Since Donald Trump won the US presidential election by garnering nearly 2 million fewer votes than his opponent, hate crimes against Latinos, blacks, gays, lesbians, Muslims and others have escalated, according to the American news media. Citing a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the media tell us more than 200 such crimes have been committed across the nation, in less than one week after the election.
The US news media – such as it is – have covered this uptick with fervor, giving the sense that this hate is all new. I and many others have watched this journalistic feeding frenzy with puzzlement, it being what my once editor and mentor at the Boston Globe, Lincoln Millstein, used to call “golly gee journalism,” whereby some sort of incident or incidents force (mostly) white reporters to suddenly notice the everyday things that have long been happening to all those people they generally ignore or ascribe to the amorphous mysterious category of “other”.
My puzzlement stems not from the hate crimes themselves. No surprise there. Rather, my consternation stems from the fact that so many in the media seem to think this is all new, or that the man with perhaps the tackiest penthouse in all of Manhattan has somehow magically conjured hate out of the ether with a (grand) wizard’s wand, and sprinkled it like Dixie dust all across the land.
Nine years ago, my family and I moved from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Scottsdale, Arizona, because the latter city’s public school system offered full-time gifted immersion classes for first graders. Our son, six at the time, was languishing in our former city’s school system in large part because he had the beautiful misfortune to have been born with a slightly higher IQ than Copernicus. As a novelist, I was able to work anywhere, and Scottsdale, with its palm trees and pebbled pools, looked and sounded like a good option for us.
We bought a half-million dollar house in a luxurious neighborhood full of gorgeous parks, and in the first day filled the garage with our boxes. We left our two Lexuses parked in the driveway. The next morning, we awoke to find all the windows shattered in both our vehicles. Nothing had been taken, not even my Vuitton purse, which I’d been too tired to remember to remove from my SUV.
When we asked our new neighbors whether they’d heard anything, they shook their heads but said the same thing had happened on two other occasions, when “the Perez family moved in over there, and the Gonzalezes moved in down there.” We were the only three Latino families in the area, they told us.
Still, we enrolled our little genius in the school. Two weeks into the fall semester, I picked him up after school only to have him ask me an astonishing question as we drove home.
“Mommy, am I legal?”
My heart sank. I looked at my beautiful, brilliant, until then innocent child in the rearview mirror – the kid who loved Pokemon and Thomas the Tank Engine and apples with peanut butter. “Why are you asking me this, sweetheart?”
“Because the ladies who watch us play at recess asked me.”
“What did they say?”
“They asked if I was legal. They asked if I could speak English. They asked if I knew who the president was.”
My son, a brown-skinned boy with a Spanish surname, is the 8th generation of our family on my mother’s side to have been born in what is now New Mexico, meaning his Spanish ancestors’ time in this nation predates the arrival of the pilgrims. The Native American women our Spanish ancestors married have been in what is now the United States for at least 10,000 years. English is his native tongue and only language. He taught himself to read two days after he turned three and was, at the time of his playground inquisition, already reading at a 9th grade level, probably one or two notches above the reading ability of his adult inquisitors. He was one of only two Latino children in that particular school. Within a month, I withdrew him, and homeschooled him. Part of his schooling at home was to read the newspaper every day and pick an article to read on camera like a news anchor. Over and over again, the Arizona Republic covered crimes committed by minorities as though their very minority-ness led them to do it, while covering the exact same crimes by whites as isolated incidents committed by crazy people.
One day, I came home to find a flyer on my door. It was for a landscaping company whose name was “Two White Guys Lawn Service.” This, apparently, was a selling point in Arizona. My family and I soon began volunteering to follow armed civilian posses enlisted by then Sheriff Joe Arpaio as they fanned out across Latino neighborhoods in Maricopa County, looking for brown people with broken taillights, so that they could haul them in for citizenship questioning. The scenes were reminiscent of pre-Holocaust Germany. Pogroms. We stopped participating after a group of neo-Nazi skinheads tried to run over my child with their motorcycles, while screaming at us to get out of the country they somehow believed had no use for people with Spanish surnames, even as their own state – and many other states, cities, rivers and streets – also boasted Spanish names. They never stopped to consider that “Los Angeles” or “Las Vegas” or “Colorado” or “Montana” were Spanish names, never wondered how that happened. They knew nothing of history, or reality, or much of anything other than the racist rants of idiots like Lou Dobbs.
We soon moved back to New Mexico, whose large Hispanic population makes such interactions blissfully rare. My son is now the valedictorian at the top-performing public high school in our city, and, at 15, has had his first political essay published on a popular progressive website that publishes works by people like Noam Chomsky. He is studying German as his language in school, in part because he would like to go to college there someday – and that choice comes in part because Germany’s self reflection as a nation in the wake of Hitler and the Holocaust has made them one of the most enlightened nations on earth. My (Mexican and Cuban) American son finds comfort in that possibility for our own nation, eventually.
Hate crimes against Latinos and others have been steadily rising for at least a decade in this country. In 2014, a study by the Pew Center showed that hate crimes against Latinos had more than tripled in just one year. Where were the media then? Silent. Just as they were silent when a Southern Poverty Law Center study in 2007 showed hate crimes against Latinos spiking dangerously in the wake of biased media coverage that conflated immigrants with Latinos with Mexican nationals with illegals with criminals, etc.
There are many reasons the US news media has been silent about crimes against my community until now, but the biggest cause is the deregulation of the news media in 1993, which led to a nearly complete loss of any sort of free press, suddenly leaving the telling of our nation’s story of itself in the hands of just five enormous multinational corporate conglomerates who now own 96 percent of the nation’s media.
Journalism is the only profession specifically named in the United States Constitution, because our founding fathers understood quite clearly the necessity of a functioning and independent free press for true democracy. Without accurate information, voters are little more than puppets. Automatons. We don’t have a free press or real information anymore. Let me repeat that for you: We in the United States do not have a free press, or a functioning democracy, anymore.
According to the organization Journalists Without Borders, the United States currently ranks No. 41 in the world for freedom of the press, out of 180 countries. Namibia, Surinam, Jamaica, Tonga and Ghana all have a freer news media than we do. This is unprecedented.
In this light, you do have to wonder why the corporate news media have suddenly decided to begin to tell the story of hate crimes against minorities and others in this country, as though these abominations were new. I don’t think it is to shine light on the problem with hopes of solving it. Not at all. If that had been their intention they would have been doing so all along instead of ignoring it.
There is a wonderful book called Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us, by Elizabeth Stone, in which she argues that the stories families choose to tell generation after generation are more than remembrances. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are also, she says, rule books for conduct, tales of what is and is not acceptable to us as a unit.
This in mind, I think that the reason the US media are now covering hate crimes against racial and ethnic minorities, homosexuals, religious minorities is to tacitly say it’s okay to do these things now. It is sort of like when an abusive spouse tortures the dog in front of you, just to let you know what they are capable of, to keep you in line, to instill fear and paralysis in you by saying “if you don’t behave, you’re next.”
The media are crowing about hate crimes now, almost in celebration – to make it seem like there is a sudden increase in hatred and violence because our new president condones it, to terrify us into submission before a demagogue who lost the popular vote by millions. There is no distinction between government, corporations and media anymore. They are all a monster with three heads, thrashing flabbily about on the same gilded brass waterbed in Trump tower.
Yes, the hate crimes are terrible. But beware a media that cherry picks when to shine the light on them, and be wary of the narrative they choose in which to set these tales. Pay attention to subtext.