Posted on 10/14/2003 12:45:53 PM PDT by mrustow
As I write this column, a bit of harmless, racist, fluff is transpiring on the TV screen: The Hispanic Day Parade. A celebration of Latin "pride." The hosts are alleged journalists Jim Watkins, who is white, and Lolita Lopez, who is Hispanic, with Hispanic reporter Matt Garcia working the street (the announcers note that reporter Marysol Castro, who worked with Garcia in 2002, is on vacation in Costa Rica, or she’d be there, too). The parade this year was dedicated to the memory of Latin singer, Celia Cruz, who died on July 16 at the age of "around 79." Lolita Lopez, who is apparently an expert on both Latin and non-Latin – i.e., ALL – cultures, tells us, "I think it’s hard for non-Hispanics to understand how important Celia was to Hispanics."
Imagine if a white TV host said, "I think it’s hard for non-whites to understand how important Frank Sinatra was to whites." He’d be fired and whitelisted from the industry, before you could say, "KKK." But let a Hispanic mouth such racist twattle, and she’ll get a promotion.
Music is universal; anyone who loves music can appreciate Frank Sinatra. Likewise, to the degree Celia Cruz’s singing was great -- having heard very little of her music, I’m in no position to judge -- anyone can appreciate it. Granted, an English-speaker may have an advantage with Sinatra, just as a Spanish-speaker may have an advantage with Cruz, but one’s racial or ethnic background will not help one. (And language fluency is more important for appreciating the lyrics, rather than the singer.)
And yet, Lopez and Watkins do not appreciate Cruz as a singer. Their concern is with "how important Celia was to Hispanics." Thus is something universal – art – hijacked and turned into the private property of racist "pride." Thus does any Latin ignoramus become an "expert" on music written or performed by any Latin, the way every black ignoramus today thinks he is an "expert" on any and all music (and non-music, i.e., hip hop) ever performed by blacks.
The hosts then read a trivia question: Who was the 1940s Hollywood love goddess, who was born in Mexico as Margarita Carmen Cansino? I immediately shouted out, "Rita Hayworth!" (When my mother came for a visit later that day, and I told her the question, she refused to even say, "Rita Hayworth," responding simply, "Everyone knows that!")
Actually, she was born in Manhattan, but who’s quibbling?
When Watkins and Lopez come back on, the hosts – who apparently have never seen any of Hayworth’s many wonderful movies, launch into a lecture on white racism, though without using the phrase.
Lolita Lopez, who reacts as if she were hearing the name Rita Hayworth for the first time, informs us that "people didn’t know that" Hayworth was Hispanic. Watkins adds, helpfully, that "Maybe it was because it was not so popular for someone to be" Hispanic back then. "Not so popular," as in THOSE RACIST WHITES.
And now, to the facts. As my mother noted, everyone knew that Rita Hayworth was a Latin; that contributed to her mystique, and she became a huge star playing a hot tamale, Gilda.
However, the real reason Rita Hayworth wasn’t known as a "Hispanic," was that she wasn’t one. Her father, dancer (and son of a dancer) Eduardo Cansino, immigrated to America from Spain in 1913; Rita was born in Manhattan on October 17, 1918. Until a few years ago, "Hispanic" referred to countries that had been conquered by Spain, and where Spanish was spoken, but not to Spain itself. Hispanic nationalists then decided to eliminate the distinction between conqueror and conquered, as regards Spain, replacing it in the role of conqueror and colonial power -- history be damned -- with the U.S.
Since Hayworth’s mother, Volga (whose maiden name was Hayworth), was Irish-English, Hayworth would more accurately be described as Anglo-Irish than as Hispanic, but with cultural/racial imperialism, one need have only one drop of the privileged culture, to be defined by it. (One drop of culture? Hey, I’m not the one who started using culture as synonymous now with race, now with religion; I just follow matters where they lead.) If anything, it was Hayworth’s Anglo-Irish roots which were suppressed. Heck, it would have been more accurate, had she been identified as being of Jewish descent (on her father's side), than as Hispanic. Where's the ADL, when you need it!
