On February 10th, a drunk driver slammed into a school bus in Massillon. No one was injured. A powerful image, maybe put it in the first segment of the 11 o’clock news, but not a story with much mileage. Old news by tomorrow. Let’s get back to the fight over having a live tiger as the high school mascot.
The next day, the revelation came when the police discovered that he had two forms of identification: a fake Ohio ID, and a Guatemalan ID. The story’s back to life! McMurphy, change the headline. “Suspected drunk illegal in collision with Massillon bus.” It’ll play great in the sticks, stories about illegals always do. What? Of course I’m not racist. Now get back to work! The Massillon Independent doesn’t run itself you know.
Institutional racism can be a hard thing to explain, most likely because we tend to conflate institutions with people. When a person commits decades of valuable service to an organization, we say “that man is an institution.” We tend to view chief executive officers/presidents/football head coaches as “the face of the institution.” When people call an institution racist, people tend to think that it means that the people in charge go to work with a white hood and trade jokes about extermination over lunch, but institutions are impersonal. The decisions that go into making an institution racist lack the amount of personal animosity that is often associated with the word “racism.”
Nothing about this story indicates that Victor Velasquez’s immigration status had anything to do with the crime he committed. In fact, the story doesn’t even say that the police checked his immigration status (hence the word “suspected”). Furthermore, Velasquez is Guatemalan, and the incident happened in Ohio, which means that it relates very little if at all to the issue of border security, much less the economic relations between the US and Mexico that have fueled the wave of migrant workers from there. And yet, this story was picked up on a blog or two – ones dedicated to exposing the criminal menace of undocumented immigrants (Real live pingbacks!). Let’s not even get into the use of the literally dehumanizing term “illegal.” Actually, let’s.
The issue of immigration into the United States is an issue of geopolitics. It is not one that is inherently ethnic or racial. “Illegals,” however, is an inherently racial category. “Illegals” are “invaders” that have come across the border from Mexico (not Guatemala, though most haters of “illegals” assume that all of central America is the same country) to steal our jobs/take back California and Texas, with the rhetoric of MECHA betraying their real intentions. They are a manifestation of a post-manufacturing society’s continued need for a labor underclass. They are what happens when communities that have only known two colors for most of their existence start seeing an influx of brown faces, brown faces of a different economic and legal status. Yes, a legal status that empowers the existing community to treat them as the outsiders that they, having grown up on or been force-fed a neoliberal diet of “tolerance,” so desperately want to. There can be plenty of de-racialized debates about what to do with an undocumented labor class of 10 million, and there are certainly de-racialized arguments that can be made for mass deportation as the solution. However, the call to “get rid of illegals,” especially in an immediate fashion, is a call for ethnic cleansing.
Racialized animosity almost always has some sort of media machine behind it, pushing the dialogue into more and more irrational territory. Back in the 1930s, when the biggest threat from Mexico to America was marijuana, that machine came entirely from the hands of William Randolph Hearst, who was pretty open about his and his institution’s racism. Today, it’s a pastiche of institutions and ethics, many of them handed down from Hearst himself. Some of it has to do with the general cynicism of the news media ethos (which stands in sharp contrast with its ethics, mind you) that leads it to give priority to individual crime stories over anything that’s an actual trend. An ethos that leads them to work so diligently to quell the pesky idea that one might be safe in one’s own community and thus not need to watch the news to learn about all the imminent dangers right outside one’s door (did you hear about that illegal drunk drivers who crashed into a school bus?).
In this milieu comes the probability that Victor Velasquez may be the only Latino face published in the Massillon Independent for a month (not that this is inherently a problem. It’s to be expected when it’s only 0.96% of the population), and the high probability that the National Hispanic Media Coalition is probably not paying attention to anything that comes from the Massillon Independent (a note about media watchdog groups: they’re the closest anyone gets to an actual “PC police.” Think GLAAD speaking out against Eminem. They play an important role in combating the news media’s self-prescribed role as instiller of social norms. However, they’re not always right. They’re filled with media people after all. Their voice is as important as the voice of the original outlet, a statement which I have left deliberately ambiguous).
Put it all together and you get “Suspected drunk illegal in collision with Massillon bus,” which is also one of most commented stories on the Massillon Independent Facebook page, and precisely the stoker of public sentiment that makes the Romney camp feel that much more comfortable in advocating a national strategy of self-deportation as his solution for immigration (aka the “your kind ain’t welcome round these parts no more, so you best git before we do something you wouldn’t like” strategy). Put it all together nationwide, and you get the news media as an institution that feeds on people’s latent racism for the sake of ratings/pageviews, or in other words, a racist institution.
I should point out that I have nothing against the town of Massillon or the Massillon Independent (any more than I have against the institution of local news in general). A stroll through the Independent’s Facebook page reveals it as the part of Ohio that I can’t help but shake a fondness for. I think Northern Ohio is one of the finest metro areas in the country and never gets enough love. This news story just showed up when I was on the Examiner news-site-turned-content-farm, and felt excited to write about anything related to Ohio. But I think it’s important; this type of sentiment is being carried out in public with institutional support just two hours to the north (not the south, notice). Institutional racism can be hard to talk about (though I’m finding it increasingly easier to talk about than personal racism), but it is a concept that everyone in the country needs to understand. I hope this lesson was helpful.
Related posts:
- Prop 8 is Not Dead and Neither is Institutional Heterosexism People flooded to dance in the Facebookstreet yesterday at the...
- Why This Isn’t An Article About White Crime Victims Pulsers, It’s been a while, but once you awaken the...
- Pay Attention, Activists: “Insulting Religion” Still Crime in Egypt Ever heard of Naguib Sawiris? I hadn’t, until hearing that...
- [Live Blog] Students Fill Union Demanding Hate Crime Alert System, Pledge to Sit-in Several dozen black students and their allies have filled the...
- “Not in Our House”: Crime Response Meeting – Fills Hale Center The Ohio State Black Student Association (BSA) held an open-to-the-OSU-community...