Who Are We When We Are All Suffering?

The Pew Hispanic Center released a study this week that revealed that Hispanics living in America have the same concerns as everyone else: the economy, the state of public education, and health care top the list of most important priorities for the Obama administration. With Latinos amounting to half of the US population growth since 2000, we better start seeing our Hispanic residents as part of a whole, too, the whole of America. Latinos voted for Obama 67% to 31% for McCain. So now, even the Democratic Party has to pay attention to our neighbors.

Which brings me to Suffolk County, NY. Home of the hate crime as sport among young white teenagers with nothing much else to do. In addition to killing Marcelo Lucero, an Hispanic immigrant in Patchogue, a group of high school boys has been indicted for beatings of other Latinos. What is most disturbing is that Suffolk County police admitted that they didn't consider these other attacks as hate crimes, despite the fact that Latino men were the victims and the perpetrators were young white men. Ummmmm.

Words have meaning and the vicious xenophobia of Suffolk County executive Steve Levy has infected the Suffolk County police so that they are blind to the obvious.

We have a problem here.

Civil Rights in the Age of Obama

Today the New York Times reported that an investigation by the civil rights division of the Justice Department will be opened finally, looking into attacks on Latinos in Suffolk County.

Maybe Steve Levy, Suffolk County's xenophobic county executive, will be forced to take responsibility for the tone he has set during his rise to power.

Unlike other administrations before Bush, the civil rights division of the Justice Department used to be an honorable division, with some of the best and the brightest working there. Bill Lann Lee, who headed the division from 1997 through 2001 during the Clinton Administration was just one of those honorable attorneys. Investigations and prosecutions by the civil rights division fell precipitously during the last eight years.

From 2003 until 2007 Bradley Schlozman politicized the civil rights division, dissembling the bureau and moving its mission away from protecting civil rights and into pushing an agenda that preferred to seek out alleged discrimination against fundamentalists. Check out the New York Times article.

According to internal investigations, Schlozman hired Federalist Society lawyers, avoided hiring anyone who looked or smelled like a "liberal," and transferred experienced attorneys out of the department because of their liberal bent. Over three quarters of the staff were transferred or left during Schlozman's tenure. In addition, Schlozman lied before the Senate. But Mukasey won't prosecute him! On January 14, The Times published an editorial about the Schlozman debacle and the failure of the Justice Department to prosecute him for such blatant law violations, including perjury.

So it's about time, in the last week of the Bush administration, that the civil rights division might do what it is supposed to be doing: investigate the degradation of civil rights based solely national origin.

Unhinged White People on Long Island

Suffolk County has the highest foreclosure rate in New York state. It also has a county executive, Steve Levy, who has built his reputation on xenophobic rhetoric and proposed legislation about ridding the county of "undocumented" workers. His popularity is so great among the majority white population that Levy, a Democrat, was cross-endorsed by the Republic Party in the last election.

With fear pervasive in Suffolk, the inevitable happened. A bunch of teenage white boys made sport out of mugging and killing an immigrant from Ecuador in the town of Patchogue. Marcelo Lucero, a 37-year-old immigrant from a poor village in Ecuador had lived in and around Patchogue for 16 years, and worked in a dry cleaning store, sending savings home to support his mother, a cancer survivor.

Steve Levy called the seven teenagers, out for thrills, "White supremacists." Some immigrant advocates on Long Island have described the attack as a reflection of widespread anti-Latino sentiment and racial intolerance in Suffolk County. Click here to read the New York Times article.

Steve Levy tried to turn this horrendous murder into a one-day news story rather than symptomatic of seething resentment, which he has been partly responsible for igniting. He was forced to apologize yesterday.

VIGIL TONIGHT: Community and religious groups will gather at 7 tonight at the site of the attack at Railroad Avenue and Sephton Street near the Long Island Railroad station in Patchogue. The candlelight vigil is expected to start with a religious ceremony and words from Marcello Lucero's family.

It gets worse on Long Island. On Tuesday night, in Mastic Beach, also in Suffolk County, scores of cars were defaced with violent anti-Obama graffiti. Overnight painted slogans "Kill Obama 08" as well as sexist slurs appeared on about 40 cars in this diverse neighborhood.

Long Island does not have a good history of racial harmony. It began as a segregated area and remains one of the three most highly segregated suburban communities in the country. As more Latinos move into the area, many legally, many to work in agriculture and restaurants, Steve Levy has fueled fires of intolerance. This is in direct contrast to Nassau County's executive Tom Suozzi. When Suozzi was mayor of Glen Cove, he helped start the first day laborer job site, and remains committed to humane treatment of immigrants, whether legal or not.

Racial intolerance is not an acceptable reaction to the economic insecurity that we are all feeling. It's up to the community, all of the community, to speak out against it, to make it clearly and unambiguously unacceptable.