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teacher's comments: Tennessee Immigrants
and Criminal Justice
This section collects the various Teacher's Comments that
have appeared as pop-up options in the Project Story and Student
Reflections segments of this exhibit.
Survey
Troubles
Racial Profiling
B. Comments on Student Reflections
Trouble Getting Through
On Working with Grassroots Organizations
On Lack of Structure and Changing Expectations
On Talking Directly with Immigrants
Survey Troubles
As the students make clear in their description, the heart of
this project was a series of open-ended, semi-structured interviews.
In addition to that qualitative work, however, Latinos
Unidos decided to make one venture into survey research.
Its plan was to develop a simple instrument that would fit on
a single page, one that could be distributed at several local
meetings the group hoped to convene over the course of the spring.
The LU advisory committee thought such a survey might
provide the organization with at least some rough idea about how
Latino immigrants in our area saw the criminal justice system
in general, and what they thought about some of the issues we
were discovering. It might also help Latinos Unidos to
identify people who had significant problems they wanted to discuss
or longer narratives they would be willing to share in an interview.
As things turned out, the survey ran into many difficulties.
By the time LU decided for sure to pursue it, the scheduled
community meetings were fast approaching, so the final text was
produced and translated into Spanish under serious time pressure.
E-mail drafts were circulated in a process of drafting
by committee, but without the luxury of time for full orderly
discussion or deliberation. One of the students was especially
frustrated because the student had some experience with survey
methods that might have improved the outcome if there had been
time for a better process.
At any rate, a pilot survey was produced, and Latinos Unidos
distributed it at a community meeting. The experiment revealed
many problems, especially given that people were asked to fill
out the paper-and-pencil form on their own. When one of the law
students and a member of the advisory committee struggled to summarize
the results, they found that many of the completed forms had non-responsive
or inconsistent answers. We were forced to conclude that
many of the questions had not been understood.
Some problems no doubt came from translation glitches.
I doubt that many people were confused by a few embarrassing but
intelligible English-induced typos (for instance, our use of "imigrante"
for the correct "inmigrante," or "systema" for "sistema").
But more people were probably left wondering by our literal translation
of "criminal justice system" into "sistema justicia criminal."
(We later ascertained that "sistema penal" would have been
the correct translation.)
Beyond these concrete translation errors, however, we think many
other questions lurked. Some members of the community have limited
experience with written instruments, even in Spanish. And
in any event, structuring questions so that a successful route
through them can be reliably self-guided, is quite an art.
Ultimately, we concluded that for Latinos Unidos to get meaningful
results from this kind of document, the surveys would need to
be filled out in a one-on-one or small-group setting where those
giving the survey could detect misunderstandings and clear them
up on the spot.
Of course, as teachers know, sometimes big methodological failures
can be the best learning opportunities of all. This was
not a big failure in any event, since it was only a
small part of the overall project and did perfectly fine service
as the pilot experiment it was planned to be. Further,
we gleaned worthwhile anecdotal and qualitative answers from the
open-ended question we had made sure to put at the end of the
survey. But at least in terms of my own learning, I found
the "failed" parts of the experiment were quite helpful.
They allowed me to see in very concrete terms how a planned communication
using the strange genre of a survey form can go at least temporarily
awry.
Racial Profiling
Reports of racial and ethnic profiling that the law student team
received from Latina and Latino immigrants in some communities
were a cause of great concern to them and to me. It was
disconcerting for our group, made up entirely of native-born white
people, to hear that in communities near our homes, some people
said they were having to get by in an atmosphere that we associated
with life under a police state.
It was bad enough to hear people say that because of their race
and language, they were being stopped and questioned disproportionately
by the authorities-and often treated disrespectfully or worse
in the process. But we also knew that for those who were
undocumented, such encounters held the threat of more drastic
consequences as well and therefore inspired even greater apprehension
and anxiety than would otherwise have been the case.
Our concern was partly for the welfare and human rights of immigrants.
(Although we began and ended the project with differences
among us on some questions of immigration policy, all of
us were clear that undocumented status does not and should not
strip an international migrant in today's world of all rights
and legal protections.) Beyond our concern for the well-being
and human rights of immigrants, however, we were also worried
about our own. We were hearing from immigrants about an
alarming situation. They were basically reporting to us
about a world in which a racially marked and legally defined segment
of the workforce was regularly subjected to intrusive and arbitrary
police action of a kind that would not be tolerated if it were
imposed on others. And this world was our own nation and
neighborhood-right next door and down the street. It was
hard for us to see how such a situation could fail to corrode
the basic civil liberties and egalitarian values of society as
a whole.
At the same time, we could see that attacking these practices,
whether legally or politically, would be difficult. Few
immigrants are willing to come forward with complaints about police
treatment. Without people willing to tell their stories,
how might one proceed?
