In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, there have been plenty of emotions running high. It is understandable to feel strongly about the result, but once fingers start getting pointed, the discourse can get real ugly real fast.
Some Democratic voters online have quickly pivoted to find a scapegoat for Donald Trump’s success and found one in the population of Latino voters who threw their support behind the Republican ticket. In particular, a TikTok video by @minipapix has made the rounds in which the poster encourages liberal viewers to report undocumented immigrants who are related to Republican Latino voters as a way of demonstrating conservative anti-immigrant policy supported by the winning Republicans.
This is blatantly repulsive behavior regardless of how one feels about the election. If someone disagrees with the choice some Latino voters made, that is fine, but to target their families is disgusting. It is also not even effective in teaching anybody any sort of lesson when these undocumented people are not the ones voting for Trump, and considering the fact that even though Trump’s policies do support deportation, Latino voters who have family affected by a report to the law are not likely to blame their misfortune on Trump. They are more likely to blame it on the more direct culprit: their liberal neighbor who made the call. If anything, greater loyalty to Trump’s cause can be expected.
It is a real horror to think these supposed compassionate liberals who like to posture about how much they care for their fellow people and wish to help protect them against violence and pain are in fact just as cruel as everything they claim to stand against as soon as they do not get what they want.
It is clear they think of this election as a team sport rather than a meaningful decision about the future of the nation, and when their team loses, they get grumpy and start acting like bad sportsmen rather than trying to look ahead and plan progress for their cause.
Two things need to be better understood in order to combat these racist sentiments and actions. The most basic is that Latino voters are people, which I can imagine is rather hard to grasp for those who think the lives of others are such frivolous political pawns that they deserve to be deported just to prove a point. Like any person, a Latino voter has their reasons for why they may have voted Republican. Maybe those reasons are not very well-informed, or maybe they simply are not popular.
One way or another, it does a whole lot more good to try and meaningfully connect with these people than to commit faceless merciless acts of systemic violence against their families. Understanding why they voted red is fundamental to trying to swing them the other way.
The other thing to understand is Latinos in the U.S. are not a monolith. There are particular cultures within the Latino American community that more frequently lean right, yet to engage in the system of reporting and deportation is to strengthen the arm of the law which impacts millions of people across the Latino community regardless of cultural origin. That is not to say it is then acceptable to find other ways to try and hurt only people of the cultures that lean conservative; basic human sympathy is still a factor here. Nevertheless, it is important to understand how dangerous it can be to throw nuance aside and make sweeping statements about Latino voters.
Charlotte King can be contacted at
cking@kscequinox.com
