By Dr. Chris A. Heidelberg III, Publisher & Producer
Do you know why so many people in America especially people of color are so angry that they can't hear what key lawmakers are saying? These folks are upset and cannot hear Governor Jan Brewer's words! Why? The governor's actions shout so loudly that she just doesn't get it and neither does State School Chief, Tom Horne!
Yesterday, Gov. Brewer signed a bill targeting a school district's ethnic studies program. State School Chief, Tom Horne refers to courses specializing in African American, Mexican American and Native Americans as just as bad as racist programs in the segregated South. What? But wait there is more! Specifically, Mr. Horne stated to the AP, " It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it." Wow! The citizens of the good state of Arizona actually elected this guy twice? My first question about Mr. Horne is where did this fellow study education, and what is his educational research area? Guess what Chip, this guy is one of yours: an attorney- educated at Harvard. He really could use an earned doctoral degree in education to get some of the litigator out of him and some of the nurturing educator in him because educational research is not the law and not necessarily driven by precedent. Quality education is driven by innovation, research and the willingness to learn new things and to challenge the status quo by listening to the people at the bottom because their views, feelings and history are just as important part of history as Anglo history because it is all American history. Anglos need to stop trying to homogenize people of color! Historically, it has been fought tooth and nail by everyone from Native Americans, to Chinese workers in the West to Blacks and Hispanics in the south and the west. Yet Anglos still do not understand why so many Anglos are angry.
Harvard is a great school, and has educated some pretty smart folks, but letting an attorney without an earned doctorate in education act as the state's point man on secondary education says a lot about why Horne pushed for years to get rid of a Mexican-American studies program because it teaches Latino students that they are oppressed by white people. Horne seems more interested in making political points to win higher office than getting data from the students and families on how they feel about these programs. Mr. Horne, this is not about you or your political ideology or even mine, it is about these children and obtaining some "buy in" from these children and their parents into the system and into America. Stop quoting Dr. King's "content of character" line because it makes you look like a stereotypical ill-informed person about people of color: Dr. King said one day! He did not say next week, next year, next month or today: he said one day! One day in historical terms often takes decades or centruries! Too many well meaning people adopt this idealist view without thinking about the very time that we live in today! One cannot go to from points A through Z without going points B through Y! Before we can ever deal with Dr. King's Utopian ideal, we still have to deal with the reality of today that literally took at least 400 years to form. We are obviously somewhere between the beginning and the middle of the alphabet based on the fact that we are still having to deal with laws that resemble some of the Black codes of over 100 years ago. Too many Anglos, and some minorities too, use the old "content of character" line to justify bias whether they realize it or not, and they need to start getting called on it! Unfortunately, we are not at that " one day" and Anglo action that is unilateral and forced will not get the desired change but will get passive resistance that you will never see regardless of any data you may obtain to say that this new law has worked. If you think the Tea Party folks are upset, you should get with groups of Blacks, Asians, and Latinos and listen to how they feel about laws and approaches like this.
This tactic of using the "content of character" line has not worked, and in fact it is often viewed as a code word by people of color. The simple truth is that people of color view the governor and you, Mr. Horne, as the enemy, and unfortunately as people with major racial issues. Stop using the old conservative mantra that the victim is now the racist, it makes you, the governor and the state of Arizona look bad and you and the governor are better than this, so stop playing this game! Remember, the true racists have the power to back up their prejudices through sheer numbers, economic power, social pressure and brute force. Everyone has prejudices, but few have power! In this nation, it is obvious that Anglos have had the sheer numbers, economic power, social pressure and the use of brute force when needed to maintain the social order. So let's be clear, real racism is when one can exercise one's prejudice en masse. The sheer numbers of Hispanics and their growing economic and social power is clearly making some people very nervous and afraid in places all over the country. This is just not about undocumented or illegal Hispanics, the Hispanic citizens whose lineage preceeded the Mayflower in places like Sante Fe, San Antonio, and Florida have been unfairly sucked into this equation simply because of their physical appearance and sometimes their dialects or accents. When people who have been historically discriminated against are having major problems with your new laws and policies you should be very concerned especially since you cannot prove what you assert, but former students like me can say that courses like this worked for me and a group of my friends who are now very well educated. Listen! Stop ordering folks around because you can! Listen to all of the people that you claim to serve! Listen to their fears and not your own because that is what real leaders do! Heavy handed tactics often have the boomerang effect, and this will not be good for America.
