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 Editorials | At Issue | May 2005 
A Comment Not Even Spinners Can Explain Away
 Kelly Arthur Garrett - The Herald Mexico
| | President Fox, right, looks at a photo during a meeting with Rev. Jesse Jackson at the Presidential residence Los Pinos in Mexico City. (Photo: AP) |
There’s no need to mince words about it. President Fox’s now-famous remark about Mexican migrants filling U.S. jobs that “not even blacks want to do” was racist. Per se, ipso facto, and on its face.
It’s not just that he shouldn’t have said it. He shouldn’t have thought it.
Still, anything that leads to the Mexican leader and Jesse Jackson sitting down to talk seriously for an hour can’t be all bad. And when the photo of their meeting appears just a few column inches away from Magic Johnson in a beaming hug with Mexican-descended Los Angeles mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa, you have to call the week a success, on balance, for Mexican/U.S. relations.
Is it overly optimistic to see a positive upshot in this unfortunate new twist to the immigration issue? Probably. But it at least seems likely that Fox had his eyes opened a bit by the sincere offense taken north of the border by Americans of all colors, as well as the negative (though far from unanimously so) reaction at home.
More importantly, Jackson’s visit connects Fox to a segment of the U.S. population mostly ignored in the immigration debate, though it has as big a stake in it as any other. The African-American moral leader (to borrow a Mexican term) once again showed his deftness at inserting himself into the middle of an international incident. Jackson’s detractors will accuse him of opportunism, but the rancor-free way he and Fox handled things may have turned a bad situation into an opportunity.
Jackson is no friend of the Bush administration, so having him even superficially involved in immigration reform might kick-start some action from the White House. Even if it doesn’t, Fox could do worse than continue a dialogue with Americans at ground level instead of waiting some more for President Bush to turn his attention to immigration reform. That would certainly be better than doing nothing while new walls go up along the border and new anti-immigrant legislation gets passed by the U.S. Congress.
The point of Fox’s May 13 speech was to inject some urgency into the long-delayed and much-needed bilateral effort to do something about the immigration situation and its causes. Maybe what started out as a distraction — Fox’s “not even blacks” comment — will end up serving the speech’s original purpose.
But not before the president’s words set off a frenzy of awkard posturing and tortured attempts at damage control by his cabinet, his allies and even many neutral commentators. An explosion of rhetoric is inevitable when the volatile issue of race is injected into a debate where it doesn’t belong. It ’s like that chemistry set you had as a kid. You put one drop of a certain solution into a glass filled with something else, you get a lot of fizz and sparks.
First we saw the presidential spokesperson, Rubén Aguilar, doing what presidential spokespersons do best — spinning like a Beyblade. The nation was told repeatedly that the president “never made any comment of a racist character respecting the African-American community.” What happened, Aguilar said, is that “a phrase that the president pronounced was misinterpreted.”
Actually, the problem for the president is not that his words were “misinterpreted,” but that they weren’t interpreted at all. They were taken at face value. When you say “not even blacks” will do certain jobs, you’re making a comment of a racist character respecting the African-American community. There’s no interpretation involved.
Others, such as Manuel Espino, leader of Fox’s party, the National Action Party (PAN), took the stance that the president chose his words imprudently but didn’t mean them the way they came out. Fox himself said much the same thing, adding that he was merely making the point that Mexican migrants should be lauded for their work ethic and appreciated for the role they’re playing in U.S. society.
This is more plausible, but hardly reassuring. Is it too much to expect a head of state to be able to make that indisputable point without offending an entire race in the process? And there’s also the more Freudian concern that wording like that can’t be entirely unintentional. It had to come from somewhere inside the man himself. (Although the singer Johnny Laboriel was so convinced that the president would never say such a thing that he told Reforma that someone on his staff must have written it for Fox to read off a teleprompter.)
Another tactic by Fox’s allies was the cultural defense. To some, perhaps forgetting that the comment was poorly received by many on this side of the border as well, the flap is just another case of Mexicans and Americans not understanding each other. Foreign Relations Secretary Ernesto Derbez told the press, “In Mexico perhaps we use language that is not considered appropriate in the United States.”
It’s hard to tell what “language” he’s talking about. But maybe he was getting at the same thing that a number of commentators, including the usually lucid Sergio Sarmiento, dwelt on. In their view Fox’s comment was so clearly no more than an accurate statement of reality — i.e. U.S. blacks were historically stuck with the worse jobs — that those who complain are "basically accusing Fox of having violated the nebulous rules of politically correct language."
What was the violation? In his daily column, Sarmiento points to Fox’s use of the word “blacks” as breaking a taboo in the United States. “Black” as a racial identifier is considered rude (grosera) there, he writes. He’s not the only one to make this mistake.
But how can it be a mistake? Anyone who’s ever read a U.S. newspaper knows that “black” is not taboo, rude or politically incorrect. And as Sarmiento knows (because he gave an example of a translation in his column) the Spanish word “negro” translates to “black” in English, not to the paternalism-associated word “negro.” Nor is “African-American” a “euphemism,” as Sarmiento (and others) claim, any more than “Asian-American” is a euphemism.
All of that, though, is beside the point. The offense wasn’t in the word “blacks.” It was in the words “not even” — “ni siquiera.” These aren’t the kinds of words that lend themselves to cultural misunderstanding or translation difficulties. They mean what they mean. And to say that migrants “are doing jobs that not even blacks want to do” is clearly to say that there is something so inferior about the black race that its members would be expected to want to do the most undesirable of jobs.
If Fox didn’t mean it that way, that’s good news. But that’s the way millions of people on both sides of the border took it. Are they all just being politically correct?
What’s unfortunate about the comment is that it injected a fresh dose of race into an issue that has too much race in it already. What may be fortunate about it is that cooler heads — notably those of Jackson and Fox himself — seem to have prevailed. The results just may be some progress in bringing the issues of immigration reform and migrant rights to the table.
kellyg@prodigy.net.mx |
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