La Raza is a term used to identify Mexican-Americans and a couple of organizations that promote the rights of Mexican-Americans. To support "La Raza" is to support equal rights for people who have been oppressed and excluded in the U.S. for many generations - people whose roots are in a country which once owned a large part of what is now the United States.

Supporting the BNP means to support the supremacy of one race and the exclusion of all but a very narrowly-defined group of white people deemed to deserve to live in the UK.

In other words, supporting the BNP and supporting "La Raza" are exact opposities.

I've told this story here before, but it's worth telling again. When I was visiting England, Micca and I were riding a bus in London; and a drunken man about 60 years of age got on. Micca thought he was a Scotsman. He went around to everyone in the bus who looked foreign, demanding their papers and telling them they didn't belong there. Then he sat down next to me, and said something looking for sympathy. I responded, "I'm not a citizen of your country, sir, and I don't like what you were doing to these people." Almost all the people I encountered in England were very nice, but this one incident was distressing and seems to be a good example of the BNP mentality

I used to go to the Deep South of the U.S. to supervise elections under the Voting Rights Act. Usually, the people were wonderful, both black and white (and the food in the rural south was the stuff of legends). But there was always one person who said something hateful, something that reminded me that it was a good thing I was there.

When it comes to wanting to exclude people, that's racism. That attitude seems to be deeply entrenched in the thinking of BNP supporters. To them, you have to be born in the right place and have the right skin color if you want to have the right to pay to rent a home or pay to ride a bus or get a job that you're qualified to perform. That just doesn't seem like justice to most of us.

-Joe Offer-