Republicans to Colored Folks: “All y’all look alike.”

They didn’t say it in so many words, but ya know, BASICALLY.

See, Republicans need Latino support in this next election, so they’ve been reaching out to those Family Values Brown Catholics. The Republican National Comittee’s Latino site is prominently featured on the main RNC page too, so everybody feels all nice and equal and worthy.

That would be all well and good, except the RNC Latino site featured stock photos of little Asian children.

RNC Latino Site Features Stock Photo of Asian Children
By ELIZABETH FLOCK
June 14, 2012

Mitt Romney has been increasingly keen to court the Latino vote, which is believed to heavily favor President Obama over the former Massachusetts governor for president. In the latest Latino Decisions poll, Obama held a 43-point lead over Romney.

But the Republican National Committee’s Hispanic site may not be doing Romney any favors.

RNCLatinos.com features as its main image a stock photo from Shutterstock, which tags the photo with keywords that clearly suggest the kids are Asian, including: “asia,” “asian,” “interracial,” “japanese,” and “thailand.”

(source)

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that riding the subway—especially when I lived in Bushwick—opened my eyes to the physical similarities between tiny Latinos (usually Mexicans) and tiny Asians. But guess what? I’m just a dude riding the subway. If I confuse Jorge with Jin Tao, so what? Nobody cares. Who am I?

I’m not running a national political website trying to court Latino voters. If Webmaster Chad saw that photo and said, “oh some cute Latino kids, lemme post that,” I totally understand. Slight oversight, but whatever. But. Shouldn’t it be somebody’s job to check and double-check everything that goes up? If random internet people were smart enough to say “wait that don’t even look right” and find out, with a few keystrokes, that they’re really little Asian kids, the webmaster should have been able to do the same thing.

I’d be mad as hell if I were Latino. Just throw up some cute brown kids and call it Close Enough? If you have an interview at Coca-Cola, you don’t try to win over the boss by offering him some Pepsi and saying “well it’s brown soda, close enough.”