Police in Florida city described at-large and armed Hispanic murderer as “white”

Emily B. writes:

I want to share my story of, and reactions to, a deadly event.

In early December, I went through a traumatic experience. I got an automated call, a reverse 9-11, telling me that a violent and armed man was loose in my area, and the coordinates given were not too far from my home. Indeed, I had heard choppers over my house for a couple of hours that morning and even said to myself, “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think a manhunt was going on.” I was told he was a white male named Francisco Rangel, had a “13” tattooed under an eye, etc. The terror was unbelievable. I just kept saying, “If only I had a gun.” I was home alone with the children in our suburban neighborhood. My husband told me to get the heck out of there. My sister sped to my place to escort me out though I had told her not to, and we burnt rubber fleeing.

About a week after the incident, and angry about the political correctness I had perceived, I emailed our Sheriff’s department. It was brief and I just wanted to know why they called the man white, even though he was Hispanic. My ultimate aim was to learn what might happen in the future: trust law enforcement or look elsewhere for the truth. Was it because Hispanics are automatically classified as white? Was it because they go by the self-identification of the perp? I even said that I understood that many Hispanics call themselves white, and that it was their prerogative, but the vast majority of the population has an idea of what white is when they hear that and conveying clear and accurate information to the general public, especially when lives were on the line, is critical.

A few days later, to my surprise, I got a call from an officer, and he talked with me for over 10 minutes. The bulk of the conversation was him telling me that they were on top of the job. He had been at central command and had issued that reverse 911 call himself. Then he finally got around to addressing the main point. He had an accent and was Hispanic, though I don’t remember his name as it was uncommon. He explained that it was federal law to call Hispanics “whites.” I absolutely got the feeling that he thought this was a good thing as he went on to say, “Scientifically, there are four races of man: white, African, Asian, and Indian. White is his (Rangel’s) race, ‘Hispanic’ is his ethnicity.” I told him I understood and thanked him for clearing up the “why.” He also made it a point to stress how “white” this guy looked, that there is a color continuum among Hispanics, etc. I told him I understood that completely. Then it got interesting. I stated that I didn’t believe we were completely informed on who to look for because the vast majority of the public has a picture of a European in their head when they hear “white.”

“That’s some people’s perspective of white,” came the reply.

I was so shocked that it caught me off guard. He went on to tell me that the perp was born in the USA, and he went above and beyond the media in describing this man’s evilness. I think this was to reiterate that it was an extreme situation and that they handled it well. Also, I sensed he wanted to distance this bad Hispanic from the regular, church-going ones like Candelario, the innocent bystander he killed.

Bottom line: Hispanics want to be white and equate themselves as much as possible with Europeans. I’ve always believed this, as I’ve rubbed elbows with so many and, indeed, a Hispanic couple are the godparents to one of our children. Also, and this is inflammatory, I’ve observed extensively that redheads are more desirable than blonds or especially brunettes (among most minorities, actually) and I believe its because redheads are usually the ultimate bleach. A long time ago, Sailer brought out, I can’t remember where, that about half of Hispanics identify as white when given a choice between white and Hispanic! Heather Mac Donald scoffed at this notion, as others have, because when Hispanics get to America or the American-born second or subsequent generation comes of age, “they more closely resemble blacks’ in social dysfunction. These writers aren’t giving IQ its due.

I hit a nerve with this police officer that I didn’t anticipate and he was quite defensive about making it understood that he was just as white as I was. He sincerely believed, and he felt it was borne out, that his description was good enough; it could have been more accurate, of course. At least in this case, but also what I suspect is at heart in much of our legalese, recognizing Hispanics as whites isn’t about “making whites look bad,” but is done to please Hispanics. All other issues aside, that they aspire to be like us, and often desperately so, is a good thing.

LA replies:

Why was it so wrong for them to describe this man as white, since, as appears to be the case, he did look white rather than Hispanic?

Also, toward the end you seem to go off in different directions about hair color and so forth and it’s not easy to follow your point.

