Category: People of Color

Overcoming Employment Barriers: Literacy, Language, and Professional CDL Written Test Requirements

We need to remove the literacy barrier to one of the top areas of employment in the United States.

I’d like to talk about Universal basic income UBI. There are two key problems with UBI. One is pride and the other is personal finance skills. But before I explain all of this, I want to say upfront that people need and want a living wage.

Universal basic income is a political-economic theory that our society would be better if we simply gave every family one or two grand from the government that they could use in any way they want.

The number one problem with UBI is pride. People want to feel proud of earning their wages and UBI robs people of that pride. According to a book called “Drive,” most people want three things: autonomy and mastery and purpose. UBI might give folks autonomy, but not mastery and purpose.

Work is more than just salary. This ability to be proud as well as earn a living wage, and to feel a part of the community is critical. We need everyone contributing to our society. This is the number one reason why universal basic income is a bad idea.

Another reason why universal basic income is a bad idea is because the vast majority of American citizens do not have enough skill with personal finance. I found this to be particularly true growing up in crushing poverty. I noted with interest reading J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy that he described the same dysfunctional relationship with the material world that I grew up with. There was always enough money for cigarettes. Maybe for tattoos or cheap jewelry or bad makeup. But I often wondered whether there would be any food for breakfast when I woke up.

There are reasons that we have problems with personal finance. One of the reasons is because we don’t have enough education so that we can understand things like interest rates and saving and credit ratings. One solution, obviously, is to add personal finance to the curriculum starting in elementary school.

Another problem with personal finance in United States is truth in advertising. A lot of major companies advertise only the monthly payment required for an item purchased on credit. But people need to know the total cost of ownership. This should apply to everything purchased on credit, including vehicles, furniture or appliances, as well as student loans.

Because we lack an understanding of personal finance, giving every family $1,000 or $2000 of universal basic income will not necessarily guarantee each family and their children will have food, clothing and housing. If the money isn’t sufficiently managed, issues like food insecurity and homelessness will persist.

Of course, many of these problems are directly related to mental health and substance abuse, which is a form of debilitating mental health in its own right. There are spirals that go up or down. Unemployed people with or without preexisting mental health problems may become depressed. Depression and its cousin anxiety regardless of whether they are caused by life’s struggles or genetic inherited mental illness can inspired self-medication. Self-medication is often a form of substance abuse if people use illegal drugs. But even legal drugs like alcohol can lead to substance abuse when used as a form of self-medication to treat depression or anxiety.

Of course, people with substance abuse and its comorbid cousin mental illness can struggle in gaining and keeping a job. Difficulties in gaining or keeping a job result in financial problems. Financial problems result in depression or anxiety. And so, the spiral goes on.

The better solution is to break down the barriers to employment to help people earn a living wage. Ideally, a wage that include health benefits so they can get help, if necessary, with substance abuse or other health issues. We need to help people get good quality jobs. We need to help companies who desperately need good employees.

Recently, I asked the governor of the state of Maryland to please make the many CDL tests and study materials available in languages other than English. These tests are required for professional driver jobs. There are two dominate career fields where the bulk of Americans work: retail and professional drivers.

Because people who speak English as a second language or having literacy issues in their own language, they struggle to understand the CDL test materials. This not only robs them of a living wage, but also robs are companies and our schools of having enough professional drivers.

The language included in the CDL test, and the basic driving test uses terms we rarely use in conversations. Words like pedestrian aren’t commonly used anywhere else. We should change the content to more simplified English communication so that everyone can understand it better.

21% of adults in the US read below a 5th-grade level.
75% of Americans who get food stamps struggle with literacy.
43% of adults with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty.

There are many reasons as to why people struggle with literacy. They may have dyslexia or other learning related problems. ADHD. We can make educational materials for professional drivers available in an audio format. Reading shouldn’t be a barrier to entry into a job where they need to look outside the windshield and avoid collisions. Except for passing the test, these professionals are not Supreme Court justices. They don’t read for living.

We can and should help folks with literacy challenges gain effective employment and help the companies and schools who need professional drivers.

We need to remove the literacy barrier to one of the top areas of employment in the United States.

The last barrier I would remove is the test fee. I would waive the test fee professional driving exams for anyone who is not working as well as for anyone who qualifies for food stamps. We need to get people off unemployment and into companies that desperately need professional drivers. And if people can pass the test, the $40 entrance fee is not important.

For companies that give free drivers training to potential employees in exchange for a contract that requires a certain time employed, they should get a tax break.

The photo used with this post is a generative AI image. The person doesn’t exist.

