You're correct, you didn't specifically say mexican. But you absolutely are assuming racism. And your assumption is false.
My ‘assumption’ is based on my observation. Which is born out by many of the actions of ICE agents who arrest US citizens who are immigrants or who ‘look like’ immigrants to them, or have dark hair/eyes and a darker complexion. I have friends who do not leave their homes without their US passports. ICE in Minnesota arrested several Native Americans —and continued to hold them illegally in an attempt to force NA tribes to allow access to reservation land. Native Americans elsewhere in the US have been arrested with their tribal IDs confiscated or torn up, ICE insisting they were fake.
Yeah, there is a LOT of racism behind ICE. And behind the drive to round up people and incarcerate them in concentration camps.
Now explain to me how
ICE behaving in unacceptable ways means that
I have racist intentions.
How does
someone else doing something you think is racist make
me a racist?
Perhaps we just see different news accounts, different videos of incidents that have happened. My understanding is that there have been some images that were altered to obscure what actually happened re: the Renee Good and the Alex Pretti murders. As far as the Alex Pretti murder, I was catching up via text with a close friend who lives in St. Paul at the moment Pretti was shot: I knew within a couple of minutes what had happened and in perhaps 5-7 minutes I saw video—too quickly and too many videos to have been altered by AI. And I’ve read accounts from people actually present at that shooting.
The ‘official’ ICE account of the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good differ sharply with video recordings and eye witness accounts. Not by a few small details that skew things in favor of ICE agents but dramatically contradicting the evidence provided by those there.
Once upon a time, I assumed whatever the government told us was factual, even if it was not always the entire truth.
Then I grew up.
Maybe you’ve never been disillusioned by contradictions between what the official version is and what is later or contemporaneously available.
Maybe you’ve never have not listened to enough from various members of the current POTUS’s cabinet or the man himself to have heard some pretty disturbing and despicable comments that are frankly, racist. Maybe you never saw or heard things first yourself that you knew were motivated by animus against the accused or that animus motivated by racism or sexism. Maybe that does not leap out at you the way it does me.
Truthfully, I was very naive as a young person. I believed that only my home town or my corner of the county was racist, except, of course, for the South. The first place I lived outside of the state where I was born was just outside of Washington DC, and in fact, I worked in DC for a few years, and lived in graduate student housing which was quite international. I lived in a bubble, believing that most people were not really racist. Despite a lot of evidence at work or racism and colorism. I was an idealist. Moving back to the Midwest, I confess that, idiot that I was, I was shocked by the racial divides. Moving to another midwestern state, in a small college town, I saw and heard a lot of things that shocked me and infuriated me. I cannot afford to be naive any more. I could not afford to be naive if I wanted my children to grow up with the ability to think for themselves, to see, hear, read, research and evaluate for themselves.
Maybe your experiences have been different.
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