Esther J. Cepeda

Let's talk

 
 

Hi everyone,

Welcome to my archive of columns published by the Washington Post Writers Group and the Chicago Sun-Times. After you've looked around please join me on Facebook where I post links to my columns as they come on-line, there's constant conversation, and you can get feedback on comments.

 CLICK HERE

Thanks! 
~Esther
 

Electronic textbooks: an e-disaster in the making?

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

As the future's promise of e-textbooks hurtles toward us, let's discuss what will be needed to keep them from becoming mere electronic clutter on the virtual bookshelf.

I have about 30 textbooks lying around my house. Ranging from first-grade to post-graduate level, the oldest book is 45 years old and the newest was published in 2010.

In flipping through the assortment, the thing that strikes me most about the older books when compared to newer editions is how much larger the font sizes have gotten, plus the number of photographs and illustrations on each page.

Textbooks have been watered down to the point where even graduate-level course texts are compact, busy, image-filled and bold-text laden. Call it persistent visual distraction. Call-out boxes, sidebars and full-page supplements make for the feel of constant interruption.

Is it any wonder that students who have used such learning materials throughout their academic careers find regular books, with their vast expanses of unbroken word passages, boring?

Enter the multimedia, Web-enabled electronic textbook (coming to a school with the funds to get tablet computers into students' hands near you).

Now, it would be one thing if it were already compulsory for teacher training programs and professional development initiatives to give classroom instructors a clear understanding of how printed classroom texts are designed and how they should teach students to use them.

Instead, rare is the educator with a deep understanding of a course's textbook.

And it's even rarer for a teacher to give step-by-step textbook tours with the aim of getting students to understand how to really use them as a tool for reading about concepts in context, for conducting critical analysis, and as a reference.

Knowing this, it appears that the educational promise of electronic textbooks will require a staggering amount of costly training to implement effectively.

Scores of educators who are tech-averse, are not inclined to teach with multimedia or are committed to their long-ago perfected lesson plans would first have to be trained on how to use both the electronic hardware and the application software.

Then teachers would have to commit to teaching students how to use the technology properly as educational tools.

Under the right circumstances, tablets and electronic textbooks can turn the task of sitting still through long sessions of direct instruction and silent reading into student-driven inquiries that play to pupils' learning-style strengths.

Under the wrong circumstances, video and Web links will serve as entertaining time-wasters while search functions will make bold text -- and the skill of using a book's index -- obsolete for completing worksheets.

And in our "get technology into the classroom now, now, now" education reform environment, guess which scenario I predict will prevail once the e-gadgetry-for-improved-academic-performance cult gains traction in a majority of public schools.

 

 

It might be a pain, but I'm going gaga over the G8

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Chicago Sun-Times Columnist

 

When riding the L or waiting in line for your morning cup of coffee, maybe you’ve heard some of our fine city’s residents moaning about the prospect of hosting the NATO and G-8 summits this spring.

“We don’t even have money to keep the libraries open all week, why should we have to pay millions to secure a bunch of international muckety-mucks?” goes a popular complaint.

“We’re already a global city, I don’t understand all this talk about putting the city on an ‘international stage,’ ” goes another.

I’ve heard this one over and over again: “Nothing is worth the pain that’ll be caused by the traffic and the downtown closings.”

Those are all legitimate concerns. But let me speak for the scores of quiet foreign affairs geeks who, like me, spent their childhood pajama-clad Sunday mornings watching people on political talk shows talk about these meetings of the presidents of the world’s major economies since back when they were the G-6 and then the G-7: This is awesome.

London, Tokyo, Venice, Versailles, Paris, Naples and Cologne — all glittering international jewels that have had the privilege of hosting the G-8, and now add on Chicago. When President Barack Obama announced it and the NATO summit last summer I practically hyperventilated.

Sweet home Chicago, hosting the G-8! And our town would be the only American city beside Washington to host the NATO gathering. How cool is that?

Obviously, everyone doesn’t wait by their mailbox for the most recent edition of the Economist like I do, so I’m not surprised most others aren’t as excited. And we’re all wondering how much it’s going to cost taxpayers to keep the peace, while no one has really made the case for what we get in return.“

Though we know we are an international city, we’re still up against the perception the world has about Chicago being just all about Al Capone,” said Jennifer Martinez-Roth, a spokeswoman for the Chicago G-8/NATO Host Committee. “The value from the 2,500 international journalists alone is just amazing. Calculations for the economic benefits to Pittsburgh when they hosted the G-20 was $35 million in local spending and $100 million in advertising value.”

Jerry Roper, president of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, said, “I ran the convention and tourism bureau for 9 years, and the benefits of hosting an event like this ripple all the way out into the neighborhoods, but that story is never told.” He explained that though money would be spent near the Loop, the paychecks for countless hospitality workers hired to put on this event would be spent across the city.

“From the thousands of attendees who land at O’Hare airport to every hotel room — which are all sold out — to every time anyone has a meal in a restaurant or goes shopping, you’re looking at that hitting our tax base,” Roper said. “It’s 15 percent on hotel rooms alone, and that’s a positive for all us who live in Illinois.”

He suggests that our neighborhoods need to start now to get their piece of the action, too. “If we do this right, our ethnic neighborhoods will embrace reporters from around the world and tell the great story of how immigrants from Germany, Norway, Greece and Italy shaped Chicago,” he enthused. “The Little Village Chamber of Commerce should be reaching out to journalists from Mexico now to arrange to entertain them and help tell the story of Chicago’s Mexican-American community.”

So, will those last days in May be a major pain in the butt? Yeah, they might. But they also have the potential to be truly lucrative for all of us.

 

The Census, Mexican Mitt Romney, media and the Latino identity crisis

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

The Latino community is finding itself in a quandary about how to reconcile a tremendously diverse collection of immigrants and multigenerational U.S.-born citizens who can fall anywhere on the socioeconomic map from dirt poor to super rich.
       

As if that weren't enough, three things have Latinos in even more of a tizzy these days: How they describe themselves to the U.S. Census Bureau, Mitt Romney's rise in the race to become the GOP presidential nominee, and a spate of Latino-centric media offerings.
       

Last week, a University of Southern California study found that 6 percent of respondents who reported Spanish or Latin American ancestry in a 2006 survey conducted by the U.S. Census answered "no" when asked if they identified themselves as Spanish, Hispanic or Latino.
       

The headlines that the news garnered, and the responses elicited from readers, ran from the sober notion that this is yet another sign of "ethnic attrition" or assimilation – aka, getting absorbed in the melting pot -- to the fear that millions of Latinos are committing the unforgivable sin of "denying their own heritage."
       

Such responses perfectly delineate the divide between those who want Hispanics to become nothing more or less than a normal part of mainstream America and those who want to ensure that the Latino community remains a distinct segment when it comes to population counts -- whether for the purpose of honoring their unique culture or to curry political favor or power. As it stands, Hispanics are folded into the three established racial groups: white, black, Asian.  
       

In this context, it's no surprise that Latino voters, usually considered a reliably Democratic base, recoiled in horror to learn that Mitt Romney has Mexican ancestry and could become -- gasp! -- the nation's first Hispanic president.
       

Yes, Romney can make a claim to America's not-quite-sure-what-to-make-of-itself Latino community because his father was born in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. At the end of the 19th century, the Romney family emigrated to Mexico in order to flee U.S. laws against polygamy, and it still has a presence there.
       

The collective Hispanic response to Romney's connection to the Aztec Empire has ranged from "But he's white!" to the ever-insulting "yeah, right -- who ever heard of a Mexican Republican?" -- an accurate reflection of the disconnect in Hispanics' view of the difference between race and ethnicity and a clear exhibition of the idea that though Latinos might hail from any of 20 separate countries and be distinct in a million different ways, no "real" Hispanic would be a -- double-gasp! -- Republican.
       

