Welcome to Esther J. Cepeda's archive of columns published by The Washington Post Writers Group and other publications.
Follow Esther on Twitter: https://twitter.com/estherjcepeda
Looking for information on the "American Dirt" discussion? Watch Oprah's Book Club on AppleTV+ and here are news stories about those episodes, below my column on the book controversy:
Posted at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
By ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- Trauma from family separation knows no age.
On a recent episode of the podcast "The Daily," I heard a grown woman talking about the fact she hadn't seen her 77-year-old mother ever since her coronavirus-affected nursing facility went on lockdown. The woman cried as she described the relief of being allowed to peer at her mom through an outside window.
Even though they had been talking on the phone, the woman just needed to be able to see that her mom was alive, sitting up in bed and able to wave "hello."
We're going to hear many more stories about the impact of COVID-19 on families as people are quarantined at home and sheltered at hospitals and other health facilities. As travel is disrupted, we'll hear about spouses being separated and children stranded from their families. It will be wrapped in anger that there isn't enough information to reconnect people with each other.
As the outbreak worsens, it could personally impact millions of Americans, giving a critical mass of people an intimate understanding of trauma.
According to the nonprofit organization Physicians for Human Rights, The kinds of after-effects experienced by parents and children who are unexpectedly or abruptly separated include: "being confused and upset, constantly worried, crying a lot, having sleeping difficulties, not eating well, having nightmares, being preoccupied, having severely depressed moods, overwhelming symptoms of anxiety, and physiological manifestations of panic and despair (racing heart, shortness of breath, and headaches), feeling 'pure agony' and hopelessness, feeling emotional and mental anguish, and being 'incredibly despondent.'"
My desperate hope is that coronavirus-related discomfort, inconvenience and suffering creates empathy for our fellow human beings. That's because I want people to identify with and understand what is still happening today at the U.S.-Mexico border: Families that include immigrants continue to be separated.
According to the Pew Research Center, the number of migrant apprehensions at the border rose in fiscal 2019 to its highest level in 12 years. The 851,508 apprehensions recorded were more than double the number of the year before.
The majority of those people were spared from official policy that rips apart families with the goal of discouraging other migrants from attempting to gain entry into the United States. But there continue to be exceptions that, according to experts, are loosely applied.
When families are apprehended by the Border Patrol or present themselves and plead for asylum, the prevailing practice is that they can be separated only after a determination is made that a parent poses a danger to the child, or has a serious criminal record or gang affiliation. Or when an aunt, uncle or sibling is accompanying the child or the parent is sick.
But "the government is trying to drive a truck through what was supposed to be a very narrow exception," Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union told NBC News last summer. Citing government data and reporting from the border, Gelernt argued that many children were being separated from their parents for minor crimes or unverified accusations of gang affiliation.
One can believe in the rule of law as well as orderly and controlled entry into our country and simultaneously believe that it is wrong to forcefully split up families and then ensnare them in a tangle of administrative red tape, as has been well documented in the past few years.
What is happening at the border is nothing short of a human rights horror. It's not much better in certain communities and neighborhoods all over the interior of the country, where raids and apprehensions at workplaces, homes and sometimes even near school grounds cause scenes as adults are arrested, leaving U.S.-born children behind with family or plunging them into the foster care system.
The threat of the coronavirus should not be politicized. But if we can find simple parallels in the pain of parents and children being torn apart by forces they have no control over, maybe more of us will sympathize with the ghastliness being inflicted on people arriving to our country. Both situations require our undivided attention.
Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 04:06 PM | Permalink
By ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO - It has long been known that the turnover of new teachers is high, especially among Hispanic teachers. But I've always wondered if this is because Latino teachers are likelier to teach children who are learning how to speak English.
In my own experience across school districts in urban, suburban and rural communities, I've observed bilingual, dual-language and English as a second language (ESL) programs to be the absolute worst.
The kids have never been the problem. The real issues have been everything from systemic racial bias in school districts to pedagogical ignorance among the people who determine curriculum and learning standards. There has also been an endemic indifference to the challenges of being an English language learner (ELL) by teaching staff.
As a result, such programs are ghettos typified by underinvestment, administrative mismanagement and the framing of English learners as "problems," resulting in educational malpractice.
If this sounds hyperbolic, rest assured that I am tempering my passionate feelings about how students who are overwhelmingly U.S.-born children or grandchildren of recent immigrants are under-resourced, miseducated and then often blamed for their school district's poor performance.
Researchers are only just starting to tease out this disparity -- which has been known as fact for years among Hispanic community leaders, parents and educators, especially those who teach Latino students.
The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan, pro-immigrant think tank, recently published a paper on this topic titled "The Patchy Landscape of State English Learner Policies under ESSA." The paper details how well the Every Student Succeeds Act -- which replaced No Child Left Behind in 2015 -- has delivered on the promise to bring new rigor to the education of English learners.
Spoiler alert: There's a long way to go.
To start, ESSA required states to develop standardized entry and exit procedures to determine which students qualify to receive ELL services and which students are no longer in need of those extra supports.
Across the country, implementation of standards remains patchy, but at least there now exists enough consistency in how ELL students are identified in nationwide school systems to tease out what needs improvement -- a major upgrade to how things operated five years ago.
The most important takeaway is that better data is needed. Right now, school districts are allowed to combine the academic outcomes of current and former ELL students, with the effect of artificially inflating current ELL scores with those from students who have been reclassified as proficient in English. And full reclassification of students obscures whether the students maintain their proficiency over time.
And "proficiency" is often not required to be defined as a test score or other objective criteria that would make it possible to see whether an ESL student in Tennessee has the same language skills as a student in Minnesota or Utah.
Worst of all, most states don't provide clear data on how many ESL students are excluded from their accountability data. This means that the students who, arguably, struggle the most and need the most help are excluded from school ratings. This masks school districts' overall performance and makes it impossible for outside observers to clearly see whether ESL students are making academic gains that are equal to, or at least similar to, their native-English speaking peers.
This all lines up neatly with another study-- this one of schools in North Carolina. This study was conducted by researchers from both Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who found what they termed "hidden segregation," or segregation within schools in a particular area, such as a county or school district.
North Carolina has long been seen as a bellwether of integration. But the analysis of the state's K-12 traditional and charter schools found that despite aggregate numbers of students of different races and ethnicities going to schools together, segregation within schools accounts for up to 40% of all racial segregation in the state.
Hispanic kids tend to be herded into classrooms with lower expectations, fewer resources and the most transient teachers. This is often based on test scores that hinge on the students' ability to read and understand the nuances of English.
It's particularly troubling to obfuscate how well integrated schools are around the country. That's because it used to be that the academic success of (BEG ITAL)all(END ITAL) public school students relied at least partly on Latinx kids (who make up a quarter of all students) getting the resources and support they need to learn.
If they continue to be segregated from their peers and allowed to falter in programs that allow their struggles to remain hidden or downplayed, public schools will only continue creating the inequality that is tearing the country apart.
Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 04:09 PM | Permalink
By ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- As our country continues to reckon with changing norms of gender and sexual identity, it's becoming more common to find people who think that transgender men and women should be able to serve in the military.
Perhaps more importantly, trans people now also have the voices of hundreds of heterosexual, lesbian, gay and bisexual service members who would welcome them into their military ranks.
This is according to a first-of-its-kind study funded by the Department of Defense, which examined survey data from 486 non-trans, verified active-duty service members across the four major branches of the U.S. military.
Their responses forcefully contradict the myth that transgender service members degrade unit readiness, or "burden" or "disrupt" the military, as President Trump tweeted in 2017 when he banned trans people from joining the armed forces.
Aaron Belkin, the executive director of the nonpartisan Palm Center, said this in a press release highlighting the findings:
"This research ... gives the lie to the claim that transgender Americans disrupt the cohesion or readiness of the U.S. military. If the military really cares about cohesion, it should read the research it funds or stop wasting taxpayer money." The study, "Support for Transgender Military Service from Active Duty United States Military Personnel," was recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Sexuality Research and Social Policy.
Going back decades, the rationale for bans of various types -- including against women and people of color -- has been that unit cohesion relies on homogeneity. This has led to the evolution of myths that our nation's service members must share the same muscle mass, body composition, religious beliefs or culture.
But, of course, race, gender, geographic origin and religion have always mattered little in what makes excellent military personnel. (Did you know that the U.S. military now formally recognizes Heathens, Druids and Wiccans in addition to Atheists and Agnostics?)
In the proverbial foxhole, what matters to service people is faithfulness to each other built over months and years of training together, loyalty to their mission and a deep calling to serve and protect their country.
