Is Univision Programmed by David Duke?
- From: Bret Ludwig <bretldwig@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2007 15:10:26 -0700
Importing Mexico's Worsening Racial Inequality
Part 2 of a Series on the Mexican racial hierarchy and its
implications for America
By Steve Sailer
Will immigration end America's racial divides? Will interracial
marriage convert our descendents into a beige nation of Tiger Woods
look-alikes? Will the flood of Latin American immigrants, who lack the
North American prejudice against "miscegenation," usher in a new era
of racial equality where a person's class cannot be assumed based
merely on his color?
This is the argument of Gregory Rodriguez, a fine young Southern
California journalist of "Unzist" viewpoint - i.e., pro-immigration
but pro-assimilation, in the manner of Ron Unz. "Latinos, whose
history has been one of mixture and among whom mestizos are the rule
rather than the exception, understand hybridity, a notion that
America's discourse on race desperately lacks. ... Perhaps once we have
fully adopted the concept of mestizaje into our racial dialogue, we
will recognize that Los Angeles is well on its way to becoming a
mestizo metropolis." [L.A. County's Answer for Racial Tensions:
Intermarriage, By David E. Hayes-Bautista and Gregory Rodriguez, May
5, 1996]
This theory sounds plausible. In many ways, it is appealing. Yet,
there's just one little problem. After an experiment lasting nearly
500 years in Latin America, intermarriage has utterly failed to
eliminate racial inequality. Mestizo nations like Mexico and mulatto
nations like Brazil are bywords for vast concentrations of wealth
among the white ruling class contrasted with extreme poverty among the
darkest citizens. In fact, in Mexico racial segregation is worsening.
What Americans don't comprehend is that, although Mexico doesn't have
a Color Line, it has an insidious Color Continuum. Latin American
immigration will push us toward an even more extensive racial caste
system than the white-black gap that has so long troubled us.
As my last column showed, the corruption of Mexican political life
that grows out of this hereditary inequality should certainly give us
pause.
Mexico's top political scientist Jorge G. Castaneda described the
striking human disparities in Mexico like this:
"But the inequality is not simply economic; it is also social. A
government undersecretary (one level down from the top echelon of
public service) earned in 1994 (prior to devaluation) approximately
$180,000 after taxes ... -- almost twice what his U.S. counterpart
earned before taxes. His chauffeur (provided by the government, of
course) made about $7,500 a year. The official addresses the employee
with the familiar "tu," while the latter must speak to the former with
the respectful "usted." The official and his peers in the business and
intellectual elites of the nation tend to be white (there are
exceptions, but they are becoming scarcer), well educated, and well
traveled abroad. They send their two children to private schools,
removed from the world of the employee. The employee and his peers
tend to be mestizo, many are barely literate, and they have four or
five children, most of whom will be able to attend school only through
the fifth grade." [The Atlantic, February, 1997 , "Ferocious
Differences"]
Readers in the American Southwest will find this portrait of life in
Mexico less and less alien. Of course, here our increasingly faux
egalitarian informality that de Tocqueville found so prevalent among
Americans dictates that wealthy white American masters insist that
their mestizo servants call them by their first name. Nor do whites
call their servants "servants," instead, laboriously describing them
as "the cleaning lady," "the babysitter," the "gardener," and so
forth. Still, as a description of America's future, the essentials are
about right. The big difference, of course, is that to prevent
mestizos from "becoming scarcer" in elite jobs in America, we offer
them anti-discrimination bureaucracies and quotas.
How did Mexico end up like this, despite twenty generations of
intermarriage? Surprisingly little is written about Mexico and race.
In the U.S., we aren't really aware of the wide racial range among
Mexicans since almost all Mexican-Americans are mestizos. This is
because the non-Spanish-speaking Indians of the Deep South have been
so downtrodden that until recently they lacked the confidence to
immigrate. (Mexican Indians who don't speak Spanish, however, have
been showing up in California in recent years. Since they haven't
assimilated into Hispanic culture in 480 years, perhaps Mr. Rodriguez
will inform us when they can be expected to assimilate into American
culture.) And Mexico's white elite finds life south of the border far
too sweet to come north for anything other than advanced degrees,
advanced medical care, and advanced shopping.
The CIA Factbook claims that Mexico's 100 million people are 9% white,
60% mestizo, 30% Indian, and 1% other. These are fairly arbitrary
estimates. It could be that some of the whites and Indians are a
little bit mixed, but not enough to show. Since Spaniards and Indians
tend to share dark hair and dark eyes, and aren't all that far apart
in skin color, without DNA tests it's hard tell whether or not people
who look pure Spanish or Indian aren't really slightly mixed. For
example, audiences can be forgiven for accepting Spanish movie star
Antonio Banderas in roles where he plays a mestizo Mexican. (On the
other hand, flamboyant, grandiloquent Spaniards and stoic, taciturn
Indians tend to differ radically in personality.)
