4progressives]

11. k&r - great post..

:kick: :applause: :thumbsup:

[Minnesota_Lib]

18. Some of the bill's provisions are fairly scarey....

http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=leg_analysis_hr4437

Among some of the more draconian provisions (IMO):

Repeals the “visa lottery”

Eliminates birthright citizenship

Wow...the implications are scarey.

Substantially increase detention space in order to end the federal government’s “catch and release” policy. While the bill does mandate the use of “all possible options to cost effectively increase available detention capacities. . . ,” it does not require a certain number of additional beds nor provide money for increased detention capacity.

Does the word "gulag" come to mind?

Require an employer to terminate the employment of an illegal alien if the verification system informs the employer that the alien is not authorized to work in the U.S.

Note: no criminal prosecution of employers, but increased "detention" for the undocumented worker. Figures.

Rep. Shadegg (AZ-3) offered an amendment to increase criminal penalties for document fraud and crimes of violence committed by illegal aliens. This amendment passed by voice vote.

Mention increasing penalties for commiting hate crimes, and these same wankers scream "there is already a law against violent crimes and additional penalties are uneeded." But I guess adding extra time on a sentence is ok for merely being an illegal alien...I mean, it's not as if they beat some poor guy half to death for being gay. Excuse me while I puke.

So, in a nut shell, this would create gulag-type, overcrowded prisons, increased detention for all and extra long sentences for those that did commit a crime. Hmmm...could we possibly be looking a forced-labor camps? Why pay them minimum wage or less when they can be used as slave labor. Now there's a thought. This could be a wet-dream for the right's corporate backers.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

20. I won't argue with scalping, rape, trees and general nusiance

but evidently there is some level of controversy about the blanket story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_American_indigenous_peoples


But I'll agree it was a bad day for the natives when Columbus showed up and it was downhill all the way from there.

[eridani]

27. Reading Guns, Germs and Steel should have helped people to get that

There were disastrous epidemics with no direct contact from Europeans at all. The basic problem was that the natives hadn't spent the last 5000 years living with their cows and pigs and chickens and building up immunity to diseases that migrated from livestock. The smallpox blanket thing is like your neighbor dumping a bucket of slops into your basement where the sewer has backed up all over everything. It demonstrates that he is an asshole, but it has no effect on your general situation.

[Ignacio Upton]

30. Correct

there WAS genocide and oppression against the Native Americans on behalf of the Spanish, but a lot of the deaths came from not maintained infarstructure and sewage systems built by the Aztecs or Incas, since the Spanish didn't know how to (read the book "1491" for examples) a lack of immunity to European diseases was also a problem, but as far as we know the Native Americans weren't killed through an act of biological warfare, just a careless placement of disease carriers.

[burrowowl]

34. The British and Americans

used the blanket technique on each other too. Many of the Redcoats were born in America and the American settlers born in America didn't have immunity either.
Just a history footnote.

[RoyGBiv]

38. Not some ...

There is no real controversy among historians except in how the information on which this myth is based is interpreted. It's a myth with a very small kernel of truth based on *one* piece of evidence indicating that someone once wondered whether it would be possible as an effective measure to "clear" the land of natives. The kernel is that, yes, some people were perfectly willing to entertain the thought of wholesale genocide. No concrete evidence exists that this actually did take place however.

What American doctors did do in the early part of the 19th century was essentially use natives as test subjects in attempts to learn about the disease and develop "cure." That may sound horrible, and it would be in a modern context, but at the time, not a lot of rules or even thoughts of rules about such things were envisioned. Many of these individuals doing the testing were well-intentioned since natives were very hard hit by smallpox outbreaks, moreso than European descendants who had better developed immune systems for dealing with it. Unfortunately, often the attempt at curing/preventing the disease actually caused epidemics within localized populations.

[nicknameless]

28. Illegal immigrants aren't going anywhere. The cabal's cronies need them

for cheap labor. Notice they didn't make the employment of illegal immigrants a crime.
Criminalizing illegal immigration will provide a powerful blackmail tool for the employers -- a favorite weapon of the * regime.
Most likely, mistreated workers aren't going to seek to have their grievances redressed, now that they're "criminals".
Imagine how much more crap they'll have to be willing to take from the likes of WalMart.

[troubleinwinter]

29. You nailed it precisely.

My husband builds wineries for wildly rich people in northern California, and converses with them about all manner of things. I asked him what the wealthy winery owners were saying... if they (mostly Republicans) were concerned about the illegal immigrant problem. Well, of course, THEY are NOT talking about THAT at all.

They want those workers. The owners live in $35,000,000 mansions, and many of the workers live cramped in decrepit, lopsided, falling down, rotted, ancient trailers (the part of lovely Napa Valley Wine Country area that tourists never see).

If a few multi millionaire recreational winery owners were hurled into jail, things might change.

[Strelnikov_]

31. Agree. Thats Why Whatever Bill Emerges Will Appear To Be Taking

a hard line, when in reality nothing will materially change in the supply of labor to the labor black market.

This is why there is the highlight on border security. They will make a big show of it, lots of guns and uniforms, blown up a few brown people good for the benefit of faux 'news' viewers, have some highly publicized mass arrests, maybe arrest a few employers using illegals who are in arrears with their 'Pioneer' donations.

Basically, more 'shock and awe' for the sheeple.

And nothing will change.

Until the next election cycle.

Then rinse, repeat.

[Cleita]

32. Hallelujah!

Now they have a scapegoat that doesn't have a vote. When they went after women (body rights), they went after a demographic who could vote. But a real scapegoat with no rights? What a bonanza!

[stillcool]

39. I am so glad I read this thread....