Only a few decades since the passage of he Civil Rights Act eliminated legal cover for Jim Crow in America – Tea Party Republicans seem determined to bring it back…
This time, at least initially focused against “illegal” immigrants.
This battle is nothing more than the opening salvo in the re-segregation of America by the Tea Bagged.
As immigrant advocates battle hardline immigration bills in state capitols across the country, they’re receiving crucial support from caucuses of black legislators.
Black Teens Face the Water Cannons in 1950's Montgomery, Alabama
Black politicians have come out in defense of immigrants, questioning the morality and wisdom of tough immigration legislation in states from Nebraska to Georgia, where “copycat bills” are being modeled on Arizona’s immigration enforcement legislation, SB 1070. That bill ignited a national debate last year on whether states should take immigration matters into their own hands. The fact that federal courts have blocked many parts of Arizona’s law from being implemented has not deterred the copycats.
Nineteen state legislatures have considered Arizona-style proposals this year, according to Suman Raghunathan, Immigration Project Coordinator at Progressive States Network, a New York City-based nonprofit. Ten of these proposals have been defeated, but they remain alive in several states, including South Carolina, Florida, Alabama and Oklahoma.
Black legislators have been vocal in warning that, if approved, these bills could have unintended consequences, including damage to local economies, racial profiling, and diluting the federal government’s constitutionally-granted authority over immigration matters.
In the face of an ongoing backlash against immigrants, this deepening alliance between pro-immigrant lobbyists and black lawmakers has begun to transform state-level politics around immigration.
In Mississippi, the black legislative caucus was instrumental in sinking a get-tough immigration measure that had seemingly unstoppable momentum and bipartisan support. The bill would have required Mississippi law enforcement agencies to check the immigration status of people detained in any “stop, arrest, or detention” and created a state offense for failure to carry “an alien registration document.” Read the rest of this entry »
How Republicans Plan to Stop the "Wrong People" From Voting
While Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and North Carolina Republicans are in the forefront of this effort to disenfranchise younger voters, and in North Carolina’s case, black voters – this is a battle which will likely rage in other states like Texas, which is rapidly moving to a majority minority population. Republicans don’t want minorities and college kids to vote…
Simply because they tend to vote Democrat, and are progressive on issues.
This really does take on a lot of the aspects of the Civil Rights battles, the Poll Taxes, Literacy Tests, and outright intimidation through violence that the ideological forbears of today’s conservatives utilized to prevent minorities from voting in the South after Reconstruction – and until 1965.
The bottom line being – conservatism can’t win if everyone votes.
New Hampshire’s new Republican state House speaker is pretty clear about what he thinks of college kids and how they vote. They’re “foolish,” Speaker William O’Brien said in a recent speech to a tea party group.
“Voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do,” he added, his comments taped by a state Democratic Party staffer and posted on YouTube. Students lack “life experience,” and “they just vote their feelings.”
New Hampshire House Republicans are pushing for new laws that would prohibit many college students from voting in the state – and effectively keep some from voting at all. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s the core of the arguments against Atty General Holder’s DOJ. And up until the last paragraph, the author makes a reasonable case of why is the DOJ involved in such minor things that should be handled within the purview of the local school administration or at worst – State Courts.
The Author points out several cases where Federal involvement seems a bit on the overkill side such as –
In the latest outrage, the Civil Rights Division is suing the board of education in the leafy Chicago suburb of Berkeley, Ill. The board’s offense? It would not allow a middle-school computer-math-lab teacher to take off three weeks during December’s crucial end-of-semester course reviews and final exams in order to make a pilgrimage to Mecca…In 1977, in TWA v. Hardison, the Supreme Court held that it is an “undue hardship” if the employer has to “bear more than a de minimis cost” in order to provide the accommodation.
The author hints at going off the rails here with:
Extremists in the Civil Rights Division are pouncing on other school policies as well. When it was first formed in the 1960s, the division pursued cases of real discrimination — cases where, for example, black students were harassed or intimidated or provided with intentionally inferior education.
