Bill Proposes Teaching Media Literacy at Each Grade Level in California

Antonio Ray Harvey| California Black Media

Three Voices on What It Takes to Heal From Hate...continued

elements of reconciliation and what reconciliation must include in order to honor human rights and make amends for harm done.

noting that the Japanese American and Jewish communities in San Francisco are among the leading supporters of reparations.

who use the internet at least once a day has increased by 5% since 2014-2015. Many of these teens are active on popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Tik Tok, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram. Currently, 97% of teens report using the internet daily, compared with 92% in 2014-15.

“Fix what you broke”

Reparation, not integration, was the first demand of emancipated slaves, according to James Taylor, a professor of politics and African American Studies at the University of San Francisco and a member of the San Francisco African American Reparations Committee.

“They know what it is to be targeted,” Taylor said, adding, “It’s not just Black America, and it’s not asking for a handout. It’s saying ‘fix what you broke’, and it’s actually a global movement.”

Two bills aimed at equipping K-12 students with the ability to discern between accurate and false news -- and teach them media literacy, more broadly –are currently progressing through the California legislature.

Assembly Bill (AB) 873, authored by Assemblymember Marc Berman (D-Menlo Park), and AB 787 by Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel (D-Woodland) would mandate that schools in California offer instruction at every grade level to promote a more informed and civically engaged society.

As of June 7, both AB 873 and AB 787 are pending review on the Senate floor and have been referred to the Education Committee.

“Children today are being inundated by misinformation and disinformation on social media networks and digital platforms,” Berman said in a May statement. “The last few years have been a terrifying wake-up call to the insidious nature of online misinformation, from jeopardizing public health, to threatening the foundation of our democracy, to dangerously rewriting history. Anyone who spends much time on social media could greatly benefit from media literacy training.”

Media literacy, also known as information literacy, develops students’ critical thinking skills around all types of media platforms and instructs students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

AB 873 intends to direct the Instructional Quality Commission (IQC) to incorporate media literacy content into the English language arts/English language development, science, mathematics, and history-social science curriculum frameworks when those frameworks are next revised.

A growing number of states are now requiring schools to educate students in media and information literacy, including

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New Jersey, Illinois, and Delaware.

“This bill is an important step to help ensure young people are equipped with the relevant media and informational literacy skills so critical in the 21st century,” said Nicholas Harvey, K-12 Policy Director for Generation Up.

AB 787 would require, on or before January 1, 2025, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI) Tony Thurmond, in consultation with the State Board of Education, to survey teacher librarians, principals, and technology directors to monitor how they are currently integrating digital citizenship and media literacy education into their curriculum.

AB 787 would also require Thurmond to share the results of the survey with an advisory committee consisting of specified representatives.

A 2022 Pew Research Report found that the number of teens

Pew Research Center reports from 2018 and 2022 also found that 95% of teens have access to smartphones, and 45% are online more frequently. In addition, the reports stated that 56% of Black teens are online, compared to 55% Latinos, and 37% of White teens.

“If these practices are important and salient to our youth, then it is critically relevant for educators to acknowledge this insight as they teach, and for researchers to write about studies in humanizing ways,” according to a January 2023 International Literacy report titled, “Normalizing Black Students/ Youth and their Families' Digital and STEAM Literacies.”

Common Sense Media’s California policy manager Kami Peer, a nonprofit focused on youth and media, told the Napa Valley Register that Berman's and Gabriel’s legislation would change the way student’s use the media to obtain information and handle ever-changing digital tools.

“We believe these two bills, if signed into law, would bring California to the forefront of this important policy area and ensure our students are well-equipped to face the rapidly evolving digital, online landscape,” Peer said.

Three Voices on What It Takes to Heal From Hate

By Peter White

A journalist and organizer, a former political prisoner and a professor of African American studies share their thoughts on how victims and communities heal from hate.

after the Vietnam War.

Do is co-director of Ethnic Media Services and moderated the Friday panel, which brought together experts including Zia to look at whether and how communities can heal from the experience of hate.

“The idea of reparations goes back to Callie House,” says Taylor.

House sued the United States Treasury for $68 million dollars arguing that former slaves were owed a pension from the government. After the Civil War, a federal tax on Southern cotton was used as a retirement fund for Union soldiers. “So she sued over the right to that taxed cotton that was Confederate cotton that black folks picked,” Taylor said. The Supreme Court ruled against the founder of the U.S. reparations movement.

That bit of history has been largely forgotten and today a new reparations movement is spreading. “But it’s just shown that time has not healed the pain that Black folk had in the 1890s. Here we are in the 2020s, still talking about the same issue,” Taylor says.

Civil rights, affirmative action, welfare are piecemeal efforts that haven’t fixed the fundamental gross economic disparity of African Americans, he says,

There are 14 countries and seven states talking about reparations now. New York, Boston, Detroit, Oakland, San Francisco, St. Paul, Detroit, Amherst and Evanston, Illinois have created funds or formed reparation task forces. California became the first state in the country to form a statewide taskforce in 2020. New York and five other states are also considering reparation programs.

James Taylor, Professor of Politics and African American Studies, University of San Francisco, explains some of the misunderstood points of reparations and says they are key to healing the injury done to Black Americans.

“They say time heals all wounds,” said Zia. “But time is not enough. There must be action, there must be learning. We must know the past… and try to change the past so we don’t repeat it in the future.”

Download the Vincent Chin Legacy Guide to learn more about the movement born in the wake of Chin’s murder. Available in English, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Bengali and Korean.

