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CNN has a brief reference and picture of a hero from yesterday, at the Holocaust Museum.

Stephen Tyrone Johns, a six-year veteran of the museum’s security staff, later “died heroically in the line of duty,” said Sara Bloomfield, museum director.

Some 5,000 people go to that important museum on a typical day. Many Black men protect US institutions, and do many other hard jobs in this society, but very rarely get credit or media attention for the fine job they do.

And violent white men like the shooter never become part of a vilified racial category of “white men” in the media or public policy discussions. And as a convicted felon he had access to guns, and no one in the media has yet raised that issue?

Interesting how that works.

Update: Johns was also not wearing a bullet-proof vest, which his union had pushed for, as one of our commenters suggested.   And, the latest reports are that Johns – seeing von Brunn as an elderly man in need of assistance – was opening the door for him when von Brunn opened fire and killed him.

The Chicago Tribune, along with other national and local news outlets, has recently published numerous articles surrounding the possible end of the death penalty.

I would like to thank state governments around the country to have the testicular fortitude to address such an imperative concern. Is it possible that they directed their attention to the issue because as of August 26, 2008, some 130 death row inmates have been exonerated in 26 states? It had to be, right?

No, the call for social justice had to come from the fact that “82% of the studies [reviewed], race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty, i.e., those who murdered whites were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks.” Moreover, this is evident with the number of executions that have occurred since 1976. Wrong again?

Ok, it had to be because the disproportionate rate of Black males to non-Black males on death row caused the ethical and moral bones within their bodies to ache.

In reality, the real cause for the debate over the death penalty surfacing again is not because of moral, ethical, religious, or even statistical evidence that has proven time and time again that the death penalty does not curb the rate of serious malicious crimes from occurring.

Money! Money is the motive for the dialogue. The lack of the almighty dollar within the hands of states during the current U.S. economic crisis, coupled with the millions states utilize to contest years of legal appeals, has made the nation second guess the efficiency of killing another human being.

Amnesty International states that, “a 2003 legislative audit in Kansas found that the estimated cost of a death penalty case was 70% more than the cost of a comparable non-death penalty case.” Moreover, the New York Times wrote a story in which “a judge in a small, poor Ohio county told prosecutors there this month that they could not seek the death penalty in the murder of a college student because the county’s share of the defense costs would be too great.”

I guess it is true as Henry Louis Mencken states, “Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”

In a post in March, I discussed a report by the Pew Center on the States documenting the dramatic increase in the number of citizens incarcerated in the United States over the past three decades, making this country’s incarceration rate the highest in the world ( photo credit: hoyasmeg). The vast majority of those incarcerated (91.4%) are being held in state prisons and local jails for nonviolent offenses, and young black men and women are disproportionately represented among the prison and jail populations. This week the Pew Hispanic Center released a new report, “A Rising Share: Hispanics and Federal Crime,” showing that the racial and ethnic composition of the federal prison population has significantly changed since 1991, with Latinos now making up the majority of sentenced federal offenders and about one-third (31%) of the federal prison population.

According to the Pew report, 40% of sentenced federal offenders in 2007 were Latino, even though they make up only 13% of the U.S. adult population. Their representation among adults sentenced in federal courts nearly doubled since 1991 when they were 24% of offenders sentenced in federal courts, making them the single largest racial/ethnic group among sentenced federal offenders in 2007. The increase in Latino federal offenders accounted for more than half (54%) of the overall increase in federal offenders from 1991 to 2007.

Who are these people and what crimes have they committed? Data in the Pew report show that more than 72% of Latinos sentenced in federal courts in 2007 were not U.S. citizens. The percentage of Latino federal offenders who were not U.S. citizens rose from 61% in 1991 to 72% in 2007. The majority of Latino federal offenders in 2007 were convicted of immigration offenses (48%), and of these, about 75% were convicted of entering the United States illegally or residing in the U.S. without legal authorization. But of Latino federal offenders who were not U.S. citizens, 61% were convicted of immigration offenses, and of these, 81% were convicted of entering the United States illegally or residing in the U.S. without legal authorization. Indeed, the Pew report concludes that an increase in undocumented immigration coupled with an intensified focus on strict enforcement of immigration laws has “changed the citizenship profile of federal offenders,” (p. 1), leading truthdig.com to label the period 1991-2007 the “age of crimmigration.”