Enter the clever, anonymous, devil behind the just-launched parody Twitter account "MexicanMitt Romney."
       

MexicanMitt, decked out in mariachi attire -- and what he verified to me through Twitter iare authentic, ultra-pointy cowboy boots -- is hilarious. Cursing in broken Spanglish, bidding a ribald "adios" to Jon "Juanito" Huntsman, proudly declaring himself one of the rich "Juan percent," and generally exploiting every Mexican convention you can think of, MexicanMitt has injected some fun into Republican poll speculating.
       

At least his followers and admirers are laughing at this stereotype-spewing lampoon. That’s opposite to the way many Latinos have reacted to big-media attempts to engage them. There's been no backlash against MexicanMitt, so far, but to scan the offerings of movies and TV in the past year is to find a community disappointed that the performing arts either ignore Hispanics or inadvertently insults them.
       

In the past months there has been frustration over how Colombia was depicted in the action thriller “Colombiana” about that region's drug cartel violence, the lack of Latinos celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors, and a TV sitcom portrayal of Puerto Ricans as natural-born drug dealers.
       

"Rob," a television show that debuted last week about a Caucasian goofball who marries into a Mexican family, made waves for both using reliable "close-knit Hispanic family" stereotypes to delight viewers and for getting Hispanics to question whether they should love or hate shows like this or "Modern Family," with its stereotypical sexy Latina mom.
       

Truthfully, no lines in the sand need to be drawn -- we can agree to disagree about our varied individual preferences and what they "mean." Latinos are diverse and complex and must accept this of our own community before we can expect others to do the same.
               

 

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

Civil rights history: a part of us that needs telling year-round

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

It's been 26 years since the first federal holiday observation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday and about time to expand the annual homage to year-round teaching of one of the most important episodes in American history.

The societal changes emerging from the civil rights movement -- roughly the period from the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to King's death in 1968 -- are reflected in nearly every part of daily life, yet it’s a little-understood part of the historical record.

How could it be otherwise when, according to "Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011,” a report released last September by the Southern Poverty Law Center, 16 states don't require any public school instruction at all about the movement and another 19 address it only minimally?

According to this research, many states believe it’s a topic of interest only to black students, an assumption that was easy to spot on the 2010 Nation's Report Card U.S. History assessment -- shamefully, only 2 percent of 12th-graders could identify the two defining facts in the Brown case that yielded the ruling to desegregate public schools.

"When we looked at data, we saw that virtually in every state that teaches about civil rights, it starts in kindergarten or first grade and begins in the same way: as a unit on national holidays. It's introduced very early and gets repeated and repeated every year, sometimes getting expanded into Black History Month, but never going beyond that," said Maureen Costello, the director of Teaching Tolerance, the project of the Southern Poverty Law Center which surveyed all 50 states and the District of Columbia on their civil rights movement instruction.

"Teaching the civil rights movement in an episodic, 'heroes and holidays,' out-of-context manner is not authentic in a lot of ways. But states are fearful about including it in the regular history curriculum because they don't require strong history standards and because everybody's most concerned with being career and college ready, which means emphasizing reading and math."

No one would argue against those goals receiving the bulk of schools’ attention. But if the aim of a well-rounded public school education is to create informed citizens ready to participate in our democracy, it should be possible to integrate the lessons of the civil rights movement -- the thousands of individual acts of courage, exercising freedoms of speech and assembly, how laws are fought for and enforced -- into reading, literature and social studies classes.

In a country where we still live very racially aware lives and the promise of equal opportunity under the law continues to be elusive for many, every public school student deserves to understand this chapter of history as well as they understand the American Revolution and the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

For that, the civil rights movement must be a constant, cross-curricular facet of K-12 public education and not a mere February mention. After all, as Costello so beautifully put it: All black history, all civil rights history, is American history.

Esther J. Cepeda's e-mail address is estherjcepeda(at)washpost.com

 

 

 

Chicago Executive's Club Economic Outlook for 2012 forecasts politics, politics, politics

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Chicago Sun-Times columnist

The only question on everyone’s lips these days is “will the economy — employment levels, home values, wage increases — fully recover soon?”

According to the yearly gathering of brilliant economic minds at the Executives’ Club of Chicago Annual Economic Outlook luncheon, the answer is “not in 2012.”

Held the day after the first anniversary of Illinois’ 67 percent income tax increase and 50 percent increase in the state corporate tax — and just days after the state’s credit rating was downgraded by Moody’s to the detestable spot of lowest state in the country — the atmosphere was as glum as I’ve ever seen it.

The distinguished panelists, with our own Terry Savage as moderator, described the coming year as hinging on two things: the health of the European Union and our presidential election.

The three experts — Diane Swonk, cheif economist at Mesirow Financial, Dennis Gartman, editor of the Gartman Letter, and the hyperkinetic Robert Froehlich, chief investment strategist at the Hartford Financial Services Group — mostly agreed that the eurozone will keep limping along without a breakup or a major recession.

But it’s the upcoming election that keeps them up at night.

The ever-plain-spoken Swonk put it this way: “Our biggest problem is that we’re suffering from political impotence.” Aside from jobs growth numbers that came from unsustainable low-income jobs like couriers and messengers, and a Christmas shopping season hype that far exceeded the sales reality, she told the crowd that politics is the country’s worst problem.

“We have tax cuts ready to expire and they cause distortions and uncertainty because no one knows what will expire when and what the tax code will be moving forward, the super committee failed and we’re looking at 1.2 trillion in automatic cuts and the rating agencies are ready to downgrade us,” Swonk said.

Even usually optimistic Froehlich wasn’t as sunny this year. Onto the pile of bad news he threw a housing market that won’t start healing for decades, continued high unemployment resulting from baby boomers who can’t afford to retire, and companies that will continue to overwork existing employees. His outlook, too, revolved around politics.

“The Democrats drew the short straw this election cycle; it’s the worst anti-incumbent mood in years and there’s nothing more divisive in this country right now than healthcare,” Froehlich said. “Unless the Supreme Court finds the mandate unconstitutional in June, if the Republicans can take the White House — or even just the Senate — they’ll throw out healthcare reform.” This, he said, would at least lead to a healthcare sector boom.

Gartman predicted that very little will happen until our political contests are settled at the end of the year. “I don’t think anybody can have any idea [what’s going to happen economically] until the Republican candidate, then the winner of presidency, and the [parties controlling] the Senate and the House are known. Anything that does happen will be relatively small.”

Swonk hoped that the lame duck congress will have time to put together a reasonable debt reduction plan, but she said, “The election in November is not likely to change the course of political decision-making in Washington unless everyone is willing to put individual agendas aside and do what democracy demands: legislate and be willing to make decisions.”

Ugh! If the last four years are any indicator, there’s little chance of that.

What a depressing set of predictions for 2012: We’re barely through the middle of January, some of us are already tired of the day-to-day election news coverage, and the year’s already a wash.

 

 

 

Education's help-seeking gap

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

"Ask and ye shall receive" has become our mantra in a society where for many of us, asking for what we want or need is second nature. 
       

Yet for those who have been drilled with the comforting adage "there's no such thing as a stupid question," the results of a recent study by Jessica McCrory Calarco, a sociologist from the University of Pennsylvania, will no doubt be a surprise: Our nation's low-income public school students don't know how to ask for help. 
       

Based on long-term observations of third- through fifth-grade students in one socioeconomically diverse public elementary school, the study, published in the December 2011 edition of the American Sociological Review, found that middle-class students ask their teachers for help more often and more assertively than do working-class students and, in doing so, receive more support and assistance from teachers. 
       

