What Many People Don’t See About Black and Latino Lives

I am fluent in Spanish, currently working also in Brazilian Portuguese as well as English and my ancestry is Irish American. When I was…

I am fluent in Spanish, currently working also in Brazilian Portuguese as well as English and my ancestry is Irish American. When I was younger, I looked hispanic. In fact, one Columbian said to me, when I was in Ecuador, that if I kept my mouth shut no one would ever know I was not native to that Andean Republic.

This gives me a perspective on racism that many people do not see. I know what it is like to be treated poorly because I appear to be from south of the border. Workers treated me abusively when I was a customer at a local franchise of a nationally known muffler chain. I mean one in particular was absolutely nasty. I was yelled at, mocked, laughed at and they all felt they could get away with it because, I assume, they thought I was a Latino. I was a college student, my car was a cheap Datsun B210 with an Ecuador sticker on the windshield, behind the rear view mirror. In 1991, it cost me less than $1000 and it needed a muffler. I suppose they might have suspected it was a failed low rider.

Years later, I was with a group of Puerto Ricans—in my own home town in suburban Boston—and we stopped at a local restaurant chain. Again the service to us specifically was less than optimal to say the least.

Supposedly educated and ‘liberal-minded’ people tell me that Latinos are uneducated and naïve.

I teach people to watch something in their local news. Check out two similar accidental tragedies. One happens in a rich suburb and the other happens in a poor, inner-city neighborhood. Aside from that, the deaths, including the deceaseds’ ages, manners of accidental death, even the timing will be similar.

I watched the media come into the inner city several times and “get a close-up of the blood.” In other words, grab the gory details and leave. The report from the suburbs of the similar tragedies included interviews with neighbors, family, and the video outside the funeral as the pall bearers carry the casket down the front stairs of the Church and return it to the hearse after the service.

This is the point of the Black Lives Matter movement. It is not that other lives do not matter, it is that many people do not see how Blacks and Latinos are treated every day. They do not know about the inner-city parents on their knees every night praying that their young children come home safely, while the media covers a benign, unrelated protest of suburban middle class people ten blocks away. Since the media does not address their plight, their targeted demographic community does not see it, so viewers do not understand what the fuss is all about.

The Latino community has its own media in such networks as Univision out of Miami, Telemundo which is an NBC network and others based in Latin America, they also have local television and radio stations too. So, they have outlets to tell their story. The Black community does not have as many local affiliates of its own network. It has the national market through BET, but local black owned media are not as prevalent.

The reason why many do not understand Black Lives Matter is that they do not understand the full story, because they do not get the full story. If they did, the Black Lives Matter movement would not exist, because no one would tolerate the conditions that led to its formation.

In the book, The New Jim Crow, the focus is on how a large percentage of prisoners in the United States are Blacks and Hispanics.

I sat in on a trial of a young black-latino teen from my neighborhood at the time when I lived and worked in the inner city. I knew his family. He was accused of shooting what was an alleged rival gang member. The all-white jury found him guilty, but the word on the street was that he is innocent.

When he was found guilty, even though he maintained his innocence, his mother screamed that they convicted him because no one on the jury was from the ‘hood. She was right.

He was remanded to a juvenile detention center. I explained to his handlers that he was falsely convicted, something that they hate to hear and can do nothing to change. I said that not because of his claims to innocence or his mother’s screams, it was simple physics and biology. I explained that what was not asked in court is if he was capable of committing the crime in the first place. He was short due to a physical problem. He was convicted of firing a strong (maybe .357) pistol three times and almost hitting his moving target twice. I pointed out that this was impossible for someone of his stature and strength.

As a US Navy veteran, I fired Colt .45’s and know their kickback. The teen was shorter and smaller. He could easily have fired the gun three times, but almost hit his moving target two of the three times shooting one shot immediately after another? No. The kickback makes that a virtually unviable scenario. I believe to this day that someone more skilled and physically capable in the use of such a weapon fired that pistol. That is also the word on the street. There was no video of the incident because the inner-city security company did not put tape in the video recording devices, and the security office was empty of security personnel—that also would never happen in a middle-class suburb.

The media never addresses these issues in their news reporting or their crime dramas because they don’t know to look for them. They don’t focus on the individual details that the inner city Blacks, Latinos and yes even others deal with daily.

Yes, all lives matter. However, all lives are not constantly portrayed the same. That is the part many people do not understand. If more news editors and producers lived in the inner city — the ‘hood — and met their neighbors and lived with them for at least a year, the news would be completely different and the Black Lives Matter movement would be too.