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Por Qué Es Latino Identidad no Noticias Ted Cruz?
I’m disappointed, albeit not surprised, at the media silence on the historical significance of America’s prospect of having its first Latino president, Ted Cruz. Not because I give a rat’s hind parts about identity politics. I don’t. I would just for once like a level playing field on race, where the media has made Republicans run uphill for the past 50 years.
When Barack Obama was a presidential candidate in 2008, there were endless references to how historic it would be to have our first black president. Some celebrities (and I surmise others) wanted it so badly they voted for Obama simply because he was black, and bragged about it.
I conceded Obama’s blackness on skin color and features. If I didn’t know of him and he walked into a room I’d see a black man, despite his Irish lineage. However, I never bought the “African American” label. That’s a sociological term of art for descendants of Africans who unfortunately can’t trace themselves to a country or tribe due to the ravages of slavery. Obama isn’t the descendant of African slaves. He is the descendant of slave owners, no different than other white presidents before him.
We are still waiting for the first president whose family rose from slavery to the presidency. It will be historic. The media wanted it so badly they just ignored that it didn’t happen with Obama and celebrated anyway.
Boy, did they celebrate. There have been constant reminders over the past eight years of the historic nature of having the first black president, and I actually have no significant qualms with it.
Yet you’d think we would see a similar wielding of historic significance in the news that Ted Cruz could be our first Latino president. It’s not in the news, except when a reporter is desperate to deny it.
Let us air our suspicions why.
My first suspicion is that media is heavily invested in portraying that one party in America as open to all and the other just for white people. They don’t journal events to be preserved for history. They journal their prejudices as history and Cruz will force them to say they’ve been wrong. There was a Republican presidential debate recently where the participants showed a Republican white minority. On stage were two Latinos, a black man, and two white men. This didn’t get mentioned in any news report I saw.
This brings me to my second suspicion: The media and the left don’t really care for identity politics or historic firsts. They care only for the Democrat party to claim these things. As proof I offer you this NBC report that holds it was a “cultural milestone” when a Latino named Bill Richardson briefly ran as a Democrat in 2008, but not so for Cruz who is a Republican. Good grief.
If Ted Cruz were a Democrat, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz would be slathering herself in media compliments of how accepting and forward her party is in contrast to the other. Yet I’ve never seen her strongly challenged on identity politics regarding the two old white people she has as candidates.
I also note we see the same pining for historical relevancy with Hillary Clinton being a woman. Madeline Albright went the full identity politics crazy and said women who don’t vote for Hillary will go to hell.
There is no denying that constant appeals to historic justice and equality by media and celebrities will bring a candidate votes, so it is very unfortunate that those things are really just a pretext to gather votes for the Democrat party, not history. It’s unfair, but a fact of life Republicans have had to put up with for 50 years.
On a personal note, I’m happy we Italians decided to assimilate and become American white people. Nothing would have been more displeasing to me than if I were compelled to support Rudy Giuliani due to some invisible genetic tie rod.
Published in General
The reason Cruz doesn’t get any love for his Latin heritage is because he doesn’t seem to have embraced it in any way whatsoever. He doesn’t speak Spanish. Culturally he is completely assimilated into a white southern evangelical identity. He hasn’t been in the forefront of issues that Latinos care about most. He seems to care more about the fate of Israel than his father’s homeland. In short, he seems to have consciously dissociated himself from any of his Latin background that would have had profound influence on him.
Maybe Ted is one of those white hispanics like George Zimmerman.
In the Democrat party, your identity bona fides are cancelled unless you are in lockstep with the leftist agenda. Conservative blacks are Uncle Toms. What’s a conservative Latino, a Tio Tomas? Women aren’t really women (i.e. Sarah Palin) unless they are pro-choice abortion-on-demand believers and evangelists. Your color only matters if you a true believer. Leftist heretics are degraded and branded as White-(blank).
Well I think John above is basically right. Does Cruz even view himself as Hispanic? This is further complicated by the fact that Hispanic is really more of a cultural association than a racial one. After all what is the difference between a Mexican and a Spaniard? Under the rubric of Hispanic there isn’t one. It is a linguistic association sort of like Germanic. But if you don’t speak any Spanish and you are assimilated into an non-Hispanic culture how does your blood line impart to you any cultural traits?
Simply put if one wished to categorize humans into races, Hispanic can not be considered a race. If one wished to break the world up into linguistic spheres then simply put anyone can be anything if they learn the right language.
Well its easy to make fun of White-Hispanic. But as I pointed out Hispanic is a linguistic association. There are White-Hispanics, Black-Hispanics, and Brown-Hispanics, you can even have Yellow and Red Hispanics if we decided to use the color wheel of racial terminology.
In the world of identity politics there are Hispanics and then there are Cubans.
Cubans do not qualify because they don’t understand how fortunate they were to have been born in a socialist paradise. (¡Los ingratos!) They turned their backs on the Glorious Revolution in favor of the capitalist running dogs in Miami. Worse yet, they did not fully appreciate everything that the Kennedy Administration did for them by canceling the ill-advised air cover at the Bay of Pigs. They further betrayed a fair, socialist world by associating with Republicans.
See? Now isn’t that really self explanatory?
Cubans are Hispanic, but they aren’t Hispanic enough.
Rafael!
Obama grew up in Honolulu, but the media reads the needle on his meter somewhere between Kanye West and Minister Farrakhan.
The disparate treatment between Obama being black and Ted not being Latino is highlighted.
