Margaret Cho and Over 100 Fellow Artists Join Campaign for Humane Immigration Reform
Earlier in May, Colorlines Magazine took note of an emerging and growing national campaign for more humane immigration reform led by artists of color and collaborating groups Air Traffic Control, the Culture Group and CultureStrike. The campaign launched signature “Migration is Beautiful” artwork, and got about 110 artists — including comedian Margaret Cho, internationally-acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma and hip-hop journalist Jeff Chang — to sign a letter to President Obama and Congress in support of better immigration policy.
In the statement, artists define this as ending detention and deportation, expediting the visa process, enforcing longstanding policies to support family reunification, ensuring all immigrants have basic worker rights, providing equal immigration rights to LGBTQ individuals and families and providing a clear roadmap to citizenship:
“With federal policy in tatters, states have passed immoral laws of questionable constitutionality that profile, isolate, and criminalize immigrants. A broken and unjust immigration policy is bad for us all — it erodes the social fabric and undermines our shared values of equity and empathy.”
“We believe that this predicament reflects not only a failure of policy but a failure of imagination.”
More at migrationisbeautiful.com.
Geographic Study on Twitter Racism Reveals Regional Derogatory Hotspots
According to Gawker, a study conducted by Humboldt State University students enrolled in an advance cartography class found that hate language is more frequently tweeted on the east side of the U.S., and that specific racial slurs can be traced regionally. According to the Gawker analysis:
“What we learn is that the South is slightly more diverse in its bigotry than the North. The N-word essentially appears anywhere there is population density, with the notable exception of Southern California, but ‘wetback’ seems to be bigger than YOLO in parts of Texas. Georgia likes the nasty word for Koreans that sounds like the stuff that gets stuck in your bathroom tiles. Virginia’s Asian derogatory slur of preference is the one that rhymes with ‘clink.’ The Hispanic pejorative that rhymes with ‘tick’ doesn’t show up much — anyone dumb enough to use it misspells it.”
The Humboldt students created their “Geography of Hate” map as part of the larger “Geography of Hate” project led by their professor Dr. Monica Stevens. The map is only based on 150,000 tweets. However, the sample was chosen based on instances of pre-selected hate language flagged by the students across all geocoded tweets in the U.S. from June 2012 through April 2013.
More about the study and a full map can be found at www.floatingsheep.org/2013/05/hatemap.html.