Esther J. Cepeda

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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

 

 

 

Latino journalists weigh in on Midterm Elections 2018

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- Incredibly, Hispanics can simultaneously be the center of a national conversation yet be virtually ignored when it comes to discussing immigration as a factor in the elections.

With few exceptions, Latino journalists, political scientists, demographers and immigration experts -- were all but shut out of English-language election-night reporting and analysis that, in many cases, focused on the role immigration and Hispanics played.

"How can we be 59 million Latinos in the U.S. and not be invited to the news desk? MSNBC had a Latinx reporter from USA Today -- ONE. Shaking My Head," tweeted Rebecca Aguilar, the founder of the Latina Journalists Facebook group and diversity chair of the Society of Professional Journalists.

This is why I took to Twitter to ask Latino journalists for the election-night insights the whole country should have benefitted from but didn't.

Many of the responses I received said that the dearth of Latino journalists and pundits was especially galling in light of this year's big headlines. "Latinos were suddenly disappeared from election coverage despite Hurricane Maria, [the] Puerto Rico vote, Central American migration, border-security issues, candidate wins, etc.," said Tanzina Vega, the host of WNYC's "The Takeaway."

Journalists on the ground were eager to talk about delays, broken machines, rejected ballots and poor customer service at the polls, misfires that were amplified by underwhelming investments in basic Latino voter outreach.

"We don't have leaders in place that are making our votes important. Here in Chicago, at my polling place, there was no Spanish translator," said Susan Rivera, a freelance writer at WGN-TV. "I had to help a Mexican couple in their 80s, two elderly Puerto Rican women [and] an 18-year-old new citizen vote. The 18-year-old I helped stood out the most ... she had basic, fundamental questions about voting. Who is reaching out to Latinos ahead of elections?"

Not only did campaigns underinvest in helping new Latino voters cast ballots, there were reports from all over the country that organizations providing interpreters for languages like Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Hindi and Bengali weren't allowed to translate for the people they showed up to assist.

"The Democratic Party has A LOT of work to do with Latino/a voters. A LOT," said Maria Hinojosa, president of the Futuro Media Group and co-host of the "In The Thick" political podcast. "They could have delivered Beto [O'Rourke]/[Andrew] Gillum. And then the perennial question: Who are these Republican Latinx voters in Texas and Florida? What moves them? And if they vote Republican now under Trump, then, will they ever turn away?"

Suzanne Gamboa of NBC News noted three details that often get overlooked: "Latino Tailored outreach in Spanish and English has impact. There are still enough Latinos voting Republican to help Republicans win in some places. [And] the 'suburban vote' includes Latinos."

Indeed, most of the writers that weighed in said something along the lines of what freelancer Claudia Garcia-Rojas shared: "Latinx people are treated as a monolith. There's little to no reporting, for example, on why such a big percentage of Latinx people voted for GOP folks. The face of Latinx issues are Mexicans, but even within the Mexican diaspora, there are differing political views. Better reporting by media, please."

Questions about why so many Latinos vote Republican referenced Democratic Rep. O'Rourke's loss to incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas. But even though O'Rourke -- who is not Hispanic -- lost the race, his Latino-centric campaign sent a few clear messages.

"A bilingual and bicultural Anglo was the major force behind driving Texas Hispanic turnout," said Roque Planas, a national immigration and political reporter for The Huffington Post. "Targeting a message to specific Latino communities and staking out clear positions on their issues is as important -- or maybe more so -- than the ethnicity of the candidate."

Multiplatform journalist Matthew Reich, editor of the "In Focus: America" newsletter, added, "I think it has to be understood a candidate needs an 'overall' message for Latinx people beyond immigration." Journalism student Luciano Gonzalez of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro added, "In many cases, it wasn't the big media attention and celebrity endorsements that won the day for either party but solid ground game and organizing."

I'll let Refinery29 reporter Andrea Gonzalez-Ramírez close out with a thought on the opportunity that last week's elections illuminated: "Women of color, including Latinas, are 10,000 percent electable. But there needs to be institutional support, both from Latinx and mainstream organizations, in order to create a pipeline for future candidates."

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

What can the U.S. learn from China's education methods?

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- Here's a shout-out to fellow gray-hairs who learned math the "old-fashioned" way, by memorizing simple formulas along with facts about addition and multiplication. This technique is anathema in today's classrooms.

But might the old ways ever come back into vogue?

I would have said "when pigs fly," but then I read Lenora Chu's can't-put-down book "Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve." Chu writes about her first-hand experience with the alarming -- and ultimately effective -- Chinese way of educating children.

I picked up Chu's book out of mere curiosity about what it must be like to work as a journalist while trying to raise a family in a country so different from our own. And while the details of Chu's son Rainey's difficult start at an exclusive Shanghai preschool are enthralling, the real story is about how Chinese culture helps explain the country's consistent dominance of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).

The secret is, obviously, that it's a test-crazy country. But those tests are laid upon such foundational principles as reverence for teachers, respect for math and a firm belief in the transformative power of hard work.

"China affords teachers more status than any other country, a global education nonprofit found in a 2013 survey (though I had proof enough in the jitter that overtakes my hands when I talk to Rainey's teachers)," Chu writes.

It goes far beyond mere professional status. According to Chu, doing well in school is "the ultimate way to respect your parents, since good grades and test scores are the path to financial stability, and the ability to provide for" parents in old age.

A child's obedience to and respect for elders transfers to teachers, whose authority is absolute and never questioned -- not even by Western parents who, like Chu, believe children should be given at least some measure of autonomy over themselves in order to mature and learn at their own pace.

In addition to the much-maligned rat race of grueling standardized testings -- which serve as the gatekeeper to most jobs and careers in China -- is the Chinese attitude toward ability.

The Chinese believe in luck and fate, but their guiding philosophy is that anything is possible if you work hard enough. Teachers and parents start with the assumption that every child is able to become a disciplined, focused learner. Chu writes that children are then reminded at every turn that "if there's a goal worth accomplishing, day-to-day life might be absolutely and miserably unpleasant for a spell. ... Hard work is the most important thing."

In stark contrast, Americans are conditioned to believe in innate ability -- hereditary traits that either make you good at something or not, regardless of effort. This is, at least in part, why Americans are unashamed to go around saying "I'm not good at math," whereas the Chinese, as a whole culture, value math every bit as much as we value reading ability.

Lastly, of course, are the differences -- rigor, extreme challenge -- in the actual methods for teaching subjects like science and math.

And, yes, it's true the Chinese use -- gasp! -- rote memorization, skills drilling and repetition to teach the fundamentals.

"In early science education, especially, 'many more children learned from direct instruction than from self-discovery,'" Chu noted. "A 2015 OECD report found that teacher-directed instruction is actually associated with higher scores in science (and inquiry-based instruction with lower scores). Kids in countries with more teacher-directed instruction were also more likely to express interest in pursuing a science-related career. I most enjoyed the stark takedown of a group of education researchers who wrote in the Educational Psychologist that 'the past half-century of empirical research' provides 'overwhelming and unambiguous evidence' that minimally guided instruction is essentially a failure.'"

Music to this teacher's ears! I've seen the damage done to students who can't thrive without structured instruction and opportunities to practice until attaining true mastery.

Not all of China's methods are transferrable (or desirable) outside their culture, but the United Kingdom is piloting direct instruction of whole-class, mastery-math teaching. That's because, as Chu quotes an architect of the PISA academic rankings, "'The Chinese memorize what needs memorizing and use the rest of the time to go very deep in conceptual understanding.'"

If it works for U.K. students and they pivot toward deep understanding of math and away from mile-wide, inch-deep curriculum, us oldsters may stand a good chance at being able to help our grandkids memorize their math facts someday.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

Latinos in Trump's America don't scare so easily

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- President Trump is playing the media, his detractors and his supporters with his pre-election stunts. Overruling the Constitution to end birthright citizenship? Sending troops to the border to combat the supposed hordes of potentially terrorist-filled migrant caravans?

Yeah, right.

These are the kind of shiny distractions Trump uses to dog-whistle at his base, hoping to satisfy their craving for fewer immigrants in this country, particularly dark-skinned ones.

The troops the president wants to deploy to our southern border will be able to do nothing more than provide logistical support to the Border Patrol, such as building tents and shoveling manure. That's because using the military to enforce immigration or criminal laws at the border -- or to perform any other law enforcement activities -- is itself illegal.

Plus, scads of legal experts, and influential Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan, know that a push to end birthright citizenship will never bear fruit. The rest of us can take cold comfort in understanding that it's all basically campaigning to energize hard-right voters ahead of the election.

It's also just one more example of brazen hypocrisy to suggest a radical use of executive authority to keep immigrants shut out of American life. Meanwhile, Republicans screamed bloody murder every time President Obama tried to use an executive order to mitigate immigrant suffering.