Semantics aside, far from hiding the Latin portion of her background, Hayworth’s first film studio, Fox, reportedly exaggerated her Latin side, by dying her dark brown hair black. Later, producers had her hair colored red, and eventually, auburn, but she often played Latins (in Blood and Sand, You Were Never Lovelier, The Loves of Carmen, and countless supporting roles in B movies early in her career).
As Hayworth-scholar and webmistress Cynthia Claudia De La Hoz wrote me, “During the 30's and 40's Latins were ‘in.’ Especially when it came to the dances - rumbas, congas, tangos, cha cha's. And they did love to play up Rita's Latin side for certain roles. With Rita's look she could be an exotic temptress one minute and an all-American sweetheart the next. That's part of the reason she was Columbia Pictures' greatest asset and audiences loved her. If you read old articles you wouldn't read ‘Rita's mother is half English and half Irish,’ but they would say ‘Rita's father is Spanish’ and they often included pictures of she and him from their days as the ‘Dancing Cansinos.’”
Indeed, not only did the Latin branch of Hayworth’s family tree contribute to her mystique, but it took on a life of its own. Hayworth was reportedly the inspiration behind the classic 1954 movie, starring Ava Gardner, that Joseph Mankiewicz wrote and directed, The Barefoot Contessa. Contessa recounts the life of actress "Maria Vargas," who was discovered by a ruthless Hollywood producer (billionaire Howard Hughes) as a barefoot-dancing, impoverished Spanish peasant. Like Hayworth, "Maria" chose her men poorly, and ended up with an Italian aristocrat who murdered her; Hayworth had in 1949 married, and in early 1953 divorced, Muslim Prince Aly Khan of Pakistan. There the similarities ended – although she was discovered by a Hollywood producer while dancing, Rita Hayworth was never poor, was born and raised in the U.S., and was the third generation of a family of moderately successful dancers, The Dancing Cansinos.
(At the time, some observers believed Contessa was based on the life of its star, Ava Gardner, who grew up barefoot in rural North Carolina, and also had notoriously bad luck with men.)
With blonde Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth was one of the two most popular pin-up girls among American G.I.s and flyboys during World War II. Her many wonderful pictures include Gilda, The Lady from Shanghai, Pal Joey, The Story on Page One, Separate Tables and They Came to Cordura. Hayworth was a lovely dancer, but could not sing; her singing voice was always dubbed. Although she made her mark in musicals and light comedies, in the late 1940s through the 1950s, she developed into a solid dramatic actress. Hayworth had five unhappy marriages – to Edward C. Judson, Orson Welles, Prince Aly Khan, singer Dick Haymes and screenwriter James Hill.
Sadly, Rita Hayworth was stricken, while still in her forties (some of her friends have claimed the onset was even earlier), with premature senility, which was then renamed "Alzheimer’s disease." She suffered increasing difficulty remembering her lines; by the time she was in her early fifties, the job proved impossible.
For years before Hayworth’s death on 1987, at the age of 68, supermarket tabloids incorrectly identified her bizarre behavior as stemming from being a drunk. In her last years, her daughter, Princess Yasmin Khan, cared for her. The publicity surrounding Hayworth’s early demise, however, and a fundraising and publicity campaign begun and continued into the present by her daughter, provided the greatest spur to support for, and research into senility/Alzheimer’s. No one who knew anything about Rita Hayworth’s life would fail to mention the Alzheimer’s connection.
All of this would be news to Lolita Lopez. We live in a time in which well-to-do ignoramuses are designated "experts" on people and subjects based on the flimsiest, demographic connection.
Later in the broadcast, Jim Watkins shows colorfully clad South American dancers, and says the costumes and dance expressed the “anger” of the people at being enslaved, but never mentions that it was the Spaniards who were the slave masters. (School children today are taught that only white American men were slave masters.) The sage Lolita Lopez adds, regarding the costumes, that there’s a "deeper meaning" to things that seem ordinary.
