Where exactly is it engraved in stone that blacks are the only people who get to be victims of white racial oppression? While many blacks are bellyaching about reparations for slavery, Hispanics in California have finally tumbled to the same racket. And why not? Since whites and their political and cultural leaders refuse to defend themselves and their people, there's no reason any and every racial and ethnic minority this side of Papua New Guinea shouldn't try to squeeze its unfair share of booty out of the white pocket.

The latest scam revolves around a class action lawsuit launched in Los Angeles Superior Court that, as the Los Angeles Times reported last week, accuses "the state of California, the county and city of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce …and 500 other unnamed individuals and entities" of violating the civil and constitutional rights of more than 1 million Mexican-Americans by deporting them to Mexico in the 1930s.

The California Senate held a four-hour hearing on this burning issue the same day the lawsuit hit the courts, and the race is on to see who's guiltier and owes the most to the most recent gang of victims.[LA Times, July 16, 2003, Reparations Sought for '30s Expulsion Program, By Gregg Jones]

Most Americans and indeed most Californians have probably never heard of the deportations, but according to the Times they actually did occur. In the 1930s, you see, there was this little episode called the Great Depression, and some of the leaders of the United States, including those at the state and local levels, actually thought things were tough enough for Americans without having to take care of a unending flood of Mexicans as well.

So apparently, as the Times reported two Hispanic professors testified in the California Senate hearings, "In the Los Angeles effort, tens of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans were loaded aboard trains and transported to Mexico. The campaign, which reflected widespread racist attitudes toward Mexicans and Mexican Americans at the time, had the assistance of state and federal authorities along with Mexican consular officials."

Some—perhaps many—of those deported were supposedly U.S. citizens, and some of these had supposedly been born in the United States, so it's hard to see how exactly their deportation could have taken place without a good deal of legal resistance. Those who were citizens at the time may in fact have a fairly strong case—against somebody—not for "reparations," but for plain old legal damages.

But the issue involves a good deal more than damages the victims of government injustice can and should be able to claim. The point of the suit, the hearings and the "study" that the hearings were intended to promote was not to gain justice, but, as it always is with racial issues, to gain power—to take power from some and give power to others.

The Hispanic reparations scam, like the one for black reparations, seeks to discredit the governmental authorities responsible for the deportations and thereby the legitimacy of the mainly white American culture that shaped government policies in that era.

That's why the two Hispanic professors [Dr. Francisco Balderrama (e-mail him), and Raymond Rodriguez, authors of Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s] and the Times itself were so intent on insisting that the deportations "reflected widespread racist attitudes toward Mexicans and Mexican Americans at the time."

"I blame the entire U.S. government," one victim, now 77, whined to the paper. Well, yes, that's the point, isn't it—to cast blame, to show everybody who wants to listen and most who don't that American and more especially white civilization is "racist" and based on the exploitation and oppression of non-whites, and thereby to undermine its legitimacy and authority. Having debunked the legitimacy and authority of white society, the anti-white forces will be able to gut whatever resistance whites might normally be inclined to mount to their own dispossession.

But the new reparations scam is not just a means of subverting the white sense of legitimacy. It's also the first confirmation that reparations won't end with payments for slavery. The reparations issue isn't about slavery or white supremacy or deportations or lynchings or any other acts of white injustice, real or imagined, toward non-whites. It's about what white American civilization was and what the new, non-white America is going to be.

There is in fact virtually nothing about the old America that did not reflect what today are almost universally denounced as "widespread racist attitudes." America was defined—almost explicitly, sometimes very explicitly—as a white nation, for white people, and what that means is that there is virtually no figure, no law, no policy, no event in the history of the old, white America that can survive the transition to the new and non-white version. Whether we will want to call the new updated version "America" at all is another question entirely.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[Sam Francis [email him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click herefor Sam Francis' website.]