But make no mistake: Although Trump's actions are primarily for the purposes of using hatred to drive people to the polls, his secondary objective of making life harder for immigrants and anyone who might sound or look like one is also going swimmingly.

In September, elementary school students in La Quinta, California, were celebrating their Mexican heritage by donning brightly colored folkloric costumes and performing traditional dances at the library. They were told to scrub their presentations of any references to Mexico, and the coordinating teacher was told that next time the students should perform patriotic songs like "Yankee Doodle."

And last week's Halloween brought with it a raft of racist costume news stories, like the one about the Kentucky dad who thought it'd be cute to dress his 5-year-old as Adolf Hitler and himself as a Nazi soldier. A news story about the guy's extracurricular activities as a Civil War and World War II re-enactor noted that he had dressed up as a Confederate soldier last year, and his Facebook account is littered with "White Pride Doesn't Mean Hate" posts.

None of this is any kind of coincidence. President Trump has valorized white supremacists while demonizing anyone who isn't white or Christian. As a result we're living in a country where Jewish people are again being slaughtered in their places of worship just for being Jewish -- just like African-Americans since before the Charleston church shooting and to this day.

But back to the border.

Yes, the border, where crossings have been declining for years since a peak in 2000.

And birthright citizenship, in the country where births to unauthorized immigrants has been on the decline since 2009.

And to Hispanics, 54 percent of whom, according to the Pew Research Center, say it has become more difficult to live in this country as a Latino since the 2016 presidential election.

Trump and his acolytes apparently want to make sure it stays that way, but quite possibly are simply reacting to their own fears that Latino voters will someday come in to political power that they could command if they were more reliable voters.

Perhaps they should be scared. Intimidation tactics can be a double-edged sword, with the potential to either cow a people or galvanize them.

Nothing I've seen suggests that Latinos and other voters of color are giving up. But I have seen plenty of flabbergasted and sorrowful social-media posts from friends who are, for the first time in their lives, concerned for their safety and well-being in the country they've called home for generations.

According to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund, more than 7.8 million Latinos are expected to cast ballots this year. This would represent a 15 percent increase in turnout and a 6.9 percent increase in the Latino share of the vote from 2014.

So, bring it on Trump. You can try your best, but take it from me and about 30 million other Latinos who are eligible to vote this week: We don't scare so easily.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

Colleges need to embrace diversity, not exploit it

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- My guiding philosophy in life has always been to go where I'm not wanted. This includes the insular, majority-white world of journalism, the insular, majority-white world of public education, and the insular, majority-white world of governing nonprofit organizations.

I've always said that those institutions needed me more than I needed them, because diversity equips them to speak more effectively to an increasingly multicultural America. It was an economic pitch, one that scores of Fortune 500 corporations have adopted and profited from.

But marketing wisdom tells us that the profit motive for diversity only works for products or services looking to gain market share -- luxury products are basically immune to changing tastes because their appeal is exclusivity.

This is why it's unlikely, despite ongoing court challenges, that Harvard University will be forced to change much about its methods for admitting what it believes is the right mix of students for its campus.

A key part of Harvard's appeal is how difficult it is to get into. This is what gives graduates from elite universities so much cache in the marketplace -- though apparently not enough to overcome racism, considering that studies have shown that white candidates with degrees from highly selective universities still get more employer responses per resume than black candidates.

The truth is that, even today, I would jump at the opportunity to study at Harvard, but I fear it would be fraught.

You see, even though I wish more Asians, Latinos, Native Americans and African-Americans could go to Harvard, I cringe at the thought of those students -- with all their hopes, dreams and sense of accomplishment for just getting in -- being on campus at least partly for the sake of enabling schools to boast about their diversity statistics.

Schools that have actively worked at being designated as Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs) have made commitments of time and money in the form of diverse teaching staffs and grass-roots outreach to those communities.

But elite universities are not primarily dedicated to nurturing first-generation college students for the sole purpose of promoting social mobility.

Harvard's mission statement is lofty, seeking to create "a diverse living environment, where students live with people who are studying different topics, who come from different walks of life and have evolving identities [where] intellectual transformation is deepened and conditions for social transformation are created."

This sounds pretty awesome, but I've been down that road before. Trust me, being the campus diversity -- and representing a whole demographic for a mostly white peer group -- is soul-deadening.

I secured a full-ride scholarship to a prestigious graduate program in marketing at Northwestern University, but became every class' "official Latina," routinely called upon to enlighten my white classmates about Hispanic consumers' struggles in the barrio with English-language acquisition, gangs, and discrimination -- none of which I'd ever experienced.

Being the diversity-scholarship recipient, which is how it felt the other students saw me, was no fun.

This is the opposite of how I've felt when observing the warm, nurturing environments of HSIs like Chicago's Dominican University, which is nearly half Latino, about a third white, and 17 percent Asian, black and international.

On a campus that has made its mission to serve Latinos and other students of color, it's difficult to imagine anyone feeling like they were admitted for the sole purpose of rounding out the life experiences and social interactions of people so rich they've been sheltered from having to get to know people of other races.

Yes, this is a thing -- for at least a decade, academic research has found that school integration potentially benefits white students more than students of color. Even scholars who research bilingual or dual-language programs have worried that white students benefit from Latino students' culture and native-language skills more than the students working to learn English while maintaining their mother tongue.

What it all boils down to is that students are increasingly seen by universities as consumers with choices. And while all high school students should aim high, they should also aim to be welcomed at schools that are looking out for them, rather than proffering an added diversity benefit for a college's core, white, customers.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

R.I.P Sears, I'll miss your snacks and cartoons

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- I know nostalgia is a bad look, but please bear with me -- this Chicagoan is feeling the Sears bankruptcy deep in the solar plexus.

Although to this day my hatred of shopping is a tremendous disappointment to my mother, who has no one except my poor dad to drag to the mall, I still mourn the passing of the department store that loomed so large in my childhood.

Hours that felt like eternities were spent crawling under racks of women's clothing, sitting in front of banks of televisions and trying on ill-fitting clothes for a new school year. I also remember getting shooed out of the sports-equipment department for playing pool on the floor-model tables or, alternately, out of the home department for tucking myself into the lushly pillowed miniature display beds.

Especially at Christmas time, I put in what felt like overnight shifts at Sears stores all over Chicago's North Side as my mom struggled to find just the right glove-scarf-wallet set for an uncle or the perfect outfits for our family pictures.

But it isn't as though there weren't many joys to be had at Sears.

I'm old enough to remember when my neighborhood location had a full-service cafeteria. Oh, how my mouth still waters at the thought of the chocolate cake, the green Jell-O with whipped cream and the domes of pudding that awaited me at the end of the cafeteria-style food line.

And they had a candy counter.

Never mind those fancy-schmancy Marshall Field's chocolate Frango mints. Our Sears had a full-service bulk candy counter that attracted little kids, like me, who would press our faces up to the glass-paneled windows in front of the bins holding chocolate-covered raisins, malted milk balls, candied orange slices, roasted nuts, chocolate stars, puffy orange "circus peanuts," and shiny gumballs.

The clerk would portion out your candy with a giant metal scoop, weigh it on an industrial stainless-steel scale -- and hand it to you in a sheet of paper expertly twisted into a cone before your eyes.

And the popcorn! So often you'd walk into the store and instantly smell the hot, fresh buttered popcorn, often flavored with cheese or caramel. It was hand-dipped when you paid for it and delivered in what, even then, were old-timey, red-striped wax bags.

Another thing I loved at my neighborhood store is that there was a cashier on the top floor where customers paid their monthly Sears bill in person. In the waiting area there were a couple of coin-operated cartoon booths that someone had rigged to play for the kiddies even without putting in a coin, so you could get a nice dose of Heckle and Jeckle, Woody Woodpecker and Mighty Mouse while mom paid on her layaway or the credit card.

It's silly to get sentimental about the closing of an icon of merchandising, a triumph of capitalism -- I haven't stepped foot in a Sears for, probably, a decade. I hate shopping, remember?

But I still love flipping through old Sears catalogs. Sure, the big-hair time capsules of the 1980s and early 1990s (the classic Big Book was discontinued in 1993) are fun when you spot one at a garage sale.

I proudly own a Fall 1909 Consumer's Guide (a 1979 reproduction, alas) and little else gives me the pleasure I derive from Sears' lists of "Factories That We Own Or Control In Addition To Our 40-Acre Plant."

There was a saw factory, a cream separator factory (in addition to the "economy cream separator" factory), one for vehicles, another for washing machines and others for making agricultural implements, furniture, paint, shoes, cameras, guns and revolvers, organs (plus other instruments) and wallpaper, just to name a few.

For each lament that Amazon is subsuming the retail industry, we can look back at a catalog that sometimes ran for thousands of pages and offered price lists and ultra-detailed line drawings of everything from "genuine diamonds and solid gold 14-karat mountings" to horse saddles, miners' tents, disc talking machines (phonographs), Dr. Hammond's Nerve and Brain Tablets ("A great remedy for weak men") and brass, E-flat cornets.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, is said to have dreamed of building "the next Sears," and so he has.

