Absolutely. Let me ask her how you can contact her. I met her for the first time a couple of weeks ago. U. of North Texas is near Dallas, and I was asked to speak on an incoming class of students about my work in the city. The program in 100% applied so everyone get a mentor if they need, and everyone has to find a client and agree upon a deliverable. I always need grad. students. so I’m trying to pull a few. The program in has 5 fields: eviromental, Business/Design, Migrants/Refuges, Border, Medical, and educational. We get a lot of teachers coming through and doing their practicums in the school district.
This is the first pilot anthro. class I’ve heard of at that level though.

There’s another fantastic opportunity at an elementary in my field site. He school lies on the fault line of a traditional African American community and a Hispanic community. She was been trying to promote ethnic cohesion for 3 years now, and things are getting better. There’s still a lot of misunderstanding between the two groups, and they don’t hang out together.
The Principle have an amazing idea to start a organic community garden at her school. The a lot of curriculum can come out of it, but the plan is to get the families to take food back home and traditionally cook it, and then get together at the school and share it with others. Sharing soother’s food is sharing in their culture. It used to be worse. She used to have her recent immigrant families pull their kids, because they didn’t want them going to a black school. But, it’s gotten better over the years.

There’s another teacher that’s getting his MS in anth., but his project in on the teachers and why they resist continuing education so much. No, I can get you a phone number right now:

Contact:

Dr. Mariela Nuñez-Janes
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Co-director Ethnic Studies Program
mariela.nunez-janes@unt.edu

She’s an educational anthro. and she might that student’s adviser. I think they have 3 there. Dr. Mariela is working with local kids in highschool. She’s got a video story telling project thing going on with unprivileged kids.

Let me know what happens. Tell her Rick gave you the info. Rick the guy doing the project for Dallas. She’ll know.

night!

That’s exactly what you did to me. I realized the turn of events, the irony of it. The fact that you are still blind to them is telling. You emphatically stated that I was blind to White privilege, and therefore blind to what is supposed to be a major cultural discourse in the literature. All I did was say that you seemed to be blind to a cultural discourse that is almost nowhere in the anthropological literature, and instead were parroting the known discourse, which happens to be subtly racist and harmful.

I consciously wrote the sentence, “I’m not saying your racist, I’m saying the narrative is,” to juxtapose the rather condescending way you told me in so many words, ‘I’m not saying your racist, just blind to the racist structure of society.’

To be much more accurate there are two privileges in our society. There is White privilege and there is Black/Brown privilege. I have to go to bed, but I’ll outline each tomorrow. Personally, in 2010 I’d rather have the Black/Brown privilege. I would easily have gotten into any school of my choice, all the scholarships I would need, etc…

What’s White privilege in 2010? Someone doesn’t get looked at funny in a store? A cop maybe doesn’t give you a second look? Yeah, that’s devastating stuff.

One simple example will clear this up: When a young black man’s basketball game isn’t that good, everyone tells him he needs to get better, he needs to practice, he needs to suck it up. When that same young man’s grades are suffering, no one tells him those things?
That simple fact is a product of White guilt, and it is both racist and devastating to that young man.

I don’t even know how we got on this subject. Wasn’t this thread about a school law?

Rick

“You’ve changed my mind, I think rather than teach about our differences, which are already quite well marketed in popular culture, we should have a kind of 4 field anth. course”

BTW, I know of a Jr. High teacher that’s getting her MA in anthropology here in Texas to start a pilot anthropology class in Jr. High as a civics/social studies requirement. The school district has green lighted it to see if it can work.

Rick–this is absolutely wonderful. I have been saying this for the past ten years. Can I connect with her?

As for the person who wrote their comment (Privilege Questioned ) I agree with you. White privilege is an access card bestowed on those who “look, pass, say they are white” and those as well who are of European ancestry. I see the empirical evidence every day.

And…thank you Dustin!you said: “While as an anthropologist I certainly am aware of the biological non-reality of racial categories, and teach from that perspective, I am also aware that the reason I *have* to teach it is that for most people, race is a primary categorizing tool and a central part of their lived experience of being *them*. While the last generation has seen increased efforts to revive distinctions like “Irish-American”, “Italian-American”, and “Jewish-American”, these ethnicities are comfortable because their distinctness is safely *non*-racial – I can be hyphenated without losing the privileges my whiteness, however socially constructed, brings me, something that is not true for “other” Americans: Mexican-AMericans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans.”

