What The Hell Is A Black Or Hispanic Job?
What The Hell Is A Black Or Hispanic Job?
Examining the Dangerous Rhetoric of Conflation and the White Supremacist Myth of Ethnic-Specific Employment
Both Candidates Conflate Skin Color With Socioeconomic Class
In last night’s presidential “debate,” both candidates engaged in troubling racist practices: demonizing migrants, conflating them with US-born “Hispanics,” and, further, pitting Migrants/Latinos against African Americans by asserting that they (we, c’mon) are an invading foreign army “coming for black jobs.” (Cue the “mwahahaha and hand rubbing, I guess?)
This Homerian (as in Simpson) narrative not only ignores the reality that the vast majority of U.S. Latinos were unlucky enough to have been born here, or that “black” and “Hispanic” are not mutually exclusive groups (many millions of people are BOTH, as 95% of the African slave trade took place south of the United States border) it deliberately seeks, through an enduring slavery-era myth that melanin dictates the kinds of jobs a person is allowed or inclined to perform, to foment conflict among and between marginalized segments of society as a means for cocaine-white supremacsim to cling to the bobbing J.Crew raft of power.
This effort to divide and conquer black, brown and (poor) white folks like recyclables or laundry is the toxic brainchild of Trump strategist and burnt-lightbulb lookalike Stephen Miller, who does not try to hide how moist Ad*lf H*tler makes his Abercrombie pantaloons.
Not only has Miller’s racist strategy never been contested by Joe “Dementia? You betcha!” Biden, the democrats, and the corporate news media, it has been teddy-bear embraced by all of them as well. It used to only be Lou Dobbs, the glowering human Saint Bernard, pounding the flabby fist of xenophobic bullshit on the plywood counters of cable news; now, it’s everyone.
We must all recognize the danger of such reckless manipulations for what they are: an oily tool to help slip white supremacy into All Your Holes, in order to keep power in the tiny squishy grabby hands of a few inept rich white men who are so stupid or evil (and quite possibly, both) they still conflate skin tone, ethnicity and socioeconomic class, despite all evidence to the contrary and mountains of research by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and William Julius Wilson.
Latinos and African Americans must reject Steven Miller’s lazy, dehumanizing and flirtatious Nazi-nod of a political strategy in a unified Fuck-You front that, let’s face it, if we all gathered at the park this Saturday afternoon would collectively have much better picnic food and music anyway.
Reality Check
I can’t believe I have to say this, but here goes: There is no such thing as a black or Hispanic job.
There are jobs, and because, according to Martin Gilens and others, the United States is now a flat-out oligarchy with a disappearing middle class, most of them straight-up suck the mossy gravy of donkey balls.
The United States loves to pretend it is not a class-based society just because it supposedly declared independence from crusty old England. Conniving slabs of fetid blubber like the economically inept Herbert Hoover found that the easiest way to do this is to divide the lower classes by ascribing them colors, like fútbol teams, then convincing them through bad George Lopez “comedies” that Color is Everything and it’s the other poor person Of A Different Color who is the problem (or “el problem-o for you invading swarms). Not the fetid blubberfucks.
Don’t buy it. Even if it comes with a free taco.
I also can’t believe I have to say this, but, well. I fucking do: There is no goddamned invasion at the border, migrants do not commit crimes at a higher rate than native-born Americans, and most US Latinos aren’t immigrants.
Let me repeat these points. Please memorize them. If you are tempted to resist reality, kindly slap yourself with a bouquet of barbed wire until you stop being a brainwashed flake of smegma on the ass of society. Thanks!
There is no such thing as a Black JobThere is no such thing as a Hispanic JobThere is no invasion at the U.S. borderMigrants do not commit more crimes than native-born citizensMost U.S. Latinos are NOT immigrants
That the two animatronic corpses vying to lead the United States off the nearest cliff either do not know any of this or, worse, wantonly ignore reality in order to scare the crap out of (mostly) powerless white people as a means to keep power in the hands of a smattering of (actually) powerful white men, is as disgusting as Steve Bannon’s gelatinous boily jowel wobble.
Simple and nauseating as that.
His(panic)tory
Most U.S. Latinos were born in the United States. Many of us have roots that predate the founding of the United States, and our lineages have been here far longer than any tight-smiling Lutheran meatballer complaining about Somalis in Minnetonka.
