Years ago, when Bill Clinton was styled as America’s first black President, more than a few Americans, knowing it to be hyperbole, were tolerantly amused. It was fun to appreciate the direct connection the African American community and he shared but, of course, along came Barack Obama. My bemusement at the Clinton pretext stemmed from the wanton disregard of Lyndon Johnson’s role in cracking open the world for African Americans – and HispanicLatinos simultaneously. After decades of oppression, minority communities began to emerge from their suppressed selves because of Johnson. LBJ was America’s first black president politically and America’s first HispanicLatino president, to boot.
Category Archives: Leadership
Census Bureau News Shatters History
People remember specifically where they were the moment they heard John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas in 1963. Very few of us will remember – since no one knows exactly when it happened – the moment that “white” births in the nation fell below 50 percent, most likely sometime in early 2011. Yet in comparison, the news that HispanicLatinos, blacks, Asians and those of mixed are giving birth to a new majority is by far more important than what happened in Dallas, although it certainly was not caught on film.
A Generational Responsibility: Understanding Oneself
In its storied history, America has had to rely on specific generations to make enormous personal sacrifices for the country’s sake. One generation fought to create the country; another generation struggled to keep it whole and not let it disappear into disunion; another generation beat back fascism; others outlasted communism; and another now fights international terrorism. HispanicLatinos are no different. They are a new generation of Americans being asked to save and to hold their country for a far greater purpose than the vast majority of HispanicLatinos might have ever considered – except that many of them start behind the social, economic and political curve. And the dimensions of the responsibility they bear are daunting. How to help save a country that seems in decline internally is no small task.
HispanicLatino: More Human Drama than New Market
Markets is a word easily thrown about, especially in the changing landscape of television. One definition of market is the old trying to catch up to the new – and to the news, perhaps. In the roiled television industry, ‘market’ could also be defined as networks discovering they stood in the way of history. Certainly, television has scrambled to catch up with the social media, and it has begun finally to move away from an old demography on which it has been stuck that each day applies less and less to the only definition of markets that ultimately matters – a way to make money.
Reworking the Networks at Last: Breaking the News
There are many tough executive-level jobs in corporate America today. The nation’s economy is being buffeted on all sides by foreign competition, skilled workers are at a premium and the nation’s infrastructure each day falls behind the rest of the world — among other issues. Few of those jobs are more challenging than leading a television network today (or a film production or advertising company for that matter).
Whether heading up an English-language or a Spanish-language operation – all are caught in some way by changing demographics; the evident and growing power of social media and new platforms; and an audience comprised of submarkets and subgroups hard to unify into a national market. It is nothing short of mayhem – and confused mayhem at that – exacerbated by business models that probably need to be revamped or scratched. Not surprisingly, rumors abound about the future of the current Spanish-language networks, the advent of news ones and the creation of new hybrids for English-dominant HispanicLatinos. ABC and Univision this week affirmed their intention to bring to life next year a new cable news channel that appeals to English-dominant HispanicLatinos.
Dream Act Leaders Now Have Tough Decisions to Make
Criticized by supporters for passing a weak civil rights bill in 1957, even though it was the first civil rights legislation in almost a century, the powerful Democratic Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson responded by saying that it was but a first step to larger gains ahead. Eight years later, a far more comprehensive civil rights package indeed became law. The story of those years — retold in part in Robert Caro’s new book on Johnson, The Passage of Power – holds implications for those contemplating a watered-down version of the Dream Act. The courageous leaders of the Dream Act movement, perhaps unknowingly, hold in their hands much of how HispanicLatinos are redefining themselves. The other part of that redefinition is being accomplished through the courtesy of states like Arizona, Alabama and Georgia and, soon enough, most likely, the Supreme Court.
‘Diversity’ Doesn’t Cut It Anymore for HispanicLatinos
Diversity is no longer an operative word for knowledgeable and informed HispanicLatinos conversing and thinking seriously about the future. Unity is by far more suitable for the times. It speaks to the strategic importance of a population that has gained critical geographic and demographic mass. A microcosm of the kind of collaboration that geography and demography will extract naturally from HispanicLatinos is the daily operations of the country’s Spanish-language television networks. Every day of the year, HispanicLatino professionals from all corners of the HispanicLatino world produce programming developed and managed by staffs whose primary language of interest might be Spanish derived from different countries of origin but whose language in the control room is likely English.
