The Language of Love

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Todos los padres que yo conozco aman a sus hijos.  Quieren que sus hijos vuelen con alas de oro, hasta vistas y montañas previamente no conocidas. And the best way to do that is bilingual education.  Around the world, children are being educated in multiple languages, opening doors for them that they have yet to imagine.

For immigrant parents in the United States, they most obviously want their young ones to learn English, in order to navigate the majority culture and access the corridors of opportunity, power and success.  For wealthy or economically advantaged parents in these same United States, school visits and decisions often hinge upon which “foreign languages” their child will have exposure to, or the opportunity to learn.

Los Latinos, entonces, debemos aprovechar la oportunidad que tenemos, y demandar educación bilingüe para nuestros hijos. No estoy hablando de “spanglish”. In this instance, we are talking about re-enforcing literacy in the native language of Spanish, and in the language of power, English.  We’re also not speaking of the segregation which has reemerged, in both Arizona and California, that places English Language Learners (predominantly Latinos in both cases), in separate and unequal classrooms where they fall further and further behind until they drop out.

A bilingual education is one that teaches both languages explicitly, and ensures literacy in both. While this may be a challenging notion, the purpose of education is to equip students with the tools necessary to succeed outside of the classroom.  The mental agility necessary to learn both languages is a skill to be developed and practiced at school.  The use of both languages consistently reinforces knowledge that will help them to navigate lives beyond campus. This inclusion and instruction of two languages is the norm in independent schools across the country.

Education in more than one language is a basic tenet of quality education that we need to adopt and demand of all our schools to set Latino children on the path to greater academic and future success. While some parents might be hesitant to confront this issue with the school administrators, it is imperative que nuestros padres step up and speak up.  Bilingualism isn’t simply a benefit to be reserved to students fortunate enough to attend elite educational institutions.  Being able to communicate in more than one language is becoming a gateway skill for success in the twenty-first century.

Standing up for our children and their learning, though, does teach them yet another language. Que mantengan el idioma de su familia, de su hogar, y que aprendan el idioma del poder en Los Estados Unidos es un mensaje en el idioma mas universal del mundo: el idioma del amor.

This entry was originally posted on Wednesday, 6 April 2011 at Latinos in Social Media for Edu-Wednesday.

Related Articles

• Language News: Dual language program gives Modesto kids best of English, Spanish – Education – Modbee.com (lingeducator.com)
• Education: Battle Over Bilingualism (time.com)
• Education: For Learning Or Ethnic Pride? (time.com)
• Getting Into College: The Personal Statement (education.com)
• Benefits of Bilingualism
• Break down the language barriers.
• Bilingual Children Are Better Mentally Developed And Do Better In School
• Studies question Arizona’s policy on English learners
• Separate and Unequal Schools Pervasive in Southern California
• The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles
• Bilingual Minds

I hate THEM, Vote for me

The Face of Hate

All politics are local, which means that there are two contests right now being contested that I have to take an interest in.  The battle for the executive office in California is being framed as the good white folk against those dirty illegal Mexicans (much like the Senate race in Missouri). With a snide smile hiding his fangs, Candidate Steve Poizner is running ads against Candidate Meg Whitman for the Republican nomination which focus solely on “services for illegals” and “just like Obama” and Governor Schwartzenegger, swinging at immigrants, women, brown and black people all in one fell swoop.  There are no positives in the ad except for the question, “Don’t we deserve a Republican?”

These politics of division were most recently on display in Virginia, when Governor Bob McDonnell officially forgot there were black people in that state during the Civil War.  And in his desperation to pick up the Orange County vote, Poizner is hating loudly and often, hoping that he will gin up enough anger to get those white hands to the voting booth.  Our state, though, cannot afford his divide and conquer attacks.  Like Carly Fiorina, who is trying to lie her way into the Senate seat for California currently held by Barbara Boxer, Poizner is doing his best to change his political dress by following John McCain into the Tea Party right wing.

Poizner hates THEM.  Unfortunately for him, there are more of us THEM than there are of him.  While I’m not crazy about Meg Whitman buying the Governor’s mansion, I’m staunchly opposed to the “subtly” racist, hyper-xenophobic and oppressive campaign that Steve Poizner is running.  It doesn’t bode well for how he’d govern.

