A bad week for Santa Fe
It’s time to take a deep breath.
Santa Fe’s political discourse went down a strange and hazardous path over the past week or so. It started with a racist meme likening African-American Maxine Waters to an orangutan, posted by the leader of a new, vocal political group called Santa Fe Power that proclaims itself nonpartisan, but against the “far left” and as a watch-dog organization.
Some of the negative responses to the post were pretty horrible themselves, denigrating the appearance of the poster of the Waters insult while condemning the meme’s obvious racism.
The controversy was pushed along by the issue of a how a second racist meme, this one about Mexicans, got posted — in the final analysis, apparently not by a Santa Fe Power adherent, but by someone who has one black parent and didn’t believe the racist Waters posting was generating enough outrage.
There was subsequently a peaceful antiracism rally outside a City Council meeting that Santa Fe Power decided constituted a threat, as it declared on Facebook.
Inside, in front of the City Council, a man who posts on the Santa Fe Power Facebook site and displays the group’s “Don’t Tread on Me” New Mexico flag on his own page spoke to the audience with his back to the councilors and while ignoring the mayor’s calls for him to address himself to the council. He said everyone shared responsibility for the “mishap” that had divided the community. He was wearing a holstered gun.
(A don’t-be-shocked alert may be appropriate here — carrying a displayed firearm is legal at almost any public place in New Mexico, including at the Roundhouse. Cities are prohibited from making their own gun control laws.)
Maybe Santa Fe’s curve into a searing political/culture war divide resembling those at the national level is a temporary thing, an outburst resulting from a collision of Trumpian discourse and resentment of the mayor’s unsuccessful push to impose a soda tax in Santa Fe to pay for pre-kindergarten programs.
Santa Fe Power initially was promoted as being about a legitimate issue for public debate — whether Santa Fe’s liberal city leadership has too often ignored basic services like public safety, street repairs and weed control while championing causes like gay rights and fighting global warming.
The mayor seems to have recognized that he has to deal with this perception. The city has beefed up weed removal and he recently was photographed repairing a pothole himself.
Santa Fe Power, though, apparently has its own broader issues. Its Facebook page veers off into commenting that “common core” education standards originated in Qatar, with a link to a video with the headline “Islamic Plan to Dumb Down America Through Common Core.”
Back to the Maxine Waters post. Its defenders online continue to say it was just a funny joke or that people have also posted images making George W. Bush look like a chimp. Or that saying Waters looks like an orangutan is like saying someone runs like a deer or works like an ox.
No, no and, it should be said many times and whenever necessary, no.
You can call George Bush or the Anglo editor of a Journal North a monkey and it’s not racist. No one has denigrated and dehumanized other ethnic groups for centuries with comparisons to monkeys as a way to portray them as less than people. That’s happened to black people. Racist Europeans don’t throw bananas at African soccer players because they think the players are hungry. Ignorance of this malevolent racist trope is hard to imagine; in any case, it’s no excuse moving forward.
As we head into election season — four council seats and the mayor’s post are on Santa Fe’s March election ballot — the anger and harsh rhetoric needs to subside.
Or maybe, in some cases, just ignored.