Middle-class children were also much more proactive and assertive in approaching teachers with questions and request s, sometimes interrupting the class. Working-class children rarely sought assistance, and often only as a last resort or in more understated ways, hanging back from a group or sitting quietly with their hands raised.   
       

The author found that unlike working-class parents, middle-class parents explicitly encouraged their children to feel comfortable asking their teachers for help and taught them the language and strategies to use in getting support. In other words, each set of parents passed their own aid-seeking skills on to their children. 
       

When I ran across a story about the study, I was amused that this was news to anyone -- probably because I had spent my professional teaching experience with low-income and minority students. Compared to the wealthier students who start to curry favor in lower grades and grow up to be grade-grubbers in high school, the majority of my low-income students had to have student-teacher interactions dragged out of them. 
       

Unfortunately, not knowing this crucial difference in student assertiveness allows educators, policymakers, and well-meaning observers who don't regularly interact with working-class people to rely on their own beliefs about how engaged and motivated students act. They then never fully understand what our current and next generations of diverse students need to succeed. 
       

Recently Gene Marks, a Forbes magazine contributor, wrote a widely condemned column called "If I were a poor black kid" -- listing free Internet-based learning tools and minority scholarship opportunities he would take advantage of if he lived in poverty. 
       

His theory was that with hard work, free tools and opportunities designed for disadvantaged students, even the very poor can lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Marks didn't recognize that low-income youth often have no idea such tools and opportunities exist and don't know how or whom to ask about them. 
       

"Privilege has this really interesting way of blinding folks to experiences different from their own, and you have to consider the impact of that on our public schools," said Christopher Emdin, a professor and director of secondary school initiatives at the Urban Science Education Center in New York.   
       

"There are lots of aspects to think about: We know that teachers don't earn as much as they should but we know that teachers are strongly middle class and in diverse and low-income schools they generally make higher salaries than that  of parents," Emdin told me. "The nature of their communication styles are just totally different -- how can we expect parents to teach kids how to engage with people who are not like them?" 
       

And this doesn't even take into account cultural differences. Like many poor white students, Hispanics and Asians grow up intimately familiar with sayings such as "children are meant to be seen and not heard." Yet Emdin noted that many classrooms, black students’ enthusiasm is dulled by instructions to sit still and be quite.   
       

Experts working to improve educational outcomes for low-income and minority students often look to curriculum and technological innovations to bridge the gaps. Perhaps the biggest advances lie in training educators to understand the different ways that low-income students must be engaged, and directly instructing those students on how to ask for help. 
               

 

 

 

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

When replica guns become deadly

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

Three days after Jaime Gonzalez Jr., a 15-year-old Brownsville, Texas, resident, was killed by police in his middle-school hallway after refusing to drop what looked like a Glock semi-automatic handgun, my son and his friend had a pistol leveled at them by a classmate, on a sidewalk near our neighborhood school.

Imagine their relief when it turned out the gun was just an airsoft -- a cheap, extremely realistic replica BB gun -- whose bright orange tip had been painted to make the pistol look real.

Of course, I gasped when I heard the first part -- the scary part -- of their story, but the rest of it is old hat: I'm the mother of 10- and 13-year-old boys who own replica pellet guns.

On any given day I can find a Glock 17 on the couch or a Double Eagle Colt .45 on the kitchen counter. Long-barrel revolvers, semi-auto pistols, shotguns, AK-47s in various finishes and sizes -- you name it and I can tell you what part of the house it's strewn in. And don't get me started on how annoying it is to find the plastic multicolored BBs all over the place even though the kids aren't allowed to shoot these things in the house.

Thinking back on their toddler years when they were forbidden from watching anything on TV that featured gun violence while their father and I had an ironclad rule that they'd never own toy weapons, I laugh at our stunning naivete.

When did we relent? I can't remember. It might have been after the 30-millionth time one of them "shot" the other in the face with a pointed index finger and a mimicked gunshot sound. Maybe after the hundredth play date or family get-together where there were toy guns in abundance. Or on a birthday or holiday where it would have been the ultimate cruelty to refuse a well-meaning and absolutely adored present.

In their short lives they've cycled through cheap Wild West revolvers to expensive and way-way-over-the-top bright orange plastic Nerf assault rifles with tough-guy monikers such as The Raider, The Barricade and The Vulcan. By the way, if you've never been involved in a Nerf war, I can attest it is a terrific way to get your Bruce Willis on.

Then, about a year and a half ago, all my sons' peers graduated to airsoft guns, and just like that I was being dragged to the sporting goods sections of Wal-Mart and Kmart, and the hunting departments of sports equipment stores.

My sons' airsoft guns were purchased with long-saved allowances and in exchange for requiring protective eye gear, long safety lectures, calls to our local police department to understand what safety procedures our area requires, memorizing what to do if someone fears you have a real gun in your hand, and discussions of occasional horror stories like that of Jaime Gonzalez Jr.

His death was a tragedy that could have been prevented only if these "recreational or training" guns were nonexistent and police officers never had to risk a very convincing replica turning out to be an actual, loaded firearm.

Since that's not the world we live in, adults must shoulder the burden of safety with these non-toys.

Although children are not prohibited from using them, only people 18 and over are allowed to purchase replica guns, and each package contains multiple safety warnings in English, Spanish, French and in pictograms. Owners are directed to consult their local law enforcement agencies to learn the laws governing their ownership and use.

"Any alteration as to the coloration and/or marking of this product to make this product look more like a firearm is dangerous, may cause confusion, may be mistaken to be a real firearm by law enforcement officers or others and may be a crime," states one user manual. "It is dangerous and may be a crime to brandish or display this product in public. Parents must not allow minors to take this product to school. Having this product at any school or college or university may be a crime."

But how many parents -- or older siblings or friends who get their hands on these replica guns -- read, much less follow, these very real cautions or take full responsibility for their use? Far too few. All they have to fall back on are painfully sad reminders that although airsoft guns don't shoot genuine bullets, they really can get you killed.

 

 

Esther J. Cepeda's e-mail address is estherjcepeda(at)washpost.com

Lots of Latinos slights so pick and choose your battles

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

Life would get darned tedious if we demanded apologies, started YouTube campaigns and generally freaked out every time something insulting was implied about Latinos.

Imagine if Mexican-Americans had decided to tar and feather Boomer Esiason in reaction to comments he made last week on whether his old team, the New York Jets, would be looking to replace their current quarterback, Hispanic heartthrob Mark Sanchez.

“If you watched Mark Sanchez the last month of the season, he was like a Chihuahua standing on Madison Avenue and 36th Street entering the Midtown Tunnel, eyes bigger than you-know-what, and just so shaky,” Esiason told WEEI Sportsradio in Boston. Esiason later told ESPN he wasn’t making a reference to Sanchez’s heritage -- “It’s a skittish dog and he’s been a skittish player.”

Since Mexican-Americans and Chihuahua enthusiasts didn’t raise a stink, few people heard about the Sanchez slam -- which is as it should be.

Too bad some in the Puerto Rican community didn’t take the same approach with a recently aired ABC television pilot for a “Bosom Buddies”-like cross-dressing pal comedy revolving around the pharmaceutical industry. One scene between two characters included the line: “But I’m Puerto Rican, I’d be great at selling drugs.”

I, and many others, would never have heard about this critically panned show had the reaction to that one line not included furious social media and blog postings, a Change.org petition demanding apologies, denouncements from politicians and a YouTube campaign featuring Puerto Ricans affirming their heritage and declaring “I DO NOT sell drugs.”

I’m half-Ecuadorean and half-Mexican, and between Mexican cartel and Ecuadorean drug-trafficking violence headlines, I sure don’t want to be associated with drug dealers either -- nor should anyone be associated with drugs just because of their Latin American roots.

