Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Julianne Hing
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Posts by Julianne Hing
Bryant Terry’s ‘Inspired Vegan’ Shows Healthy Food Isn’t Just for White Folks
01 week ago
Bryant Terry isn’t interested in lecturing anyone. But he’s still got plenty to say. For the last ten years the activist, cookbook author and chef has been a passionate advocate for sustainable food in the communities of color most likely to be isolated from healthy food options. His argument? White people didn’t invent healthy cooking and sustainable eating. And the traditional foodways of people of color have the answers to the pressing food justice issues we’re facing today.
These days Terry’s interested in sharing the deep pleasures of healthy cooking and sustainable eating as a way to support grassroots organzing to increase poor folks and people of color’s access to sustainable food. Healthy, sustainable food doesn’t need to be snooty or tasteless, and in Terry’s hands, it’s neither.
With his latest book, ”The Inspired Vegan,” out this week from Da Capo Press, and a new web series called “Urban Organic,” Terry offers inventive, easy, exciting ideas for integrating healthy, sustainable cooking into everyday life. He caught up with Colorlines to talk about his new book, and shared a recipe from “The Inspired Vegan” just for Colorlines readers, available at the end of the interview.
The revolution, Terry argues, will begin at people’s kitchen tables. It might as well be a delicious one.
Can you tell me what inspired this book? It feels so fresh.
Most of the book was written when my wife was pregnant with our daughter, and the final stages of the editing work were done during the first seven weeks of her life. My daughter drove the vision for this book. I wanted to write a book that in 40 years she could look at, and have as a snapshot of the world, this movement I’m so active in. I also wanted her to get a deeper sense of who I am at 38 years old. Who are my heroes? What are my values? What are the things I’m working to change in this world to make it a better place?
And in terms of my approach as an educator and activist, for so many people, starting with the heady intellectual ideas, starting with the politics, that doesn’t do it for them. And for many people who have had experiences with people trying to encourage them to eat more healthfully or more sustainably, their experience is that of being harangued, or having finger-wagging nannies tell them what to do. So I understand those types of triggers. I used to be that kind of person.
When I was in high school and I started learning about factory farming and animal rights and starting thinking about my own consumption patterns. I was that guy that I just despise now, yelling and screaming at my parents, and really having this level of compassion for animals and the environment, but not for the people around me.
So I just feel like for me as an adult, as someone who’s truly invested in making change, it’s not about me being the most righteous person, this is about me growing this movement, and being someone who has a wider platform who can build a base for those that are working on the ground doing the grassroots organizing.
Using food as an entryway, bringing people together through the central pleasures of the table, and getting people more invested in and excited about eating healthful, sustainable food, is a way to change people’s habits and attitudes, and their politics eventually.
That seems to explain why this book also reads like a recipe for a party. There’s a playlist for every recipe, there’s also a reading list of suggested books. There are links to all sorts of community organizations and activist groups throughout the book. It’s really inviting.
I understand that these are very political issues, and we have to keep one eye on the policy changes that need to take place to change these food systems, and we have to understand the need for grassroots organizing. When we consider that many of the social movements of the 20th century, the educating and the organizing, it all took place in people’s homes. So it only makes sense to me that the food justice movement will start in people’s home kitchens, and move outward.
You say in the book that there’s a hidden narrative of African-American cooking and that you want to reclaim the popular idea that African-American cuisine is just red velvet cake and macaroni and cheese. Can you say more about that?
When people talk about African-American cuisine, they talk about soul food, and when people hear soul food, I think most often they’re talking about the comfort food of the cuisine: the high-fat meats, the sugary desserts, the things people enjoy on holidays. And what often is evoked is the antebellum survival food. To generalize and say that is the whole of African-American cuisine, even during that period, is historically inaccurate.
African-American cuisine is very diverse and complex and the reality is it’s constantly evolving and changing.
It goes back to my own connection with food and growing up in a family in Memphis, Tennessee who had roots in the rural South. And we’re talking working class African Americans. My grandparents were working poor African Americans who were growing their own food, often times raising animals in their backyard. It wasn’t anything cool or hip, it was just way that they lived.
You talk very honestly about food access issues, and the fact that just locating a grocery store can be a challenge for people. So I wonder, who did you write this book for?
