HHS 201 Introduction to Human Services Wk5
Chapter 8 Working with Diversity
The election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States was hailed by some as proof that we are in a postracial society where race doesn’t matter. The Tea Party soon gave the lie to that belief by portraying Obama as an alien, not really a loyal American—a foreigner, a clown, a Hitler, a socialist—and by demanding vigilante action against dark-skinned people. Rand Paul, who received the support of the Tea Party when he ran for the Senate in Kentucky in 2010, said that he would probably not support the section of the Civil Rights Act that forbids discrimination by private businesses (e.g., the young people who staged sit-ins at lunch counters to protest discrimination during the civil rights movement).
The facts also give the lie to the belief that we are in a postracial society, as we point out in Chapters 2, 6, and 7.
Yet, the country has come a long way in overcoming racism. The comedian Chris Rock asked, “What does it say about America when the greatest golfer in the world [Tiger Woods] is black and the greatest rapper [Eminem] is white?” While much of Rock’s comedy targets the racism that is directed against black people, in this statement he was celebrating the fact that in the United States today “no role or occupation (at least in sports and music) is now determined by skin color” (Gallagher, 2003, p. 31).
We celebrate the progress that the United States has made in combating racism. The civil rights movement of the 1960s ended legal segregation. White and black people now eat together in restaurants, sit together in public transportation, go to school together, play on the same sports teams, and marry one another. Advertisements show black models in yachting clothes. Tiger Woods sells sneakers; Michael Jordon sells underwear. But do these media pictures give the true picture of race relations in the United States? Have we finally ended discrimination against people of color?
Many people think so. National polls show that a majority of whites believe that discrimination against racial minorities no longer exists. They believe that blacks have as good a chance as whites to find a job and are as well off financially and educationally as whites. When people are asked to explain why so many blacks aren’t doing well, “the most popular explanation is that of black people’s lack of motivation or willpower to get ahead” (Schuman, 1997).
Most black people don’t see it that way. Author bell hooks writes about her childhood as a black girl. She learned as a child that to be safe, it was important to recognize the power of whiteness, even to fear it, and to avoid encountering it. She remembers walking from her home to visit her grandmother:
It was a movement away from the segregated blackness of our community into a poor white neighborhood. I remember the fear, being scared to walk to Baba’s, our grandmother’s house, because we would have to pass that terrifying whiteness—those white faces on the porches staring us down with hate. Even when empty or vacant those porches seemed to say danger, you do not belong here, you are not safe.
Oh! that feeling of safety, of arrival, of homecoming when we finally reached the edges of her yard, when we could see the soot black face of our grandfather, Daddy Gus, sitting in his chair on the porch, smell his cigar, and rest on his lap. Such a contrast, that feeling of arrival, of homecoming—this sweetness and the bitterness of that journey, that constant reminder of white power and control. (hooks, 1997, p. 175)
Times have changed since black people had little intimate contact with whites, but bell hooks believes that the feeling of impending danger has never completely left black people, even when they have adopted the values, speech, and habits of white people. She says that even though it was a long time ago that she visited her grandmother, she still has associations of whiteness with terror. “All black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness” (hooks, 1997, p. 175). She says that most white people don’t understand this terror.
A look at some facts contradicts the belief that we have achieved equality between people of color and white people. In Chapter 7 we discuss the disparities in income and wealth. Other disparities include:
Home ownership and housing discrimination. In 2009, 74.5 percent of white households owned their own homes compared to 46 percent of blacks and 48.4 percent of Hispanics (U.S. Census Bureau, 2009a). “Even when homeseekers contact housing providers by telephone, linguistic profiling (whereby the provider recognizes the race of the caller and provides less service to those with a recognizable black voice) results in African Americans experiencing discrimination in efforts to buy or rent a home even when they do not even meet the housing provider” (Squires, 2006). In 2010, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimated that more than 2 million instances of housing discrimination occur each year, but fewer than 1 percent are reported (Carlton, 2010).
Dark-skinned Latinos face far more discrimination than do light-skinned Latinos.
Blacks are the least favored neighbors by all other racial and ethnic groups. When asked to describe their neighborhood preferences, one-fifth of whites opted for a neighborhood that has no blacks, as did one-third of Hispanics and more than 40 percent of Asians (Squires, 2006).
Black and Hispanics lost their homes to foreclosures proportionally more than did whites; 8 percent of both African Americans and Latinos, compared to 4.5 percent of whites, had their homes foreclosed. These disparities hold even after controlling for differences in income between the groups (Gruenstein, Li, & Ernst, 2010).
Health. Whites have lower rates of diabetes, tuberculosis, pregnancy-related mortality, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and are more likely to have prenatal care in the first trimester than blacks, Latinos, or Asians. African Americans face a higher risk than any other racial group of dying from heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and hypertension. Affluent blacks suffer, on average, more health problems than the poorest whites (Drexler, 2007).
Life expectancy for U.S. white males in 2006 was seventy-eight years compared with seventy years for black males and eighty-one years for white females compared with seventy-seven years for black females (National Center for Heath Statistics, 2008).
Health insurance. Minorities are more likely to be uninsured than whites, even when accounting for work status. This results in lack of access to health care and more health problems. Nearly 70 percent of nonelderly whites receive employer-based insurance while only 40 percent of Hispanics, 48 percent of blacks, and 43 percent of Native Americans/Native Alaskans receive such coverage (American College of Physicians, 2010).
Professional advancement. Blacks and Latinos are underrepresented as lawyers, physicians, professors, dentists, engineers, and registered nurses.
Racial profiling. In California, since 1991 between 80 percent and 90 percent of all motorists arrested by law enforcement officials have been members of minority groups. In Maryland, although only 21 percent of drivers along a stretch of Interstate 95 are minorities, including blacks, Latinos, Asians, and others, 80 percent of those who are pulled over and searched are people of color. Racial profiling has come to be known as “driving while black (DWB)” (ACLU, 2007).
Job discrimination. White job applicants with a felony conviction on their record were more likely to get a job than comparable black applicants with no criminal record. Applicants with white-sounding names are more likely to obtain employment than those with black-sounding names (Squires, 2006).
Political representation. In 2007, the House of Representatives had forty blacks, only 9 percent of 435 members. The House had twenty-four Latinos, 5.5 percent of the membership. On the other hand, blacks and Latinos comprised over 12 percent of the population. The Senate had only one black, Barack Obama (out of 100 members), and three Latinos. There have been only six black Senators in the history of the United States, and there have been only six Latinos since 1928 (Congressional Black Caucus, 2007; LatinosVote.com, 2007). There is only one black governor, Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. There is only one Latino governor, Bill Richardson of New Mexico.
In 2007–2009, there were sixteen women in the Senate (16 percent of the total) and seventy in the House (16 percent of the total).
Voting rights. Blacks who lived in Florida in the 2000 presidential election were four times as likely as whites to have their ballots invalidated (Parker & Eisler, 2001). Most convicted felons are prohibited from voting, and a disproportionate number of prisoners are people of color.
School segregation. A 2010 study sponsored by Harvard School of Public Health found “gross levels of disparity” between schools that white and black children attend. Children of color “continue to attend very different schools than white children.” In Chicago, the average black student goes to a public school that is 74 percent black while the average white student goes to a school that is 6 percent black. Forty-three percent of both Latino and African American students attend schools where the poverty rate is more than 80 percent. Only 4 percent of white students do. The study concluded that “issues of persistent high racial/ethnic segregation and high exposure of minority children to economic disadvantage at the school level remain largely unaddressed” (Jackson, 2010).
8.2 Understanding Ethnicity
The Definition of Culture
There is no one agreed-on definition of culture. We will use the term to connote a group of people who share history, language, traditions, and networks. They may also share a minority social status. More importantly, they see themselves and others see them in a special way, although their ethnic and cultural status may have slightly varied meanings for each individual (Lukes & Land, 1990).
During World War II the U.S. government forcibly interned thousands of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry. The official reason was that they might spy for Japan, our enemy. Yet the German Americans and Italian Americans, both of whose ancestral countries also opposed us, were not harassed. Why do you think Asian Americans were treated so much more harshly?
Theories about cultural identity have changed over time. The melting-pot theory, popular among the “establishment” of the 1960s, implicitly assumed that the white, Anglo-Saxon culture was the ideal that other cultures should aspire to. The theory proved to be inadequate. Ethnic groups never totally assimilate into the majority culture, and they have asserted their right to be unique.
During the War on Poverty, some sociologists proposed a cultural-deficit theory (Moynihan, 1965), which assumed that minority cultures were inferior to the mainstream. This theory called for socializing minorities into the mainstream culture. That was one of the guiding principles of the Head Start early-childhood program.
Through the organized efforts of those supposedly deficient cultural groups, the cultural-deficit theory yielded to a theory of cultural difference, which focused on the uniqueness of each minority culture but implied that each was separate from the dominant culture. However, that too was inadequate, as there is much overlap between the minority and dominant cultures.
A current theory is called bicultural theory. It states that, although people are socialized into their minority culture through family and ethnic community, they are also influenced by the dominant culture through social institutions and the mass media. No one is quite sure how people incorporate cultures. Each person goes through the process with varying degrees of success. A totally bicultural person moves easily between two cultures, feeling at home in each, to the extent that the dominant culture allows this (Lukes & Land, 1990).
bicultural theory
A theory asserting that although people are socialized into their minority culture through family and ethnic community, they are also influenced by the dominant culture through social institutions and the mass media.
Anthropologists say that a person’s ethnicity is situational, asserting itself according to the situation (Green, 1982). An African American person might speak black English with other African Americans, but, when with white people, may speak the dominant form of English. It is important to know how people deal with ethnicity in cross-cultural interactions as well as within their culture. Here is what one black woman says about this:
Learning formal English has left me, and many like me, at the crossroads between “Black is Beautiful” and “White Equals Wealth.” The pressure, from both communities, to choose one direction is daunting. Being black is in no way synonymous with using slang, but we all want to stay true to who we are, and be proud of it…. The glares I encounter when talking on the train with friends, the stares I receive when I report that I am trilingual in that I speak English, Spanish and slang, the offended feeling I get when white people tell me how articulate I am, and the anger I feel when my friends tell me I am “acting white”—these are all different ways of asking me to choose a side…. When asked once by my college roommate about my newfound crush, I answered, “His swag is through the roof!” She, being unfamiliar with slang, did not understand. How could I let that slip? What I really meant was that I was utterly impressed by the way the young man carried himself. I liked his style. (Sturdivant, 2010)
It is absurd that the amount of melanin (pigment) in one’s skin or the tightness of the curl of one’s hair should cause another person to do anything more than casually notice these features as two of the many that distinguish one person from another. Yet the social meaning of these features in the United States has built up over three centuries, beginning with the arrival of the first slave ship from Africa. Since its arrival (and the thousands that came after), no one in this country has been casual about color. Ever since the arrival of those three fateful ships that Christopher Columbus led to the American continent in 1492, the rulers of this country have subjugated native populations and constricted them with minority status in their own lands.
Advances in genetics and biotechnology in the past few decades have caused a dramatic shift in thinking about race. Most anthropologists now agree that race is not a biological reality at all. It is nothing more than a social, cultural, and political invention (Chandler, 1997). But that is not how the general public sees it. A biological anthropologist at Yale University, Jonathan Marsh, said that changing most people’s minds about race is “like convincing someone in the 17th century that the Earth goes around the sun and not vice versa. What you think is out there is different from what’s really out there” (Chandler, 1997, p. A30).
The mapping of the human genome provided scientific proof that human beings are not divided into separate biological groups. J. Craig Venter, whose company, Celera Genomics, mapped the human genome, said, “It is disturbing to see reputable scientists and physicians even categorizing things in terms of race. There is no basis in the genetic code for race” (Stolberg, 2001, p. 1 wk).
While we agree that there is only one race, we go on to discuss race as a social construct because it is a concept deeply embedded in people’s ideas about themselves and others.
The actress Lonette McKee, who played the role of Alice in the TV series Queen, has both African American and Finnish-Swedish ancestry. Her mother told her that she had the best of both worlds. But McKee does not agree. She said that the world doesn’t tell you that when you look for a job or when you have a job and don’t get paid what you are worth. She says, “It’s a political, social reality—one drop of black blood, you’re black. To look at yourself any other way is a lie. And we’re involved in a system designed to weed us out, to keep us out of the mainstream” (Smith, 1993, p. 30).
Media Stereotypes
The media has a powerful influence in shaping our attitudes. A comparison of how the media presents black and white people shows that black people are likely to be shown in a more unfavorable light than white people. For example, consider the media treatment of six fatal schoolyard shootings over eight months by white youths in American small towns.
Kip Kinkel, 15, the boy who allegedly killed his parents and two classmates in a gun rampage in Oregon, was “skinny,” “slight,” “diminutive,” or “freckle faced.” A Newsweek story described him as having “an innocent look that is part Huck Finn and part Alfred E. Neumann—boyish and quintessentially American.” A Roxbury judge, Milton Wright, said, “Quintessentially American? That always means white” (Dowdy, 1998, p. E1).
Luke Woodham, convicted in Mississippi of killing two students, was described as “the chubby, poor kid at Pearl High School who always seemed to get picked on,” a “nerd,” and “intelligent but isolated” (Dowdy, 1998, p. E1).
Michael Carneal, who allegedly killed three students in West Paducah, Kentucky, was “thin” and “a solid B student.” Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden, who allegedly killed four girls and a teacher in Jonesboro, Arkansas, were “little boys.” Andrew Wurst, who allegedly killed a teacher in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, was a “shy and quirky eighth-grader with an offbeat sense of humor” (Dowdy, 1998, p. E1).
Contrast these benign descriptions with the media treatment of young African American and Latino killers. They have been called “maggots,” “animals,” and “super predators.” Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, comments, “If this were black kids doing this, you’d see op-ed pieces… talking about a pathology of violence loose in the community, about some dangerous elements being unleashed, about the breakdown of family values” (Dowdy, 1998).
News accounts of young black killers in court often describe them as “blank faced,” “dazed,” or “showing no emotion.” “Unlike the more human terms given the white school killers, young black suspects often are not described physically at all. Often, the first description of them is whether the youth was in a gang” (Dowdy, 1998, p. E1).
Boston District Attorney Ralph Martin says that many young black suspects are “seemingly sweet of countenance, and lacking in obvious bravado” (Dowdy, 1998, p. E1), but he rarely sees black youth described that way in the newspapers.
Alvin Poussaint, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, notes that although there is wide media discussion of mood disorders and depression for the white teenage killers, “there is little of that for low-income African-American and Latino youth killers who suffer at higher levels of the kind of depression that precedes violence” (Dowdy, 1998, p. E1).
Julian Bond comments that it is time that the United States looked at factors behind youth violence that cut across race and class. He says, “It seems to me there’s kind of a pathology out there, some kind of love of guns, a gun culture out there that’s dangerous and insidious” (Dowdy, 1998, p. E1).
Ethnic Identity
It is risky to generalize about ethnic traits. There is much variety within each culture. For example, some of the literature on working with ethnicity points out that although the usual advice in interviewing technique is to look someone straight in the eye, that would be the wrong technique for some Asian, Latino, and Native American groups, who might interpret that as hostility. In her autobiographical novel The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston (1977) shows that this advice would be wrong for an older woman, Moon Orchid, who was newly arrived from China, but right for her nieces, who were acculturated to the American tradition of looking people straight in the eye:
“Good morning, Aunt,” they said, turning to face her, staring directly into her face. Even the girls stared at her—like cat-headed birds. Moon Orchid jumped and squirmed when they did that. They looked directly into her eyes as if they were looking for lies. Rude. Accusing. They never lowered their gaze; they hardly blinked…. Sometimes when the girls were reading or watching television, she crept up behind them with a comb and tried to smooth their hair, but they shook their heads, and they turned and fixed her with those eyes. She wondered what they thought and what they saw when they looked at her like that. She liked coming upon them from the back to avoid being looked at. They were like animals the way they stared. (Kingston, 1977, p. 133)
Stereotypes can both demean and exalt a group. For example, Asian Americans are sometimes seen as the “model minority,” a homogenous group of high achievers taking over the campuses of the nation’s most selective colleges. A report by New York University, the College Board, and a commission of mostly Asian American educators and community leaders, pokes holes in stereotypes about Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. It points out that the term Asian American is extraordinarily broad, embracing members of many ethnic groups. “Certainly there’s a lot of Asians doing well, at the top of the curve, but there are just as many struggling at the bottom of the curve,” said Robert T. Teranishi, the N.Y.U. education professor who wrote the report, ‘Facts, not fiction: Setting the record straight’” (Lewin, 2008).