The Pew analysis shows that Latinos sentenced in federal courts were more likely than non-Latino offenders to be sentenced to prison (96% and 82%, respectively), and Latinos who were not U.S. citizens were more likely than Latinos who were citizens to be sentenced to prison (98% and 90%, respectively). But Latinos receive significantly shorter sentences than non-Latinos, on average 46 months compared with 62 months for whites and 91 months for blacks. And Latinos who are not U.S. citizens receive on average shorter prison sentences than Latinos who are citizens (40 months and 61 months, respectively). These shorter sentences are indicative of the non-serious nature of immigration offenses, which raises the questions of whether the criminalization of undocumented immigration is the best strategy for addressing the problem and the best use of federal criminal justice resources. At this point, it remains uncertain how long the “age of crimmigration” will continue.

CNN reports on an important hearing in Austin, Texas, one that sought the

photo credit: Biggunben

first posthumous exoneration of a wrongly convicted man in Texas history: a black Texas Tech student named Timothy Cole. Cole died in prison a decade ago after serving a long term for a rape, it has now been proven by DNA and other evidence, he did not commit. Numerous black Texans have been released in recent years because they were wrongfully convicted by the criminal injustice system.

His family successfuly sought to clear Timothy Cole’s name. Today they won that exoneration. Here is today’s report on the judge’s decision:

State District Judge Charlie Baird closed an extraordinary hearing today by finding that Timothy Cole, who died in prison in 1999, did not rape fellow Texas Tech student Michele Mallin in 1985. “I find to a 100 percent moral, factual and legal certainty that Timothy Cole did not sexually assault Michele Murray Mallin.” Baird, who took the case after a Lubbock case denied a joint request by Malin and Cole’s family to consider it, further stated that Timothy Cole’s reputation was wrongly injured, that his reputation must be restored and that his good name must be vindicated.”

CNN reports the very troubling story of likely institutional racism thus:

Cole was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison for the 1985 rape of 20-year-old Michele Mallin. He maintained his innocence, but it was not confirmed by DNA until years after his 1999 death, when another inmate confessed to the rape.

Mallin was a young student when raped and, to her great credit, once she found out the truth, has joined Cole’s family in this unprecedented exoneration effort, assisted by the Innocence Project of Texas, which has helped in several wrongful conviction cases. The actual rapist has confessed and is also expected to testify at the hearing. The Innocence Project has raised serious questions about the role of the criminal justice system is this wrongful conviction. CNN continues:

The next day, police investigators showed Mallin pictures of possible suspects. She chose a picture of Cole and said he was her attacker. She later identified him in a physical lineup, according to the Innocence Project of Texas…. But there was one detail: Mallin told police her attacker was a smoker. “He was smoking the entire time.” And Cole, who suffered from severe asthma, “was never a smoker,” Session [Cole’s Brother] said. “He took daily medications (for asthma) when he was younger.” “He was the sacrificial lamb. To them, my brother was the Tech rapist, there was no backtracking. It was the trial of the decade for Lubbock.”

The Austin American-Statesmen legal blog has a piece by Steven Kreytak that adds this point about witness misidentification and numerous exonerations in the Texas criminal justice system:

Cole’s case is not isolated. About 80 percent of the Texas cases where people were exonerated by DNA testing since 1994 involved some kind of witness misidentification, according to the Innocence Project of Texas. Gary Wells, an Iowa State University professor who is a leading authority on witness identification has written that their accuracy is frequently imperfect and often depends on the methods employed to obtain the identifications.

The Innocence Project became involved and DNA tests showed that Cole was not the rapist. But this should have been obvious to the police and prosecutor in Lubbock. Cole could not have been the smoking rapist, yet for some reason this very white criminal justice system could not see that reality. Do white officials often “see black” in many such cases? What role did the white racist framing of young “black man as rapist” play in this event? The conviction of course ruined Cole’s life, for he was a student at Texas Tech. CNN continues thus:

But his dreams of getting married and having children never materialized. He was arrested and charged with Mallin’s rape, declining a plea bargain offer that would have put him on probation. A jury convicted him and imposed a 25-year sentence. That night, “he hugged my mother, and he said, ‘Mother, why these people lie on me? Why they do this to me?’