Let me put it like this. There have been communities that I visited like five years ago, and for all intents and purposes people would describe it as a food desert. Five years ago there wasn’t a farmers market, or even a supermarket where people could get a lot of staple ingredients. So I feel like it’s very patronizing and cynical for me to write a book and imagine that, well, you know, I’m not going to include ingredients that aren’t available in XYZ neighborhoods, because I go back to these same communities now, and community organizations have been working on the ground for several years, and there is a farmers market.
And so now, whereas five years ago you might not be able to find dandelions within three miles of a neighborhood, you can get dandelion greens there. Whereas there might not be certain staple products like black eyed peas in a neighborhood I’ve seen people ask the grocer to stock it, and now they do.
What’s one practical tip you would give to people who are interested in changing how they eat?
One of the major messages I want to impart to people that we can’t do it alone. For many of the problems that we want to address — the public health crisis we’re seeing, issues of food and consumption — things would be so much easier if we do it in community, with family and friends and comrades. If we do it in a community things would be so much easier.
We do need to be building more community, we do need to be exchanging with those that we love and live around.
One thing that I always talk about is having food parties. You know, understanding that people work two or three jobs sometimes, it’s hard to come home and make a homecooked meal. So people can purchase food collectively, pull people together to share the cost and share the ingredients. That addresses the cost issue. If everyone’s doing one or two dishes, and everyone’s working on prep and everyone’s helping clean up, it’s much more manageable than if it’s just one or two people doing it. And with food parties, having people say: You make a stew, Julianne, I do a casserole, somebody else does a big vat of peas, and someone else does collards, people come together and divvy them up among the group and then you have food throughout the week that you can pop in the oven and heat up.
And you’re building community. You’re having fun, you’re getting to know people. These kind of communal spaces outside of commercial spaces are so important for everyone.
—–
Two-Rice Congee with Steamed Spinach and Other Accompaniments by Bryant Terry, from “The Inspired Vegan”
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
Soundtrack: “Into the Wind” by Bei Bei and Shawn Lee from “Into the Wind”
Book: “Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African Americans and Asian Americans,” edited by Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen
Congee is a type of rice porridge popular in many Asian countries. Alone it is pretty simple, but the array of condiments that are sprinkled over the dish give it more flavor and complexity. It can be enjoyed sweet, but I prefer it savory adding shoyu, caramelized onions, preserved turnips, roasted peanuts, minced cilantro, and fried bread sticks known as youtiao (or Chinese doughnuts as my wife calls them). While I call for specific additions in this recipe, feel free to add whatever your mouth desires that day. Think of the congee as your blank canvas and the accompaniments as a colorful palate from which you create. Since this is a big batch, you can continue experimenting with things to add to the porridge throughout the week (think: breakfast porridge). This recipe starts with uncooked rice, but you can also add water to leftover cooked rice and simmer until it has a creamy texture. It also freezes well, and can be eaten at a later date.
Congee
1/4 cups short-grain white rice, soaked in water overnight
3/4 cup short grain brown rice, soaked in water overnight
Two 1/4-inch rounds of fresh ginger
9 cups vegetable stock
Freshly ground white pepper
Accompaniments
Shoyu
Toasted sesame oil
Chili oil
1 cup caramelized onions
blanched or steamed spinach
2 scallions, thinly sliced
1/4 cup minced cilantro
For the congee
Drain the rice and set aside.
In a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, combine the rice, ginger, and 6 cups of stock.
Bring to a boil, then immediately reduce the heat to low and simmer, whisking occasionally, for 30 minutes. Add the remaining stock, and simmer for 2 to 2 1/2 hours more, until the rice is broken up and has the texture of porridge. Remove the ginger with a fork. Whisk the congee vigorously for 1 minute, and season with a few turns of white pepper right before serving.
For the accompaniments
Serve the accompaniments in small bowls along with the congee.
Hometown Loving Boyle Heights Youth Head to Harvard
03 weeks ago
For Los Angeles teen Perla Gutierrez, a trip with her classmates to visit Harvard was not just her first time visiting the East Coast. It was her first time in an airplane.
She and three classmates from Boyle Heights’ Roosevelt High School head there, in a video series put together by Politik Media, to explore the campus and consider a path most of her peers don’t take after high school: pursuing a college degree at an Ivy League university. As their teacher says in the videos, many high school graduates from the neighborhood don’t go on to college, and even Roosevelt students with strong academics tend to head straight to a community college or a state university nearby to stay close to home.
But on their trip to Harvard they meet a fellow Boyle Heights kid who made it to Harvard, and they get to step outside their close-knit communities for a second. It’s a lovely look at a moment in these young people’s lives when the future is an exciting, mysterious expanse before them.
