The Bigot Spigot: White Bigots Demanding the Privlege of Demeaning Minorities without Criticism

Race is an artificial construct; it does not really exist.  Rather what we term racism is antagonism and hatred towards an ethnicity, towards people who come from a specific country OR region of the world, usually defined by appearance.  More general bigotry is that emotion, combined with factually false stereotypes directed towards a group of people rather than an assessment of an individual on issues of character.  Racism is a form of bigotry that frequently overlaps other forms of bigotry, like misogyny or religious bias.

I was struck last evening when reading about a Missouri conservative bigot attempting to give some sort of political cover, political approval, political permission to hate an ethnicity, while falsely denying this is racism.  Consistently the right demands to be allowed to hate or demean others without consequence, while howling whenever they are victims when properly criticized for it.

The right are not victims, they are abusers and haters who harm others with their beliefs.

From Raw Story:
Missouri ‘Tea Party for Trump’ speaker assures rally: It is not racist to hate Mexicans

Former MO GOP Chair, Ed Martin with fulltime right wing bigot
and professional hater, Phyllis Schlafly; both white and privileged

At a Tea Party for Trump rally held at a Harley-Davidson dealership in Festus, Missouri on Sunday, a Republican official said that he and his fellow attendees aren’t racist for hating Mexicans because “Mexican” isn’t a race.
Riverfront Times writer Danny Wicentowski attended the rally, which he described as a scene where “some 200 patriots who really, really hate Hillary Clinton listened to a succession of speeches delivered by a string of local conservative luminaries who also really, really hate Hillary Clinton.”
Before featured speaker Jim Hoft — also known as conservative blogger The Gateway Pundit aka “The Stupidest Man on the Internet” — took to the stage, former Missouri Republican Party director Ed Martin reassured the crowd that they’re not racist for hating Mexicans.

“Donald Trump is for Americans first,” Martin said of the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. “He’s for us first. It is not selfish to support, or to be for, your neighbor, as opposed to someone from another nation. And Mexico, Mexicans, that’s not a race. You’re not racist if you don’t like Mexicans. They’re from a nation.”

He applied the same logic to Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants.

“If you don’t think Muslims are vetted enough because they blow things up, that’s not racist,” Martin said. “There’s white Muslims, black Muslims, green Muslims. This is not racism.”

Given the bias against Muslims tends to be against ethnic minorities who the right identify as people of color, this latter statement is BOTH religious bigotry AND racism.  Trump has not proposed banning Muslim Europeans or any vetting for Europeans, or for that matter any of his rich Muslim friends.

The organization La Raza, which loosely translates as 'the race' is in fact an anti-racist title.  It means "we are one race" regardless of color or region of origin, is frequently the target of right wing bigotry and specifically racism. The right persists in claiming this is racist, when it is the antithesis of racism.

I usually excerpt from links but the following item is worthy of more expansive quotation. Coincidentally, last night the same evening's reading brought me to this gem, from Banderas News:

Races of Mexico and the Mexican Genome
A friend of mine was visiting in Europe, and there encountered a white tourist. Upon finding she was from Mexico, my friend blurted out “But you don’t look like a Mexican!” So what does a Mexican look like?

Racially speaking, there is great variation among Mexicans.

The Mexican racial breakdown is officially presented as 9% white, 60% Mestizo (Indigenous-European hybrid), 30% Indigenous, and 1% other. The Mestizaje (mixture) of Indians and Spaniards is the principal fact of Mexican racial history. And yet, the details are even more complicated.

The race mixture is so thorough that among Mexico’s Mestizo majority, within the same nuclear family you can find full siblings, with the same mother and father, who are very dark, and very light-skinned.

But it’s not only the skin color. Some Mexicans have white skin but indigenous racial features, while others have dark skin but European facial features.

Then there's eye color. When I first moved to Mexico, it struck me how many Mexicans would make it a point to tell me they had relatives with blue or green eyes. And sure enough, there are blue- and green-eyed Mexicans. Eye color is inherited from both parents. If someone has blue eyes, it’s because both his parents have the genes for it (dominant or recessive).

When the Spaniards arrived in the early 1500s, the nation-state of Mexico did not exist. What is now Mexico was a large landmass inhabited by many ethnic groups. Although they would now all be classified as “Indians” or “Indigenous,” there were physical differences among these groups, just as there are between different people groups in Europe. The Indians of northern Mexico, for one thing, were taller than those of the south, and their heads were shaped a little differently.

Even the Spaniards were not exactly homogeneous. The Iberian Peninsula was a melting pot of many peoples: the mysterious “Iberians,” Phoenicians, Greeks, Celts, Romans, the Teutonic Goths, the Moors and the Jews. Even today, Spain has its sharp regional divisions, and areas where other languages are spoken: Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque Country, where people still speak a language unrelated to any known in the world today.

Besides the Spaniards and the Indians, there were many other groups that contributed to Mexico ’s racial heritage. Blacks from Africa were brought over and settled largely, but not entirely, in coastal areas. After emancipation, they mostly assimilated to the Spanish-speaking majority, but in certain regions you can still detect strong Negroid facial features.

As for the Spaniards, they never stopped coming. Even after independence, Spanish immigrants have continued to emigrate to Mexico, and have assimilated rather easily. But other non-Spanish Europeans have also come to Mexico: Germans, French and Dutch for example.
Middle Eastern immigrants were mostly from Lebanon and Palestine and predominantly from Christian and not Muslim backgrounds. Also, there have been immigrants from East Asia, mostly China and Japan.

Mexico also has a Jewish community. The first Jews to come to Mexico were conquistador Catholics of Jewish background.

Anglo-Saxons too have immigrated, both British and Americans, some of the latter were ex-Confederates who came to Mexico after the Civil War.

All these form part of the Mexican melting pot. And now, with advances in biotechnology, and the breaking of the DNA code, it can be traced through the genes. This was the goal of Mexico’s National Institute of Genomic Medicine, which recently concluded a 2-year study of the Mexican genome, investigating blood samples from a representative sample of Mexicans, half male and half female. The project’s director was Dr. Gerardo Jimenez-Sanchez.

Generally speaking, the genome reseach confirmed what was already obvious about the mixed origins of the Mexican population. The project concluded that Mexicans are the product of the mixture of 35 ethnic groups.

Roughly speaking, the Mexican population was calculated to be 65% indigenous, and 35% non-indigenous (European, African, Asian.)

Of course, there is great regional variety as well. According to the Mexican Genome Project, the population of the northern state of Sonora is 58% European. The population of the Pacific state of Guerrero is 22% African origin.