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"Tell Me How It Ends" By Valeria Luiselli

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"Tell Me How It Ends" By Valeria Luiselli

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“It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.” The book addresses the abundant myths in official and public remarks on immigration. Luiselli approached minors crossing the border who came to survive rather than take Americans' jobs. This describes some of the minorities/refugees who come to this country. All they want is just a place to survive and flourish instead living among wars and crimes that was present in their country. Other people view these minority groups as a "burden" because they take their jobs even though their parents or grandparents immigrated to this country too. This shouldn't be the case since all they want is just to live life without fearing for their lives.

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Welcome to my curation! My name is Fady Graiss and I created this exhibition to raise awareness about the discrimination that Christian Arabs face in their home country. I also discuss the discrimination that immigrants/minorities face in their everyday lives. I've realized that every time I go visit my home country, I get subtly mistreated for my religion as I wear a necklace with a cross on it and that's how they know. Fortunately, it's not a big deal for me since it barely impacts me. But others have been tortured and killed for their Christian faith. For this reason, a lot of Christian Arabs immigrate to the U.S. and Canada. Once they migrate to another country, they get a sense of relief because they no longer have to fear mistreatment, or that's what they imagined.... In reality, they face discrimination all over again since they do not fit the description of being an American or a Canadian. Minorities are frequently victimized when it comes to attaining access to their civil rights. They get those "faces" in public, get denied employment for having a "weird name", and get called names and phrases such as "go back to your country". This is why I created this curation to gather as many artifacts as to show the public what they have to endure. I hope you understand and articulate how all of these artifacts I included tie in together.

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Inside the Lives of Immigrant Teens Working Dangerous Night Shifts in Suburban Factories

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Inside the Lives of Immigrant Teens Working Dangerous Night Shifts in Suburban Factories

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This article resonated with me since I've seen teens working extremely hard just to get by. They go to school in the morning and when they come back, they don't even have a chance to sit down and have dinner with their family because they have to go to work. Why you may ask do they go through all of this? the answer is simple: Poverty. Ever since Donald Trump implemented new measures for deportation policies, he pressed for more arrests on immigrants that had become undocumented, reaching almost 7,000 a month. Consequently, farm owners and managers complain of a shortage in jobs. They also started recruiting more children, many of whom have been born in America and are citizens of the same immigrant communities.

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It's a little before 6 a.m. and still dark when Garcia gets home from work this October morning. The apartment where he lives with his aunt and uncle is silent. They've already left for their own jobs.

After nine hours hosing down machinery at a food processing plant, Garcia is tired and hungry. But he has less than an hour to get ready for high school, where he is a junior. He quickly showers, gets dressed and reheats some leftover chicken soup for a meal he refers to as his dinner. Then he gulps down some coffee, brushes his teeth and walks outside to catch the school bus waiting near the edge of the sprawling apartment complex.

Here in the Chicago suburb of Bensenville, and in places like it throughout the country, Guatemalan teenagers like Garcia spend their days in class learning English and algebra and chemistry. At night, while their classmates sleep, they work to pay debts to smugglers and sponsors, to contribute to rent and bills, to buy groceries and sneakers, and to send money home to the parents and siblings they left behind.

They are among the tens of thousands of young people who have come to this country over the past few years, some as unaccompanied minors, others alongside a parent, amid a spike in the number of Central American migrants seeking asylum in the U.S.

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Around Urbana-Champaign, the home of the University of Illinois, school district officials say children and adolescents lay shingles, wash dishes and paint off-campus university apartments. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, an indigenous Guatemalan labor leader has heard complaints from adult workers in the fish-packing industry who say they're losing their jobs to 14-year-olds. In Ohio, teenagers work in dangerous chicken plants.

ProPublica interviewed 15 teenagers and young adults in Bensenville alone who said they work or have worked as minors inside more than two dozen factories, warehouses and food processing facilities in the Chicago suburbs, usually through temporary staffing agencies, and nearly all in situations where federal and state child labor laws would explicitly prohibit their employment.

Though most of the teens interviewed for this story are now 18, they agreed to speak on the condition that they not be fully identified and that their employers not be named because they feared losing their jobs, harming their immigration cases or facing criminal penalties.

Some began to work when they were just 13 or 14, packing the candy you find by the supermarket register, cutting the slabs of raw meat that end up in your freezer and baking, in industrial ovens, the pastries you eat with your coffee. Garcia, who is 18 now, was 15 when he got his first job at an automotive parts factory.

Like many adult workers, they often don't even know the names of the factories where they work. They refer to them, in Spanish, by the product they make or pack or sort: "los dulces" (the candies), "los metales" (the metals) and "las mangueras" (the hoses).

The teenagers use fake IDs to get the jobs through temporary staffing agencies that recruit immigrants and, knowingly or not, accept the papers they are handed. Working overnight allows the teens to attend school during the day. But it's a brutal trade-off. They nod off in class; many ultimately drop out. And some, like Garcia, get hurt. Their bodies bear the scars from cuts and other on-the-job injuries.

Labor advocates say they've long heard whispers about child labor, but whenever they try to dig deeper, nobody wants to talk. Adult factory workers at some facilities say they routinely encounter children on their shifts. And teachers say they have had students who have gotten injured at work and were too afraid of getting in trouble to seek help.

Meanwhile, the government agencies charged with enforcing child labor laws don't look for violations, though some officials say they aren't surprised to hear it's happening. Instead, those agencies wait for complaints to come to them, and they almost never do.

The companies benefit from the silence. It's an open secret no one wants exposed, least of all the teenagers doing the work.

Before they disappeared into crowded assembly lines, the young Guatemalan immigrants in Bensenville arrived in the United States as part of a new wave of young Central American asylum-seekers who have captured the nation's attention in recent years.

Many of them passed through the federal network of shelters for unaccompanied immigrant minors that came under scrutiny in 2018 during the Trump administration's policy of separating children from their parents. As they waited weeks or months to be released to sponsors, they grew anxious about their mounting immigration debts, desperate to get out and work so their relatives back home didn't suffer the consequences of a loan default.

"Honestly, I think almost everyone in the system knows that most of the teens are coming to work and send money back home," said Maria Woltjen, executive director and founder of the Young Center for Immigrant Children's Rights, a national organization that advocates for immigrant children in court. "They want to help their parents."

But whether they stayed in a shelter in Florida or California or Illinois, the teens heard similar warnings from the staff: They had to enroll in school and stay out of trouble. The immigration judges who would decide their cases, they were told, didn't want to hear that they were working.

