Loading ...Archive for law
Systemic Racism & the “Race to Execution”
Posted by: | CommentsThe New York Times reported recently that a leading group, The American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the current system of capital punishment almost 50 years ago, pronounced the project a failure and walked away from it (h/t to Sister Scholar). Even though there were other important changes in news about the death penalty last year, including that the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely, but none of these changes was as significant as the institute’s move, which represents “a tectonic shift in legal theory.” The WSJ has more analysis of this issue here, suggesting we’re the throes of an upheaval in the administration of the death penalty.
We write here often about systemic racism and what that means. For compelling evidence about how race is built in to the very fabric of U.S. society, one needn’t look much further than the evidence about the race and the death penalty. Race is the single greatest factor in who lives and who dies when it comes to death penalty cases. A black defendant who kills a white victim is up to 30 times more likely to be sentenced to death than a white defendant who kills a black victim.
The imposition of the death penalty is even more likely when there is a black defendant and a predominantly white jury. Most minority defendants, especially in death penalty cases, are judged by predominantly white jurors. White male jurors can be especially persuasive in death penalty cases. Researcher Bowers, Steiner and Sandys (2001) analyzed cases in which a black defendant was accused of murdering a white victim found that the racial composition of the jury matters in death penalty cases. Once the proportion of white male jurors reaches 70%, the death penalty is far more likely.
The U.S. Supreme Court took this kind of data into consideration when it ruled in 1972 in the Furman v. George case and struck down the death penalty as “arbitrary and capricious.” Then, in 1987, the Supreme Court ruled again on the death penalty. In the McCleskey v. Kemp case, the court refused to overturn an individual decision to execute a particular man solely based on the bias in the system. Basically, what the Supreme Court basically decided that it didn’t want to look at the “statistics about race” because it wouldn’t consider the social science evidence in the case. The evidence, had they considered it, overwhelmingly showed a pattern of racial bias in who lives and who dies in death penalty cases.
instead, what the Supreme Court was suggesting was that they wanted to look at whether race played a role in each individual case, not at systemic racism. In some ways, what the Supreme Court was doing with this case was rejecting social science in the law and declaring that racial inequality is ineradicable and inevitable.
This is where the The American Law Institute comes in. They were attempting to “fix” what had been broken with the 1987 McCleskey v. Kemp decision, and see if there was some way to administer the death penalty in way that didn’t just reinforce racial discrimination already in place. Now, the organization has decided to abandon the project and admitted it was a failure. Another way of looking at this news is that this is further evidence that the death penalty is deeply, systematically racist and should be abolished.
There is a powerful documentary that tells this story in a fresh way called “Race to Execution” and it’s directed by Rachel Lyon, narrated by Charles Ogletree. While it’s been out a couple of years now, it recently re-aired on my local PBS station and I was moved by it once again. It’s a really powerful, and nuanced, telling of human stories of those affected by the death penalty interwoven with the court cases and social science research about race and the death penalty. (If you’re considering it for the classroom, there is lots of great additional material here.)
If race is the single greatest factor in who lives and who dies, and now the leading legal organization in the nation has admitted defeat in trying to change that, isn’t it time to abolish the death penalty and put an end to state-sponsored racism?
Anti-Latino Hate Crimes: Finally the New DOJ Acts
Posted by: | Comments
New American Media has a El Diario/La Prensa, Editorial, today about charges by the U.S. Department of Justice that white law enforcement officials worked with and protected the white teenagers who attacked and beat to death Luis Ramirez, apparently as part of a hate crime.
According to these charges,
Pennsylvania police officers, including the police chief of Shenandoah, Pa., abandoned their duty to uphold the law and instead aided and abetted the teenagers who brutally attacked Luis Ramirez. . . . The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) says they deliberately undermined an investigation and fair process.
That does sound like the white law enforcement agencies approach in most of the Jim Crow South until recent decades.
