Strong Families is a home for the 4 out of 5 people living in the US who do not live behind the picket fence—whose lives fall outside outdated notions of family, with a mom at home and a dad at work. While that life has never been the reality for most of our families, too many of the policies that affect us are based on this fantasy. From a lack of affordable childcare and afterschool programs, to immigration policy and marriage equality, the way we make policy and allocate resources needs to catch up to the way we live.
We see the trend of families defining themselves beyond the picket fence—across generation, race, gender, immigration status, and sexuality—as a powerful and promising development for the US, and we want to help policy makers catch up.
Our vision is that every family have the rights, recognition and resources it needs to thrive. We are engaging hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals in our work to get there.
1,950 mile-long open wound
dividing a pueblo, a culture,
running down the length of my body,
staking fence rods in my flesh,
splits me splits me
me raja me raja
This is my home
This thin edge of
barbwire.
-La Frontera
Same land, different politics. The US - Mexican border, seen from space.
The US-Mexico border from space!
If they can’t come up with something that gives…opportunity for immigrants to come from Africa or Haiti yet they can give them to Ireland, I can’t vote for it…
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX)
A growing number of members in the Congressional Black Caucus say they will not vote for an immigration reform bill that does not include diversity visas. The Senate’s bipartisan “gang of 8″ eliminated the 55,000 slot diversity visa program in their immigration legislation. There are 43 voting members of the CBC in the House.
(via thesmithian)
When Hindu women in the United States wear the bindi, people love to make fun of them. I have heard a countless number of jokes about the bindi. If you watch “Family Guy,” and even if you don’t, you’ve probably seen the scene where Peter Griffin asks his neighbor whether he uses the “red button” on his wife’s forehead as a remote control to shut her up. When people in the Western countries, such as America, see an actual Indian woman wearing the bindi, she is coined as a fob, a backwards and old-fashioned person who does not know how to embrace the American culture.
THE OTHER SIDE OF IMMIGRATION
directed by: Ray Germano
executive producers: Conor Oberst, Team Love Records
for more information visit their website: www.theothersideofimmigration.com
(you can watch this documentary on Netflix or purchase it on www.othersideofimmigration.com website)
30 Days: Immigration
(Source: vimeo.com)
The food movement has been slow to recognise the fact that worker rights and working conditions should be a key part of any discussion about the ethics of food. Reforms to the food system need to incorporate workers and their welfare, not just better farming practices, more humane treatment of animals, and other measures focusing on food as an end product. Food is also a process, and the people involved in that process have a right to fair treatment, something they don’t have currently. The continued marginalisation of farmworkers and the focus on other issues in the food movement speaks poorly of the movement overall, and reveals some telling attitudes about labour, race, and entitlement.
The finger arrived in the mail next to the gas bill and the grocery store coupons, bubble-wrapped in a sealed envelope with no return address. By then, Luis had already been gone for two months of his thirty- four years. His severed finger—they didn’t even put it on ice; they just let the blood dry, the skin purple, the smell swell—was proof that he was alive, that he existed, that the rest of his body was somewhere, still warm, still beating. The finger meant they wanted more money.
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists first pushed the news media to stop referring to immigrants without lawful immigration status as “illegal” in 2006, arguing that the term criminalizes people rather than their actions. Almost half of likely Latino voters find the term “illegal immigrant” offensive, according to a Fox News Latino poll published last year.
The NAHJ was later joined by the Applied Research Center and its publication ColorLines, which pressured the media to “Drop the I-Word,” calling it a “racially charged slur used to dehumanize and discriminate against immigrants and people of color regardless of migratory status.”
But pressure to drop the term “illegal immigrant” ramped up last year, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and immigrant rights activist Jose Antonio Vargas andABC/Univision News openly challenged the New York Times and the Associated Pressto change their stylebooks. At the time, the AP said it would restrict its use of the term illegal immigrant without dropping it entirely, while the New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan said she continued to view it as the appropriate word choice.
“It is clear and accurate; it gets its job done in two words that are easily understood,” Sullivan wrote in October. “The same cannot be said of the most frequently suggested alternatives – ‘unauthorized,’ ‘immigrants without legal status,’ ‘undocumented.’”
Vargas welcomed AP’s decision to strike the term entirely.
“This was inevitable. This is not about being politically correct,” Vargas said in an interview with Poynter.
Got this in my email today:
Dear friends,
We are elders of the Maasai from Tanzania, one of Africa’s oldest tribes. The government has just announced that it plans to kick thousands of our families off our lands so that wealthy tourists can use them to shoot lions and leopards.The evictions are to begin immediately.
Last year, when word first leaked about this plan, almost one million Avaaz members rallied to our aid. Your attention and the storm it created forced the government to deny the plan, and set them back months. But the President has waited for international attention to die down, and now he’s revived his plan to take our land. We need your help again, urgently.President Kikwete may not care about us, but he has shown he’ll respond to global media and public pressure — to all of you! We may only have hours. Please stand with us to protect our land, our people and our world’s most majestic animals, and tell everyone before it is too late. This is our last hope:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/maasai_fb_dm_3/?bNDofcb&v=23793
Our people have lived off the land in Tanzania and Kenya for centuries. Our communities respect our fellow animals and protect and preserve the delicate ecosystem. But the government has for years sought to profit by giving rich princes and kings from the Middle East access to our land to kill. In 2009, when they tried to clear our land to make way for these hunting sprees, we resisted, and hundreds of us were arrested and beaten. Last year, rich princes shot at birds in trees from helicopters. This killing goes against everything in our culture.Now the government has announced it will clear a huge swath of our land to make way for what it claims will be a wildlife corridor, but many suspect it’s just a ruse to give a foreign hunting corporation and the rich tourists it caters to easier access to shoot at majestic animals. The government claims this new arrangement is some sort of accommodation, but its effect on our people’s way of life will be disastrous. There are thousands of us who could have our lives uprooted, losing our homes, the land on which our animals graze, or both.
President Kikwete knows this deal would be controversial with Tanzania’s tourists - a critical source of national income - and does not want a big PR disaster. If we can urgently generate even more global outrage than we did before, and get the media writing about it, we know it can make him think twice. Stand with us now to call on Kikwete to stop the sell off:This land grab could spell the end for the Maasai in this part of Tanzania and many of our community have said they would rather die than be forced from their homes. On behalf of our people and the animals who graze in these lands, please stand with us to change the mind of our President.
With hope and determination,
— The Maasai community of Ngorongoro DistrictSources:
- The Endorois people (also in Kenya) were removed from their sacred land in the 1970s under similar circumstances & for similar motives (the establishment of parks for colonial tourists.
PLEASE REBLOG THIS AND SPREAD THE WORD GUYS. Traditional cultures in East Africa have been getting completely trampled on by the government and barely anyone seems to know or care. And this loss of land isn’t just destroying their livelihood but their entire culture. These really are issues that could actually get some backing if people just freakin’ knew about them, so PLEASE SIGNAL BOOST!