"They would ask you: 'Who are you going to live with? Is he going to support you financially?'" said one 19-year-old who spent nearly six months at a shelter in New York before a family friend in Bensenville agreed to take him in. "And you say yes. 'Are they going to be responsible for you?' And you say yes. 'Are they going to take you to school?' And you say yes."

Garcia heard this, too, at the shelter in Arizona where he spent about six weeks after letting himself get caught by agents at the U.S.-Mexico border. He knew he wasn't supposed to work, but he also knew he had no choice. "I had nobody here who could support me," he said.

He was 15 and he had debts to pay, starting with the roughly $3,000 he owed for the "coyote" who guided him across Mexico from Guatemala. To finance the trip, his parents had taken out a bank loan, using their house as collateral. If he didn't repay it, the family could lose its home.

Garcia made the trek north in the spring of 2018 to escape the street gangs and poverty of Huehuetenango, the capital city of the western state of the same name.

A slender, shy boy with an easy smile, Garcia didn't like to imagine his future in Guatemala. Other boys his age had already quit school, unable to afford the fees, and worked full time. Even if Garcia finished high school, he'd likely work in construction for the rest of his life, like his father. On weekends and during breaks from school, he had a job as a bricklayer's assistant. He could earn about 350 quetzales, or around $45 in today's dollars, for six days of work . It wasn't much, but usually enough to cover school fees and books. His parents couldn't always afford to help.

"You feel guilty about it," said his mother, Juana, a restaurant cook in Huehuetenango who irons clothes and washes laundry on the side for extra money. "How I wish I had a job that paid me enough so that I could fulfill my children's dreams, so they can get an education and a good career. But no matter how much you do, you just never make enough money here to help them get ahead."

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For years, children and families had been fleeing Guatemala's impoverished highlands as word spread that it was easy for minors - or adults accompanied by a child - to get into the U.S. and seek asylum. From 2012 to last year, the number of Guatemalans apprehended at the border jumped from some 34,000 to more than 264,000, according to federal reports. Of those apprehended last year, about 80% were families or children traveling alone.

The other teenagers who would eventually settle in Bensenville left for all sorts of reasons: One said his father beat him when he drank, burned his hand against a hot motorcycle engine, then threw him out of the house; another said he feared being physically attacked because he is gay; others said they came to join parents who'd immigrated years before.

For Garcia, immigrating meant the possibility of safety, a high school diploma and perhaps even attending college and studying to become an architect, all while earning dollars to send home to his family. He told his parents he wanted to come. His mother pleaded with Garcia, the youngest of three, not to leave her side. But his father, who'd spent some time in the U.S. when Garcia was much younger, said he could go.

The journey can be traumatic, even violent. But Garcia made it unscathed as he rode buses and walked long stretches through Mexico. Within days of turning himself into agents at the border, he had arrived at the shelter in Phoenix where staff verified his relationship with a maternal aunt in Bensenville who had agreed to receive him. Through Garcia, his aunt declined to speak with ProPublica for this story.

Sponsors are supposed to guarantee they can care for the children, including providing financial support and appropriate living arrangements, according to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which oversees the shelter program. They usually must pay for the minors' travel from the shelters to their homes. They are not allowed to require a child to work to repay his or his family's debt, or charge for room and board.

Shelter staff are supposed to call to check on the children 30 days after their release to ensure they are still living their sponsor, safe, in school and aware of coming court dates. The monitoring typically ends there.

But sponsors, particularly those who are not immediate family, often ask minors to repay them for the travel costs, plus a share of rent and other bills. Sometimes they charge an additional fee that can run $500 or more. For the teens, it's a fair exchange; they can see that their relatives are scraping by, often in cramped housing and working multiple jobs.

Garcia's aunt, who had immigrated years earlier with her family, was reluctant to take him in. "It's too hard here," Juana recalled her sister's explanation. "You have to work so much here, and there are so many challenges, and he is far too young." At Garcia's insistence, his mother asked again. "I don't have anybody else to turn to but you," she implored. "Please help us so that he can be there and with his own family."

Eventually her sister relented, but she made clear that she couldn't afford another mouth to feed. Her own remittances were already supporting Garcia's grandmother back home. If he came, Garcia would have to work to pay his share of the expenses. He readily agreed.

Within a week of arriving, Garcia accompanied his aunt and uncle to the factory where they worked making auto parts. He got hired on a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift, cleaning newly made screws and bolts with an air blow gun. Workers wore safety goggles to protect their eyes from the shards of metal that blew in their faces. It was a dirty job. "I didn't like it, working with so many oily parts," he recalled. "And it was dangerous."

Garcia was not directly employed by the factory. Instead, he got the job through an "oficina, " the word Spanish-speaking immigrants use to describe the dozens of temporary staffing agencies that employ hundreds of thousands of workers in Illinois. In some cases, the teens interviewed by ProPublica - all but one of them male - say they don't even know the name of the staffing agency that employs them; it's just the place where someone told them they could find work.

In recent decades, American factories have increasingly turned to temp agencies to fill their jobs. The agencies offer staffing flexibility and can help shield companies from legal issues surrounding employees' questionable immigration status or workers' compensation claims because they are the direct employer. ProPublica has reported extensively on injuries and exploitation tied to temp work. Some agencies actively recruit immigrants; over the past few months, at least two temp agencies dotted the Bensenville apartment complex with lawn signs advertising jobs, including one that offered a $200 bonus after four weeks of work.

By the teenagers' accounts, age rarely seems to come up when they try to get hired.

Ramos was 14 and had just finished eighth grade when he got his first job in the summer of 2018. He didn't feel the same pressure as some of the other teens at the apartment complex to pay off immigration debts or help with the rent. That's because he had come with his mother and younger siblings the previous fall to join their father, who had immigrated to the U.S. years earlier.

But at night, Ramos saw his father return home from work exhausted after back-to-back shifts at two factories. "Even on the weekends he was tired. He was always sleeping," said Ramos, a wiry teen with curly hair. "I told him I wanted to help out. He'd say: 'No. I want you to study.' But I kept insisting."

One afternoon as he walked home from the bus stop after summer school, Ramos got a call from another boy who lived at the apartment complex about job openings at a candy packaging plant. "I came running home and told my mom," he recalled. "She gave me the OK and packed me a lunch."

Within an hour, he was learning handwashing and hairnet protocols at the plant. He began working that day, grabbing boxes of packaged sour candies as they whipped down an assembly line and stacking them onto wooden pallets.

