Barone: "The End of the Wave"

A popular idea right now is that amnesty wouldn't cause more illegal immigration in the future because Mexicans are done coming to the U.S. (and don't even think about the possibility of large flows from other countries). Michael Barone makes a sophisticated (i.e., Sailerian) case for the new conventional wisdom in National Review:

The End of the Wave  

The northward surge of Mexicans into the United States may never resume. 

By Michael Barone

Is mass migration from Mexico to the United States a thing of the past? 

... There’s a widespread assumption that Mexican migration will resume when the U.S. economy starts growing robustly again. But I think there’s reason to doubt that will be the case.

Over the past few years, I have been working on a book, scheduled for publication next fall, on American migrations, internal and immigrant. What I’ve found is that over the years this country has been peopled in large part by surges of migration that have typically lasted just one or two generations.
Almost no one predicted that these surges of migration would occur, and almost no one predicted when they would end. 

For example, when our immigration system was opened up in 1965, experts testified that we would not get many immigrants from Latin America or Asia. They assumed that immigrants would come mainly from Europe, as they had in the past.  

I would take from this history of elite failure to predict the future of immigration a precautionary principle: There are a lot of different peoples in this world, and we don't know what any one of them might get up to, so we need to be prudent and protect ourselves. Instead, the failures of elite forecasting have led elites to double down on the idea that policy should be based upon a philosophy of Hope for the Best, Come What May.

Life in Mexico is not a nightmare for many these days. Beneath the headlines about killings in the drug wars, Mexico has become a predominantly middle-class country, as Jorge Castañeda notes in his recent book, Mañana Forever? Its economy is growing faster than ours.

I reviewed Castaneda's book and he emphasizes how much Mexican material desires outrun any possible fulfillment for most Mexicans within the borders of Mexico. In some other Latin American countries, middle class people are content to live in apartments and take public transportation. Mexicans, in contrast, hate sharing a wall or a subway car with other Mexicans. The Mexican Dream is a single family house with a V8 vehicle or two or three parked out front. Mexicans love sprawl.

And the dreams that many Mexican immigrants pursued have been shattered. 

You can see that if you look at the statistics on mortgage foreclosures, starting with the housing bust in 2007. More than half were in the four “sand states” — California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida — and within them, as the Pew Hispanic Center noted in a 2009 report, in areas with large numbers of Latino immigrants.  

These were places where subprime mortgages were granted, with encouragement from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to many Latinos unqualified by traditional credit standards. 

These new homeowners, many of them construction workers, dreamed of gaining hundreds of thousands of dollars as housing prices inevitably rose. Instead, they collapsed. My estimate is that one-third of those foreclosed on in these years were Latinos. Their dreams turned into nightmares. 

I call this Convergence. Letting in tens of millions of Mexicans has made the U.S. more like Mexico economically, which is what Mexicans have been trying to get away from. They don't come to American because they love the Declaration of Independence's propositions, they come to live the Exurban Dream, to emit a lot of greenhouse gases. A decade ago, the Bush Administration announced at the 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership a war on racist old downpayments to facilitate that. Now, we are out of money, but how much of a reckoning has there been? Barone has largely adopted my analysis of What Went Wrong, but how many others in the press are completely clueless?

We can see further evidence in last month’s Pew research report on the recent decline in U.S. birthrates. The biggest drop was among Mexican-born women, from 455,000 births in 2007 to 346,000 in 2010.  

The most extreme fertility is among newly arrived immigrant women, who have been saving up their babies to have them on American soil. Less immigration knocks hell out of fertility among illegal immigrants. But, that means there are a lot of women in Mexico who have been doing a lot of saving up of babies over the last 4 years. An upturn in the American economy could bring them and their future anchor babies back in a hurry. The notion that Mexican women can't delay fertility for a few years, the way women in more advanced countries have done since the 1970s, seems naive.

Keep in mind also that the Drug War in northern Mexico since 2007 has made the traditional overland routes less attractive, especially for Central Americans (e.g., the large massacres in Mexico of Central Americans heading for the U.S.). The Drug War won't last forever.

Surges of migration that have shaped the country sometimes end abruptly. The surge of Southern blacks to Northern cities lasted from 1940 to 1965 — one generation. The surge of Mexicans into the U.S. lasted from 1982 to 2007 — one generation.  

The 1965 terminus for black migration reflects two changes: improvements for blacks in the South and the beginning of the black destruction of their own Northern neighborhoods through rioting and crime.

Similarly, Hispanic illegal immigration contributed hugely to the Recent Economic Unpleasantness, so maybe Mexicans won't find it in their interest to move to Mexico Norte anymore.

The northward surge of American blacks has never resumed. I don’t think the northward surge of Mexicans will, either.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe there are other countries out there in this big world gearing up to send vast numbers into our land, and would find Amnesty II a big encouragement.

Certainly, the obvious lessons of history are that elites don't know what they are doing, have made disastrous immigration decisions in the past, and that they are loathe to admit their mistakes on the grounds that talking about what they did wrong could offend the busboys.

All this history suggests prudence, but the conventional wisdom is that we should make another Bet the Country decision based on tea leaf readings.

Ah, the good old days of late 1979

Late 1979 was the scariest period since the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the well-remembered landmarks being the Iranian hostage seizure on November 4, 1979 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas. But the most bizarre and foreboding event came in between: on November 20, 1979 the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the absolute center of the Islamic religion, was seized and held for a bloody week against Saudi military assaults by ... a bunch of guys you had never ever heard of. 

Who were they? Wikipedia explains:

The seizure was led by Juhaiman ibn Muhammad ibn Saif al Otaibi, who belonged to a powerful family of Najd. He declared his brother-in-law Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani to be the Mahdi, or redeemer of Islam, whose coming at endtimes is foretold in many of the hadiths of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. His followers took that the fact that Al-Qahtani's name and his father's name are identical to Muhammad's name and that of his father, and the saying ("His and his father's names were the same as Muhammad's and his father's, and he had come to Mecca from the north") to justify their belief. Furthermore, the date of the attack, 20 November 1979, was the first day of the year 1400 according to the Islamic calendar, which was stated by another hadith as the day that the Mahdi would reveal himself.

Well, that clears that up. 

Unsurprisingly, Muslims in a half-dozen countries responded with anti-American riots, burning American embassies in Pakistan and Libya.

