pew research center

As the commercialism of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday begins to dissipate, Giving Tuesday on Nov. 28 reminds us that there are plenty of good causes that need our help.

A Pew Research Center analysis finds a decrease in the share of U.S. Latinos who speak Spanish at home.  

 A day or so after Sonia Sotomayor’s biography, “My Beloved World” was released, I got a call from a New York Times reporter asking me how well the book would sell. She jumped in to the first question: “Why don’t Latinos read?”

 In London last week, I met a Nigerian man who succinctly expressed the reaction of much of the world to America these days. “Your country has gone crazy,” he said, with a mixture of outrage and amusement. “I’m from Africa. I know crazy, but I didn’t ever think I would see this in America!”

 News headlines are screaming about how fearful Latinos are due to moves the Trump administration is making toward stepping up deportations. These are valid concerns for many Hispanics, a majority of whom have acquaintances or family members who could be at risk.

A recent survey on the public’s view of national institutions elicited headlines that suggested a tale of backwardness and ignorance. One example: “Majority of Republicans Think Higher Education is Bad for America.” 

The reality is more complex.

Pew Research Center Survey confirms that more and more people are supporting marital union among members of the LGBT community.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, President Trump. 

I offer my gratitude because after years of being the last of my immigrant family members to undertake the naturalization process, my mother just took the oath to become a U.S. citizen.

 My brother-in-law, a volunteer constable in a small Arkansas town, once said that the answer to the tensions and violence between motorists of color and the police was for law enforcement to treat those they are sworn to protect with respect and politeness.

When “The Bell Curve” by Charles A. Murray and Richard Herrnstein was published in 1994, I was a junior in college and didn’t know anything about the book except that it had my white literature professors in an uproar. A few of them inveighed against the book’s premise -- the very notion of intelligence as something people possess in varying degrees -- and then the whole controversy eventually died out.

For the past decade, the narrative of an upcoming Hispanic demographic tsunami has been alternately energizing and scaring people into believing that America will eventually become Latinized beyond recognition. 

Don’t worry, it isn’t going to happen.

At the outset of their new book, “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes note that adviser David Plouffe prioritized three goals for Clinton to win: “It was important to have the right culture and mission, to manage Bill Clinton, and to effectively target Latino voters.”

We know how well that turned out.