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| Texas Senator Ted Cruz |
Texas Senator, Ted Cruz, who almost singlehandedly shut down the United States government, and George Zimmerman, the man acquitted for murdering Trayvon Martin, have a lot in common. No, I'm not accusing Senator Cruz of having shot another black kid in cold blood. I'm rather referring to their disingenuous and opportunistic claims of being "Hispanic." Given the way the term is used in America, those two men are about as "Hispanic" as
Governor Mitt Romney, who attempted to leave Spanish-speaking audiences with the impression, during the last presidential campaign, that he was soon to become the first "Hispanic" president of the U.S. In actuality, Romney's white-American father was born in Mexico after his great grandfather fled the U.S. to escape religious persecution. Members of that tight-knit Mormon community did not become Mexican citizens nor marry outside their own American community.
Senator Ted Cruz belongs to the same anti-Castro Cuban-American community as Miami columnist
Pepe Billete, who in a fit of irritation, proclaimed:
The words "Latino" and "Hispanic" are xenophobic cojones, and I'm sick and tired of people calling me that shit!
According to
recent polls, 85% of Cuban Americans identify themselves as being White, mostly Spanish, and maintain cultural ties with Spanish American or European Spanish communities in the United States. Many are the descendants of European-Cuban aristocrats, who were forced to flee the island after the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959.
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| Trayvon Martin killed by George Zimmerman |
As for George Zimmerman, his father is white and mother Peruvian.
Salon columnist Isa Hopkins made the following insightful and prescient comments even before the acquittal verdict in the killing of Trayvon Martin had been announced:
The outcome of George Zimmerman’s trial is that he will go free, pardoned by a white supremacist society for acting like a white supremacist. But such a grant is, in fact, a gilded cage, entrapping Zimmerman in whiteness and a privilege that will never allow him to understand and accept the meaning of his own heritage in today’s United States. Should he break the implicit contract he has signed with the lightness of his skin — should he express remorse, or agitate against the justice system that found him not guilty of murder when, by his own proud admission, he stalked, confronted, shot and killed an unarmed 17-year-old — he will find his privilege revoked, his financial support from strangers cut off, his celebration in conservative corners come to an abrupt end.
Bytheway, this shading of ethnic identity is not, in truth, designed to confuse real Hispanic audiences. It is rather a ploy to comfort certain Whites into believing that their support for specially-designated "Hispanics" proves that they're not the racists everyone else accuses them of being.
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