In the span of two days, there have been two reports in the Dallas Morning News of children being neglected and abused by their parents.
Both sets of children were stomach-turningly betrayed by their parents. One group of children were starved and locked in a tiny motel bathroom for hours at a time by their stepfather, while their mother allowed it. The second set were found by authorities after an anonymous caller reported strong fumes coming from their hotel room. When police arrived, they found two adults who had been huffing paint fumes all day in a 300 square foot room, not only intoxicating themselves, but their children.
Besides the places of residence, the two stories had something in common - the families had Latin surnames. Immediately, commenters on both stories began upping the anti-immigration rhetoric, insisting that this is the way of illegal immigrants.
They do bad things to their children.
To that, I obviously say hogwash (actually, I had a less ancient term that starts with bu and ends with it). For one thing, neither story comments on the immigration status of the four adults in question. Generally, if a reporter knows the status is noteworthy, you will see something along the lines of, "immigrants found guilty of felonies are subject to being deported," somewhere in the story.
But neither story has proffered that up. So how do these commenters know the couples in question are illegal immigrants?
Well, by their last names, of course. Santiago, Rocha and Barron must be indicative of the 100% ne'er-do-wells that crawl under or over a fence in the dark, dark night to invade the soil of the U.S., fostering hate in their hearts and evil in their veins, ready to do horribly heinous crimes at a moment's notice.
Sounds absurd, right? Well, to me, it does. I've had occasion to know two people that were in the country illegally. One was from Mexico, and had moved to the States under what she thought was a visa good for years, but instead was only good for months. She had three terminally ill children, and had come to America hoping to procure better health care for them. Her husband had worked - legally - in the U.S. until his death, and had contributed to the Social Security system. She had benefits coming from that.
The second one? Her last name was Nelson. She was as Anglo as one can get, here on an expired student visa from Canada.
So surnames are not exactly a good indicator of immigration status, I think. Nor is immigration status an indicator of morality.
And let's not forget that in the case of the Santiago family, the mother's parents are in Florida, indicating that likely she is not an illegal immigrant, and is probably of Puerto Rican or Cuban descent - not the not so veiled Mexican descent so many of the commenters kept trying to hint at.
So she's probably a U.S. citizen, and not guilty of entering the country illegally. She's just a really crappy human, something that's not exclusive to one race in particular.
And let's be honest. All these claims are really just an excuse to be racist without anyone calling you on it. But really, does this kind of evil have more offenders in one race than another?
Well, yes. According to 2007 data from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families, 21.7 percent of maltreated children nationwide are from African-American families; 20.8 percent are from hispanic families; and 46.1 percent are from white families.
So really, in the U.S., being from a white family nearly doubles your chances of being maltreated or abused.
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ConnieMack
thebloggess
Steve Klingaman
Blue in TX
ccrunch
Scott Cobb
Salon.com
Comments
My familiarity with Mexican-American people is that they are more family oriented than others around us. OK, they will still give their kids a slap on the butt when they truly need it, but there are some kids of other ethnicities round here who would have benefited from more of that.
The data indicates that misstreatment of children is proportional tot he population. No one treats their children worse and no one better.
(Oh, and Livemonster...so was California. "LA" is short for "Los Angeles" which is short for "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula." It isn't the Latinos that took over your once-white city, dumbass.)
Nor is any race immune from general douchebaggery and obtuseness, either.
I'm really not sure I'm following you. Yes, I'm a grammar snob, but has anyone ever told you that it's really difficult to follow your written train of thought?
It may sound hopelessly old fashioned, but you are probably a very bright and articulate person, but these responses don't adequately indicate that. Punctuation and grammar not only indicate you respect your readers, but also that you respect your own thoughts and ideas enough to articulate them in the best way possible.
If you identified with something, that's hardly my fault.
But I would assume abuse is more prevalent in poorer households. If you have money, you can afford day care, babysitters, after school activities, playrooms with TV sets and other ways of keeping your kids out of your hair.
Compared to income level, do the Hispanics mistreat their kids more than other groups? That might be an interesting question.
to take control"
LiveMonster: The Native Americans who used to own the land you now live on would likely dispute that point with you. You wouldn't be living in America if we didn't "go marching into other places and overpopulate it to take control"
The same is true of most southwestern States.
I'm bigoted against racists and wish that we could lock them all up somewhere until they die. Damn, they're stupid and evil, with a poor excuse for every ignorant thing that they do.
Now I know that there will be much angry defense of Racist-Americans, but I want them off my streets and out of my country now.
As for the maltreatment of children, I wish that this post clarified whether the counts include the misuse of the reporting system in cases of bickering couples (and the grannies) who are using their children as battering rams against each other.