We’re Slipping

Update:  California finally passed a budget today – 2/19/09.

California used to have the fifth largest economy in the world.  Now we have the eighth.  Those three places represent billions of dollars that no longer reside in the Golden State.  And the dollars that we do possess collectively are not being used wisely or well.  Governor Schwartzenegger is overseeing yet another all-nighter in the State Senate, where the budget yesterday failed to pass by one vote.  With little brother following big brother, the California budget needed three Republican votes and received only two.  Is this a litmus test in the Gallant Old Party these days?

20,000 pink slips are set to go out today if the $42 million shortfall isn’t somehow negotiated by the end of the day.  All of this occurring as Senator (I want to be Governor of California) Feintstein lays out how the President’s stimulus package will impact California.  Unfortunately, it looks like we have two different fiscal issues going on: 1) things are hard all over, so things are hard in California; and 2) the state government is spending more than it brings in, and has been for a number of years.  Since we can’t use the stimulus monies to fill in the gap left by state government outlays, these two issues seem to be two ships passing in the night.

Oops!  In doing more reading, it seems that the stimulus package will cover part of the shortfall . . . about $11 billion dollars . . . still not sure how, but as I learn, I’ll pass on.

And California isn’t the only state hit.  With the President signing the stimulus package today, states with Democratic and Republican governors are having to make up the cash crunch by crunching people out of jobs.  And my question is simply this:

Why do people who have jobs, like the Republican Representatives and Senators (and Democratic ones, too) stand up and say, “we’re doing this for the people” when the people are losing their jobs?

It’s been argued that tax cuts are stimulative, but that’s only when you have a job.  Until then, the tax cuts that the current GOP keeps harping on will have the same effect as the tax cuts enacted under forty-three –

None if you didn’t have the money to qualify in the first place.

We’re slipping, dog.  We’re slipping.

California budget crisis jeopardizes 20,000 jobs

Senator Feinstein Outlines Funding Details for California

States in financial pinch looking at drastic cost-cutting measures

White House: Stimulus plan will add jobs

California Into The Abyss

Blogging History

Eric Holder, the Attorney General-designate of the Obama Administration is drawing a lot of fire from Republicans.  They are trying to bluff and bluster, in order not to appear patsies to the mandate of the President-elect and the Democratic majority in Congress.  One of the “issues” they are going to try to get him on is his role in the Elian Gonzalez case.

Elian Gonzalez was a young Cuban boy who left Cuba with his mother in a boat trying to escape Fidel Castro’s regime.  His mother, though, died on the journey, and he was picked up by the US Coast Guard, and brought to his mother’s family in Florida.  When all this came to light, his father, still in Cuba, asked that he be returned.  After months of very public grandstanding and pleas from entertainment and political figures, the US government raided his mother’s family’s home, and pulled the crying youngster from his mother’s family at gunpoint.  The Senate Republicans want to know “exactly what Mr. Holder’s role in the affair was in his capacity as the Assistant Attorney General.”

I firmly believed then, as I do now, that Elian should have been returned to his father without any qualms, and that the United States government should not have been beholden to a group of wealthy ex-patriots who were trying to prove a political point instead of worrying about what was best for Elian.  That being said, I began to wonder what else I would have blogged about, had blogging been around at the time.

Here’s my list:

1. The fall of apartheid in South Africa

2. The Tienamen Square Uprisings and suppression

3. The Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984

4. The election of Bill Clinton (my first presidential election as a voter)

5. The persecution of President Clinton

6. The real reason he should have been impeached

7. Tupac, Biggie and the real meaning of assassination

At this point, blogging was around, but I wasn’t doing it!

8. Bush v. Gore and the Supreme Court

9. The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers

10. The invasion of Iraq

11. John Kerry and John Edwards?  Seriously?

12. The recall of Gray Davis in California

13. Barack Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention

14. Rodney King, OJ Simpson and Reginald Denny

This list was just off the top of my head, and I was staying in the frame of time I have been walking the earth and aware of the outside world.  Otherwise, I would have blogged about Jefferson and Hemmings, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln’s “Show me the spot!” speech, and Plessy v. Ferguson, too.