No one asked his age, he said. "They asked if I was in school," Ramos recalled. "I said yes. And they said that's good."

Just two of the 15 young people interviewed for this story said their age had ever interfered with their attempts to get hired, and even then, they ultimately found jobs.

One teen said an older cousin took him to a temp agency office shortly after he arrived from Guatemala in 2014. He was 15, but his ID said he was 21. It did not convince agency staff. His cousin stepped in and implored: "You know why we come to this country. ... We come here to work." The agency, the teen said, placed him in a factory job.

Another adolescent, Miguel, was also 15 when he tried to get a job using an ID that said he was 19. He said employees at the agency scoffed: "They saw how short I was and my little boy's face and told me I can't work." Dejected, Miguel returned to the complex and told a friend what had happened. The boy, who was 14, said there were openings at the metal recycling facility where he worked with his mother. Within days, Miguel had a job there.

At his age, Miguel should have been in school, though he wouldn't enroll for several more months. Federal law limits children of this age to working a maximum of three hours on school days and eight hours on Saturdays or Sundays, and it prohibits them from working overnight. There are also strict limits on the type of work children who are 14 or 15 can perform; employment in a metal recycling facility is not permitted, for instance. And yet there he was, working 12-hour, overnight shifts, often six days a week.

Mark Denzler, president and CEO of the Illinois Manufacturers' Association, said in a statement that staffing agencies are considered the employer of record and "are required by law to properly vet job candidates including verification for employment." He said his group "strongly encourages all manufacturers and employers to abide by all federal and state laws especially as it applies to child labor laws. We do not condone violations of these laws."

Dan Shomon, a lobbyist for the Staffing Services Association of Illinois, which represents some staffing agencies, declined to speak about how agencies ensure their workers aren't underage but said the companies he works with "follow dozens and hundreds" of federal and state regulations.

"Our goal as an association is to get people to work and treat people well because that makes us good employers and we need to find people all the time," he said. "So it doesn't benefit us to be a shoddy employer but a good employer."

Miguel had no complaints about the metal recycling facility; he was grateful to have the job. But it was hard work, scrubbing scraps of metal in hot cleaning chemicals. Sometimes, chemicals splashed on him and burned his forearms. He said he got used to it. "Every day, different kinds of metal would come in," said Miguel, who is now 18 and a high school senior. "You had to scrub them hard. The boss yelled a lot if you didn't do it right. ... Within a week, I got the hang of it."

Until this summer, when they moved to a larger rental home, Miguel and his father lived for almost three years in a two-bedroom apartment at the Bensenville complex along with 11 other relatives and family friends, sharing expenses to save money. Miguel and his father slept on blankets on the living room floor, alongside two other men and their small children. Sometimes, he'd awaken to see cockroaches scurrying by.

"The truth is, it was rough to see the kids like that, sleeping on the floor," said Miguel, a laid-back teen with a pierced ear, tattoos and dreams of becoming a professional soccer player. "I thought, well, I'm old now, I can get used to this. But not them."

While his father took care of the rent and other bills, Miguel sent most of the $600 or so he made each week to his mother and three sisters in Guatemala. He thought most often of his youngest sister, just 6 now, when he sent the money.

"I want my little sister to go to school, to get a diploma one day," he said. "I don't want her to go through what I have."

A cluster of three-story brick buildings near an industrial zone and golf course, the Bensenville apartment complex houses so many people from the same region of Guatemala that some residents call it "Little Huehue," for Huehuetenango.

Waves of immigrants have joined friends and relatives who told them that it was a convenient place to live to find factory and warehouse work. A few blocks away sits a strip mall with a Guatemalan restaurant, stores that offer currency exchange and parcel delivery services, and a temporary staffing agency.

The largely self-contained world of the apartment complex feeds into a school district in Elmhurst, a more affluent city just south of Bensenville. York Community High School can be a culture shock for the teens: Almost three-quarters of the students are white, and just 5% study English as a second language.

Miguel and the others got lost in the massive brick school building, which is unlike anything they had seen back home. And unlike the complex or factories where most everybody speaks Spanish, here they struggled to make sense of what was being said in English. They stuck together, rarely interacting with the white, non-Latino students with whom they took few classes, or even other more Americanized Latino students.

In some ways, Miguel is one of the lucky Guatemalan students at York because his father can support him financially, allowing him to take fewer or shorter shifts during the school year to focus on his studies and even play for the soccer team. This fall he stopped working to try to improve his grades. But there have been periods when he's had to prioritize work.

He stopped attending classes for several weeks last year when he thought his mother might need expensive medical treatment in Guatemala, and again when his father wound up briefly detained in immigration custody. At those times, he worked back-to-back shifts to earn additional money, he said.

Something similar happened to Ramos. This spring, when the coronavirus pandemic shut down the factory where his father worked, Ramos became the household's sole breadwinner for a few months, working at a plant that packages meat. When school started again this fall, he switched to a part-time shift at a book packaging facility; his 15-year-old sister recently joined him.

Their mother, Lucy, said she is grateful for the money they bring in but reminds them that she wants them to get an education. When she was a child, growing up in Guatemala, she couldn't attend school herself because she had to work as a farmhand. Her children are now teaching her to write her name and basic math. "They are my treasures," Lucy said. "I want them to study so they can get ahead in life."

Garcia, on the other hand, has always had to prioritize work because he has to pay his own way. After a month at the auto parts factory, he found a new job cleaning food-processing machinery where he could work a shorter shift, typically 8 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. But once he enrolled in school, he slept just three, maybe four hours each afternoon.

He couldn't stay awake in class. Most teachers were understanding, he said, but one teacher's reprimands still bother him. Garcia tried to explain to the teacher, in his limited English, why he was so tired. "That's not my problem," he remembers her saying. "I don't know why you're working and not focusing on school."

Figuring out how to respond to these students' needs has been a challenge, said Lorenzo Rubio, who heads York's world language department. And it's not just because the students are exhausted; many have significant gaps in their education, meaning they are further behind their classmates in core subjects like math and science.

When Rubio started his teaching career at York nine years ago, there was just one recently arrived Guatemalan student in the school's English learners, or EL, program, he recalled. As immigration from Central America surged, the number of Guatemalan students at York increased "to eight, then 15, then 30," Rubio said. Last school year, 79 Guatemalan-born students were registered at York, according to state records.

In response to the influx, York expanded its EL program and hired more teachers, including some who now help teach popular electives like auto mechanics. That makes it easier for the Guatemalan students to take a greater variety of classes and meet students outside the program.