The editorial reminds us of the brutal details:
In 2008, Ramirez was beaten in Shenandoah by a gang of white teenagers who left him foaming at the mouth. The medical examiner ruled that his death was a homicide caused by blunt force trauma to the head. A witness said she heard the attackers spewing ethnic slurs, like “f-ing spic.”
Only two of the attackers have been tried so far, and they were acquitted by an all-white jury of the serious charges against them. According to the editorial the collusion is reported to be substantial:
The DOJ lays out the relationships between Shenandoah police officers and the defendants’ families. The police chief was friends with Piekarsky’s [one of the white defendants] mother. A patrolman … was dating her. . . . the chief … ignored advice for the department to recuse itself from the investigation. A lieutenant . .. is charged with lying to the FBI and with advising the parents of one of the attackers to get rid of the sneakers he wore during the assault on Ramirez. … The dizzying list of charges includes that the police failed to record certain statements by [the various defendants] are all charged with conspiring to falsify official police reports, with the intent of impeding and obstructing investigations into Ramirez’s murder. Ramirez’s attackers gave a false account of the beating, according to the DOJ.
Anti-Latino hate crimes are on the increase. The most recent FBI report counted some 830 Latinos in the last year as being victims of racialized crimes, a significant underestimate given that most law enforcement agencies do not make a serious effort to report such crimes to the FBI. This is up from a few years back. (For more, see chapter 8 here)
One relatively good sign of the times, it seems, is that the U.S. DOJ seems now, under President Obama, to be taking hate crimes much more seriously.
Native Americans Get a Little Justice in Trust Lawsuit, Maybe
Posted by: | Comments
Well, after a century or more of ripping off Native Americans’ trust accounts the U.S. government, that is the U.S. Justice Department, has finally agreed to a
a $3 billion settlement with Indian tribes. This marks the end of a 13-year lawsuit brought against the government by Indian tribes over billions of dollars in valuable land and oil royalties. The class action lawsuit Cobell v. Salazar alleged that the federal government mismanaged more than 300,000 American Indian trust accounts for more than a century. The American Indians claimed they were deprived of money they should have received for sale or usage of land for oil, gas, grazing and timber overseen by the Interior Department since 1887.
Under this agreement half a million account holders will receive some compensation, plus a modest Indian Education Scholarship Fund, possibly as much as $60 million, will be set up for Native American youth. All of this is conditioned of course on the court and the Congress agreeing.
Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff and executive director of the Native American Community Development Corp. (and a tireless campaigner for this justice) pointed out in this NPR report that numerous
plaintiffs have died since the suit began to wind its way through the courts in 1996. The original lawsuit was filed by Cobell and four other Indians on behalf of present and past beneficiaries of individual Indian trust accounts, including 300,000 then-current IIM account holders.
I have summarized some of this lawsuit’s history and historical contextin chapter six here:
In this lawsuit these Indian plaintiffs have sought a financial accounting and reform of the government’s trust account system, which had been mismanaged for a century. To this point in time, the U.S. government has fought their lawsuit. Soon after it filed, a federal judge ordered the departments of Interior and Treasury to produce records for the trust accounts for the named plaintiffs, which they did not do. These trust accounts stem from land allotments made to individual Indians in the nineteenth century. Profits from the land—such as leasing fees and royalties for oil, logging, and other land uses—should have been held in trust by the government, but poor or no records were kept. A federal judge referred to this as “fiscal and government irresponsibility.” In 2006 an Indian Trust Reform Act was introduced in Congress, but has yet to pass. If passed, this legislation would have provided $8 billion as a settlement (plaintiffs have requested $47 billion) to individual trust account holders and give some Indian groups control over trust assets on reservations.
The federal government gets off very easy in this settlement, and Native Americans once again get exploited.
A Belated Milestone in Racist America: Judge Sonia Sotomayor Confirmed
Posted by: | Comments
Judge Sonia Sotomayor was just voted on in the U.S. Senate and was confirmed in a 68-31 vote, with ailing Senator Kennedy not present but also a supporter. We now have the first woman of color and the first Latino ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. (She is also only the third woman out of about 111 justices who have ever served!)
