Fear of a Brown Planet

The enemy preaches "race hatred," according to FrontPageMagazine's David Horowitz. It aims to undermine the very foundations of Anglo-American civilization--and perhaps, through sheer numbers and singleness of purpose, it will succeed. Horowitz was the featured speaker at a March rally held on the UCLA campus, where attendees denounced the "brainwashing," "evil propaganda" and "institutional racism" of their adversaries in a looming cultural war.

These white Republicans are at the forefront of a new wave of minority politics: 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--and co-opting--the arguments and terms of the civil rights movement. The occasion for the UCLA rally was the campaign against what a recent article called "one of the most prominent and powerful organizations in the United States": the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, known as Mecha, a national Chicano student group founded during the identity and power movements of the early 1970s.

Former California Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cruz Bustamante was the most high-profile Latino politician to come under attack for association with Mecha last year, though City Councilman and former LA mayoral hopeful Antonio Villaraigosa and dozens of other Latino politicos have also been targeted. At issue are references in Mecha's founding documents to "La Raza," a concept popularized by the early twentieth-century Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos, which translates literally as "the race" but refers figuratively to Latinos born of the Spanish conquest of Indians. Casting this vocabulary of racial solidarity as a pernicious ideology of racial supremacy, UCLA's 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. Meanwhile, university Mechas in other states, including Colorado, Texas (offices of UT El Paso Mecha were vandalized late last year) and New Mexico are facing similar challenges.

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