Folks please memorize this. And keep a picture of it mentally when you enter these discussions. I would also like to again add, skin color appears to be the all in all determinant in society for ascribing a category of this false biological concept of race, and Prof. Gates who is running around doing DNA historiography is ridiculous.

I am not entering the fray, because it has to do with legal issues and changes that will affect the economics of business in America. As well if you arrest persons,even if it is dismissed or expunged it still remains on your record, and can prevent future employment.

Let me leave you with this: for 40 years I worked on my ethnocentrism. I am Cuban. I am the descendant of the quintessential hodge podge. I will not use “mutt” as President Obama did because I believe that to be offensive. Any one of my relatives can fit into about 20 ethnic categories. From popular and erroneous common public perceptions. From Asian, European, African phenotypes to pink cheeked or black as night. Please. Please my fellow anthropologists do what you can to destroy the “racial” labels. We all know why A.A.’s are still marginalized. We know why then they set themselves apart. The same for the Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn,or the Haitians, or any other group who share common mores and values.

The problem in America particularly is that “race” is Institutionalized.

I can attest to the real feeling of what it is like to carry oneself as a human above all other labels and categories and feel free.
True I have been reading and studying for 40 years, and I read everything, not just anthropological papers but it’s a good feeling to be able to express and understand the cultures that surround us. I don’t bite my tongue when I am speaking with my Russian, Italian,Polish, Columbian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Israeli, Southerner,Northerner or Westerner and so forth acquaintances and friends.

Yes I do have a lot of explaining to do, each and every time there is a confrontational issue being discussed, but at least I get that information out there one person at a time.

They don’t have to agree, but they should at least know, if not then what are we anthropologists doing to make this country, this world a better place?

I ask myself that question everyday, which is why I chose to travel solo. I am now in law school. There are new frontiers on the horizon and I want to add that to what I have been learning all of these years. It was very nice being here, I just found this blog, but I have to get back to my studies. !Adiosito!

“Race often structures, influences, overdetermines the perception of who the ‘good’ people are, and often does so *implicitly* and *unconsciously.* ”

You and everyone with similar comments are assuming, often wrongly that race or ethnicity are major determinants in who is considered good or bad by the police in question. Most of the officers I know are black and Hispanic. This is Texas and most cities have not been a majority “white” for some time now.
In my home town I was one of a small handful of kids with white skin, and light colored hair (there are European Mexicans, watch a Novela on Telemundo) at a high school of 5,000 and a 50% drop out rate. My Spanish is shit, because it would shock people and they’d always say something, so I would hear things in Spanish and answer in English. I grew up thinking that people didn’t like white people, so this whole assumed reversal shocked me when I first moved up north.

As you know, the more you take measurements of something the more of a chance or getting a significant result, which statistically would be a Type I error. Social scientists that measure ethnicity and race generally begin with very biased assumptions, and only measure one thing. These unconscious assumptions that you all trying to point out to me as though I haven’t seen the data in the literature as long as I’ve been alive, contain the seeds of an unconscious assumption that isn’t studied. This something we dare not speak of, lest we are branded and stigmatized with invented guilt.

In your mind this flow of assumption is one way, but that’s not true. Misunderstandings are common among all groups. It’s like history froze in 1960 in social science. It is your unconscious assumption that when you hear or read the word “cop” that it’s some white guy, probably with a mustache, and perhaps mirrored sun glasses. It’s because people allow other people to guilt trip them for their own advantage that we let people get away with things that we wouldn’t let other people get away with.

This is a very biased and paternalistic attitude that by and large is the unconscious aspect of US culture that is invisible to most anthropologists. There is an assumption that “we” have to protect “those” people, as though they’re children. As thought they have no say over their own lives, and no agency in their own history.