He died in prison of heart complications linked to his bad asthma. Because of this wrongful conviction, he was “murdered” in effect by the criminal justice system, one of many black men in US history.

Indeed, the number of men of color who have been exonerated in recent years shows just how unjust our criminal justice system really is. In recent years there have been many exonerations of people in prison for felonies. The Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School reports that their 232 exoneration cases reveal that well over half (138) have been African Americans (my thanks to Kim Cook for these data links). For just death row exonerations (wrongful capital convictions) from DNA evidence and other evidence, 130 death row inmates have been exonerated: 50 are white, 66 African American, 12 Latino, 2 other (Native American and Asian). All but one are male. In these cases Some 16 were exonerated by means of DNA evidence. Well over half (62 percent) were men of color.

So much for the nonsense about a “post-racial America.”

In an article in the January (2009) issue of The Progressive, political analyst Chip Berlet argues that the election of Barak Obama “has poked the racist beehive, and we can expect a lot of buzzing around in the months ahead,” (p. 27). Berlet notes the increase in racist incidents – e.g., cross burnings, arsons – in communities throughout the United States following the election, with the Southern Poverty Law Center noting that the rate has been far above “normal.” Berlet remarks that rightists of all kinds are “eager to reframe issues in ways that invoke racialized fears” among white citizens (p. 27). Interestingly, as I read this, I thought of the recent exchange on this blog regarding Jessie Daniels’ post on the Grant police brutality case. I think some of the reaction to Jessie’s analysis reflects the success of the previous political administration and various right-wing groups in convincing many of us that we have much of which to be afraid and from which we need protection. The law-and-order, lock-em-up approach to criminal offending in this country – so much a part of the “War on Drugs,” as well as the “War on Terrorism” – has garnered widespread mainstream support and resulted in a dramatic rise in incarceration rates such that the United States now has more citizens in prison than any other country in the world. Many people are convinced that the police must be aggressive in combating crime and catching “bad guys,” and in doing so, they may make some mistakes, but they’re “honest mistakes”; the police, after all, are “just doing their job” (image from here).

Ironically, crime in the United States has declined fairly steadily since the 1990s, and many criminologists attribute at least some of this decline to the prosperous economy during this period. Given the current economic crisis, we can be fairly confident that crime rates will be on the upswing, and we are likely to hear an outcry for more police intervention. I doubt, however, if many of those who demand such action will be expecting law enforcement to arrest the “white collar” offenders on Wall Street who precipitated this mess in the first place, or those in the previous administration whose gutting of regulatory legislation helped fuel Wall Street greed. Such offenders are rarely considered “criminals” and their offenses aren’t viewed as “real crimes.” Instead of “crime in the suites,” law enforcement will be focused on crime in the streets, and those most likely to be caught up in any new “crime crackdown” will be those who are always the first targets of law enforcement: the poor, and racial and ethnic minorities who are disproportionately represented among the poor. But this time, we have a liberal Democratic president in office, who also happens to be African American, which returns me to my opening concern. If crime increases during Obama’s first term in office – and it most certainly will – rightists will likely use it to invoke racialized fears.

No doubt some of the comments about Jessie’s original post on the Grant case were offered by members of rightist groups, who lurk on progressive blogs to try to disrupt the dialogue. I see this not infrequently on feminist sites when members of fathers’ rights groups post comments about women being as violent as men or claims that divorcing mothers falsely accuse their spouses of abuse. This, though, actually bothers me less than attempts to saturate the mainstream with racist fears. If rightists feel the need to infiltrate a progressive blog such as this one, we must be doing our work well; they’ve noticed us and we’re cause for them to be concerned. What is more important, then, is for progressives to be certain not to just talk among ourselves and to like-minded folks, but to discuss these critical issues more broadly and to debunk racist myths whenever and wherever we find them. In other words, we need to knock down the racist beehive.

Like many of the readers here (h/t: Victor, Ilish), I’ve been following the news of the shooting death of Oscar Grant, III (photo from Facebook) in Oakland, California by a transit cop.