Oddly enough, a third of a century later, the Saudi royal family is still going strong. In fact that's turned out to be a pretty good rule of thumb over my lifetime: whatever craziness happens, no matter how many predictions you read of imminent overthrow of the Saudi rulers, the Saudi royal family comes out okay. Of course, some day that will presumably stop being true, but in the meantime, it almost seems like the royals benefit from stuff like this happening.

Social science for fun and profit

The field of social psychology was embarrassed recently when revelations respected, highly productive social psychologist Diederik Stapel was discovered to be simply making up data for his popular papers.

But you can still run experiments and cheat anyway.

Via Andrew Gelman:

The Data Vigilante

Students aren’t the only ones cheating—some professors are, too. Uri Simonsohn is out to bust them.

By CHRISTOPHER SHEA

... Simonsohn initially targeted not flagrant dishonesty, but loose methodology. In a paper called “False-Positive Psychology,” published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science, he and two colleagues—Leif Nelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Wharton’s Joseph Simmons—showed that psychologists could all but guarantee an interesting research finding if they were creative enough with their statistics and procedures. 

The three social psychologists set up a test experiment, then played by current academic methodologies and widely permissible statistical rules. By going on what amounted to a fishing expedition (that is, by recording many, many variables but reporting only the results that came out to their liking); by failing to establish in advance the number of human subjects in an experiment; and by analyzing the data as they went, so they could end the experiment when the results suited them, they produced a howler of a result, a truly absurd finding. They then ran a series of computer simulations using other experimental data to show that these methods could increase the odds of a false-positive result—a statistical fluke, basically—to nearly two-thirds.

One thing that's interesting is how seldom these kind of data-mined false positives are published regarding The Gap, despite the huge incentives for somebody to come up with something reassuring about The Gap.

It's easy to come up with Jonah Lehrer-ready false positives if you don't care what your results are. Say you are having psych majors fill in Big Five personality questionnaires in four rooms: one is painted blue, one yellow, one light green, and one off-white. That gives you 5 personality traits times four rooms = 20 combos. It would hardly be surprising if one combination of room color and personality trait diverges enough to be statistically significant at the 95% level. (Especially if you can stop collecting data whenever you feel like.) People in yellow rooms are more neurotic! Or maybe they are less neurotic. Or maybe off-white rooms make people more conscientious. Or less.  It doesn't really matter. Jonah Lehrer would have blogged your paper whatever result you came up with. 

On the other hand, if your goal is to close The Gap, it's harder to stumble into a false positive by random luck because you know what you want ahead of time. You want to show you can close The Gap.

Thus, mostly we read about uncontrolled studies of Gap Closing: The Michelle Obama International Preparatory Academy of Entrepreneurial Opportunity Charter School, where black and Hispanic students are taught by Ivy League grads working 75 hours per week, had tests scores almost equal to the state average! (Don't mention that 45% of the public school students in the state are NAMs. And don't mention what white and Asian students would have done with those Ivy Leaguer teachers. There's no control group in this pseudo-experiment.)

The most popular social science research cited on The Gap -- stereotype effect -- seems to be a combination of two things: the file drawer effect (there isn't a big market for articles saying you couldn't replicate a beloved finding) and the fact that it's not really that hard to get black students not to work hard on meaningless tests.

Two modes of intellectual discourse: Taking everything personally v. debate as sport

Much of the intellectual progress the world has made over the millennia is due to men managing to turn argument into sport rather than either a test of popularity or of physical strength.

Consider Zeno's paradoxes. I suspect that other individuals in other times and places came up with similar ideas, but either nobody paid attention or the propounders of annoying paradoxes got punched in the face by frustrated listeners who couldn't come up with a response. The Ancient Greeks, in contrast, found this type of debate interesting and felt that there ought to be a way -- logic -- to figure out who wins.

As I've mentioned before, the superiority of debate in the British House of Commons to what we're used to in American politics can be startling to an American observer. This is a social construct of the highest order. The British have crafted a society over many hundreds of years that emphasizes sport as a nonlethal, even potentially friendly form of male combat, and parliamentary debate as the highest form of sport. Today, most countries have legislatures modeled upon the British parliament and play British sports such as soccer. (Outliers include British offspring such as America, which has its own system and plays its own games.)

Similar attitudes were reflected in the written spheres. A century ago, G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, say, could go at it hammer and tongs like the intellectual sportsmen they were. 

It's not surprising that Americans have never quite attained this level of intellectual sportsmanship. Nor is it surprising that the British masculine model is fading, both here and in Britain.

Englishman Alastair Roberts writes a blog called Alastair's Adversaria on largely theological topics. As a writer, he has what I call an indoor voice, attuned to the style of the time, which makes his endorsement of the fading tradition of debate as sport interesting by contrast. Starting from some controversy in England, Roberts launches into a lengthy but insightful description of what has gone wrong:

In observing the interaction between Pastor Wilson and his critics in the recent debate, I believe that we were witnessing a collision of two radically contrasting modes of discourse. The first mode of discourse, represented by Pastor Wilson’s critics, was one in which sensitivity, inclusivity, and inoffensiveness are key values, and in which persons and positions are ordinarily closely related. The second mode of discourse, displayed by Pastor Wilson and his daughters, is one characterized and enabled by personal detachment from the issues under discussion, involving highly disputational and oppositional forms of rhetoric, scathing satire, and ideological combativeness. 

To provide a scorecard: you can think of Roberts' "first mode of discourse" as the one dominant in the 21st Century, while the second mode represents an idealized 19th Century British view of discourse as sport. First = New, Second = Old.

When these two forms of discourse collide they are frequently unable to understand each other and tend to bring out the worst in each other. The first [new, sensitive] form of discourse seems lacking in rationality and ideological challenge to the second; the second [old, sporting] can appear cruel and devoid of sensitivity to the first. To those accustomed to the second mode of discourse, the cries of protest at supposedly offensive statements may appear to be little more than a dirty and underhand ploy intentionally adopted to derail the discussion by those whose ideological position can’t sustain critical challenge. However, these protests are probably less a ploy than the normal functioning of the particular mode of discourse characteristic of that community, often the only mode of discourse that those involved are proficient in. 

To those accustomed to the first mode of discourse, the scathing satire and sharp criticism of the second appears to be a vicious and personal attack, driven by a hateful animus, when those who adopt such modes of discourse are typically neither personally hurt nor aiming to cause such hurt. Rather, as this second form of discourse demands personal detachment from issues under discussion, ridicule does not aim to cause hurt, but to up the ante of the debate, exposing the weakness of the response to challenge, pushing opponents to come back with more substantial arguments or betray their lack of convincing support for their position. Within the first form of discourse, if you take offence, you can close down the discourse in your favour; in the second form of discourse, if all you can do is to take offence, you have conceded the argument to your opponent, as offence is not meaningful currency within such discourse. 

