This may be the hardest post I’ve ever written. It goes against my very… “blackness”. It is contrary to every belief I held growing up… yet, it’s time to confront the issue of Black and Mexican relations. No… it goes deeper… African and Latino relations.
I confess that I can go to a country like France or Mexico and feel intense racism… and three other black people will return filled with stories about how wonderful they experienced the same locals.. during the same date and time. This is a key reason why I’ve been reticent on this topic. No need to hurt what doesn’t need to be hurt… but it has become overwhelming clear that we can’t resolve the unspoken Black and Brown war until we confront the reality that blacks are targeted by Latinos throughout the world. Until Zimmerman shed light on Florida, Southern California was perhaps where the worst Mexican violence was taking place against Black Americans.
It only takes a second to do a Google search on the issue. L.A. Times Latina writer Tanya K. Hernandez (professor of law at Rutgers University Law School) points the finger at Latinos as being the source of most of the black-brown tension in Los Angeles.
“The fact is that racism — and anti-black racism in particular — is a pervasive and historically entrenched reality of life in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 90% of the approximately 10 million enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were taken to Latin America and the Caribbean (by the French, Spanish and British, primarily), whereas only 4.6% were brought to the United States. By 1793, colonial Mexico had a population of 370,000 Africans (and descendants of Africans) — the largest concentration in all of Spanish America.”
The list of … horrifying murders committed by Mexican and Latino gangs is far, far too long to ignore. In 2007 I was sent to pick up a truck that was abandoned by a Mexican trucker who’d gone to court and was sent to jail. The truck was parked in East L.A. across the street from the courthouse. A veteran Mexican-American driver took shuttled me over. It had to be around noon… a bright, normal day in the United States. Upon parking, he grabbed me when I tried to get out of the truck. I could see the alarm on his face and I looked around at the normal street scene. I’m a Vietnam era ex-military K-9 policeman. WHY should I be afraid to walk a few feet in a parking lot across the street from an American courthouse? I finally bolted from the cab, unlocked the truck, and followed the other driver back to our Fontana yard. It was during that time I learned how horrendous the crimes against unarmed, normal, law-abiding black families had become.
On Dec. 15, 2007, 14-year-old African American Cheryl Green was murdered, allegedly by members of a Latino gang in the Harbor Gateway neighborhood where she rode a skateboard. Two Latinos simply walked up to her and shot her to death.
The entire Black population of Azusa (small city near Los Angeles) suffered years of attack by a Latino gang who conspired to terrorize them through racial intimidation, threats and violence – all to display loyalty to the Mexican Mafia prison gang and terrorize them enough to drive them out of the city.
For years Los Angeles county authorities denied the reality of what was happening. After a young child was murdered on a Sunday afternoon excursion by his family to search for a new car, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and LAPD officials came on television and denied publicly that any tension or black-brown violence was occurring. Later that year, propaganda rag, Newsweek published a story on Racial ‘Cleansing’ in L.A.
On a “Brown Pride” internet forum, Latinos discuss why Mexicans hate blacks. Even though many sides of the issue are covered, deeper issues go unsaid. The fact that so many Africans were brought to Mexico, and only 1% of the Mexican population now carry African features and skin color, shows clearly that all those African genes got absorbed into today’s Mexican population. They are murdering part of what they are.
African-Americans earn approximately 1.6 trillion dollars a year. American tourism is at least 4 billion a year and a some portion of that comes from us. It is beyond foolish to travel to countries where people hate us… to spend our dollars supporting our own oppression. Part of the goal of slavery was to teach the slave to participate in his or her own destruction.
Forget the years we’ve supported the Latino community. All that seems to be water under the bridge. Love those who love you… but with the eminent decline of corporate globalism, it’s clear we will continue to suffer economically unless we become wiser how we spend our dollars. Of the 2011-2015 economic forecast of the ten fastest growing economies, SEVEN are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Get a passport. Begin searching Pan-African websites for information about the shockingly beautiful countries that welcome you instead of target and degrade you.
Black Traveler 