Rest in peace, old Sears.

Those of us who love scrolling through Amazon.com for motion-activated toilet-bowl night lights, velvet-lined caskets or clamps for do-it-yourself nose jobs will enjoy it while it lasts -- and then, surely, leap toward whatever the next "Cheapest Supply House on Earth" turns out to be.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

Malnutrition and obesity are a national security threat

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- My 17-year-old son and I lock horns nightly when bedtime approaches and he hasn't consumed his pre-negotiated 7 ounces of milk for the day.

It's the same battle that comes up at dinner if he didn't eat his daytime serving of fruit. Our meal then becomes a slog of cramming the bare minimum of fruit and vegetables down him to aid his growing skeleton.

"You don't want to be like your brother, do you?" I ask, referencing his older sibling who was raised under the influence of early-2000s parenting books that said to ignore how our own parents did things and not force toddlers and young children to clean their plates or eat foods they didn't care for until their palates matured. "He had two broken bones by the time he was your age!"

So my younger son powers through dinners garnished with his short list of tolerated green vegetables, a multivitamin and vitamin C supplement, and a dose of fish oil since he'd sooner saw off his own leg than let fish pass through his lips.

He's a young adult who spent his formative years in a daycare setting and then a public school system that made him believe that French-toast sticks drenched in pancake syrup with fruit-flavored sugar-water mislabeled as juice was a proper breakfast. He was habituated to cheese crackers as a "snack" and to pizza and chocolate milk as daily lunch options.

At least he's trim and fit. But I fear that the day he moves out, his nutrition will start suffering.

Hey, we tried -- in no small part because my husband and I had the privilege of going to college, where we learned about nutrition and the importance of physical fitness. In that sense, we breathe the same rarified air as the policymaking elites. Yet these influential power players fail to recognize that America's obesity crisis is not only a health emergency, but also a national security risk.

"I talk a lot about this in Washington, D.C., where people look at each other in disbelief when I say obesity is a national security threat," said Tom Spoehr, a retired lieutenant general who served in the Army for 36 years and is a member of "Mission: Readiness," a bipartisan coalition of more than 700 top retired military leaders who advocate for children's wellness. "They say, 'How can this be? Everyone I see is healthy, they're out running, I see everyone at SoulCycle; this doesn't resonate.' That's especially how the media outlets on the coasts see it.'"

Spoehr told me it's a constant struggle to get people to understand that millions all over the country are overweight and suffer from malnutrition (a seemingly oxymoronic state that occurs when people take in too many high-calorie, low-nutrient foods) to the point that the military can't fully staff its ranks.

Nationwide, 71 percent of young people between the ages of 17 and 24 don't qualify for military service. And out of that group, obesity disqualifies 31 percent of them from serving, according to "Unhealthy and Unprepared: National security depends on promoting healthy lifestyles from an early age," the third and latest health report from Mission Readiness.

This past year, the Army fell short of its recruiting goal by 6,500 people because they couldn't find young people who wanted to serve and were in good enough shape to pull it off.

What's more, even those who do make it fare worse in the field than previous generations.

"While not all injury can be traced to obesity, one study found that there were 72 percent more medical evacuations from Iraq and Afghanistan for stress fractures, serious sprains, and other similar injuries -- injuries associated with poor fitness and nutrition -- than for combat wounds," noted the report.

Spoehr underscores that there are no easy fixes: "We're going to need a web of solutions -- there's no one federal law that is going to change this."

It's going to take everything from more recess and gym classes in schools to enabling a culture of cooking real, healthful food at home, better food consumer education and many other changes to modern life.

Most of all, our citizenry must recognize how truly unwell the 40 percent of adults and 20 percent of kids ages 6 to 19 who are obese are. And then they must understand that countless political, economic and sociocultural factors like the interests of big-food corporations and our fetishization of junk food will need to be upended in order to restore a bare minimum of health to vast numbers of Americans.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

The Nation's Civic Health Depends on all of us

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- You can't throw a rock these days without hitting a book, news headline or podcast episode about the impending end of democracy.

I'm no doomsayer but, yes, it's coming.

Not just because of increasing political polarization, the influence of corporate money on elections or any of the other usual suspects. It'll be just plain apathy and ignorance that finally do us in.

Let's start with these little nuggets of information. Of the 1,000 randomly selected American adults who recently took a multiple-choice quiz:

-- Only 13 percent knew when the U.S. Constitution was ratified, with most incorrectly thinking it occurred in 1776.

-- 60 percent didn't know which countries the United States fought in World War II.

-- 57 percent did not know how many justices serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

-- Only 24 percent could correctly identify one thing Benjamin Franklin was famous for, with 37 percent believing he invented the lightbulb.

-- 12 percent incorrectly thought Gen. Dwight Eisenhower led troops in the Civil War; 6 percent thought he was a commander in the Vietnam War. (He served in WWII.)

I could go on with more startling results from the quiz conducted by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (WWNFF) but, frankly, it's too depressing.

This level of cluelessness doesn't just happen in a vacuum. It's been coming on for some time as civics education has gotten crowded out of public school curricula by an increased push to get more kids proficient in reading, math and writing.

We'll have to wait until next year to learn how our nation's students fared on the National Assessment of Educational Progress civics assessment in 2018 -- the test is administered every four years -- but the 2014 test was a sad scene.

Scores among 8th graders showed no improvement from their dismal level in 2010. Less than one-quarter of students scored at the level of "proficient" or better, and only about half said they found their civics coursework interesting "often" or "always."

No one knows where the blame lies for today's students being low-performing in civics.

It could be anything from poor teaching to the educational trend of telling students that rote memorization is unnecessary in the age of the internet search engine. Perhaps the educational philosophy of "constructivist" learning -- which means that students create their own knowledge based on their own experiences -- just isn't moving the needle.

But none of those exactly explain why, as the WWNFF's survey noted, people 65 years and older scored the best. Only 19 percent of people under 45 passed the quiz, with 81 percent scoring a 59 percent or lower.

Ironically, there is a little-known subsection of the American population that has passed a similar test -- 10 questions on U.S. civics from a pool of 100 questions -- and there's no question that they did so because passing was deeply personally meaningful to them.

I'm speaking, of course, about naturalized U.S. citizens.

They take a speaking, reading, writing and civics test as just a small part of their application for citizenship. Then, at their ceremony, they swear to support our Constitution, renounce allegiance to all other countries, and vow to bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law.

So how can we make civics and history personally meaningful to young people in school and to the adults who are navigating the governmental structures that have so much influence over nearly every aspect of their lives?

There may be no alternative. As climate change-related weather events decimate whole regions of our country, trade pacts continue to reshape the American economy and voter behavior keeps being threatened by partisan lawmaking and foreign interference, we will need to hold our elected leaders accountable for ensuring that we aren't doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Whether you live in a rural area that doesn't have adequate internet connectivity or in an urban enclave where clean, lead- and chemical-free water isn't readily available, chances are you're part of a community that needs to know how its government works now more than ever.

Every impending disaster has the potential to also be an interesting opportunity. You can either feel as though the country you grew up in and love is changing too quickly for you to adapt and thrive, or you can commit yourself to understanding how we got here and how, together, we can change direction for the better.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

 

Sandeep Jauhar brings the heart home in "Heart: A History"

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- My husband claims that every Spanish song he's ever heard includes the word corazon. So if he doesn't understand anything else, he knows it has to do with matters of the heart.

In love songs, as in life, the heart is at the very center of things, serving as a vessel for endless metaphors: It can be big, small, brave, chicken-y, the seat of the soul, a fountain of emotions, or just a machine susceptible to high-stakes plumbing issues.

The heart is also the apparatus through which Dr. Sandeep Jauhar, author of the captivating memoirs "Intern" and "Doctored," has confronted his own mortality as well as the death of both grandfathers and his mother.

In his latest book, "Heart: A History," Jauhar takes readers on an intensely personal journey that started the moment he noticed he was having a hard time breathing after walking up stairs. Jauhar wondered whether his work as a first responder on 9/11 was catching up with him or if his ancestry was closing in.

For a reader like me who usually devours almost every popular medicine, psychology and science book that comes down the pike -- whether about cannibalism, teeth, cadavers, nutrition or men who mistake their wives for hats -- it takes a lot more than a midlife crisis-induced trip into the inner workings of a particular organ to make a book worth the read.

Jauhar delivers on emotional, technical and historical fronts.

For however many books about advances in medicine I've read, I had never heard about the story of Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, an African-American physician who performed what is believed to have been the first open-heart surgery.

As Jauhar puts it, "Until that summer day in 1893, surgery had scarcely ever been attempted on a live human heart. Though it is difficult to fathom today, when invasive cardiac treatments are at the forefront of medicine, the heart was essentially off-limits to doctors until almost the beginning of the 20th century. All major human organs, including the brain, had been operated on, but the heart stood apart, encased in historical and cultural prohibitions much thicker than its membranous pericardium."

