Introducing Presente

I'm passing this along at the request of Nezua from The Unapologetic Mexican. He's working on a new online initiative -- Presente-- standing up for immigration justice for Latino communities.

Of course, this is a huge issue in Georgia. There are all kinds of anti-immigrant whacko politicians around here (merely one example). They hate all kinds of "furriners" but Latino immigrants do bear the brunt of it. It's frustrating try to figure out ways how to fight against them.

I look forward to signing up and hearing more about Presente.

Presente.org seeks to strengthen the political voice of Latino communities. Using the Internet, we give our members ongoing opportunities for action on the issues they care about. Our goal is to unite Latinos of all generations, nationalities, and regions, together with allies from other communities. It all starts with the simple pledge below. Join us. ¡Adelante!

The Pledge
Be Counted!

"We, the undersigned, call for an end to immigration policies that divide families, deny educational access, and exploit workers. We agree to stand up and be counted on the issues that matter to Latino communities. With a unified voice we can't be ignored. Together we will become a powerful online community that promotes justice and holds our leaders accountable. We will be Presente."

I'll also mention another Nezua-collaboration site, The Sanctuary, for coverage of the recent disgusting attempts to use swine flu to attack Mexicans.

Close to Home

It's on the national news. Eleven-year-old Jaheem Herrera killed himself because of severe emotional abuse. This story hits close to home because I happen to know a boy who was in the same school and grade and class as Jaheem Herrera. I'm never going to look at him the same way.

I know from my own experience how isolated Jaheem must have felt. If just one single kid in the class had stood up for him, he probably would have been saved.

I never wanted to kill myself, but I was pretty desperate. For years, I used to lie awake at night hoping that aliens would abduct me in my sleep so I wouldn't have to go to school the next morning. The abuse I went through was primarily racial, but it had other elements as well... I wasn't good at gender-conforming, and got called a lesbian a fair number of times.

It sounds like what Jaheem went through was primarily about gender-conforming but had racial/ethnic elements as well. I know the school in question is not diverse (almost entirely African-American), and although I don't know how Jaheem's family identified, it's obvious he didn't fit in.

From My bullied son's last day on Earth
Bermudez says bullies at school pushed Jaheem over the edge. He complained about being called gay, ugly and "the virgin" because he was from the Virgin Islands, she said.

"He used to say Mom they keep telling me this ... this gay word, this gay, gay, gay. I'm tired of hearing it, they're telling me the same thing over and over," she told CNN, as she wiped away tears from her face.

But while she says her son complained about the bullying, she had no idea how bad it had gotten.

"He told me, but he just got to the point where he didn't want me to get involved anymore because nothing was done," she said.

Bermudez said she complained to the school about bullying seven or eight times, but it wasn't enough to save him.

"It [apparently] just got worse and worse and worse until Thursday," she said. "Just to walk up to that room and see your baby hanging there. My daughter saw this, my baby saw this, my kids are traumatized."

She said Jaheem was a shy boy just trying to get a good education and make friends.

"He was a nice little boy," Bermudez said through her tears. "He loved to dance. He loved to have fun. He loved to make friends. And all he made [at school] were enemies."

Bermudez said she thinks her son felt like nobody wanted to help him, that nobody stood up and stopped the bullies.

"Maybe he said 'You know what -- I'm tired of telling my mom, she's been trying so hard, but nobody wants to help me,' " says Bermudez.

I feel so sorry for him. But at least he was happy once upon a time, before he came here and started the period of misery that ended his life.

I don't know what to do, but I have a few ideas. I'm going to continue writing about my own experiences with abuse in school and giving advice on the topic where I can. I'm not calling it bullying anymore, because "bully" is too light of a word. I can't be an advocate in any more public sense, however. I can be very articulate in person but not on this subject. I can write about it, but it's almost impossible for me to talk about it.

I'm going to talk to Sunny about Jaheem Herrera, and show him his photo, and explain that it happened because other kids called him "gay" and were mean to him. I'll try to find some way of telling him that I don't want Sunny to ever abuse anyone in that way, and more importantly, to stand up for kids who are being abused, because if you don't, you could end up being guilty for the rest of your life. And finally, that if he was ever a victim, I'd pull him out of school and do whatever it takes to protect him.

