Many are eagerly awaiting the debut of CNN’s new “Latino in America,” hosted by Soledad O’Brien. In the recent weeks however, Latino communities and organizations, such as GALEO here in Georgia, have spoken out against CNN’s hypocrisy in shedding a brief light on the stories and contributions of Latino-Americans in America while continuing air time for Lou Dobbs, who often equates “Latino” with his xenophonic phrase “criminal illegal alien.” Every time I hear this phrase, broadcast to millions of households, I am reminded of conversations I had with friends in Rwanda, for instance, who remember hearing Tutsi’s being referred to as ‘cockroaches’ in the media in the years leading up to the 1994 genocide. I am taken back to discussions with my professors who assert that the first step before mass human rights violations is the dehumanization of a group of people. To be clear, I do not in any way equate genocide with the situation of Latinos in the US, but rather, I want to highlight a very important trend in the propagation of hatred and violence in our world and question if such trends are present here in the United States and in our media.

What is the line between free speech and hate speech in news programs? Is crossing a border to seek a better life, often times because of rural poverty resulting from U.S. free-trade policy, criminal? What does it mean for a human being to be illegal?  And I won’t even begin to address the connotations of the word alien. When I witnessed the immigrant marches of 2006, I saw people holding signs that read “Ninguna persona es ilegal” (No one is illegal), and was reminded of those held by sanitation workers in 1968 as they marched behind Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., declaring: “I AM A MAN.” To me, both groups were challenging the hegemonic names given to them and were demanding to be regarded equally as human beings, and therefore, worthy of all the rights guaranteed therein. Roberto Lovato of the Huffington Post has written a powerful critique of CNN’s double-message, which also features the following video:

By lesoltis
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 8:26 am and is filed under Race and Difference, lesoltis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.