Nothing will change for my institution, the University of Michigan. In 2006 the good people of the state passed Proposal 2, forbidding the use of race as a factor in admissions.

This measure caused the percentage of African-American students to drop. In 2005 non-Hispanic Blacks made up 7.2% of the Ann Arbor undergraduate student body.

Today African-American students make up less than 4% of the undergraduate student body on the Ann Arbor campus. That is a 45% drop. Virtually the same thing happened in the University of California system when they had to stop doing affirmative action.

The University of Michigan drop came despite the university’s attempt to substitute “hardship” as an admissions criterion for “race.” Students wrote in their personal statements about difficulties and obstacles that they faced in life through their high school years. But of course, as hard as life might be for African-Americans in the United States, there are others who face obstacles and hardships — poor whites, LGBTQ+ people, and women, and many of these other disadvantaged people are white. So they seem to have taken up nearly half the slots formerly allotted to Black people.

In other words, “hardship,” which Chief Justice John Roberts admitted in his decision might be considered in admissions, just doesn’t do the same work as race-conscious admissions do.

13.64% of Michiganders are African-American, so they are vastly underrepresented on the Ann Arbor campus.

Leave slavery aside, when they were unpaid labor for as much as 400 years. From the 1930s to 1968 the practice of redlining in Michigan prevented African-Americans from accumulating wealth through home ownership. That gave white families a galactic advantage. Even since redlining was officially outlawed in the 1960s, it cast a long shadow on homeownership rates and pricing of houses by neighborhood. Informal segregation, sometimes abetted by realtors, continues to keep Detroit and Flint among the most segregated cities in the United states.

H/t Urban.org

That bastion of left-wing radicalism, the RAND think tank (which started out as an adjunct to the US Air Force) reports: “The median Black household in America has around $24,000 in savings, investments, home equity, and other elements of wealth. The median White household: around $189,000,” This happened because of redlining and other elements of systemic racism, not because of any fault of African-Americans themselves.

John Roberts believes that such injustices have already been made up. They haven’t. They haven’t begun to be. Having robbed Black people blind since 1619, the least we can do is try to give them educational opportunities consonant with their proportion of the population.

Personally, I think the University of Michigan should set up a magnet K-12 school in Detroit and promise admission to those who graduate from it with good grades. If it was our school, we should be able to do as we please with its graduates. If it was in Detroit, it would ipso facto have mostly African-American attendees, but that wouldn’t be our problem.

There is a well-known fallacy among economists, called the “lump of labor.” Many people assume that if you increase job-holders among one group, it will reduce the jobs for another, that there is a fixed amount of labor to be done. This idea could not be more false. Look at Turkey in 2016-2017, when the economy grew 4% a year at a time of slowdowns for other countries. Economists concluded that the growth came about because two million Syrian workers had fled to Turkey from their civil war. That meant that farmers who wanted to expand suddenly had access to farm labor, and urban businesses that wanted to expand had access to educated Syrians, adding to the available work force. Turkey could do more work because it had more workers. Syrians didn’t take jobs from Turks, they expanded the pie.

Opponents of affirmative action in higher education believe in a similar fallacy, the “lump of education.” So they think if you admit more minorities to colleges and universities, it will keep out some whites who might otherwise have gotten in. But the colleges and universities might expand their student body. This has happened at my university, In 1984 when I arrived at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus there were a little over 34,000 students, including about 6,000 graduate students. Today we have almost 50,000 students, including 17,000 grads. Michigan’s population was 9 million in 1984. It is 10 million today. The state grew 10%. The student body grew by 32%. Things change. In many cities and states “meds and eds,” medicine and education have replaced traditional industry as contributors to gross domestic project, and we can expect further expansion of education.

There is room in this growing economy for everybody. Let’s find a way to benefit from the talents of all Americans of all races and backgrounds, and not systematically sentence some to menial labor based on the color of their skin.

( Cronkite News) – WASHINGTON – The Biden administration reaffirmed its commitment last Tuesday to DACA, officially posting regulations to extend the 10-year-old program that has protected hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants.

The rule, which takes effect Oct. 31, makes few changes to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and it does not move it any closer to becoming law – a key shortcoming for advocates who lived through Trump administration efforts to overturn the program.

“Any program that is created by one president can be undone by another,” said Jose Patiño, vice president of education and external affairs at Aliento. “That is an issue we have seen with DACA.”

Patiño said groups like his “are looking at all avenues” to pressure Congress into passing comprehensive immigration reform that would enshrine and expand DACA.

But critics said that is not likely to happen, noting that DACA had to be approved as a regulation because Congress could not reach agreement on immigration legislation. Matthew O’Brien, director of investigations at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, called DACA “a federal regulation that doesn’t have any statutory authority underlying it.”

“The fact is that Congress put restrictions on immigration for a reason and the president, whether it is Obama or Biden, doesn’t have any authority to unilaterally change those because they don’t like the restrictions that are in place,” said O’Brien, a former immigration judge.

It was during then-President Barack Obama’s first term that the Department of Homeland Security first enacted DACA as an administrative rule that said Dreamers – undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children – would not be priorities for removal.

The program deferred deportation of those immigrants for up to two years, protection that is renewable. It did not provide a path to citizenship, instead granting them “lawfully present” status, which allowed them to legally obtain work permits, drivers’ licenses and more.

Immigrants had to apply for the protection, paying fees and showing they had continuously been in the U.S., had a clean record and were in school or the military, among other requirements.

As many as 776,000 people have been protected by the program, and there were 611,470 active DACA recipients in the U.S. at the end of 2021, with 23,090 of them in Arizona.

Critics have said since the start that DACA is an abuse of executive power and former President Donald Trump vowed to overturn it. Those efforts ultimately failed, but legal challenges since have had some success stifling the program.

The most recent ruling, from a federal district court in Texas, said DACA could continue to protect current recipients, who can reapply for coverage. But it said DHS cannot accept applications from Dreamers not previously covered.

DACA supporters protest in Phoenix on Sept. 5, 2017, the day the Trump administration said it planned to end the program. (File photo by Tynin Fries/Cronkite News)

That injunction barring new applicants would still apply under the rule posted Tuesday. And the final rule does not expand on the requirements or eligibility for DACA recipients, some of whom are now reaching upward of 40 years old.

Patiño called the final rule somewhat “disappointing.”

“We have been advocating for the program to be expanded. By that we mean the opportunity dates,” he said. “We were hoping that with this new rule it would change some of those deadlines.

“It seems that nothing really changed for DACA recipients or the community,” Patiño said.

Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, said that “all of this is really just kicking the can down the road in respect to DACA.”

“The administration would be better off simply letting the court rule and sending it over to Congress who actually has the authority to grant amnesty – or not – to this population of people,” Arthur said.

He called DACA something of a relic, a remnant of the Obama administration. Even though DACA has been beneficial to a large number of immigrants, he said, its practicality is starting to wane.

“They are certainly a sympathetic population of people,” Arthur said of Dreamers. “Although I will note that many children covered under this are approaching middle age based on criteria for it.”