Since you’re here, what would you have blogged about?

A Paradoxical Act of Poetic Justice

Crispus Attucks was told, as he stood at the front of a crowd of unruly citizens harassing British soldiers in Boston Massachusetts, “this ain’t none of your affair.” When the soldiers opened fire, he was the first to die. Barack Obama, as President-elect of the United States of America, while dealing with Israel’s current air strikes against Hamas, is also being told, in musical verse, that he’s “a magic negro.”

Over the course of two hundred nineteen years, many gains have been made in terms of granting full equality to all citizens of the United States. Black folk have attained the right to vote. Women have attained the right to vote. Segregation by race is no longer legal. Japanese American citizens can live wherever they want. People from China are allowed to immigrate to the United States. Slavery has been outlawed. That none of these issues should really have been contested is moot. But the marginalization of numerical minority groups is rooted in the American landscape as surely as the ideals we aspire to. And full equality has yet to be achieved in some areas still.

So while I celebrate President-elect Barack Hussein Obama’s rise to the highest office in the land, I am also cognizant that Jim Clark’s spirit is alive and well today. I am cognizant that I had to send my young black, Chicano, Chilean children to school on November 5^th armed against their second and third grade classmates’ “innocent ignorance” when they commented that “Obama won just because he’s black.” I am cognizant that Rush Limbaugh (who said Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama was “all about race”), Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and their ilk and followers who may or may not believe that black people are inferior use their rhetoric and their megaphones to continue the oppressive racism of Andrew Jackson and John Wilkes Booth, of George Wallace and Strom Thurmond. Kanye West’s statement that “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People,” in the wake of the President’s inaction when the levies broke, and my brother the teacher’s latest experience of being pulled over by the police after the officer watched three other (white) drivers make the same left turn, and the assassination plots and attempts constantly monitored against this President-elect remind me that much as things CHANGE, the more they stay the same.

Crispus Attucks was the first man to die in the struggle for American independence. The paradoxical nature of an enslaved/escaped black man dying for the freedom and creation of a country in which he was considered less than human by the legal framework that defined it should be lost on no one. The same way that the poetic justice of a man whose father was a black Kenyan and whose mother was a white Kansan, who is African American by nationality as well as visage and life experience being elected to lead that same country should be lost on no one.

In speaking with my sister-in-law and her parents on Christmas Eve, I asked, “do you realize what it means, to have him elected to be President of these United States?” Forty years ago, black people were being killed for wanting to register to vote. Forty years ago, one man was shot for encouraging black people to dream of equality. Forty years ago, Barack Obama was seven years old.

As we look forward to the changes President Obama will enact both inside and outside of our country, it is important that we take a look back as well to understand the moment that we are standing in, the moments others have worked for, and the legacy that we are heirs to and guardians of for the next generation.

Happy New Year!

Obama, Rice discuss Gaza strikes

RNC chairman condemns controversial Obama song

You’re Likeable Enough, Gay People

Neo-Nazis charged over Obama ‘assassination plot’

Forced to pass on a front seat to history

My Money Where My Mouth Is

President-elect Obama’s candidacy and campaign moved me.  I’ve been inspired to write, donate, cajole, inform, argue and call because it is apparent that our country is in need of a change, and the only way to do that is to stop leaving the work to others, whether they are Barack Obama or Rod Blagoyevich, and start doing some of the heavy lifting myself.   I have even had some acquaintances ask me when I was going to run for office, which I summarily brushed off and kept writing and working to get President-elect Obama elected.

Then I got an email from the chair of the Democratic Party in California that forced me to evaluate how much mouth I have to answer for:

Dear Democrat,

In 2008 California grassroots activists changed the nation! California Democrats from up and down the state volunteered their time, made phone calls, donated money, and knocked on doors in California and across the county as part of our largest grassroots effort ever.

Now it’s time to make sure we keep our fight for CHANGE alive here in California! Can you keep our efforts going by running to be a delegate to the 2009 State Convention?

