The end of Affirmative Action most definitely results in a loss of intellectual talent. The lack of a diverse environment is costly both to the college classroom and research, considering the power of diversity to illuminate knowledge that aligns and fails to align with race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Gothamist author Arun Venugopal interviews author and professor OiYan Poon, who wrote a pertinet book titled, Asian American is not a Color: Conversations about Race, Affirmative Action, and Family.”

Dr. Poon mentions "repressive legalism," a concept developed by Dr. Liliana Garces at UT Austin where interpretations of policy result in over-each encouraging conservative interpretations that are harmful, in this case, to the goal of diversity.

I would also underscore that there are absolutely material consequences when affirmative action, a now-defunct policy tool, goes away. This quote by Poon nails it when she expresses: "There's still a lot of opportunity in higher education, but we can't pretend like there's also not material consequences and inequalities, right?"

Poon's own work is enlightening with respect to what race-conscious admissions mean for Asian Americans across the U.S.  Her research shows that Asian American identity is still in flux, caught between individuals striving to align with whiteness at the top of the racial hierarchy and those advocating for a vision of justice and humanity built through inter-ethnic solidarity.

-Angela Valenzuela

Black enrollment falls at Columbia, top schools after affirmative action ruling. Now what?

By 

Arun Venugopal |Gothamist

Published Sep 21, 2024

Some of the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities, including New York City's Columbia University, have released data in recent weeks on the racial makeup of their newest classes. The handiwork of the U.S. Supreme Court is written all over them.

The share of newly admitted Black students dropped off significantly at the most selective schools, according to the institutions. The enrollment figures are the first since the Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling in June 2023, barred schools from using race as a factor in higher-education admissions decisions.

Some of the reported results: At Columbia, the share of Black students fell from 20% to 12%.

At Amherst College, the share of Black students fell from 11% to 3%.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the share of Black students dropped from 15% to 5% and the share of Hispanic students fell from 16% to 11%.

At the same time, Asian American representation increased at Columbia (from 30% to 39%) and at Brown University (from 29% to 33%), but stayed flat at Harvard (37%) and marginally fell at Dartmouth and Princeton. At Yale, it declined from 30% to 24%.

To help make sense of the new admissions landscape, Gothamist spoke with OiYan Poon, the author of “Asian American is Not a Color: Conversations about Race, Affirmative Action, and Family.” Poon, a proponent of race-conscious admissions, offers advice for students and parents who are at the very center of a college admissions landscape that's very much in flux.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
These results are confusing. But one of the results is that a number of higher-ed institutions have taken fewer Black students. What does this mean to you?

We saw this historically with the University of California, when they ended affirmative action in 1996. It's in some ways communicating to Black students, “We don't want you, as a college.”

We're also seeing, simultaneously, increasing applications to historically Black colleges and universities, which are gems in the ecosystem — underfunded gems. But what we're seeing is really a loss, I think, of intellectual talent among Black students at these predominantly white institutions that are often deemed as pathways to upward mobility.

And I think this is a real challenge for a democracy that claims to be multiracial and diverse. So I just fear that this is going to have adverse effects on science, on economics, on a lot of sectors of life in our country.
By which you mean fewer African Americans getting those pathways?

Yes, absolutely.

We are seeing a decline in the number of Asian Americans at certain colleges and universities, while at others like Columbia and MIT, the Asian American enrollment has dramatically risen. What gives?

There was research that came out of Georgetown by Anthony Carnevale and his team several years ago, before the lawsuit's ruling [the one last year significantly limiting affirmative action in school admissions]. And his team found that without race-conscious admissions, there might be a 1% — give or take — increase in Asian Americans being admitted.

So when you take the ecosystem of all these institutions, it's been a mixed bag. It kind of washes out into what Dr. Carnevale and his team predicted, which was maybe a slight gain. But at the same time, I want to be clear that there are natural fluctuations year to year in admissions.

Depending on things that are happening in the world with each cohort of high school graduates — there might be a pandemic, or there's a debacle with the FAFSA [Free Application for Federal Student Aid] form with the federal government, right? So things happen that then create these kind of so-called natural fluctuations in enrollment numbers.

The percentages going up and down in the shares of Asian American enrollment may have to do with, again, these institutions perhaps not recruiting in ways that they had before or building relationships with different communities. There's just a lot of things that could go into it. So I'm interested in seeing how this unfolds in the next few years, to see actual trends, because one year does not make a difference.
Is it clear how white students have been affected by the changes?

It's also been a little bit of an up and down, but mostly the picture is not fully clear yet. For now, you've only got a couple dozen institutions, and the actual public reporting data day is Oct. 15, barring any federal government shutdown.
So there's a very strong to-be-determined quality to all of this.

