Latino Students at Duke Release Laundry List of Demands
Why not? Releasing lists of demands is all the rage on campus these days.
The College Fix reports.
Latino students at Duke refuse to recruit more Latinos until its laundry list of demands is met
It may sound odd to sabotage your group’s political strength in order to get more political strength, but that’s what Duke University’s undergraduate Latino organization is doing.
Mi Gente (“My People”) is refusing to help plan Latino Student Recruitment Weekend with the Office of Admissions until peace arrives in the Middle East (or at least they get nicer digs), The Chronicle reports:
Mi Gente will channel its energy into demanding that its “voice be heard” and its “community be represented” on campus. The letter also called for the creation of a Latino/a cultural center, more Latino/a faculty members, a larger office space for Mi Gente and Latino/a students and the formation of a Latino studies department, including a major, minor and tenured faculty.
Latino students are mad that they have so few faculty members who look like them while black faculty have tripled over the past 20 years. They’ve been waiting 11 years for Duke to accede to their demands for their own
segregationcultural center and more Latino faculty.This is definitely front cover news. We've been ignored for too long. #LatinxExcellence #ListenToLatinxVoices https://t.co/FHhYmWryOk
— Mi Gente (@DukeMiGente) January 26, 2016
The group published a letter in the Chronicle laying out their grievances – note that “Latinx” is intended as a gender-neutral ethnic term but is pronounced like a laxative (“Lateen-X”):Our requests are simple yet imperative: we demand a cultural center, which will assume full responsibility of Latino Student Recruitment Weekend programming, more Latinx faculty members in various departments and a public apology for the racism exhibited within the Department of Education and towards Dr. Jason Mendez [see below]. We are continuously disappointed with Duke and its dismissal of the needs of students of color, particularly those of the Latinx community. …
Latino students at Duke refuse to recruit more Latinos until its laundry list of demands is met (The College Fix)
Comments
I went to high school in a 51% ESL (English second language) school district, and when I went to Duke in the 1990s they had statistics that said that Duke was even more diverse than my high school.
A lot of the Hispanics at Duke turned out to be dubious. Very few were what Mexicans would call mestizos, Indios, or mulattos. Most were Jews or other Europeans who spent some of their early childhood in Latin America.
Is somebody like Cindy McCain, whose father was born on an American military base in Latin America a Hispanic?
Are people with European Spanish or Portugese ancestry like Tom Hanks or Katy Perry Hispanics?
That’s what I saw at Duke. Cooked books. (but maybe I’m behind the times because the census allows those groups to self identify as Hispanic).
Even in the 1990s, there was a big sense that college administrators were discriminating against white people, and it would be advantageous to label your ethnicity as anything but white to get into college.