What's inside a service person's undergarments has little impact on any of this.
Notice I didn't say "no impact."
The truth is that, while two-thirds of all non-trans military people surveyed support transgender service, there are some variations in how individual subgroups responded.
Not surprisingly, 82% of lesbian, gay and bisexual respondents supported transgender military service, compared with 57% of heterosexual/cisgender respondents.
And lesbian, gay and bisexual service members and women service members reported the greatest support of transgender service (81% and 75%, respectively), while heterosexual and male service members indicated the lowest support (56% and 62%, respectively).
Black and Latinx service members reported the highest support (69% and 75%, respectively) for transgender people serving. No doubt this is because black and brown people know what it's like for people to conflate "different" with "lesser."
On a particularly bright note, the researchers found that there were no statistically significant differences in support for transgender service between the four branches of the military.
Most "new" groups gain wider acceptance as soon as they become more visible in communities.
This is particularly tricky for trans people, because some can "pass" as their true gender identity and there's nothing in it for them but potential sorrow if they come out to friends, co-workers and others. Others will never be able to transition to their desired gender to the point of fitting unambiguously into what society expects to see when they think of "men" and "women."
And still others will choose to exist in some state of in-between that makes sense for them, regardless of what society's neat categories demand.
All should be welcomed into the diverse branches of our military.
None of them ask for special treatment. Just fair and respectful treatment so that they can focus less on where they'll be using the bathroom or sleeping and more on training to defend our country.
Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 04:03 PM | Permalink
By ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- Supreme Court justices do their best to both remain apolitical in public and to get along with each other in private.
Steering clear of partisanship helps maintain the independence of the court, and keeping the peace is important because their lifetime appointments effectively make them a family.
This is why Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent in the case of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security v. Cook County, Illinois, was supposedly so exceptional.
The case entails the Trump administration's so-called public charge rule, which will prohibit legal immigrants from obtaining green cards if the government has reason to believe that they are likely to rely on public aid, such as cash or food assistance.
Less publicized but equally vexing, the rule will make it harder for immigrant workers and international foreign students to extend or change their visas. It also makes it tougher for green card holders to reenter the U.S. if they've spent more than six months abroad.
In Sotomayor's dissent -- described as "scathing," "blistering," "sharp" and "furious" by mainstream media outlets - she somberly objected to the rule change.
But she didn't object because of the dubious practice of subjecting potential new green card holders to far higher standards than past immigrants petitioning for legal permanent status. Nor because the new move reflects the carelessness with which President Trump treats immigrants generally.
This is mere context.
Sotomayor is sore over how the current Supreme Court has bowed to the Trump White House even in standard administrative matters with long-standing precedents.
"To justify upending the normal rules of appellate procedure, a party must also show a likelihood of irreparable harm," Sotomayor wrote. "The government has not made that showing here. ... The government's only claimed hardship is that it must enforce an existing interpretation of an immigration rule in one state -- just as it has done for the past 20 years -- while an updated version of the rule takes effect in the remaining 49. The government has not quantified or explained any burdens that would arise from this state of the world."
That's pretty straightforward -- and as boring an administrative stance as any careful observer of high court legal maneuverings can imagine.
But the smoking gun that caused headline writers to go bananas with their assertion that Sotomayor was "blistering" is the following:
"Claiming one emergency after another, the government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited court resources in each. And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow," Sotomayor wrote. "Perhaps most troublingly, the court's recent behavior on stay applications has benefited one litigant over all others. This court often permits executions -- where the risk of irreparable harm is the loss of life -- to proceed, justifying many of those decisions on purported failures 'to raise any potentially meritorious claims in a timely manner.' Yet the court's concerns over quick decisions wither when prodded by the government in far less compelling circumstances -- where the government itself chose to wait to seek relief, and where its claimed harm is continuation of a 20-year status quo in one state. I fear that this disparity in treatment erodes the fair and balanced decisionmaking process that this court must strive to protect."
Let's be super clear here. Sotomayor cited administrative precedent, then made an on-the-record observation about how quickly the court moves when Trump says "jump," to assert that the entire court is itself flirting with the appearance of partisanship.
That makes her "blistering" and "scathing"?
Further searching yielded an article on the right-leaning media watchdog site Accuracy in Media complaining that the mainstream press "failed to acknowledge how unusual it is for a sitting Supreme Court justice to accuse his or her colleagues of blatant partisanship."
Framing Sotomayor's measured dissent as "accusation" is itself a hysterical overreaction -- one that illustrates how even heavy, sober legal language can become a Rorschach test for bias depending on who writes it.
It can be interpreted as steady or strongly worded when coming from a white male or "furious" -- and other terms implying emotional loss of control -- when written by women of color.
It's a painful and bracing reminder that Latino professionals are held to far different standards than white ones. It's unfair and totally fabricated bunk.
Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 04:58 PM | Permalink
By ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- Ahead of last Wednesday's Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar introduced herself to a group of Latino workers in the city's Culinary Union by recalling that she was assigned the name "Elena" in her fourth-grade Spanish class.
I rolled my eyes so far back into my head that I gave myself a headache.
And then I pitied Klobuchar. She clearly has no one in her circle of campaign workers who could explain to her that Hispanic people -- potential voters, no less -- are human beings, first.
Just like Irish, Italian and German Americans, we are women, men, mothers, fathers, daughters, etc., before being line cooks, servers, chefs or Mexican, Guatemalan or Honduran.
This isn't to say that Klobuchar should have kept this little anecdote to herself. She could, in fact, have used it to forge an authentic connection to members of her audience by mentioning it while talking about education.
For instance, she could have highlighted her education platform and added that she would encourage cultural respect to be a part of all teacher-preparation programs. Maybe even tie this cultural respect to limited federal funds, because no child should be assigned a "new" name because his or her teacher "couldn't" pronounce their real name -- a phenomenon that many children have had to contend with.
Or she could have woven the feeling of not being "good enough" just because of how she pronounces certain words into the feeling of alienation that many immigrants feel today, during everyday exchanges with non-Hispanic white Americans.
Whatever. I've come to expect nothing more or less from Hispandering candidates who seem to just not understand the whole Latinos-are-people-too thing. They and their campaigns are far too focused on what the latest polls say.
So here's the latest:
A joint electoral survey by Univision, Latino Decisions and the Latino Community Foundation of California found that 74% of Latino registered voters are "certain" they will vote in the 2020 presidential election.
The pollsters also found that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders rose by 10 points to 30% in voter preference among Hispanic Democrats since September, leaving behind former Vice President Joe Biden, who stayed at 21%.
Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg managed 18% of voter preference among Latino Democrats surveyed, leaving him in a virtual tie for second place with Biden. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren trailed them with 10%, similar to where she stood in September. And former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg has not improved his 5% support among Hispanic Democrats -- one in five said they don't know enough about him.
Last week, Telemundo also released the findings of a poll of registered Latino voters in Nevada -- a fantastic bellwether for the intentions of Hispanics since the state is about one-third Latino -- showing that Biden has 34% of support and Sanders has 31%. About 12% were undecided, and no other candidate had double-digit support.
From my perspective, Sanders and Biden have so much Latino support for two very different reasons.
For many younger Latinos, Sanders is seen as a more authentic politician whose values align best with their desire to tear old systems down and build better ones. Older Latinos see Biden as able to beat President Trump and steady the ship.
Warren, Klobuchar, Buttigieg and Bloomberg, to a great extent, are only household names to those of us who closely follow politics as it is presented by largely East Coast media outlets.
Though policy wonks know their "stop and frisk" from their "broken windows," the vast majority of voters pay only peripheral attention to the campaigns.
Latino voters, in particular, are younger -- or just newer to being a registered voter -- and less likely than white voters to have been through the primary and final election process once before.
They're also likelier to have a lower level of education, a lower household income and possibly a distrust of electoral politics that's a holdover from experiences with governments outside of the U.S.
But compared to white voters of all ages, Latinos probably feel as though they've had their good name dragged through the mud, been targeted for harassment and had their culture and language marked for extinction.
Never forget that the Latino vote is always up for grabs. But while it's tough to get people to be "for" something, do not underestimate the power of people ready to be against their bully.
Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 04:53 PM | Permalink
By ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- We're more than halfway through February -- what happened to Black History Month?
Is it that impeachment hearings, coronavirus and caucus debacles just overshadowed everything else?
Maybe, but Black History Month just seems to suffer from a celebration deficit.