Yes.

What did you feel last year when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action?

I felt pretty devastated when the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions. I just knew it would have ... it was just a continuation of attacks on a multiracial democracy — and who is affirmed and included in spaces of higher education and spaces of learning and engagement in the life of our nation. As a mom of a young child and the daughter of immigrants, I felt really upset. I think there were a lot of tears actually.

Did the ruling fundamentally change how colleges and universities do their work?

I think there's been a lot of changes. People are still trying to figure out what they can do.

I think what we're finding, like my colleague Liliana Garces at the University of Texas — she's a professor there, and a trained lawyer — she has really put forward this idea of "oppressive legalism." In other words, lawyers are telling their colleges and universities to back off of things that are still very legal.

And so schools are moving away, and they're really driven and leading through fear, which I think is not a good way to lead principled and mission-driven organizations.
What does this mean for an institution that sees a very exciting application from, say, a Black student, but who is objectively less impressive because of some numerical score?

I think they're second-guessing. I think some of these colleges are so afraid of getting sued, they have really rolled back their target recruitment efforts to visit and build relationships with communities, with talented Black and brown students, low-income students.

If you're in the business of finding talented students, then you should be doing that. But I think because this lawsuit and the makeup of the court is what it is, that fear is really driving these institutions to say, "Well, I don't know if we can do this."

Do you think that Ed Blum — the legal activist who founded a group called Students for Fair Admissions, which won the Supreme Court victory against Harvard and the University of North Carolina — and this movement is ultimately about increasing white student representation in institutions of higher education?

Yes. [laughs] I mean, the simple answer is yes. I think at the end of the day, what Ed Blum's movement is about is really shutting down and decreasing who's at the table in this country in various sectors. He started out in voting rights. It's about power and who gets to have it in this country.

There are students across the country, high school juniors and seniors who are just trying to make sense of this. What advice would you give them?

Be yourself. Really, just be yourself and know that you've worked hard. And lean into your interests and curiosities and know that there are over 4,000 colleges and universities in this country. And we forget that sometimes, right? We think that there's only like 50.
So how to reconcile that with what you said earlier, which is that Black students are being denied spots in some of these more prominent institutions?

There's still a lot of opportunity in higher education, but we can't pretend like there's also not material consequences and inequalities, right?

There's an economist, Zach Bleemer, who studied the University of California and what happened there in relation to who went to the University of California campuses, versus the California State University campuses and community colleges. After the ban on affirmative action, there was kind of this cascading effect where fewer Black and Latino and Indigenous students were going to the UC's but were going more to the Cal States and the community colleges. And, as a result [for] white and Asian students, he said, there was no economic gain.

But there was an economic decrease, there was harm done to these other students of color who were cascading downward.
So it sounds like what you're saying is that there are material gains for the most disadvantaged communities...

When you go to the most prestigious institutions.
Less so for white and Asian students.

Right.

Do you have specific advice for the parents of students whose anxieties are probably supercharged right now?

I am very sympathetic to those concerns as a mom. My daughter's in Chicago Public Schools. We have magnet high schools. This is not about college, but it's still a selective process.

And I have told my daughter since she was entering kindergarten just very casually, "Hey, isn't this a beautiful neighborhood high school? Someday you can go here, right?"

And last year in third grade, she came home and said, “Mom, if I don't go to Lane Tech High School” — which is, I guess, like a Stuyvesant here in New York, we have about 10 or 12 of those kind of magnet high schools — she said, “If I don't go to Lane Tech High School, my life is over.” And I was just like, “Té Té, you're in third grade!” What is happening here?

It just was confounding. I guess in some ways, I'm the anti-stereotypical Asian parent. There's lots of possibilities, but I recognize that this is actually a privilege that she has.

My daughter has a privilege as a daughter of two highly educated professionals. So when I think about middle-class and educated parents, I really want to tell them, "Let's calm down here." But I think about my daughter's classmates and their parents, and a lot of their children, if they go to college, this will be their first person in their families to go to college.

And so that anxiety I recognize and respect.
How about institutions themselves? Do you think they need to be changing course in some manner or are they at the mercy of larger political and legal forces?

I mentioned there's over 4,000 colleges and universities, right? The great majority of them are at the whims of their financial situations.

Historically, if you look at how colleges and universities developed, they've been financially precarious institutions. The majority of colleges and universities are driven by financial considerations. So admissions decisions have so much to do with the calculus [around] what percentage of my incoming students can pay full or close-to-full tuition? So that I can also then cover those who need financial aid, because I only have X amount of dollars in next year's fiscal budget in the university to cover financial aid. Here's my limited financial aid budget. And how do I leverage Pell Grants or state aid, right? And so there's this prediction there, but it does create a privilege for wealthier students.