I also don’t think that sufficient attention is given to the manner in which differing forms of education prepare persons for participation in these different modes of discourse. There is a form of education – increasingly popular over the last few decades – which most values cooperation, collaboration, quietness, sedentariness, empathy, equality, non-competitiveness, conformity, a communal focus, inclusivity, affirmation, inoffensiveness, sensitivity, non-confrontation, a downplaying of physicality, and an orientation to the standard measures of grades, tests, and a closely defined curriculum (one could, with the appropriate qualifications, speak of this as a ‘feminization’ of education). Such a form of education encourages a form of public discourse within which there is a shared commitment and conformity to the social and ideological dogmas and values of liberal society, where everyone feels secure and accepted and conflict is avoided, but at the expense of independence of thought, exposure to challenge, the airing of deep differences, and truth-driven discourse. 

Faced with an opposing position that will not compromise in the face of its calls for sensitivity and its cries of offence, such a [new] mode of discourse lacks the strength of argument to parry challenges. Nor does it have any means by which to negotiate or accommodate such intractable differences within its mode of conversation. Consequently, it will typically resort to the most fiercely antagonistic, demonizing, and personal attacks upon the opposition.

Generally, anybody who denounces opponents as representing "hate" is hate-filled.

While firm differences can be comfortably negotiated within the contrasting [old] form of discourse, a mode of discourse governed by sensitivities and ‘tolerance’ cannot tolerate uncompromising difference. Without a bounded and rule-governed realm for negotiating differences, antagonism becomes absolute and opposition total. Supporters of this ‘sensitive’ mode of discourse will typically try, not to answer opponents with better arguments, but to silence them completely as ‘hateful’, ‘intolerant’, ‘bigoted’, ‘misogynistic’, ‘homophobic’, etc. 

A completely contrasting mode of education, one more typical of traditional – and male-oriented – educational systems, values internalized confidence, originality, agonism, independence of thought, creativity, assertiveness, the mastery of one’s feelings, a thick skin and high tolerance for your own and others’ discomfort, disputational ability, competitiveness, nerve, initiative, imagination, and force of will, values that come to the fore in confrontational oral debate. Such an education will produce a mode of discourse that is naturally highly oppositional and challenging, while generally denying participants the right to take things personally. Deep divergences of opinion can be far more comfortably accommodated within the same conversation by those accustomed to such discourse. While the first form of education risks viewing persons as passive receptacles of knowledge to be rewarded for their conformity to set expectations, which are frequently measured, this form of education prioritizes the formation of independent thinking agents. 

This form of discourse typically involves a degree of ‘heterotopy’, occurring in a ‘space’ distinct from that of personal interactions.

In other words: "in the arena."

This heterotopic space is characterized by a sort of playfulness, ritual combativeness, and histrionics. This ‘space’ is akin to that of the playing field, upon which opposing teams give their rivals no quarter, but which is held distinct to some degree from relations between the parties that exist off the field. The handshake between competitors as they leave the field is a typical sign of this demarcation.  It is this separation of the space of rhetorical ritual combat from regular space that enables debaters, politicians, or lawyers to have fiery disagreements in the debating chamber, the parliamentary meeting, or the courtroom and then happily enjoy a drink together afterwards. 

This ‘heterotopic discourse’ makes possible far more spirited challenges to opposing positions, hyperbolic and histrionic rhetoric designed to provoke response and test the mettle of one’s own and the opposing position, assertive presentations of one’s beliefs that are less concerned to present a full-orbed picture than to advocate firmly for a particular perspective and to invite and spark discussion from other perspectives. 

The truth is not located in the single voice, but emerges from the conversation as a whole. Within this form of heterotopic discourse, one can play devil’s advocate, have one’s tongue in one’s cheek, purposefully overstate one’s case, or attack positions that one agrees with. The point of the discourse is to expose the strengths and weaknesses of various positions through rigorous challenge, not to provide a balanced position in a single monologue. Those familiar with such discourse will be accustomed to hyperbolic and unbalanced expressions. They will appreciate that such expressions are seldom intended as the sole and final word on the matter by those who utter them, but as a forceful presentation of one particular dimension of or perspective upon the truth, always presuming the existence of counterbalancing perspectives that have no less merit and veracity. 

In contrast, a sensitivity-driven discourse lacks the playfulness of heterotopic discourse, taking every expression of difference very seriously. Rhetorical assertiveness and impishness, the calculated provocations of ritual verbal combat, linguistic playfulness, and calculated exaggeration are inexplicable to it as it lacks the detachment, levity, and humour within which these things make sense. On the other hand, those accustomed to combative discourse may fail to appreciate when they are hurting those incapable of responding to it. 

Lacking a high tolerance for difference and disagreement, sensitivity-driven discourses will typically manifest a herding effect. Dissenting voices can be scapegoated or excluded and opponents will be sharply attacked. Unable to sustain true conversation, stale monologues will take its place. Constantly pressed towards conformity, indoctrination can take the place of open intellectual inquiry. Fracturing into hostile dogmatic cliques takes the place of vigorous and illuminating dialogue between contrasting perspectives. Lacking the capacity for open dialogue, such groups will exert their influence on wider society primarily by means of political agitation. 

The fear of conflict and the inability to deal with disagreement lies at the heart of sensitivity-driven discourses. However, ideological conflict is the crucible of the sharpest thought. Ideological conflict forces our arguments to undergo a rigorous and ruthless process through which bad arguments are broken down, good arguments are honed and developed, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different positions emerge. The best thinking emerges from contexts where interlocutors mercilessly probe and attack our arguments’ weaknesses and our own weaknesses as their defenders. They expose the blindspots in our vision, the cracks in our theories, the inconsistencies in our logic, the inaptness of our framing, the problems in our rhetoric. We are constantly forced to return to the drawing board, to produce better arguments. 

Granted immunity from this process, sensitivity-driven and conflict-averse contexts seldom produce strong thought, but rather tend to become echo chambers. Even the good ideas that they produce tend to be blunt and very weak in places. Even with highly intelligent people within them, conflict-averse groups are poor at thinking. Bad arguments go unchecked and good insights go unhoned and underdeveloped. This would not be such a problem were it not for the fact that these groups frequently expect us to fly in a society formed according to their ideas, ideas that never received any rigorous stress testing.