Still, only 57% of students learning English at York graduate within four years, according to state records from the 2018-2019 school year. Where York struggles most is addressing the needs of the students who work overnight, Rubio said.

Educators in several nearby districts say that they, too, are adapting to an influx of recent Central American arrivals who work overnight shifts in factories, restaurants and hotels. At Fenton High School, just a few miles from York, most of the 80 or so students learning English are from Guatemala and perhaps half work in factories, said Michelle Rodriguez, who coordinates the English as a second language program.

Now that her school has shifted to remote learning in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Rodriguez sometimes sees students log in from factory breakrooms. She said it's been hard to keep them engaged online. But even before the pandemic, she knew many students were tempted to quit school to work full time. "We have, say, three years with the student," she said. "Let's try to make it that in these three years we give them the best education that we can."

The teens can be reluctant to talk about work, even to the adults at school they trust. Becky Morales, an EL teacher at York, is one of those adults. When in-person classes were held before the pandemic, she would allow students to nap during lunch if they stayed awake during math or science. "If you don't have the basics of food and sleep and if you're not loved," she said, "you're not going to be able to learn anything." (Classes have been held in person intermittently this school year because of the pandemic.)

By chance one day last winter, she noticed that Garcia's hand was swollen, wrapped in gauze and caked in dried blood. Morales pulled him aside and he told her what happened. In the middle of his shift the night before, he said, he cut a knuckle on his left hand with the high-pressure washer he used to clean machinery. A strong burst of water dug into his hand, tearing open his rubber glove and slicing the skin. He thought he could see the bone.

He said he went to a supervisor and asked to be taken to a clinic. The supervisor asked if he had a "good Social Security number," meaning he had a work permit. "I didn't," Garcia said. "So they didn't take me." The supervisor found some gauze and wrapped his hand, and Garcia finished his shift.

At school, Morales found a first-aid kit, cleaned him up and sent him to the nurse's office. When the nurse asked what had happened, Garcia said he'd cut himself with a kitchen knife. The nurse, he said, told him the cut was too deep to be from a knife and asked again. "After that I pretended I didn't understand what she was saying," Garcia said. "That I didn't understand English."

He was afraid that if he admitted he got hurt on the job, he'd get in trouble for using a fake ID or his aunt would go to jail for allowing him to work. Garcia never sought additional medical care. Almost a year later, he said the bone still feels dislocated.

Three other teens interviewed by ProPublica said they'd been injured at work. Two were already 18 when they got hurt, though both had worked since they were 16 in jobs that, under federal law, should have been off limits because they are considered hazardous. One fractured his heel when a forklift he was pulling slid over his foot at a meatpacking plant. The other cut his thumb with a knife at a packaging facility; a supervisor took him to an urgent care facility to get stitches.

Miguel cut the palm of his left hand with a sharp piece of metal at the recycling facility during a shift earlier this year, when he was 17. The wound was deep, about 2 inches across. He was scared but told nobody. Later, when he got home, he washed and bandaged the wound. The next day he wore long sleeves to work, tucking his hurt hand inside so nobody would ask questions. "What if that caused them to shut down or ask about my age?" he said. "It's better to not say anything."

Unlike in cases of suspected child abuse, state labor officials said they were unaware of any mandatory reporting for child labor violations. When asked if she considered reporting the incident involving Garcia to authorities, Morales paused. It's a question she's thought about a lot.

"That's really hard. Who am I supposed to tell? I don't even know," she said. "We know they're doing it to support themselves and don't want them to not be able to support themselves. If I went to a student and said, 'You need to stop working because it's dangerous,' he would potentially drop out of school and keep working.

"Let's say I would make a complaint to the state of Illinois ... then all these kids could lose their jobs. Then what happens? I feel like I would put them in a worse situation."

By and large, labor departments are complaint-based systems. If nobody complains, there is rarely proactive investigation or enforcement.

Federal records show child labor sanctions against just one Illinois factory over the past five years, and none involving temp agencies. And there have been no such complaints filed with the Illinois Department of Labor over the same period.

The state Labor Department conducts random audits of employers' payroll and other records, but child labor violations are unlikely to be uncovered because the audits are based on paperwork, and minors typically use fake IDs. Department officials say staff members routinely meet with community organizations and labor advocates who have more trusting relationships with vulnerable workers to learn whether other systemic issues are occurring but aren't being reported. But child labor in temp agencies or factories hasn't come up in those conversations, said Yolanda Carrillo, chief legal counsel at the state Labor Department.

She and other state officials said they would take action if they knew where to look. "If you don't know where it's happening, who it's happening to, anywhere to start your investigation, it's hard to be able to tackle the issue as a whole," Carrillo said. "And it's not for a lack of willingness."

Similarly, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, whose office has a workplace rights bureau and has brought several lawsuits against temp agencies in recent years, said in a statement that his office was willing to "act expeditiously" in partnership with other agencies to ensure the safety of children and businesses' compliance with child labor laws. But the office has never received a complaint.

One possible reason the issue hasn't surfaced is that the Guatemalan youths came to the U.S. recently and are disconnected from the organizations that traditionally serve Spanish-speaking immigrants, most of whom are Mexican. Guatemalans who primarily speak one of the country's many indigenous Mayan languages are even more isolated.

Still, Carrillo - like nearly every labor advocate, researcher, consular official, immigration attorney and others interviewed for this story - was not surprised to learn about the experiences of the young Guatemalans. Before joining the Labor Department last year, she'd worked for legal organizations that serve low-wage workers, including immigrants, on labor-related issues.

"It's not shocking to me," Carrillo said. "The problem is people don't share. You [as a reporter] may be able to go into a conversation and have people share information with you. ... I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's a lot harder for an agency to go in and have people share information."

But there have been clues in recent years that children and adolescents are working in suburban Chicago factories.

Last month, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago charged a Guatemalan couple in Aurora, another western suburb, with forced labor for allegedly making a girl, who was either 16 or 17, work to pay off smuggling debts, according to the indictment. At least one of the jobs, obtained through a staffing agency, was at a factory and required her to be 18.

And in a case that generated publicity last year, authorities found a 15-year-old Guatemalan girl working through a staffing agency at a food-processing facility in Romeoville, also in the western suburbs. She was among more than two dozen people living in the home of a woman to whom they allegedly owed immigration debts, in addition to rent and other expenses. The woman has since pleaded guilty to federal forced labor and other charges and is awaiting sentencing.