In my own case, three of my thieving genocidal colonizing Spanish Inquisition asshole ancestors arrived in New Mexico (in what’s now the United States) in 1598, with the expedition of another Catholic supremacist fuckwit, Don Juan de Oñate, aka the Elon Musk of New Spain. There, they raped Tewa woman whose ancestors arrived 20,000 years before. So. You know.
This means my Latino ass has European ancestors who lived in “this country” 14 years before the first anemic English consumptives feebly dropped their Bibles in the dirt at Jamestown.
There’s a reason eight U.S. states bear Spanish names, if you include Utah, though Yute is only the Hispanicized version of Ute, which is, um… Ute. Anyway. Put simply, the Spaniards got here before the English. I’m not saying this as a point of pride, because all Europeans except the Vikings have acted like enormous pus-buckets poured over the beautiful existant worlds in the Americas, but as depressing but important fact. Huge portions of the United States were part of New Spain, like much of Latin America, for lit-er-a-lly centuries. The same douchenozzle friar who “civilized” Venezuela, for instance, pulled that same pedophilia and patriarchal punitive pedantry here in New Mexico. Whee!
White anglo Americans have sought to erase Hispanics/Latinos since they took over what’s now the western part of the United States in 1848, and they’ve been largely successful. Like, they are LITERALLY still fucking doing this. We do not appear in most children’s history books. We do not appear in most books, film, TV or news as anything other than exoticized, criminalized, foreignized, terrifying Others. When we do appear, Hollywood hires Sofia Vergara to play us, in a pushup bra and leopard stilettos.
Again, it’s all bullshit.
The story of Latinos in the U.S. is not one of recent immigration alone, or even overwhelmingly an immigrant story; it is a story of longstanding and deliberately erased presence. While immigrants bring new perspectives and skills, native-born Latinos have been shaping and enriching American culture for generations. This historical context is often conveniently overlooked in political discourse that seeks to make people with differing levels of melanin hate each other, because it’s much easier for rich white men to retain power if they can convince African Americans that 60 million brown folks don’t really belong here and are only here to Steal Your Black Jobs.
Don’t buy it. Not even if it’s on sale. Not even if they’re giving that shit away with a casino cheeseburger.
Where The Notion of Black & Hispanic Jobs Comes From
Jobs have been legally limited by race in the United States for far longer than they have not. That practice was made illegal only in 1964. Trump was 18 that year. Biden was 22. Here are some jolly examples of the “good old days” neither bumbling arthritic candidate realizes are over:
Slavery and the Antebellum Period: Enslaved African Americans were restricted to forced labor and were legally forbidden from holding any other types of jobs. Free African Americans in the North and South also faced severe restrictions on their employment opportunities.
Post-Civil War and Reconstruction: Although the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, many Southern states enacted Black Codes that severely restricted the types of jobs African Americans could hold, often forcing them into agricultural or menial labor roles.
Jim Crow Era: During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation and discrimination in many aspects of life, including employment. African Americans were often legally barred from holding certain jobs, particularly those that were considered skilled or professional.
Chinese Exclusion Act (1882): This federal law explicitly restricted Chinese immigrants from working in many industries, forcing them into a narrow range of low-paying jobs such as laundry work and restaurant services.
Labor Unions and Racial Exclusion: Many labor unions in the early 20th century excluded African Americans and other minorities from membership, which in turn barred them from certain skilled trades and better-paying jobs.
World War II: Although there was a significant demand for labor during World War II, African Americans and other minorities often faced discrimination and were restricted to lower-paying and less-desirable jobs. Executive Order 8802, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941, sought to prohibit racial discrimination in the defense industry, but enforcement was inconsistent.
While these legal restrictions have technically been abolished, Trumpian criminal industrialist gang members, propagandists and balding white Hollywood screenwriters have found clever ways to perpetuate them through limited narratives in entertainment that society comes to view as “truth,” such as only portraying Latinas as exoticized oversexed foreign maids with funny accents.
Today’s United States presidential candidate rhetoric, which seeks to pit marginalized groups against one another (with all the grace of a pregnant horse on a dental-floss tightrope) by claiming that “Black jobs” are being "taken" by disease swarms of invading Brown people from Down There is nothing but scarcity marketing mixed with a dentured nostalgia for tea-time with Robert E. Lee. It fosters division and distracts from the larger issues of economic inequality and systemic barriers that affect all marginalized communities and poor people, at a time of unprecedented income inequality.
Don’t buy it.
Instead, do us all a favor and go buy something from an Afro-Latina-Owned Business today. Here are a few.