In 1891, Williams, a self-taught surgical apprentice who completed his training at the medical college that eventually became Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, had set up Provident, the first African-American owned and operated hospital in America.

He had to invite the public into his operating room once a week to create trust with a marginalized community that had learned, through years of mistreatment, that modern medicine was not set up for blacks to have successful health outcomes.

Williams' incredible success story is tempered by others in "Heart: A History" that reflect some of the racism that has created fear of mistreatment at the hands of supposed healers.

In the late 1950s, when C. Walton Lillehei, pioneer of a procedure that used catheters and pumps to circulate blood between two humans in order to repair heart defects, needed a volunteer to help an ailing black man, even the volunteers of last resort -- white inmates at a penitentiary -- refused to help the black patient. Lillehei resorted to using a dog's lung to oxygenate the man's blood and he quickly died on the operating table.

Jauhar also tells us about women, like Mary Hopkinson Gibbon, who was essential in developing the first heart-lung machines that have made modern surgical heart procedures possible.

Mary assisted her husband, Dr. John Gibbon, in the painstaking work of performing early experiments on stray cats and dogs. This work yielded a precise method for keeping the animals alive for several hours by circulating blood and oxygen with a machine so the heart could be operated on safely.

Jauhar relays other historical events, current-day case studies and personal experiences in beautiful, poetic language. The book wraps up with a call to investigate how psychosocial factors like interpersonal connectedness, joy, state of mind, the safety of our neighborhoods and the environment affect our health and well-being.

No one knows whether the human heart's journey from being seen as an "inviolable sanctuary" to what one writer called "an object of surgical assault" will eventually result in sure-fire medical technology for extending life beyond our current spans.

But if you learn nothing else from "Heart: A History," know that your views on this promise will vary depending on how good you feel after a brisk walk. Maybe listening to some sappy love songs can help.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

Women are increasingly finding their voices, and they're going to use them

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- Would it surprise you to learn that even in academia -- a supposed bastion of liberalism and equality -- women are two-and-a-half times less likely than men to ask questions in academic seminars?

In a new article published in the journal PLOS One, researchers crunched data on 250 talks at 35 institutions in 10 countries as well as survey responses from about 600 academics in various disciplines around the world. Their conclusion: Both men and women sometimes don't ask questions when they want to but, unlike men, women said they hesitated for reasons like "not feeling clever enough" or not being able to "work up the nerve."

It's a particularly important finding because these numbers were collected before Trump was elected in 2016, and they will doubtlessly shift dramatically now that the Trump era has opened the floodgates to unprecedented ire toward women -- and what is quickly becoming a muscular backlash to it.

During the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, we got to see a nominee to the Supreme Court -- usually an avatar of balance and temperance -- display stunning impertinence to a female senator. He responded to Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar's question about whether he'd ever blacked out by turning the question around on her, as if she were the one accused.

After a break, during which he surely consulted with his lawyers, Kavanaugh apologized to Klobuchar. But it doesn't change that fact that, based on the judge's fiery demeanor, the outcome would have been much different had the tables been turned. As Klobuchar commented to CBS the day after: "If I was in his courtroom and acted like that, he would have thrown me out."

At a bare minimum, no doubt.

A few days later, there was the spectacle between President Trump and Cecilia Vega, ABC News' senior White House correspondent. Trump picked Vega to ask the first question at the Rose Garden news conference announcing the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

As Vega reached for the microphone, the president remarked, "She's shocked that I picked her. She's in a state of shock."

Vega responded: "I'm not. Thank you, Mr. President."

Trump, with a snide tone said, "That's OK, I know you're not thinking. You never do."

Vega was, no doubt, incredulous and visibly annoyed as she said, "I'm sorry?" -- not as an apology but as in, "Come again?"

But Trump dissembled and said, "No, go ahead."

The next day, at a rally in Mississippi, Trump repeatedly mocked Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers. Trump called those who support Ford -- another way of saying "women" -- "really evil people."

During the years of Trump's candidacy and presidency, people of color have felt that white Americans have been emboldened to proudly admit to their racist beliefs and take them out on unsuspecting dark-skinned men and women.

The same goes for misogyny, a condition as old as the hills. But hatred of women -- actual violence-inducing hatred against women -- gained momentum after Hillary Clinton's failed run for the presidency.

Absurdly, in the era of the #MeToo movement, with its well-attended women's marches and a raft of female office-seekers in the upcoming midterm elections, there's an emerging narrative being pushed by some on the right that posits that it is men who are in danger -- of being victimized or having their lives ruined by the angry women they've mistreated.

Don't worry, this male victimhood narrative isn't going to take. There are too many women out there willing to come forward with their stories of humiliation, abuse, belittlement and rape to be disregarded as partisan plants, deployed to escalate the culture wars between the right and left.

And, based on what I've seen so far, there are too many men who care about the physical and emotional safety and well-being of the mothers, sisters, wives, friends, colleagues and bosses in their lives to pretend that we aren't in the middle of a watershed moment in history.

One in which men will become acutely aware of the potential consequences of disrespecting women and change their behaviors accordingly.

It may not happen as soon or as quickly as we would like, but right now this correction feels inevitable.

The world has changed a lot since 2016, and it has made women find their voices. And, increasingly, they aren't satisfied with just asking questions -- they're demanding answers.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

Alyshia Galvez: How NAFTA destroyed the way some cultures eat

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- A few weeks ago, my aunt came to visit from Mexico for the first time in nearly 20 years. During her month-long stay, my family and I were treated to hand-made sopes -- a deep-dish tortilla topped with beans, meat, cheese and a meticulously minced raw salsa -- and pozole, a chicken, corn and hominy soup so time-consuming to prepare that my mom usually only makes it at New Year's.

These kinds of from-scratch, labor-intensive meals are what Alyshia Galvez, a professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at Lehman College/City University of New York, calls milpa-based cuisine, a term derived from the Spanish words for "maize field."

In her new book, "Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico," Galvez describes this style of cooking as found across a wide variety of regions in Mexico. They share a core set of ingredients like ground corn and the kinds of fresh vegetables and plants -- squash, beans, tomatoes, chiles -- that can be grown in a small field close to home to create meals that are made fresh immediately prior to their consumption.

This way of eating is nearly the opposite of what is generally considered "Mexican food" in the United States (especially if you stop to consider the brain-numbing reality that a Harris poll recently found: Taco Bell is Americans' favorite Mexican restaurant). And it is in danger of becoming extinct.

That's because NAFTA, and other trade policies, have incentivized people all over the world to migrate for work or take jobs in factories for low wages -- breaking up their way of life. This has made an attractive alternative of the super-cheap, ultra-processed foodstuffs that industrialized food manufacturers are increasingly finding it harder to sell to nutrition-conscious Americans.

"Along with their counterparts in other countries, rural and low-income Mexicans have provided a market for producers of industrial foods to offset declining sales in the United States," Galvez writes. "[Yet] economic trends and policy decisions that have taken ancestral ways of eating out of the reach of the average Mexican citizen [are also] making traditional foods available as a high-value, high-status commodity to be 'elevated' and reinterpreted by global elite chefs."

In a recent interview, Galvez told me that she became interested in connecting the dots between trade, food policy, migration and health in both the U.S. and Mexico when she started seeing loved ones in Mexico becoming ill with the same kind of weight-related diseases -- obesity, diabetes and heart disease -- that afflict so many Americans, even though those people never migrated.

"I wasn't really aware of those interconnections at all; trade wasn't something I was particularly interested in," Galvez said, "But I pulled on one string and all these other strings unraveled. The story of how NAFTA has altered the food system in the whole continent, and the health effects, affects every single one of us."

Galvez touches on such issues as the rise of the avocado, how soda taxes get watered down by corporate interests and the role of "personal responsibility" in how populations eat (spoiler: make fresh fruits and vegetables more expensive and harder to find and poor people will turn to cheap, processed foods). She ultimately wants people to understand the unintended consequences of wide-ranging trade deals, and she does it by appealing to our self-interest.

"Sure, we get access to fresh fruits and vegetables from Mexico year-round, but the takeaway problem is fundamentally about democracy," Galvez said. "When these deals are negotiated behind closed doors by the executive branch, with Congress then voting up or down, we all lose, because these policies affect 99 percent of the population in three countries, yet we are not at the bargaining table. Very specific interest groups and corporations are at the table, and they get their well-defined wish lists met. If we care about democracy, then we have to care about representation and about who is being taken into consideration when these deals are made."

Still, as President Trump renegotiated the trade pact of what will reportedly be called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), Galvez said, "I'm in the uncomfortable position of hoping [Trump] doesn't recklessly trash NAFTA. There would be a lot of pain for everyone involved. We can't afford the crumbling of our current food system. ... We just don't realize how intertwined and interdependent we are. [Drastic changes] could cause an incredible logjam on products we depend on daily. We'd see unbelievably high costs, farmers would see their crops rotting on the vine and hunger on a massive scale."