An important guideline for a human service worker is to seek to understand how each individual person is affected by his or her ethnicity. To do that, there is no substitute for asking the person. If you were working with many people from a culture different from yours, you would be wise to read as much as possible about that culture, including the literature of the culture. That will enrich your life as well as help you in your work. If their language were different from yours, it would also help you to learn their language. We are the first to admit that this isn’t easy. One of the authors of this book (Mandell) has been struggling to learn Spanish so she can talk with Latino people who come to the welfare office where she does outreach. She has been taking Spanish courses for many years, but she is still far from being fluent. Yet even her halting attempts to communicate with Latina women are appreciated, and the women help her with the language.
The Power of Names
Before we discuss ethnicity, we need to explain some terms. You may wonder sometimes what you should call a particular group of people. Do you call old people elderly, senior citizens, or simply old? How do you designate people who do not have all possible physical or mental functions? Are they handicapped, disabled, differently abled, physically challenged, developmentally disabled, or people with disabilities? Are American people of African descent called African Americans, black, or Negro? Are American people with Mexican ancestors called Mexican Americans or Chicanos (Chicanas)? Are people whose native language is Spanish called Hispanics or Latinos (Latinas)? Are indigenous people Indians, Native Americans, First Nations, or a specific tribal name?
The name that a group chooses to be known by is important because it reflects that group’s self-identity. When a group is oppressed, the name it chooses becomes a political as well as a linguistic issue. For example, people with disabilities generally do not like to be called simply disabled rather than people with disabilities because the former term implies they are deficient in some way and not whole people.
In the course of their liberation struggles, American people of African descent said they no longer wanted to be called colored, because that term carried connotations of lower status, so they changed their designation to Negro. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, they proudly declared that their skin color should be a source of pride rather than shame, so they called themselves blacks. Later on, as they proudly claimed their African heritage, politically active people used the term African Americans. Recently the trend seems to be to return to the term black, partly out of consideration for West Indians, who do not consider themselves African Americans, and partly because black is an easier term. The term people of color is often used to describe people of ethnic groups that are not considered white or Caucasian, but some people point out that these are not entirely accurate terms because Caucasians are not actually white, and many Latinos are white, even though they may be considered under the rubric of people of color. Similarly, some politically active people of Mexican descent changed the old term Mexican American to Chicano (for males) and Chicana (for females).
As these name changes take place, not everyone in the group adopts them, and often the old names linger on alongside the new ones. For example, the word colored is still part of the name of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Many people still call themselves Mexican Americans rather than Chicanos (Chicanas). Although many indigenous people prefer the term Native American to Indian, some activists are now saying that both terms are reminders of colonialism. They prefer the term First Nations or First Americans, or their tribal names. American Indian is also an accepted term. The Census Bureau calls all Spanish-speaking people Hispanics but makes it clear that “persons of Hispanic origin may be of any race.”
Some names are acceptable to people of minority status if used by someone of their own ethnicity, but not if used by someone who is not of their ethnicity. For example, there has been a long-standing debate among African Americans about whether the term nigger is acceptable when used by black people. The comedian Dick Gregory vowed never to use it again after he had used it in a book, but some black people argue that it is a good-natured expression of solidarity.
As authors, we use the terms that we believe are in current usage by people who are in the forefront of their particular group’s liberation struggles. When more than one term is in current usage, we use both. When you are in doubt about the term a particular person prefers, ask that person.
Broad Categories Disguise Large Differences
Many different nations are lumped under the categories “Asian American” and “Latin American,” but these broad categories obscure enormous national differences. One could no more speak of a “typical Asian” than of a “typical European.” Immigrants from Japan, China, Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and the Philippines all speak different languages and come from vastly different cultures. Immigrants from Colombia, El Salvador, Argentina, Guatemala, Mexico, and Puerto Rico all speak Spanish, but they too come from very different national cultures. Although Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same Caribbean island, their people speak different languages and have different histories and cultures.
The Census Bureau has finally recognized the reality that many people are of more than one race and for the first time in 2000 allowed people to select more than one racial category. The Census Bureau records “race” and “Hispanic ethnicity” as separate questions. Thus, a Hispanic person can be of any race. Officially, the proportion of ethnic groups in the United States in 2008 was as follows: Non-Hispanic white 65.6 percent; Black or African American 12.8 percent; Hispanic origin 15.4 percent; Asian 4.5 percent; American Indian and Alaska Native 1 percent, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander 0.2 percent; Two or more races 1.7 percent (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010).
The Hispanic population has surpassed the black population recently, and there is a trend toward an increasing Hispanic population.
Discrimination Hurts Everybody
The college students who scrawl JAP (Jewish American Princess) on a dorm door have been infected with a contagious, chronic virus. Having learned how to hate one group of people, they are likely to turn on others from backgrounds they do not understand or feel threatened by.
Prejudice and discrimination have economic, psychological, and political causes. In recent years, as the job market has contracted and wages have gone down, people’s anxieties and fears about competition for jobs have increased. Many working people look for scapegoats, and we have seen a frightening increase in hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, American Nazi Party, Aryan Nation, and right-wing militias. The bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 was an example of these groups’ potential for violence and the danger that hate inspires.
Prejudice is widespread and is directed against many kinds of people. The comedian Tom Lehrer satirized the pervasiveness of prejudice in his song “National Brotherhood Week.” Following are some excerpts:
Oh the white folks hate the black folks;
And the black folks hate the white folks.
To hate all but the right folks is an old established rule…
Oh the poor folks hate the rich folks,
And the rich folks hate the poor folks.
All of my folks hate all of your folks;
It’s American as apple pie…
Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics;
And the Catholics hate the Protestants.
The Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.
During National Brotherhood Week, National Brotherhood week,
Its National-Everyone-Smile-at-One-Anotherhood Week.
Be nice to people who are inferior to you.
It’s only for a week, so have no fear.
Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year. (Lehrer, 1965)
In his classical study of prejudice, psychologist Gordon Allport described a racist as a person who is suspicious and distrustful of anyone perceived as “different” and who is a “super-patriot,” believing that all newcomers or those who are different from the mainstream pose a threat to an idealized and more secure past (Allport, 1954). Allport’s study discovered that bigoted people go through life feeling threatened. They are insecure, cannot live comfortably with themselves or others, and are burdened by guilt. They insist on a strict code of morality in order to try to control their own instinctive feelings, which they mistrust.
Prejudice generally leads to discrimination against the feared group. It is a way to shore up the prejudiced person’s weak ego by feeling that he or she is better than other people. It is also a way to protect privileges, by keeping other people out of jobs, housing, or other benefits they need.
Sociologist Robin Williams says that “racial ideologies developed to rationalize the social, economic, and political domination initially developed to enhance the resources and privileges of white Europeans” (1966), a domination that persists to the present day. Discrimination harms all workers. Discrimination against people of color and women enables management to pay workers low wages and to rationalize cutbacks in social spending. Anti-Semitism enables the power elite to use Jews as scapegoats to deflect anger away from those in control. As long as they are fighting with each other, minority groups cannot unite to bring about equality and equity for everyone.
The closing off of equal opportunities to people of color has not only caused incredible hardship to them and to their communities, but it has also created social instability that threatens all of society. Rising unemployment in the black community has affected the structure of the black family. Sociologists have pointed out the relationship of black male unemployment to the rise in single-parent families. Although he does not claim that this is the only reason for the rise in female-headed families, sociologist Robert Staples says that “the percentage of black women heading families alone … corresponds closely to the percentage of black males not in the labor force. Men want to help support their families and lose self-esteem when they cannot find work” (1988, p. 321). The massive incarceration of black men and women is another reason for the instability of black families.
Until the problems of unemployment and low income are solved, none of the other problems of the African American community can be solved. Slavery, and the decades of racism that followed, created a workforce in which “blacks still predominate in those occupations that in a slave society would be reserved for slaves” (Ezorsky, 1991, p. 74).
There is also a correlation between the numbers of unemployed young men and the crime rate. The official response to crime has been to build more prisons, at great expense to the taxpayer, but as the director of the American Civil Liberties Union points out, Crime rates correlate, not with how many prisons are built, but with the proportion of young people in the population and the percentage of those young people who are unemployed, uneducated and face a bleak future. Most violent crimes are committed by alienated young men, who have no reason to hope and nothing to lose—a dangerous mix. (Glasser, 1992, p. 16)
Institutional Racism
How does institutional racism or sexism differ from individual racism or sexism? Imagine a situation in which no worker in an agency holds strong racist (or sexist) views, yet the policies of the agency are constructed so that minorities don’t receive fair treatment. Such a situation is an example of institutional racism (sexism). It is larger, more powerful, and harder to change than one person’s attitudes, because interconnected systems and policies perpetuate it. Even if a policy may appear fair and neutral on the surface, it can become racially discriminatory in the way it is practiced. Institutional racism is pervasive in all of society’s institutions, including human services.
institutional racism (sexism)
Discrimination against a racial group (or gender) practiced by an organization or an institution, usually perpetuated by an interconnected system of policies and practices.
Research has shown that adoption workers favor affluent parents over low-income parents. When agency policy blindly gives preference to adoptive applicants because of a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and a professional occupation, these criteria will necessarily discriminate against minority applicants. Treated unequally by the society they live in, they are less likely to make a high salary, live in a well-serviced neighborhood, and have a stable work history in an occupation that requires long and costly training. This adds up to institutional racism.
Institutional racism can be attacked through changing social policy and legislation. One of the purposes of a practice called “subsidized adoption,” which was given federal support in the Child Welfare and Adoption Act of 1980, was to make adoption financially possible for those prospective parents who had been denied access to the chance to earn the money that qualified them to adopt. Now, more people of color and of low income are able to share their lives with those children who need a home, many of whom because of unequal opportunities are themselves from low-income and/or minority groups.
Another example of institutional racism occurs in the criminal justice system. The hypothetical stories that follow are based on research that contradicts the widespread belief that drug use is primarily confined to the black ghetto. In actual fact, white youth sell and use drugs at higher rates than black youth. Institutional racism seems to be at work here:
William Greer, an African American youth, was picked up by the police while he was using crack on a ghetto street corner. He was unemployed and could not afford a lawyer to represent him in court. The legal aid lawyer appointed to defend him was overworked and could not spend much time with William; in fact, he talked with William for just a few minutes before court began. He advised William to plead guilty and plea bargain rather than ask for a jury trial. The judge, known to be “tough on drugs,” sentenced him to a mandatory five-year prison sentence.
Jack Clifford, a white college student, was sniffing cocaine at a party. He had purchased the drug in the suburbs from another student who was known as someone who always had drugs for sale. The party got wild and a neighbor called the police. Jack had to appear in court on a drug charge. His parents hired a skilled lawyer. She asked the judge to allow Jack to get psychiatric treatment for his drug habit rather than go to jail. The judge agreed, knowing that the parents were successful professionals in the community.
Generally, the deviant behavior of poor urban people (minorities are overrepresented among the urban poor) is more likely to be defined as criminal and handled in the criminal justice system. Conversely, the deviant behavior of whites is more likely to be defined as a mental health problem and handled in the mental health system (Morales, 1978). To explain this difference, researchers look to the dynamics of institutional racism.
A Houston Law Review study found that black people are more likely than white people to get the death sentence. Defendants who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than those who kill blacks. All else being equal, blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites in more than three decades since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 (Liptak, 2008).
Institutional racism is pervasive in the criminal justice system. Black and Latino youths are treated more severely than white teenagers charged with comparable crimes at every step of the juvenile justice system, according to a comprehensive report sponsored by the Justice Department and six of the nation’s leading foundations (Butterfield, 2000). The report found that minority youths are more likely than white youths to be arrested, held in jail, sent to juvenile or adult court for trial, convicted, and given longer prison terms. At each additional step in the juvenile justice system, things get worse for minority youth than for white youth. Here are the shocking facts (Butterfield, 2000):
Among young people who have not been sent to a juvenile prison before, blacks are more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced by juvenile courts to prison.
For those young people charged with a violent crime who have not been in juvenile prison before, black teenagers are nine times more likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison.
For those charged with drug offenses, black youths are forty-eight times more likely than whites to be sentenced to juvenile prison.
White youths charged with violent offenses are incarcerated for an average of 198 days after trial, but blacks are incarcerated an average of 254 days and Latinos are incarcerated an average of 305 days.
Mark Soler, the president of Youth Law Center, said, “These disparities accumulate and they make it hard for members of the minority community to complete their education, get jobs and be good husbands and fathers” (Butterfield, 2000, p. 2).
A black boy born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison in his lifetime; a Latino boy a 1 in 6 chance; and a white boy a 1 in 17 chance. A black girl born in 2001 has a 1 in 17 chance of going to prison in her lifetime; a Latino girl a 1 in 45 chance; and a white girl a 1 in 111 chance (Children’s Defense Fund, 2009).
In the past, when studies have found racial disparities in the number of adult black or Latino prison inmates, critics have said that it was because members of minorities committed a disproportionate number of crimes. Soler said while that may be true, it does not account for the extreme disparities found in the report, nor for disparities at each stage of the juvenile justice process. He said, “When you look at this data, it is undeniable that race is a factor” (Butterfield, 2000, p. 2).
The nation’s war on drugs unfairly targets African Americans, who are much more likely to be imprisoned for drug offenses than whites even though far more whites use illegal drugs than blacks:
According to a 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, African Americans make up an estimated 15 percent of drug users, but they account for 37 percent of those arrested on drug charges, 59 percent of those convicted and 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or consider this: The U.S. has 260,000 people in state prisons on nonviolent drug charges; 183,200 [more than 70 percent] are black or Latino. (Huffington, 2007)
Overall, black men are sent to state prisons on drug charges at thirteen times the rate of white men. Drug transactions among blacks often are easier for police to target because they more often occur in public than do drug transactions among whites (Fletcher, 2000).
“We’ve spent a lot of money and we’ve wasted a lot of lives,” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist who teaches at Northeastern University. “The war on drugs was a failed policy which resulted in the overincarceration of drug offenders, most of whom are not dangerous” (Rodriguez, 2001).
The United States has the highest incarceration rate on the planet—five times the world’s average. A total of 2,380,000 people were in prison in 2010. The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s prison population (Fisher, 2010). The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics attributes much of the increase to get-tough policies enacted during the 1980s and 1990s, such as mandatory drug sentences, “three strikes and you’re out” laws for repeat offenders, and “truth in sentencing” laws that restrict early releases.
The “get-tough” sentencing laws adopted by the federal government and most states have forced judges to impose prison terms for certain crimes, including drunk driving and drug possession or selling. More than four in five of drug related arrests in 2008 were for possession of banned substances, rather than for their sale or manufacture. Four in ten of all drug arrests were for marijuana possession, according to FBI data (Eckholm, 2008).
These laws have resulted in a disproportionate number of arrests of blacks and Latinos. The possession of five grams of crack—the weight of five packets of sweetener—results in a five-year mandatory minimum jail sentence, whereas it takes 500 grams of powdered cocaine—the weight of 500 packets of sweetener—to get the same penalty. Ninety-five percent of those convicted of crack offenses are black and Latino, although almost two-thirds of crack users are white (Jackson, 2007). More than 81 percent of those convicted for crack offenses in 2007 were African American, although only about 25 percent of crack cocaine users are African American (Margasak, 2009). These harsh sentences for crack users do nothing to solve the problem of drug abuse. The recidivism rate for those who get treatment is much lower than for those who don’t, but there are not enough drug treatment facilities. Although more blacks and Latinos than whites get prison sentences for drug use, proportionately more white people die from drugs.