Julia Gelatt, senior policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, said that posting the new rule in the Federal Register is a way to give for the program to have a “strong legal footing” against ongoing court challenges.

Related story

Dreamer drama: Arizona man hopes play about his life drives DACA discussion

But without action by Congress, she said, the program can only hold out for so long.

“Ultimately, Congress should be legislating on immigration,” Gelatt said. “The only kind of real relief for Dreamers would be legislation offering them a path to legal status.”

She agreed with Patiño that Congress should not only codify DACA but expand it, including a pathway to citizenship. She said “DACA has enabled beneficiaries to contribute a lot.”

“We’ve seen them working all kinds of vital jobs in the pandemic, increasing their earnings, paying higher taxes, and really contributing to the country,” Gelatt said.

While the two sides of the issue don’t agree on much, they all seem to agree that Congress needs to act on the question.

Even though O’Brien does not think congressional action is likely, that does not mean it’s not possible. Arthur said Congress can act at “any time,” and that the Biden administration should focus its efforts there.

“It would be better for the administration to propose some real changes that would pass with a bipartisan majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate that would beef up border security and make some meaningful changes to lawful immigration in the United States and at the same time provide real benefits that would allow the DACA population to move on with their lives,” Arthur said.

Tristan Richards, News Reporter, Washington, D.C. expects to graduate in spring 2024 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communications. Richards, who has worked for The State Press and plans to attend law school, is working for Cronkite News D.C.

Via Cronkite News

The shooter’s hate-filled manifesto denounced immigrants and Black people as “replacers” of white people just as Carlson did. In April last year, Carlson said “The Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.”

Both he and the racist shooter hate diversity. In 2018, Carlson blamed ethnic diversity for “radically and permanently changing our country” and questioned its value: “I don’t see that diversity is the strength of our country — why don’t you explain it to me?” In his manifesto, which does not mention Carlson by name, the Buffalo terrorist echoed Carlson’s viewpoint: “Diversity is not a strength. Why is diversity said to be our greatest strength? Does anyone even ask why? No one can give an answer.”

Carlson helped popularize the far-right ideology that coincided seamlessly with the rhetoric of Republican Party members who also describe immigrants seeking asylum as an invasion or infestation. On America’s most-watched cable news show, Carlson warned viewers that Democrats want “demographic replacement” through a “flood of illegals” in order to increase their voter base.

Is it possible that Carlson read the terrorist’s screed and saw the same Fox/Republican race-baiting nonsense about white replacement that he has been pushing for a year? Maybe he thought to himself: “I have the same ideology as a mass murderer, maybe I should re-think my position.” As a good Episcopalian Christian, possibly Carlson had a Saint Paul-on-the-Road-to-Damascus-type of spiritual and intellectual awakening?

Well, no, he made a dark turn and took a non-saintly road. More MAGA than Christian, Carlson — despite hosting “the most racist show in the history of cable news,” according to reporter Nick Confessore — claimed he was the victim of race politics, not its purveyor. Carlson’s condemnation of race politics was aimed at those denouncing him for his promotion of the vile “Replacement Conspiracy Theory.” He said that the mass shooting resulted from mental illness, not the same racist ideology that he preaches. In this way, he dismissed the racist pronouncements of the Buffalo shooter as the product of a “diseased mind,” yet through some mental gyrations he views his racist declarations as the product of a rational mind. Rational or not, violence inevitably erupts out of Carlson’s white supremacist ideology.

The Carlson creed that motivated the mass murder in Buffalo — “White Replacement Theory” — has a lengthy and blood-soaked history. Since 2011, it has been the explicit motivation for over 160 murders, including Norway’s Anders Breivik’s slaughter of 77 people, mostly immigrants, in 2011; Dylan Roof’s mass murder of Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; the Tree of Life Synagogue killings in Pittsburgh in 2018; the massacre of 51 Muslims in shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; and the murder of 23 people, mostly Latino immigrants, in El Paso, Texas, in 2019. Most come with a manifesto that “justify” the killings as a defense against “white genocide” — protecting white people from being replaced by non-whites.

This is not about passive demographic change. These racist fanatics promote the preposterous notion of an apocalyptic threat — a frightening future of decline, degradation and chaos — perpetrated by a cabal of mostly Jewish elites to eradicate the white race. Linked by almost identical ideological manifestos, these white power gunmen are part of a global terrorist movement that share an ideology — an old, dangerous, and idiotic ideology that white people are endangered and about to be made extinct.

Racist mass atrocities like these do not occur in a vacuum. The Buffalo massacre is not only facilitated by Republican resistance to gun control that put a semi-automatic weapon of war in the hands of a teenager, but was enabledby a normalization and mainstreaming of their white supremacist ideology by the former Racist-in-Chief, by Fox News, and by the Republican Party. They created a miasma of hate and intolerance that promotes violence. Like the terrorists themselves, they are not only adherents of the ideology, but evangelists for it as well.

The Muslim-hating Christchurch assassin hailed Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Saturday’s Buffalo killing spree was a disgusting symptom of the white-power President’s viral contamination. His open stoking of racial animus and xenophobia unshackled Fox News and the Republican party to openly spew its racist viewpoint.

”Far-right ideologies, such as the Replacement myth, are normalized through mainstream political discourse by framing immigration as an existential threat,” wrote Cynthia Miller-Idriss, author of Hate in the Homeland. “In recent years this conspiracy theory has made its way from the far-right fringes into the mainstream spotlight, helped both by political speeches and media commentators.”

Tucker Carlson and Fox News played a key role in tweaking the “the white replacement” myth — swapping out Jews for Democrats. Carlson lied to his audience, telling them that Democrats want “demographic replacements” from the non-white world. This has the advantage of not sounding anti-Semitic while making the Republican’s political opponents responsible for eradicating white people. Fox’s Laura Ingraham warned viewers that “the Democrats want to replace many of you,” suggesting there is an “invasion of the country.” Fox’s Jeanine Pirro said that Democrats were involved in “a plot to remake America – to replace American citizens with illegals who will vote for the Democrats.”

Following Fox News’ racism, ambitious Republican lawmakers use the same inflammatory and contemptible rhetoric, reiterating their embrace of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, once relegated to far-right lunatics. Third-ranking House member Elise Stefanik ran a series of Facebook ads that explicitly used “great replacement” rhetoric: “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a plan to grant amnesty to 11 million illegal immigrants that will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” But she’s far from alone.

One of the nation’s dumbest senators and an anti-Vax proponent, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson falsely said, “This administration wants complete open borders. They want to remake the demographics of America to ensure that they stay in power forever.” Johnson may soon have more like-minded colleagues in the Senate who believe that Democrats’ are planning an insurrection to import enough non-white voters to take over control of the electorate for good. At least a half-dozen Republican Senate candidates have voiced similar sentiments on the campaign trail in recent weeks, a sign of how mainstream and deeply ingrained, in Republican orthodoxy, this conspiracy theory has become.