But be sure to start at the beginning of the series (at the top of the page) when Gutierrez and her classmates introduce their neighborhood of Boyle Heights, an immigrant community on the east side of Los Angeles, where all of their stories begin. They talk about their beloved community and their courageous families who immigrated to the country to give them better opportunities.
“It’s not the best neighborhood to live in, but I mean, you can’t complain,” says Gutierrez, of the Boyle Heights. “Everyone’s welcoming. Everyone’s there for you.”
We’re ending the day as often as possible by celebrating love. We welcome your ideas for posts. Send suggestions to submissions@colorlines.com, and be sure to put Celebrate Love in the subject line. You can send links to videos, graphics, photos, quotes, whatever. Or just chime in to the comments below and we’ll find you. Be sure to let us know you’ve got the rights to share any media you send.
To see other Love posts visit our Celebrate Love page.
10 Years Later, No Child Left Behind Ignores Plenty
03 weeks ago
No Child Left Behind turned 10 years old this week, and few threw it a joyous birthday. The landmark law called for all U.S. schoolchildren to be proficient in math and reading by the year 2014, but it was hardly successful. It turns out that idealistic goals attached to punitive sanctions levied without adequate support aren’t an equation for success.
The law explicitly highlighted the racialized achievement gap, but set about ameliorating it with a set of punitive measures based on competition and other market principles.
Most significantly, it solidified the centrality of testing as the way to measure student achievement and demand accountability. The law was the first to require states to report annual testing data to show how much, or how little, progress students are making. In doing so, it ignored the myriad social factors that impact students’ ability to learn; students facing homelessness or whose parents were dealing with joblessness are expected to perform just as well on tests as students who got three hot meals a day and had a quiet, stable place to do their homework every night. Critics have argued that NCLB, in its quest to eradicate educational inequality, has actually only solidified and further entrenched them.
In the decade since No Child Left Behind has been on the books, income inequality has worsened and economic disparities have meant that communities of color, who are disproportionately poor, have gotten squeezed tighter and tighter by policies that ignore their everyday reality.
–Julianne Hing
*This article had been updated since publication
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How Did 15-Year-Old Jakadrien Turner, a U.S. Citizen, Get Deported?
03 weeks ago
The troubling case of a 15-year-old U.S. citizen’s wrongful deportation has raised alarm about what immigration agents have long known is a serious problem: increased enforcement has led to the wrongful detention and deportation of U.S. citizens. And young people are at particular risk in a system where detainees have few rights and immigration agents wide discretion.
This week, 15-year-old Dallas native Jakadrien Turner is back home with her joyful family, but last week she was, according to immigration officials, Tika Lanay Cortez, a 22-year-old they had confidently deported to Colombia last April. Turner, who speaks no Spanish, was deported to the South American country after she was arrested for shoplifting in Houston and told officials she was a Colombian woman and identified herself as Cortez.
Cortez, it turned out, was wanted on separate warrants, and even though Turner’s fingerprints didn’t match up with those of the actual Cortez, immigration officials got Colombia to agree to issue the teen travel documents. Turner lived in Colombia for nearly a year, working at a call center until her grandmother’s furious search for her led to the girl’s release and return to the U.S.
The bizarre details of Turner’s case make it uniquely outrageous, but immigration experts insist that the phenomena–of U.S. citizens mistakenly getting deported–is not uncommon. And with the expansion of enforcement programs like Secure Communities absent any increased protections for people facing deportations, U.S. citizens have gotten caught up in the dragnet.
“Part of it is the push for so many deportations, which the Obama administration has ratcheted up,” said Mark Silverman, director of immigration policy at the San Francisco-based Immigrant Legal Resource Center. “If the priority is deporting people then there’s less priority on scrutinizing whether someone should be deported.”
Aside from the political pressures driving increasingly sloppy enforcement, immigration experts explain that the structural mechanisms of the immigration system facilitate these kinds of terrible oversights.
“One of the major weaknesses is there is no due process,” said Maricela Garcia, an expert in how unaccompanied minors navigate the U.S. immigration system and the director of capacity building at the National Council of La Raza. “We place in our democracy a lot of value on due process but most don’t have access to legal representation because they have to pay for it and the government is not going to provide it.”
Because immigration violations are technically a civil issue, immigrants in detention have no right to an attorney even though the consequences–deportation–can be much worse than for those facing criminal proceedings. Multiple reports in recent years have found that the bulk of immigrant detainees navigate the labyrinthine immigration system on their own, or are isolated in far-flung detention centers out of reach to legal aid services which are concentrated in urban areas.
