Well folks, Tennessee has arrived. And not in a good way. The Nation has a very unflattering expose of the anti-immigrant fever in our state. One of the stars of the feature is Phil Valentine, billed as "Tennessee's most poisonous media personality." Who could argue with that?
Valentine makes use of WTN, 99.7 radio (apparently an ABC affiliate) to push a consistent message of intolerance and hatred. The message seldom changes, but the target does vary from year to year.
Here are some excerpts, but you should read the entire piece.
The Nation -- White Heat -- Nashville
"When I tell you that the area where I grew up now resembles Tijuana more than the US--well, hang on, you're about to see what I mean," says Theresa Harmon. Tennessee's most vociferous anti-immigration organizer . . .
While politicians legitimize nativist arguments, the flames of bigotry are fanned in Tennessee by a plethora of sources--not only "mainstream" anti-immigration groups and websites like Harmon's and Locke's but ad hoc "concerned citizens" groups in small towns around the state. Fears of a Ku Klux Klan revival in East Tennessee have been stoked by large turnouts of Tennessee Klansmen at recent rallies of a newly invigorated KKK in nearby northern Alabama--and by two hate crimes that put Tennessee immigrants on notice last year. In one case, a former Klansman named Daniel Shertz was arrested for plotting to blow up buses carrying Hispanic immigrants from Tennessee to Florida. In the other, a Mexican grocery store in Maryville was torn up by five young white supremacists who scrawled swastikas, "SS," and "WP," for white power, on the front of the store as their calling card.
"Tennessee has a uniquely toxified mix when it comes to immigration," says Devin Burghart of the Center for New Community, which monitors the nativist movement and works to counter its message. The toxins don't just come from campaign rhetoric, and anti-immigration and hate groups--they also churn up through the media. In June the big Nashville daily, the Tennessean .
. . . Tennessee's most poisonous media personality. .
Late this April, in an old factory complex converted into swank suburban shopping digs in the Nashville suburb of Franklin, more than 1,000 Tennesseans came out to cheer their hero, 99.7-FM drive-home-time host Phil Valentine. The son of a former Democratic Congressman in North Carolina, Valentine is a leading voice--and instigator--of Tennessee's nativist backlash. "Wake up and smell the tacos," Valentine likes to say, flaunting his political incorrectness. . .
All in all, a lot like the "joke" that slipped out of Valentine's mouth at his rally in Franklin, where three Republican state legislators joined him on stage. Susan Tully, field director of FAIR (the Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform), was complaining about the Border Patrol's "catch and release" policy, saying that illegal immigrants were returned the first time they were caught, the second time, the third time...all the way to seven times. And what, Tully asked rhetorically, do we do the eighth time? "Shoot 'em!" Valentine interjected. The surburbanites roared their approval...
... "I've talked to people who said that before the protests they were sitting on the sidelines," Valentine says, "but now they are incensed. They see that these people are carrying Mexican flags, they don't speak English--they are in your face. People are more attuned to what the problem is."
Valentine's show dishes up a full menu of problems: immigrant diseases, "terrorist gangs" and, of course, illegal killers. . . "I have heard that from thirteen to twenty-five people a day are being killed by illegal immigrants," he tells me. (He's a little sketchy on the source.)
But does Valentine believe the biggest nativist myth of all, that there's a reconquista afoot? "Oh, absolutely," he says. "Not with all of them, but with many of them. I think there's a plan to move Hispanics into the Southwest and vote it back to Mexico. I think there's a big plan to do that. They think that the territory was taken illegally from them in the Mexican-American War. That's where this reconquista thing comes from. They are nuts. This is the United States of America. We can't change that!"
Nor should we have to, Valentine says. "A lot of these people who are illegal want to come and plant their culture inside of ours," he says. "We're having to, now, speak Spanish, and try to understand them. We've never had to understand anybody."
Phil Valentine gets on Rick Casares's very last nerve. "I don't like to say this about anybody," Casares says, "but he's just a racist." Casares has been working only six months as outreach coordinator for TIRRC, the statewide immigration-rights group, and he knows he needs to be more politic when talking to reporters. But he feels this in his bones. "For me, it's personal," he says. "My parents were illegal immigrants from Mexico." His father, among other accomplishments, rose to become mayor pro tem in the predominantly white town of Rosemeade, California. Still, Casares says, it was ugly at times. But the discrimination he saw his parents face "pales to what immigrants face today in this climate of poisonous rhetoric."
Casares's job is to detoxify. He's heading a new Welcoming Tennessee Initiative, inspired by a successful effort in Iowa. "We're trying to highlight what we have in common, and get past the myths and stereotypes that diminish immigrants' worth," he says. The myth-busting message will be spread around the state by regional volunteers trained to address civil and community groups, churches, minority and business groups. Welcoming Tennessee has also launched a billboard campaign appealing directly to native Tennesseans' values. The first shows two grinning children and quotes the Book of Matthew: "I was a stranger, and you welcomed me." The second is a collage of images of immigrants throughout US history; the message is, "Welcome the Immigrant You Once Were."
Casares knows that welcoming immigrants is not exactly at the top of most Tennesseans' agendas these days. "Last year we turned back gay marriage," he says. "This year we're turning back the brown horde."
Politics Immigrants Tennessee Racism Phil Valentine Nashville The Nation Anti-Immigration Republicans News Rick Casares TIRRC