Considering Watkins and Lopez’ huge credibility problem, I’m skeptical, to say the least, about their slave dancer story.
And so, Lopez and Watkins encourage Hispanics watching the broadcast to hate innocent whites (but not Spaniards), based on non-existent, past "racism." As Lopez emphasizes, the audience is "absorbing everything."
The lies spread by Jim Watkins and Lolita Lopez are, unfortunately, all too typical of today’s mainstream media reporters, and of educators, as well.
The Hispanic youngsters in the parade’s TV audience attend schools where teachers and administrators – many of whom are themselves illiterate in English – typically refuse to speak English to their Hispanic students. That’s the real face of "pride." These racist, incompetent "educators" fill children’s heads with the notion that they are victims of "discrimination," and that it doesn’t matter what they do to improve their lot.
It’s no wonder that at 44.1%, Latin immigrants have by far the highest high school dropout rate of any group in New York City, almost three times the overall rate of 16%, and over three times the non-Hispanic rate. And when the dropouts fail to get jobs, they will know why – "discriminacion!"
The same Hispanic ethnic gangsters who deprive Hispanic kids of an education, then demand money for "dropout prevention programs" (read: more patronage jobs for Hispanic ethnic gangsters).
Not only do Hispanic "educators" refuse to teach Hispanic children English, but like "news people" such as Jim Watkins and Lolita Lopez, they deliberately teach them lies.
Howard Schwach, the longtime editor of the newspaper, The Wave, which serves the Rockaway area of Queens, recently retired after over thirty years as a classroom teacher and social studies curriculum (and textbook) writer within the New York City school system. In the September 19 edition of The Wave, Schwach wrote of the propaganda foisted on the world by the schools and by National Public Radio (NPR), which once came to Far Rockaway IS (Intermediate School) 53 "for three days to do a story on the need for an increased Bilingual program – a program that destroys Hispanic kids but is the darling of Latino politicians everywhere…."
"When the story aired, however, there was a segment about the history being taught at the school decrying the fact that a Hispanic man … played a big part in the Confederacy. In fact, he was billed as being ‘more important to the Confederacy than Robert E. Lee.’
"He never existed."
Schwach told how such lies are spread by the New York City teacher’s union, the United Federation of Teachers, and the New York City Education Department (the newly renamed Board of Education), under the guise of "authentic learning." Authentic learning propagandists insist that unless history is rewritten – like pseudo-historical Hollywood movies and TV shows -- to place non-existent blacks and Hispanics in prominent historical roles, kids from those groups will not be interested in learning. "Authentic learning" is the multicultural culmination of "relevance."
(If the propagandists were logical, they would realize that their claims imply that it is impossible to teach Hispanic kids: Either they will ignore teachers, or demand flattering lies from them.)
For better or worse, such demands are not made in the name of white kids.
(Schwach has also written of how the UFT trains teachers to instruct children that a non-existent black woman was one of the leaders of the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, in order to engage black children.)
Just imagine how those same students would likely react to someone who later on, destroyed their illusions about the precious Hispanic role in the Confederacy. And why would an educator seek to elevate Hispanic kids’ self-esteem, by inventing a hero who was a pillar of the slave system? Do these people even know what the Civil War was about?!
The interviewers were shocked at Schwach’s refusal to write curricula based on lies, and refused to hire him. Maybe they could get some help from NPR and the WB.
And as retired New York City assistant principal Edwin Selzer observed in a sworn affidavit published in the anthology, The Failure of Bilingual Education, "once a child was in a bilingual education program, he ... was never mainstreamed into regular English-speaking classes." Selzer reported, too, that "many students graduating from Eastern District High School were illiterate in both Spanish and English."
Bilingual education is the greatest method ever devised, to arrest language acquisition.
At the top of this column, I spoke of "harmless, racist fluff." I need to revise that statement. This stuff is not harmless.