The evolution of how we eat is a fact of life. But negotiating away the gastronomical cultural heritage of whole countries -- including ours -- in the name of enhanced trade, is not a deal many would make if they were aware of what was at stake.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

Is the idea of free college ready for prime time?

 

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- Gubernatorial candidates in Maryland, Arizona, Connecticut and at least seven other states -- plus even more candidates for Congress -- are running on plans to make college free or "debt-free," according to the industry publication Inside Higher Ed.

But how much impact on college attendance, graduation and lifetime earnings do such programs actually have? There are no definitive answers, but some indicators aren't exactly reassuring.

According to a study by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a nonprofit based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the underprivileged don't get a lot out of college and, perversely, those who benefit most from a college degree turn out to be students with middle-class backgrounds.

The institute's analysis of a data set that included 50 years of interviews with 18,000 Americans found that "the career earnings premium from a four-year college degree (relative to a high school diploma) for persons from low-income backgrounds is considerably less than it is for those from higher-income backgrounds ... [and] we find that education not only has much lower absolute returns for persons from low-income backgrounds, it also has much lower proportional returns."

A small earnings boost, coupled with student loans that can never be discharged through bankruptcy, sounds like a raw deal to the first-in-their-family students who have been most encouraged, inspired and practically pushed into pursuing a college degree.

So while the campaign-speech catnip of free college sounds enticing to those who want a shot at a middle-class life, the benefits of a free educational lunch may be nothing more than a crowd-pleasing mirage.

A study by the Brookings Institution on one of the first randomized control trials of a debt-free college program looked at students in the Milwaukee Public Schools program who were promised up to $12,000 to pay for college -- an amount that would cover all tuition and fees at the local two-year college or at most of the in-state four-year institutions. But the study found that the incentive had no effect on whether students went directly on to college from high school.

The programs didn't randomly hand out free tuition like candy, either. Students were required to graduate on time from a Milwaukee public high school with at least a 2.5 cumulative grade-point average and a 90 percent class-attendance rate.

The students were also required to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which, because it requires parental tax information, often serves as a proxy for how much the student's family supports their desire to attend college.

Still, even though the students in the program did exhibit more motivation to attend college -- and filled out more applications to college than they might have otherwise -- the totality of the investment in getting the students across the finish line of a degree was not significant. In the end, only 21 percent of the students enrolled in The Degree Project with the Milwaukee schools met the performance requirements to unlock the college funds, basically the same as the control group.

"We identify three related reasons why the effects were not more substantial," the report noted. "(a) The performance requirements greatly reduced the number of students who could plausibly receive the funds; (b) the performance requirements, combined with the temporary, small-scale design, meant that the program did not have the catalyzing effect on high schools that otherwise similar programs have seen; and (c) the context in Milwaukee -- particularly, the very low level of academic performance and lack of counselor resources -- may have been particularly ill-suited to make a performance-based aid program work well."

Leaving aside the size of the program and its location -- though one would have to imagine that communities with low academic performance and few resources would be the most attractive target for such economic-mobility spurring programs -- the performance requirements are particularly problematic.

The American public, with its aspirations of meritocracy, seems unlikely to ever support a program that doesn't require, at a minimum, the middling grades that produce a 2.5 GPA (about a high C or low B). This bar can be harder to reach for low-income students who are struggling against many factors to make the grade.

Worse, according to the authors, even though performance standards might seem like they might, "induce students to work harder and become more academically prepared for college," they don't. "The main effect of performance requirements, then, is to provide more funds to higher-income families, which only reinforces existing disparities."

As with so many other well-meaning efforts to reduce inequalities in society, free college seems like it has great potential but requires far more pilot programs and longitudinal research. Before making promises to young people, we must design programs that won't have the unintended consequences of leaving needy students economically insecure after promising them that college is the ticket to a financially prosperous life.

 

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

COLUMNIST NOTE: Three representatives of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, including Brad Hershbein and Timothy J. Bartik,  the authors of the report on career earnings emailed me after this column was published expressing concerns about the research I cited. They wanted me to point out two things:

1) The data show that "college still has a good economic return for most Americans, including the poor and other disadvantaged groups." I was simply emphasizing that any mass, national programs to make college more accessible to people with lower incomes should be further studied. Their op-ed on the report referenced in my column is here: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/opinion/college-does-help-the-poor.html

2) Another researcher wanted me to note that the Milwaukee program information I included is not the best for extracting generalizable insights due to several factors, including poor program design, and that it should not be considered typical. It's true that programs have varying degrees of effectiveness and outcomes. Here is some more in-depth information on the pros and cons of other promise initiatives: 

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2018/09/18/understanding-the-design-of-college-promise-programs-and-where-to-go-from-here/

 

Be ready to defend your life

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- Last week, Gabrielle Giffords nailed it: "Three workplace active shooting attacks in just the last 24 hours should spark outrage in every American. No matter where you work, learn, play or live -- you have a right to feel safe, and I'm horrified that that's no longer the reality in America."

The former Arizona congresswoman was shot in the head while meeting with constituents outside a grocery store in 2011. She states the obvious, and it stings.

No matter your walk of life, chances are you don't feel 100 percent safe in your community and harbor at least a little fear that your schools, churches or movie theaters could be the next target of someone's indiscriminate rage.

But as Illinois police officer Andrew Mannino recently told an audience: "You can feel scared, but you don't need to feel helpless." Mannino spoke to about 30 people who gathered Aug. 30 at the police station where he works in Lake in the Hills, a small-town exurb 50 miles from downtown Chicago, for a course called "Civilian Response to Active-Shooter Events."

Throughout the free two-hour training, Mannino shared gun-shooting statistics and explained how deaths at Columbine High School in 1999 could have been prevented with proper training. He also emphasized that when acts of violence occur, innocent bystanders must believe, first and foremost, that "you have the right to survive."

It was a message of empowerment, followed by specific steps for reacting to an active-shooter event. The people in the room -- older couples, school secretaries, parents with teen kids, military vets, young guys sporting gun manufacturer T-shirts, and women of all ages -- had come out listen on a warm, late-August weeknight.

Mannino first illustrated how surviving an active-shooter event depends on purposefully resisting crowd pressure to go on as if nothing is happening even as shots are ringing out or someone is behaving bizarrely.

"There is a theory called social proof that says even when something is obviously amiss, most people will look to the reactions of others surrounding them and then conform to their behavior so as to be in step with the crowd," Mannino said as he introduced video clips of researchers filming passersby ignoring a planted actor writhing in the street.

In these clips, pedestrians looked around, saw everyone else ignoring the "suffering" stranger and walked quickly past him or her. However, the moment one person stopped to check on the sufferer, almost all other passersby also stopped to inquire or offer help.

This knowledge alone, Mannino said, could make the difference between life and death, "which is why it's important to respond to a life-threatening situation quickly. Other people will follow if we lead the way."

Leadership in an active-shooter situation starts with being aware of your surroundings, specifically potential exits like doors, windows and fire escapes, at all times. If you hear gunshots -- and remember that a burst balloon or car backfire isn't likely to be a repeated pop-pop-pop -- run and hide.

If you avoid an attacker and an escalating situation immediately, your action will cause others to react, too.

Second, deny an attacker access to your area -- by locking doors behind you or creating a barricade, turning off lights, putting your phone on silent and staying out of sight.

Lastly, if you have to, fight for your life. "You have the legal right to defend yourself. And don't fight fair," Mannino said. "Be aggressive, use anything you can get your hands on as a weapon and go for the eyes, face and groin." Mannino even suggested that school workers and teachers can keep items like hammers in their classrooms that are harmless if kept out of the sight of students but could help for self-defense in an emergency.

The aftermath is just as important: Call 911 and don't guess at any questions you are asked. When the police arrive, follow commands, show your hands and don't make any sudden movements.

It's important to visualize yourself making these moves and practicing in your mind so that you're ready to react if the unthinkable happens.

Is this any way to live?

No, of course not. It's sad and maddening, and none of us wants to live in a world where teachers keep heavy tools in their classrooms for a just-in-case that isn't outside the realm of possibility.

But absent meaningful changes to a society that is breeding and enabling "active shooters," isn't it better to believe you're at least a little prepared to survive and aid others than to feel utterly helpless?

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

 

 

Dads: Don't forget your sons look to you for how to treat women

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- What's it like to be a boy these days?

It's a frequent thought for me as I navigate my son's 17th year of life in a world where the scourge of toxic masculinity shares the public consciousness with admiration of spectacularly muscled sports stars and big-screen superheroes whose worth is predicated on their physical prowess.

In my house, the desire to adventure on the high seas or crawl through the trenches of World War I via immersive video games competes with the pressure to get out to the gym to pack on muscle for the sake of measuring up to, let's face it, practically every dude on TV or in movies.

