How do egalitarian interventions address the barriers to belonging and choice that limit disadvantaged Latinos from experiencing their ethical right to be respected?
Background:
The Children’s Learning Center(CLC) in Jackson, WY is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that began it’s services in 1972 with a mission to “support the development of the whole child through Early Childhood Care, Education, Early Interventions and Access for All”. Their mission is actualized through Head Start programs that serve children up to 5 years old from at-risk families. Their underlying principles are that all children have an equal right to belong, to make choices, and to be respected particularly those disadvantaged by their initial socioeconomic conditions. The CLC believes that through subsidized early childhood education, they can most effectively provide supportive child development programs that lead to greater belonging, choice and ultimately respect - critical rights in a liberal democratic society. The fundamental right to be respected represents Kant’s ethical theory that all persons are owed respect because they are free rational beings.
“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or the person of any other, never simply as a means but always at the same time as an end”
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
This right to be respected and have moral value for one’s existence as a rational being manifests itself through the other two CLC principles - the right to choose and the right to belong. The CLC actualizes these egalitarian rights through $3.3 million dollars in government funding spent to subsidize high quality educational choices for disadvantaged students (Boyd, 2020). Nationally, Head Start programs are criticized from the libertarian frame of justice based on how educational choices are realized. The freedom to choose is equally important in egalitarianism as it is under libertarianism. Under libertarianism, free markets create choice through competition. The inequities that arise from differing initial conditions reflect the natural order of life and should not be disrupted by government intervention. Egalitarians believe that society should intervene and seek to mitigate the effect externalities have on the freedom of choice. Given that the Teton County Latino community is the majority provider of low-income service industry jobs that cater to high income, predominantly non-Latino, clientele living in the wealthiest county in the United States, there are many opportunities for social and economic externalities to obstruct free choice. These inequitable conditions are fertile for generating ethical conflicts between the individuals that benefit hugely from an individualistic libertarian frame versus those that benefit from a more communal egalitarian frame.
This paper seeks to demonstrate that the Children’s Learning Center’s Head Start & First in Family programs and their Community Mobilizers are important solutions in overcoming the social and economic inequality barriers that limit Latinos from accessing their Kantian right to respect and self-actualization as a rational being.
Right to Belonging
Under normal circumstances, each individual has a right to belong to their family. As Kant believes, this right should increase in scale to larger communities and to the nation. As a child, the sense of belonging to larger communities is not fully actualized until they are at least a teenager. The right to vote, drive, hold political office, and protest are all rights that increase the capacity for respect and self-actualization that one experiences by participating in increasingly larger communities.
Barriers to Belonging (See Figure 1.0, point 1):
Social norms often obstruct belonging. Social norms are the informal rules that govern behavior in society. This paper breaks social norms downs into the components of beliefs & expectations and group & common knowledge (Bicchieri, Muldoon, and Sontuoso, 2018). Beliefs establish the social behaviors to be followed or are expected to be followed for an individual to belong. Group and common knowledge reflect an individual's ability to access, understand, and influence knowledge creation through shared experiences.
Teton County Barriers to Belonging:
Beliefs and expectations vary between the two distinct subcommunities (Latino vs non-Latino) based upon language, agency, past-times, and trust.
Language is a significant inhibitor for the Latino community to participate in the formation of beliefs for how individuals should act in-line with community expectations. This constrains their development of a common knowledge about how to engage the social and civic processes, seek educational services, and advocate for their rights. A lack of political agency is reflected in the lack of representativeness in all levels of governance. There is no Latino representation on neither the Town Council and County Commissioner boards nor the Teton County School Board - despite Latinos representing over 26% of the student population (American Community Survey, 2018). Furthermore, socio-economic disparities often lead to divergent beliefs about the past-times that define participation within the community. Wealthy residents dine out, take exotic vacations, purchase expensive goods, and generally benefit from the privilege their economic and social position affords. There are certainly exceptions but the social barriers to belonging are well defined by these distinctions.
