Migration Is Normal, Effects of Racial Discrimination, and More

 #Daniel Immereichr, "We All Move," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - Yale University cartographer Bill Rankin "calculates the the uninhabited areas discovered by seafaring Europeans amounted to only 0.14% of the world's land." "Polynesians came first from Asia and not by accident." "It is typical of a non-migratory closed-border world." Sonia Shah, author of 'The Next Great Migration' (Bloomberry), writes that most people assume lemmings on the move are seeking death, yet her research suggests that they are actually seeking new lives.

Shah writes that: "We no longer think ancient migrants accidentally reached new locales on pre-time, one-way journeys. Rather, it now appears, they crossed back and forth, migrating in multiple and many directional streams. The image of humanity as a tree with diverging branches, makes sense only it we imagine those branches frequently curling back and fusing with one another."

"The year 2015 saw an unprecedented surge in construction of new border walls," Shah writes. "Barriers shot up on the European side of the Mediterranean to block refugees from the Middle East." "People, plants and animals move, and they do so regularly. The coming years will see more migrants than ever, and we should not see that in itself as a crisis. Migration is normal. The lemmings are all right." 

As he warned in his best-selling treatise of 1916, 'The Passing of the Great Race,' Madison Grant, a founder of the Bronx Zoo, the migration of people from their customary climate would lead to intermarriage and the enfeeblement of the white race. "Grant's work eventually helped inspire a U.S. immigration law in 1924 to heavily restrict immigration from countries outside Western and Northern Europe."

#Maritga L. Felix, "Unfinished Reunions,"  The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "Under the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy, migrants, including migrant seekers -- who attempted to cross the border without authorization -- were detained and criminally prosecuted." "The immigration courts still have more than a million pending cases."

#Nefertiti Austin, "Care Interrupted," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "In Los Angeles County, where I live, 20 percent of the 20,876 children in foster care are Black." "Covid mandates delayed reunifications, movement between foster homes, and adoption finalizations; the whole system came to a screeching halt." "In fact, 52 percent of young adults currently or formerly in foster care reported that Covid negatively affected their health or mental health care."

#Jenni Moret, "Reclaiming Indigenous Birthways," The Nation, 3.22 -29.2021. - "According to one study, nearly a quarter of Native patients reported experiencing racial discrimination while visiting a doctor or health clinic, and 15 percent of those surveyed also said they avoided seeking health care altogether because they feared mistreatment."

"Further damaging the relationship between Indigenous women and health care providers was the shameful practice of forced sterilization. Beginning in 1970, physicians working in the Indian Health Service carried out this permanent procedure to prevent pregnancies, an agenda initiated by an act of Congress." 

Nicolle Gonzales is one of a small but committed group of Indigenous midwives trained to provide modern, professional pregnancy and childbirth-related care in any setting." "Fewer than 10 percent of today's certified nurse-midwives are practitioners of color. That figure is  dramatically less for Indigenous midwives -- by Gonzales's account as little as 1 percent." "Native Americans are more than twice as likely as other women to die from pregnancy-related causes."

#The most comprehensive research on integrated schools comes from Rucker C. Johnson, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. "White kids who go to integrated schools thrive academically and develop the mental and emotional muscles for long-term interracial friendships." "In one study of the most and least progressive districts in America, researchers found that Black and brown kids actually get better education (scoring 15 and 13 percentage points higher in math and reading) in what we might reflexively assume are more racist cities." "We must employ what Martin Luther King Jr. called 'creative maladjustment': doing what our parents and friends think is maybe a little too extreme and very much unexpected."

#Jamileh Lemieux, "Diversity Is Not Enough," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "But Black children enrolled at a good Black school are learning while being affirmed, nurtured, and loved;" "Disparities in academic achievement and discipline suggest that the vast majority of non-Black educators in this  country lack an understanding of Black history, Black identify, and Black culture that is not comprehensive enough to serve our children well."

 "According to data from the Department of Education, the nation's public school teaching force is 79 percent white and over 75 percent female. 'The man,' a once popular colloquialism among African Americans, referring to the unseen force that is white supremacy, reflects how white men have largely been the face of anti-Blackness in this country." 

#Chesa Boudine, "Across Prison Walls," The Nation, 3.22 - 29.2021. - "The majority of people in prisons are parents, and there are far more children with an incarcerated parent than there are prisoners. Because of the constant churn of people in and out of incarceration, one in 12 American children will experience parental incarceration." "As my friend Emani Davis, who grew up visiting her father in Virginia prisons, put it, 'We're told prison visiting rooms are set up for security and control; to kids, they feel designed to kill the human spirit and deter us from coming back.' " 

"40 percent of the people in prison never completed high school." "Prisons and jails do not promote parenting; they seriously impede it."