Why? Because one of the problems with the Bushit Administration’s DOJ was a complete ignoring of Minority Civil Rights for a all hands on deck, fruitless search for the Holy Grail of conservative bigots – cases of reverse discrimination.
They managed to actually find and prosecute 1 case in 8 years, despite 12,000-16,000 cases of discrimination against minorities being referred to the DOJ by local authorities a year… Which they ignored. So when the author is referring to “Extremists”… The Bushit Administration perversion of the Civil Rights Division resulted in filling the Division with…what? Good Ol’ Boys?
The current cases involve two schools in upstate New York that supposedly discriminated against one male student who wore a pink wig and makeup and another male student who wore a wig and stiletto heels and wanted to be able to “dress like a woman.” These students had violated the schools’ common-sense dress codes and were told to change clothes and remove the makeup. That prompted the Civil Rights Division to come knocking. The boys were being treated “differently” from female students, and such differential treatment, the division asserted, “implicate[s] the civil rights laws that we enforce.”
Sounds reasonable. The local school system should have the ability to define a dress code for all students as far as I can see. One of my personal heroes is the principal in memphis who has developed “The Urkel” System –
But then the author goes and quotes these scumbags –
As Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity observes: “The Obama administration apparently believes that it is unconstitutional for high schools to have a dress code that makes distinctions between what is appropriate dress for males and what is appropriate dress for females.” Clegg also points out that the division’s attempt to equate “sexual-orientation discrimination” with sex discrimination, by asserting that the use of sexual “stereotypes” is an instance of the latter, is nothing but naked bootstrapping (if you will pardon the expression). But legal justification or not, in the eyes of the warped and silly (but dangerous) lawyers inhabiting the division, barring boys from wearing stiletto heels is a serious civil-rights violation.
For those not familiar with right-wing racist code language, “The Center for Equal Opportunity” is one of the KKK organizations in suits that occupies the right, whose sole purpose is to re-segregate schools fully with the financial and legal support of the so called “Federalist Society” made up of right wing, and racist lawyers little better than the Council of Conservative Citizen scum they shill for.
So our writer isn’t really pissed about th DOJ’s intrusion into local decision making, as much as he is pissed that such intrusion isn’t on behalf of re-segregation, and the re-institution of Jim Crow.
The proof?
Oddly, one of those views is that discrimination by some racial groups is perfectly acceptable. This explains why the Justice Department dismissed the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case it had already won. It is why this administration is studiously not pursuing cases like the one filed against Southern Illinois University in 2006 for maintaining a paid fellowship program that categorically excluded white males from applying. It was the Bush administration’s race-neutral enforcement policy in such cases that enraged the radical civil-rights organizations that dominate Washington and formed the basis for much of the unfair and misleading criticism of that administration’s enforcement of civil-rights laws.
The “author” in this case, was one of the racist scumbags illegitimately placed in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division during the Bushit Administration, who now works at one of the right wing’s premier racist “think tanks”…
Hans A. von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department.
Methinks this conehead sheet wearer…
Has a problem.
If the best the right can do is to complain that Atty General Holder is a “bad man” because he won’t let them be bigots-in- charge anymore.
They have a weaker case than even I thought, and I already had them as the “bargain brand” in those toilet tissue commercials where one drop of water cases where you wouldn’t want to set the good china on the cheap stuff…
Rachel does get it correct that the MSM is spinning for the Republicans. What she gets wrong is why. This election is about race – not the economy, jobs, or the deficit… It is about fear of a non-white America. One of the best articles on this phenomenon was in the Village Voice – White America Has Lost It’s Mind…
Laying out why whack job right wing candidates suddenly have a chance, despite the reality that these folks are so far out of the mainstream as to be part of the tinfoil hat crowd.
Watched this same movie during the Bushit’s first illegitimate selection by the 5 thugs in robes. Bushit was their Golden Boy. Boy! That turned out well, now – didn’t it?
The really bad news is that things are so screwed up right now – America really can’t afford the off-the-wall isht the Tea Baggers and whack-job righties are going to bring…
So if it does turn out as so heavily advertised by the MSM…
Welcome to Third World America, complete with Banana Government.