The California Democratic Party’s Assembly District Election Meetings will be held on January 10th & 11th, 2009. At these meetings, registered Democrats will elect 12 delegates from each Assembly District to be members of the California Democratic Party State Central Committee.

WILL YOU BE THE CHANGE CALIFORNIA NEEDS and run to be an Assembly District Delegate for the California Democratic Party?

Now is your opportunity to help direct the future of Democrats in California! Delegates approve the platform of the Party, elect Party officers and endorse candidates for congress, state legislature, and executive office.


The question is, do I take the next step?  While I was encouraged to run as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention this year, do I start working in the machinery of government?  Is being a delegate to the party convention over the next couple of years a way to start working on fixing public education in California, cutting the horrendous waste in our state budget which has the Democratic representatives trying to raise taxes by calling the fees and the Republicans fighting them without offering solutions?

It’s easy to stay out of the fray, reading and offering analyses.  I’m not as silly as Rick Warren to say that bloggers don’t serve a purpose, though.  I think that we are, to paraphrase the Huffpost’s new book, “transforming the way that news and information are disseminated and ingested, how stories are determined and presented, and what is really going on!”  And there’s no guarantee that I’ll stop blogging if I run . . .

Do I have the guts to put my money where my mouth is?

His back must hurt

Barack Obama was the perfect candidate to win the 2008 election.  But apparently, he’s not the same person we all voted for, because every time he opens his mouth, people are jumping on his back.  It seems that although he’s appointed one of the most diverse cabinets in history, he’s making everyone angry.  He started with the Republicans, because he slapped their hopes of victory into twenty-twelve with his landslide victory, and now he’s not being inclusive enough to appoint more than one or two to his cabinet.  Then it was Latinos, who said that Bill Richardson wasn’t getting a fair shake, and there weren’t enough Spanish-speakers at the table in the first three appointments.  Then it was the Gay and Lesbian community, with Rick Warren.  Now it’s women.  From Campbell Brown to NOW, he’s either not being forthcoming enough, or else he hasn’t done any better in appointing his cabinet than George Bush.  And apparently, black lawmakers aren’t happy with him, either.

While I am disappointed that Rick Warren is getting such a prominent symbolic role in the inaugural festivities, I’ve already said that I trust the President-elect to do what needs to be done.  And a friend of mine linked me to an article that tried to talk me down by pointing out Rev. Joseph Lowery’s role as a counterpoint to Warren.  A couple of the comments struck me:

by: Lev Raphael @ Fri Dec 19, 2008 at 07:45:58 AM CST

Has anyone noticed (3.50 / 4)

that Barack Obama does things that cause people to howl in protest, yet he does not respond. Then he completes the project, turns to his accusers and says “What is it you were upset about?”

It is his style. He did it during the debates – remember how we howled for him to land a knock-out punch, but he went deliberately along and won his own race, thank you very much?

This is more of the same. My gut says that this guy thinks and behaves longer-term than either the press or the American people are accustomed to. We respond/react instantaneously to each piece of the plan instead of waiting to see the whole plan and judging that.

Just my second-cup-of-coffee thoughts this morning. 
 

by: Dawn in Maine @ Fri Dec 19, 2008 at 08:41:06 AM CST

you may be right (3.33 / 3)

I’m being forced to confront my own fantasies that he would do every single thing I would wish could happen… some kinda superman. There is absolutely no way he can make everyone happy. The Warren choice infuriates me (so does choosing Vilsack), while other choices delight me, and some are just blah.

 I do feel it is literally impossible for a U.S. President to please anyone 100 percent of the time.  

 

And it doesn’t matter your political persuasion – Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Independent, liberal, conservative, male, female, black, white, brown, mixed-up – President-elect Obama is not going to do everything that you or I want him to do.  But he is going to do what is best for the United States, and he is going to do his best to help out the citizens of this country.  So let’s all cut him some slack.  The whining on the nightly news is getting old.

