Documented Discrimination in Arpaio’s Arizona

• • criminal justice, immigration, Latinos, law, police, racial profiling, racism, white racial frame



Self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio has made the news again for his treatment of undocumented immigrants in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. On December 15, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a report that details unlawful and inhumane abuses carried out by Arpaio and his underlings against “illegals” between 2008 and the present. It details violations in community policing and in the County detention facilities. Below are some excerpts:

• Latino drivers are four to nine times more likely to be stopped than similarly situated non-Latino drivers.

• Our investigation uncovered a number of instances in which immigration-related crime suppression activities were initiated in the community after MCSO [Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office] received complaints that described no criminal activity, put rather referred, for instance, to individuals with “dark skin” congregating in one area, or individuals speaking Spanish at a local business.

• Individual accounts regarding MCSO deputies stopping Latinos on the basis of their appearance corroborate the use of discriminatory policing practices.

• MCSO detention officers discriminatorily punish Latino LEP [Limited English Proficient] inmates who fail to understand commands given in English by, for example, locking down their pods (which increases the risk of inmate-on-inmate violence), or imposing disciplinary segregation (solitary confinement).

• MCSO detention officers refuse to accept forms completed by Latino LEP inmates in Spanish. Such forms include tank orders, which enable inmates to request basic daily services, and grievance forms, which enable inmates to identify and address alleged mistreatment. Even in instances when Spanish language requests are accepted, Latino LEP inmates face delays in services for not submitting requests and grievance forms in English.

Arpaio is popular among (mostly white) voters not only in Arizona but also in the rest of the nation, to such extent that several GOP presidential candidates sought his endorsement, which he eventually gave to Rick Perry.

At first blush, it is hard to believe that these injustices were perpetrated so unabashedly, but when one remembers how “illegals” are so very negatively viewed in the dominant White Racial Frame, it makes perfect sense.

Thinking Black: Derrick Bell and the Living of a Racial Realist Life.

• • African Americans, law, racism, social justice, systemic racism, white supremacists, whiteness, whites

The Negro, in the universities and colleges of Europe and America, has to do his thinking and his reading in…the white man’s language…Our environment makes us think white, and some of us think white so persistently that we haven’t the time to think Black. I urge upon you…to help, with voice and pen, to hasten the coming of the morning when Negroes all over this broad land will wake up to the importance of thinking Black. (John Edward Bruce—“The Importance of Thinking Black”—1917}

The academic production of “race theory” is itself fraught with a dishonesty that few care to admit. To speak about race without attending to the very real social, economic, and political consequences of racism, says Barbara J. Fields in “[w]hiteness, Racism and Identity,” is to afford whites a symmetrical parity in our academic discourse that not only contradicts reality, but exposes the very content of our academically approved “race theory” to be little more than the careful arrangement of euphemisms taught to us by our white oppressors to obscure the deliberate machinations of racism. The life of Derrick Bell stands in sharp contrast to this practice, as only a life lived with Black people in mind can. His body of work is not only a testament to John E. Bruce’s call, but a literature that shames, even today, our irreconcilable attempts to rationalize our cowardice and maintain détente with white racists, despite their tyrannical reign throughout the university and in American society.

It is standard practice of scholars to honor their intellectual fore-parents who have been caste into the shadows of history, we eulogize their memories and praise their life’s work as a goal to which we should all aspire, but Derrick Bell’s life is the stuff “Black thought” is made of and resists such “fluffy-ization.” Derrick’s courage rang with the testament of Black thinkers from beginning to end. When I dared to suggest back in October of 2007 that philosophers were trying to make sense of his work next to Marx and Nietzsche, he told me that he considered himself

the academic counterpart of Errol Garner, the late jazz pianist from my hometown, Pittsburgh, who never learned to read music fearing, as I understand it, that it would ruin his style. I think there must be value in Marxist and other writings, but I did not really read them in college and have had little time since. I am writing this in Pittsburgh where I have been celebrating my 50th law school reunion from Pitt Law School. I do care more about the thought and writings and actions of Du Bois, Robeson, Douglass, et al. I think during my talk at UCLA, I read from the 1935 essay by Ralph Bunche about the futility of using law to overcome racism. It made more sense than so much of the theoretical writings on law, past and present, that I can barely understand and have great difficulty connecting with my experience. And you are right. At almost 77, I do not care to write in ways that whites can vindicate.

