Can Latinos count on Evangelicals?

via Brad, a great blog entry from Ortho Cuban, Why Latinos (and African-Americans) have concerns about their fellow Evangelicals Here's the article's the bottom line:

...Make sure not to count on your white conservative Evangelical (and other conservative Christian) brethren. They will not see the problem and may even argue that you are the problem for arguing that you have civil rights that ought not to be violated based on the color of your skin or your accent. In one of the responses to one of the people who commented, I quoted Martin Luther King’s letter from the jail of the City of Birmingham. Let me quote it here again.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.


I want to see the day when white people have to prove that they are not illegal Canadians using false papers when there is a traffic stop. I want to see the day when white people driving vans are periodically stopped near Federal buildings because they might be another Timothy McVeigh. I want to see the day when white men are kept from boarding a plane because it is feared that they may have an aggression problem. I want to see the day when young white males in a car are stopped to check for illegal oxycodin prescriptions. Barring that, I will settle for a country in which no citizen of color or accent or religion or gender has to be concerned about their being a second-class citizen.