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The Color of the Race Card
White People Pull the Race Card From a Stacked Deck — and Then Complain.
I write from the borderlands, where I am surrounded by brown people. During the times I lived far from the Mexican border — about a year at a time in Oregon and Wisconsin and then a ten year stint teaching at Indiana University — I missed the music of the Spanish language in public spaces.
I’ve always known there are people who don’t think like I do about hearing Spanish in a band of the United States that stretches across the desert southwest all the way to California. It was only when I came to live within that band that I began to understand how our southern border splits families that have lived on both sides for generations.
The family ties and close friendships spanning the border are much stronger social glue than the interdependent economies that have been disrupted first by the drug trade and then by Donald John Trump raising up xenophobia as the public policy of the United States.
I came as a teenager and acquired a new racial identity, “Anglo.” That common descriptor came out on top of many other possibilities: yanqui, norteamericano and, of course, gringo. That last descriptor does not get italicized because it’s as much English as it is Spanish, and it’s one of those words where context is everything, from buddy-speak to ridicule to…
