Race and/to the Border!

A long-term complaint about the US seems to be that it always imagines that it’s the Most Correct, Most Important, Most Whatever Nation in the World. I recall buying a Canadian history book and lending it to my US history teacher in grade school. He returned it by saying that it made Canada seem too important. Well, maybe it did—but don’t US histories inflate the greatness of the US? Is there, for example, a single military action where the standard US myth is that we should never have gone in? Maybe Vietnam. But look at the aggression of the US against Mexico and other former parts of the Spanish Empire in the 19th century. Engagement after engagement is built up entirely on placating the US desire for annexation, for more land. It’s a surprise we stopped when we did, instead of marching to the Straits of Magellan (though the Marines already sing of marching all the way to Mexico City).

In some ways, then, this post is about the Newsweek retraction so artfully deconstructed already by Keith Olbermann here. When I first heard the story of Qur’an flushing over at Chapati Mystery, I had no trouble believing it. To paraphrase Olbermann, why would interrogators who have no problem waterboarding or sending suspects to Uzbekistan draw the line at desecrating a book? But, in honesty, I’m only using the Newsweek hubub to make a point about, actually, not the Bush administration, but the US media in general, which is why Vicente Fox is on the left of your screen now.

For all the missteps of Scott McClellan in the Newsweek situation, an underlying theme unifies his positions: the US doesn’t fuck up. We don’t fail to respect others. We love freedom and liberty. We don’t torture. Or, to put it in the language above: The US is the Most Careful, Most Respectful, Most Liberty-Minded, Most Gentle Nation in the World. This is mantra (and, hence, myth). This is also why Newsweek had to retract. Their story, after all, is probably entirely true. Where they messed up was in their attribution of their anonymous source, a teeny detail that should not sink the whole item. After all, similar abuses of the Qur’an have already been documented repeatedly, and the lack of previous rioting over these report suggests, perhaps, that the White House response is a bumbling into the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy. Blaming Newsweek for deaths in Afghanistan is too simple, and it exculpates the White House from its continued policy of failure. But in sinking the ship with a tiny hole, the White House does further multiple duty: it calls into question the whole story itself (“Newsweek is careless in their efforts to find any possible way to slam Our Leader,” let’s say), reanimates the myth of the liberal media, and placates the American public into going back to sleep, thinking that, again, the US is the Most [good thing] Nation in the World.

If this reminds anyone, and I mean anyone of “Rathergate,” well, you’re crazy. I assure you that the White House’s going after a ticky-tack problem of attribution in order to sink a story that is, actually, true is unprecedented. No way did they do that before, because to do that would suggest that the White House is politically motivated, instead of simply trying to make sure that no actions, anywhere, call into question the unblemished record of the United States abroad.

OK, this is getting hard to write without descending into sophomoric sarcasm, so let’s just jump ahead to Mexico.

Among the noise over Newsweek, you may have missed this story, unless you read Hoy and/or are in the middle of a serious hispanophone fetish, but Mexico’s president Vicente Fox remarked in Puerto Vallarta on Friday that, “No hay duda que los mexicanos y las mexicanas, llenos de dignidad, de voluntad y de capacidad de trabajo, están haciendo trabajos que ni siquiera los negros quieren hacer allá en Estados Unidos.” The part people are flipping out is the end. Mexicans, he says, “are working jobs that not even blacks want to work over in the US” (my translation). People in the US demanded an apology (the non-journalist’s version of a retraction), but Fox was resolute. Now, it seems, the latest is that he’s apologised for being “misunderstood.”

I’m not taking sides here, because this is a simple culture clash. It’s obvious that Mexico, and Latin-America in general, have different racial discourses than the US does. They have different sensitivities, for better or for worse, but it should be noted that Fox has been a tireless opponent of discrimination during his presidency. My beef, instead, comes from the first AP story I read about the situation. Here’s the lede:

President Vicente Fox refused to apologize Monday for saying Mexicans in the United States do the work that blacks won’t a comment widely viewed as acceptable in a country where blackface comedy is still considered funny and nicknames often reflect skin color.

Doesn’t this appear sort of wildy inappropriate as the opening to a seemingly objective piece of journalism? What the hell do the final dozen words have to do with Fox’s comments? Perhaps a little cultural background, sure, but in the lede? Now, via the AP instead of the White House, we get another example of the US pretending to be the Most Sensitive Nation in the World. Oh yeah, no one in the US finds blackface funny anymore, and we would never make up a nickname that reflects skin color. On what planet, precisely, is the AP living where it feels it can sneer that, somehow, Mexicans are more racist than Yankees?

Reading Mexican accounts of the events in Texas and California during the early part of the 19th century, in fact, I’ve learned that Mexicans (and Californios) frequently complained that the Yankees were the racist ones. After all, Mexico had managed to abolish slavery, and had laws that prohibited slavery in Texas, laws that Anglos like Steve Austin and his ilk ignored when they infiltrated Texas, slaves in tow, to create a cotton economy, an economy most profitable when, you know, the labor is free. Or what about current racist opinions of Mexico itself in the US? Via an ad on the Facebook, which has links all over the place where scolds can complain about people’s profiles’ being offensive, I learned about Busted Tees, a company that offers t-shirts featuring slogans like “New Mexico: Cleaner than Regular Mexico,” or a logo of a silhouette in a sombrero as the mascot of the “Mexican Basketball Association.”

Yet the AP, completely without irony, can critique not just the president of Mexico, but all of Mexico, for being, essentially, unreconstructed racists, implying that the US is not at all racist in comparison. Again, this is not the White House participating in myth making anymore—this is our very journalists starting to, with the imprimatur of objectivity, engage in some myth-creation.

So what do we know: Fox strikes me as having a tin ear for race relations in the US, and that’s too bad, but also to be expected, as he is, you know, not a Yankee politician, despite his familiarity with the US. His understanding of race is simply different, and it works on different registers. But the AP should save its indignation for people who deserve criticism within our borders. Remember how Americans bristle when other nations (hi, France! hi, readers of the Guardian!) scold us and tell us how to do things? If not, then perhaps that’s precisely what should be remembered during this brouhaha.