I get email: ALL White People

I have a great aunt who likes to send me e-mails and I got one today that I felt I had to share. Not because it’s good, but because I am sure many of you don’t have the un-privilege of being related to southern “poor white trash“. And so I present to you this e-mail which left me dumbstruck. It’s important to remember that the woman who sent this to me does not think that this is a racist e-mail. All original ridiculous font choices preserved.

Old White People And young white people ALL white people!
 
IF WE DON’T VOTE RED IN NOVEMBER, 2012, WE WILL LOSE EVERYTHING WE HAVE ACCOMPLISHED IN 230 YEARS!

 

“Those who hide from current political reality will soon wonder where their American Liberty has gone.” DPM
HISPANIC LEADERS SPEAK OUT ——– “ALL You  white people, It is your duty to die.” 

Augustin Cebada
, Brown Berets; “Go back to Boston ! Go back to Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims! Get out! We are the future. You are old and tired. Go on. We have beaten you. Leave like beaten  rats. You oldwhite people. It is your duty to die. Through love of having children, we are going to take over.

Richard Alatorre
, Los Angeles City Council. “They’re afraid we’re going to take over the governmental institutions and other institutions. They’re right. We will take them over . . . We are here to stay.”

Excelsior
, the national newspaper of Mexico , “The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot.”

Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez
, University of Texas ; “We have an aging white America . They are not making babies. They are dying. The explosion is in our population . . . I love it. They are shitting in their pants with fear. I love it.”

Art Torres
, Chairman of the California Democratic Party, “Remember 187–proposition to deny taxpayer funds for services to non-citizens–was the last gasp of white America in California .”

Gloria Molina
, Los Angeles County Supervisor, “We are politicizing every single one of these new citizens that are becoming citizens of this country . . … I gotta tell you that a lot of people are saying, “I’m going to go out there and vote because I want to pay them back.”

Mario Obledo
, California Coalition of Hispanic Organizations and California State Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Governor Jerry Brown, also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton, ” California is going to be a Hispanic state. Anyone who doesn’t like it should leave.”

Jose Pescador Osuna
, Mexican Consul General, “We are practicing ‘La Reconquista’ in California ..”

Professor Fernando Guerra
, Loyola Marymount University ; “We need to avoid a white backlash by using codes understood by Latinos . . . ”

WHEN I WAS YOUNG
:
When I was young, I remember hearing about the immigrants that came through Ellis Island .. They wanted to learn English. They wanted to breathe free. They wanted to become Americans. Now too many immigrants come here with demands. They demand to be taught in their own language. They demand special privileges–affirmative action. They demand ethnic studies that glorify their culture.

HOW CAN YOU HELP?
:
Send copies of this letter to at least two other people, 100 would be even better. Help us get the word out.


R
emember when you vote this year that we need someone in the White House who will balance the budget and control illegal immigration. If we make all illegals, legal, then we have lost our country forever. Liberalism will have won and you will have a one party system forever. Redistribution of wealth will be the law. It is called socialism. Our country is heading in the wrong direction and we are doing it to ourselves without serious protest
 
ALL AMERICANS SHOULD BE DISTURBED, VERY DISTURBED BY THIS. WHAT A SHAME, THAT NOT ENOUGH AMERICANS HAVE THE BACK BONE TO STAND UP AND SAY, “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH”. IT IS TIME WE TOOK OUR COUNTRY BACK!

… but I like the immigrant version better. I am completely unable to grasp this. What are they afraid of?

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I get email: ALL White People
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35 thoughts on “I get email: ALL White People

  1. 1

    *facepalm* I’ve got ridiculous “conservative” (code word for “bigot”) relations too.

    I’ve blocked them all from e-mailing me.

    Did you respond at all?

    What are they afraid of?,

    Being treated the way they have always treated others. I’ve always suspected a hint of guilty conscious in bigots. Or, at least, fear of comeuppance.

  2. 2

    Ashley, as one of (maybe) six or so liberals living in the state of Mississippi, let me tell you- this is mainstream thought down here; and not just among poor whites either. It would be funny if it weren’t so…uh, not.

  3. 3

    Hey, if we want to “take the country back” from all immigrants, that’s cool. There’s a lot of real estate around here the reservation wouldn’t mind having instead.

  4. 5

    Sometimes I wonder if things like this aren’t actually sock-puppetry from well-meaning progressives in an attempt to shine a light on the last pockets of racism…and then I look at my family, and my wife’s family and my friends’ families and the harsh reality sets in.

    By the time I actually get around to looking at policies and party platforms, I’m close to writing my own multi-colored, oddly-capitalized chain mail.