We've seen this deterioration of discourse in recent years among gay men. Gore Vidal, for example, liked to argue and insult. But gays have increasingly taken on lesbian modes.

In general, the contemporary mode of emotionalism and herding is the human default. The great ages of intellectual progress via debate were rare social constructs, and it's not surprising that they easily break down.

If I were a rich man ...

I think I'd want a private library like George Lucas's at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County. It appears to be modeled after the 1938 library at Chateau de Groussay, but with warmer colors and a 40' diameter stained glass dome. It's amazing what a 40' stained glass dome can do to spruce up any room. You should try it the next time you're redecorating.

You can browse through Truly Grand Home Libraries here. Interestingly, there are almost no pictures available on the Internet of the library that Bill Gates built his librarian mother.

The two guys on the list who definitely use their huge personal libraries, Larry McMurtry and Umberto Eco, go for the Ikea white pressed wood shelf look. You can't afford a George Lucas-style library from selling books, even as many as McMurtry and Eco have.

Why do we laugh?

In the Times Literary Supplement, Tim Lewens reviews a book on humor by three philosophers: Inside Jokes: Using humor to reverse-engineer the mind by Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams, Jr.

The big problem with theories of humour is not that they are sombre; it is that they are often implausible or myopic. 

All of the usual suspects have their shortcomings. Surveys typically list three broad varieties of humour theory: superiority theories, release theories and incongruity-resolution theories. Superiority theories say that humour illustrates the inferiority in some respect of the joke’s butt, provoking laughter as a sort of small triumph in the superior witness. This works well in some cases, but struggles to account for “butt-less” humour such as puns, or the kinder forms of imitation. Release theories have a Freudian pedigree: humour provides a sort of relief from a build-up of nervous tension. Again, it is not clear that one can plausibly think of simple puns as having such therapeutic functions, and many of today’s cognitive scientists are sceptical of the more general hydraulic metaphors used to depict build-up of energy, overflow, release and so forth. Incongruity-resolution theories are more popular: they assert that humorous situations involve the presentation of an incongruity that is subsequently resolved. Here we might be concerned about whether “incongruity” and “resolution” are understood in suitably precise ways: without such tightening, the theory seems vulnerable to counter-example. In The Emotions and the Will (1875), Alexander Bain complained that “There are many incongruities that produce anything but a laugh”, and went on to list many examples that are not funny, and that would remain unfunny even if they were, in some sense, resolved: “snow in May, Archimedes studying geometry in a siege; . . . a wolf in sheep’s clothing; . . . a corpse at a feast, parental cruelty”.

Actually, those examples of unfunniness sound pretty funny to me. A wolf in sheep's clothing is a standard for cartoonists, such as Gary Larson's Far Side panel where an entire flock consists of wolves wearing blatantly phony sheep disguises and one disgusted wolf, fake head under his arm, says to another, "Wait a minute! Isn't anyone here a real sheep?" (Warning: Far Side cartoons likely to disappear off the Internet.)

Perhaps the more that something seems comic rather than tragic is a sign of economic progress?

As for snow in May, admittedly, that wasn't as funny back in a more Malthusian age when it was likely to wipe out your crop and put your family in the poorhouse. But in Seventies Southern California, it was pretty hilarious. As Woody Allen pointed out in Annie Hall, most things in 1970s SoCal were pretty funny.

On May 28, 1977, my friend Steve (yes, it was a common name, mid-century) and I started backpacking from Crystal Lake above Azusa in the L.A. sprawl. 

We started up the dry south-facing slope of the San Gabriel Mountains under a scorching sun on our way to Little Jimmy Camp at 7,500 feet elevation over the Angeles Crest onto the north-facing slope.

What we found to our surprise when we reached the pass was that the north side of the mountains on Memorial Day weekend were covered with two feet of snow, and we hadn't packed anything warmer than those embarrassingly short shorts that were in fashion in 1977. You can crack up Steve to this day by reminding him of this snowy May campout I dragged him on.

I presume laughter has a variety of causes (as, clearly, do tears, although philosophers seem less baffled by crying than laughing). So, there's no apparent need for an all-purpose explanation. Still, I would suggest that humor often serves as a sort of brain candy to reward noticing stuff. For example, ever since I've been fairly obsessive in thinking about which directions slopes face. 

I learned my lesson.

NYT: Is Hollywood finally ending its War on Women by sending women to war?

In December of each year, the New York Times film critics, like film critics everywhere, write Deep Think pieces about what patterns in the movies released in the current year tell us about Trends in the Big Issues. The annual answer ought to be: Virtually nothing, because what gets released in a single year is a close to a random sample of projects that had been in the works for years and happened to come to fruition now. But that never stops the critics from pontificating on 2012: The Meaning of It All.

Not surprisingly, they are still using Obama Campaign talking points.

A.O Scott starts out by recounting that some nobody in some nowheresville (Buffalo?) complained about Snow White and the Huntsman being yet another Butt-Kicking Babe movie in which a 105 pound starlet whomps on bad guys in hand-to-hand combat.

The picture’s apparent reversal of gender norms — this Snow White wears armor, wields a sword and leads an army into battle — struck Parlato (who does not seem to have seen it) as emblematic of “a Hollywood agenda of glorifying degenerate power women and promoting as natural the weakling, hyena-like men, cum eunuchs.”

Neither the NYT scribe nor the nobody in Buffalo seem to notice that the main audience for Butt-Kicking Babe movies are nerdier guys who wish women would be interested in the kind of stuff they are interested in: weapons, fighting, quests, and so forth.

A Hollywood agenda of glorifying powerful women — now that is news. Granting that Parlato’s rant seemed to emanate from the same zone of the culture-war id that undid a few Republican Senate candidacies this year, you might still be inclined to wonder if, in sensing a shift in the portrayal of women, he was onto something — or for that matter to hope that he might have been.

In reality, Snow White and the Huntsman was least interesting for its Butt-Kicking Babe aspect -- pothead Kristen Stewart's under-energized Snow White has been dropped from any sequel, with Chris Hemsworth's Huntsman more likely to carry. And it was most interesting for Charlize Theron's Wicked Witch, because evil women characters, such as that Golden Age of Hollywood mainstay, the femme fatale, have largely disappeared due to a combination of feminism and movies being aimed at younger, more innocent males who are more idealistic about girls.

