I applaud this woman. But I also remember that last year someone was stabbed while doing something similar, so each situation is different.
I am ashamed to say this happened in Colorado, but happily, another Coloradoan stood up and the sheriff arrested the offender.
White woman intervenes when a racist white lady harasses 2 Hispanic women for speaking Spanish in the store saying that they should be speaking English in America.
Kamira Trent not only spoke up and defended these 2 women but got the racist lady harassing them arrested
Retweet pic.twitter.com/yLW3TnEeBN
— StanceGrounded (@_SJPeace_) June 25, 2019
Good news!
Linda Dwire—the woman who harassed two women for their "crime" of speaking Spanish—has been charged and arrested for two counts of bias-motivated harassment
Thank you to Kamira Trent, the courageous ally who stood up against white supremacy✊?https://t.co/AWRZpRufHk
— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) October 4, 2018
BTW, if you’re on twitter, follow @_SJPeace_ StanceGrounded, he’s a good guy: “Also, if you don’t know a Muslim or have one as a friend, more than welcome to follow me. Trying to dispel Muslim stereotypes and End the hate. One Love”
Open thread
Belafon
I thought that story sounded familiar. It happened last year: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/04/get-out-woman-roars-defense-spanish-speakers-confronted-not-speaking-english/?utm_term=.7dcfc5d96da6
Edit: Which I obviously missed the date on the second tweet.
plato
Typical trumpian twit aping his ugly hand gestures.
It will take good
germansamericans to rescue their own country from these racists.burnspbesq
I can remember when most white folks would have been too embarrassed to pull shit like that.
Something happened recently … around 2016 … that changed things.
Wonder what it was …
TaMara (HFG)
@Belafon: Yeah, he’s been highlighting people standing up for this stuff all week. Since this happened in Colorado, I wanted to post it. And also, it wasn’t even a blip on the local new stations and its should have been.
The Moar You Know
The problem is that the kind of person who would start yelling in a public place at some Mexicans for speaking Spanish (or me for speaking Spanish to a Hispanic, for that matter) is going to be FAR more likely to be stupid and violent than your average person.
Read the situation before you go into battle.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
“WHAT A LOST GENERATION!!! YOU’LL LOSE THE COUNTRY IF YOU TREAT THEM LIKE THEY’RE HUMAN!!&!&!&!”
The fucking gull of this woman. What a fucking piece of shit. And she actually argued back when called out!!
This woman obviously wasn’t around when European immigrants formed their own tight-knit communities and spoke their native tongues amongst themselves. She just flat out assumed the two hispanic women didn’t speak English at all and used that as an excuse to berate them.
plato
Lapassionara
OT, but I just received a call from McGurk’s, where the St Louis area BJers are gathering this coming Thursday, at 5 pm. If you are in the area, please join us. Ask for Quinerly, who has said she will be attending. Also Opiejeanne.
plato
trollhattan
Thank goodness they weren’t trying to picnic in Spanish!
The hell is wrong with people?
Programming note: Japan tries to make quarter-finals versus Netherlands, to which I wish them good luck. Anybody looking for your tournament dark horse might well choose the orange side. Giddyup!
kindness
What really would be priceless is the look on that hater woman’s face when she realizes she’s being arrested for being a hater. Sadly we don’t have that but it would be sweet, no?
cmorenc
@The Moar You Know:
@burnspbesq
These two things go together. Since 2016, lots more bigoted stupid people feel permissively entitled to be belligerently “out” with their racism, or for that matter wrt their resentment of any sort of people they regard as “others” impinging or benefitting at their expense.
CathieFonz (used to be Cathie from Canada)
Off topic but I had to share — Wayfair employees are walking out rather than send beds to Border services for the concentration camps. I think the hashtag is #WayfairWalkout
raven
@CathieFonz (used to be Cathie from Canada): They are opening a 400 job facility here.
Roger Moore
@cmorenc:
That is precisely what they voted for. A vote for Trump was a vote to bring bigotry back out into the open.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@raven:
Where’s that at?
