Must the Minutemen showcase their minority members?
Andrew McCarthy has an
article on NRO on the budding controversy over the report that the U.S. Border Patrol informed Mexican authorities of the whereabouts of the Minutemen. Howard Sutherland writes:
This is quite good, considering where it is posted. Why, though, does McCarthy feel obliged to defend the Minutemen against the charge of vigilantism by mentioning, inter alia, that the Minutemen are “multi-ethnic and multi-racial in background”? The clear implication is that the Minutemen would be vigilantes if they happened to be all or mostly (as I suspect they are anyway) white men.
Until we can get over this reflexive reaching for some colored fig-leaf we will never mount an effective cultural defense of the remnants of Western society. While I am thrilled that the Minutemen are on the border doing their thing—I wish I could dump what I am doing and join them—I get a little tired of their need to push one of their handful of Mexican-American members in front of the cameras to prove their multicultural bona fides.
LA replies:
Absolutely. As long as the Minutemen feel compelled to push their minority members in front of the cameras (assuming that that is what they are doing—I haven’t seen it myself), they are still within the liberal orbit, still subscribing to the crippling assumption that whites as whites are morally illegitimate and must constantly do liberal things, namely have a minority person attached to their hip, to prove their legitimacy. If Mexican-Americans are members of the Minutemen, fine, great. But don’t turn them into your mascots. Have some self-respect, and respect for your Mexican-American members as well. Don’t be like George and Condi.
On McCarthy’s “multi-racial” reference, here is what he said:
The Minutemen have been maligned by pro-illegal-alien lobbyists, swaths of the mainstream media, and—infuriatingly—President Bush himself as a “vigilante” group. In fact, they are a vigilance group.
The project is a lawful association of citizens, multi-ethnic and multi-racial in background, who assiduously monitor the way government performs one of its most basic enforcement missions.
Now, that’s not terrible, he’s not exactly kow-towing to liberalism. However, I must say that if I were writing that article, I would not have mentioned the multi-racial nature of the organization. I just wouldn’t have done it, for the reasons stated. I would simply have called them a “lawful association of citizens who assiduously monitor the way government performs one of its most basic enforcement missions.” In a self-respecting America, that would have been sufficient.
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Ken Hechtman, a Canadian leftist and VFR reader, writes:
I can tell you why the Minutemen drag their minority members in front of the cameras. It’s our (the left’s) fault.
We put out the Big Lie that the Minutemen are a racist hate-group, no different in style or substance from David Duke and Richard Butler.
I first heard the smear at a No One Is Illegal event three years ago, a year before the Minutemen hit the national press. I asked an American conservative friend if he’d ever heard of them and he said he knew a few from the Tancredo campaign. He gave me the basics of what they are and what they’re not. Everything he said checks out. They’re not Nazis. They put a lot of effort into screening Nazis out.
But they have to do more than just quietly keep their own house clean. They have to publicly put some daylight between themselves and the Nazis, otherwise the lie will stick and showing it works a lot better than just saying it. There are millions of white Americans who will support the Minutemen if they knew what they really are, what they really want and what they really do to get it—but who won’t if they believe the Big Lie.
There’s another angle as well: Which side gets the support of the millions of legal Mexican immigrants and native-born Americans of Mexican ancestry?
The first-order approximation (race determines everything) is that they’ll back the illegals. We thought that too, in the first few NOII campaigns. But it doesn’t work that way. Legal immigrants from the same ethnic group as the illegals can be *more* hostile than anyone else. An organization of law-abiding, patriotic Americans will get their support. An organization of white people won’t.
LA replies:
I thank Mr. Hechtman for the information and analysis. But I still don’t agree with his conclusion. He’s saying that the charge of Nazism that the left has created around the Minutemen is so pervasive and powerful that the only way the Minutemen can be free of it is through never-ending conspicuous displays of diversity. But what do such displays accomplish? They merely legitimize the leftist attack. They legitimize the liberal presumption that a group like the Minutemen must be racist and that it’s the Minutemen’s responsibility to clear themselves of the charge. Conservatives and patriots cannot win if they continue to dance to the left’s tune, which is what Mr. Hechtman wants them to do, even though he admits the left’s charge is false.
So they don’t have to engage in public displays. They merely have to keep their house clean. And then when reporters ask them if they’re racists, instead of saying, “We’re not racists,” they should turn the tables on the reporters and say, “What is the evidence that we are. Why do you assume that a group of citizens defending our country are evil, in the total absence of any evidence that we are?” They could mention in passing that they have Hispanic members, but they shouldn’t emphasize it. By not emphasizing it, they prove that they’re not merely using minorities as window dressing but that they are sure of their own rightness and not dancing to the tune of the left.
As for Mexican-Americans being turned off by an “organization of white people,” that’s not a problem, because the Minutemen are not an organization of white people. They are a national organization most of whose members are white. Mexican-Americans who share the goals of the Minutemen will support them, on the basis of the national ideal the Minutemen represent, not on the basis of the Minutemen doing a GOP-style song-and-dance, “Oh, look at us, we’re not racist, we have lots of Mexican-Americans, please, Mexican-Americans, join us!” The Minutemen don’t need Mexican-American supporters who will be drawn by such an appeal.
Mr. Hechtman still shares the general belief that Western patriots need nonwhite minorities to validate them. They do not. If they stand confidently on their own principles, ignoring the left’s charges and its poison, minority persons who are loyal to America and the West will support them, and that would be all the better. But the Minutemen do not need a single minority member.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 11, 2006 12:05 AM | Send