Think about it: Hispanic Heritage Month brings to mind women joyfully twirling their multicolored folkloric dresses, the many flags of Latin America and images of people dancing or playing instruments.
One of my Facebook friends felt the same way and encapsulated the shortfall thusly: "If y'all celebrated Black History Month like you do Pride month, s--- could be different but non-POC [people of color] HIDE during this month."
It's so true.
I attended and marched in Chicago's LGBT Pride Month parade last summer for the first time, and there were hundreds of thousands of people -- many as straight as an arrow. They clogged city buses and trains, lined the streets in their best rainbow attire, and otherwise showed they were ready to attend a massive, blowout party.
The joyous nature of the colorful Pride month festivities is why so many corporations have glommed on both to support LGBTQ people in their journeys to become fully accepted and respected members of our society and to make money.
Black History Month, however, is neither in the middle of the summer like Pride, nor in early fall, like Hispanic Heritage Month. It happens in the middle of winter to commemorate the birth month of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
But just think what Black History Month could be if it occurred in fairer weather and not in the shortest -- and one of the dreariest and coldest -- months of the year.
One of the major TV networks could televise a parade, along the lines of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day event. It would be chock full of historically black college and university marching bands stepping in gleaming uniforms, floats highlighting not just Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks but also lesser-known heroes like civil rights activist Ella Baker, blood-bank inventor Charles Drew, journalist Ida B. Wells and others on The Undefeated's recent list of the "44 African Americans Who Shook Up The World." (Don't miss this: https://tinyurl.com/han52q4.)
Can you imagine the show Beyoncé would put on? The float, alone, would be an engineering marvel!
And fairer weather would make it more bearable to participate in slavery-escape reenactments and simulations.
Have you heard of this?
There are outings you can join that will put you in the shoes of fugitive slaves attempting to escape their masters. They sometimes include having actors portray hunters who rattle chains and call out in order to create the "real" feeling of being pursued on a journey of escape.
They're not without controversy.
In his New Yorker article, "Can Slavery Reenactments Set Us Free?" Julian Lucas recounts his interpretation of Colson Whitehead's "Underground Railroad" in which "the novel's fugitive heroine finds a job on free soil as a 'slave' in a museum diorama, raising the question of whom the slave-narrative renaissance really serves. Do fugitive lives belong to everyone, as models and martyrs of democracy? Or are they victims of appropriation, their stories warped by repetitive reconciliation myths and kitsch entertainment? Can 'embodying' the past empower the living, or does it trivialize history and traumatize its inheritors?"
If we lived in a world where people of all colors truly grappled with this, and other visceral issues of race and power, it'd be a better world.
But my fantasy of a better-weather Black History Month will probably never materialize, so there are other ways to connect. Reading Whitehead's award-winning book is a great start.
I highly recommend the books "White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism" by Robin DiAngelo, "The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation" by Natalie Y. Moore, "Becoming" by Michelle Obama and "We Were Eight Years in Power, An American Tragedy" by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
If you're looking for something free and easy, listen to "The City: Six Stories of Rubble. A Million Stories Underneath," an investigative podcast by USA Today. It's a fast, gripping narrative that underscores how systemic racism in urban housing, building codes and politics harm people of color.
If you can't read a book about the black American experience, listen to one. Or read an article, or do a Google search of "Black excellence." Just don't let Black History Month 2020 pass without making a personal connection. After all, celebration comes in many different forms.
Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 04:52 PM | Permalink
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- Public education is a study in competing inequities that parody each other while leaving the neediest behind.
For every group of students at an under-resourced school that finally gets laptops, there is a group of concerned parents at a high-performing school that opts out their kids from screen-fatiguing, web-based apps in the classroom.
Show me a school where the students are encouraged to pursue their own interests and design their own curriculum, and I'll show you 100 other schools where the classes are heavily scheduled and scripted down to the minute, making the kids feel -- as my sons always complained -- that school is like prison.
A recent story in The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news outlet based at Columbia University's Teacher College, underscored what life can look like for students whose earliest formal education experiences aren't geared solely toward proving academic achievement on standardized tests.
The kids who are lucky enough to attend a school like the Pathfinder Kindergarten Center in Everett, Washington, get to pretend to make meals at a play kitchen, build with wooden blocks and "drive" toy cars around their make-believe cities.
Just for fun.
Oh, it's not all freedom and paradise -- even though this $26 million facility for 5- and 6-year-olds puts a premium on unstructured play. The freestyle period is only about an hour out of an academically rigorous day.
Still, that's so much more than what most kids get at school. It always comes as a total shock to people who haven't spent any time in a kindergarten class in the last 40 years, but it's hard!
For one, the kids are there all day -- if they're lucky enough to get a spot. That's a long time for little ones to be away from their caregivers.
I've been inside several suburban kindergarten classes as a resource teacher, assisting classroom teachers with students who have special needs. And I've been blown away by what the kids are expected to do.
From Day One, they're supposed to be able to sit still, and quietly, at a designated spot. They're expected to be able to use the bathroom by themselves, eat a simple snack on their own and navigate a lunch line and a loud cafeteria -- mostly independently.
And there's very real teacherly disappointment if they don't start the year knowing their full name, how to spell it, the names of the letters of the alphabet and the numbers from zero to 10.
Though it surely isn't true, I bet most of us over 40 would say we didn't know anything before our kindergarten experience and remember the whole thing hazily as a nice time to eat paste and pull other kids' hair.
In the classrooms I've been part of, kindergarteners learned to sit at desks, fill out reading skill sheets, solve math problems using just the visuals provided in their workbooks (as opposed to counting with blocks), read along with video books, and use Chromebooks to take standardized exams like the Measures of Academic Performance (MAP) test.
Because students who had the benefit of preschool arrive to kindergarten with a lot of the reading and math skills that used to be taught in first grade, the stakes are ever higher. Kids who didn't have access to high-quality or academic care prior to their sixth year of life start school at high risk for being left behind for good.
This only creates more inequality in the world, because affluent, highly educated parents are likelier to have had the skills of talking to their children through running monologue and dialogue, reading them age-appropriate books and instilling them with number skills through singing counting songs and talking about measurement and time. This does not include the extra time these parents had to spend with their child -- from birth.
Lower-income parents might have those same abilities and good intentions, but be off working two or three jobs, inadvertently leaving their young children in a patchwork of childcare that may not provide the kind of organized attention little ones need to eventually hack it in kindergarten. But more work and less play isn't the fix for low-income kids.
Five or 6 is too young to be a lost cause -- or a stressed, grade-conscious student.
Let wisdom prevail in more school districts across the land: Academic preparation is crucial, but let all kindergarteners play, and it'll pay off in the form of fewer kids who don't "hate" school.
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Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 04:59 PM | Permalink
By ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- Most Sundays at our church, "Pastor Leslie" begins service with a welcoming prayer asking for strength to "love our neighbors, (BEG ITAL)all(END ITAL) our neighbors." This week, she decided to dump her planned sermon to let the congregation share their ideas about what responsibilities people of faith hold in these times.
"In these times" was deliberately vague. But I was heartened that in addition to naming political polarization and amnesia about the suffering of the poor and homeless amid news of our "booming economy," several members of the nearly all-white congregation despaired about immigration.
The owner of a neighborhood restaurant was beside himself because, out of nowhere, two of his longest-serving employees had their work permits revoked by immigration authorities.
Others noted the general fear in the community -- not just fear that immigrants have, but that all of us have who love and depend on those immigrants.
In that moment, I felt there was nowhere I could go to get away from the daily traumatic burden of carrying grief and worry about what's happening both at the border and in communities all over America.
The news stories bring an unending torrent of pain: There are still so-called "unaccompanied alien children" being held in detention centers in Chicago and across the country as a result of President Trump's zero-tolerance enforcement policy, which separated children from their families so parents could be prosecuted for crossing the border illegally.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is still reportedly treating immigrants and their friends and family cruelly and without regard to their humanity.
Last week, an unarmed Hispanic man was shot in the face by ICE agents as he attempted to intervene in an ICE house arrest. According to the victim, the agents attempted to detain his housemate without identifying themselves or explaining on what grounds they were making the arrest.
The Trump administration used the incident to double down on so-called sanctuary cities -- Attorney General William Barr announced lawsuits, the withholding of funds and possible criminal prosecution against cities that do not cooperate with federal immigration detainers.
According to ICE, the target of the arrest was released by the New York City Police Department on charges of possessing forged papers even though he had been deported to Mexico twice and had been convicted of assault in 2011. Basically, the administration blames NYPD and their sanctuary city status for an unarmed bystander getting shot in the face during a federal house raid.