In neither case did the authorities prosecute the staffing agencies that employed the minors or the factories that, knowingly or not, benefited from their labor. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office declined to comment as the cases remain ongoing.

Those cases focused on the individuals involved and not the broader system that allows child labor to be used. It's a similar approach when labor departments do proactive child labor investigations, said Janice Fine, a labor professor and researcher at Rutgers who recently surveyed state labor departments about how they enforce labor law. (Illinois was not part of this survey.)

The strategy commonly employed to respond to child labor - investigators doing sweeps at businesses where minors were likely to be employed, like carnivals in the summertime or restaurants - isn't an effective long-term fix, she said.

"They're not thinking, 'What's driving child labor and how do we take a systemic approach to taking it on and figure out in this industry what's driving it, who are the key actors, who are the key employers and what kinds of employment arrangements are they taking advantage of to engage in this kind of activity?'" Fine said. "The question of how do you actually make it a long-term structural shift is what they're not solving for."

The problem is larger than the question of enforcement; it's a reflection of the intractable poverty in the countries that send migrants of all ages here and the pull of an American labor market eager to hire them.

"The bottom line is if you interfere with the situation, that child is still going to work," said Woltjen of the Young Center. "If something happens and he gets scared that he's going to be turned over to the authorities, he's going to run and he's not going to come back to school and he's still going to work."

Over the 17 years she has worked with unaccompanied immigrant children, she and her staff have seen many minors from China to Central America who arrive in this country with a personal sense of duty to work to repay their smuggling debts and send home remittances. "They're determined to do it," she said.

The young people in Bensenville do not feel exploited. They are not asking to be rescued. They want to keep working to help their families in Guatemala and contribute to the households where they live.

"For those of us from countries where there is more poverty, there is a stronger need to work," Garcia said. "You don't have a choice, between just going to school or just working. So we have to do both. Back home, other kids quit school altogether."

At least here, he said, he is getting an education.

Billy A. Muñoz Miranda, the consul general for Guatemala in Chicago, knows what's happening with his young compatriots in Bensenville and across the country. In a previous stint as the consul in Southern California, he said, he knew of teens who worked late-night shifts at restaurants and factories, then showed up to school only to fall asleep in class.

As a consular official, he is responsible for protecting Guatemalans here, and he doesn't believe minors should be working factory jobs, earning minimum wages, in sometimes dangerous conditions. But no one has ever complained to the consulate about the practice, he said, including the teenagers and their families. "They don't see this as a crime," he said. "They see this as a source of income."

On a personal level, he admires how hard they work. "Thanks to their labor and work and efforts they are giving stability and social peace for Guatemala," he said. "And without us knowing it they have sacrificed their childhoods for that."

When you talk to the young men who live at the apartment complex, they sound like adults. Responsible. Matter of fact. Stoic. But there are moments that remind you that they are still boys. They say they miss their mothers. They play video games on their cellphones. And, almost without exception, they adore soccer, the Barcelona "futbol" club and superstar Lionel Messi.

Few of them could imagine playing for the team at York; with school and work, they have no time for extracurricular activities. But on a cold, rainy Sunday morning in September, about a dozen gathered for a game at a park not far from the apartment complex. Several had clocked out of their factory jobs only a few hours earlier. Yet they seemed full of energy. They laughed, teased each other and passed a ball around as they warmed up.

Morales, the York teacher, stood on the sidelines, wet and shivering. She started organizing these games last fall to connect with her students and create an opportunity for them to have fun outside of work and school. She calls them "mis hijitos," or "my little sons," and takes her own children to the weekend games or on the visits she makes to the complex to deliver groceries from the local food pantry. At the games, she makes a point to call out each boy's name at least once.

The games reflect the two worlds the boys inhabit, one by day and the other at night. Sometimes, they might play against the men they work alongside on factory floors. Other days they face a suburban high school soccer team. It's uncertain where they will ultimately land: growing into adulthood and continuing to work in the factories, or finishing school and going to college.

Several of the Guatemalan teens say they'd like to attend college one day, but few have any clear sense of how that might happen. Their future in this country is uncertain. Most have already been waiting for years as their asylum cases play out in a massively backlogged court system. Their cases have seen additional delays with shifting federal priorities, the retirements of judges and, now, the coronavirus pandemic. They know they may be deported one day.

Garcia doesn't like to imagine a life back in Guatemala. "Life is a little harder there," he said. "Sometimes there's work. Sometimes there isn't."

He said he would like to go to college here in the U.S. He's been drawn to architecture since he was a boy in Guatemala, because of a cousin back home who works in that field. "I've always liked to draw," he said, "and I'm good at math." He doesn't know how he'd pay tuition. He's seen friends graduate from high school and say they'll work a factory job for a year or two to save money and enroll in college. "Not a lot of them are able to do it," he said. "They stay working in a factory."

Garcia said he'd rather try to get scholarships, whether through joining the military or getting his grades up and qualifying for merit aid. For most of his time here, his work schedule has made learning and staying focused on class nearly impossible, and his grades have suffered. Earlier this year, he left the factory job and tried working fewer hours at a restaurant so he'd have more time to sleep. But when the pandemic struck this spring, the restaurant closed. At the same time, York shifted to remote learning and shorter school days. Garcia couldn't take advantage of the extra time to study; he needed money.

He returned to the overnight shift.

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Inside the Lives of Immigrant Teens Working Dangerous Night Shifts in Suburban Factories

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It's a little before 6 a.m. and still dark when Garcia gets home from work this October morning. The apartment where he lives with his aunt and uncle is silent. They've already left for their own jobs. After nine hours hosing down machinery at a food processing plant, Garcia is tired and hungry.

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“Brave doesn't mean you're not scared. It means you go on even though you're scared.” (pg. 331). This quote stuck out to me because of how true it is and how it can change a person's perspective of what the word brave truly means. This quote can be applied to many minorities who face discrimination everyday even though there's a chance it might negatively impact them physically, emotionally, and mentally. Even if they're scared, they still go on with their day.

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Repressed Brits, evil Mexicans, Arab villains: why are Hollywood's animated movies full of racist stereotypes?

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Repressed Brits, evil Mexicans, Arab villains: why are Hollywood's animated movies full of racist stereotypes?