The biggest crime in the US criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.
Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that. Below, I set out numerous examples of these facts.
The question is – are these facts the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as intended? Is the US criminal justice system operated to marginalize and control millions of African-Americans?
Information on race is available for each step of the criminal justice system – from the use of drugs, police stops, arrests, getting out on bail, legal representation, jury selection, trial, sentencing, prison, parole and freedom. Look what these facts show.
One. The US has seen a surge in arrests and putting people in jail over the last four decades. Most of the reason is the war on drugs. Yet, whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales at roughly comparable rates – according to a report on race and drug enforcement published by Human Rights Watch in May 2008. While African-Americans comprise 13 percent of the US population and 14 percent of monthly drug users, they are 37 percent of the people arrested for drug offenses – according to 2009 Congressional testimony by Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project. Read the rest of this entry »
There is a full frontal attack on black Americans by the Glenn Beck Tea Bagger right. Been a while coming, but it looks like forces are aligning to step up and call what is going on for what it is.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will propose a resolution this week condemning racism within the tea party movement.
The resolution, scheduled for a vote as early as Tuesday by delegates attending the annual NAACP convention in Kansas City, calls upon “all people of good will to repudiate the racism of the Tea Parties, and to stand in opposition to its drive to push our country back to the pre-civil rights era.”
NAACP leaders said the resolution was necessary to make people aware of what they believe is a racist element within the tea party movement.
“I think a lot of people are not taking the tea party movement seriously, and we need to take it seriously,” said Anita Russell, head of the Kansas City chapter of the NAACP. “We need to realize it’s really not about limited government.”
Russell said she was “pretty certain” the resolution would pass.
Tea party leaders deny that the movement is racist and said the resolution is unfair.
“I just don’t see racism in the tea party movement,” said Brendan Steinhauser, director of campaigns for FreedomWorks, which organizes tea party groups. “Racism is something we’re absolutely opposed to.”
“The NAACP has more of a political agenda now, but I would hope that they would appreciate the fact that the tea party movement has a lot in common with the civil rights movement. I’m personally inspired by what the civil rights movement did, and I want them to know that.” Read the rest of this entry »
Twenty-five years ago, Earl Jerome McGahee was charged with two counts of murder in the deaths of his ex-wife and her friend.
McGahee, an African-American, was tried by an all-white jury in an Alabama county that was more than 55 percent black.
The district attorney dismissed every one of the 24 blacks who qualified to serve on the jury, including Edith Ferguson, who had worked for the Selma, Ala., Police Department for many years. The reason cited for striking Ferguson from being a juror: “low intelligence.”
Bryan Stevenson of the nonprofit group Equal Justice Initiative tells NPR’s Guy Raz that assertions about intelligence are “one of the most troubling but persistent reasons” given to dismiss potential jurors who are black. Many of those potential jurors are college graduates, Stevenson says.
Last year, McGahee was granted a new trial because of the racially discriminatory jury selection in his original case. But many defendants are not so lucky.
Study Documents ‘Widespread Discrimination’
In a new study, Stevenson’s group details “widespread discrimination” in the selection of jurors across the Deep South. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the long running “truths” spouted by conservatives is that black students perform worse than white or Asian students on SATs, and thus are variously a) less intelligent, b) don’t take educations seriously, c) are lazy, or d) are “anti-education” in condemning successful students as “acting white”.
Despite mounting evidence of flaws in high stakes academic testing is invalid.
“All admissions decisions based exclusively or predominantly on SAT performance–and therefore access to higher education institutions and subsequent job placement and professional success–appear to be biased against the African American minority group and could be exposed to legal challenge.”
Roy Freedle is 76 now, with a research psychologist’s innate patience. He knows that decades often pass before valid ideas take root. When the notion is as radical as his, that the SAT is racially biased, an even longer wait might be expected. But after 23 years the research he has done on the surprising reaction of black students to hard words versus easy words seems to be gaining new respectability.
