Friday, January 14, 2011

The Name Loughner: 'A Latino Sigh of Relief'

Posted By on Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 10:30 AM

Daisy Hernandez (no relation to Daniel Hernandez), co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women on Today's Feminism, was recently featured on NPR's All Things Considered with a Latin view on what happened Saturday in Tucson. You can listen to the report and Hernandez here.

Takeaway:

It's safe to say there was a collective sigh of brown relief when the Tucson killer turned out to be a gringo. Had the shooter been Latino, media pundits wouldn't be discussing the impact of nasty politics on a young man this week — they'd be demanding an even more stringent anti-immigrant policy. The new members of the House would be stepping over each other to propose new legislation for more guns on the border, more mothers to be deported, and more employers to be penalized for hiring brown people. Obama would be attending funerals and telling the nation tonight that he was going to increase security just about everywhere. ...

It's painfully ironic that a gay Latino man came to the aid of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the storm of gunfire. Daniel Hernandez, an intern with the congresswoman, ran to Rep. Giffords and helped to stop the bleeding. If a judge hadn't blocked provisions of Arizona's SB 1070 law, the intern's surname would have easily qualified him as a target for police under different circumstances on Saturday. As Sheriff Clarence Dupnik of Pima County, Ariz., told reporters: "The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous, and unfortunately Arizona has become sort of the capital."