This story is running together in my head with another story I heard second-hand from my mother, about a discussion she had with a man who had been one of the "Lost Boys" of the Sudan. Our family has connections to refugee families, including some Sudanese, though I don't want to go into any more identifying detail on the connections.

Anyway, the man said he was willing to share his story because he considered himself an advocate. His story involved some very simple math. His group tried to go Ethiopia, but the Ethiopians expelled them back into Sudan. So on their next attempt, they walked 500 miles from Khartoum into Kenya. There were 800 of them when they started walking. There were 300 when they arrived. Wild animals, starvation, disease and soldiers had killed the rest. He was seven years old.

I couldn't even imagine. The same age as my son...

I actually tried reading "What is the What", the story of former "Lost Boy" Valentino Achak Deng, but I gave up less than 100 pages in because it was making me so unbearably sad. It's hard to say what was worse, going through all the nightmare of the civil war, or being so poorly treated in America, just when he thought he was safe.

And then many of the children of the refugees end up in poorly managed public schools where they suffer tremendous abuse for not "fitting in".

In this country that's supposed to be so rich and civilized, we can't even keep children safe in schools.

Testing

Sunny has the CRCT this week. That's the big important statewide test for Georgia.

I think there's a general overemphasis on testing in public education, especially in the context of the horribly failed policy of No Child Left Behind. However, I'm really pushing for Sunny to do well on these tests. We're promising him some major swag if he gets good scores. I told him that he usually only gets toys on his birthday and Christmas, but he has an opportunity to earn one with the CRCT.

If he had a different personality, I wouldn't be pushing him as much, or at all. But he's got a lot of self-confidence and competitive spirit. He loves competing. He will do almost anything (eat vegetables, put away clothes) if we can frame it as a race.

Right now, his competitiveness is harming him at school as much as it's helping him. He always wants to be the first to finish so he can yell "DONE!" I'm trying to get him to shift his focus and asking him to compete against the test and compete against himself. I've explained that the best achievement is beating yourself... establishing your own goal and then surpassing it, like the "personal best" of a marathon runner. It's a fairly subtle point so I doubt he understands it yet, but if I keep repeating it, it should eventually sink in.

Since he gets so easily frustrated with us over homework, we're not personally doing any test prep. That would be a recipe for blow-ups. Instead, we've increased his tutoring sessions to three times a week.

I know he can do really well if he just slows down and focuses. His tutor is reinforcing that point as well. According to his 504 plan, he'll have special accommodations at testing time, away from the other kids, and I think that's going to help him focus.

I had an interesting talk with my other cousin last week -- the one who used to have severe ADHD. He was in town visiting my older cousin. He got very emotional when he talked about his own education and gave me some warnings based on his own experience. He felt his mother simply gave up on him when it came to school. My aunt is loving, but disgustingly passive, and I could see her accepting without a complaint anything that any authority figure told her needed to be done. He was put into a self-contained classroom. "They just warehoused me with the retards for six years." I would never use that word myself, but that's how he phrased it. He was finally mainstreamed in junior high, but by that point he'd barely learned to read. He's obviously very bitter about it. He wanted me to make sure that I wouldn't do that to Sunny, and I reassured him I wouldn't.

Although I think our schools overemphasize testing, and that approach only serves a minority (as in cognitive skills minority)... I have to admit, I've benefited from it. I'm a great test-taker. There's something about the application of brute intellectual force, problem by problem, that fits well with my psychology. On the other hand, my mother is brilliant with puzzles, as was my grandfather, and I never inherited that. I have no patience for them.

My mother once bought me a Rubik's cube, but she was the one that learned to solve it, not me. For one birthday, she got me a $20-dollar bill embedded in a clear plastic sliding puzzle, and I spent about half a minute trying to solve it before I got so mad I took a hammer and went to the garage and smashed it to bits so I could get the money. And I was great at math up to the algebra level, and then I became hopeless at it, probably because the nature of the problems began to resemble puzzles. I also failed to inherit my father's genius for languages. But I always did great at any kind of standardized test.