At the time of the shooting, Grant was unarmed, on the ground, his hands were hand-cuffed behind him.  Grant was employed as a butcher at Farmer Joe’s Marketplace in Oakland, had a young daughter, Tatiana, age 4.   Several people at the BART train station recorded the incident on their mobile phones, and witnesses reported that Grant begged officers not to shoot him, telling them he had a young daughter.

The BART cop who shot him, Johannes Mehserle, has since resigned his position, thus avoiding internal affairs investigators. And, lawyers have filed a $25 million lawsuit against the transit authority on behalf of Grant’s family.

As Grant was laid to rest today, protestors gathered at the Fruitvale BART station where he was killed to demand justice (update: the protest prompts The New York Times to take notice).

While officials at BART are suggesting that the shooting was an “accident” in which Mehserle mistook his gun for his taser, the videos taken at the scene suggest otherwise.  The BART cops move Grant from a seated (and hand-cuffed) position, place him on the ground face down, and then Mehserle reaches for his gun and shoots Grant in the back. It is not hyperbole to call this an execution. Clearly, this is an example of excessive force, and it is a nothing less than a racist murder.  And, racists are lining up to defend Mehserle’s actions.  For example, Michael Crook joined the Facebook group “Justice for Oscar Grant,” then started a discussion thread called “Quit Whining,” in which he writes:

“This was a justified shooting, and even if the officer was in error, another ape is off the streets. … This is just another family of black monkeys wanting a payday.”

I suppose the good news is that the other members of that Facebook group called out Crook for his racism.   At this point, no one knows  whether or not Mehserle held these kinds of overtly racist views.  And, to some extent it’s beside the point.    Whatever Mehserle’s individual level of racism, Grant is still dead because of racism.  The racist idea expressed by Crook that some lives are less valuable than others is one that pervades our institutions, particularly criminal justice institutions, and operates without individual racists. Institutional racism assures that some people, particuarly young black men, are continually viewed as suspects and are perpetually vulnerable to assault by police.

As I mentioned, there are multiple videos of this shooting taken by concerned passers-by.  This may persuade some that there is incontrovertible evidence of this outrageous, criminal act.  But, the institutionalized racism that creates black men as ontological suspects has already started denying the reality of this mobile phone video evidence.   In one report, there’s mention that Grant possibly had a criminal record; in another, a BART spokesman calls the video evidence is “inconclusive”; and, reports are painting Mehserle as sympathetic for a variety of reasons, including the fact that he is getting death threats.    For observers of racial politics in the U.S., this should all sound eerily similar to the kinds of strategies used in the trial of the LAPD cops accused of beating Rodney King.   As you may recall, even though there was clear, stomach-turning video of those officers brutally beating and tasering the unarmed King, defense lawyers for the cops successfully portrayed King as a “monster” and a “thug” and cast the officers as “victims” who felt threatened by him.   All the officers were acquitted of beating King, and if past is prologue, I expect Mehserle to walk without criminal prosecution.

The sort of citizen journalism and activism of cop-watch style actions are promising for addressing brutal acts such as the racist murder of Oscar Grant. Yet, the lessons of racism in the recent past are that these are important, but not sufficient in and of themselves to bring about justice.  For that, we must work much harder.  Take action.

Dedrick Muhammad has an interesting publication, 40 Years Later: The Unfinished American Dream, out of the Institute for Policy Studies (April 2008) that provides strong challenges to the end-of-racism nonsense that we hear much about these days. In his summary he accents these points:

Since Dr. King’s death, the African American high school graduation rate has increased by over 214%. At this rate, African Americans will reach equality with white Americans by 2018.

It will take more than 537 more years for Blacks to reach income equality with whites if the income gap continues to close at the same rate it has since Dr. King was assassinated.

If the racial wealth divide continues to close as slowly as it has since 1983, it will take 634 years for Blacks to reach wealth equality with whites.

Forty years since Dr. King called for the abolition of poverty, the annual decline of poverty for Black children is about a quarter of a percentage point per year. At this rate it will take over a century to end poverty for Black children. Today a third of Black children live in poverty.

These facts about racial inequality are well-known to researchers and activists in this area.

photo credit: caboindex
Since not long after Dr. King spoke often about them, since the late 1960s, they just have not had much impact on public policy action, especially in recent years. We certainly are a country where such catastrophic racial inequalities, which reflect basically the past effects of hundreds of years of past and present systemic racism, somehow stay on the policy backburner while white-collar, almost all white male, criminals on Wall Street get their companies bailed out with a trillion or more–and usually get golden parachutes of millions personally—even as they have raped and destroyed our economy.

