AlexfromLA said:
As Latin America moves progressively forward, the US and the EU move backward in time to a place where racism and xenophobia is common and forceful deportations by police squads are the norm. Where simply being a specific race or creed will cause disdain.
I've seen reports of this expulsion in the past few days, but haven't read all the details. Owing to the EU's liberal cross border travel provisions it's not clear whether the Roma entry into France was illegal (do they have EU passports?), but the article does state their camps were illegal. I wonder what percentage of Portenos would favor elimination of Villa 31.
If the deportees were breaking the law by illegally establishing and occupying encampments, it isn't necessarily racism or xenophobia to deport them if French law provides for deportation in such cases. I'm pretty sure many, if not all, countries have laws providing for deportation of guests who violate the law. Are there any other groups occupying illegal encampments who have been treated differently than the Roma? Absent differential treatment it might be a stretch to call this an act of bigotry.
I think it is difficult to compare the prevalence of racism in No America and So America owing to the existence of a large indigenous population in the latter. There was a smaller population of Indian peoples in No America when the Europeans (mostly English) came over, decimated the natives, forced the remainder to live in mind-numbing reservations, and essentially eradicated Indian culture. With some infamous exceptions the native people of the southern continent have fared better. It could hardly have been worse.
In any case,
de facto racism remains an issue for the US and lots of other places around the world especially Brasil and Argentina. Have you seen a lot of black people living in Buenos Aires? Many suspect that race does play a part in the facility to live as a permatourist in Argentina. Until just recently, the Argentine constitution required the President to be Catholic. Only due to Menem's Lebanese ethnicity was it amended (not sure what it now provides).
Racism is difficult to measure in Brasil owing to the great influx of African slaves and the crossbreeding with Portugues settlers that occurred during the last couple of centuries. Nevertheless, in Rio de Janiero where I spend most of my time, the overwhelming percenage of favela dwellers are dark skinned and the bottom rungs of employment (maids, sanitation dept, street vendors) seem to be disproportionately occupied by dark skinned residents.
There is no movement back to a
de jure or institutionalized racism or xenophobia in the US. Obama's election in 2008 was the culmination of the bumpy road travelled by black skinned Americans, a road that began with a Constitution that countenanced slavery, to the 1857 US Sup Ct decision in
Dred Scott that confirmed slaves as property without citizenship, to constitutional amendments in 1868 granting citizenship to all Americans regardless of color or creed, to the 1896 Sup Ct decision in
Plessy v Ferguson upholding segregation, to the Sup Ct's 1954 decsion in
Brown v Bd of Edu. abolishing institutional segregation. A road that continued through the turbulent 1960s but which ultimately led to passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, that banned discrimination based on "race, color, religion, or national origin" in employment practices and public accommodations; the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, that restored and protected voting rights; the
Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, that dramatically opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional European groups; and the
Fair Housing Act of 1968, that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. Is it any wonder that black skinned Americans were exhilirated with the election of a black man as President?
There is a growing antipathy towards Muslims arising out of the terrorist attacks around the world carried out in the name of Islam (9/11, London, Madrid, Bali, Mumbai, Chechnya, Somalia, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc),
but Islam is not a race. It is a belief system. The Muslim Arabs of Gaza have more genetic material in common with the Jews of Sderot than they do with their co-religionists in Iran. Accordingly, it is inaccurate to describe the growing anti-Muslim sentiment triggered by Islamic acts of terror as indicative of either racism or xenophobia.
The belief system that is under attack is an intolerant, supremacist ideology that divides all people in the world into only two camps, believers and infidels. All sects of Islam believe that the Quran is the divine word of god. All pious Muslims, including Sufis like Imam Rauf, are required to obey the Quranic command to establish a
global theocracy governed by sharia law.
I have said this before, but it bears repeating. Sharia is homophobic and misogynistic and expressly denies equality under the law to all women and non-Muslims. It prescribes death and mutilation for premarital sex and homosexuality. Witness the sentence of stoning to death for adultery that is now on hold in sharia law Iran and the identical sentence recently executed in sharia law Afghanistan. Sharia denies freedom of conscience and freedom of expression in that it prescribes death for both apostasy and blasphemy. It obliterates separation of church and state by virtue of the governance by non-elected theologians.
What amazes me is that critics of Islam are often vilified as bigoted rightwingers. Surely the opposite should be true - those that support such a supremacist totalitarian ideology are the rightwingers.
