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  • 2016-06-09 (xsd:date)
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  • Judge Curiel a Member of 'Latino KKK Hate Group' Called 'La Raza' (en)
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  • During the 2016 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Donald Trump became notorious for making inflammatory comments or assertions. Trump's stances on Mexico (that rapists are crossing the southern border in droves, for example) provoked outcries and demonstrations across the United States. In June 2016, Trump repeatedly said that a federal judge presiding over the Trump University case, U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, may have a biased perspective because of his Mexican heritage (Curiel is American, but born to Mexican immigrants in the state of Indiana). The lawsuit brought against Trump University says that while the school claimed to teach Donald Trump's real estate strategies and techniques, it was actually an unlicensed and illegal school, and a thinly-veiled scam to sell high-priced seminars. In an interview with CNN, Trump alluded to Curiel's alleged involvement with a very pro-Mexican group: While Trump did not mention any group by name, his spokeswoman identified the group as the La Raza Lawyers Association: While Curiel is indeed a member of the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association, several conservative pundits, politicians, and supporters of the Republican presidential candidate accused the federal judge of being a member of a different organization with La Raza in its name: the National Council of La Raza, a civil rights organization that advocates for (among other things) immigration reform and better opportunities for Latino families. Luis Osuna, president of the La Raza Lawyers Association, confirmed to the Washington Post that these two organizations are not connected: However, neither the NCLR nor the La Raza Lawyers Association could accurately be described as radical or equated with the Ku Klux Klan. The NCLR has actively worked for immigration reform and is a nonpartisan civil rights group, not a hate group. In fact, on 6 June 2016, NCLR president Janet Murguía released a statement condemning the violence at Trump's rally in San Diego and informing protesters that violence is never the answer: The NCLR is not a radical group similar to the Ku Klux Klan and U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel is not the grand master, or affiliated in any way, with this group. The San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association (of which Curiel actually is a member) is one of more than a dozen affiliates of the California La Raza Lawyers Association, and not an outlier group: Accusations that the National Council of La Raza and the La Raza Lawyers Association are akin to the Ku Klux Klan seem to hinge on a mistranslation of la raza. While la raza does mean the race, the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association noted that this is not the only translation: The phrase La Raza is actually truncated from La Raza Cósmica, a phrase coined by politician and philosopher José Vasconcelos (also a former secretary of education and 1929 presidential candidate in Mexico) to describe the ideology that the mixture of ethnicities in the New World ushered in a new era of humanity characterized by love and inclusivity. (en)
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