New Mexico Congresswoman Deb Haaland sent out a news release last week on International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. She wrote, “Every year that we move further from the Holocaust, we must be proactive and never forget the dangers of Antisemitism.”
“There is no place in our country for hate,” she said. And coming from New Mexico as a Native American, she knows what she’s talking about.
Because of our state’s long history of conquest, subjugation, colonial occupation, poverty and isolation, New Mexicans know a lot about some of the worst things in life — racism and sexism among them, which are embodiments of the foulest of human instincts — to dehumanize, through hatred, whole groups of people, creating “acceptable” objects for the targeting of aggression.
But because of those same conditions of violence and exclusion, New Mexico is also rich in counterbalancing traditions of hospitality, courtly good manners, generous empathy and toleration. As a wise old friend of mine, John Cordova, once pointed out, our general rejection of hate as an operating principle and our embracing of an attitude of open-minded curiosity stems, in part, from our long-held custom of inter-marrying across racial and ethnic boundaries. It’s hard to hate groups of people to whom your children partially belong.
Despite our traditions of toleration, and even though the Southern Poverty Law Center last month reported that our state is the only one in the nation in which no known hate groups reside, New Mexico knows racism inside out. That’s one of the reasons I was so proud of Deb Haaland when she cosponsored the bipartisan Never Again Education Act to teach the “horrors of the Holocaust” and voted for a House bill known as the Securing American Nonprofit Organizations Against Terrorism Act to help provide additional funds and security for our vulnerable places of worship and community centers.
Despite everything, though, including Haaland’s good efforts, incidents of antisemitic violence are becoming more frequent in New Mexico, according to the Anti-Defamation League as quoted by the Albuquerque Journal in December 2018.
In the Twitter atmosphere of Trumpian rage, anti-choice misogyny, patriarchal privilege and white supremacy, we’re also seeing a spike in hate crimes against LGBT communities. Violence from misogyny might well have been indirectly encouraged in New Mexico when early in the administration of Governor Susana Martinez the venerable Commission on the Status of Women, which had championed women’s rights for almost 40 years, was defunded by the governor and the legislature in 2011.
It was heartening to read lately, however, of Attorney General Hector Balderas’s effort to add homeless people to the New Mexico’s Hate Crime law, giving them the status of a group legally protected against violence stimulated by prejudice.
Among the more hopeful signs I know is the University of New Mexico’s intensely serious efforts to curtail hate crimes on campus through mandatory annual training for faculty and staff. Anti-bias policies at UNM “forbid unlawful discrimination and/or harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, physical or mental disability, age, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity, ancestry, spousal affiliation, medical condition, or veteran status,” says the LoboRESPECT Advocacy Center. The University considers “sexual violence” as an intolerable act, though like all schools, date rape and other forms of violent misogyny are always an issue at UNM. Despite its best efforts, UNM, like all campuses, suffers from appalling acts of prejudice. African American students have found nooses drawn on their dormitory doors, immigrant students have been harassed, Hispanics and Native Americans have been looked down upon as an intellectual underclass, women are still consigned to demeaning gender roles at lesser pay for similar work, religious proselytizers have been known to verbally assault people of different religions and cultural backgrounds. A university is largely an embodiment of its society.
But as Deb Haaland, Hector Balderas and others point out, hate crimes of all sorts are looked upon with horror and outrage in New Mexico. They have no place here. In an America so polarized by political animosities that the president of the United States gets away with speaking of Mexicans as constituting a criminal class, our state’s rejection of bigotry as an acceptable worldview gives New Mexicans a platform from which to advocate strenuously and continually in support of the anchoring virtues of a civil society — respect, toleration and the frequently ignored pragmatic altruism of the Golden Rule, that bedrock of moral order the world over: treating all other people as you would like to be treated yourself.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Image from debforcongress.com)
I am so proud that we in New Mexico elected Deb Haaland to Congress. Especially when we have a president who spews hate toward any and all social groups not his own and sometimes even to members of his own when feeling threatened. Haaland is not simply a Native American woman; she is also an excellent representative of us all. We must be on constant alert against antisemitism, any stripe of racism, misogyny and homophobia, including trans phobia and all other evidence of how easy it is to make a particular group the target of our basest instincts. New holocausts rise, often before our ability to contain them. Human progress can only be based on respect for difference and appreciation of what every person has to offer.