But let’s get a grip here: We’re talking about a comedy TV pilot that few people saw and most critics have written off. And it’s not as though TV shows and movies don’t prominently feature white drug dealers all the time -- I don’t recall anyone being offended by Mary-Louise Parker's character as an upscale, suburban-mom drug dealer in “Weeds.”

Is it now the duty of members of any category of the population -- women, various religious faiths, ethnic or racial minorities -- to take offense and rebel any time they feel they are slighted?

I always say that if you go around looking to be insulted, you’ll never be disappointed. But hey, if Puerto Ricans want to exercise their First Amendment rights this way, then more power to them, I guess.

But Darlene Vazquetelles, the Los Angeles-based actress who started the effort to put positive Puerto Rican images on YouTube, was in Chicago filming a movie over the weekend and asked me to make sure people understood that social media blew this whole thing up way beyond her intentions.

“I’m honestly not asking an apology from ABC or Amaury (Nolasco, the Puerto Rican actor who delivered the line) or anybody -- I’ll still watch ABC and the show,” Vazquetelles told me. “I’ve decided to leave behind the anger I felt when I first saw the episode. I know not every (Latino) was offended -- I just want to concentrate on starting the new year with a positive way to break stereotypes.”

 

 

Esther J. Cepeda's e-mail address is estherjcepeda(at)washpost.com

 

My dogs went wild in a fight but don't ban them

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Chicago Sun-Times

Two summers ago I was involved in a violent, terrifying dog fight.

During a quiet evening stroll around my neighborhood, my husband, our two dogs and I spotted a family of four up the street. A mom pushing a baby in a stroller, a young girl trailing behind a big, white Samoyed and dad with a large, leashed Boxer were headed our way and we decided to cross the street to let the merry band pass.

But one of our dogs barked, setting off a cacophony of growls and woofs, and the next thing I know, the girl with the large white dog had been yanked face-first onto the concrete sidewalk from the force of her dog charging at ours. As her mom started screaming, the dad started running toward us to gain control of the loose dog with his increasingly agitated, though leashed, boxer in the lead.

Before we were able to get our own two dogs reined in, I was in the middle of a full-on dog melee.

The boxer bit the hindquarters of one of my dogs while my other dog struggled to tear open the snout of the Samoyed, despite being violently flailed in the air. There was some blood and neither of the large attacking dogs walked away unscathed from their encounter with my two pets, who had turned instantly into seemingly demon-possessed killing machines at a moment’s notice.

Are my two canine children — who would have gladly torn the throats out of the unsuspecting boxer-and-Samoyed combo had my husband and I not been able to grapple them away from the fracas — of a vicious breed? Hulking, blood-thirsty, bred-to-kill pit bulls, perhaps?

No, not at all. I own two Chihuahuas. They weigh 15 lbs. combined and soaking wet. They require darling little sweaters to get through the cold Chicago winters.

My point here is not to boast about my dogs’ ability to throw down in the name of protecting their loving owners. It is to illustrate that under the right circumstances, any dog — even when placid temperament, good training and responsible ownership are factored in — can be a lethal weapon.

Sure, pit bulls can be the equivalents of a loaded gun, a ferocious package of animal instinct and near super-human strength. But you could realistically categorize most dog breeds that way in many situations. Then you’re looking at banning the ownership of all dogs, and that’s no solution at all.

What happened to the Chicago lakefront jogger who was mauled by two loose pit bulls so badly last Monday that he spent most of last week fighting for his life is nothing less than a tragedy.

But a citywide ban on pit bulls — or other large breeds with bad reputations — would punish scores of dogs and their responsible owners instead of putting the penalty where it belongs: on the testosterone-fueled and negligent people who keep these dogs only to make statements about their own personal power.

When the City Council meets on Jan. 18, they must be ready to put laws with real teeth onto the books so that careless, irresponsible pet owners can be held accountable — without unnecessarily persecuting reliable owners who, despite best efforts, can sometimes have their dogs somehow escape the family backyard.

In any case, it’s owners, not whole breeds of dogs, who should be punished for reckless behavior.

 

 

Photo ID voting requirements - why not a bipartisan program?

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

The thing that interested me most about the Iowa caucuses was the fact that 122,255 Republican ballots were cast without the voters having to produce a photo ID.
       

The Iowa Republican Party neglected to play by the stringent voter fraud-curbing rules that the GOP is pushing in states across the country. Some have wondered whether this merely reflected the Republican Party's perception that since Iowa isn't racially diverse -- read: filled with minority voters considered a Democratic lock – there was no need to fear the kind of "voter fraud" that's been troubling conservatives for the last few years.
       

Naw, they just haven't gotten there yet.
       

Iowa too is trying for a photo ID law and on caucus day, Matt Schultz, the Republican secretary of state, was lamenting to MSNBC that because it wasn't an official primary, neither he nor the Legislature had any say in whether caucus-goers had to show a photo ID. "You know, if I had my way everybody's showing ID," Schultz said. “You have to show an ID to open a checking account, fly on an airplane, and buy a beer. So why not when you vote?"
       

This is the oft-cited argument of those who believe photo ID laws are a sane precaution against fraudulent voting. The typical rebuttal is that there must be a voter suppression agenda at play because proven cases of such fraud are few and far between.
       

Can't we all just be adults and agree that it's vital to our democracy to avoid people casting ballots they shouldn't and make it easier for all eligible voters to do their civic duty?   
        

In a rational environment, this could turn into a perfect bipartisan effort to guarantee that all votes cast are valid without blunting either party's Election Day turnout. Republicans -- who are hammered for caring only about the wealthy -- could especially take advantage of the chance to push their vision of American opportunity by vowing to do everything possible to ensure that poll barriers are eliminated for the estimated 21 million voting-age citizens who don't have a government-issued photo ID.
       

How about doing robust outreach to educate potentially affected voters on new requirements requiring an ID? Or investing in programs that help them gather and pay for the documents and the transportation needed to get them?
       

If this sounds too pie-in-the-sky, fighting to adequately fund relevant state agencies such as a Department of Motor Vehicles so they can offer more evening and weekend hours for people to obtain IDs or working with universities to bring uniformity to their student identification procedures might be reasonable starts.
       

It's not like any of the get-out-the-vote organizations I've spoken to want to wait until voter fraud is rampant for precautions to be put into place. But with photo ID laws continuing to spread -- the Brennan Center for Justice estimates that in addition to the 10 states that now require a photo ID to vote, approximately 40 others have introduced or are expected to continue pushing similar legislation -- they're now facing the reality of having to get people ID'd in addition to getting them registered.
       

"If we're going to require proof of identification, we have to make sure we're not disenfranchising people," Heather Smith, president of Rock the Vote, told me. "There is still that specific segment of lower income and young people who don't have ID, they're not driving because they don't have a car, they take the bus. We're carpooling and busing people to the DMV because transportation is in fact a burden many people don't take into account when considering these laws."
       

Marcia Johnson-Blanco, the co-director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Voting Rights Project, told me she's heard of only one state  -- Tennessee -- that is attempting to use their public transportation programs to assist people in getting their IDs. She suggested policymakers analyze Georgia, where specific programs to get free IDs into the hands of eligible voters have gotten mixed reviews.
       

"Studies have shown there is tremendous support for photo IDs if you are going to have an affirmative requirement to ensure rights aren't compromised," Johnson-Blanco told me. "But there needs to really be a comprehensive look at the effects of the laws being passed so we don't keep people from casting ballots because they don't have or can't afford the documents they need."
       

Democrat and Republican leaders need to get past their simplistic voter fraud versus voter disenfranchisement arguments and pledge to figure out how to avoid both.
       

 

 

Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

New year's Resolutions 2012: the cartwheel imperative

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

Here it is again, National Best Intentions Week -- that's how I describe the first few days of the new year when resolutions are still exciting and every workout place in the country is bursting with people who have promised themselves a Speedo body by summer.
       