As an African American with Native American, Anglo, Asian and Hispanic lineage in my background, I am always entertained when well meaning Anglos attempt to tell me how I am thinking and how I am feeling based on a program designed to help racial minorities. You noticed that I said entertained, and yes I am laughing out loud because it clearly demonstrates that these folks just don't get it! You have never been a person of color for one second in your life and you cannot understand what it means unless you have lived with the reality and the scary moments that often accompany being a person of color in this society that has a bad history that legally ended in the mid 60's but was not established firmly until the 1970's. You cannot undo 300 plus years of extremely bad treatment of people with 40 years of better treatment that still has way too many ugly episodes. Affirmative action was started in the early 70's and was already disabled by the early 80's and both at the hands of Republicans. Welfare was largely utilized in the 1960s to assist Blacks and the poor by Democrats, but instead it became one of the worst injuries ever inflicted on Blacks and the poor in this nation and was radically reformed by Democrats at political gunpoint by House and Senate Republicans. Some Anglos just don't get it and people of color see through this and other tactics being used to keep them in their place. It takes time to really look in the mirror from a historic perspective. Some, not all and not most, Anglos want to spend as much time learning and talking about the real history of America and the contributions of people of color as a motorist in an empty drive through line, a man getting paternity results from Maury Povich from a woman that he is not dating, and that dreaded trip to the dentist office for root canal. Simply put, they would rather die or opt out rather than learn the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth from multiple perspectives. Maybe this is part of the reason so many neighborhoods and public school systems are more segregated now than during the 1960's? I say make mandatory public service or military service the law of the land so that people from different places can get past their parents and elders because this form of ignorance is reprehensible in the Twenty first century.
This is dangerous ignorance and it not only needs to stop, it has to stop in order for Arizona and the nation to move forward successfully, but it cannot and will not happen until some Anglos in critical leadership positions in Arizona and America can learn to listen to the minorities and enable all Americans to learn that they had a role in the building of this great nation. As one scholar said to me today, Arizona has pulled back the covers, and exposed a bunch of sheets that we can now see in broad daylight and other states are doing the same thing too! An Anglo can't tell someone of color how they feel when their history books ignore, minimize or only tell part of the contributions of people of color. I challenge anyone willing to learn about history and foreign born leaders to come to the Smithsonian and go online and read what Thomas Jefferson and his supporters, the liberals, used to say about Alexander Hamilton and his supporters, the conservatives. The result was a Bill of Rights with a concession to the Madison and the Jeffersonian wings with a strong national government and the capitalist economic system. Interestingly enough, folks who didn't like each other actually worked together to create something? Yes, it was a little thing called The Federalist Papers that advocated the adopting of The Constitution by the states and it had support from across the aisles from people who literally hated each other even those who died on the same, July 4th, in the cases of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Sorry my Anglo brothers who share the mindset of Mr. Horne, you just don't get it; you never have; you never will and that is the point! I am not angry about it, I get it! We are all products of our environment, and it is very difficult to rise above the heard and tell your own folks that they are wrong for feeling and voting a certain way, but educated leaders of substance do it. Sam Houston, the founder of Texas, stood for right during the run up to the Civil War. Lyndon Johnson did it by going after the Klan and Richard Nixon did it by establishing Affirmative Action. Real leaders are often hated in their time for doing thing or standing up for the right thing when it was unpopular. In hindsight, these things that these historic figures did was sheer genious in retrospect. In 15 or 30 years when the Hispanics are the majority in Arizona and nationwide, I can guarantee that folks like Mr. Horne will be extremely upset and cry revisionism when programs that promote what Hispanics view as part of white dominance are made illegal by the stroke of a pen. Mr. Horne was never a Black man in the deep South during the Civil Rights era or even post Civil Rights era, so he absolutely has no clue as to what he is talking about and he is spouting dangerous rhetoric that is devoid of facts and experience. However, my grandfather, father, uncles and older cousins told me stories of being terrorized, followed and detained while traveling. I even witnessed them being stopped by a few rogue cops and by citizens with unenlightened viewpoints while driving and walking in certain areas as a child. What made it worse was that my grandfather could pass as white and often had to do it to help other Blacks during that time and he absolutely hated it! He was treated differently unless he claimed he was Black and "Reds" often had to take one for the team so to speak to make sure that folks kids got medicine, clothing or other things during segregation. I got a tiny taste of what the older men told me when I had the experience of being the Jackie Robinson of my neighborhood and my school in the late 1960's as a child and the feelings were real: real frightening, real segregationist, real dangerous, real angry or in short real racist. I was called the N word, C word and other assorted words like the S word because of my interesting appearance and last name as a child.