    That’s when I remember that we’re winning and that the trend is toward improvement and my sanity returns.

    (If that doesn’t work, I alternate between drinking and looking for pictures of really cute things.)

    1. 5.1

      I have wondered the same things about Victoria Jackson, Anne Coulter and Sean Hannity. They are either out of their minds or performance art genius’s.

  5. 7

    hmmm, can we subsitute “Irish” or “Italians” for all of this bigotted nonsense to get what our dear “ancestors” felt too?

    I’d say that you should tell your great aunt she’s a bigotted idiot, no matter if she doesn’t think it’s racist. At one point I thought I should keep my mouth shut when sent such nonsense by aged relatives because they are “too old to change” but that’s not true. They aren’t too old to vote, are they?

  6. 8

    It’s amazing how many conservatives claim to remember a past that never happened. As if Irish, Italian, Chinese, and countless other kinds of immigrants weren’t subject to racism when they started arriving in numbers! There’s clearly a reason why the classic American example of a racist party was called the Know-Nothings.

    1. 8.1

      It’s amazing how many conservatives claim to remember a past that never happened. As if Irish, Italian, Chinese, and countless other kinds of immigrants weren’t subject to racism when they started arriving in numbers! There’s clearly a reason why the classic American example of a racist party was called the Know-Nothings.

      Actually, my dad (Lithuanian) would bring up how he was taunted for his accent and called a DP when he first came to Canada, but he got over it, therefore everyone else should suck it up.*

      Drawbridge politics.

      *I’d point out that it was only thanks to newer waves of immigrants that Eastern Europeans, especially those who arrived young enough to lose their accents, gradually became ‘white’.

    2. 8.2

      Hmm, oddly enough, I know some legal Chinese immigrants who are annoyed at the illegal Chinese immigrants and laws that legalize them, because they had to spend so much more effort in time and money to get in legally and feel it’s unfair.

      It’s weird how they’ll so quickly turn on fellow immigrants, and don’t realize that “hey, just because I had to suffer doesn’t mean I should want others to suffer as badly as I did”. I guess it’s the same mentality as hazers, who see it as a right of passage instead of a crappy legacy to continue.

  7. 9

    My dear old dad, who is not racist in any way, keeps forwarding stuff like this from some second cousin who is a frothing conservative racist nutbag. Dad is extremely sweet & trusting plus seriously dyslexic. He doesn’t read them, just sees a bunch of exclamation points and colors and thinks it must be important.

    The emails freak me out but the conduit is seriously pissing me off.

  8. 10

    My aunt had to spend several hours talking my 90+ year old, North Carolinian grandmother down after Obama won. She was genuinely convinced there would be race riots in the street. While most– perhaps even all– of her children & grandchildren are progressive, the same cannot be said for my progressive grandparents’ brood.

    I see the increase in racial tension over the last couple decades as the result of the decline of the middle class– it’s hard to be generous toward the “other” when you’re fighting to stay out of poverty. And those who benefit from the current system have decades of practice trying to pit those who do not benefit against each other.

    This book review by Krugman and Wells makes some interesting points about the current political situation: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/getting-away-it/?pagination=false

  9. 13

    Is it a function of trying to use as many buzzwords as possible that these things are unreadably composed? Can as many conservatives to keep this going be that crazy that they understand this? Do none of them realize this is insane?

    1. 14.1

      Does the Snopes link provide any context for the quotes? Having received plenty of email forwards “proving” that President Obama is a “reverse racist” by cherry-picking quotes from his books and speeches, I don’t like drawing conclusions on words out of context.

      Also, because I am white and therefore don’t experience many negative consequences based on my skin color alone, it doesn’t offend me in the way that a person of color reading statements from the KKK would be (legitimately) offended. That’s my privilege.

    2. 14.2

      Certainly some, e.g. the Cebada quote, are pretty bad, but there are a few reasons I personally don’t care all that much:

      1) Some of the quotes are decades old. If you *couldn’t* find a list of a dozen-ish scary quotes, given the entire population of politically active Hispanics for the past twenty years, I would say you weren’t trying hard enough. It’s cherry-picking, even if you were to grant that the quotes are mostly legit.

      2) The chain mail is still racist regardless. It puts these quotes under the headline “Hispanic leaders speak out”, which is nonsensical. It doesn’t even pretend to speak to universal values, but presents the issue as Americans vs. Hispanics (falsely implying, of course, that all Americans are white and all Hispanics are not).

      3) Conquest analogies notwithstanding, immigration simply is not an act of violence. Much of this is just hyperbole, no matter how you interpret it. And if you don’t live in the Southwest, doubly paranoid to worry about this.