Young people become uniquely vulnerable in these situations.
“A lot of children are scared and their age and developmental experience doesn’t allow them to understand what is expected of them or the legal remedies that they might otherwise be eligible for,” Garcia said. “Often minors do not know what they are agreeing to or how to present their cases.”
In many cases, there is no requirement that detainees see a judge, which only compounds the problem.
“These two massive deficiencies, that you have no lawyer to help advocate for you and no guarantee you can see a judge, mean that very low level ICE agents are in many cases the first and last arbiter of your citizenship claim,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, deputy legal director at the ACLU of Southern California. Too often, he said, immigration agents don’t believe or bother checking people’s stories, even when they might make valid claims of citizenship.
One or both of these checks would certainly have helped someone verify Turner’s actual identity before she got deported, Arulanantham said.
The federal government is clearly aware of the trend, though. In 2009 ICE director John Morton issued a memo providing guidance on how agents should treat detainees who make a claim for citizenship. And just last week ICE announced it would launch a 24-hour hotline for people who thought they’d been wrongfully detained and others to get up-to-date information about their cases.
“The hotline is bleated recognition of the overwhelming evidence that immigration agents are detaining U.S. citizens,” Arulanantham said. “Obviously they don’t need a hotline if it’s a one-off problem.”
For Turner, this chapter of her story comes to a close, even though basic questions about her case remain unanswered. ICE spokesperson Carl Rusnok said in a statement that, “ICE is fully and immediately investigating this matter in order to expeditiously determine the facts of this case.”
There is no guarantee that others might not face Turner’s fate in the future.
“As long as we approach every case as a potential deportee and we rob them of opportunities for due process and an opportunity for them to show why they are here, we are more prone to making the horrible mistake of deporting even U.S. citizen children,” Garcia said.
Jakedrien Turner, Dallas Teen Deported to Colombia, Heads Home
04 weeks ago
Jakedrien Turner, the 15 year old African-American girl who was mistakenly deported to Colombia by ICE last April, is on a flight back to the U.S. and could be home by today.
Dallas’ WFAA reports that Jakadrien’s grandmother Lorene Turner, who waged a relentless campaign to locate her granddaughter, received a phone call last night informing her that her Jakadrien would be returned to U.S. officials this morning. From WFAA:
“Trying to catch my breath,” said Lorene Turner, Jakadrien’s grandmother. “You just don’t know how I feel. I’m just speechless.”
Thursday night she received a call from Bogota. It was the answer to a prayer.
The Colombian government agreed to hand over Turner’s granddaughter, Jakadrien, to the U.S. Embassy.
“Oh I feel good,” she said. “It was worth it.”
The Dallas teen, who spoke no Spanish and is a U.S. citizen, reportedly told police that she was a native of Colombia after she was arrested for shoplifting last year. According to news reports, the name she gave immigration officials matched that of a person who was wanted on other charges, and even though Turner’s fingerprints didn’t match, ICE deported her anyway. Turner’s been living in Colombia since April of last year and making a living working at a call center.
For now, it seems the worst of Turner’s harrowing experience is over. The questions surrounding her alarming case–including how a minor was deported from the U.S. without immigration officials confirming her identity–continue to swirl.
Justice Dept. Finally Cuffs Sheriff Joe, But Not the Policy That Made Him
01 month ago
Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” will cooperate with the federal government’s demands to clean up his department after a three-year investigation found rampant racial profiling and widespread discriminatory policing under his watch. But he’s not doing it without issuing a few demands of his own.
Arpaio was up against a Wednesday deadline set forth by the Department of Justice following the release of its damning report last month. He had to either voluntarily comply with the DOJ’s proposed reforms for Maricopa County, Ariz., or face civil action, the Department of Justice told Arpaio last month. Arpaio responded pointedly, saying he would begin talks with the Department of Justice only when federal government provided “proof” he’d done something wrong.
The lengthy response from Arpaio’s attorneys all but bristles. It includes 106 separate requests for documentation of the Justice Department’s findings and claims a “dearth of facts” in the original report.
“We, too, prefer to resolve this matter without litigation, but will not cower at the threat of litigation, either,” Arpaio’s attorneys wrote to Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez.
It was a classic move from the publicity-obsessed sheriff, who’s made a name for himself as an anti-immigrant hardliner so committed to detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants that he was willing to trample on the rights of citizens and non-citizens alike.