Seven years ago, after being discouraged from investigating findings while working for the Educational Testing Service, Freedle published a paper in the Harvard Educational Review that won significant attention.
He was retired from ETS by then. As he expected, his former supervisors dismissed his conclusions. Researchers working for the College Board, which owns the SAT, said the test was not biased. But the then president of the University of California system, a cognitive psychologist named Richard C. Atkinson, was intrigued. He asked the director of research in his office to replicate Freedle’s study.
Now, in the latest issue of the Harvard Educational Review, the two scholars who took on that project have published a paper saying Freedle was right about a flaw in the SAT, even in its current form. They say “the SAT, a high-stakes test with significant consequences for the educational opportunities available to young people in the United States, favors one ethnic group over another.” Read the rest of this entry »
This is a powerful analysis of the forces behind the “culture wars” and the desire to preserve Jim Crow as a functional entity by the right wing in America by Cary Fraser. Follow the link below to the original where support documentation is provided in the form of footnotes and links. As one example of this, work by Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness) has shown that during the height of Jim Crow, blacks went to prison at roughly four times the rate of whites; today the black imprisonment rate is seven times that of whites. (Another good reference in the prison industrial Jim Crow element of this is by Robert Perkinson – Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire.)
As I have reported here in The New Jim Crow series – the New Jim Crow impacts nearly every aspect of life for minorities in America, starting with access to education, credit, the ability to start business and conduct commerce, through access to jobs.
The New Jim Crow, Ubiquitous and Masked as "Culture Wars"
The recent decision by the Texas School Board of Education to revise the curriculum in the state to reflect a more “conservative” approach to social studies and history has highlighted the ongoing debate about the role of education in American society and culture. The explicit desire by the conservative majority on the Texas School Board to impose an ideological orientation in elementary and secondary education – including a shift of focus away from the civil rights movement and slavery, an emphasis upon ensuring that students be taught that the idea of the separation of church and state is not in the Constitution and promotion of the need to safeguard American sovereignty from threats posed by organizations such as the United Nations – is a barometer of the increasing uncertainty that has overtaken the conservative factions in American society. The election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president, on the basis of a well-executed campaign that demonstrated the increasing electoral influence of multi-ethnic coalitions in American politics, has served as a catalyst for reactionaries of all stripes to seek ways to reverse the movement of American society toward a greater openness and engagement with the wider world, including the diverse communities of color within the country. A recent article in the Wall Street reports that recent statistics suggest that population growth among minority groups in the United States will exceed growth rates among whites in the near future.(1) If that demographic shift takes place, the United States will become a country where there is no single ethnic group or race that will constitute a majority within the population. The promise of greater cultural and ethnic diversity in the American population is a guarantee of the erosion of the white-supremacist ethos that has defined American society over the course of its history. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the reasons the right wing despises Obama so much is his focus on small business. Which is the same reason they despised Bill Clinton. Follow my logic here –
After the Civil War, the majority of skilled artisans in the South were black. The people who built wagons, coopers, dressmakers, furniture makers – and many of the skilled labor jobs prior to the industrial revolution were done by either slave, or free black labor. By 1860, there were more free blacks in Virginia than black folks slave or free in most of the northern states.
What Jim Crow really was about was stopping these people’s economic progress, such as to preserve white supremacy. Ergo though the destruction of the black artisan class businesses, Southern whites prevented the emergence of a new, black merchant class – who by nature of existing skills was in position to dominate certain industries when freed from the “Black Codes”. A merchant class, who would have followed the logical progression of gaining a piece of political power through wealth.
In America today, according to Forbes Magazine and numerous other sources, black folks a 3 times more likely to start a business than their white counterparts. And despite receiving only .3% of the Venture Investment in this country, are – according to the same studies 8 times more likely to succeed when they do get Venture financing. Only in America does that not translate into quickly shifting 30% of the investment money into more successful enterprise.