Since it is both a time of childlike hope and crushing realities, I thought I'd share with you the ongoing ups and downs of my own resolution, which was made back in August.
       

On a beautiful day, I saw my neighbor's kids out in their front yard doing perfect, effortless, giggle-filled cartwheels -- the kind I've never been able to do.
       

Ordinarily a simple, missed-out-on-childhood experience would inspire only wistful regret in a busy 37-year-old's life. But cartwheels struck terror into my heart early last year when I found out I'd need to perform one -- with a sword in one hand, no less -- during the series of basic form tests necessary to earn a black belt in Korean sword fighting, which I've been working on for a year and a half.
       

Watching those 8-year-olds tumble effortlessly feet-over-head, I knew there was no way I could handle learning that skill with my complete lack of upper body strength. So I naively vowed to gain 10 pounds of muscle.
       

I honestly thought that for someone in OK shape, this was a reasonable, achievable goal in time for mid-February when I'd be expected to learn, then flawlessly execute, the cartwheel for my two extremely demanding Korean Masters. As additional inspiration, I had medical research from UCLA showing that muscle-building helps reduce the risk of getting type 2 diabetes, which runs like wildfire in my family.
       

And then reality intruded: I got a free fitness assessment from the certified trainers at my gym and they broke the news to me that someone with my sad lack of muscle tone could, with intense training, meet that goal in a year. Maybe.
       

I forged ahead.
       

Now, you might imagine that health vows are easily made and kept during summer months because it's nice outside and there are many opportunities to be active. True, but this didn't help me -- the weight machines and dumbbell racks at my fitness center are inconveniently located inside the gym where, in the summer months, the only people there are the ones who are already in tiptop shape.
         

Try straining against the gravity-defying heft of five-pound hand weights just feet away from Adonises who could bench-press a 115-pound weakling like me one-handed.  
       

That wasn't the worst of it. At the rate I went -- three hour-long muscle-group workouts a week, the most amount an average full-time worker with a family can possibly set aside for fitness -- I made slow progress. Verrry slow progress accompanied by day-after aches that felt like a bad case of the flu, constant hunger, plus a fair amount of wondering whether I was wasting my time.
       

In five months I've gained about an inch on almost all of my major muscle groups. And though I still have to build up to the 90 that are required to pass my black belt test next November, for the first time in my life I can now do a handful of real, military-style pushups.
       

It will probably take me another two years to reach the lofty goal I set for myself last summer but I'm going to continue working at it through these cold, dreary months and after I (hopefully) earn my black belt.
       

Keeping a resolution to get into shape or be healthier in any way takes a lot of hard work in the form of actually doing it and also fending off comments from well-meaning friends and family who can't understand why you'd waste your time on such an exhausting pursuit. "You'll never be a model, anyway," will sound familiar to many.
       

Keeping these types of New Year's resolutions might call for a different mindset this time. Forget about the swimsuit -- how strong do you want to be when your first grandchild is born? Do you want to live long and healthy enough to meet your great-grandchildren?
       

Put it like that and your best intentions will seem worth it.

 

 

               
Esther Cepeda's email address is estherjcepeda(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

Cardinal George’s Klan analogy wrong on all counts

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Chicago Sun-Times Columnist

Hitler and the Klan: two evils whose names should not be invoked unless specifically referring to Adolf or the white nationalist hate group.

Countless are the numbers of celebrities, legislators, and talking heads who have gotten themselves in trouble for comparing someone to Hitler — Hank Williams Jr. kinda-sorta comparing President Obama to Hitler last October springs to mind.

Now, Cardinal Francis George has compared gay rights activists to the Klan. Let’s start with who George imagines these shadowy “gay liberation people” might be. By using the term “the gay liberation movement” — one I had not heard before — during a recent TV interview, George brought to mind groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Animal Liberation Front, which, coincidentally, appear on lists of recognized American terrorist organizations along with the Klan.

The “gay liberation movement” is no organized band of radical gay freedom fighters but, rather, the general term for the struggle for equal gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (GLBT) rights.

Interesting side note: there was a “radical” group called the Gay Liberation Front in the late 60s and early 70s formed in reaction to the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village. They held dances to raise funds to create gay-friendly public spaces and their actions seem less radical than those of temperance movement darling Carrie Nation, whose early 1900s “Hatchetations” involved violently destroying bars and their supplies of liquor. Also coincidentally, that anti-alcohol activism eventually led to a dry movement so strong that the Klan ended up marching in front of the White House in support of Prohibition.

That brings us back around to the same Klan that had a hand in torpedoing the 1928 presidential candidacy of Democratic New York Governor Al Smith because it was feared that a Catholic president would take direct orders from the Pope.

So, yes, there’s a history of anti-Catholic Klan activities. And how does that relate to the millions of Americans — heterosexual and other — who want our GLBT friends, family members and business associates to have the same rights as straight people? It doesn’t. Under no circumstances should any clear-thinker ever equate a person’s sexual orientation with their support or opposition of any religion.

Anyone who has been to the Pride Parade can attest to the potential for unruliness. But if the St. Patrick’s Day parade organizers had set a time that would inconvenience a church’s mass, no one would have jumped to the ridiculous conclusion that “the Irish rights people” were seeking to “stifle the religious freedom of the Catholic Church.”

Those last words were by George’s, used in a press release in which he re-affirmed his belief that the “Organizers (of the pride parade) invited an obvious comparison to other [anti-Catholic] groups.”

George expressed an opinion that reinforces one of the many reasons Catholics leave the church. One out of every 10 Americans is an ex-Catholic — like me — and if they didn’t run away screaming because of the Church’s stance on abortion, birth control, divorce or the inadequate prosecution of priests who have sexually abused children, it’s because of its attitudes toward women and sexual orientation.

My GLBT friends and readers would do best to ignore this latest slight by considering its source. As for everyone else, remember this golden rule: unless you’re actually talking about Hitler or the Klan, do yourself and everyone else a favor by leaving them out of all comparisons, metaphors, and similes.

 

 

 

Must-read Chicago book of 2011: David Ansell's "County"

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Chicago Sun-Times Columnist

Make it the last book you read in 2011 or your first of 2012, but whatever you do, don’t miss out on County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago’s Public Hospital.

Written by Dr. David Ansell, now vice president for clinical affairs and chief medical officer at Rush University Medical Center, County is a brutally frank, lovingly detailed account of one doctor’s mission to end health-care inequities in Chicago.

I was fortunate enough to stumble upon the book, published last June, as I cleared my office last week. I meant to read the first few lines to see if it was any good and ended up getting so swept up in the breathless narrative that pretty soon I was 10 pages in and didn’t want to stop.

Ansell arrived at Cook County Hospital in the spring of 1978. He and four fellow medical school graduates managed to haul their belongings to Chicago despite professional mentors’ warnings not to sink their careers into such a “simmering cauldron of conflict and third-world patient care.”

But, as Ansell writes, “We came to County Hospital eyes wide open because of its troubles and not in spite of them.” He and his fellow doctors-in-training healed the sick despite “an antiquated facility, inept management, underfunding and a corrupt political Machine.”

The young, idealistic doctor had gotten through medical school and his first most difficult years with a belief that access to health care is a fundamental human right, so he was dumbstruck by the role race played in Chicago’s health and well-being. When Ansell arrived at County, patients were routinely dumped there because other hospitals simply refused to care for them.

“The presence of the County Hospital allowed for the extraordinary exclusion of black patients from almost all other hospitals,” Ansell wrote. “This was a form of Jim Crowism as heinous as any practiced in the Deep South and enforced, not by law, but by the collective behavior of an entire city’s establishment.”