(Photo Source: Wikipedia)
Senator Robert Menendez (NJ), the only Latino Democratic senator had this to say:
History awaits, and so does an anxious Hispanic community in this country the Senate’s lone Hispanic Democrat and the head of his party’s campaign arm, just minutes before the vote. When she places her hand on the Bible and takes the oath of office [scheduled for Saturday], the new portrait of the justices of the Supreme Court will clearly reflect who we are as a nation, what we stand for as a fair, just and hopeful people.
Yes, finally. There are about 47 million Latinos now in this country of about 300 million.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor: Issues of Empathy, Gender, and Gendered Racism
Posted by: | Comments
As we watch the hearings in the US Senate on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination, we can reflect on some images generated about her in most parts of the conservative sector and in the mass media that often plays lapdog for conservatives’ views. One conservative view accents her previous talks and speeches (but not, interestingly, her decisions in this regard) that indicate her important experiential understandings as a woman of color (”wise Latina”) and attacks her for thinking and operating necessarily out of her own racialized and gendered experience, as if that is possible for white men to do.
Indeed, when Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) questioned now Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito about these matters in his hearing a few years back, Coburn and other conservatives did not challenge this candid answer that Alito gave indicating that he operated very much out of his own experience (H/T Glenn Greenwald and Dailykos video ) in his own thinking about cases as a judge:
Because when a case comes before me involving, let’s say, someone who is an immigrant — and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases — I can’t help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn’t that long ago when they were in that positionAnd so it’s my job to apply the law. It’s not my job to change the law or to bend the law to achieve any result. But when I look at those cases, I have to say to myself, and I do say to myself, “You know, this could be your grandfather, this could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time, and they were people who came to this country.”
Isn’t Alito here speaking about having some human empathy for immigrants because of his own family’s immigrant experience? Yet, Coburn and other numerous conservatives (and some others) lately have tied some of what Sotomayor has said about her similar experiences to President Obama’s stated concern for judges to have empathy across important lines in society—apparently a bad thing to have, especially for many white conservatives, including many Republicans in Congress. Indeed, Sotomayor has been forced the last day or two to disagree with President Obama’s earlier statement on empathy in judging, and to assert what Alito does in this comment–that she does not make or bend the law to her personal views (etc.).
Is this conservative attack on the concept of empathy as it is raised by people of color like Obama and Sotomayor because they are afraid that real empathy across color lines is indeed corrosive of the oppressive structure of society, from which they greatly benefit? Hernan Vera and I have argued that individual racism and systemic racism generally require a lack of real inter-human empathy, what we call “social alexithymia”? Doesn’t US racism, past and present, require a breakdown of real empathy in the dominant racial group? Is real empathy corrosive of racist framing and much racist action?
Dailykos has an interesting June 2009 poll on how the public sees this judge/empathy issue. People we asked, "Do you think empathy is an important characteristic for a Supreme Court Justice to possess or not?" This was the breakdown for key demographic groups:
.........Yes No
18-29 63 17
30-44 47 34
45-59 55 26
60+ ...46 35
All age groups have a majority or plurality that said yes, but those under 30 are more oriented this way than older groups.
White ..41 39
Black ..81 4
Latino .79 4
Other ..79 5
Whites barely have a plurality for judges having empathy, but you can see that folks of color, who experience the harsh end of everyday racism, are far more likely to see human empathy as important, even though it is not defined in this survey. Majorities there seem to be coming from the same place as Judge Sotomayor in her comments. It would be interesting to do in-depth interviews to see what people understand the word “empathy” to mean. The survey also had an interesting gender breakdown:
Men ......48 34
Women .56 24
Both men and women were more yes than no, but the women were more strongly in the yes column. A majority of the whole sample comes down on the side of empathy for judges, white male Senators notwithstanding!
Let us explore some more aspects of this gender and leadership issue in another major survey of 2,250 adults done last year by the Pew Center. It is revealing in regard to various gendered matters that clearly relate to societal debates on Judge Sotomayor, and on other women recently nominated or appointed to key positions. The survey asked about the leadership traits and assets of men and women. The public, interestingly, seems more enlightened than some US senators.
