Last Gasp: The Sunday Night Reader for 9/19/21
Manufacturing plants, school board meetings, and border crossings
Rivian in BloNo
The New York Times called Normal, Illinois, a “green-economy boom town” earlier this week. Rivian, the electric truck company backed by Ford and Amazon, has plowed $1.5 billion into a shuttered Mitsubishi plant and currently employs more than 2,500 in Bloomington-Normal. The IBEW has shipped in hundreds of electricians from other states, having already cleared their bench locally. (The construction is union; the plant isn’t. Workers top out at about $23 per hour. They topped out in the high twenties six years ago when Mitsubishi left. Amazon gonna Amazon.)
It’s an exciting time and an exciting product. Read a thorough story of the city’s ups and downs from Noam Scheiber.
Schools facing critical race theory battles are diversifying rapidly
The signs at these protests might as well read: “I’m white. I’m not in the same dominant position I used to be. And I am FREAKING OUT.” It’s totally reasonable to be frightened by a rapidly changing world. But it’s immoral to respond to that by trying to keep other people down.
From the article by Tyler Kingkade and Nigel Chiwaya: “An NBC News analysis of 33 cities and counties where school districts have faced rancor over equity initiatives this year in at least three recent school board meetings finds that each has become less white over the last 25 years, reflecting a national trend.
To explore whether something unusual was happening in those 33 districts, the analysis focused on a metric known as exposure, which measures how likely white students are to have classmates of a different race — not just in their district overall, but in their school. While students of color have become a larger share of public school students nationally, accounting for 54 percent of total student enrollment in 2020, communities have long segregated their schools to cluster students of color together. The exposure measurement goes deeper by examining how much schools have diversified.
The analysis, using federal statistics, found that the exposure of white students to students of color increased by 11 percentage points across the United States from 1994 to 2020. And in 22 of the 33 districts facing recent battles over diversity initiatives, the exposure of white students to students of color increased more than that national average.” Read more.
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How thousands of Haitian migrants ended up at the Texas border
The humanitarian crisis at the border didn’t end just because we have a new president. There are more than 10,000 people living in a camp under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. Keep paying attention. Keep pushing for more welcoming responses. And always keep in mind that seeking asylum is perfectly legal.
From The Gaurdian: “There are abundant reasons to flee Haiti. The western hemisphere’s poorest nation — long been dogged by violence, corruption, and poverty — was thrown into further instability in July when president Jovenel Moise was assassinated in circumstances that remain mysterious.
Natural disasters, exacerbated by climate change and poor planning, also regularly batter the country. A catastrophic earthquake struck southern Haiti on 7 August, killing at least 2,200 people and leaving more than 30,000 homeless.
In Port-au-Prince, insecurity reins. Gangs, often with political backing, have launched a campaign of violence, which has been compared to a civil war. Civilians can be caught in the crossfire, robbed in an instant, or kidnapped for ransom. Meanwhile, public services are all but absent. Rubbish is not collected, and thousands of homes have no running water or a latrine.
‘There is no normal life anymore in Port-au-Prince,’ said Louis Henry Mars, who runs peacemaking initiatives in the capital’s gang-controlled slums.” Read more.
Say it plain…
