Western Imperialism, Globalization and The real reason why critical race theory is under attack

Thoughtful piece by University of Milwaukee Wisconsin Associate Professor Dr. Javier Tapia who places the current attack on CRT against the backdrop of globalization that tracks back to Western imperialism. Great for the college classroom, he references the following pertinent readings:

• I. Wallerstein, “The Modern World-System” 
• Eric Wolf, “Europe and the People without History” 
• Edward Luce, “The Retreat of Western Liberalism” 
• Ian Bremmer, “Us vs Them”

Dr. Tapia is correct in saying that the facts of history about which he writes are scarcely taught in K-12 schooling anywhere and not even fully throughout the academy. Instead, he suggests, this extremism exists because of an enduring "mindset" made for another time but with a long reach into the present.

While this is manifestly true, what should not get lost his how this mindset finds expression in fascist logics of imminent concern as well expressed in this recent piece by Paul W. Kahn titled, Opinion: Texas bounty hunters, or a private army?

-Angela Valenzuela

#SayNoToFascism

OPINION: The real reason why critical race theory is under attack

July 6, 2021 by Dr. Javier Tapia | Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service

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Five states (Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa and Tennessee) have passed laws against the teaching of critical race theory while similar bills have been introduced in 19 other states, including Wisconsin.

A common element in these bills is that public schools should not present the foundation of this country in a negative light nor discuss how the white/Caucasian (white from now on) population has benefited at the expense of racial/ethnic minority populations. Critics further argue that critical race theory is divisive.

Critical race theory can be defined as an intellectual framework used in academia to explore and analyze racial inequality in society. A key element of the theory is that society’s legal, economic and educational institutions operate (often in subtle ways) to marginalize racial and ethnic minority populations. As such, this process of marginalization tends to benefit the white population, primarily the wealthy class. Along with critical theory and multicultural education, critical race theory promote equity in society.

We can trace critical race theory to the ‘70s when a number of scholars like Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado and Kimberlé Crenshaw pointed out that the legal system has played a key role in maintaining racial inequality in society in a systemic and pervasive way. Thus, the negative effects of systemic racism is not confined to the legal system, but it is also present in unequal access to jobs, housing and health care as broadly discussed by Diana Kendall in her book “Social Problems in a Diverse Society.” The effects of systemic racism became very visible when the African American and Latino communities were greatly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even though the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was crucial in its attempt to end discrimination, current events (as discussed below) indicate that we still have work to do. When we take a closer look at the criticisms against critical race theory (and multicultural education) we find them lacking in substance and critical analyses.

In order to understand the current context for this debate, we need to go back to the rise of the European powers in the 15th century. Immanuel Wallerstein’s “The Modern World-System” and Eric Wolf’s “Europe and the People without History” illustrate how the British, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese empires exploited human and natural resources in Asia, Africa and the Americas for their enrichment. A common element in these colonization practices was the idea that European values and practices were better, and this justified their exploitation in those areas of the world.

A similar mindset was present in the first white-European settlers who arrived into what today is the United States. The white population generated their economic growth by taking land away from Native Americans (and sending them to reservations), importing Black slaves from Africa and by taking land from Mexico. The actions of the white population were guided by the idea of manifest destiny present in the 19th century. According to this belief, God gave white Europeans the right to expand from the Atlantic to the Pacific and all across North America. This view “justified” the dispossession of Native Americans, the U.S. invasion of Mexico and the expansion of slavery territories.

The critics of critical race theory and their efforts to ban its teaching through state legislatures make it seem as if it is rampart in K-12 schools. This is false! A more accurate discussion on European imperialism and U.S. history are present only in certain courses at the university level and a few courses that incorporate aspects of multicultural education at the high school level.