(Source: Wikipedia)
On most leadership traits women did better than men. Half of the survey respondents viewed
women are more honest than men, while just one-in-five say men are more honest (the rest say they don’t know or volunteer the opinion that there’s no difference between the sexes on this trait). And honesty, according to respondents, is the most important to leadership of any of the traits measured in the survey.
Then there is the old saw that men are more intelligent, which was not accepted by the sample:
Here again, women outperform men: 38% of respondents say women are smarter than men, while just 14% say men are smarter, and the remainder say there’s no difference between the sexes.
On the qualities of hard work and ambition, there was a tie, with equal percentages citing women and men on each as better. Men did best on only one of the traits, decisiveness
with 44% of respondents saying that men are more decisive and 33% saying women are.
Most strikingly, perhaps, women had huge
leads over men on the last three traits on the public’s rankings of the eight items measured: being compassionate (80% say women; 5% say men); being outgoing (47% say women; 28% say men) and being creative (62% say women; 11% say men).
Significantly, the African American women were the most pro-female (womanist) in their views:
Nearly eight-in-ten (78%) black women (compared with 51% of white women and 50% of all adults) say women are more honest than men. About two-thirds (65%) of black women (compared with 37% of white women and 38% of all adults) say women are smarter than men. And about half (49%) of black women (compared with 33% of white women and 28% of all adults) say women are more hardworking than men.
I could not find a breakdown for Latinas or other women of color in the sample, but one might expect them to be closer to black women than white women? Most of the respondents also thought women made as good leaders as men, about 69 percent said so. If so, then, why are there so few women leaders in many sectors of society? The survey respondents agreed that it was substantially because of gender discrimination and the old boy’s club, with smaller percentages accenting women’s family responsibilities and lack of experience. However, Even with high marks for these virtues, women (the 51 percent population majority in the US) do not do well at the top of the society, as these statistics indicate:
2 percent the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies
17 percent of U.S. House members
16 percent of U.S. senators and governors
24 percent of state legislators
11 percent of the U.S. Supreme Court justices
And the statistics are even worse for women (and men of color), especially for Latinos/as like Sotomayor. It is odd that no one in the hearings has analyzed well the point that out of 110 Supreme Ct. justices so far in our history, 106 have been white men, virtually all elite white men. And this is supposed to be some sort of democracy? It is more like a male-ocracy?
It is significant that there seems to be some recognition of the gender discrimination faced by women in the survey too:
A majority of adults (57%) say the nation needs to continue to make changes to give women equal rights with men. A similar majority (54%) says discrimination against women is either a serious or somewhat serious problem in society
Now, the greatest political difficulty is getting some real societal change in the gendered, and gendered racist, structure of this society.
Should We Regulate Extreme Racist Speech Like Other Democracies?
Posted by: | Comments
photo credit: Caveman 92223
The New York Times blog site (HT, Zulema) has an editorial on the white supremacist and “free speech” issues arising out of recent killings. After their opening they have comments from a variety of criminological and legal experts (Phyllis B. Gerstenfeld, criminal justice professor; Chip Berlet, Political Research Associates; Eric Hickey, criminology professor; Edward J. Eberle, comparative law professor; Eugene O’Donnell, John Jay College of Criminal Justice; and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Simon Wiesenthal Center.)
Here is what the Times editors open with under the general theme of “room for debate”:
The killing of George Tiller, the abortion doctor in Wichita, Kan., and the attack on the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington yesterday have raised questions yet again about the role that extremist propaganda sites play in inciting violence among some militant believers. In both cases, the suspect arrested was well-known among fringe “communities” on the Web. Most legal scholars and many experts on extremist violence in the U.S. oppose reining in of such sites, or restrictions on extremist speech generally. Should the United States consider tighter restrictions on hate speech?