She’s really, really, really black

My 3-year-old daughter will turn 4 in a week. She’s Amerasian. I want to raise a racially aware child because she will likely present as white, and I want her to be aware that a lot of people, including her father who has unusually dark skin by Chinese standards, face a lot of rude behavior from people just because of skin color. As a part of this educational process, we watched the movie Harriet about a month ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqoEs4cG6Uw
From the movie about the life of Harriet Tubman, Ann learned that people with dark brown skin can be referred to as black. The week after watching the movie, she said to me as we started one of her many classes, referring to a colleague’s mom, “She’s black like Harriet.” Yes, she is, I replied. I wanted to discuss more, but all parents were wrangling toddlers out of jackets and into chairs and the teacher was there and the class was starting before I could get more conversation either with my daughter or with the mom she had just compared with the stunning beautiful actress who portrayed Harriet in the movie.
Today, we were leaving her pre school at noon on our way to pony riding class. I encouraged her to wish her favorite teacher, Ms. Jones to have a wonderful evening, and she did with unusual enthusiasm. Ms. Jones responded equally affectionately, rubbing both of her checks and wishing Ann a wonderful evening. As we walked forward, Ann said to me, “She’s really, really, really black.” Yes, Ms. Jones is likely African American, although as with most American citizens, she’s likely to have more than one racial/ethnic category. However, since the first comment, I wanted to get into this conversation more deeply and since we weren’t pressed for time, I stopped right there and said, “I’m also white. And you are Asian.” Ann did a double-take. “What is Asian?” Actually, you are not Asian, I explained. Your dad is Asian. Your grandma is Asian. But you … Ann cut me off. “What is Asian?” she asked. Asian is people like your father from places in Asia like China. “I’m Asian?” She asked. Well, you’re half Asian. You got Asian genes from your dad and white genes from your mom. Then she said I want ice cream.
I’m posting this because I have no idea if I’m doing this right or wrong. Kids don’t come with manuals, and I have no idea to how to approach conversations like this.
We had another encounter completely independent but related to the idea of accepting the people in your neighborhood. We were leaving ice skating class maybe 2 or 3 months ago and a group of women and girls dressed in burkas came into the ice skating rink. Ann stopped and stared at them for a long time, and I was unable to continue the clothing changeover and backpack organization that goes with leaving the rink because she wouldn’t move. She just stared at the group from a distance of a meter or two.
I walked her over to the group and asked Ann to give a salutation in Arabic from the Qu’ran. I forgot which one I selected. But she was unable to pronounce it, so I said that’s okay, you can say Hello.
“You won’t understand this right now, but your mom is Christian. Your grandma is Buddhist. You dad generally talks like a Taoist and your new friends are Muslim. These are people in our neighborhood. Let’s say hello to them.”
By this time, the girls who had been getting shoes off and skates on stopped and looked at us. We greeted them. They said hello. The oldest woman in the group, possibly grandma for one of the girls thanked me. After the hello, Ann didn’t stare any more and women in burka seemed to have achieved a non-alien status.

I’m happy for any inputs on these topics, including criticism, because I’m not sure if I’m doing it right, and I’d like to get it right. All ideas welcome.
Harriet

not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character

My husband and I are struggling with a parenting question. Bin is from China where people are judged based on their party affiliation or connection to political power, which is really one in the same. His upbringing taught him that people are their socioeconomic class, the names of the various educational institutions where they studied. In Bin’s words, “In China, people judge by your parent’s social status and money.”

He brings his references to our painful struggle to decide which school district to move to so our daughter will have a good education. I told him I’d like to move to the school district where my colleague’s son just graduated high school and was selected to all 3 of the service academies in the United States – West Point, the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy. The problem is, my colleague’s son was most probably the only student from that school who was so honored. So it was not the name of the institution on his application that got him accepted. I assume most universities are looking for the content of the character of the students they select.

Of course, content of character is subjective and difficult to judge. But what it is almost certainly not is a list of attributes that actually have nothing to do with the individual knowledge, skills and abilities of that one student. A list like family class, ethnicity, gender, political connection and other elements of the “accident of birth.”

I’m going to go back to my case example, my colleague’s son. But let’s start with my colleague, Norris Agnew, born 40+ years ago in rural Mississippi as an African-American male. And since that time, he served in Okinawa, Japan (2 yrs), South Korea (1 yr); Belgium (2 yrs); mainland Japan (6 yrs); Germany (3 yrs). He spent more time was overseas than stateside. He has traveled the world over in 20+ years with the U.S. Air Force. He has become, in an overused and trite term, cosmopolitan. He’s still American, but he’s also international and transnational. He’s an award winning broadcaster and a former instructor at the DOD school of journalism with a master’s degree from John Hopkins. He’s married to a lovely Korean woman.

This sets the background for his son, who was raised bilingual Korean-English. Undoubtedly at least one of the attributes the military service academies saw in him was his native fluency in the language of one of our greatest adversaries, North Korea, and one of our strongest allies, South Korea. I assume his SAT scores and grades were extraordinary, but so are all the grades and scores of students applying to the Ivy League, and yes, I consider the service academies on par with the Ivy League. He was also an extraordinary athlete and the captain of his school’s football team several years running. He also served in the Civil Air Patrol. Obviously military academies as well as all universities are looking for applicants who display leadership capabilities and potential. So his leadership in sports and in the Civil Air Patrol would have made him an attractive candidate. Additionally, physical fitness is a critical element of the military lifestyle, so his athletic skill undoubtedly contributed to his selection.

