According to my buddy Merriam-Webster, a microaggression is: “a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (such as a racial minority)”

I’m 32 years old and I’d like to think that my patience has grown with my age. This is particularly true when dealing with bad drivers, senior citizens without a filter, and waiting in slow-moving lines at the grocery store. I like learning about social justice, culture, and inclusion and I enjoy discussing these topics at length with friends and colleagues. Marriage, kids, work experience, and friends have helped me grow more patient over time. My patience has also grown when it comes to microaggressions.

Recently, I had a few microaggression incidents happen in the same week and this allowed me to reflect on older experiences. Below are events in weekday order to give readers an idea of what microaggressions can do when bunched together in a particular week:

• Monday – I meet a stranger and say, “hello” She immediately compliments me by saying, “I really like your accent.” I smile and ignore the comment (I’ve been speaking English for 25 years). I guess I have an accent? I later make a joke to a colleague about having to work on “my accent”
• Tuesday- I’m working in the east side of Michigan and I walk into a high school to meet with students. A lady greets me at the main office, shakes my hand, and looks me up and down several times. She makes it painfully obvious that she’s staring me up and down. I respond by looking her up and down in an exaggerated manner. I do this mainly sarcastically to let her know how she’s making me feel.She gives me a blank look and proceeds to point me in the right direction. In case your curious, I wear business/professional attire when making my school visits – no different than some teachers and most administrative school professionals.
• Wednesday – I’m still traveling for work and I meet a secretary at a high school. I say hello and take a seat as I wait to be directed to my presentation room. The secretary comments on my name (Salvador) and proceeds to ask the, “where are you from?” question. I tell her I’m from California and that I’ve lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan for 17 years. She follows up her question with “but where are you from?” Her interrogation would most likely end if I say that I’m Mexican but I refuse to do so (just because). I insist that I’m from California. She appears puzzled but nods, and continues about her business.
• Thursday – I go to the grocery store and buy a six pack of beer in Wayland, MI, a small town about 20 minutes away from Grand Rapids, the city where I live. The small grocery store is called Harding’s Friendly Market. The clerk in my lane is a white, older woman that looks to be pushing sixty. She asks for my identification and proceeds to look at my driver’s license very carefully. After a few moments, she says, “you’re quite a ways from home, aren’t ya?” I’m literally twenty minutes away from home. I give her a slight smile and say, “I thought this was a friendly market. You’re not very friendly.” She gives me a blank stare and proceeds to complete my transaction.
• Friday – I stop at a local gas station in Wyoming, Michigan near my home. I put the pump in the tank and go inside my vehicle to scroll through Twitter on my phone. After a couple of minutes, I hear a woman yell, “gas is spilling!” I frantically get out of my car and see gas all over the side of my car. A larger white man about my age with a shaved head is standing almost directly next to my vehicle. He has a smirk on his face and is staring at the puddle of gas by my vehicle. It appears that he had seen the gas spilling from the start. I make direct eye contact with him and in a snarky and grammatically incorrect way HE SAYS, “no fumar today amigo” or “don’t smoke today friend” I give him a dirty look and sarcastically thank him for the advice. He stares at me with a blank look on his face and doesn’t break eye contact with me as he gets into his car.

It’s hard to be patient and it only takes a bad day to lose it. It could be a long or bad day at work. Perhaps one of my daughters is sick and I’m running on three hours of sleep. Or it could be that I’ve been fighting a migraine, I’m behind on work deadlines, and I haven’t had time to go grocery shopping. You add any of these situations to a microaggression after a microaggression after a microaggression and you have an angry brown man.

My point is that the next time you run into a black or brown person, someone with a disability or from an underrepresented group and they get upset over a potential insensitive remark or action, please know that this is not the first time this person has experienced a negative comment, a bad joke, a curious question, or a snarky sarcastic comment. This happens more often than you think. So, be patient.

The 13th is a thought-provoking documentary where scholars, activists, and politicians analyze the criminalization of African Americans and the U.S. prison boom. I started taking notes during the film and I quickly realized that there is enough interesting facts, quotes, and information to write an entire blog series or book. The 13th takes its viewers through a history lesson followed by recent and current systemic issues that criminalize people of color; more specifically black people. The following are highlights that struck me as impactful while watching the film last year.

Notes, Facts and Figures

• The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners. 1 out of 4 human beings in the world are locked up in the land of the free.
• 2.23 million people are in jail up from 300,00 in 1972 – the U.S. has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. 357,292 in 1970 to be exact – 513,900 in 1980 after Nixon began the incarceration movement.  759,100 in 1985 under Reagan.  1,179,000 in 1990, 2,015,300 in 2000. Read these numbers again and let it sink in for a minute.
• After the civil war, African Americans were arrested in mass through a 13^th amendment loophole.
• Slavery ended in December 1865 but people’s rights were taken away until the Civil Rights movement. Note that slavery ended but systemic racism and oppression continued in different forms.
• Richard Nixon’s call for law and order rhetoric started the mass incarceration movement; a new form of systemic racism and oppression.
• Nixon coined the term of world on war and president Reagan turned it into a literal one. The modern world on drugs was declared by Ronald Reagan.
• Reagan ultimately takes the problem of economic inequalities of hyper segregation of American cities and criminalizes all of that in the form of the world on drugs.
• The history of interracial rape is far more marked by white men against black women that black men against white women.

