"Edumacation"

edumacation

Noun. Used to refer to an education that someone received at a bad school, or a lack of education all together.

(First off, apologies for lateness, I've succumbed to the dorm-flu that's going around and so wasn't very prepared, and then the campus internet stopped working)

When Donald Trump was boasting about his latest victory, he made a very exuberant speech about how much he "love[d] the poorly educated". This stands to reason, as we've known for years that education is the biggest stumbling block to Republican agendas. The more highly educated a voter is, the more likely they are to be liberal (and I also apologize for not finding the sources for these--I read them somewhere once, I promise). This is part of the reason No Child Left Behind was pushed through by a Republican administration and torn down by a Democrat--teaching to the bottom third of the class will under educate the rest. For immigrants facing language and culture hurdles and for illegal immigrants especially, this issue is even more critical, as education is also the path to the American Dream, such as it still exists, of immigrant's children rising above their parents. For the half of the Los Angeles school-going population who are Latinx and the 10% who are undocumented, this new move on the part of the school board will make an enormous difference. The world outside of school might still be dangerous, but at least those cares can be put on hold at the classroom door.

Los Angeles School Safe Zone

Mexico

Here is a nice little article that I found from our good friends at Pew Research Center which debunks some common myths about Mexican Immigration. Quite a bit of it was news to me, though it fits in with the way I’ve been thinking lately. For example, according to the article, only about 30% of Mexican adults would move to the US if they had the chance, which is a vastly smaller number than most Americans would estimate. I think our perceptions are skewed by our border’s close proximity to some of the poorest regions of Mexico, and we tend to forget that the fabulous and luxurious tourist destinations of Cabo San Lucas and Ensenada are even part of the same world much less the same country. Americans have a conception of Mexico as sort of vaguely second-or-third-world, when in fact many parts of the country are very well developed. We also tend to forget that there are parts of America which are not super-fabulous modernity embodied.

Mexico and Immigration to US

'White' People

I talked in my Ben Franklin reflection paper about the annoyance some white people feel (myself included, I confess) when they have to check the 'white' box on race and ethnicity forms. I know we don't really have space to complain in the face of the extreme white privilege being evidenced virtually every night on national television, but all the same there's no denying the fact that the 'white' box does erase the ethnic diversity within whiteness. Worse still is the moniker 'Caucasian', which, taken literally, is an demonym referring to people who live in/hail from the Caucasus Mountains, which straddle the Europe-Asia continental divide. I'm not Caucasian; I'm half  'American mutt', admittedly, but I'm also a quarter Czechslovak and a quarter German. I speak German at home and bake koláče for Easter, and those sorts of cultural differences used to be more acknowledged when they were the biggest differences between immigrants. Now with something as insurmountable as skin color and visible 'race' in the way, they are being forgotten. That's a tragedy, I think. We're lumping in Chinese, Tibetans, and Japanese under the banner of 'Asian' when those groups have had enmity for years. We're losing sight of the differences between Argentinian and Bolivian, losing languages and foods and cultural traditions that once made life so much more colorful. But we can't forget that we're also losing dirndles and Tyrolian hats and presents opened by candle-light on Christmas Eve. Its sad what we're doing to diversity by recognizing only 'all the colors of the world': red, yellow, black, white, as in the song, and also brown, and Middle Eastern and Latinx? Seven little categories, one for each billion of us.

The article below isn't much more than we've been talking about in class, really, I just thought it was an excellent graphical representation of that discussion. It shows the transition from a nation made up of white immigrants from different places to a nation made up of white 'natives' and PoC 'interlopers' rather well. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the change in views I've been thinking about matched up with that sudden shift from Germany to Mexico.

A Shift From Germany to Mexico

Legal Language

Jumping off Megan's post from last week, which dealt with issues of race as they relate to the current Flint, Michigan, water crisis, and my own post from last week, which dealt with the fear of authority undocumented immigrants live with on a day to day basis, I have found an article which combines these two issues. In an effort to prevent non-Flint residents from accessing the water support which had been pouring (ha) in from around the country, local authorities have been asking to see identification before they release clean water. For those without identification, this can be hugely damaging as these people are then forced to purchase their water or go without. Even more troubling is the fact that no effort has been made to reach out to those in the community who do not understand English well enough to understand what is going on. There is a story in this article about a woman who just kept drinking the tap water until only 3 weeks ago, though the crisis has been well known and talked about for much, much longer than that.

Emergency Water in Flint is Not Reaching Undocumented Immigrants