(One important group of people who do voice objections to police
encounters is criminal defendants seeking to exclude evidence
found in the course of investigation and arrest. After
all, since these defendants are already involved in a criminal
prosecution, they have little to lose and much to gain by opening
up these questions. Such objections have done little to
increase the rights of those subject to police stops, however.
The law that continues to emerge from a long line of complaints
and test cases about the proper scope of police investigations
and police stops is complex and increasingly unfavorable toward
the criminally accused.)
Meanwhile, the atmosphere after 9/11 led to a situation in which
profiling by national origin and religion was more widely practiced
and more widely tolerated by public opinion. Before 9/11,
a heartening consensus seemed to be building on two points, both
among the public at large and within some important parts of the
law enforcement community: first, that racial profiling (as in
"driving while black") was commonly practiced in America, and
second, that this was not a good thing and should be stopped.
In my own view, it is important for Americans in the post-9/11
climate to defend and bolster that pre-9/11 consensus that had
formerly begun to emerge around the problem of racial profiling.
It is also important that we find ways to educate the public
about ways that immigration and security issues are feeding into
new forms of racism.
In any event, racial profiling is likely to be an issue that
immigrants' rights groups in Tennessee target for special attention
in the future, because it has such an immediate and palpable impact
on the Latina/Latino community. Further, African Americans
have labored under these practices for years, and have often led
fights to expose and address them. The issue therefore
provides a possible opening for principled coalition-building
across racial and ethnic lines.
Trouble getting through
The students involved with this project were amazingly diligent
and flexible about seeking out interviews and figuring out ways
to get information from people whose perspectives we wanted to
hear. I was thoroughly impressed with the range of interviews
they were able to secure for Latinos Unidos, and happy with the
broad perspective that range afforded us. Nevertheless,
as is plain from the students' comments in the Project Story,
these kinds of interviews can be a headache to set up and carry
out.
Law students generally are not well-positioned to play telephone
tag, given that they are seldom in a daytime office of their own,
rarely have someone who takes their messages, and live schedules
that are chopped up into tiny disparate chunks devoted to carrying
out highly focused tasks assigned on short time-lines by others.
None of this is particularly conducive to structuring one's
own semester-long project, or to pursuing a telephone contact
who is not independently motivated to be reached on the matter
at hand. Cell phones help, admittedly, but they do not
solve these problems.
The immediate example of telephone tag is one instance of a larger
phenomenon. Many law students seem to have a hard time
connecting effectively beyond the four walls of the law school.
In some cases, the cause has to do with skills.
Many law students come to us with very little experience at what
one of my colleagues calls "shaking the tree." So these
days I try to be conscious of helping students appreciate the
need for and the contours of such skills.
Skills, however, are not the only concern. I believe there
are other reasons for the obstacles that many law students seem
to encounter when given assignments that require them to venture
out into new territory, make cold calls to possible resource people,
or do other kinds of networking and outreach. The insular
nature of legal education is partly to blame. Students
enter our doors and are at once submerged in a totalizing kind
of experience that makes communication with the outside world
problematic in a whole range of ways, even for those who used
to be relatively well-connected and highly skilled.
I have no magic advice to offer. I think it helps
if the teacher talks explicitly about this complex of issues.
I try to let students know that I appreciate the
obstacles they are encountering, and I try to warn them early
that special effort, preparatory research, creative initiative
and dogged persistence are likely to be required.
Increasingly, I point to the process itself as a learning opportunity.
I observe that pursuit of sources takes energy and craft,
and that the skills involved can be as important for lawyers as
for journalists and social scientists. Even in semesters
when I fear I have been harping too early and too often on themes
like these, I am likely to get feedback from students at the end
of the semester that they wish I had talked sooner and more clearly
about them. It comes as a surprise to an amazing number
of people how seldom one can just leave a message and wait.
On working with grassroots organizations
One of my strongest beliefs about the struggle for justice is
that it must be infused with the voices, energies, and leadership
capacity of people who are most directly and negatively affected
by current arrangements. Otherwise, even best efforts will
ultimately prove ineffective at producing meaningful change.
If we want to see a society that is more democratic, egalitarian,
and participatory, then the efforts we exert to get there must
reflect and embody a commitment to those goals from the start.
Accordingly, when searching out potential field placements,
I am always on the lookout for grassroots groups that are working
to organize among the marginalized and excluded because I want
to offer my students the opportunity to work in these kinds of
settings.
These are not easy times for such organizations. Funds
are tight. Media entities are difficult or impossible to
access. Many people are unhappy about how things are but
have little or no hope that they can make a difference, and in
any case have little time for civic involvement once they have
taken care of the demands of job and family. In this atmosphere,
grassroots organizations often find it difficult to attract members
into active leadership and the demands of working together with
others for a common cause.