In case you’d like to complain about the WB’s combination of racism and ignorance, its news director, Karen Scott, can be reached at (212) 210-2411, and e-mailed via links at this page.
BTTT for an awesome post
I'm a former Midwest-based newspaperman with several years experience covering the crime & courts beat both as a writer and photog, initially for the old Chicago Daily News before it went under in 1978, then several newsmagazines and the short-lived St Louis Sun befor wrapping up my tenure in the Midwest as a syndicated columnist [no, please do NOT refer to me as *a syndicate guy*] for the Illinois/Indiana-based Hyatt newspaper chain.
I'm semiretired, but remain a consultant on those and other matters, both for newspapermen on deadlines looking for good story details and for book authors trying to fill chapters, check their facts or grab a little reasonably knowledgable informed speculation. And I have a couple of research projects on the burner even now....
My maternal granddad was a New Jersey guy, at one time the state commander of the NJ Veterans of Foreign Wars. I heard a few stories from him about the way things were done, and in Chicago and environs saw them put in practice and realized the old boy was not spoofing me a bit.
-archy-/-
But what on earth is an "Anglo" --- why are you singling out the British here?
You're welcome, and feel free to ping me any time you'd like my estimate of any sort of related or derivitive news or FReeppostings...which can cover quite a chunk.
-archy-/-
There is now, and it's all your doing! Am I about to have fun the next time I have to fill out any form or inquiry- ..... And if they do not like my Britannic response, those filthy racists can just go to hell.
Well, as a proud Britannic, you will need your own Roman coin from back in the days when we were all one Roman Empire.
Here ya go:
Bronze As of Emperor Antoninus Pius honoring Britannia
Here ya go:
Hey, cool. I suppose you could say that *All in all, we're just another brick in the Hadrian's wall....
-archy-/-
I didn't coin these ridiculous terms terms, FITZ. I am merely passing them on. If you note, I wrote "so-called Anglos".
This B.S. is even in the medical literature: Infant-feeding practices among middle-class Anglos and Hispanics.
The way "Anglo" is used nowadays in the U.S., it means a white, American-born, English-speaking person who does not have a Spanish surname. The fact that the so-called "Anglo" could be 100% ethnically German, Polish, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Greek or Lithuanian does not seem to matter.
Now, the way that the American news media labels someone such as myself depends on the situation.
If the article is about how successful my medical practice is, I would be labelled an "Hispanic" or a "Latino".
If the article is about how I did something that the news media totally disapproves of, I would be labelled a "Cuban exile".
If the article is about how I spray-painted racist graffitti on a black man's house, I would be labelled a "white man".
I know you didn't ---- "anglo" is a completely silly word they invented --- at least with "hispanic" most have at least one ancestor who spoke Spanish but maybe nothing else in common. "Anglo" is even more vague because their ancestors may have nothing in common whatsoever.
We apparently think alike. (See Post 114 above.) :-)
The Guatemalan Indian and the Mexican mestizo were never called "Hispanic" in their own country. Only when they cross into the U.S. are they given that name which, incidently, they hate.
It is exacly analogous to declaring that English Speaking Native Americans will, from now on, be called "British". The term not only strips the Indios of their Indian roots. It also strips the Spanish European of his ancient roots.
The point that Nasstarr and I are trying to make is that the term "hispanic", in the way you are using it on this post and in the way that the American media uses it, is a co-opted term whose meaning has been totally turned on it's head.
Nowhere else in the world except in certain U.S. circles and not in Spain, not in Europe and not in Latin America, is the term "Hispanic" used as a euphimism for "non-white Spanish speaker".
In Spain, "Hispano" (from Hispania) specifically means Spain as in for example, III Seminario Hispano-Portugués de Periodistas España y Portugal en el nuevo horizonte europeo
Now, the Portuguese will take exeption to this and protest that Lusitania was just as much a part of Roman Hispania as Spain was and that the Spaniards have no right to take the name solely for themselves.
