Rodriguez: Focus on prevention, not contention

Growing up in north Portales, as kids we called police “pigs.” If we were at Grandma Chaya’s house in Lubbock, they were “chotas,” slang for police.

I’m not proud of this, but it was what I ignorantly picked up in the 1970s growing up after the civil rights movement. My mom worked for Community Action and sometimes went to court to translate for people in cases of “police brutality” against Hispanics. Who provoked the attacks? I don’t know.

But these were times of lingering racism. An added factor, besides skin tone, was differences in language.

In the early to mid-1900s, there were towns that had signs reading, “Mexicans and niggers will be shot after dark.” They had “Sundown Laws” for minorities.

Fast forward to half a century later, and there’s no more racism because we have an African American president. That’s what some people say. On the other hand — ironically — there is more racism now, others say, because there is an African American president.

Since the tragic shootings of blacks in Ferguson, Baltimore, Bloomington, Cleveland, Madison, and now Dallas, you’ve heard of the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Blue lives matter, too. The police officer who pulled me over in 1991 for speeding in Midland, Texas, thought my life and my daughter, Laura’s life, mattered, too. He looked at Laura, then a toddler, and then at me, shaking his head, “There was a fatality on this very stretch of road yesterday. Please slow down, ma’am.” At that moment, I mattered. I looked at Laura. You didn’t have to tell me how much she mattered. I realized how much that policeman mattered.

Something needs to be done to improve relations between black communities and law enforcement, but there’s no quick fix. There have been abuses on both sides of the color wheel. We need to ask, “What can be done to improve this? Why do African American communities have high crime rates?

We know there is an above average number of black single moms living in poverty. The same is true in Hispanic communities, too. There are too many factors to point the fingers at. Some people also link the high rates of poverty amongst blacks to the blatant racism of the 1950s and 1960s, saying these are after-effects. To some degree that is true, but the blame game will not fix things.

We could point fingers at the BET Network and rap music for promoting violence, drugs, and materialism amongst blacks. It’s this quest for materialism which provokes lawlessness. “Black Lives Matter” needs to look within the black culture itself to see where breakdowns are happening. The focus should be on prevention, not contention.

Men and women in blue need classes in multicultural relations. Hillary Clinton is already volunteering to do this. She has her own problems with the law. The same needs to be done on the other side, too. Black youth need to be educated on how to deal with people, namely authority figures, outside their culture.

It’s easy to blame the big bad media and the corporations who’ve taken it over. We could also blame it on everything from materialism, relativism, egoism, commercialism, increasing socialism, stupidism, and other “isms.” But perhaps it’s as simple as mannerisms. Has that become a forgotten school of thought?

Yes, there are a few bad apples in blue, just like there are bad apples in any bunch of peaceful protesters. But the bad apples aren’t the big problem. Larger cultural “isms” are.

As for the men and blue, they’re not Public Enemy No. 1. I no longer call them “pigs.” That is demeaning and “chotas” is disrespectful. I call our men and women in blue “police officers.” It is a sign of respect, and I find that when I am in the right place, doing the right thing, I get treated with respect by our police officers, too.

Now that’s a nice “ism” to end on. I call it “mutual respectism.”

Helena Rodriguez is a Portales native. Contact her at:

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