I gather your main point is that Hispanics want to be considered white, and that this is really what drives our strange system of classification?

Emily replies:

In the picture, he looks more white, but is clearly not Anglo. In the videos, he was very Hispanic. I had a genuine concern: Am I being told the whole truth or did political correctness hamper the description, so that citizens were not armed with the best information to look out for this man? In the future, I wondered, how vague are the police capable of being in life or death situations like this? I was so scared and later so angry when I saw that this man arrested on TV and realized that the call I received was so needlessly generic. Talking to the officer mitigated the anger quite a bit, but it is clear that strong feelings about race and identity can be an impediment to warning the public about danger.

If I meandered at the end of my email, I apologize. There has been debate about Hispanics and who they are and who they want to be. I guess I brought up hair color and being very pale because, being in my shoes and the extreme ways I and others like me have been treated, I cannot come to any other conclusion than that most minorities want to be much more similar to Europeans.

LA replies:

Ok. With your further explanation I understand.

But a couple of more things. I just looked up the killer Francisco Rangel and his victim Candelario and found this article, with Rangel’s photo.

First, to describe this individual as white is absurd. You are absolutely correct that this was a life-threatening exercise in political correctness.

Second, considering that this man is not what people think of as white, I don’t understand why talking to the officer mitigated your anger, since the officer had reported as a “white” someone whom most people would not think of as white.

Third, the article I linked is an example of the worse-than-incompetent journalism that is typical today. It’s almost impossible to understand what happened from this article, since the account jumps back and forward and does not give a sequential narrative. In particular, it doesn’t tell us clearly about the murder that took place on the previous day for which Rangel was being hunted, nor distinguish it from the killing of the bystander that took place during the chase.

Here’s another article, with more detail and drama. Notice its nihilistic use of the nonjudgmental word “tragedy” to describe a murderer firing repeatedly at police officers and killing a bystander.

Here is another article.

LA continues:

This is just a dynamite story, that the police described the obviously not-white Rangel as white, while he was armed, dangerous, and escaping from police in a residential neighborhood. And, it appears, this was done basically on the decision of the officer you spoke with, who, as a Hispanic, has a hang-up that Hispanics must be seen as white.

If the police had announced that a killer was on the loose in my neighborhood, and that the killer was white, and then, a little later in the day, I saw Rangel approaching me on a street, my first thought would have been, “That’s not the guy the police are looking for, the police said the guy was white.” That incorrect thought on my part could cause my death or the deaths of other people. People’s lives were put at risk because the Hispanic officer who put out the warning call has a personal need to think that all Hispanics are white. On a life-and-death issue, he gave a wrong and misleading information about an at-large killer, to satisfy his own racial and personal agenda. He put the lives of the public at risk, to satisfy himself. (Not unlike the black police chief Charles Moose, who, when leading the investigation of the Beltway Sniper case in 2002, deliberately ignored and suppressed evidence that the killers were nonwhites and only checked white suspects. Moose was worse than the police officer in your city, of course, as Moose’s pro-nonwhite racial agenda actually caused people’s deaths.)

Emily replies:

I understand where you are coming from and I’ll try to explain why my anger was put at ease. I felt confident after talking to this officer that had this been a drawn-out situation where, say, a little girl has been kidnapped and the search area is wide, he would have been identified wholly: light-skinned Hispanic male. As it was, they were confident that he was cowering somewhere, which turned out to be the case. I even said told him had that of course if I had seen anyone hiding in my backyard, I’d call the police, regardless of description.

Yet you are correct that this was unnecessary and it sure surprised the rest of us, including my neighbors who also got that call, and I told this to the officer. I was extremely polite and I think he knows he was wrong as he spent over then minutes defending himself to a homemaker with babies (who I had to apologize for as they were being loud).

- end of initial entry -

Terry Morris writes:

A couple of thoughts come to mind:

(1) While Hispanics may well wish to be identified as white, I wonder whether Hispanics would have been looking out for another Hispanic based on the police’s description of the perpetrator as white? I suspect no.

(2) Has Emily since armed herself?