I thought raising sons would be easier than raising daughters, because the gendered societal pressures girls deal with is so overwhelming. But boys aren't exactly cake-walking through adolescence.

In a nationally representative survey of 1,000 boys and girls ages 10 to 19, boys' responses to pressing questions of the day exemplify the difference between what parents and elders say boys should be and what boys infer from their actions.

For instance, though adults typically say that honesty, morality, ambition and leadership are the traits that society values most in men, boys are likelier to say that society most values strength and toughness in boys.

Seven out of 10 boys personally feel pressure to be physically strong, according to a survey by Plan International USA, an independent development and humanitarian organization focused on girls' equality and children's rights that commissioned the research. Forty-four percent of older boys (14 to 19) feel pressure to be "willing to punch someone if provoked," and about one in three younger boys (10 to 13) feel the same way.

Chillingly, the strongest correlation with feeling pressure to be physically strong and ready to fight is exposure to boys (and men, including family members) who make sexual comments and jokes about girls.

The report, "The State of Gender Equality for U.S. Adolescents," noted that, "The more frequently boys are around other boys who make these comments, the more likely they are to feel pressure to be strong and ready for violence."

Boys are routinely goaded into "bro behavior." One in three boys ages 14 to 19 said they feel pressure to "join in when other boys talk about girls in a sexual way." And this was most heavily correlated with having male family members who make sexual comments and jokes about women.

Forty-seven percent of boys ages 14 to 19 have heard their dad or other male family members make sexual jokes and comments about women (compared with 34 percent of girls) -- instances that are also among the most prevalent factors correlated with thinking it is OK to ask a girl for sexy or naked pictures.

And boys are swimming in this sort of talk. Six in 10 boys hear other boys making sexual comments or jokes about girls at least once a week. One-third of boys ages 14 to 19 said they hear this daily, and that several times a week or more they hear male characters on TV or in movies making sexual comments and jokes about women characters.

"One of the most startling findings from the survey is the frequent rate at which boys are hearing their fathers or male family members making sexual jokes and comments about women," the report stated. "[It's] a glaring reminder that the messages being communicated to boys could be perpetuating continued harmful attitudes and behaviors toward girls, particularly in light of more awareness around sexual experiences, the importance of consent, and what constitutes harassment."

In addition to dehumanizing women, the cumulative effects of being submerged in these attitudes oppresses boys' psyches, leading to feeling pressured to hide their emotions when they feel sad, anxious or scared.

This isn't entirely new information. Past academic research has noted substantial differences in how fathers talk to daughters vs. sons: Dads tend to unconsciously talk about emotions and use more language referencing the child's body with daughters, and engage in more achievement-related language and physical play with sons.

The work of shaping boys into respectful, self-aware men is everyone's job -- indeed, we need the whole "village" to take a stronger role in eradicating demeaning talk about women. But it's clear that dads and male relatives of boys have an outsize opportunity to set an example of respect for women that will reverberate across generations.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

War on poverty not over for Hispanic and black children

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- A mere two months ago, President Trump's White House declared the War on Poverty "largely over and a success." The administration argued that few Americans are truly poor anymore -- it estimated that the poverty rate was only about 3 percent -- and that the economy's upward tide would continue to lift the boats of those who remained poor.

Millions of Hispanic and black infants and toddlers would beg to disagree, if only they could.

Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau released its 2017 annual report on poverty, and there's no question that the numbers were, in the aggregate, positive.

The national poverty rate declined from 14.8 percent in 2014 to 12.3 percent in 2017, marking the third successive drop.

But the devil is in the details.

The same data set reveals that one in five children up to 2 years old were poor (19.9 percent) -- a number almost identical to the 2016 rate. In fact, infants and toddlers represented the age group most likely to live in poverty, according to an analysis by Child Trends, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center.

Child Trends underscores the enormity of the problem by highlighting that in 2017, nearly one in three black infants and toddlers (32.7 percent) and more than one in four Hispanic infants and toddlers (27.3 percent) lived in poverty, compared with approximately one in nine (11.8 percent) white, non-Hispanic infants and toddlers.

In fact, the younger and more vulnerable the kids, the worse off they've become.

"While the overall percentage of infants living in poverty significantly increased between 2016 and 2017 from 17.2 percent to 20.2 percent, the largest increases were among black and Hispanic infants, for whom the poverty rate rose by 6 and 8 percentage points -- 28.5 to 34.4 percent and 20.7 to 28.4 percent, respectively," Child Trends noted on its blog.

There is also the potential for the situation to get bleaker if the economy starts cooling down. And expect that Hispanic children would be among the hardest hit if the president gets his way and sees to it that the Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and federal rental subsidies are cut.

Already, the Trump administration has moved to limit access to green cards and/or naturalization to lawfully present immigrants if they -- or anyone living in their household -- have ever used children's health insurance (CHIP), "Obamacare," SNAP or other social safety-net benefits. This is scaring off the parents of U.S.-born Hispanic children.

After news of the limits first spread in late August, health providers across the country started getting emotional phone calls from lawfully present and undocumented immigrant families pleading to be dropped from the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) federal nutrition program for pregnant women and kids, according to Politico. "Agencies in at least 18 states say they've seen drops of up to 20 percent in enrollment, and they attribute the change largely to fears about the immigration policy."

The target of Trump's most dehumanizing policies has been immigrants, specifically poor ones, even though immigrants who are living in this country unlawfully are absolutely not eligible for any public-assistance benefits. And of those who are lawfully present and eligible, working households headed by an immigrant without a high school degree use fewer welfare services than their native household counterparts.

It hardly matters. For the Trump administration, babies, toddlers and other young children are apparently expendable, disposable and unworthy of any kind of mercy if they're Latino -- regardless of whether they are U.S. citizens or refugees seeking asylum at the border.

Yet it's not just a Hispanic issue.

There are 4.2 million black immigrants living in the U.S. as of 2016 -- up from just 816,000 in 1980, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. About 85 percent of them are lawfully present, as refugees or asylees or due to Temporary Protected Status because their home countries experienced catastrophic disasters.

Even if they exist below the radar, they're no less vulnerable to being scared away from government child benefits that their U.S.-born kids are legally entitled to.

Let's be clear: If the War on Poverty is over, it's being replaced by a war on black and brown children, regardless of their immigration status.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

 

Despite economic realities, Latinos sunny about the American Dream

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- Hispanics in the United States have always been paradoxical -- both ultra-invested in their heritage yet proudly all-American; more law-abiding in the immigrant stages of life in the U.S. yet more likely to brush with the police in subsequent generations.

Another paradox is that no matter how demonized or discriminated against, Latinos continue to be more likely than the general U.S. public to believe in the promise of the American dream.

For 77 percent of Hispanics, compared with 62 percent of the total U.S. population, it's an article of faith that hard work will pay off and a similar proportion believe that each successive generation will better off than the one before it, according to the Pew Research Center.

But the optimism is colored by realism -- 74 percent of Latinos said attaining the American dream is difficult for people like them.

And if we look at the generally assumed best path to socioeconomic mobility -- i.e., a college education -- that particular calculation is spot on.

By all accounts, Hispanics are underrepresented on college campuses. And even the academic stars struggle: Latinos with high SAT/ACT test scores have similar rates of college enrollment to whites, but only 63 percent of them complete a degree or other credential compared to 78 percent of white students with similar test scores, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (Georgetown CEW), an independent, nonprofit research and policy institute.

It's tough. About one-third of Latino college students are the first in their family to go to college. And three years after first enrolling, 33 percent of first-generation Latino students had left school without earning a credential, compared with 26 percent of students whose parents had attended some college and only 14 percent of students whose parents earned a bachelor's degree, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Money is an issue, obviously, since parental lack of a college degree is highly correlated with low household income. But there's also no worn path to follow, leaving many first-timers without the benefit of family members who could show them the ropes of higher ed.

It gets worse.

There are 14 million working students enrolled in school, and about 6 million (43 percent) are low-income. Of these low-income students, 47 percent are first-generation college-goers, and 25 percent are Latino, according to the Georgetown CEW.

These students are more likely to be enrolled in certificate programs and attend two-year community colleges or for-profit colleges than higher-income working students.

And all of this leads to low-income working students being less likely to earn a credential overall.

Even the ones who somehow manage to complete their studies sometimes find that the light at the end of a tunnel is an oncoming train.

You won't be a bit surprised to learn that Hispanic (and black) adults who graduate college owing money on student loans have a significantly lower net worth at age 30 than students who didn't borrow to pay for college.

According to a study by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, student loans hamper low-income student graduates' ability to convert their hard-won educations into wealth for longer than previously thought. In fact, they have $11,780 less in financial assets and nearly $39,600 less in nonfinancial assets than their peers by age 30, researchers found.

Alleviating this low-income, first-generation Latino encumbrance to social mobility will require two things.

First, we need to recognize that it's nearly impossible to "work your way through college" like people in earlier generations did -- the average price of an undergraduate degree has risen roughly 161 percent from $39,643 in 1987 to $103,616 in 2016.

