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With Hispanics in America, Brokaw misses the story

Ruben Navarrette Jr. on

SAN DIEGO -- Hello liberal racism, my old friend. I get to talk of you again.

Thanks to Tom Brokaw. The 78-year-old newsman wrote a best-seller about "The Greatest Generation." But his recent comments about America's largest minority were not great.

Brokaw may, or may not, be a racist. I don't know, I don't care. It is not my job to decipher if the veteran journalist hates Hispanics, fears Hispanics or looks down on Hispanics.

Yet it is my job to point out that what Brokaw said about Hispanics was indisputably racist.

The telenovela started on Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." That's where Brokaw -- the former anchor of "NBC Nightly News" who, like the party guest who stayed too long, now carries the title of senior correspondent at the network -- rounded out the fivesome on a roundtable discussion about immigration and the border wall that, surprise, included no Hispanics.

Why? Because one of the conveniences of liberalism is that you get to celebrate diversity without having to practice it.

 

Brokaw was asked by moderator Chuck Todd how it is that "in Wyoming and in South Dakota, they think they need a wall, but in Texas and Arizona, they don't." Brokaw -- who was, how's this for a coincidence, born and raised in South Dakota -- responded by explaining what some white folks find so terrifying about the estimated 58 million Hispanics in the United States.

"And a lot of this, we don't want to talk about," he said. "[But] I hear, when I push people a little harder, 'Well, I don't know whether I want brown grandbabies.' I mean, that's also a part of it."

Brokaw was right about how Hispanics have a lot of experience with intermarriage. More than 40 percent of Hispanics marry non-Hispanics, and a 2017 analysis of census figures by the Pew Research Center found that unions between Hispanics and whites are the most common type of intermarriage.

But that is the only thing he was right about. For one thing, he should have skipped the negative reference to "brown grandbabies" -- even if he was just quoting someone else.

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