Ohio GOP Senate hypocrite nominee J.D. Vance — a former moderate now sporting MAGA gear — charged, on multiple occasions, that President Biden wanted to end Title 42, which automatically sends asylum-seeking immigrants who cross the border back to Mexico, because Democrats see them as guaranteed future votes. At a late-April town hall, Vance claimed that lifting Title 42 would mean 250,000 immigrants entering the U.S. every month, allowing Democrats to import 10 million to 15 million future voters, 70 percent of whom he claimed, without evidence, would vote Democratic. “This shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we [Republicans] never win.” Supported by the former Liar-in-Chief, Vance also got a big early boost in his race from billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who gave $10 million to his super PAC.

Thiel’s other major campaign investment was to his former employee and protégée Blake Masters, who’s running for Senate in Arizona. Masters has floated similar rhetoric for months. “The Democrats want to change the demographics of this country,” Masters said on a podcast in late April. “They think that if they can bring in millions and millions and millions of illegal aliens, someday they’ll be able to grant them amnesty, grant them citizenship, and make them reliable Democrat voters.”

Even when mainstream politicians do not actively circulate conspiracy theories, they help validate them by failing to denounce them.“Silence is complicity,” said President Biden in Buffalo this week. Republican conservative Liz Cheney agreed: “The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.” But they won’t. The mainstreaming of replacement theory will promote racism and xenophobia and help mobilize individuals to violence because it fosters an apocalyptic sense of crisis and emergency.

In moving away from terms like “white genocide” and “Jewish cabal,” Republicans have repackaged the replacement conspiracy as one driven by political partisanship. By ignoring the violent and anti-Semitic underpinnings of these extremist beliefs, Republicans expose more people to their racist ideology, potentially radicalizing them. Simultaneously, Republican attacks on ”critical race theory” try to stifle, in schools, any discussion of the history of racism and xenophobia, protecting white people from feeling bad.

“Mainstreaming is critical to the growth of far-right movements globally, wrote Miller-Idriss in Hate in the Homeland, “because it helps them recruit, radicalize, and mobilize individuals toward violence, while reducing the likelihood that the public will raise the alarm about their efforts.” At the same time, normalizing extreme racist and xenophobic ideas by smuggling them into apparently mainstream Republican campaigns helps the far right achieve political goals related to border closures, restrictions on immigration, and deportations.

The normalization of white supremacist ideas has become more widely accepted by the general public. An Associated Press-NORC poll showed that fully one-third of Americans, and almost half of Republicans, believe that “there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political view.” What were once written off as deranged conspiracy theories and doomsday cult fantasies about white extinction are gaining traction as mainstream beliefs. Racist replacement rhetoric that purports to protect white people from annihilation is another Republican weapon, another attempt to “justify” extreme, anti-democratic, and even violent means to re-gain power in 2022 and 2024.

Michael Luciano at Mediaite reports that Carlson had a hissy fit over Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s self-description as a “woman of color.” He ranted,

“No one ever dares to challenge that description, but every honest person knows it is hilariously absurd. There is no place on Earth outside of American colleges and newsrooms where Sandy Cortez would be recognized as a quote, woman of color, because she’s not! She’s a rich entitled White lady. She’s the pampered obnoxious ski bunny in the matching snowsuit who tells you to pull up your mask while you’re standing in the lift line at Jackson Hole. They’re all the same. It doesn’t matter what shade they are.”

This passage is classic, showing that “whiteness” has no reality to it at all. I pointed out that Carlson’s Italian-Swiss maternal ancestor Cesar Maurice Lombardi would not have been considered white by many Americans (Italians were lynched in Louisiana), and that Benjamin Franklin identified whiteness solely with Englishness, considering Swedes “swarthy.” So Carlson’s own claims to whiteness are historically shaky.

Carlson has voiced some miserably racist views, including calling Iraqis “semi-literate primitive monkeys.” So there is nothing surprising about his playing the race card in trying to bait the congresswoman.

Ocasio-Cortez is of Puerto Rican heritage, with her father having been born in the Bronx of Puerto Rican parents and her mother having been born in Puerto Rico.

Ocasio-Cortez certainly belongs to a group that has suffered racism. A study by Anna Santiago and George Galster notes that in the 1970s and 1980s the socio-economic status of Puerto Ricans in the mainland declined markedly compared to that of other minorities, and that they were of lesser status in that regard than Blacks. They were not, however, quite as residentially segregated as African-Americans. While Ocasio-Cortez’s father was an architect and the family moved to a middle class neighborhood, the ethnic group to which they belonged was suffering when she was born in the late 1980s.

They arrived at findings that

“suggest that 1) patterns of Puerto Rican segregation are a consequence of their economic status; and 2) the effect of segregation on median income is mediated by female headship and labor force participation rates. We also find evidence to suggest that the relationships between residential location and economic status for Puerto Ricans differ in important ways from those observed for Blacks and other Latino group.”

Nowadays, a majority of Hispanics in the US say that their skin color shapes their lives.

As for being white, Puerto Ricans have mixed feelings. About half have told pollsters over the years that they consider themselves white. But in the most recent census, those on the island of Puerto Rico who ticked “white” as their ethnicity plummeted by 80 percent. The Trumpian revival of open racist rhetoric in US politics and the contempt with which Trump treated them after their hurricane disaster (and his refusal to allow the government aid earmarked for them to reach them) may be part of the reason for which they have realized that they are not viewed as white by many Americans of northern European heritage.

“Whiteness” is a useless category from any rational point of view. It is visceral, used to include and exclude, arbitrarily. After years of deriding Ocasio-Cortez, who has a degree in international relations, as a low-class bartender, now Fox is dragooning her into whiteness in an attempt to deny her the right to represent people of color.

Carlson went on to cover himself in further shame, if that is possible, with what Ocasio-Cortez correctly characterized as “creepy” comments on her womanhood, which seemed to involve on-air sexually fantasizing about her.

Lloyd Green at the Guardian reports that Carlson commented on a passage in a new book about about her by Lisa Miller of New York Magazine, Take up Space: The Unprecedented AOC in which the congresswoman is described as “pointedly” saying into a camera, “I’m alone today”.

Carlson asked, “Is it just us or does that sound like an invitation to a booty call? Maybe one step from ‘What are you wearing?’”

Since there was no innuendo at all in the actual statement, it seems clear that Carlson is projecting his own desires onto the congresswoman and using his multi-million-dollar platform to fantasize about sexually possessing her.

You always knew it — Tucker Carlson is Jabba the Hutt.

Fox News poobahs have has a long history of sexual harassment of female staff, and the organization was fined $1 million for it last year. I once described the mandatorily blonde Fox News female anchors as “not so much hired as trafficked.”

So Carlson’s objectification of the congresswoman is par for the course at a Murdoch news property.

The congresswoman replied,

I genuinely want to know why Tucker Carlson is allowed/paid to engage in clear, targeted, libelous harassment that endangers people &drives so many violent threats that ppl have to fundraise for their own safety.

