Reply to Did Dr. McKnight's antiracist speech fall flat?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I wish mcps and the larger MoCo community would step back and examine what the real issues are. I’m not opposed to tackling the issues, but I feel like our community tends to miss the mark despite its well-intentioned, well-resourced efforts.

Fact: MoCo is a highly educated, super progressive, welcoming place.

Fact: Racism exists everywhere and everyone experiences bias.

Fact: There’s nothing wrong with flagging this and encouraging people to do better…and there’s nothing wrong with establishing expectations for teachers and students.

Fact: Demographics have shifted dramatically in the last two decades, and it’s causing issues that moco and mcps seem to fail to understand.

-Latino newcomers can’t be shoe-horned into our culture. They don’t prioritize education the same way African and Asian newcomers do. Latinos make up the fastest growing student demographic and will outpace whites across the county soon (it’s already happened in several school pyramids).

[b]Fact: There’s a conflict between blacks and Latinos. Reams of research and data on this at the school level as well as the societal level.[/b]

Fact: We won’t see the success mcps is looking for until they realize the game has changed. We need a system that recognizes the real issues rather than focusing on the wrong things.

The unfortunately, I’m not optimistic. The changes we need are big. [/quote]

I think most of what you said was spot on, but I have no idea why you threw this in there or what it means.

There's no race war going on between blacks and hispanics. And you do realize there is a whole intersection of people who are both black and Hispanic, right?

If you're talking about street violence, that's gang stuff. That is not a race issue. The gangs might use race as the basis of their conflicts, but it's not like there's some storied, entrenched racial conflict between blacks and Hispanics.

It's quite the opposite, in my experience. I see more unity and collaboration between blacks and Hispanics then anything, because they often tend to suffer in the same ways and face similar issues. Hence why the Black and Brown Coalition exists, which quite literally unites the black and Hispanic communities together to improve outcomes for both communities in MoCo: https://www.bandbcoalition.org/[/quote]

It depends.

I wasn't aware of this but apparently it is a thing.

Part of the reason I found out was because a Latino family had a family member marry a Black person.  And when talking about it was when I found out what their thoughts were, that it was actually a prevailing thoughts and feelings in the community, etc.

Now that family is a happy blended family (or from what I can tell).

Some of it might be a generational thing, where the parents were among the first wave of immigrants.  And remember the Hispanic/Latino culture is diverse too.  Apparently people from countries are look upon as snobby, they have stereotypes of each other within.

So just like anything else, it might not be something applicable to the entire community and could be a generational thing.  But it is a thing that Latinos and Blacks did have conflicts.[/quote]

I think I kind of get what you're talking about and it is most definitely a nuanced and layered issues that has more to do with generations, immigrant POV, etc.

But again, some Hispanic communities are quite literally both: Black and Hispanic. Think Dominican Republic, huge swaths of Puerto Rico, Colombia, Panama, etc.

And you're right, there is variance depending on the Hispanic country the family is immigrating from. Peru, for example, does not have a large black population. So they might be more hesitant to identify and mix with blacks.

In general, most immigrant families want their kids to carry on the legacy and stick to their own. I've seen the exact same scenario you described play out when kids from brown immigrant families marry white people too. It has more to do with the foreigner status and the families not wanting their kids to break with that. But usually, as you pointed out in your own example, it's something they get over in the long run.

But yeah, there is no fundamental racial conflict between blacks and Hispanics. On the contrary, there's a long history of community and collaboration between blacks and Hispanics. In fact, that community and collaboration is what gave birth to Hip-Hop in NYC, which was started by black and Hispanics kids in New York City in the 1970s....[/quote]

Well what I gathered from the family, and just taking their word for it I guess, is that apparently there are some Latinos that do/did look down on Blacks and they had a lot of the same conflicts or tensions as any other minority/immigrant did.

Yeah they may be grouped together now because of their place on the totem pole and maybe that's why there's a lot of intermingling between the two groups.

And some of it is what do you mean by conflicts.  By conflict I'm not talking about like actual physical or violent confrontations.  But more like separation and relations between the communities.[/quote]

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