I agree with Tommy – I don’t give a rat’s behind about race, but I recognize how much it has been used as a club to beat down conservatives. And now that it’s possible for a member of a minority to rise to national leadership (yeah I know, Cruz is Ivy League – but Obama went to Harvard Law), I just want the same pride for him as they gave to Obama.
And as Tommy said, it’s precisely because they’re not going to celebrate Cruz that we know their “minority” advocacy was a lie to begin with.
What I’d like to know is when conservatives will get off the “diversity” treadmill, quit running uphill and tell the media to **** off. Any charge of racism should be thrown back at progressives, voters should be told how leftist race rackets are destroying our culture and our economy, and the GOP should campaign 100% against affirmative action.
Yeah, that’ll happen.
tim
If so, he’s done what every movie I ever saw as a kid urged us ALL to do–THINK LIKE THE AMERICAN YOU ALREADY ARE. That was in the melting pot day, not the salad of today’s approach. I still think it makes most sense in a Republic this large.
That does NOT mean you show disrespect to your uncles and aunts.
Are you suggesting that Cruz fails to show proper respect in some way?
Exactly right. Hispanic is an ethnicity, like Irish or Italian. Not a race. It’s something I’ve had to explain about myself to non-Hispanics all my life.
As for whether I view myself as Hispanic…it’s complicated.
My gracious, he could be one of those invisible Scots-Irish patriots who did so much fighting to secure our independence from England. They never looked back either. Some call it assimilation.
That’s not a French name?
Little I know…
If you want to get the attention of lefties, you have to get offended. Someone has to say they are offended that no one has mentioned that Cruz is Latino, and then it will be news.
I think that only works for Democrats.
If Cruz said he was offended they’d say that’s because it’s true.
Yes, it’s French. I’m Québécois (French-Canadian) from my dad’s side of the family, Tejano (Spanish Texan) from my mom’s.
Your Spanish-Texan doesn’t have roots in the Basque region, do they? Between Basques and Québécois you have some real separation anxieties.
Identity politics only works if you are running as a liberal democrat. And if you have no cultural ties or ability to speak Spanish you will never get credit for having a Cuban father. And Ted walks away from his heritage by not using his first name (Rafael?). Rubio gave Cruz a hard time about this at a debate. So Cruz is out of luck on this one IMO.
What interests me in all of this that when you look at the history of the American Southwest there are families in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona that can trace their history back to the 1600’s. Whether you call them Hispanic, Latinos, Indians, or Spaniards that married into these families. They were here long before the Gadsen Purchase, they still have a place here.
There are still families from Mexico that run cattle on both sides of the Arizona border. It is not unusual to see vehicles with Sonora, Mexico license plates that shop in Tucson, or visit relatives.
The last Apache raid into Arizona occurred in 1924 twelve years after Arizona was granted statehood. I cannot get too excited about someone from Manhattan lecturing me on history.
My roots are in Galicia (northwestern Spain). That’s where Francisco Franco was from. So I have nationalist *and* separatist anxieties.
Successfully. I admit I’m always slightly surprised when reminded of Cruz’s theoretical hispanidad, and I wonder if many of his supporters aren’t as well.
Does the fact that if he was Hispanic he’d be a White Hispanic come into it? Meaning there was a default identity right there.
Because the two Indian Americans who have been notable in politics (both Republicans, btw) – Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal, have also succeeded in part because of their assimilation to white Southern evangelical culture (which is fine), but they remain unmistakably Indian Americans.
I agree with John Wilson (above). Ted might as well be “Ted Cruise” rather than “Ted Cruz”. He’s got an hispanic last name, but looking at him, listening to him, observing his lifestyle, you’d never know he was anything but Southern white evangelical.
Mike, I’m sobbing and trying desperately to care about your roots, but I have a new, acutely beautiful, and wonderful fifth wheel trailer; we’re taking it out on a maiden voyage this Friday to a perfect Pacific ocean locale, and all I hear is tra-la-la-la-la. We should all have such problems!
Good! Skin color and language familiarity don’t determine your policy positions?
No, they don’t. My family came to the US before the Revolution, but they were all poor farmers and laborers, scraping by, still true today. My husband’s family is Polish. My sister-in-law’s family is Chinese. I have other family members who identify as black. We all celebrate who we are and where our roots and cultural leanings lie. Nobody tries to hide who they are.
Ted is Ivy League vanilla. What we used to call WASP.
I work at a major university. I see America’s future every minute of every day. America will be ethnic European, ethnic Asian, ethnic African, ethnic Hispanic. We live in a global world. The world of Leave It To Beaver and Happy Days no longer exists (if it really ever did).
PS – Don’t try to tell me that a naturalized white man is eligible to be President when the child of illegal Mexican immigrants who was born in the US is not eligible. Or, that the children of my best friend, who were born in an African country, are not eligible to be President–as they were told by an ambassador during Reagan’s presidency.
Labels!
Ethnicity is the bane of our American culture. While I appreciate your varied heritage and the contributions by all the members of your extended family, I appreciate most those who relish being simply citizens. We are not a global world, we are members of the USA. Global is a word with no intrinsic meaning. Of course we’re global in the sense of inhabiting our globe, but there are serious differences among the dominant governmental paradigms. The USA are exceptional, and rightfully so. God smiles on freedom.
Enjoyable and on-target. Thanks for taking the time to write it, Tommy.
Agreed. Assimilation is of primary importance.