All the popular blogs are doing it.From: What Privileges Do You Have? - based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. (If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.)

1. Father went to college.
2. Father finished college.
3. Mother went to college. (for 1 class)
4. Mother finished college.
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.
9. Were read children’s books by a parent.
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18 assuming that sport counts.
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18 assuming that sport counts.
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively.
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18.
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs.
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp (requirement for the middle school I went to)
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
9. Family vacations involved staying at hotels. Much less than 50% of the time.
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18.
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child.
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house.
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home.
25. You had your own room as a child. I got the guest room in my teens when we didn’t have guests.
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course. (all free)
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school.
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college.
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16. (Dominican Republic, Miami)
31. Went on a cruise with your family.
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family.
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up.
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.

I actually did a Google search to get the original exercise, and I laughed really hard, because post after post had most of these lines emboldened or underlined, and I’m here with about 6 lines in bold. And as I graduated junior high school, a predominantly Latino school, I never knew I’d be inundated with products of such privilege. Maybe it’s the idealist in me, but I thought that having this kind of privilege would make it easier for some of my classmates to become more benevolent, especially since they had less worries economically and got a head start on much of the material we studied in our four years.

Unfortunately, that not only proved false, but it’s one of the many factors that played into my antagonism towards some of my classmates. They were so comfortable with their privileges, they more readily demeaned others who couldn’t / wouldn’t get certain items. And naturally, it only got worse in Syracuse, where stories about massive car wrecks only made me and my friends roll our eyes after the person who caused the accident would say “I’ll just get a new one from my Daddy in a couple of weeks. No big deal.” And when you have “Juicy” sprawled across your ass, it’s a really easy life … really.

This isn’t to say that I haven’t had a lot of luck in my own right. I went to a poor but well-managed public school, a good middle school with small class sizes, and a private high school with its share of good resources. I had a lot of opportunities that most people in my demographic didn’t get, nor even realized they could. I’m a product of these fortunate events, and I’m happy I got what I got.

In this country, there’s this politics of access. Those to the right of the issue say that everyone has access so long as they try their hardest. They’re the ones that usually ask “Why don’t these people work hard to attain what the rest of us have?” Those to the left of the issue are the ones usually asking “Why doesn’t everyone have the same access to these privileges?” I find myself to the left, since the politics of the left demands a lot of deep digging, and deflecting the images posted in front of us about the grandness of this empire. Underneath it all, there’s no equity, and underneath it all, we don’t do enough to reinterpret successful tips for the underprivileged in this country (and in dirty not-so-secret secret news: in order to have rich people, there must be poor, and thus with all the very rich people there are many destitute areas all over this country.)

You can give people access to museums for free (NYC does it), but will they have the proper education or historical background to understand what they’re observing at the museum, even with the little notes telling them what the artifacts and painting represent?

You can have free opera showings and Caucasian-centric musicals for the masses, but do you risk telling other cultures theirs is not good enough to be considered “cultured”?

You can give as much financial aid to some of your less privileged but promising students so they can attend your institution, but are we preparing the population who got in through a trust fund or as a legacy for the culture shock as well?

Because if not, access is simply a way of telling people “See, we did something” knowing that it would do nothing to ameliorate the problem, quasi-placating the critics and thrusting the responsibility on the victim.

I’m even aiming this at well-to-do Blacks and Latinos, many of whom forget from whence they came, but that’s another post altogether. The politics of access demands that some people have it and some many don’t, because if it’s something everyone has, it’s not that special and hence not a privilege. Yet, those who already get the privilege consider it a right of birth, and don’t know what to do with themselves when they lose those “rights.”

I suppose that’s the irony of not having anything; having something above anything is considered a privilege, and when you have nothing to lose, there’s nowhere else to go but up.  Right?

jose, who wants to know how to get  1/2 a million without the FBI catching feelings …

A few notes of interest:

1. Yes, I cleaned up around here. Click refresh, and tell me what happens to that header. Do it a good 7 more and you’ll get your wishes granted ;-).

2. The oddest thing happened on Friday. One minute, my Feedburner says I have 83-93 readers, and the next, I have 299! Sick. What’s more, it goes back down the next day. Weird.