Muhammad also makes two points that you probably have never heard in the mainstream media or among social science researchers:

While the incarceration rate of African Americans is extraordinarily high, the probability of incarceration for white men has been increasing at a faster rate (268%) than for Black men (240%) since 1974.

The increase in the share of white children living in a single parent home has been much higher (229%) than for Black children (155%) since 1960.

So, there is, in terms of acceleration in recent decades, a very serious problem of increase in white crime and incarceration and in terms of white children living without two parents. Of course, the baselines for whites are relevant here to the percentage increases, but these percentages are in any event very sharp increases, to say the least.

I certainly have not heard ANY politician or media commentator (or other scholar for that matter) make a point out of either one of these white problems. Why isn’t the “problem of white families” and their “lack of family values” being discussed? Or the problem of “increasing white incarceration” being discussed? Maybe if they were we could start getting into deeper issues of why these might be seen as “problems,” and what “family” really means in this society. Or is that wishful thinking?

In March, I posted an item alerting readers to a newly-released report from the Pew Center on the States showing that the United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other country. Moreover, the report showed that the incarcerated population was disproportionately made up of young African American and Hispanic men and women. On May 5th, two additional reports were released detailing how drug enforcement policies and sentencing practices contribute to these racial disparities in arrests and incarceration. (photo: Pennington).


Disparity by Geography: The War on Drugs in America’s Cities, by Ryan S. King (Sentencing Project), is the first longitudinal analysis of city-level drug arrest data by race, covering the 23-year period (1980-2003) of the initiation and expansion of the “war on drugs.” Looking at 43 of the country’s largest cities, King found that 40 of these cities had a substantial increase in drug arrests during this time, with six cities showing an increase of more than 500%. Increases in drug arrests varied across the cities studied, but what is more interesting is that King found significant variations within states. For example, Tucson, Arizona had an 887% increase in drug arrests between 1980 and 2003, while the increase in Phoenix was only 52%. Once again, African Americans disproportionately bear the burden of these increases. The increase in drug arrests of African Americans was more than three times greater than the increase in drug arrests of white Americans (225% and 70%, respectively). In 11 of the cities examined, drug arrests of African Americans increased by more than 500% during the study period.


What accounts for these disparities? While some might argue they reflect racial differences in drug dealing and usage, the Sentencing Project report states that African Americans and whites have relatively equal rates of illegal drug use. King’s analysis indicates instead that the disparities are largely accounted for by law enforcement practices. More specifically, many law enforcement agencies have adopted a practice of saturation policing in which they concentrate their resources on low-income urban neighborhoods with large minority populations under the assumption that in these communities drug dealing is more open and more violent than that which occurs in suburban neighborhoods with predominantly white residents. But the data indicate that most arrests are not for violent drug-related crimes or even for the sale or manufacture of drugs, but rather for simple possession. In fact, four out of five drug arrests are for possession, and 40% of all drug arrests are for possession of marijuana.


In Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States, researchers at Human Rights Watch (HRW) document some of the consequences of the saturation policing strategy and the disparate impact on minority communities. The HRW analysis uses data from 34 states compiled by the National Corrections Reporting Program for 2003, the most recent year for which data are available. In an effort to “get tough” on drug crimes, many states adopted mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug offenders, resulting in a swelling of incarceration rates. For example, in 1980, “there were about 40,000 people in jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000” (The New York Times, April 23, 2008, p. A14). But the HRW report shows that not everyone has an equal chance of being incarcerated for a drug conviction.


The analysis documents that despite the fact that African Americans are 12.8% of the U.S. population, they were 53.5% of all individuals who entered prison in 2003 because of a drug conviction. Overall, blacks were 10.1 times more likely than whites to go to prison on drug convictions. In agreement with the Sentencing Project’s report, the HRW researchers conclude that this disparity is a direct outgrowth of the conceptualization of the nation’s drug problem as largely an urban black problem, even though there are data indicating that there may be six times as many white drug offenders as black drug offenders. “The racially disproportionate results presented in this report are as predictable as they are unjust” (p. 4).