      4) Fear of Hispanic takeover seems much more politically influential than resentment against white people. My perception has been that in the 1.5, 2nd, 3rd generations, there’s a big decline of feeling of national identity within families. A huge percentage of Hispanics in the U.S. are people like me, third generation, speak better English than Spanish, and have bigger political concerns than trying to drum old white people out of LA (leaving aside the bigger issue that many of us look white or are related to people who do, via blood or marriage). Whatever else one might find good or bad about this situation, it is one of a dozen reasons why claiming Austin or SoCal for Mexico is a total pipe dream. On the other hand, the possibility of irrational fears about immigrants influencing elections? That seems pretty possible. In fact it happens every year.

  10. 15

    A white guy I know told me that an older white guy said “I KNOW there’s a them, I just don’t think there’s an US anymore.” The younger white guy – a friend of mine who is progressive, realized that if the older guy had known his politics, the older guy would have thought of him as one of *them.* So part of this backlash might be that racist white people don’t want to admit it, but lots of white people aren’t on their side anymore. In their minds they have to believe that all white people are a singular block with unified interests, but in reality it’s not true.

    White racists – ones who can communicate more coherently than the sample here – usually go on about how a nation needs a ‘unified culture’ to function and so a multi-cultural society is impossible and will fail. What I don’t think they realize is that culture and race aren’t necessarily the same thing. Part of culture is values, and younger white people probably share the values of younger people of color far more so than older white people – a young white kid might, in a sense, be closer culturally to a younger Black, Hispanic or Asian young person than the older members of zer’s own white family. Perhaps what they feel such a panic about is that liberal values have become the basis for a new, younger culture where in-group loyalty isn’t the first and greatest commandment.

  11. 17

    What are they afraid of?

    Losing their place at the top of the social order, and all of the privilege that comes with it. Even if they’re “poor white trash” they’re still miles above non-whites when it comes to privilege in the social order. They know it, and the prospect of that changing terrifies them.

  12. 18

    Excelsior, the national newspaper of Mexico , “The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot.”

    A joke I heard in Mexico in the early 1980s was that Mexico may have lost California in 1848 because of the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, but they were buying it back, one house at a time.

  13. 20

    This email reminded me of *my* great aunt. Lots of capitals and Christ and conservatism and colors. I’m just waiting for a slipup on a racist email to complete the collection; she doesn’t send those to our branch of the family. Course, half that side of my family slips up in *other* ways…

    1. 21.1

      I’m pretty sure that a lot of those people like the things they get because of, essentially, socialism. Like, say, Medicare, which they somehow don’t realise is a government program. I feel like a shifty character, wanting to sidle up to them and say, “Try it, you’ll like it. The first one’s free.”

  14. 22

    I’ve never seen a reason to be “proud” of being white, but I’ve often seen reasons to be embarrassed and ashamed.

    Those who are doing the complaining are upset that they will no longer benefit from illgotten gains. They’re not afraid of being discriminated against, they’re afraid of being treated as equals. The US will not end up like Zimbabwe, no matter how much clowns like Limbaugh or Lou Dobbs want to claim it will. Every empire eventually fades, whether religious, political, social or cutural, and that’s what we’re seeing now.

    White and christian “dominance” of the past 500 years is only a temporary phenomenon, mostly due to imperialism and violence. Now that many non-white people and countries have had educational opportunities and caste systems in China and India have gone, we’re seeing that anyone anywhere in the world is capable of bright ideas. The idea of “white superiority” is laughable.

  15. 23

    The only thing racist I see here is the use of the term “poor white trash” to refer to poor southerners and the racist comments in the e-mail itself, which according to Snopes are mostly true. Other than that, it shouldn’t be surprising that the “white trash” are highly resentful of liberals who denounce them as such and therefore tend to vote for the other half of the corporatist war party.

    Of course there is the usual racist “white privilege’ canard by which having white skin is something to be ashamed of because it somehow makes you “privileged” even if you are sleeping under a bridge on a mattress made of cardboard and crumpled newspaper. After all, you are by definition better off than a black man in similar circumstances.

  16. 24

    Ashley,

    I am from Jacksonville, Fl and have extensive family ties in North-East Alabama and North-West Georgia so I get forwarded emails like this all the time. I am sure we have gotten some of the same ones from people who can’t or refuse to recognize the inherent racism/white privilege/white paranoia that is present in everyone of them.

  17. CT
    27

    There’s a whole fucking world of poor white trash that are not homophobic racist morons. No, I don’t buy the ‘well most are’ bullshit argument either. I know them, I live with them, I work with them, I am related to them. For every racist homophobe there are 10 who are not.

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