The Conservative Heritage Foundation Needs a Major History Lesson About Latinos

In a scathing opinion piece slamming Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s now epic dissent about this week Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling, Mike Gonzalez, the VP of Communications for The Heritage Foundation (the same person who defended Jason Richwine’s Latinos are stupid dissertation), wrote the following to explain why Sotomayor needs to calm down (boldface emphasis is ours):

There are many reasons to oppose affirmative action: It imposes the soft bigotry of low expectations on whole groups of people; it delegitimizes the hard-earned diplomas of minority graduates; it flouts simple principles of fair play, and, by rewarding characteristics that have nothing to do with talent or hard work, it contributes to national decline.

Even after considering the above, some Americans are still willing to make an exception for the descendants of Africans forcefully brought here in chains in centuries past. The view is that they can make a case that they’re still suffering from the legacy of the horrible system of slavery, which is only four or five generations in the past.

Hispanics simply have no parallel claim. There’s nothing in the Hispanic experience in America that compares with the repulsive system of slavery. Some Jim Crow laws did affect some Mexican-Americans living in the Southwest, but there was nothing comparable with the African-American experience.

And the vast majority of today’s Hispanics either immigrated here or, more likely, descended from people who immigrated of their own volition. They chose to come here to better their lives.

With that said, we would like to share some examples as to why claiming that “nothing in the Hispanic experience in America that compares with the repulsive system of slavery:”

Exhibit A: Hernandez v. Texas, 1954

Exhibit B: Mendez v. Westminster, 1946

And don’t forget, Lemon Grove.

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