Ansell describes waiting rooms stuffed “as tight as a stockyard cattle car,” clinics that felt like mosh pits, brilliant doctors and tough-as-nails administrators who fought alongside staff and community activists for much-needed reforms.

We learn about the race, political and financial issues still shaping urban medical care through the stories of County’s long-suffering patients. As anyone who has endured the difficulties of receiving care at County’s replacement, John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital, can surmise, the book offers no happy ending.

“Back in those days we fought to keep the hospital open and get the new one built. We fought for patient rights, set up preventive programs and eventually did make things better, but we still have these very clear, race-based inequalities,” Ansell told me. “Here I am 33 years later and the health outcomes have actually gotten worse.

“The chance that a 16-year-old black kid on Chicago’s South Side will live to 65 is 50 percent, whereas 80 percent of white ones will,” Ansell said. “Half of the early deaths are because of heart disease and cancer, which could be prevented if they had access to organized preventive treatment.

“I see waiting lists [at Stroger Hospital] so long that they say you can go blind waiting for an eye doctor appointment. At other hospitals, you can get an appointment the next day.

“Ansell said he wants people to read this book so they can decide for themselves if this is how we, as a society, want to treat people. “This is not the America I signed up for,” he said. It is shocking — and necessary — to read about third-world patient care just a few miles from the Magnificent Mile.

 

 

Forget the Mayan 2012 prediction, the intellectual apocalypse is upon us

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

Well, we've finally passed a worrisome milestone on the road to the end of the world.

Not the Mayan calendar's prophecy about life-as-we-know-it ceasing to exist on Dec. 21, 2012 -- most Mexican archeology experts have agreed that the 1,300-year-old stone tablet said to predict destruction merely marks the end of a cycle in the Mayan calendar.

No, I'm talking about the intellectual apocalypse from which Mayan priests, with their prayerful chants and incense, cannot save us. I speak, of course, of the slow and painful self-destruction that will surely result from our perverse relationship with our cellphones.

I'm not using the word "our" as a rhetorical device so I can make pious judgments. I'm open and honest about the sad fact that an iPhone is my constant companion -- the first "face" I gaze at in the morning and the last "voice" I hear at night -- and I'm starting to think that, one way or another, smartphones are going to lead us all to a premature end.

As soon as I heard that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) called for a nationwide ban on distracting portable electronic devices I began to wonder: Now who could ever oppose keeping innocents from getting run over by a driver who was busy texting a friend? But we're so far past traffic accidents being the worse or most prevalent smartphone-related peril we face, you have to question if it would really make any difference in the long run.

Our everyday lives have been so astronomically enriched by the development of cellphones and web-enabled smartphones that it's nearly impossible to quantify how much better off we are even with their terrible distractions.

Mobile applications on phones make our lives more productive, uplift the poor in countries all over the world, and connect countless parents, via text messaging, to children who wouldn't want to be caught dead talking on the phone with mom in front of teen peers -- so hallelujah for that.

But this good thing is quickly becoming too much so.

Just months after the National Center for Education Statistics released its devastating portrait of a nation where less than one-third of public schoolchildren have proficiency in geography, the subject covering basic map-reading skills and knowledge about the Earth's surface, a college professor lamented to me that his recent teacher graduates were convinced that such knowledge was unnecessary because GPS systems and Google Earth programs are easily accessible on smartphones.

(If this doesn't foretell the end of civilization, I don't know what does.)

In my mind, these recent college grads are the same young people a University of Rhode Island study found to be sleep-deprived, anxious and depressed because their phones kept them awake at night with a steady and irresistible barrage of emails, texts and phone calls.

But even they are not nearly as addicted -- or irresponsible -- as surgeons, anesthesiologists, and nurses who text, talk, check their Facebook profiles, and monitor eBay bids on their phones during surgery.

As a New York Times report recently spotlighted, "distracted doctoring" is a new hot topic in hospitals across the country. Peer-reviewed research has revealed that about half of 439 technicians surveyed who had assisted in cardiopulmonary bypass surgery admitted to having made personal phone calls or texted while a patient was under the knife.

The NTSB, and countless local authorities that have already tried outlawing phoning and texting while walking, biking and driving, may mean well. But people's obsession with their productivity tools has far exceeded government's limited influence and capacity.

We just can't help ourselves! With the world's collected wisdom available at our fingertips and the possibility of a quick virtual hug from a loved one awaiting in the inbox, it's becoming unthinkable to waste that bit of time at a stoplight, during a break in a major surgical procedure, or in between dreams.

Friends, there is no doubt that we are going to multitask, socialize, shop, inform and generally entertain ourselves to death -- if not from a traffic fatality then from the strain of processing torrents of unlimited stimuli every waking moment of the day.

At least boredom won't intrude upon our last breaths. To paraphrase the rock group R.E.M., it's the end of the world as we know it -- and we feel fine.

Esther J. Cepeda's e-mail address is estherjcepeda(at)washpost.com

 

 

 

Bad news about Latinos travels fast

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

As I look back on 2011, I'd say the most memorable headlines concerning Hispanics fell under the "made us look bad" category. As in, I saw a negative news story attached to someone with a Latino surname and thought "Why, oh why, did the perpetrator have to be 'one of us'?"

After five years of increasingly coarse anti-Hispanic and anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric -- which has resulted in the highest percentage of Latinos targeted for hate crimes and has subjected even U.S.-born Hispanics to immigration detentions -- there is a special kind of disappointment and dread of hostile reaction when bad news is associated with Latinos.

For instance, there was that awful moment when the identity of the competitive shopper who pepper-sprayed fellow Black Friday customers at a Walmart was described by Los Angeles police as a "Hispanic woman, 32 to 38 years of age, 5-foot-3," and so on.

Ugh.

And, what Latino didn't grimace when it came out that the guy charged with firing an assault rifle at the White House in November, and is believed to have wanted to assassinate the president, was U.S.-born Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez of Idaho Falls, Idaho?

Double grimace a few days later when Jose Pimentel, an American citizen of Dominican heritage who had converted to Islam and got mixed up with al-Qaeda, was arrested under the suspicion of plotting to commit a terrorist attack in New York.

Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, known to some as the first serious Hispanic presidential candidate after his relatively short campaign ended in early 2008, is said to be under federal investigation for two separate incidents -- one in which $250,000 from campaign funds was allegedly used to pay off a woman who had threatened to file a sexual-harassment complaint and another involving corrupt state investments.

And these are just the most recent examples of Latinos who deserve to be stood in the town square and have rotten tomatoes flung at them for shaming the rest of us. The rest of 2011 had plenty of standouts. Who can forget the backlash all Hispanics experienced after a predominantly Latino crowd booed the men's U.S. soccer team when they played Mexico's squad at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., last summer?

There is a familiar, unpleasant, pit-of-the-stomach feeling that gnaws at Hispanics when "one of ours" does something stupid. It reinforces a certain public sentiment -- stronger is some circles than in others -- that Latinos are underachieving, violence-prone foreigners who don't love America as much as others' ancestors did when they immigrated here. Legally, some would add.

Many Hispanics will be angry at me that I've even brought up these bad apples instead of focusing on success stories. But pretending that these transgressors don't exist won't make them go away, and committing to spotlighting only the heroes would be equally unbalanced and unbeneficial to the public perception of Latinos.

Obviously, countless Hispanics overcame barriers to become professionals, showed courage under fire, healed the sick, comforted the poor, and otherwise made the world a better place this year. But the seemingly never-ending stream of negative stories involving Latinos -- crime, illegal immigration, lagging educational achievement and poverty -- will always eclipse good news because humans' insatiable love of conflict and villains tends to center around race, ethnicity and gender.

The bright side is that for every Latino who does something idiotic to reinforce someone's deeply ingrained biases against Hispanics, there will always be other exemplars of good character or stratospheric achievement to counter the stereotypes.

