Abstract

Fear of a Brown Planet

White Republicans are at the forefront of a new wave of minority politics in the United States: white minority politics. Though rooted in California, this new politics of fear is cropping up across the country as its promoters redefine who is racial victim and who is racial oppressor, neatly inverting the arguments and terms of the civil rights movement. Former California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cruz Bustamante was the most high-profile Latino politician to come under attack for association with the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, known as Mecha, a national Chicano student group in 2003, though City Councilman and former Los Angeles mayoral hopeful Antonio Villaraigosa and dozens of other Latino politicos have also been targeted. Casting Mecha's vocabulary of racial solidarity as a pernicious ideology of racial supremacy, Republicans have raised a war chest of more than $28,000 to accomplish what Stanford University's Republicans have already done: cut off Mecha's funding. Instead of participating in serious dialogue about the roots of racial tension, the forces of white fear work relentlessly to portray now vulnerable postindustrial whites as victims of a shadowy Latino, and especially Mexican, empire. The politics of white minority status have been the blind spot in liberal Democratic California, where mostly white political consultants have yet to figure out how to reconcile Latino ascendancy with white (and, increasingly, elderly black) fear to create the grand coalition that will eventually replace the black-white coalitions that elected liberal Governors Pat and Jerry Brown as well as Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles.