By Hipolito Navarrete, Managing Editor/Publisher
Many Latino immigrants work in Downtown Los Angeles in the garment industry for Jewish folks that they feel do not understand them and at times feel very slighted and disrespected by them, my mother was one of those immigrants. She eventually dismissed their remarks and some of their mistreatment as just part of the stress they constantly deal with as small business folks, Stephen Miller, U.S. President Donald Trump’s senior advisor for policy, has now provided evidence to her that her original feelings about the Jewish community toward Latinos is true.
The damage that this man is causing to that precarious relationship of the Jewish community to the Latino immigrant community, will be repaired, but its becoming very personal and will have the effects he is hoping will have on the business ties that have always been the foundation of the relationships the Jewish community has fostered very carefully all over the world. Miller has now become the focus point of the most repudiated aspect of this administration, its focus on rolling back and essentially destroying all aspects of social justice in the land of freedom. He is the unwelcomed commodity that the Alt Right, White Supremacy sickos did not expect, and will use him until he is no longer a necessary asset. The damage that his presence as the White House voice for the segregationist and anti-civil rights, racist, misogynist faction is creating the type of stain that will affect the long legacy of the civil rights fighters such as Henry Moscowitz, Kivie Kaplan, Julius Rosenwald, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and many more who created and continued the long tradition of the Jewish community in its struggle to advance social justice throughout the world many times as a matter of personal survival. Stephen Miller has now become the evidence to many that were looking for to justify their prejudice and hatred.
Miller has a long history of paranoid racism. He has always felt that others did not deserve to be here or anywhere he is. He is now in a position to encourage the creation of very damaging policies to those that are most vulnerable, that are most in need of our compassion. On the long run, he will suffer the same consequences that those that want to hurt a vulnerable population does, isolation and probably legal or civil lawsuits, but mean while, he will bring humiliation and pain to those he has a personal vendetta against because they bother his sensibilities, which is what most racists respond to.
My mother and I have had several conversations about making sure she does not do to the Jewish community what Stephen Miller is doing to the Latino community he hates so much, generalize as if we are not individuals. She no longer gets on the phone with her vast community and joins on the incendiary accusations, she now listens and tries to remind them that we are all individuals, but to not ignore the power they have to vote and to influence others that can, yes my mother is now a voting, engaged, political citizen, a loud influential one.
