The New Yorker: Latinos can be white supremacists, too

The New Yorker has come to the profound revelation that crazy, evil people who carry out heinous crimes hold crazy, evil beliefs to justify their crimes. Such people, the New Yorker has apparently now realized, can be of different races. But no matter what, the most common motivating cause is white supremacy, regardless of the perp’s race — and it’s all America’s fault.

In his piece on “the rise of Latino white supremacy,” New Yorker columnist Geraldo Cadava writes about how Mauricio Garcia, the mass shooter who killed eight people at a mall in Allen, Texas, before being killed by an off-duty police officer, expressed white-supremacist views in a diary and online — and because of this, “many were shocked that he was Latino.

“In fact, Latino white supremacy isn’t an oxymoron,” Cadava continues, “and carrying out a premeditated mass shooting in the United States is one of the more American things a Latino could do.”

Cadava then seems to implicate all Americans, especially white ones, in the crimes Cadava and other “Latino white supremacists” committed — because contrary to concerns that “Mexican immigrants weren’t assimilating as earlier European immigrants had done,” they have, indeed, assimilated, right down to adopting our racist, violent ways. “They learned English, intermarried, became loyal Americans and adopted American politics, including its most extreme and violent forms,” Cadava writes.

Latinos, you see, assimilate not because they admire our culture and came to this country to be a part of it, but to “fit into the racial and capitalist order of the United States, to avoid the discrimination that black Americans experience, or to justify the pursuit of individual wealth and belonging.” Latinos may also assimilate to attain “multiracial whiteness,” writes Cadava, “which the political scientist Cristina Beltrán defines as an identity that people from all racial backgrounds can participate in. It is rooted, she writes, ‘in a discriminatory world view in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.’ Such concepts help to explain how, in a country with rising racial violence, Latinos can be both potential perpetrators and potential victims.” Confused? You should be.

It’s a Catch-22 for white Americans, according to Cadava, who implies that Latinos are pressured into assimilating into American culture, and they either take it too far, as “Latino white-supremacist thinking [is] another marker of Latino assimilation at a time when white-power ideology is spreading rapidly at home and abroad” — or are afraid if they don’t take it far enough. “Motivated by extremism or a sense of fear, they’ve bought a lot of guns in the past few years,” Cadava notes, twisting his argument with as much contortion as possible to blame America for the awful deed of an evil person.

Cockburn can’t help but feel that Cadava has made something of a category error: could he not have found a way to explain the far-right ideologies of many extremely online Latino mass murderers without laying it at the foot of “whiteness?” Maybe just maybe there are more significant factors at play than skin color…