Less violent, but equally heartbreaking, are the stories of U.S.-born children being separated from their parents because, for instance, dad was granted a deportation deferral but mom wasn't. Or the stories of states refusing to accept legal refugees who need communities in which to settle. Or the stories of immigration officials arresting, detaining and deporting immigrants who were lured to immigration offices for interviews as they sought legal status based on their marriages to U.S. citizens.
I sat thinking about all the angst rocking immigrant communities as, one-by-one, people shyly asked for the microphone and said it was our responsibility to also recognize and savor all the good that was happening in the neighborhood and the world.
They also said that it is our responsibility to not tune out of what's going on because it's so painful. And that it's our responsibility to have humility.
And, I thought, courage.
The courage to keep fighting for what we believe is right even when it's obvious that the people who hold the highest titles and positions can lie and act in their own self-interest with impunity.
And the courage to do what Pastor Leslie asked us to do this week. She said that we would not be praying for the poor, the weak and the pained.
This week we were asked to pray for the rich, those in positions of power and those who lead.
They, Pastor Leslie said, were the ones who needed our blessings, appeals and the divine guidance to find humility, wisdom and brotherly love.
Courage is not bravery -- it means doing something despite intrinsic fears.
It will take courage to not see our political opposites as enemies. It will take courage to not be overwhelmed with fear about what the next four years will bring, and not act out of anger instead of seeking to understand.
Humans are hardwired to cluster into tribes and respond to outsider threats by uniting against the "other." Will enough of us have the courage to pray for the political or national "other" over the next eight months?
Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 03:11 PM | Permalink
By ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- At this point, it feels futile to even try to use facts to debunk the half-truths and outright lies President Trump presented during his State of the Union address.
When it comes to partisanship, sociologists have found that even facts are not enough to sway people from their political beliefs. Banging people over the head with real, authoritative information can result in them accepting the facts, but they find or create rationales to fit those facts into their preferred worldviews.
Also problematic are the truths that partisans believe but don't want to accept.
People on the left believe that immigrants and refugees are a net positive addition to our nation -- our nation whose native-born population is stagnating and hit an 80-year low in 2018. We tend to shun negative facts about them. They hurt to hear.
"Last year, our brave ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers arrested more than 120,000 criminal aliens charged with nearly 10,000 burglaries, 5,000 sexual assaults, 45,000 violent assaults, and 2,000 murders," Trump declared during his speech.
For the record, 120,000 is the number of total ICE arrests, which includes women and children whose crimes were limited to entering the country illegally.
Also for the record, unauthorized immigrants commit crime at lower rates than the native-born population in the United States. More than a century of data gets analyzed over and over again by different groups and it always comes out the same.
"A large majority of the areas recorded decreases in both violent and property crime between 2007 and 2016, consistent with a quarter-century decline in crime across the United States," wrote Anna Flagg, a senior data reporter with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on criminal justice. "The analysis found that crime went down at similar rates regardless of whether the undocumented population rose or fell. Areas with more unauthorized migration appeared to have larger drops in crime rates, although the difference was small and uncertain."
Flagg has also crunched data which has found that deportations do not lower crime.
Nevertheless, how many burglaries, sexual assaults, violent assaults and murders are too many?
Even one, is the only answer. All such crimes are life-altering traumas for families across our nation.
Even one unauthorized immigrant harming someone else is to be decried. It is undeniable that crimes by the undocumented are real.
Immigrant advocates tend to not talk about this sort of crime because nativists already over-emphasize its prevalence. But we should address it because, as a result of trying to avoid the topic, what is always left unsaid is that the perpetrator's immigrant status has nothing to do with his or her propensity to harm someone else.
I'm no apologist, just a realist: Unauthorized immigrants don't commit violent crimes because they left their own country to come to the U.S. to harm others. If they commit crimes at all, they do it out of desperation, or due to any of the same reasons the native-born commit violent crimes. Nothing about immigration status correlates with the propensity to harm.
Without a doubt, we should absolutely do everything in our power to prevent all burglaries, sexual assaults, violent attacks and murders.
But let's say unauthorized immigrants did commit 2,000 murders. What does that say about the 11,382 other murders that occurred in 2018 (for a total of 13,382), according to the latest FBI statistics?
Of all the murders in 2018, legal immigrants and native-born people living in the U.S. committed nearly six times the number of murders that Trump attributed to "criminal aliens."
Sexual assaults? Trump cherry-picked the 5,000 undocumented immigrants accused of rape and left unmentioned the 119,653 total reported rapes the FBI tallied in 2018.
Again, every single crime that is perpetrated by an unauthorized immigrant is one too many.
But saying that a particular crime could have been prevented if the perpetrator had been stopped from entering the U.S. (or deported) ignores the poverty, racial discrimination, education disparities and personal histories that those who committed 1,206,836 violent crimes in 2018 are likely to have in common.
Yes, everyone, even immigrant allies and advocates, must get behind doing all we can to reduce violent crime committed by unauthorized immigrants.
But first, let's all acknowledge that -- because those particular offenses are such a small part of all the crime committed in the U.S. -- the best way forward is to fix high poverty, broken education and unaffordable health care for all.
Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 03:08 PM | Permalink
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- Amid the frenzy of reactions to Jennifer Lopez and Shakira's Super Bowl half-time show, I saw several people on social media wondering who could possibly have clutched their pearls about, arguably, the most athletic performance of the night.
Guilty as charged.
This was the first year I didn't watch the broadcast with my parents and sons, and I was so grateful, because I would have been incredibly uncomfortable and embarrassed sitting next to them during the butt shaking, twerking, pole dancing and crotch thrusting.
But, that's just me.
Growing up in a Hispanic household, Spanish language TV channels brought shows like the infamous "Sábado Gigante" — and its bevy of string-bikinied eye candy — right into my kitchen and living room. These days you can't even watch the weather report on Latino cable channels without being confronted by incredibly proportioned and scandalously clad meteorological goddesses.
Basically, I've been tyrannized by Latina beauty my whole life.
From my cousins teasing me about not having anything like the breasts "all" Latinas are supposed to be endowed with, to my family members constantly remarking on my fatness or lack of Latina "style" (I was an 80s new-waver who adored gothy, boyish, black clothes and accessories), I was regularly shamed when I was held up against the ideals of Latina beauty.
It was super weird to me that I was expected to aspire to wearing skimpy clothes, lots of make-up and to dance in a suggestive manner. But if I had done this, I'd likely have been called a slut for it. In a devout Catholic family, that was not right. (And, the fact I was super-secretly lusting after all those sexy Latinas was problematic as well, because being bi- or homosexual was definitely not right.)
So, yeah, as an "out" gender-fluid, pansexual, 45-year-old feminist, J. Lo and Shakira's butt-shaking elicited many, many feelings.
Not that the show was too inappropriate — it's an evening performance during one of the most violent, trauma-inducing games in the world. Anyone worried about their little kids being exposed to content not right for young children should have kept them away.
And it's not that the women were too sexual — sex is the currency of modern-day entertainment; it's everywhere.
Also, the poles were not "too much." For Pete's sake, athletic/artistic pole dancers have petitioned for pole dancing to be included in future Olympics. Even senior citizens use pole dancing to keep fit in some of our nation's retirement homes.
Shakira and J. Lo were magnificent and entertaining. They highlighted Puerto Rican, Colombian and Middle Eastern culture, made political statements against holding kids in cages and showed that you can love America and other countries at the same time.
But my angst persisted. Were these performances empowering because of their skillfulness and joy, or embarrassing and cringe-worthy because they feed negative stereotypes?
Unsure, I asked my favorite feminist, Veronica Arreola, the Program Director of Latin@s Gaining Access to Networks for Advancement in Science (L@S GANAS), at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
"It's very complicated when you factor in the oversexualization of Latinx bodies, balancing wanting to be sex-positive and embracing that we have this cultural sense of music and moving our bodies. It's art, but, unfortunately, that art does follow us into the workplace and the rest of our lives," Arreola told me, the day after watching the halftime show with her husband and 16-year-old daughter.
"It brings up the question about how, as Latinas, we can be ourselves and still be respected," Arreola said. "It's hard because there are stereotypes and bias, but I'm moving into a space where I'm more comfortable with having tension in my beliefs; in having my feminism tested by appreciating two amazing artists in an amazing show and, at the same time, wondering what it means for them to be dancing around partially clothed in a society that values women more for their looks than what's in our brains. There will always be those questions, and we will always be able to appreciate a performance and still be able to critique it at the same time."