Aided by a new demography and a resilient geography while Spanish-language television and radio networks expand in more markets while English media distribute both positive and negative messages that bolster its identity, a HispanicLatino population that is allegedly a loose conglomeration of groups competing against each other is unlikely to succumb to expansive division over the long term.
While only an example, the English-Spanish paradigm evident in television production will continue to extend to many more sectors of the economy, calling, of course, on HispanicLatinos to maintain, improve or acquire both Spanish and English to an effective level.
On Afghanistan, Obama Resonates within the HispanicLatino Community
There was something unusual about President Obama last night when he spoke from Bagram military base in Afghanistan. His tone of voice seemed to capture the nation’s weariness of war without his own voice sounding listless. There was no bluster, no nonsense. Matter-of-fact, he sounded presidential. He did not rush to useless rhetorical heights. All of this should have resonated well within the HispanicLatino community, whose contributions to the Bush wars are well documented.
Obama embodied part of the common sentiment expressed to me by a family member a year ago. “We need to get out. We have done all we can. It will not work in the end, but no one has given it a better shot.” Indeed, the casualties within the country and within the HispanicLatino community will last for decades and entire lifetimes. It really is time to come home. It is hard to believe that we have spent more than $3 trillion in those wars and will spend trillions more to take care of the wounded and the families of the dead.
The message Obama delivered was a powerful as the one that went unstated: Get out, close that checkbook, open up another course at home. The hope is that the discredited neoconservatives, the ones who sat back while others fought and the habitual warriors who plunged America into these meaningless wars, get the message for all time.
Somewhere in his voice lay the possible reaction of a country were it ever attacked – God forbid – again as in September of 2011. Only the most ridiculous people would argue for some sort of land invasion – of what? More probably, we would step up what we are doing now: Keeping the pressure up and waiting for generational change to come in the Islamist world. Nations can change within a generation. Some can climb; others decline. Perhaps that is the reason for a longer commitment than most Americans want now.
Court Set to Empower Ethnic Cleansing of HispanicLatinos
Last week a Department of Justice led by Attorney General Eric Holder mounted an attack so lame in front of the Supreme Court against Arizona’s anti-immigrant, anti-HispanicLatino law known as S.B.1070 that even first-time observers realized how thoroughly DOJ had been routed. Obama’s lawyers cratered in a case of existential importance to HispanicLatinos, who should be thankful that Obama’s lawyers later this year will not handle the challenge before the same Court to the minority-friendly college admissions policies of the University of Texas – meaning those of all of the nation’s colleges and universities.
HispanicLatinos should not be happy about last week’s unmitigated disaster if the Court affirms any part of 1070 in June. Any HispanicLatino citizens who think they are exempt from its ramifications have a surprise waiting for them. As surprised might be President Obama in November.
Most legal experts presume that last week’s faux attempt at lawyering by DOJ will cause the Court to endorse at least part of the Arizona law that targets individuals based on color, race, ethnicity and sound of speech on the mere supposition that they might be in the country illegally. My fear – and I so hope I am wrong – is that local governments will rush to propose and enact ordinances against defenseless local immigrant and HispanicLatino populations. Imagine the likes of hundreds of “Americans” like Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona running wild in every state.
News About HispanicLatinos? Proper Context, Please.
At times in journalism it is not the story but the context that matters. So it is with news reports this week about rapid declines in Mexican immigration that generated front-page news coverage throughout the nation. Mexicans coming northward form only one component of the changing demographics roiling the country — and it is important that HispanicLatinos do not think that the size of their population is going to diminsh in any way in the years ahead. Almost 50 years ago – long before the advent of the HispanicLatino population became newsworthy – the power of demography and the economy made a deep impression on me.
The winding down by Congress of the bracero program that allowed for Mexicans to work legally in the country and the nearly simultaneous closing of the local air force base economically devastated the town in West Texas where I grew up, reducing the county’s population from about 40,000 to 30,000. But at the same time the country already had written a prophetic passage in its history, and its authors were not Mexican immigrants, changes in the economy or laws passed by Congress but the so-called Anglo population. Sometime in 1972 or 1973, the Anglo population decided it was going to stop having more than two kids per family. Thus news gives way to context.