Test-taking is a skill you can learn. It doesn't really reflect what you know, although a good base of general knowledge does help. It's a fairly arbitrary skill, but it's an incredibly important one in today's society.

I always approached tests in a hostile manner. I'd glare at the test a while, psyche myself up, silently threaten it, then take out my pencil and begin beating it into submission.

I don't know if Sunny is going to develop good test-taking skills or not. Still, I'm going to keep my expectations high. If he doesn't succeed in this area, I'm sure he will succeed in other areas.

Anyway, according to this article, what I do as a parent doesn't matter anyway. Ha! Seriously, I do agree with the article's premise that parents drastically underestimate the importance of the peer group. I've complained about this tendency innumerable times when it comes to transracial adoption, but it's worth noting again... it's a general parenting issue too.

Joy Luck Hub Submission

This sounds like an interesting project, so I'm submitting my own entry. 299 words...

When people found out I was "half-Japanese" they would always ask me about my Japanese mother. In their minds, my story was already written. My father was a white military man, my mother a Japanese girl he had married and taken away back to the States when his post was finished. In the beginning I was simply confused by how wrong this story was. Later on, it made me angry that people kept imposing it on me.

When they met, my mother was a radical hippie and my father was a hippie radical. He made his own sandals out of used car tires, and was once jailed for punching a policeman in a student riot in Tokyo. He loved retelling the anecdote: "Pig hit me with stick. So I punch pig. Then pig take me to jail!" We lived briefly in England during the 70s, and the Sex Pistols caught his imagination, for obvious reasons. He used to sing me to sleep with "God save the queen, iza fascist regime," which he intoned in a bizarre but somewhat credible imitation of a cockney accent.

My parents raised me with bits and pieces of the traditions they were raised with. They also raised me not accept authority at face value, and to question any claims to an ultimate truth.

So I didn't ever experience a "Joy Luck" clash between a sense of Asian tradition and American modernity. I was always on the outside looking in, no matter where I lived. This wasn't easy. In fact, it was incredibly painful. I had no hometown, no home culture, nowhere to stand my feet... and nothing to rebel against in order to define myself. But I still like my own story much better than the stories other people try to force onto me.

Dope Boys

We had Sunny in a spring break camp for last week. My schedule, Guy's schedule and my mother's schedule were all very busy, so we thought it would be better than having Sunny stay home and mostly complain about being bored during the day.

The organization that holds the camp is pretty close to us and has a good reputation. Sunny had fun and got lots of time playing outdoors... but we're both feeling very ambivalent about the camp and are not going to do it again next year.

This is a difficult subject to talk about, but we don't want Sunny associating too much with some of the children that went there.

The last day, when Guy came to pick him up, he overheard an older boy talking about how some other boy wanted to be a dope boy just like he was. Being a drug dealer (or more likely, pretending to be a drug dealer) is not something elementary-aged kids should be doing!

Also, Sunny told me a girl called him a bitch. He said he went to tell an adult, and I complimented him for that decision. If I was minding kids that age, I would want to know if they started using such bad language so I could go break it up.

A lot of the kids came from a very low-income part of the neighborhood and could pay a subsidized rate for the spring break camp.

I've had both friendly discussions and heated arguments with Guy over the subject of class. And class is the looming issue here... of course race is involved, but it's not the most important aspect. Sunny's friends at school are almost all black, his neighborhood block friends are all black, his summer camp is majority black... but they're all also middle-class. They're from families that have enough resources so that they can be really involved with their kids' lives, they can demand high standards in education, and they're able to minimize contact with horrible negative stuff like crack dealing.

I know that the poorer parents living in the dilapidated apartment blocks one mile and another world up the street from us want exactly the same things for their kids... they just don't have the resources to do it.

Guy admits he has a stronger reaction against what he sees as low-class behavior. He grew up in a small-town Georgia setting where his family wasn't at the bottom, but they were a lot closer to the bottom than the top. The bad things that happen to lower-class small-town white kids aren't that much different than the bad things that happen to lower-class urban black kids, except that the drug of choice is meth instead of crack.

