Color, Kinetics, Kin

Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple (Spanish Fork, Utah)

 This week's article contributed by guest writer, Gloria Gardner Murdock.

An electromagnetic field in Utah’s Spanish Fork drew in 50,000 revelers – reported as predominantly LDS college students – in celebration of the Hindu Festival of Color, known as Holi, March 24-25, 2011.

Jessica, age 33, learned about the Sri Sri Radha Krishna Temple’s event from friends in the Seattle area where she lives, and decided to share the fun with her newly married younger sister, Shairstin, in Sandy, UT and their returned missionary brother, Brett, who attends BYU.

Do you judge people by their race?

Earlier this week, I found this:

The U.M. Magazine Poll Results

We asked you...

With all honesty, do you judge people (whether negatively or positively) by their race?

We ran our poll for one year and it resulted in 33% of our voters choosing "yes" and 66% choosing "no".

(Urban Mozaik Magazine)

Well, this is odd, I thought. I wondered to myself if the third admitting “yes” to pre-judgment was a more self-aware and open-minded bunch than the 2 thirds voting “no.” I thought the demographic for the poll complicated the results anyway. Urban Mozaik is a multicultural, e-magazine, intended for celebrating diversity. Anyone taking their poll is presumably a lover of all races and cultures, why else would he or she read the magazine? I trust UM recognized that they were basically asking, “Are you aware of your natural, human tendency to judge people (whether negatively or positively) by their race?” My big question is, did the pollsters realize as much? Then I had a good laugh imagining myself taking the poll, and staring for a half-hour at the question, unsure of its intent. What kind of answer would they prefer to see in the ideal future? 100% “yes, I’m self-aware of my racism?” Or 100% “no, I’m not racist, period?” 

I’ve been enjoying UM’s free-response questionnaires. Reading them, I mean. They ask candid questions about controversial race and immigration questions, and post volunteers’ thorough responses. 

What I’d like to publish here today is not a questionnaire response submitted to UM, but one submitted to The Culturalist.

Utah Minutemen Project: Undercover Report

UMP participates in debate at Salt Lake City Library

The Utah Minutemen Project (UMP) is often pitted against immigration reform groups in public debates, and has found its way into the arms of Republican Party partnership. It seems like every time I read an immigration-themed article in a local newspaper, I find some quotation from Eli Cawley, UMP's long-time leader.

While I recognize that many conservative Utahns support deportation, I find it strange that Eli is so frequently called upon to represent mainstream Republican values.  I have, for several years, believed his views to be quite extreme, especially with regard to the UMP's essential belief that citizen's should literally take the border law into their own rifle-cocking hands. I met Eli in 2008, when I attended a UMP meeting and took notes. A couple of friends and I attended the meeting under the guise of possible interest in the cause, although our real intent was merely to observe the workings of the organization.

Arizona minutemen at the border (http://www.life.com)

 I'm interested in the sympathetic portrayal of all groups of people. Even groups that represent public efforts antagonistic to my own principles. I hope to offer a frank-and-fair peek into the values and views of the members of the Utah Minutemen Project. This can be best done, not through a rehearsal of my own opinion and analysis, but by presenting what was said and done while I spent some time among them. Below are my UMP meeting notes:

Japanese Americans in Utah: Opression and Art during WWII

This blog post is a photo and written word collage containing the following elements:

• Photographs I took (with permission) during my visit to the Testament to Topaz exhibit, which was displayed at Pioneer Theater on University of Utah campus March, 2011. The exhibit held primarily artwork created by those California residents forced to reside at Topaz, the Japanese American internment camp in Southern Utah, during World War II. The art pieces belong to the J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections Department, and the Topaz Museum, Delta, Utah.
• Facts quoted from exhibit posters and the Topaz Museum website.
• Quotations from a couple of my favorite books by Japanese-American authors, The Strangeness of Beauty (set in Japan and California in the 1930s) by Lydia Minatoya, and When the Emperor Was Divine (set in San Francisco and Topaz Interment Camp in the 1940s) by Julie Otsuka.