Disproportionately white.

Yes. Disproportionately white.

As an Asian American, how do you explain the centrality of Asian Americans to this particular issue? Is it simply about equity?

Asian Americans are so complicated. We are an extremely diverse community — socioeconomically, ethnically, culturally, linguistically, you name it. There's all kinds of Asian American experiences. There's folks who are incredibly wealthy and folks who are incredibly poor and everyone in between.

But at the end of the day, there are these flattened racial stereotypes about Asian Americans — as crazy, rich Asians, as extremely intelligent but only at math and science, really docile, quiet, hardworking, not complainers, overcoming adversity and so on — unlike these undeserving minorities, posing against the stereotypes of undeserving Black, undeserving Latino communities.

This is all flattening all of us, and it's a divide-and-conquer tactic that Ed Blum has played into very well, unfortunately. And so you use these stereotypes to say we don't need policies or practices to recognize these inequalities in our education system. And so then you can keep these inequalities in place and those who are most privileged continue to benefit.

And so Asian Americans get used, and that's what I talk about in this book and how different Asian Americans are making sense of all of that.

I’m the Republican Governor of Ohio. Here Is the Truth About Springfield, by Governor Mike DeWine

Friends:

I'm happy to share such a beautiful, truthful, and factual statement on Springfield Ohio by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Published in the New York Times, Gov. DeWine conveys the value that Haitian immigrants add toa Springfield, Ohio, while being compassionate toward Haiti itself and explaining why Haitians must leave to begin with, as follows: 

Haiti is one of the poorest, most dangerous places on earth. The government is in shambles, with machete-wielding, machine-gun-toting gang members taking over 80 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Read this in tandem with my next post by Greg Sargent who praises Gov. DeWine's statement illuminates the tired racist trope to stoke fears in the white population writ large so that they'll vote for him as the "fixer":

"The picture Trump is seizing on Springfield to invoke—that of a largely white, innocent heartland town getting ravaged by dark, alien hordes who basically constitute a subhuman species—simply cannot be a distraction from the immigration debate. To Trump, it is the immigration debate." (Sargent, The New Republic, Sept. 21, 2024)

I do sense that we are at a turning point in our nation. It behooves our leaders to actually begin to look deeply into the immigration and refugee crisis that spans so many borders beyond the U.S. and to think more imaginatively on how to do this without dehumanizing them. 

Republican leaders should follow Gov. DeWine's example and call out Trump and Vance for their hateful lies and rhetoric to manipulate people instead of an actual changing of conditions where nobody has to lose and everybody wins as Gov. DeWine puts out as not just a possibility, but a living, breathing example of what could be. When was the last time here in Texas that we've heard a governor praise our own immigrant communities? It's been a while. Geez, what a positive difference a governor can make.

-Angela Valenzuela

I’m the Republican Governor of Ohio. Here Is the Truth About Springfield.

By Mike DeWine, a Republican, is the governor of Ohio. New York Times,September 20, 2024

I was born in Springfield, Ohio. My wife, Fran, and I have lived our entire lives less than 10 miles from this city.

When we were dating in high school, we would go there to see movies at the Regent or State Theater or to eat fried clams at Howard Johnson’s. I remember Fran taking the bus about eight miles from our hometown, Yellow Springs, to Springfield to shop at Wren’s Department Store. Over the years, we’ve eaten countless doughnuts from Schuler’s Bakery, worshiped at St. Raphael Catholic Church and we logged many work hours there when I represented Springfield in the U.S. House and Senate.

Springfield has a rich history of providing refuge for the oppressed and being a place of opportunity. As a stop on the Underground Railroad, the Gammon House, which still stands, was a safe haven for escaped slaves seeking freedom. And, as a stop on the Old National Road, America’s first east/west federal highway, Springfield attracted many settlers both before and after the Civil War. Immigrants from Ireland, Greece, Germany, Italy and other countries helped build the city into what it is today.

For a long time, commerce and manufacturing flourished in Springfield, which earned the title “Champion City” after the founding there of the agriculture implement giant Champion Machine Company.

But the city hit tough times in the 1980s and 1990s, falling into serious economic decline as manufacturing, rail commerce and good-paying jobs dwindled. Now, however, Springfield is having a resurgence in manufacturing and job creation. Some of that is thanks to the dramatic influx of Haitian migrants who have arrived in the city over the past three years to fill jobs.

They are there legally. They are there to work.

