Nursing African American Community Paper

Write an 5 paragraph essay which argues, using evidence from the course, how race and racism has impacted U.S. society and history. For each of your body paragraphs choose a different community ( African American, Chicanxs/Latinxs, Asian Americans) to state how they were racialized and what actions have these communities taken to fight against racism. *ONLY USE EVIDENCE FROM THE READINGS BELOW*

African American

The Civil Rights Movement

In the 1940s and 1950s, Black communities in the United States mobilized against Jim Crow laws and racial segregation in all aspects of life. Black people have been formally barred from many aspects of public life, including employment, education, housing, and voting. These legal conventions emboldened white people to participate in racial violence against Black people with no fear of consequence or retribution. This led to further restrictions on Black communities’ ability to travel, participate in culture, observe their religious beliefs, or exist in many public places where white people are present.

Mobilization for the Civil Rights Movement was driven by women working directly in the community in partnership with churches and religious institutions. While organizers had political goals of changing laws and policies, they also identified that community members had immediate needs for food, housing, education, and other social services. Churches often provided these services, and community members cultivated the time, capacity, and skills to participate in activism. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference brought together these religious groups to participate in the Civil Rights Movement. While women carried the movement forward on the front lines, the formal organizations and religious institutions in the Civil Rights Movement often prioritized charismatic male leaders to hold positions of authority and power (Robnett, 1997). This includes famous figures like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Figure 3.2.2$\mathrm{3.2.}2$ displays the statue of Martin Luther King (MLK) that is part of the U.S. Smithsonian Institute’s National Mall, alongside memorials of famous presidents like Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. Although MLK is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the history of Black people in the United States, he was just one of many influential leaders during this era who made change happen.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in April 1960 and was widely recognized for their sit-ins, Freedom Rides, voter registration drives, and other direct-action campaigns. SNCC’s founding statement of purpose states, “Non-violence… seeks a social order of justice permeated by love… Justice for all overthrows injustice. The redemptive community supersedes systems of gross social immorality.”

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Fannie Lou Hamer

Born to sharecroppers Lou Ella and James Lee Townsend in Montgomery County, Mississippi, on October 6, 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer was the youngest of 20 children. She worked as a sharecropper and a timekeeper for the plantation owner and was married to Perry Hamer. Fannie Lou was an outspoken civil rights activist that endured acts of violence by white doctors, policemen, and politicians. Hamer inspired many people to register to vote and ran for Congress to raise awareness around the acts of terror that white supremacists enacted to prevent Black people from voting.

Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in 1964. The Democratic Party in Mississippi barred participation from Black people, and they formed an all-white delegation for the National Democratic Party Convention. The “Dixiecrats” were a branch of southern Democrats who supported racial segregation and held substantial power in the U.S. South. MFDP organized voter registration drives for Black communities throughout Mississippi and supported Black leaders to run for office. They also protested the legitimacy of the Democratic Party delegation at the National Convention.

Concerned Citizens Environmental (In)Justice in Black Los Angeles

Sonya Winton (Article)

In August 1985, two African American women learned that the City of Los Angeles had selected their neighborhood as the site for a thirteenacre, municipal solid waste incinerator plant. They immediately took action by establishing the Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles (CCSCLA)—“one of the first African American environmental organizations in the country.”1 Through their locally based environmental justice organization, Robin Cannon and Charlotte Bullock—who possessed moderate grassroots activism experience2—launched a largescale protest campaign against a $535 million bond issue for the development of the Los Angeles City Energy Recovery (LANCER) Municipal Waste Incinerator.3 According to Cannon, “The minute LANCER sprang up, we saw it as a health threat, but we also considered it an environmental issue. An incinerator has the potential to impact the air, the land, and the water. LANCER [could have] affected the totality of where we lived and worked.”4

Los Angeles’s economically disadvantaged communities of color already faced more than their fair share of environmental hazards, and LANCER posed yet another potentially adverse health risk to the predominantly black and poor inhabitants in Cannon’s neighborhood.5 Initial reports estimated that LANCER would have emitted “nearly 5 million tons of ash—most destined for landfills—of which over 8 million pounds would . . . [have] spewed into adjacent neighborhoods from its 280 foot main stack, as well as an additional 150,000 pounds of cooling tower particulate matter emissions.”6

Undeniably, the two-year battle between CCSCLA, a politically disenfranchised, underfunded community organization, and an all-powerful Los Angeles City Council resembled the biblical narrative of David and Goliath. In the absence of national organizational support by mainstream environmental groups (MEGs),7 which are politically powerful and rich in resources, members of CCSCLA accessed their organic resource base and “mobilized a citywide network of community organizations and local political and business leaders.”8 When CCSCLA emerged victorious, the city council reluctantly suspended the construction of the $170-million LANCER facility and reevaluated “their long prioritization of incineration in its waste management policy . . . to pursue instead a commitment to recycling.”9

