By Preston Blair
Last week (July 25-28) the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) held its annual conference at Chicago’s McCormick Place West. The conference was originally scheduled to be held in Kansas City, Missouri, but organizers moved it in order to “punish” that town after its mayor had the audacity to appoint one of the Minutemen to an official position.
I decided to pay our friends at La Raza a little visit. One of the workshops, “Lessons from Lucero: Overcoming Hate at the Local Level,” sparked my curiosity particularly. With Orwellian-style hate crimes legislation pending in Congress, I was interested to see exactly what “overcoming hate” meant.
Lisa Navarrete, Vice President of NCLR, introduced each of the workshop’s speakers after lamenting the “wave of hate”(a La Raza catchphrase) against Latinos that she seemed to believe was sweeping the country and making it hard to pass “comprehensive immigration reform”. The first speaker was Jose Perez of Latino Justice PRLDEF, the successor group to the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. Some readers might recall that Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s connections to this organization were an issue during her confirmation hearings—a development that Perez spent some time deploring.
He expressed amazement at the idea that anyone could ever consider his organization a “hate group” and quoted a statement from its website:
“As the leading advocate for Latinos in New York and the Northeast, and known nationally for its work in educating the next generation of Latino lawmakers, LatinoJustice PRLDEF is well-positioned to bring attention to the need to cultivate more Latino leaders in professional fields and in decision-making positions.”
When he finished reading he lifted up his head and asked incredulously, “Now, does that sound like a hate group?”
Of course, Perez’s inability to imagine how anyone could ever call a group with such an agenda a “hate group” illustrates how deeply ingrained the double standard is when it comes to ethnic activism. Take the same exact paragraph and replace the word “Latino” with the word “white” and Perez would probably be among the first to decry it as the manifesto of “racists” and “supremacists.”