Throughout our many exchanges concerning his thought, Derrick remained convinced that attacking racism, the deliberate system of social, political, and legal subjugation of Black people, was the task of the Black Intellectual. He believed whole-heartedly that equality, even under Obama, was little more than illusion. In a speech he sent me entitled “On Celebrating an Election as Racial Progress,” he said that

every aspect of Barack Obama’s election and Inauguration has been covered like a heavy rain on a parched landscape. His taking office as the first black president is deemed a racial breakthrough….[but], in our celebrations, we should not confuse progress with fortuity, as we have while celebrating so many earlier unique moments that appeared to signal significant racial advances.

As early as 1976, Derrick Bell had already formulated the basis of his now famous racial realist thesis—the idea that

Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those Herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than ‘temporary peaks of progress,’ short lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance”—in the realization that “white self-interest will prevail over [B]lack rights.

Following the teachings of his mentor Robert L. Carter, Bell understood well that integration offered Blacks nothing but proclamations of equality without daring to question the white supremacist organization of society. While the Black bourgeois continue to market  the suffering of poor, disenfranchised, brutalized and terrorized Black people as a means to gain visibility and compassion from white gatekeepers, Bell lived a life that demonstrated struggle amidst the permanence of white supremacy, not because he believed in a “mythical hope” in whites’ moral character, but because he saw Afrolantica and knew just as his hero Paul Robeson that Blacks could create a world here in America unseen by the tyrannical gaze of whites and unrecognizable to those who simply cannot “THINK BLACK.”

I will always remain grateful for his friendship; his time, and his patience in helping me understand the totality of his thought while writing my dissertation on his work. He has certainly earned his place at the table of our ancestors. To his remembrance.

Professor Curry teaches and researches philosophy at Texas A&M University

Conversations about Race in the Legal Profession: The White Racial Frame

• • Latinos, law, white privilege, white racial frame



What happens when a profession that doesn’t come close to representing the demographics of diversity in America has a conversation about race? I just found out.

Because of the recent publication of my book, Everyday Injustice based on extensive interview-based research (the first in the history of US social science) about the experiences of many Latino attorneys, the editor of the American Bar Association requested an article drawing from my book for the ABA’s monthly publication. I was (and remain) honored to be invited to contribute to the journal–especially because I had the privilege of interviewing the very first Latino president of the ABA in its history!

However, I did not expect the comment stream that followed. It began with someone saying, “Waahhhhh! Waaaaahhh!” and ended with a couple of individuals spouting off typical resentful racist rants with one commentator finally stating: “Overall, I think the legal profession focuses way too much on gender and minority issues.” I hurled some comments back, so I am not blameless in the whole discussion, and most of the responses where quite supportive. Nonetheless, the two or three individuals who attacked not only my research methods and findings, but also the very importance of the discussion on the experiences of Latinos itself is very revealing.

What kinds of skews develop in perspectives and in practice when some people do not have to see other people as connected to the whole of humanity? What happens when a profession that is 90 percent white (thereby not reflective of the reality of American society) tries to have a discussion on race?

The white-generated racist realities of American society as demonstrated in Joe Feagin’s The White Racial Frame become evidently clear. Emotions surrounding the old white racist framing of Latinos and all people of color demonstrate we have a long way to go before we can see the connections between and among each other more than we focus on the differences which will lead to racial equality, at least in this is what I learned about the legal profession after contributing to the journal.

One More Reason to Oppose Secure Communities Policy: It’s Racist

• • anti-immigrant, immigration, law, racism

The secure communities policy is driving a massive increase in deportations. Since President Obama took office, we have seen one million deportations. In 2010, the United States deported 400,000 people, more than in the entire decade of the 1980s. The secure communities policy is also racist.

(Photo by Runs with Scissors)

This rise in deportations is due to laws passed in 1996, and a massive infusion of money into draconian enforcement of immigration law with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). With an annual budget of $60 billion, DHS has been able to expand its operations far beyond those of its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

When we look at who is getting deported, however, it’s clear that Asian and European immigrants are almost never deported, yet blacks and Latinos are deported in massive numbers. And, nearly all deportees are men. Sound familiar? Yes, racial and gender disparities in immigration law enforcement look a lot like those in criminal justice law enforcement.