Like so many other multiracial, locally based environmental justice organizations in the United States, CCSCLA was established by lower- to moderate-income African Americans because the dominant, indigenous institutions in their community10 failed to address hazardous environmental afflictions that disproportionately plagued minority communities. Meanwhile, prominent, national environmental groups also had little to contribute to their cause: “[W]hen members of Concerned Citizens [of South Central Los Angeles] first approached these organizations [the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund] in the mid-1980s for support to fight LANCER, they were informed that the poisoning of an urban community by an incineration facility was a “community health issue, not an environmental one.”11

At the heart of this dismissive rejoinder was the longstanding neglect by MEGs to “sufficiently address the fact that social inequality and imbalances of social power are at the heart of environmental degradation, resource depletion, pollution, and even overpopulation.”12 By combining the issues of race, concentrated poverty, social isolation, and environmental health, leaders of CCSCLA not only made certain that South Central Los Angeles emerged as a significant focal point of the burgeoning modern environmental justice movement that was sweeping the nation, but they also effectively challenged an overly narrow definition of “the environment.” MEGs had long employed this definition to prioritize public policies related to conservation, preservation, and aesthetics, all at the expense of environmental inequity in historically marginalized communities of color.13 The emergence of a thriving environmental justice movement, as embodied by CCSCLA, challenged MEGs to develop more inclusive discourses and policies a move that was met at times with hostility from their predominantly white membership base.14 By contesting the city’s plan to locate a potentially harmful municipal waste incinerator in their neighborhood, the founders of CCSCLA ensured that Los Angeles became a site of contestation over how environmental issues would be framed.

The goal of this chapter is to chronicle the process by which CCSCLA overcame the challenges confronting it and became a model to be emulated by other community groups committed to social justice. By pooling organic resources (e.g., community members and volunteer legal and policy experts), which allowed them to offset much of the financial burden associated with CCSCLA’s startup, group members created an effective triangle approach to their grassroots campaign. CCSCLA thus built an impressive cooperative partnership comprised of city and state officials, academicians, scientists, and national environmental justice activists. By the early twenty-first century, decades after its embroiled battle with the city, CCSCLA had evolved into a key social justice organization in the Greater Los Angeles area.

Chicanxs/Latinxs

Racialization of Mexican and Puerto Rican Peoples

In the 19th century, both the Puerto Rican and Mexican peoples and their lands were directly impacted by U.S. imperialism and colonization. Beginning with the defeat of the Spanish empire 1821 by the new republic of Mexico (which up until 1823 also included El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica) the United States government and especially the Southern oligarchy (the small ruling class of slavers in the South) began to worry about this new political development. This worry by the US slaver class only grew when in 1829 Mexico officially abolished chattel slavery. This opened opened up a second Underground Railroad to MexicoLinks to an external site. which at the time had a border with Louisiana which the U.S. had purchased from France in 1803. This meant by walking only a few days and for some just a few hours, these brave escaping African peoples could be free in the lands of Mexico after fleeing the horrors of Southern plantations. And it is for this reason that in some Northern Mexico towns, like in the border towns of Coahuil

While the anti-Slavery Mexican constitution did not sit well with Southern oligarchs, neither did the fact that Mexico had lands that extended as far north into what in 1820s was called the territory of Alta California, the territory of Nueva Mexico, and Tejas. This fact of Mexican land was seen as barrier to what many Norther politicians in U.S. Congress called the “god given right” of this new racial idea called “Anglo-Saxons” to dominate the lands directly west against what they called “barbarous Mexicans” and “savage Indians.” There were some strong voices raised by a minority of politicians in the U.S. against a racially charged war against Mexico, those voices were drowned out by a large majority of politicians who beat the drums of “Manifest Destiny,” of building a massive Anglo Empire that stretched East/West across the continent.

War with Mexico and Creation of “Foreigners in their own Lands”

Between 1830-1848 the United States slowly began belligerent acts of state sanctioned and extralegal violence against Mexico, its peoples, and laws. These acts included the uprising by a small slave owning class of U.S. settlers in Texas in 1835 who defeated the Mexican army in 1836 to become an single-state slaver republic until it became formerly part of the U.S. in 1845. Then in 1846 the U.S. formerly declared war with Mexico, invaded the northern states of Mexico, and forced Mexico to surrender its northern territories and accept $20 Million settlement or have to fight to save the entire country from a full-scale military invasion of Mexico.

