La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz for October 18, 2014

How refreshing. Not a single one of your racist commenters came to play today. Guess they couldn’t bring themselves to condemn one of their own along with you. Good show on this strip, Mr. Alcaraz.

Depends what the “sponges” are absorbing…

I blame chemtrails.

V-Dare are a bunch of mad cows?

I lived in L.A. in the ’70s and we had a prolonged drought then. The singer Anita Bryant said it was because of the homosexuals in California. She was doing “Minute Maid” orange juice commercials at the time.

Does this mean all the slack jawed idiot supremists will have to start calling Hispanics “drybacks”?

While their brains may be spongiform I doubt if they are able to absorb anything other than hatred.

Could Lalo be thought of as belonging to a brown supremacist group?

Nope, because he’s not arguing for Latinos’ inherent supremacy over other racial groups, or other racial groups’ inherent inferiority. He just advocates for Latinos as a group that have historically been and continue to be discriminated against. You know, like by folks such as VDARE, Steve King, Cory Gardner, Tom Cotton, Mitch McConnell, Rick Perry, and the like.

That’s why I mentioned that advertising them to others that may not know about them is not really a good thing.

It was great when nobody was talking about ISIS, because then it was totally ineffective, right? Not a threat at all, just doing its little thing, not making any gains whatsoever.

You know what makes cockroaches scuttle? Light. Shine light on who they are and what they’re doing.

As evidenced by pro sports and entertainment industries, if minorities show that they have a value, any color/race is embraced.

So the ones that aren’t tapped for the big time don’t have a value? Once black folks proved their worth, then they were instantly allowed onto Major League baseball teams, right? You know, when people saw in exhibition games for decades that Negro League players were as good or better than their Major League counterparts? You know, just as one itty-bitty example.

As far as the entertainment industry, you apparently don’t know how that industry actually works. I suggest watching such movies as The Player, Hollywood Shuffle, and Bamboozled to get some satirical insider perspective on that.

How’s this for worth? Latinos are waaaay disproportionately responsible for putting food on our tables, at pretty much every spot on the supply chain. Food’s valuable, right? It’s the stuff that keeps us alive, right? So why do those workers get paid such crap wages? I mean, they’re doing valuable work, right?

Or let’s talk about people of color and women getting paid less than their white and male counterparts for doing the same job at the same level of seniority. Is it because they’re somehow racially and sexually inferior and therefore less valuable?

Lalo’s “victim” position is old fashioned

You know, next time someone comes into your house and robs you, or wipes out your bank account in one fell electronic swoop, I’m going to remind you of this statement. Just move on! Why dwell on it? If you just work hard, this shouldn’t affect you at all, right?

If you read the news lately, Latinos are making it in politics and other endeavors.

Because Obama getting elected POTUS magically ended discrimination against black folks. Or, if not him, then all those black officials who’ve been elected for decades. They signaled the end of discrimination against black folks, right? There’s women in politics, on TV, and running companies. That means sexism is dead, right?

It’s very easy to make the kinds of arguments you do in your post when you don’t actually know what it’s like to live as a person of color or woman in this country. I’d suggest reading some Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Maya Angelou, Junot Díaz, Toni Morrison, Americo Paredes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sherman Alexie, and the like to get more of a sense of it.

I guess you can refute anything you want.

Particularly because the points are so refutable.

Lalo is still whining, blaming

If that’s what you think Lalo’s doing, I’m curious whether you realize you’re also “whining” and “blaming.” But rather than doing so about matters that affect people’s lives and health, you’re doing it about a cartoonist.

How long do you think you and he need to do that until you feel Latinos have gained enough to cancel their terrible history? (that’s a rhetorical question, of course).

Rhetorical or not, here’s an answer: people, including Alcaraz, and including me, will stop talking about it when the discrimination ends and the playing field is well and truly even, with everyone starting from the same starting line and not being weighted down with a few extra sandbags tied around their waists. And other folks, who quite enjoy their positions of privilege, will probably continue to tell everyone else to stop whining and blaming. To just shut up and be happy with how things are going, because the privileged people sure are.

So I have to conclude that your self-righteous call to alert everyone to awareness of a problem has a solution of using puerile name-calling.

Hoo boy, Mr. Pot, it sure seems like you’ve got names for the whole Kettle clan!

You once again fail to understand the nature of a comic strip.

You also apparently haven’t done any research into VDARE. They’re not the sort of hate group who burn crosses on lawns. Rather, they’re the sort who run a website that regularly engages in inflammatory language, particularly against immigrants, and who natter on about how the US was founded as a white country. They’re paleo-conservatives whose contributors include former editors of the National Review (extreme right-wing publication, in case you weren’t aware), and who run syndicated columns from folks like Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter.

This is the sort of hate group and publication that is best addressed with words and sunlight. And probably a bit of laughing-at. You may not appreciate today’s “puerile” humor (to be honest, I felt the joke could have been sharper), but again, this is a comic strip.