3. Yes, it’s my birthday on Thursday. Fun.

4. Memes that highlight the differences between men and women / Blacks, Whites, Asians, Latinos, etc. / rich and poor in a defensive and divisive way bore me to tears these days. I used to be enthralled by them when I was younger because I was able to contrast my unsophisticated observations about those differences and the ill-conceived notions of roles different people take in those stereotypes. While I agree that some stereotypes come from real research, I’m more ready to believe that those lists along with hack comedians and delusional, angry people make these lists up to reinforce divisions amongst the sexes, races, and classes when we’re really all people.

5. Cloverfield had an awesome preview, but it was an awesomely bad movie. Great effects, and snide social commentary that in some ways, I found interesting, but that ending was abrupt as all hell. Rather than make us think for a second, it made us think to leave. People in the audience laughed about as much as they were scared and grossed out. I wouldn’t watch it again, and I want some of my money back, but if you do watch, prepare for the worst.

6. Yesterday was my boy Omar’s birthday, and whenever we all get together, it’s just a mess of historic proportions. We went to Carmine’s, a popular Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side with family-style dining. Anyways, Kenny, one of the realest dudes and resident ALM (Angry Latino Man), Mike, my homegirl’s boyfriend, and Omar had a heated discussion (some in the restaurant might have called it an argument, but that’s besides the point). Every so often, I’ll interject with an off-beat joke here and there, but last night, I was more good for a hearty, body-aching laugh.

As I’m observing them, I notice that, on their side of the table, Kenny’s sitting on the left, Mike’s on the right, and Omar’s at front and center of the table, appropriate if not ironic. At first, it was pleasant enough, with each side making their points, but then it got really intense, curses being flung across the table and the rest of us caught in the crossfire. I’m all for political conversation, and all the participants brought up awesome points from their side. Yet, what struck me the most was how, after all of that, they’re still friends.

Of course, I was more on Kenny’s side of the argument, even if I was sitting on Mike and Omar’s side of the table. After all, how can anyone at the table argue against poor people when we were all the sons and daughters of immigrants or poor people? We were all the privileged offspring of people who had just enough of the essentials, and for many of our relatives and neighbors, they weren’t lucky or privileged enough to receive a college education and live on a a much better income than minimum wage. It’s easy to dismiss that when we’ve never had to experience that for ourselves.

Not to say that our fathers were anything like Phillip Banks (of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air fame), but we sometimes get the Carlton and Hillary effect, where the parents consciously protect their children from knowing about those struggles or the children live incongruously from that reality, concentrating solely on case study of self rather than percentage. Will, the hoodlum he is, often reminded them of the position they’re in and from whence they came, which is why Ashley, the most liberal of the three Banks offspring, turns out the way she does. She was still rich, but she got a better sense of what came before her, and that’s important.

But I’m a socialist by nature, so I’m inclined to this opinion, and I’ve already written my stance on all of those matters, but my opinion doesn’t dismiss their contributions to their families or their people. After all, we still shared our personal lives with each other, and ate from the same dishes. There’s still, inevitably, common threads of human decency that run through all of us at that table, and somewhere in between all of our arguments lied the solution: a huge plate of ice cream with all the fixings. We all sat there for a good 5 minutes, quietly letting the food settle. Mike ate the candle apparently, mistaking it for licorice. Omar and I laughed about stupid MySpace people. Kenny started hating on people. We left the restaurant and all went our separate ways, but we’d see each other again. As it should be.

jose, who can’t stop looking at his theme, and has Pearson and Aaron to thank for the inspiration …

2 weeks ago or so, I watched Charlie Wilson’s War, and I must say, this movie had my attention the whole movie. I was enthralled with the idea of a covert war, mainly because things of this nature happen so frequently but are kept from us by the national media. In any case, what really made me contemplate the world’s ills a little was the bit by Gust Avrakotos (wonderfully played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) in which he says:

A boy is given a horse on his 14th birthday. Everyone in the village says, ‘Oh how wonderful.’ But a Zen master who lives in the village says, ‘We shall see.’ The boy falls off the horse and breaks his foot. Everyone in the village says, ‘Oh how awful.’ The Zen master says, ‘We shall see.’ The village is thrown into war and all the young men have to go to war. But, because of the broken foot, the boy stays behind. Everyone says, ‘Oh, how wonderful.’ The Zen master says, ‘We shall see.’

