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At the “black and progressives website for Obama,” Amiri Baraka provides a good critique both of the whitewashed New York Times cover story, “Is Obama The End of Black Politics?” and also of the “people with the signs in St. Petersburg” who said to Obama “You’re undermining the (Black) Revolution.”

In his analysis Baraka points out that

Black politics will only disappear when the Black majority disappears. And even the wish fulfillment of New York Times “liberals” can never achieve this, nor the creepy self hatred of those incognegroes the Times wants to anoint as post black negroes. Still the question of Obama’s candidacy is a quite different consideration. As I have said , in print and in the flesh at many forums, no matter what is said by whoever thinks to deny this, or even what Obama says himself, the foundation of Obama’s successful candidacy is the 90% support by the Afro-American people. A fact that I’m sure he understands. Obama also understands that it is the rest of the American people he must reach out to, no matter how attempts he makes to do this are questioned, even by Black people.

This is a point the mainstream media constantly miss. If it were not for the long African American struggle for liberation from racism, indeed every phase of that nearly four centuries struggle, this country would not be nearly the democracy that it so far is. African Americans are the major carries of the deep liberty and justice frame and tradition, which has been mostly rhetoric for the white majority historically. He then critiques the “militants” who recently protested Obama. Black or white, he says, the do not

understand that the logic and strength of Obama’s candidacy is the 21st century manifestation of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements, impossible without it. Jesse Jackson’s two impressive candidacy’s were also part of that motion, not to accept both these phenomena as positive aspects and results of our collective struggle is to lack “True Self Consciousness”.

Then he asks the million dollar question about what the next major step in this long history of progressive struggle should be and lists an excellent set of planks for a “more progressive Obama campaign.” And at the same website, Maulana Karenga adds some important points about the white racism in the New York Times shoddy analysis:

But in spite of the catchy title and the lineup of rising Black political stars, the end point is always the same—definition of a deficient, divided and self-destructive community. It is an old racialist ploy of singling out and praising the few in order to better condemn the many. And the praise is never for self-determination, but rather for self-denial and self-concealment of one’s Blackness.

He adds this sharp piece about the Times arguing that the Obama campaign means we are in a post racial era where the older black politicians are increasingly irrelevant:

This racialized and irrational “reasoning” is directed towards several ends. First, it is to indict and dismiss the older generation of leaders and at the same time the legitimacy and relevance of their social justice claims, their rootedness in community, and their recognition of the centrality of multiform struggle around issues of wealth, power and status. In this regard, they are criticized both for their being /too race conscious for their people /and /not race conscious enough for a selected person/. Needless to say, no such discussion is carried on about being post-White, post-Jewish, post-Gentile or even about other ethnics of color.

Secondly, the article seeks to redefine normal generational differences into divisive ones, to provide a language of antagonism and rupture instead of one of necessary continuity and regular generational change as in every group.

In other words, the Obama campaign, win or lose, stands, not against those who led and engaged in previous black political and civil rights efforts, but on their shoulders. Obama stands on the shoulders of the many black men and women (and some white allies) who sacrificed to get all of us this far toward democracy. This is still the early stages of racial politics, indeed. No “post racial era” is anywhere in sight.

Occasionally, someone will suggest that that the best way to address the persistence of racism is to begin adopting a “race-blind” analysis that abandons the use of racial categories. As it turns out, this doesn’t help eliminate racism and racial inequality, it merely obscures the reality of it. Here’s a case in point.

The NYPD recently collected and released a quite extensive dataset on police shootings over the past 11 years (image from Flickr Creative Commons). The data included such details as the number of shots fired, the reason for each shooting, and how many bullets hit their target. Yet, after 1997 there was no data on the race of people shot by police. Today, the New York Times published a partial explanation for this curious omission of data, which emerged as a result of a lawsuit filed against the NYPD by the New York Civil Liberties Union. Here’s the relevant bit:

“Testimony by a former police chief now offers an explanation. The former chief, Louis R. Anemone, said that while the data on people killed by officers were being compiled in 1998, the police commissioner, Howard Safir, ordered the department not to include the race of those killed by officers.

