Good lord. “Hispaniels.”
Here’s the thing, my conservative friends. Just like you are afraid that there are a ton of liberals sitting around reading Marx and pulling statues of Lenin out of our closets at night to drape with flowers and hemp scarves while we blow pot smoke in each others’ mouths in their honor before delving into a great big orgy and then all go marry each other and our dogs, we are afraid that y’all are secretly sitting around nodding along to people who get their inspiration from Stormfront and KKK Today.
It’s not a hard stretch for me to think that, if I were to go to Stormfront’s site, I would find people referring to Hispanics as “Hispaniels.”
So, when Representative Eric Watson calls Hispanics “Hispaniels,” I would like to believe that it’s just a fun slip of the tongue. But I’ve got to tell you, when he starts talking about “the yellow man” in the same breath, I do start to get concerned that it’s not that he’s an idiot, but that, for a second, he forgot that, though it’s fine to talk like that among friends, he shouldn’t do it in public.
It’s a sad–though hilarious–day when you’re praying that a State Representative is an idiot, because the alternative means that your state policy is being decided by people at home on the CCC.
Tiny Cat Pants 
Can’t he be both a racist AND an idiot?
Maynard articulates my question precisely. I think yes, he can be. The conditions are strongly interrelated, I’ve noticed.
q.v. “macaca.”
Unconscionable. Why, that’s as bad as, say, accidentally saying, “We are resolved to halt the rise of privacy in that region”.
He’s obviously an idiot AND a racist.
Is it just possibly possible, at the remotest possible bounds of possibility, that he thought he was saying or was trying to say “españoles”? No, I didn’t think it could possibly be so.
Okay, I am trying to take this seriously and get outraged. But I just keep picturing a group of spaniel dogs (although not cockers, more like field dogs or even a brittany or two in the mix) running about and chattering like those chiuauas of TV and film fame. And it’s just too cute to be mad at.
Then again, maybe that’s the kind of stuff that informs the racist bullshit that is happening in these people’s minds but they don’t find it so much odd and funny but informative about others’ character and such. It’s just madness.
Ask and ye shall receive, Auntie.
http://blogs.nashvillescene.com/pitw/2009/04/rep_eric_watsons_hispaniels_co.php
Oh god. It certainly says something unfortunate about the life of a white midwestern gal when she can smell the Stormfront bullshit a mile away.
And I just made a comment to my online eugenics class about how difficult it is to have honest political debates these days. I thought I was being too pessimistic, but I see I was not. When an unabashed racist can win public office at the state level, that doesn’t speak well for the voters of his district.
Rep. Watson said he said, “españols” – more here.
But what did it sound like, John? You said you were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the pronunciation, so does that mean that it’s not clear to you if it’s “espanols” or “espaniels”? Either way, I don’t like it.
Why, if you mean people from Spain and you are an English speaker, are you getting all fancy-pants with the singling out of people from Spain for referring to them in what you imagine might be a Spanish word instead of just referring to them as Spanish people or Spaniards?
To make it clear, of course, that those are some “other” people who did those bad things, some foreign people who were not us. Instead of having to acknowledge it as the first experiment in European colonization and enslavement in the Americas.
Calling Spaniards (a clearly “European” word), “Espanols” is a clear way of saying “Not us.” See? Everyone was doing the particularly noxious strain of slavery found in the Americas, not just us.
That rhetorical move wins no points with me.
It’s completely intellectually dishonest to suggest that all cultures everywhere had slaves JUST LIKE WE HAD SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS. I know of no other system of slavery that involved creating families with the people you’ve enslaved and then owning, trading, and selling your own family members.
How in the world, in the face of that complete mind-fuck can it be the least bit surprising that a man of black and white ancestry would own slaves?
Again, to me, it speaks to the utter dishonesty of the reality of slavery here in the U.S. South. We continue to want to pretend that this was something white people (one group) did to black people (a completely separate and distinct group), so that any black person who owned slaves must be understood as proving that black people were just as bad as white people, instead of seeing that slavery was something people who could prove they were white did to their family members who could not, and so a community member who was understood to be more “white” than other community members could, often, own those community members.
What it means to be “white” in a case like that is clearly about more than skin color–it has to do with being recognized as being free and having money, among other things.
Anyway, to get back to the “yellow man” comment.
So, he doesn’t mean Asians. He means light skinned black men.
Wow.
As in “high yella?” Wow indeed. This is the sort of thing I expect to hear in places like the Belle Meade Country Club during candid and intoxicated moments, not in official public discourse.
Yes, apparently so. I mean, at least when white folks use the term “yellow” they have the “Jesus love the little children” excuse (whether or not one chooses to believe it). But when you start talking about “yellow” in reference to a black man? Woo hoo.
I think we all start to know how you butter your bread.