Powerful. It’s amazing how even when a few people fancy themselves as benefactors to a certain situation can they end up being their executioners. For instance, I take a glance over at Dominican Republic, a country wrought with so much promise yet so much poverty. In the song “El Niagara en Bicicleta” by Juan Luis Guerra, he discusses a trip he took to the medical office, and the trouble with just getting medicine in that country. I thought, for someone as rich and popular as he is, if he can’t get good health care in his own country, what does that mean for the other inhabitants of this country?
With so many American-titled streets and statues (there’s even a Vietnam there, fittingly enough), one would think the country was a property of the United States (kind of like putting the Monroe Doctrine on its head). Yet, this property still has problems keeping the electricity on, still can’t have fair elections, can’t get a real sewer system running, still have drastic medical needs, and have had a series of dangerous robberies even in communities that never had issues with theft on such a massive scale before.

Yet, people in these Americas get mad because so many of us whose families immigrated from other countries would rather concentrate on the countries from whence we came instead of places like Darfur, the African country du jour for anyone who considers themselves “liberal” in this country. Rather than acknowledging that it’s really easy for some of the inhabitants in this country to drop everything and go save this “Third World” country, (don’t we live on one planet?) they get mad and post secrets like this:

Please. If they really wanted to do some good, they don’t have to look any further than across the bridge, or on the other side of the highway, or a few stops on the train or bus, or on the south or east side of things. Or even better, look in the mirror and acknowledge their own roles in the continued conflicts we have amongst ourselves. Lower East Side, Harlem, South Side of Chicago, East St. Louis, South Central, and Watts all have flashes of the impoverished countries some of these “liberals” think they’re saving. And the easiest way to deal with these neighborhoods is not by ensuring that every citizen of this country has the same rights as the next, but to supplant them and gentrify the neighborhoods they live in so it fits their ideal. Similar to what’s happening to Iraq, but on a smaller scale and unfortunately much more legal.

This isn’t to say that I think anyone who lines up in support of Darfur is a faker. I think they have issues that we can help resolve. However, we’ve gone through a laundry list of countries that need America’s help; it’s like a biannual tradition of twirling the globe in our rooms and picking a country to shift the agenda to. And that’s insincere.

Which brings me back to Charlie Wilson’s War. Charlie finds himself doing the right thing for the people of Afghanistan because, honestly, he wants to. Yet, when it comes to them building their own means of survival by building a school, it’s no longer in the interest of his government. And people who want to save Afghanistan like Joanne live in these mansions as if to relieve their souls from dealing with the obvious contrast between her and the impoverished people of the country.

Thus, it’s Gust, the most dangerous, craziest, and anti-social character in the movie who observes the inevitable most eloquently. Or maybe he’d just been through so much that he’s deprogrammed from the wresting conformity that all these distractions have let us to. Because that too is like riding a bike up the Niagara …

jose, who’s been wielding Excalibur’s sword doing some serious work in class, and will report on that next week for sure …

Before I continue, I’d like to thank Tia (not sure who she is, but she likes my blog) for nominating me for the Best Education Blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards. If you’d like to drop by and hit the little plus button next to her comment, that’d be dope. If not, keep reading anyways. The best is yet to come.

The best way to turn me off from any argument is to magically introduce some mental condition. Ever since I was in college, I found myself very critical of the increasing amount of mental / developmental disorders, especially in an age where the more conditions you can come up with, the more money you can get for your “exclusive” research.

Studies have shown that there’s been a huge increase of mental disorders and chronic diseases in the United States, and the first two factors commonly associated with this are 1) the ability to see the symptoms and treat them early on and 2) the higher risk behaviors people are taking on at a much younger age. Of course, it also stems from the other, and more understood factors like birth conditions, environment, dietary habits, family situations, and genetics.

But the not-so-secret secret for these treatments has a lot to do with people’s self-interest. If you can make someone’s adjustments to society’s ills into a mental disease, then you can look like you’re doing something about it.

