Kip Austin Hinton

Yes, many of us white people do remain silent. We don't think of ourselves as racist. And we prefer not to think about our government herding 80,000 impoverished men, women and children into internment camps or crowded shanties without soap or medical care. But when it comes down to it, many of us value law and order more than we value human lives. But then it turns out that U.S. laws actually support the rights of the refugees. And it turns out that requesting asylum is completely legal. Still, isn't it better to just blindly obey what our government says? I mean, I don't endorse 100% of the administration's policies, but what am I supposed to do? Fight for change? Protect innocent victims? Even if Border Patrol and ICE are not following the law, surely they have my best interests in mind. Right? It's not like they're violating the constitution to oppress my own (white) family. BP and ICE are government, so just obey their orders! What's so hard about t...

--> September 4, 2015 Hillary Clinton on the refugee crisis in Southern Europe:   “Well the pictures, well the stories, we’ve been watching this terrible assault on the Syrian people now for years, are just heartbreaking. I think the entire world has to come together, it should not be just one or two countries, or not just Europe and the United States. We should do our part, as should the Europeans, but this is a broader, global crisis.   We now have um, more refugees than we’ve had, in many years, I think since the second world war. And as we’ve seen tragically, people are literally dying to escape the conflict in Syria. Uh, I think that the, the larger Middle East, I think Asia, I think everybody should step up and say we have to help these people. And I would hope that, under the aegis of the United Nations led by the Security Council, and certainly by the United States which has been such a generous nation in the past, we would begin to try to...

The Acceleration of Metaphorical Capital, from my published article. Copyright Kip Austin Hinton. "Social science research on communities of color has long been shaped by theories of social and cultural capital. This article is a hermeneutic reading of metaphorical capital frameworks, including community cultural wealth and funds of knowledge. Financial capital, the basis of these frameworks, is premised on unequal exchange. Money only becomes capital when it is not spent, but is instead invested, manipulated, and exploited. Metaphorical capitals have been criticized as imprecise, falsely quantitative, and inequitable. Some research assumes that, rather than reinforcing economic class, metaphorical capital somehow nullifies class or replaces economic capital. Yet marginalized students, by definition, have been excluded by dominant culture. Compared to low socioeconomic status (SES) students of color, high SES students have a wealth of capital, in all forms. Metaphorical ca...

The effect of this will be to undermine the entire concept of public education. Private colleges are not raising tuition as fast, and their students use much more federally funded loan aid than UC students. State institutions will stagger. For poor students, access is reduced, while for middle class students, private schools may become the norm (non-profit and for-profit). For now, this will save some state money, but it will greatly increase the federal burden, greatly inflate total student loan debt, and greatly reduce the investment in California's economy -- which will reduce future tax earnings. This disinvestment is not only inequitable, it is financially stupid. Penny wise pound foolish. _________________________________ By Steve Lopez March 14, 2012 My daughter attends elementary school in Los Angeles Unified, which has just sent out 11,700 layoff notices in the latest round of miserable news. ... I was in the Bay Area recently and caught this headline in the Con...

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with _______ learning , grade advancement with _______ education , a diploma with _______ competence , and fluency with the _______ ability to say something new . His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for _______ health care , social work for the _______ improvement of community life, police protection for _______ safety , military poise for _______ national security , the rat race for _______ productive work . Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends...

"TransCanada numbers count each job on a yearly basis. If the pipeline employs 10,000 people working for two years, that's 20,000 jobs by the company's count. The estimates also include jobs in Canada, where about a third of the $7 billion pipeline would be constructed... Even according to TransCanada, the amount of permanent jobs created would be only in the hundreds." The pipeline plan would have very little impact on the unemployment rate in the states it passes through. The pipeline plan would have no measurable effect on the supply or cost of petroleum in the U.S. Finally, the petroleum will not belong to any of us. It will belong to TransCanada, who will obviously sell it to the highest bidder (for many barrels, experts say that will be China). The greatest problem is the process of gathering and processing oil from oilsands. This is not like the stereotype of a gusher, with oil bursting from the ground. They have to dig down with gigantic machinery, hauling out...