In my view, the efforts to ban critical race theory reflect changing demographics and the struggle for political control of the country. Reports from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that whites will become a minority by the year 2045. We see a clear pattern of white population decline and an increase in the number of racial/ethnic minorities. In the year 2000, whites represented 75% of the total population followed by Hispanics (12.5%), African Americans (12.3%) and Asian (3.6%). In 2020, we have Whites (60%), Hispanics (18.5%), African Americans (13.4%) and Asian (5.9%). Projections for 2060 are White (44.3%), Hispanics (27.5%), African Americans (15%) and Asians (9.1%). Of great importance is the fact that the white population is aging, and racial/ethnic minorities will become the engines of economic growth.

Critics of critical race theory cherry-pick information to argue that racism is no longer an issue and often point out that Asian Americans have a higher level of educational attainment than whites. This view ignores the different ways in which the various racial/ethnic groups have been incorporated into the U.S. and how they are viewed by white society. Thus, we have Vietnamese people incorporated as U.S. allies during the Vietnam War. Globalization has led to the expansion of middle class people in China and India, and many have migrated to the U.S. with a college degree. Nevertheless, the political climate in the last four years indicate the prevalence of racism and prejudice toward all non-white people. Thus, we have seen the murder of George Floyd, efforts to stop the Black Lives Matter movement, attacks toward Mexico, Mexicans, Muslims and also toward Asian Americans, who have been blamed (without basis) as being responsible for COVID-19.

Edward Luce’s “The Retreat of Western Liberalism” and Ian Bremmer’s  “Us vs Them” illustrate the factors leading to economic stagnation for a segment of the white population (primarily blue collar without a college degree). Resentment in this population led to the rise of populism and paved the way to victory for former President Donald Trump. In this context, it is easy to blame racial/ethnic minority people for the problems of the country. For many people, MAGA represented Making America Great by making it white. At the end, attacks against critical race theory and multicultural education are efforts by a sector of the white population to maintain control of the schools and society. This is un-American! Critical race theory and multiculturalism promote “Liberty and Justice for All.”

Dr. Javier Tapia is an associate professor of educational studies and community studies at UW-Milwaukee with a specialty in public anthropology, Latino affairs and global educational studies.

On August 11, 2010, Texas became a "majority minority" state, meaning that people of color outnumbered Anglos. The shift right now is that Texas' Latino population is the largest demographic, growing by 2 million in the last decade. 

Go to the actual Texas Tribune website and roll over the map of Texas so that you can see the percent change in total demographic growth between 2010 and 2020 by county.

Redrawing district lines ahead of the 2022 election promises to be a bruising battle. 

-Angela Valenzuela

People of color make up 95% of Texas’ population growth, and cities and suburbs are booming, 2020 census shows

The state’s Hispanic population is now nearly as large as the non-Hispanic white population, with Texas gaining nearly 11 Hispanic residents for every additional white resident since 2010. Those trends set up a pitched battle for political control when state lawmakers redraw legislative districts.

BY ALEXA URA, JASON KAO, CARLA ASTUDILLO AND CHRIS ESSIG AUG. 12, 2021

Texas’ cities and suburbs are booming. The state is home to three of the country’s 10 largest cities and four of the fastest-growing. Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune

Setting the stage for what is expected to be a bruising battle over political representation, the results of the 2020 census released Thursday showed that Texas’ explosive growth over the past decade was again powered by people of color.

And it is the state’s cities and suburbs that are booming, with Texas home to three of the country’s 10 largest cities and four of the fastest-growing.

Texas gained the most residents of any state since 2010, and its Hispanic population is now nearly as large as the non-Hispanic white population, with just half a percentage point separating them. Texas gained nearly 11 Hispanic residents for every additional white resident since 2010.

Texans of color accounted for 95% of the state’s population growth. The 2020 census puts the state’s population at 29,145,505 — a 16% jump from 25.1 million in 2010. Hispanic Texans were responsible for half of that increase.

Non-Hispanic white Texans now make up just 39.8% of the state’s population — down from 45% in 2010. Meanwhile, the share of Hispanic Texans has grown to 39.3%.