In his tenure as sheriff, Arpaio has eagerly exploited the power that the Department of Homeland Security handed him to enforce federal immigration law, through programs like 287(g) and Secure Communities. The Department of Justice investigation confirmed the community’s longstanding complaints about racial profiling and a jail system that runs roughshod over inmates’ basic rights. It found that Latino drivers were four to nine times more likely than their non-Latino counterparts to be pulled over for traffic stops, for instance.
But Immigrant rights advocates say that the Department of Justice report calls into question more than Arpaio. They say it also indicts the immigration enforcement programs that Arpaio the Department of Homeland Security empowered him to carry out. Under 287(g) and Secure Communities, local law enforcement collaborate with federal immigration enforcement officers to screen and refer deportable immigrants who pass through local and county jails to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“We all knew what Arpaio was doing,” said Carlos Garcia with the Arizona-based immigrant rights organization PUENTE, “but the most important fact was the report also condemned the ICE programs that gave Arpaio immigration enforcement powers, and that being what created the racial profiling and what created the abuse.”
Immigrant rights groups argue that DHS should stop contracting with Arpaio entirely.
“The DOJ has exposed the corrupt partnership between DHS and Sheriff Arpaio,” said Sarahi Uribe, an organizer with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “A precedent has been set when the Constitution is being violated and when people are being racially profiled the federal government should not be contracting with those local law enforcement agencies.”
Immediately after the DOJ released its investigation last month, DHS moved to cut off Arpaio’s participation in 287(g) and access to Secure Communities. In recent weeks the changes have not led to any substantive change on the ground, Garcia said.
According to Garcia, Arpaio’s deputies are no longer allowed to ask for a person’s immigration status upon arrest; that responsibility has been moved to ICE officers who are inside county jails. However, Arpaio’s officers still patrol the streets and stop and book people as always.
“The racial profiling doesn’t happen once people are in jail,” Garcia said. “It happens out and about when officers are in the community, and right now these officers don’t have to answer to anyone. They can bring in anyone and book them.”
Arpaio has long defended his harsh policing by saying that his federal contracts and expanding and ever more aggressive state law gave him the power to be as tough as he is, said Doris Marie Provine, a professor in the school of social transformation at Arizona State University.
“He’s always said, ‘The legislature gives me a law and I enforce it. Don’t get mad at me, get mad at the legislature,’” Provine said. “That was his position with state law and I think that’s his position here as well.”
Even if Arpaio cooperates fully and efficiently with the Department of Justice, police accountability experts caution, the road to reform is a long one. “We need to be careful in our expectations,” said Sam Walker, a criminologist at the University of Nebraska. “The DOJ is just talking procedural reforms here.”
The DOJ’s list of proposed reforms includes a mandate for better data tracking to curb discriminatory policing, and training for law enforcement officers and a system for the public to file complaints. They will take time to implement, and will likely not get to the root of immigrant rights advocates’ concerns.
To do that, said Uribe, the Department of Homeland Security must stop empowering local law enforcement agencies that have a proven track record of violating people’s civil rights to enforce immigration law.
“The federal government can’t have this ongoing contradiction where one federal agency is facilitating local agencies’ breaking of the law,” Uribe said.
Scholars Eye SB 1070 as Among Court’s "Biggest Immigration Cases Ever"
01 month ago
On Monday the Supreme Court announced that it’s ready to settle the contentious dispute over whether states, and not just the federal government, get to have a hand in enforcing immigration law.
The Supreme Court will be examining Arizona’s SB 1070, the first law in the country that made it a state crime to be an undocumented immigrant. Technically, the Supreme Court is only examining four key provisions from the broad law, including the mandate that law enforcement officers question anyone they suspect to be an undocumented immigrant. But the high court’s ruling will likely have far-reaching impacts on the lives of undocumented immigrants, and those suspected of being undocumented.
“This case has the potential for being one of the biggest immigration cases decided by the Supreme Court ever,” said Kevin Johnson, dean of the UC Davis School of Law. “It touches on immigration. It touches on civil rights. It touches on state and federal power. And it’s got a real cast of characters too.”
One of them, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who’s been an unapologetic backer of SB 1070 and the copycats it has spawned since it became law in April 2010, praised the Supreme Court’s decision to take up the case, and defended the controversial law’s constitutionality in the face of a forceful challenge from the Department of Justice.