It is disappointing to me that Springfield has become the epicenter of vitriol over America’s immigration policy, because it has long been a community of great diversity. Fran and I were reminded of this when we attended Mass at St. Raphael this past Sunday and stopped at the nearby Groceryland on our way home. We talked with community members from many backgrounds who are understandably concerned about the negative things being said about their city in news reports and on social media.

Bomb threats — all hoaxes — continue and temporarily closed at least two schools, put the hospital on lockdown and shuttered City Hall. The two local colleges have gone remote. I have posted Ohio Highway Patrol troopers in each school building in Springfield so the schools can remain open, teachers and children can feel safe and students can continue to learn. On the troopers’ first day in the schools, Fran and I visited Simon Kenton Elementary, where reassured teachers told us: “Yesterday was rough. Today was a good day.”

As a supporter of former President Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance, I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield. This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it hurts those who have spent their lives there.

The Biden administration’s failure to control the southern border is a very important issue that Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance are talking about and one that the American people are rightfully deeply concerned about. But their verbal attacks against these Haitians — who are legally present in the United States — dilute and cloud what should be a winning argument about the border.

The Springfield I know is not the one you hear about in social media rumors. It is a city made up of good, decent, welcoming people. They are hard workers — both those who were born in this country and those who settled here because, back in their birthplace, Haiti, innocent people can be killed just for cheering on the wrong team in a soccer match.

Only about a two-hour flight from U.S. shores, Haiti is one of the poorest, most dangerous places on earth. The government is in shambles, with machete-wielding, machine-gun-toting gang members taking over 80 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Fran and I first traveled to Haiti almost 30 years ago as part of a congressional delegation when I was serving on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. We have since been there over 20 times and have supported a Catholic priest who runs a tuition-free school in a slum in Port-au-Prince.

We have always been amazed when, even in the poorest areas of Haiti, we see children coming out of homes made of rusting corrugated metal and cardboard with shoes shined and clothes neat and pressed. We know that the Haitian people want the same things we all want — a good job, the chance to get a quality education and the ability to raise a family in a safe and secure environment. Haitian migrants have gone to Springfield because of the jobs and chance for a better life there.

On Monday, I met with Springfield manufacturing business owners who employ Haitians. As one of them told me, his business would not have been able to stay open after the pandemic but for the Haitians who filled the jobs.

There have been language barriers and cultural differences, but these Haitians come to work every day, are fitting in with co-workers and have become valuable employees. As a teenager working in my parents’ seed company, I worked with the guys loading seed bags onto trucks and boxcars. Their acceptance of a co-worker depended on if they thought the person was pulling his own weight. What is happening today in these companies in Springfield with the Haitian employees is no different.

At the same time, the sudden surge in population has created challenges that no city could anticipate or prepare for. The health care system, housing market and school classrooms have been strained. There is a desperate need for more Haitian Creole translators. And ensuring that Haitians learn how to drive safely and understand our driving customs and traffic laws remains a top priority.

These are the real challenges. Mayor Rob Rue; the City Council; the county commission president, Melanie Flax Wilt; and others have been working tirelessly on these issues, and we are assisting them at the state level.

Fran and I have met with so many other dedicated people in Springfield, many of them teachers or volunteers from nonprofits and the faith-based community, who are doing the Lord’s work each day, teaching English to children who speak only Creole or Spanish or helping those who need health care, whether a new Haitian immigrant or someone whose family has been in Springfield for generations.

Their work will continue long after this fall’s election is over and the national spotlight turns away from Springfield. But in the meantime, our people and our history deserve better than to be falsely portrayed.

This isn’t just personal for a lot of us; it’s about our pride in America. When one of the nation’s biggest railroads built the Big Four Train Depot in Springfield, the city became a hub for passenger and express rail, with an average of 3,000 freight cars and 40 passenger trains speeding through the city daily in the mid-1920s. Located downtown, the Depot became the perfect campaign whistle stop for politicians. In 1960, when I was 13 years old, my parents and I went to see the Republican candidate for president, Richard Nixon, when his train came through Springfield, and four years later to see Barry Goldwater as his train also stopped in the middle of Springfield as he traveled across the Midwest. They both talked about the prospects for the future.

Springfield today has a very bright future. The people who live there love their families, value education, work hard, care about one another and tackle the challenges they face head-on, just as they have done for over 200 years.

I am proud of this community, and America should be, too.

A GOP Gov’s Harsh Takedown of Trump and Vance Exposes MAGA’s Ugly Core

Friends:

Excellent response to Gov. Mike DeWine's New York Times piece that seeks to correct the record on the value that Haitian immigrants add to Springfield, Ohio. MAGA's "ugly core" is what is spotlighted here by Greg Sargent in The New Republic.

