Social Cohesion

ALEX COHEN, host: Meanwhile, as immigrants are being talked about on Capitol Hill, they are also being courted by politicians.MADELEINE BRAND, host: And here in Los Angeles, the city's top politician, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, is seen as a guy who can deliver that vote nationwide. He endorsed Senator Hillary Clinton earlier this week, despite the fact that there is a Latino candidate in the race, and that has raised some questions about Villaraigosa's loyalty.NPR's… more

It sounded like a desperate groan, or maybe it was a guttural, exasperated "Oh, please." But near the finale of a preview performance of David Henry Hwang’s new play, Yellow Face, which opened Sunday night at the Mark Taper Forum, an unidentified female audience member -- was she Anglo? Asian? -- made known her displeasure with one of the protagonist’s closing lines.

The offending words? They were relatively straightforward, if not utopian. After a successful career of both deconstructing and… more

What if you don’t have anything in common with your brother? What if you live on different continents? What if you’ve never even met the man? Are you still his keeper?

In a diverse nation such as ours, there is always that expectant pause after a major violent tragedy, between the moment we hear the news and when we’re told who did it. In that time, we tend to look around the proverbial room and wonder from which group the perpetrator… more

If Sunnyslope had a patron saint, her name would be the Virgin of Solitude. The black-cloaked woman is the saint of Oaxaca, Mexico, but her image drapes walls in homes and businesses throughout Sunnyslope, one of the Valley's oldest neighborhoods, nestled at the bottom of Phoenix's North Mountain. Over the past decade, so many immigrants from the southern Mexican state have moved into Sunnyslope that the working-class community in north-central Phoenix is becoming known as "Little… more

You go, Loretta Sanchez. Just keep walking away from that Congressional Hispanic Caucus. No, not just because of the nasty name caucus chief Rep. Joe Baca allegedly called you. But because you’ll be undermining a political practice that will increasingly hurt Mexican American statewide candidates in the most politically powerful states in the nation.

From all accounts, Rep. Sanchez’s public feud with Baca is highly personal. (She says he called her a "whore.") Nonetheless, the moment provides an opportunity to ponder… more

California is losing market share -- as a destination for immigrants. As the rest of the country experiences an explosion of immigration (especially of the illegal variety) that has the national percentage of foreign-born residents soaring, the immigration increase in the Golden State is in the rearview mirror. Since 1990, California has seen a decline in the number of new immigrant arrivals. In the 1990s alone, that number declined by almost 10%, and the decrease in Los Angeles County was… more

Sunflower County, MS -- “Are Lebanese white people?" we asked 71-year-old Ned Holder, a former sheriff here. "Yes," he said, "although they’re real dark." How about Italian Catholics; are they white? Sure. And Jews? Yes. What about the Chinese? "Yes," he said, "they go to the white schools." And Mexicans? "They’re becoming more white. More of them are getting an education."

Then what’s a white person, we asked? After some confusion over the meaning of the question, he concluded that it… more

We know this: Barack Obama is a rising star. He's a powerful speaker and a gifted writer. He is the only African American serving in the U.S. Senate. But is he black?

That's what New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch asked last month, and his answer was decidedly "no." No, Crouch wasn't just employing the old "blacker than thou" canard. Nor was he concerned with the fact that Obama was raised by his white mother. Rather, he was treating blackness… more

Homogenizing the image of the "other" has always been a way for groups to marginalize undesirable minorities and foreigners. Two dozen centuries ago, Hippocrates wrote that the Scythians -- nomadic people whom the Greeks considered barbaric -- all looked alike. By contrast, the good doctor could discern that his own people came in all shapes and sizes.

To refuse to make distinctions among members of any given group is the first step to stripping them of individuality. And depriving people of… more

RIO DE JANEIRO -- Even as U.S. society struggles to move beyond its confining binary view of race -- white versus black with nothing in between -- Brazil, a country where the celebration of racial mixture has long been a central part of the national self-image, may be heading in the opposite direction.

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, this South American nation received more African slaves than any country in the Americas. But the shortage of white women, and… more