By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez
In a previous column, I used the term CULTURAL GENOCIDE to describe the attempt by the state of Arizona to criminalize and to eliminate the teaching of Ethnic Studies. The use of the term unnecessarily set off a firestorm across the Atlantic. Incidentally, the similar attempt to destroy native cultures in the Americas in a previous era was called: REDUCCION. The term may not have been controversial, but the dehumanizing practice certainly was.

Perhaps its time to set off another firestorm, a necessary one this time. This effort has now devolved into an attempt by an APARTHEID school governing board in Tucson, Arizona to eliminate Mexican American Studies via a thousand bureaucratic cuts. The use of the term Apartheid is not used lightly; it is what we are up against in this historic Indigenous city in our battle to defend Ethnic Studies.

Admittedly, the term cannot be accurately used in relation to Arizona’s draconian anti-Mexican, anti-immigration-related and anti-Indigenous laws (racial profiling). Apartheid is a system of legalized discrimination by a minority upon a majority (South Africa’s former system of oppression). In Arizona, people of Mexican origin are still a minority, comprising approximately 30 percent of the state’s population, and growing. Because these laws have the same intent, it can perhaps more aptly be described as pre-apartheid.

The State’s effort to eliminate Ethnic Studies also qualifies as pre-apartheid, though the percentage of White students in Arizona schools is already less than 50 percent. The statewide Mexican American K-12 population is approximately 40 percent and growing daily. On the other hand, the term Apartheid is arguably accurate when describing the internal effort by the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) to degrade and essentially terminate its highly successful Mexican American Studies (MAS) program, especially considering the state’s political climate.

Rather than contest the constitutionality of HB 2281, TUSD’s board has elected to comply with the new anti-Ethnic Studies measure, which was signed on May 11, 2010, even though on that day, TUSD affirmed that the TUSD program was already in compliance (Supporters of the program locally are calling for a national day of convergence on Tucson May 11, 2011 in support of Ethnic Studies).

While this board should be contesting this law, instead it is rushing to what appears to be an effort to dismantle MAS-TUSD from within. The obvious question is: who is this board representing? For the record, the district superintendent is white, as are three members of the governing board. Two members are Mexican Americans. TUSD’s K-12 student body is close to 70% Mexican American and at least 75% students of color. TUSD’s K-6 is close to 80% Mexican American and growing. Unquestionably, the community that TUSD serves is not being adequately represented. At each meeting, while board members don’t always vote according to their race/ethnicity, it becomes more and more obvious; students, parents and community members (majority brown) are forced to literally beg the board for support. Like overlords, the board members “listen,” but never comment.

In the past few months, critics have resorted to voodoo statistics to claim that MAS is not in fact a successful program. Statistics recently released by TUSD’s statistician does in fact confirm that its MAS students district-wide do substantially better than students not enrolled in the program.

Playlist: Exposing Republican Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Hispanic Bigots

Playlist: Gov. Jan Brewer’s Apartheid Arizona

Despite this, the effort to dismantle the program continues. Recently, the superintendent has moved the program (and its directors) under a bureaucrat who is openly hostile to the besieged MAS program. It has next moved to designate MAS classes as unaccredited elective courses, which has the effect of dismantling the program. This move is imminent. Additionally, the state has ordered a curricular audit by a firm that specializes in turning around failing programs. MAS-TUSD graduates more than 90 percent of its students, this at a time when dropout rates nationwide for students of color range between 40-60 percent (The firm is not auditing any of the state’s many failing programs). On top of this, a financial audit has also been ordered by TUSD. To shut the nails on the coffin, the program’s highly acclaimed summer transformative educator’s conference — 12 years running — is now history.

Despite all these attacks, Mexican American Studies is not dead; the HB 2281 lawsuit against the state by 11 educators is moving forward. Also, the transformative conference will still be held this summer, with nationally and internationally acclaimed speakers, but independent of the TUSD. And the program continues to gather support; this past month, it received unanimous endorsements from the annual conferences of the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies and the National Association of Ethnic Studies.

Because the attempt to eliminate Tucson’s MAS program comes falsely wrapped as an effort to achieve Martin Luther King’s dream of achieving a color-blind society — in the state that was last to recognize the MLK holiday — people everywhere recognize the importance of defending this program. After 40+ years of harassment, the discipline will be defended in the desert. Yet people everywhere also understand that this isn’t simply a debasement of King’s dream or simply an attack against Ethnic Studies, but that it is an effort to destroy the very precept of education itself. If uncontested, what’s next? Women Studies? European Studies?