People who grow up in protected settings (and this means me, because I also had a solid middle-class existence for a crucial stretch of my life) have a certain freedom from class-related fears. But if you grew up a few rungs from the bottom, and saw some kids fall off that ladder, that's a lesson that's going to stay with you the rest of your life.... and it might cause you to make much harsher judgments than otherwise.

I see a related kind of issue with my stepfather, who did grow up at the bottom of the ladder. Often, he won't want to take advantage of certain disability or insurance claims because he's got this weird idea that that's what lazy white trash does, game the system, and he's not like that anymore, and then my mother has to browbeat him into actually claiming the money he's entitled to.

I think Guy is often too paranoid... when he sees a group of dangerous kids that might shoot us, I see a group of rowdy teenagers, like we used to be a while back.

However, in this case, I agree 100% with Guy. I don't want Sunny to be exposed to any group of kids that thinks being a dope boy is a worthy real-life ambition. It's not like we're keeping him in an ivory tower. We live on the edge of a huge, constantly changing city, and he's going to come in contact with this stuff. I just want to minimize it as much as possible. I don't want him to look down on people from lower-class families, or be afraid of them, but I do want him to have a healthy sense of caution and know how to stay out of trouble. Atlanta is a very dangerous city, especially for a young black man. It's a difficult balancing act... I guess you'll have to check back in 12 years to see how it all works out!

From "Dope Boys" by T.I.

A crack a ki' a crumb do it fifty mo' times
The quarter go for 5 and the half go for 9
Still in the trapp wit them break down dimes
Hit me on the hipper anytime, I don't mind
Why y'all n****s bitching on and whining I'm a grind
Shack it in the winter and the summer I'm a shine (getting mine)
It's plenty of money to be made from Candler Road to Bankhead
It's plenty of room to get paid for those that ain't scared
I got the hard for the j's and dro' for the dank heads
The dope game still strong like pimping ain't dead

Very short update on BB

This is going to be very short because there's not much of anything happening.

We're chugging through the paperwork that will keep us up-to-date as a licensed pre-adoptive home, just in case things with BB start moving faster. The part I hate the most is the drug test. The lab closest to me is a dimly lit hole-in-the-wall with a filthy bathroom, and the whole place smells very suspicious.

The foster mom told me that BB has just started learning how to crawl this week. It's nice to hear that, but it also makes me sad that I'm missing all these milestones.

I may try calling BB's dad again and checking in with him. The last time I talked to him was about three weeks ago. Since then, like I'd told him, I mailed him some pictures of BB from the March visit.

The last time we talked, I told him that he should call the worker and set up visits with BB, but the foster mom said she hasn't heard anything at all from him (he has her number, also).

This weekend I had a great talk with our neighbor about Sunny and his issue. They're a really interesting family. The mom works with teenagers in foster care in a group home. Their son is middle-school aged and autistic (Asperger's syndrome). He's not very physically active and doesn't have a lot of friends his own age, but he gets along fine with younger kids and older kids and adults. The neighbors love it when Sunny keeps knocking on their door and bugging their son to come out and play with him.

I had a frank talk with her about the raging, because I know her son is easily upset by strong displays of emotion. She was really sympathetic and offered to help as much as she could. She's not worried about Sunny, since he's always had great behavior around their house and with her son. Her son has never been aggressive, but she has a lot of experience with aggressive acting out at her job, and with raising an adult stepson who has autism plus bipolar.

Return of the Raging

Sunny has been doing really well for the last several weeks. In fact, last week, his behavior marks in school have been some of the best he's ever received.

He's had a few tantrums where we had to hustle him into the back seat of the car, but they've blown over in a few minutes.

Yesterday night, he seemed really hyper and out of control around bedtime. It took a long time to get him to bed.

Today, he had two rages. The first one was in the early afternoon and took 10-15 minutes. I was driving him to dance class, and he was really angry because I had enforced the "no Legos" rule and told him he couldn't bring his Legos in the car. We only got a few blocks from home before I had to pull over. I don't know if I handled it well, perhaps I could have de-escalated better somehow, but I wasn't thinking on my toes... when I pulled over and just sat there silently for a few seconds thinking about what to do next, the silence wound him up to the point that he started throwing and screaming, and I had to get into the back seat to hold him down for a while.

