gomez books

Gomez thinks we should send this link to the site Stuff White People Like, because there's nothing white people in academia like more than studying supposed "Hispanic" issues that don't make any kind of sense unless you actually believe Hispanics are different from other human beings. Which Gomez doesn't.

In this case, a press release tells Gomez that "Carol Scheffner Hammer, associate professor of communication sciences and disorders in Penn State's College of Health and Human Development, has received a $500,000 Head Start--University Partnership Grant to study the efficacy of a bilingual school-readiness program called Madres Educando a Sus Niños/Mothers Educating Their Children."

Gomez wonders why white people always draw weird conclusions about Hispanics, like that we can't get skin cancer, or, now, that we aren't reading to our kids because we don't have culturally appropriate books. Gomez thinks that if white people at Penn State were to extrapolate census data by poverty rather than "race" they would find that poor folks aren't reading to their kids because they're poor, not because the bunny in Guess How Much I Love You isn't wearing a sombrero like the Taco Bell dog.

Poverty is well-documented to lead to all sorts of problems, including low literacy. It is simplistic and insulting to assume that Hispanic moms (what about the dads, Penn?) would not read, say, Goodnight Moon or Hungry Hungry Caterpiller because those books aren't about rolling tortillas with abuelita. In the ghetto. The only people Gomez knows who want to read tortilla ghetto children's books are non-poor white people who hope to expose their children to "diversity".

Gomez thinks the $500,000 grant would be better spent studying why Hispanic moms are still paid less than any other women in the nation, for the same work. Maybe then Penn State could peg the blame for low literacy among many Hispanic families to the real culprit: Institutionalized racism that leads to low wages, bad neighborhoods and crummy schools.