Somewhere In This Great Land, A Spanish-Speaking Citizen Listens To An Account Of Tom Brokaw's Recent Statement On "Meet The Press" And Proclaims ¡Qué Idiota! ("What A Dumbass!")

Jemele Hill confronts the folksy, South Dakotan veneer that has been Tom Brokaw's shtik throughout his 42-year career with NBC News as a correspondent, nightly news anchor, and substitute host of various news shows. Hill scratched through the South Dakotan folksiness and exposed a fellow-traveler with the Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office as a racist xenophobe with his baseless assertions that Spanish-speaking citizens or legal residents who pursue their happiness by speaking Spanish with family members and friends were undesirables. With his critique of Spanish-speaking on "Meet The Press," BlowCraw demonstrated that he was simultaneously monolingual and bi-ignorant. Unlike the Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office who has NEVER apologized for any of his racist xenophobic rantings, BlowCraw issued a mea cupla following the blowback that was too little, too late. Back in the troubled days of the Trickster's second term, the dead-man-walking-Oval-Office-occupant offered the Press Secretary's gig to BlowCraw and the NBC anchor smelled impeachment in the air and declined. By offering his apology for a racist xenophobic remark on "Meet The Press," Sarah Huckleberry Sanders can sleep better in the aftermath of the uproar. Jemele Hill has spoken truth to power to the Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office as well the idiot who occupies the Owner's Box in the Dallas Cowboys AT&T Stadium. Racist xenophobes run with their kind in that pack. If this is a (fair & balanced) rejection of racist xenophobia, so be it.

[x The Atlantic]
The Conversation The Press Isn’t Having
By Jemele Hill


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There was something sadly poetic about hundreds of journalists being cut loose by some of the biggest media outlets the same week that the veteran news anchor Tom Brokaw provoked a firestorm of criticism with his comments about Latinos and immigration on last Sunday’s "Meet the Press."

Brokaw made the case that the mere presence of Latinos has scared conservatives into supporting the push for a border wall. He explained that conservatives in the Donald Trump era have told him they are taking a hard stance on Latin American immigration because “I don’t know whether I want brown grandbabies.”

“Hispanics should work harder at assimilation,” Brokaw said. “That’s one of the things I’ve been saying for a long time. They ought not to be just codified in their communities, but make sure that all of their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel comfortable in the communities, and that’s going to take outreach on both sides, frankly.”

The problem, I realized, was bigger than a single journalist, advanced in years and speaking off the cuff, making unsupportable claims. It was that no one on the panel was positioned to respond to, or able to explain, from their own lived experience, what he had failed to understand. And listening to Brokaw speak, I couldn’t help but think that by laying off hundreds of journalists—many of them journalists of color—HuffPost, BuzzFeed, Yahoo, AOL, and Gannett were raising the likelihood that marginalized groups will continue to be excluded from these conversations.

What Brokaw and the conservatives he cited fail to comprehend is the degree to which people of color already go out of their way to placate white paranoia, easing fear at their own expense.

From a young age, most people of color are taught that they have to minimize their identity in some form in order to gain acceptance and appear less threatening. It’s a full-time job, with no days off.

I’m reminded of a scene in the movie "Bad Boys," in which the co-stars, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, arrive at the house of a potential lead in a murder case. Smith and Lawrence, who play brash Miami detectives, are immediately suspicious because the door is wide open. Smith shouts, “Don’t be alarmed, we’re Negroes,” as the pair enters the house. Lawrence tells Smith, “There’s too much bass in your voice. That scares white folks. You got to sound like them.” And then Lawrence hilariously imitates a white person’s voice.

It was a funny scene, but it was baked in the uncomfortable truth that people of color must be fluent in code-switching as a condition of their survival.

The burden of duality has become even heavier for people of color because conservatives, to their credit, have successfully defined who gets to be considered American. That definition is almost always concentrated on promoting and enabling entitled whiteness—the kind that makes it perfectly acceptable to call the police on black people for sitting peacefully in Starbucks, barbecuing in the park, entering their own apartment, or engaging in the very American practice of selling lemonade to neighbors. Even when people of color do very American things, they still aren’t seen as being members of American culture.

Had "Meet the Press" bothered to facilitate a conversation that wasn’t centered on white fragility, it could have told viewers that the use of Spanish among Latinos in major metropolitan cities has declined substantially over the past decade, from 78 percent in 2006 to 73 percent in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center.

Pew also noted that the use of Spanish among Latinos drops significantly with each generation. Overall, 71 percent of second-generation Latino parents who have at least one immigrant parent speak Spanish to their children. But among third-generation Latino parents, that number drops to 49 percent. From 2000 to 2014, the percentage of Latinos age 5 to 17 who said they speak only English at home jumped from 73 percent to 88 percent.

So most young Hispanics seem to have been doing exactly what Brokaw and others with his mind-set want: learning to assimilate. But there is a tinge of sadness to these numbers, as well. Many immigrants have insisted that their children learn only English, even if that means surrendering a chunk of their own cultural inheritance, because they believe that speaking Spanish will lead to their children being unfairly stereotyped and prevent their advancement.

Instead of being upset by the persistence of Hispanic enclaves, Brokaw should have been asking how the hostility directed at Latinos has created an environment in which many of them only feel safe to be their true and full self in their own communities.

It’s futile to try to capitulate to people who will never be satisfied. The irony here is that it’s not Latinos who have historically struggled to assimilate in a changing world. It’s people like Brokaw. ###

[Jemele Hill is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she covers sports, race, politics, and culture. She worked nearly 12 years for sports conglomerate ESPN. She wrote a column for ESPN.com's Page 2 and formerly hosted ESPN's "His and Hers." In June 2013, she succeeded Jalen Rose on ESPN2's "Numbers Never Lie." In February 2017, Hill and Michael Smith became co-hosts of SC6, the 6 PM (ET) edition of ESPN's flagship SportsCenter. Hill remained in that role until February 2018, when she moved to ESPN's website The Undefeated. On September 11, 2017, Hill made a series of tweets critical of President Donald Trump, including describing him as a "white supremacist." ESPN issued a statement saying Hill's comments "do not represent the position of ESPN. We have addressed this with Jemele and she recognizes her actions were inappropriate." Hill later clarified that she stood by her comments as representative of her personal beliefs; "My regret is that my comments and the public way I made them painted ESPN in an unfair light." Some criticized Hill's comments, including White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who called them "a fireable offense by ESPN"; Trump criticized the network and demanded an apology. Others voiced support for Hill and criticized ESPN and the White House's responses, arguing that Hill's comments were accurate and that a White House official suggesting Hill be fired infringed on the First Amendment. On October 9, 2017, ESPN suspended Hill for two weeks for a "second violation of our social media guidelines". Hill suggested fans upset with Jerry Jones' threat to bench any player who does "anything that is disrespectful to the flag" should boycott the advertisers who support Jones and the Dallas Cowboys.[ On January 25, 2018, ESPN announced that Hill would anchor her final SC6 on February 2 and begin a new role at The Undefeated, the company’s website that covers the intersections of sports and race. In the aftermath, Hill joined The Atlantic as a staff writer in October 2018. Hill received a BA (journalism) from Michigan State University.]

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