Sargent is on point when he expresses,

"The picture Trump is seizing on Springfield to invoke—that of a largely white, innocent heartland town getting ravaged by dark, alien hordes who basically constitute a subhuman species—simply cannot be a distraction from the immigration debate. To Trump, it is the immigration debate."

It's important to remember, as Sargent notes, that even if MAGA agree with Trump's and Vance's toxic, racist claims that for them are a political strategy, most Americans see this differently. A conversation we're having in Texas is that Gov. Abbott needs to prioritize education by funding our schools and stop sending Texans' hard-earned tax dollars to the border for political grandstanding. They're all cut from the same racist cloth that manifests as the dehumanization and disenfranchisement of Black and Brown people. 

As Gov. DeWine makes crystal clear, there is nothing to fear and everything to gain from the hard, honest contributions that Haitians and all immigrants contribute to our society.

-Angela Valenzuela

A GOP Gov’s Harsh Takedown of Trump and Vance Exposes MAGA’s Ugly Core

Finally, a top Republican calls on Trump to stop attacking Haitians, arguing that it’s politically backfiring. But Trump wants this debate to be as charged with hate and rage as possible.


Former President Donald Trump and Senator J.D. Vance in New York City on September 11

By Greg Sargent The New Republic, Sept. 21, 2024

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has written a remarkable piece in The New York Times taking Donald Trump and J.D. Vance to task for their demagoguery about the Haitian influx into Springfield, a small city in the western part of the state. This is striking—it’s rare for a governor to criticize the top of his party’s ticket quite this publicly.
But DeWine’s piece is worth dwelling on for another reason: It lays bare an essential truth about the Springfield controversy, and why the MAGA movement has seized on it so fervently. For Trump and key elements of MAGA, Springfield is not really about border security, or the proper pace of legal immigration, or how best to assimilate new arrivals. Rather, it’s a stand-in for a subterranean argument about the desirable ethnoracial makeup of the American population.
In his piece, DeWine, a Republican, defends the decision to allow thousands of Haitians to move to this city of 60,000 people. He recaps arguments you’ve heard: The city badly needed workers, and Haitians are there legally to work. Many residents have welcomed the newcomers. Haitians have revitalized another Rust Belt city coping with postindustrial population decline.

DeWine also indicts Trump and Vance in surprisingly harsh terms for a Republican. “I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield,” he writes, noting that their behavior “hurts the city and its people.” But another passage from DeWine merits attention:

The Biden administration’s failure to control the southern border is a very important issue that Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance are talking about and one that the American people are rightfully deeply concerned about. But their verbal attacks against these Haitians—who are legally present in the United States—dilute and cloud what should be a winning argument about the border.

There’s something quaint in DeWine’s assumption that this might move Trump and Vance. They may be right to draw attention to the Biden administration’s border mismanagement, DeWine suggests, but in attacking Haitians so viciously, they are allowing that argument to be tainted by intimations of cruelty and racism, alienating swing voters. Surely Trump and Vance will see the political error of their ways!

Yet this misses how Trump—and perhaps Vance, though this is murkier—really understands this issue. Trump actively wants the argument over immigration to be as charged with hate and rage as possible. He doesn’t think that will alienate swing voters. He thinks it will activate their latent MAGA tendencies. The picture Trump is seizing on Springfield to invoke—that of a largely white, innocent heartland town getting ravaged by dark, alien hordes who basically constitute a subhuman species—simply cannot be a distraction from the immigration debate. To Trump, it is the immigration debate.

An underappreciated difference between Trump and Vance is that Trump is explicit on that point, while Vance is not. Trump says that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” that we should not let in people from “shithole countries” like Haiti, and that other countries are sending millions of people “from prisons, from insane asylums, from mental institutions.” Those and other statements constitute quasi-open declarations that the problem with immigration is racial contamination. They drain migrants of any trace of basic humanity that might make claims on our sense of justice. When Trump says Haitians are “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats,” it’s more of that dehumanization game.

So what exactly does Vance believe about all this?

After Vance got caught out spreading falsehoods about Haitians eating house pets, he angrily insisted there’s no racial component to his assertions about their impact on Springfield. He declared that he objects to the scale and speed of their influx and their effect on housing costs and public health.

Local leaders and business owners have said that social tensions are real but manageable, that Haitians are filling real labor shortages, and that Haitians are hardworking, upstanding people who carry out jobs that locals won’t do. But Vance has an answer here too. He has suggested that when local employers hail Haitians’ willingness to work, employers are using them as tools to drive down wages, and that native-born Americans are the real victims of that.

