“Apparently, 1 in 5 people in the world are Chinese. And there are 5 people in my family, so it must be one of them. It’s either my mum or my dad. Or my older brother Colin. Or my younger brother Ho-Chan-Chu. But I think it’s Colin.” - Tim Vine
You and Tim have a lot of math to talk about.
Nonsense that there’s some form of nepotism going on, unless you define nepotism so broadly as to make it meaningless–that is, if you define nepotism as “hiring folks you know.” Certainly immigrant communities often have cultural boundaries that set them apart from their new adopted wider community; that’s been the case since there’s been permanent human settlements. And if your business hires through word-of-mouth, those community boundaries are likely to affect the hiring process.
What’s more, a boss from a given culture is likely to speak that culture’s language. If you speak Spanish but your English is crappy, who’s likelier to hire you: someone fluent in Spanish, or someone who’s not? This dynamic by itself could lead to an all-Latino work crew, if the boss is Latino.
As for the legal status of the workers, you ought to consider letting the evidence change your mind on this one: the fact that the workers’ documentation checked out should show you that your assumptions about the legality of workers ought to be challenged at least. It seems highly likely to me that, rather than the uniform distribution you and Tim propose for the 20% of the population, there’d be clusters: undocumented workers would know that Billy over there at Liberty Apple Orchards doesn’t do I-9 forms, so let’s all go work for him, rather than spreading out evenly among the workforce.
That’s not math, that’s abuse of statistics. Statistics generally tell you about trends in large populations, but they break down when you try to use large-scale statistics to guess information about a small group. In your particular example with 10 Latino construction workers on a site, I’d bet that you’d have a bimodal distribution of legal/illegal workers. In most cases, they’d be working for a reputable company and 10/10 would be legally employed, and in a few cases they’d all be illegal.
What you won’t find that every ninth and tenth Latino you meet is illegal.
They demonstrate a group of millions of Americans who Speak Spanish.
Another, much larger group I reference is Americans born of Hispanic families, who grew up with strong Hispanic influences, which includes the sub group of Puerto Ricans.
So please elucidate. Why the scrutiny over their language or their perceived appearance? The woman clearly had it in for them because they were Spanish, per her other correspondence in HookerChemical’s cite:
"Matson calls illegal immigrants locusts that devour the nation’s resources, says pregnant Latinas are the nation’s “greatest enemies” and says “other things the dirty filthy Mexican/Latino illegals do is steal Social Security numbers.” "
If someone was part Irish and I said “better check to make sure they’re not drinking on the job. those rotten filthy alcoholics are a poison”, would that be right, or would that be harassment?
If non-racism requires willful stupidity and ignorance, then sign me up for racism.
And FWIW, I think this type of PC self-delusion is somewhat counterproductive in that it taints the whole fight against racism as being a denial of obvious reality, as it is in this case.
[FTR, this does not address comments other than the ones about the immigration status.]
Based on the information supplied by the OP: yeah, kinda. Anyone who sees a construction site and demands that the sheriff pull the workers’ papers because they look Hispanic has racist tendencies.
Based on the other comments quoted later in the thread, Matson is absolutely a racist, and was clearly just trying to pick a fight based on her own ideology.
[QUOTE=Magiver]
Would it have been racism if she had said something to the effect, “Please check the immigration status of all the construction workers building the jail, to make sure they are all here legally.”?
[/QUOTE]
Assuming the person asking hasn’t been e-mailing other public officials and the media about how dirty, filthy Mexicans are ruining America?
Well, that depends. Is she asking somebody to do it in compliance with an established county procedure? Or is she asking because they look Mexican?
Unequal enforcement is discrimination. Prior to the civil rights movement, some segregated states had literacy requirements to vote. Somehow only blacks failed it. If a cop sits next a stop sign and lets every white person blow through and pulls over every black person who does not come to a full stop it most definitely racist. And if the whole purpose of the law is to force black people to stop, it is an invalid law. Just like if a law was passed making it oral sex illegal and the only people ever prosecuted for it where gays and lesbians it would be probably be ruled illegal.
It appears to be what they call “rational racism”. Non-English speaking Hispanics in the southwestern US working construction have a higher likelihood of being in the country illegally.
It’s like the Jesse Jackson story where he felt nervous about being followed on a street one night, and looking around, he felt relieved that his followers were white.
Are all non-English speaking Hispanics here illegally? Obviously not. But a lot of them are. It’s hard to convince people to pretend otherwise just to be politically correct.
It’s not about being politically correct. It’s about treating people as individuals and allowing them their individual rights. Unless you can show probable cause to investigate this specific person, you have no cause to do so.
That’s why it’s called “rational”. There are going to be situations where a snap judgment, unfair by political standards, is going to turn out to be right on the money.
One of the longest Pit threads in history was about the Duke lacrosse case. And one of the sore points that kept it running for hundreds of posts was the assertion that it was unfair and racist to assume that the accuser was lying. And the fact that white-on-black rape is so rare in the US as to be statistically indistinguishable from background noise, it was alleged, was meaningless.
The difficulty being, of course, that the accuser was, in fact, lying. And even if it was unfair to assume so, it still turned out to be correct.
Some, probably most, racism is selective perception and selective memory. Some is not. Some of it is pattern recognition.
While I understand the need to respect people as individuals, it is not always possible for the private individual to treat everyone he meets as if he were meeting them for the first time.
Because ultimately it becomes silly, if not counter-productive, to try to convince people not to believe the evidence of their own eyes and experience.
For the government? Maybe. But the difficulty is what I mentioned earlier. Because I would bet that a good many of the people the official mentioned were here illegally.
I agre. I also think that putting those snap judgments into action ends up having deleterious effects.
Imagine a situation in which 90% of crime is committed by 10% of the population–let’s call those 10% the purples. Let’s say that that 90% of the crime committed by purples is committed by the 10% of purples who are bad: let’s call them the bad purples.
Rational racism would lead to investigating the purples first any time a crime is committed. 90% of the purples who are totally innocent of wrongdoing live their lives under constant suspicion, while the nonpurples don’t have to deal with any level of suspicion.
It’s rational. It leads to an extremely unfair effect on the good purples, though. And when a crime is committed by a nonpurple, the good purples and bad purples alike bear the irrational suspicion for the crime.
How about the stereo types that Asians can’t drive, or Jews have horns? Because bigots who make racial and ethnic stereo types are stupid enough to believe that.
Maybe you think black people are obsessive over watermelon and fried chicken.
Let’s go back to the Asians can’t drive stereotype.
Let’s say some “rational racist” decides Asians can’t drive and denies someone a job driving semi because their eyes look a little too east Asian, and their skin a little too tan.
Why isn’t that person a hateful jackass?
How about someone who believes gay people are too sexual and shouldn’t be around children, and denies a qualified lesbian woman a teaching job at an elementary school?
Please explain why that person isn’t being an evil bigoted piece of shit?
If you can’t it looks to me like a good and decent person would fight their prejudices.
Exactly. It isn’t whether people make snap decisions based on ingrained stereotypes or personal experience. It’s whether people are rational enough to overlook those snap decisions because they generally don’t work at the individual level and are a crappy thing to do to groups of people.
Well, she can propose a new procedure, or better documentation of an existing procedure, because constituents have raised the issue.
Turn it around:
A lot of people are questioning that all the city bus drivers are ‘white’ and want an investigation into hiring practices. So, she audits the applications for bus driver positions. She recommends that 30% of all interviewed applicants be ‘non-white’, based on the most recent census data for the city. Fine by me.
What she can’t do is state that anyone can see the bus-drivers speak Erse.