And the fact that the information comes out of Texas makes it automatically suspect, as I haven't considered Texas anything but a source of lies; producer of the biggest crooks, creeps and criminals in our history; a mortal enemy of California, and not part of America for decades.
As for Leeandra Nolting.. funny how you sink to rude and immature name calling to attempt a defenseless point.. that what LiveMonster says is entirely accurate, statistically and observationally. Sad indeed.. wonders how children are raised to insult those who you don't agree with. Ad Hominem!
I witnessed (AT WORK) a former illegal who was complaining how her credit report followed her to her new SS # from the fraudulent one she used for years because she used the same name & address. . Oh poor dear! Criminality is UNacceptable unles.. uh... oh dear!.. unless your a Mexican illegal immigrant.. than by all means.. go ahead a steal and cheat..! You need it more than those Americans who STRUGGLE their way through the SYSTEM.
Mexico's rampant corruption is rationale that someone else controls the system.. same thing that this lying, cheating game of illegals here in the US has created.
The only one who is controlling the system are those who benefit in in the framework of those rationales.. and thereby destroy it.
As for the American Indian, or Mexican.. we were here first rationale.. becomes a failure in conquest.. and does not make a rationale for today's actions.. the slipperiness of using weak arguments for illegal immigration is disgusting and immature..
pitiful indeed.
African Americans make up around 13% of our population. Therefore, their maltreatment of children accounts for a considerably larger proportion than we should see if things were "equal." Likewise, Hispanics (note the capitalization?) make up only about 15%, making their 21% child abuse rate of considerable concern! Caucasians account for over 80% of the population, and the statistic of 46% of abuse cases means that they offend at only about 57% of the rate expected.
I think you managed in that last paragraph to prove the opposing point, and to make yourself look pretty ignorant in the process. Maybe a few more math classes and fewer "creative writing" courses are in order?
And if you're going to be insulting, how about doing it on your own blog? You can dispute the figures I presented without it being an attack.
Like the children of Andrea Yeats, or Susan Smith...Or maybe that's how Jeffery Dahmer, David Berkowitz (son of Sam), or Jack the Ripper got their start....
Go get a fourth-grade U.S. History book. And some common sense.
(Note I said nothing about immigration law or child abuse.)
When I was in Jr. High and living in Houston, there had been a famous case where a man had brutally murdered a young female postal worker. The media, in this area which is predominantly Southern Baptist, could not report the story without repeatedly mentioning that the accused was Jewish - as if his being Jewish somehow was responsible for him committing the crime. Each little broadcast would mention this fact repeatedly, so naturally it didn't take long for extreme anti-Semitism to start working its way into the culture in terms of comments, calls and letters. Yet when Susan Smith or the Houston mother who drowned her kids in the bathtub made the news, I have yet to hear one single mention of their religion or their church.
The ugly truth is that we hold white and Christian to be the gold standard and everyone else is... somehow inferior. When a little American company called Union Carbide killed what is now considered to be an estimated 25,000 people due to gas-related illnesses..... well, they are poor and brown. Accidents happen even if they happened due to repeated and willful negligence. When upper class white people die when a couple of planes fly into the WTC, it's the defining moment of America and the world. People have even tried to use the bible code and Nosterdamus to see if this could have been prevented even though many more people died within the first few days of Bhopal than due to 9/11. The only logical conclusion is that is that we assume the world revolves around people who look like us and share our ideals. Therefore, we assume others are subhuman and look for reasons to treat them as such. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm also very glad you wrote this.
Now:
80% + 13% + 15% = 108%. Doesn't inspire confidence in those numbers.
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"I witnessed (AT WORK) a former illegal who was complaining how her credit report followed her to her new SS # from the fraudulent one she used for years because she used the same name & address. . Oh poor dear! Criminality is UNacceptable unless.. uh... oh dear!.. unless your a Mexican illegal immigrant.. than by all means.. go ahead a steal and cheat..! You need it more than those Americans who STRUGGLE their way through the SYSTEM."
And this proves what? You are working with a population sample of one, or, as we say in statistics, an anecdote. It proves nothing about anyone but the individual. Hence, it is useless, unless you were trying to demonstrate your own ignorance and bigotry. That worked out perfectly.
From Wikipedia: "illegal immigrants as a group tend to be less educated than other sections of the U.S. population: 49 percent haven't completed high school, compared with 9 percent of native-born Americans and 25 percent of legal immigrants."
I quote this because there is also a direct correlation between education and birth rate. One way of lifting women out of poverty and "barefoot and pregnant-ness" is to educate them. This particular technique is being used in the third world to help oppressed women.