JPL
@Roger Moore: From the Washington Post article
Wapiti
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: My father was a third-generation German-American and they were still singing hymns in German in church when he was a kid. Up until that Pearl Harbor thing happened.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@JPL:
But again, here’s the thing: how did she know that they didn’t know how to speak English? Back in the day, lots of first generation immigrants from Europe, who were viewed as less than white in the past, spoke their native languages amongst themselves. Most people, afaik, didn’t give a shit then, and at some point last century these people were positively portrayed in media
JPL
@raven: That’s pretty sick that wayfair is profiting off of asylum seekers in detention camps.
Gin & Tonic
I’ll never understand this. I am fascinated and delighted when I hear people speaking a non-English language in a public place in the US. Most of the time I try to figure out what it is; a few years ago, I’d be likely to go up and ask if I didn’t recognize it. Don’t dare do that now.
And I’m beyond delighted at the prospect that my son’s eventual children (I’m assuming they will come fairly soon) are likely to be tri-lingual.
trollhattan
@Wapiti:
Same with my mom’s family. She grew up with both German grandfathers in a primarily German-speaking home, attending German church and school. Story goes the grandfathers had a falling out over Herr Hitler and mom’s dad said “Nein!” and insisted the family mainstream. The grandfathers had emigrated as teens in the 1800s.
JanieM
@Gin & Tonic:
Me too. I am about to be done with a job I’ve had for 33 years, in an office a half-mile outside Harvard Square. I actually live in Maine, so I often stayed in the company apartment — for ten years, I spent a week or so each month in Cambridge. One of the most fun things about it was that I could get up in the morning, take a stroll into the Square, and, as I used to put it, “hear twenty languages before breakfast.”
Sad that people resent and fear things that are so much worth celebrating. Right near the top of the list of skills I’d like to cultivate in my next lifetime is being multi-lingual.
trollhattan
@JPL:
They’d use Ikea except nobody wants Salvadoran kids to end up with allen wrenches. “MS13 is comin’ for mah KALLAX bookcase!”
Sloane Ranger
If I witnessed something like this I hope I have the courage this woman did. It probably won’t happen though. English people tend to be passive aggressive. They’ll purse their lips but won’t say anything then complain about it to anyone they assume to be “one of us”. I’ve been on the receiving end of such complaints from relatives and at Sunday Lunch club and the look of total amazement and disbelief when I say I don’t agree with them is unbelievable.
gwangung
@JPL: This is AMERICA dammit! Where we have FREE SPEECH….which means we can say what we want, however we want and in ANY DAMN LANGUAGE WE WANT.
Gin & Tonic
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
There are plenty of 6th and 7th generation descendants of the Slavs who emigrated to the prairie provinces of Canada who still speak their native languages.
BC in Illinois
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
In Southern Illinois, going back to the 1830s and 40s, people would often speak Plattdeutsch (Low German) at home and with the family, go to the local Lutheran School and Church where they learned Standard German (High German — Hochdeutsch), and then go to town where they spoke English as necessary. In some areas, this lasted until the 1930s; in some families, until the 1950s.
It’s America! Sprich amerikanisch!
This isn’t how we lose our country, this is how we keep it.
JanieM
@JanieM: And now that I’m about to be without a job, I’m thinking of taking a training with these people. Some practice in a supportive atmosphere would make it more likely that I could be helpful. Just taken as is, my patented combination of hot temper and tongue-tied-ness is not the best set of qualities for effective intervention.
(N.b. “LA” isn’t the one out west ;-)
Martin
@Gin & Tonic: I grew up in NYC, went to college in the US where there were a lot of German speakers, and work now at a university. I don’t know very many adults that can’t at least muddle through a conversation in a 2nd language, and most are fluent in at least one other. Spanish, French, German, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Farsi, Arabic were/are all pretty commonly spoken around me through my entire life.
People need to get out more.
BC in Illinois
@gwangung:
Or what gwangung said.
satby
@JPL: and Wayfair operates five branded retail web sites: the main Wayfair site,[7] Joss & Main,[8] AllModern,[9] Birch Lane,[10] and Perigold.[11]
They all need to feel some pain.
BC in Illinois
@BC in Illinois:
Of course, when German/English speaking bootleggers were in operation in the 1920s [there was a lot of sugar coming into Randolph County — made people suspicious], if the revenooers came around, they were greeted with blank stares and a lot of Ich kann Sie nicht verstehen.
