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Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 12, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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The main recruiting tactic of white nationalists majoritarians is to argue that wokeness is being fueled by America's increasing diversity and, therefore, decreasing diversity will decrease wokeness. I used to believe that, but at some point I realized that the drivers of wokeness are affluent whites and Asians, not Hispanic immigrants. This doesn't mean that Hispanics are opposed to wokeness, but rather, that even if the white share of the population stopped declining, wokeness would continue marching through the institutions.

I've believed this for a couple years now, so I don't care about immigration as much as I did during Trumpmania. However, is there any reason to believe that increased Hispanic immigration would help combat wokeness? I understand that most Hispanics vote Democrat and likely always will, but one can vote for them for reasons unrelated to wokeness, and wokeness could be a dividing line for the party at some point. We already saw signs of that with the "Bernie Bro" discourse.

(Wokeness, for the purposes of this and any other post I make, is defined as the belief that any disparate outcome between groups is the self-evident result of systemic oppression and, therefore, must be counteracted. Other terms often used to describe this ideology are "social justice", "identity politics", "neo-Marxism", "post-modern neo-Marxism", "Critical Race Theory", "disparate impact", "anti-racism", "intersectionality", and "intersectional feminism". One of the weird quirks of this ideological movement is that anytime its opponents start addressing it by name, its proponents abandon that name and switch to a new one. This makes it almost impossible for anyone to discuss the ideology; it's hard to discuss something without a name. I've settled on wokeness.)

is there any reason to believe that increased Hispanic immigration would help combat wokeness

To discuss this in depth, it's important to first point out that Hispanic is a made up category with very different elements. Traditionally it was made up of Cubans in Florida, Puerto Ricans in the NYC area, and Northern Mexicans in the Southwest.

The Cuban refugees were frequently educated and anti communist, so they have been accessible to voting republican for a while.

The Hispanics being bussed to the southern border in those caravans are a different demographic. From southern Mexico or central America. Bottom social tier in their original countries. Often completely illiterate, unable to read English or Spanish. Due to "bilingual" education, which in practice means doing HS in Spanish, their children never learn college level English. The education system fudges the numbers by giving them affirmative action entrance, throwing them in remedial classes, letting them wash out, then declaring them as having "some college" in statistics.

So the parents and children end up to some degree reliant on social programs run by the PMC. They aren't in any position to fight wokeism.

Venezuelans fleeing Maduro tend to be more similar Cubans but they aren't going to have any desire to rock the boat.

Besides, the woke don't have any objection to making exceptions for non-whites. You won't see them pushing "gender affirming care" on Somali Muslims. The famous famous "gay wedding cake" couple drove way out into the boonies to find a Christian baker who had a problem making the cake, while ignoring Muslim bakeries a few miles away from their home who had similar objections.

So I think that while Hispanic immigrants that get into the PMC would be culturally less supportive of wokeism, they would tend to see it as either helpful to their careers or not worth opposing.

Due to "bilingual" education, which in practice means doing HS in Spanish, their children never learn college level English.

This is not accurate: High school is not and has not been all in Spanish. Perhaps in the future, but... California for example only removed the (English for Children) 1996 ban in 2016. (PLIC was offered for a few years in the early 90s.)

  • currently few teachers credentialed for another language

  • core subjects are in English (math, science) - there's no current model to do those in another language in highschool

  • higher income monolingual parents are using this to teach their kids Mandarin

  • these programs concentrate on elementary school immersion

  • these programs leverage non-public heritage classes (like Saturday Chinese schools) established to keep kids from losing their home culture (it's not hard to just speak to your kids in your language and teach them, but immigrants aren't generally aware of how language acquisition works.) You end up with 2, 3, 4th etc. generation kids with no connection to the local language, a terrible command of Spanish but perfectly fine English. (Honestly, growing up in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood and going back, I believe complaints about closed off immigrant neighborhoods self perpetuating are solely based on ignorance and memories of them having just arrived in the 80s or 90s. Even the gangbangers primarily use English.)

Going to school myself, only 3 of us spoke English in 1st grade (across all 1st grade classes, and the Vietnamese twins learned Spanish by exposure) - but by 3rd grade everyone had learned. Unlike 20 years ago, only 40% are ESL now. Nowadays they have more kids in the Vietnamese programs than Spanish.

Anyway, education in Spanish or English would be better than what we actually got. I literally had 2-3 actual classes. In all others (including APs), teachers would put movies kids brought in all day and we'd talk or such. I got a lot out of this - reading almost the whole time, eventually going through language learning and programming textbooks.

So to clarify: This is not accurate. These (lower class) Hispanics aren't doing high school in Spanish, because they aren't really getting an education at all. That said, I'm also in Mexico at the moment and quite a lot of Hispanics (and American whites) are studying here (due to the cost) in Spanish. A few girls doing computer science, veterinary medicine, geology...