After all, the contrary complaint — that Hollywood is a swamp of testosterone, turning out entertainment that marginalizes or condescends to women when it does not ignore them entirely — has been around much longer, and has, to say the least, a much stronger grounding in reality. Have things really changed that much?

Movies are more masculine than advertising-funded media because they are largely paid for by ticket-buyers, and, on average, males pay for movie tickets more than females. There are plenty of roles for actresses of a certain age solving murder mysteries on TV, because advertisers love the women's market, because women spend more than men, because men turn more of their income over to women than vice-versa.

There is a smattering of evidence to support the impression that they have, because 2012 was, all in all, a pretty good year for movies and also a pretty good year for female heroism. In addition to “Snow White and the Huntsman,” there was “Brave,” whose flame-haired heroine, Merida, combined Disney-princess pluck with Pixar’s visual ingenuity; “The Hunger Games,” which drew on young-adult literature to find, in the resourceful person of Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Lawrence), a new archetype of survivalist girl power; ...And we should not forget the culmination of the “Twilight” saga, speaking of Kristen Stewart, whose Bella Swan, grown from a sulky, indecisive teenager into a fiercely protective vampire mother, fought alongside her in-laws against the supernatural forces of evil. Forget about Team Jacob and Team Edward: it was Team Renesmee that triumphed in the end. 

Of course it would be silly to proclaim, on the basis of a handful of movies, that some kind of grand role reversal has taken place, that cultural power has shifted toward women, or even that 2012 is yet another “year of the woman,” a wishful phrase that surfaces periodically in movies as it does in politics.

Let me focus on Twilight, Brave, and The Hunger Games, because those are coming from farther right in the cultural landscape than normally makes it into movies. Twilight is a woozy Mormon fantasy, Brave comes from Pixar (which long ago set itself up in Northern California to stay out of the Hollywood cultural orbit), and The Hunger Games novels were written by a woman trying to channel her military historian father. 

The big innovation in Brave and The Hunger Games in the Butt-Kicking Babe genre is that the heroine does not fight with her fists or feet, a gun, or a sword, but with the more culturally traditional bow. Of course, this is an ancient trope, going back to Diana/Artemis. Archery was extremely fashionable among mid-Victorian maidens because it gave them an excuse to show off their legs in Robin Hood-style tunics and tights. (One contemporary complaint was that because archery was so fashionable, girls wouldn't wear their glasses while shooting, and thus many couldn't even see the target or perhaps even the bale of hay the target was pinned to.)

"Asian women are a story of BRAVERY of Love"

Tall white knight appears to want in on the anti-hate / pro-hot Asian babe
diversity action, but the Asian Womyn activists don't look too interested

The Obama Coalition is now widely perceived as an unstoppable juggernaut of unified diversity or, perhaps, diverse unity (I can never remember which) that will inevitably steamroll white male divisiveness into oblivion. But, there are certain cracks in the Obama Coalition. Fortunately, the Obamaites possess an all purpose solution: blame the White Man in order to get more diversity goodies.

From the UCLA Daily Bruin:

Rally responds to incidents of hate speech at UCLA

By ANTONIO GONZALEZ

Editor’s note: We have decided to run in this story the exact wording of the racial and sexist slurs in this incident. Given the nature of these slurs, the editorial staff were faced with the question of whether it was appropriate for the student newspaper to repeat these slurs and potentially perpetuate their use. The editorial decision was made to write them as they occurred in order to report accurately and thoroughly on the incident. 

About a hundred people rallied outside Kerckhoff Hall earlier today, following acts of vandalism involving racial and sexist slurs that were reported to police earlier this week. 

On Tuesday, a student found a piece of paper with the words “asian women R Honkie white-boy worshipping Whores” attached to a Vietnamese Student Union sign in Kerckhoff Hall. Wednesday, a similar phrase was found handwritten on the door of a bathroom stall in Powell Library. University police are currently investigating both incidents. 

Obviously, the phrase "Honkie white-boy" is a slur against white men. But nobody is going to protest that. Equally obviously, this sign was put up either by an Asian guy or a non-Asian gal. (The second sign was found in a women's bathroom.) Or an Asian lesbian.

Technically, this doesn't even qualify as another campus Hate Hoax because the perp isn't even trying to make it look like a white man did it. But nobody in authority seems to notice.

Amid chants of “hey, hey, ho, ho; Racism has got to go” and people holding colorful signs, speakers from various campus groups expressed their disappointment with the occurrences at the rally, which was hosted by the Vietnamese Student Union. 

Anees Hasnain, the student who reported the slurs on the Vietnamese Student Union sign to UCPD, said she felt numb and was shocked when she found the sign. 

She added she is concerned by repeated incidents of hate speech on campus, referring to reports from earlier this year about anti-Mexican and sexist slurs written on an apartment door, and a video posted by former UCLA student Alexandra Wallace that included derogatory comments about Asian students. ...

The Asian Pacific Coalition plans to hold a forum in the basement of the Student Activities Center on Dec. 5 to further discuss campus climate at UCLA.

From the website 18MR: 18 Million Rising: Activating Asian America

(By the way, did they really think this name through? What happens when the Census announces there are 19 Million Rising? 20 Million? How many different websites are they paying to reserve?)

TAKE A STAND AGAINST CAMPUS HATE 

Imagine starting your academic day opening a door with this on it:

Now, imagine the very next day, another racial and sexist slur is on the bathroom stall at the library.

These two things actually happened back-to-back on UCLA’s campus in November 2012. And unfortunately, these are not isolated incidents. Will you stand with us and demand that UCLA take action against hate?

Vietnamese Student Union (VSU) is urging UCLA’s Academic Senate to implement the “diversity requirement” by next academic school year. This diversity requirement would give students a balanced understanding and appreciation for their own, and other, cultures. The curriculum would address issues of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other institutionalized systems of inequality.

Send an email to UCLA's Academic Senate Chair, Dr. Linda Sarna, and demand the diversity requirement for the next academic school year. 

UCLA is the only UC that does not have a diversity requirement.

And here's the email:

Dear Dr. Linda Sarna, UCLA Academic Senate Chair, 

We are writing in response to the recent attacks to the Vietnamese Student Union at UCLA and the greater API community, especially womyn of color. 

We would like for the University of California, Los Angeles to reconsider prioritizing the diversity requirement. This incident has shown that ignorance and insensitivity to other cultures still exists on your campus. This ignorance has aggregated in the form of a deliberate action that threatens the safety of colored communities on campus. Additionally, this is just one of many actions that have been formed to attack people of color, including the Alexandra Wallace video and the vandalism directed toward the latino/a community. 