A charitable interpretation of all this was offered by Ross Douthat on the Times’ Matter of Opinion podcast. As Douthat put it, Vance wants to “stand up for the interests” of working-class Americans “against an economy that would prefer to employ people” like Haitians, who are here of desperation and will take lower wages, “rather than them.”

When Vance is on his best behavior, as he also was during a separate interview with Douthat, he does center his arguments around immigration’s material impact on American workers. Vance’s broader economic argument—that more immigration dilutes workers’ bargaining power, driving down wages—is wrong on the substance, as Eric Levitz details. In Springfield, Haitian arrivals helped boost the local economy and drive wage growth. But that aside, it’s hard to square any innocent construction of Vance’s intentions—that he piously hopes to prompt debate—with how deeply debased his public performance has become.

For instance, Vance’s staff was told early on that the pet-eating claim was false; he escalated it. Vance urged supporters to keep the memes coming after the debunkings became more conclusive. Vance keeps insisting that due to Haitians, communicable diseases have “skyrocketed,” even though this is just false and he is surely aware of this particular trope’s dark and despicable history. And Vance has vowed to keep calling Haitians “illegal,” which he dresses up as mere questioning of the validity of their legal status but is actually meant to excite the base with the specter of their mass expulsions.

Douthat did admit on that podcast that Vance is wrong for employing demagoguery to steer the public argument. But this doesn’t go far enough. What needs to be asked is this: Is it even true that Vance is purely out to inspire public deliberation over immigration’s impact on American heartlanders? Isn’t Vance also plainly trying to energize the very same sentiments in the MAGA base that Trump is stirring up with his more explicit appeals? Vance’s public conduct is much more compatible with this latter explanation.

DeWine’s piece tried to address all these surging sentiments. He appealed to Americans’ sense of fairness and solidarity toward immigrants. He depicted them as hardworking people who have struggled against great adversity and deserve our admiration and respect. He noted that Haitians are assimilating.

But here again, this just shows how diametrically at odds with such arguments Trump and large swaths of MAGA truly are. It’s obvious from Trump’s own rhetoric, and from the eager amplification of all these lies about Haitians in MAGA-aligned media, that to Trump and much of MAGA, the idea that the Haitians might be assimilating successfully is a cause for fear and loathing, not something to feel good about.

Recent polling by the Public Religion Research Institute finds that 67 percent of respondents with a positive view of Trump agree that undocumented immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country.” Sixty-three percent agree that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Among overall Americans, large majorities disagree with both claims.

It’s hard to know how deeply felt or significant those sentiments among Trump supporters truly are. We do know, however, that Vance is perfectly happy to exacerbate them.

But Vance can’t have it both ways. He wants to exist in a place where respectable columnists will nod along as he furrows his brow about the effects of immigration flows on local labor markets—even as he simultaneously feeds vile and hateful sentiments toward immigrants that have nothing whatsoever to do with inspiring polite policy discourse.

In his piece, DeWine writes that the Springfield horrors that Trump is describing are unrecognizable to him. But that’s because for Trump, the argument over Springfield has nothing to do with what’s actually happening in Springfield. It’s about fomenting violent hatreds in order to seize power. What must be asked of Vance is why this gives him no discernible qualms whatsoever. He knows what Trump is up to perfectly well—and he’s absolutely willing to go along with every bit of it.
Greg Sargent @GregTSargent


Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcast The Daily Blast. A seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from 2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New York magazine, and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author of the critically acclaimed book An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics.

Xinachtli Pedagogy, Thinking Outside of the Box, and Addressing the Water Crisis in Texas

Friends:

Xinachtli means "seed" in Nahuatl and as described in this wonderful video as a way of thinking "outside the box" of tradition, mainstream schooling in the U.S. Maestro Carlos Aceves shares, an Indigenous elementary school teacher his view that children do get a lot of information in schools, but they're objectified through processes and their corollary logics like high-stakes testing, tracking, drill and kill curriculum and the like, that reduce their sense of who they are and accordingly, their possibilities.

Indigenous Cultures Institute (ICI) Board of Elders Dr. Mario Garza and Maria Rocha and Director Marial Quezada, also a doctoral student in Cultural Studies at UT-Austin are featured in this film as the ICI regularly invites Maestro Aceves, who lives in El Paso, to provide instruction at the ICI's annual Tanko Institute both of which are in San Marcos, Texas. Our school, Academia Cuauhtli is partnered with the ICI with our teachers attending the Tanko Institute and a number engaged in Indigenous pedagogy. I see some of them in the video. 😊 Academia Cuauhtli students also annually attend the ICI's Sacred Springs powwow.