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This article that we discussed about in our course talks about the stereotypes that each ethnicity faces. For Arabs, they frequently find themselves with some negative associations in mainstream Hollywood films. Arabs have been depicted both in West culture and film in Hollywood's history in numerous racial stereotypes. They're depicted as barbarian, oil sheikhs, and terrorists most prominently. Arabs in most types of Western culture, frequently in stereotypical positions, are depicted in a negative way.  In his novel, Reel Bad Arabs, Jack Shaheen writes about this and analyzes over one thousand films of Arab characters produced between 1896 and 2000. Just 12 illustrations were positive in these films, 53 were neutral and 935 were negative. Almost all the media depict Arabic and Arab Americans as Muslims, but most Arab Americans identify themselves as Christians and according to PBS, about 12 percent of the world's Muslims are Muslims.The media taught us that every Arab is Muslim even though there are various ethnicities in the Arab World.

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hese are supposed to be progressive times for movies and people of colour. Django Unchained was a hit action movie about slavery. A black director just won the best picture Oscar for another one ( Steve McQueen for 12 Years A Slave), and a Mexican won best director ( Alfonso Cuarón for Gravity). Hollywood is finally starting to reflect the ethnic makeup and sensitivities of its national and global audiences.

But all those dodgy racial politics that have been swept out of live-action movies seem to have quietly found a home. Modern animation is the success story of our movie era. It pushes at the technical frontiers of film-making and gives us visual spectacles previously unimaginable, along with substantial, accessible themes. So why are its racial politics stuck in the 1970s? Maybe parents have been too busy dozing at the multiplex, or doing the washing-up while their kids are anaesthetised in front of the TV. Maybe we've dropped our guards because talking animals are the lingua franca of innocuous cuteness, but we seem to have got to a point where these movies are teaching children the finer points of racial prejudice before they've even learned to read.

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Take this week's new release, Rio 2. In terms of diversity, it's about as good as current animation gets - though that isn't saying much. It is set in an authentic foreign country (director Carlos Saldanha is Brazilian), there's a conservation-minded theme and a mixed cast of white, Latin American and African-American voice actors. In case you missed the first Rio, the story hinges around the last surviving pair of talking blue macaws: Blu (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg as a sort of avian Woody Allen) and Jewel (Anne Hathaway), an independent-minded Brazilian bird. This time round, they discover that there is a lost flock of blue macaws in the Amazon rainforest and fly there to meet them.

Rio 2 is a colourful, tuneful carnival of multiculturalism, but certain prejudices prevail. For a start, the lead characters are voiced by white Americans. Justifiable in the case of Blu, who was raised in Minnesota (having been "Americanised", he can't sing or dance like the other Brazilian birds), but more mystifying in the case of Hathaway's Jewel, supposedly born and raised in Rio. As for the couple's long-lost jungle relatives, Rio 2 uses non-white voice actors (just as James Cameron did for his blue-skinned indigenous people in Avatar). Jewel's father is Cuban-born Andy Garcia, her aunt is Puerto Rico-born Rita Moreno, her former beau is mixed-race Hawaiian Bruno Mars (there's singing involved, you see). The singing, dancing, comic-relief sidekicks are primarily voiced by African-American actors: Jamie Foxx and will.i.am as a pair of hip-hop fluent "urban" birds, and Tracy Morgan as a slobbering, dim-witted bulldog. And in time-honoured fashion, the cockatoo arch-villain of the piece ( Jemaine Clement) has a British accent. Added to which, the humans we see in Rio 2 range in skin tone from pinkish to, at best, taupe, maybe coffee. Brazil's darker-skinned, African-descended contingent seem to be largely absent - this, despite a flypast of the city, sanitised favelas and all.

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Is it a coincidence that Rio 2's tacit racial hierarchy pretty much corresponds to one so often promulgated throughout movie history? It doesn't matter if they're animated jungle animals, sea creatures, fairies, cars, whatever ... this same racial pyramid persists through the animated realm: white-voiced characters at the top (British just below mainstream American); other ethnicities below; darkest-skinned at the bottom. Even if the differences aren't spelt out visually, they usually are in terms of accent, which means the spectre of stereotyping is never far away. Disney's long history of racism has been well documented: the lazy, African American crows and illiterate, dark-skinned labourers in Dumbo; Sebastian, the workshy Jamaican crab in The Little Mermaid; the darker-skinned "evil" Arabs in Aladdin; the hyenas in The Lion King; the Native Americans in Peter Pan; the list goes on. Not forgetting the notorious Song of The South, Disney's 1946 musical depicting happy black slaves singing with cartoon birds on a southern plantation. The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) called for a boycott of Song Of The South and issued a statement condemning the film's "dangerously glorified picture of slavery". It would be another half-century before Disney atoned with a black heroine, in 2009's The Princess And The Frog.

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But Uncle Walt's torch of bigotry still burns bright in the 21st century. Staying with good old African-American stereotypes, recent cinema has brought us such egregious examples as Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, in which comic-relief robots Skids and Mudflap talk about popping caps in asses, bump fists, bicker among themselves and, it turns out, can't actually read. One of them has a gold tooth. Even Jar Jar Binks would roll his eyes at that. Eddie Murphy's Donkey in the Shrek movies isn't exactly miles away from this jive-talking sidekick either. Or Chris Rock's wise-ass zebra and Jada Pinkett Smith's big-bootied hippo in the Madagascar franchise. In Madagascar 2, in a similar move to Rio 2, Rock's zebra meets other zebras for the first time, but unlike the individuated, caucasian-voiced lions they all look exactly the same.

Or how about Hispanic stereotypes? The world was furnished with one in last year's third-highest grossing movie worldwide: Despicable Me 2. Perhaps it was the hilarious Minions, but we all overlooked the fact that Despicable Me 2's villain is a grossly caricatured Mexican. Eduardo (voiced by Peruvian-American Benjamin Bratt) is fat, big-nosed, sentimental, and wears an open-necked shirt exposing a large medallion over his hairy-chest. His baddie persona is El Macho, a Mexican wrestler. And just to clear up any remaining ambiguity, Eduardo runs a Mexican restaurant. If someone was assigned to take a bunch of hackneyed tropes about Hispanic people and animate them, this is what you'd get. It's by no means the only Hispanic stereotyping out there. Try the Oscar-winning Happy Feet, for example, where the street-dancing, pleasure-seeking underclass penguins speak in Spanish accents and are voiced by ... Robin Williams.

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Dr Charles Da Costa, a British lecturer who has written on racial stereotyping in animation, frames these portrayals within the context of what he calls "PEPs": Problem Contexts, Entertainment Contexts and Performance Contexts. "Within PEPs, black people and other genotypes have to be associated with vexing circumstances," he says. "Strive to pacify, make others happy and be exceptional or extraordinary - far from 'normal'. Villainy, exoticism, jocularity and athleticism are common indicators of this malaise. Images of ethnicity do not need to be conveyed within the narrow scope of PEPs."