Why should they have to pay for his harassment? Make it make sense

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 19, 2022

Luciano at Mediaite reports that Carlson reacted against another passage in the book about Ocasio-Cortez that said that “the degradations of womanhood are deeply personal to her.”

Carlson griped about the representative, whom he insists on calling “Sandy Cortez,” “No one has done more personally to degrade American womanhood than Sandy Cortez has. She is living proof that 60 years of feminist liberation did not work. Sandy Cortez is not empowered. She’s neurotic and silly. She’s far more frivolous than any 1950s housewife ever was. June Cleaver was a more serious person. At least she made dinner.”

Carlson seems to have been on the verge, as he frothed at the mouth, of slipping into German and of shouting “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (children, kitchen, church!)– the Nazi ideal for women. At least June Cleaver, the fictional mother and housewife of the 1950s situation comedy, “Leave it to Beaver,” cooked meals and raised children and went to church.

God forbid that women should step out of the house and actually exercise power in one of the branches of government.

Ocasio-Cortez’s website notes that “In her first term, the Congresswoman saw three amendments pass into law, despite Republican control of the Senate and Presidency. One shifted $5 million from the failed war on drugs to treatment for opioid addiction and another secured $10 million to clean up toxic bombardment sites in Puerto Rico. Most notably, the Congresswoman also worked with Senator Schumer to include a Funeral Assistance Program into the COVID-19 relief package. To date, the program has reimbursed over a billion in funeral expenses to Americans who lost loved ones to COVID-19.”

Last summer she also helped convince President Biden to extend the moratorium on evictions during the pandemic.

Since one of Carlson’s primary constituencies is slum lords, and think we now know the real reason he is so angry at her.

( Cronkite News ) – PHOENIX – One in four Asian households in the U.S. report fearing physical attacks and threats because of their race, according to a recent survey by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The survey, taken Aug. 2 through Sept. 7 as the delta coronavirus variant swept the country, showed other minority households also reported fears for their safety. In addition, households across the country said they were worried about finances and other stressors during the summer surge of COVID-19 infections.

The survey found that 21% of Black households, 22% of Native Americans and 8% of Latino households report similar mental health stressors and anxiety because of their race or ethnicity. The survey used a nationally representative sample of 3,616 adults 18 or older and was released in October.

“In the field of psychology, there is such robust literature that we have done in our research team and with my colleague Dr. Tahirah Abdullah and so many other folks that suggest that racism is, by and large, connected to mental health challenges, to depression, to anxiety and stress,” said Jessica LoPresti, co-founder of BARE Mental Health & Wellness. LoPresti, who also is a clinical psychologist at Suffolk University in Boston, focuses on promoting resilience, health and well-being among people and communities of color.

According to the FBI, physical and verbal attacks on Asians, Black Americans, and other minorities have increased since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

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In Arizona, hate crimes rose to 282 in 2020, from 209 the year before.

“One of the most significant barriers that communities and people of color face are not necessarily only that Black people aren’t accessing mental health care, it’s that when we do that the mental health care is not culturally responsive,” LoPresti said. “Folks are entering therapy and sort of sitting across from someone and saying, ‘You have no idea what I experience, how who I am affects my mental health, so how could I possibly talk to you and find help in our sort of relationship?’”

The NPR survey – which asked respondents about finances, health care, racial or ethnic discrimination, education, caregiving, work and well-being – also found that 38% of U.S. households report facing severe financial issues in the past few months. This has a significant contribution to mental health problems, experts say.

“Reducing socioeconomic inequities, that kind of goes across the board of realizing that there is a connection with poverty, racism, how racism contributes to poverty, how poverty then contributes to mental health problems – all of this is intermingled,” said Imelda Padilla-Fraustro, a research scientist at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. She focuses on the social determinants related to these communities’ inequities.

She and LoPresti have dedicated their time to studying the multilevel impacts that race has on mental health and the barriers faced by underrepresented communities. Their research and the NPR study offer evidence that fearing for your safety adversely affects mental health, and that poverty exacerbates all mental health challenges.

Phoenix

Breanna Isbell expects to graduate in May 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism. Isbell will be working in the Phoenix News Bureau and plans to pursue a master’s degree.

I pointed out in April that Tucker Carlson’s “White Power Hour” on Fox (Joy Reid’s term) is full of contradictions on replacement theory, and that Carlson’s immigrant Catholic Italian ancestor could have been lynched once upon a time by English racists angry that he was trying to replace them.

Dan Patrick is the truly odious Lt. Governor of Texas, a former right wing shock jock who has turned his adolescent and racist radio schtick into public policy. He sort of promised us he would die of COVID so that his grandchildren would not have to wear masks or socially distance, but he reneged on that pledge as he has on so many others. The Lt. Governor is the real power in Texas, not the governor, and so Patrick is behind some of Texas’ most reactionary policies. He has now also gone in for replacement theory, like the Nazis in Charlottesville, who chanted “Jews will not replace us.” They were referring to the malicious lie that Jewish business people push for immigration to get cheap brown and black workers that can replace higher-salaried whites.

Actually, our current immigration laws were passed by a largely WASP Congress in 1965 and signed off on by a Christian president, Lyndon Johnson.

Patrick, born in Baltimore, is in part of immigrant German ancestry and changed his name from Dan Goeb. I am also in part of immigrant German ancestry, but we declined to pretend to be English. Plus we’re still hoping in vain for royalties on that slaw we invented.

Patrick told Laura Ingraham, the second nuttiest person on TV, according to the Houston Chronicle,

“Let me tell you something, Laura, and everyone watching,” Patrick said. “A revolution has begun. A silent revolution by the Democrat party and Joe Biden to take control of this country.”

Patrick called on red states to petition President Joe Biden for “protection from invasion” and intoned direly about immigrant families coming to America and having children who grow up to vote for Democrats.

“Laura when I say a revolution has begun…they are allowing this year, probably two million — that’s who we apprehend and maybe another million — into this country. In at least 18 years, even if they all don’t become citizens and before then and can vote…In 18 years, if every one of them has two or three children, you’re talking about millions and millions and millions of new voters. And they will thank the Democrats and Biden for bringing them here. Who do you think they’re gonna vote for?

“This is trying to take over our country without firing a shot.”

So here are all the falsehoods in Gruppenführer Patrick’s screed.

1. In most years, a little over 1 million immigrants come into the United States.

2. The birth rate of immigrants is 2.0, i.e. it is at replacement, and is only slightly more than native-born Americans. In recent years fertility among immigrants has fallen faster than that among people born here.

So just to underline this, in 18 years if immigration laws and trends remain the same, we can expect 18 million more immigrants in a country of 345 million or so. They won’t have three children they will have two, just replacing themselves, and the children won’t be of voting age for the most part.

3. Only 45% are likely to be naturalized US citizens, so that is only 8.1 million new voters. They will be 2.3% of the population and spread all over the country.

4. On average, about 20% of recent immigrants in the U.S. vote Republican. About 30% say they have no political leanings. The rest, about 50% do vote Democratic.