The racial inequalities of the war on drugs also disproportionately affect pregnant women of color. “Despite similar or equal rates of illegal drug use during pregnancy, African American women are ten times more likely to be reported to child welfare agencies for prenatal drug use” (Drug Policy Alliance, 2003).
Fortunately, the Supreme Court ruled in December 2007 that the sentencing guidelines were merely advisory, not mandatory. Budget constraints are forcing states to reconsider the enormous amount of money they have spent on building prisons. State spending on prisons has grown from $12 billion in 1987 to $49 billion in 2007 (Jackson, 2008). State spending on corrections rose 127 percent since 1980, while higher education expenditures rose just 21 percent (Fisher, 2010). Crime is down, and voters are saying they are more concerned about issues like education than with street violence. A voter initiative in California provides for treatment rather than prison for many drug offenders.
In 2009, the Obama administration joined a federal judge in urging Congress to end a racial disparity by equalizing prison sentences for dealing and using crack versus powdered cocaine. Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said the administration believes Congress’s goal should be to completely eliminate the disparity between the two forms of cocaine. “A growing number of citizens view it as fundamentally unfair,” Breuer said. Jurors have expressed an unwillingness to serve in crack cocaine cases because of the disparity. The Obama administration was also seeking to increase drug treatment, as well as rehabilitation programs for felons after release from prison. The Justice Department was working on recommendations for a new set of sentences for cocaine (Margasak, 2009). Senator Jim Webb, a Democrat from Virginia, submitted a bill to Congress in 2010 to establish a commission, the National Criminal Justice Commission, to study the criminal justice system and make recommendations for change. He said, “America’s criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace” (Fisher, 2010).
Discrimination against Arab Americans and Muslim Americans
Discrimination against Arab and Muslim Americans has been around for a long time, especially in the workplace, but since 9/11, it has risen at alarming rates and spread into many other areas of life.
Case Study What a Human Service Worker Needs to Know about Arab and Muslim Americans: Meet Luby Ismail
Lobua “Luby” Ismail awoke before dawn in her hotel room near Orlando, Florida, knelt on the floor, and bowed low in the direction of Mecca to say her morning prayers. She finished dressing, wrapped her Muslim headscarf, or hijab, snugly around her dark features and, after a light meal, headed off to lead a cultural training session at Walt Disney World Resort.
Ismail sat in silence in the front of the room while the trainees, all of them Disney World employees, arrived. She then scrawled a message on the blackboard: “The first part of this session will be nonverbal, okay?”
As the students nodded in agreement, she wrote another message, asking the trainees to share with their training partners, in writing, some assumptions that society—or the class members themselves—might make about a woman who looks and dresses like she does.
[To the student who is reading this book: Put this book face down on the table and write down five words that come to your mind as you picture this Arab woman. Now read the responses that Luby got and compare them with yours.]
The responses her trainees came up with ranged from submissive and uneducated to foreign and someone who is not my friend. Other responses she might have heard—especially if she had been accompanied by an Arab man—might have been Ali Babi, Sinbad, The Thief of Baghdad, white slaver, abuser of women, slave owner, polygamist, sheik, oil millionaire—images drawn from books and the media… and since 9/11, religious fanatic and bomber. Even Sesame Street, the children’s educational TV program, has one character dressed in stereotypical Arab garb, and he always teaches negative words such as danger.
Ismail then broke the silence by proclaiming in perfect English that she is a born-and-bred American who was the pitcher for her ninth-grade softball team and student body president in high school and who today is a wife and business owner. She is one of many advocates engaged in a campaign to pierce the stereotypes about Islam and its followers, called Muslims. These advocates want to help employers make their workplaces more comfortable for the country’s growing numbers of Muslims, who may be of any race or from any part of the world (Panaro, 2004).
The following basic facts will help you avoid simplistic assumptions (a.k.a. stereotypes) (Adams, 2002; Deen, 2003):
Although some articles assert that Muslims are the second largest religious group in much of Europe and North America, it is very unclear exactly how many Muslims there are in the United States. Estimates of the number of Muslims range from a high of over 6 million to a low of 1.6 million. Why is there such a wide disparity and why does it matter? First of all, it is important to know that the Census does not ask people their religion.
Groups that hold to the higher number include those who want to assert the growing importance and/or electoral impact of this religious group. This includes many Muslim American Associations, as well as fear-monger groups who decry the supposed threat they pose. Groups that espouse the significantly lower number might use that figure to minimize the relative importance and impact of the Muslim community in the overall society or quell the fears of the alarmists.
Many people who are born into the Muslim faith do not necessarily attend a Mosque. On the other hand, there is some evidence that there is an increasing (but difficult to know how large) growth of homegrown converts to this religion. In any event, this is a cautionary note—be skeptical about numbers and always think about who is making the estimates, what data they are using, and what they might gain from the information they present.
There are twenty-one separate primarily Arab nations.
There is no simple definition of who an Arab is. That word refers to those who speak the Arabic language—but some of those twenty-one countries’ version of Arabic are different from the others and several Arab countries have internal ethnic groups who speak a totally different form of Arabic or some non-Arabic language. There are also several countries with large Muslim populations who do not speak Arabic and consider themselves Arabs.
There are two more terms that are often used to describe people like Luby (or her ancestors): Middle Easterners and Muslims (not Moslems). The first refers to geography and the second to religion. But not all persons who consider themselves Arabs or Muslims come from the Middle East (e.g., Indonesia, and some countries in Africa)—and not all Arabs are Muslims. Some are Christians, some are Hindus, and a few are atheists (they practice no religion). For many years (before the state of Israel) numbers of Jewish people lived in the predominately Muslim countries and felt themselves to be culturally Arabs. To complicate matters, there are three countries in the Middle East that are not Arab or wholly Muslim: Iran, Israel, and Turkey.
While some Arab/Muslin Americans are very wealthy, many others are extremely poor, and there is a growing professional middle class. Arab/Muslim Americans as a whole are more highly educated than are many other ethnic groups.
Arab/Muslim Americans are very family oriented and often come from large families. They tend to shun social service intervention in private affairs. While conversation is very important and articulate, many who hew closely to the Muslim faith do not accept public touching of the opposite sex.
Religious discrimination is currently at an all-time high. Most Americans know very little about the Muslim faith and the importance of articles of clothing, such as head coverings, scarves, as well as beards. Often the wearing of these is prohibited in schools and workplaces, and practicing Muslims may not be given the time or space for the daily prayers that are fundamental to their religion. Yet these observances are protected under the U.S. Constitution and Section VII of the Civil Rights Act.
When surveyed, many Americans stated that Muslims face more discrimination inside the United States than any other religious group. In fact only gays and lesbians are seen as facing more discrimination. Results of a survey among 2,010 adults revealed that two-thirds of non-Muslims say that Islam (another term for the religion) is very different from their own faith although they are unsure what the Muslims do believe (Pew Research Centers Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2009).
But most importantly, a record number of Muslims in the United States are complaining of serious employment discrimination and harassment on the job. “There’s a level of hatred and animosity that is shocking” says Mary Jo O’Neil a regional attorney at the Phoenix office of the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission). “I’ve been doing this work for 31 years and I’ve never seen such antipathy toward Muslim workers” (Greenhouse, 2010). Although Muslims make up about 2 percent of the population, they accounted for about 25 percent of the complaints submitted to the EEOC. During the same period, complaints by other religious and racial groups declined.
An Important Current Controversy
In 2009 a group of Muslim citizens purchased a building at 51 Park Place in New York located two blocks from the destroyed World Trade Center. They drew up plans for a thirteen-story Islamic Cultural Center, which would include a 500-seat auditorium, theater, performing arts center, fitness center, swimming pool, basketball courts, culinary school, bookstore, food court, child care center, a September 11 memorial, and a Muslim prayer space (not an official Mosque). The developers named the proposed building The Park 51 Center after its address, but most of the media refer to it incorrectly, as the “Ground Zero Mosque.” The pattern for such a cultural center is similar to two major Jewish Centers in the city that are open to all people, as this center would be. Although the building would not be visible from the World Trade Center, opponents have argued that a mosque so close to the site of the tragedy would be offensive to the memory of the thousands who died in the conflagration and an affront to families and friends who mourn them since the pilots of the planes and the plotters behind the attack were Muslims.
Supporters of the project, including the mayor of New York City, asserted that in this time of great tension between Muslims and the general population, a center such as Park 51 could increase multicultural appreciation and demonstrate our tolerance and openness. Both prominent supporters and opponents of the project include the families of the 9/11 victims as well as the American public as a whole.
Unfortunately, the project was being hotly debated during the lead up to the extremely divisive 2010 congressional elections and it became a hot issue in many candidates’ campaigns. The president and several Democratic office seekers voiced support of the center’s location or stayed out of the debate, while many Republican candidates were vociferous in denouncing it.
George Salem, the Chairman of the Arab American Institute (AIA), who is a long-time Republican voter, tried to defuse the rancor he has encountered with an open letter to other Republican party members. He wrote:
We need to reach the day when race-baiting against Arabs and Muslims ends in this country. The mosque issue is the most recent manifestation in American politics where politicians can target Arab and Muslim Americans with impunity. It is in our national interest to end this deplorable practice. Over a billion Muslims in the world watch this and paint Americans with a broad brush as people who hate Muslims. Our public diplomacy efforts in the Arab world are seriously undermined by this form of negative and hurtful politics and it must end. (Salem, 2010)
As we go to press, the Park 51 center is still a major controversy.
What Can a Human Service Worker Do to Stop Discrimination against Muslim Americans?
Learn more about the religion and customs of Muslims and Arabs, and whenever you encounter misinformation, try to set the record straight.
Support your clients or fellow citizens who are being denied their rights to practice their religion (as long as such practice does not endanger others) in their school or work place by suggesting accommodations that administrators might make. When helpful suggestions fail to result in changes, encourage persons who feel their rights are being abridged to file complaints with the top level of administration or the town or state commissions against discrimination. It is always more effective if the complaints come from other members of the affected population and if coalitions are built with like-minded individuals outside of the ethnic group or religion.
Remember that while it is important to learn about groups other than the one you belong to, be aware that there are enormous differences both among various populations and within groups who share some characteristics. For example, some very observant Catholics oppose abortion rights and work to repeal Roe v. Wade, other coreligionists reject abortion for themselves but support the legal right to choose. Similarly, some Jewish people eat only kosher foods and wear special clothes, others eat what they wish and dress like the mainstream population, while still attending synagogue or special celebrations for Jewish holidays.
Anti-Semitism
There is a long history of discrimination against Jewish people. For hundreds of years in many countries of the world they have been persecuted and punished simply because they were born of Jewish parents and chose to follow their faith. In recent history, the Nazis efficiently exterminated 6 million Jews in death camps in the 1940s.
Since the end of WWII, discrimination against Jews has lessened a great deal in the United States but they are still arbitrarily excluded from some neighborhoods, job promotions, or social clubs, causing pain and damage to their self-esteem. American Nazi skinheads, the Ku Klux Klan, and militia groups still spread their virulently anti-Semitic messages. The Anti Defamation League, a Jewish support organization, publishes a yearly audit of anti-Semitic assaults, vandalism of synagogues and centers, and harassment. While the 2009 audit included over 1,200 specific incidents, they have found a decline of the more obvious assaults but point to a great increase in anti-Semitic websites, blogs, and other cyber bullying (ADL, 2009).
Jewish people constitute only about 2 percent of the entire U.S. population, and their numbers are diminishing because of low birthrates and marriage to non-Jews. American Jews now have an out-marriage rate of 54 percent.
In contrast to people of color, no physical characteristics distinguish a Jew from a non-Jew, because they have come here from every corner of the world. American Jews have no common language, other than English (although Hebrew is spoken in Israel and in orthodox religious practice and Yiddish was often spoken by an earlier generation of Eastern European Jewish immigrants). There is enormous variation in their involvement in Judaism and their identification with its practices and culture. Although always a small percentage of the population, Jews have been in this country since the 1700s with most coming from Eastern Europe in the 1900s.
Currently, most people of Jewish ancestry are clustered in urban areas, primarily in New York and New Jersey, and in white-collar professions, although this was not so in their early immigrant days. They are not, as a group, economically deprived. They are also represented in most professions.
Some Paradoxes of Prejudice against Jewish People
Prejudice against whole groups of people is a very difficult phenomenon to understand because it serves many psychological, economic, and political purposes for those who express negative attitudes. It is difficult to eradicate these negative attitudes because the stereotypes and misinformation upon which they are built are essentially not rational.
Those who hate others have some self-interest or some self-delusions in continuing to hate or act upon the hatred. The following paradoxes are issues to think about.
Despite the generally high level of economic security of Jews in the United States, their voting patterns have overwhelmingly supported candidates who place priority on the needs of the have-nots, women, and ethnic minorities over the demands of the haves and the industrial complex (Svonkin, 1998).
In the unsuccessful bid for the presidency of Kerry in 2004, 76 percent of the Jewish community voted for him while in the successful campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, 78 percent of the Jewish community voted for Obama. Members of Congress from Jewish backgrounds are among the most supportive of civil rights in both the Senate and House of Representatives. During the era of agitation for the end of racial segregation in the l960s and l970s, the Jewish community played a highly supportive role. Speaking at the historic march on Washington for racial equal in 1963, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, said “Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom. During the Middle Ages my people lived for a thousand years in the ghettos of Europe. It is for these reasons that it is not merely sympathy and compassion for the black people of America that motivates us. It is, above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions, a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience” (Prinz, 1963).
Despite this tradition of Jewish people siding with the underdog, survey data indicate that many residents of low-income communities, predominately in urban areas, when asked about their attitudes toward Jewish people, express many negative views. Residents of poor ghetto communities often perceive Jewish people as being the source of their exploitation in the person of landlords or employers. It is not an easy thing for people who find themselves left out of the American dream to find the source of their distress. Interestingly, minority group members with high levels of education (college and above) from the same ethnic groups hold less stereotyped opinions. With exposure to books and many different types of people, prejudice seems to lessen (Anti-Defamation League, 1998). Certainly it is clear to many people of color that Jews because of their white skin have had the opportunities to disappear into the mainstream in ways that people of color rarely have the luxury of doing.
With the escalating violence between the state of Israel and the Palestinian refugees and the cold war between Israel and many of the Arab nations, tensions between Muslims and Jews have grown alarmingly. At the same time, paradoxically, the prejudice against both Jews and Muslims has risen, exacerbated by the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the explosions in England and Spain in 2006, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the more diffuse war on terror.
Some Paradoxes of Prejudice against Arab Americans and Muslim Americans
An increasing number of U.S. citizens polled assume that many members of the Muslim community in the United States are potential terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, whether they are citizens of long-standing or recent immigrants. Currently, wearing a headscarf or having a noticeably Arabic-sounding surname or face can put a person in danger of rebuffs from neighbors, scrutiny from the authorities (the CIA, FBI, and local police) and, especially, the security screeners at airports.
In the most basic measure of negative attitudes, a 2006 poll (Ellis, 2006) found that 46 percent of Americans expressed generally unfavorable opinions of Islam. This is a new high and nearly double what it was in early 2003, In the same poll, 39 percent of the respondents said they felt at least some prejudice against Muslims and favored requiring Muslims, including U.S. citizens, to carry a special ID as a means of preventing terrorist attacks in the United States. (Editor’s note: This practice would represent the same type of thinking that branded all Japanese Americans, regardless of how many years they lived in this country, as being potential spies or saboteurs, during World War II.) About 20 percent of those polled stated that they would not want a Muslim as a neighbor. At the same time, most of those polled admit to knowing almost nothing about this religion, and most did not personally know a Muslim person. Many of the respondents based their opinions on the activities of a small number of people they learned about from various media sources.
