N.C. Sheriff Calls Latinos Drunk ‘Taco Eaters’

By Hector Luis Alamo, Jr., Being Latino

Juan Crow rears its ugly head in North Carolina.

From Fox News Latino:

“A North Carolina sheriff and his deputies routinely discriminated against Latinos — whom he called ‘taco eaters’ — by making unwarranted arrests with the intent of maximizing deportations, according to a U.S. Department of Justice two-year investigation. 

In an 11-page report issued Tuesday, the federal agency said Alamance County Sheriff Terry S. Johnson and his deputies violated the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens and legal residents by illegally targeting, stopping, detaining and arresting Latinos without probable cause.”

Besides referring to Latinos as “taco eaters” and drug-dealing drunks, Sheriff Johnson is also alleged to have said that “Mexicans” — a term he interchanges with “Latinos” — are intrinsically un-American.

“Their values are a lot different — their morals — than what we have here. In Mexico, there’s nothing wrong with having sex with a 12- or 13-year-old girl.”

To optimize the number of Latinos they pulled over and arrested, the sheriff had his officers camp on the outskirts of Latino neighborhoods so that they could stop anyone who entered or left.

But North Carolinians got a whiff of something rotten in their state long before the federal report was even released.

A study conducted earlier this year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studied more than 13 million traffic stops conducted between 2000 and 2011 and found that Latinos were 96 percent more likely than whites to have their cars searched during such stops, while blacks were 77 percent more likely than whites.

No matter how you slice it, the numbers are unsettling for blacks and Latinos living in the state of North Carolina — and doubly so for Afro-Latinos.

What should be the response of the average Latino on hearing that Latinos are being targeted in the South, chased down, and corralled like calves at a coleadera? The natural inclination for most people might be to get angry and grow distrustful of white faces.

But if we do that, we run the risk of becoming the very thing we despise: indiscriminate racists incapable of seeing past skin color to the person contained within that skin. White people have never been the enemy of Latinos in America. Racism is the true immortal assailant of Latinos. Racism is the common enemy among all republican, peace-loving Americans.

The best way to end racism in America is through education. The surest way to end discrimination is to know your rights.

As with Jim Crow following the abolition of slaves and Reconstruction, Juan Crow has emerged as a system to control what some Americans view as a growing Latino threat.

Yet, Latinos are only a threat to the old American traditions of racism and discrimination that systems like Juan Crow look to impose.

This article was first published in Being Latino.

Hector Luis Alamo, Jr., is an associate editor at Being Latino and a native son of Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. He received a B.A. in history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where his concentration was on ethnic relations in the United States. While at UIC, he worked first as a staff writer for the Chicago Flame and later became the newspaper’s opinions editor. Since then he has contributed to various Chicago-area publications, most notably, Hispanically Speaking News and Gozamos. He has maintained a personal blog since 2007, YoungObservers.blogspot.com, where he discusses topics ranging from political history and philosophy to culture and music.