So of the 8.1 million new voters among immigrants, 1.6 million will vote for Dan Patrick and his like, and we have no idea how another 2.5 million or so of them will vote, if they vote at all.

So we are down to about 4 million new Democratic Party voters in a country of 345 million, spread all around the country. It is highly unlikely that they would affect any but the very tightest races. And it is just as likely that the immigrant Republicans, depending on where they settle, could become a swing vote for that party.

5. 20% of immigrants are white.

So of the 8.1 million new voters, 1.6 million will actually be white people, the sort Patrick likes.

It is good for the US to grow the population somewhat, since a falling population presents economic challenges (who is going to pay into social security?) It is also good for the US to become more diverse ethnically, since it has been proven that a diverse workplace is better at problem-solving.

In any case, we have gone from Patrick’s image of being swamped by millions and millions of new immigrant voters, all black and brown or Asian, and all Democrats, replacing white people, to a mere 8.1 million new voters over 18 years, a fifth of them white and a fifth of them surely Republicans, with another 30 percent unknown as to affiliation.

If Patrick’s problem is that he thinks minorities vote Democratic, that is his own fault. Lots of Asians and Hispanics tilted Republican 20 years ago. George W. Bush got 40% of the Hispanic vote. It was the turn of the Republican Party to strident white nationalism that chased them into the arms of the Democrats. American Nazis desperately need to be replaced with humane people.

—–

Bonus Video:

GOP ‘Great Replacement’ Theory Takes Shape

Arizona may keep two voting laws that Republicans say protect election integrity and Democrats believe will make it harder for some residents to cast ballots.

That’s the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, one of the decade’s most important voting rights cases.

One Arizona law challenged in the case, H.B. 2023, makes it a felony for anyone other than a family member, caregiver or postal worker to collect and deliver ballots. The other requires ballots to be cast in the assigned precinct where a voter lives. If a person votes at the wrong polling place, Arizona election officials will reject their ballot.

The Democratic National Committee argued at the Supreme Court that both Arizona rules disproportionately hurt minority voters. The majority of justices, split 6-to-3 along ideological lines, disagreed.

“Voting necessarily requires some effort and compliance with some rules,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court’s majority on July 1, 2021. Merely making it more “inconvenient” for certain groups to vote does not violate federal law, according to the court.

The ruling will have national consequences. Arizona is one of 14 states restricting third-party ballot collection. It is one of 26 that require in-precinct voting.

The Supreme Court’s decision makes it more difficult to legally challenge such laws, which, according to our research on elections, significantly affect voting, particularly among racial minorities and the poor.

From Arizona to the Supreme Court

In Arizona, nearly 80% of voters in 2018 cast their ballots by mail. But mail service is not always available in rural areas of the state where many Hispanic and Native Americans live. Only 18% of Native Americans in the state, for example, have access to home mail delivery.

The Tohono O’odham reservation, which covers an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware, has no home delivery and only one post office. These rural voters often rely on friends or get-out-the-vote workers to deliver their ballots to polling stations.

The burdens on rural and tribal voters were cited in a 2016 lawsuit filed by the Democratic National Committee to block the Arizona ballot collection ban and out-of-precinct vote restriction. The Democratic National Committee claimed both policies violated Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act, which prohibits practices that “result in a denial or abridgment of the right (to vote) on account of race or color.”

The lawsuit, which was supported by Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, also argued that the ballot collection ban purposely targeted minority voters. That would violate the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits states from intentionally denying the right to vote on account of race.

Arizona’s Republican attorney general and the state’s Republican Party argued the laws were race-neutral restrictions that do not impede Arizonans’ equal opportunity to vote and were enacted to safeguard election integrity.

The case reached the Supreme Court after an appeal process in which the full Arizona Ninth Circuit Court ultimately determined that the state’s ballot collection ban violated both Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the 15th Amendment because minority voters were more likely than nonminorities to rely on others to return their ballots. And the law could not be credibly defended as an election integrity measure because judges saw no evidence that third-party ballot collection led to vote fraud in the past.

The appeals court also found that the out-of-precinct policy violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Arizona officials frequently changed polling places in urban counties, so voters there easily made mistakes. In 2016, 3,709 out-of-precinct Arizona ballots were rejected, and minority voters were twice as likely as whites to have their ballots discarded in that process.

The justices’ reasoning

In deciding against Arizona in 2020, the Ninth Circuit Court relied on a “results test.” This means that a law does not require proof of an intent to discriminate to be struck down. Judges ask only whether the law disproportionately affects historically disadvantaged groups.

In overturning the Ninth Circuit, the Supreme Court concluded the Arizona laws did not intentionally discriminate and rejected the logic of the “results test.”

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act still prevents states from enacting voting rules that purposely discriminate. But proving intentional discrimination is much more difficult than showing a law disproportionately impacts minority voting.

The three liberal justices on the court, led by Justice Elena Kagan, dissented.

The “Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses,” Kagan wrote.

Electoral consequences

The Brnovich ruling means Arizona’s voting restrictions stand. It also gives other states greater latitude when adopting similar rules and limits the federal government’s ability to police restrictive voting practices.

Since the 2020 presidential election, legislators in at least 48 states have introduced 389 so-called “election integrity” bills placing new restrictions on voting. Of these, 22 have been enacted.

For example, Georgia’s March 2021 election law imposes new limits on the use of absentee ballots, makes it a crime for outside groups to provide food and water to voters waiting at polling stations and hands greater control over election administration to the Republican-led state legislature.

On June 25 the U.S. Department of Justice sued Georgia, arguing these rules violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and that Georgia’s law is intended to discriminate.

Before 2013, states with a history of racial discrimination needed federal approval before enacting new voting laws, under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. But in 2013, the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder – an Alabama voting rights case – dismantled these procedures.

As a “preclearance” state, Arizona was previously blocked by the federal government from enacting voter restrictions like H.B. 2023. Other former preclearance states that have passed restrictive laws since 2013 include Georgia, Texas and Florida.

Since Shelby County v. Holder, voting rights advocates have had to rely on a different part of the Voting Rights Act – Section 2 – to block these restrictive voting laws. Brnovich v. DNC was the first Supreme Court test of this strategy.

The court’s decision severely cripples it, further eroding the Voting Rights Act.
Attention now shifts to Congress to see whether it will respond.

This is an updated version of an article originally published June 8, 2021.

Cornell William Clayton, C.O. Johnson Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Washington State University and Michael Ritter, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Washington State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

MSNBC: “DNC Chair: SCOTUS Ruling Was A ‘Kick To The Gut’ For Voting Rights” >/a>

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Joe Biden entered the White House with some inspiring yet contradictory positions on immigration and Central America. He promised to reverse Donald Trump’s draconian anti-immigrant policies while, through his “Plan to Build Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of Central America,” restoring “U.S. leadership in the region” that he claimed Trump had abandoned. For Central Americans, though, such “leadership” has an ominous ring.