Daniel Hernandez, the intern for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords whose fearless and quick thinking after Jared Loughner's shooting rampage in Arizona in January played a huge part in saving the congresswoman's life, springs to mind.

The reality is that universal truths always win in the end. Once people get used to seeing masses of Latinos in roles across the wide breadth of society -- in everything from middle-class jobs to positions of legislative power and mainstream celebrity -- we will be no more threatening or valuable than anyone else in this country.

In a decade or so America will take stock of itself and realize that Hispanics are neither exclusively good nor evil. Like people from every age group, religion, political ideology, and sports-team fan base, there is a perplexing mix of wonderful, horrible and everything in between.

Esther J. Cepeda's e-mail address is estherjcepeda(at)washpost.com

 

 

All-American Muslim, Lowe's and the reality of reality TV

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

I expected the blowup over sponsorship of "All-American Muslim," a reality-TV show highlighting the lives of five Muslim families in Dearborn, Mich.

The day after the premiere, I wrote a column suggesting that those who believe Muslims are "out to get us" needed to tune in to get to know more about this growing community that, like all other immigrant groups, is adopting American norms.

Based on the emails that flooded in, I quickly realized the show would become controversial.

"Do yourself and your readers a big favor ... make it your crusade to inform America of what is the true agenda of the Muslim Community in our country," read one. Others warned that "in the future Islam represents an existential threat to the United States as we know it." My favorite chided my ignorance: "With all due respect, you may be looking at 'All American Muslim' with Rose Colored Glasses because MOST Muslim's adhere to a faith that's extremely at odds with Christianity on which our Values are designed & structured."

A fundamentalist Christian group called the Florida Family Association watched enough episodes to convince itself that the subjects are not "average" Muslims and that the show is "propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda's clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values."

Lowe's, a major sponsor of the show, pulled its advertising. Talk about a hot, corporate, mess.

Lowe's, which signed on to gain credibility among a growing American Muslim population estimated to have $170 billion in purchasing power, is now getting it from all sides. A war continues to rage on its Facebook page -- first there was outrage because angry and racist comments were allowed to stay visible, and now there is new outrage because the company began filtering out disrespectful posts. And scores of people who had never connected the retailer with the new TV show got on the bandwagon against the company's about-face toward the Muslim community.

From celebrities who have spoken out against Lowe's suspension of their sponsorship -- actor Kal Penn sent this delightful Tweet: "Our next movie: "Harold & Kumar Do Not Go To Lowes" -- to editorial boards of U.S. newspapers, marketing pundits, and people with Muslim friends and family, lots of folks are disappointed at Lowe's.

It's truly incredible that the company didn't spot this controversy coming a mile away and either decline to connect the Lowe's name to the show in the first place, or be prepared to take the opportunity to be true to its stated "strong commitment to diversity and inclusion" and stand up to the inevitable vocal minority of people infected with a severe case of Islamophobia.

As for me, and other Americans who accept Muslims as peaceful and beneficial additions to our country's diverse fabric, we'll keep our rose-colored glasses on while waiting out this controversy.

Esther J. Cepeda's e-mail address is estherjcepeda(at)washpost.com

 

 

 

Latino progress in jobs hits blue-collar ceiling

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Chicago Sun-Times Columnist

You’ve heard of the glass ceiling (women) and the bamboo ceiling (Asian Americans). It turns out there’s a blue-collar ceiling for Chicago Latinos.

So says a new study from DePaul University’s New Journalism on Latino Children project and the Latino Policy Forum. They analyzed Hispanic representation in 480 occupations identified by the U.S. Census Bureau and found that both Mexican immigrants and many of their U.S.-born counterparts are overrepresented in low-skilled, low-pay manufacturing, food service, and construction industries.

Considering that Latinos represented three of every five new entrants to the region’s labor force over the past decade and that their dismal high school graduation rates — a mere 59 percent — are colliding with a time when our city is turning toward a knowledge-based economy, this is very bad news.

Bad for Hispanics, you ask? Well, sure, no community wants to see its future rooted in jobs that either seem gone forever (new construction) or are well on their way towards extinction (manufacturing, once Chicago’s strength), especially since we’re talking about people who came to this country for economic opportunities.

Nevertheless, this lack of upward mobility must be particularly painful for parents who made countless sacrifices to come to Chicago. This report — reinforcing others — found that at least 40 percent of U.S.-born Mexican Americans are working in the same low-paying, low-skilled industries as their Mexico-born immigrant counterparts, a trend that hasn’t budged in a decade. In fact, Latinos of Mexican origin have the lowest intergenerational mobility of any minority groups in the Chicago area.

But this isn’t just a Latino problem; it’s a Chicago regional work force problem. Though media coverage of the Hispanic community gives the impression it’s solely concentrated in the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods, Latinos are scattered across the city and suburbs, comprising about 22 percent of the Chicago region’s population — double a decade ago.

The reality of this terrible tale of Mexican Americans’ failure to thrive is that if these mostly-U.S.-born Hispanics are not doing well — because they’re getting trapped in poor schools, not succeeding academically and not feeding the knowledge worker pool that Chicago needs — then we’re all in trouble.

With the exception of some efforts in the area of helping families with English-language acquisition, the solution is the same as for low-income Asian, African-American, Native American and white children: expanded access to high-quality pre-school programs and high-performing K-12 schools, and access to outreach programs that will engage them in the science, technology, engineering and math disciplines needed to make it in tomorrow’s work world.Chicago is no stranger to economic inequalities, which are usually sliced, diced and reported on through the lens of race.

That way of thinking has proven ineffective when it comes to rallying the city’s entire population and business community to see what’s at stake for us all in equalizing our painful disparities.

Let’s hope that this latest round of data doesn’t get the same flash-in-the-pan treatment that other reports about various low-income groups’ struggles usually garner. Maybe since these disappointing statistics are coming just weeks after we learned that Cook County alone lost more than a quarter of its manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010, more efforts will be launched at breaking the “blue collar ceiling” for Hispanics and all the other young, low-income Chicagoans who aren’t being prepared to succeed in tomorrow’s knowledge-based economy.

 

 

Bah humbug? Swear by it

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

 

'Tis the season to be crabby!

I'm not kidding -- this has turned out to be the grumpiest, most anxiety-ridden holiday season ever.

It's not some perennial "Christmahanakwanzika" observation because someone was rude to me on the cut-throat turf of a mall parking lot -- now a 365-day-a-year custom.

No, a pervasive sense of boredom, dread and resignation just seems to be all around like never before. Usually it's me -- the absolute, all-time Ebenezer Grinch of the Cepeda family -- who goes around bah-humbugging the holiday spectacle, already weary of premature Christmas sales, carols and cookies long before Thanksgiving.

This year I've been bombarded with data seeming to corroborate a feeling summed up by a tweet I ran across last week: "Plagued by first-world problems today. Taking deep breaths. I hate the holidays. ... I want to remove myself from them forever."

Is it any wonder that Google has made it so that the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number appears prominently in search results when phrases such as "how to kill myself," "suicide" and "I want to die" are typed into the box? And Facebook just implemented a new reporting service that allows users to report friends if they post a message similar to the one I saw on Twitter -- vaguely, if not specifically, suicidal. A counselor from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is supposed to try to contact the sad friend through a chat messaging system.

Days after shoppers were pepper-sprayed in a Thanksgiving-night tussle over an Xbox and we were all still contemplating whether the almighty consumer should have the right to shop "Black Friday" sales during the early-evening hours of Turkey Thursday, a Poll Position survey reported that 61 percent of Americans feel we've started celebrating the Christmas season too early.

The only reason that number wasn't higher is because 44 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds didn't agree. I imagine they can't remember a time when Christmas decorations weren't displayed in craft stores during the month of August, and "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" were not much-hyped retail phenomena.