Terry Morris continues:

Emily was told that the man loose in her neighborhood had a Hispanic name yet that he was white. In a highly stressful situation such as Emily’s, that is just too confusing. She and others in her neighborhood should have been told that Francisco was indeed Hispanic.

Jeanette R. writes:

I happen to be Hispanic (on my mother’s side, she was Puerto Rican, my father was British), and for many years I also considered myself white. Yet at the same times I sometimes would say that such and such a person was behaving very white (my sister’s in laws for example, who were from the Midwest).

I have since revised my thoughts on that subject after a few years of travel. I have lived in Eastern Europe and in Canada. When I lived in Kiev the taxi drivers often mistaken me for Hispanic and one even spoke to me in Spanish (yes I speak some Spanish). When I visited Germany I was often mistaken for Italian or Hispanic. And I am fair. Yet members of the expat community in the Ukraine who were English or Irish would remark how I just didn’t “look” all white.

It’s more than skin color. It taken me many years the realize that it also a cultural thing. I have vivid memories of my Hispanic family, they were quite colorful, loud and emotional and sometimes violent. The British side of the family was thoughtful and quiet to the point of being almost cold. But they valued education. I never saw my Hispanic family read a book. For whatever reason I gravitated to the British side of the family and took on many English mannerisms of my father and my grandmother. But that fools no one in Europe. I don’t have to say a word, I am pegged as someone with a Latin heritage.

Just to give you and idea how I look here is a link to a picture of me. As you can see I am fair. However I took typically like an Tanio Indian Yes I do have Tanio Indian in me). http://tinyurl.com/a24g5b.

BTW I have my mother’s birth certificate from Puerto Rico. It goes back several generations. I happen to know that I have Tanio Indian ancestry but on the birth certificate everyone is listed as white. My grandfather was quite dark. There was no way anyone of European extraction would ever consider that man white.

LA replies:

What’s needed to solve this problem of racial designation is more detail. The notion of the police officer who spoke to Emily that “Hispanic” is an ethnicity, not a race, is true as far as it goes, but must not be used as an excuse to avoid determining what is the race of a Hispanic person. Obviously a correct racial description is essential when it comes to describing an at-large criminal suspect.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that white means that a person is of European ancestry, without noticeable non-European admixture. Therefore a person who is partially of European ancestry but also has Amerindian or Negro features would not be called white, though he may be “culturally” white. He would be called mixed.

How should Francisco Rangel be described? Perhaps as a Mestizo. Clearly he’s not white. But there are so many racial types that we in the U.S. don’t have names for.

I don’t have a solution to the problem, but just the first step toward a solution, which is that the idea that Hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race, must not become a bar to coming up with a reasonable racial description of Hispanic people.

LA continues:

I haven’t addressed the question of personal identity that you brought up. You wrote:

When I lived in Kiev the taxi drivers often mistaken me for Hispanic and one even spoke to me in Spanish (yes I speak some Spanish). When I visited Germany I was often mistaken for Italian or Hispanic. And I am fair. Yet members of the expat community in the Ukraine who were English or Irish would remark how I just didn’t “look” all white.

It seems to me that the way to avoid these sorts of misunderstandings or perhaps unwanted comments is to be up-front about one’s own background and identity. For example, Paul Nachman, a blogger at Vdare and commenter at VFR, will say right at the start of any e-mail he’s writing that may have to do with Jewish issues or Israel, that his parentage is half-Jewish but that he does not identify at all with Jewishness and does not consider himself Jewish. That way he’s completely clear about where he’s coming from, and people don’t have to wonder or get wrong ideas, which is what happened with you in Europe, where people you met would speculate on your background. So, it seems to me that if you came right out and said that your ancestry is half Puerto Rican and half British, and that you identify culturally with the British side, then the issue would be immediately put to rest and there would be no question and no problem.

In any case, one thing is clear: though modern society declares that people are not supposed to be interested in other people’s racial background, they are interested in it, and nothing is going to change that.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 03, 2009 01:56 PM | Send