Once government is in the position to decide what is acceptable curriculum and what are acceptable books, then the right to a free and uncensored education will have been compromised. This is the true specter of BIG GOVERNMENT. In Tucson, it comes wrapped in APARTHEID.

(SPECIAL-LENGTH FINAL COLUMN OF THE AMERICAS)

   By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez
How do you end a column after 16 years? With regrets and unfulfilled dreams? Perhaps, but truthfully, Column of the Americas as a deadline-based column ends with even bigger dreams.

There indeed is disappointment with the ease in which the U.S. populace has accepted and normalized 1) the notion of permanent war as a God-given U.S. birthright; 2) the further militarization of the nation & world; 3) the politics of fear, hate and blame; and 4) Big Brother Government. All with nary a whimper.

Under George W. Bush, this was not surprising. The disappointment has come in seeing the Obama administration generally embrace the reactionary policies of Bush’s 9-11 Nation. Despite the 2006 & 2008 electoral sweeps – in which the electorate thoroughly repudiated the Republican program of war, xenophobia and corporate welfare – [angry] conservatives act as though they won. The irony is that president Obama actually has governed as though he agrees, and owes them. For example, his health care reform is actually a centrist compromise; universal health care it is not.

There are regrets; while many of us drove CNN’s Lou Dobbs into political exile, we didn’t consistently go after the entertainment industry – an industry that enables dehumanization and what amounts to racial apartheid. During this era, Jay Leno made Americans comfortable laughing nightly at “illegal aliens.” After 35 years, Saturday Night Live has still not taken its “No Red-Brown comedians need apply” signs down, and Spanish-language TV continues to generally be an assortment of “all-blonde” networks.

Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez and Patrisia Gonzales, Ph.D

Another regret is that the journalism profession has now become the lapdog of government.

Even now, there’s plenty of money for invading, occupying and bombing nations, but little for health and education.

While pols are seemingly unaware of this jarring equation, media lapdogs are nowadays handsomely rewarded for being consistently wrong and/or silent.

Enough on these failings.

The bigger dreams involve ceasing writing reactively and writing from a point of creation. Column writing is necessarily reactive; I’ve been writing about human/Indigenous rights, anti-immigrant hysteria and U.S.-support of brutal military dictatorships since 1972. And now, with a president lying us into Iraq, the instinct is to counter. The same holds true when society unabashedly scapegoats brown peoples, and treats migrants as disposable populations; witness the March 21 rally in Washington D.C. More than demanding reform, it was a demand by more than 100,000 marchers to treat migrants as full human beings. While the president’s centrist approach to immigration reform places a heavy emphasis on draconian enforcement, conservatives will interpret human rights for migrants and “the path to legalization” as nothing short of “freeing the slaves” and a cause for insurrection.

Simply creating, without countering is akin to burying one’s head in the sand. But there comes a time when always responding means always reacting – rarely creating. But because of permanent war, my focus as a writer lately, has become heavily tiled towards resistance. The creation element of who I am has suffered (this is true of most people). It’s time for balance, thus a time to create.

Through the years, I’ve been exposed to great maestros/maestras and great Tlamintini – great teachers – who have shared their knowledge and Huehuetlahtolli (ancient guidances) about what it means to be human. Hereafter, I want to continue with those traditions and contribute to the definition of what it means to be human.

In discontinuing the column, I take no pleasure in hereafter writing strictly for an academic audience. It goes against who I am. I’ve always written for mass audiences, including writing Column of the Americas since 1994 for more than 100 newspapers nationwide. For the first 12 years, it was co-written as a weekly, syndicated column with my wife, Patrisia Gonzales, for Chronicle Features, then Universal Press Syndicate (Her Patzin column is slated to return). In writing for the academy, the audience is much smaller and narrower, while jargon is the preferred means of communication. It’s not naturally conducive for storytelling. Even beyond that, the acceptable experts continue to be “the usual suspects.”

I will continue to assert that if our own aunts and uncles, parents, grandparents, neighbors and other elders – whom we used to quote frequently – can’t understand our own writing, then what good did all our years of schooling accomplish?

As such, I plan to continue to make public the knowledge that has been passed on to me via elder knowledge – in forthcoming essays and columns and academic and non-academic books. I look forward to the day when I will not have to write for two separate audiences.

I also look forward to the day when we as a society have finally eliminated war as a “solution” to anything, and when society ceases to divide human beings into legal and illegal categories. I am convinced that even the most conservative of conservatives don’t either want such a society. I look forward to the day when we can all truly say: San Ce Tojuan – Nosotros Somos Uno – We Are One.

It’s not something that comes about solely through dreaming. One has to imagine it, fight for it, and then live it.

