Latino organizations dismiss George Zimmerman, question his ethnicity

Daily Caller ^ | 03/29/2012 | Caroline May

[maggief]

The death of Trayvon Martin has sent racial shock-waves through the country, and while the focus has largely been on anger from the black community, the fact remains that the alleged shooter, currently in hiding from vigilante threats, is a self-described Hispanic man.

But if George Zimmerman was hoping to find support in the Latino community, he should look elsewhere.

“The Latino community joins the African-American community and other communities in condemning George Zimmerman as what he is – a murderer and a racist,” Roberto Lovato, co-founder of the online Latino advocacy organization Presente.org, told The Daily Caller.

The group is acting on Trayvon’s behalf. Presente.org has joined with Color of Change to petition for the arrest of Martin’s murderer.

“Todos somos Trayvon! (We are all Trayvon!),” Presente.org wrote, urging supporters to sign the petition. The group also has a petition to condemn Geraldo Rivera for blaming Martin’s hoodie for his death. According to Lovato, the petition currently has 18,000 signatures.

La Raza has rallied for Martin with the civil rights community as well.

The organization’s urged so much in a March 22 post at the Huffington Post.

“NCLR joins allies in the civil rights community in calling for a real investigation for this grievous failure of justice,” president and CEO Janet Murguía wrote.

[nathanbedford]

Do you remember all those oh-so-reasonable pleas to withhold judgment on this affair until we were in full possession of the facts? Do you recall Republicans and conservatives pleading for the world not to leap to judgment but to wait for facts?

Nothing could have been more ineffectual. Pleas to the world not to leap to judgment succeeded only in granting the race baiters a head start.

Well, the facts are coming out now and they are proving to be utterly irrelevant. That is because the demagogues who exploited this affair as race baiters knew perfectly well that their target audience was indifferent to the facts on the ground and was interested only in personalities, but personalities only in terms of their racial identity.

It does not matter if Zimmerman is Hispanic or if there is a cut on the back of his head. It simply does not matter!

The whole process of projecting guilt was done exclusively by identifying the group identity of the participants.The whole opposition to racial profiling is a group identity movement. This has nothing to do with an Anglo-Saxon application of facts to law; it has only to do with tribal identity.

These people are utterly indifferent to facts, the entire matter is concluded once racial identity is established. As the facts come out and Zimmerman is vindicated at every turn there will be no change of attitude in the African-American community, the matter will simply trail off and die a whimpering death except to be revivified from time to time, especially before elections, as part of ghetto lore. It will live on into eternity as myth.

Therefore, it is hopeless to attempt to win over the African-American community which is utterly resistant to reason on this issue. The Republican angle should be to exploit the white blowback and to divide the Hispanic community from the Democrat party which is committing this shameless demagoguery.

The fact that the leaders of the Hispanic groups are coming out against Zimmerman indicates that these leaders are in the business of identity politics and remain tethered to the Democrat party. Moreover, if they debunk this sham they undermine their own posturing. This is a money game for the leaders and they cannot afford to shut the game down.

Whites, conservatives, Republicans, civic minded citizens, lovers of justice, all can exhort these groups to consider the facts and they will accomplish nothing and lose the political argument. We must go on the attack and make the Democrats pay with white independent voters and some Hispanics. It is a shame that this is being left for the most part to talk radio to do. Newt Gingrich certainly has struck the right tone but the chorus should be unanimous and stentorian, driven by real moral outrage.

[Maverick68]

Then the Latino gangs get involved...should be fun!

[Texan5]

Thank you-and to that point, even “Amerindians”, no matter where on the continent they are from have been mixed for countless centuries, according to DNA tests done by researchers. This whole fracas has got to have MLK spinning-he promoted color blindness, not this s***...

[DoughtyOne]

Agreed.

What’s interesting about this, is that these minority groups have sought to increase their numbers by counting people with even less than 50% of racial presence, as part of their group.

Now they’re trying to go the other direction. Perhaps they didn’t get the memo.

[Maverick68]

This is gonna backfire BIG TIME on the Dems.
They have become the party of the angry black guy and the media is helping to push that perception into the living rooms of Americans....I believe I could run a ham sammich against Obama and win if this keeps up!

[trappedincanuckistan]

“a murderer and a racist”

There was a trial last night that I didn’t know about?

[Texan5]

Anyone who has the intelligence of a rabbit would run away from a recommendation from Henry Cisneros-every non-liberal from Austin to SA knows what a pig he is...

[Texan5]

Just the one that has been going on in the media...

[kabar]

The term Hispanic, as dominated by the Office of Management and Budget, is used in the United States for people with origins in Spanish-speaking countries, like Mexico, Costa Rica. Hispanic is not a race, as the Chilean Nobel Prize Gabriela Mistral once said, "mi patria es mi lengua" (My fatherland is my language). Latino, from American Spanish, is used in some cases as an abbreviation for latino americano or "Latin American" and tends to be used interchangeably with Hispanic in the United States, despite the fact these two words are not synonyms. The term "Latin America" was used for the first time in 1861/1867, when the French occupied Mexico and wanted to be included in what has been known until then as "América Española" or "Spanish America".

The 1970 Census was the first time that a "Hispanic" identifier was used and data collected with the question. The definition of "Hispanic" has been modified in each successive census. The 2000 Census asked if the person was "Spanish/Hispanic/Latino".

"The terms "Hispanic" or "Latino" refer to persons who trace their origin or descent to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Spanish speaking Central and South America countries, and other Spanish cultures. Origin can be considered as the heritage, nationality group, lineage, or country of the person or the person's parents or ancestors before their arrival in the United States. People who identify their origin as Hispanic or Latino may be of any race."