Notice the language here and in later parts of the analysts’ commentaries. They talk about “militant believers” from “fringe communities,” and sometimes call them “extremist.” One has to ask why they do not call these terrorists by the term “white terrorists”? Indeed, “white” rarely appears at all in the editorial or commentaries. If these white men had been “Middle Eastern extremists,” they likely would be called by that term. Do white men get a pass when it comes go this group-linked terrorism? And not one of the scholars even raises this question and the related one about the very long U.S. history of white terrorism (e.g., thousands killed by Klan-type groups) against people of color, as well as others like Jewish Americans.
The main debate in the Times blog here is over “free speech,” and how we cannot restrict white supremacist and other hate speech because of first amendment protections. One of the Times blog commentators, Edward J. Eberle, law professor at the Roger Williams University School of Law provides what I see as very interesting comments:
The United States is perhaps the only country in the world that allows for protection of hate speech. Much of this has to do with the idea that a free exchange of ideas is important and that allowing speech — even hate-filled speech — can be a safety valve that helps prevent outbreaks of violence. Under this view, speech needs to be regulated only when it will present a clear and present danger, as when it is a direct incitement to violence.
OK, why is this point not central in our media and political discussions: We are the only country that protects aggressive white supremacist and other aggressive hate speech. Why is that? Is it only because of our first amendment and conventional ideas of “free speech” in the United States? Is it because we really do cherish freedom more than other countries? Is our past and present history one of much greater freedom and liberty than other countries? Or is it because we (especially elite whites who run the country) do not see aggressive racist or other extremist hate speech as threatening to them and the values they care about?
Yet, the United States does NOT have unlimited “freedom of speech.” This notion is in fact a myth. As Eberle points out, things like obscene speech are not protected speech, “even when there is no concrete demonstration of harm.” Indeed, numerous types of speech are not protected, including obscene words, “fighting words,” some deceptive commercial ads, etc, as this comment from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (epic.org) indicates:
Obscenity. Speech defined as obscenity is outside the boundaries of First Amendment protection. As defined by Miller v. California, obscenity is speech that (1) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find, taken as a whole, to appeal to the prurient interest; (2) depicts or describes in a patently offensive manner specifically defined sexual conduct; and (3) lacks as a whole serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. The definition of obscenity, developed in 1973, focuses on a local “community standard,” and has proven to be the crux of litigation surrounding internet censorship cases, which by their nature cannot depend upon local community standards.
So, let me get this straight, we do legally ban obscene words, sexual words, obscene speech in many contexts even when these words have not been, or cannot be, proven to create significant harm. We still ban them in numerous settings regardless of the first amendment. But it is OK to spout much racist hate speech all over the place, including on the Internet, when one can show it causes some or much harm–including inciting people like white terrorists to commit violence against people of color and others? (Some “communities’ standards” and views of what is harmful clearly count more than others.)
Eberle notes how isolated the “free” United States is from other free countries, including those we consider our closet allies and kindred countries. Most do not protect serious hate speech, but prosecute it:
This is the case in all the European countries, like Germany, France, Britain, etc., and also Canada.
Notice that these are countries with high levels of free speech, in many ways countries where speech is more diverse and/or free than in the United States (as many newsstands in these countries reveal). Their legal systems recognize a conflict in human freedoms. The right of freedom of speech is not so absolute and does not always trump the right freedom from extremist hate speech and related hate crimes. Eberle notes what he calls the U.S.
individualist model of a right to self-determination and expression. For the Europeans and others, there is also a right to speak your mind, but there are some bounds based on respect of others.
So, how did we get to this backward place of protecting extreme racist speech over the right to be free from such vicious, often violence-generating hate speech attacks? Not one of these criminologists and law professors speaks to how we as a country might reasonably regulate the most extreme forms of racist hate speech, the kind designed to incite people to discriminate and commit hate crimes. These analysts do not consider what other “advanced” democratic countries do in this regard as legal or political strategies we might just consider in dealing with aggressive and virulent hate speech. Why are we so ethnocentric and provincial in not even knowing about or considering other, often more democratic, legal and political systems–and what they do to free their citizens from such virulent racist attacks?
