Is One Free To Hate Hispanics in the US?

To talk about political correctness, it is best to be politically incorrect. And, in return, to be a little bit honest. Once that premise is established, we can ask the question: Is one free to insult Latinos in the United States?

At first glance, that seems absurd. We are tired of hearing that Spanish is the language of the future in the U.S. That by the year 2050, 30 percent of the population in that country will be of Hispanic origin. That the former candidate for vice president who ran with Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine, is bilingual in Spanish. And that one of the former Republican presidential candidates, Jeb Bush, speaks Spanish. Not to mention Gloria Estefan, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Penelope Cruz. And Despacito.

Of course, it is also true that two former Republican presidential candidates − Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio − despite their unequivocally Hispanic names, just speak in English. And that the winner of the presidential election, Donald Trump, insulted Spanish-speaking residents, something that would have meant the death of his civic life if he had directed such insults to African-American or Jewish people, for instance. To paraphrase George Orwell, author of “Animal Farm,” all minorities are equal, but some minorities are more equal than others. The future is always Hispanic. The present, never.

That has been clearly revealed this week in New York, a city where a quarter of the population is identified in the census as “Hispanic.” Last Tuesday, on one of the city’s most select streets, Madison Avenue, attorney Aaron Schlossberg had a hysterical fit in a store, and began insulting two women who were speaking in Spanish, at whom he screamed insults along the lines of “My next call is to ICE,” “This is America! The least they can do is speak English,” and “I pay for their welfare.”

Although Schlossberg lost the the lease on his law office, he remained defiant in a number of his messages. On his Facebook profile, he has displayed a picture of the red cap worn by Trump supporters sporting the slogan, “Make Cafeterias Great Again,” and he has posted the following message: “I’m a white privileged rich kid with a law degree. I’ll lay low for a while, shop a couple of interviews here and there, write a book about this whole experience where I talk about the online harassment and death threats I’m getting, I’ll get invited to Fox as a panelist and before you know it, I’ll have a full-time gig as a host.”

Schlossberg´s reaction is perfectly normal. Here is another example, this time in California, where, according to the census, 38.8 percent of the population is Hispanic. It happened in a Starbucks store, where a waitress wrote down the order of a client named Pedro with the word “Beaner,” a derivative of bean, which is an insult to Latin-Americans derived from the fact that their traditional food contains, as a matter of fact, a lot of beans.

A month ago, when two African-American men were involved in an incident at a Starbucks in Philadelphia that ended with their detention − despite the fact that they were sitting on the premises without buying anything, which goes against Starbucks’ rules − the company closed each and every one of their 8,000 stores for a day to provide their employees a “racial education.” Pedro was offered a $50 Starbucks coupon.

These cases show that the demographic weight of Hispanics does not translate into power or social consideration. After all, President Trump has accused Mexican immigrants of being rapists, and last week he called undocumented immigrants “animals.” Although later he tried to qualify his words by saying that he only referred to the members of the Salvadoran Mara MS-13 gang, (that is to say, the mafia), whoever heard his words would not have known whether the president was talking about people living in the U.S. without legal permission or criminals.

Trump’s contempt is not only directed at people living in the U.S. without legal permission. During the presidential election campaign, he attacked the judge who was overseeing a fraud case involving Trump’s university, arguing strongly, “This judge is of Mexican heritage.” Certainly, Gonzalo Curiel´s family comes from Mexico. But they have been living in the U.S. for longer than the Drumpf family, who changed their name to Trump to avoid being associated with their country of origin, Germany, against which the U.S. fought in two world wars.

In addition, the problem is that Hispanics are very diverse, and they do not get along with each other. Anyone who has gone to Miami and has spoken with Cuban exiles realizes that for them, it is one thing for them to be “Cuban” and another very different thing to be “Latino” like the others. The same goes for Venezuelans who flee from Chavismo. Not to mention race. A white Colombian will not register as “Hispanic” in the census, because this puts him in the same category as a mestizo or a mulatto.

Moreover, the growth of the Hispanic population does not automatically mean the growth of the Spanish-speaking population. The second generation of Latinos speaks very poor Spanish because, in the U.S., to get skilled work you have to speak the language of Shakespeare, not the language of Cervantes. The third generation barely understands Spanish.

Even the proposition that Latinos are going to devour the U.S. demographically still remains to be seen. In 2000, the census predicted that by 2050, there would be 98 million Hispanics in the country. In 2008, the census increased the projection to 133 million. In 2014, the projection was reduced to 106 million.

What about Jennifer Lopez, Penelope Cruz, Shakira and Despacito? Don’t they show that the Latin culture is sweeping the U.S.? Of course. But culture does not translate into power. Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Marian Anderson and Hattie McDaniel (the Mammy of “Gone with the Wind”) were also very famous artists in the U.S. in the 20s and 30s, the golden age of the Ku Klux Klan.