Tag Archives: Hispanic

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Coming Soon: The Museum of Me

In another bow to ethnic division, on June 13, 2022, President Biden signed into law a bill (H.R.3525) authorizing a commission to build a possible National Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) museum in Washington, D.C.

Introduced by Rep. Grace Meng (D-New York) in May 2021, the bipartisan bill cleared the House on April 26 and the Senate on May 18, both by unanimous consent.

The signing was couched as a way to counter Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders remaining on the margins of American education, with little mention in classes beyond the topics of Pearl Harbor, immigration and the U.S.’s territorial interests in the Pacific. A museum would be key to combating the stereotypes and misconceptions that drive anti-AAPI discrimination, supporters say.

If built, an AAPI Museum would follow on the National Museum of African American History & Culture, which opened on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 2016.

It would also supplement the National Museum of the American Latino. Legislation calling for the Smithsonian to establish that museum passed in Dec. 2020.  “The new museum will be the cornerstone for visitors to learn how Latinos have contributed and continue to contribute to U.S. art, history, culture, and science.,” according to the Smithsonian. “Additionally, it will serve as a gateway to exhibitions, collections, and programming at other Smithsonian museums, research centers, and traveling exhibition services.”

At the rate things are going, today’s pandering politicians, who, as Blake Smith, says, eagerly “offer cultural victories instead of substantive ones,” will eventually advocate the creation of museums for every single ethnic group in America. Where they will be put in an already crowded mall is unknown. 

Some might argue that recognition of America’s diversity through such museums is a good thing. I’d offer a “Yes, but”… There’s no question that education about our multifaceted country can combat stereotypes and misconceptions, but excessive focus on identity is not such a good thing when it exacerbates divisiveness and encourage a splintering of the populace.

Oregon’s new K-12 Ethnic Studies standards, for example, were well-intentioned, but are a prime example of identity politics run amok. 

Kindergarten Standards, for example, include the following: *Describe how individual and group characteristics are used to divide, unite and categorize racial, ethnic, and social groups” and *Develop an understanding of one’s own identity groups including, but not limited to, race, gender, family, ethnicity, culture, religion, and ability.” Good grief!

Colt Gill, the Director of the Oregon Department of Education, clearly sees the K-12 education universe as nothing more than an assemblage of distinct and maligned minorities. This is the kind of identity politics that foments perilous division of our state and our country. Rather than emphasizing common values and interest, Gill’s identity politics stresses differences and creates a feeling of ‘zero-sum’ competition between groups. 

One problem with this kind of identify politics is that it leads to even more minority designations. “Once identity politics gains momentum, it inevitably subdivides, giving rise to ever-proliferating group identities demanding recognition,” says Amy Chua in Political Tribes.

And that leads to an AAPI Museum.

As for highlighting Asian Americans with a new museum, one problem is they are far from a monolith. Instead, they have a complex history and cultures.  Even the term “Asian American” encompasses dozens of ethnic groups of Asian descent. Just Southeast Asians, for example, includes Filipino, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Hmong, Laotian, Burmese, Indonesian and Malaysian. 

 An analysis from Common App, a nonprofit that allows prospective students to apply to more than 1,000 member colleges using one application, noted that the term Asian American can refer to around 50 ethnic groups. “While Asian American was a term established by activists in the 1960s as a means to build political power, it’s also been criticized for obscuring the immense diversity among those it purports to cover…,” notes a Vox article, part of an Asian American identity series.

The analysis also points out a “prominent shortcoming” of the “Hispanic” category for completely concealing the racial identities of its members. The analysis found that, in 2021, half of the applicants identified as white.

What are craven politicians going to endorse next? A German Museum and an Irish Museum? The high immigration numbers in the 1800s were largely fueled by Irish and German immigrants.  A Hungarian Museum? The Hungarian revolution in 1956 led to a burst of Hungarian refugees coming to the United States, including some families who settled in my hometown in Connecticut. Maybe an Eastern European Museum?

The 1959 Cuban revolution drove hundreds of thousands of Cubans to the United States. Given their concentration in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis and other politicians seeking the Cuban vote could probably be counted on to endorse a Cuban Museum on the National Mall.

The way things are going, we’ll end up with a Museum of Me. Or a Museum of You.

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The mob is not the rest of us

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, (Photo by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)

When the demand went out from activists earlier this year to “Defund the police,” Portland, Oregon responded. 

In June, the City Council cut $15 million from the police budget, rewarding Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, a key architect of the cut, with a big win. 

But when Hardesty pushed later for deeper cuts, she failed. At an Oct. 28 City Council Zoom call meeting, Hardesty proposed slashing the Portland Police Bureau’s budget by $18 million and shifting the money to other city services. When the proposal was tabled until a Nov. 5 meeting, Hardesty did not take it well. “I see it as a cowardly move to put this vote off until after the election,” she said. “I am a bit disgusted at the lack of courage on this council.”

Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty

Citing 156 nights of street protests as a call for action, Hardesty said, “It is shocking that my City Council colleagues don’t know why people are taking to the streets.”

Hardesty either didn’t know, or didn’t want to acknowledge, that the people “taking to the streets” in this and other protests, and generating a lot of overwrought media coverage, don’t necessarily represent the community at large. Too many other politicians and members of the public often make the same mistake.

A recent Gallup poll, conducted as part of a newly launched Gallup Center on Black Voices, found that, in fact,  a large majority—81 percent—of black Americans want the same or increased levels of police presence in their neighborhoods. Just 19 percent of black Americans said they wanted the police to spend less time in their neighborhoods. This is similar to the 67% of all U.S. adults preferring the status quo, including 71% of White Americans.

Previously reported Gallup findings show the vast majority of Blacks believe police reform is needed, such as improving police relations with the communities they serve and preventing or punishing abusive police behavior, but that’s not the “Defund the police” message seen on protester’s placards.

“The “defund the police” movement is backed by progressive activists and politicians, who in turn are funded by nonprofit social-justice organizations and money from corporations shaken down by agitator groups…which pose as community organizations, though they have little popular representation or membership,” Charles Blain, the president of Urban Reform and Urban Reform Institute, asserted in City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. “They champion the most adverse policies for the very citizens they claim to be fighting for.”

Linked to this is the pressure by some activists to eliminate the Transit Police that patrol TriMet’s transit system. 

Activists have aggressively criticized The Transit Police, alleging that say they focus on people of color and make members of marginalized communities fearful. In response, the Portland City Council has already voted to pull the Portland Police Bureau out of group on Dec. 31.

The problem is research presented to TriMet’s board of Directors indicates there’s actually a high level of support for the Transit Police among TriMet riders. According to a TriMet survey, a lack of transit police makes half of all riders feel unsafe. The percent is higher for Blacks (67%), non-English speakers (58%), and people of color (54%). Just 24% of those surveyed said the presence of police makes them feel unsafe.

According to the TriMet survey, 61% of riders think the greatest threat to their safety isn’t the Transit Police,  but other riders who are too aggressive, perceived to be abusing drugs, or having mental health issues.

Then there are the Parlance Police who want to ram their word usage down our throats.

One of the best examples of these people in action is activists (including much of the media) pushing the public to embrace use of the term Latinx as a gender-neutral, pan-ethnic label to describe a diverse Hispanic or Latino population.

The term has come into wide use by entertainment outlets, magazines, corporations, local governments, and universities to describe the nation’s Hispanic population. Politicians, in particular, have hopped on the Latinx trend. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for example, marked Hispanic Heritage Month by promising in English and Spanish to champion Latinx families.  

But there’s a problem. Recent work by the respected Pew Research Center found that only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have even heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves.

“Progressives, Hispanics are not ‘Latinx.’ Stop trying to Anglicize our Spanish language,” Giancarlo Sopo, a public relations strategist, wrote in a USA Today Opinion column. “Hispanic Americans face plenty of challenges as it is. The last thing we need are English-speaking progressives ‘wokesplaining’ how to speak Spanish.”

Progressives argue that Latinx fixes the gendered nature of Spanish,” Sopo wrote.” It is true that nouns are gendered in Spanish, but it is unclear what, if any, problem this poses to Americans. Taken to its logical conclusion, a push for gender-neutral Spanish nouns requires dismantling a language spoken by 572 million people across the world.” 

“The term (Latinx) makes me sad and angry — it represents another anglicism of my native language and a feeble attempt at gender inclusivity,”  Laura Phillips-Alvarez, a student at the University of Maryland, wrote in an Opinion column for the school’s newspaper, The Diamondback. “…America is obsessed with labeling things, and “Latinx” is just another attempt at categorizing a group of people who are so frustratingly difficult to categorize.”

And while we’re on the subject of mobs, let’s not leave out the college student activists who pressure campus administrators and intimidate the rest of the student body.

Recent events at Bryn Mawr College, a small women’s liberal arts college in Pennsylvania that charges $71,550 a year to attend, are a prime example of a student mob takeover that effectively shut down the campus and led to administration capitulation. 

After two Philadelphia police officers fatally shot Walter Wallace Jr., a Black man armed with a knife, on Oct. 25, a group of Bryn Mawr activists “embraced the dubious claim that their extremely progressive campuses were actually contaminated by a dangerous climate of racism that (quite literally) threatened the survival of black students,” the parent of one student’s parent wrote in Quillette, an online magazine. “In many cases, the ire was directed not only at administrators and non-ideologically-compliant faculty, but also at any student suspected of not supporting the strikers’ apocalyptic rhetoric, dramatic postures, and inflated demands. Anyone who sought to attend class, go to the dining hall, or even turn in schoolwork was denounced as a “scab,” and often faced acts of bullying.”