I had a conservative nun who was liberal on race who nurtured me and found stories of various Black historic figures in literature, warfare, science and religion and let me know that I could be just like them. Mr. Horne does not know how it felt to be reminded daily by people who did not know me that I was considered sub-human. Fortunately, the good people at my school and their kids eventually stood up for me and put the less enlightened racial idealists in their places and I even won some over in time. In short, I did not hate white people even though I was literally being oppressed by some of them and it was socially acceptable at that time for them to do it in my Southern state which is a border state. I do not hate whites now despite being stopped on the road and in stores and searched despite never being arrested. It is humiliating, but you learn to live with the fact that you may resemble some unknown suspect or you are driving a late model sports car which has been my real experience. I literally had to stop driving my sports car because of how many times I was stopped by well meaning officers who usually apologized most of the time, but some were plain scary at night when I was alone on a dark road or highway. Hate requires a lot of energy and it eventually tears you up, and that is not how I use my energy, and life is just too short to waste good time!
What I hated was when I found verified evidence from white scholars that was considered fact, I realized that some people only wanted people to know part of the truth and and not the part that made Anglos looked bad for doing bad things in America. Listen, every ethnic and racial group has horrible people and great people. Unfortunately, Anglos did some bad things like slavery and cultural destruction of Native Americans that have a lasting legacy that still lives in too many places. This doesn't mean that Anglos haven't contributed mightily as the dominant culture in America because they have, but Anglos need to let go of the "old Allen Iverson attitude" described by Charles Barkley of "me, myself and Iverson" and share the ball because everyone helped to create the America of today! The dominant group in a culture gets better when they learn about their past. Why? So that they learn from it! So that they don't repeat it! So others will learn from their example! Remember if one ignores history makes it easier to repeat the identical mistakes or worse. Why does Germany do a better job than America of dealing with there terrible past? They confront it directly with education! Fear is what has given us racism! Education trumps fear and ignorance, and the cigarette fight is a prime example for those of us who can finish the sentence that begins with, "Winston tastes good..." If you do not know the answer to this line that is the result of a successful educational campaign by the anti-smoking groups who had these ads taken off the air and magazines, so that young people would never fall victim to the tobacco lobby's extremely successful campaign that worked for years until Joe Camel got busted! However, if you do know the answer to this line this is also the result of the tobacco lobby's very successful educational advertising campaign since that ad has not been run for close to forty years or more! Why do you still remember it so clearly? Good education execution can still obtain the desired results: due to something called the stickiness factor. The stickiness factor is what enables the desired message and education nuggets to stick to the brain over time. This is why education is important because bad education has a stickiness factor too! This is why racism, sexism and other isms survive: they are taught! Yes, racism is often taught at home, and the government has a stated and Constitutionally mandated right to insure fairness to all citizens through the equal protection clauses, so this is not about political correctness: this is about the upholding of the Constitution!