In addition, those who turn their negative thoughts into violent actions, such as committing hate crimes, often have not even known the actual ethnicity or religion of the victims they have targeted (Cohen, 2006; Ellis, 2006). Finally it is most paradoxical that, just as many Americans assume that a large portion of Muslims in America are sympathetic to Osama Bin Laden, both Muslims and non-Muslims often confuse people of the Jewish faith with citizens of the state of Israel and blame them for our conflicts with the Arab world. Though many American Jews might support the concept of a Jewish homeland, others are very critical of the way Israel deals with the displaced Palestinians and the encroachment of settlements in Palestinian territory. The important point is that American Jews, just like Muslim Americans, are most likely to put the interests of their own country above that of any other land.
Fighting Back against the Rising Tide of Prejudice
There are some positive developments in resisting the rising tide of prejudice:
Across the United States, groups have organized special interfaith vigils and celebrations. Many towns have enlarged or started human rights councils to protect the civil rights of citizens and to rally around those who have been harassed. Legal advocates have come forward to help when rights have been violated. Most importantly, conversations are taking place across religious lines.
Many schools have begun or expanded their “teaching tolerance” curriculums. The Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Alabama (SPLC, Teaching Tolerance), has expanded its twenty-year-old program that helps elementary and high school teachers promote tolerance in the classroom and learn how to respond to hate crimes. The classroom is one of the best places to counteract many of the misconceptions that lead children to adopt stereotypes and mistaken ideas about religious or racial groups.
Many colleges and adult education institutions have organized classes and seminars to teach the history of the Muslim and Arab countries, their contributions to world culture, and the shape and variations within the practice and beliefs of the adherents of the religion.
Advertisers and business owners who long ignored the substantial population of Muslim Americans are beginning to focus on ways to use the cultural aspects of the Muslim religion to help sell their products. An article in the New York Times (Story, 2007) reported that the chief marketing office of a large advertising agency plans to encourage clients such as Johnson & Johnson and Unilever to market to American Muslims by being sensitive to their special dietary needs, dress requirements, holidays, and so on. This kind of reaching out can say to a population, “We understand what your lives are like and we think you are an important part of this country” (while it makes more money for the companies). The Times article reports that a McDonald’s in the Detroit area (which has a large Muslim population) now serves halal (meat prepared according to Muslim law) Chicken McNuggets, and Walgreens has added Arabic signs to its aisles. Ikea, which has recently opened a store in the area, has been touring local homes and talking to Muslims to figure out their needs. The store plans to sell decorations for Ramadan (just as it sells for Christmas, Easter, and Chanukah); it will include some catalog material in Arabic, and female Muslim employees will be given Ikea-branded hijab (a traditional part of Muslim dress) to wear over their heads, if they wish.
Advertisers that try to target their programs or ads to the Muslim community will face the same dilemmas they would face if selling to the Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish communities. Just what approach companies should take to reach Muslims is far from clear. The market is diverse, including African Americans, South Asians, Caucasians, and people from the Middle East, some very observant, others quite secular. Welcome to the wonderful world of diversity!
Affirmative Action
Affirmative action, a policy that gives some preference in admissions, hiring, or promotion to equally qualified members of underrepresented minority groups, is one of the mechanisms that attempts to redress the inequalities that minorities have historically encountered. African Americans have not only suffered from slavery, but also from many forms of discrimination since slavery. In housing, for example, the Federal Housing Administration, which underwrote one-third of all new housing construction from 1937 to 1972, required that all properties “continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes” (Chappell, 2004). The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 directly displaced 330,000 poor families, mostly black. State laws and local zoning ordinances artificially concentrated both poverty and wealth and sharply segregated people on the basis of ethnicity and social class (Chappell, 2004).
Federal support for affirmative action has weakened since the 1980s and the policy continues to be under fierce attack. White people who feel they have been denied opportunities because of affirmative action have fought it in court on the grounds that it violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In a case brought against the University of Michigan, in 2003 the Supreme Court ruled that colleges could consider race in admissions but must also treat students as individuals and not accept or reject them solely on the basis of their skin color. Soon after this decision was handed down, Ward Connerly, a member of the University of California Board of Regents who led successful ballot initiatives in California and Washington states that ended racial preferences, continued his campaign in Michigan to put a similar measure on the ballot there. In Colorado the bill that would have banned affirmative action in the state was defeated by one vote in the Republican-controlled state senate. That one vote was cast by Senator Lew Entz, a Republican, who crossed party lines to deliver the deciding vote. Senator Entz had a large constituency of Latinos, who favored affirmative action (Klein, 2004).
A 2009 CBS News/New York Times poll found 50 percent of the population in favor of affirmative action, with 41 percent opposed. Six in ten Republicans opposed such programs, while 67 percent of Democrats favored them. However, there was broader support for programs that make special efforts to help people from low-income backgrounds get ahead, regardless of gender or ethnicity. Eight in ten favored this, with just 15 percent opposed (Dutton, 2009).
While affirmative action is often divisive and cannot by itself achieve racial equality, we believe it is still an essential device to counteract institutional barriers to minority advancement. Ezorsky reports, for example, that 80 percent of executives find their jobs through networking, and over 86 percent of available jobs do not appear in the classifieds:
Historic patterns of discrimination and segregation which exclude blacks from white neighborhoods, business and social clubs have locked blacks out of a remarkably high percentage of job opportunities simply because they do not have the necessary white contacts to learn of the jobs or to be considered for them. (Forman, 1992, p. 172, reviewing Ezorsky, 1991)
Furthermore, some hiring criteria, such as diploma requirements or standardized tests, often work against minorities. Many tests are culturally biased, drawing material from the white middle-class world. This bias can be overcome either by constructing culturally sensitive tests or by giving training in test taking. For example, the highest pass rate on the National Teachers’ Exam is by graduates of Grambling University, which has a primarily African American student body. That has been attributed to the fact that the university requires its students to take a test-taking course (Hacker, 1992).
Even when they are hired, blacks are discriminated against through seniority-based promotions, layoff plans, and the “glass ceiling” (an invisible but real barrier to advancement) of tradition. Because they are the last to be hired, they are the first to be fired and among the last to be promoted (if they ever are).
Many universities have admission practices that favor upper-class people. Critics say that a policy of “legacy admissions,” which gives preference to children of alumni, amounts to affirmative action for upper-class whites. President George W. Bush was admitted to Yale through a legacy policy, as he himself has admitted that he was not accepted to Yale on the strength of his grades. The legacy policy at Texas A&M University helped more than 300 white students qualify for admission every year but only about 30 blacks and Hispanics. After Texas A&M did away with affirmative action for minorities, the school decided that it was inconsistent to keep a legacy policy that favored white students and did away with that policy. Georgia and California have also ended legacy policies in their state schools (Talk of the Nation, 2004a).
Affirmative action has become a lightning rod that attracts people’s anxieties about race. It “dominates the nation’s obsession with race relations” (Holmes, 1997, p. 1) and seems to have become magnified out of all proportion to its real significance in people’s lives. When public opinion polls ask whites whether they ever lost a job or a promotion or were denied college admission as a result of affirmative action, few say yes.
Affirmative action costs little in comparison with social services. It hardly affects the majority of Americans. Most students who are eligible for college are accepted, regardless of affirmative action (Holmes, 1997).
We can get some idea of what will happen when affirmative action is eliminated by looking at what has already happened in California, where Proposition 209 spelled the end of affirmative action in that state in 1997. There has been a dramatic decline in minority applications to medical and law schools at the University of California. Most applicants who were accepted did not enroll because they felt unwelcome. Just one of the fifteen blacks accepted to Berkeley’s Boalt Hall law school enrolled in the fall of 1997. Only fourteen of the forty-six Hispanics admitted enrolled. The two Native Americans who were accepted turned the school down (Gorov, 1997). Hashona Braun, a black student at the law school, said, “We really don’t feel welcome here anymore, and the people who aren’t here yet feel even more unwelcome” (Gorov, 1997, p. A1). Michael Rappaport, dean of admissions at UCLA’s law school, said, “Another way of looking at it is that there are fewer blacks in Boalt than at the University of Alabama in the days of George Wallace. That’s what’s so frightening” (Gorov, 1997, p. A1).
One of the many programs that was ended because of Proposition 209 was a state-funded program called CAL-SOAP, or California Student Opportunity and Access Program. The program’s math classes aimed to give minority students an edge in math when applying for college. CAL-SOAP recruited about 200 seventh-graders a year who scored at least a 2.4 grade point average and then worked with them until they went to college. It also mentored and trained college students to work intensively with the teenagers. The program had a 100 percent college attendance rate. Norma Lara, a former CAL-SOAP participant and a student at the University of California at Berkeley, was the first in her family to attend college. She now worries about her thirteen-year-old twin sisters. Lara says that Proposition 209
says we’re all one big happy family in California. We’re all equal. Our education system is great. But it’s obviously not true. We don’t have a level playing field. In order for everyone to have the same opportunity, the education system has to be equal. They have to reform the school system before they can take that away. (Katz, 1997, p. L7)
Some people argue that economic diversity is as important as racial diversity, and we need to refocus on a new kind of affirmative action based on social class. Affirmative action helps middle class more than low-income minorities. Low-income white people as well as low-income minorities are also disadvantaged in college admissions. In the 146 most selective universities, low-income students make up only 3 percent of the student body. In two-year colleges generally, about two-thirds of those from the top economic quartile go on to a four-year college, while in the bottom economic quartile, only about one-fifth do (Talk of the Nation, 2004b). This economic stratification is getting worse as colleges increasingly grant scholarship money on the basis of merit rather than need. As college tuition becomes more expensive, low-income students are increasingly priced out of college.
On a day when many of us celebrate our Thanksgiving festival, two children from the Wampanoag Nipmucs look across at the Mayflower replica. Native Americans gathered together for a day to mourn over the plight of their people since the Pilgrims landed.
8.3 Immigration
As the United States celebrated the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the nation, people from the First Nations reminded us that they had already “discovered” this nation and had been living in it for a long time before Columbus appeared at their shores. The rest of us immigrated here from another country, and the African slaves were forcibly brought here. Some Mexican Americans came with the territory when the United States won the Mexican American War in 1848 and annexed Mexican land in the Southwest. The following are vignettes about three children who immigrated after the Vietnam War and what it was like for them.
A twelfth-grade Lao Mien boy who immigrated from Laos at age 14 told an interviewer:
The school was so big! There was no one who could speak Mien and explain to me. My uncle had told me if I needed any help to go to the Dean. My teacher asked me something and I didn’t understand her. So I just said “Dean, Dean” because I needed help. That is how I got my American name. She was asking me “What is your name?” Now everybody calls me Dean. It is funny, but it is also sad. My name comes from not knowing what was going on.
A ninth-grade Filipino girl who immigrated with her parents declared:
Our parents don’t come [to school functions] because they don’t know any English. I don’t even tell them when they are supposed to come. They dress so different and I don’t want our parents to come because the others will laugh at them and tease us. We are ashamed.
A Cambodian boy who immigrated was reminded of his past:
In an elementary school in San Francisco, a teacher is playing “hangman” with her class as a spelling lesson. One “Limited-English-Proficient” (LEP) student, a Cambodian refugee, bursts into tears and becomes hysterical. Later, through an interpreter, the teacher learns that the student had witnessed the hanging of her father in Cambodia. (Portes & Rumbaut, 1990, pp. 180–181)
People immigrate because they need work or perhaps their own countries are at war or in crisis. Sometimes, as with the legacy of the war in Vietnam, our own country has helped to bring about the crisis conditions. Ultimately the problem of immigration would have to be solved by stabilizing countries’ political situation and by ending world poverty. Yet instead of alleviating poverty, some national and international policies have increased poverty in underdeveloped nations:
The United States supported repressive military dictatorships in the Southern cone between 1964 and 1985 leading to waves of political refugees and exiles. The U.S.’s wars against nationalist and leftist movements and governments in Central America in the 1980s set millions of migrants in motion. Then in the 1990s the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico and the United States, had a devastating impact on the Mexican economy, ruining poor farmers who also migrated to seek work in the United States. More generally, the Washington Consensus, the regime of neoliberal globalization imposed on Latin America by the United States, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank resulted in a more or less continual crisis of their economies causing high unemployment and persistent poverty, which has driven more and more farmers and workers to seek work in the United States. (La Botz, 2007).
8.4 Immigration in the United States
Some Background to the Current Situation
The United States has more immigrants in the country today than at any other time since 1910, the high tide of the great European immigration that began in the 1880s. Almost 12 percent of the U.S. population today is made up of foreign-born individuals—more than 33.5 million people. Over half come from Latin America, one-quarter from Asia, and most of the rest from Europe, with others from the rest of the world. Minorities now make up one-third of the U.S. population:
The U.S., with a population of 300 million people in October 2006, accepts over one million legal immigrants every year, with the nations of Mexico, China, India, Philippines and Cuba providing 37 percent. However, in addition, an estimated 500,000 immigrants also enter the United States illegally each year, most coming from Latin America. The United States today has over 10 million undocumented immigrants, though nobody knows for sure how many. (Some estimate the number as 12 million.) Close to 60 percent come from Mexico, while almost a quarter come from Latin American countries. About 10 percent come from Asia.” (La Botz, 2007)
Illegal immigrants often suffer sweatshop-like working conditions and low pay because they are afraid that if they complain they will be reported to immigration authorities and deported. Barbara Ehrenreich (2007) describes how some domestic workers who are undocumented immigrants are treated like slaves by rich Americans.
Fluctuations in Immigration Policy
The immigration policy of the United States has fluctuated between the country’s need for labor and people’s xenophobia and fear of losing their jobs to foreigners; it has also been influenced by foreign policy. When the country needed workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to build the railroads, work in the mines and the steel mills, and weave cloth, it especially welcomed European immigrants for these jobs. African slaves were brought in primarily to work on southern cotton plantations. Chinese immigrants were brought in to help build the railroads in the West, especially for menial work that white men refused to do.
After the railroads were built, the country no longer wanted Chinese people and passed restrictive legislation to keep them out. They didn’t even allow the Chinese men who had built the railroad to be present when the golden spike was driven to mark the joining of the two railroads (Hsu, 1971). This was one example of the rising tide of racist fears that led to the United States excluding people of color. Some of the fears were fueled by competition for jobs. Organized labor feared that Chinese laborers would be used as strike breakers, which did sometimes happen.
Immigration policy in the United States has always made distinctions by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. Japanese people were excluded in 1907, except in Hawaii where they were needed as agricultural workers. In 1924, the United States adopted a national-origins system that limited admissions from each European country to 3 percent of the foreign-born population here as of the 1910 census. That resulted in favoring northern Europeans over southern and eastern Europeans for nearly half a century. Most Asians were still excluded, but there were no limits on migrants from the Western Hemisphere (Schmitt, 2001b).
The eugenics-based racism that produced the restrictive 1924 immigration law increased the distance between white and black people. White immigrants bought homes in racially-restricted areas, resulting in all-white neighborhoods, and a kind of American apartheid.
The civil rights movement helped to achieve more fairness in immigration policy. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 eliminated racial criteria and replaced country-by-country quotas with a system that awarded lawful permanent resident status* based largely on family or employer sponsorship.
*Someone with Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR) status can work without limitation, travel in and out of the country, and petition for spouse and children. After five years as an LPR, he or she can apply for naturalization and become a U.S. citizen. If married to a U.S. citizen, the LPR can apply for citizenship after three years instead of five years.
The author Calvin Trillin, a connoisseur of ethnic food, is grateful for the Immigration Act of 1965 because it brought in a rich variety of ethnic food. He says, “I have to say that some serious eaters think of the Immigration Act of 1965 as their very own Emancipation Proclamation” (Trillin, 2001, p. 42). Immigration policy before 1965 “reflected not simply bigotry but the sort of bigotry that seems to equate desirable stock with blandness in cooking. The quota for the United Kingdom was so high that it was never filled. Asians were, in effect, excluded” (p. 42).
But the pendulum swung again in the 1980s. The Immigration Reform and Control Act, passed by Congress in 1986, was a response to increasing concern about illegal immigration, particularly across the Mexican border, but also from other war-ravaged Latin American countries. Now employers can be fined and sentenced to prison for hiring illegal aliens. That is why, if you start a part-time job at a restaurant or store, your employer will ask you to give proof of your citizenship.