Police are much more likely to arrest blacks and Latinos. In New York State, 94% of those arrested on drug charges are black or Latino. And, yes, whites and Asians do use and sell drugs. They are just rarely arrested.

Now that President Obama has forced more cooperation between police and immigration law enforcement through the Secure Communities program, we can expect to see more blacks and Latinos deported.

Stereotyping Muslim Americans: The White Racial Frame Expanded

• • law, Muslim Americans, racism, stereotyping, white privilege, white racial frame



I received this participant-observation note today from a student (thanks Chris) at a major east coast college, who attended a hearing of the NJ Senate Judiciary Committee on June 27th was at the State House in Trenton, NJ. It says a lot about how backward we have become on the overt (post-post-racial?) white-racist framing of people who are not white, and most especially those seen as new immigrants or “foreigners.” This racist framing, in this case of a Muslim American lawyer from India, now often is so extreme that it rivals some of the worse racist framing and harassment in U.S. history.

Chris begins his observational account with the setting:

The hearing’s main purpose was to confirm a slate of nominees to the NJ Superior Court. The first hour or so of the hearing passed in much the same manner that I’d imagine most state-level judiciary committee hearings do. A few white nominees for the Superior Court came before the committee, swore a short oath of truthfulness, were greeted with kind words by one committee member or another, and gave a brief statement expressing their gratitude to various persons, their commitment to fairly and impartially uphold the law, and their willingness to answer any questions. Just one of the three/four . . . nominees who came before Mr. Mohammed was asked a question. It was a courtesy softball to give the nominee a chance to brag about her experience.

Then an Asian American nominee, Sohail Mohammed, was called up. He came to the U.S. as a child with Asian Indian parents, got an engineering degree, worked as an engineer while he also went to law school in his spare time. As an influential immigration lawyer, he won awards and two years ago was named one of the 101 most influential people in the state New Jersey by the New Jersey Monthly magazine. He is also on the state’s ‘Super Lawyer’ list (2006 to 2010).

Chris then describes a rather dramatic change from what happened to the white nominees:

On paper, his is a classic tale of rags-to-riches in the land of opportunity, but two of the committee members saw in him not the American Dream, but rather the “enemy within”. NJ State Senators . . . grilled Mr. Mohammed on his religious beliefs, his past clients, and his affiliation with a Muslim-American civil group. They asked him to define jihad, after which he was made to state under oath that he would adhere to the New Jersey and U.S. Constitutions–and not Sharia law in his rulings from the bench.

This is clear evidence that the far-right propaganda machine has so stereotyped Muslims and Middle Eastern peoples that numerous major political officials see Muslim Americans as alien or extremists first, and maybe “real” Americans after a full interrogation. Once again, they often seem rather uninformed about Islam and the history of actual Muslim Americans. (No Muslim American was involved, for example, in the 9/11 terrorism.)
Chris then adds:

He was questioned in detail on the nature of his association with the Muslim American Brotherhood, which works to advance relations and understanding between the Muslim-American community and non-Muslim Americans. He was questioned in even greater detail on his duties as a member of an FBI group tasked with building cultural understanding of Islam and Muslim-Americans among law enforcement and intelligence personnel in the wake of 9/11. He was asked to defend having represented an Imam whose immigration paperwork was later found to contain an honest error.

In contrast, too, white politicians and interrogators never seem to raise questions about the many Christian Americans who are nominated for various critical and sensitive government positions–and yet belong to a religion that has many members in US groups with extremist-religious or terrorist connections like the extreme anti-abortion groups or the white Christian Klan-type groups in the United States (recall Tim McVeigh too).

Chris’s reactions seem appropriate:

The attacks on Mr. Mohammed were baseless, outrageous, embarrassing, and insulting; yet, most of the senators who came to his defense did little to challenge the narrative that informed his attackers. The witnesses from “Women Against Sharia Law” and the Tea Party suggested that Mr. Mohammed had terrorist ties. A few Senators spoke out against these allegations, but only because they were sure that Mr. Mohammed’s background had been thoroughly vetted by the FBI and the Governor’s office. They countered the questions about his religious beliefs and civic associations by pointing to his extraordinary qualifications, as if to say, “we don’t have to worry about this Muslim, look how successful he is.”