Included in the settlement was the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalg Links to an external site. which stated all the policies to end the war and what would happen to the estimated 80,000 – 100,000 Mexican citizens as well as the over 500,000 Indigenous peoples living in the former Northern Mexican states. For the Mexican citizens who stayed, they would become U.S. citizens and be afforded all the protections of the U.S. consition so long as they could prove they were neither African or Indigenous. While the Indigenous nations became the targets of the Indian Wars that had started under the president Thomas Jefferson.

Please watch the video below to see how these Manifest Destinted Anglo settlers would not uphold the citizen rights of Mexican people in these lands and actually do everything they could to integrate them into the White Supremacist social order of 19th century Americanism.

First Laws in California Against Mexican Peoples

This week you will read Reginald Horsman’s analysis of the reasons the U.S. went to war with Mexico starting first with white slaver-owning vigilante settlers in Texas in the 1830s and then eventually an all out invasion of Mexico from 1846-1848 to conquer 1/2 of the entire country (California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah). The following video will provide historical context of the first laws passed in California to target Mexican peoples based on race and class.

Chicanx and Latinx Healthcare Perspectives

There is much health and healing of body, mind, and spirit to do given our Chicanx and Latinx history of genocide, colonization, violence, acculturation, sterilization, hazardous working conditions, environmental toxins, diabetes, intergeneration trauma, abuses, and more. Views of health are shaped by one’s culture, and culture is informed by nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, language, and dis/ability (Chabram-Dernersesian and de la Torre, 2008; de la Torre and Estrada, 2015; Flores, 2013; Borunda and Moreno, 2022). At the same time, health access and health resources are historically and negatively impacted by a history of anti-Indianness, racism, classism, undocumented status, and region (Viruell-Fuentes, Miranda, and Abdulrahim, 2012). The implications of wealth, or net worth (what you own minus what you owe) by race and ownership of housing, and neighborhood income are apparent in the health inequality and lack of access to health care. You often see better health facilities and well-trained doctors, and fully staffed medical facilities in more affluent communities compared to poor ones. For this reason, the emergence of community-based clinics has been critical to racialized ethnic communities, especially in California Chicanx Latinx communities (De la Rocha, Bonta, and Garcia, 2019).

Think about your own experience with health and healing and that of your parents and grandparents. Where have they received most of their health and healing information? Both institutional and traditional health care are key to our communities. Institutional health care has to do with health care provided by hospitals and with doctors, physicians, prescribed medications, surgical procedures, and psychiatric appointments, which typically involve insurance. Traditional health has to do with Indigenous ways of health and healing of cuerpo y alma (body and soul) mediated through curanderas/os (healers) or other specialists, like parteras (midwifes) and involves remedios (medicinal herbs), ceremonies, limpias (spiritual cleansings), sobaras/os (message), huezera/o (bone setter), informal counseling for bilis (rage), susto (fright), or envido (envy), ancestral foodways, and referrals to medical doctors if needed (Avila and Parker, 2000; Flores, 2013; McNeill and Cervantes, 2011; Perrone, Stockel, and Krueger, 1989; Tello, 2019). Traditional health care has been in existence since before colonization and requires skilled and experienced healers.

Traditional Health Practices and Perspectives

Traditional remedios or medicinal herbs and ancestral foodways for the people connected to land have been impacted by invasion and colonization by the Spanish and European Americans ranging from 500 years ago to 150 years ago, depending on the region in this hemisphere (Rodríguez, 2013; Facio and Lara, 2014; Kimmerer, 2015; McNeill and Cervantes, 2011; Medina and Gonzales, 2019; Torres and Miranda, 2017). When people are de-terroritorialized or displaced, they lose their land and access to remedios (medicine) and ancestral foodways. When you lack access to ancestral food, there is a shift to more processed foods with sugars leading to an increase in diabetes and other related health conditions. Diabetes, in some cases, is caused by the experience of being torn from ancestral food and shifting into colonial foodways. In addition, assimilation has been detrimental to the health and healing of Chicanx Latinx communities. The longer the generations of Chicanx Latinx are in the United States, the higher the rates of diabetes, obesity, suicide, and drug and substance abuse. In some contexts, researchers have observed a pattern that can be described as the Latino Health Paradox. This means that immigrant Mexican and Latinx people will report better health and longer life expectancy compared to their acculturated Mexican origin and Latinx counterparts and European Americans of higher class statuses. Despite experiencing discrimination and institutional exclusion, which are typically risk factors that exacerbate bad health, recent migrants can carry forward strong traditions of resilience and well-being. Traditional diet and lifestyle play a major role in the Latino Health Paradox theory. Fewer years of processed foods, more walking, and less drug and substance abuse by immigrants make a difference in everyday health and overall longevity.