ETA: Or so I am told.
Jay
There’s a ton of antifia folks and far right researchers, doxxing Naxis.
Today they bagged an Oklahoma Judge and his son.
Martin
@BC in Illinois: It’s still spoken in a lot of Amish/Mennonite communities. I mean, it is to German what Creole is to French, but it’s part of the culture. A lot of French Canadian in the northeast as well. Decent Dutch speaking population in Minnesota.
But these are all white people languages, so it’s charming.
Another Scott
TheHill:
Cheers,
Scott.
Martin
Looks like we have a nice pick-up opportunity in CA-50, provided we even keep the district after the census.
trollhattan
@Jay:
Lovely. It being Oklahoma I assume this will be taken as A-OK.
Omnes Omnibus
@Wapiti: @trollhattan: One of my great grandmothers grew up a native German speaker and she was the third generation of her family that was born in the US. She and my great grandfather lived with my grandparents when my mom was young. They spoke German to each other until my great grandfather died in the early ‘50s. Living with them, my mother was able to understand German but not speak it. This kind of thing is a lot more common than the sssholes think.
On the other side of my family, my dad remembers his great grandfather always looking forward to the county fair because he could meet up with the rest of the geezers and speak Norwegian.
Barbara
@Wapiti: One of my great aunts knew German (born in 1884) and corresponded with cousins in Germany until the eve of WWII. But the speaking German really diminished among Americans with German heritage when the U.S. entered WWI. Many schools stopped teaching it until the war was over. One state, Nebraska, tried to outlaw the teaching of German, which led to the very first Supreme Court case with a holding grounded in notions of personal privacy.
rikyrah
@Roger Moore:
They wanna party like it’s 1928
trollhattan
@Martin:
CA’s really on a bubble with the citizenship question. We could easily lose a seat. Do I hear two seats?
Although Texas and Florida will be busy screwing themselves in this regard, so there’s that.
Baud
@gwangung:
And people need to love America enough to recognize that.
Jay
Cheryl Rofer
Barbara
@Sloane Ranger: You do really have to pick your battles. This woman was harassing people, which the store should have intervened in, but pushing her out of the way was the right thing to do. Once when I was standing in line at a grocery store two men behind me in line (law students, most likely, given time and place) began loudly criticizing the woman in front of me who was paying with food stamps. I was so angry — they were basically leaping to the conclusion that because she was buying soda that’s all her kids would be eating that night. I decided not to say anything because as ugly as they were being, they were not speaking directly to her and I was already in between them, plus she absolutely refused to look at them. I felt like I would be escalating the situation by pointing out that just because they were buying nothing but beer, cigarettes, and chips, I would not assume that was the ONLY thing they would be consuming for the rest of the night. Boy, that incident really stuck with me. It was in the fall of 1980. In hindsight, they might as well have been screaming “Welcome to the Reagan Revolution.”
satby
@Martin: the Farmers Market I sell at has about 1/3 of the vendors who are or grew up Amish or Old Order Mennonite, they all speak it when they talk among themselves.
Mnemosyne
@JPL:
The irony is that the ancestors of the people speaking Spanish probably lived in North America for centuries before this asshat’s family arrived.
Sloane Ranger
@Martin: I remember reading a book many years ago. It was written by someone working with Displaced people immediately after WWII. She was surprised by the small number of American officials who could speak a foreign language given its then recent history of mass immigration. She said she was told by a senior US diplomat that there was a deliberate policy to present the US to the world as a WASP nation.
Barbara
@Mnemosyne: This irony is lost on most people. When I saw “I Am Not Your Negro,” one of the things that vividly stood out was James Baldwin recounting how Bobby Kennedy said or seemed to say that African Americans needed to be patient — and here he was, no more than a third generation American, wealthy as all get out, whose grandfather set foot on the continent at least 200 years after Baldwin’s own ancestors.
skerry
I recently went through “Bystander Intervention Training.”
The biggest take-away was “don’t engage with the attacker.” I was taught to engage with the target. Ask if assistance is wanted. Let the target decide how and if to engage. Don’t touch anyone. De-escalate the drama.