The act has contributed to discrimination against both legal immigrants and illegal immigrants. Many employers hire and then exploit illegal immigrants, forcing them to accept substandard wages and working conditions because they fear deportation. Employers also sometimes assume that anyone who has a Spanish name or speaks English with an accent is an illegal immigrant, and so they refuse to hire immigrants who actually have valid work permits (Schaefer, 1989).
The Immigration Act of 1996 provides for “expedited removal” of immigrants and represents a major change in the country’s treatment of immigrants. Columnist Robert Kuttner sees it as one aspect of a growing police state. Kuttner (1998) says that under the provisions of the act,
Since the end of the Vietnam War, the United States has received many refugees from that country. A worker facing a client who has lived in that culture should try to learn about how this legacy will affect his or her attitudes and values.
legal permanent residents who make innocent technical mistakes face Kafkaesque nightmares. Hundreds of U.S. married couples have been separated for years because a foreign-born spouse neglected to fill out paperwork.
People guilty of only technical lapses have been led off in handcuffs and jailed. Legitimate Canadian and Mexican business people, including corporate board members, have been barred from entering the United States and treated like common criminals because they lacked some immigration form.
Other long time legal residents have been deported abruptly because of minor legal problems decades ago. The law disdains due process, makes judicial appeal almost impossible, and reinforces the thuggish tendencies of the Immigration and Naturalization service. (p. F7)
The 1996 law changed the rules for about 300,000 refugees from Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala who fled civil wars in the 1980s and were given temporary protection from deportation. The law made it more difficult to stay in the country (“Flaws in Immigration Laws,” 1997). The law made it harder for people to go back to the country and reenter this country. It also stipulates that legal immigrants who leave the country and then return—even after a brief vacation—may be subjected to harassment and imprisonment without due process if they have any criminal record. This includes the most minor infractions. Unauthorized use of cable television service, for example, can be treated as an “aggravated felony” under the new law, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, formerly a part of Immigration and Naturalization Service, INS) may detain legal immigrants and begin deportation proceedings against them for it (The Progressive, 1997).
The Justice Department’s attempt to speed deportations of thousands of immigrants convicted of crimes in the United States was dealt a setback in 1999 when the Supreme Court let stand Court of Appeals decisions that gave those immigrants the right to judicial review of their cases (Vicini, 1999).
The Immigration Act of 1996 and the benefit-cutting effects of the Personal Responsibility Act created panic in the immigrant community. Immigrants and their advocates fought back through both legal and political means. Lawyers in California challenged the law’s income requirement as unconstitutional and discriminatory (Lewis, 1997). The twenty members of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus mobilized their resources to fight both the immigration law and the cuts in benefits of the Personal Responsibility Act. Congress and the president decided that they had gone too far in attacking immigrants and in 1997 they eased some of the immigration curbs of the law.
The fierceness of the anti-immigration sentiment was beginning to abate before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The AFL-CIO, in an 180-degree policy turn, shifted from denouncing illegal immigrants as a threat to American workers, to calling for a general amnesty for them all (meaning they could stay and join a union) (Pertman, 2001). Some states have granted drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants. Virtually no business owners worried at all about being fined for hiring illegal immigrants. Cecilia Munoz, vice president of policy for the National Council of La Raza, the largest Hispanic civil rights organization, says, “Frankly, they’ll take anybody they can get and undocumented workers are often the only ones willing to accept such poor wages” (Pertman, 2001, p. D2). Much of the shift in attitude stemmed from the need for workers. Offering driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants so they can get to work benefits not only the workers but also the employers who need them (Pertman, 2001).
After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, fears about terrorist attacks led the White House and Congress to move rapidly toward making immigration laws tighter. The reversal, which came just as the administration had considered loosening its policies, sent a chill through legal and illegal Latino immigrants. Maria Blanco, national senior counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said, “People are very disappointed that, so soon after the debate seemed to be moving forward on immigration, it has taken a few steps backwards. Latinos don’t want to be tainted by this broad brush” (Sterngold, 2001, p. A20).
In 2008, Congress authorized the Secure Fence Act, a multi-billion dollar plan to build hundreds of miles of fencing along the southern border of the United States to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants from Mexico (NOW, 2008). The bill was controversial. An organization of mayors, county commissioners, and economists, named the Texas Border Coalition, filed a federal lawsuit opposing the wall and asking for the constructions to be halted. Two environmental groups, Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife, supported the suit. Many homeowners complained that the wall cut through the middle of their properties. The president of the University of Texas said she had not been consulted about plans to build the fence, and it would leave the campus’s technology center and golf course on the Mexican side of the fence (Archibold & Preston, 2008).
Although Homeland Security didn’t build the full 700 miles of fence originally planned, it did tighten up gaps in the fence where immigrants had found easy access. It became increasingly dangerous for immigrants to cross the border as they had to travel longer distances in the hot sun.
Border patrol agents are aggressive in catching and deporting immigrants, and sometimes killing them. On April 1, 2011, Arizona activists marched against the increasing use of excessive and sometimes lethal force against illegal immigrants, and even Hispanic citizens. Three teens have been shot and killed while trying to climb the border fence (Medrano, 2011).
Many immigrants have died while trying to cross the desert and some activists have gone into the desert to give them water and directions, and to rescue them. One of those is Lois Martin, a retired social work professor. Following is an interview with her.
Savior in the Desert: Interview with Lois Martin, Volunteer Worker for Three Undocumented Immigrant Support Groups on the Arizona/Mexico Border*
*This interview was originally published in New Politics, Winter 2011.
Barbara Schram
Interviewer:
I know that you are a retired faculty member from an undergraduate social work program and before that you were a counselor at the Veterans Administration, a teacher in Africa as well as at many other agencies in the human service field. Why did you decide to spend your retirement years volunteering in the Sonora Desert in Arizona?
Lois Martin:
For many years I have been concerned about the problems facing immigrants from Latin America. I read about the terrible number of deaths of Mexicans that occurred in the Sonora Desert. That area is the border between Tucson, Arizona and Nogales, Mexico. So, when I moved to Arizona, I began volunteering, with Humane Borders, which was started in 2000 by two local ministers. Volunteers regularly drive four-wheel trucks across the vast dry expanses of the Sonora Desert to refill the water stations we have built and also to leave barrels of water along the paths that Mexicans trying to get into this country, might follow, Many migrants, unable to get legal entry visas for the United States, walk for days (actually mostly at night when the risk of being found by the U.S. border guards is lower) across this stretch of desert. It is one of the few areas on the border that does not have a fence yet and it is less patrolled by the U.S. border guards than other stretches of the border between New Mexico and California. But, it is a torturous journey with temperatures often in the 100-degree range and no sources of drinkable water. There are no houses or other landmarks, so many of these seekers lose their way and die from dehydration, Often they get separated from their families or the group they are crossing with. They fail by the wayside due to weakness or illness and their fellow migrants often cannot wait for them. Sometimes they are abandoned to die by the so-called, coyotes, criminals who smuggle people across the border for cash and then dump them in the desert, stealing both their money and their lives.
Interviewer:
What are the other groups you work with?
Lois Martin:
I have gone out into the desert with volunteers from the Samaritans. They focus mainly on locating lost or sick migrants and administering emergency medical treatment, or in the most critical cases, transporting them to hospitals in Tucson. If they recover they will be sent back to Mexico. I have taken first responders training, so although I am not a doctor or nurse, I can do some basic first aid and know how to treat dehydration. The third group I volunteer for is the newest one, No More Deaths. It was started in 2004, primarily by a bunch of young people who were outraged at seeing more and more dead bodies in the desert. The Border Patrol, which keeps a count of the so-called illegals who have died during the crossing, estimates that there have been at least 250 deaths this past year. That number reflects only the bodies they have actually found! Rev John Fife, the co-founder of the other two migrant support groups, says that the number of dead is probably much higher. He also said that ten years ago there were almost no deaths recorded. He asserts that the U.S. government has created a gauntlet of death where only the strongest survive. He believes that the Border Patrol knows how life-threatening the desert crossing in this area is, but it thinks that the threat of death will keep others from trying to enter Arizona. So, the volunteers from No More Deaths have set up shelters in several places in the desert where the migrants can get some food, some rest in the shade, and even maps that might keep them from getting so lost.
Interviewer.
Since it is so dangerous to try to enter the United States illegally (and many Americans believe it is also wrong to do so) why do so many Mexicans (and occasionally other nationalities) try to do this? Why don’t they wait for legal visas like other prospective immigrants do?
Lois Martin:
First of all most of these people who undertake the journey are desperately poor. They are trying as best they can to simply put food on the table for their families. Many were farmers who lost their land or who came to the border areas to work in factories that have now closed their doors and moved to places where labor is even cheaper than in Mexico. Surprisingly, globalization, which should help a poor country, has made their lives more difficult. An enormous amount of cheap food (our surplus crops) floods into shops in Mexico. The small farm owners cannot compete with American agribusiness companies in price, and so they lose their farms and lay off their workers. Finally, the waiting list for visas to enter this country legally is very long. Applying for a visa costs much more money than these people can raise and frankly they don’t stand much of a chance of being accepted, even if they get the money and are able to travel from their homes to Mexico City where there is an American Embassy. U.S. visas usually go to professionals who have the special skills we need or who are sponsored by employers in the United States. The paradox of all this is that there are plenty of farm owners in the United States who count on low priced labor to plant and harvest the crops. There are also contractors who count on Mexican laborers for their building projects. Once they slip across the border into this country most find jobs and family members to help them.
Interviewer.
What happens to the folks who get caught without documents crossing the border or living in the states without the proper papers?
Lois Martin:
Well, that is another very upsetting part of the story and it varies a lot according to where they are apprehended. If the Border Patrol finds them in the American part of the Sonora Desert they put them in trucks and drive them across the border to Nogales, which is the nearest Mexican town. That is a whole other problem. Once brought there they rarely have any money left to buy food or pay the bus fare back to their home village. They are virtually stranded. Nogales is full of impoverished people trying to survive…. Of course that leads to drug dealing, gang formation and the like. The volunteer workers from No More Borders have set up some centers in Nogales and work with a branch of the Mexican government to try to help these folks make contact with family and find a way to get back home if that is what they want to do. If Mexicans are found to be illegally in other parts of the United States, they are frequently imprisoned, sometimes for long periods of time before they are repatriated. I have interviewed many of these folks and their stories are heartrending. One young man was brought to the states as a young child. His parents never had legal status so he did not have it either. At the age of 25 years, with a steady job and a family he was picked up on a minor traffic violation in an urban center. When it was discovered that he wasn’t legal, he too was literally dumped in Nogales, without being able to notify his employer or his family….
Interviewer:
What are your future plans with the support programs?
Lois Martin:
My new project is to create a network around the country of former volunteers who can help those folks who are being held in deportation centers in various cities. Sometimes the deportees need someone to help them obtain back salary that is owed to them by their former employers or they need legal representation. We also need to improve our ability to monitor the abuses of over zealous border guards and of course we need to lobby Congress for genuine immigration reform.
Interviewer:
How does the Border Patrol react to the support and advocacy work the volunteers do?
Lois Martin:
Well obviously, they don’t approve of what we do. They see us as interfering with the performance of their jobs. Now that Border Patrol is under Homeland Security they have stepped up their activities. Sometimes they cite us for littering, when they see us leaving water jugs. We have to waste the time of volunteer lawyers defending against the citations they issue.
Interviewer:
This all sounds like very draining work. What keeps you going?
Lois Martin:
I would have to answer it is people who give me the courage to continue my work. I have met some of the most amazing strong decent people among those seeking entry into the country. A group of five men I interviewed in Nogales came across a woman in the desert who was dying. Even though it meant they would be caught and sent back to Mexico, they carried her for several days till they could get to the Arizona border where she would get medical help. Of course each of the volunteers experience moments of feeling overwhelmed with despair but, luckily, there is always another volunteer to buck you up. The young people who work with us are especially inspiring. It gives me hope for the future to see such dedication. This is the most satisfying work I have ever done. I hope to keep doing it as long as my strength holds out.
According to the 2010 Census, about 30,000 people who are not American citizens are held in immigration detention on any given day, including children. (Fox News, 2010). Of the 80,000 unaccompanied immigrant children seeking entrance to the United States each year, approximately 75,000 are deported upon arrival. These children confront U.S. state and immigration officials who tend to be “oppressive and terrifying rather than reassuring and protective.” The few who are allowed to stay are transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement Division of Unaccompanied Children’s Services, but some children are thrown into detention facilities where they must await the outcomes of their immigration cases behind bars (Alejandra, 2010).
For several months in 2006 and 2007, the ICE carried out immigration raids in factories, meatpacking plants, janitorial services, and other workplaces employing immigrants. ICE called the factories “crime scenes” because immigration law forbids employers to hire them. This made the public think of the workers as criminals, although immigration violations are civil violations, not criminal violations. Many of the workers were deported and some were separated from their children. However, the employers received only light reprimands and none went to jail. (Immigration courts are civil courts. That is why foreign nationals in deportation proceedings have no right to court-appointed counsel even though the proceedings “feel” criminal. They do have a right to due process; the Constitution protects all persons in the Unites States, not just citizens or LPRs.)
The Southern Poverty Law Center investigated guest worker programs that allow labor contractors to maintain blacklists of workers who work slowly or demand their rights. “Public interest lawyers spend years in court, trying just to get back wages for cheated immigrants. Meanwhile, the Department of Labor almost never decertifies contractors who abuse workers” (Bacon, 2007). After agents raided Swift & Co. meatpacking plants, Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff told the media the deportations would show Congress the need for “stronger border security, effective interior enforcement and a temporary-worker program.” Bush wants, he said, “a program that would allow businesses that need foreign workers, because they can’t otherwise satisfy their labor needs, to be able to get those workers in a regulated program” (Bacon, 2007 p. 1).
According to Bacon (2007):
Guest worker programs are low-wage schemes, intended to supply plentiful labor to corporate employers, at a price they want to pay. Companies don’t recruit guest workers so they can pay them more, but to pay them less. (p. 2)
guest worker program
A program that contracts immigrants to work for a specified time in the United States for a particular job, but does not hold out any promise of citizenship.
The Current State of Immigration Reform
In 2007, a compromise immigration bill was co-sponsored by Senators Ted Kennedy (Dem.) and John McCain (Rep.). The bill proposed to gradually change a system based primarily on family ties, in place since 1965, into one that favors high-skilled and highly educated workers who want to become permanent residents. Low-skilled workers would largely be channeled to a vast new temporary program, where they would be allowed to work in the United States for three stints of two years each, broken up by one-year stays in their homeland. At the time, there was a backlog of 4 million people who had applied to come to the United States legally (Archibold, & Preston, 2007).
The bill was very controversial. Some conservatives called it an “amnesty” bill and opposed any effort to legalize undocumented immigrants. Pro-immigration advocacy groups lobbied lawmakers to reject the bill, saying it would place onerous restrictions on illegal workers who want to win legal status, hurt efforts to unify immigrant families, lead to more enforcement raids and greater militarization of the border, and erode basic due process rights. Among those who favored the bill was Microsoft Corporation CEO Steve Ballmer, who threatened to move more high-tech jobs out of the country if electronics corporations didn’t get more contract migrant labor (Bacon, 2007).
The bill did not pass. Anti-immigration sentiment, already strong, became even stronger in 2010 when Arizona passed a law that directed police to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect is in the country illegally. The law also made it a state crime to be an illegal immigrant. The law inflamed the national debate over immigration and led to boycotts against the state. The Obama administration sued the state.
Emboldened by the passage of the nation’s toughest law against illegal immigration, Russell Pearce, the Arizona senator who sponsored the measure, put forth a proposal to deny U.S. citizenship to children born in this country to undocumented parents. Legal scholars laughed at the proposal and warned that it would be blatantly unconstitutional, since the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States (Price, M., 2010).
Immigrants and their advocates worked to provide an avenue of citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants by sponsoring a bill called the “Dream Act” in Congress. It was first introduced in the U.S. Senate in 2001 and re-introduced there and the House of Representatives in 2009.