“I signed SB 1070 in order to give our state and local law enforcement one more tool with which to combat illegal immigration, while acting in concert with federal law and the U.S. Constitution,” Brewer said in a statement this week. “As I [signed SB 1070], I was keenly aware of the need to respect federal authority over immigration-related matters.”
Not so, the federal government has argued. The DOJ, which sued Arizona, and has also filed separate lawsuits against Utah, Alabama and South Carolina over their unique SB 1070 copycat laws, has argued that under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, the federal government and the federal government alone have the right to create and enforce immigration laws. The DOJ has also argued that it has an enforcement plan, explained University of Texas law professor Denise Gilman, and that state laws that funnel more people into local immigration offices siphon away resources the federal government needs to focus on its actual priorities.
“What it signals is a decision by the Supreme Court that it is time to take up this question of where the boundaries lie between federal and state action on immigration enforcement,” said Gilman.
The case arrived in front of the high court because of a complex legal tussle; Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is challenging a lower court’s decision to block SB 1070′s key provisions from being enforced while the courts deal with the actual constitutionality of the provision. Brewer’s argued that the law should go into effect anyway. Still, it’s likely that the court will address the broad range of issues SB 1070 raises, not just the injunction request.
“I think the Supreme Court understands that this is a pressing issue for the state and for immigrants as well, and these issues are coming across the country, and you can’t deny it if you wanted to,” Johnson said.
“There’s a record number of these types of laws getting passed right now,” he said, adding that the court likely took up the case now because it saw a need for clarity on the issue, especially given the number of disparate rulings on these state laws.
“Whatever the Supreme Court decides in the Arizona case will absolutely impact the other litigation that is taking place,” Gilman said.
For the meantime, she said, the federal government will likely keep pressing hard to reign in states that attempt to pass their own laws, even as ICE faces a similar problem of its own making.
Get Ready for Battle: Supreme Court Will Take Up SB 1070
01 month ago
The fight that both sides of the immigration debate have been itching for has finally arrived. The Supreme Court has decided to examine Arizona’s SB 1070, CBS reported.
The Supreme Court responded to a petition from Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer over her state’s trailblazing anti-immigrant legislation requesting that the high court void a lower court’s injunction that blocked parts of the law from being enforced. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had affirmed a yet lower court’s ruling that the state must hold off on mandating that police officers question someone about their immigration status if they believed the person to be undocumented. Other provisions, including one that made it a state crime to be an undocumented immigrant, and another that allowed law enforcement officers to hold someone in police custody while officers determined that person’s immigration status, were enjoined while the courts dealt with the constitutionality of the provisions. U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton’s court ruling was a partial injunction though; there are provisions of SB 1070 that are currently being enforced in the state.
Arizona was the first state in the nation to attempt, and pass, such brazen anti-immigrant legislation. It’s also the first state that the federal government sued over its attempts to pass and enforce its own immigration laws. In its lawsuits, the Department of Justice has argued that under the Supremacy clause of the Constitution, the federal government and the federal government alone are allowed to create and enforce immigration law. Civil rights groups have also charged that the law relies on racial profiling.
Yet since Brewer signed SB 1070 into law last year, Utah, Indiana, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina have passed copycat versions of SB 1070, clearly undeterred by the expensive and controversial legal battles they’ve instigated. Some, like Alabama’s HB 56, go further than SB 1070 in their attempts to criminalize every aspect of undocumented immigrants’ lives. And the federal government, in an effort to respond to these various individual laws, has chased down Utah, Alabama and South Carolina with separate lawsuits.
Now that the Supreme Court has agreed to take up SB 1070, they’ll attempt to settle the question of where the federal government’s territory ends and state power begins in the ongoing debate over immigration enforcement law.
Jesmyn Ward Talks National Book Award Win and the Will to Write
01 month ago
When Jesmyn Ward’s second novel “Salvage the Bones” was awarded the National Book Award two weeks ago, which she explained to her family as the “Oscars for books,” it immediately propelled Ward, a relative newcomer, onto the national stage. It also shone a light on her story of a poor black family living and loving in a rural backwater Gulf Coast town in the days before Hurricane Katrina.
The place and the people were inspired by her own hometown of Delisle, Miss. In the book, the family of siblings have better things to do than fret about the storm, which is just days away from making landfall. They’re chasing basketball dreams, tending to beloved spouse-pets, and in the case of Esch, the book’s 15-year-old narrator, struggling to accept the new life growing in her.