Although the second half of his plan’s name does, in fact, echo that of left-wing, grassroots organizations like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), its content highlights a version of security and prosperity in that region that’s more Cold War-like than CISPES-like. Instead of solidarity (or even partnership) with Central America, Biden’s plan actually promotes an old economic development model that has long benefited U.S. corporations. It also aims to impose a distinctly militarized version of “security” on the people of that region. In addition, it focuses on enlisting Central American governments and, in particular, their militaries to contain migration through the use of repression.

Linking Immigration and Foreign Policy

The clearest statement of the president’s Central America goals appears in his “U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021,” sent to Congress on January 20th. That proposal offers a sweeping set of changes aimed at eliminating President Trump’s racist exclusions, restoring rights to asylum, and opening a path to legal status and citizenship for the immigrant population. After the anti-immigrant barrage of the last four years, that proposal seems worth celebrating. It follows in the footsteps of previous bipartisan “comprehensive” compromises like the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act and a failed 2013 immigration bill, both of which included a path to citizenship for many undocumented people, while dedicating significant resources to border “security.”

Read closely, a significant portion of Biden’s immigration proposal focuses on the premise that addressing the root causes of Central America’s problems will reduce the flow of immigrants to the U.S. border. In its own words, the Biden plan promises to promote “the rule of law, security, and economic development in Central America” in order to “address the key factors” contributing to emigration. Buried in its fuzzy language, however, are long-standing bipartisan Washington goals that should sound familiar to those who have been paying attention in these years.

Their essence: that millions of dollars in “aid” money should be poured into upgrading local military and police forces in order to protect an economic model based on private investment and the export of profits. Above all, the privileges of foreign investors must not be threatened. As it happens, this is the very model that Washington has imposed on the countries of Central America over the past century, one that’s left its lands corrupt, violent, and impoverished, and so continued to uproot Central Americans and send them fleeing toward the United States.

Crucial to Biden’s plan, as to those of his predecessors, is another key element: to coerce Mexico and Guatemala into serving as proxies for the wall only partially built along the southern border of the U.S. and proudly promoted by presidents from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump.

While the economic model lurking behind Biden’s plan may be old indeed, the attempt to outsource U.S. immigration enforcement to Mexican and Central American military and police forces has proven to be a distinctly twenty-first-century twist on border policy.

Outsourcing the Border (from Bush to Biden)

The idea that immigration policy could be outsourced began long before Donald Trump notoriously threatened, in mid-2019, to impose tariffs on Mexican goods to pressure that country’s new president into agreeing to his demand to collaborate with Washington’s anti-immigrant agenda. That included, of course, Trump’s controversial “remain in Mexico” policy that has continued to strand tens of thousands of asylum-seekers there.

Meanwhile, for almost two decades the United States has been bullying (and funding) military and police forces to its south to enforce its immigration priorities, effectively turning other countries’ borders into extensions of the U.S. one. In the process, Mexico’s forces have regularly been deployed on that country’s southern border, and Guatemala’s on its border with Honduras, all to violently enforce Washington’s immigration policies.

Such outsourcing was, in part, a response to the successes of the immigrant rights movement in this country. U.S. leaders hoped to evade legal scrutiny and protest at home by making Mexico and Central America implement the uglier aspects of their policies.

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It all began with the Mérida Initiative in 2007, a George W. Bush-initiated plan that would direct billions of dollars to military equipment, aid, and infrastructure in Mexico (with smaller amounts going to Central America). One of its four pillars was the creation of “a 21st century border” by pushing Mexico to militarize its southern border. By 2013, Washington had funded 12 new military bases along that border with Guatemala and a 100-mile “security cordon” north of it.

In response to what was seen as a child-migrant crisis in the summer of 2014 (sound familiar?), President Barack Obama further pressured Mexico to initiate a new Southern Border Program. Since then, tens of millions of dollars a year have gone toward the militarization of that border and Mexico was soon detaining tens of thousands of migrants monthly. Not surprisingly, deportations and human-rights violations against Central American migrants shot up dramatically there. “Our border today in effect is Mexico’s border with Honduras and Guatemala,” exulted Obama’s former border czar Alan Bersin in 2019. A local activist was less sanguine, protesting that the program “turned the border region into a war zone.”

President Trump blustered and bullied Mexico and various Central American countries far more openly than the previous two presidents while taking such policies to new levels. Under his orders, Mexico formed a new, militarized National Guard and deployed 12,000 of its members to the Guatemalan border, even as funding from Washington helped create high-technology infrastructure along Mexico’s southern border, rivaling that on the U.S. border.

Trump called for reducing aid to Central America. Yet under his watch, most of the $3.6 billion appropriated by Congress continued to flow there, about half of it aimed at strengthening local military and police units. Trump did, however, temporarily withhold civilian aid funds to coerce Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador into signing “safe third country” agreements that would allow the United States to deport people with valid asylum claims to those very countries.

Trump also demanded that Guatemala increase security along its southern border “to stem the flow of irregular migration” and “deploy officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to advise and mentor host nation police, border security, immigration, and customs counterparts.” Once the Central American countries conceded to Trump’s demands, aid was restored.

This February, President Biden suspended those safe third country agreements, but is clearly otherwise ready to continue to outsource border enforcement to Mexico and Central America.

The Other Side of Militarization: “Economic Development”

As Democratic and Republican administrations alike outsourced a militarized response to immigration, they also sought to sell their agendas with promises of economic-development aid to Central America. However, they consistently promoted the very kind of assistance that historically brought violence and poverty to the region — and so led directly to today’s migrant crisis.

The model Washington continues to promote is based on the idea that, if Central American governments can woo foreign investors with improved infrastructure, tax breaks, and weak environmental and labor laws, the “free market” will deliver the investment, jobs, and economic growth that (in theory) will keep people from wanting to migrate in the first place. Over and over again in Central America’s tormented history, however, exactly the opposite has happened. Foreign investment flowed in, eager to take advantage of the region’s fertile lands, natural resources, and cheap labor. This form of development — whether in support of banana and coffee plantations in the nineteenth century or sugar, cotton, and cattle operations after World War II — brought Central America to its revolutions of the 1980s and its north-bound mass migration of today.

As a model, it relies on militarized governments to dispossess peasant farmers, freeing the land for foreign investors. Similarly, force and terror are brought to bear to maintain a cheap and powerless working class, allowing investors to pay little and reap fantastic profits. Such operations, in turn, have brought deforestation to the countryside, while their cheap exports to the United States and elsewhere have helped foster the high-consumption lifestyles that have only accelerated climate change — bringing ever fiercer weather, including the rising sea levels, more intense storms, droughts, and floods that have further undermined the livelihoods of the Central American poor.

Starting in the 1970s, many of those poor workers and peasants pushed for land reform and investment in basic rights like food, health, and education instead of simply further enriching foreign and local elites. When peaceful protest was met with violence, revolution followed, although only in Nicaragua did it triumph.