Only two senators spoke out about the racial profiling done by the others at the hearing:

The last witness I heard before walking out suggested that it was inappropriate to put a Muslim on the bench because this is the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 and the face of the justice system should not be the same as the “face of those who attacked our country.” Mr. Mohammed’s children were in the audience the whole time.

The array of discrimination against Muslim and Middle Eastern Americans in recent years is broad–racist jokes, cartoons, e-mails from fellow employees, not being hired or promoted because of Islamic religious observance, taunted with slurs. Many cases of employer discrimination involve workplace prohibitions against religious practices, such as not allowing Muslim men to wear beards or not permitting daily prayers. And then there is this chronic type of racial profiling. We as a country, and especially some arch-conservative whites, seem to be moving in the old nativistic or racist direction of needing scapegoats to blame for various U.S. problems, or just to take out collective minds off the much serious and central reality of white racial framing and institutionalized racism still at the core of this society.

Latina Struggles: Challenges Within the Culture

• • Latinos, law, Mexican Americans, racism, sexism, social change



Discussing dysfunctions within a minority culture that already experiences oppression and discrimination by mainstream white society is a difficult thing to do. Many women of color—Asian, Indian, and Black women understand sexist treatment from both dominant white society and from their cultures. Black women have courageously written about the unique oppression as women of color from Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I a Woman to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s pathbreaking article in the late1980s, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” to the writings of Audre Lorde, and bell hooks to name a few. These and many other women of color have provided the foundation for analyses that examine how multiple identities such as race, class and gender result in increased oppression for women of color that are separate from those of white women. The same is true for Latinas.

The unequal treatment of Latinos in many aspects of traditional Latino culture is one of the greatest dysfunctions of our culture. And my study on Latino lawyers demonstrates that even for Latina professionals, this dysfunction does not easily go away. It is evident within the law firm and it is also evident in many traditional Latino families.

For example, Josefa one of the Latina attorneys I interviewed had this to say about sexism in the firm environment:

I see women more involved. Men often get the limelight, but women do the work….What’s ironic is that women are not reaping the benefits and success that men generally experience as a result of community involvement. All you have to do is look at the rate of women making partnership in firms. The percentage is absolutely dismal.

Reflecting on her time in law firms, Josefa commented,

There is such isolation. Even after you ‘make it,’ you are probably the only Latina or the only woman of color. You are always viewed as the outsider, with little support to help you succeed. No one tells you of the land mines because, frankly, you make them uncomfortable and they really want you to go away. . . . Perhaps it is our past that prevents Latinas from fitting into a profession where people frequently come from very privileged backgrounds.

Latinas experience sexism in our culture as well. As one Latina respondent shared with me,

When I was in law school and I’d go to Latino dances with my friends, we would have to lie to the guys so they would ask us to dance again.

She and her friends discovered that once they revealed they were law school students they would not get asked to dance again. So they developed the strategy of telling the Latinos whom they were interested in dancing with again that they were secretaries in order to be asked for more dances. Sharing this experience made her laugh. However, she quickly stopped laughing and said that one of her greatest personal challenges has been with her traditional Latino family stating it has been very difficult “to be taken seriously . . . being taken seriously that this was my career choice and that I would be good at it.”

Many of the Latina respondents also expressed feeling trapped between unreasonably rigid gender roles in Latino culture and stereotypes and limitations from mainstream society. As one Latina attorney from Seattle stated:

I think people need to understand the challenges of becoming a lawyer in spite of our culture that expects different from us, from our families that expect less from us, from our husbands that are not always supportive. The fact that in our culture humbleness is a virtue but not in American culture. That culturally we sometimes feel caught between acting as advocates for Latinos in an American system or acting as Americans representing foreigners.

In fairness, many Latinos recognize the problem with traditional sexist roles in Latino culture as well. One of the male Latino attorneys relayed the following experience during one of his volunteer Latino youth educational outreach efforts:

One thing during undergraduate work at the business school, once in a while they sent out brochures and those kinds of things, and we asked high school students from Eastern Washington, especially [which] is where we were trying to focus. You know, get them here to the U [the University of Washington] so they can experience it. And I remember one response from this high school girl that she really wanted to come but her parents felt that a girl’s position was in the house. So you had those cultural barriers as well.