It's true: Complex, multilayered works of art like J. Lo and Shakira's melting pot masterpiece cannot be distilled into either-or sentiments. They can be declarations of strength that also make us question how we represent ourselves in the world.
Ultimately, my discomfort will persist until Latinas are judged the same as everyone else. When white artists like Britney Spears, Madonna and Lady Gaga dance suggestively or wear revealing costumes in performances no one projects their behavior onto all other white women.
Why should Latinx women be any different?
Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 03:04 PM | Permalink
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO — I don’t feel well. I’m in a lot of pain.
Yes, present tense. No matter when you read this, whether it’s next week or next month, I will surely be in pain, because that’s how it’s been for the past 20 months.
Right now, it’s a headache, a patch of sore skin on my left arm that feels like bad sunburn (it really isn’t) and tingly throbbing on my upper back. But tomorrow, sharp discomfort may be radiating from my right leg down to my ankle. Alternately, it could all be in my neck, or only in my rusty-feeling, swollen hands.
Or I could be pain-free, but desperately sleepy. Or merely sore but suffering from insomnia. Who knows?
The nonfiction writer Ada Calhoun thinks she has an idea about why so many of us are suffering these days. Actually, she’s written a whole book about it called, “Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis.”
The “why” seemed obvious to me.
Immigrants, their children and anyone else who lived through and escaped generational poverty — or, really, anyone trying to maneuver through a different socioeconomic status than their parents — know why sleep doesn’t come: Life is hard, full of difficult work. You worry about “making it” and cross your fingers that your kids will be OK. Then you die.
After reading Calhoun’s book, however, I see I’ve simply been cursed to have been born female and destined to reach my mid-40s in the time of the self-care movement.
The “unique circumstances” that have brought Generation X women to sleeplessness include: high expectations borne from having more choices for careers, families and lifestyles than any other generation in history; the stifling nature of family responsibility — whether you have a spouse and children or merely creaky old parents; unfair workplace policies that favor single people, or those with families and full-time homemaker spouses; ageism from pesky millennials who assume people in their 40s can’t use computers very well; the pressure to perform a perfect life on social media; menopause
If it seemed a little tiresome to run through such a long, uninterrupted list, understand that it’s a defining characteristic of Calhoun’s writing style.
I like my’ ’80s/’90s pop culture references as much as the next person (I also can remember the sound of a dial-up modem!), but some sections of Calhoun’s book read like lists jotted on a notepad, inspiring the thought: “OK, OK, I get it, let’s get on with it!”
That said, I don’t regret devouring this book from cover to cover. Every Gen X person — male or female — needs to hear that others’ lives are insipid and full of hurts, disappointments and regrets along with joys, just like any other human who lives to middle age.
And every woman should know that the whole process leading up to menopause basically starts long before you think it possibly could, lasts way longer than you ever bargained for (perimenopause could last “anywhere from a few months to 10 to 13 years”) and is — surprise, surprise! — not considered important enough to be the subject of in-depth medical research.
Plus, guess what? All the smiling, gorgeous, rich-and-happy seeming female peers who stare back at us from social-media photos of them and the people who adore them (usually on beaches or at fabulous dinners/Broadway shows/rock concerts, etc.) are probably just as saggy, bored, tired-but-unable-to sleep and in pain as me.
I seriously wondered if my diagnosed depression, anxiety and fibromyalgia (the conclusion some doctors come to when they can’t figure out what in the world is wrong with the women who come in miserable and looking for any kind of relief) is just a weirdo case of perimenopause-menopause.
Not that it matters — there’s not much the doctors can do for that, either, and no one’s exactly killing themselves looking for cures or good symptom-management treatment regimens.
Though at times Calhoun’s book reads like a litany of the complaints of middle- to upper-class women who, from afar, seem like they “have it all,” the tome had a soothing effect.
By assuring us overachieving Gen X women that we’re all very far from having reached the full potential we were endowed with at birth, Calhoun doesn’t take the pain of standard midlife misery away. But she does take a little of the sting out of it.
Cepeda is a columnist for The Washington Post Writers Group.
Posted at 02:59 PM | Permalink
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- There's a literary war going on over a new book about migrants in crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. "American Dirt," by Jeanine Cummins, elicited ferocious fuss and combating reviews even before its release last week.
Writing in The New York Times, staff critic Parul Sehgal said: "There are so many instances and varieties of awkward syntax I developed a taxonomy. There is subtext announced at booming volume. There are the strained similes. ... There are perplexing bird analogies. ... Then there are the real masterpieces, where the writing grows so lumpy and strange it sounds like nonsense poetry. I found myself flinching as I read, not from the perils the characters face, but from the mauling the English language receives."
Other reviews about the narrative were glowing -- including one that also appeared in the Times. In it, Lauren Groff, the author of the best-selling novel "Fates and Furies," wrote: "I was sure I was the wrong person to review this book. I could never speak to the accuracy of the book's representation of Mexican culture or the plights of migrants; I have never been Mexican or a migrant. In contemporary literary circles, there is a serious and legitimate sensitivity to people writing about heritages that are not their own because, at its worst, this practice perpetuates the evils of colonization, stealing the stories of oppressed people for the profit of the dominant."
Groff hit the nail on the head. The fuss is because Cummins is neither Latina nor of any Mexican heritage. And that caused a lot of fireworks on the internet, where people of color go to get the hearing they feel is often missing in mainstream media.
First up was Myriam Gurba, writing on the academic blog Tropics of Meta, who told her story about being asked to write a review for a feminist magazine and turning in such an on-fire take-down that the editor told her it was "spectacular" but a nonstarter, because Gurba wasn't famous enough to level such criticism.
"The nicest thing I can say about "[American] Dirt" is that its pages ought to be upcycled as toilet paper," she wrote.
There's no question that Cummins' story lacks a certain authenticity -- she may have visited Mexico a lot to research the story, but she identifies as white, even though she does have a Puerto Rican grandmother.
We can criticize inauthenticity in lots of literature, though.
The real issue here is that legions of Hispanic, Latino and Latinx writers, authors and journalists who either have written an authentic border story book, or have pitched one and been turned down -- or write about real people in real immigration crises all the time but are roundly ignored -- see a white lady getting a windfall of opportunities (the book has gotten Oprah's love, plus a movie deal) for writing stilted trauma porn about brown people.
This isn't an issue of who can or "should" write fiction about people who are not their own so much as it's about who gets to write about important issues that are about their own people.
I can think of so many great, knowledgeable Latino/Hispanic/Latinx writers who could have tackled a fictional treatment (or already have but got little notice for it) about the border. But they aren't recognized by the same brown-averse white media and publishing establishment that made the choice to uplift a white author and not let Latinos even review the book.
And did I mention the barbed-wire table decorations at the official launch party? Ugh.
In the end, Groff put it best: "Perhaps this book is an act of cultural imperialism [but] 'American Dirt' is written for people like me, those native to the United States who are worried about what is happening at our southern border but who have never felt the migrants' fear and desperation in their own bodies."
It's good that Cummins is getting the word out about the atrocities at the border. I just wish it weren't to the exclusion of others who could tell the story from a more authentic perspective.
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Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
If you're interested in seeing more on this discussion, watch The Oprah Book Club on Apple TV+
Also, here are some articles about the Oprah discussion:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/books/american-dirt-oprah-book-club-apple-tv.html
https://www.latinorebels.com/2020/03/04/oprahbookclubtalk/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/05/oprah-american-dirt-row-book-club-jeanine-cummins
https://variety.com/2020/tv/opinion/oprahs-book-club-apple-american-dirt-episode-1203525972/
https://ew.com/books/latinx-authors-american-dirt-discussion-oprah-winfrey-jeanine-cummins/
Posted at 05:57 PM | Permalink
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- It's the time of year when adults in higher education start waking up in the morning with persistent thoughts of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).
"Fill out your FAFSA" is a winter tradition that affects nearly all adults with kids who will start or continue their college studies in the fall. The dreaded form must be filled out in order to qualify for financial aid to attend college -- both federal loans and grants, and, in some states, scholarships and other forms of cash assistance.
Did I say "affects"? I meant the FAFSA afflicts.
It causes special mental and emotional pain in millions of people across the country as it confounds students and parents with no college-going experience.
Last year, the National Center for Education Statistics released an updated brief detailing the reasons why students failed to fill out their FAFSA. Many students simply thought they could afford college without financial aid or (in nearly the same numbers) thought they or their families wouldn't qualify for it.
Other students said they didn't want to take on student loan debt, didn't know they were eligible to apply for aid, didn't understand how to fill out the FAFSA or had decided they weren't going to college.