So, this has nothing to do with the "race" of the people in question, but their poverty and lack of education. That poverty, especially, is why immigrants come to the US. That they are primarily Latinos is because the poverty stricken in this hemisphere are Latinos. If Canada were a third-world country, we would have a lot of white, English-speaking illegal immigrants. It would then be a lot harder to use over-population as a cover for bigotry, as I think Livemonster is doing.
One reason I say that is because your language, LM, includes things like this:
"'we are taking you over- get ready' [comics like George Lopez and Carlos Mencia] say- well I do have a problem with that- my white friends from Italy and England are put through bloody frigging hell to get legal- why should every f---Latino who crawls across the border get it?"
Do you have ANY statistical evidence to support this anecdote? And your focus on "them" taking over sounds a little racist to me. Call me crazy, but it's a fairly common fear of racists. Six per cent of illegal immigrants are from Europe and Canada. So, as people asked of Bethany, does your example take into account the huge numerical difference between Latinos (57%) and Europeans? Have your Italian and English friends been subject to raids and imprisonment? Non-whites are, regardless of their status.
And what about this lovely "non-racist" statement: "I am sick of the Latinos and their attitudes towards everything ... the too many kids, the treatment of animals and the environment-and their abject hatred of us and intent to take this city over"?
Because that certainly sounds like all the liberals I know, doesn't it, LM? Liberals are well-known for generalizing statements filled with hate for a huge group because of their skin color or ethnic origin.
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"...people who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of changing themselves, or the world. This is the place in which it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves. Impaled. They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mostly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence." - James Baldwin
You know who “really” does “vitriol?”—nice word, dumb motherfuckers here will go wow—those that do not know where they are really from, whether fucking Greece, Lebanon, Cypress or whatever else God forsaken place. It does not matter where they are from, they, not me, hate where they are originally from. They come here, but they will not do honest work like Mexicans, they become Americanized. They work so hard to “talk” mainstream and learn the popular culture; they even learn words like “vitriol” and “duality.” They may use the word “vitriol” in the right context, but they definitely always misuse the word “duality.” Then they kiss mainstream ass, eat mainstream riffraff shit and vomit sunshine just to fucking fit in. They even dare to badmouth superior cultures, the French, for example, just to appease the riffraff. They go even further and say shit like, “all people treat their children the same,” or “no culture is better than another,”—you know, Indian chief shit. O, I am sorry, are you that Americanized yet? Did you get that, Stellaa?
Then one day, Stellaa, it gets to their head and they fuck up royally. They say shit like, “there are a couple of liberals like you here…,” subtly and very authoritatively. And the riffraff go “wow, Stella is going to show the liberals.
See, Stellaa, The “two” liberals you are talking about and all the right wing racists are boy scouts compared to those people I mentioned when it comes to bigotry.
You know these people I mentioned, don’t you Stella? Yes, you do.
To all readers: if you are from any of the countries I mentioned and you do not hate your country of origin, then I am not talking about you.
No need to actually bother defending whatever it is, because they know, with the surety of the true believer, that they are correct and everyone else is wrong, politically correct, weak-willed, unable to see the hate of others as clearly as they do.
When I see people writing: "whether fucking Greece, Lebanon, Cypress or whatever else God forsaken place," or "Then they kiss mainstream ass, eat mainstream riffraff shit and vomit sunshine just to fucking fit in. They even dare to badmouth superior cultures, the French, for example, just to appease the riffraff. They go even further and say shit like, ... you know, Indian chief shit," or "They hate us. They send their money home. They don't want to assimilate." I know these are caring people who are truly concerned about the conditions of immigrants and of the United States.
It makes me proud to be an American.
Do not mention literacy, it is so embarrassing. I could tell you to check my work and try to to learn something, but I check out your blog and you get an F if you are a fourth grader. Do mention my work, it is way out of your league. Go back to school and do not mess with your betters.
Mitchom,
My Grammar? Are you fucking kidding me? You must read first, little creature, before you fuck up. It is not my fault that my writing way over your TV head. Again, read first, or get someone to help you understand, not that donkey though.
My earlier comment here was directed at a bigot and a hypocrite who accuses liberals of being bigots. If you can read English your response should have been either yes she is what you said or she is not. If you want to call someone names, pick on their weakest point, not their strongest you idiot. Grammar? Do you have that much trouble reading?
You two little poodles, tell your master, the fifth grader--you know exactly what I mean--to go fuck himself.
So I'm turning off comments to what could have been a great debate, because I tire of coming back here to see hate.