The Hispanic population’s approach to becoming Texas’ largest demographic group marks a significant milestone ahead of this year’s redistricting, during which state lawmakers will draw new political maps divvying up seats in Congress and the state House and Senate in what will no doubt be an intense and protracted fight over political control of the state for the next decade.

Texas Republicans hold every lever of power to try to lock in or even expand their majorities at the state Capitol and in Congress. But they will be working to redraw the state’s political maps while confronting the demographic reality that the state is growing in ways that put the party’s stranglehold in question.

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Hispanic leaders will surely point to the growth to lobby for increased political control and representation, particularly as lawmakers consider how to draw the two additional congressional seats — the most gained by any state — Texas earned because of its fast growth.

The sluggish growth among white Texans could also complicate Republican efforts to cement their power, which relies on a political base much more likely to be white and rural.

The state’s Hispanic, Black and Asian populations all significantly outgrew the white population since 2010. The white population growth — an increase of just 187,252 — was swamped by the total growth among Asian Texans, who make up a tiny share of the total population but have seen their numbers grow at the fastest pace in the state. The state’s Asian population grew by 613,092 since 2010.

The Hispanic population saw the biggest growth, with nearly 2 million additional Hispanic people now calling Texas home.

The state’s growth has been concentrated in diverse urban centers that serve as Democratic strongholds and suburban communities, several of which have either already turned blue or are trending in that direction. Since 2010, 44% of the state’s growth took place in its five largest counties — Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar and Travis. All 10 of the state’s fastest-growing counties in the last decade were suburban.

Hays County — between Austin and San Antonio — experienced the most growth, doubling its population in the last decade.

Over the last two decades, the GOP has maintained its power by drawing political maps at the expense of voters of color. During the last round of redistricting, federal courts found that Texas lawmakers discriminated against Hispanic and Black voters in particular. The Legislature’s Republican majority was reprimanded by federal judges for intentionally diluting the power of their votes; their maps after the 2010 census flunked both the U.S. Constitution and the federal Voting Rights Act.

The growth driven by people of color easily surpassed the growth captured in the 2010 census, which showed people of color accounted for 89% of the total increase in population that decade.

This time, though, the GOP will be working in a more favorable legal landscape.

The 2021 round of political mapmaking will be the first in nearly half a century without federal oversight that previously helped shield voters of color living in states with a long history of discrimination, like Texas, from being robbed of political clout through gerrymandering.

Congress has worked slowly in its bid to revive some of those protections by restoring preclearance, which required the state to submit any changes to its elections and maps for federal review to ensure they would not harm voters of color. The U.S. Supreme Court knocked down that requirement, a lynchpin of the Voting Rights Act, in 2013. This year, the court also continued to whittle away at other portions of the act used to challenge discriminatory districts.

Congressional and state House and Senate districts must be reconfigured ahead of the 2022 elections to account for the state’s population growth and to even out residents across districts that were drawn to be close to equal in population a decade ago but are now significantly out of balance.

But that work is running well behind schedule, largely because of pandemic-induced delays of the census. With Thursday’s release, the Legislature’s number-crunchers will begin processing the massive set of data released by the Census Bureau — down to the block level — to upload it into the system lawmakers will use.

But the actual work of drafting maps, wrangling the numbers that represent communities and neighborhoods, might not begin until next month.

On Thursday, state Rep. Todd Hunter, the Corpus Christi Republican who chairs the House Redistricting Committee, told his colleagues to expect the data to be ready for them by Sept. 1.

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U.S. Population Growth Has Been Driven Exclusively by Minorities

This finding is rather stunning: "The median age for White non-Hispanics rose to 43.7 years — more than a decade older than the median Hispanic of any race — with Black and Asian American residents in between."

Another eye-popping statement: "The decade after 2010 would be the first one since the first population count was taken in 1790 that the White population didn’t grow, according to Frey."

I welcome this diversity at the same time that I can see how it contributes to white's anxieties about a loss of privilege and centrality—that they should actually never have had.  Pre-contact America—before the arrival of Europeans—was a model of diversity and largely peaceful relations among Indigenous peoples.  