Ward, who called her recent win “surreal,” chatted with Colorlines.com about conventional depictions of black women, giving life to the stories of people she grew up with, and having the courage to commit to writing.
You mentioned in your acceptance speech that you set out to write about the lives of black folks and poor folks and rural folks, “so that the culture that marginalized us for so long would see that … our lives are as fraught and lovely and important as theirs.” Can you say more about that?
Jesmyn Ward: When I first committed to writing that was the reason I did it, because I wanted to write about people who were just really marginalized, who I never really saw in our modern popular culture, and so that was important to me, to reach the kind of people who had misconceptions and preconceived notions about those kinds of people, and to write against that.
That’s a large part of the reason that I decided to write about the kind of people I grew up with and did not use writing as more of an escape into another world, which I’d done when I was young in high school and somewhat in college. When I really committed to writing, I didn’t do that.
Can you talk about popular depictions of black women and girls, and where they fit in our popular imaginations, and if or how you see your work as a response to that?
It’s an interesting line that I’m walking because at the same time that I’m trying to write against these preconceived notions that I feel people have about black people, poor people, Southern people. I know that in some ways if people were summarizing my book, they could say: Oh, it’s about a black pregnant teenager who is poor and in love with a boy who’s not in love with her. In some ways they could think it’s reinforcing these stereotypes, but I feel–I hope–that the power of the characterizations, and how human they are, works against that. So even though she’s pregnant, she’s 15, they are very poor, I still hope that because she’s very human, that will counteract those expectations and make her story more universal.
I think we have a very limited view of black women in this country in regards to what we think they’re capable of and what we expect of them. There’s a reason that [Esch, the 15-year-old narrator] is darker than I am, you know what I’m saying? That she’s not light skinned, that she thinks of herself as unremarkable in every way, because I wanted to write about a character who is outside of all the norms of those standards of beauty.
I remember earlier this year there was this insane article that I read by that crazy scientist who said there was a scientific reason that black women were unattractive, the most unattractive out of everyone. That we’re still encountering things like that, I feel like I have to write against it, so hopefully after people encounter these characters, it’ll be harder to reduce black women and black men, the people I write about, to these insane types and reduce us to these weird, arcane ideas.
There’s another character in your book, China, who’s such a powerful force in the book, and who’s a dog. Who or what inspired her?
She just popped up into my work one day. I discovered her and [her owner, Esch's older brother] Skeetah at the same time, and what’s interesting about them, at least to me, is this bond that they have, which is so strange and weird and it confused me and intrigued me. I couldn’t let them go. I kept returning to this character in my head, before I began “Salvage the Bones.” And where I was growing up, my dad had pit bulls that he sometimes fought. My brother also had a pit bull. Young men in my neighborhood, and some young women, too, when they get a dog, there’s no choice, they always get pit bulls. It’s part of that culture that informed my choice.
The scenes of Katrina were incredibly gripping. Where were you and where was your family during the storm?
I was home, in southern Mississippi, in my hometown of DeLisle. That was the summer between my second and third years at the University of Michigan and so I was supposed to go back to teach in the fall and because I would always come home for the summers in Mississippi, I thought, I’ll stay here till the storm passes so I can be with my family and then go back to school. I totally underestimated the storm, so I was here for it.
Living through it allowed me to understand, it’s going to sound trite, but the power of a storm like that. The terror that people feel in the middle of it, because you can’t cope with it when you’re in a storm like that. It really is just about survival, just about scrambling to survive.
I would love to know where these characters are now, six years after the storm.
I can’t picture them. I can picture her having the baby, but I can’t picture them as adults. I can’t move them that far into the future, I don’t know why. I think maybe because I love them so much as they are, as being teenagers and kids, it’s hard for me to move them into adulthood.
When did you know you had stories you wanted to tell and when did you get up the courage to tell them. I read in your Wikipedia profile you had gotten into a nursing program, is that true?
Oh no, no no. I was thinking of applying. I had gone to Stanford as an undergrad, which is a really good school, and I had gone to the University of Michigan, which was a really great school, and I felt like compared to my peers, my writing career was dead in the water. I had a novel no one wanted. I kept getting rejected by publishing companies, no one wanted to publish it. I didn’t have anything published at all yet, even though I had a short story accepted. [Around 2006 to 2008] I began rethinking everything and whether or not I should even continue doing this. And then several things happened. I didn’t give up. It’s like foolish or bravery or, I don’t know, desperation. I didn’t give up. I just kept at it and we brought my book to a smaller publishing company out of Chicago, and then I was chosen as a Stegner fellow and everything turned around.
