May 11, 2006
Then There’s This Guy Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:15 PM EST I’m in a nitpicky mood today (as usual). At National Review Online, David Frum writes: “Nearly half the nation’s five year olds (45% to be precise) are now ethnic minorities, with most of the surge in minority population driven by Hispanic immigration. About half that immigration is illegal. In other words, the decision today not to enforce the immigration laws is guaranteeing that the US of the second half of the 21st century will cease to be a country predominantly populated by people of European descent.” Uh, dude? Do you know what “Hispanic” means? (Not to mention that some of the immigrants will go back, and there will be further immigration, and what’s wrong with non-Europeans anyway, but that’s a whole different topic.) I suspect that Mr. Frum wanted to say “nonwhite” but realized how that would sound, so he tried to come up with a euphemism. And he is not the first person to see the Spanish as being not really European. As I wrote in 1998 in “Time Machine,” at the time of the Spanish-American War, some Americans went to great lengths to explain why we were fighting against a white European power and for the mostly African and indigenous population of Cuba. “Harper’s Weekly [I wrote] was so fond of Europe and its people that when war broke out, it could barely admit that Spain was part of the continent: ‘The Spaniards are the last remnants of white barbarians, and, like their prototypes of the Middle Ages, whom they closely resemble, they have the savage instincts and methods that are found nowhere else in civilized Europe in this nineteenth century except in Turkey, and, with the exception of Spain and Turkey, are found only among the uncivilized red men of the remote regions of our own continent, and the brown and black and yellow men of Africa and Asia.’”
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