Well it is one thing for one of us to say the Minutemen to say they are racist, it is quite another for someone who was on the inside (and in leadership) to say so - from the horse's mouth as they say.
As to distinctions, Chuck argues - and many of us agree - that the Minutemen are a front for openly racist white supremacists. However, the official politics of the Minutemen is bad enough - it is right wing populism- of the kind the periodically sweeps the Southwest. In California we have seen variants of it for several generations, it swept Reagan into the Governorship of California, it passed Proposition 13 in 1987 and Proposition 187 in 1994. In recent years, this right wing populism has manifested a particularly vicious anti-immigrant nativism. Although one can rightly say that such nativism is racist in its motivation, it is not overtly racist in the same way as the Klan. The supporters of Proposition 187 or the Minutemen can fill football stadiums for rallies and win elections on a statewide basis (and, ironically, gaining the votes of many Latinos), while the Klan and the Nazis cannot. A fine distinction but an important one. SR
> Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
> >
> > And the Minutemen's original impulse wasn't racist? What fine
> > distinctions he's drawing.
>
> Oh, big surprise that the group is racist!
>
> My activist friends on the West Coast who are doing anti-Minuteman
> organizing tell me that the Minuteman are basically a front group for
> white supremacist extremists. It should be interesting when this fact
> becomes more widely known and certain politicians have to deal with
> their association with and/or vocal support for the group.
>
> Chuck
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