A few years ago, on the Iberian History Discussion List ESPORA-L which is populated by posters in Iberia as well as the Americas, a thread began about the "Spanish Armada" and a Portuguese historian posted that a more proper term would be the "Hispanic Armada" as Portugal also had ships in it. (On ESPORA-L, English, Spanish and Portuguese were all used. The Portuguese wrote his "Hispanic Armada" post in Portuguese.) A Spaniard then chided the Portuguese about now wanting Portugal to be part of Spain as, the Spaniard claimed, Hispano and Hispanic specifically meant Spain.
The Portuguese properly corrected the Spaniard as follows:
Sender: History of the Iberian Peninsula
From: ***** <******@INDIVIDUAL.EUNET.PT>
Subject: Re: Spanish Armada
To: Multiple recipients of list ESPORA-L
About de Spanish an the Hispanic, the question is that spanish is from Spain - excluding Portugal - and Hispanic is from Iberia Peninsula or Hispania, including Portugal.
Those are the two ways that the term "Hispanic" is used in the Iberian Peninsula itself. The Spaniards have taken it exclusively for themselves and the Portuguese rightly point out that they are "Hispanic" too.
Now, the Spaniard comes to the U.S. and his 2,200 years of cultural history are summarilty thrown out the window by being informed by some that "Hispanic" refers not to his ancient civilization that produced Trajan, Hadrian and the Senecas but to the non-white Mesoamerican Indians who hate being called "Hispanics" as much as the Irish hate being called "Brits".
A recently arrived Spaniard, before he is acquainted with U.S. Politically Correct euphimisms will take it as a matter of fact that he is himself a Hispanic and that the Mexican with mixed Indian apearance is a Mexicano Mestizo and that the Mexican with no apparent trace of white ancestry is a Mexicano Indio. The Spaniard, being a jovial sort and having studied his English in Europe might readily admit that he is a gay fellow.
Only later, when he learns the code words, is he forced to foresake the name of ancient Hispania and make it perfectly clear that he is not gay.
The absurdity of these euphimism was recently illustrated by the newest member a our medical community, a Mexican surgeon who hails from Mexico City. His office nurse asked him what ethnicity label he preferred. Hispanic? Latino? Chicano? What?
He replied, "Why don't you just use 'Mexican'? That is, after all, what I am."
You're projecting, Disruptor, 10/15/2003. Show where Stix uses the term "Hispanics" racially. In fact, he explicitly criticizes such usage. You are dishonestly projecting the usage Stix criticized onto Stix himself. I guess you're hoping that most people reading your post won't have read the article.
Why shouldn't Stix get bent out of shape, when a TV reporter makes a racist remark? You're not bent out of shape, because you are pleased by racist remarks, as long as whites are on the receiving end of them.
Finally, Stix's remark that "Hispanic" originally only referred to the colonies of Spain [where on earth does he get this from???], and therefore, Rita Hayward whose father was from Spain is not Hispanic is the height of absurdity.
He used longtime American usage. Your pathetic word games are what is absurd -- and ignorant!
And it's Hayworth, not "Hayward." You have the singular distinction of being the only poster who misspelled her name. And that's because, like the reporters Stix criticized, you have no idea who the hell Rita Hayworth is! Talk about ignorant!
Let me guess -- you're used to being able to race-bait people under conditions more to your liking, where someone you attack can only defend himself at the price of getting flunked in a class, thrown out of school, or fired from his job.
I hope you hang around FR a while, so you can get your bigoted brains beat in, on a regfular basis, before you slink on back to DU, with your tail between your legs, and claim to your comrades that you showed up those "evil FReepers"!
He used longtime American usage.
As I noted in my Post 114, the use of the term "Hispanic" in it's current P.C. context is very recent. In 1973, Webster's Dictionary defined it in it's proper form.
The use of the P.C. codeword "Hispanic" to mean "non-white Mexican" is as recent as the use of the P.C. codeword "immigrant" to mean "illegal alien" and the use of the P.C. codeword "choice" to mean third trimester abortion.
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