I ended up driving back to the house because I didn't think he was in a good enough mood for dance class, and we also would have been late because of the altercation anyway. I thought he was doing better. We've established that any attempt at hitting means no TV or DVD for the rest of the day, but I let him play outside for a while instead.

Then, as we were all getting ready to go to my mother's house for dinner, he had another and even stronger raging episode. It started because I asked him to put away the Uno cards he'd been playing with.

I had to hold him down for a long time. This takes so much out of me, emotionally and physically. He would cry and scream that I was hurting him, holding him too tight... I kept telling him "I love you, but I won't let you hurt other people or hurt yourself" and "you're a good boy, I know you don't want to do this, you can calm yourself down" and "I will let you go once you take responsibility for your behavior." If I loosened my hold on his wrists for even a second he would slip free, try to kick out the car windows, try to bite me or punch me in the face. Then when I held on to his wrists harder again, it would be back to the "you're hurting me."

The worst were the few times he fooled me by saying he was sorry, all he wanted was a hug, then when I relaxed my hold, he would try and attack me or scream insults at me.

I knew he was finally coming out of it when he patted me on the arm softly while he was sobbing. I could finally let him go and hug him.

Guy was watching outside the car during this time. I would rather hold Sunny down myself. I can do it showing less negative emotion than Guy, and I'm also much softer, so there's less chance of Sunny actually getting banged or bruised.

When it was all over Sunny was very remorseful. We had a frank talk. Guy asked Sunny what he would do if someone tried to hit him like he tried to hit us. Sunny said he would hold them down or hit them back... we said we would never hit him back, and hitting is wrong.

I told him we all had to do work to control his anger, and that the neurofeedback was part of trying to teach him how to control his anger. I also told him that I would keep holding him down when he started hitting, but in a few years, I wouldn't be able to do that anymore, because he'd be way too strong. And when that happened, and he hurt anyone, we'd have to call the police instead. He asked if they would take him to jail. I said no, little boys wouldn't go to jail, but he would go to the hospital, and it wouldn't be fun at all. Which is why we had to work hard right now to make sure he could control his anger and calm himself down before he started hitting.

He's already very, very strong.

We've already talked about the worst case. Guy was driving me crazy with scenarios when the raging first started... he was literally keeping me up at night worrying about it. My attitude is that we'll worry about it when it actually happens. We have a few years to turn things around before we get to that tipping point. Recently, Guy has arrived at the more pragmatic stage, and we're both maintaining there. In fact he reminded me again, today, "we have several years."

I'm not angry about it, just mildly rueful, but I've realized that there must have been a tacit conspiracy to downplay Sunny's behavior. Sunny's worker talked about tantrums, but said he was not violent towards other people... that the worst he did was kicking his feet. When you hear that, you imagine "kicking feet at floor" not "kicking feet at glass windows and other people's heads".

Anyway, his foster mom confirmed he had some of the same behavior when he was living with them... in fact, she wondered how long it would take for it to show up with us. The answer was about eight months.

We'll just have to wait and see. There've been only been four sessions of neurofeedback so far. Later, we can also see if going off meds will help, or perhaps even increasing them... if that's what he really, really needs.

I also don't want to get complacent about holding Sunny down. I don't want this to become our new normal. There has to be something else we can do to stop the raging before it erupts. I can see it coming, but so far I just feel powerless to stop it.

His adoption finalization date is within a month. It's hard to know what it means to him. We've talked about it, I've even told him it's OK to feel weird or sad about it, he just doesn't seem to attach any importance to it that I can tell. We're already mom and dad.

This is so depressing. I just want to get back to worrying about more typical things, like the CRCT testing and his soccer team and his next round of clothes and so on.

We went to my mother's house and had dinner and Sunny behaved pretty well, although Guy noticed that his positive and negative reactions seemed to be more intense than usual. And then he went to sleep easily, unlike last night. Maybe he's worked it out of his system for a while.