Editorial:
It goes without saying that the white folk in Arizona are scared and they see the enemy as the His-panic community. How else can you explain the sudden rush of xenophobic laws intended to marginalize the Hispanic community?
First it was SB1070 that made it a crime to be in Arizona without papers which singles out Hispanics as the focus of this law, and in turn leads to racial profiling. Now this week Governor Jan Brewer signed into law HB 2281, a bill that prohibits schools from teaching classes designed to teach students of color about their heritage and history because such classes promote resentment and encourage students to want to “overthrow” the U.S. government. Such classes, the bill says, advocate ethnic solidarity instead of treating students as individual people.
State schools chief Tom Horne, a Republican running for office, has been pushing for the bill for years ever since he learned that Hispanic civil rights activist Dolores Huerta in 2006 told students that “Republicans hate Latinos,” according to a recently story. Horne went on to say that ethnic studies and Chicano history classes encourage Latino students to believe they’ve been oppressed by white people. Horne cited a book on one class’s reading list as particularly suspect: Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, by Rodolfo Acuna, a leading scholar in Chicano studies at Cal State University, Northridge.
Then there is the move that the Arizona Department of Education made that banned teachers with accents to teach English – jingoistic. All ESL (English as a Second Language) teachers could be without a job.
These political actions remind us very much of the actions of Hazelton, PA., in 2006 whose political leadership passed a law that penalized landlords for renting to Mexicans.
Hazelton was a small town that was pretty much dying a slow death ever since the mining business left town. There was no future there and the young folks were moving. In this void migrant workers moved in and this once dying town started to take on a new life.
While the Hispanic community grew, the power structure which was still controlled by the white folks saw the growing Hispanic population as a threat to their power. To maintain this power they looked to control this growing population which led to the political structure to generate a law that intended to control this growth. This law never went into affect; it was struck down by the courts.
On a much grander scale the power structure in Arizona is feeling the same affect. The Hispanic community is growing and the Republican power structure which has control of this state can see the handwriting on the wall and in the next decade they see their power slipping and as we have often repeated on these editorial pages, those in power never give it up, not without a fight.
The white power structure in Arizona is fighting to stay in power, in the meantime the Hispanic community continues to grow and the political power will shift to the Hispanic community.