Lastly, trust is one of the most critical barriers for belonging. Trust is paramount to increase engagement (Uslaner & Brown, 2005). Many Latinos are undocumented citizens who fear deportation. It has been shown that Latinos are stopped more often than non-latino citizens, and this leads to a fear of government interactions (Gelman, Fagan, & Kiss, 2007). A general lack of formal education, limited English language skills, and diverse citizen status result in a sense of inferiority and displacement from the broader community (Liera, 2020). This inhibits their sense of belonging and their agency to do something about their disassociation.
Intergenerational discord between how parents and children respond to conditions of distrust amplify this barrier. Parents who were born in Mexico often hold safety and native traditions as the top priority in evaluating trust versus their children, born in the United States who due to age and citizen status seek belonging, agency, and esteem to engage and define their trust. Subsequently, parents often seek invisibility and separation to minimize their scale of belonging and hence risk versus the younger generation seeks engagement and visibility to participate in belonging as the move towards self-actualization associated with citizenship. This conflict further burdens choices and dynamics within the Latino community (Liera, 2020).
Right to Choose
Choice pertains to an individual's ability to pursue their own ends (Sandel, 2009). This paper frames that right as ranging between limited choices and significant choices.
“ [Egalitarian liberals] argue that enabling individuals to pursue their own ends requires that governments ensure the material conditions of truly free choice.”
-Michael Sandel, Justice (2009)
Barriers to Choice (See Figure 1.0, point 2):
Between significant choice and limited choice, is the barrier of generational wealth and educational inequality. Access to high-quality education provides more significant employment and economic opportunity (Santos, Asgary, Nazemzadeh, & DeShields, 2005). Access to generational wealth provides access to more goods, services, and resources that aid in pursuing one’s self-determined ends.
Teton County Barriers to Choice:
Many within the Latino population in Teton County have emigrated from Mexico to seek greater economic conditions (Doppelt, 2017). They typically occupy low paying construction and hospitality jobs. Many families do not have the financial resources to fund high quality educational programs and rely on relatives and neighbors to care for their children while they work multiple jobs (Leira, 2020). Low income circumstances are compounded by the cost of living, 61% higher than the statewide average (Bittner, 2020). The US Department of Health and Human Services establishes that affordable ECE should cost no more than 7% of income and in Teton County, ECE costs on average, 15% of income (Norton, 2020). And while Head Start programs provide subsidized programming for families that fall below the federal poverty level the gap between poverty and the self-sufficiency threshold of $75,000, forces many families to forego quality ECE (Pearce, 2016). These circumstances coupled with the educational disparities where 46% of Mexican Immigrants have a high school degree compared to 91% of all U.S. born residents are two distinct barriers to life choices (Radford, 2019).
Analysis & Solutions
Solutions to greater belonging
The CLC works to overcome barriers to belonging through their Community Mobilizers (see Figure 1.0, point 5). Community Mobilizers are a group of Latino individuals, organized by the CLC who engage systems of power, advocate, and disseminate information back to their community. They bridge language barriers, knowledge barriers, and expectation barriers that impede access to critical social and civic services. These bridging or “belonging” skills position them as hub nodes with a high-degree of centrality in a small-world network. The Latino network has a centralized, moderately dense topology given the influence of family and religion (traditionally paternalistic centralized structures). The diversity of “belonging” skill sets within the network establishes the degree of connectedness and influence within the network where a rapid transfer of information is possible if the mobilizers participate in information exchange.
The non-Latino network operates more like a decentralized network due to the dominance of libertarian ethos that prioritizes individualism. When the non-Latino network engages the Latino network, three outcomes arise: nodes with less centrality generate isolated engagement (a construction worker recruits friends), centralized mobilizers initiate broad engagement(attend CLC information nights), and minimal community response when untrusted non-Latino agents attempt broad engagement (the school boards email Latino parents for participation). The topological difference between the networks informs outcomes in cross network exchanges depending on how and who is participating in the exchange.
