RE: Mark K.’s post on La Raza and hate speech: When Ms. Murguia of the National Council of “The Race” announces that “when free speech transforms into hate speech, we’ve got to draw that line ” we don’t know whether to laugh or cry, since her own organization’s very nomenclature “The National Council of La Raza” is hate speech to the core.
No other ethnic organization these days would dare to refer to themselves as “The Race.” Despite all the contortions of the group, Raza (as its Latin cognate suggests), reflects the meaning of “race” in Spanish, not “the people” — and that’s precisely why we don’t hear of something like “The National Council of the People” which would not confer the buzz notion of ethnic, racial, and tribal chauvinism.
What we are seeing is that a moderate corrective back to sanity on illegal immigration threatens these extremists and racialist groups to the point of causing hysteria. Apparently, they assumed that no one was ever going to question their racist language deeply embedded in 1960s ‘resistance’ culture.
In this regard, Ms. Murguia could do her part in curbing hate speech by starting with the many campus MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan).affiliates, who have never repudiated all the nonsense of the “liberation of Aztlan,” and on whose websites one can still find the old racist hatred: “Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada,“ and new ones like “Anchor babies are destined to transform America — although during the California recall election and the implosion of the Cruz Bustamante candidacy, there was the welcome development of seeing that the old motto “A bronze state for a bronze people” suddenly began disappearing off MEChA university websites, no doubt due to the civil-rights humanitarianism of La Raza.
By November I don’t know why either Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama should not have been asked to repudiate the support of an organization self-described as “The National Council of The Race,” or why public funds on campuses go to an organization like MEChA whose very title “Aztlan” refers to the notion of reclaiming parts of the southwestern United States under some Hispanic utopia, and whose affiliates at UC Berkeley and Pasadena City College were implicated in destroying campus newspapers deemed critical. I suggest Ms. Murguia also peruse The Voice of Aztlan, distributed on university campuses, in which disgusting anti-Semitic rants have been commonplace.
Ms. Murguia is absolutely right. We need to draw the line on real hate speech as it pertains to race and questions of ethnic identity — and she could make a useful beginning by modifying the name of her very own organization.