Nonetheless, the Mexican elite tends to look strikingly European. In
Tim Burton's affectionate biopic Ed Wood about the worst movie
director in history, our hero Ed runs into his hero Orson Welles. The
great man complains that in his new film A Touch of Evil, the idiotic
studio has cast Charlton Heston as a Mexican! This seemed awfully
funny, until I was looking through the handy pictures of top Mexican
politicians and drug barons (not mutually exclusive categories)
included in Andres Oppenheimer's luridly frank portrait of Mexico,
Bordering on Chaos. There I saw a photo of Hank Gonzales, former Mayor
of Mexico City and billionaire. (His motto: "A politician who is poor
is a poor politician"). Damn, if he didn't look like Chuck Heston's
brother. And everyone else looks pure Spanish.
Mexicans don't talk much about race due to the Mexican government's
national ideology that We Are All Mestizos. By insisting upon this,
the intractable problems of the horrendously exploited pure Indians of
the deep South can be obfuscated, while the fact that most of the
extremely wealthy are pure white or near white can be obscured.
Yet, despite Mexico's massive problems, we should not wholly denigrate
this Mestizo Mythology. Keep in mind that Mexico is still a far more
successful country than many similar Latin American countries-such as
its southern neighbor Guatemala, where white vs. Indian mass butchery
has been recurrent. The Mestizo Myth may have played some role in
keeping Mexico from turning into Guatemala. Further, Mexico may be the
only country in the Western Hemisphere to assimilate almost completely
(genetically and culturally) its West African population. Thus, it's
hardly surprising that Mexicans tend to find it prudent to subscribe
to the Mestizo Myth.
There's a regional aspect to race in Mexico. The backward south is
heavily Indian. The central highlands around Mexico City tend to be
mestizo, while the desert North, which was almost unpopulated until
the 20th Century, is whiter. Thus, the recent call by the Chicano
academic Charles Truxillo for the creation of a breakaway Republica
del Norte, which would consist of southwestern U.S.A. and northern
Mexico, paradoxically reflects the Northern Mexican's regional/racial
bias against the more Indian parts of Mexico.
It seems odd, though, that the Mexican Establishment is so white and
getting whiter. After all, in times of upheaval such at the 19th
Century Reforma or the early 20th Revolucion, hard-charging mestizos
and even pure Indians clawed their way to the top (such as Benito
Juarez, the only Indian ever to be President). The ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party (or PRI) started out fairly mestizo.
In the late Twenties, the various warlords, robber barons, insurgent
generals, and godfathers who had emerged from the bloodshed as the
highly fractious ruling class agreed to institutionalize the
Revolution. Their brilliant innovation was to make the President a
dictator, but to allow him only a single 6-year term. This inculcated
patience in other politicians. If you didn't like the current
President because he didn't let enough rakeoffs trickle down to your
faction, don't assassinate him, just wait. Your clique's turn would
come eventually. Loyalty to the system rather than to the current
President became the most admired virtue. This brought a massive
reduction in political violence.
Corruption was pervasive, of course. But initially it was fairly
broadly distributed, rather like in Chicago's quite similar one-party
machine. For example, to shine shoes in Mexico City, you have to
belong to the PRI-run Shoe Shine Union. To stay in the union you must
show up at PRI political rallies and act wildly enthusiastic about its
candidates whenever the TV cameras are pointed in your direction. But
in return, the PRI subsidizes your union's health and burial insurance
plans. For some poor shoeshine guy, this kind of traditional machine
politics is not such a bad deal. As in Chicago politics, in the past,
most Mexican politicians were ethnically similar to their
constituencies.
So, how come most of the top dogs in the PRI and other high-status
realms no longer look mestizo? (For example, although the dour leftist
Presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas is mestizo, the charismatic
rightist candidate Vincente Fox has an Irish grandfather and is 6'5"
tall, towering close to a foot over the heads of the average Mexican
man.) This whitening trend is especially strange due to all the
nepotism among Mexican elites. Many of the big shots in Mexico today
are the grandsons and great-grandsons of mestizos who made the family
fortune during the Revolution ... yet they are much fairer than their
distinguished ancestor. What in the world is going on?
In my next column, I'll explain what is happening. But here's a hint:
watch Spanish-language shows on Univision and count the percentage of
women who are blonde. It's as if the casting director for these shows
aimed at Mexican-Americans is David Duke.
[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity
Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website
www.iSteve.com features his daily blog.]
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