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Arizona Adds Another Racist Lawby George Ziemann -- May 13, 2010 You'd think that the fallout from Arizona's recently passed immigration law would make our crack team of legislators think twice before passing another stupid law aimed primarily at Mexicans. The city of Los Angeles has joined Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco and St. Paul, Minnesota in an economic boycott of Arizona. Hotel reservations and business conventions have been cancelled left and right. The Republicans scratched Phoenix off the list of potential places to have a convention in 2011, and major league baseball is considering relocating the All-Star game next year as well, which was scheduled for Phoenix. I wish I could find the original quote again, but in one of the Los Angeles gatherings, the Arizona law was compared to the methods employed by the Nazis at the beginning of the Holocaust. We're building a 700-mile fence to "protect" a 2,000-mile border. Apparently, someone thinks the Mexicans are too stupid to figure out that they can go around it. Our airhead governor called the boycotts "misguided," and yesterday she signed another racist bill into law. According to the New York Times, "Mr. Horne, the state's superintendent of public instruction, told reporters on Wednesday that he wanted to learn more about the Tucson Unified School District's courses in African-American studies, Native American studies and Asian studies. But, the Arizona Daily Star reported, 'He said he felt he knew enough about Mexican-American studies and intends to go after' the district when the new law comes into force in December. So here's the key section of this fiasco:
When I was a kid, we had to learn local history in school. Since Arizona used to BE Mexico, and Mexican-American studies are first on the hit list, we can be sure that our children will learn nothing about it. Then there are the Native Americans, which white people hunted and treated like animals. We won't be able to talk about any of them. Black History Month is obviously illegal now, as are any discussions of the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, Nazi Germany, the World Trade Center, Abraham Lincoln, Cuba, the Spanish Inquisition and just about every other historical event that children used to learn about in school. Arizona will have none of it. When you register for school in Arizona, you have to fill out the "Home Language Survey and Immigration Status" report, mandated by the state legislature. The form offers 73 languages to choose from, most of which are probably represented by actual students. My child has gone to school with students from the Ukraine, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, Vietnam and several other countries. What Horne is really trying to do is get rid of the non-English speaking students because they drag down the overall test scores. It's much easier than teaching them. He started with an "English-only" obsession, which is now pointed primarily at our arrivals from south of the border, but any foreign student suffers. And what about the schools on the reservations? Those schools are "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group." There are 18 different Native American tribes in Arizona, each with their own language. And in most cases, their own schools. All now illegal. And when you get right down to it, the schools won't be able to talk about this new law, either. It certainly promotes resentment toward the white assholes who took the land from the Mexicans and Native Americans in the first place and are now telling them that they can't speak their own language, learn about their people, or be given accurate knowledge about the violent history of the state they live in. When the state superintendent of education invites this degree of narrow-minded, racist stupidity to infect the school system, it's really no surprise that Arizona holds the national last place trophy in education. We're number 50!! |
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