Monica Muñoz Martinez, Public Historian | 2021 MacArthur Fellow

So happy for, and proud of, my colleague and University of Texas History professor, Dr. Monica Muñoz Martinez who just won the MacArthur genius grant. Her work helps rescue the memories from an earlier time of vicious lynchings of Mexicans that she accurately regards as "state-sanctioned racial terror against Mexicans in the early 20th century."

This award is so important at a time when our Texas State Legislature wants to keep our students from knowing the uncomfortable and inconvenient truths about the past. This award and recognition, in effect, "talks back" to this white supremacist racial project that intends to keep our K-12 youth from knowing the truths of history.

As per my earlier post this morning, Dr. Muñoz Martinez' work sheds light on racial logics undergirding current violence we are witnessing against our community today. 

Thank you for your life-saving work and a big c

ongratulations for your hard-earned efforts

! What an outstanding honor!

Congratulations!!! Felicidades!!!

-Angela Valenzuela

Racial Violence Historian Awarded ‘Genius Grant’ by MacArthur Foundation

Monica Muñoz Martinez, Public Historian, 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Austin, TX. Photo by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

USTIN, Texas — Monica Muñoz Martinez, a historian at The University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded a MacArthur fellowship, often referred to as the “genius grant.” The award recognizes her work to recover untold histories of racial violence along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Martinez is one of 25 individuals selected for the five-year fellowship — a no-strings-attached, $625,000 “investment in a person’s originality, insight and potential.” Recipients are nominated based on proven talent and extraordinary originality and dedication to their creative pursuits.

Martinez’s research and public history projects bring long-obscured cases of racial violence along the Texas-Mexico border to the forefront so communities can reckon with their past and work toward racial healing. Her work combines traditional archival research with oral histories and memorabilia from victims’ descendants to piece together a fuller picture of the past and transform modern narratives.

“People have a right to learn truthful accounts of history in schools, museums, the news and popular culture, even when those histories are troubling,” said Martinez, an associate professor in the Department of History. “This is especially important when lessons of the past can help inspire a more inclusive and equitable future.”

To amplify her research, Martinez wrote an award-winning book, “The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas,” in which she recounts a period of state-sanctioned racial terror against Mexicans in the early 20th century. She co-founded the public history nonprofit Refusing to Forget to increase public awareness of these events through museum exhibits and curricular materials and by placing historical markers in areas where such killings took place.

Her current project builds on her previous work by establishing the first national record of racist violence to recount lesser-known lynchings, homicides, policing shootings, bombings, physical assault and community banishment.

“Dr. Martinez’s work as a scholar and public historian is a shining example of rigorous, engaged scholarship in the humanities,” said Ann Huff Stevens, dean of the College of Liberal Arts. “Her careful research into the history of racial and ethnic violence comes at a time when society continues to wrestle with the past and work toward a better future. Her brilliance, engagement with the community, and the accessibility of her work are all tributes to Dr. Martinez and to the role of public research institutions.”

Martinez is one of nine UT Austin faculty members to have been awarded MacArthur Foundation fellowships: Livia Schiavinator Eberlin (Chemistry, 2018), Jacqueline Jones (History, 1999), David Hillis (Integrative Biology, 1999), Nancy Moran (Integrative Biology, 1997), Nora C. England (Linguistics, 1993), Philip Uri Treisman (Mathematics, 1992), Thomas G. Palaima (Classics, 1985) and Karen K. Uhlenbeck (Mathematics, 1983).

 

I remember when I was around 4 years old finding my grandfather's gun.  I remember feeling excited about it, taking it out of its case, and going to show my little sister who was about a year old at the time.  Thankfully, my grandfather caught us and took it away from me and hid it so that I never came across it again in his home.  I shudder to think of what could have happened.  And I shudder to contemplate the lives that these young people must lead who accidentally shot or killed siblings and loved ones because of their parents' negligence.  

Relatedly, check out this June 19, 2017 CNN.com story titled, Guns kill nearly 1,300 US children each year, Study says, that elaborates trends more fully.

A sense of proportion is necessary.  Toddlers and home shootings and deaths are a much more serious problem than terrorists. We desperately need greater gun control in this country to save us from ourselves.

-Angela Valenzuela

Trump fears terrorists, but more Americans are shot dead by toddlers

Gary Younge | The Guardian 

Gun deaths – intentional, accidental and self-inflicted – dwarf those related to terror. The talk is of secure borders but within the US many live in a state of fear

 ‘An American is at least twice as likely to be shot dead by a toddler than killed by a terrorist.’ Photograph: Gilles Mingasson/Getty Images

Shortly before leaving America for Britain, after 12 years as a correspondent, the relative of one of my son’s friends politely declined my invitation to visit us in London.

“I don’t think I could go to Europe,” she said. “It doesn’t seem safe.”

Try as I might I could not suppress a laugh. My wife and children are African American. I am British. We were living in Chicago.

“The odds of you being shot dead here are far greater than of you being killed in a terrorist attack over there.”

When the president uses his executive powers to ban more than 200 million people from entering America, ostensibly in the interests of security, and then, in the same week, the House of Representatives relaxes background checks for gun ownership, one is compelled to question the sense of proportionality when it comes to security. Whom do they intend to keep safe? By what means? And at what price to liberty?

Let us leave aside for the moment the fact that since 9/11 not a single American has been killed in a terrorist attack by a citizen from the countries on this list. The reality is that an American is at least twice as likely to be shot dead by a toddler than killed by a terrorist. In 2014 88 Americans were shot dead, on average, every day: 58 killed themselves while 30 were murdered. In that same year 18 Americans were killed by terrorist attacks in the US. Put more starkly: more Americans were killed by firearms roughly every five hours than were killed by terrorists in an entire year. It is unlikely that scrapping a rule requiring extended background checks for gun purchases by some social security recipients suffering from mental illness will improve the situation.

