Showing posts with label Texas public high school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Texas public high school. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

A.D. 2041 -- the end of white America? Pat Buchanan ponders the possibility.


  Patrick J. Buchanan
  TOWNHALL 10-18-2011 8:49 am 

John Hope Franklin, the famed black historian at Duke University, once told the incoming freshmen, "The new America in the 21st century will be primarily non-white, a place George Washington would not recognize."

In his June 1998 commencement address at Portland State, President Clinton affirmed it: "In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States." The graduates cheered.

The Census Bureau has now fixed at 2041 the year when whites become a minority in a country where the Founding Fathers had restricted citizenship to "free white persons" of "good moral character."

With publication today of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?" this writer takes up what this portends. And while many on the left are enthusiastic about relegating the America of Eisenhower and JFK to a reactionary past, I concur with the late Clare Boothe Luce.

In this world, she said, there are optimists and pessimists.

"The pessimists are better informed."

What are the seemingly inevitable consequences of an America where whites are a shrinking minority?

First, the end of a national Republican Party that routinely gets 90 percent of its presidential votes from white America.

California is the harbinger of what is to come.

Carried by Richard Nixon in all five presidential elections when he was on the ticket and by Ronald Reagan all four times he ran, California, where whites are now a shrinking minority, is a state where the GOP faces extinction. John McCain's share of the California vote was down to the Barry Goldwater level of 1964.

When Texas, where two-thirds of the newborns and half the schoolchildren are Hispanic, goes the way of California, it is the end for the GOP. Arizona, Colorado and Nevada, also critical to any victorious GOP coalition, are Hispanicizing as rapidly as Texas.

In every presidential election since Bush I in 1992, Hispanics have given 60-70 percent of their votes to the Democratic ticket.

For Hispanics, largely poor and working class, are beneficiaries of a cornucopia of government goods -- from free education to food stamps to free health care. Few pay federal income taxes.

Why would they not vote for the Party of Government?

Second, the economic crisis of California, brought on by an outflow of taxpayers and a huge influx of tax consumers -- i.e., millions of immigrants, legal and illegal -- will be mirrored nationally.

For though the majority of immigrants and illegals comes to work, and work hard, most now come from Third World countries and do not bring the academic or professional skills of European-Americans.

Third, the decline in academic test scores here at home and in international competition is likely to continue, as more and more of the children taking those tests will be African-American and Hispanic. For though we have spent trillions over four decades, we have failed to close the racial gap in education. White and Asian children continue to outscore black and Hispanic children.

Can the test-score gap be closed? With the Hispanic illegitimacy rate at 51 percent and the black rate having risen to 71 percent, how can their children conceivably arrive at school ready to compete?

Should this continue for three decades, what will it mean for America if Asians and whites occupy the knowledge-industry jobs, while scores of millions of black and Hispanic workers are relegated to low-paying service-sector jobs? Will that make for social tranquility?

Affirmative action is one answer. But this is already causing a severe backlash, and the reason is obvious.

When affirmative action was first imposed, whites outnumbered blacks nine to one. The burden of reverse discrimination on the white community was thus relatively light. Today, however, not only blacks, but Hispanics and women -- two-thirds of the entire population -- qualify for affirmative action in hiring and school admissions.

And the burden falls almost entirely on white males, who are one-third of the country but three-fourths of the dead and wounded coming back from Afghanistan.

Sociologist Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone," has also found that the greater the racial and ethnic diversity in a community, the less social capital there is -- i.e., people in diverse settings are far less disposed to cooperate for social goals. They retreat into enclaves of their own kind.

Putnam found social capital at the lowest level he ever measured in Los Angeles, the most diverse community on earth. Yet, by 2042, the demography of every American city will approximate that of L.A.

What is happening to America is happening across the West.

Can Western civilization survive the passing of the European peoples whose ancestors created it and their replacement by Third World immigrants? Probably not, for the new arrivals seem uninterested in preserving the old culture they have found.