Second, these students of color who'll be the first in their family to attend college need more scholarships, fellowships, grants, lower-interest loans and other financial supports, including counseling.

Don't think there's nothing in it for you.

The Georgetown CEW estimates that the U.S. takes an annual hit of about $400 billion in lost wages, plus costs of lost productivity, because every year approximately 500,000 students who are in the top half of their class simply don't complete college.

A well-educated populace ready to fill high-tech jobs and other positions that require higher education helps businesses, surrounding communities and nearly everyone else. Ultimately, we all benefit when disadvantaged young people are enabled to reach their potential -- it's really a little piece of the American dream for all of us.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

Politicians can't afford to take Hispanic voters for granted

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- It's that time of the year again, when Latinos suddenly transform, Cinderella-like, from an undereducated, downtrodden and problematic population into a desirable voting bloc. They will soon turn out in droves, like an awakened sleeping giant, to revive the fortunes of the Democratic Party.

Or not.

There's little reason to believe that the upcoming midterms -- or even the run-up to the 2020 presidential election -- will inspire any breathless 2012-style magazine covers proclaiming that Latinos will pick the next commander in chief.

It's not because Hispanics are uninterested in political participation, or because immigrants hold no political power. Oh, their clout could definitely be better, but the Pew Research Center recently calculated that at least 65 of the current 529 voting members of Congress (12 percent) are immigrants or the children of immigrants.

Mostly it's because, as usual, Latinos are simply taken for granted.

"They're all going to come out to vote against Donald Trump's candidate," goes the prevailing wisdom, because there's no end to the evidence that life has gotten harder for Latinos during this presidency. So, as a result, it's a no-brainer that eligible Latino voters will be energized.

Well, theoretically, that's what should happen.

But there's the pesky business of the Hispanics who voted for Trump in 2016 -- even by the most thoroughly vetted estimates, this was anywhere from 11 percent (specifically in California, a blue state) to an astounding (and highly contested) 29 percent of Latino voters nationwide.

Then there's the fact that the assumption that Latinos will overwhelmingly vote for Democrats tends to dull outreach efforts.

With the midterms less than two months away, nearly 60 percent of Latino registered voters report that they haven't been contacted by a campaign, political party or organization asking them to register or vote, according to a recent tracking poll by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO).

"This poll confirms what we have known for some time -- that Latino voters are still being ignored by the nation's major campaigns, political parties and funders," said Arturo Vargas, NALEO Educational Fund's CEO, in a press release. "We are once again witnessing an overall lack of investment in Latino outreach efforts across the country in Election 2018, with the little funding that is available being diverted toward partisan outcomes. If we want to make significant progress increasing the number of Americans who vote, we cannot afford to have history keep repeating itself by continuously ignoring the nation's second largest population group election cycle after election cycle. The time for change is now."

Lastly, there's the irrefutable fact that no matter how angry, motivated or passionate Latino voters are, they're still likelier to face more hurdles to getting into the voting booth than people of any other race.

Nearly one in 10 Hispanics (9 percent) said they or a family member were harassed or bothered at the polls the last time they tried to vote, compared with 4 percent of white Americans and 7 percent of black Americans, according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute/Atlantic research brief.

Hispanics, like blacks, were three times likelier (9 percent) than white Americans to be told that they or someone in their household lacked the correct identification the last time they tried to vote.

Overall, 7 percent of Americans reported that the last time they tried to vote, they or a household member were told their name did not appear on the rolls even though they were registered. Meanwhile, 11 percent of Hispanics reported they or a household member had this experience.

And Hispanics were twice as likely as whites (16 percent vs. 8 percent) to say they couldn't vote because of not getting the time off work to do so.

"Neither public polls nor private research suggests an organic surge to the polls among Hispanic voters outraged by Trump is developing the way it appears to be coalescing among college-educated white women and African-American women," according to a CNN analysis. "And that means Democrats face their typical challenge of energizing a community whose voter participation has remained stubbornly low."

Just look at the data: Latino turnout has been stubbornly low by others' design.

If anyone -- Democrats or Republicans -- wants Latino votes, they need to put both genuine interest and money behind outreach and get-out-the-vote efforts. Only then will we be able to talk about how "energized" Latino voters can get.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

AP classes finally attracting more students of color

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- Finally, some good news for brown and black students: A record number of them took Advanced Placement (AP) computer-science exams and earned a high-enough score to qualify for college credit.

The College Board, the nonprofit organization that owns the AP program, recently reported these three very bright spots:

-- African-American students saw the most growth in participation, with an increase of 44 percent in those taking an AP computer-science exam (from 5,057 in 2017 to 7,301 in 2018).

-- Hispanic students did nearly as well, with their participation increasing by 41 percent (from 14,860 in 2017 to 20,954 in 2018).

-- Female students who took an AP computer-science exam increased 39 percent (from 27,395 in 2017 to 38,195 in 2018).

This is a tremendous feat in the face of continuing roadblocks to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) courses for women and students of color in public schools.

In a recent report reflecting data from the 2015-16 school year, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights confirmed what parents in poorly resourced schools have known for years: High schools that serve disproportionate numbers of black and Latino students offer fewer advanced math and science courses -- like calculus, trigonometry and physics -- than schools with a predominantly white student body.

Just as universities use introductory college courses in STEM disciplines to "weed out" lower-performing students, secondary schools unintentionally do the same, setting black and Hispanic students back when they fail to thrive in algebra.

In the 2015-16 school year, whites made up 58 percent of the students enrolled in Algebra 1 in eighth grade, compared with Latinos at 18 percent and blacks at 11 percent.

Of these students who enrolled in Algebra 1 in eighth grade, 85 percent of the white children passed the course, compared with 72 percent of the Latinos and 65 percent of the blacks. The students who did pass gained entry into the high-school track that would put them in advanced math and science courses by junior year, when college applications and student transcripts start going out.

Part of the College Board's success is due to the 2016 launch of a new course called Computer Science Principles (CSP). Traditional AP classes focus on one specific area, such as calculus, statistics or a computer-science class that teaches JAVA programming. But CSP is more of a survey course that touches on the fundamentals of computing, including problem solving and working with data as well as understanding the internet, cybersecurity and programming.

Because early success in algebra is not a strict prerequisite for a step-wise progression through required courses designed to enable a high-school student to pass the springtime AP tests, a more diverse group of students has been able to access the CSP course. This includes 70 percent more black students, 68 percent more Hispanics, 70 percent more females and even 73 percent more students who attend rural schools, over the number enrolled in 2017.

Make no mistake: Minority, female and rural students still have tremendous barriers to cross in order to make it from an introductory college-level STEM course to completing a university undergraduate degree in a STEM discipline.

However, what academics have been saying for years is that there aren't enough blacks, Latinos and women in the pipeline. The opportunity for students to learn coding, data analysis and cybersecurity in high school will open pathways for students to continue to study these subjects after high school, even if not through traditional college-degree programs.

And, far from being a shortcut past high-level math courses, giving students hands-on experience in the kinds of projects that make tangible connections between abstract math and its application in the real world promises to get more students motivated to try challenging math.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 93 out of 100 STEM occupations paid wages above the national average in 2015 and that the STEM jobs projected to grow fastest by 2024 are those for people in mathematical science occupations. That's why a fuller pipeline of STEM-interested students of color and women is much-needed good news.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

Lazy summers can pay off when kids go back to school

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- Labor Day marked the traditional end of summer. Students are back in school and back to the daily and weekly rhythms of homework, term-long projects and standardized testing.

If you're a parent who spent a hot, harried few months just trying to keep everyone fed, entertained and in one piece, don't fret.

Even if you're dreading an upcoming open house-night at your school, rest assured that no teacher is going to look down on you for not having read the classics to your children nightly or helping them to memorize their multiplication tables.

Let's face it, as parents we go into summer with towering hopes -- we'll spend quality time with the finger paints, read oodles of books, try out some science experiments in the backyard and maybe squeeze in some math puzzles and penmanship practice.

Ha! It's already over and we don't even know where it all went.

But don't worry. Even though research has found that "summer melt" means the average kid loses about a month's worth of school knowledge during lazy summers of streaming their favorite TV shows and eating junk food, your child isn't going to bomb this year.

In fact, fully checking out of formal academic activities for a few months might actually be helpful to the formal learning process.

"The process of relearning actually helps students solidify information in their brains, as they work to remember what they once forgot," say Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and Chris Frank, a researcher at ClassDojo, a classroom-to-home communication app used in many elementary schools. "So if your child forgets her times tables, it doesn't have to be a loss; counterintuitive as it may sound, science tells us that young learners may be well served by a thoughtful summer pause so that they can forget -- and re-remember."

Our brains are naturally hard-wired to forget information that we don't use frequently, explain Boser and Frank in their blog post, "Forgetting Can Be an Important Part of Learning," on the education website The 74.