Case 1:

When inner-city teachers who have detrimental classroom management or have a negative outlook on the children they teach get fed up with their most extreme cases of misbehavior, they turn to the psychiatrists in the building and say “He / she’s got ADHD, and I can’t take it anymore!” I personally have referred a few children here and there, with much reluctance and after serious discussions with them and their parents. I don’t pull the trigger unless I know something is severely wrong or the kid asks me to refer him. Yet some teachers just want to point and scream ADHD like it’s a witch hunt. I mean, with some of the living conditions these kids have, it’s no wonder why they would go crazy.

Case 2:

The drug market is at an all-time high. There’s a pill for any and every disease, condition, problem, and quandary. Drug companies profit off of commercials that exacerbate the problems in your life (Do you feel depressed? Lonely? Out of sorts?). People in America are working harder than ever at lesser wages with less sleep, less family time, and everything from gas and food to health care and housing become more expensive. So when we sit down to watch our favorite TV shows, go on the Web, or read our afternoon paper, we see these ads telling us how their drug will miraculously cure us of what ails us. Then, they give the drug a fancy new name so it sells better because a name with all those x’s, y’s, and h’s won’t do well. What’s more, many of the drugs that we end up intaking actually have chemicals that keep us dependent on them, so what does that say? Mind control through chemicals isn’t far fetched …

Case 3:

Understanding Case 1 and 2, we can see how people are quick to find new ways to disorder and prognosticate our entire realities. If you’re having problems with math, it’s not that you haven’t been shown how to do it, it’s that you have a mental disease called Mathematical Anxiety Disorder (MAD). If you’ve experienced a series of oppressive events and still live in a rather dismal existence, the policies that keep that sort of environment together isn’t the problem, it’s a mental condition called Poverty Induced Trauma (PIT). If you have an inordinate prejudice against someone else because of a combination of culture, ethnicity, and skin color, then you’re not a racist. You have a mental condition called Ridiculous Assumptions Causing Extremism (RACE).

And I hate to be the one to point these things out, because I’d be offending those who believe something different than me (ha), but everything we’ve done since the dawn of our existence has been about translating our realities for our own minds. We have the opportunity to redefine our existences, but we also have to outline the obstacles and act upon the forces preventing us from making those changes.

When we happened upon this Earth, everything we understood and felt about the world was told to us. Blue was blue, and there was no denying that. 1+1=2 and that was that. We accept a lot of things as fact and the rationales we assume come from the many experts and authorities we have in our lives, yet when we grow up, we start to see the cracks in the authorities’ assumptions and make our own wedges within them. Contrary to what some of you believe, ADHD isn’t endemic to Black and Latino children, poverty does affect the supposed opportunities we have, and race exists, and a big of its existence is mental, something we can’t undermine.

Like Dr. Carter G. Woodson, one of the greatest authors I’ve ever read, said in his seminal work The Mis-Education of the Negro,

“When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.”

jose, who might be crazy himself …

Last week, I spoke extensively about one student who had some serious behavioral problems in his classroom, and how that’s a microcosm of what he’s going through at home. Whenever I look at kids like him, I know how to approach them because I’ve been witness to that environment. Unfortunately, because of program restrictions, I no longer work with the child after-school, but best believe I’m still paying attention to his progress.

After all, many of our children come from environmentally abusive backgrounds, and environmental issues in the urban ghetto usually get glossed over. People are quick to blame their environment on the victim when almost all of the evidence shows that our condition stems from oppressive policies stemming back to when this country was first founded. It’s hard to point a finger when the policies don’t just stem from one particular face, but a whole institution. That’s the critical part of understanding how our children can be constantly subjected to the road less wanted.

For instance, people blame poor urban families for their own health issues, everything from diabetes, heart failure, asthma, obesity, and high blood pressure. Yet, the foods we get here are usually in poor condition. I thought the food here was alright, until I visited the Farmer’s Market on 14th St., where I was astonished to see real and fresh vegetables. Real lettuce, with actually red tomatoes, and truly green broccoli and ripe pickles. Natural apple juice, and freshly picked oranges. Usually the first stop that these items make is the more affluent places, where the customers presumably live a healthier lifestyle but conversely where the produce makers will make top dollar for their produce. Meanwhile, a poor urban mother could a) settle for the less than pleasurable and unkempt vegetable aisle or b) go to the canned foods and boxed food aisles. After all, processed foods are much cheaper than organic food, even when the organic food’s quality has been severely diminished.

