Dull, frightened anxious people tend to be Conservatives. Not as well educated, traveled or exposed to other cultures, philosophies or people. May have an education more slanted toward numbers than words. Tend to need God and guns to help quell their fears and built-in sense of inadequacy.

There’s a reason for that.

Watch a Mexican telenovela sometime. The actors are always playing upper-class twits, and they often look N European: blonde, fair skinned, blue-eyed. They do not reflect the racial mix of the average Mexican population. Spaniards, particularly from the N part of the country, are fair, often of Celtic stock. The Cubans even have a saying “He was as red-haired as a Spaniard”. Wherever they took over, their features were a marker of the ruling class. The rich could even afford to import white girls, or bring their families over with them. The lower-class adventurers and freebooters, the conquistadudes, had to consort with the natives. After a while, skin color became associated with your colonial status.

Yeah, we come in many flavors and colors.

My family was working class, skilled factory workers that came to the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They had little in common with the business/managerial professional class that escaped Castro for Miami in the early 60s. They were our hoity-toity relatives that suddenly showed up on our doorstep looking for a place to crash. There was some conflict with the Tampa and Miami Cubans due to these historical and class differences. We were working class, they were upper middle. And those attitudes survive long after a family’s economic status changes, whether it be for better or worse.

The communities that have emigrated from Central America vary enormously, from peasant Indian agricultural laborers who barely speak Spanish, to upper class carpetbaggers and moneyed elites who can sense that their welcome in their home countries is rapidly wearing thin.

Here’s another excerpt from my memoirs.

It must have been soon after my last summer in Cuba because I remember the great public demonstration of joy in the Tampa Cuban community when the tyrant Batista was routed and the rebels triumphantly rode on captured tanks into Havana. Later, as the Revolution progressed, most of the Tampa Cubans continued their support for Fidel. I remember the outrage expressed by my family at the CBS documentary ‘Is Cuba Going Red?’. It was understandable, my mother was a New Deal Democrat, she remembered the Depression, had been a working woman all her life, we all knew how the USA had bullied Cuba from the war with Spain to the days of the butcher Batista. Although she worked very hard and lived very frugally for the support of her family, the welfare state, through my father’s Social Security and Veteran’s benefits, had made the difference. Memories were still fresh of the great strike that had crushed the cigar workers in the thirties, the Commie-baiting that had been used against them and the obscenity of McCarthyism. I haven’t forgotten either, I’m still a New Deal Democrat.

But as time passed it soon became clear that something was going terribly wrong with the Revolution, not only was the evidence in the press accumulating, we started getting veiled references in the censored mail coming out of the island. We could read between the lines, our family was suffering, and the oppression wasn’t just economic due to the Yankee embargo. A grim apparatus of totalitarian rule was being unleashed on the people of Cuba, block Party committees that brought government surveillance down to the apartment building floor level, ‘voluntary’ labor in the sugar cane fields, forced conscription of the young and participation in the militia for everyone else. Then came the loss of employment for those who refused to cooperate, the ostracism of even the families of suspected critics of the regime, then beatings, imprisonment, and eventually, el paredón (firing squad). Family businesses were not expropriated outright by the government, but were forced to operate at a loss under restrictive regulation until the owners begged the State to take them over. This was then refused until the proprietors went bankrupt. Requesting an exit visa began an expensive year-long nightmare of red tape beginning with the immediate loss of one’s job, home, property, legal rights, and the expulsion of children from school. At any time the process could be terminated by the whim of an official and it had to be started again from the beginning while the friends or relatives who sheltered you were subjected to constant harassment. You could take no cash away from the island, and only what property you could carry or wear on your back. At the airport, your baggage was ransacked of everything of value; jewelry and even clothing were often confiscated. I decided then and there that the simplest way to identify a dictatorship was if a state restricted the right of its citizens to travel abroad freely. Cuba was a government of corrupt officials, informers and bullies. My grandfather traced the whole sad business with the French Revolution of his youthful reading as a guide, the Terror had begun. In spite of all their troubles, the Cubans were always a happy people, both on the island and in exile, but they are no more. That is the Revolution’s most remarkable achievement and its greatest crime.

It is difficult for recent arrivals to Tampa to understand how completely and pervasively Cuban culture was once established in the major cigar-factory neighborhoods of the town: Ybor City, West Tampa, and Palmetto Beach (Desoto Park to the Crackers). There was remarkably little conflict between the Cracker and Cuban communities. There was some discrimination, especially in the business world, but as a rule, people got along, played together as kids, intermarried as adults, and lived and worked side by side. In fact, if there was any racial prejudice, it was more likely to be directed at the Crackers, not the other way round. I was taught at home that although many of them were ‘nice people’, they did have a tendency as a race to dislike hard work, drink too much, beat their wives, abuse their kids, and not bathe very frequently. Their food was bland, their music barbaric, their religion ridiculous and they had little use for culture or education. ‘Crackers’, by the way, was not a pejorative term, it was the name native Floridians adopted, referring to their skill with the bullwhip driving mule trains during the pioneer days. I suppose that makes me one as well. On the other hand, we felt the way they treated their colored people was totally unforgivable. Cubans weren’t free of racism, slavery was outlawed in Cuba well after the American Civil War, but they felt that they kept racism confined to social relations. Jim Crow laws and the KKK were totally incomprehensible to them, and lynching was as much a horror as the ovens at Dachau.

