We are Untermenschen to Them: The Tea Party Cheers a Hispanic Child Whose Father is Being Deported

[lunasun]

http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/chaunceydevega/we-are-untermenschen-them-tea-party-cheers-hispanic-child-whose-father?page=0%2C0


The Tea Party GOP are a death cult. They are also, for all intent and purposes, a White Identity organization, one that is willing to betray all norms of good governance and consensus in order to advance a narrow set of interests which are sold to their public through the politics of white racial resentment and white grievance mongering
When we survey the various grotesqueries of human history, there is a fundamental question that must be asked: how can human beings treat each other so badly?

Josie Molina is an alien outsider to the White Right and the Tea Party GOP. Because she is racialized as being "different", her father is a type of perpetual stranger. For the Authoritarian, especially those in the Tea Party who have now internalized the idea of "white politics" and "white group interests" as being synonymous with "real America", those who are not white--or overly identified with Whiteness through a type of "honorary" status (see George Zimmerman or Clarence Thomas)--are not worthy of dignity or respect.

Once more, the word "herrenvolk" is a perfect descriptor for the Tea Party GOP.

The lack of empathy towards a non-white child is a means of reinforcing how the fruits of democracy and liberty are demarcated and limited for conservatives by the color line, and through a sense of "us" and "them", in post civil rights America. Ultimately, if the Tea Party GOP are the herrenvolk, Josie Molina, her father, and people of color, more broadly, are the untermenschen.
For the Tea Party members who cheered the breaking up of a child's family, the latter is not really an innocent. Because she is some type of Other, Josie Molina is subjected to a process of "adultification".
By comparison, a white child would be protected and fawned over. She would be in need of help at a minimum; in the best case scenario, a white child would be given assistance and her family made an exception for an "unfair" law.
And just as black youth are not allowed to be either children or innocent in the eyes of the White Gaze and the State, Josie Molina must be cruelly introduced to the realities of the adult world. In all, and as we saw with the smearing of Trayvon Martin by the Right-wing media, one of White Supremacy's most powerful weapons is its capacity to rob black and brown youth of their innocence.

the word "herrenvolk"
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1981/mar/05/herrenvolk-democracy/?pagination=false

[babylonsister]

1. Rec'd/getting ridiculous. nt