More Latinos in professions educates U.S.

It seems to have been a common theme expressed by President Barack Obama’s cabinet members who appeared at the National Council of La Raza’s recent convention held in Chicago – we need more Latinos in the professions.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who once was head of the Chicago Public Schools, made remarks about how much better off we’d be if there were more Latinos working as school teachers.

HIS COMMENTS CAME a couple of days after Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said she thinks significant health care reform in this country needs more Latinos working as doctors, nurses and other health care professionals.

The idea both expressed is that the quality of health care and education would improve by having more doctors and teachers, and that the growing Latino population is going to feel more comfortable about receiving medical treatment and going to school if they see “some of our own” in charge.

But I’m inclined to think there’s another benefit, one that both barely touched upon.

I think we need to have more Latinos in positions of significance largely to show the nativist halfwits of our society that it is not absurd to have Latinos in positions of significance.

IN FACT, IT probably will do the world some good to see Latinos around to just become a part of the landscape of society.

For those people who say they resent having to take ethnicity into account because they want to be “blind” to color, this is how it is achieved. Make it so that the idea of Latinos (or any group) as a doctor or a teacher or anything else is such a common occurrence that it doesn’t strike anyone as odd.

That is the day we will achieve a “color blind” society, not when we focus on issues that try to ignore that certain groups of people exist in our society. That’s not being “color blind,” it is being blind to color. (And I’m sure many people have used that line in the past, so I don’t want to hear from anyone claiming plagiarism, as cliches can’t truly be plagiarized).

But it becomes easy for people to be “blind” to color when there isn’t much of it. Duncan says that despite the fact that about one-fifth of all public school students are Latino, only about one-twentieth of their teachers are.

THE HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONS experience a similar trend, where Latinos are more likely than others to be impacted by the whole desire to reform the way in which people are insured because about one in three of every uninsured person is of a Latino ethnic background.

Even for those of us who have adequate health insurance, it is not unheard of for us to know people do not. That is a situation that many in our society need to be better informed about.

In fact, there are times when I feel like my life has become an education experience in and of itself. Letting the masses know that Latinos are not limited to being the hired help is something I often keep in mind.

There have been occasions when the thought that my bad behavior would have consequences by feeding the negative misperceptions held by nitwits was enough to discourage me from doing something improper.

EVEN IN MAINTAINING this weblog and in my work as a writer, I have often seen my greater purpose as trying to explain the thought process (and occasionally the variety of thought) felt by the Latino population in this country.

If it sounds like I view myself as trying to educate Anglos about us every time I sit down to write, there is some of that in my work. To the degree that Duncan and Solis pushed for more Latino professionals, it would seem that they also are touting the idea of increased education of the masses.

It’s just too bad that Republican officials made a point of deliberately ignoring the La Raza convention held in Chicago.

For by doing so, they managed to keep themselves just a little bit ignorant of the growing number of Latinos. That ignorance is ultimately going to be their downfall.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Barack Obama’s cabinet members used the recent National Council of LaRaza convention (http://educationfrontblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/07/arne-duncans-right-we-need-mor.html) held in Chicago to tout the need for Latinos to be involved more (http://nwitimes.com/news/local/illinois/article_18b3e253-43e2-5ea3-a110-92354cf604da.html) in society.

The one-time Party of Lincoln didn’t want to show up at La Raza’s event held in the one-time (http://www.americablog.com/2009/07/la-raza-smacks-gop-leaders-for-blowing.html) president’s home state.