The Murder of Marcelo Lucero. How could this happen?
Q. If a sovereign nation-state has long articulated a code of racialized, supremacist Whiteness, is the murder of Marcelo Lucero, incomprehensible and inexplicable OR possible and predictable?
See "Theory of Systemic Whiteness" in this Blog (or Google it)
It is important to read something of the history of Suffolk County where Marcelo Lucero an Ecuadoran immigrant lived before he was murdered by Suffolk County teen and high school athlete Jeffrey Conroy and his pals. What kind of place is Suffolk County? What is its history, demography? Suffolk County is 86% White. (Note: racial categories are self-ascribed and this self-ascription is mandated by the US Census Bureau which has racialized the census from its inception. Even this fact is part of the structural, systemic, ideological content of Whiteness. Whiteness is first and foremost a system of unearned,unequal, unshared, dominant POWER.
Finally it is important to focus on WHITENESS rather than racism. To call someone a racist is to impugn their individual behavior rather than to place that individual's behavior within the context of "White supremacism". That individual can and must be held responsible and accountable for his/her actions, but those actions are explainable with the larger societal context.
But again "white supremacism" is attributed
dismissively to belong to a few 'ignorant' individuals or even small radical fringe groups like the KKK, neo-Nazi and punk groups. By imputing white supremacist ideas to only a few misguided and violent individuals, the real POWER of structural systemic and ideological Whiteness is made invisible and its dominant power is further strengthened.
In contrast to the term "racism" or even "white supremacism" the term "WHITENESS" focuses on a power construct of structural, systemic and ideological supremacist racialization, by which so-called OTHER(s) like Lucero are permitted to be constructed as despicable,somehow less than HUMAN, which is a central organizing strategic principle of the US racialized history of slavery of Africans and genocide of indigenous peoples, as well as directly related to contemporary experience.
Q. Are Palestinians and Iraqis the new "others" along with Latinos in the contemporary American racial experience?
An essential raw data source for the demographics of Suffolk County would be:
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet (For Suffolk County). You might even want to compare census factfinder data for Nassau County. Both these counties together make up Long Island.
It is also important to analyze press reports on the murder. In particular the comments of Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive are important in providing political context for the murder.
Most important read the comments of Lucero's brother, Hispanic civic leaders, ACLU officials, prosecutors and defense attorneys.
We cannot come to grips with the murder of Marcelo Lucero unless we examine the
Systemic, structural and ideological constructions of Whiteness that were central in to murder of Marcelo Lucero. The demonized construction of the racialized OTHER is central to the affirmation of Whiteness.
Both the murder and the search for justice are part of the American Experience.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
======================================================================================
This article is protected by New York Times copyright.
link to New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/nyregion/14immigrant.html?emc=eta1
New York Times article
Title:
A Killing in a Town Where Latinos Sense Hate
Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times
image
Caren Cajamarca, 9, of Patchogue, N.Y., at a memorial near the site of the fatal stabbing of Marcelo Lucero last Saturday night. Prosecutors call it a hate crime.
By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: November 13, 2008
PATCHOGUE, N.Y. — It was an occasional diversion among a certain crowd at Patchogue-Medford High School, students said: Drink a few beers, then go looking for people to mug, whether for money or just for kicks.
Skip to next paragraph
Joselo Lucero, brother of the victim, Marcelo Lucero, said Marcelo had warned him to stay safe.
Friends of Jeffrey Conroy, a star athlete at the school, say he was known to do it, too. And last Saturday night, after drinking in a park in the Long Island hamlet of Medford, Mr. Conroy, 17, and six other teenagers declared that they were going to attack “a Mexican” and headed to the more ethnically diverse village of Patchogue to hunt, according to friends and the authorities.
They found their target in Marcelo Lucero, a serious-minded, 37-year-old immigrant from a poor village in Ecuador who had lived in the United States for 16 years, mostly in Patchogue, and worked in a dry cleaning store, sending savings home to support his mother, a cancer survivor.
After the boys surrounded, taunted and punched Mr. Lucero, the authorities say, Mr. Conroy plunged a knife into his victim’s chest, fatally wounding him.
The attack has horrified and puzzled many in this comfortable Suffolk County village of 11,700. Prosecutors have labeled it a hate crime and County Executive Steve Levy called the defendants, who have pleaded not guilty, “white supremacists.” And some immigrant advocates on Long Island have described the attack as a reflection of widespread anti-Latino sentiment and racial intolerance in Suffolk County.
Interviews with business owners, students, government officials and immigrants in the area suggest that illegal immigration has been a wellspring for anger and tension in the neighborhood, with day laborers drawing the greatest fire. Indeed, a number of people — adults and students alike — drew sharp distinctions between assimilated immigrants, who they said should be welcomed as friends and neighbors, and newly arrived illegal immigrants, who they said do not belong.
“No disrespect here, but I’m a firm believer that if you want to come to this country, you should have a job waiting for you,” said the co-owner of the Medford Shooting Range, who gave only his first name, Charlie, and is known by the nickname Charlie Range.
He said he was offended by the behavior of some day laborers — throwing trash in the street, urinating in the bushes, hooting at passing women — and complained that illegal immigrants were crowding rental apartments and swelling the ranks of criminal gangs.
“How do you stop the illegal alien influx?” he wondered aloud. “How do you stop the rain?”
Thousands of immigrants from Latin America have flowed into Long Island in the past two decades, attracted by employment opportunities, particularly in the construction industry, which until recently was booming. Patchogue’s Latino population has risen sharply during this time, village officials say, with Ecuadoreans now being the single largest Latino group.
According to the 2000 census, Latinos were 24 percent of Patchogue’s population, up from 14 percent in 1990, and government officials say the percentage has continued to grow. In just the past five years, the Latino student population of the Patchogue-Medford School District has risen to 24 percent from about 4 percent, said Michael H. Mostow, the district’s superintendent.
Anti-immigrant hostility has led to several highly publicized attacks in recent years in Suffolk County, including the near-death beating of two Mexican day laborers in 2001 and the burning of a Mexican family’s house in 2003, both in the nearby town of Farmingville.
Immigrant advocates have accused some local politicians, particularly Mr. Levy, of helping to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment by promoting tough policies against illegal immigration. But Mr. Levy said this week that the attack on Mr. Lucero “wasn’t a question of any county policy or legislation; it was a question of bad people doing horrific things.”
For all the parsing of motives and rationales in the case, many Latino immigrants here describe Suffolk County as a place where daily life can be a struggle for acceptance in a predominantly white population, particularly in this time of economic crisis. Rocio Ponce, a Brentwood resident and real-estate agent from Ecuador, said that many residents had developed a hatred against recent Latino immigrants “because they think they’re coming to take their jobs.”
* 1
* 2
Next Page »
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 15, 2008
An article on Friday about fear and anger in Patchogue, N.Y., after the stabbing death of an Ecuadorean immigrant in what prosecutors have called a hate crime, referred incorrectly to Jeffrey Conroy, 17, a high school athlete who has been arrested in the case. He has not been offered a lacrosse scholarship to the University of Maryland, as several of his classmates reported. (His lawyer, William J. Keahon, said on Friday that Mr. Conroy had been offered athletic scholarships to other colleges.)
More Articles in New York Region » A version of this article appeared in print on November 14, 2008, on page A25 of the New York edition.
Need to know more? 50% off home delivery of The Times.
Past Coverage
* THE ISLAND; Salvadorans, Building Their Own Cultural Bridge (May 4, 2008)
* As Primary Nears, Voters Critique Field (February 3, 2008)
* Lawmaker on L.I. Wants Worker Status Verified (February 1, 2008)
* Filipino Nurses, Healers in Trouble (January 27, 2008)
Advertise on NYTimes.com
A Killing in a Town Where Latinos Sense Hate
Published: November 13, 2008
(Page 2 of 2)
Latinos say the attack against Mr. Lucero, if not his murder, was foretold. Some report being threatened and physically harassed in the streets, with bottles thrown at them and their car windows smashed during the night. Anti-immigrant epithets and racially motivated bullying are common in the hallways of the schools, children say.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
James Carbone/Newsday
Jeffrey Conroy, front, 17, and other suspects in Mr. Lucero’s killing.
“They tell us to go get a green card, ‘Go back to your community!’ ” said Pamela Guncay, 14, an Ecuadorean-American born in the United States.
Many Latinos, particularly those who are here illegally, say they would never report such incidents because they do not trust the police and fear deportation.
“We’re here to work, we’re not here to do any damage,” pleaded César Angamarca, 45, who rents a room in a small house where Mr. Lucero lived. “We’re working honorably.”
Friends of Mr. Conroy and the other suspects insisted that the defendants were not racist and said they were shocked that a frivolous escapade by bored, drunken teenagers had quickly turned tragic. They pointed out that one of the defendants, José Pacheco, 17, is the son of an African-American mother and a Puerto Rican father, and that Mr. Conroy counted Latino and black classmates among his closest buddies.
“They were good kids,” said Sean Ruga, 19, who graduated from the high school in 2006 and remained friends with the defendants. “It’s not something I could see them capable of doing.”
Mr. Pacheco’s uncle, Jerry Dumas, said his nephew was with the group because he was looking for a ride home and would not have knowingly joined an attack against a Latino, especially considering his ethnic heritage. He also said that Mr. Pacheco’s parents had themselves been apparent victims of violent racism: When they moved into the Patchogue area in the early 1990s, Mr. Dumas said, their house was burned down twice.
Mr. Conroy was the best known of the defendants and, according to prosecutors, the leader of the group. He was on the school’s lacrosse and wrestling teams, according to his friends, and his lawyer, William J. Keahon, said he had received “a number” of offers of college athletic scholarships.
Jeffrey Francis, 18, who is black, said Mr. Conroy befriended him soon after he transferred into the school this fall. They were on the wrestling team together, he said.
Acquaintances of the defendants said it was not unusual for groups of students from the high school to go out looking for people to mug. “It was just for fun, or for money,” said Taylor Fallica, 15, a student at the high school who said he was a friend of Mr. Conroy and the other defendants.
A friend who said he had been hanging out with the seven defendants in the park that night said there had not been much in the way of a plan before the group set out.
“We were just chilling, having a few beers,” said the friend, who requested anonymity because he had also been interviewed by the police and feared making contradictory statements.
Toward midnight, he recalled, “they said they were going to go jump a Mexican,” and they left.
Mr. Lucero had come to the United States to help support his family in Gualaceo, Ecuador, said his brother, Joselo, 34, in an interview this week in Patchogue, where he lives. Their father had died when they were young and Marcelo assumed the role of father figure in the family, Joselo said.
Marcelo Lucero was a hard worker and had little social life, according to his brother and a resident in a house where he rented a room. When Joselo joined Marcelo in Patchogue in the mid-1990s, the older brother frequently counseled him on how to take care of himself and be safe.
“He was a like a protector,” Joselo recalled. “He told me: ‘You have to be a man here. There’s no mom here anymore.’ ”
As the mob descended, Mr. Lucero’s friend managed to escape and contact the police, who rounded up the suspects minutes later.
Mr. Conroy was charged with first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime and first-degree gang assault; the others were charged with first-degree gang assault. They were arraigned on Monday and the case was sent to a grand jury, which began reviewing evidence on Thursday, according to a spokesman for the Suffolk County district attorney’s office.
Joselo Lucero said his priorities were now to get his brother’s body back to Ecuador for burial and to ensure that justice was served. But he said he felt no bitterness or vengefulness toward his brother’s attackers.
“I don’t really feel hate,” he said.
“I feel sorry for the families, in some way, because they have to be responsible for their kids.”
Since Mr. Lucero’s death, local officials have almost universally played down any suggestion that ethnic and racial tension had been prevalent in the community. Nonetheless, local, county and state officials have responded to the killing with various plans, including the introduction of sensitivity task forces, outreach programs in the Latino community and community forums.
“It is imperative that we bridge the divide,” Patchogue’s mayor, Paul V. Pontieri Jr., said on Thursday, “and realize that the things we have in common far outnumber those that divide us.”
END of New York Times article A Killing in a Town Where Latinos Sense Hate
Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times
This article is protected by New York Times copyright.
===================================================================================
KarunaKaran, Chithra Theory of Systemic Whiteness
=====================================================================================
Reading List
Ababio-Clottey, Aeesha, and Marianne Williamson. Beyond Fear: Twelve Spiritual Keys to Racial Healing. HJ Kramer, 1999.
Armour, Jody David. Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism : The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America. New York: New York University Press, 1997.
Bailey, Alison, and Jacquelyn Zita. "The Reproduction of Whiteness: Race and the Regulation of the Gendered Body." Hypatia 22.2 (2007): vii-xv.
Bash, Harry H. " If I'm So White, Why Ain't I Right? Some Methodological Misgivings on Taking Identity Ascriptions at Face-Value." Critical Sociology 32.4 (2006): 675-97.
Bell, Derrick A. Faces at the Bottom of the Well : The Permanence of Racism. New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1992.
Berard, Tim J. "The Neglected Social Psychology of Institutional Racism." Sociology Compass 2.2 (2008): 734-64.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists : Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006.
Brown, Michael K. Whitewashing Race : The Myth of a Color-Blind Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Butterworth, Michael L. "Race In "The Race": Mark Mcgwire, Sammy Sosa, and Heroic Constructions of Whiteness." Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 228-44.
Dei, George J. Sefa. "Critical Perspectives in Antiracism: An Introduction." The Candaian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 33.3 (1996): 247-68.
Dwyer, Owen J., and John Paul Jones III. "White Socio-Spatial Epistemology." Social & Cultural Geography 1.2 (2000): 209-22.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1st ed. New York Berkeley, Calif.: Grove Press ; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2008.
Gillborn, David. "Rethinking White Supremacy." Etnicities 6.3 (2006): 318-40.
Griffin, Anya T. "Racism, Stress, and Health in African American Females: The Impact of Stress Experienced from Perceived Racism on Cardiovascular Reactivity in African American Adolescent and Adult Females." Dissertation. Fielding Graduate University, 2005.
Guess, Teresa J. "The Social Construction of Whiteness: Racism by Intent, Racism by Consequence." Critical Sociology 32.4 (2006): 649-73.
Hartmann, Douglass. "Rush Limbaugh, Donovan Mcnabb, and a Little Social Concern: Reflections on the Problems of Whiteness in Contemporary American Sport." Journal of Sport and Social Issues 31.1 (2007): 45-60.
Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Sexual Politics : African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Hoelscher, Steven. "Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South." Annals of Association of American Geographers 93.3 (2003): 657-86.
Holloway, Sarah L. "Burning Issues: Whiteness, Rurality and the Politics of Difference." Geoforum 38.1 (2007): 7-20.
Hooks, Bell. Black Looks : Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992.
Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. Color of Violence : The Incite! Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2006.
Leary, Dr. Joy Degruy. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Milwaukie, Oregon: Uptone Press, 2005.
Levine-Rasky, Cynthia. "Framing Whiteness: Working through the Tensions in Introducing Whiteness to Educators." Race Ethnicity and Education 3.3 (2000): 271-92.
Lewis, Amanda E. ""What Group?" Studying Whites and Whiteness in the Era Of "Color-Blindness"." Sociological Theory 22.4 (2004): 623-46.
Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness : How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Rev. and expanded ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.
Markovitz, Jonathan. Legacies of Lynching : Racial Violence and Memory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.
Memmi, Albert. Racism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Mills, Charles. "White Ignorance." Suny Series, Philosophy and Race. Eds. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana. vols. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. 13-38.
Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, N.Y. ; London: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States : From the 1960s to the 1990s. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Ortega, Mariana. "Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant: White Feminism and Women of Color." Hypatia 21.3 (2006): 56-74.
Prividera, Laura, and John W. Howard III. "Masculinity, Whiteness, and the Warrior Hero: Perpetuating the Strategic Rhetoric of Us Nationalism and the Marginalization of Women." Women and Language 29.2 (2006): 29-37.
Pulido, Laura. "Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in South California." Annals of the Association of American Geography 90.1 (2000): 12-40.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2003.
Said, Edward W., Moustafa Bayoumi, and Andrew Rubin. The Edward Said Reader. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.
Saxton, A. "Whiteness and Reconciliation: A Discursive Analysis." Australian Psychologist 39.1 (2004): 14-23.
Shearer, Tobin Miller. Enter the River : Healing Steps from White Privilege toward Racial Reconciliation. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1994.
Simpson, Jennifer Lyn. "The Color-Blind Double Blind: Whiteness and the (Im)Possibility of Dialogue." Communication Theory 18 (2008): 139-59.
Staurowsky, Ellen J. "“You Know,We Are All Indian” Exploring White Power and Privilege in Reactions to the Ncaa Native American Mascot Policy." Journal of Sport and Social Issues 31.1 (2007): 61-76.
Sullivan, Shannon, and Nancy Tuana. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Suny Series, Philosophy and Race. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.
Sullivan, Shannon, and ebrary Inc. Revealing Whiteness the Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. American Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Tochluk, Shelly. Witnessing Whiteness : First Steps toward an Antiracist Practice and Culture. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2008.
Trepagnier, Barbara. Silent Racism : How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006.
Vanderbeck, Robert M. "Vermont and the Imaginative Geographies of American Whiteness." Annals of Association of American Geographers 96.3 (2006): 641-59.
Vanderbeck, Robert M. "Inner-City Children, Country Summers: Narrating American Childhood and the Geographies of Whiteness." Environment and Planning A 40.5 (2008): 1132-150.
Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid : The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 2006.
Welcome, H. Alexander. ""White Is Right": The Utilization of an Improper Ontological Perspective in Analyses of Black Experiences." Journal of African American Studies 8.1 (2004): 59-73.
Williams, David R., and Ruth Williams-Morris. "Racism and Mental Health: The African American Experience." Ethnicity & Health 5.3/4 (2000): 243-68.
Wise, Tim J. White Like Me : Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. Rev. and updated ed. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2008.
Yancy, George. What White Looks Like : African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. New York: Routledge, 2004.
October 12, 2008 12:27 PM
