The timing of this poll is quite suspect given the Arizona anti-illegal immigration law, and Mexican president Felipe Calderon’s America-scolding. But who are the real discriminators here?


An Associated Press-Univision Poll found that 61% of people overall said Latinos faced significant discrimination, compared with 52% who said blacks did and 50% who said women.

If you get a chance, watch some Univision or Telemundo. See any dark-skinned Latinos on their shows who aren’t buffoons, bad guys or maids?

The AP-Univision Poll compiled the views of 901 Latinos, which were compared with the results of a separate AP-GfK survey of the general population.

Did the Associated Press and Univision ask who they thought was doing the discriminating? As someone who lived in Los Angeles for over a decade, I’d be willing to bet a significant amount of people would say that Latinos were doing as much discriminating as anyone else.

That doesn’t make it right, but don’t fall for the implied notion that Latinos are the primary victims here, and judging from the casting of programs on channels like Univision, it’s quite clear they don’t think much of their own people of color.

Quick story. I’m sure many of you parents know how near-impossible it is to get a child transferred from one public school to another. My oldest son wanted out of his San Fernando Valley middle school because he said the kids were picking on him. After asking him to deal with it for awhile, I opted to see what I could do.

I asked the assistant principal if my son could transfer out and she said no. When I asked the same of the principal, ‘no’ was again the answer… that is, until I showed her my son’s yearbook. On the inside front pages were comments written by some of his classmates; comments full of four-letter expletives and racial slurs.

The kids who wrote those comments were Latino.

The principal turned visibly red, apologized profusely and asked me what school my son would like to attend. The paperwork was completed in ten minutes.

The AP and Univision need be very careful with the insinuation that everyone else is picking on them. Most in the black community know that discrimination is a two-way street.

I’ve never said, nor would I ever say all Latinos are racist, but they are far from exclusive victims as this biased poll implies.

And until there is real diversity on Univision programming, they are the last people to slime the American people.