by Kevin Alfred Strom

WHILE I WAS in a restaurant the other day with a few friends and their children, I saw another group enter the establishment and take a table nearby. It was a handsome-looking White family, a father and mother with a teenage son and daughter. I was close enough to hear parts of their conversation.

The father was almost a double for a writer I know personally, a rugged-looking brunet of medium height with piercing eyes and ruddy complexion, about 50, with a tall, fine-haired slender blonde wife perhaps ten or twelve years younger. The children were well-behaved, good-looking, and intermediate in appearance to their parents, to whom they bore an obvious family resemblance. They weren’t speaking English.

Where were they from? I wondered. Listening a little more closely, I realized they were speaking Spanish. As we left the restaurant, one of the young children in my party decided to try her schoolgirl Spanish on the lady of the family at the other table. The wife was delighted to be greeted in her native tongue and spoke a bit in Spanish with the little girl in our group, then switched to flawless and almost unaccented English to talk to the rest of us. Her husband was a mechanical engineer working on a project in this country, and she was an accomplished pianist and music instructor. Both spoke three languages, French being the third.

I eventually asked where they hailed from. The answer was Mexico, where they were born and where they had lived almost all their lives. They were Mexicans. They were Mexicans of entirely European descent. They were Hispanics. And in those facts there are two lessons.

The first lesson is that using the term “Hispanic” for the Mestizos who are crossing our southern marches is inappropriate. The term Hispanic, strictly speaking, should be used only to refer to people of Iberian descent — like this family. Even as it is it misused today, the word “Hispanic” is racially ambiguous. It can refer to a Spanish-speaking Black — or a totally European person from Spain or from the substantial Spanish-speaking White populations of Latin America. We should prefer racial terms when we’re talking about race. That’s why we should, like Latin Americans themselves, say “Mestizo” when referring to those of mixed European and Amerindian descent, and “Amerindian” or, better yet, a proper tribal or national name when referring to Amerindians. (Often, except when it causes misunderstandings, it’s good to call people what they call themselves. It might be a good thing if the Nation of Aztlan nationalists forged a new name for their people, replacing the broad-brush words “Hispanic” or “Mexican” that have almost no biological meaning. “American,” by the way, is rapidly becoming meaningless too.) Race is what matters. And that brings us to the second lesson illustrated by my restaurant encounter.

The accomplished and cultured White family from Mexico I met is no more likely than I am to join MS-13 or chop someone’s head off with a machete. This family is not a threat to our culture — in fact, it would not surprise me if they were more imbued with Western culture than 95 per cent. of Americans and Europeans. And this family, most important of all, is not a threat to our gene pool. They are as European as any of us, they are indistinguishable from us, and their offspring could intermarry with ours and our future generations would continue as ever, their destiny undimmed. And all of this would remain true no matter what papers they had or didn’t have in their wallets. It would remain true even if these engineers and piano virtuosi came here illegally. What really matters isn’t laws or papers or even geography. It’s race. It’s genes. And we can never have sane laws or sane immigration policies until we understand that fact.

The anti-immigration “conservatives” on Fox News are always screaming about how they’re “not racists” and how “it’s not about race, it’s about obeying the law.” Well, if it’s about “the law,” what are they going to say when Congress simply legalizes every illegal immigrant? They won’t be able to say a thing. The conservatives are simply wrong. In fact, they’re more than wrong — they’re lying. It is about race.

*  *  *

Based on the American Dissident Voices broadcast of June 5, 2005