A student who would be the first in his or her family to attend college may genuinely have not heard of the FAFSA if, for instance, they attend a low-performing school where college matriculation is not something a critical mass aspires to. Or perhaps they attend a school where there are too few guidance counselors trained to spot students who could benefit, but just need an extra push.
(And what are the chances that such a school's counseling staff would have time to reach out to individual students and provide them with hands-on help?)
To many middle-class, college-educated people who fill out their tax forms annually and always anticipate a tax return, it just doesn't make a bit of sense that any student wouldn't try for college and get the financial aid form filled out.
They'd scoff at the nearly 10% of all students surveyed who just flat-out said the form was too time consuming or too much work.
For some students -- sometimes the likeliest to do well in college and the likeliest to get free money to attend -- they're not wrong about what a Herculean task it is. Not at all.
Their time and effort are not a middle-class person's time and work.
A first-generation college student may have parents who are not in their lives and have caretakers who are not comfortable entering their IRS information into the form for their student. Or their parents have irregular, low-income work and have not filled out their taxes in several years. They may even be homeless and not have an address to start with.
Just the emotional exertion required to have conversations about money for college with family is intense, making this the very point at which many potential first-generation college students figure it's not worth it -- when it really is.
These hurdles can be jumped with the help of an advocate who could offer advice for overcoming such barriers -- if such an advocate were available.
Filling out the FAFSA is a pain, but doable (there are resources on the web for figuring it out).
It's doable even if students have been out of school for a while or even if students aren't great scholars. It's doable and worth trying even if a student's family makes up to $200,000 per year.
Getting the FAFSA done creates a solid foundation upon which to build a life plan that may include several secondary education options and at least a few ways to pay for them.
Ironically, the students who are likeliest to qualify for grants, scholarships or loans -- low-income students who would be the first to attend college -- are the ones who might see the FAFSA as an insurmountable barrier to higher education.
According to the most recent data, 34% of Hispanic and 27% of black students said that they didn't complete a FAFSA because they didn't have enough information.
Most of them probably just needed someone college-educated, with a computer and internet connection, to get them on a path to more options in life.
Could that someone perhaps be you?
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Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 05:48 PM | Permalink
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- When I was in college, my roommate and I would together drive the six hours to our southern Illinois campus the day before the spring semester started. Our tradition was that, while my friend took a turn driving, I would read aloud Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, which was printed in our local newspaper annually on the Monday commemorating the activist.
That was a quarter of a century ago -- before our first black president seemed to have made good on the promise of an America that could see beyond race.
It was also before white supremacists seized on King's ideal of not being judged by the color of one's skin but by the content of one's character in order to push back against what they perceive as rampant racism against whites in the form of affirmative action and other preferential treatments for historically marginalized people of color.
And it was before blacks, as well as others of color, wondered whether being "good" (or, in fact, "twice as good as whites" and hoping to at least attain "half as much") was really the way to gain equality in a country that refused to see the lasting, daily impact of the legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow era.
It was at a time when, in public schools across the country, trotting out the "I Have a Dream" speech in mid-January and then discussing King -- along with Rosa Parks and Jackie Robinson -- during a few social studies lessons in February was considered super progressive.
And it was long before African Americans would look critically at King's life -- such as his purported sexism and marital infidelities -- and consider how his legacy of nonviolence is often used to point out the failings of today's more aggressive, less polite Black Lives Matter movement. (Don't miss Mychal Denzel Smith's electric 2018 essay "Is King All That We Are Allowed to Become?" in The Atlantic.)
"I Have a Dream" holds up through the ages, but it's not difficult to imagine that King would have hated his "day" being the prequel to a single month out of each year when black people are recognized as important, positive contributors to the greatness of America.
While the month does give saintly treatment to a handful of very important black icons, those same icons would probably be horrified to learn that Americans' interest in outstanding, important and pivotal black people ended, more or less, in the '60s.
In a perfect world, Black History Month -- like the months celebrating the heritage of women, Latinos/Hispanic, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders and Native Americans -- would be every month, just like white history is celebrated. They are not separate, they are equal.
Since perfection does not describe how history is taught in the public schools or reported in the media, it falls on us to seek out alternative sources for information in February.
The Civil Rights History Project of the Library of Congress (www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/) is a great place to bookmark on your web browser. This collection couldn't make it easier to read an article or essay on a little corner of history, such as the role young people played in the fight for civil rights or how music fueled the movement.
Even more enticing are the many video-recorded oral histories of people who lived in the communities struggling to win their civil rights and what their everyday lives were really like. Just prepare your chest to tighten -- these are powerful, emotional stories.
This idea to explore black history might be one we return to, or it might fall by the wayside as we navigate busy, hectic lives. But, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the chances are high that you'll see a copy of his famous speech scroll across your news feed or posted in your social media streams and notifications.
Take a moment to read through the speech. It's not long. And it remains tragically relevant today.
While there's no comparing living conditions for some African Americans in the Jim Crow South with the lowest-income blacks today, it's still true that, regardless of educational attainment, many often still live on a "lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."
And, for people of all races and ethnicities, King's words ring out as strongly today as ever, because now is absolutely still "the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children."
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Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 05:43 PM | Permalink
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- For many years, well before Donald Trump was elected, immigration hawks complained about the practice of so-called "catch and release."
These observers just couldn't understand how migrants who were caught living illegally in the country, or attempting to enter, weren't just bounced back to their country of origin right away instead of being given an opportunity to "disappear into the shadows."
But that's not how it works.
Research has long shown that the vast majority of migrants who have been released into the U.S. show up for their court cases in front of immigration judges.
In fiscal year 2019, immigration judges decided a record 67,406 asylum cases, more than twice as many as in 2014. Even though 69% of those cases actually resulted in asylum, 99% of migrants appeared for the opportunity to plead their case, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, a nonpartisan research project that tracks staffing, spending and enforcement activities of the federal government.
And the time between arriving in the country and actually getting a determination had little to do with how faithful the immigrants were. Asylum applicants waited on average 1,030 days, or nearly three years, for their cases to be decided. A quarter of them even waited 1,421 days, or nearly four years, for their asylum decision.
Just imagine nervously waiting for the final decision on your immigration status and hearing news of people being deported after reporting for their regular check-in meetings. Add to that the headlines about the Trump administration trying to prevent others from even attempting to seek asylum. It must be terrifying.
It has to be, but the alternative -- being held in immigration custody for any amount of time -- is even worse.
A 40-year-old native of Angola and citizen of France died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody days before the new year. He had been in custody since early November and was taken on Dec. 12 to the Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque for "evaluation of emaciation, altered mental status and possible sepsis," according to an ICE news release. The man died of a bowel obstruction.
He was the fourth person to die in U.S. custody since October, according to BuzzFeed, and just the latest grim reminder of how migrant men, women and children fare while in the care of the U.S. government.
An earlier BuzzFeed investigation detailed a Department of Homeland Security memo that cited detainees receiving the wrong medicine, getting treatments only after long delays and suffering from what was described by a source as "grossly negligent" care.
Some detainees grew urgently sicker, while others were so distraught that they seriously lacerated themselves or committed suicide. An 8-year-old boy was misdiagnosed with swimmer's ear when he was actually suffering from an infection inside the skull -- the misdiagnosis cost the child part of the skull bone behind his forehead.
In the 2019 fiscal year, eight people died while in custody. Thousands more reportedly grew sicker than when they arrived or suffered other abuses such as lack of fresh water or food, lack of sanitary products like toilet paper or facilities in which to shower. Plus, they allegedly endured routine intimidation, use of physical force and sexual assault.
Why in the world would people who are awaiting an immigration court date show up for routine check-ins and for actual court dates when they could legitimately feel they are at risk for being immediately deported or put into the hellscape that is federal immigration custody, according to countless media investigations?
Why not just slip away and start fresh somewhere under a fake Social Security number, in an attempt to simply dodge or circumvent the system altogether?
Faith.
People who come to the U.S. fleeing the violence, repression or poverty of their home country believe in the American legal system, which promises justice for all -- especially the tired, the poor and those yearning to breathe free.
They believe in the promise of an America that will give them their day in court and, perhaps, the opportunity to eventually make a life here.
When you think about it, these seekers may have even stronger and deeper faith in the ideal of American justice than those who dehumanize them by wanting to eradicate, cage or "catch and release" them like animals.
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Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 05:38 PM | Permalink
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- My son, his best friend, Dave, and I were chatting over a pizza last weekend when Dave dropped some (absolutely incorrect) information: The elderly are forgoing nursing homes for cruise ships, because the room and board cost about the same, plus you get entertainment and travel.
