Part Four: Relevancy

Source: Arslan

Hello everyone, welcome back for another blog post! Today I will be analyzing the fourth part of the book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? By Beverly Daniel Tatum. Along with this analysis I will also connect this section with related relevant topics of current events. I will mainly be focusing on the current Mexican American struggles regarding recent policy changes made by our current president. I hope you enjoy reading!

↣ PART FOUR: BEYOND BLACK & WHITE ↢

In this section, Tatum focuses on the other races that make up the population of the United States besides White and Black people. Tatum mainly uses logos through population statistics to provide an insight and context as to how relevant the discussions about other minorities is highly important. The minorities that Tatum chose to expand the history of problems for people of Latinx, Native Americans, and Chinese decent who live in America. 

Tatum first begins this section with some general information about the Latinx population who have immigrated to the United States. Here she briefly explains the stigma of being bilingual, and how it makes you appear less intelligent. Even though bilinguals are fluent in two languages, there has been a common stereotype placed because of general racism.  Here she also briefly explains how the population of Latinx people has increased greatly and has become the largest minority of the country. 

Even though this book was written in 1997, it was re-written in 2017, a few months after the election of our current president, President Donald Trump. In this section, Tatum chose to add how the discrimination of Latinx people has increased significantly because of recent policies added and comments made by our president. 

For example, Tatum chose to include the information regarding the rises in hotlines for immigrants to call to talk about their troubles regarding racism and the fear of being deported. The reason for the increase of hotlines are also due to an increase in bullying as well:

"In the days following Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election, there were reports of schoolchildren teasing their Mexican American classmates that they could be deported" (251).

Here Tatum explains that young Mexican American students have been outcasted and bullied because of their racial decent and stereotyped that "All Mexicans are illegal immigrants".  This significantly highlights the problem of racism because exposure to racism at a young age can be very emotionally degrading, which Tatum expanded upon in the previous sections.

This increase in teasing is largely due to the effects of the policies imposed by the Trump Administration. In 2017 alone, policies were placed that would reduce refugee admissions to the lowest level since the resettlement was created in 1980,  increase thousands of arrests on unauthorized immigrants, and cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that would allow temporary relief from deportation to over a million unauthorized immigrants who were children at the time (Pierce). This tight constriction targeted towards Mexican Americans has created the stereotype that they only come to live here in the United States illegally.

Currently, some Mexican Americans feel that a mass deportation could be coming. Although this may sound extreme, many are worried, for they know many friends or family members that have been deported even though they are complete law-biding citizens. To give an example, Jorge Garcia, a Detroit father of two, explained to NBC News that he was being deported to Mexico. He had come to the U.S. when he was ten, and had been living here for over thirty years (Gamboa). Even though the amounts of immigration coming from Mexico has been decreasing over the years and other countries have increased, Mexican Americans feel that they are being targeted no matter how beneficial to America they are. With recent policies placed, this group of people have been targeted by racism. 

Through this section and this book we can learn how to deal with this racism targeted towards minorities by learning the basic concepts of racism and understanding a clear plan of action, first being through acknowledgement of the problem by more Americans. This growing problem will not go away until more people understand how racism works and what we can do to allow that the United States is truly a land of opportunity. 


SOURCES:

Arslan, Mark B. “Armenian Immigrants .” Armenian Immigration Project, 2015, markarslan.org/ArmenianImmigrants/shiplists.html.

Gamboa, Suzanne. “Is Trump Carrying out a Mass Deportation?” NBC News, NBCUniversal News Group, 17 Jan. 2018, www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/trump-carrying-out-mass-deportation-it-feels-way-some-n838381.

Pierce, Sarah, and Andrew Selee. “Immigration under Trump: A Review of Policy Shifts in the Year Since the Election.” Migration Policy, 22 Jan. 2018, www.migrationpolicy.org/research/immigration-under-trump-review-policy-shifts.

Tatum, Beverly Daniel. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the
      Cafeteria? New York, Basic Books, 1997.