The 2013 NBA Championships are over, and we will have to wait another year for oversized and overpaid players to lift the trophy in triumph once again. Don’t get me wrong, I love basketball—I just liked it better when it was more about the skill of the players than their egos. But that’s another story.
The national anthem raises racist hackles
The 2013 NBA Championships are over, and we will have to wait another year for oversized and overpaid players to lift the trophy in triumph once again. Don’t get me wrong, I love basketball—I just liked it better when it was more about the skill of the players than their egos. But that’s another story.
Looking back over this series, what stayed with me was not so much the frenzy of the final game but the image of an 11-year-old boy singing the national anthem before Game 3. A former contestant on America’s Got Talent, Sebastien de la Cruz showed off his amazing pipes by singing a song that most professional singers are terrified to perform. Yet, as his voice rang loud and clear across the stadium, an almost instant volley of tweets made something else abundantly clear.
Most of the tweets are too offensive to repeat, but suffice it to say that the sight of de la Cruz dressed in his black-and-white, Spurs-themed mariachi attire brought out people’s true colors. Questions like, “What’s up with this little Mexican kid singin’ the anthem?” and “There’s a little Mexican kid singing the national anthem. What has the world come to?” lit up the Twittersphere.
What has the world come to?
This disgusting display of racism aimed at an 11-year-old boy takes our country’s discussion of immigration to a whole different level. As our Congress teeters on the edge of passing legislation that has languished in the wake of partisan politics for years, its members need to stop, listen to de la Cruz and take a line or two from his book.
His response to the vicious words, in an interview with local network KENS 5, was simply: “With the racist remarks, it was just people—how they were raised. My father and my mama told me you should never judge people by how they look.”
We need a lot more parents like his.
This display of unabashed bigotry reveals the increasingly ugly face of the immigration debate. When children are attacked, we see how low we’ve sunk. It doesn’t really matter that de la Cruz was born in San Antonio or that his father served in the U.S Navy—although people felt the need to mention that in his defense—what matters is that the color of his skin and the clothes he wore discounted him instantly as an American. Something has to give.
We are a country of immigrants; our land was founded and built by immigrants. During World War II, we found it very convenient to bus over thousands of immigrants to take on the role of saving our agricultural industry. However, when immigration becomes inconvenient, we close our doors—along with our minds, our hearts and our souls.
Our country needs to send a message loud and clear, and it needs to happen now. A message that erases the language of the past and rewrites it with one that embraces every expression of American identity.
I am proud to live in a state where, finally, undocumented students who’ve lived and studied in Oregon like the rest of us can pay in-state tuition for college instead of the astronomical non-resident rates. The tuition equity bill that Gov. Kitzhaber signed into law earlier this year is one step, albeit a small one, toward acknowledging the rights of young people who are caught in the middle of a bitter national argument.
Congress needs to come back from the archaic past it’s mired in, stop taking cues from the tweets of ignorant bigots and start leading our nation toward progress, sustainability and equity. People like de la Cruz and millions of others of every color and background will be part of rebuilding this country and are, in fact, critical to its success. It’s about time we treated them that way.