The Dream Act would have provided a path to citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants who had come to the United States as children with their parents. If they have been in the country continuously for at least five years, the students would be given the opportunity to earn permanent residency while they complete at least two years of college or two years in the military within a six-year period. It would also allow them to pay the resident rate of college tuition, rather than the non-resident rate that they now pay.
One of President Obama’s campaign promises was to get the Dream Act passed, but Congress failed to pass it in 2010. President Obama promised that he would get it passed in the next Congressional session.
Case Example Despite a Supreme Court decision, those banished for minor crimes may not return
Vincenzo Donnoli was 9 when his family immigrated legally to New York. He stayed there, attending high school, marrying and divorcing, running a landscaping business and having five children. But at 51, alone and jobless, he is back in Pomarico, the hill town in southern Italy where his father was a shepherd, as a deportee banned for life from returning to the United States.
His offense: two misdemeanor convictions for possessing small amounts of cocaine, in 1988 and 2006, both guilty pleas resolved without jail time. Retroactively, the immigration authorities added them up to equal an “aggravated felony” that required Mr. Donnoli’s automatic deportation in 2009 (Bernstein, 2010).
In June 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that legal U.S. residents with minor drug convictions are eligible to have an immigration judge weigh their offenses against other factors in their lives and decide whether to let them stay. But deportees who were denied such a hearing had no means to get one. The U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals said it had no jurisdiction over any case after deportation. Government regulations prohibit any motion to reopen the case of someone who has left the country. The Obama administration, which planned to deport a record 400,000 people in 2010, showed no eagerness to open the door.
Daniel Kanstroom a professor at Boston College Law School, said, “The Supreme Court has said in a series of cases that the government’s theories of deportation have been wrong for years. And yet the legal system has not developed a mechanism to right the wrong for the thousands of people who have been wrongly deported.” No one knows how many cases could be affected, but public defenders’ associations estimate that there could be several thousand. More than 34,000 noncitizens were deported for drug-related offenses in 2008 (Bernstein, 2010).
8.5 Key Elements in the Immigration Debate
Immigration is a very complex issue and many people are confused about it. It engenders fierce, and sometimes vitriolic, debate. The following are some arguments and issues to consider as you think about the fate of immigrants in the United States.
Some people compare present immigrants unfavorably to past immigrants. Much of the anti-immigration sentiment seems to reflect a belief that there are “good” immigrants and “bad” immigrants. People whose ancestors arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believe that this qualifies them as real Americans. The early immigrants are remembered as good, hardworking assimilators, while the new ones are “inferior, parasitic, and implacably foreign.” (Walker, 1995, p. 62)
While watching a festive parade in a small Mexican village, we need to look past the colorful costumes and think about the onlookers. Many of them unable to find work will make the torturous trek across our borders.
People who are anti-immigrant sometimes exaggerate the health problems that immigration creates. For example, in 2005, Lou Dobbs (a popular TV commentator) claimed there had been 7,000 cases of leprosy in this country over the preceding three years and attributed it to immigration. He said, “The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans.” In 2007, Dobbs appeared on the 60 Minutes TV show. Researchers for the show had checked his statement, and on the show, interviewer Leslie Stahl said there didn’t seem to be much evidence for it. The official leprosy statistics do show about 7,000 diagnosed cases—but over the preceding thirty years, not the preceding three years. James L. Krahenbuh, the director of the National Hansen’s Disease Program, said, “It is not a public health problem—that’s the bottom line … the 137 reported cases last year were fewer than in any year from 1979 to 1996” (Leonhardt, D., 2007, p. 2).
People who oppose immigration say that immigrants are costing taxpayers money and taking advantage of such programs as welfare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Alabama politicians who believed this passed a bill called The Deficit Reduction Act, which required a birth certificate or other proof of citizenship from people before they could qualify to continue or begin receiving Medicaid. The bill resulted in more than 5,000 people losing their Medicaid coverage for failing to provide a birth certificate or other proof of citizenship. Children were the largest group affected, and black people were disproportionately affected.
Alabama’s Medicaid Commissioner said that Alabama doesn’t have a large problem with illegal immigrants trying to cheat the state out of Medicaid dollars. Most of the people who lost their Medicaid were not immigrants, but they were unable to provide the requested documentation. After Medicaid officials realized what was happening, people were put back on the rolls (Angus Reid Global Monitor, 2007).
A bill was filed in the Texas legislature in 2007 that would not only deny public services to undocumented immigrants but also strip their American-born children of benefits as well. The bill challenges the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, which states that all persons born in the United States are citizens of the United States and of the state where they reside (Bustillo, 2007).
A look at the facts contradicts exaggerated fears about the cost of immigration. The largest cost is the border control and law enforcement measures, according to a study by the Congressional Budget Office. But this study concluded that legalization of immigrants would contribute tens of billions to the federal Treasury (Milligan, 2007).
Illegal foreign-born residents contribute in many ways, such as paying Social Security and Medicare taxes. In 2002, illegal immigrants paid $6.4 billion in Social Security taxes for benefits that they would never receive (Steinberg, 2005). Illegal immigrants are not eligible for need-based aid, except limited emergency medical care and children’s health care, as well as elementary and secondary schooling. Legal immigrants must be in the United States lawfully for five years before being eligible for aid such as food stamps and welfare. The exceptions are refugees, including Cubans, who are immediately eligible for federal need-based aid. U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants are citizens and are also eligible for such assistance (Milligan, 2007).
Undocumented immigrants were guaranteed access to a free public education (Kindergarten through twelfth grade) by a 1982 Supreme Court decision, but the 1996 Immigration Act prohibits undocumented immigrants from accessing any postsecondary education benefit. As a result, many states have blocked access to in-state tuition for undocumented students. An estimated 60,000 undocumented students graduate from the nation’s high schools each year, and most are unable to pay out-of-state tuition at their public college, except in the few states that allow them to pay in-state tuition (Lazarin, 2003).
The people who benefit most economically from immigration, aside from the immigrants themselves, are businesses and the wealthy. David Card, an economist who studies immigration, said that when he moved to San Francisco, he noticed some changes from his lifestyle in Princeton. “In California, a professor has at least a gardener and maybe two, someone who cleans his house, and two or three day-care workers,” he said (Cassidy, 1997, pp. 41–42).
The rich, despite the law prohibiting that practice, hire many undocumented immigrants. Two prominent cases involved people who were nominated for federal attorney general—Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood. President Clinton withdrew their nominations because it became known that they had employed illegal immigrants as nannies.
Aside from the economic benefits, we all derive enormous social and cultural benefits from living in a country with a large and diverse immigrant population.
Some pro-immigration advocates minimize problems with immigration, such as its effect on African Americans. In his article “Immigration, African Americans, and Race Discourse,” Stephen Steinberg points out that African Americans have been historically disadvantaged by immigration (2005). After the Civil War, the 4 million emancipated slaves could have filled the labor needs of the North. However, businesses preferred to import white immigrants from Europe:
Here was a missed opportunity to integrate blacks into the industrial labor force during the critical early stages of industrialization, and the failure to do so, set the nation on a path of racial division and conflict that continues to this day. (Steinberg, 2005, p. 43)
Steinberg (2005) questions whether the influx of another 25 million immigrants since 1965, and the millions more of undocumented workers, has “again made the Negro ‘superfluous,’ undercutting black progress. Here was another missed opportunity to integrate blacks into the economic mainstream” (p. 44).
Steinberg makes it clear that he is not calling into question the rights of immigrants. He says, “I am the grandson of immigrants, and the new immigrants have as much right to be here as I do, and to claim all the rights of their adopted nationality” (p. 45). But, he says, the rights of immigrants should not override the rights of African Americans.
Immigration should be part of a national manpower policy that protects the interests of immigrants and native workers alike. A laissez-faire policy that relegates millions of immigrants to the vagaries of the “free market” only throws low-wage workers in pitiless competition with each other, and closes off avenues of mobility into more desirable job sectors. As a result, current policy exacerbates existing inequalities along lines of race, ethnicity, gender and class. (p. 53)
Some people have used the argument that immigration hurts African Americans in order to oppose legalizing it. Bill Fletcher, a board member of Black Commentary, argues against this, saying that immigration is not the main reason for the problems of black workers:
The economic reorganization which many people call de-industrialization has had a devastating impact on the Black worker, disproportionately so. The elimination and/or shrinkage of manufacturing jobs in urban centers has had the effect of hollowing out entire communities, destabilizing Black America economically, socially and politically…. Black America has witnessed the disintegration of segments of its working class and professional/managerial class.
This crisis began well before there was a significant influx of immigrants, and it is this crisis that has been haunting us. This crisis has been compounded by the right-wing political assault on the public sector, largely through anti-tax revolts and privatization, which has resulted in both a decline in services and a decline in employment with the latter also having a disproportionate impact on the Black worker. (Fletcher, 2007)
Fletcher points out that where immigrants are displacing African Americans, as in construction, that is happening because employers want lower-paid, non-union workers. The solution is not to oppose immigration, but to oppose the lowering of wages:
The problem is the system. And, just as African American workers were used in certain industries as low-wage workers in the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries, in order to undercut higher paid workers, this changed dramatically through a combination of unionization and the Black Freedom Movement…. Low-wage workers will not be competitors if they cease being low-wage workers, i.e., if they are unionized and gain power in their workplaces or jobs. (Fletcher, 2007)
Resistance to Cutbacks in Immigrant Rights
Immigrants and their advocates have mobilized to resist their discriminatory treatment. Inspired by the freedom riders of the civil rights movement, thousands of immigrants participated in an Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride in October 2003. With organizing support from the AFL-CIO and other groups, they marched and demonstrated in 116 cities across the country, including New York City, where over 76,000 rallied to publicize a host of immigrant rights issues from equal rights in the workplace to immigration reform (Northeast Action, 2004).
Demonstrations occurred between March and May of 2006 in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and dozens of other U.S. cities in the largest social and political demonstrations in U.S. history. “As the immigrants left work or school to join the marches, in some areas the protests, dominated by Latino workers, had the effect of a general strike, shutting down local businesses and blocking traffic in the centers of major cities. Many carried signs reading, ‘We are workers, and not criminals’ and ‘No Human Being is Illegal’” (La Botz, 2007, p. 24).
The AFL-CIO opposes guest worker programs and says immigrants should be given permanent residence visas, so they have labor rights and can become normal members of the communities they live in. America’s labor unions see immigration reform as essential both to organizing immigrants and revitalizing the labor movement and to winning greater political power. “Almost every major labor organization has now taken a position calling for “comprehensive immigration reform” meaning legalization and a path to citizenship for those now here and guest worker programs with legalization and citizenship provisions” (La Botz, 2007, p. 32).
CATA, a migrant farm-worker organization, was one of the many groups from across the nation rallying for comprehensive immigration reform in Washington D.C. on March 21, 2010. The photo was taken by Franklin Soults, a member of the Massachusetts Immigration Reform Advocacy Coalition (MIRA), a group that also attended the rally.
Religious sanctuary, the practice of being protected from deportation by staying in a church, has been revived. It was invoked in the early 1980s to prevent thousands of Central American refugees from being deported. In 2006, an undocumented Mexican cleaning woman, Elvira Arellano, invoked the ancient right of sanctuary in a Chicago church in a desperate effort to avoid being separated from her seven-year-old son, Saul, a U.S. citizen. Arellano said, “I was desperate. I remembered how Joseph and Mary were given sanctuary. I asked my church for sanctuary, and they agreed” (Sahagun, 2007 p. A2).
Discussing the repressive Immigration Act of 1996, a New York Times editorial (“Hard Times for Immigrants,” 1997) warns of the threat to all of us:
This law won political passage by attacking an unpopular group. That, historically, is how more widespread deprivations of rights have started. The law is not just an assault on vulnerable people who deserve protection from abuse, but a threat to the liberties of all Americans. (p. 14)
8.6 The Controversy Over Bilingual Education in the Schools Versus English Immersion
Ron Unz, a California multimillionaire software developer and former Republican candidate for governor, sponsored California’s Proposition 227, a voter initiative called English Only, aimed at eliminating bilingual education across the country. He spearheaded the defeat of bilingual education in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts, but in Colorado it was voted down. While Unz has funded many anti-bilingual education ballot initiatives, the English Only movement is led principally by a multimillion-dollar conservative organization called U.S. English (DePass, 2003).
Unz scoffs at research that says it can take up to seven years for students to become fully fluent in academic English. He proposed that they be given just one school year—180 days—to learn the language intensively before being mainstreamed into all-English classes. This program, called “English immersion,” has eliminated most bilingual education programs. Those programs help LEP children keep up with their required academic competencies, such as math, history, and science, while learning English through ESL (English as a Second Language) classes. Many LEP students learn to speak conversational English within the first two years, but research consistently shows that it takes four to seven years before most students are able to use English to learn academic subjects and perform on par with native English-speaking peers (Massachusetts English Plus Coalition, 2003).
Unz and his supporters argue that the offspring of earlier immigrant groups were forced to learn English, and doing so helped them to succeed. Opponents of English immersion have argued that the initiatives are too punitive because teachers could be personally sued for speaking Spanish in the classroom. The program would also eliminate dual-language programs and parent choice. Latino opponents argue that the attack on bilingual education is an attack on their cultural identity. Many African Americans joined the struggle to save bilingual education, remembering their own struggles to become literate, being able to vote, and having equal access to education.
Arizona implemented a program called Structured English Immersion (SEI). In this program, significant amounts of the school day are dedicated to the explicit teaching of the English language, and students are grouped for this instruction according to their level of English proficiency. The English language is the main content of SEI instruction. Academic content plays a supporting, but subordinate, role. English is the language of instruction; students and teachers are expected to speak, read, and write in English. Teachers use instructional methods that treat English as a foreign language. In Arizona, SEI is required of all schools in the state.
Opponents of SEI brought the case to the Supreme Court, arguing that the Arizona SEI model is not research based and “contradicts the large and credible body of research evidence on effective instruction and school practices that produce high levels of academic achievement for ESL.” In 2009, the Supreme Court ruled in Horne v. Flores that research on bilingual education instruction showed that there is documented, academic support for the view that Structured English Immersion (SEI) is significantly more effective than bilingual education (Mora, J., 2010). The Arizona SEI program continues.
Guidelines for Ethnic-Sensitive Human Service Work
People who have been discriminated against because of their skin color have reason to be mistrustful of white-dominated organizations, including (and sometimes especially) human service agencies. Unfortunately, agencies have a poor track record in eliminating discrimination. After the Civil War, such agencies were almost always segregated and poorly funded. The Charity Organization Society served very few people of color. In her autobiography, The Woman Warrior, author Maxine Hong Kingston (1977) gives an example of the feeling of alienation created by discrimination:
Lie to Americans. Tell them you were born during the San Francisco earthquake. Tell them your birth certificate and your parents were burned up in the fire. Don’t report crimes; tell them we have no crimes and no poverty. Give a new name every time you get arrested; the ghosts* won’t recognize you. Pay the new immigrants twenty-five cents an hour and say we have no unemployment. And, of course, tell them we’re against Communism. Ghosts have no memory anyway and poor eyesight. (pp. 184–185)
*In this story of Chinese people in San Francisco, the Chinese regarded all non-Chinese people as “ghosts” because they seemed as alien as ghosts. Interestingly, her protagonist saw black ghosts as more friendly than white ghosts.
The distrust that discrimination creates affects all of us. An individual white person may never have discriminated against anyone, but the climate of fear that prejudice has created in a society may make every white person seem like a potential enemy until he or she proves to be trustworthy.
Of course, people of color can also express prejudice against white people when they believe that all white people are alike. And some light-skinned black people are prejudiced toward dark-skinned black people.
Guidelines to Build Trust
Learn the culture. You can learn a lot about a person’s culture by asking sensitive questions. No matter how much you have read about a group’s culture, you won’t know how it affects the specific person you are talking with until you ask.