The testimony by Mr. Anemone, a former chief of department, did not say why Mr. Safir made his decision, but the shift appeared to have occurred during a public furor over race and the police’s use of deadly force in the shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, in February 1999. Mr. Diallo was killed in a barrage of 41 police bullets in the Bronx.”

Here, the former police commissioner intuitively understands what many social commentators on race fail to grasp. Namely, that if you bury knowledge about racism and racist practices (such as the NYPD’s abysmal record), then you effectively subvert efforts to combat racism.

In June, the Supreme Court of the United States completed its 2007 term with several significant decisions, one of which, District of Columbia et al. v. Heller (5-4), provided a landmark ruling with regard to the right of American citizens to bear arms.  Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia rejected a narrow interpretation of the Second Amendment as the right of citizens to keep and bear arms only in connection with a “well regulated militia,” as stated in the preface of the Amendment.  Instead, Justice Scalia maintained that the phrase “to keep and bear arms” means that every citizen, whether in the militia or not, could possess in their homes weapons for their personal defense, and further, that the Amendment applies to weapons, such as handguns, that did not exist when the Constitution was written.  In rendering this decision, the Court struck down as unconstitutional a law banning handguns in the District of Columbia. 

 Legal analysts and commentators were quick to point out that the decision was not likely to bring about dramatic changes in gun laws in most jurisdictions, particularly since the Court explicitly stated that certain restrictions were unaffected.  For example, the Court said that the Amendment only pertains to weapons in “common use” and not “unusual weapons,” such as machine guns.  Moreover, Justice Scalia qualified the majority opinion by saying that it protected only “the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home,” so that prohibitions on firearms possession by felons and the mentally ill were not deemed unconstitutional by this ruling, nor are laws prohibiting possession of firearms in certain places, such as schools and government buildings.  And, because the case originated in the District of Columbia, the decision affected only federal law; the Court did not explicitly address the question of if or how their interpretation of the Second Amendment applies to state and local jurisdictions (image from allamericanpatriots).

 This latter question may get answered soon, since immediately following the Court’s decision in Heller a lawsuit was filed in Chicago challenging that city’s similarly restrictive gun law.  Another suit, filed in San Francisco the day after the Heller decision was handed down, challenges a law there banning handguns in public housing developments. So while legal analysts were claiming that the Heller decision is important though largely symbolic, I couldn’t help but question who gains and who is most likely to lose as a result of this decision, given the new legal challenges filed already in its wake.

 I was struck, for example, by comments that the Heller ruling will most likely affect gun control laws only in major urban areas.  It is mostly municipal governments, after all, that have enacted laws like the one in DC because of the high incidence of gun violence in many urban neighborhoods. And some commentators remarked that the gun restrictions were not enforced in these neighborhoods anyway, so the Heller ruling would probably have no impact, one way or another, on gun violence there.  I came away with the sense that what was really being said is that these areas – and by extension, their residents, who happen to be disproportionately poor and people of color – are expendable: Just let them all have guns and they can shoot it out.  To me, there are strong undertones of abandoning neighborhoods perceived as “not worth saving,” areas where “law-abiding, responsible citizens” don’t live or wouldn’t go to anyway. 

 Perhaps I am reading too much into these comments, but I think it is worth remembering that all such decisions, by the Supreme Court and by policy makers, almost always have differential effects on different groups of people – with some benefiting and others losing – even though they are promulgated as affecting everyone equally.  There is considerable debate, for instance, as to whether gun control laws really do reduce violent crime. In fact, there are researchers who argue that potential crime victims who have guns may deter criminals.  Yet, I cannot help but think of a recent case in Houston, Texas, in which a white man, Joe Horn, shot and killed two Hispanic men, whom he saw breaking into his neighbor’s home. Horn mistakenly identified the men as “black” when he phoned a 911 dispatcher about the break-in, telling the operator he was going to shoot the men, that he was going to kill them, that he was not going to let them “get away with it.” Texas law permits the use of deadly force to protect property, and a grand jury refused to indict Horn.  But some observers questioned whether the grand jury – described as a “sea of white faces” – would have come to the same decision if Mr. Horn were black. The Supreme Court has now given citizens the right to bear arms to protect themselves and their “hearth and home,” but how will that right be implemented in practice? There has historically been a wide disparity between the written law and the law “in action,” with  the poor and people of color usually being on the losing side when it comes to how laws are applied.            