Approach this blog post the way you would a museum. Browse. Take a few moments to ponder who these artists were, what they experienced, and how they responded.

BYU Forum: Mark Zuckerberg on Increasing World Empathy and Connection

When I clicked “Maybe Attending,” on the “Mark Zuckerberg and Orrin Hatch to Talk Technology and Policy at BYU” event page, I mentally conceived an image of Senator Hatch giving a tedious power-point presentation (laser-point clicker in hand) on the future of web development as envisioned by Congress. How fascinating . . . His remarks would be followed (I presumed) by a nervous Zuckerberg, speaking (in a nasal voice?) primarily on how he is nothing like his character on The Social Network. I wasn’t particularly excited. But my husband wanted to go, so somehow I ended up in the Marriott Center on Friday morning, along with 10,692 others (according to Brigham Young University’s official facebook page).

A refugee, a legal permanent resident, and a Reagan-pardoned immigrant: Why are they up for deportation?

In March of  2009, a BYU sociology research team, UCIP (Utah County Immigration Project) conducted several interviews with ICE-Hold detainees at Utah County Jail. ICE-Hold detainees are immigrants who are not currently serving time for a crime, but are on "hold" under an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainer as they await the federal immigration court proceedings that precede deportation.

I summarize the histories of three particularly interesting detainees here to illustrate the complicated process immigrants go through in the justice system. Some of their quoted statements have been translated from Spanish. The names have been changed.

Crime and Immigration: Facts and Fabrications

Utah’s public discourse on illegal immigration has greatly changed in the last few years. In 2009, the Utah legislature passed HB81, a law that allows local police departments to train their officers to enforce federal immigration law, and ups the consequences ($$$) for employing undocumented immigrants. But this year, the legislative session has churned out a couple of surprises.

Rather than passing Representative Stephen Sandstrom’s Arizona-like law (HB70) in it’s intended form, legislators modified the law, removing from it the provision that would have allowed police to ask immigration questions based on a “reasonable suspicion” that a person they stopped had illegal immigrant status. Perhaps, they didn’t want the anti-racial-profiling response that continues to affect Arizona. The law now requires officers to check the immigration status of anyone they arrest who is on a felony or class B or C misdemeanor charge, something the federal immigration police (ICE) do in the county jails anyway.

The legislature also passed Representative Bill Wright’s bill, (HB116), one that allows for a guest worker program for undocumented immigrants already living in Utah.

These laws continue to be controversial even among immigration activists. The guest worker program will cost immigrants a couple thousand dollars to join, and there’s still some question as to whether or not the federal government will consider a state immigration plan constitutional. However, these legislative moves are landmarks that indicate Utah’s famously ultra-conservative stance on immigration may have shifted to a more moderate position. The big question is, why? What sparked the change? The media has suggested these reasons:

• The Utah Compact, a declaration of humane principles that should guide immigration legislation, which happens to be signed by several powerful groups and endorsed by one of Utah’s most influential organizations, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
• Business and Farm lobbyist arguments for the need of migrant labor.
• Major efforts by the conservative media to portray undocumented immigrants in a more sympathetic light. (KSL, Deseret News)
• New (2011) comprehensive research on undocumented immigrants and crime by Sutherland Institute and Brigham Young University, which reveals that of all the inmates in Utah jails and the state prison, only 5.4% are undocumented immigrants (3.8% if you don’t count the illegal-status inmates who have already served their criminal sentence and are simply detained as they await trial for federal immigration violation).

The last item was a brilliant response to a concern held by Utahns for the past few years that while very few reputable studies have been published to give us a clear picture of immigration and crime, politicians and activists have proposed conflicting answers based on estimations formulated without following academic standards essential for accurate statistics.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." (Mark Twain)

The intent of this blog post is to discuss the nature of the immigration-and-crime concern, to describe the events leading up to the new research, and to reveal the flaws in previous research.