While this incident seems to have ended well, the bystander interventionist put herself in danger. She didn’t know the attacker and didn’t know how she would react.
Handouts (pdf link)
Kent
@trollhattan:
Same thing with my grandparents who grew up Mennonites in Pennsylvania Dutch country which is really the Americanized version of Pennsylvania Deutsch (German) as they were all German immigrants and not Dutch. There never really were any Dutch immigrant communities in Pennsylvania. They didn’t stop speaking German in schools until WWI and didn’t stop speaking it in church until WW2.
Mnemosyne
@Martin:
I usually end up doing charades with a lot of nodding and smiling, and that generally works.
I did run into a woman from housekeeping in Portland that I had a hard time explaining our late check-out to. She seemed to be from a country in Africa (not sure which one, I’m just going by her accent) but I didn’t think to attempt my high school French until now.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
Not as the Republicans see it. If there’s an undercount because immigrants are afraid to respond, they figure it will be in areas that vote for Democrats. Even if there’s a loss of seats in Texas and Florida, they expect to be able to make the Democrats lose the seats. And, of course, it will also help them in state redistricting, where there are no seats to lose to other states.
TenguPhule
FTFNYT
There is no timeline where this ends well.
Mnemosyne
@skerry:
I’ve heard that it can sometimes be useful to pretend to recognize the person being harassed and engage them in a conversation that excludes the harasser. Was that something that was said to be a useful technique?
Kent
@Barbara:
I’ve been in that exact same situation in the grocery store with food stamps with some assholes hounding a young mother. You don’t have to go all medieval like that women in today’s video did. But you can still shame them and let them know people are watching. I just turned around and say “Geez guys…don’t be assholes” and they basically shut up to the relief of the customer and clerk.
Jay
@trollhattan:
For some people it will be okay.
For others, not so much.
It’s a funny thing how some family members, friends, employers and neighbors respond to discovering that the “run of the mill, wipple racist next door” is actually a heavilly armed Nazi trying to instigate a Race War and Genocide.
LivinginExile
@BC in Illinois: A few miles from where I live, in west central illinois, is a farm that was bought by my great grandfather in1867. He came from Germany. Fast forward 60 years. When my mother started to school she had a hard time because she could barely speak English. Talk about slow to assimilate. The adults spoke enough English to get by but at home it was mostly German.
dmsilev
Pertinent context:
For Republicans, if you’re not a white straight Christian, you’re nobody. Being male and rich are of course also important.
Kent
@Roger Moore:
You may be right regarding Congressional seats. Although I have my doubts. If Texas loses 2 congressional seats I have a hard time seeing how they make them both Dem seats because the state is already so gerrymandered. The only way they could pull that off would be to make a whole lot of semi-safe GOP seats into competitive toss-up seats and then win them all.
But TX and FL would also lose electoral college votes, no way around that. Of course it would be Utah or Georgia or some other red state that would likely gain them so probably a wash there.
Hilfy
How come the decent good American is a generic “woman”, and the vulgar racist is a “lady”? Weird word choice.
Yutsano
@Kent: I could actually see where the undercounts affect more than just California and Texas. There are many other places where undocumented immigrants live besides those two states. It could possibly affect districting in Washington as well, depending on how short the undercount is. I’m going with optimism in that the question ultimately won’t be allowed. But if it is, oh man a lot of the country will look different.
Mnemosyne
@Hilfy:
Because in American English, “lady” is often used in anger or exasperation, like, “Hey, lady! The light turned green, get moving!”
That’s my theory, anyway.
low-tech cyclist
@skerry: What I’ve heard is: greet the target as if you’re a friend of theirs, ask them how the job’s going, how the family’s doing, stuff like that. The idea is, this way it isn’t even about the attacker who, finding him/herself ignored, will hopefully lose interest and go away if you can keep the pretense alive for even a minute or two.
If the attacker is still there and being belligerent after a couple of minutes (or at whatever point you can tell your pretense is breaking down), then engage the target in the way your handouts describe.
