Separatist and Racially Charged Ideas

A recent study suggested that Hispanics were forced to breathe worse air than Anglos. The method of arriving at such a finding was not discussed, but apparently we were to imagine that power plants or polluting industries were deliberately placed in barrios. Does that means that the bad air thousands of white persons breathe in the Central Valley of California is any different from what a Mexican neighbor three hundred yards away inhales? Does one town that is 99% Hispanic, have dark clouds of particulate matter while five miles away a town that is mostly white enjoys clear blue skies?

It is reported that diabetes is more common among Mexican people after they arrived in the U.S. than it had been in Mexico--a result of their partaking of a malignant diet. Such an unfortunate statistic may be true. But does this mean that cheap American fast food, through nefarious corporate advertising, had been foisted particularly upon people of color and was contributing in a racist fashion to their premature deaths? Absurd, whites eat that same fast food in vast quantities. Mexicans, like everyone else, must educate themselves and their children as to the value of fruits and vegetables, and strive to avoid Coca Cola, beer, Big Macs and fries, with Twinkies for dessert. No statistics were reported to compare obesity and diabetes prevalence among poor white people--a group that seems to have been no more successful in avoiding such lethally starchy, high-fat diets. Nor did the report acknowledge that such unwholesome fare, while certainly unfavorable to well-being and longevity, might be safer in the short term than many of the foods and water in rural Mexico that are laced with bacteria and parasites. Thus, while Mexican aliens are perhaps are becoming obese like many Americans, they are now suffering far less from catastrophic dysenteries and malnutrition--and therefore, on the whole, living longer in America that they would in rural Mexico.