At the end of the day, this measure is figuratively and literally strike 3 for Arizona in the eyes of many Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans and Anglos alike! Arizona lost many Native Americans a long time ago; and the fact that the state only accepted the King holiday after economic boycotts like we are seeing now over the "show me the papers' law that passed today sealed Arizona as the new deep South. There is a notion with Supreme Court support that suggests that the government not interfere with academic freedom in the learning process. This law clearly interferes with academic freedom and it is a joke that the foxes are now afraid that the hens may get together in solidarity to hate all the foxes, organize a hen union to fight foxes and organize a fox hunt to thin the herd of greedy foxes. Yes this sounds ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than a law that creates division and is clearly based on the same type of fear of a minority group coming together that was used to create Jim Crow. I hear a lot of inaccurate and false information on how the United States is becoming a socialist society, but this attempt at thought control is the very demonstration of socialism in action: making sure that everyone is the same and the government is the owner of the information that would be taught. Can someone join me in singing Pink Floyd's Another Brick In The Wall and say, "We don't need no education; we don't need no thought control; hey teachers leave those kids in alone! All in all it's another brick in the wall of misguided Arizona politicians who really need to learn empathy and learn what it is like to be something other than Anglo in America. Guess what they can't do it, won't do it, and will have to die out and become a minority in order for justice to reign in Arizona! What a pity?
One more question why was Hamilton and future naturalized citizens not allowed to pursue the office of the President of the United States of America? When you visit the isle of Nieves in the West Indies you may get an alternative view from a native perspective that you cannot and will not get here in the states, but in Arizona you may not be able to discuss the notion that Hamilton had birthers too! Just ask Jefferson about why he referred to Hamilton as "that mongrel from Nieves." The alternative view is extremely important because we now have technology that verifies stories told by slaves and islanders but were dismissed by historians loyal to our iconic Founding Fathers.
Arizona how about a little academic freedom, and please allow some alternative voices and views at the table! This is why you still don't get it! But hope springs eternal and I am rooting for you because the future of America is too crucial and it will be one of a Hispanic majority. My Anglo brothers and sisters, you may want to keep that affirmative action thing because I think your grandchildren may need it because if you don't they will come to know how I felt in the 1960s if the flamethrowers in Arizona keep getting their way! American history is everyone's history, but it has been traditionally been delivered and presented primarily as the European version of American history with limited appearances by people of color and women who often and usually played great roles in developing the narrative. The victors always used to write the history books, but this is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain in the digital age. Anglos were the victors back in the day, but now we are all victors when we share the rich history of America and how everyone has contributed and not just the talented tenth who were nearly all Anglo males. One of the major reasons why so many Americans often have problems in dealing with the rest of the world is because as a nation too many of us don't study or understand other cultures, and truthfully speaking too many of us don't want to understand other cultures because too many of us don't value other cultures because too many of us view other cultures as inferior. I did not say all Americans, most Americans, or many Americans because no one has a true quantitative number, but I can say too many of us view other cultures as inferior by simply viewing the qualitative results from the perspective of those who have been negatively impacted. I love America and served this country but too many of us are displaying some unattractive viewpoints that are indicative of when someone does not respect another culture or the history of that culture. I did not say that we have to love another culture, but we need to learn to understand what we can and respect other cultures if we want our culture to be respected and embraced.That is the power of our form of the American culture: the power of shared ideas. This is the critical point of this entire piece: people recognize when you deem their history, their culture, their ideas and their very existence as inferior and they recoil when they are not respected. For many people of color, it has been love on a one-way street: the Anglo way or the highway because there is no respect just patronage.
At the end of the day, this is all about respect. If you respect people for who they are and what they have done, you would cease and desist from trying to mold them into your image of what they should be. This educational hegemony worked great in the 19th and 20 centuries, but in the 21st century it is not so easy to hide from the truth or the numbers, and the numbers say that a minority majority will be running things in America and some people know it and are trying to make sure that the South will rise again in a futile attempt to prevent the inevitable. Arizona, let's give a real educational experience that begins with enabling academic freedom for teachers and respect for the students, their history and their individual cultures. Respecting other cultures is not politically correct or multi-cultural, respecting other cultures is what America was built on! If you don't believe me, read the Constitution some time and you will see it in the Bill of Rights that was designed to protect the rights of the minority from an oppressive majority! There was some great foresight exercised by the Founding Fathers that apparently has deserted too many of their successors who would rather win at all costs and the consequences be damned! That my friends is The Real Gold Standard!
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