One of the advantages of growing up biculturally is that you soon learn that the superstitions of your tribe are not necessarily the laws of physics. With close contacts on both sides of the fence, I soon understood how similar the misconceptions of each were about the other. But I believe that rejecting unfair prejudices about others should not lead to cultural relativism. Individuals and civilizations (but not races) have their good and bad points, and some are corrupt and decadent, at least in part. Another advantage of being bicultural is that you are under no obligation to make excuses for the ugly and the bad your conscience sees in another nation; you learn to have confidence in your ability to recognize evil when you face it. You also develop a keen insight into the nature of hypocrisy. Americans did not invent racism, it is a natural phenomenon that exists in every society and even its victims embrace it. But underneath the genteel politeness of the American South it was never far below the surface, and it could erupt unexpectedly with an Oriental ferocity. I am old enough to remember institutionalized segregation, and even worse, the rationalizations and excuses for it. Although I sincerely believe that the worst is over now, the disease is still not cured, and none of us, not even its victims, is totally immune from infection. In this respect America was like a beautiful woman with rotten teeth.

Those lines were written over a decade ago, and American racism is making a comeback. Obama has exposed it, brought it back out into the open. If you don’t see the opposition to Obama is not primarily racially based, you are deluding yourself. No, I’m not saying if you disagree with Obama you must be a racist. Or that if you are one of his supporters you are not a racist yourself. What I’m saying is much of the antipathy to the man is racially based, disguised as something else, or obscures racist roots. There is a subtle nuance there that perhaps only Americans with strong cross-cultural roots can see.

Yes, I believe racism is declining in this country, but it will not fade away quietly. I realize many well-meaning conservatives will bitterly disagree with these remarks, but I don’t care. I’ve lived here all my life and I know how you guys think even better than you do, because I’ve always had a different culture to contrast and compare you against.

Remember Alexis De Toqueville?

Strong white perhaps? Have you ever heard the term?

I know you are Hispanic and by your tone you seem to feel a brotherhood with blacks for the prejudice they experience. In my life I have had several very close friends who were Hispanic and I don’t mean that in the “some of my best friends” sense. They were bff’s, to use the current vernacular.

I was close with them and I met and associated with their families and friends. They felt no such racial brotherhood and in fact most of them disliked blacks intensely. This was not a Southern racial thing, it was more like a caste thing.

They were well educated and not conservative to my knowledge but they felt a definite superiority far greater than I ever felt as a Southern boy.

Most of them originated from Spanish cultures where Hispanic blacks and non-black were well integrated for hundreds of years but the “blanco” pride was pervasive.

I am willing to bet that race and politics are a hot topic at your family reunions.

We are still very primal and the commercials personify this.

As for the commercials, they aren’t that way because they are produced by liberals or conservatives. They become that way because they are molded by economic forces which work the same for liberals and conservatives. It’s not the ad men that make the system rotten, its the other way round.

Its the reason I got out of public relations/marketing/public information. It is intrinsically dishonest. It is an industry based on lies, deliberate conscious lies.

People naturally feel the compulsion to do a good job, and the system rewards those who do it better. This sets up a mechanism that pretty much serves its own ends and leads to certain outcomes, outcomes perhaps not morally acceptable to those working within the system. it is out of human control. Except for the occasional sociopath you mention, No one sits down and decides to be evil. The system itself selects for it.

That’s how the German people allowed the Nazis to take over and lead their country, and almost the world, to ruin. Hitler was the salt speck around which the entire storm coalesced, but he couldn’t have done it by himself. Sure, social and historical events set up the conditions and guided events. But a lot of good, decent Germans helped him, too. “I vass only followink orderss” is just another way to pronounce “I’m only doing my job”.

Liberals tend to make excuses for the poor, to look the other way at their crimes and excesses. Conservatives prefer to think the poor had it coming to them. The former are condescending and patronizing, the latter are vindictive and judgemental. For them, the poor are not just unfortunate, they deserve to be punished.

Look at the millions affected by the loss of unemployment benefits this year, and those threatened by food stamp cuts. Most of these people are white, most are hard working, or used to be; many were until just recently, solidly middle class; now in this position because of economic forces over which they had no control, and which they couldn’t have possibly anticipated. Some are working full time but still can’t afford to feed their families or stay off the homeless rolls on the minimum wage or less they’re earning. And of course, many are infirm, aged or children.

But to the conservatives, they’re all welfare cheats, people with fancy sneakers, long fingernails, driving Cadillacs, (polite code for “black and Hispanic”) blowing their food stamps on gourmet meals. They actually believe these people would rather be on the dole than working for a living. They have somehow convinced themselves that welfare is a disencentive to work, and cutting it off will actually be a service to the poor. They don’t want their tax dollars subsidizing this low-life scum.

You know, I used to think people who felt that way were just on the tail end of the bell curve when compassion was being handed out. But now, after listening to their arguments, and paying close attention to their politicians and intellectuals, I’ve changed my mind. THEY are the sociopaths. THEY are the ones who are no damn good.