Then there’s the issues our children’s parents go through. Imagine all the history of denigration they’ve gone through: Reaganomics, crack infestation, needle and blue cap infiltration, gun warfare, massive rape and abuse, police brutality, immigration, English acclamation and retention, prison industrial complex promotions, rent hikes, gentrification, asbestos paint, lead-tainted water, declining hospital service, and abject poverty … and that’s just in my neighborhood.

Many of them have a good from 8-6, then come home and work on their families until 11pm. We have Third World conditions right here in America, and Hurricane Katrina only highlighted that temporarily. Little do people know that the Lower 9th Ward wasn’t pretty before the Hurricane, so what does that say about America’s response to places like that, Watts in California, East St. Louis, Southside of Chicago, Chinatown in NYC, and a thousand other places where poor children of all colors are all subjected to a lack of money and hence care.

Yet, when the children get to school, malnourished and uncared for, they act out. They’re acting out, stealing from each other and screaming at their teachers. Of course, that’s when teachers and administrators who don’t understand where these loveless children come from want to treat them for every possible disorder and dysfunction on Earth. I admit that some of them that do come from this background really need more substantial help than any teacher in the current public school system can offer. Many of these children don’t really have a disorder, and it’s been proven that if you just talk to some of these kids like human beings, those disorders start going away. And even if they’re not getting mistreated for some disability, they’re getting mistreated in the classroom. Some people who don’t belong near a classroom but see the value in looking like they’re making a difference let their inherent classism and racism shine brightest and thus build mistrust for an education for kids who need it.

None of this is new. To the contrary, the miseducation of our youth has gone on for centuries. And people wonder why poor people won’t take out loans to get a new home since money’s meant nothing but trouble for them. Pregnancy and STI prevention information isn’t a deterrent to those who have no self-esteem or self-worth. Thug rap went from reporting what’s going on in the streets to just living life on the fast lane because there’s no future so they live for the present. Colleges are easier to get into but harder to successfully get out of with the increasingly expensive tuitions and steady drop of governmental financial aid (which works well for a booming college loan market). With slave wages for the increasing population of immigrants from the West, South, AND East and a depreciating job market, it’s no wonder why the rich continuously get richer while the rest of us unknowingly have remained on the same plateau of poverty.

The one argument that everyone uses against me when I discuss these multifaceted issues is “But Jose, you made it. You lived in the same environment these people did, and yet look at you now. You’re successful and have a promising future. Why can’t they make it?” And usually, this person either comes from a household where the parents are successful and have been for generations, or a family whose grandparents were successful, and that story didn’t pass onto the person who asked me.

Their point usually starts with how some families they’ve seen concentrate more on getting 200$ sneakers an rims for their cars instead of investing in the stock market. They’ll see people rockin’ gold chains and wearing inappropriate clothing wherever they go. What I also believe they see is exactly what they want to see and not what’s truly there.

I contend that the factors that led me to where I am today were nothing short of fortunate. I had a mother who, with her flaws, pushed me in the right direction, a set of schools that were top-notch in their own respect, whether private or public, a good amount of people who believed in my own ability, and a genetic intelligence and stubbornness that could have prevented me from making some of the decisions I made but they did. If anything in this paradigm fell out of place, I wouldn’t have been as successful.

These opportunities I’ve worked hard for and have been granted haven’t made me any more complicit with what’s around me. I still struggle with different health issues like many of my neighborhood brethren do, and it’s something that I have more information on now. People don’t often break that seal until they’ve tasted a certain echelon of society. I am a firm believer in self-determination and making something out of nothing, but that’s exactly it. I don’t believe in alchemy. As a math person, I think there are simple solutions to some of the problems that afflict us, and it’ll be worth it if we can find those solutions.

Not everyone’s has been as fortunate as I am, though, which is why I fight for them. The images we see of the bling and the pomp are usually a very small percentage of truly poor people, and that’s what we don’t really see. Many of the little gadgets we see the kids have are second hand illegal devices, and liquor stores on every corner surface because it’s the one legal potion people use to get away from their daunting troubles. Change doesn’t happen by just sitting there; we need to be that change.

jose, a proud supporter of blog action day …