Think outside the race box, Arizona

Dear Arizona government,

I’ve become increasingly disturbed at your public policies toward those of a different … let’s say “color.”

Being white myself, maybe I should applaud your racist, xenophobic and outdated adherence to the concept of race, but I can’t find it in my heart to support something so thoroughly disgusting as institutionalized, state-supported racism even if it is to protect the feelings of my “race.”

The banning of books is nothing new and it is useful to identify places that you in no way want to be. You’ve stooped so low as to ban Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” from your schools for its semi-sympathetic take on Caliban, and your banned book list contains mostly Native and Hispanic authors.

And what is up with the racial profiling? Why have you told your police to harass anyone who looks “illegal?” You seem to think it’s fair to pull over people based on their skin color and subject them to illegal searches. Now, I know the Fourth Amendment is the most violated amendment in the country, but you appear to have raised its violation to an art form and your politicians defend it with the smarminess of those who see nothing wrong with it.

Why should any citizen regardless of ethnicity or their parents’ nationality have to carry papers in case they get stopped on the highway? Why should I fear for my friends when they need to go through your sorry state to visit California? How far are you willing to go? Why not just leave the Union? That way we could beat you back to your senses.

Let me say this as clearly as possible: There is only one race — the human race. The concept of different races is a racist one that has been used to justify countless inhuman practices throughout history including torture, murder and genocide. It is still used in the modern day to categorize people and enforce social stratification.

And you, Arizona, have appeared to have wholeheartedly embraced this last category in a misguided effort to stem illegal immigration.

While we’re on the topic of illegal immigration I’d like to point out that your very own Misters Antenori, Schapira, McCain, McComish, and Murphy (via a quick glance at the Arizona State Senate roster) must have come from immigrant families and must have experienced the same hatred and intolerance you now level at people with names like “Martinez.”

So, let’s all be hypocrites and say those who got here later are less entitled than those who got here first, if we can indeed guarantee that there weren’t Martinezes in Arizona hundreds of years before any white man.

I know exactly how you became so racist, Arizona. When you were a poor state struggling to make do, you decided that you could sell yourself as a good place to retire due to your hot weather and wide, open spaces.

You called in the snow birds and they came and you filled up with old white people with older, more conservative ideas, and that snowballed until today when racism has infected you down to your constabulary — men and women who should know better.

And before you accuse me of being ageist or a self-racist, let me state that I have no problem with old, white, non-racists insofar as I even think of people as white. I am not an advocate of putting people in little boxes from which they can’t and aren’t supposed to escape.

There’s that old phrase, “Poor New Mexico, so far from Heaven, so close to Texas.”

Let’s modify it to “So far from Heaven, so close to Arizona.”