In recent years, with an alarming rate of cancer and research on the connection between our gut and minds, there’s been an attempt to move away from processed foods and move towards decolonizing diets and cultivating gardens (Calvo and Esquibel, 2015; Peña, 2017). This means moving towards the use of ancestral foodways, which includes Meso American (Anaucan) super foods like corn, beans, squash, nopales (cactus), chiles, amaranth, and chia. This has meant regarding food as an essential part of health and healing rather than consumption. Chicanx and Latinx communities often have few stores and market sales of fresh items compared to alcohol and processed foods within approximate distance to homes. These impact Chicanx and Latinx farmworker families who work in the food industry and provide sustenance for communities around the globe. In addition, the lack of clean and safe water and toxic pollutants used on crops compounds health issues and avoidable illnesses. The impacts of contemporary food systems on our bodies, minds, and spirit have been detrimental. Historically groups like the United Farmworkers, American Indian Movement, Black Panther Party, and the South Central Los Angeles Farm have raised awareness about this reality concerning food access and insecurity in Chicanx, Latinx, and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. Food is ultimately important to forming healthy families and communities. In response, more and more farmers’ markets are emerging in low-income working-class communities, aided by the ability to accept EBT payments (food stamps).

Traditional health through an Indigenous framework acknowledges the connection and health between body, mind, and spirit. This creates space for more diverse understandings of how healthy bodies can look, including fat bodies. Oftentimes, traditional food and food cultures of people of color are characterized as unhealthy, without regard to their place in spiritual, physical, and social processes.

Asian Americans

Stop AAPI Hate was established on March 19, 2020 by three Asian American organizers and professors after they were denied support from the California Attorney General’s office in creating an anti-Asian discrimination reporting center. They launched their own reporting center titled Stop AAPI Hate, which helped track and analyze anti-Asian hate at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, Catherine Ceniza Choy pointed out that the swift thinking and coordination of the reporting center, “emerged from a legacy of six decades of Asian American activism as well as a response to contemporary anti-Asian violence” (2022, p. 19). A political infrastructure already existed. Asian Americanists and Asian American organizers grew concerned about the backlash that could be faced by the Chinese and Asian American communities when it was reported that the coronavirus spread in China, especially since president Donald Trump publicly referred to it as the “Chinese virus.” They were right. Stop AAPI Hate received around 100 anti-Asian incidents a day in its first week alone (p. 20).

Professor Choy pointed out that while the more disturbing examples of anti-Asian violence made it to the news, less sensational incidents were still reported to Stop AAPI Hate, including: people being prevented from utilizing public transportation; being coughed at; being verbally harassed or harassed online; and vandalism (2022, p. 21). The data analysis also showed that Asian American women experienced discrimination at over twice the rate of men. They reported that although Chinese were the most targeted, 60% of respondents were of other ethnicities, including Korean, Vietnamese, Filipinx, Japanese, Taiwanese, Hmong, Thai, Lao, Cambodian, and those of mixed ethnicities, proving “the significance of ‘Asian American’ as a panethnic category” (p. 22). Often, the racialization of Asian Americans doesn’t make distinctions between ethnicities, and Choy brings up the importance of collecting both aggregated and disaggregated data that helped to express the shared experiences among Asian Americans and distinct experiences of Asian ethnic groups.

Many Americans found anti-Asian hate during the pandemic as unexpected or surprising, but anti-Asian violence is not new in the United States. Historian, Dr. Erika Lee testified before Congress on the topic of “Discrimination and Violence Against Asian Americans” on March 18, 2021. She started out by affirming the rate of anti-Asian violence rising in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic that started in late 2019, early 2020. Lee testified,

As shocking as these incidents are, it is so vital to understand that they are not random acts perpetrated by deranged individuals. They are an expression of our country’s long history of systemic racism targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. We’ve heard in the past 24 hours many describe anti-Asian discrimination and racial violence as unAmerican. Unfortunately, it is very American. This history, this American history, is over 150 years old (House Committee on the Judiciary, 2021, 01:22:48 – 01:23:25).

