Arizxenophobia

Can you spell Arizxenophobia? The overtly racist "show me your papers" law--something that more than echoes Nazi profiling of Jews--is exposing and inflaming a racial divide, especially as several other states are clamoring to pass similar laws, and polls suggest the Arizona law is widely popular.

But let's parse this for a moment. First of all, racism by whites and by police against browns in Arizona is not in any way new. Writer Leslie Marmon Silko has been exposing harassment and terrorizing since the 1980s (it's a particular problem for Native Americans whose tribal lands are on both sides of the Mexican border--but then, a Native American with Spanish blood pretty much defines "Mexican.") So when they say they know an illegal immigrant when they see one, they mean brown and poor. This story corroborates that impression in the Phoenix area, where the Sheriff and most popular white political figure in the state has been employing it for years. (Whereas the strongest opposition to the law is coming from the Sheriff in the Tucson area, and law enforcement there.)

But it's not all racism, just as the racially tinged innuendo and outrageous charges leveled at President Obama is not because he's black, exactly. It's because black people are Democrats. If black people or Latinos were Republicans, most of the GOPers in national politics at least would accept them without batting an eye. But Republicans have made themselves into the White People's Party, and they need to limit the political power of non-whites, including the number of voters. This may be intuitively obvious, but here's a story specifically about Arizona with numbers.

Since sending black people back to Africa didn't work, the best they can do about keeping the numbers down is prevent efforts to register blacks (so they demonized and effectively destroyed Acorn) and keep the Census from counting them. They can do the same for Latinos, but they can also prevent more of them from becoming citizens and voters, by keeping them out or even sending them back.

Of course, they find a ready tool in the residual racism among whites, in using the grievances (real and imagined) of poorer whites, and stoking everybody's fears on every level--personal, neighborhood, city, nation, society. It's the fear that greeted and oppressed every immigrant group, except perhaps the first whites to arrive and take the place over. But in this obviously crowded and troubled country, it's worse now in a number of ways. So, in the end, it is the political use of racism, for whatever reason, and so it is racism after all.

It's there in the virulence of the opposition to health care reform: it's because some white people are persuaded that the beneficiaries are going to be black and brown; that, like government programs for the poor, they are going to be taxed to pay for the medical care of blacks and browns, violating their Freedom and Liberty to spend that money on what they want. They know this because the President is black, so he's engineering everything to take away from whites and give to fellow blacks, not to Americans. They know this because the biggest white mouths on radio, Fox News and in various legislatures and governor's mansions are telling them so.

But about those polls. While the answers to some questions are pretty troubling, some others indicate the general impatience with ineffective immigration policy and rules. Those involved in governing rather than political grandstanding for fun and profit pretty much know the current mixed bag of contradictory policies and rules don't work, even on the level of fairness.

Barack Obama talked a lot about bipartisan solutions to big problems, and in office he's tried to walk that talk, and here's yet another obvious reason: it's an issue so charged and so easy to exploit for political and monetary gain (ask Sarah) and yet so important to deal with for the health and basic functioning of this society that only responsible people of all political persuasions willing to work together sincerely to come to a real solution will be able to fix this.

It's hard to see the Republican strategy of inflaming this as working in the long term. It's a mid-term strategy, and then for as many elections as it proves successful. But the demographic trends are unlikely to change in favor of a white majority. Then throw the Climate Crisis into the mix--the permanent drought in Arizona to the point--and things get really roiled. One thing I'm willing to bet on--if Arizona registers a population gain in the 2010 Census, it will be the last Census it does so. I haven't yet seen anyone write about any possible connection between the ongoing drought and this resurgent racism. But there's been a connection elsewhere. In a place called Darfur.