Washington spent the 1980s attempting to crush Nicaragua’s successful revolution and the revolutionary movements against the right-wing military governments of El Salvador and Guatemala. The peace treaties of the 1990s ended the armed conflicts, but never addressed the fundamental social and economic divides that underlay them. In fact, the end of those conflicts only opened the regional floodgates for massive new foreign investment and export booms. These involved, among other things, the spread of maquiladora export-processing plants and the growing of new export-oriented “non-traditional” fruits and vegetables, as well as a boom in extractive industries like gold, nickel, and petroleum, not to speak of the creation of new infrastructure for mass tourism.

In the 1980s, refugees first began fleeing north, especially from El Salvador and Guatemala, then riven by war, repression, and the violence of local paramilitary and death squads. The veneer of peace in the 1990s in no way brought an end to poverty, repression, and violence. Both public and private armed forces provided “security” — but only to elites and the new urban and rural megaprojects they sponsored.

If a government did threaten investors’ profits in any way, as when El Salvador declared a moratorium on mining licenses, the U.S.-sponsored Central America Free Trade Agreement enabled foreign corporations to sue and force it to submit to binding arbitration by a World Bank body. In the Obama years, when the elected, reformist president of Honduras tried to enact labor and environmental improvements, Washington gave the nod to a coup there and celebrated when the new president proudly declared the country “open for business” with a package of laws favoring foreign investors.

Journalist David Bacon termed that country’s new direction a “poverty-wage economic model” that only fostered the rise of gangs, drug trafficking, and violence. Protest was met with fierce repression, even as U.S. military aid flowed in. Prior to the coup, Hondurans had barely figured among Central American migrants to the United States. Since 2009, its citizens have often come to predominate among those forced to flee their homes and head north.

President Obama’s 2014 Alliance for Prosperity offered a new round of aid for investor-driven economic development. Journalist Dawn Paley characterized that Alliance as in “large part a plan to build new infrastructure that will benefit transnational corporations,” including “tax breaks for corporate investors and new pipelines, highways, and power lines to speed resource extraction and streamline the process of import, assembly, and export at low-wage maquilas.” One major project was a new gas pipeline to facilitate exports of U.S. natural gas to Central America.

It was Obama who oversaw Washington’s recognition of the coup in Honduras. It was Trump who looked the other way when Guatemala in 2019 and Honduras in 2020 expelled international anti-corruption commissions. And it was Trump who agreed to downplay the mounting corruption and drug trafficking charges against his friend, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, as long as he promoted an investor-friendly economy and agreed to collaborate with the U.S. president’s anti-immigrant agenda.

The January 2021 Caravan Marks the Arrival of the Biden Years

All signs point to the Biden years continuing what’s become the Washington norm in Central America: outsourcing immigration policy, militarizing security there, and promoting a model of development that claims to deter migration while actually fueling it. In fact, President Biden’s proposal designates $4 billion over four years for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to distribute. Such disbursement, however, would be conditioned on progress toward Washington-approved goals like “improv[ing] border security,” “inform[ing]… citizens of the dangers of the journey to the southwest border of the United States,” and “resolv[ing] disputes involving the confiscation of real property of United States entities.” Significant resources would also be directed to further developing “smart” border technology in that region and to Border Patrol operations in Central America.

A preview of how this is likely to work came just as Biden took office in January 2021.

One predictable result of Washington’s outsourcing of immigration control is that the migrant journey from Central America has become ever more costly and perilous. As a result, some migrants have begun gathering in large public “caravans” for protection. Their aim: to reach the U.S. border safely, turn themselves in to the border patrol, and request asylum. In late January 2021, a caravan of some 7,500 Hondurans arrived at the Guatemalan border in hopes that the new president in Washington would, as promised, reverse Trump’s controversial remain-in-Mexico policy of apparently endless internment in crowded, inadequate camps just short of the U.S.

They hadn’t known that Biden would, in fact, continue his predecessors’ outsourcing of immigration policy to Mexico and Central America. As it happened, 2,000 tear-gas and baton-wielding Guatemalan police and soldiers (armed, trained, and supported by the United States) massed at the Guatemala-Honduras border to drive them back.

One former Trump official (retained by President Biden) tweeted that Guatemala had “carr[ied] out its responsibilities appropriately and lawfully.” The Mexican government, too, praised Guatemala as it massed thousands of its troops on its own southern border. And Juan González, Biden’s National Security Council director for the Western Hemisphere lauded Guatemala’s “management of the migrant flow.”

In mid-March, President Biden appeared to link a positive response to Mexico’s request for some of Washington’s surplus Covid-19 vaccine to further commitments to cracking down on migrants. One demand: that Mexico suspend its own laws guaranteeing humane detention conditions for families with young children. Neither country had the capacity to provide such conditions for the large number of families detained at the border in early 2021, but the Biden administration preferred to press Mexico to ignore its own laws, so that it could deport more of those families and keep the problem out of sight of the U.S. public.

In late January 2021, CISPES joined a large coalition of peace, solidarity, and labor organizations that called upon the Biden administration to rethink its Central American plans. “The intersecting crises that millions in Central America face are the result of decades of brutal state repression of democratic movements by right-wing regimes and the implementation of economic models designed to benefit local oligarchs and transnational corporations,” CISPES wrote. “Far too often, the United States has been a major force behind these policies, which have impoverished the majority of the population and devastated the environment.”

The coalition called on Biden to reject Washington’s longstanding commitment to militarized security linked to the creation and reinforcement of investor-friendly extractive economies in Central America. “Confronting displacement demands a total rethinking of U.S. foreign policy,” CISPES urged. As of mid-March, the president had not responded in any fashion to the plea. My advice: don’t hold your breath waiting for such a response.

Copyright 2021 Aviva Chomsky

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Via Tomdispatch.com

——–

( Tomdispatch.com) – When Jennifer López shouted out that last line of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish during Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony, like so many Spanish-speaking Latinos in the United States I felt a sense of pride, a sense of arrival. It was a joy to hear my native language given a prominent place at a moment when the need to pursue the promise of “liberty and justice for all” couldn’t be more pressing.

A sense of arrival, I say, and yet Spanish arrived on these shores more than a century before English. In that language, the first Europeans explorers described what they called “el Nuevo Mundo,” the New World — new for them, even if not for the indigenous peoples who had inhabited those lands for millennia, only to be despoiled by the invaders from abroad. The conquistadors lost no time in claiming their territories as possessions of the Spanish crown and, simultaneously, began naming them.

Much as we may now deplore those colonial depredations, we still regularly use the words they left behind without considering their origins. Florida, which derives from flor, flower in Spanish, because Ponce de León first alighted in Tampa Bay on an Easter Sunday (Pascua Florida) in 1513. And then there is Santa Fe (Holy Faith) and Los Angeles (the Angels), founded in 1610 and 1782 respectively, and so many other names that we now take for granted: Montana (from montañas), Nevada (from nieve, or snow), Agua Dulce, El Paso, and Colorado, to name just a few. And my favorite place name of all, California, which comes from a legendary island featured in one of the books of chivalry that drove Don Quixote, the character created by Miguel de Cervantes, mad and set him on the road to seek justice for all.