Rigid gender roles hurt the entire Latino community, are recognized by both Latinos and Latinas, and unfortunately, are also perpetuated by both Latinos and Latinas. Until we face this dysfunction in our culture we hold ourselves back. I am not saying that white culture isn’t sexist, but Latinas and other women of color have to fight for equality, respect, and freedom not just within dominant mainstream society, but also within their own families and culture.

We have to fight being oppressed and controlled at many levels. And my study on Latino lawyers’ experience underscores this huge problem. There is a long entrenched historical pattern of unequal treatment and even the devaluing of Latinas in traditional Latino culture. Ignoring these challenges within our culture will only keep us all down.

Thousands March against Georgia’s Nativistic Immigration Law

• • freedom and equality, immigration, Latinos, law, nativism, protests, resistance, white privilege, whites



Here’s a good article on the march in Atlanta by thousands against the new nativistic Georgia law on immigration. Parts of the law have already been voided by a judge, as has been the case in Arizona and Utah:

Men, women and children of all ages converged on downtown Atlanta for the march and rally, cheering speakers while shading themselves with umbrellas and posters. Capitol police and organizers estimated the crowd at between 8,000 and 14,000. They filled the blocks around the Capitol, holding signs decrying House Bill 87 and reading “Immigration Reform Now!”

These nativistic laws, which mostly arch-conservative white legislators are passing in a number of states, always remind me that all of us, except for the indigenous folks, are indeed immigrants or the descendants of fairly recent immigrants to this continent. And they need, I think, to ponder carefully the 1880s poem of immigrant Emma Lazarus on our Statue of Liberty:

The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Somehow the mostly white nativists forget we are an immigrant nation, and that these Latino, Asian, and other recent immigrants and their children have constantly saved this country from economic decline by providing a regular infusion of new and usually youthful workers who are willing to work, often in the worst jobs in the country, to build new lives and families–and thus to build up the US as it like many countries would otherwise have an aging population and too few younger workers (as in much of Europe)……. They also constantly bring in new cultures, new ideas, new currents of all kinds. I suggest we remember Emma Lazarus’s fine words on the Statue of Liberty, this July 4th.

International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination: US Failures

• • affirmative action, discrimination, international, law

The U.S. Human Rights Network has a good summary of the weaknesses in U.S. civil rights laws and civil rights enforcement. In 1965 the United Nations adopted an antidiscrimination treaty called the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). The U.S. Senate took until 1994 to ratify it largely because of white conservative opposition to it. We have only ratified three international human rights treaties, which are binding on U.S. states and the federal government.

We as a nation are way behind in our law and Supreme Court interpretations of CERD. Here are two excerpts from this critical analysis (The document is at the Poverty and Race Research Action Council website; look for the June 23 weekly update. It is well worth joining their list too):

The CERD treaty embodies an obligation not just to avoid policies with a discriminatory impact, but also to affirmatively take action to address racial disparities in outcomes for people of color, both within government programs and in society at large. This principle of affirmative obligations to redress past discriminatory practices and present day outcomes is largely absent from federal civil rights law (with the notable exception of the Fair Housing Act, which calls on the government to “affirmatively further” fair housing. The CERD treaty requires its signatories to use carefully tailored race-conscious measures to redress past racial discrimination and continuing racial disparities. But the U.S. Supreme Court has recently been undermining this basic principle of our civil rights law by making it harder for government to use race as a factor in student assignment to promote voluntary racial integration. The CERD Committee has recommended a government-wide “Plan of Action” to implement CERD, and a central agency or commission to educate the public and monitor treaty compliance. No such mechanisms exist in the U.S.

Civil rights enforcement vs. human rights compliance: the Obama Administration has done a good job of reviving the dormant civil rights enforcement units within each federal agency that are responsible for investigating complaints of discrimination by state and local recipients of federal funds, and the revived Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice is once again at the forefront of civil rights enforcement. But civil rights enforcement is only a part of compliance with the CERD treaty – the federal government is also supposed to be addressing racial disparities and impacts in the way it spends its money and runs its domestic programs (including federal programs affecting health, education, labor, environment, criminal justice, housing, transportation, etc). The federal government is still falling short of its CERD obligations in this area.