Addendum: Paul Krassner reviews some of the array of speech censored and banned under the “obscenity” regulations of various places in the country. But no hate speech.
Racists calling “Racist”
Posted by: | Comments
BarbinMD at dailykos has a useful summary of some of the right-wing white male commentators calling Sonia Sotomayor “racist,” even with their own extensive records of racist commentaries and actions (Image Source: Wikipedia). Barbin MD reproduces this nice little discussion centered on congress critter, Tom Tancredo, and a young white male associate:
TANCREDO: If you belong to an organization, called La Raza in this case, which is from my point of view anyway, just nothing more than a Latino, it’s a counterpart, it’s a Latino KKK without the hoods …
SCHUSTER: A Latino KKK — would you like to take this opportunity to apologize?
TANCREDO: (Laughs) No.
SANCHEZ: It turns out that Tom Tancredo has some explaining to do on this very front, because the Executive Director of his political action committee, his political action committee, has admitted to a blatantly racist act. It’s now revealed that in 2007, this man, Marcus Epstein, according to a Secret Service witness, came out of a bar in Washington, called a woman the “n” word, and then slapped her in the head. Slapped her in the head. He fled the scene, but he was eventually arrested. Epstein, who is due back in court next month, is blaming his behavior on too much alcohol. But according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, it’s more than that. They have described Epstein as a man with a network of racist connections. Back to Tancredo now — who said on this show, people who associate with racist organizations are racists. Congressman, why is Mr. Epstein still in charge of your political organization? And what sir, does that say about you? We got in touch with Tancredo. He declined to answer our questions yesterday, repeatedly.
Various folks like Tom Tancredo, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh first called not only the La Raza civil rights group, but also Judge Sonia Sotomayor a racist, but then later started backing off on this and sounding confused.Rush Limbaugh is one good example, as here in this meandering gibberish:
… it’s racism, reverse racism, whatever, but it’s still racism. And she would bring a form of racism, bigotry to the court. But as I said yesterday, folks, I may look past that. I’ve got a whole stack on Sotomayor today. You know she would be the sixth Catholic on the Supreme Court and there are a lot of people worried about that. That does not bother me at all. I know a lot of Catholics, I love Catholics. But Sotomayor, she’s a Catholic, and she doesn’t have a clear record on abortion and I’m, overturning Roe versus Wade, well, that could be huge. I don’t know that it’ll ever happen, but if, you know, the opportunity to get somebody like her — she’s a Catholic, she’s a devout Catholic. She’s a Hispanic Catholic, Puerto Rican, they tend to be devout. She hasn’t got a record on this. Normally liberals do have a record, I mean when they’re pro-choice, man they’re, they, they, they champion it. They shout from mountaintops, they trumpet it. She hasn’t so I, I can see a possibility of supporting this nomination. If I can be convinced that she does have a sensibility toward life.
Given his own record of racist comments, this is very strange indeed.
Living in this country, when it comes to issues of race and racism is often like being Alice in Wonderland. The white-controlled mainstream media commentators get to define any word, like “racist” or “racism,” just about any way they want to. Why then do we have social scientists working so hard on trying to gather data on racism and defining it more precisely?
President Obama Nominates the First Woman of Color to the Supreme Court
Posted by: | Comments
President Obama has just nominated the first woman of color, a Latina, Sonia Sotomayor, ever for the US Supreme Court. It is way past time for this. Only four of the 110 Supreme Court justices ever serving on that high court–which operates much like an unelected legislative body in our system–have not been (mostly elite) white men. Here is the White House report and video.
A DailyKos Diarist, AlRodgers, has some great photos at this link.
Here is some of her personal and civil rights background as listed by Rodgers:
Age 55
► Raised in the Bronxdale Housing project, in the South Bronx, New York
► Die hard New York Yankee Fan!!!
► Her father was a tool-and-die maker, who passed away when she was 9.
► Raised with her brother by single-mother, who was a nurse in a methadone clinic.
► Won scholarship to Princeton University, where she graduated summa cum laude.