“The federal crime bill of 1994 by Bill Clinton was responsible for a massive expansion of the law system. It increased funding to build prisons and put 100,000 police officers on the street. This was far more harmful than Raegan or Nixon because it built the infrastructure that we see today – the militarization, swat teams, etc.”

• Fred Hampton pulled together blacks, whites, native Americans, and Latinos – at the age of 21 and he was killed by police. They literally shot him in his bed and his pregnant wife.
• ALEC is a way for corporations to influence which laws get proposed. Stand your ground laws are examples of ways corporations made money because it boosted gun sales (i.e. Walmart).
• CCA – Corporate Corrections of America is a 1.7 billion business that gets rich off of punishment.
• SB 1070 allowed police officers to arrest immigrants based on looks. Detention facilities are prisons with a different name. Note that Donald Trump is quickly trying to bring this back.
• For corporations, business is booming. Examples of prison labor products: sports uniforms, Idaho potatoes, hats, JC Penny jeans, and Victoria Secret clothing. Let’s clarify a bit: corporations are profiting from punishment.

“97% of people that are locked up had plea bargain and that is one of the worst violations of human rights that we have in the United States. If you exercise the right to a trial, and are convicted, you will be punished more.”

• 30% of the Alabama population cannot vote due to felony convictions.

“The likelihood of white men going to prison is 1 in 17 and 1 in 3 black males during their lifetime. Black men account for 6.5% of U.S. population and make up 40.2% of the prison population. We now have more black men under criminal supervision than all the slaves back in the 1850s.”

The 13th depicts U.S. history racism and oppression through different systems that include; Slavery, Jim Crow terror and lynching, and now mass incarceration where black people are prevented from voting and are unable to find a job after prison.

Police Brutality Riots (largest in recent history)

• Rodney king, Detroit riot in 1967, Newark riot in 1967, Harlem 64, Watts 65 – every single riot was as a result of police brutality.
• There has never been a period in our history where the law and order has not acted against the African American black community. To ignore that context means you cannot have an informed debate about what is going on today.
• The murder of Emmett Till shocked the community into creating a movement. The whole black world could see what could happen. Dr. King used video and photos hoping that your basic humanity could be recognized. We are still using video and photos to attempt to shock the community and this is still a big tool to exploit police brutality and discrimination.
• Police violence is not the problem in and of itself – rather a much larger brutal system of social and racial control known as mass incarceration that authorizes this kind of police violence.

“We are the product of the history that our ancestors chose.”

The Atlantic’s Mass Incarceration visual does a great job of summing up how mass incarceration has a deep effect in the lives of our youth – particularly Black children. 1.2 million African American children with a parent who is incarcerated is about 1 in 9. Research shows that these children are then affected in many ways including; diminished school achievement, parental problems, behavioral problems, depressive symptoms, and acting out. There’s also evidence that these kind of negative effects are concentrated more with young boys than young girls.

The 13th is a powerful, well organized piece of work that forces viewers to become educated on the fact that systemic racism and discrimination continues to exist in different forms despite social and technological advances. The question isn’t whether systemic racism will end during my lifetime but rather; what new form of systemic racism will come next? The 13th asks, what’s the next phase? Perhaps the Donald Trump administration will answer this question.

 

About this blog series: This is the second blog post that explores Critical Race Theory (CRT)  as I seek to better understand race-related issues in America. My hope is that I develop a stronger understanding of both law and race relations and apply this knowledge to personal and professional projects related to inclusion and equity in my community. 

Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement begins with a foreword by Dr. Cornel West and Derrick A. Bell Jr.’s Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation. Bell’s article also breaks down the 1954 landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education and quickly moves to affirmative action and how desegregation was later used by White policymakers to obstruct the efforts to establish an equitable process that would help level the playing field for people of color.

According to Bell, the argument behind desegregating schools was that “In essence, the arguments are that blacks must gain access to white schools because “equal educational opportunity” means integrated schools, and because only school integration will make certain that black children will receive the same education as black children.” As well intended and social just as it is to desegregate schools, Bell argues that the rationale or theory behind this movement was flawed from the beginning because this theory fails to encompass the complexity of achieving equal educational opportunity for children to whom it so long has been denied (CRT Bell, 1995, pg7). Little attention was given to make black schools educational effective; furthermore, the disinclination of white parents to send their children to black schools. As true is this was back in the 70s and 80s, it remains true in 2017.

