redblueamerica.com

Thanks to Barak Obama, we are all allowed to speak of race in America, but the conversation is crippled before it is opened. The problem is that a Black/white dialogue is incomplete, there is a third player in the room, and it is the proverbial 800 pound gorilla. Of course I speak of the Spanish-Americans, now the largest minority group in this country. In fact, if one was to accept reality, and subdivide the so-called “white people” into their component ethnic groups, the Spanish-Americans might well be the single largest bloc in this patchwork nation.It is common to say that “diversity is dead” that we are all one great McNation, but that  generalization will not bear scrutiny. Even among the whites, the gap that John Edwards spoke of between rich and poor is large and growing larger. The Catholic, Mainstream Protestant and Fundamentalist religions also divide the  pale of skin in to frequently antagonistic groups, as does the Liberal/Conservative schism, which has led to major groups of whites that cannot  and will not talk to each other in any meaningful way. I use the old fashioned term Spanish American for several reasons. First, there are families that are descended from Spanish speakers who were on their own land since well before 1776. All the southern tier of states were Spanish at one time, from Florida to California, as you can tell by the names. A second group are or are descended from legal immigrants dating back a century or so. When my Ukrainian grandparents came to America, the rules were simple; you had to be white, and you had to be healthy. The situation along the Rio Grande, was more fluid, with people moving back and forth across the border at will until a very few years ago. Then, of course there is a smaller, but very large group, the illegal immigrants. But they are Spanish, and they are from America, which, you might remember, extends all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Spanish Americans. All of a sudden, in historical terms, they are demonized, blamed for all the ills of the US, and are the subjects of every rabble rouser with a soapox to stand on or a radio show to bloviate over. Some people seem to think we have to kill them all and pile the bodies on the border to keep the rest out. You can even read that there is a giant plot to reconquer Azatlan for la raza.Which has about as much chance of happening as Marcus Garvey coming back to life and leading the African Americans  back to Africa. I don’t want to get into the he said/she said, but I just want to say that without including the Spanish Americans in the conversation, nothing can be done. The African Americans are afraid of losing their hard fought political gains, and the poor whites are in no mood for yet another competitor for their jobs and livelihoods. However, I see positive signs. A duality, a two valued system, black and white, say, can easily be read as right and wrong, good and evil, win or lose. The fact that these dualities have little relation to reality is often overlooked. A three valued system can be more stable, using the metaphor of the three-legged stool. Some Spanish Americans are darker of skin than some African Americans. Some are lighter than many whites. So what color line can be enforced then?Some Spanish Americans could sneer at the newly arrived families that came over on the Mayflower either as cargo or as passengers. What of your blue blood then?And so on right down the racial/ethnic line.This is important, and we must get serious about this. I read today that the largest tomato grower in Pennsylvania had decided to stop planting tomatoes this year. He can’t get help. He plants over two million tomato plants a year, and if he can’t harvest the fruit, he loses a lot of money. So he did the math, and quit. So the American market loses tens of millions of tomatoes this year. That exact scenario is going to play out time after time, until people come to their senses, and stop all this hysteria.  Or not. Your choice.