Has America Become the Anti-Melting-Pot?

I generally steer clear of politics on my blog because I'm not looking for comment confrontation, but I'll put myself out there just this once (or is this a first? Food for thought). With the passing of the Alabama immigration law, America has given our Hispanic population a swift kick in the shins. Latino families in Alabama are emigrating out of the state for fear of being deported. Even families with full citizenship are worried that they'll be negatively affected by the law. I'd like to highlight this here article though, which I believe shows the saddest effects of our current state of affairs. The article highlights the child to child bullying that has increased so dramatically since the passing of the law. I'm sorry, but what the eff is so wrong with the parents of this nation that they teach their children that it's acceptable to tell their fellow THIRTEEN YEAR OLDS to "go back to Mexico" and "if you're not going I'm going to punch you." 

This kid knows what's up.
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Are we for real right now? And the worst part is that the kids won't even report their abuse to teacher for fear of drawing more attention to themselves. Where have we failed that school yard bullying has reverted back to the 50's when no one was willing to tell the teacher? Be the tattle tale! No, really. Do it. The silent sufferers will thank you.


This isn't even a matter of illegal immigration anymore. Racism, which never really left America in the first place, has taken a giant step as of late. It seems that all brown people are falling victim to the blatant racism that has somehow become okay because "we hate illegals. arggggg." Look at the response of a mother whose daughter was verbally abused...basically because of the color of her skin.


"She is a citizen. She doesn't even speak Spanish," said Conde, a U.S. citizen originally from Puerto Rico. "The culture being created (by the law) is that this sort of thing is OK."

Should this bear also go back to Mexico because it's brown?
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Again, this is hardly about illegal status anymore. It's about the color of a person's skin. Way back in the day, my just-off-the-boat Sicilian grandfather was told he couldn't enter certain establishments because he was so tan that the store owners thought he was African-American. I though we had moved past that.... It might seem like this issue is centered on the Hispanic community right now, but if we can silence the brown people, then it's only a matter of time before Hate's slithery tentacles wrap themselves around other minority groups (disclaimer: I'm not suggesting that other minority groups aren't facing racism right now. I'm just saying that it's not quite so headline-prominent at the present). 



As a proud Native American (if you don't believe me, go back to this article), I'm going to have to pull the "everyone here is an illegal immigrant" card. Seriously, there was actually a time where this continent didn't have any Europeans on it. Crazy, I know. Like I mentioned in my other article, I understand that population shifts happen over the ages. People move in and out of areas. And we Natives are generally told to stop complaining about it. "Americans," however, are completely entitled to b*tching about what's going on right now. Wait....



And because racism likes to manifest itself in our everyday speech, I'm also pretty disgusted with recent attempts to make English the official language of the United States. The intolerance. Make it stop. 


Basically every immigration-related news article on the web will have a few comments to the tune of "THEY COME IN OUR COUNTRY AND DON'T EVEN SPEAK OUR LANGUAGE WTFFFFFFFF"**

But actually.
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If you're not going to recognize the myriad indigenous languages of our Native peoples, why on Earth should English be our national language? Does this mean that we should tell the French Quarter of New Orleans to stop speaking French? Or that the Chinatowns of our major cities should stop conversing in Chinese? Or that Jewish communities need to stop speaking Hebrew? Or that American Indian reservations should stop using their native tongues (wait, Natives already got fined and beaten for that once...)?


If America wants to continue to call itself the melting pot, then it has to start (re?)accepting differences in language, skin color, and cultures. Parents need to stop teaching their children that they should hate their classmates who don't look like them. No matter what your views are on illegal immigration issues, hating people isn't going to "fix" anything. All it does is make the United States an unpleasant and hostile place to live. America is America because of its diversity. No other country can boast so many different types of people living within the same set of political boundaries. 


Let's not completely tear that apart, thanks.

Because believe it or not, you're not better than everyone else.
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**You see what I did there with the grammatical error? That's me judging.