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On the Border - In Focus

On the Border - In Focus
The border between the United States and Mexico stretches 3,169 kilometers (1,969 miles), crossing deserts, rivers, towns, and cities from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. Every year, an estimated 350 million people legally cross the border, with another 500,000 entering into the United States illegally. No single barrier stretches across the entire border, instead, it is lined with a patchwork of steel and concrete fences, infrared cameras, sensors, drones, and nearly 20,000 U.S.

Rape Culture At Work: Five Examples Of How Employers Turn Women Into Sex Objects By Tara Culp-Ressler and Bryce Covert "Rape Culture At Work: Five Examples Of How Employers Turn Women Into Sex Objects" CREDIT: Shutterstock It’s no secret that women face a disproportionate amount of discrimination in the workplace. But the issues that women encounter on the job can run deeper than being unfairly assumed to be less competent or less valuable than their male counterparts. That attitude toward women’s bodies becomes entrenched at an early age, as girls are told what type of clothing is or isn’t appropriate to wear at school so they don’t “distract” the male students. A New Jersey judge ruled that casino waitresses can be fired for gaining weight. Twenty two former cocktail servers sued a popular casino in Atlantic City over a policy that forbids waitresses from gaining more than seven percent of their original body weight. A widely-used employee training manual tells women how to make sure they don’t lead men on.

Uneasy Neighbors: A Brief History of Mexican-U.S. Migration | Harvard Magazine May-Jun 2007 The recent political sparring over immigration reform has included scant mention of cross-border diplomacy. Despite the growing interdependence of the U.S. and Mexican economies over the past few decades, the governments of the two nations have shown little interest in cooperating on the thorny issue of human migration. A brief look at the history of the Mexican-U.S. labor relationship reveals a pattern of mutual economic opportunism, with only rare moments of political negotiation. The first significant wave of Mexican workers coming into the United States began in the early years of the twentieth century, following the curtailment of Japanese immigration in 1907 and the consequent drying up of cheap Asian labor. The Depression brought a temporary halt to the flow of Mexican labor. The demand for Mexican immigrants reemerged after Pearl Harbor, when the U.S. government sought an agreement with Mexico to import large numbers of Mexican farm laborers.

LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa speaks at SAIGU Portraits Of Transgender Children Reveal “The Person They Feel They Really Are" Famous Mexican Inventors From birth control pills to color television, Mexican inventors have contributed to creating many notable inventions. 1. Luis Miramontes Chemist, Luis Miramontes co-invented the contraceptive pill. 2. Victor Celorio patented the "Instabook Maker" a technology supporting e-book distribution by quickly and elegantly printing an offline copy. 3. Guillermo González Camarena invented an early color television system. 4. Victor Ochoa was the Mexican American inventor of the Ochoaplane. 5. Jose Hernandez-Rebollar invented the Acceleglove, a glove that can translate sign language into speech. 6. Doctor María del Socorro Flores González won the MEXWII 2006 award for her work on diagnostic methods for invasive amebiasis. 7. Mexican inventor Felipe Vadillo patented a method of predicting premature fetal membrane rupturein preganant women. 8. Juan Lozano, a Mexican inventor with a lifelong obsession with jet packs, invented the Rocket Belt. 9. 10.

11 ways white America avoids taking responsibility for its racism I am white. I write and teach about what it means to be white in a society that proclaims race meaningless, yet remains deeply divided by race. A fundamental but very challenging part of my work is moving white people from an individual understanding of racism—i.e. only some people are racist and those people are bad—to a structural understanding. A structural understanding recognizes racism as a default system that institutionalizes an unequal distribution of resources and power between white people and people of color. This system is historic, taken for granted, deeply embedded, and it works to the benefit of whites. The two most effective beliefs that prevent us (whites) from seeing racism as a system are: that racists are bad people and that racism is conscious dislike; if we are well-intended and do not consciously dislike people of color, we cannot be racist. How dare you suggest that I could have said or done something racist! The Rules of Engagement 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Home | Latino Americans LATINO AMERICANS is a production of WETA Washington, DC; Bosch and Co., Inc.; and Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB); in association with Independent Television Service (ITVS). Corporate funding for LATINO AMERICANS is provided by The Ford Motor Company. Major funding is provided by Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Foundation support is provided by Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, The Annenberg Foundation and The Summerlee Foundation. Funding for outreach is supported by a grant from The New York Community Trust. Follow us on: Twitter (#LatinosPBS) | Facebook Published 2013. Terms of Use | PBS Privacy Policy | Contact Us PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.