Lee informed the committee of one of the largest mass lynchings by a mob in U.S. history, happening in 1871 when seventeen Chinese men were lynched by a white mob of 500 in Los Angeles. She also shared that in 1886 a mob forced out all of Seattle’s Chinese residents; similarly South Asian immigrants were attacked and driven out of their homes, and Japanese and Filipinx people were subject to beatings and other racially motivated attacks. She brought up the brutal 1982 killing of Vincent Chin, and the wave of anti-Asian violence in the 1980s that targeted Korean shopkeepers and Southeast Asian refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. She reminded the committee that in the weeks after September 11, 2001, hate crimes against Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities increased by 1,600 percent. Lee continued, “As these incidents reveal, Asian Americans have been terrorized, we’ve been treated as enemies, we’ve been discriminated against. Today we are still viewed as foreigners, rather than U.S. citizens” (House Committee on the Judiciary, 2021, 01:24:17 – 01:24:31).

These historical and contemporary events are often not taught in our schools. Even our Asian American students often end up internalizing the “model minority” myth; that Asian Americans are successful and don’t face racism, and even that Asian Americans are “honorary whites.” We’ve read many essays by Asian American students who’ll write that they’ve never faced racism, but follow up with examples of racial discrimination. Deceptively “positive,” the “model minority” myth only works to divide people of color and ignore the long legacy of systemic racism and racially motivated violence against Asian Americans. The most recent expression of anti-Asian discrimination and hate is simply an extension of this legacy.

Sidebar: Varying Degrees of Pan-ethnicity

As a diverse group, Dhingra and Rodriguez (2021) explain how Asian Americans exhibit varying degrees of connection with other Asian Americans. For example, East Asian Americans (such as Japanese and Chinese Americans) display a stronger sense of pan-ethnicity as Asian Americans than South Asian Americans or Southeast Asian Americans. South Asian Americans (such as Indian and Pakistani Americans) “do not develop a pan-ethnic identity, possibly due to their distinct racialization and reliance on one another rather than on other Asian Americans (Schachter 2014)” (p. 126). A distinct racialized experience for South Asian Americans was during the post-911 Islamophobic attacks on South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, and South West Asian communities who were targets of hate crimes, harassment and racial profiling (South Asian Americans Leading Together). Southeast Asian Americans (such as Vietnamese and Cambodian Americans) may not identify with the “model minority” stereotype and feel distinct because of their refugee experience. Dhingra and Rodriguez also point out how a focus on structural inequality may lead Southeast Asian Americans to “salient ethnic rather than pan-ethnic identities,” such as in the case pointed out by Bindi Shah (2008) who argues that Laotian Americans center their ethnic rather than pan-ethnic identity in their social justice organizing when assisting refugees and low-paid workers (2021, p. 126).

Vincent Chin and the pan-Asian American Movement of the 1980s

The 1982 murder of Chinese American Vincent Chin in Detroit, Michigan, is considered an important landmark in Asian American history and panethnic political identity development. Asian Americans protested the fact that two white men, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, were sentenced to probation and a small fine with no prison time for their manslaughter conviction. The case led to the development of a nationwide consciousness around Anti-Asian hate, and established some groundwork for continued civil rights and social justice campaigns (Tajima-Peña, 2014, p. 185).

Journalist and activist Helen Zia witnessed the collapse of the auto industry in Detroit, with hundreds of thousands of mostly Black and also white working class auto workers left to fend for themselves. Described as “a city in crisis,” people in Detroit lost their jobs, homes and cars, and “gloom turned to anger as they searched for the cause of their miseries” (2010, p. 36). Japan made an easy target. First, the oil crisis of 1978 essentially “killed the market for heavy, eight-cylinder dinosaurs made in Detroit,” leading to massive layoffs. Meanwhile, Japan’s auto industry was beginning to grow, meeting the demand for inexpensive and fuel-efficient vehicles. Zia continued, “They were easy to hate. Anything Japanese, or presumed to be Japanese, became a potential target” (p. 37). Unions sponsored events where they sledge-hammered Japanese cars. Zia reflected that living in Detroit at the time, “It felt dangerous to have an Asian face” (p. 37).

Vincent Chin, age 27, was out with his friends celebrating his bachelor party on June 19, 1982 at a local strip bar. Ronald Ebens, a Chrysler plant superintendent and his stepson, Michael Nitz, a laid-off autoworker, seemed annoyed that Vincent was receiving attention from the dancers. Vincent’s friend overheard Ebens say, “Chink,” “Nip,” “fucker,” and one of the dancers heard him say, “It’s because of motherfuckers like you that we’re out of work.” Vincent responded, “Don’t call me a fucker” and they fought. When both groups were kicked out of the bar, Ebens and Nitz drove around searching for Vincent. Once they found Vincent, Nitz held him down while Ebens swung a baseball bat into his skull four time

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