The leaders of Bryn Mawr’s student strike, which began on October 28th, said their goals were “to dismantle systemic oppression in the Bryn Mawr community,” and end the apparently crippling regime of “institutional racism, silencing, and instances of white supremacy.” Their demands, which by mid-November were a dense 24 pages long, included implementation of a “Reparations Fund” for grants to “Black and Indigenous students in the form of grants for summer programs, affinity groups, multicultural spaces, and individual expenses such as books, online courses, therapy, and any and all financial need beyond the scope of racial justice work.”

This would presumably mimic an action students at Georgetown University took in 2019 when they voted to increase their tuition(likely paid by their parents) to benefit descendants of enslaved Africans that the Jesuits who ran the school sold nearly two centuries ago to enhance its financial future.

On Nov. 16, Bryn Mawr President Kim Cassidy surrendered, sending an email to Bryn Mawr students, faculty, and staff saying, ” I am in agreement with the areas for action laid out in the November 12 demands. I have attached a response that details how specific aspects of demands will be fulfilled, including timelines and our commitments to invest the resources needed.” 

At the end of the strike, Bryn Mawr President Kim Cassidy said The Bryn Mawr Strike Collective’s actions ” have been brave and bold.”

On November 21st, Cassidy sent an email to parents saying the strike was over. The strike leaders, now named The Black Student Liberatory Coalition (BSLC), invited students and faculty to “continue to disrupt the fucking order.” 

According to the parent-written Quillette article, some professors have agreed to accept “strike work”—conversations with friends and family about racism, diary entries, time spent watching anti-racism documentaries, and so forth—in lieu of actual course work, even in math and science programs. 

Activists have every right to press their agenda, but decision makers, the general public and the media need to be more careful about assuming the activists speak for the rest of us.

 It’s like relying on Twitter to interpret the public mood. A small share of highly active Twitter users – most of whom are Democrats – produce the vast majority of tweets from U.S. adults, according to another Pew Research Center report. The most active 10% of users were responsible for 92% of tweets sent between November 2019 and September 2020 by U.S. adults with public-facing accounts. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents accounted for 69% of these highly active Twitter users, while Republicans and GOP leaners accounted for 26%. 

Mobs are like that. They don’t speak for everybody.

These are difficult and dangerous times. Pandering to the mob makes things worse.

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Danger ahead: the dismal performance of some minorities on the SAT

The College Board recently reported the results for SAT test-takers in the class of 2015…and the news isn’t good.

african-american-teenagers-taking-the-sat

On average, high school graduates in the class of 2015 had lower scores in all three subject areas (critical reading, math and writing) than in 2014 and overall the lowest performance since the 2,400-point scale was developed about a decade ago.

The mainstream media covered this pretty well, but most ignored or said little about a more disturbing aspect of the report: the results for Native American, African American and Hispanic students were appalling.

Just 41.9% of SAT takers in the class of 2015 (712,000 students) met the SAT College and Career Readiness Benchmark. That means they have a 65% probability of obtaining a first-year GPA of B- or higher at a four-year college. It indicates a student’s readiness to enter college or career-training programs and to succeed in credit-bearing, entry-level college courses.

But look at the percent of U.S. test-takers who met the benchmark broken down by race/ethnicity:

  • Asian: 61.3%
  • White: 52.8%
  • Native American: 32.7%
  • Hispanic: 22.7%
  • African American: 16.1%

The numbers for native Americans, Hispanics and African-Americans in Oregon who met the College and Career Readiness Benchmark were pretty dismal, too: 

  • Native American: 31%
  • Hispanic: 22.6%
  • African American: 24.9%

Some argue that the averages for minority students are low because the number of them taking the test is expanding: 32.5% were underrepresented minority students in the class of 2015, compared to 31.3% in the class of 2014 and 29.0% in the class of 2011.

Others argue that this is avoiding the real issue, that too many minority students are not getting a good education. “Without access to challenging courses and assessments that measure their progress, students will not be able to get the most out of their opportunities to prepare for college and careers.” The College Board said in its report.

The College Board noted that there continue to be striking differences in academic preparation between white and Asian students and African Americans, Native Americans and Hispanics that affect college readiness. White and Asian students taking the SAT, for example, are more likely to have taken AP and Honors courses. They are also more likely to have completed a full “core curriculum,” which includes four or more years of English, three or more years of mathematics, three or more years of natural science, and three or more years of social science and history.

“Nowhere is there more of a need to expand access to more rigorous coursework than among low-income and minority students,” said Cyndie Schmeiser, Chief of Assessment at the College Board.

The U.S. Census projects that racial and ethnic minorities will represent more than half of all children in the United States by 2023, and that the U.S. population will be 54 percent minority by 2050. As noted by the Association of American Colleges & Universities, “Youth from these communities need full preparation for and access to higher education. It would be both immoral and impractical to ignore the disparities facing these young people, as a brighter future for them means a brighter future for all.”