Indeed, the Bushit Administration was quite possibly the most hostile administration in history to small business, and was especially toxic to Minority owned business, as I have documented in previous articles, in reducing the quantity of SBA Loan Grantees to black owned business by 60% over 8 years, while holding it the same or increasing it to non-Minorities. The Bushit administration was also adamantly pro BIG business. So much so as to flat-line R&D and emerging technologies in a number of previously competitive industries like Telecom and Energy.
So why don’t Republicans want small business to succeed? Because the wrong color folks just might make a success at it, and in doing so threaten the old-boy power structure.
The New Jim Crow… Not much different from the old.
President Barack Obama turned the spotlight to his small business agenda Friday, urging congressional passage of legislation meant to boost federal assistance to a key segment of the economy.
Among the proposals highlighted by the administration is a $30 billion government lending program offering capital to community banks that boost their small-business lending. Banks with assets worth less than $10 billion would be able to borrow money from the Treasury at a dividend rate as low as 1 percent provided they use the cash to make more small-business loans this year than they did in 2009.
Other proposals being pushed by the president include an elimination of capital gains taxes on certain small business investments.
“Ensuring that small businesses can thrive is about more than our economic success,” Obama said at the White House after a meeting with small business leaders. “It’s about who we are as a people. It’s about a nation where anybody with a good idea and a willingness to work can succeed. That’s the promise of America.”
Legislation enacted in March included new business tax credits for hiring additional workers, as well as a measure allowing companies to write off, instead of depreciate, new equipment.
Many small businesses, however, are still struggling to regain their footing in the wake of the recent recession. The Commerce Department reported Friday that retail sales fell for the first time in eight months in May, widely missing analyst expectations.
Total retail sales fell 1.2 percent to $362.5 billion last month, compared with April’s upwardly revised 0.6 percent increase. It was first decline since last September, when retail sales fell 2.3 percent.
Data from the Small Business Administration (SBA) show that small companies have generated 64 percent of the net new jobs every year over the past 15 years. Those businesses, however, were particularly hard hit by the economic downturn. A Senate report last year found that American businesses with fewer than 20 employees have suffered steeper job losses than larger companies.
In Waterproof, a small northern Louisiana town near Natchez, Mississippi, the African American mayor and police chief assert that they have been forced from office and arrested as part of an illegal coup carried out by an alliance of white politicians and their followers. In a lawsuit filed last week, Police Chief Miles Jenkins asserts a wide-ranging conspiracy involving the area’s district attorney and parish sheriff, along with several other members of the region’s entrenched political power structure. These events come at a time of widespread and high-profile racist attacks against the US President and Black members of Congress nationwide, and in a state where white political corruption and violence have been and continue to be used as tools to suppress Black political representation.
Chief Miles Jenkins
About 800 people live in Waterproof, a rural community in Tensas Parish. Tensas has just over 6,000 residents, making it both the smallest parish in the state, and the parish with the state’s fastest declining population. The regional schools remain mostly segregated, with nearly all the Black students attending public schools, and nearly all the white students attending private schools. With a median household income of $10,250, Waterproof is also one of the poorest communities in the US. The only jobs for Black people in town involve working for white farmers, according to Chief Jenkins. “Unless you go out of town to work,” he says, “You’re going to ride the white man’s tractor. That’s it.” Read the rest of this entry »
The staff of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has looked closely at jury selection procedures in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee. We uncovered shocking evidence of racial discrimination in jury selection in every state. We identified counties where prosecutors have excluded nearly 80% of African Americans qualified for jury service. We discovered majority-black counties where capital defendants nonetheless were tried by all-white juries. We found evidence that some prosecutors employed by state and local governments actually have been trained to exclude people on the basis of race and instructed on how to conceal their racial bias. In many cases, people of color not only have been illegally excluded but also denigrated and insulted with pretextual reasons intended to conceal racial bias.
Funny - But Not Far From the Situation Faced By Many Black Defendants in Certain States
In Mississippi, Alvin Robinson, an African-American man, was on trial for murder after he’d allegedly had an altercation with and killed a white man following a frightful traffic incident. During the jury selection for his trial, an African-American woman showed up dutifully for service, but was turned away because she had “no ties to the community,” though she’d worked for the same local company for six years. One by one, the African-Americans who had been summoned were dismissed from service.