Rather than how they get depicted by Hollywood—as if all Native Americans were Plains Indians—at least three quarters were horticulturalists. Europeans didn't just settle anywhere. Rather they conquered places where Native peoples lived. That's why so many names, including towns, rivers, and states bear Indigenous names. 

"Texas" or "Tejas," in Spanish, are derivatives of the Caddo Indian word "teyshas" or "thecas," meaning friends or allies as you can read about here. Why don't we all go back to being friends and allies as our Native ancestors would have wanted? 

Thanks to Jorge Haynes for sharing. 

Peace/ paz,

-Angela Valenzuela

U.S. Population Growth Has Been Driven Exclusively by Minorities

Alex Tanzi  7/4/2020

(Bloomberg) -- U.S. racial and ethnic minorities accounted for all of the nation’s population growth during the last decade, according to new Census Bureau estimates.

The data underscore the nation’s growing diversity and suggest that the trend will continue as the White population ages and low birth rates translate to a declining share. Non-Hispanic Whites declined to 60.1% of the populace in 2019 and their number shrank by about 9,000 from the 2010 Census to slightly more than 197 million.

Over the same period, the U.S. added 10.1 million people identified as Hispanic. The median age for White non-Hispanics rose to 43.7 years — more than a decade older than the median Hispanic of any race — with Black and Asian American residents in between.

© Bloomberg American Youth More Diverse

“The declining White population share is pervasive across the nation,” according to a report by William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The decline was “accentuated in the past few years by a reduction of births among young adult White women and an uptick in deaths, perhaps associated with drug-related ‘deaths of despair.’”

If the data are confirmed by the 2020 census that’s underway, the decade after 2010 would be the first one since the first population count was taken in 1790 that the White population didn’t grow, according to Frey.

White people’s share of the population declined in all 50 states, increasing only in the District of Columbia, according to the Brookings analysis. It fell in 358 of the 364 U.S. metropolitan areas and in 3,012 of its 3,141 counties.

More the one quarter of the 100 largest metropolitan areas have minority-White populations, including Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C. Leading the states with the highest share of White residents last year were Maine, Vermont, West Virginia and New Hampshire.

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

Texas Lawmakers Reminded of Declining White Population by Ken Herman

This piece is abundantly clear that the future of Latina/o youth in Texas is the future of Texas' well-being.  I hope that folks read this piece not with a sense of dread but rather with a sense opportunity.  After all, according to Pew Hispanic,  Latina/o students are dropping out of high school at record lows while college enrollment is at a record high.

This is not at all a case of exaggerated hope and promise.  Indeed, Texas' Latino community wants to be educated.  This pertinent Dallas Morning News piece titled, "Only half of Latino college students graduate. What are Texas schools doing to help?", suggests as much.  The problem is less one of college enrollment (although more needs to be done here, as well), but rather with college completion where they experience a significant gap relative to their white peers.

Financial aid is a very important factor in college completion, but also, particularly for first-generation students, other interventions like Summer bridge programs, regular access to advisers, mentors, and internship programs.  Plus, they need to feel and experience a sense of belonging.  Ethnic Studies departments and program help with this, but much more needs to be done since many students will not find themselves in these programs or classrooms.

This innovative approach at UNT Dallas that builds on neuroscience research creates a ‘Thirdspace’ for Teachers and School Leaders sounds promising, as well.  For me, it suggest possible new frontiers for college student retention that we've not yet explored.

Sí se puede!  Yes we can!

Angela Valenzuela

Texas Lawmakers Reminded of Declining White Population

By Ken Herman | Austin American-Statesman

February 22, 2019

Sometimes I think I have the easiest job in the world: Think up stuff. Type it. (Sometimes I skip the thinking part.) Then, I run into a job that seems even easier.

Here’s one: Texas demographer. The story’s been the same for decades. Our Hispanic population is growing rapidly. It’s a simple fact with complicated implications, a point reiterated at a Texas House County Affairs Committee hearing last week.