That is the U.S. is out of compliance with a major treaty, and indeed in several ways fairly weak in its civil rights enforcement and action on racial and other discrimination.

40th Anniversary of Loving v. Virginia. Loving Indeed!

• • African Americans, intermarriage, law, systemic racism, white privilege, whites

NPR had this important report on a key anniversary today. I strongly recommend it. It begins:

This week marks the 40th anniversary of a seminal moment in the civil rights movement: the legalization of interracial marriage. But the couple at the heart of the landmark Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia never intended to be in the spotlight. On June 12, 1967, the nation’s highest court voted unanimously to overturn the conviction of Richard and Mildred Loving, a young interracial couple from rural Caroline County, Va.

Here are a couple of passages from that Loving decision, with clear implications for marriage debates today:

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State. . . . There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy.

This country can change when people of principle make key decisions. This was the greatest rights court in US history, operating in the late 1960s. Soon Nixon began its destruction. Would the current court’s right-wing majority have decided it the same way?

Mexican American Democrats (MAD): Will Texas become a Democratic State Again?

• • Latinos, law, Mexican Americans, politics

I just got a Constitution for an organization called the Mexican American Democrats of Texas, dated June 1 of this year. It clearly reflects the growing demographic and political strength of Mexican Americans in Texas, a state where all statewide elected officials are currently Republicans. Since Mexican American voters tend to vote for the Democratic Party (about 67 percent voted for Obama in 2008), will this mean that Texas may soon move back into the “blue column,” especially given the new attacks on immigrants just this week mounted by the mostly white Republicans in the special session of the Texas legislature. The dramatic growth of the Mexican American (and larger Latino) population in Texas has led to reasonable forecasts that Texas will be more than half Latino in just a few decades. It has also led to forecasts that the Latino growth in numerous states will likely be to the benefit of Democratic Party candidates.

Even the usually savvy on immigration issues Texas governor, Republican Rick Perry, has joined in the rather nativistic support for severe limitations on the rights of the many undocumented Texans with their roots in Mexico. These Texans do much of the hardest and toughest work in Texas.

(That anti-immigrant political position is a bit ironic given that “Texas” history started as an invasion of US citizens mostly of European origin [and usually without documents] flooding what became Texas. Eventually the US invaders decided to secede from Mexico by force, in part so these whites could protect the enslavement of black Americans they enforced in the Texas area. That immigration story is often told in a substantially mythological form some distance from the historical truth.)

Here is the first part of the new constitution for the Mexican American Democrats. (Here is their email address: mexicanamericandemocrats@yahoo.com)

CONSTITUTION AND BYLAWS

PREAMBLE

We, the Mexican American Democrats of Texas, seeking to ensure the benefits of a free society for ourselves, our families, our communities, counties, state and nation, and seeking to achieve full representation at all levels of the Democratic Party, do hereby adopt the Constitution and Bylaws of the Mexican American Democrats of Texas.

ARTICLE I – NAME

The name of this organization shall be the Mexican American Democrats of Texas, hereinafter referred to as “MAD” or as “Texas MAD”.

ARTICLE II – PURPOSE

The purpose of this organization shall be to seek full representation of Mexican Americans at all levels and in all activities of the Democratic Party. This shall include, but not be limited to, participating in the delegate selection and committee processes at all levels of the Democratic Party conventions and organizations; selecting, screening, supporting, and endorsing Democratic candidates; taking appropriate public stands on issues relevant to our communities; and proposing, supporting, and, when necessary, opposing legislation relevant to the Mexican American community.

ARTICLE III – GENERAL MEMBERSHIP

Section 1. Qualifications: The General Membership of Texas MAD shall be open to any member of the Mexican American community, but will not be limited to the Spanish surnamed.

Section 2. Application Procedures: The Credentials Committee of Texas MAD shall adopt a mandatory application form which shall at a minimum include the applicant’s name, address, voter registration number, effective date of state membership, and a mandatory signature line. The Credentials Committee of Texas MAD shall also adopt verification procedures of membership.

[and it continues at some length]