What happened at the VSU office was not just a singular racially offensive action, but part of a set of actions that has been ongoing for the past couple of years. It will serve as a reminder that these types of incidents will continue to recur until the university takes action against it. It surprises me that a campus that prides itself on diversity does not act as a model in having such a requirement. 

We urge the Academic Senate to do everything in its power to work with students and faculty to get the diversity requirement implemented immediately. 

Sincerely, 

By the way, Google (I presume) chose to serve up the following ad on the Daily Bruin's article about this event, presumably due to keyword matching. (Can you guess which keywords?) You won't get this ad everytime, but it came up every half dozen times or so I hit Refresh.

PR suggestion

If Bibi Netanyahu had a better ear for American SWPL propaganda, in his U.S. appearances he’d refer to the Palestinians as “anti-immigrant hate groups.” As in, “Today, the Israeli Air Force dropped white phosphorus on a nest of anti-immigrant hate groups.”

Who is interested in elite college admissions? Right: nobody.

As you may have noticed, articles about elite college admissions are a staple of the national press. For example, a parody in The Awl began:

The Most Emailed 'New York Times' Article Ever 

David Parker | January 20th, 2011 

It’s a week before the biggest day of her life, and Anna Williams is multitasking. While waiting to hear back from the Ivy League colleges she’s hoping to attend, the seventeen-year-old senior at one of Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools is doing research for a paper about organic farming in the West Bank, whipping up a batch of vegan brownies, and, like an increasing number of American teenagers, teaching her dog, José Saramago, to use an iPad.

And goes on to touch on other favorite topics of New York Times readers such as Obama's dog, black-Jewish relationships, Mandarin-immersion programs, and neuroscience, but revolves back to conclude with Topic One:

Six months ago, Anna started her own bocce club. It’s already one of the most popular extracurricular activities at her school. 

Will bringing bocce to the Upper East Side be enough to get Anna Williams into Harvard, Yale or Princeton? She’ll find out next week. Until then, she’s got her hands full: José Saramago just learned how to use Twitter.

So, you might think that Ron Unz's "The Myth of American Meritocracy," which is crammed with more info about elite college admissions than anything published in years, would have made quite a splash. And, indeed, when mentioned, it tends to elicit voluminous comments (e.g., 363 on Marginal Revolution). So, since the news media lives for traffic, they must be all over this, right?

Meh.

At Google News, if I type in 

Unz college

I get:

1. Elite College Admissions Are Unfair, Sure... We Still Shouldn't Care Huffington Post (blog)-Nov 29, 2012 In fact it might be utterly the wrong thing to worry about. Many argue that the inequity of elite collegeadmissions is really important. As Ron Unz ...

1. For Third-raters Who Want to Get Into Harvard, It Helps To Have ... Forbes-Dec 1, 2012 Although virtually every paragraph in Unz's long essay is brimming with controversy, if I were 18 again and trying to get into a good college, ...

And that's it of late December 7: two stories on Google News.

2012: The Sports Fan Gap

Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira gives his analysis of the Edison Exit poll numbers. Here's an excerpt on the Slippery Six states that slipped through Romney's fingers, especially Ohio:

Change in minority share of
voters, 2008-2012 

Iowa -2
Michigan 5
Minnesota 3
Ohio 4
Pennsylvania 3
Wisconsin 3 

President Obama carried all six of these states. Of the six, the most hotly contested  and the state with the narrowest margin was Ohio, where President Obama eked out a 3-point victory (51 percent to 48 percent) thanks to two key factors. One was the minority vote: People of color increased their share of voters by 4 percentage points in Ohio, which was entirely due to an increase in black voters, who gave the president 96 percent of their vote.  

The other factor was white working-class voters, a weak group for President Obama in the state during the 2008 election. In that election, Sen. McCain carried these voters by 10 points. The Romney campaign anticipated a large expansion of the Republican margin among these voters, but it was not to be. Gov. Romney’s 14-point margin (56 percent to 42 percent) was an improvement over Sen. McCain’s numbers but proved too modest a gain for his purposes. Indeed, Gov. Romney actually improved more among white college graduates, expanding Sen. McCain’s 1-point margin to a very strong 18-point advantage (58 percent to 40 percent). If Gov. Romney had improved that much among white working-class voters, he would have easily taken the state and its 18 electoral votes.

I think it's pretty weird that Obama won the Which One Is the Regular Guy You'd Wanna Have a Beer With popularity contest. I mean if I had a beer with him, I'd probably steer the subject to what he thinks of the latest lit fic he's read. 

Besides not drinking beer, Romney allowed a major Sports Fan Gap to emerge. Romney likes outdoor activities, but he never showed much evidence that he was a passionate spectator sports fan, while Obama's army of paid Tweeters were always churning out the Commander in Chief's views on how to set up a college football national championship playoff and other pressing topics.

Dogs that don't bark

One of the hardest things for intellectuals to be aware of is the absence of evidence. So, it's worth noting some explicit evidence of absence.

For example, I've been pointing out for years that it's imprudent of intellectuals to bet the country on massive Latin American immigration without considering just how intellectual the country is going to wind up being afterward. Here in Los Angeles we're a couple of generations ahead of you in the Northeast.

From the Los Angeles Times "Jacket Copy" column on publishing, May 12, 2012, about a Spanish-language book fair in Los Angeles that is an offshoot of the big annual trade show for Spanish language publishers in Guadalajara:

Finally, LéaLA attempts to help make amends for a bizarre L.A. cultural phenomenon: the city’s near-absence of Spanish-language bookstores. Apart from public libraries, university bookstores (which stock course-related titles) and a handful of small shops like Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in Sylmar and the Libros Schmibros bookstore/lending library in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles -- with the United States’ largest Spanish-speaking population -- has virtually no place to find and buy Spanish-language books.

It's a bit of an exaggeration to say that Los Angeles has virtually no place to find and buy Spanish-language books. For example, there's a shelf in my local Barnes & Noble devoted to Spanish-language books. But, still ....

Washington ruling class to rest of America: "What, us worry?"

From WJLA:

Census Bureau: D.C. is becoming whiter, younger, richer

From the perspective of K Street, it's obvious that the real problem facing America is all these trustfunders with advanced degrees making it hard to get a 7:30 PM reservation at a decent restaurant. Something needs to be done about America getting too white, too young, and too rich. I know ... more immigration!

What does it take to be a GOP anti-white racism expert?