All this is to say: What resulted in his selection was not his political connections, tribal affiliation which equates in the vernacular of the United States, ethnicity, or his socioeconomic status. In fact, all of those factors are what the founding fathers of the United States would have dubbed, “the accident of birth.”

This makes me think of the MLK speech, I have a Dream, because Martin Luther King, Jr. tapped into something that is fundamentally American. He tapped into the idea that each of us is more than the sum of our social ties. We all have unique, intrinsic elements of our personalities that contributes to the content of our character.

So, I understand that my job as a parent is to help my daughter embrace and develop the specific knowledge, skills and abilities which come to her most naturally and which build for her an independent sense of herself. Her schools and instructors are important in so much as they support that goal, but the specific name on her transcripts isn’t what makes her special. It’s how she combines her experiences and understanding into a human being that transcends them.



The Guyger case speaks to a general sense of the lack of physical safety for POC

I’ve been reading posts in a Facebook group called Woke and Aware, which discusses “current racial injustices, while sharing information that will SUPPORT the overall well being (mind, body, & spirit) of Black people & Black communities.”

In my sincere desire to learn, understand, and become actively supportive, I combined conversations from Woke and Aware about the Amber Guyger case with comments about racial issues from deeply admired friends and work-teammates. In the case, Guyger, a white off-duty police officer, walked into the wrong apartment and shot its Black resident, Botham Shem Jean, and claimed that she thought he was an intruder in her apartment. Botham was a father, husband, brother, son, a church leader known for his singing voice and an accountant. He was 27 years old. 

I was pondering what happened and people’s reaction to it and suddenly it all clashed together in my head at 2 a.m. after I’d fallen asleep before 9 p.m. The iconic image from the 2014 Ferguson protests lingered in my semi-conscious mind. “Twelve-year-old Devonte Hart was holding a sign offering “free hugs” during a protest in Portland, Oregon against a grand jury’s decision not to charge white officer Darren Wilson for killing unarmed black teen Michael Brown. The image, shot by freelance photographer Johnny Nguyen and published by The Oregonian, showed a man identified as Portland Police Sgt. Bret Barnum hugging Devonte as tears streamed down his face,” according to the British online newspaper the Independent.

Some 18 months before the Guyger case, a colleague told me he never went out in less that business casual. I had prompted this conversation by telling him my husband worried about police encounters after seeing all the press because he’s an Asian person of color with imperfect English. My colleague suggested I give my husband the same advice he raised his son with, that is never to leave home wearing less than business casual clothing to avoid ugly incidents. In the 18 months since that conversation, I think about his words every time I run out to get milk or gas the car in jogging shorts and Tevas. But suddenly, at 2 a.m., I pondered what exactly defined an ugly incident and the Mwende “FreeQuency” Katwiwa TED talk had the answers. Maybe it’s just someone looks at you as a criminal rather than a child, in the case of my colleague’s son. Maybe someone is just rude or suspicious. But maybe … a family member doesn’t come home … ever.

During the discussions of Guyger trial, I had a private conversation with a mother of three sons whose young adult nephew had been living with her family when he was killed a month earlier in a senseless act of violence. I realized during our conversations that her family wasn’t simply mourning the loss of a family member, but I worried and wondered if her children believed they could be next. She told me she had been diagnosed with PTSD. We discussed whether maybe her children might be struggling as well.

I suddenly realized the Guyger case, independent from the facts of the case, is part of a greater social reality for People of Color in which there is a general sense of lack of physical safety. A sense of physical safety is one of the most important elements to human development after food, clothing and shelter. An Army special forces medic once explained to me that people can get PTSD not only from experiencing violence or witnessing it, but from the pervasive fear that violence is a constant threat.

Now we leave the battle fields of Iraq/Afghanistan and come to the U.S.  Here, we view the perception of physical safety in communities of Non-Whites after the string of videos showing random violence, police brutality, unarmed Black people killed by police, added to the senseless death of Botham and the end result is unquestionably a sense the world is not safe in the poetry of Mwende “FreeQuency” Katwiwa, “if you’re Black in America.”

Unlike the battle fields of foreign lands, the fear here isn’t only that sudden, senseless death might come to an individual or someone they know, but here it could be a family member, loved one or in the worst case of fear, a child.

We not only need a justice system that actually treats everyone equally with equal time for equal crime; we not only need police forces that engender trust among all; we need a sense of physical safety for everyone, including and especially People of Color. We need a sense that we are all physically safe in our homes. This is the underlying meta reality of  Guyger shooting Botham. People of Color are not even physically safe in their own homes.

I know we all live in our own skin and we can only know the lived experiences of others by listening. I’m trying to listen, process, learn and understand.