Supporters of the DC handgun ban argued that it was correlated with a reduction of homicides in that city. Although some researchers dispute this finding, one may legitimately ask, who is most likely to die from a firearm homicide?  According to the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), the answer is young black males.  Statistics compiled by the CDF show that the chance of a black male being killed by a firearm before his 30^th birthday are 1 in 72; a white male had a 1 in 344 chance.  The CDF reports that black children and teens are more likely than white children and teens to be victims of firearm homicide, and the firearm death rate for black males, 15-19 years old, is more than four times greater than the firearm death rate for white males, 15-19 years old (image from cinematical).

 It is still too early to determine what impact the Heller decision will have, particularly in terms of challenges to other municipal gun control laws and death rates.  But taking legal history into account, I am not optimistic that residents of economically disadvantaged neighborhoods are going to benefit this time around either.

Colorlines has a very good story by Caroline Kim and Jenna Loyd (“Is Riding the Bus a Ticket to Jail?”) on racial profiling of bus riders and others who travel and use public accommodations in the United States. The USA has become something close to a police state not only for black Americans, who have faced this problem for nearly 400 years, but now for everyone who does not look white. The story indicates that reports by the Detainment Task Force, a Northern New York group, has found that Border Patrol agents in upstate New York cities–Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo–now routinely engage in racial profiling by questioning only those

who appear to be Mexican, Central American, South Asian, Asian, Afro-Caribbean, or Middle Eastern. Border Patrol officials deny that the agency racially profiles….But common understandings of race in the U.S. fuse nationality and ethnicity so that some groups are permanently deemed to be “foreign.”

Yet, none of the people interviewed for their report noticed that blond-haired or blue-eyed white travelers were being stopped by the Border Patrol. The authors discuss next a legal U.S. resident:

The story of Tomas, who is from Guatemala, illustrates the ways in which law enforcement’s use of racial profiling—and the collaboration of local law enforcement with Border Patrol agents—impedes people’s ability to travel. In July 2007, Tomas and his friend Salvador were driving to a doctor’s appointment. As they pulled out of the toll plaza … in Syracuse, a state trooper stopped them. Tomas has a valid U.S. driver’s license and a properly registered vehicle. The state trooper gave no indication of why he had stopped the vehicle, but he did ask Tomas and Salvador about their immigration status and then called Border Patrol agents. “The police officer stopped us because we have Hispanic faces,” Tomas said.

DWH, “driving while Hispanic,” is a apparently crime in the United States. The article continues:

Last October he was traveling to Syracuse on Greyhound when Border Patrol agents boarded the bus at the Rochester bus station. “The Border Patrol agents questioned all the Hispanic, Middle Eastern and Asian passengers,” he recalled. “They did not question any of the white passengers except some women who were wearing veils. Border Patrol had dogs with them and checked the whole bus.”

If you are a person of color, traveling by bus now can be like traveling in the Germany of World War II, with uniformed police checking for identification papers just like Nazi German agents on trains and buses in the old Hollywood movies. I remember dozens of those movies well, when I was a kid. They were supposed to teach us how bad authoritarian regimes were.

And then, according to the Colorlines article, it happened again in another place:

A separate incident occurred in December when Tomas was at the Syracuse bus station with another friend. They were speaking to each other in Spanish as they approached the ticket counter where a Border Patrol agent was stationed. “As soon as the Border Patrol agent heard us speaking Spanish, he asked me for my papers,” he said.

The oldest European language in North America, Spanish, is now a signal to Border Patrol agents to do racial profiling, which some/many do with impunity.

Are such warrant-less searches and asking for identification illegal? They are if there is no probable cause to do so. A recent ACLU lawsuit reported by the National Immigration Law Center makes this clear:

The Rhode Island Affiliate of the ACLU has filed a federal lawsuit against the Rhode Island State Police, challenging the legality of the detention and transporting to immigration officials of 14 Guatemalan nationals who were stopped in a van on I-95 on July 11, 2006, after the driver changed lanes without using a turn signal. The lawsuit … argues that the actions by the state police violated the state’s Racial Profiling Prevention Act, as well as the driver’s and passengers’ constitutional rights to be free from discrimination and from unreasonable searches and seizures.