Above: Journalist, author and organizer Helen Zia; Hispanic LA Editor Nestor Fantini; USF Prof. James Taylor, with the SF African American Reparations Advisory Committee.

Across the country acts of hate are on the rise, targeting minority and historically marginalized groups and leaving lasting scars on victims, their families, and their communities. Addressing that trauma is key to healing for individuals and society.

But advocates say documenting the hate impacting diverse communities is a crucial first step.

“We have to be able to show these stories and reach as many communities as possible, because that’s where the healing will begin and it also means empowerment,” says veteran journalist and community organizer Helen Zia, founder of the Vincent Chin Institute, which commemorates the 1982 murder of Chin in Detroit.

Chin, who was Chinese American, was beaten to death by two white unemployed autoworkers who mistook him for being Japanese at a time when Japanese automakers began to make inroads into the US market. Despite numerous witnesses, the judge in the case sentenced the attackers to probation.

Zia, who spent time as an autoworker in the 1980s, says the ruling marked the birth of a “new civil rights movement” among Asian Americans.

“So these two killers actually never spent a single day in jail. But the trauma also triggered a great sense of inequality, of injustice,” Zia said, noting many Asian Americans began to draw connections to the experience of African Americans and other communities of color.

“What made a difference was a community coming together… to tell the world this is something that happens to Asian Americans. This was a terrible thing that happened to Lily Chen’s son, Vincent, and to then begin to do something about it,” said Zia, who spoke during a national press briefing organized by EMS.

Today groups like Stop AAPI Hate have taken up that cause, compiling the alarming spike in hate incidents targeting the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first two years of its existence Stop AAPI Hate documented nearly 11,500 such incidents.

For victims and their families, the trauma inflicted by these attacks often leaves a lasting sense of vulnerability. In Zia’s experience it was when different communities rallied together to denounce the hate that things began to change, and that change is what promotes healing.

Zia says Vincent Chin’s mother, Lily Chin, “became like a Mamie Till for the Asian American community,” comparing the former to the bereaved mother of Emmett Till, who was tortured and lynched by racist whites in Mississippi in 1955.

“And so what happened was that she and the Asian American community were able to channel their grief through action to make a difference, and not just Asian Americans coming together, but reaching out and joining with the Black community – Black, brown, red, white – and coming together,” Zia said.

Helen Zia, author and founder of The Vincent Chin Institute, shares how Vincent Chin’s mother Lily and the Asian American community came together in the aftermath of Vincent’s murder to fight for justice.

“The state can judge, only the individual can forgive”

Still, healing does not mean forgetting.

“There is a huge percentage of people who came to America as a result of war, conflict, and genocide that occurred in their homelands,” says Julian Do, a Vietnamese refugee whose family immigrated to the U.S.

“It’s been well-documented that many immigrants who have been exposed to war and imprisonment are still living with this trauma even decades later,” Do said.

One of those people is Nestor Fantini, who was a 22-yearold student at the University of Cordoba in 1976 when the Argentine military staged a coup d’état. Fantini, who today serves as editor of the Spanishlanguage news site Hispanic LA, was arrested and tortured but never charged with a crime. He spent four years in prison during Argentina’s “Dirty War” from 1976-1983.

“That was pure state terrorism. These victims were kidnapped. They were taken to more than 360 concentration camps and they were systematically tortured and as many as 30,000 disappeared. I mean they were executed. Prisoners were dragged and thrown from planes into the Atlantic Ocean,” Fantini said.

Eventually, more than 900 members of the junta were tried and convicted including 26 military officers who were convicted of crimes against humanity. “The state can judge but only the individual can forgive,” Fantini said.

The offender needs to acknowledge the harm that he or she has caused, and should provide material restitution and symbolic reparations, Fantini added.

Nestor Fantini speaks on the

Keeping it Real: The Supreme Court Rules on Race and Redistricting or Did It?...continued from page 1

incumbent office holders and their political agents choose what configuration of voters best suits their political agenda. The decennial redistricting battles reveal the bloodsport of politics, shorn of the claims of ideology, social purpose, or broad policy goals. Redistricting is politics pure, fraught with the capacity for self-dealing and cynical manipulation.”

– T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Samuel Issacharojf

Despite Thursday’s ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to contort himself in order to explain his decision that aligned with the lower court ruling. Rather than letting the decision stand on the merits of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act he offered a trifecta of elaborate explanations for his ruling including that the real issue before the court was not whether the lower court had applied existing law, but instead on “Alabama’s attempt to remake our jurisprudence anew” by focusing on computer-generated maps that are created without considering race at all.” It seems like a cop out to me and also a way of leaving wiggle room so he can make an opposite choice the next time a similar issue comes before the court.

But for today, it matters not so much how he got there, we are just glad he did.

I should also note that another notable victory regarding the court’s decision in this case according to experts, is that it declined the opportunity to adopt an interpretation of the Voting Rights Act that could have made it much more difficult to challenge redistricting plans on the grounds that they weaken the collective voting power of Black people.

This is because had the court upheld the new maps it would have sanctioned Alabama’s plan that packed Black voters into a single district in a part of central Alabama known as the “Black Belt,” while at the same time dispersing Black voters in the rest of the Black Belt into several other districts precluding an opportunity to be the majority in any other district.

In the end, just as sure as we know the sun is going to rise tomorrow, we know this is not the end of the epic struggle for Blacks and other minorities to enjoy the full and fair benefit of one of America’s most fundamental rights–fair and equal access to the franchise.

Of course, this is just my opinion. I’m keeping it real.