The slow, expensive, labour-intensive process of producing animation could also be a factor, suggests Da Costa. "Decisions on character and performance must be made quickly in order for design and production processes to commence and advance. So regarding representations of ethnicity and epidermal type, family animation often finds itself in a bind. It consciously and subconsciously weighs financial against moral obligations, then unconsciously opts for the 'safe' representational defaults - stereotypes."

There's possibly another imperative here. In today's global cinema market, movies such as Rio and Despicable Me 2 can expect to make twice as much overseas as they do in the US. So there's the desire to be slightly more outward-looking, but not to the extent that domestic white audiences are turned off. In the same way African-Americans once cheered Mammy in Gone With The Wind - not because she wasn't a racist portrayal but because she was an actual black person with a speaking role in a Hollywood movie - so non-white audiences are assumed to be grateful for whatever representation they get.

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Put all this together and what you often get is an apparently globalised story peddling lowest-common-denominator racial shorthand. It could look like Disney's Planes - a spinoff of its equally shallow Cars movies - which follows a round-the-world race between anthropomorphised vehicles. The premise makes for kid-friendly, merchandise-shifting action, while the international scope affords the chance to visit key movie territories (India, China, Germany) and stuff the cast with international cliches. There are vehicles wearing straw hats toiling the paddy fields in Asia, for example. There's an emotionally repressed British plane (voiced by John Cleese), a seductive but mendacious Indian plane (Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra), a dainty pink French-Canadian female plane, and no surprises for guessing that the Mexican plane is rotund, sentimental, romantic and wears a wrestler's mask. They could have called it Around The World In 80 Cliches. As Variety reviewer Justin Chang put it: "Planes is so overrun with broad cultural stereotypes that it should come with free ethnic-sensitivity training for especially impressionable kids."

Like many animated stories, Planes hinges on the premise of an exceptional individual who dreams of transcending their allotted role in life - in this case, an ambitious crop duster (voiced by Dane Cook). The other planes ultimately help him by donating parts. It's the same story in Turbo. Ryan Reynolds' snail also harbours racing ambitions, and is aided by street-talking comic-relief sidekicks voiced by Samuel L Jackson, Snoop Dogg and Michelle Rodriguez, among others. And let's not forget Turbo's human accomplices: some Mexicans who run a taco stand and The Hangover's Ken Jeong as a Vietnamese woman. Social mobility is only available to white characters, the message seems to be, and it's the job of non-whites to facilitate it.

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As if it couldn't get worse, recent animations have hit upon a new way to circumvent this problem: get rid of people of colour altogether! Which brings us to Disney's latest smash-hit Oscar-winnig animation, Frozen. Frozen was applauded for its nuanced, active female characters (let's gloss over the Barbie-like approach to body image for now) in contrast to passive princesses past. On a diversity level, though, the film's vision of wintry unmitigated whiteness extended not only to the landscape but the movie's characters, too. "Aha!" its defenders could say. "This is a story set in 17th-century northern Europe, why should there be any people of colour?" To which the reply could be: "This is a work of fantasy concocted in ethnically diverse, 21st-century America, in which you have chosen not to cast or represent a single non-caucasian person."

For campaigners such as the NAACP, Frozen represents a step backwards, says Robin Harrison, of its Hollywood Bureau. "It was just a few short years ago that we were finally introduced to the first African-American Disney Princess, Tiana, portrayed by Anika Noni Rose," she says. "We had hoped this was a turning point for the industry. Unfortunately, what has now become the most successfully animated feature of all time, Frozen, is probably the least diverse. There is still much work to be done in all areas of film and television animation created for children and adults."

Look around and you'll find other animated stories set in these ethnically cleansed "historical" realms, such as Robert Zemeckis's weird, motion-capture rendition of Beowulf. Or the very likable How To Train Your Dragon, whose Viking-ish setting also justified an Anglo-Saxon voice cast (at least the movie's theme was insular people confronting their prejudices). Or prehistoric adventure The Croods - a white-voiced family in a time before race even existed. Then there was Pixar's Brave, set in an ancient Scotland chock-full of fair, flame-haired maidens and fiery ginger warriors. No need to stray beyond the stereotypes, no need for people of colour.

Talking of Pixar - and we need to - its record on ethnic representation during their vaunted "golden age" demands another look. Let's see, there was Samuel L Jackson's Frozone in The Incredibles, Jordan Nagai's Vietnamese kid in Up, Delroy Lindo voiced a dog in Up, and, er, that's right: the pioneers of 21st-century animation have taken us through worlds populated by toys, monsters, insects, sea creatures, superheroes, rats, French people and robots, and barely found a role for a non-white actor in any of them. The closest Pixar have come to representing ethnic diversity, in fact, was the spaceship towards the end of Wall-E: a post-apocalyptic world of obese, cosseted, unthinking, conformist consumers who were too busy looking at screens and slurping from cups to actually notice their dystopian reality. At last, a rainbow nation Pixar can get behind.

Clearly, none of this has been a barrier to success for the animation sector. Nor should it take away from these movies' many strengths. And it would be absurd to argue for tokenism, or quotas, or strict guidelines on what ethnicity of actor is entitled to play which species of animal. But surely it doesn't have to be like this? Plenty of movies manage to get it right, or at least less wrong. The biggest movie this year so far, The Lego Movie, felt no need to caricature along simplistic race lines. Last year's Epic included Beyoncé as a brown-skinned fairy queen (and, oddly, rapper Pitbull as a ghetto-pimp toad). Lilo and Stitch was a Disney high point. And even a movie such as Madagascar 3, which threw together a United Nations of funny-accented talking creatures, got away with it by making them more nuanced and eccentric than standard caricatures (and being hilarious).

Perhaps it's a matter for the film classification boards. They could put a warning on the certificate: "Contains mild fantasy violence, very mild language, a white-supremacist subtext, and grotesquely derogatory portrayals of ethnic minorities." Or: "Probably won't make your child into a racist, but sure as hell ain't gonna help." It's not as if children have demanded any of this, but they are the ones soaking it all in. It goes without saying that racism is learned, and how diversity is portrayed on screen is a big part of that learning process. One day, our children could look back on these movies in the same way that we see Song of the South, and wonder why their parents did so little about an iniquity that was staring them in the face.