Here is an example of an incorrect assessment of a person based on a lack of understanding of the culture:
A young Southeast Asian woman was ordered by the court to attend therapy for repeatedly shoplifting merchandise from a neighborhood grocery store. The young woman had been in this country less than a year and spoke minimal English. She was assigned to a white therapist who after several failed attempts to get the young woman to communicate her reasons for shoplifting informed the court that the client was withdrawn, uncommunicative, and appeared depressed.
A young Asian paralegal working in the office at the time read the case and was able to shed some light on the problem. The Asian paralegal related that the item, repeatedly stolen from the store, sanitary napkins, was not openly displayed, or sold in public markets in the country of the Southeast Asian woman…. In the woman’s country, it was considered highly improper for women to publicly acknowledge their monthly menses. Purchasing the pads outright or explaining her reasons for taking this product would have caused this woman great embarrassment and public shame, not to mention a breach of her ethnic and cultural values on proper conduct. (Boyd, 1990, p. 160)
Create a welcoming atmosphere. As soon as they walk in the office, people should receive the message that they are welcome. If the agency’s clientele includes people who speak a language other than English, posters on the wall and informational brochures should be written in that language. The magazine rack could include local African American and Hispanic newspapers. Gays and lesbians will be reassured to see their own newspapers or magazines.
Acknowledge the validity of their suspicion of you. Research has shown that people from minority groups are less likely to return to a human service agency after the first interview than are people from the dominant culture.
Maxine Hong Kingston (1977) talks of the reticence about discussing intimate affairs within the traditional Chinese culture, but she indicates that it was a much more serious offense to share secrets with the ghosts:
They came nosing at windows—Social Worker Ghosts; Public Health Nurse Ghosts; Factory Ghosts recruiting workers during the war (they promised free child care, which our mother turned down); two Jesus Ghosts who had formerly worked in China. We hid directly under the windows, pressed against the baseboard until the ghost, calling us in the ghost language so that we’d almost answer to stop its voice, gave up. (p. 98)
The U.S. government continues to build fences and increase security patrols to stem the flow of illegal immigrants pouring across the border with Mexico. At the same time, we rely on these immigrants to fill jobs as farm workers, domestics, day laborers, and other low-paying but vital jobs.
The person who suffers from discrimination feels a dreadful wound, a humiliating degradation, and if he or she is strong enough to feel it, tremendous rage. (Most tragically, the individual may turn the rage inward against him- or herself.) The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Malcolm X & Haley, 1966) presents a vivid literary description of these feelings. An outstanding leader of the American Muslims in the 1960s, Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. He gives us a personalized account of his disillusionment as he writes bitterly about the state welfare workers who claimed to be “helping” him. In the course of his life, he encountered a good many helping agents of the state and found them wanting. When he was a young boy, his father was killed by whites, and his mother had to struggle to keep the family together, eking out a living by cleaning houses. She hated to accept welfare assistance, but when she finally gave in, she was harassed by welfare investigators. They termed her crazy for, among other behaviors, refusing to eat pork, even though she was a Seventh Day Adventist and it was against her religion to do so. They also opposed her seeing a male friend, even though this made her happier than she had ever been before. Malcolm X held them partially responsible for his mother having to go to a mental hospital, and he said they were as vicious as vultures (Malcolm X & Haley, 1966).
Malcolm was placed in a foster home, and this is what he thought about that:
Soon the state people were making plans to take over all of my mother’s children…. [A] Judge McClellan in Lansing had authority over me and all of my brothers and sisters. We were “state children,” court wards; he had the full say-so over us. A white man in charge of a black man’s children! Nothing but legal, modern slavery however kindly intentioned…. I truly believe that if ever a state social agency destroyed a family, it destroyed ours. We wanted and tried to stay together. Our home didn’t have to be destroyed. But the Welfare, the courts, and their doctor gave us the one-two-three punch. And ours was not the only case of this kind. (pp. 20–21)
When Malcolm was about to enter the third grade, an English teacher asked him what kind of career he wanted. Malcolm said that he wanted to be a lawyer, to which the teacher replied:
“You’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be. You’re good with your hands—making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don’t you plan on carpentry?” (p. 36)
By raising people’s consciousness about discrimination and pressuring organizations to change, Malcolm X and other civil rights activists helped reshape social services as well as other institutions of society. Since the 1960s, many ethnic groups have developed their own agencies and professional organizations, creating changes in the policies and hiring practices of white-dominated agencies. The National Association of Black Social Workers was formed in 1968 to improve the provision of social services to blacks and to spur the recruitment of black social workers (McRoy, 1990).
Emphasize strengths in individuals and communities. This is especially true when working with people who have been treated as inferior because people have already focused so much on their weaknesses.
Emphasizing people’s strengths is equally important when working with communities as it is when working with individuals. John McKnight (1992) believes that some professionals who claim to help others actually harm them by focusing on their weaknesses. He has developed a questionnaire designed to discover people’s talents and a map called the Neighborhood Assets map designed to highlight a community’s strengths. It lists strengths—cultural organizations, individual capacities, religious organizations, citizens’ associations, home-based enterprise, social service agencies, and so on. McKnight also designed a map called the Neighborhood Needs map, which lists pathologies—slum housing, crime, mental illness, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism and substance abuse, illiteracy, and so forth. The Neighborhood Needs map is the one that people use most often, but it ignores the strengths of a neighborhood.
The liberation movements of oppressed people have revealed their enormous strength and courage. Thousands of people have literally put their lives on the line to win their freedom. And there is the quieter but enduring strength they show by protecting their families and communities in the face of constant oppression and discrimination.
Find sources of power. Lorraine Gutierrez (1990) recommends that the worker and client together engage in a “power analysis” of the client’s situation to assess the structural barriers a client faces and the potential strengths available to the client:
Clients and workers should be encouraged to think creatively about sources of potential power, such as forgotten skills, personal qualities that could increase social influence, members of past social support networks, and organizations in their communities. (p. 152)
Use the network of family and friends. The first strength of any group is family and friends. Many minority groups rely heavily on this support. Some students of Native American culture say that it is hard for Native Americans to accumulate resources, not only because of their low-wage work and unemployment but also because of their ethic of sharing with other family members.
African American communities have a long tradition of mutual help. Carol Stack (1974) showed that although many families in a poor black community in the Midwest were officially designated “single-parent” families, they were actually extended-kin networks, sharing in child care. This was more typical among the very poor. As families became upwardly mobile, they were less likely to share their resources. Urbanization and industrialization have weakened extended-family networks for all of us. But the African Americans who shared their resources despite their poverty were expressing a higher value of caring and compassion than more affluent people, who were more preoccupied with “getting ahead.”
Use the community networks. The ethnic neighborhood itself is a support system in which people can share their language, religion, food, memories, and experiences. Networks include neighbors; churches; political, social, and service organizations; newspapers; stores; restaurants; and bars where people gather. The church is an especially important support network in the African American community. In Hispanic communities, the spiritualist is an important support to many people, and many Native Americans turn to the tribal medicine man or woman for support and guidance. In her study of ethnicity in the social services, Shirley Jenkins (1981) found that, in general, minority people prefer going to services in their own community staffed by bilingual and bicultural workers.
Understand patterns of informality and friendliness. Pedro de Cunha, a Portuguese American social worker, tells of common complaints among Portuguese immigrants regarding social agencies: “The social workers are too cold, too distant. They are never there when we need them; They don’t really help; They never found us a job or an apartment” (de Cunha, 1983, p. 15). One of the problems, says de Cunha, is that the Portuguese come from a country that has not developed specialized helping agencies; instead, people tend to turn to the priest for help. The priest has many roles. Not only does he minister the Word and the sacraments, “but he is also the financial adviser, the marriage counselor, the funeral director, the father, the judge, the social worker” (p. 15). The grocer not only sells groceries; he “would not sell any groceries if he did not listen to the problems of his patrons, if he did not extend credit to those who cannot pay immediately, if he did not read the illiterate their mail” (p. 15).
People from an agrarian society are more likely to expect help to come in the context of a personal relationship. They expect helping roles to be diffuse rather than specific. De Cunha recommends that workers be trained to understand their clients’ background and expectations and become more comfortable being less formal and friendlier.
Be willing to share yourself. Workers need to be willing to share something of their own lives with clients, to make the atmosphere of the agency warm and nurturing. Perhaps you could serve refreshments or coffee, be willing to accept small gifts, be flexible about time, be willing to make an occasional home visit, and have at least one worker for walk-in clients.
Understand clients’ lack of resources. People’s poverty affects how they use social services. They may not even have the carfare or gasoline to get to the agency. If they do have a car, it is probably in poor repair and often breaks down. Clients may not be able to keep appointments because they can’t afford baby-sitters or fear losing their job if they take any more time off from work. They may not have a checking account, so cashing a check might be costly and time-consuming.
Give concrete services and information. Because of their lack of resources, poor people need concrete help. Whatever your agency’s activities, your knowledge of benefit programs might be more important than any mental health counseling. One formerly homeless woman said that she was in homeless shelters for four years because the workers there did not tell her about housing vouchers or how to get welfare benefits. It was not until she discovered a welfare rights group that she learned about her rights from other welfare recipients.
Learn how to empower. Oppressed people are relatively powerless. Women, who have less power than men, head a large proportion of poor families. Women of color make up a large proportion of the clientele in human service agencies. They are more than twice as poor as white women. They are overrepresented in low-status occupations and have on average a low level of education. The stress of having poor housing or no housing, insufficient food and clothing, and inadequate access to health services takes a toll on their physical and mental health. Human service workers need to deal with the psychological effects of their clients’ powerlessness and provide concrete resources to better their lives (Gutierrez, 1990).
The literature on empowerment indicates that small-group work is the ideal method for empowerment. In these groups, members receive support, reduce self-blame, learn new skills, and provide a potential power base for action (Gutierrez, 1990).
8.7 Working with Women
Many college women, even those who do not call themselves feminists, are benefiting from the gains won by the women’s movement, even though they might not be aware of the struggles that other women went through to win them. Although women have many struggles to endure before they achieve equality with men, the gains of the women’s movement have been enormous. The women’s movement has touched every aspect of women’s lives. Women have fought for equal pay and advancement and have often won. They have defined some lower-paying jobs as equal in worth to higher-paying men’s jobs, even though the jobs may be different, and won some major comparable worth lawsuits. They have entered fields previously defined as men’s work, and some have argued that housework and caretaking, traditionally defined as women’s work, should be paid wages and shared equally by women and men.
comparable worth
A practice of describing and paying wages for jobs according to their inherent difficulty and worth in order to help equalize women’s wages with men’s.
The Women’s Movement and New Social Services
Some of the most dramatic changes in the helping process were brought about by the women’s movement. By 1994, shelters for victims of domestic violence had been established in more than two-thirds of the 3,200 counties in the United States (Carden, 1994). Women also created rape crisis centers; women’s health centers; feminist mental health services; and services for displaced homemakers, women substance abusers, older women, single parents, and ethnic minority women (Gottlieb, 1980a, 1980b).
Feminists created new social services because they believed that traditional social agencies were not in tune with women’s needs. Drawing on Freudian psychology, traditional workers said that a woman who is battered by her husband might have a sadomasochistic need to be beaten. But feminists would assert:
The husband is committing a criminal act by beating his wife and must be legally restrained.
No one has the right to beat her for any reason.
She might be staying with him because she has:
No place to go
No money
Children to care for
No marketable work skills
Shame because of the stigma of being abused
She might need supportive therapy, but she also needs:
A court order
A shelter
A support group
A job or an adequate welfare grant
Decent, affordable child care
Help in finding an apartment
Feminists also redefined rape. Traditional common wisdom assumed that women inadvertently “asked for it” with their behavior. Feminists defined rape as an act of violence used to control women. They told women that they didn’t ask for it or deserve it. They taught women how to struggle against it and how to do the healing grief work to recover from the assault. They told women that there is no “allowable” rape—forced sex by a date or by a husband is rape. They also lobbied to change the laws that made reporting of rape another form of assault on self-esteem. In fact, feminists looked at every aspect of services to women and suggested new ways to view old problems.
Feminists took a new look at depression, menopause, and premenstrual syndrome and critiqued the way the medical establishment deals with them. Depression, for example, is much more prevalent among women than among men. Feminists believe this is due to the socialization of women rather than to any inherent female characteristics. This socialization includes:
A stress on self-effacement, which leads to low self-image
A sense of powerlessness and of lack of control over one’s life
Difficulty in asserting oneself
An inability to cope with stress (Gottlieb, 1980a, 1980b)
Women, socialized to be passive rather than assertive, have a much greater tendency to turn their aggression on themselves than do men. This is generally considered to be one of the dynamics of depression.
Understanding New Theories about Women
There has been a flowering of feminist theory since the late 1960s that has had a profound effect on the human services. Feminist psychologists challenged some of the traditional Freudian theory that claimed women were “naturally” masochistic, passive, and envious of men. These psychologists helped women to feel comfortable with the assertiveness they had been taught to repress since childhood.
Feminist research has helped women reclaim their sexuality by rejecting the Freudian assertion that the only “healthy” orgasm is a vaginal one (Koedt, 1971). Ann Koedt showed that the vagina has few nerve endings and that the clitoris is more sensitive to sexual stimulation than is the vagina. (Kinsey had also shown this in his research on sexuality in the 1940s, but it was not until feminists focused on female sexuality that these findings became more widely understood.)
“Women’s intuition” and emotionality, which had been ridiculed as inferior to the male world of “hard facts,” won a new respectability when feminist researchers, in comparing women’s ways of learning about the world and relating to people with men’s ways, concluded that women’s ways were different but might make for a more peaceful world.
How Feminist Theory Influences Our Practice
Feminist therapy introduced a sociological and political perspective that had been lacking in most traditional therapy, helping women as well as men to realize that their problems were not just personal troubles but also social issues. The women’s movement was built through consciousness-raising groups, a model that was adopted by other self-help groups.
Yet much of feminist theory and practice has been focused too narrowly on middle-class white women, neglecting issues of social class and ethnicity. Women of color have written a wealth of literature and contributed research about their lives, and some white feminists realize that the assault on poor women is an assault on all women, particularly at a time when the middle class is eroding. However, although the leadership of the National Organization for Women (NOW) has been militant in fighting against repressive welfare policies, most NOW members have not been involved in welfare rights struggles.
That may be changing. When more than 1 million people attended the March for Women’s Lives in Washington D.C. on April 25, 2004, there was the largest representation of women of color and low-income women that has ever attended a women’s march. Cheri Honkala, a welfare recipient and leader of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union in Philadelphia, gave a moving speech about welfare and emphasized that choice for women involves not only the right to have an abortion but also the right to choose to have children and the resources to care for them. Toni Bond, a low-income woman who had been helped to get an abortion by the National Network of Abortion Funds, spoke powerfully about the importance of financial help to women who can’t afford an abortion. (There has been no federal funding for abortions since the Hyde Amendment was passed in 1974.)
Feminist scholars have analyzed social policies and social services, exposing institutional sexism. Abramovitz (1988) described how Social Security regulations discriminate against women. By giving larger pensions to those who earned more in their work, women, who almost always earn less than men, receive lower pensions. Thus gender inequality is perpetuated through the life cycle. Further, by not including caretaking work as wage earning, homemakers are unable to draw a pension of their own but must rely on their husband’s record of earnings.
This woman’s strength shines through her face. If she came for help, a worker would need to recognize that strength and help the woman draw on it.
A Gender Analysis of Child Welfare
More than thirty advocates in New York City, employing a feminist perspective, challenged the way the child-welfare system treated battered women and their children in New York City (Coalition of Battered Women’s Advocates, 1988). This group mobilized after the widely publicized death of a child, Lisa Steinberg, and the battering of her mother, Hedda Nussbaum, by the child’s father, an affluent attorney.
The coalition pointed out that women are often afraid to cry out for protection to the police or social service agencies for fear that they will lose their children or that the batterers/child abusers will retaliate against them or that no one will believe them. Often, service providers remove battered children from the home where a man is abusing his wife rather than force the abusive husband to leave. This can result in children being victimized a second time by the trauma of foster placement (Coalition of Battered Women’s Advocates, 1988). Many of these women and their children become homeless when they leave the batterer. Subsequently, many mothers are charged with neglect, and their children are taken from them and placed in foster homes.
