Just a couple links for you on this fine August Friday!
Colorlines reminds us that the 45th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and they present some amazing photos of courage and determination from the Selma to Montgomery Right to Vote March.
Tag Archives: Latino/Hispanic/Mexican
This Week in Diversity: Appearance
Greetings on another Friday afternoon!
Steph Su Reads starts us out with Why I Want More Asians on YA Book Covers: My Experience with Racism, in which she shares a personal experience with racism and her dismay over the revised cover of Cindy Pon’s Silver Phoenix.
This Week in Diversity: Oil, Russia, and Avenue Q
The oil spill in the Gulf has been all over the news lately, and, frustrating though the lack of progress has been, there have been many efforts to stem the oil geyser. What about oil spills that don’t have a large impact on Americans? The Times looks at the Niger River Delta, which has seen the equivalent of the Exxon-Valdez spill a year every year for fifty years, with little attempt at cleanup or attention to the disastrous effect on the area’s ecosystem or economic future.
This Week in Diversity: American Geography
Oh, Arizona. Why are so many things happening in your beautiful state lately that give us reason to talk about you in these roundups? This time around, it’s a mural featuring the faces of local schoolchildren—but the schoolchildren are a diverse crowd, the mural was drawing racist slurs, and the school’s principal asked for a prominent Latino face to be lightened on the mural. He’s since reversed the decision, and the mural will stay. The Atlantic Wire has a good summary of the situation and the response to it.
The repercussions of Arizona’s anti-immigration law are still rippling outward. RaceWire elaborates with a look at the disappearing schoolchildren, as parents, particularly illegal immigrants, are keeping their kids—often natural-born citizens themselves—at home to protect the family.
Video Thursday: Illegal European Immigrants
Via Stuff White People Do, a different perspective on Arizona’s new immigration law:
This Week in Diversity: Arizona, the Supreme Court, and Crayons
Before we launch into this week’s roundup of race and diversity links, I’d like to make a plea: help your local library. Many around the country are facing massive budget cuts, so let your elected officials know that your library is important. New Yorkers, NYPL has a handy form to help you contact your City Council member and the mayor, in the hopes of preventing massive service cuts, including closing ten branches and limiting the library to four open days per week.
Now, to diversity!
White people adopting children of color is discussed relatively often, but Charles Mudede looks at the other side: what it says when a black person adopts a white child.
Video Thursday: We speak Racist
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9ohsvJHkbY&w=475]
We’ll ignore the fact that they wouldn’t save money because they would lose their Federal transportation funding if they only offered the test in English. We won’t ignore that it’s racist; it’s barely-coded anti-immigrant rhetoric, and in the current political climate, anti-immigrant rhetoric is barely-coded anti-Latino rhetoric. And “If you want to live here, learn [English]” adds another layer: the implication that immigrants and minorities are lazy. Learning a new language and adjusting to a new culture are not easy things, and needing a driver’s license before needing English fluency is practicality, not laziness.
This Week in Diversity: History, Alternate Reality, and the Future
Last Friday haiku
Thirty days of poetry
Ending with a verse.
Let’s start the week’s links with some history! It turns out that there have been biracial people for a long time, and we’re not just talking homo sapiens of European descent with those of African descent: a recent genetic study found evidence of interbreeding between early humans and Neanderthals. Pretty cool!
Video Thursday: Immigration Reform and Racism
In his deadpan way, Colbert reminds us how central race is to the immigration debate:
This Week in Diversity: Heritage
The census, however flawed and necessary it may be, has triggered some great writing and thinking about race and how we define ourselves. From CNN we have two great essays: journalist and filmmaker Raquel Cepeda writes on being Latino and the stories her family has told of their mixed heritage, and author Walter Mosley brings us a poetic look at the 10,000 years of history that led to him.