Angel Gonzales
Business Insider News recently reported that numerous Americans are extremely outraged with Home Depot and its past CEO and co-founder Bernie Marcus. Again, this billionaire (worth $7.4 billion per Forbes), who enriched himself to a great extent on the backs of Latinos while establishing Home Depot, continues to endorse Trump for president and by extension, his white supremacist, racist, misogynistic ideologies. Marcus donated $7 million to Trump in 2016, and it’s speculated that he probably donated a similar amount in Trump’s bid for re-election.
As such, many Americans across the country are calling for a boycott of Home Depot.
Home Depot supporters respond that Marcus left the company in 2002 and that this retailer has been a publicly traded company since 1981. However, what the general public doesn’t realize is that most of Marcus’ wealth is still tied up in Home Depot stocks based on his own admission to the Atlantic Journal-Constitution News in July, 2019.
As a result, a percentage of every hard-earned dollar spent at Home Depot goes into Marcus’ pocket. And until Home Depot forces Marcus to disassociate himself from Home Depot by buying back his stock portfolio they will continue to be associated with him and his considerable damaging influence. They (Home Depot) can’t have it both ways.
How we Latinos respond to this highly critical controversy will eventually determine who we are as a people.
Therefore, Marcus and Home Depot by its association with him indirectly share responsibility for Trump’s most vile and outrageous behavior as follows: The neo-Nazis and the white supremacist related deaths at Charlottesville, VA in 2017; Trump’s pardon of the virulent racist sheriff, Joe Arpaio of Arizona; Trump’s sell out of América’s national security to Russia’s Putin; his ongoing racist attacks against all Latinos and his vicious immigration policies that have resulted in thousands of immigrant Latino children in cages and separations from their parents. But the most appalling aspect of Trump’s behavior has been his mismanagement of the coronavirus that caused a second great economic depression destroying thousands of businesses, created massive unemployment and killed over 230,000 Americans.
Furthermore, Home Depot’s ongoing support of one of its major stock holders (Bernie Marcus), also indirectly created the basis for the Trump white supremacist follower that caused the El Paso, Texas massacre on Aug. 3, 2019. 46 men, women and children were brutally shot and 23 were slaughtered. 99% of those poor souls were Latinos. In one of the most horrendous parts of the shooting, a young Latino couple holding their new baby were savagely gunned down. Miraculously, the baby survived with minor injuries, but his parents did not. He will now grow up without a loving father and mother. All those slayings now represent the single greatest massacre of innocent American Latinos in this country’s modern history.
And Trump and his supporters; regardless of their individual separation from those heinous incidents still constitute part of the whole outcome of those events.
That is what Home Depot now also represents. And anyone that financially supports Home Depot indirectly supports all of the above abominations according to those Americans now seeking to boycott Home Depot.
Latinos innocently represent a large clientele and work force of this corporate giant. Yet, this monied behemoth has turned a blind eye toward the major issues of the Latino community.
Accordingly, the Home Depot boycott is now very much a Latino issue. How we Latinos respond to this highly critical controversy will eventually determine who we are as a people.
Angel Gonzales is a former teacher with the domestic Peace Corps and is also a retired senior official with the Colorado State Justice Dept. He is now a documentary filmmaker living in New México.
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