The linguist John McWhorter has talked about the linguistic patterns that surround this paternalism, which again is a subtle form of racism, largely developed during the War on Poverty in the 1960’s. Poor minorities became people went from being needed to be made like others, to being people that needed to be taken care of and protected. It’s when elite “white folk” developed this new paternalism, and everyone else bought into it, that allowed people to basically be angry just because.
He calls this:

Therapeutic alienation: defined as “alienation unconnected to, or vastly disproportionate to, real-life stimulus, but maintained because it reinforces one’s sense of psychological legitimacy, via defining oneself against an oppressor characterized as eternally depraved.” (McWhorter 2005:6).

It’s the “eternally depraved” abstraction that comes into the minds of elite whites, and makes them feel sorry for others, which is probably the most insidious and subtle form of racism. Not saying you’re racist, just saying that the narrative is, and like discourse of development, this discourse in still invisible.

White privilege is also largely an illusion in 2010. When people say “white privilege” they are invoking a particular cultural meme, a particular why of dress and speech. The US president conveys and embodies that meme more than I ever could. Part of the discourse is the way that elites feel they need to educate people about things they read about, or were told about by someone. Go, go to a working class, white neighborhood and talk to me of privilege. Go to Appalachia. When people warn other not to “act white” they aren’t referencing a working class poor guy. Tell me, when you go to the barrio, or a poor black neighborhood, if you have ever been, do you feel that what you see is your fault, and that you need to save people? How condescending is that?

Current evidence of this paternalism you say? Here you go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dukMrL_MBGs

This question of perception tracks back to another comment you posted: “I think everyone here understands the distinction between race as biology and race as culture. ” That the social fact of *white privilege*–regardless of class–keeps sliding off the proverbial table, raises the question of exactly what definition/concept of race–and of power–is being used. Perhaps ‘we’ are not all in agreement as to what the distinction of race as biology and race as ‘culture’ actually is. I, for one, am not: I do think that “poor working class white folk” have power–that whiteness itself is a kind of power–especially after the Henry Louis Gates/Cambridge police incident last summer, and the question of why the cops were called in the first place, and whether they would have been called had the caller seen two (similarly-dressed) white males trying to get into the same house. I think Dustin is spot-on in raising the question of whiteness as an unmarked category, and to ask what this (i.e., its normativity and invisibility) means to and for the teaching of American history (or, for that matter, for the teaching of anthropology), especially in relation to who is understood to be ‘ethnic’ and who is perceived to be advocating ‘exclusion.’

I agree that they generally make the law work for them. I also know from the cops I know and talk with, and ask questions about this stuff, that not all cops equally apply the law. That’s usually a good thing, because they tend to be lenient towards people they think are generally “good” people are people they can work with, and fully apply the law when they think someone is just no good. I’ve had a few openly admit that fact.

I also thought about this aspect. A Tuscan cop sued Arizona right after this law was passed for this very reason. Personally, I think this falls under the wishful thinking category. By and large this population does not call the police, ever. I mean unless there is a dead, bloody body in the living room. I’ve got a buddy that used to live in the barrio in West Dallas, who now lives in East Dallas, and people, not even illegals, will call him and ask him to call 9-11 for him.

I’ve driven around with police that work around these areas so I can get their input for reports, and they’ll have a weird reaction when they drive into the barrios like, “I’ve never been here before. No one has ever call from here.”

A cop is never going to get someone to admit illegal status to them. A good cop will simply not ask the question if there are other more important things involved, but there are some cops that are like law robots.

“What they’ll do is look the other way like they do with a thousand other little irregularities that are merely a distraction from the much more important and complex business of negotiating and maintaining local systems of relationship and order.”

They’re cops, not anthropologists. They regulate the law, not social relationships. That’s role confusion on your part. I admit to the same confusion of their roles too.

The Sergeant in charge of my field site area has ordered his cops to build more relationships with residents, especially the kids.
It’s a misconception among academics and upper class leftists that people in low-income areas hate the police. They hate that the police don’t give them as much attention. They want the police there more often. Criminals that terrorize people in the areas hate the police. Police forces are so ethnically mixed that the old days of good ‘ol boy justice is mostly a thing of the past.

That’s circular logic and not allowed legally.

I’ve worked with cops and God love ‘em, I could never, ever do their job and I know that the vast majority eat shit on a daily basis for far too little money. But I also know that any gifted police officer doesn’t work for the law, the law works for him. Most of the time the general public should be happy that that is the case. But then there are your bad eggs that do the same thing.

