NPR had a series of interviews this morning, asking Latino people’s reaction to the El Paso murders.

I began to examine my own reactions, as a Xicano mixed race Mestizo Latino.

I was surprised not at the murders of Mexicans at the hands of a white man but at the reaction by some others mixed race Indians, “Mexicans” (a historically racial term). A young Mexican was interviewed in the immediate aftermath of El Paso, a member of a family victim of the murders, also a Trump supporter who denied Trump’s racism and “preferred” to focus on the good Trump is doing for the country, even appearing with Trump on his brief, unwelcomed visit to El Paso. A Peruvian immigrant was interviewed today with the same purposeful blindness, preferring to ignore Trump’s call for racist white privilege, preferring to ignore his provocative racist rants.

Even in progressive San Francisco, Latinos are murdered by police. One poor soul, a security guard apparently legally wearing a holstered taser, was killed by the San Francisco police while eating his lunch at a park not far from my house, because a white lady had called them about a “man with a gun.” The violence of the forced homelessness and forced displacement of Black and Brown people from San Francisco by privileged white techies is not seen as violence at all, but as some invisible hand working the natural order of things – an Act of God.

The immigrant to the Southwest are white people. George Washington is irrelevant here. The Spanish colonized what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada and parts of the Northwest. Ignoring the place names still used, not only San Francisco, Los Angeles, and numerous other cities and towns, these immigrants are claiming now the same violent, racist privilege they historically exercise over Native Americans and Afro descendants in the rest of the US of A. We Mexicans are now the immigrant invading hordes. We smell bad. It’s not that we were here first. Only the Ohlone can say that. It’s just that we were and are here when they show up and they shouldn’t be upset about that. But since gentrification began, I’ve had white neighbors who complain about Mr. Lopez’s cars on street cleaning day or the Peruvian Mestizo mechanic working out of his garage. Both are now gone. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, it’s Columbus all over again.

Racism and other forms of xenophobia are ingrained in American culture. Since the Monroe Doctrine, since Andrew Jackson’s legacy, violent white privilege has extended to its foreign policy. Violent, despotic governments like Honduras, Brazil and the Philippines, are supported and maintained while socially progressive governments like Venezuela and Nicaragua suffer economic and social destruction at the bloody hands of US “intelligence.”

It gets old really fast. But it also gives us insights on reality. The term “privilege” is too polite. It sounds like an innocent “special” right, like sitting in the front of a bus that gets everybody there anyway. It is in fact an affront to human dignity. It is economic, physical, moral and cultural violence. It is an exercise of power.

The solution is too difficult to contemplate. We could begin with solidarity among the oppressed. But as long as there are those in our communities willing to ignore its manifestations even that is beyond our reach. Equally disturbing is the attitude of college students such as those at Berkeley who seem very willing to embrace it. Electing Elizabeth Warren, even if we could, will not drown it. It will survive as a mainstay of American culture.

God bless America.