Some law students with histories of working in these kinds of
efforts are fully aware of these realities. I have learned,
however, that many law students lack such histories. Some
students, for instance, although genuinely interested in a particular
issue and excited about working with a local group to address
it, have always assumed that it would be easy to turn out large
numbers of people for a meeting as long as the issue is going
to affect those people, and one has taken reasonable steps to
advertise the event.
I remember vividly the day several years ago when a student confided
in me that she had expected several hundred people to
attend a training for lay advocates interested in welfare reform.
She reasoned that the issue was important and that the
organization had aired radio spots; placed stacks of leaflets
in local stores; posted fliers on church bulletin boards, in laundromats,
and on key telephone poles in the neighborhood; and that it had
made announcements at several meetings in the weeks leading up
to the training. It seemed like a no-brainer to her that
the hall would be packed. When "only" 15 people showed
up, she was dumfounded.
Since then I try to do a better job of giving law students a
concrete idea of the current climate for organizing and for civic
engagement, and to explain the serious obstacles that many groups
face in attempting to build membership-based organizations from
the bottom up. I share with my students how important I believe
it is for groups of this kind to have lawyers who understand what
they are up against and who are prepared to join in the work of
overcoming the obstacles that confront their efforts.
On lack of structure and changing
expectations
I wish I could say that the problem the students point out here
lies entirely in reality itself -- that people who want to work
with grassroots groups and disadvantaged populations just need
to learn to adjust to the fluid nature of work in such communities,
to roll with the punches, to stay flexible, etc., etc.
All of that wisdom would be true, of course. And I could
also add accurately enough that law school schedules and law school
culture do little to encourage the kind of adaptability and responsiveness
that law students need to bring to these tasks.
But after many years of teaching, and many years of getting feedback
from students, I can't avoid the conclusion that my own personality
plays a role in how these things play out in my courses.
If left to my own devices, I would quite likely redesign my course
requirements several times during most semesters, always discovering
how my original concept could be improved, as I saw how things
unfolded. Perhaps two percent of the population would find
this kind of liberating. The rest would probably be ready
to pull every hair out of their heads -- or mine.
So I try hard to clarify course requirements, not only for the
purpose of giving my students the information they surely need
and deserve, but also to box myself in. For instance,
I spell out time expectations in much greater detail than I once
did. And I schedule planning sessions with each fieldwork
team early in the semester, where the announced goal is to delineate
the final product or event that will culminate the semester, and
then start planning backward from that endpoint. Nevertheless,
I know from experience that even what I perceive to be my firmest
efforts at definitive structure will feel dangerously amorphous
to more than a few students. And in any event I am likely
to start trying to wiggle out of any constraint as soon as I create
it, because some good reason to do so will always suggest itself.
The Latinos Unidos project entailed all these themes.
My memory is that we sat down at the very beginning of the semester
and began creating an outline of what a final report to the organization
would look like. (I was so pleased! Such structure!
Such clarity of expectation!) But the students are
right; it took several meetings with our advisory committee before
we reached provisional consensus. And several other twists
and turns emerged before the semester was done. I probably
could have done more to resist those changes that were initiated
by our community partner, since I played something of an intermediary
role between the students and Latinos Unidos. And it is
more than likely that some of the changes were actually initiated
by me or at least received my encouragement.
I imagine this is a tension that will dog me as long as I continue
teaching. My basic strategy at this point is twofold.
First, I put a lot of warnings on my course materials and convey
them personally when students stop by to ask me about my classes.
Second, I try to tame my own problematic tendencies through
various kinds of limits and commitments that are stated publicly
and at an early point in the course. A book called Understanding
by Design, listed in the Resources section of the Teacher's
Overview, has been a challenge and a help in this regard,
because it suggests ways to wed efforts at better clarity and
structure with the process of defining and achieving substantive
learning goals.
On talking directly
with immigrants
This is not the first time students have told me that their most
significant learning experience during a fieldwork course came
from an encounter like this. When I say "encounter
like this," I do not yet have a precise definition of what I think
is going on, but I have come to think of these junctions as "other
side moments." The instances I am thinking of all seemed to involve
(1) moments that were abnormal, outside the learner's accustomed
physical and metaphorical territory; (2) moments that inverted
-- or at least flattened -- some predominant presumed social hierarchy;
and (3) moments that centrally featured person-to-person communication
across a salient social divide.