► She earned her law degree at Yale, where she was editor of the law journal.
► At 40, she became the youngest judge in the Southern District of New York and the FIRST judge of Puerto Rican descent.
► Divorced; no children.
► Assistant DA for Manhattan from 1979 to 1984; Partner at Pavia & Harcourt from 1984 to 1992.
► U.S. District Court judge in Manhattan in 1992-1998; U.S. Appeals Court judge in Manhattan in 1998-present.
► Board member of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.
That last item is very revealing. This PRLDEF organization on which she serves as a board member is one of our leading civil rights organizations.
For example, they have been working very hard to deal with the discrimination against Latino workers and immigrants that we have blogged about several times in recent months. See here, for example:
LatinoJustice PRLDEF has warned Mahopac Town Supervisor Kenneth Schmitt that his attempts to initiate a program which would authorize local police to arrest Latino day laborers on public sidewalks could lead to a costly lawsuit.
Latinos in Plainfield, NJ won a major legal victory when a Federal judge dismissed a claim alleging that renting apartments to undocumented immigrants constitutes unlawful harboring. Attorneys from LatinoJustice PRLDEF filed an Amicus Brief in the case on behalf of Latino residents of several rental communities in Plainfield managed by Connolly Properties, Inc. There have been mounting tensions in Plainfield over its growing immigrant population, including a series of beatings and robberies targeting Latinos.
It will be very interesting to watch how conservatives and Republicans deal with this matter. Attacks on her will alienate not only much of Latino/Hispanic America, but also much of the Latino world outside the US. As well as most progressives of all backgrounds. What is your take on this excellent nomination?
UPDATE
Southern studies has an interesting discussion of the potential significance of this nomination for voting rights, given Sotomayor’s opposition to attempts to keep voters of color out of the voting booth:
FELON DISENFRANCHISEMENT: Judge Sotomayor’s biggest voting rights case has likely been Hayden v Pataki. In this 2006 case in the 2nd Circuit, ex-felon Joseph “Jazz” Hayden brought a challenge under the Voting Rights Act against New York’s law banning ex-felons from voting. Civil rights advocates had mobilized around the case, saying felon disenfranchisement laws showed a clear history of racial discrimination. The [appellate court's] majority dismissed the case, but Judge Sotomayor dissented, saying the issue of discrimination was actually quite simple, as SCOTUSBLOG reports: “[Sotomayor] opined that the issue was actually much simpler than the majority and concurring opinions would suggest: the VRA “applies to all ‘voting qualifications,’” and – in her view – the state law “disqualifies a group of people from voting.” “These two propositions,” she concluded, “should constitute the entirety of our analysis.”
There is also a good detailed discussion on SCOTUSBLOG about her qualifications as revealed in her many court decisions.
SECOND UPDATE
The nomination has gotten lots of white supremacist types into an assassination mode, as an ad was put into a paperin Pennsylvania to that effect. Other stuff like this too::
“Unfortunately, the attitude of the person who placed the ad is too prevalent in Pennsylvania,” said Michael Morrill, the executive director of Keystone Progress. “In the last few days we’ve gotten emails calling the president ‘chimp’ and the n-word after he nominated Judge Sotomayor. It makes it very difficult to organize around issues when the opposition to the president’s policies is so racially charged. ”
<!– /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Verdana; panose-1:2 11 6 4 3 5 4 4 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:536871559 0 0 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Verdana; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –>
Update three: More commentary from our blogger, José A. Cobas:
I find the discussion of Sotomayor’s nomination in the white-dominated media replete with absurdity. Suggesting that Cardozo belongs in this discussion is nonsense. Cardozo was a Sephardic Jew whose family lived in Portugal for a time. [They migrated later, directly from England.] It was not unusual for Jews in the Iberian Peninsula to take Portuguese or Spanish surnames. Cardozo’s self-identity was Jewish. He was appointed to the “Jewish” seat in the Supreme Court that Felix Frankfurter had vacated. As Rubén Rumbaut put it, to suggest that Cardozo was Hispanic makes as much sense as saying that the last baseball player to hit .400 was Hispanic. (Ted Williams’ mother was from Mexico.) White elites have been very diligent in protecting the boundaries of the white racial category. Their casual use of “non-white” racial categories is simply a reflection of the fact that in the U.S. racial world the difference between whites and every other racial group is where the action is. The identity of the “other than white” masses is inconsequential.
