Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, Victor Hanson [cool books to read .txt] 📗

not merely different, but often far worse at providing freedom and security for their people. But to maintain the fiction of cultural equality, our schools, while harrowing up the evil in the soil of America, have waffled on the fifty million or more killed by Mao and Stalin, the existence of slavery in contemporary Sudan, and the rampant corruption and lawlessness in Mexico today. In this regard, American schools have also completely failed to note the critical distinction between a multiracial and a multicultural society. The former welcomes all races to learn one language and heritage; such a society is found only in the present-day West. The latter encourages separate but purportedly equal languages and traditions, and is a prescription for disaster -  as we have seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia and much of India.

Serving side dishes of therapeutic history and imagery to each racial and ethnic group, an idea hatched in the 1970s, not only erodes the basis of national unity, but also emboldens the architects of separatism to demand even more concessions from appeasers in the deans' offices and legislatures. Suddenly we had racial enclaves throughout the university, segregated "theme" houses and graduation ceremonies, the institutionalization of racist assumptions, and set-asides in university admissions. Concessions denoted weakness, which was felt to be evidence of guilt arising over past prejudice, and that, in turn, justified more present concessions.

Almost all of our university research into issues of health, the environment and crime has become astonishingly separatist, and the racially charged ideas peddled in thousands of master's and doctoral theses have trickled down into our daily papers, to be digested by the general public. In one week alone, I read in our local newspaper the following five stories:

First, a "recent study" suggested that Hispanics were forced to breathe worse air than Anglos. The method of arriving at such a finding was never discussed, but apparently we were to imagine that power plants or polluting industries were deliberately placed in barrios. Am I supposed to believe that the bad air that I and thousands of white others breathe in the Central Valley is any different from what my Mexican neighbor three hundred yards away inhales? Does toxic air simply hover in one place while people stay put to breathe it in? Does Parlier, which is 99 percent Hispanic, have dark clouds of particulate matter while five miles away the town of Reedley, which is more white than Mexican-American, enjoys clear blue skies?

The next story reported that diabetes was more common among Mexican people after they arrived in the United States than it had been in Mexico - a result of their partaking in our malignant diet. Such an unfortunate statistic may be true. But the article's author teased out a further implication: that cheap American fast food, through nefarious corporate advertising, had been foisted particularly upon people of color and was contributing in a racist fashion to their premature deaths. Nowhere in the story was there an acknowledgment that Mexicans, like everyone else, must educate themselves as to the value of fruits and vegetables, and strive to avoid Coca Cola, beer, Big Macs and fries, with Twinkies for dessert. The article gave no statistics on diabetes and obesity among poor white people - a group that seems to have been no more successful in avoiding such lethally starchy, high-fat diets. Nor did it acknowledge that such unwholesome fare, while certainly unfavorable to well-being and longevity, might be safer in the short term than many of the foods and the water in rural Mexico that are laced with bacteria and parasites. Thus while Mexican aliens are perhaps becoming obese, they are now suffering far less from catastrophic dysenteries and malnutrition - and therefore, on the whole, living longer in America than they would in rural Mexico.

The third newspaper article, in advocating more medical interpreters for Mexican patients, alleged that local doctors on average spent far less time with Hispanics than with their white counterparts. Again, the methodology was never exactly specified. (What constituted "Hispanic" - one-quarter, one-half, three-quarters Mexican ancestry? Who and how many doctors or patients were interviewed and what were they asked?) But more importantly, the journalists did not address three or four obvious though unpleasant questions: Why should American doctors hire interpreters for patients inside America? Why does the Hispanic community not insist on more English immersion programs to ensure that the sick are able to communicate effectively and at length with their doctors? Why do not children or relatives who speak English interpret for patients instead of costly state translators? And finally, is this a distinctly American problem? Would the Mexican government worry much that Americans in Mexico did not understand Spanish - and therefore got shorter shrift from doctors - when they visited Mexican hospitals?

A fourth newspaper report alleged that more Mexicans than whites have been jailed under California's somewhat draconian "Three Strikes and You're Out" legislation. Again, the obvious question was never raised: Could it be because they were committing more third strikes than their white or Asian counterparts - and if so, why? Nor did the article wonder: If Mexicans were going to prison in large numbers for committing felonies such as murder, rape, theft and assault, who were their victims? Could it be mainly innocent Mexicans? The account also did not raise other issues such as whether Mexicans committed proportionally more violent crimes against Anglos than Anglos against Mexicans.

The final pertinent story I encountered in my week's reading centered on a number of aliens who have tragically died in the Arizona desert. The main theme of the article was that California's recent "fence" near San Diego and its increased border vigilance there, coupled with the American "paranoia" after 9/II, had caused dozens of poor immigrants to die of dehydration along the much more perilous and poorly demarcated routes through the desert. The reader was to conclude that overt racism had resulted in a policy to kill innocent Mexicans who simply wished to come to