In 1997 I co-taught a course with Appalachian scholar and activist
Helen Lewis about welfare reform. This was at the time
when Clinton's welfare reform program was lumbering into place,
and people all over the country were trying to monitor and influence
how states would translate the mandate to move single mothers
from welfare to work given that the jobs available to women without
a college degree are insufficient to support even a modest family
budget in the real world. The main "other side moment"
in that course took place at a weekend workshop at the Highlander
Center, with which we opened the semester. We invited
several women from the region, white and African American, who
had themselves been "on the system" of welfare at some point in
the past and who had since gone on to become community developers
and local leaders. We asked them to plan an educational
program for our students for the Saturday sessions at the heart
of the workshop, a program that would prepare them to study and
understand welfare reform in our area. The women did so,
and dazzled us all. Their methodology included sharing
their own stories, providing a theoretical framework about the
welfare state in Appalachia, warning people about emotions they
were likely to feel in the course of our investigations, conducting
interactive exercises in interviewing and debriefing from interviews,
and providing open discussion.
Virtually every student in the workshop later mentioned those
Saturday sessions as eye-opening, re-orienting, inspiring, unsettling,
and tremendously important to the work they were able to carry
out over the remainder of the semester. In terms of the
criteria for "other-side moments" outlined above, please note,
(1) The context was highly abnormal. (We spent an entire
weekend together in a rural setting totally away from the law
school. We lived in a dormitory-style setting rather than
buzzing in and back out of the standard 50 or 75-minute module.
We sat in Highlander's circle of rocking chairs rather
than in law school seats. We sang and did theater games
together in the evening, we mixed with a crazy assortment of Harvard
law students and Boston welfare rights scholars and activists
whom Professor Lucie White had brought to join our workshop, and
included in the circle were a number of past and present welfare
recipients. None of these features was standard law school fare.)
(2) The Saturday session was distinctly inverted .
(The law students were not being invited to consider how
they could best prepare to save or reform welfare recipients in
need of their service, generosity and expertise. They were
being put at the feet of past recipients and current low-income
activists, to learn from them about the welfare system and efforts
to change it.) (3) For most of the law students from UT,
having a chance to interact with these workshop leaders was definitely
communication across a social divide . (Few of
the UT students had ever been on welfare as a child or adult,
or had ever before spoken with a welfare recipient about such
matters or about her view of the world. Later in the semester,
each student was required to find some way of getting an interview
with a person who was actually on welfare. This task turned
out to be quite a challenge, and led to several intense conversations
about why that particular assignment should so often have felt
so hard to carry out.)
Past experiences with these kinds of other-side moments led me
to tell the students in the project with Latinos Unidos that I
wanted them to try to get interviews directly with immigrants
at the very start of the semester, so that we could at least attempt
to better ground our investigations in an immigrant-centered perspective.
However, finding a way to connect with undocumented
immigrants for free and open conversation poses special challenges
even beyond the substantial ones that faced Helens and my students
who sought out interviews with welfare recipients back in 1997.
Language barriers, cultural differences, and the
wariness that can accompany undocumented status are not small
impediments.
One student involved in the Latinos Unidos project quite rightly
reminded me that I should not take such difficulties lightly:
The project coordinator must have a realistic goal in mind
and a sense of the community and people that his/her students
will be dealing with. Expecting immediate interviews
with immigrants, even when recommended by community leaders,
is not a realistic expectation, given cultural and societal
norms. Also, when working with people from many countries
with many different concepts of time, family, and privacy, students
need to be adequately briefed by their coordinator on what to
expect (namely, the unexpected).
I take this advice to heart, and I am currently thinking about
ways I can give students more concrete helpful advice when I send
them out on their own quest for other-side moments.
On the other hand, I have also received feedback from students
who have been lucky enough to find that great divides are -- sometimes
-- less daunting to cross than one might imagine. Below,
for instance, is an e-mail I received from a student in my Discrimination
class (not a course that ordinarily involves fieldwork).
We had recently done a unit on Latina/Latino issues in the Discrimination
class, and I had invited any students who were interested to come
to the Catholic cathedral to help welcome a busload of people
traveling through Tennessee on the Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride.
This student was one who took me up on the invitation.
Here is her e-mail:
I would love to discuss my thoughts about the freedom ride
event with you at some time. I think that for me it has
created more awareness of immigrant issues. In fact,
this afternoon while I was at work, I took a break to go get
lunch. When I was at the deli, there was a Hispanic man
sitting by himself. I smiled at him, and he smiled back,
and then he asked if I was Hispanic. (I have had other
people make this same assumption because of the way I look.)
I told him no, but I sat and talked to him while I was
waiting for my food.
He works construction in the Knoxville area and has lived here
for 8 years. He has two sons in Vera Cruz, Mexico, one
5 and one 2 ½ (and has never seen this younger one).
He became very emotional as we talked, and I could tell
he really missed his family. After we finished talking,
he told me that it really helped him to talk about his family
and various issues about being in this country with other people.
I really felt good that I stopped and talked with him.
Had it not been for my participation in both this class
and the freedom ride event, I don't think I would have done
so.
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