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You change my way of writing, you change my way of thinking. You change my way of thinking, you change who I am.
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MediaMatters: Lou Dobbs’ coverage of the phony controversy surrounding President Obama’s birth certificate ran afoul of CNN president Jon Klein, who sent a memo to Dobbs’ staff telling them to knock it off with all the “birther” stories. This apperently enraged “Mr. Independent,” who was given a choice — stick to news on TV and leave the garbage for your radio show, or quit CNN. Apparently, the bigot chose what he is most comfortable with — LIES, BIGOTRY and ANTI-IMMIGRANT XENOPHOBIA. [ READ MORE ]

Notes: The New York times reports that months ago the president of CNN/U.S., Jonathan Klein, offered a choice to Lou Dobbs, the channel’s most outspoken anchor. Mr. Dobbs could vent his opinions on radio and anchor an objective newscast on television, or he could leave CNN. [ READ MORE ]

The Week in Which Lou Dobbs Got Fired Reviewed

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From DropDobbs.com: Over the years, Lou Dobbs has consistently used his CNN platform to spread hatred and fear. He has promoted the work of hate groups, spread racially charged conspiracy theories including about President Obama’s birth certificate, railed against “ethnocentric special interests,” and accused the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of being sympathetic to “Mexico’s export of drugs and illegal aliens.” When advertisers sponsor Lou Dobbs, this is what they are paying for: [ READ MORE ]

Lou Dobbs’ History of Anti-Immigrant Bigotry, Hate and Obama Bashing

Over the years, Lou Dobbs’s anti-immigrant campaign has been very similar to that conducted against Jews by Dr. Joseph Goebbels — “Minister for Public Enlightenment & Propaganda in Nazi Germany.”

Consider the following scenarios: (from LouDobbsRadio.NET)

1.   In Nazi Germany Jews were scapegoated as the source of Germany’s economic woes. In the United States, Lou Dobbs has insinuated repeatedly that the economic troubles of the “middle class” is a direct result of U.S. jobs being exported overseas and by extension – immigrants are either stealing jobs from “middle class” directly and/or driving down wages. There is some truth in the “wage” element of this assertion, but without bothering to explain the “mechanics” of this claim, Lou’s over simplification results in “uninformed” contempt by his viewers of immigrants in general.

2.   In Nazi Germany, audiences were continually reminded of the struggle of the Nazi Party and Germany against foreign enemies and internal enemies, especially Jews. In the present United States, Lou Dobbs always reminds his audience, that millions of foreigners and criminal illegal immigrants are running rampant in the United States, quite contrary to official statistics. He often invites “white-supremacists” and demagogue politicians from racially intolerant constituencies, as analysts and commentators in his shows — while denouncing civil rights groups such as the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center as “despicable” and “reprehensible.” The few pro-immigrant guests invited to Mr. Dobbs’ shows are routinely scolded and lambasted for their stance. To stir the pot further, Mr. Dobbs’ always ends his TV shows with un-scientific impromptu polls, that are always skewed and probably doctored — maliciously presented as the view of the majority.

3.    Propagandists lauded Germany as the sole defender of what they called “Western European culture” against the “Bolshevist hordes(Russians).” In his highly touted town hall meetings (a few years ago), the issue of English as an official language came up — the fear that English will be “replaced,” by the Spanish language [...a subliminal insinuation that the white Anglo-Saxon culture in being contaminated] has been used repeatedly by Lou Dobbs and co., to drive fear up the spines of Americans.

4.   Jews in Nazi Germany were branded as disease carriers, contaminants of the pure German race — a few years ago, Lou Dobbs and despite being confronted with undisputed evidence to the contrary, maintained his claim that there have been 7,000 new cases of leprosy in the U.S. in recent years attributing the increase to “unscreened illegal immigrants.” Such irresponsible utterances in mainstream media, only help to embolden hate groups — who gather often to keep the ‘Cradle of the Confederacy‘ safe from leprosy, pedophiles, Spanish and rampant godlessness.

[ Read More ] [ Visit LouDobbsRadio.NET ] [ A collection of Lou Dobbs' Most Scandalous Moments ] [ BastaDobbs.com -- We are thrilled that Dobbs no longer has this legitimate platform from which to incite fear and hate ] [ Presente.ORG -- Seeking to strengthen the political voice of Latino communities ] [ Relentless Pressure from Progressive Groups Pushes Hatemonger Lou Dobbs Out of CNN ]

Dobbs and guest Jeffrey Lord suggest DropDobbs.com campaign is an effort “to stifle debate“

Flogging “political correctness,” Dobbs guest Jeffrey Lord links criticism of Dobbs to Fort Hood massacre

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Part 1

Part 2

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