Challenging Gender Identity: Biologists Say Gender Expands Across A Spectrum, Rather Than Simply Boy And Girl The sex designation of your brain and body may not be as black and white as scientists have believed it to be. Instead gender may fall somewhere on a gray scale. Scientists are trying to unravel the complex biological breakdowns of gender, and as they learn more, it’s becoming more apparent there aren’t just men and women among us. “The main problem with a strong dichotomy is that there are intermediate cases that push the limits and ask us to figure out exactly where the dividing line is between males and females,” biology sex expert Arthur Arnold at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Nature. The scientists discovered the XX and XY cells that differentiate between genders can actually behave in different ways. These discoveries question the widely accepted and generally understood genders. The plot thickens for babies born with ambiguous genitalia. Source: Ainsworth C.

Why White People Freak Out When They're Called Out About Race Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Last year, a white male Princeton undergraduate was asked by a classmate to “check his privilege.” Offended by this suggestion, he shot off a 1,300-word essay to the Tory, a right-wing campus newspaper.In it, he wrote about his grandfather who fled the Nazis to Siberia, his grandmother who survived a concentration camp in Germany, about the humble wicker basket business they started in America. He railed against his classmates for “diminishing everything [he’d] accomplished, all the hard work [he’d] done.” His missive was reprinted by Time. What he did not do, at any point, was consider whether being white and male might have given him—if not his ancestors—some advantage in achieving incredible success in America. To Robin DiAngelo, professor of multicutural education at Westfield State University and author of What Does it Mean to Be White? I spoke with DiAngelo about how to deal with all the fragile white people, and why it’s worth doing so. RD: Yes.

Racism in real estate: Landlords, redlining, housing values, and discrimination. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images In 1934, Homer Hoyt wrote a dissertation—“One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago: The Relationship of the Growth of Chicago to the Rise of Its Land Values, 1830–1933”—that ranked various races and nationalities by order of “desirability.” Most desired were the old American stock of Anglo-Saxons and Northern Europeans—English, Germans, Scots, Irish, and Scandinavians—followed by Northern Italians, Czechoslovakians, Polish, Lithuanians, Greeks, “Russian Jews of the lower class,” South Italians, and at the bottom of the list, “Negroes and Mexicans.” Jamelle Bouie is a Slate staff writer covering politics, policy, and race. For whites, there was some flexibility. Journalist Antero Pietila gives a short biography of Hoyt in Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City. This is obviously racist, but it’s also unsurprising. Housing discrimination is illegal, and most Americans express egalitarian beliefs on race.

Fully Equipped Village Allows Dementia Patients To Lead Normal, Independent Lives A Dutch village allows patients with dementia to live their lives normally while also receiving proper care. From the outside, Hogewey, located in the Netherlands, seems like any other village. It has a small grocery store, a theater and various restaurants and shops. But its residents all have dementia, and the town itself is actually a care facility. Photo Credit: Hans Erkelens/Flickr "Everything is arranged to give all residents all the care they need," Isabel van Zuthem, Hogewey's information officer explained to ABC News back in 2012, "But they feel like they're living a normal life, and that's what we think is very important." The community, which is only open to people who have been diagnosed with severe dementia, houses 152 patients in its 23 apartment units, according to Hogewey's website. "Sometimes we shop, sometimes we listen to classical music," Jo Verhoef, a Hogewey patient, told the New York Times in 2012.

whites_are_seeking_conversations_about_undoing_racism--with_each_other by Carla Murphy Tuesday, December 9 2014, 2:58 PM EST. With the national uproar surrounding the unpunished police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, some white Americans say they are rethinking the lack of diversity in their lives—and the work they need to do to help create social change that lasts. Take Philadelphia artist Katherine Fritz. In her attempt to understand events in Ferguson, she stumbled upon a 2013 national survey finding that white American social circles tend to be 91 percent white. “Whites can live, love, study, work, play and die in segregation,” says “Whiteness Studies” scholar Robin DiAngelo, “and still profess that race has no meaning in their lives.” But something appears to be shifting in that in the weeks since news broke that there’d be no indictment in Officer Darren Wilson’s case. Intentional conversations about racism—by whites, for whites and not of the KKK variety—are happening across the country. ‘Deal With the Upset’ It’s Your Problem, Not Theirs

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