Tough Times Don't Last-- Tough People Do

There isn't a single Caucasian student in the class my pal Roland teaches. There wasn't one last year either. Or the year before. No wonder Republicans-- and let's face it, would anyone choose to be a Republican if they weren't racist on a profound level?-- don't want to continue paying for public education! Roland tells me the Mexican students are almost universally respectful and eager to learn and that the parents are super-involved in the education process and recognize that upward mobility comes through education. A friend of mine in Georgia, one of the most oppressive states in many ways, immigration included, sent me the above video. It was made by some talented high school kids in his daughter's school. They're not allowed to go to Georgia's public universities but some of gotten full scholarships-- based on merit-- to some of the most prestigious private universities in America. University of Georgia's loss. Georgia Tech's loss. Georgia's loss. And Georgia is far from the only state working itself into a racist frenzy of repression over immigrants coming here from Latin America. People of Color Organize blogs about the attack on Mexican culture itself in Arizona.

There have been 71 reported deaths on the US-Mexican border in Arizona since October 1, 2011. This isn’t the full story though. Tucson hit the national news again earlier this year when the Tucson Unified School District voted to ban Mexican American Studies and had the books removed while classes were in session. Now John Huppenthal, a state official involved in the ban is reported to be targeting the department of Mexican-American studies at the university and other college-level programs.

I believe these sorts of attacks on Mexican culture, in conjunction with xenophobic legislation such as SB 1070 has created the sort of environment where the April 8 shooting deaths of two Latino immigrants in a wash that is part of the migrants’ trail near Eloy are a natural extension of government actions, especially since this occurred just after what has been reported to be the largest series of immigration raids ever.

Author Amy Greene wrote an inspiring OpEd in yesterday's NY Times, God and Man in Tennessee that gets to the root of the miseducation and enforced ignorance in backward bigoted states, states that prove the premise of Chris Mooney's latest books, The Republican Brain and The Republican War on Science.

Earlier this month state senators in Tennessee approved an update to our sex-education law that would ban teachers from discussing hand-holding, which it categorizes as “gateway sexual activity.” The bill came fast on the heels of a new state law that effectively allows creationism to be taught in our classrooms. Though he voiced misgivings, our governor, Bill Haslam, refused to veto it.

It’s election season, and there’s no doubt these politicians are pandering to Tennessee’s conservative Christian majority. They’re right in one sense: most of us, myself included, are faithful Christians. But by politicizing our faith, they are ignoring Tennessee’s true religious roots and threatening the liberties they claim to protect.

Our governor, like many of our state’s political leaders past and present-- from Estes Kefauver and Cordell Hull to Howard Baker and Lamar Alexander-- was born and raised here in East Tennessee, and he knows well how deep-rooted our spirituality is in Appalachia.

But he seems to have forgotten where it comes from.

The first Scots-Irish settlers to move into these mountains, the ones who saw the fog lying thick between the trees and called them the Smokies, were religious dissenters. They refused to live under the Penal Laws that forced them to accept Christianity as the English defined it. The churches they established rejected formalized, state-sanctioned religion and embraced diversity and individualism.

...I fear that these bills, written to give us what they think we want, will have the opposite effect. By legislating our Christianity, what they’re really doing is taking it away from us.

It's inconceivable to me that my pal Roland would ever think to mention God in his classroom, let alone presume to teach his students anything about religion. He teaches them how to read, how to do math, how to behave in society. He leaves religion to their pastors and their parents. They're grow up to be better Americans that way, regardless of where they or their parents were born.