But yeah, confronting the attacker is the worst option, no matter how tempting it might be. I hope and pray that I don’t yield to that temptation if I’m ever in a situation like that, because Lord knows I can be hotheaded at times.
waspuppet
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: “You are a different generation. You will lose this country.” Nope, I’m younger than you, so you’re the one who’s leaving it. I’ll be just fine.
Jay
https://www.wonkette.com/so-hero-congressman-duncan-hunter-has-a-lust-for-life-is-that-so-wrong-and-also-illegal-yes
Kent
@Yutsano: I’m not trying to diminish it. This type of thing needs to be squeched and the first order of business for a new Dem president in 2021 should be to throw out all the tainted census data or statistically adjust it to account for deliberate undercounts. And then call for a 2022 census to repair the damage.
That said, I think the real purpose of the citizenship question is to give amunition to state GOP parties to use citizenship-based data for state-redistricting of state-level legislative seats. In other words, the Texas GOP would very much love to redraw the Texas State legistlative districts based on citizen-only census counts to pull representation away from the Blue cities and weight it more heavily in the Red suburbs and rural areas.
So there are both Federal and State level implications and frankly the State level implications will be harder to root out if they get established. The GOP knows how important it is to keep control over state legislatures. I don’t think the Dems do.
Flander's Other Neighbor
Can you imagine one of these morons spending a day at a tech company here in San Francisco? Their heads would explode. We’ve got rainbow decorations for Pride Month all over the place, and white is definitely not a majority. Studies show that diverstity in the workforce is more profitable, but don’t let facts ruin your narrative.
The Moar You Know
@Martin: On what do you base this opinion? Before you answer, I live right next door to it and worked there for eight years.
R +11, very white, massive evangelical presence (unusual for San Diego County).
Another Scott
ObOpenThread: ProPublica:
Things to keep in mind in the days and weeks ahead… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Mike in NC
Have read where people like this have been dubbed “MAGAflakes”. Sounds about right.
Jay
skerry
@Mnemosyne: We were told to first engage the target by asking if you could sit beside them (as appropriate, like a bench or on a bus) or if they were ok and then talk about random things with them while ignoring the aggressor. Also good to try to place yourself physically between the two, if it feels safe to you.
And *always* ask before calling the police unless there is physical violence. Some people may not feel safe with police intervention.
rikyrah
Robert Barnes (@scotusreporter) Tweeted:
BREAKING: US Court of Appeals for 4th Circuit sends Census citizenship question case back to Maryland judge so he can reopen query into whether Trump administration had discriminatory intent https://twitter.com/scotusreporter/status/1143576867703787526?s=17
Aziz, light!
Until the U.S. forced it from them in 1848, half of Colorado, including the location of this incident, was Mexican territory.
Another Scott
@rikyrah: TheHill has more:
It sounds like it’s quite likely that the question will be stricken from the Census. As it should.
We’ll see…
Cheers,
Scott.
JoeyJoeJoe
@The Moar You Know: Hunter did win by a fairly small margin in 2018, 4-5 points I think, and the state Republican Party has collapsed. Still, a generic Republican, and even Darrell Issa has publicly considered running if Hunter resigns, would do better than Hunter. Special elections are unpredictable though; some special elections in 2017 were in seats more Republican than this one and they were close.
Mnemosyne
@waspuppet:
Goku is, like, 25. Are you a teenager?
mrmoshpotato
@Mnemosyne: I read that as waspuppet agreeing with Goku about the ridiculousness of the racist harasser.
Aziz, light!
@Mnemosyne: I believe the commenter was addressing the bigot, not Goku.
divF
@BC in Illinois: I was at a retirement dinner in Zurich for a colleague last month, sitting next to a ten-year-old boy who was expecting another kid his age (much to his relief, it was clear). He asked his mother – in English – whether the new kid spoke SchweizDeutsch or HochDeutsch (answer was the latter).
I was exchanging life stories with another companion at that dinner, and we found that we had both spent some time during our childhoods living in Germany, while our respective fathers were stationed with the Army there. Except she was Russian, and had lived in East Germany during the Soviet era.
Mnemosyne
@mrmoshpotato:
@Aziz, light!:
Ah, okay. The sequence had me a bit confuzzled.
Carol
My hearing is failing me, but couldn’t figure out who is the good guy and the bad guy here.