I recently corresponded with Maestro Aceves when I received one of his emails that expressed:

Restore the ceremonies, renew the covenants, return to the sacred places, and follow the story in the Sky.”

 As Natural Peoples we look to Creation for guidance. We were given ceremonies as textbooks, we made agreements with Natural Powers so that we can continue surviving as a people, we travel to special places of Creation on Earth to make offerings in appreciation of Life, and we learn the cycles above as patterns for our Natural Way of Life.

"Ceremonies as textbooks." These words touch me deeply. There is such beauty in his words that encourages us to think of the natural world differently. 

For Texans, this should be an urgent matter as according to a recent Instagram post by Progress Texas, our state is running out of water. Newsweek also has a recent story on this last week on September 11. It's shocking to learn from Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, "We lose about a farm a week in Texas, but it's 700 years before we run out of land, the limiting factor is water." Okay...  That's not a small "but" to me. In any case, you get the point.

What should also concern us is that recent statistics show that people from around the country are flocking to Texas because it's an affordable state. Long term, this places stress on our state's water supply that is additionally jeopardized by fracking. 

To combat all of this, we absolutely do need to address policy related to natural resources, but we also need a different kind of consciousness and permission structure where we are not estranged from the natural world but rather see ourselves as a part of it, even caught up with it as a form of destiny. If we change, the world changes. It's not either-or, but both-and. After all, it doesn't make sense to change policies when the thinking that got us to where we are remains in place.

This is what we are collectively about, Academia Cuauhtli, the ICI, the Tanko
Institute, and so many, if not all of us, in the Ethnic Studies Movement. Education is always about changing consciousness. Unfortunately, mainstream schooling with its colonial logics is often about reducing children to a number on a piece of paper—and not just the children, but their teachers and schools. This testing regime has been so terribly harmful. What is there not to love about spending time in nature and taking time to learn, not just from teachers, but from the natural world itself?  

For a paper I'm writing that is focused on our work at Academia Cuauhtli where I cite Maestro Aceves, I asked him how he identifies and this is what he shared,

Carlos Aceves Yolohuitzcalotl

Cihuacoatl for Kalpulli Tlalteca People of the Earth Community.

bilingual elementary school teacher

I have seen Maestro Aceves in action. He is the consummate Indigenous bilingual elementary school teacher. I would love to be in his elementary school classroom every single day, were it possible. 

Thank you, Maestro Aceves and thank you ICI for our partnership that from our own Xinachtli moment has grown and blossomed exquisitely over the years. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Tānko Institute || Xinachtli Pedagogy for Educators

 Friends:

Last semester was very brutal with respect to free speech. We need to hold onto free speech, disallow viewpoint discrimination, and protect academic freedom which are First Amendment rights. 

Just as importantly, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's new interim charges of the legislature are continuing to use DEI as a weapon and are pointing to a defunding of departments like humanities and social sciences because they are not satisfying workforce demands (see p. 7). The language is very vague and general, but I'm with AAUP in sounding this alarm. This is nonsense, but folks in humanities and social sciences in colleges and universities statewide need to be aware and ideally prepare to make their case in the upcoming 89th Session of the Texas State Legislature.

Here is a pertinent piece on the matter by Willard Dix in Forbes titled, "Eliminating The Humanities Decimates Every Student's Education." Dix correctly states how weakening humanities weakens critical thinking, creativity, and cultural awareness, all key to a well-rounded education. Dix stresses the need to preserve these subjects to prevent societal decline.

In the area of policy studies, the social sciences and humanities, these help us to reflect deeply on the structures that uphold unjust social relations while also exploring ways that we as individuals and institutions are similarly implicated in hidden structures of power and injustice. 

To treat "workforce demands" as if they were an objective goal separate from humanities and social sciences is to suggest incorrectly that the former is "value-free" and the latter is not only "value-laden," but antithetical to the former. As students, citizens, advocates, and society, we need to push back on this as Dix eloquently states:

Whatever you think of higher education, one of its main roles is to preserve and transmit culture while adapting to and being changed by it. From libraries to classrooms, each generation of teachers and students communicates ideas and demonstrates theories that have evolved over thousands of years of civilization, now more and more including non-Western and non-white cultures. Since education isn't a zero-sum game, all of the collected wisdom and foolishness of the world comes crashing together in college. One way or another, students leave (ideally) with a greater sense of the world and who they are in it. The back and forth of educated debate is both a cause and a result of where we have come from and where we are now.

