Opinion: Obama’s Moral Failure by Joshua Hoyt

March 18, 2010 Politics 1 Comment

I’m a community organizer. Last week, I did something I never thought would be possible. I met with the president of the United States in the West Wing of the White House.

President Barack Obama met for 75 minutes with 14 leaders from across the country to discuss immigration reform — and the destruction of some 1,100 immigrant families a day through deportations carried out by his administration.

The meeting was tense, blunt and passionate. And there was a racial irony to our discussion. Our labor, faith and immigrant rights leaders included seven Latinos, three Asians and four whites. We were meeting with our country’s first African-American president, the son of an immigrant father. His senior advisers at the meeting included three African-Americans (one the child of immigrants), a Latina, a Chinese-American woman and a white woman.

There were years of intertwined friendships and relationships at the table, including my own with the president that began when he was a Chicago community organizer in 1986. Yet, despite all of these ties, we were there to tell him about his moral failure on immigration, and his looming political catastrophe.

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The Editor

Hill lags in hiring Hispanics

February 24, 2010 Front Page, Politics, Power, Problems No Comments

Hispanics make up nearly one-sixth of the U.S. population, but a new study shows that they’re almost nonexistent in high-level staff positions on Capitol Hill.

Out of 100 Senate chiefs of staff, only one is Hispanic: Amanda Renteria, who works for Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow. There are no Hispanic legislative directors or deputy chiefs of staff in the Senate, the study shows, and only one Hispanic staff director.

In the House, the study finds, Hispanics hold only 12 of the roughly 440 chief of staff jobs and only nine of about 440 legislative director slots.

The Congressional Hispanic Staff Association calls the results an “outrage.”

“For whatever reason, we’re just not getting into senior-level positions,” said the chairman of the CHSA’s Placement Committee, whose office would not allow him to give his name. “We’re really trying to avoid finger-pointing at any one individual office. The real problem is that every single office is hiring [fewer] Latinos than they should be.”

That’s not to say that lawmakers aren’t hiring Latinos to staff their offices — currently, 156 members of Congress, seven leadership offices and 27 committee offices have at least one Hispanic employee on staff, according to the Latino Leaders Network.

But when Latinos are hired, it’s most often for low-level positions that don’t offer opportunities for policy work. A 2009 House employment survey found that the greatest number of Hispanic staffers in the House work as schedulers, followed by staff assistants.

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The Editor

Black History (from a Latino Perspective)

February 1, 2010 Front Page 3 Comments

As January moves over to make way for February, we get ready for Black History Month. You know, McDonald’s “365” commercials, jokes about black people getting the shortest month of the year, factoids about George Washington Carver and pictures of Harriet Tubman appearing on the walls of elementary schools, and reminders that we shall not simply delegate this celebration to one month. We’ve seen and heard these images, phrases and American cultural attachés to the point where the month becomes a cliché, a corporate slogan, even unnecessary in the supposed “post racial age” of Obama.

jacked via Joe Maldonado's Facebook page

Let me try to take it from a different angle.

What does black history mean to me? This is not one of those essays that says “Black History is American History”, though we are all deeply interconnected. This is also not a tribute piece to African American historical figures gave me hope and inspiration, though they did.

Let me attempt to explain and expand “Black” History Month from a Latino perspective.

More after the jump.