Those who hold the white race responsible for the mortal sins of mankind -- slavery, racism, imperialism, genocide -- may welcome its departure from history. Those who believe that the civilization that came out of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome and London to be the crowning achievement of mankind will mourn its passing.
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http://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2011/10/18/
ad_2041_--_end_of_white_america/page/full/

Monday, October 17, 2011

Texas high school students forced to recite Mexican pledge of allegiance, sing country's national anthem.

Verne Strickland Blogmaster

By    THE BLAZE

Posted October 17, 2011 at 8:56am 

McALLEN TEXAS -- Students in a Texas public high school were made to stand up and recite the Mexican national anthem and Mexican pledge of allegiance as part of a Spanish class assignment, but the school district maintains there was nothing wrong with the lesson.

It happened last month in an intermediate Spanish class at Achieve Early College High School in McAllen, Texas — a city located about 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.

(Related: Listen to Glenn Beck interview the father of the girl who refused to recite the pledge)

Wearing red, white and green, students had to memorize the Mexican anthem and pledge and stand up and recite them in individually in front of the class.

That didn’t go over well with sophomore Brenda Brinsdon. The 15-year-old sat down and refused to participate. She also caught it all on video.

“I just thought it was out of hand, I didn’t think it was right,” she told The Blaze. “Reciting pledges to Mexico and being loyal to it has nothing to do with learning Spanish.”

She said she was particularly offended because the presentations in teacher Reyna Santos’s class took place during “Freedom Week,” the week after the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and on U.S. Constitution Day — the same day as Mexico’s Independence Day.

“Why are we doing their independence when it‘s Freedom Week and it’s also Constitution Day?” Brinsdon said.

Brinsdon said she complained to the school principal, Yvette Cavazo, who told her it was part of the curriculum and that she should participate. Her father, William, also got involved, calling the school district superintendent to complain.

When Brenda made clear she would not stand up and recite the pledge, she was given an alternative assignment: an essay on the history of the Mexican revolution.

Meanwhile, other students continued with their presentations, which took place over the course of several days.

When Brinsdon talked to Santos — a first-year teacher at Achieve — about her new assignment, the teacher told her she grew up in Mexico.

“She told me that she loved Mexico,” Brinsdon said.

School district spokesman Mark May defended the presentations, saying it’s a state requirement for upper-level language classes to teach about foreign culture.

According to the state’s Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards, students are expected to gain “knowledge and understanding” of other cultures and use the language to demonstrate understanding of different practices and perspectives. There are no specific requirements about learning to recite pledges or anthems.

May said it’s up to the teacher how to interpret and teach the standards.

“It wasn’t required to pledge loyalty and renounce the U.S., they were simply spreading the culture of another country,” May told The Blaze. “In my mind it’s no different from memorizing a poem or memorizing a passage from Shakespeare.”

William Brinsdon took issue with that notion, saying if that’s the case it cheapens the pledge.

“You‘re taking their allegiance and their oath from Mexico and cheapening it just as a grade or words don’t mean anything,” he said.

May reiterated that the lesson was all done within the context of meeting the state requirements, and that the school did its duty providing Brenda with an alternative assignment when she objected.

“The students came away with a better understanding of the culture, heritage and customs of a neighboring country where Spanish is the primary language,” he said.

May added that the lesson was “well received” by other students and parents.

“There’s always going to be people that always feel a little bit differently,” May said.

William Brinsdon is still having a hard time fathoming the idea of reciting foreign pledges and anthems in a U.S. public school in the first place.

“Our kids don’t even know the [American] national anthem and here we are…teaching them to memorize and perform the national anthem for Mexico,” he said. “I just think it’s so backwards.”

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/blaze-exclusive-tx-high-school-students-made-to-recite-mexican-national-anthem-pledge-of-allegiance/

The Blaze’s Jonathon M. Seidl contributed to this report.