The advocates demand that the police and judges take women’s complaints seriously, removing the batterer from the house rather than the nonabusive mother and her children, and doing everything possible to prevent further harassment. They call on agencies to provide more safe, short-term emergency refuges for women and children and ask that funds used for foster home placement be used instead to provide violence-free homes for the children. Advocates also ask that service providers receive training in domestic violence, as few know even the basic facts about it.
The advocates lobby for more affordable housing, more community-based services such as day care, legal assistance, health care, substance abuse prevention, child abuse prevention, and job-training programs. They point out that undocumented abused women are especially at risk for fear of deportation, that lesbian mothers fear losing custody of their children if they ask for help, and that women of color face racist assumptions that their children are at a higher risk of abuse. Domestic violence affects women of every race and class, yet the poor, who are disproportionately non-English speaking and/or black, are most often victims of involuntary intervention by police and child protective workers (Coalition of Battered Women’s Advocates, 1988).
8.8 Working with Gays and Lesbians
In Chapter 5, we discussed the value judgments people make about gays and lesbians. Here we will put forward some guidelines for human service workers in their work with this particular population.
Betty Carter (1995), a feminist therapist and director of the Family Institute of Westchester, tells the story of how her awareness was raised about the needs of lesbians:
My awareness was … raised by a trainee … who was an out lesbian. At the end of the training, she told me what a wonderful experience she had because we had all been so open to her sexual orientation. “But can I tell you something?” she asked. I said, “Of course,” knowing I didn’t want to hear it. “You know, there is nothing that would let anyone like me know that I would be welcome here.” I was totally startled because I had never thought about how stigmatized groups do need a sign that they are welcome. She pointed out that we had no featured course on gay or lesbian families. (p. 12)
Since then, Carter has instituted a training program on lesbian and gay family issues. She seeks the expertise of lesbians, who understand the complex issues of being marginalized because they experience it in their lives. After hearing the personal experiences of women in lesbian families, heterosexual workers who used to wonder why they needed to spend so much time and attention on lesbians and gays “had an awakening: ‘Oh, I never thought of how heterosexism would have affected someone that way’” (Carter, 1995, p. 14).
Carter uses what she calls a “gay lens” to take special notice of the effects of stigma. She says, “Until you tell me otherwise, I will assume everyone in your family and work system takes a dim view of your not being straight” (p. 15). The gay lens helps to define the task of therapy, which is empowerment. Carter tries to help them deal nondefensively and strategically with the way in which they are pushed to the margins of society, and she helps them to recognize it as a product of ignorance and fear that has almost nothing personal to do with them.
The gay lens not only helps Carter and other therapists work with lesbians, but it also helps them work with heterosexuals. Every new way of viewing issues has far-reaching implications for human service work. Carter describes how she uses the gay lens:
The “gay lens” challenges the way roles in relationships have become gendered. For example, if you ask about the division of chores in a heterosexual couple, it becomes clear who is in charge of the emotional life of the relationship and who will fix the boiler when it breaks. When we therapists are working with couples in a heterosexual relationship, most of us have stopped even questioning the fact that it is 99.9 percent of the time the woman who is in charge of emotions and the man who is in charge of the boiler. But when we look at lesbian and gay couples, it becomes clear that this isn’t inevitable, because here you have two people of the same sex who have ungendered these roles. The emotional life still gets taken care of; the boiler still gets fixed. So how do they decide who does what, if it’s not based on gender?
… The gay lens gives you a way to look at how same-sex couples manage to work these things out, and you can apply it to straight clients. This is no small matter. A fair division of housework and parenting would make life much more harmonious for heterosexuals. Most of our clients come in with some irritation or larger complaints about these matters, and I know I had started to believe it was impossible to achieve equity between men and women around the house. But then I’ll see a gay or lesbian couple and suddenly realize it’s not impossible for people to be total partners. Or, just as I’m about to give up on men for being exasperatingly unemotional, I’ll work with a gay couple and be amazed by how open and tender they can be in expressing their feelings. (p. 14)
After Vermont legalized same-sex civil unions in 2000, researchers surveyed nearly 1,000 couples, including same-sex couples and their heterosexual married siblings. The researchers found that same-sex relationships, whether between men or women, were far more egalitarian than heterosexual ones. In heterosexual couples, women did far more of the housework, men were more likely to have the financial responsibility; and men were more likely to initiate sex, while the women were more likely to refuse it or to start a conversation about problems in the relationship. Controlling and hostile emotional tactics, like belligerence and domineering were less common among gay couples (Parker-Pope, 2008).
Gays and lesbians won a major victory in 2004 when the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared that the equal protection clause of the Massachusetts Constitution called for full-fledged marriage rights—and nothing less—for same-sex couples. Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriages. Since then, Washington DC and four other states—Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut—have legalized same-sex marriages.
Gays and lesbians won another victory for equality in 2010 when Congress struck down the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rule of the military that forbade servicemen and women from admitting they were gay or lesbian while they served in the military.
8.9 Working with People with Disabilities
People with disabilities are an oppressed group because they have not been allowed equal access to society’s benefits. They are a minority both in absolute numbers and in the political meaning of the term.
People with disabilities have an acronym for people who define themselves as nondisabled: They call them TABs—temporarily able bodied. This word vividly reminds us that being able-bodied is only a temporary condition. Any one of us could get hit by a car when crossing the street or get hurt when skiing or diving. The recognition of our own vulnerability helps to lower that psychological barrier between “them” and “us,” which is the biggest handicap of all.
The liberation movement of the disabled population challenged the arbitrary distinctions people make on the basis of differences in physical or mental functioning. Members declare that the real disability lies in society’s unwillingness to structure its architecture, public facilities and space, cultural offerings, and so forth to open up the entire society to everyone regardless of their level of functioning.
New Definition of Disability Influences Our Practice
Traditional models of disability focused on labeling each “disease,” defining what people can do in the job market, and what functions a person can and cannot perform. The new model is a psychosocial model of disability. It looks at the entire environment of the person, including social attitudes, attitudes of other individuals, and the society that the able bodied have created (Roth, 1987). The psychosocial model of disability was recognized in public policy by Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the first civil rights act for disabled people, as well as by the Education for All Handicapped Children’s Act of 1975. That law required disabled children to be mainstreamed with able-bodied children as much as possible. The most sweeping civil rights law for disabled people was the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
psychosocial model of disability
A model that looks at the entire environment of the person, including social attitudes, attitudes of other individuals, and the society that the able bodied have created.
At different times in history and in different places, certain disabilities could be or were viewed as somewhat of an asset, not as a liability. Dostoyevsky, who had epilepsy, describes the aura preceding an epileptic seizure as a route to cosmic clarity. Julius Caesar had epilepsy in Roman times, when it was considered to be a holy disease. During the nineteenth century in the Western world, people with tuberculosis were considered especially refined, sensitive, and wise. If a character in a nineteenth-century novel was described in Chapter1 as refined, sensitive, and wise, it was sure to be revealed by Chapter8 that the character was dying of tuberculosis, or “consumption.”
Obtaining an accurate count of how many disabled people there are is especially tricky because the number depends on whom you define as disabled. Some deaf people do not consider their deafness a disability because they are totally immersed in the deaf culture and take great delight in it. They would consider it a handicap to be deprived of that culture. When the deaf students at Gallaudet College for the Deaf successfully rebelled against a hearing person being chosen as president of the college, some of them declared that their deafness should not be defined as a disability and that they were as “normal” as anyone else. Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks (1989), who described that rebellion so vividly, tells of a community on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts in which so many significant citizens were deaf that everyone learned sign language. With no communication barrier, life was the same for the hearing and the nonhearing.
In 2008 there were 36,169,200 people in the United States who reported a disability, 12.1 percent of the population (Cornell University, 2008). In March 2011, the percentage of people with disabilities in the labor force was 21.0. The percentage of persons with no disability in the labor force was 69.7. The unemployment rate for those with disabilities was 15.6 percent, compared with 8.9 percent for persons with no disability (U.S. Department of Labor, 2011). There are a disproportionate number of disabilities among older people, poor people, people of color, and blue-collar workers. Disabled people are more likely to be unemployed or underemployed, and if they are employed, are more likely to earn less than able-bodied workers. They face discrimination in the job market and often have to navigate buildings not designed for their needs.
Six disabled Tennessee residents achieved a victory in 2004 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared that states can be liable for not making courthouses accessible. One of the people who sued was a man who refused to crawl or be carried up to a second-floor courtroom in a county courthouse to answer a criminal traffic complaint. He sued after the state charged him with failing to appear for his hearing (Greenhouse, 2004).
Human service workers who work with people with disabilities need to be informed about the eligibility guidelines for both Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), as well as for workers’ compensation, to make sure their clients get the benefits they are entitled to. Legal service lawyers who specialize in disability law can help with this.
Because applying for these benefits requires people to see and define themselves as disabled and thus unable to work, many people do not apply. This is a dilemma for both the client and the worker. On the one hand, clients are refusing needed income; on the other hand, people’s self-definition and self-esteem are critically important to their mental health. Some people will accept general assistance even when the grant is much lower than SSI because they regard general assistance as short-term temporary help until they get a job.
Summary
The election of a black president marked an advance in racial equality in the United States, yet this country is still far from a postracial society.
Racial inequality exists in housing and home ownership, health and health insurance, professional advancement, arrests and imprisonment, jobs, political representation, voting rights, and school segregation.
There has been a long struggle for equality in the United States, and the struggle continues.
Human service workers are faced with issues of diversity in all of their practice.
People who claim to be colorblind are actually ignoring an important aspect of a person’s identity. They maintain white privilege by negating racial inequality.
Prejudice and discrimination may negatively affect people’s feelings about themselves.
In order to fully understand people, we must understand their cultures.
The current theory about culture is bicultural theory, which assumes that people are socialized into their own culture and influenced by the dominant culture.
Having limited access to power defines a “minority group.”
The United States has been run predominantly by white, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking, middle- and upper-class able-bodied men. Those who differ have often suffered discrimination.
Latinos face discrimination sometimes on the basis of skin color and often because of not speaking English or because of speaking with limited fluency and an accent.
Acculturation is stressful, causing conflict between the older and younger generations in families.
Ethnicity, social class, and gender must be considered together.
In order to understand any group, we must understand its history.
Because minorities have been discriminated against, they are likely to be distrustful of white-dominated organizations.
Institutional racism is harder to change than individual racism because it involves interconnected systems and policies that perpetuate it.
The media often perpetuates stereotypes.
There are large differences within ethnic groups.
The drug war is a failed policy that resulted in the overincarcertion of drug offenders, most of whom are not dangerous.
Black men are sent to prison at thirteen times the rate of white men.
Discrimination against Arab and Muslim Americans has risen at an alarming rate since 9/11.
Most Americans know very little about the Muslim faith.
Discrimination against Jews has lessened since WWII, but they are still discriminated against in some neighborhoods, jobs, or social clubs.
Affirmative action has become a lightning rod that attracts people’s anxieties about race.
The immigration policy of the United States has fluctuated between the country’s need for labor and people’s xenophobia and fears of losing their jobs to foreigners.
The 1996 Immigration Act, which provides for “expedited removal” of immigrants, represents a major change in the country’s treatment of immigrants.
A study by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that legalization of immigrants would contribute tens of billions to the federal Treasury.
The Personal Responsibility Act of 1996 denied federal help to legal immigrants in the SSI, food stamp, and Medicaid programs. In 1997, some SSI and food stamp benefits were restored.
The immigration bill that was debated in the U.S. Senate in 2007 proposed to gradually change a system based primarily on family ties, in place since 1965, into one that favors high-skilled and highly educated workers who want to become permanent residents. Low-skilled workers would largely be channeled to a vast new temporary program.
The elimination of bilingual education programs was an attack on immigrants.
It is important to emphasize people’s strengths rather than their weaknesses.
Family and friends are the most important supports for people.
Most minority groups are poor and therefore need concrete supports from human service agencies. Telling people about the benefits to which they are entitled empowers them.
Workers need to be willing to share themselves, be informal, be flexible about time, and be willing to make home visits.
Feminists have created alternative social agencies and new theories.
Feminist practice strives to be egalitarian.
Understanding issues that affect gays and lesbians not only helps them but can also give new insights into heterosexual behavior.
Five states have legalized marriage for gays and lesbians.
The Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell law that forbade gays and lesbians in the military from being open about their sexuality was struck down by Congress in 2010.
The new definition of disability does not accept the medical model; rather, it sees the problem as the reluctance of society to accommodate the needs of the disabled population.
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 requires sweeping changes in accommodations for people with disabilities.
Discussion Questions
What do you think is a good immigration policy for a nation? What guidelines would you use in setting up such a policy? The National Catholic Social Justice lobby NETWORK calls for “just reform of immigration policy” and “a just U.S. foreign policy that fosters economic equity and alleviates global poverty.” What do you think would be a just reform of immigration policy and a just U.S. Foreign Policy?
The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that there was no “constitutionally adequate reason” why same-sex couples should not enjoy the same legal rights as others. Opponents of that rule say that it will destroy traditional heterosexual marriage. On what do they base that argument? What do you think are the pros and cons of same-sex marriage?
Exercise: In group discussion, name several social identity groups that you think influence people’s lives. This could include race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, physical ability, religion, age, and any other. Identify where you fit in those groups in a notebook. During class discussion, share this information to the extent that you feel comfortable doing so. Discuss how (or whether) people are oppressed, or feel oppressed, because of their social identity. (No one should feel under any pressure to share personal information.)
Exercise: In group discussion, students share information on the neighborhoods you grew up in and organizations you belonged to. How diverse were these neighborhoods and organizations? Discuss the reasons for their diversity or lack of diversity.
France has passed a law saying that Muslim girls are not allowed to wear head scarves in school, as this violates the principle of the separation of church and state and erodes national identity. What do you think of this law?
Web Resources for Further Study
Teaching Tolerance
www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/teaching-tolerance
Created by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1991, Teaching Tolerance supports the efforts of K–12 teachers and other educators to promote respect for differences and an appreciation of diversity.
Facing History and Ourselves
www.facinghistory.org
Since 1976, Facing History has been engaging students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and anti-Semitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. By studying the historical development and lessons of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide, students make the essential connection between history and the choices they confront in their own lives.
National Council of La Raza
www.nclr.org
The National Council of La Raza (NCLR)—the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States—works to improve opportunities for Hispanic Americans.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
www.naacp.org
The mission of NAACP is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination.
National Organization for Women
www.now.org
The National Organization for Women is the largest organization of feminist activists in the United States.
LGBT social movements
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_social_movements
A discussion of the social movements of lesbians, gays, bisexual, and transgendered people.
Beyond Prejudice
www.beyondprejudice.com
This site provides an extensive discussion of prejudice by Jim Cole, EdD, who conducts workshops and presentations on reducing prejudice. Includes information on how to conduct discussions and workshops about prejudice, exercises, and quizzes.
Betsy Leondar-Wright
www.classmatters.org
Betsy Leondar-Wright was formerly the Communications Director at United for a Fair Economy. Her book Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists helps activists collaborate better across class lines to build stronger movements for social change. Her web site gives advice that she has gleaned from interviews with activists, resources, and information about class and how it intersects with other identities such as race, gender, disability, and sexual identity.
SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective
www.sistersong.net
The SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective is made up of local, regional, and national grassroots organizations in the United States representing four primary ethnic populations/indigenous nations in the United States: Native American/Indigenous, black/African American, Latina/Puerto Rican, and Asian/Pacific Islander. SisterSong does community organizing, self-help, and human rights education on reproductive and sexual health and rights.
Abortion counseling or referrals
www.prochoice.com
This site counsels women on their options when they are pregnant and explains what is involved in whatever choice they make.
National Abortion Federation hot line (English/Spanish): 800-772-9100
National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF) www.nnaf.org
NNAF provides support and technical assistance to local abortion funds, aids in the creation of new abortion funds in areas where they do not exist, and provides visibility and voice for women facing financial barriers to abortion.
