Mapping Latine Inequalities – Reading Responses

Mapping Latine Inequalities – Reading Responses

Author: Vivian Corry

  • Vivian Corry Week 8 Response

    This week’s content asked us to examine the way we understand the role of law enforcement in our communities.  

    We Do This Till We Free Us by Mariame Kaba is a sort of introduction to abolition as a political movement. Abolition is not merely prison or police reform. It asks us to imagine a world without police and prisons, a world where we address harm by accountability rather than punishment. Here are some of the themes that really stuck with me: 

    1. Kaba devotes many pages to discussing the stories of Black people who were murdered by the police. While she empathizes with the impulse to seek justice through the legal system, Kaba warns that true justice is not possible. The system that killed these people will never deliver true justice, even in the rare case when their killers go to prison. She emphasizes many times that true abolitionists do not celebrate even when people like Larry Nassar or R Kelly go to prison. Vengeance is not justice.  
    1. When you hear discussions of harm by law enforcement and police against people of color, you see these tendencies: the perfect victim narrative and the focus on excess. We empathize far more with “perfect victims” who live up to specific standards of morality and value, meaning that anyone who does not satisfy this narrative does not receive the same outcry. We talk about the excessive number of times a person was shot or the excessive time they were put in a choke hold. But of course, even murder by a single bullet is horribly unjust. The focus on the excess of violence means that we disregard violence that doesn’t seem so excessive.  

    “At the Ready” takes a more microscopic view of the role of law enforcement within a specific community in El Paso, Texas. The documentary follows lives of Latino high school students who are training to get jobs with border patrol after graduation. Their aspirations are greatly shaped by geography, class, and ethnicity so much so that their world views are being shaped in ways that seem contrary to their best interests.  

    These pieces together capture the ways that law enforcement tears communities apart and create a false sense of security. 

  • Vivian Corry Week 6 Response

    This week’s materials focused on the ongoing process of gentrification in San Francisco and Los Angeles. “How to Kill a City” begins with background information on the assigned film “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” and how the film aims to tackle gentrification on both the large scale – by bringing awareness to the realities of displacement – and the personal – by supporting the artists who created it enough to keep living there. The piece goes on to examine the economic and political driving forces of gentrification in which governments and corporations maximize profit generated by a given piece of land leading to displacement. It highlights how more subtle forms of eviction go undetected in the data, masking the severity of the problem. Gentrification is accompanied by a loss of the city’s identity, culture, and its long-time residents. The mostly white individuals who instigate gentrification, “How to Kill a City” claims, do not do so intentionally or maliciously. They are simply trying to find affordable housing themselves without realizing the displacement they are indirectly causing. 

    Our second reading, “A Lighter Shade of Brown? Racial Formation and Gentrification in Latino Los Angeles,” would disagree and likely critique this view of gentrifiers. The article includes an anecdote about a white real estate agent who posted flyers encouraging home-buyers to look for cheaper options in Boyle Heights. When this rhetoric was criticised, the real estate agent was quick to deny malintent and present herself as a lesser evil and an ally against corporation driven gentrification in the area. I found this anecdote particularly salient because it captures many of the themes we have discussed this semester. We see a white person using a move to innocence, presenting herself as sharing a common enemy (corporation driven gentrification), as sympathetic to this “very sensitive nerve,” and as apologetic for offending anyone. She does all of this while refusing to change her behavior or offer material solutions. We also see whiteness as property. This woman frames gentrification as an unavoidable process in which white people will eventually take over the area in one form or another. More broadly, “A Lighter Shade of Brown?”  tackles race as a central dynamic that is both shaping and being shaped by gentrification while “How to Kill a City” approaches race as a secondary correlate in the process. Both articles along with the film were tremendously impactful. 

  • Vivian Corry Week 5 Response

    This week’s readings centered on Black captivity, first through The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, a first person account of slavery in the Americas and England, and second through “The Dysfunctional and the Disappearing: Democracy, Race, and Imprisonment,” an article describing how policing, incarceration, and capital punishment continue the legacy of slavery in modern times. 

    The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano tells the story of Olaudah Equiano’s childhood, kidnapping, many years of enslavement, spiritual transformation, and path to freedom. Equiano captures the distinctly cruel nature of the institution of slavery as it existed in the US, contrasting these experiences with those of his enslavement in Africa. He captures the horrors of the middle passage. He captures the vulnerability of having one’s safety entirely dependent on the whims of a particular master. He captures the inability to be truly free even as a free man since he could be returned to slavery at any time. Equiano’s narrative is fundamental to our understanding of the experiences of enslaved people. His story is incredibly moving. I was intrigued by Equiano’s rhetorical choices, especially the choice to begin the narrative with a prologue that essentially diminishes the quality of his own work and asks his audience for forgiveness. It seems like this was necessary to win credibility in the eyes of a white audience that was empathetic to his cause but prejudiced nonetheless. 

    When we read historical documents like Equiano’s, it is easy to conclude that slavery happened a long time ago and that the world looks very different today. “The Dysfunctional and the Disappearing: Democracy, Race, and Imprisonment” demonstrates how we are not as far removed from the legacy of slavery as we may feel. The article reveals how through the thirteenth amendment, involuntary servitude continues, affecting Black men enormously. Policing and sentencing continue the legacy of Black captivity in what is known as neoslavery. Mass incarceration of Black and Brown people creates a new form of segregation which is “self-perpetuating.” This article captures the complex dynamics of mass incarceration very succinctly, and I would like to read about this in more detail. 

