Newt to Hispanics: Mi Malo
  “We should replace bilingual education with emergence (sic) – with immersion – in English so people learn the common language of the country and so they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.”
There you have former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s prescription for ending poverty in America. Just hablar the gringo lingo and it’s all to the good ese. Gingrich’s comments were about the cholos in southeast Los Angeles and the Puerto Ricans in Spanish Harlem, but no doubt come as big news to the brothers in Watts and the other Harlem. They speak English just fine, as do the poor whites in Appalachia and the Native Americans out west – yet somehow the bus to prosperity passed them by, too.
It’s important to note that Gingrich wouldn’t have been pandering to the xenophobes with this line of prattle if he weren’t strongly considering running for president. Nor would he have bothered to post a subsequent YouTube mea culpa to the Latino community. But Newt’s cotton-mouthed TuTubo Spanish oratory may have made things worse.
This is an insight into why Gingrich and company have been abject failures at making policy that helps raise the living conditions of anyone but the already very rich. How many Spanish-speaking ghetto dwellers even have the broadband connection necessary to watch Newt say lo ciento?
According to a study by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, African Americans and Latinos are significantly less likely to have a home computer than white Americans. More than seven in ten whites own a home computer compared to roughly five in ten African Americans and Latinos.
African American and Latino families are also much less likely to be online. Forty percent of African American and Latino children have home Internet access compared to nearly eighty percent of white children.
It’s an old trick to blame the victims of cultural and economic disparities in America, and every attempt to explain away one’s racist comments invariably underscores the ridiculousness of the original argument – but Gingrich may be the first Know Nothing to prove himself wrong simply by the means in which he chose to apologize.
Or then again, maybe he knew just what he was doing. Maybe the only Latinos he cares about offending are the ones with broadband – those with a few bucks in the bank and a house in the burbs where they can speak the language of the ghetto when no one else is listening. Comments?
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