It was not justice, not justicia para todos, however, that the millions who kept Spanish alive over the centuries were to encounter in the United States. On the contrary, what started here as an imperial language ended up vilified and marginalized as vast swaths of the lands inhabited by Spanish speakers came under the sway of Washington. As Greg Grandin has documented in his seminal book, The End of a Myth, the expansion of the United States, mainly into a West and a Southwest once governed by Mexico, led to unremitting discrimination and atrocities.

It was in Spanish that the victims experienced those crimes: the girls and women who were raped, the men who were lynched by vigilantes, the families that were separated, the workers who were deported, the children who were forbidden to speak their native tongue, the millions discriminated against, mocked, and despised, all suffering such abuses in Spanish, while holding onto the language tenaciously, and passing it on to new generations, constantly renewed by migrants from Latin America.

Through it all, the language evolved with the people who used it to love and remember, fight and dream. In the process, they created a rich literature and a vibrant tradition of perseverance and struggle. As a result, from that suppressed dimension of American history and resistance, Spanish is today able to offer up words that can help us survive this time of pandemic.

That’s what I’ve discovered as I navigated the many pestilences ravaging our lives in the last year: the Spanish I’ve carried with me since my birth has lessons of hope and inspiration, even for my fellow citizens who are not among the 53 million who speak it.

Words of Aliento for Our Current Struggle

Aliento tops the list of Spanish words that have recently mattered most to me. It means breath, but also encouragement. Alentar is to give someone the chance to breathe, to hearten them. (Think, in English, of the word encourage, which comes from the same root as corazón, heart, in Spanish.)

It’s worth remembering this connection today, when so many are dying because they lack breath and not even a ventilator can save them. Because they don’t have aliento, their heart stops. Perhaps they can’t breathe because others didn’t have the courage, el coraje, to help them survive, didn’t rage against the conditions that allowed them to die unnecessarily. Recall as well that so many of us in this country felt suffocated in another sense, breathless with the fear that we wouldn’t survive as a republic, not as a democracy, however imperfect it might have been.

Maybe that’s why, last year, so many Americans felt represented by the next to last words of George Floyd, repeated more than 20 times before he died: “I can’t breathe.” If he had cried out those words in Spanish, he would not have gasped, “No tengo aliento,” though that would have been true. He would undoubtedly have said: “No puedo respirar.”

Respirar. English speakers use the verb “to breathe,” but can certainly appreciate the various echoes respirar has in English, since it’s derived from the same word in Latin, “spirare,” that has bequeathed us spirit, inspire, and aspire. When we inhale and exhale in Spanish, I like to think that we’re simultaneously in communion with the sort of spirit that keeps us alive when the going is rough.

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In normal times, the sharing of air is a reminder that we’re all brothers and sisters, part of the same humanity, invariably inhaling and exhaling one another, letting so many others into our lungs and vice versa. But these times are far from normal and the air sent our way by strangers or even loved ones can be toxic, can lead to us expiring. So rather than respirar together in 2021, we need to inspirar each other, to aspirar together for something better. We need to band together in aconspiracy of hope so that every one of us on the planet will be granted the right to breathe, so that good things can transpire.

As so many of the initial measures of the Biden-Harris presidency suggest, to begin to undo the venomous divisiveness of the Trump era, we all need to tomar aliento or breathe in new ways to survive. We need to have more vida juntos or life with one another in order to go beyond the masked solitude of this moment, este momento de soledad.

Here Comes the Sun, But Let It Be for All

As soledad originates from that same word, solitude, it undoubtedly will sound familiar to English speakers. But the Spanish syllables of soledad radiate with the word sol, the sun, that antidote to loneliness and separation, which rises for all or will rise for none, which warms us all or fries us all or heals us all. And soledad also contains the suffix dad (from the verb dar, to give), telling us again that the way out of isolation is to be as generous as sunlight to one another, especially to those who have more edad; who, that is, are older and therefore at greater risk. To be that generoso is not easy. It may take a lot of work to care for those in need when one is also facing grief and hardship oneself — a labor that is frequently difficult and painful, as the Spanish word for work, trabajo, reminds us.

Trabajo is not just physical labor or exertion. It brings to mind something more distressing. The last novel that Cervantes wrote after finishing Don Quixote was called Los Trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda and there trabajos refers to the torments and trials that two lovers go through before they can be unidos, united.

Think of trabajos as akin to travails in English and, indeed, many who toil among us right now during this pandemic are going through special travails and trouble to keep us fed and sheltered and safe. Called “essential workers,” trabajadores esenciales, many of them have journeyed here from foreign lands after terrible travails and travels of their own (two words that derive from the same tortuous linguistic roots). As in the era of Cervantes, so in our perilous times, to leave home, to wander in search of a secure haven in a merciless world is an ordeal beyond words in any language.

It gives me solace, though, that when so many of those migrants crossed the border into the United States where I now live, they brought their Spanish with them, their throats and lives full of aliento, inspiración, trabajo, sol, and solidaridad. Now may be the time to record them — or rather recordarlos — in the deepest meaning of that word, which is to restore them to our hearts, to open those hearts to them at a moment when we are all subject to such travails and plagues.

In concrete policy terms, this would mean creating a true path to citizenship, ciudadanía, for so many millions lacking documentos. It would mean reuniting (re-unir) the families that Donald Trump and his crew separated at our southern border and finding the missing children, los niños desaparecidos. It would mean building less disruptive walls and more roads, caminos, that connect us all.

There Is No Unidad Without Struggle

Not all words in Spanish, of course, need to be translated for us to understand them. Pandemia, corrupción, crueldad, violencia, discriminación, muerte are sadly recognizable, wretchedly similar in languages across the globe as are the more hopeful, justicia, paz, rebelión, compasión. The same is true of President Biden’s favorite word of the moment, unidad, to which we should add a verb whose indispensability he and the Democratic Party should never forget, at least if there is to be real progress: luchar or to struggle.

Equally indispensable is a more primeval word that we can all immediately identify and make ours: mamá. Who has not called out to his or her mother in an hour of need, as George Floyd did at the very end of his existence? But the Spanish version of that word contains, I believe, a special resonance, related as it is to mamar — to suckle, to drink milk from the maternal breast as all mammals do — and so to that first act of human beings after we take that initial breath and cry.

For those of us who are grown up, an additional kind of sustenance is required to face an ominous future: “esperanza,” or hope, a word that fittingly stems from the same origin as respirar.

Many decades ago, Spanish welcomed me into the world and I am grateful that it continues to give me aliento in a land I’ve now made my own. It reminds me and my fellow citizens, my fellow humans, that to breathe and help others draw breath is the foundation of esperanza. The native language that I first heard from my mamá — even though she is long dead — still whispers the certainty that there is no other way for the spirit to prevail in these times of rage and solidarity and struggle, full of light and luz and lucha, so we may indeed someday fulfill the promise of “libertad y justicia para todos,” of liberty and justice for all.

Copyright 2021 Ariel Dorfman

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

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