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(To hide behind the mantra “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is an act of fallacious sophistry. Toasters don’t make toast, people make toast. True. But toasters exist to make toast: guns exist to kill people.)

One need not downplay the importance of terrorism here. Terrorism is not only murderous. In its ability to spread anxiety and undermine democratic engagement with violence it is also deeply reactionary. Rather than galvanising people around a cause it divides them in the crudest manner possible – on the basis of fear. That’s as true when America kills innocent civilians. But the fear most Americans experience daily isn’t imported – it’s home grown. That’s true across the board, but particularly true for some minorities. Every day seven children and teens are shot dead in the US. Firearms are the biggest killer of young black people and the second biggest killer of all children, after traffic accidents. When the new US education secretary, Betsy DeVos, suggests schools might need guns to protect themselves from grizzly bears, she’s clearly not capable of gauging the real threat to American children.

While researching my book about all the young people who were killed on one random day – 23 November 2013 – every single parent of a black teenager who lost a child that day that I interviewed said they assumed this might happen to their kid. “I didn’t think it would be him,” said one mother. “I thought it would be his brother.” “You wouldn’t be doing your job as a father if you didn’t,” said another.

Doriane Miller is a primary-care physician who practises on Chicago’s South Side, where one teen was killed that day. Dr Miller noticed a significant number of young black patients arriving with psychosomatic symptoms – many also had tattoos bearing the names and dates of loved ones who had been lost to gun violence. When she tried to talk to them about it they shut down.

“There was that sense that this is the way it is in my life and in my community,” she said. “There is a learned hopelessness around this. And so you suck it up, you man up, and you move on.”

Many of the areas where these young people live, and die, look like war zones – empty lots, half-demolished houses, depleted infrastructure, militarised policing, potholed roads, boarded-up houses, abandoned churches. But more importantly, they are experienced as such. People (mostly young men) disappear – either to prison or to the grave – leaving a huge gender imbalance. Times are hard, and the informal economy is rife, meaning there are spivs everywhere making an ostentatious display of their wealth. The one major difference is that whereas wars often cement communities as people band together against a “common enemy,” in these areas the enemy is everywhere and, potentially, anyone.

These, too, are Americans. They too deserve security. Indeed it is a nonsense to talk about securing the borders from the outside world if many of those who live within those selfsame borders continue to live in a state of constant fear.

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Many of those who insist that, when it comes to terror, one must balance individual rights against collective security, become curiously silent when it comes to adapting their interpretation of the right to bear arms to the issue of public safety.

In 2002 I interviewed the late Maya Angelou about her views on the 9/11 terror attacks. “Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America,” she told me. “But black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.”

If the current administration applied just half the zeal to making sure all people in the country feel included and safe as they do to making sure some outside of it feel excluded and anxious, the impact on Americans’ sense of security would be repaid exponentially.

After a judge blocked the Muslim ban over the weekend Trump said that if there was another terrorist attack America should blame him. Between me writing this article and you reading it the chances are another child will be shot dead. Whom, I wonder, should we blame for that?

• Gary Younge is the author of Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of 10 Short Lives

Powerful piece by Max Berger.  Here's where anti-racist education should be able to make a big difference.  Select quotes from within:

 The emergence of fascism has always depended upon democracy’s failure. The growing proto-fascist, white-supremacist movement in the Republican Party is preying upon non-rich white people who are literally dying of despair, turning to drugs and suicide to deal with a reality they can’t bear, and a society they believe doesn’t care for them. Over the past 15 years, the death rate for white men has actually increased — an unprecedented rise in modern times that’s comparable to the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. White people are right that they are under attack — they’re just pointing to the wrong culprits. For the wealthy elite who fund the political operatives and media companies that tell white people who to blame for their plight, the race war is a very useful substitute for the class war. 

I have come to believe the fears of white Americans are really just reflections of the things that white supremacy and empire have done to others. White America has not been terrorized by people of color; we have terrorized people of color. Black wealth is not based on stealing from white people; white wealth is based on stealing from black people. Instead of confronting the reality of our history and what our country has become for most people, too many Americans would rather kill those mourning their dead and send orphans and widows to a hellscape we created — all in order to preserve the myths of whiteness, masculinity, and empire.

 I have to imagine the white men who commit these egregious acts of terror do so out of a silent, personal fear that the myths of whiteness and masculinity engender in themselves. The dehumanization white supremacists perpetrate on others has to be, in part, a projection of the dehumanization they feel themselves. The sad men that hang out on 4chan plotting the destruction of innocent others don’t believe they can be the strong, virile, white male dominators they are prescribed to be. No one who feels good about themselves talks as much as Donald Trump does about how he is a “winner” and other people are “losers.” No one who is confident of their humanity would deny acceptance to a 5-year-old orphan refugee.

And yet, these white, American men are taught they must be silent in considering their fear, because to even admit they feel it would be to undo the myths of whiteness and masculinity they cling to.

-Angela

 How to Understand White Male Terrorism

We’ve been here before, and we know that violent backlash is at its fiercest when movements for racial and gender justice are winning.

By Max Berger

November 30, 2015

Police lead suspected shooter Dylann Roof, 21, into the courthouse in Shelby, North Carolina, June 18, 2015. Roof, a 21-year-old with a criminal record, is accused of killing nine people at a Bible-study meeting in a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina. (Reuters / Jason Miczek)