Response to a Racist

My most recent post has a link to an op-ed piece I wrote for Yahoo! News about Rick Perry. At the time I wrote the piece, it slipped my mind that viewers are permitted to make comments on these op-ed pieces; when I remembered this today, I started looking over the comments. One of the comments did not address anything involving Rick Perry at all, but did address another surprisingly widespread attitude that is alive and well in America today. I'll let the comment speak for itself; it was posted on August 22 by someone posting under the name, "The Illuminator":

The various crises around the world -- not the natural disasters, per se, but everything to which mankind has put its hands -- each and all have a common single cause; that cause is the degradation, diminution and destruction of racial differentiation. Miscegenation is genocide; worse, it promotes less-evolved dominant genes to the detriment of more-evolved recessive genes: except for the evils of political machinations promoting such absurd, obvious and unreasonable lies as the "manifest equality of all races" and the insanely evil and self-destructive policies and practices arising therefrom, the proper hierarchy would be preserved and leadership would have provided sufficient prosperity for each and all. What we see today is instead a matter of the animals having overtaken the farm; the pigs are now at the top, and the public has neither the mind to discern and acknowledge, let alone the stomach to correct the problem.

The following is what I posted this morning as a reply to The Illuminator's comment:

I'm guessing that most of the readers of this comment might not realize exactly what "The Illuminator" is saying. He is saying that the root of all problems is that people have not kept "racial purity," but rather have mixed the races. "Miscegenation" is [a very biased term for] inter-racial marriage.


One hardly knows where to begin. First of all, from a purely scientific viewpoint, inter-racial marriage promotes a hybrid-like resistance to disease. More to the point, though, is the thoroughly racist ideology that The Illuminator is basing his comments on. Note that he gives not the slightest evidence -- not even a link to a website, weak as that type of evidence might be -- for any of his assertions blaming world crises on inter-racial marriage. No doubt what he sees as the "proper hierarchy" of the world would put him at the top of the heap. (Remember: This is exactly where the Nazis started, as an ideology.) He strongly implies that people of other races than his own are "pigs," yet he does not have the courage to actually identify himself.

Buster, I am Mark Koltko-Rivera. I have in my veins the blood of medieval Polish Catholic knights and probably more than a few Russian Jewish rabbis, the Spanish conquistadores, Marranos and Moors, the Taino natives and their Aztec-Mayan warrior ancestors, as well as the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Vandals who swept over so much of Europe [and ended up in Spain]. With so many strengths from so many sides of the human race, I and others like me may be set back here and there, but never defeated. Who are you to call my people "pigs"?

Both the comment by The Illuminator and my reply are given in full. My guess is that The Illuminator is riffing on my last name, which in my case identifies me as having a varied ethnic background.

Frankly, my blood is still boiling as I type this. But I wanted to put this up on the blog, even in the heat of the moment, to bring the matter of racism in America onto my blog radar, as it were. I'm sure I'll be returning to this issue again in the future.

Note to The Illuminator: The right side won the Second World War. The racist ideology that the Axis powers built upon was a filthy abomination then, and it remains so now. The future does not belong to you.