Again -- this is not a real phenomenon. A few healthy, affluent retirees have spent a few years this way, but the cruise ship industry is in no way prepared to offer extended care for masses of frail elderly adults with complex medical conditions like chronic diseases and memory problems.
When I prompted our friend for more information, he said it made sense because cruise ships have onboard medical staff and morgues.
When further pressed -- in my son's spirited retelling, I'm described as in a rabid state, pouncing on his innocent pal -- Dave said he'd definitely read a news story about it.
Errrrr, actually, he knew he'd definitely seen it somewhere.
Mmmmmm, maybe on Reddit?
My son acts like at this point I had fire blazing from my eyes. I'll only admit that I was alarmed.
Dave is a bright young man who attended an excellent high school, just completed his first semester of college at a fancy East Coast university and is generally thoughtful and curious about the world.
But he passed on information he believed was fact because he saw "something" on a news aggregation and message board site, or "somewhere."
This gem about retiring to a cruise ship has been around since at least 2003, according to the fact-checking site Snopes.com. It started out as a bit of viral e-lore, and there havebeen a few examples of real-life extended stays. But today, otherwise legitimate news-gathering organizations post branded, sponsored-content "articles" (these are paid advertisements) about how to plan such a retirement alongside real news that was reported by professional journalists and vetted by editors.
I'm not picking on a kid I care about -- he's just an example of how incredibly ill-equipped our young people are to navigate an internet that's loaded with fake news, junk science and other "information" designed to fool them and everyone else.
In a 2018-19 national assessment of U.S. high school students, researchers at Stanford University found that two-thirds couldn't tell the difference between reported news stories and advertisements set off by the words "sponsored content" on the homepage of a popular news website.
And more than one-third of middle school students in the U.S. said that they "rarely" or "never" learned how to judge the reliability of sources, according to an analysis of 2018 survey data from The Nation's Report Card by the Reboot Foundation, a Paris-based nonprofit that promotes the teaching of evidence-based reasoning skills.
But while it's clear that students must be taught media-literacy skills, there are few teachers prepared to do so. Many people, not just teachers, tend to believe that their maturity and life experience make them naturally media literate -- i.e., not likely to fall for fake news or bad sources of information.
A small 2011 study of the effectiveness of teacher training on media literacy found that eight hours of in-person training -- quite a lot by the common standards of professional development -- prepared someone to pass on such skills. And the study also showed that, like anyone else, teachers need systematic, direct instruction on media literacy, and it must be practiced over time.
The bright side is that it's not rocket science. For the average reader, becoming media literate is generally simple: Find some good sources, check bold assertions and be aware of any fine print, like the basis of an author's expertise or their potential financial interest.
Now, no one can check every fact in every bit of text they read, but a high level of skepticism is warranted in this time of newsy advertisements and active disinformation campaigns. If it sounds too good (or too bad) to be true, it probably is. And since those types of pieces of "information" are what drive clicks, views and "reader engagement," they've proliferated.
Do yourself and your loved ones a service, bookmark a few key fact-checking websites and use them regularly (an extensive list can be found in the appendix of the Reboot Foundation's report, at reboot-foundation.org/fighting-fake-news).
Just try not to burn your less-informed friends and family with the fire from your newly illuminated eyes.
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Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 05:35 PM | Permalink
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- A fellow journalist friend recently posted photos of Julián Castro from last summer, showing the former presidential candidate in the wee hours of the morning after a long day on the campaign trail in Michigan.
There Castro was: still crisp in his suit, sitting ever-so-properly while chowing on a famed Coney Dog.
Oh Julián ... he never stood a chance. He's the super polite, clean-cut, high-achieving guy you'd be proud to bring home to your Mexican mom and dad. But, ultimately, he was the kind of guy undervalued by an electorate looking for a strong change agent.
Castro's brainy preparedness and youthful enthusiasm were overlooked on debate stages where many others were also whip-smart and on the young side.
Being Hispanic -- potentially the first Latino president -- and an effective spokesperson for the border when that region is in such turmoil never gained traction.
How could it? The media was too busy writing long-form love poems to Pete Buttigieg. The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was depicted as a triple threat (young, gay, war veteran), and he never had to battle the baseline believability test of being "presidential" enough to win (read as: white and male).
Worse, while Castro initially sought to relate to wider national audiences as being just like everyone else, Hispanic voters started getting antsy that he wasn't effectively emphasizing his identity as the son of an activist Latina mom.
Even as the media took turns elevating the different candidates (the dude who was "born" to be president, the professor, the sassy black prosecutor, the young tech guy, etc., etc.), Castro never really put the glimmer in many assignment editors' eyes.
Until he dared question Joe Biden, that is. During a debate in mid-September, Castro pressed the former vice president about whether he was backpedaling on his Medicare stance. There was a semantic difference between whether Biden would require those who wanted Medicare coverage to have to "opt in" to a plan or if they would be automatically enrolled and have to "opt out."
In an instant, Castro went from a boring good boy to an attacker who disrespects the elderly. About a minute later, he was all but forgotten.
I knew his candidacy would never be taken seriously because -- despite Donald Trump's efforts to demonize and deport Latinos -- America doesn't hate us for the most part. It merely overlooks us, indifferent to our contributions to this country's military legacy, pop music and food culture.
Despite Mexicans having a history in the United States that actually predates the country as a sovereign nation, Hispanics don't fit neatly within the white-black binary that the sin of slavery set as a foundation for white-nonwhite dynamics.
Not that ethnicity was Castro's biggest "flaw" as a candidate.
Americans love bad boys and, to a lesser extent, "nasty women" who will snark, fight and defy convention, generating tabloid-style headlines and fun memes to share.
The days of so-called boring leaders in the White House -- like bookish, humble Harry Truman -- are long gone. You can say whatever you want about Trump, but he has delivered a level of excitement that, it seems, the American people are gobbling up.
Which brings us to a potential Elizabeth Warren-Julián Castro ticket, now that Castro endorsed her for president.
(Long exhale ...)
Right now, this country needs strong, steady leaders with the wisdom to walk a fine line between reshaping institutions that need systemic change and reinvigorating the ones that serve the common good but require investment and guidance.
Even if you made the case for Warren and Castro being such leaders, my bet is on an electorate that actually likes swinging from extreme to extreme, studiously avoiding the middle.
But were Trump to give the smart May-December ticket a snappy, hateful nickname and position them as actual rivals -- that might be another story.
Trump taught us that simplistic, direct messages that are repeated over and over win the day. The Democrats need to run a ticket that can plainly and quickly explain what the candidates stand for, not against.
Considering that the Democratic Party is having a difficult time figuring out how far to the left it will shift to win younger voters while simultaneously capturing moderate swing votes, it's going to take a lot more than Mrs. and Mr. Nice Guy to beat Trump.
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Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2020, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 05:32 PM | Permalink
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- Ugh -- I know I'm such a downer all the time. So much policy, so many research reports and data-data-data about the most powerless people in society.
Then every New Year, I tell about how to be kinder, smarter, more active and less dependent on your digital devices -- all wonderful life goals that require time and energy.
But who has both?
People often ask me when I sleep.
Sleep? Ha, I wish.
A life consumed with reading, writing, battling anxiety and depression, taking care of dogs, cats, a spouse and a partner; houses that require cleaning, meals to cook and friends who shouldn't be ignored makes me like everyone else just trying to keep their head above water.
So this year's advice is to simply add more enjoyment to your life.
Who has the time or money to go buy fresh flowers all the time? Not me, but this was the year I discovered the unending aesthetic boost of fake flowers and plants. They add beauty and cheer to life without ever making you feel bad about letting them die.
Also, I finally figured out that grocery stores have really upped their game -- freshly cooked, to-go food offerings have gotten more healthful and cheaper. Lean poultry and meats, selections of roasted vegetables, mix-and-eat salads for two and fresh-cut fruit. If you're in charge of dinner, don't be a martyr every day, OK?
My favorite "life hack," though, is listening to audiobooks.
Nothing makes lengthy commutes, cold dog walks, loads of dishes or laundry and just about any other mundane task more enjoyable than a real page-turner read by a skilled audiobook reader.
I've been listening to audiobooks for nearly a decade, and their quality and abundance has improved while their price and ease of use have gotten even more attractive.
Is it really "reading," though?
Who cares?! Great books are masterfully written, thought-provoking and so enriching in countless ways, not the least of which is that they provide pure enjoyment. As long as you're not texting, watching TV or surfing the internet while listening, I say it counts as "real" reading.
