Under the present widely perceived Neo-Fascist MAGA Regime, the two most disadvantaged ethnic and racial groups and communities here in the United States of America are African Americans and Latino Americans, in particular members of the Afro-Latin sub-ethnic community. Equally significant to observe here is the fact that the much greater mix and composition of the Euro-Latinx Community makes the Latin and/or the Hispanic Community the relatively far less politically and ideologically cohesive, although one would have thought that the strong and salient psychocultural marker of the Spanish language and, for the most part, a striking similarity of cultures or subcultures, created unignorably by a single geographical and, for the most part, a similarity of geopolitical provenance, would have more strategically bonded this “New Wave” of “Backyard Americans” in ways that could have inclined it relatively much closer to the African American Community than to the politically and the socioeconomically and culturally self-segregated Neo-Aryan “Mainstream” Community of the United States of America.
But that, of course, is absolutely not the case; and it is absolutely not accidental at all. It is simply a question of POWER and the community of self-proclaimed Americans that controls the same. There is, of course, a good reason for this “proximal anomaly,” and it has to do with the bread-and-butter issue of the distribution of the collective spoils of an American Society whose political epicenter is for all intents and purposes White and unapologetically Eurocentric, President Donald John Trump’s rampantly diarrheal tirades against the Euro-NATO Community and bloc of nations notwithstanding.
Which is why when the Trumpian policy and political propaganda shill, Mr. Shermichael Singleton, literally explodes that: “We don’t have unlimited resources” to take care of illegal or officially undocumented migrants, in a comical tone reflective of plaintive desperation, it ought to be aptly understood within the context of the Biblical and the slavo-colonial metaphor of “Feeding off the crumbs from the Master’s Dining Table,” that is, within the unmistakable context of the kind of socioeconomic pressure that an influx of latter-day migrants and immigrants automatically exerts on the traditionally and the historically marginalized African American Community and Humanity.
But, here again, of course, this is a scandalously parochial manner of envisaging the proverbial “Big Picture,” especially regarding the massive contribution unignorably made by Latin American migrants and immigrants, including formidable intellectuals and scholars like Ana Navarro, a Latina of working-class Nicaraguan descent. You see, anybody who is familiar with the seismic socioeconomic and politically seminal role that the United States has played, a la the infamous “Monroe Doctrine”, on Latin America would be logically and naturally expected to be humble and modest enough to avoid making the sort of historically and epistemically vacuous claim made by Mr. Singleton in response to the morally, historically and the legitimate plea by Ms. Navarro for recent migrants and emigrants from Latin America, both documented and undocumented, to be accorded and afforded utmost and well-deserved respect and toleration or tolerance by self-entitled bona fide American citizens like Mr. Singleton.
There was something tragically ironic about the vehement protestation of a self-entitled Mr. Singleton, in the form of what may be aptly characterized as “A pecking order of citizenship privilege,” in which the socioeconomically privated or underprivileged African American felt perfectly and/or legitimately entitled to, in return, visit a third-class status of inferiority upon a Johnny-Come-Lately Latino, by a second-class relegated African American citizen who, properly speaking, is the real and the most authentic author-creator of Contemporary American Civilization.
The most rational and constructive solution here, of course, is “Solidarity,” which clearly appears to have been the message that “NewsNight” host Abby Phillip had unsuccessfully attempted to pass on to an implacably self-absorbed and morally self-righteous Shermichael Singleton. Hopefully, this well-suited albeit culturally and politically self-alienated young man was brought to his senses either in-between different segments of the program or shortly after the conclusion of the program. But, of course, the complicity of a relatively more favored Latino Community cannot be completely excused from being inadvisably complicit in their own collective self-destruction by the crusading Anti-Replacement MAGA Theorists and Revolutionary Irredentists.
For example, it is an open secret that a critical mass of Latin-descended Americans voted to put President Trump into the Oval Office for the second time around and, in exchange or return, appear to have been generously rewarded by having one of their own named to the very powerful cabinet portfolio of Secretary-of-State. Which, ironically, also means that in Mr. Marco Rubio, the Cuban-descended American, Hispanics or Latin Americans have heavily implicated themselves in the sort of ethnic and racial profiling that Ms. Navarro recently complained bitterly about on the Abby Phillip-hosted “NewsNight” program.
Now, the next most logical question becomes: Where do we go from here? It is a perennial and a never-ending question that all civil and human rights advocates, activists and leaders have been asking themselves since time immemorial. And the answer appears to lie in the inviolable will and the determination of all civilized humans to live and thrive with dignity and respect. I am also strongly inclined to suspect that on this subject, that is, the subject of of respect and dignity, both Ms. Navarro and Mr. Singleton could not agree more.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
.
