White Fear

By Roberto Lovato, Pacific News Service. Posted May 18, 2004.

Just as excerpts from a polemical new book by Harvard international relations expert Samuel Huntington were hitting newsstands, I was in New York and visited Huntington's old neighborhood in the Bronx near blocks of sooty, industrial-age housing projects.

Despite the slight chill that overcast Sunday, the area's main drag, La Bainbridge, a street long ravaged and revived by the ebb and flow of economic depression and war, burst with beats of American life: colorful restaurants and shops, vibrant Catholic, evangelical, and Muslim churches and mosques, and lots of immigrants pregnant with a ferocious work ethic.

Most of the Bronx residents of Puerto Rican, Dominican and – increasingly – Mexican descent trekking along Bainbridge have probably never heard of the powerful Bronx native who recently penned what may become the defining document of "Americanness" and "Latinoness" in our time (if the profound impact of his best-selling previous book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is any indicator).

These Bronx residents may not be aware that they and other Latinos in the United States are protagonists in an ongoing American – especially Anglo-American – crisis in which they are the latest group cast as "Barbarian Other."

In his just-published book, Who Are We: The Challenges to America's National Identity, Huntington speaks about the meteoric rise of white nativism in America, for which he offers not an apology but a rationale: "The most powerful stimulus to such white nativism will be the cultural and linguistic threats whites see from the expanding power of Latinos in U.S. society."

What Bronx residents and for that matter most of us don't know is that, in crossing the East River or the Rio Grande, Latinos have crossed a modern-day Rubicon into hostility and war in the eyes of some whites like Huntington.

We Latinos are now living in the vast and varied terrain of white fear.

The failure to recognize white fear and confront it on its own terms has become Latinos' central strategic error in the domestic policy wars that vilify immigrants, destroy schools and disproportionately push larger and larger numbers of former students of crumbling school systems into prisons and into the ranks of the dead and endangered in Iraq.

In a chapter entitled "Assimilation," Huntington is very explicit about this nexus between perpetual war and the construction of national identity: "Without a major war requiring substantial mobilization and lasting years ... contemporary immigrants will have neither the opportunity nor the need to affirm their identity with and their loyalty to America as earlier immigrants have done."

I can't erase from my own mind the images of families and children devastated by the Cold War counterinsurgency culture designed for El Salvador by the U.S. National Security Council, or NSC, during Huntington's tenure there in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Today, I can't but wonder what awaits all Americans of Latin American descent as Huntington lunges into the domestic component of his perilous vision known as "The Clash of Civilizations" in his earlier book.

The stakes couldn't be higher. Huntington isn't just some cloistered academic crank; he's a warrior-scholar with direct links to vast networks of political, military, academic and media power; he's a political scientist who learned how to integrate the double helix of domestic and foreign policy as the former coordinator of security planning at the NSC.

As one of the pioneers of the post-Cold War American grand strategy, Huntington understands better than most how to engineer society through an ongoing psychological operation or, as his NSC memos put it, a "psy-op." Manufacturing various types of fear – including racial fear – is a standard psy-op that affects multiple audiences in multiple ways.

Rather than fall into the psy-op trap of reactive anger by dismissing the book as the rant of a "racist" or a 19th century backwoods nativist, it is best to interpret Who Are We as another very dangerous installment in the career of a seasoned national security specialist. With the steely calculus of a post-Cold War warrior in search of new enemies, Huntington is helping create a fear that is transforming American and Latino identity, and U.S. politics overall – a fear most visible in our gated communities, gated countries and gated minds.

Huntington's 1968 classic, Political Order in Changing Societies, has for many years been a textbook for authoritarian leaders. Another of his books, The Soldier and the State was and still is required reading in national security theory for numerous military leaders, including those of the Salvadoran military. That's the same Salvadoran military that brought my Salvadoran college students in the United States their most vivid recollections of their home country: Dante-esque mounds of body parts and ground littered with the dead bodies of national security practice.

Roberto Lovato is a Los Angeles-based writer. This article was produced under the auspices of the George Washington Williams Fellowship of the Independent Press Association.

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