This article was amended on 9 April 2014. The original incorrectly stated that Planes was a Disney/Pixar film. It is a Disney film, but not a Pixar production.

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Repressed Brits, evil Mexicans, Arab villains: why are Hollywood's animated movies full of racist stereotypes?

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hese are supposed to be progressive times for movies and people of colour. Django Unchained was a hit action movie about slavery. A black director just won the best picture Oscar for another one ( Steve McQueen for 12 Years A Slave), and a Mexican won best director ( Alfonso Cuarón for Gravity).

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On February 15, 2015, 21 Christian men have been executed in a beach in Libya by ISIS. Behind the guys, who kneeled in a line of orange jumpsuits, were their masked executors in all black. Following the publication of a video of the killing by the Islamic State, images of the genocide of Coptic Christians worldwide reverberated. Egyptian Christians have suffered persecution for many years, Archbishop Angaelos, serving in London, claims, even though this single act of violence has attracted the attention of millions worldwide. The artwork below shows the martyrs being held by their persecutors and with Jesus leading the the path. It symbolizes the suffering Jesus faced when he was on his way to get crucified, the same way these martyrs were on their way to get killed for their faith.

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Freedom - Beyonce, featuring Kendrick Lamar

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Freedom - Beyonce, featuring Kendrick Lamar

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Even though this song doesn't directly relate to the discrimination that Christian Arabs face, the context of the song relates to the situation. The key objective of the title is to act as Beyoncé's "freedom" call, as its title suggests. Her desire is evidently for the expected public to deliberately search the protagonist state while at the same time trusting in itself, as Kendrick Lamar alludes to.

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Beyonce - Freedom feat. Kendrick Lamar (Audio)

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Although there weren't any short performances of being a Christian Arab in the Middle East, I found a short film describing how Christians are treated in these Middle Eastern countries. What shocked me the most was when the person who preferred not to be recorded was beaten up as a kid in front of his school for not converting out of Christianity. When his dad came to report the situation to the school, they denied his claim and even said if those people even killed him, they wouldn't be guilty of the situation. These countries don't take us seriously enough and coming from their perspective, it would feel like we're a burden to them.

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Where Is The Love? – The Black Eyed Peas

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Where Is The Love? – The Black Eyed Peas

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This track, which was released in the early 2000s, was written in reaction to the hatred and terror that followed the 9/11 attacks. This song, urges people to love one another and questions why there is so much hatred in the world, is still important more than a decade later, serving as a timely reminder that love can be extended to people of all races and faiths. "But if you only have love for your own race Then you only leave space to discriminate”.

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The Black Eyed Peas - Where Is The Love? (Official Music Video)

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The exhibition "Sacred Goods" confronted the impacts of modern consumerism on faith and protested hundreds of Arab Christians outside the Haifa Art Museum in Israel on Finnish artist Jani Leinonen's McJesus (2015) sculpture of the crucified Ronald McDonald. The image is below is very disturbing and shouldn't have been created in the first place, let alone displaying it in an art exhibition for others to come look at it. I feel like since a lot of people practice Christianity, it's okay for others to make a joke out of it since they feel Christians won't be offended.

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The word "discrimination" is significant because it demonstrates how anyone can be subjected to it. It gives everybody a victim by using the human race as the entity that is being discriminated against. It elicits feelings by placing the reader in the shoes of someone they have ever discriminated against. Repetition-Rexroth also uses terms like "they," "their," and "they" to convey how the humankind is inferior to the race in which the speaker is affiliated.

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"I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background" (Rankine). This statement is used by the writer to shape Serena as a black athlete in a white sport. Even though this book doesn't quite relate to my personal identity, it shares the same message. Minorities all around the world feel like they're being alienated from their own community. They feel like they've done something wrong to deserve this when in reality, it's just we're raised and brought up in this world.

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Throughout the poem, Chrystos shifts her mind on this "racism workshop," presenting the voices of most of the speakers as poetic in quality, but then experiencing frustration and feeling torture. Given that she feels guilty for making this discussion of injustice is so poetic and still wondering why they were even discussing it. Racism isn't embedded within us, it's taught by society. When we're taught to discriminate against a certain group just because of their skin color the religion they're practicing, we tend to stick with that thought throughout our lives. Although racism is taught, we can "unlearn" that thought, we can educate others to learn more about other groups and become open-minded towards others rather than being closed-minded and sticking to the same thought that the media and society keep teaching us.

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& blank faces of outrageous innocence

knowing I'd have to walk over years of media

declaring we're vanished or savage or pitiful or noble

My toes twitched when I saw so few brown faces

but really when one eats racism every time one goes out one's door

the appeal of talking about it is minuscule

I sat with my back to the wall facing the door

after I changed the chairs to a circle

This doesn't really protect me

but I con myself into believing it does

One of the first speakers piped up

I'm only here because my friend is Black & wanted

300 too many racism workshops

Let it be entered into the Book of Stars

that I did not kill her or shoot a scathing reply from the hip

I let it pass because I could tell she was very interested in taking

up all the space with herself & would do it if I said a word

They all said something that I could turn into a poem

but I got tired & went to sleep behind my interested eyes

I've learned that the most important part of these tortures

is for them to speak about racism at all

Even showing up is heresy

because as we all know racism is some vague thing that really doesn't

exist or is only the skinheads on a bad day or isn't really a crucial problem

not as important certainly as queers being able to marry

or get insurance for each other

When they turned to me as resident expert on the subject

which quite honestly I can't for the life of me understand

things I didn't know I knew

of the deadly poison that racism is for all of us

Maybe some of them were touched

but my bitch voice jumps in to say

I heard back that someone thought I was brilliant

Does that mean that I speak well

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Into the Racism Workshop by Chrystos | Poetry Foundation

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Another important song with messages relevant for today is One Love. This song is about how there is only one love and reminds us to treat each other with compassion and kindness, singing:"‘One love, one heart"
This everlasting music is a plea for world harmony and reconciliation. It's a calm but strong human rights album, with tension simmering under the surface as Bob Marley expresses his outrage at racism and inequality in the lyrics.

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The Door (Admissions Office) by David Hammons

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The Door (Admissions Office) by David Hammons

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David Hammons' dissertation is self-explanatory. It has a performative quality to it, as Hammons literally approaches the audience by imprinting a body print onto an admissions office door, as he does in a lot of his work. The rejection of entry in this work is a clear sign of isolation and separation. This art piece stuck out to me because it can relate to the situation Christian Arabs face. They become isolated as a minority group rather than coming together as one.