One outcome of the rise in incarceration has been prison overcrowding with many states incurring a huge strain on their budgets. As their prison populations have grown, states have had to spend a larger share of their funds on corrections, diverting funds from other areas, such as education. Nationally, between 1987 and 2007, state spending on corrections increased 127%, while state spending on higher education increased 21%, controlling for inflation. In Michigan, spending on corrections exceeds spending on high education. To save money, some states have been looking for ways to reduce their prison populations, using programs such as early release, community supervision, and unsupervised parole (See Keith Richburg and Ashley Surdin, “Fiscal Pressures Lead Some States to Free Inmates Early,” Retrieved May 6, 2008 from http://www.washingtonpost.com ).


But the emphasis on fiscal costs overlooks the human costs of the “war on drugs” law enforcement strategy. As the Sentencing Project report states, saturation policing of minority urban neighborhoods that has resulted in the arrests of hundreds of thousands of young black men has not stopped drug sales or drug use in these communities. Instead, it has created a group of able-bodied citizens with a criminal history that renders them chronically unemployable. Many employers simply will not hire ex-offenders. Inadequate education is also an employment obstacle for many ex-offenders, but individuals with a drug conviction do not qualify for federal tuition grants. Those who get jobs sometimes face transportation problems because they have difficulty getting driver’s licenses. The jobs they get are typically low-paying, but while in prison, child support and court fees have accrued so they may find their meager paychecks are heavily garnished, leaving them with little to live on, let alone to support a family (The New York Times, April 27, 2008, p. 26). In short, the “war on drugs” law enforcement strategy has not solved the drug problem, but it has substantially reinforced social inequalities.


In April of this year, President Bush signed the Second Chance Act, a new law that provides $326 million in grants to local governments and nonprofit organizations for programs – from housing to drug treatment to employment services – that assist the approximately 650,000 people that are released from prisons and jails every year. Although the law received bipartisan support and has been praised by politically diverse groups, it is seen by many as insufficient largely because it focuses on the aftermath of imprisonment and not the factors that lead to imprisonment. Drug treatment, improved education, social services, community development to address urban blight, job training – all instead of using resources for saturation policing, arrest, and incarceration – would go a long way in not only reducing prison overcrowding and strained government budgets, but also reducing racial disparities in arrest and imprisonment and improving public safety in urban minority communities. As Julie Stewart, president and founder of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, recently commented regarding the Second Chance Act, “If we’re concerned [about] people coming out of prison, maybe we should think about how many people are going to prison in the first place. . . . This is the back end of the problem. We need to look at the front end” (quoted in Dan Eggen, “Bush Signs into Law a Program that Gives Grants to Former Convicts,” Retrieved May 6, 2008 from http://www.washingtonpost.com).


The full Sentencing Project report is available here; the Human Rights Watch report is available here.

This week I came across an article in Playboy (June 2008) suspiciously and nonsensically named, “The Black KKK: Thug Life is Killing Black America. It’s Time to Do Something About It” by Jason Whitlock. First the title grabbed my attention and caused my blood pressure to rise, for my scholarly intuition alerted me that the blame of Black violence would be placed on Blacks. Mr. Whitlock noted that the title was crafted not by him, but by the “second in command” under Hugh Hefner, Chris Napolitano, editorial director of Playboy magazine. Whitlock refers to Napolitano as a person “committed to stirring a racial controversy” with use of the title and his efforts in this regard are “calculated and deliberate.”


Whitlock missed pointing out that the title attempted to tie a white hate group that has historically (and presently) attempted to psychologically and physically terrorize people of color for centuries within the U.S. for the purposes of social control to an epidemic of violence between a segment of poor Black people. It is easier to compare oranges to apples than the KKK to Black violence.


The article in essence makes “a desperate plea for America to change course from its lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key criminal justice system. The approach doesn’t create safety. It breeds corruption and gang culture. And it is currently crippling state and federal budgets.” This is a point I and others (here and here) agree with.


The article does a good job at presenting information on the uniquely politically strong prison-guard union in California and their effects on policies and procedures around Black and Brown incarceration. This in fact is the same system that leads the country in the mentality of the “lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key criminal justice system” that has swept the country.


