Gregory Rodriguez on the Arizona Ethnic Studies Law

It’s no surprise that LATimes Latino activist columnist, Gregory Rodriguez, does not like the Arizona ban on ethnic studies in high school (click here to let the Times know what you think). After mentioning Arizona’s “ruthless, racially charged campaign against illegal immigrants,” he tones it down a bit, saying he disapproves of the fact that the curriculum includes  Paulo Freire’s jargon-heavy Marxist Pedagogy of the Oppressed, describing it as “a bit much.”  But then he goes on to say that “I’m all for students being taught that their ethnic histories play a significant role in U.S. history.”

Right, but the problem is that the people teaching these courses hate Whites. And they love their own people and the cultural Marxist rhetoric fomented by authors like Friere. The curriculum also included Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, by Rodolfo Acuña which emphasizes the evil that Whites have inflicted on Mexicans and Native Americans in the past (see discussion here).

Rodriguez carries on in the grievance tradition.

A new exhibition, “Beyond Geronimo: The Apache Experience,” includes the story of the Chiricahua band of Apache Indians, who were forced off their lands in Arizona in the 1870s and held by the government as prisoners of war from 1886 to 1913. Even more moving, however, was an exhibition about Indian boarding schools in the late 19th century. It documents with first-person immediacy the federal government’s late-19th century policy of forced assimilation, in which Indian children were removed from their homes to be transformed into Americans in the mold of Anglo Protestants. School officials began by cutting off the children’s long hair, and they drilled them in a curriculum that did all it could to destroy native language and culture.

Rodgriguez should be happy about the Anglo tendency to believe they could mold the Indians into good Anglo Protestants. Unfortunately, the fantasies of the 19th-century Anglos who think that immigrants from around the world would turn out to be just like them are still with us. This is the libertarian fantasy, and afflicts so many of those labeled conservative in the media. Here’s Sean Hannity deploring Pat Buchanan’s views on immigration and the end of White America. Eric Kaufmann emphasizes this trait in his The Rise and Fall of WASP America. It is a very large part of White pathology.

Rodriguez concludes: “Put bluntly, Arizona banned ethnic studies to protect the reputation of the white majority. … Whatever its faults, the program was not anywhere as dangerous as a white majority that simultaneously fights to protect its power and the purity of its reputation.”

Actually, there’s nothing anywhere as dangerous as a militant hostile minority that simultaneously fights to achieve power (using illegal aliens and a high birth rate as tactics) and the purity of its reputation. Somehow, Latinos gaining power is a moral imperative, but Whites trying to hang onto power is evil.

Such moral indictments of Whites are central to the our current malaise. We see them every day, whether from Blacks, Jews, Latinos, and even Asians. The White guilt trip is constantly paraded in the elite media, with devastating effect. Because ultimately people like Rodriguez dislike Whites having power and want to delegitimize any attempts by Whites to retain their power.

I agree with Rodriguez that Arizona Whites are probably trying to protect their reputation, although a very convincing rationale for the law was made in terms of emphasizing individualism as a basis for American citizenship rather than group-based grievances so loved by the diversity industry.

But if we are going to get into the reputation-protecting mode, the problem is that the only reputation-related issues that are presented in the elite media are those intended to induce White guilt, typically by groups that jealously protect their own reputation and are able to use the elite media to do so. The LATimes would never print anything that takes seriously research indicating the low IQ of Mexican immigrants. Nor would they print anything on Mexico as a failed state whose problems have to do with the capabilities of its people who then head north in order to trade the grinding poverty of Mexico for the largesse and affirmative action of the US.

Of course, it’s the same for other aggrieved groups. Jewish groups act aggressively against any suggestion of Jewish power, whether it’s media influence or Jewish involvement in promoting wars on behalf of Israel. The entire history of anti-Semitism is forced into remain within very narrow confines that are politically acceptable to Jewish interests. Truth is irrelevant.

Whites only rarely try to protect their reputation these days. The usual response from Whites is to beg forgiveness on bended knee rather than to think seriously about the shortcomings of other groups and to think about how these shortcomings will affect them when they lose control of their own destiny after Whites become a minority.

Arizona is a huge anomaly—a stick in the eye of the powers that be. The constitutionlity of the law is now under challenge. We can only assume that righteousness will be restored at a higher level in the justice system, as it so often has been.