Shearing off humanities because they don't deliver the goods impoverishes every student no matter what his or her background. And it's a mistake to set up a humanities vs STEM contest either. Both are important. Anyone who's watched Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson knows that. We need all of these things, even if they aren't packed with students. Looking at them solely with a bookkeeper's gimlet eye makes no sense.

We shouldn't need a social movement to defend what is obviously an attack on core values and beliefs that uphold higher education. Yet this is what is needed in this moment. Let's unmask these legislators and their enablers who can't be straight up about actually doing all they can to pre-empt the working and middle classes, as well as the next generation's capacity to conceptualize their way to personal liberation and collectively, to a better world.

I have a B.A. in English, a Spanish minor, a master's degree in sociolinguistics, two additional master's degrees in sociology, and a Ph.D. in sociology. These have trained me to think, create, share, and store knowledge and provided me with skills and dispositions that are important to society. I know it's Texas, but I hold out that truth and wisdom will ultimately prevail over chaos and division—including, if not especially, manufactured polarization by a small group of extremists in power that seek to undermine public institutions, reversing decades of progress. 

Policy battles are important and always necessary in a democracy, but voting is too. We need to vote these extremists out of power.

Today happens to be National Voter Registration Day. You must register by October 7 to be able to vote on November 6, 2024.

-Angela Valenzuela

UT Austin ranks among worst colleges in nation for free speech, a recent survey finds

Israel-Palestine protests, censorship and scholar sanctions contribute to UT Austin's low score on free speech survey.

By Elizabeth L. T. Moore,Staff writerSep 15, 2024

In a survey of 257 colleges, UT Austin ranked 244 in the analysis from research company College Pulse and the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. DSCZ/Getty Images

A survey of college free speech ranked the University of Texas at Austin among the lowest in the nation, largely because of its response to student protests related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

UT Austin placed 244th with a "poor" speech climate in a survey of 257 colleges by the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and research company College Pulse. The ranking means a score of 23.39 out of 100.

Close to 59,000 students responded nationally to the survey between January and June of this year.

The bottom 10 ranking "followed the university preemptively calling the police to campus, presumably to prevent students from establishing an encampment," the report says.

ALSO READ: ‘Great impact’: S.A.-area schools find hard-to-hire educators by looking outside U.S.

In April, police and state troopers responded to protests in riot gear, arresting dozens of people.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was identified as “difficult to have an open and honest conversation about” by 54% of students in the nationwide survey.

In "Administrative Support," UT Austin ranks 228, and the report gave it a "yellow light" rating, indicating that the school has at least one policy that restricts protected expression.

The survey found two instances where the university experienced "efforts to censor invited speakers, artwork, film screenings, or performances." UT Austin also saw at least three "scholar sanctions," which contributed to its ranking.

Elizabeth L. T. Moore
Reporter

Elizabeth L. T. Moore is a Hearst Fellow in San Antonio. She can be reached at Elizabeth.Moore@hearst.com

Historian Heather Cox Richardson issues STUNNING WARNING about Trump

Friends:

Take a little time to listen to Historian Dr. Heather Cox Richardson speaking with Brian Tyler Cohen on what a Trump presidency would mean in light of Project 2025 and all the kinds of extreme proposals that seem so wild that they're hard to take seriously. She elaborates further that this was how Nazis were so ingenious in their approach primarily by being outrageous, exploiting the lack of an "emotional groundwork" that allows people to process this.

With a Trump presidency which means that we'll never have to vote again because, by implication, we'll have power concentrated at the top combined with a one-party state, she clearly suggests that we need to take this as their exact plan and not let him get close to our nation's highest office.

It is dangerous to have a one-party system because it literally means an overturning of democracy. It would not be helpful to the economy, politics, or society, ushering in an extended period of domestic unrest and violence with the polity having to claw back from this. 

More than Trump, Dr. Cox Richardson expresses greater concern about J.D. Vance and his billionaire "Tech Bros" that want to control the world's mining, cotton, copper, oil and by extension, the world's money supply that would have disastrous consequences for people globally, as well as the planet. 

My thoughts take me to this disheartening piece I just read in the Wall Street Journal titled, "The Texas Billionaire Who Has Greenpeace USA on the Verge of Bankruptcy Energy Transfer’s Kelcy Warren, a hypercompetitive mogul, is behind a lawsuit that could deal environmentalists a grievous blow." Geez, a country without Greenpeace is unnerving. I hope they prevail although the WSJ piece was not encouraging. 

Do learn about the promised horrors of Project 2025. I have some helpful resources on this page from an earlier blog.

Consider yourselves duly warned. The short of it is that every vote counts. 

-Angela Valenzuela

Star Historian issues STUNNING WARNING about Trump