In a silent protest to being stricken from the jury for what she suspected to be a thinly-veiled attempt to maintain the racial homogeny of the all-white jury, this woman returned to the courthouse each day, only to watch Mr. Robinson be found guilty for murder (even though three of the jurors slept through portions of the trial) and sentenced to prison. Read the rest of this entry »
LOS ANGELES — Immigrant rights groups Wednesday slammed Arizona lawmakers after they approved a bill which will allow police officers to determine whether suspects are in the United States legally.
Arizona’s House of Representatives passed the bill by a margin of 35 votes to 21 during a session on Tuesday, the legislature’s website showed, mirroring a similar measure passed by the border state’s Senate earlier this year.
The bill will now proceed to Arizona’s Republican Governor Jan Brewer to be signed into law.
The bill makes it a misdemeanor offense for an individual to lack proper immigration paperwork and also allows police officers to determine someone’s immigration status if they believe he or she could be an illegal immigrant.
Currently police can only ask about an individual’s immigration status if they are suspected of involvement in another crime.
However critics say the bill will transform Arizona into a “police state” and even sections of law enforcement have voiced fears it could harm relations between police and the immigrant community.
Chris Newman, Legal Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which campaigns on behalf of day laborers in the United States, called on Governor Brewer to veto the bill, which he described as “odious” and “unwise.”
“Arizona is on the verge of enacting the most anti-immigrant legislation the country has seen in a generation,” Newman said in a statement.
“We are hopeful Governor Brewer will consult with her legal counsel, issue a veto, and spare Arizona the expense of defending an unconstitutional, unwise, and odious bill in federal courts.
“Arizona has long been a laboratory for anti-immigrant experimentation, and its demagogue leaders have become folk heros for white supremacists throughout the United States, but this bill ushers in a new chapter of disgrace for the state that resisted celebrating the life of Martin Luther King.”
A little History here of how Poll Taxes and Literacy tests were utilized during Jim Crow to disenfranchise black people –
Va Republican Governor McDonnell, AG Cuccinelli, and Lt. Gov Bolliing Pray to Restore Jim Crow
In 1890, Southern states began to adopt explicit literacy tests to disenfranchise voters. This had a large differential racial impact, since 40-60% of blacks were illiterate, compared to 8-18% of whites. Poor, illiterate whites opposed the tests, realizing that they too would be disenfranchised. To placate them, Southern states adopted an “understanding clause” or a “grandfather clause,” which entitled voters who could not pass the literacy test to vote, provided they could demonstrate their understanding of the meaning of a passage in the constitution to the satisfaction of the registrar, or were or were descended from someone eligible to vote in 1867, the year before blacks attained the franchise. Discriminatory administration ensured that blacks would not be eligible to vote through the understanding clause.
Georgia initiated the poll tax in 1871, and made it cumulative in 1877 (requiring citizens to pay all back taxes before being permitted to vote). Every former confederate state followed its lead by 1904. Although these taxes of $1-$2 per year may seem small, it was beyond the reach of many poor black and white sharecroppers, who rarely dealt in cash. The Georgia poll tax probably reduced overall turnout by 16-28%, and black turnout in half (Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, 67-8). The purpose of the tax was plainly to disenfranchise, not to collect revenue, since no state brought prosecutions against any individual for failure to pay the tax.
Racially disparate charging and sentencing has had the effect of disenfranchising millions of black people – enabling Republicans to remove millions of Democrat voters from the roles. It would seem that the new Governor of Virginia wants to keep them from voting…
Virginia’s slide toward extreme conservative governance under Gov. Bob McDonnell continues.
McDonnell wants to change the process by which non-violent felons apply to have their voting rights restored, the Washington Postreported over the weekend. Whereas before, applicants had had to fill out a one-page form, making the process almost automatic, they now will have to submit an essay outlining their contributions to society since their release. Read the rest of this entry »
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