MALDEF Combats Racist Attacks on Immigrants
Posted by: | Comments
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)–created in Texas in 1960s and now a leading Latino civil rights and educational organization–operates a “Truth in Immigration” website with useful information and research data on how the media are portraying Latino immigrants, with an accent on errors. One of their productions is this short video (2:29) (see here) , which does a good job of highlighting some recent media distortions:
Media Matters has also challenged the conservative blaming of undocumented immigrants for our current (Bush) economic depression as having no solid evidence for their claims. Conservative
media figures have baselessly claimed that according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 5 million mortgages taken out by undocumented immigrants are in default, or close to it. In fact, according to an October 9, 2008, Phoenix Business Journal article, HUD “says there is no basis to news reports that more than 5 million bad mortgages are held by illegal immigrants. A HUD spokesman said … his agency has no data showing the number of illegal immigrants holding foreclosed or bad mortgages.” Nevertheless, conservative media figures continued to baselessly attribute the financial crisis in part to excessive lending to illegal immigrants, including:
* San Diego radio host Roger Hedgcock and radio host Joe Madison, during the October 9, 2008, edition of Lou Dobbs Tonight; * Phoenix radio station KFYI, in an article on its website; * The Drudge Report in an October 9, 2008, link to the KFYI article; * Syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin in a September 24, 2008, column; * Limbaugh, during the October 10, 2008, broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show* Radio host Lee Rodgers, during the October, 10, 2008, broadcast of KSFO’s The Lee Rodgers Show; * Radio host Jim Quinn, during the October 10, 2008, broadcast of Clear Channel’s The War Room with Quinn & Rose
As we have discussed here numerous times, this type of fear-mongering accounts for some/much of the rise in hate crimes against US Latinos, including many attacks on undocumented and other immigrants. Recent FBI data indicate that “hate crimes” against Latinos increased in the most recent data year; some 4,956 people were reported as victims of racially motivated crimes. About seven in ten of those victimized (3,434) were targeted because of an anti-black bias, and 830 Latinos were also victims of racial hate crimes. These numbers are very serious underestimates, because most (nearly 15,500) of the 17,500 police jurisdicitions do not report their hate crimes or report zero hate crimes.
Indeed, a 2009 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center calculated from various data that at least “210,000 people a year are victimized by hate crimes, the vast majority of them motivated by race or ethnicity.” According to this report much of the recent increase in hate crimes has involved immigrants from Latin America. In addition, they report that the number of racist hate groups, such as Klan and neo-Nazi groups, has grown by nearly 50 percent over the last decade (up to 926 groups now!). They suggest that much of that growth is connected to nativistic agitation against Latino immigrants in the media and by white politicians.
Nominate Kimberlé Crenshaw for Supreme Court
Posted by: | CommentsWith the soon-to-be vacant seat on the Supreme Court due to the retirement of Justice Souter, President Obama has a unique opportunity to make history with his nominee to fill that position. I want to add my voice to Melissa Lacewell Harris’ call to nominate Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw to the Supreme Court (hat tip: @bfp @harrislacewell via Twitter). Crenshaw is, as Harris describes her, a “field-defining scholar” in the area of race, gender and the law.
Earlier this week, First Lady Michelle Obama joined other women at the U.S. Capitol to dedicate a bust of Sojourner Truth, abolitionist and early advocate for women’s right to vote. At that ceremony, Mrs. Obama said, “I hope that Sojourner Truth would be proud to see me, a descendant of slaves, serving as the first lady of the United States of America.”
To really bring change and fulfill the legacy of Sojourner Truth, President Obama has a unique opportunity to seat the first black woman on the Supreme Court. Crenshaw is that woman.