  • Vivian Corry Week 4 Response

    This week’s materials centered around educational inequities among Latino populations in the US. “Still Falling Through the Cracks,” a report conducted by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center examines how education attainment among Latines not only remains low, but actually continues to fall. The report then examines each part of the educational pathway – from K-12, to community and four-year colleges, to graduate school and beyond – and analyzes the structural failings which lead to students dropping out of these programs. These failings include Latine students’ increased likelihood to be suspended or given a disability classification, racial microaggressions, lack of representative role models, administrative and financial barriers, and lack of resources and support for undocumented students. These are all symptoms of both institutional and interpersonal racism, and this report argues that understanding the role they play throughout students’ educational careers can help to reduce the inequities they create. The report also includes recommendations to tackle each identified problem. Some solutions include recruiting and retaining inspirational Latine educators, creating curricula that reflect the experiences of students of color, fostering a college-bound school climate, providing resources for undocumented students, and maintaining effective diversity and inclusion initiatives. Some school districts across the country have taken these recommendations. Precious Knowledge captures these efforts in action at school districts in Tucson where a large population of Latine students are receiving their education. The documentary captures the very real and very material improvements that these efforts have brought about. We see how Raza and ethnic studies courses engage students quite profoundly. We see how exceptional educators make the classroom a safe and fun environment that keeps students coming to school when they otherwise might not. We see how these efforts have changed students’ relationship to school and widen their cultural understandings. At the same time, however, we see how these changes have provoked pushback from individuals who are at best misguided, and at worst malevolent. All of these things highlight the importance of scholarship in this area and, perhaps most importantly, resource allocation. I found this week’s materials to be very compelling, but I feel discouraged about the likelihood of this important work to be done in the current climate. 

  • Vivian Corry Week 3 Response

    “Whiteness as Property” analyzes the historical, legal, and cultural conceptions of whiteness. Harries describes how through laws like the Black Codes, whiteness came to stand for free people and Blackness for enslaved people. Whiteness became enshrined in law through the three-fifths compromise, the enfranchisement of all white men regardless of property ownership, Plessy, and countless other court decisions. Harris goes on to discuss ways that we define property – rights of disposition, right of use and enjoyment, reputation and status, and the absolute right to exclude – and demonstrates how each of these are also facets of whiteness. This creates her thesis that whiteness is property: it can be used by white people as “the master-key that unlocks the golden door of opportunity,” others can be excluded from its benefits (e.g. the “One Drop” rule), and white people expect the privileges of whiteness and feel stripped of a thing of value when that expectation is subverted. Harris also discusses Brown, what it accomplished, and most importantly, what it failed to accomplish. She concludes with a discussion of affirmative action and its potential for challenging whiteness as property.  

    This is a long and dense text, but it accomplishes an astonishing amount. Harris establishes the historical and legal evidence of how whiteness was intentionally crafted to serve white people in the same way that property does. She shows how this is not just an analogy for the power of white privilege but a reality that is baked into our legal system. By discussing Brown, hailed by white people as the decision that fixed segregation, she reveals how the courts have changed from “race-ing a group” to create racial subordination to a “color-blind,” liberalist denial “denial of the existence of racial groups.” This did nothing to solve the material, economic and social inequality that still pervades American society. She then goes into a brilliant discussion of affirmative action. She advocates for a distributive rather than corrective approach. I was most captivated by her discussion of court cases that challenged affirmative action. These cases precisely prove her point; white people expect privilege and when that undue benefit is taken, they act as if their property has been taken. I wish she would have discussed the idea of the “innocent white” a bit more. The notion that white people today are innocent in white supremacy despite benefitting from it seems worth further discussion.  

  • Vivian Corry Week 2 Response

    This week’s texts were primarily concerned with space, land, and decolonization. “When Place Becomes Race” by Sherene H Razack examines physical space to counter notions of space as merely a container to be filled but rather a dynamic, material product of segregation, “unequal economic relations,” and social construction. This introduction covered a wide range of topics –  mythologies created by settler colonialists, economic inequality, unhoused people using public spaces, separation created by institutions like the Hopital General, landscapes in literature, and more – and discussion of how each are inherently spatial considerations. “Land as Life” by Mishuana Goeman also centered around space, but Goeman is careful to separate her use of the word “land” from those that mean home or landscape or space in an abstract sense. Instead her discussion centers on land as a meaning-making place and one in which we must deconstruct the view of land as property. Like Razack, Goeman discusses the danger of assuming space “acts as a fluid medium in which mobile subjects dwell,” demanding a closer examination of relationships to land in Indigenous scholarship and a recognition of land as more than a limited territory delineated by invisible boundaries of property and border lines. I was most captivated by the discussion of the many prison sites which are placed on sites of significance in Indigenous narratives. I was honestly completely unaware of that fact, and I found it a striking example of the intersection between settler colonialism and the modern prison industrial complex. This is a topic I hope to explore further. I also noticed Goeman’s mention that “we need to decolonize our imaginations to decolonize the lived spaces we occupy.” Upon reading this the first time, I barely noticed this use of decolonization to mean an abstract, individually lead process of analyzing one’s thinking patterns. Afterall, I have seen decolonization to mean just that on many occasions. It wasn’t until reading “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Tuck and Yang that I really stopped to analyze this line. Tuck and Yang, acknowledge the importance of the questioning and social work that Goeman and others mean when they use “decolonization” this way, but they warn that this metaphorical use dilutes the words true and literal meaning. I found “Decolonization” to be the most salient text.