There are so many explanations for being unmerry this year, not the least of which is that the economy is still in the dumps and, for many, this will be at least the fourth year in a row that the bounty under the tree will be more meager than it was the year before. A lot more people won't have to worry about feigning delight about getting an ugly Christmas sweater -- chances are there won't be one.

Consumer Reports magazine's recent "Holiday Jeers" survey found that "35 million Americans actually despise 'having to be nice' during the holidays " -- and that was only No. 10 on an 11-item list of holiday exasperations.

"Seeing certain relatives" was No. 6 and my email inbox is stuffed with guides for traversing the canyons of familial ire during endless visits to rarely seen acquaintances and family. I have articles and story ideas about ways to "put the joy back into the holidays this year," how to politely ask guests to not take phone calls or send text messages during sit-down dinners, and tips for talking about racism, immigration, recent coming-outs and other topics that can ruin holiday get-togethers.

On the bright side there is at least one free, non-alcoholic method of letting off some of the steam that will inevitably build up over the next two weeks' worth of office parties, family get-togethers and next-to-impossible lavish and/or romantic New Year's Eve expectations.

A study published in December's Journal of Pain backed up prior research showing that swearing produces a pain-lessening effect for many people, especially those who don't usually pepper their speech with this kind of language.

As far as I can tell this leaves out great swaths of the population. But for those who usually keep their putrid thoughts to themselves -- and those who will spend too many hours reining in their tongues around bosses, elders and kiddies -- give controlled swearing a try.

When you finally get overwhelmed, slip into an empty bedroom and head for the pillow, cower in the bathroom with a hand towel wadded in your mouth, or, better yet, "take the garbage out" and let 'er rip.

Fa la la la la, la, la la la la.

 

Esther J. Cepeda's e-mail address is estherjcepeda(at)washpost.com

 

 

 

"Anchor baby" and the wrong way to fight a slur

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

Here's a perfect example of why do-gooders who crusade for the personal dignity of illegal immigrants have all but lost the war of rhetoric.

In November, the American Heritage Dictionary added the term "anchor baby" to its new fifth edition. The entry read: "A child born to a noncitizen mother in a country that grants automatic citizenship to children born on its soil, especially such a child born to parents seeking to secure eventual citizenship for themselves and often other members of their family."

An immigrant advocacy organization complained that the definition masked the "poisonous and derogatory nature of the term," and last week the editors of the dictionary changed it.

The revised version handles the term as it does other slurs, flagging it as "offensive." It now reads: "Used as a disparaging term for a child born to a noncitizen mother in a country that grants automatic citizenship to children born on its soil, especially when the child's birthplace is thought to have been chosen in order to improve the mother's or other relatives' chances of securing eventual citizenship."

Note that in the new version the parents no longer have a citizenship-gaining strategy. The definition instead rests on the underlying assumptions and insulting intent of those who use the words "anchor baby" because they are passionately against illegal immigration.

It's fine to flag the term as derogatory, but this is an ineffectual defense against hysterical nativists who love this put-down and will continue to use it regardless of whether a reference book considers it inappropriate or not.

This redefining response smacks of a schoolyard tiff where a bully zings a peer and instead of reacting with a searing comeback, the victim runs to an adult in the hopes that the ensuing comeuppance will make the jerk stop.

Words have power. Their use, and misuse, is important. But the effort expended to change how this rude term is defined shows a lack of imagination -- it should have been spent on highlighting the inaccuracy of the term.

Why not ask the dictionary to add a few words -- "legally incorrect" springs to mind -- to the definition clarifying that anchor baby is a misnomer? For the record: a newborn U.S. citizen can't help parents who are residing in the country illegally gain legal residency. Not, at least, until that baby has reached adulthood and only after the parents have gone home for three or 10 years before they can even begin the process for legal entry and eventual citizenship.

"The funny thing about it is that people believe that undocumented immigrants use this method to become legal but the immigration law is already structured to prevent the phenomenon of the 'anchor baby,'" said Bryan Johnson, an immigration attorney in New York. "The parents are barred from adjusting to permanent residence if they've come to the U.S. illegally, or even if they are here legally on a tourist visa."

Another way to attack a slur is to flip it around: Why not inject the terms "anchor parent," "anchor spouse," "anchor sibling," and "anchor employer" into the lexicon? Millions of U.S.-born and naturalized citizens have scaled mountains of immigration-law red tape in order to get their loved ones -- or uniquely talented employees -- into the country legally and permanently.

Immigrant advocates should be out plastering the Internet with smiling pictures of U.S. servicemen and women who fell in love and married while overseas, successful business owners who went through the expensive and protracted process of securing permanent employment-based visas, and on and on.

"The whole history of the United States is about people emigrating here with the whole family following along -- almost everyone emigrated here at one point and a lot of times their status was based on their parents," Johnson told me. "My business partner got her status as a derivative of her parents' asylum so her parents were her anchor. I'm only here because my grandparents came to this country so they were my anchor, for that matter."

Not all rhetoric wars call for fighting fire with fire -- though the escalating attacks on all immigrants, even the legal ones, and their families is increasingly making it feel necessary. In this case, though, dowsing the flames of ignorance with a cold, clear dose of reality would have been the better way.

Esther J. Cepeda's e-mail address is estherjcepeda(at)washpost.com

 

 

 

 

Are you serving your kids junk food for breakfast?

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA, Washington Post Writers Group

Here's a side note about the sugary cereals headlines you saw last week: It's actually much worse than you think.

If your eyebrows rose when you saw news stories topped with lines such as "Kids' cereals more like dessert than breakfast" and "Kids' cereals pack more sugar than Twinkies and cookies," consider that the cereals were compared to other junk foods only in single-serving sizes.

The Environmental Working Group made waves by equating the sugar content in popular kids' cereals to the famous snack cake and Chips Ahoy, Oreos and homemade sugar cookies, but should have gone even further and told us what number of each is equal to the amount of cereal kids actually pour themselves. In other words, the Working Group missed the opportunity to talk about that wily sneak, portion size.

For instance, the report compared a "one-cup serving of Honey Smacks cereal" to a Twinkie. But if you look on the side of the Honey Smacks box, you'll find that Kellogg's considers a single serving to be a mere three-quarters of a cup -- an even less filling expenditure of 100 calories and 15 grams of sugar.

Then consider that if you drop that small amount of cereal into a standard-size bowl, it leaves that bowl well short of being half full. Even including the milk, you're looking at two full servings of cereal to make up a bowl.

If I allowed my 13-year-old son to eat Honey Smacks, I would have to pry the box from his sugar-twitchy hands before he downed half of it in one sitting. And there's no way he would feel as if he'd eaten anything at all if he had less than two bowls, or, by my calculation, 400 calories and 60 grams of sugar -- the nutritional equivalent of about three Twinkies, not counting the milk.

Not exactly the breakfast of champions.

I've actually been happy about the level of surprise and public interest in the Working Group's finding's because in an October column on whether parents should be trusted with their kids' breakfast I noted that a serving of Cheerios was nutritionally similar to three Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies -- and some readers thought it was a strange and unfair comparison. Hopefully, people stopped to think about the everyday foods their families have grown attached to.

If the Working Group really wanted to drive the point home, it would create an online visual calculator that would translate the number of bowls of cereal -- and other fake nutritious foods like sugary yogurts and candy-coated granola bars -- a person eats, and convert them into the nutritional equivalent of treats like sports drinks, sodas, candy bars and salty snacks, which most people acknowledge should be a very limited part of their diets.

Think what a wake-up call it would be to learn that junior's breakfast is as filling and healthy as a Snickers bar and can of Mountain Dew.

Esther J. Cepeda's e-mail address is estherjcepeda(at)washpost.com.