To bring this back around to the situation in Arizona, I am sure that plenty of the cops there don’t want to be saddled with enforcement of this new law. Sure, they now have a new power to help with habitual criminals who are living undocumented and off the grid. But there must be officers who have spent years building a good relationship with communities made up of mostly illegal immigrants. Their PC is the fact that all of these people have told them the truth about their status. What are those guys going to do when SB 1070 goes into effect?

I get the same reaction when I talk to people in the field about their legal rights. I was talking to a priest that serves a large immigrant populations in my city, and telling ways to work to avoid imminent domain in the barrios that his people live in. He was like, “they can’t just take someone’s land and bull doze his home to build something else,” oh yes they can. Actually, mine is a progressive city, so they actually banned imminent domain in all low-income areas of the city. The next step is to ban land speculation. I hate speculators.

Really, what we need is a very honest and data rich national discussion of immigration period. That gets destroyed when the propaganda machine kicks into gear. I mean I don’t think illegals bleed the system at all. In what they pay in payroll, sales, and other taxes, they pretty much break even with services or maybe put more into the system than they take.
But you see that discussion has zero to do with the legal discussion we just had.

That’s circular logic and not allowed legally. You can refuse, which I would, but if the officer is one of those asshole cops, and they are on every force probably, and they demand it to the point of using violence then comply and fight it in court later. I mean if there are no witnesses, and the cop has a spotless record and no complaint, probably rare in these cases, then it could be your word against theirs. Then they’d have to invent probable cause later, which leaves them open having their statement picked apart by the same methods used on suspects. I mean then you’re getting into the level of corruption of planting evidence (I’ve seen it at border crossings). If you’re dealing with a corrupt cop then you’ve got bigger problems, and really for a cop like that profiling, planting evidence, not using a warrant, etc… then all civil rights for everyone can be violated.

A lot of people don’t know this, but when you reenter the country, you lose a lot of your rights until cleared by ICE. If they have a “reasonable suspicion” they can (no shit) take your car apart in front of you, and leave it like that and make you call a tow truck to take away your car to get put together on your dime. Do not fuck with a customs agent when you cross. I’ve personally never had a problem, and I crossed at a young age probably 2 or 3 times a week into Mexico, because my dad did a lot of business there.

I didn’t see it, but a punk friend swears to me that a customs guy put a nickel bag in his car because he gave him a lot of attitude, and did this to him. The dude smoked a lot weed, so he’s not the most reliable witness.

The point is that its not good to start with the “if” hypotheticals, because they would be valid under all other situations; citizen or not.

The year before we used They Poured Fire On Us from the Sky, an account of the civil war and refugee crisis in southern Sudan. Again the hope was that the main protagonists’ similar age to our students would create the grounds for identification. Not so much, as it turned out, not even among our Black students; that is, until one of the authors came to campus with pictures. His personal testimony and the visuals did the trick.

My short tentative conclusion is that much of the thinking on both sides about how to support or damp ethnic consciousness through education is magical. Of course people do learn all sorts of stuff about that, but I doubt much of it happens in schools. Not that I know.

An officer can’t just ask me to show ID, but if he has a reasonable suspicion that I am doing anything wrong in any legal way, then he can.

The tricky thing is whether he can ask—not demand—your ID, and then, when you say you aren’t under any obligation to produce it, interpret your refusal as PC-level suspicious behavior.

So: “So good of the Great State of Arizona to deign to follow federal law.”

That’s just legal speak. It’s a whole unique kind of linguistic pattern. Laws must walk a weird and fine line of specificity and generality. The changing of a single word in the constitution can change the seeming intent of the whole document.

Yeah, from working in a court room that language used under oath is a whole different thing than otherwise. The ”[c]ourses or classes for Native American pupils that are required to comply with federal law” is in there for a reason, all right. Native American tribal governments deal with the federal government on a nation-to-nation that leaves Arizona pretty much out in the cold on this count. This particular chunk of text might suggest something about the understanding of the relationship between ethnicity and nationality underlying this legislation. That is obviously a whole ‘nother thread.