Solutions to greater economic and educational equality (See Figure 1.0 point 4)
The solutions to address wealth and educational inequality are federally funded Head Start programs for children under the age of 5 and the First in Family college scholarship program. Head Start programs overcome both wealth and educational inequality simultaneously through scholarships for education. The First in Family program provides college scholarships, overcoming wealth inequalities and mentorships that bridge the barrier to belonging and educational equality. Mentors cultivate knowledge of the social norms that govern the educational system, they support the academic growth, and generally advise on increasing student agency.
Figure 1.0: Phase space with axes of belonging and choice. Critical barriers and interventions are identified with numbers and three pathways are shown based upon initial socio-economic conditions. Four attractor states of dependence, autonomy, interconnected, and integrated self-realization.
As the previous discussions and Figure 1.0 allude to, different initial conditions (generational, belonging skills, and socio-economic privilege) can lead to different pathways through the phase space and the subsequent barriers experienced. The attractor states each represent a relatively stable life outcome. An individual is stable if they are dependent on only a small network(family), one is stable if one is interconnected to the larger systems of power that have influence over social norms, one is stable if they are autonomous and have choice due to educational and economic opportunities, and finally one is stable if they both belong and have the power of choice to not only influence social norms but self-actualize based upon how they so desire to govern themselves.
Conclusion
The choice of the Children’s Learning Center to implement egalitarian solutions elevates the values of belonging and choice to increase the opportunities and rights for disadvantaged residents of Teton County. This paper reveals that the interests of the various agents often lead to divergent outcomes. First generation Latinos may not always seek out support from the CLC for fear of increased visibility and risk of law enforcement interaction. Conversely, their children often seek support, through the First In Family scholarship program for better opportunities to self-actualize and better belong within American society. This generational conflict in response to the approach the CLC has chosen is critically useful in understanding the complex system dynamics that underpin engagement by many within disadvantaged communities. The moral implications for both parents and children are equally justified in that each seeks a state of equilibrium. And yet from the Kantian perspective of the right to be fully respected, taking advantage of the CLC interventions appears to provide critical agency in overcoming the social, educational, and economic barriers that obstruct individuals from achieving the right of respect and self-actualization. This analysis can help inform policy and future action by agents seeking to understand the complex dynamics that disadvantaged individuals face when operating within socially and economically segregated communities such that greater autonomy, interconnectedness, and justice can be achieved by all.
Word Count: 1900
References:
American Community Survey. (2014-2018) Teton County School District Total Children by Race
Bicchieri, C., Muldoon, R., & Sontuoso, A. (2018) "Social Norms", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/social-norms/>.
Bittner, A. (2020). “Wyoming Cost of Living Index for the Fourth Quarter” Retrieved from http://eadiv.state.wy.us/wcli/NewsRelease-4Q19.pdf
Boyd, P. (2020) Phone Call Interview.
Doppelt, J. (2017). Why do so many Mexican immigrants come to the United States? Retrieved June 30, 2020, from https://immigrantconnect.medill.northwestern.edu/blog/2017/03/16/why-do-so-many-mexican-immigrants-come-to-the-united-states/
Liera, L. (2020) Video Conference interview.
Gelman, A., Fagan, J., & Kiss, A. (2007). An analysis of the New York City police department's “stop-and-frisk” policy in the context of claims of racial bias. Journal of the American statistical association, 102(479), 813-823.
Norton, A. (2020) “Childcare Baseline Inventory” PDF File. Retrieved from Author
Pearce, D. (2016) “THE SELF-SUFFICIENCY STANDARD FOR WYOMING” Retrieved from: https://wywf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/WY16_SSS-Web_051116LMa.pdf
Radford, J. (2019) “Key findings about U.S. immigrants“ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/
Uslaner, E. M., & Brown, M. (2005). Inequality, Trust, and Civic Engagement. American Politics Research, 33(6), 868–894. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X04271903
Santos, G. de los, Asgary, N., Nazemzadeh, A., & DeShields, O. W. (2005). The Agony and the Ecstasy: Current Status of Hispanic Individuals’ Achievement in Higher Education and Earnings—With a Glimpse to the Future. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 4(2), 149–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/1538192704273999