President-elect Obama defends inviting Pastor Rick Warren to speak at Inauguration

Why Gay Marriage is the Wrong Issue

Campbell Brown has another temper tantrum

Why some women’s groups are miffed at Obama

Black Lawmakers not happy with Obama Cabinet Picks

It may be Rick Warren’s neighborhood, but it isn’t Rick Warren’s world

Rick Warren and Ken Starr aren’t married . . . yet

Following the President-elect’s poor choice of pastor for the invocation at his inaugural celebration, former special prosecutor Ken Starr has filed a lawsuit in California on behalf of the klan that pushed for passage of proposition 8 which seeks to divorce married couples they don’t like.

There are those who think these two seemingly random acts have nothing to do with each other, but they don’t take into account the knapsack of straight privilege that the heterosexual majority in the United States often wields like a bludgeon in what is frequently described as “innocent ignorance.”

Somehow, it is okay for a man who called homosexuals an abomination to pray for Barack Obama.  Which gives courage and confidence to latter day homophobes to try to exterminate loving committed relationships.  The national pulpit on the historic occasion of the inauguration of the first black president is speaking loudly, not only to the gay community, but to all Americans, and the message is clear:  if you are not one of us, you are expendable.  Heterosexual couples can walk down the street, holding hands, without much fuss.  Homosexual couples have to “not flaunt their lifestyle.”  Heterosexuals can get engaged, get married, adopt children, visit each other in the hospital, put each other on their insurance plans without much to do – just some paperwork.  Homosexual couples have to fight to do any of these, and often fail and are told directly it is because of who they love and want to be with.

Gay marriage is on the ballot, as if miscegenation laws banning blacks and whites from cohabitating and marrying weren’t wiped off the books forty years ago because they were discriminatory, or that the American populace somehow has a right to vote on who should be married.  No one voted on whether my wife and I should be married.  That was our decision.  I don’t see any reason that should not apply to all American citizens of consenting age.  It’s as if our nation picks one or more groups each generation to hold up to second-class citizenship, and then denies them basic rights that all other Americans enjoy. Rick Warren, James Dobson & Ken Starr are all members of a fraternity – a homophobic clan that also boasts Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and to my chagrin, Barack Obama.  And while I don’t agree that Obama has thrown the gay community completely under the bus, his choice of pastors has definitely pushed them into incoming traffic.

The symbolic nature of Warren’s speech is just that, a symbol – of hate, of intolerance, of religious bigotry, of exclusion, of division, of betrayal, of casual dismissal.  And it obviously symbolized HOPE and CHANGE for Ken Starr and his cronies.  From a man as thoughtful as President-elect Obama is, this was a thoughtless and unnecessary boost for the forces of Christian extremists and intolerance.  Just ask Rick and Ken.

Dear Obama: Here’s Why You’re Wrong On Warren

Prop 8 proponents seek to nullify same-sex marriages

US balks at decriminalizing homosexuality

Obama defends Warren Choice

The purpose-driven bigot

Obama Certified

As the national lens focuses on the governor of Illinois, I continue to return to a conversation I had with my brother from another mother a few weeks ago.  We talked about whether or not the election of Barack Obama, a black, Harvard-educated, faithfully-married, articulate, good-looking, athletic father of two would change the way that we are perceived, whether this new climate of change would affect us, as we are attempting to affect it, as we walk the streets and halls as black men in America.  In much the same way that our image has continually been defined in the media by the most violent and vile, are we now to be painted with the Obama brush?  Are we “Obama Certified”?

I know that my white counterparts are not having the same conversation about whether Blagojevich and Bush affect their perception in the world.  The white privilege that they posses allows them to be individuals in American society, even while the current President continues to run his party into the ground by enacting his own type of “pay-to-play” style politics. Barack Obama’s steady pace of putting his team together, building on years of hard work and keeping his nose clean, makes him the standard bearer in national politics and American life even before he takes office. President Bush and his administration continue to highlight these differences, in their duplicitous “cooperation” with the Obama-Biden transition team, even as they deny the President-elect and his family housing in the New Year.

But I digress.  I was talking about being Obama Certified.