I go back to "Moby Dick," "The Sea Wolf," "A Hundred Years of Solitude" and many other classics, but there are innumerable great books that are also excellent ear candy. Here are a few of my favorite fun listens from last year:
"Knife," the new novel by Jo Nesbo, the godfather of Nordic noir. Narrated by John Lee, who perfectly captures the gritty voice of the washed-out but ever-redeemed Norwegian detective Harry Hole, Nesbo returns with another murder, another set of prime suspects and more heartache for Hole. Yes, "Knife" is 12th in a series, but I promise: If you love a gritty whodunit, you'll drop right in without missing a beat and then have 11 more books to feast on when you're done.
"The Dutch House," Ann Patchett's latest novel, is surely amazing on paper because Patchett is a brilliant storyteller. But none other than Tom Hanks reads the audiobook, and he gives an incredible warmth and joy to the story of a brother and sister, whose twisting, turning lives always leads back to their childhood home. No one does family dynamics like Patchett -- and no one does nice, sometimes frustrated people like Hanks.
"The Institute," by Stephen King, is terrifying, not because there's gore or slashing or any of the horror tropes that people assume King uses as a substitute for thoughtful narrative, but because the world King creates is uncanny. Are super brilliant people harvested from America's far-flung corners to be used as conduits to manipulate world events through mind control? It seems extremely plausible, and reader Santino Fontana's performance of many very different characters makes the story feel all too real.
Another great listen is "Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms," written by John Hodgman of the "Judge John Hodgman" podcast and ever-so-sweetly narrated by the author. I'll admit I'm a total fool for anything Hodgman does, from podcasting to writing real books full of fake facts and acting roles that play up his brainy personality. In this, his second book of real, autobiographical vignettes, Hodgman uses his midlife ennui to poke fun at his amazing life. In the process he lets us peek behind several elite curtains -- and laugh uproariously at what lies beyond.
Trust me, listen to any of these books and your ears will soon be thanking me. Enjoy!
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Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2019, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 05:29 PM | Permalink
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- For many, this week will be chock-full of family dinners, making it a perfect time to talk about why they're great for bringing people together -- but not a silver bullet for ensuring children's academic success.
Family dinners are the stuff of legend. Throughout history, countless brilliant minds have credited their enhanced intellectual development to the act of sitting down for dinner with parents, siblings and extended family.
As these stories go, gathering for a communal meal allowed the successful person to learn about everything from household happenings and their parents' work concerns to the political issues of the day. More importantly, it allowed them to eventually take part in lively back-and-forth of discussions, during which positions needed to either be argued against or defended.
In 2017, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told CNBC that when he was a young entrepreneur, he felt confident having professional conversations with older business people because he'd grown up hearing his parents articulate their thoughts and ideas at the dinner table.
"I think family traditions that get you to come together and talk about what you're up to -- going on trips together, always sitting at dinner and sharing thoughts -- really made a huge difference," Gates said.
Basically, unless a family has some sort of serious dysfunction -- alcoholism, drug dependence and mental illness can make for some horribly painful family meals -- you can hardly go wrong with insisting that your crew gather to share some food and talk.
But, like so many other pieces of educational advice that seem like a slam-dunk to people with means, family dinners are neither a magical cure to what ails modern public education nor an adequate counter to families' economic struggles.
To start, though the majority (almost 71%) of children under 18 live in two-parent households, nearly 30% live either with one parent or with no parents at all. It's hard for kids to hear the interplay between two adults engaging in mature conversations about the world when there's only one caregiver present who's probably just doing the best they can to get dinner on the table.
And about those two-parent homes -- they aren't the be-all, end-all of what makes for successful children, either.
New research from Christina Cross, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of sociology at Harvard, found that living apart from a biological parent doesn't carry the same life-quality penalty for black kids as for their white peers. And, similarly, being raised in a two-parent family is not equally beneficial.
Cross contradicted previous analyses by using more than 30 years of national data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to demonstrate that family structure has a weaker relationship to the educational success of black adolescents than of white adolescents.
"I show that living in a single-mother family does not decrease the chances of on-time high school completion as significantly for black youths as for white youths," Cross wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed. "Conversely, living in a two-parent family does not increase the chances of finishing high school as much for black students as for their white peers."
The big factor at play in these instances was access to socioeconomic resources, such as a mother's educational level and generational wealth or business connections. Cross noted that, "although in general, youths raised in two-parent families are less likely to live in poverty, black youths raised by both biological parents are still three times more likely to live in poverty than are their white peers. Additionally, black two-parent families have half the wealth of white two-parent families."
So even though family dinners have been pushed as a surefire way to improve lifelong educational and earning outcomes, research going back to 2012 has bucked that notion by finding no causal relationship between family meal frequency and a child's success.
This isn't, of course, to say that two-parent and other families who are able to come together for a meal at least once a day aren't an ideal worth striving for.
But even as some tsk-tsk about "today's young people" or "unwed mothers," it's important to note that low-income children's academic performance isn't a matter of culture or character.
If we want families to have two parents, we must make it possible for them to thrive. And If we want families to eat together, we must first ensure that the most vulnerable among us actually have food to put on the table.
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Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2019, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 05:27 PM | Permalink
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA
CHICAGO -- For the uninitiated, it will come as a bit of a surprise that the familiar pronoun "they" has been named Merriam-Webster's word of the year.
No longer just another form of "them," which we use to refer to two or more people, "they" has been crowned the official nonbinary pronoun of the English language.
Basically, it's the word you'd use if you were to come upon a person -- oh, let's say ... me -- and they sort of looked female, but they were dressed kind of like a guy (let's say a NASA T-shirt, black skinny jeans, all-black Vans skateboarding shoes, no purse in sight).
Maybe I would be wearing only the barest hint of lipstick -- despite the pretty picture of me at the top of most of my columns, I look nothing like that on a day-to-day basis. I never wear makeup and, guess what? I shaved most of my hair off.
So if you were standing in a busy checkout line of a grocery store in a suburban town and the small child with you loudly blurted out: "Hey, that man just dropped his gift card!" you might be embarrassed. You also might say, "Oh, we should tell them so that they don't lose it."
And the kid with you would think nothing of it. Zero. Today's kids already live in a world where even rough-and-tumble 10-year-old boys who live on ranches will tell you, with incredulity that anyone would disagree, that "yeah, guys wear nail polish!" (I couldn't have made this up even if I'd tried, by the way.)
My haircut isn't nearly as edgy as those of some of the third-graders at the elementary schools where I've taught -- and my hair isn't even pink, green or purple.
Among young people, the idea that gender is a continuum, and not a binary limited only to male and female, is as normal as the air they breathe.
Some picture books in elementary schools already use the pronoun "they" for characters who have ambiguous gender. For that matter, some very popular books in classrooms openly hint at what it means to be nonbinary, or transgender, and treats the subject without judgment either way.
For us Generation X oldsters, using "they" and "them" instead of all the regular pronouns is uncomfortable because we're not used to it.
Even people who are nonbinary and total grammar sticklers don't particularly love it (yes, I'm speaking of myself here).
It just feels wrong.
But I persist even as I resist.
I struggle with labels -- always have. I never wanted to be "a girl." I hatehatehate being called a "Latina" and have been looked down upon by my less "colonized" Hispanic peers for the only label I've ever been proud of: American.
I've even voted for both Democrats and Republicans -- and found myself a lonely, independent "moderate" in a time when politics is very starkly binary: "You're either with us or against us!"
Now, I'm wary of labeling myself a "they/them" user because I don't want anyone to think, "Oh, she's one of those" before they even get to know me.
But times change, people change, the history of every language on earth is that itchanges, too.
Back when the title "Ms." for unmarried women in the workplace became common, some believed that insisting on being addressed as Ms. was a proclamation of militant feminism. Today, hardly anyone thinks that way.
If there's anything that the average fully female and fully male person needs to know, it is that no one is cramming political correctness down anyone's throat. It's not like the grammar police are going to come and give you a ticket for not using "they" or "them" all the time.
But it is a little different if you know that someone in your life uses the terms "they/them."
You'll know it's important to them if they specifically tell you they use those pronouns (it has gotten very common for people to put it in their email signature, wear pins on their clothes, or declare it when introduced).
If this happens to you, don't sweat grammar, usage or political correctness -- just be polite and show them respect.
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Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com or follow her on Twitter @estherjcepeda.
(c) 2019, Washington Post Writers Group
Posted at 05:23 PM | Permalink