From the LA Times:

Carlos Gutierrez, who led Mitt Romney’s outreach to Latinos during the presidential campaign, had harsh words for the former nominee Sunday as he joined the growing number of conservative voices calling for immigration reform.

I don't know, but a mustache, hand gestures, and gold cufflinks apparently can't hurt. From Wikipedia:

Carlos Miguel Gutierrez (originally Gutiérrez) (born November 4, 1953) is an American former CEO and former U.S. Cabinet Member who is currently a Vice Chairman of Citigroup's Institutional Clients Group. He has previously served as the 35th U.S. Secretary of Commerce from 2005 to 2009. Gutierrez is a former Chairman of the Board and CEO of the Kellogg Company.

Gutierrez was born in Havana, Cuba, the son of a pineapple plantation owner. Gutierrez is of Spanish and French descent. As a successful businessman, his father was deemed an enemy of the state by Fidel Castro's regime. ... Gutierrez learned his first words of English from the bellhop at the hotel where they initially stayed ...

Someday, when historians have a better sense of humor, the Amnesty Act of 2013 will be known as Katherine of Aragon's Revenge. If only Henry VIII had been a nicer husband, all this unpleasantness could have been avoided.

P.S., I think I'll grow a mustache so I can be an immigration expert, too. Growing a mustache is cheaper than buying gold cufflinks.

The point of the Latin American mustache is to prove you are not too much of an Indio, right?

Conquistador-Americans advise GOP on how to stop being so racist

What does it take these days for a Republican apparatchik to become a sought-after expert on What Do Mexicans Want?

A Cuban or Puerto Rican surname and maybe a membership at a tanning salon (hair dye and brown contacts optional). That seems to be all that's required to turn K Street into Que Street.

From the Washington Post:

Latino Voice Alfonso Aguilar also conservative voice for immigration reform 

By Krissah Thompson, Published: December 5 

“Que?! Que?!” 

Alfonso Aguilar shouts into the mike, gesticulating wildly to no one in particular on a recent Saturday morning. He is taping his radio show, which is recorded in the District and beamed into nine cities, including Houston, Chicago and Miami. 

News has broken that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney blames his election loss in part on “gifts” President Obama gave Hispanics and other minorities.  

Aguilar — “La Voz de Los Latinos” (the Latino Voice) — is incredulous. 

“He thinks Latinos voted for entitlements,” he tells listeners in Spanish. “Mr. Romney, Latinos didn’t vote for President Obama because they liked Obamacare. No, they voted for Obama because of your stance on immigration. In the primary, you moved to the far right.” 

Not the kind of talk you’d expect from a committed Republican, a guy who stumped for Romney and whose employer ponied up $400,000 in anti-Obama campaign ads that focused on the administration’s record deportation rates. It’s a set of curiosities not lost on a caller from Los Angeles.  

“How could you have supported him at all?” Francisco wants to know. 

“I’m a conservative,” Aguilar responds.  

But not just any conservative. Aguilar is a 43-year-old Puerto Rican-born former official in the George W. Bush administration; an opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage; a supporter of free markets and limited government. But on immigration, he has differed sharply with his party’s orthodoxy, unapologetically embracing comprehensive reform, including a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. 

With Obama promising to push immigration reform early in his second term, Aguilar is poised to be a driving force in the debate, helping to shape how Republicans respond to an issue of paramount importance to about 12.5 million Latino voters — a growing segment of the electorate that has continued to skew Democratic. In many ways, Aguilar already is a pivotal presence. 

Jorge Ramos [see photo], a Univision anchor and the most influential Spanish-language journalist in the United States, sent a tweet to his 626,400 followers recently that could very well help define the next stage of Aguilar’s career. “Republicans you have to listen to for the immigration debate: Jeb Bush, [former commerce secretary] Carlos Gutierrez and Alfonso Aguilar.” 

On the ego wall of his small K Street office, Aguilar has hung photos of himself with Pope John Paul II, former vice president Richard B. Cheney and a former governor of Puerto Rico, and a group shot of all the Hispanic political appointees in the Bush administration. Aguilar and the other Latino bureaucrats fill multiple rows, stretching along the entire facade of the White House.

To make it from Spanish-language radio to Spanish-language TV, I think he needs a mustache.

(Thanks to the commenter who turned K Street into Que Street.)

NYT v. Daily Mail on lessons of Romney's defeat

The winning Democratic and losing Republican campaign strategists just got together for their quadrennial post-election conference to fix prices discuss the lessons of the election.

According to the New York Times, the headline news was the snooze-inducing:

Romney Campaign Manager Says He Regrets Immigration Stance

According the Daily Mail, the headline news was:

Romney's defeat caused by 'extraordinary' drop in white male support as autopsy of failed Republican campaign gets underway

Unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail manages to, apparently, botch up one of the details, but this quote from the end of the New York Times piece is worth noting:

Neil Newhouse, the chief pollster for Mr. Romney, said the campaign was taken aback by the composition of the electorate. He said that the “real hidden story from our side” came from the number of white men who did not vote in the election in some key states like Ohio. 

“When you lose, you nitpick the numbers as you go through this stuff,” Mr. Newhouse said. “The number of white men who didn’t vote in this election compared to white women compared to four years ago was extraordinary.”

But not extraordinary enough to be worthy of a headline.

All voters are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Lincoln favored self-deportation of ex-slaves his entire life

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln invited a couple of dozen affluent black freedmen to meet with him so he could tell them they ought to leave the country.

They were unenthusiastic.

In recent decades, historians have typically alleged that Lincoln then grew in racial sensitivity and dropped his long-nurtured plan to persuade black ex-slaves to move to colonies in warmer climes, whether Liberia, Hispaniola, or Central America.

An article in the NYT by historian Sebastian Page documents that this is just statue-polishing by historians. Despite a lack of enthusiasm among his political allies, Lincoln continued to work on his plans for facilitating self-deportation of ex-slaves up through his death in April 1865. For example, the same morning he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed a contract establishing a colony for 5,000 American ex-slaves in Haiti.

Of course, today, the idea of helping African-Americans move to a black ruled state like Haiti or Liberia sounds utterly inhumane.

Yet, Zionism has worked out reasonably well for Mormons in Utah and for European Jews in the Middle East, so why was it racist of Lincoln to think that African-Americans could do a decent job of ruling themselves too?

Indeed, isn't our assumption that they couldn't kind of racist of us?

How was Lincoln supposed to know 150 years ago that Haiti would today be a byword for bad government? We think of black-colonized Liberia as a failed state where the natives massacred their African-American elite on the beach in 1980, but how was Lincoln supposed to know that "Can't we all get along?" wouldn't work among blacks in Liberia?

NYT: Latinos don't read, whites to blame

Here's the fourth most emailed article on the New York Times:

For Young Latino Readers, an Image Is Missing 

By MOTOKO RICH

I'm guessing that Motoko Rich isn't Latino. (But, "Motoko Rich" would make a great name for a videogame character or the Bad Girl in a James Bond movie).

PHILADELPHIA — Like many of his third-grade classmates, Mario Cortez-Pacheco likes reading the “Magic Tree House” series, about a brother and a sister who take adventurous trips back in time. He also loves the popular “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” graphic novels. 

But Mario, 8, has noticed something about these and many of the other books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard Taylor Elementary here: most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of people that don’t have a lot of color,” he said. 

Hispanic students now make up nearly a quarter of the nation’s public school enrollment, according to an analysis of census data by the Pew Hispanic Center, and are the fastest-growing segment of the school population. Yet nonwhite Latino children seldom see themselves in books written for young readers. (Dora the Explorer, who began as a cartoon character, is an outlier.) 

Education experts and teachers who work with large Latino populations say that the lack of familiar images could be an obstacle as young readers work to build stamina and deepen their understanding of story elements like character motivation. 

While there are exceptions, including books by Julia Alvarez, Pam Muñoz Ryan, Alma Flor Ada and Gary Soto, what is available is “not finding its way into classrooms,” said Patricia Enciso, an associate professor at Ohio State University.

I suspect the pay is more regular for being a Latino activist than for being an author who is Latino.

Books commonly read by elementary school children — those with human characters rather than talking animals or wizards — include the Junie B. Jones, Cam Jansen, Judy Moody, Stink and Big Nate series, all of which feature a white protagonist. An occasional African-American, Asian or Hispanic character may pop up in a supporting role, but these books depict a predominantly white, suburban milieu. 

“Kids do have a different kind of connection when they see a character that looks like them or they experience a plot or a theme that relates to something they’ve experienced in their lives,” said Jane Fleming, an assistant professor at the Erikson Institute, a graduate school in early childhood development in Chicago.

There aren't many faces that look like the typical Mexican-American on Spanish-language Univision either (starting with blue-eyed news anchorman Jorge Ramos, who looks like Anderson Cooper's cousin, the Tyrolean count), except for maybe the fat guy in the sombrero who falls down a lot on Sabado Gigante.

And, yet, Mexican-Americans watch the heck out of Univision.

She and Sandy Ruvalcaba Carrillo, an elementary school teacher in Chicago who works with students who speak languages other than English at home, reviewed 250 book series aimed at second to fourth graders and found just two that featured a Latino main character. 

The Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, which compiles statistics about the race of authors and characters in children’s books published each year, found that in 2011, just over 3 percent of the 3,400 books reviewed were written by or about Latinos, a proportion that has not changed much in a decade. 

As schools across the country implement the Common Core — national standards for what students should learn in English and math — many teachers are questioning whether nonwhite students are seeing themselves reflected in their reading. 

For the early elementary grades, lists of suggested books contain some written by African-American authors about black characters, but few by Latino writers or featuring Hispanic characters. Now, in response to concerns registered by the Southern Poverty Law Center

Hey, at least the SPLC is doing something with its quarter of a billion bucks ... Maybe the SPLC can declare the Magic Treehouse a hate group.

and others, the architects of the Common Core are developing a more diverse supplemental list. “We have really taken a careful look, and really think there is a problem,” said Susan Pimentel, one of the lead writers of the standards for English language and literacy. “We are determined to make this right.” 

Black, Asian and American Indian children similarly must dig deep into bookshelves to find characters who look like them.

So, that explains why Asians never do well enough on the PSAT to become National Merit Scholars.

Latino children who speak Spanish at home and arrive at school with little exposure to books in English face particular challenges. A new study being released next week by pediatricians and sociologists at the University of California shows that Latino children start school seven months behind their white peers, on average, in oral language and preliteracy skills. 

“Their oral language use is going to be quite different from what they encounter in their books,” said Catherine E. Snow, a professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. “So what might seem like simple and accessible text for a standard English speaker might be puzzling for such kids.” 

Hispanic children have historically underperformed non-Hispanic whites in American schools. According to 2011 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a set of exams administered by the Department of Education, 18 percent of Hispanic fourth graders were proficient in reading, compared with 44 percent of white fourth graders. 

Research on a direct link between cultural relevance in books and reading achievement at young ages is so far scant.

And it's only been obsessively studied for the last 45 or 50 years, but Real Soon Now somebody will discover something.

And few academics or classroom teachers would argue that Latino children should read books only about Hispanic characters or families. But their relative absence troubles some education advocates. 

“If all they read is Judy Blume or characters in the “Magic Treehouse” series who are white and go on adventures,” said Mariana Souto-Manning, an associate professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, “they start thinking of their language or practices or familiar places and values as not belonging in school.” 

On the other hand, if you do put Latino characters into your books, you are likely guilty of stereotyping:

At Bayard Taylor Elementary in Philadelphia, a school where three-quarters of the students are Latino, Kimberly Blake, a third-grade bilingual teacher, said she struggles to find books about Latino children that are “about normal, everyday people.” The few that are available tend to focus on stereotypes of migrant workers or on special holidays. “Our students look the way they look every single day of the year,” Ms. Blake said, “not just on Cinco de Mayo or Puerto Rican Day.” 

On a recent morning, Ms. Blake read from “Amelia’s Road” by Linda Jacobs Altman, about a daughter of migrant workers. Of all the children sitting cross-legged on the rug, only Mario said that his mother had worked on farms. 

Publishers say they want to find more works by Hispanic authors, and in some cases they insert Latino characters in new titles. When Simon & Schuster commissioned writers to develop a new series, “The Cupcake Diaries,” it cast one character, Mia, as a Latino girl. “We were conscious of making one of the characters Hispanic,” said Valerie Garfield, a vice president in the children’s division, “and doing it in a way that girls could identify with, but not in a way that calls it out.” 

In some respects, textbook publishers like Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are ahead of trade publishers. Houghton Mifflin, which publishes reading textbooks, allocates exactly 18.6 percent of its content to works featuring Latino characters. The company says that percentage reflects student demographics. 

There was this book that used to be assigned in middle schools and high schools with Hispanic characters and even boys liked it: The Old Man and the Sea.