The U.S. Office of Management and Budget currently defines "Hispanic or Latino" as "a person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race". This definition excludes people of Portuguese origins, such as Portuguese Americans or Brazilian Americans. However, they are included in some government agencies' definitions. For example, the U.S. Department of Transportation defines Hispanic to include, "persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central or South American, or others Spanish or Portuguese culture or origin, regardless of race." This definition has been adopted by the Small Business Administration as well as many federal, state, and municipal agencies for the purposes of awarding government contracts to minority owned businesses. In addition, both the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Conference include representatives of both Spanish and Portuguese descent.

Still, other government agencies adopt definitions that exclude people from Spain, since there is a distinct ethnic difference (indigenous American or European American). Some others include people from Brazil, but not Spain or Portugal. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission encourages any individual who believes that he or she is Hispanic to self-identify as Hispanic. The United States Department of Labor - Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs encourages the same self-identification. As a result, any individual who traces his or her origins to part of the Spanish Empire or Portuguese Empire may self-identify as Hispanic, because an employer may not override an individual's self-identification

[Praxeologue]

This is like the Jewish community disowning Barry Goldwater in 1964. Goldwater's politics was wrong, so he couldn't be Jewish. Zimmerman ran afoul of America's top dog protected class, so he couldn't be Hispanic. Zimmerman can't be Jewish either, as we will likely see.

The first lesson is that ideology trumps identity politics. The second lesson is that Hispanics and Jews, who can't access white guilt, rank below Blacks as a protected class. The Democrat Party enforces the pecking order.

[lentulusgracchus]

Don’t you just love these self-appointed “Leaders” who speak for whole “Communities”!

I didn't know these jumped-up "community leaders" had that mighty power, to revoke and recall half of Zimmermann's gene sequence.

Tremble, and obey!! < / s >

[lentulusgracchus]

Then by definition he is mestizo and hence hispanic

Being peruana, his mother probably gave him genetic content that was over 50% indio ......

In the Spanish Empire, every newborn was given a birth certificate, and at the top was an ethnic descriptor of some sort (Creole, mestizo, negro fino, etc.) that that child carried with him for life. If your baptismal certificate said you were jibaro, then you were jibaro for life. The descriptors were excimiatingly exact and went down, in some cases, to 1/128 part ancestry. There were more than 50 such descriptors, some of them redundant (e.g., quinteron, 1/8th black, = ochavado).

And Mexican-American ethnic-studies types call us "racist"!

[magellan]

This is really getting Orwellian.

[FreeAtlanta]

Mr. Roberto Lovato, my wife and kids are Americans of hispanic origin. Just like Zimmerman, you don’t speak for them.

So, stick it in your ear Mr. Roberto “pendejo” Lavato

[dannibp]

My thought exactly!

[lentulusgracchus]

Latino, from American Spanish, is used in some cases as an abbreviation for latino americano or "Latin American" and tends to be used interchangeably with Hispanic in the United States, despite the fact these two words are not synonyms.

"Latino" (scare quotes intentional, and precise) is not even a word in English. I consulted my 1967 Merriam-Webster Third New Collegiate dictionary, and it isn't there.

The point being, it's a word that has been "whomped up" by ethnocentric advocates who are no friends of the American people, and therefore their usages should be shunned on hygienic grounds. Do not use the language of your enemies.

Defenders of "latino" say that it is a calque, a loan-word borrowed for lack of a good English equivalent (implicit here is the claim that "Hispanic" isn't descriptive enough). That's true, only if you concede that what was wanted was a propaganda term-of-art that did not exist in English (or in Spanish, either -- "latino" doesn't mean in these guys' usage what it means in Spanish). Therefore "latino" is not a good calque and simply should not be used at all.

[ThisLittleLightofMine]

Using this logic, our dear leader is obviously white.

I am a caucasian, and growing up I was taught “hispanics” are also caucasian, there for no racist crime was committed. I am convinced that blacks/hispanics by and large are the only ones looking at skin color.

[El Gato]

Then by definition he is mestizo and hence hispanic

Not quite. Mestizo means mixed European and American Indian. I have a friend who is part Choctaw and part Irish and looks it, but I think he'd take umbrage to your calling him Hispanic. Hispanic is actually a cultural thing. Another guy I know, whose name is Sven, is pure European/Caucasian, half Swedish the other half the usual American mishmash, but both his parents and he are Latinos, since they were all born in Mexico. He was at our house once, (he was a student at the college where my wife teaches) when the (now) mother in law of our first Mexican exchange student was also visiting. She heard him speak, in Spanish, looked at him, and said "Es un Latino??" :) He looks like you'd think someone named Sven would look. It was pretty funny. (But truth be told, she doesn't look very Meztizo, and might be of pure Spanish ancestry. She's a rubia, a red head.)

Zimmerman is indeed Mestizo, but he's also Hispanic, since his mother is from a Spanish speaking country in the Americas.

We also have a niece, and two pair of great nieces who are technically Mestizo, to one degree or another. They are also Hispanic by ancestry, but only one set of great nieces thinks of themselves that way. That set are our legal wards.. The other set live with their Hispanic grandparents, who were both born in Texas.

[9YearLurker]

I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Sure, legal definitions of “Hispanic” include a superset, but there is clearly a set of racial characteristics to many people of Latin American origin who have variously been described as Mestizo or native Indian/American. Such a recognizable ‘racial’ identity is vital to the claim of a need for continuing participation in affirmative action programs here in the US.