Whitlock fails in presenting an encompassing analysis of the issue of Black and Brown people being incarcerated. First, he fails to discuss or acknowledge the effects poverty has on the occurrences of crime. Secondly, he goes no where near presenting to the reader the effects of racism, oppression, and social control within the judicial system. Seeing him on varies television shows, it is apparent that Whitlock is grounded in a color-blind functionalist paradigm, therefore it does not amaze me that these variables were left out of the discussion. Now, I know that Mr. Whitlock’s forte involves writing within the sphere of sports. But he needs to stick to his arena of expertise of field goals and touch downs for writing on social issues without a critical lens within an arena such as Playboy can do more harm than good. What did he think would happen when publishing within a magazine (see also this) that has historically courted a particular population–well-to-do White males.

Slate.com has posted scanned copies of the racist emails the Secret Service has finally turned over to a judge in the long-running lawsuit filed by African American employees. This batch of emails sent in recent years (several date from 2003) by at least 20 high-ranking supervisors in the Secret Serviceare excellent examples of two-faced racism. As blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, many of the emails seem fixated on Jesse Jackson and the jokes in the emails focus obsessively on sexual innuendos about black men’s bodies. The majority of the racist emails posted at Slate.com take the form of jokes of the sort that many whites use to bond with each other in whites-only private, backstage spaces. One of the emails is noteworthy because it departs from this pattern. Instead, it’s more of a general rant that encapsulates much of the white racial frame. What’s especially interesting about this rant is that the middle-class, college educated, well-employed, white, male, heterosexual, author of the email characterizes himself as such a victim of the current cultural milieu of “reverse racism.” Here’s part of what the (very long) email says:

“Reverse racism and political correctness are destroying virtually every aspect of American life. We’re completely surrounded by illegal aliens (who even illegally vote in our elections…) suck up our welfare dollars, steal public educations, commit massive amounts of crimes to include rape and murder, and refuse to learn English (why the @#^* should I have to choose which language I want to use at the ATM? It wastes my time and disgusts me.) …”

Interestingly, part of what the author of this racist email is complaining about is the technology of ATM’s – many of which offer built-in options for selecting different languages.   These kinds of options that build racial or ethnic identity into the machine is what Lisa Nakamura has referred to as “menu driven” racial identity in the digital era.  While some writers have suggested that cyberspace offers there are new, liberating possibilities for moving away from old forms oppression tied to modernity, the actual picture is more complex.    What used to be an ‘old media’ form of racism, shared either face-to-face, written on the back of lynching postcards, or via telephone, today takes on a slightly new twist when some of these old forms of backstage communication make the transition to digital media and such messages are now sent between whites via email. In this instance, the emergence of cyber racism opens up the possibility of disrupting old patterns through the mechanism of forwarding email. What was once only said in private can now, through forwarded email, move beyond the private whites-only space for which such communication was intended. However, such a possibility was not sufficient to lead to an actual interruption in the transmission of white supremacy.  Note that in this instance, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a single white ally within the Secret Service who would ‘break rank’ and forward these racist emails outside the white-only intended audience.  Instead, what it took to wrest these emails from the backstage and bring them into the frontstage for all to scrutinize was it always takes to change entrenched forms of oppression:  political action.   In this instance, that took the form of a lawsuit by African American employees of the Secret Service.


The rest of the email quoted above goes on to make the case for the importance of intersectionality in discussions of racism.  He goes on to include elements of gender and sexuality in the latter part of his rant:

“I’m not even going to start on partial birth abortions and selling baby parts to heal old people (Are the Nazis back in power doing experiments?).  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, the two lesbians down the street from me…with their adopted Korean SON, menorahs in the front window….are a typical American family.   And I’m the sicko nut because I think they’re about as far from what God intended a normal family to look like as giant grasshoppers playing croquet on my front lawn.  But I’m the one with the screwed up view of reality.”

Screwed up, that’s one interpretation.   With this last, broad rhetorical swipe, the author pulls together themes of reproductive and sexual politics, homophobia, antisemitism, and combines it with yet more racism – this time against the adopted child of his lesbian neighbors.   The views he expresses here are indistinguishable from the overt white supremacist websites that I examine in my work.   Yet, people in power and the vast majority of whites in this country, continue to maintain that we have moved”beyond” racism.   Emails like the one discussed here suggest a far different reality.