The numbers remain eye-opening, and the committee meeting came a few weeks after the Texas Demographic Center released preliminary population projections through 2050, when researchers expect there to be 47.4 million Texans, an astounding 88.3 percent increase over 2010.

“Our population projections suggest the Hispanic population will likely surpass the non-Hispanic white population in size by 2022,” researchers said.

The bottom line is what the bottom line has been for years. Our state legislators have been hearing versions of it for decades. At the committee meeting last week, Chairman Garnet Coleman, D-Houston, recalled how Pete Laney, when he chaired the State Affairs Committee in the latter 20th century, would bring in a demographer to make sure lawmakers understood what the future of Texas looked like, even back then.

I’m not sure the lesson took back then. It’s crucial that it takes now.

To that end, Coleman brought several experts in to teach it to his committee. Among the experts was Steve Murdock, the former Texas state demographer and former director of the U.S. Census Bureau. Murdock, backed by statistics, told the story of the Texas to come, which, under one projection assumption, shows the Hispanic population will grow from the 37.6 percent of the population it was in 2010 to 55.6 percent in 2050. Over the same period, our non-Hispanic white population will shrink from 45.3 percent to 21.8 percent.

“We are not coming back,” Murdock says of a non-Hispanic white majority of folks like himself. “Why do I say that with such certainty? Because when I look at the age structure, we are aging out of the reproductive periods of life.”

“The reason that’s important is that due to a variety of historical, discriminatory and other factors these demographic characteristics are tied to socioeconomic characteristics that are tied to the resources that people have to buy goods and services in the private sector,” Murdock said. “They’re tied to the resources that people have to pay taxes in the public sector. As we change our population, if we don’t change the socio-economics that go with our demographics ... we will be poorer and less competitive in the future than we are now.”

He noted that poverty rates for Hispanics and African-Americans are two to three times higher than for non-Hispanic whites.

The growth trends are irrefutable. Birth rates for non-Hispanic whites have been below the “replacement” rate for 25 years, according to Murdock. “And if you look at the world, where would we get that big infusion of non-Hispanic whites?”

I thought maybe Vermont. I was wrong.

Murdock was thinking Europe, where, he said, countries have declining population rates. So Europe is not the answer. And Murdock’s wife told him we’re very unlikely to produce lots more non-Hispanic whites here at home. “She said go out there and find those non-Hispanic white women who want to have four kids,” Murdock said. “She said they don’t want to sacrifice their career which, she’d argue, why should they compared to men?”

The projection for Travis County is similar, if a bit less pronounced than the statewide numbers. In 2010, Travis County was 50.5 percent non-Hispanic white and 33.5 percent Hispanic. One version of the 2050 projection shows Travis County will be 29.7 percent non-Hispanic white and 47.4 percent Hispanic.

We know the answer to the challenges of the reality of where Texas is headed demographically. And we have been making some, though not yet enough, progress on that front.

“We do know that education pays,” Murdock said. “It pays for every racial and ethnic group.”

Then, pausing for emphasis between words, he said: “Education is still the major way forward in terms of socioeconomic progress in the United States and in Texas.”

He summed up by reiterating the irrefutable truth, a truth our lawmakers must keep in mind as they tinker with our school system: “The future of Texas is tied to its minority populations. And how well they do, is how well we’re all going to do.”

(And, yes, we’re going to have to retool who we think of as “minority populations.”)

“One of the things that people sometimes overlook,” Murdock said, “is the fact that as a society, as a group, as a state or whatever you’re looking at, we all benefit from as many of us benefiting as much as possible.”

Education. It’s all about education — always has been, always will be — and the important truth that it’s a participatory activity, one that requires more than just taking money from some people to pay for schools for other people.

“Could those be wrong?” Murdock said of the projections. “Yes. Are they going to be reversed? No. You can come and kick dirt on my grave if I’m wrong, because by the time this happens, I’ll have been gone a long time. But we’re seeing this kind of change, and it means there are going to be changes required.”

We have been duly warned. Have been for years.