| Abajo con Tancredo’s innuendo |
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Tom Tancrudo, as my fellow poet Trinidad Sánchez called him, and his once comic flamboyancy during his long stint as a United States Representative is like a train without a conductor, ready to fall off the tracks. With desires to be catapulted into the limelight again, his recent heretical insinuation that La Raza is “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses” is simply a racist attack.
His verbal calumny hurled at the Bronze People of the Continent only shows his continued bigotry. He can now successfully join his fellow Klansmen on las fronteras, prejudiced men whose Mayflower Pilgrim’s attempts at colonizing La Raza have been successful failures.
Tancredo’s assertion is erroneous. To compare the KKK with La Raza is stretching the imagination or in Tancredo’s case delusional thinking. La Raza’s history is not about predatory plundering, rape, conspicuous hangings, outright lynching, or murder. It is about struggling for human and civil rights and creating a just social order.
It was White privileged Americans that treated human beings as commodities, selling them on the common market como si fueron animales, prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. Chicanos and Mexicanos were treated as material products in marketplace.
Historically, race relations in American society have been based on a black/white dichotomy. Until its upsurge in demographic growth La Raza has been invisible, left in the peripheral of América’s consciousness or lack thereof. This group was shunned by sociologists and race relations theorists whose lenses were equally tainted. Remember that demographers categorically classified us as Caucasian.
What was the KKK really about? David Chalmers, in “Hooded Americans” portrays the KKK as a clandestine group, under the modus operandi of Christianity using symbols of sacred cloths and burning crosses to “provide light in times of darkness.” White Supremacy, the racial code of the times, had been used to justify inequality as a black race was relegated to chattel slavery. Racial separation was accepted as moral and legal doctrine. A precept of exclusion was the norm. América had not lived up to the principle that “all men are created equal endowed with certain inalienable rights...among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The slogan “f América or the Americans,” framed by the Klu Klux Klan in the 1920’s was an attack on immigrants and antithetical to América’s preamble. Tancredo’s continued imigraphobic sentiments when traced within a historical framework places him in what past President Lyndon Johnson termed a, “hooded society of bigots.”
History books are filled with pictures of political figures, voted in to uphold the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by their constituents who were actually full fledged members of the Klu Klux Klan. This includes some Colorado politicians. Chalmers further asserts that “the southern states of Mississippi, Alabama as well as Indiana, the Klan State whose voting block included 350,000” housed closet racists. They sat in Congressional seats making a mockery of the United States government.
The KKK was a terrorist organization with Grand Cyclops and Grand Dragons slinging racial epithets at members of groups who did not fit the American mold. Following the Reconstruction Period in the late 1860’s “separate but equal” prevailed in the camps of the so called wisdom keepers. Now as an alternative Latina voice resonates, Tancredo belittles her.
When the film, “Birth of a Nation,” was released, the suppressed racist ideology once again flared up. As many as 500,000 women also joined the Klan. The Klanistas dressed in garb similar to those invented by its founders, white sheets and hoods.
Following the Civil War, as the social order changed, Black men and women demanded and struggled for their inherent and constitutional rights; the dominion of those in power was threatened.
The history of the Klan has its roots man’s uncontrollable fear of differences based on the color of one’s skin, different languages, linguistic accents and other visible dissimilarities. Today, the Klan has become more sophisticated with men like David Duke.
Tancredo’s fear comes from the demographic growth of this group that has recently begun to assert its power in American politics. Without a place to hang his hat on, perhaps the only slot left for Tancredo is president of the Klu Klux Klan or the Grand Kook.
Dr. Ramón Del Castillo, Independent Journalist.
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