Bell cites The Detroit Case and The Atlanta Case as examples of predominantly black school districts that disagreed with desegregation over the improvement of educational quality. Parents opposed having their children bused miles away simply to abide by the desegregation laws backed by the NAACP. In the Atlanta Case, lawyers for the local NAACP branch, worked out a compromise that led to the hiring of a number of blacks in top administrative positions, including a black superintendent of schools. At the time, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, one of the most respected black educators in the country, stated:

“Black people must not resign themselves to the pessimistic view that a non-integrated school cannot provide Black children with an excellent educational setting. Instead, Black people, while working to implement Brown, should recognize that integration alone does not provide a quality education, and that much of the substance of quality education can be provided to Black children in the interim.” (CRT, 2015)

Dr. Mays’s thoughtful statement made it clear that racial separation is only the most obvious manifestation of this subordination and that there is still a lot of work to be done to assure that all students, including black students, receive high quality education. Sadly, Bell’s argument and the lack of progress in developing high quality education in addition to the Brown decision is still true in 2017. Black schools are still provided with unequal and inadequate school resources and black parents are excluded from meaningful participation in school policy-making and this is as least as damaging to black children as enforced separation.

Michigan has school choice and some would argue that this has accelerated segregation by race, by class, by ability, by special education status, and by language. Detroit is a perfect example that school of choice is simply not the answer. More than 2,900 students using school of choice leave East Detroit (2015 figures). Most head out of the districts that were far whiter than East Detroit, which saw the white population of its schools fall from 50 percent to 18.6 percent from 2009 to 2015 (Michigan Department of Education).

Despite the work that was done during the civil rights era, what came of Brown, and other victories, we have simply not done enough to educate Black children. W.E.B. Du Bois’ words are sadly still accurate, despite having him remind us of our reality back in 1935. Bell reminds us of this in Serving Two Masters by using a quote from Du Bois:

The Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education. What he remembers is that there is no magic, either in mixed schools or in segregated schools. A mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of truth concerning black folk, is bad. A segregated school with ignorant placeholders, inadequate equipment, poor salaries, and wretched housing, is equally bad. Other things being equal, the mixed school is the broader, more natural basis for the education of all youth. It gives wider contacts, it inspires greater self-confidence; and suppresses the inferiority complex. But other things seldom are equal, an in that case, Sympathy, Knowledge, and the Truth, outweigh all that the mixed school can offer (W.E.B. Du Bois, 1935).

Both W.E.B. Du Bois and Derrick Bell understood that the desegregation of schools was a component that would move our society towards a more inclusive and equal space but they  were both aware that this was only a step towards equity and that society needs to work and strive for equal funding, equal salaries, and equal neighborhoods. We have yet to listen to Bell and Du Bois and 50 years later, we are still separate and still unequal.

I don’t particularly care for New Year resolution plans but one of my goals in 2017 is to become more knowledgeable about Critical Race Theory (CRT). I have read articles but I’ve never truly explored the legal components of CRT and the impact of law in race discussions. This is the beginning of a CRT blog series where I’ll share CRT findings and how the theory is applicable in my community in Michigan. President Trump has declared that he plans enforce the United States laws and I figure now is as good a time as any to educate myself on law, race, and social justice in America.

I’m currently reading Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement edited by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil T. Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas. The book offers a compilation of scholarly articles that presented new paradigms for understanding racial injustice and seeing the links between race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Mexigander was founded on the idea that we all have multiple identities that are intertwined and Critical Race Theory scholars like Kimberle Crenshaw set the foundation and historical context that has helped me think critically about how I can contribute solutions to race issues that have been prominent in America for hundreds of years.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) research is a compilation of the growing body of legal scholarship related to the importance of race in law. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (1995), briefly explains CRT in the following two points:

• CRT first seeks to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America, and in particular, to examine the relationship between that social structure and professional ideals such as the “rule of law” and “equal protection.”
• CRT research and writings desires to not merely understand the vexed bond between law and racial power but to change

This blog series will continue to explore CRT articles by starting with the civil rights movement and how some of the struggles that existed during the 60’s and 70’s are still very prevalent in 2017.

 

My latest project was being a part of the organizing committee for Grand Valley State University’s first Latin@ Graduation Celebración where student graduates were honored while joined by their families, friends and loved ones. It was inspiring to listen to students come up to the stage to thank their parents, mentors, and friends.

GVSU had over 3,000 students graduate this winter semester and over 240 of the students self-identify as Latino/a. There are over 25,000 students at Grand Valley and Latin@ students compose 4.6% of the population. This is truly a milestone for many students that are first generation college graduates.

A big thank you goes out to the Grand Valley State University Latin@ Faculty and Staff Affinity group, the Office of Multicultural Affairs, and the Division of Inclusion & Equity for making this happen. This is only the beginning!

Congratulations graduates!

My latest project includes being a part of the fundraising committee for Advocates for Latino Student Advancement in Michigan Education (ALSAME). The fundraiser will take place at the UICA in downtown Grand Rapids on April 15th at 5pm.

Our goal is to raise funds that will support Latino/a students through scholarships. Tickets are $50 at the door or you can pay online through Eventbrite. We will have El Granjero Mexican Grill food, agua de horchata, limonada and desserts. Cocktails will be available for purchase and live music will be playing until 10pm.

Join us for a night of networking, good eating, and a few drinks while making a difference in the lives of Latino/a youth. The flyer below was designed by yours truly; spread the word!