That’s not to say I’ve been successful in all my endeavors since, because I haven’t. But some people started saying yes, and that was enough to keep me going.
But I didn’t commit to writing until after my brother died. He died in the year 2000. I’d just graduated from college and at the time I was thinking of going to law school, but I couldn’t shake this impulse to write and write specifically about the place where I came from. But I kept trying not to do it, you know? Because I was the first person in my family to graduate from college, and I felt a lot of pressure to get a stable, lucrative career. And then my brother died and everything changed for me, because all the old standards that I had lived by before… Suddenly, getting some stable job that I probably wouldn’t enjoy didn’t seem so important. I thought, what could I do with my life that would give it meaning, and that’s the first thing that popped into my head, writing. So I decided to try, and I could try and fail, but at least I could try.
What would you say to other young writers out there who have stories to tell, and who want to be telling those stories?
I would tell them, you’re going to face a lot of rejection and a lot of people are going to tell you no, but you only need one person to tell you yes, so hang in there. I mean, look at me, it happened to me. You can have a ton of people telling you no, but as long as you have one or two people tell you yes, then something is still happening and it’s still worth it.
I would tell them to be as truthful as they can be to their stories, because I think young writers of color, we’re not the norm in the literary world. I feel like the literary world feels like it’s like Highlander. “There can only be one.” And I’ve read that before, other writers of color expressing that sentiment. And that’s tough because I think those expectations hold true in regards to class, too. Like, there can only be one hard-scrabble writer, and even region, too, right. There can only be one writer of color from the South.
So I think we are facing an uphill battle where because people feel the market is limited as far as our stories go, that they don’t feel they can give all the attention to different writers of color. But I believe in the power of our stories, and I believe in the value of our stories, and I believe they have merit and they need to be told. There’s universal appeal in my story, even though it’s about a very specific time and place and set of people, and there’s universal appeal in the stories a lot of young writers of color are writing. We just have to fight to make sure people recognize that.
Keep fighting, because those stories are worth being told. If you keep fighting people will recognize that.
Poverty Soars Among Children in California School Districts
01 month ago
Poverty is soaring in California school districts, according to recent Census figures, with little relief in sight.
As the number of children living in poverty continues to rise, meeting students’ educational needs becomes a more complex task, and the impact of poverty on children’s ability to learn can’t be understated, say education experts and community advocates.
“Poverty creates a lot of constraints for families to provide appropriate learning environments for children,” said Angelica Solis, the executive director of Alliance for a Better Community, a Los Angeles-based community advocacy group that works with Latino families in the city’s public schools. “Everything from having enough food on the table to providing adequate space to study and a quiet place to sleep at night.”
“If a child isn’t getting adequate nutrition or enough sleep, then their ability to concentrate and do well in school is diminished.”
Between 2007 and 2010, poverty in California ballooned 30 percent. In 2010, 27.3 percent of the 773,749 children in Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, are living in poverty, compared to the district’s 23.1 percent poverty rate in 2007.
The increase isn’t limited alone to California. In the same period, two million more children sunk into poverty. And 96 of the nation’s largest 100 school districts also saw increases in poverty. Today, nearly half–45 percent–of U.S. schoolchildren between the ages of 5 and 17 are enrolled in school districts where poverty levels exceed the national average of 19.8 percent.
The federal government sets the poverty level at $22,113 for a family of four people, and uses the data to set funding for schools.
The rise in poverty is inextricably linked to a similar rise in homelessness and rates of children who depend on free and reduced lunch. Since the start of the recession, more and more families are on the move, Solis said, moving in with other family members to share the rent of one home instead of several. More parents, out of work and with no permanent address, are spending their days just trying to scrounge enough food for dinner for their kids, and find a place to sleep at night.
The impacts of grinding poverty create more educational challenges, say experts, but poverty gets further entrenched because schools where poor kids are concentrated are given less to work with to meet their greater needs, says Jamienne Studley, president of Public Advocates, a California-based advocacy organization and law firm that works on poverty issues.
Studley says that states serious about their mandate to provide a quality public education to their students must re-evaluate funding streams to make sure that resources are allocated equitably.
“It’s a system question,” Studley said. “We make it harder for them to overcome those problems instead of easier. We send them the brand new untested teachers, we give them less funding instead of more, we are less likely to give them the schoolbooks they need. We stack the odds against them.”