If you, like my brother and I, are working hard at what you do, making a difference for others by making yourself a better person, you are Obama Certified.  If you, like the men of Loyola High School of  Los Angeles, are a person for others, putting their interests so close to yours that they are indistinguishable, then you are Obama certified.  If, like the President-elect, you listen to what people say, both those who agree with you and those who don’t, before you make a decision, then you are Obama Certified.  If you can look at the hard choices that need to be made, and make them despite what is popular to do what is right, you are Obama Certified.  And I take a short break here to say that many of us have been doing this for years, with recognition from family, friends and immediate community, but still getting pulled over for driving while black.  My purpose in defining the qualities that Barack Obama brings to the national stage is to elucidate that while he is doing a wonderful job of representing, like Gwen Ifill’s new book points out, he is not alone.

To continue, if you can admit that you don’t know everything, that you make mistakes, and that you try your hardest not to repeat them, you are Obama Certified.  The saying goes that your are judged by the company you keep.  If you keep company, then, with those who share your goals and aspirations, who understand that long journeys are taken with individual steps, who are willing to give their best efforts daily because they understand that the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” you are Obama Certified.

My brother and I have been working with these ideals, these goals, this work ethic for many years.  They come from fathers who walked this walk, mothers who walked this walk, ancestors who carried chains, sang songs, sat in buses, drank at water fountains, and asked questions.  They came from Kunta Kinte, not Toby.  And as long as I’ve been on the planet, I’ve been aspiring to the positive and fighting the negative perceptions and images, stereotypes and prejudices leveled at black men, black people, Latinos and minorities in this country since it’s inception.  We were Obama Certified before he was elected.  We’ll be Obama Certified when his second term ends.  But his election gives us (and everyone else) a term to use when describing who we are and what we do.

Barack Hussein Obama’s election to the presidency of the United States will not overnight change the systemic racism, the prejudices that exist in homes of all ethnicities and cultures across the United States.  But it will take us one step closer to forming a more perfect union.  And he’s got a whole host of Obama Certified supporters working with and for him to make that happen.

Illinois attorney general asks court to act on governor

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

Bush on auto bailout, war in Iraq, shoe-throwing reporter

Bush sneaks through host of laws to undermine Obama

Sorry Obamas, Early Check-in Isn’t Available

Obama wants temporary aid for automakers

Bush visits Iraq to mark passing of security pact

A Deal to Die For?

The day after giving thanks, Americans were running around like turkeys behind Sarah Palin looking for the best deal on consumer items they don’t need in order to placate some Reagan-esqe consumer free market sense of loneliness, to prove to themselves and their loved ones that despite the dire economic conditions in which many of us don’t have enough to pay our mortgages, our car notes, our light bills, our grocery tabs, or our medical bills, we can still get an X-Box360.

In the rush to feed that hunger, though, some of the tension that underlies our national and international condition burst through:  a Wal-Mart employee was stampeded to death in New York as shoppers (I didn’t know there were still people called that, given the highest unemployment figures since I don’t know when) broke into the store when it didn’t open at 5am so they could get the best deals; several fist fights broke out amongst waiting patrons in line outside a Best Buy in Florida; and there was a shooting at a Toys’R’Us in California. A death, some fights, and a shooting.

Black Friday originated as a pejorative term, though at this point I won’t delve into the subconscious necessity of equating black and negative.  Retailers objected to the negative and began to circulate the rumor that it meant they would be moving into the black, and making a lot of money on this day.  Wherever the term began, though, in my adult lifetime it has come to mean a gluttonous rush by consumers to sate their ravenous commercial hunger, and with yesterday’s violent accompaniment, the ridiculous lengths to which we as a populace now go in order to prove to each other and ourselves that we are somebody because we can get the latest, the newest, the most flashy things out there, without regard to costs, either financial or social.

President-elect Obama has talked often about the need for individual responsibility as an individual contribution to help alleviate the growing national and international financial crisis.  I would argue that since the “me-ism” of the Reagan era began, and that has continues in the present day, we have become a lot less cognizant of what we are as human beings sacrificing on the altar of greed.

Yesterday, it seems, we found out.

RIP Jdimytai Damour

RIP Alejandro Moreno

RIP Juan Meza

Wal-Mart death preventable, Union says

Shoppers storm stores; Officers stop fights

Toys’R’Us reopens in Palm Desert after two men kill each other