The process of forgetting those details and relearning or re-remembering them "can help us gain expertise and allows us to develop a richer form of understanding. The more you forget, the more you learn -- because relearning makes the path to [a] specific memory ... more robust. That means parents should see forgetting as an opportunity."

This concept hasn't made it to teacher-training programs yet, but teachers do see the process playing itself out every day in the first few weeks of school.

Sure, students come back rusty. But as they fall back into familiar routines, skills related to close reading, formal writing, math theories and other knowledge banks roar back to life. Trust me, students wobble in the first few days of school, but by the second week, it's obvious how past study informs new learning.

This new understanding of how forgetting and relearning can be beneficial comes at the right time in education. Schools across the country have redesigned their curriculum and their instruction strategies according to the Common Core Standards, which call for a far higher level of analysis and depth in learning even in the youngest grades.

If you remember early elementary school days as focused on nothing more taxing than learning to cut and paste, get it out of your mind. These days, learning addition and subtraction facts is ancillary to understanding how grouping and regrouping work in abstract ways, so that this knowledge can be transferred to more difficult, algebraic concepts as early as first grade.

Story time is still fun, but it's often also packed with lessons about self-awareness, emotional intelligence and vocabulary-building. Students as young as kindergarten are asked to reflect on these stories, sometimes in small groups and other times in writing and pictures, to solidify understanding.

So don't be surprised if, when you attend your school's open-house event, your kids' teachers ask you what your family did over vacation. Teachers want to make connections between what happened last summer to what will happen in the classroom.

Be ready to answer so you can provide some insight into how to link home life and school experiences so your children's learning can be more meaningful -- and more memorable.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

Rural communities, like Postville, Iowa need immigrants

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- I can't think of a stronger endorsement for the positive role that Latino immigrants are playing in rural towns across the country than the heartfelt words of Rob Tibbetts, father of Mollie, the 20-year-old Iowa college student who was recently found dead after being missing for five weeks:

"The Hispanic community are Iowans. They have the same values as Iowans," Tibbets said, during his daughter's funeral, according to The Des Moines Register. "As far as I'm concerned, they're Iowans with better food."

Tibbetts said he felt the need to defend the immigrants in his small town of Brooklyn, Iowa, because so many had used his daughter's tragedy to highlight that her killer was an immigrant from Mexico -- a fact that Tibbetts made clear should not be used to characterize all immigrants from south of the border.

The truth is that for all the "invasion" news items that gain traction on far-right media outlets, most people who live in rural areas and small towns know that life would be worse if it weren't for immigrants.

In a new report, "Revival and Opportunity: Immigrants in Rural America," the Center for American Progress (CAP) details how even though globalization, the Great Recession and the shift to an information economy have magnified an overall population decline in rural America, immigrants and refugees are fueling growth in some corners that is preventing school closures, the scaling back of health services and the dwindling of town commerce.

"In many rural communities, these new residents open small businesses, provide critically needed health care services, and supply labor for meatpacking plants, small manufacturers, dairies, fruit and vegetable farms, and other enterprises," authors Silva Mathema, Nicole Prchal Svajlenka and Anneliese Hermann write. "While the stakes are high and the obstacles daunting, successfully integrating immigrants into America's rural communities can bring large dividends."

The report tallied that in 78 percent of rural places experiencing population decline, the loss would have been more dramatic if not for the influx of foreign-born residents. And in the 873 rural places that experienced population growth, more than one in five can attribute the entirety of population growth to immigrants.

And these new arrivals typically bring with them vitality, youth and, usually, a rock-solid belief in the attainability of the American dream.

The CAP report notes that some communities have proactive plans in place to integrate newcomers and allow them to capture the full set of benefits that a thriving and strong community brings. When they do, it can pay off.

A recent episode of the Latino political podcast "In the Thick" featured an interview with data researcher Ronny Rojas, who works on the new Univision documentary "America First," which details the aftermath of the 2008 Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on the meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. Rojas said that the town and surrounding area has lost almost 8 percent of its labor force.

But, Rojas added, in the last decade Postville has grown even more diverse. There is a burgeoning Jewish community, immigrants from Somalia and Russia are moving in, and the Hispanic population has increased by 80 percent.

"To be honest, I think people seem to get along really well in Postville," Rojas said. "The people we talked to did not mention any racial incidents or confrontations due to immigration issues. ... There is a Mexican restaurant in town playing (BEG ITAL)musica nortena(END ITAL) all day long, you can see white people having lunch. ... There is an all-American bar, the only bar in town, where you can see immigrants being served without a problem."

It's not just some sort of taco halo effect. The Des Moines Register recently reported that, "since the raid, the town's school population has rebounded, the housing market has recovered and the community has healed and grown, becoming more active in immigration rights, residents said."

And as the CAP report found, "Despite the challenges, these new populations have revived the town as new shops open and school enrollment increases. Although Postville had a small student body of about 750 students in 2016, 40 percent of its students spoke a language other than English, and students overall spoke about 14 different languages."

From Brooklyn to Postville, and in countless other communities that have been dismissed as ghost towns, the ones thriving have approached the challenges and difficulties of integrating newcomers with a mindset of opportunity, not with fear.

When even the shattered, grieving father of a victim of an immigrant's crime can sing the praises of the majority of his newly arrived neighbors, we need to stop and ask ourselves whether, as a country, we're willing to take on the promise that immigrants represent.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

Outliers should not be used as poster children for whole swaths of population

By ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO -- The past couple weeks have seen a slew of recriminations and gotcha moments regarding the hot-button issues of illegal immigration and the #MeToo movement.

It started with the bombshell about the Italian film actress and director Asia Argento, who grabbed headlines in 2017 for helping to galvanize the #MeToo movement with her allegations of sexual coercion at the hands of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Argento has been accused of sending cash payments to silence the actor Jimmy Bennett, her co-star when he was 7 years old, who claims that Argento sexually assaulted him in 2013 when he was 17. The age of consent in California is 18.

The revelations were seen as a blow to women's rights activists, who have been fighting an uphill battle to get men to take seriously the epidemic of mistreatment of women. In the past few months, high-profile men who lost their jobs for harassing women -- like Matt Lauer, Al Franken, Mario Batali and Charlie Rose -- have begun publicly plotting their comebacks.

It's such a toxic situation that women are embroiled in movement-splintering arguments about whether the Argento case reveals that women are as abusive, manipulative and opportunistic as men. Or if it reveals nothing more than the ugly fact that society is only willing to believe women who come forward about their sexual assault if they are "perfect victims" whose personal, sexual and professional lives are pure, innocent and unimpeachable.

Meanwhile, just a few days after the Argento controversy, a tragic death in California exploded into a heated national debate about immigration. After five weeks of searching for 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts, a college student home on summer vacation, news broke that her body had been found in an Iowa cornfield and that Cristhian Rivera, an unlawfully present immigrant from Mexico, was under arrest for her murder.

The Trump administration wasted no time in pointing to the incident as evidence that mobs of illegal immigrants are prowling the United States voraciously looking for women and children to rape or kill, with the only solution being Trump's deportation policies and a costly wall on the southern border.

Tibbetts' family pleaded with the media to let them grieve in private and asked that their loved one's death not be politicized. "Please remember, Evil comes in EVERY color," Billie Jo Calderwood, Tibbetts' aunt, wrote on Facebook. "Our family has been blessed to be surrounded by love, friendship and support throughout this entire ordeal by friends from all different nations and races."

But two horrible, painful events are playing out for families who weren't expecting to have their lowest moments paraded through the media. And large swaths of news consumers and social commentators are ignoring facts that are well-established, overwhelming and irrefutable.

For starters, women definitely have flaws, but when it comes to sexual violence, it's pretty clear who gets victimized most of the time. One in three women experience some form of sexual violence in their lifetime, compared with one in six men, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.

And the truth about unauthorized immigrants is that records going back 100 years consistently show that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans.

These unemotional data points do not, in any way, diminish the real and excruciating pain that victims of violence and their families experience. They deserve more than a statistical dismissal of their anguish -- those losses, after all, are close and tangible, not just headlines on a smartphone.

Still, neither of these terrible incidents should be considered emblematic or representative of any wider legal policies or social norms.

We lapse into using high-profile cases to reaffirm our pre-set political beliefs because the human brain and psyche are hardwired to over-simplify and categorize the complex, messy and nuanced overload of information that pours over us daily.

Sorting aggressors and victims into angels and devils is a human coping mechanism, but not one without its own victims. We should not be entranced by lurid details into seeing the perpetrators of coercive sexual abuse or cold-blooded murder as a symbol of some larger hypocrisy, conspiracy or societal failure.

If they are found guilty, we'll all be right to feel angry and disgusted with Argento and Rivera. But we'd be mistaken to allow them to become poster children -- the sexually predatory woman; the raping, murdering Mexican -- for "trends" when they are actually just horrible outliers.

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

(c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group