Kinky is a Racist

Yesterday Kinky Friedman revealed his plan for curbing immigration and crime in Texas (“Kinky maps out his plan for state”). In a racist scapegoating of migrant workers, this so- called plan would further criminalize workers and militarize our border with 10,000 troops while doing nothing to alleviate the persecution of the people that harvest our food and build our homes. Freidman fails to recognize that migration is driven by the U.S.’s own economic policies, which create poverty in Mexico by forcing small farmers to compete with U.S.-government subsidized crops and allow corporations to freely cross the border to escape labor and environmental laws while denying human beings that same right. Workers will seek jobs to feed their families no matter the barriers, and U.S. companies will continue to hire the labor force that is the foundation of our economy. Adding troops to the border will only create more violence and death for those forced to come here in search of work. No human being is illegal – and immigrants deserve all the rights of U.S. citizens.

Friedman also called displaced victims of hurricane Katrina “crackheads and thugs”. If anyone is on crack, it’s Friedman. The federal and state governments have failed completely to provide the assistance with loan refinancing or rebuilding costs that is needed to guarantee that low-income and African American communities have the right to return to and rebuild their city of New Orleans. Friedman is appealing to the same ideology that created this crisis in the first place: historically-rooted and institutionally-perpetuated racism. That is what kept black New Orleaneans poor, uninsured, and living in the more flood-prone neighborhoods of New Orleans.