I don't think Bincente Fox's statement was 'racist' at all - whether he is or not is another matter, - but the historical reality is that black American's were at the bottom of the labor food chain and Mexican and other Central American immigrants have assumed that role, key to which was the tacit provision for legal superexploitation (which was essence of slavery in the Americas). The Jesse Jackson's and Al Sharpton's are just using this as yet another opportunity for hypocritical self-aggrandizement. I lived in Mexico for a while, including remote rural areas and while people are indeed racialist, they are certainly not racist in the same sense as in the US (hanging out in rural Mexico as a black person is not the same as hanging out in say Terra Haute, Indiana, where a Kenyan friend of mine once needed a police escort to pass through during a fund raising cross-country bike ride in 1991 - on the advice of the police). Everybody in Mexico called me 'negro' with affection, (my close friends call me 'pinche negro' - which loosely translates as 'bloody (in the British sense) black dude'.) which would not have the name connotations as white people calling me 'black' here in the US. There is in Mexico - on the one hand a racial heirarchy which venerates whiteness (on TV and commercial advertising) while at the same time an official romantic glorification of 'Indianess' as central to Mexican identity. As to referring to people by color, this reference also misunderstands the context. People are not only refeered to by color, but by shape or bodyweight, skinny people are commonly referred to as 'gordo' and vice versa (flaco) it has to do more with a culture that likes to play with words than 'racism' per se. In short, all this is much ado about nothing and says more about North American schizophrenia and hypocrisy than about Mexican attitudes towards race.
Joe W.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/mexico_fox_blacks
Mexico's Fox Defends Comment on Blacks By TRACI CARL, Associated Press Writer 57 minutes ago
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