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Everyone knows that black people have it worse in this country.
While the aristocracy in this nation was getting a head start over them with slavery, and then segregation that barely ended a few decades ago except in Tucson where it still exists, it is fair to say that not all people start life on a level playing field.
In the 2004 documentary The One Percent, made 7 years before that term would become common, an heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune wonders why, at midnight on his birthday, he will inherit more money that most Americans will ever make in their entire lives working.
He shows how members of the one percent spend frivolously because they can, and in the end, they gather annually with their wealth manager and after a year of no work but tons of partying and travel and spending, they manage to become even richer still!
The 1% is not just made up of the smart capitalists who started a successful company. It is made up mostly of their families, many of whom inherited that wealth. Consider the Walton family, aka the Walmart heirs. When Sam Walton passed, his fortune was split:
Bentonville is also home to the Walton family–the widow and offspring of Sam Walton. They control about 39% of Wal-Mart stock, worth some $90 billion, which makes them by far the richest family in the U.S.
via Fortune.
These families will never ever starve. No matter how dumb the child, they will make it into college after the appropriate donations are made, and they will graduate. Some trust-fund children, like Rodney Britz Glassman from the Republican Fresno agriculture and pesticide conglomeration, can even write not only a substandard dissertation, but have clear examples of plagiarism in it, get caught, and not only get to keep all his degrees, but get to sing the national anthem at UA football games also.
While the rest of America may not be living the lifestyles of the 1%, most of the white America still got to live a life of white privilege, some not even believing that racism still exists because they don’t see it in their daily lives.
To demonstrate the economic privilege, consider the Occupy protests.
As soon as white unemployment numbers dropped to what it has been for black people all along, or in other words when white people had to start experiencing what the black community has all along but was ignored, then this is unacceptable! They are now getting to experience what minorities experience all along, such as hard-working but now laid-off white America being told to stop being lazy, to get a job, etc.
Just like the families of the 1% who inherited their “hard-earned” money.
How interesting that when the white “middle-class” (everyone is middle-class, right?) has to live the conditions that minorities do, there will be protests on the streets, including Wall Street.
Why is Mark Stegeman afraid of transparency into his own documents? Photo: Diana Uribe.
Another example of this unfair treatment of white vs brown can be seen in TUSD. We have already covered how European history gets to be taught, while Mexican American history is banned as a result of votes from people like Mark Stegeman.
We have seen a year’s worth of comments from Stegeman talking about transparency and reviewing every last bit of curriculum in MAS (and not doing so with other programs, including those that hurt minorities such as ELL). Stegeman is not convinced of other people’s analysis and has to see things for himself, analyze every last bit, and put in his own public information requests to the MAS director.
There has been nearly 100 public information requests made of the MAS program. No other program in TUSD even comes near!
But this is fair game right? The public has a right to that information. Even if a few requests becomes dozens and dozens… MAS in TUSD must comply.
Now consider one single public information request made of TUSD board president Mark Stegeman.
Not only are his UA emails public information under law, certainly his UA emails dealing with his role as an elected official presiding over 50,000 students in Tucson’s largest school district are public information also. The UA is a public institution, and all emails on their computer servers are available to Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and for Mark Stegeman this is doubly so.
Nearly six months after filing a public-records request for emails to and from Tucson Unified School Board president Mark Stegeman, the Tucson Weekly has received only a fraction of what was requested.
via Tucson Weekly.
You should read the rest of the story as it is quite disturbing how Stegeman and the UA were giving the Tucson Weekly the runaround on their FOIA request.
But the story gets even better. Mark Stegeman responds:
I think that such intrusive requests should be reserved, if used at all, for larger targets.
Before responding to Stegeman’s ridiculous statement, I include Dan Gibson’s response (also from the TW):
I might be crazy, but I tend to think public records should actually be public… Mari’s doing her job by asking for the records.
Mari Herreras, the journalist who put in the original FOIA requests as her role on the education beat at the TW, responded:
Mark – You are president of the TUSD school board. TUSD is the largest school district in the city. You are accountable to more than 60,000 students and their families, as well as those in Tucson who support public education and vote. You are part of a board responsible for approving a $500+ million budget. You are not a low-level bureaucrat. Public records are public records.
These are all reasonable and valid responses, and the main point is that public records are public records.
But now back to Stegeman’s bone-headed response. “Such intrusive requests should be reserved, if used at all, for larger targets.”
The school board president is much higher on the totem pole than the director of MAS… and are those dozens of requests of MAS, their teachers and students also not “intrusive?”
Consider a poem written by an MAS student that discussed the problems she saw in her daily life. It was a personal poem from an underage child. That did not prevent the state under Huppenthal’s Department of Education from using her poem as evidence that MAS is discussing racism in the classroom. Everything in the MAS classroom was available for their witch-hunt, and that included student journals!
Horrific?
This is what Latinos have to deal with in Tucson.
Furthermore, Mark Stegeman himself put in “intrusive” requests of “smaller targets” of those lower on the power structure than he. Did MAS complain and whine like Mark Stegeman did?
Nope. They complied with the law.
But more to the point, after experiencing just 1% of the “intrusion” that the MAS program, the director, the teachers, and the students has had to deal with; after just one single (and so far the only that I know of) public request for his public UA emails on a public computer server dealing with his capacity as an elected official, thus even more open to FOIA requests, the response from Mark Stegeman is clear.
He does not like being treated as he treats the Mexican American Studies program and people involved.
The lack of mirror neurons will do that to you, and just like the Occupy movement demonstrated, when white people have to endure just a taste of the conditions that minorities have to live with everyday, there will be protesting.
As another example of white privilege, sometimes people like Glassman and Stegeman, both who have worked against unions in Tucson (Glassman in his new job with Waste Management, Stegeman at TUSD), will get blind support and almost zero criticism from Tucson “Progressives.”
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In Alameda County schools, we are proud of our strong and vibrant Latina/o student population, and we know first-hand that curriculum supporting cultural heritage inspires pride, self-confidence, and success in the classroom.