. . . the state trooper who stopped the van first confirmed that the driver’s registration and license were valid and that he had no criminal record. The trooper nevertheless opened the vehicle’s doors and, with the driver interpreting, asked all the passengers to also present their IDs. When some did not produce any, the trooper asked them if they had any documents demonstrating that they were U.S. citizens, and no one was able to produce any. Ultimately, the trooper advised the passengers that they all would be escorted to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Providence…. he instructed the driver that if any passenger attempted to escape from the van en route to Providence, the passenger would be shot. The suit argues that the defendants “knew or should have known that the search, seizure and detention of the Plaintiffs were without reasonable or probable cause and were therefore unlawful under the circumstances.”

Skin color and language are not adequate reasons for requesting identification or for search, seizure, and detention in a “free” country with a Bill of Rights. One can apparently be shot for holding too close to the Bill of Rights’ fourth amendment, which reads thus:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Senators Obama and Clinton have brought up the huge racial disparities in U.S. arrests and incarceration, yet have not explained yet what they would do about this distinctive aspect of systemic racism. A New York Times reporter has recently summarized two reports on extreme racial inequality in arrests and incarceration. One report is by the Sentencing Project and the other by Human Rights Watch.


The article accents the all-too-well-known impact of systemic racism in our criminal “injustice system”:(Photo credit) More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates. (Italics added.)

Same rates of drug use, yet huge racial differences in how those who use drugs are treated by the criminal injustice system. People who read good newspapers and magazines probably have some sense of this reality, but they likely do not know a central fact accented in these reports:

that the murderous crack-related urban violence of the 1980s, which spawned the war on drugs, has largely subsided, reducing the rationale for a strategy that has sowed mistrust in the justice system among many blacks.

That is, now racially inegalitarian policing has little rationale except for white-racist framing and racial profiling:

In 2006, according to federal data, drug-related arrests climbed to 1.89 million, up from 1.85 million in 2005 and 581,000 in 1980. More than four in five of the arrests were for possession of banned substances, rather than for their sale or manufacture. Four in 10 of all drug arrests were for marijuana possession, according to the latest F.B.I. data. Apart from crowding prisons, one result is a devastating impact on the lives of black men: they are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men, according to the Human Rights Watch report. Others are arrested for possession of small quantities of drugs and later released, but with a permanent blot on their records anyway.

The racial differentials are striking:

Two-thirds of those arrested for drug violations in 2006 were white and 33 percent were black, although blacks made up 12.8 percent of the population, F.B.I. data show. . . . [One] report cites federal data from 2003, the most recent available . . . , indicating that blacks constituted 53.5 percent of all who entered prison for a drug conviction.

The Human Rights Watch report adds this bit on the stats too:

Across the 34 states, a black man is 11.8 times more likely than a white man to be sent to prison on drug charges, and a black woman is 4.8 times more likely than a white woman. In 16 states, African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at rates between 10 and 42 times greater than the rate for whites. The 10 states with the greatest racial disparities in prison admissions for drug offenders are: Wisconsin, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, West Virginia, Colorado, New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Such extreme bias in the criminal injustice system has huge domino effects, negative impacts, within most African American communities, especially those mostly of working class and low-income families. The Times article cites Ryan King, analyst with the Sentencing Project, on the significance of his report:

“Arresting hundreds of thousands of young African-American men hasn’t ended street-corner drug sales.” A shift of resources toward drug treatment and social services rather than wholesale incarceration, he said, would do more to improve conditions in blighted neighborhoods.

Once again, a sensible approach to what is in effect a public health problem like alcohol abuse and addiction—and is treated that way in numerous more advanced countries—seems beyond the reach of a society whose social problems like crime, as much research shows, are still fundamentally grounded in racism and classism. Once again a recent (March 2008) United Nations report is more concerned with reducing this racial inequality in (photo credit) sentencing than the US government and legal system, which the UN calls on to take action. (See March 2008 Recommendations of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination).