“Million Dollar Blocks” : Incarceration as the New Jim Crow

• • criminal justice, Jim Crow Segregation

There is some fascinating research being done these days with mapping and the visual representation of data, some of it illustrates the reality of incarceration as the new form of Jim Crow segregation.

Currently, the U.S. has more than 2 million people incarcerated in jails and prisons. A disproportionate of these come from a handful of neighborhoods, and in many places the concentration of incarceration rates is so dense that some states are spending in excess of a million dollars a year to lock up the residents of single city blocks.  A lack of opportunity in the legitimate economic structure, combined with more opportunities in the unofficial economy, and the aggressive police state practices that Joe mentioned yesterday, fairly guarantees high reincarceration rates.   In fact, roughly forty percent of those who are released and reenter their communities do not stay more than three years before they are reincarcerated.   These “million dollar blocks” are almost exclusively also blocks where African American and Latino people live. 

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(Image of Brooklyn, NY from Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia University.)

Blogger Julie Netherland notes the staggering public health costs of such policies, then poses the relevant question here: “how could we improve the health of these neighborhoods if we invested a million dollars into community development, jobs, or education … instead of incarceration?  How many public health problems could be solved?”  Indeed, I suspect the health of these “million dollar blocks” would look a lot different if we could shift the focus from incarceration to community development.

This systemic pattern of incarcerating black and brown young men from a few city blocks is a continuation of decades of social, political and cultural exclusion based on race.  Legal scholar and litigator Michelle Alexander has a new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, in which she argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Her work shows that by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness.

So, while it is important to celebrate the victories over Jim Crow won at lunch counters, it is imperative that we look for ways to dismantle the current, pernicious system of Jim Crow segregation.

February: Celebrating Black History

• • African Americans, civil rights, digital video, Jim Crow Segregation, resistance

February – the shortest month of the year – marks the beginning of black history month in the U.S. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro, N.C. lunch counter sit-ins at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. If you’re not familiar with this important history, this short (6:11) video clip from the History Channel provides a basic review of the facts:

Today is also significant for the opening of a Civil Rights Museum on the site of the sit-ins in Greensboro. While the courage of people like the four young, African-American men that sat at that segregated lunch counter helped change the system of Jim Crow segregation, we should not let the civil rights struggle become ossified in memorials and museums. The truest celebration of black history month is to continue the struggle for racial equality now.

Jim Crow Racism Reported in Philadelphia, Yet Again

• • African Americans, Jim Crow Segregation, judicial system, systemic racism, whites



In his pathbreaking book North of Slavery, Leon Litwack (quoted by Vann Woodward) showed that Jim Crow segregation was not invented in the South, but long before the end of slavery white northerners used it to subordinate “free” African Americans in the North:

In virtually every phase of existence Negroes found themselves systematically separated from whites. They were either excluded from railway cars, omnibuses, stagecoaches, and steamboats or assigned to special ‘Jim Crow’ sections: they sat, when permitted, in secluded and remote corners of theaters and lecture halls; they could not enter most hotels, restaurants, and resorts, except as servants; they prayed in ‘Negro pews’ in the white churches, and if partaking of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, they waited until the whites had been served bread and wine. Moreover, they were often educated in segregated schools, punished in segregated prisons, nursed in segregated hospitals, and buried in segregated cemeteries. (See also the book Dixie Rising)

segWhen white southerners developed Jim Crow for the newly freed enslaved population, they imitated northern segregation strategies, often enhancing it–infamous segregated restrooms, water fountains, lunch counters, and so forth.

We recently noted attempts at Jim-Crow-like segregation in a swimming pool case in Philadelphia, and now we have a lawsuit alleging informal Jim-Crowing of bathroom and water cooler segregation, and other racial discrimination, in a Philadelphia city government workplace. According to a CNN report

Black employees at a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, waste transfer plant were harassed, humiliated and discriminated against by their supervisor for decades, says an attorney representing two workers who filed a complaint against the city. Among the allegations in the complaint is that for decades . . . [the white] superintendent, limited one restroom to whites only, said the attorney, Howard K. Trubman. The restroom — which he called the “supervisors’ bathroom” — was supposedly for the sole use of upper-level officials with the city’s Streets Department….As far back as 1996, it became apparent to black employees that they were being slighted, said Trubman. They would watch white co-workers walk into the segregated bathroom, conveniently located one floor above Gill’s [the superintendent’s] office. “If you tried to use the bathroom, you might get suspended,” said Leslie Young, a former worker at the facility…. Young said he recalled that a lock was placed on the restroom door, with keys distributed only to white workers. The restroom black workers could use was down five flights of stairs and was “not in the greatest condition,” Trubman said. Some employees were forced to ask … permission before they could make the trip, he said.

Just like when I was growing up in the very segregated South, this is way too familiar a story, but now 50+ years later. And bathroom segregation was not the only thing on the Philadelphia “plantation,” the term the white in charge reportedly used (he says he was kidding) for the workplace:

The issue didn’t end with the bathroom at the facility, which is a transfer station where garbage trucks bring citywide waste to be distributed to various landfills. Black employees complained that they were stuck with the oldest garbage trucks. Whites, they say, were frequently upgraded to newer vehicles…. According to Young, in the sweltering summer of 2007, Gill would only allow whites access to a water cooler kept in his barricaded office. Black employees were forced to use a water fountain elsewhere in the building. “It made me feel like less of a man,” said Young.…When he told Gill about some resentment felt by some of the employees, he said, Gill launched into a diatribe, saying those unhappy at “the Northwest Plantation Station” could leave.

Significantly, the black protest and antiracist counter framing tradition, as reflected in a book the late great African American historian, John Hope Franklin, had a direct impact on these black workers and their protests according to a Philadelphia newspaper:

Recently, after the black workers found in the trash a book titled Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation, by historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, they began to read it for solace and inspiration, Young said. “When this book turned up on our platform in the trash, …it just made us think that this is like slavery again,” Young said. “So we started keeping the book…as our little Bible in the drivers’ shack, where all the black drivers sit and we relax and eat lunch. And we just try to encourage each other to every now and then, when he does something racist to you or that really pisses you off, to read a couple pages of the book, to show you that this is not the first time this happened, we can get through this, but we got to do it together.”

They protested actively within the department and the city, but got no permanent redress. They took their complaint to the human rights commission (PHRC), but as is the case with many such commissions, nothing got done there either:

Shannon Powers, a PHRC spokeswoman, said that the PHRC deals with several thousand allegations of discrimination a year — 3,382 allegations of employment discrimination alone were initiated in the fiscal year that just ended. “We started the year with 4,393 cases pending from previous years,” she said. If the PHRC hasn’t resolved a complaint within a year, the complainant may take the case to the courts, Powers said.

We have some pretty good civil rights laws in the U.S. but most of them are weakly enforced or unenforced. For the most part whites can discriminate with impunity. Not unexpectedly, the Philadelphia solicitor’s office asserts:

We don’t comment on allegations. … Based on what we know, we have no reason to believe there is any merit, and that will come clear as the litigation proceeds.

The case is set for trial early next year.

Frederick Douglass: The 1852 Speech on the Meaning of the Fourth of July

• • African Americans, history, Jim Crow Segregation, politics, slavery








On this Independence day it is well to remember a speech, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” given by the formerly enslaved and probably greatest 19th century American, Frederick Douglass, at Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, at the peak of North America slavery (indeed, about 230 years into that era).

In this era Black Americans were usually not allowed at 4th of July celebrations in the slaveholding South, apparently because many slaveholders feared that they might get an idea of freedom from such events (as if they did not already have such an idea!). Also, Black residents were often discouraged from attending such festivities in the North.

It is in this very dangerous and hostile national racial climate that the great Douglass–increasingly, a leading intellectual of his day and the first Black American to receive a roll-call vote for US President (later on, at the 1888 Republican national convention!)–was asked by leading citizens of Rochester to give an address at their Fourth of July celebrations. He gave them this stinging indictment of racial oppression:

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too-great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.

But later adds:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Take the American slave-trade, which we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now. Ex-Senator Benton tells us that the price of men was never higher than now. He mentions the fact to show that slavery is in no danger. This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. It is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of this confederacy; and millions are pocketed every year by dealers in this horrid traffic. In several states this trade is a chief source of wealth. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) “the internal slave-trade.” It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. That trade has long since been denounced by this government as piracy. It has been denounced with burning words from the high places of the nation as an execrable traffic. To arrest it, to put an end to it, this nation keeps a squadron, at immense cost, on the coast of Africa. Everywhere, in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave-trade as a most inhuman traffic, opposed alike to the Jaws of God and of man. The duty to extirpate and destroy it, is admitted even by our doctors of divinity. In order to put an end to it, some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally free) should leave this country, and establish them selves on the western coast of Africa! It is, however, a notable fact that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans upon all those engaged in the foreign slave-trade, the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass with out condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and American religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh jobbers, armed with pistol, whip, and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-curdling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the centre of your soul The crack you heard was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow this drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me, citizens, where, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.

And then concludes with this:

Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from oppression in your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and kill.

The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, “Let there be Light,” has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God.” In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:

God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er!
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,

And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom’s reign.
To man his plundered rights again
Restore.

Sadly, our system of racial oppression still persists, even as most white Americans are in denial about its deep and foundational reality. Yet, there remain many people like Frederick Douglass today who still fight to remove this “yoke of tyranny” from us all. May they flourish and prosper. We should remember those now and from the past who fought racism most on this day to celebrate freedom.

ADDENDUM
Some forty-two years later, in the last speech (“Lessons of the Hour”) he gave before his death—at an AME Church in DC, on January 9th, 1894—Douglass made these comments as he watched southern and border states hurtle toward bloody Jim Crow segregation, the new neo-slavery system:

We claim to be a Christian country and a highly civilized nation, yet, I fearlessly affirm that there is nothing in the history of savages to surpass the blood chilling horrors and fiendish excesses perpetrated against the colored people by the so-called enlightened and Christian people of the South. It is commonly thought that only the lowest and most disgusting birds and beasts, such as buzzards, vultures and hyenas, will gloat over and prey dead bodies, but the Southern mob in its rage feeds its vengeance by shooting, stabbing and burning when their victims are dead. I repeat, and my contention is, that this “Negro problem” formula lays the fault at the door of the Negro, and removes it from the door of the white man, shields the guilty, and blames the innocent. Makes the Negro responsible and not the nation….. Now the real problem is, and ought to be regarded by the American people, a great national problem. It involves the question, whether, after all, with our Declaration of Independence, with our glorious free constitution, whether with our sublime Christianity, there is enough of national virtue in this great nation to solve this problem, in accordance with wisdom and justice.

He concluded thus, his very last words ever spoken in public:

But could I be heard by this great nation, I would call to to mind the sublime and glorious truths with which, at its birth, it saluted a listening world. Its voice then, was as the tramp of an archangel, summoning hoary forms of oppression and time honored tyranny, to judgment. Crowned heads heard it and shrieked. Toiling millions heard it and clapped their hands for joy. It announced the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages. Apply these sublime and glorious truths to the situation now before you. Put away your race prejudice. Banish the idea that one class must rule over another. Recognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citizen are as worthy of protection as are those of the highest, and your problem will be solved; and, whatever may be in store for it in the future, whether prosperity, or adversity; whether it shall have foes without, or foes within, whether there shall be peace, or war; based upon the eternal principles of truth, justice and humanity, and with no class having any cause of compliant or grievance, your Republic will stand and flourish forever.

Racist Thinking at the Supreme Court—Again

• • employment, Jim Crow Segregation, judicial system, racism, white racial frame



Well, our least democratic major political institution, the Supreme Court, ruled today in a 5-4 RICCI ET AL. v. DESTEFANO ET AL decision that white men had been the victims of racial discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Written by conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy, and joined in by the court’s far-right justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito (damaging gifts of the Ford, Reagan, and Bush administrations), the overview summary starts thus:HONKING HORN OF JUSTICE FOR NEW JERSEY FIREFIGHTERS--BEEP BEEP
Creative Commons License photo credit: roberthuffstutter

New Haven, Conn. (City), uses objective examinations to identify those firefighters best qualified for promotion. When the results of such an exam to fill vacant lieutenant and captain positions showed that white candidates had outperformed minority candidates, a rancorous public debate ensued. Confronted with arguments both for and against certifying the test results—and threats of a lawsuit either way—the City threw out the results based on the statistical racial disparity. Petitioners, white and Hispanic firefighters who passed the exams but were denied a chance at promotions by the City’s refusal to certify the test results, sued the City and respondent officials, alleging that discarding the test results discriminated against them based on their race in violation of, inter alia, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. . . The City’s action in discarding the tests violated Title VII.

That is, they discriminated against the white men who took the test, and would under the city’s decision have to take a new, presumably less discriminatory test. Actually, no one was discriminated against in actual promotions, as the city did not promote anyone, white, black or Latino. The city decided that because no African Americans scored high enough to be in the top promotion pool the tests needed to be replaced by better more-ability-based testing. However, the five racial conservatives on the court argue that in the record there is no “equally valid, less discriminatory alternative that served the City’s needs but that the City refused to adopt.” They, of course, are wrong on the social science evidence.

In her dissent, however, Justice R. B. Ginsburg (joined by Souter, Breyer, and Stevens) not only took the unusual step of giving her dissent orally in court but argued effectively (perhaps because she knows how discrimination actually works?) against the majority decision, running rings around them. She gives a rather sociological dissent starting with this opening line:

In assessing claims of race discrimination, “context matters.” [Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306, 327 (2003).] In 1972, Congress extended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to cover public employment. At that time, municipal fire departments across the country, including New Haven’s, pervasively discriminated against minorities. The extension of Title VII to cover jobs in firefighting effected no overnight change. It took decades of persistent effort, advanced by Title VII litigation, to open firefighting posts to members of racial minorities.

That is, there is this little matter of systemic racism. The majority justices completely ignore the 346-year history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, which has been followed by much successful foot-dragging for four decades now in regard to undoing deep structures of white privilege, but the majority want to ignore that systemic-racism reality and its continuing impact.

One powerful argument that Ginsburg makes is that New Haven’s population is now a majority of people of color, yet the city has disproportionately few fire department officers who are black and Latino. She notes other (some nearby) cities that do not depend on New Haven’s discriminatory testing and thus get a more diverse workforce:

The Court similarly fails to acknowledge the better tests used in other cities, which have yielded less racially skewed outcomes. By order of this Court, New Haven, a city in which African-Americans and Hispanics account for nearly 60 percent of the population, must today be served—as it was in the days of undisguised discrimination—by a fire department in which members of racial and ethnic minorities are rarely seen in command positions.

The right-wing majority leaves out other important systemic and historical facts, as she notes:

Firefighting is a profession in which the legacy of racial discrimination casts an especially long shadow. In extending Title VII to state and local government employers in 1972, Congress took note of a U. S. As of 2003, African-Americans and Hispanics constituted 30 percent and 16 percent of the City’s firefighters, respectively. In supervisory positions, however, significant disparities remain. Overall, the senior officer ranks (captain and higher) are nine percent African-American and nine percent Hispanic. Only one of the Department’s 21 fire captains is African-American.

That is, a profession that was aggressively white-controlled until well past the 1970s, and in New Haven now has great underrepresentation of blacks and Latinos in ranks like fire captain. One problem that the media has not assessed is the makeup of the exams, with 60 percent of the testing score based on the written exam, and only 40 percent on the oral exam, which got directly at leadership and ability issues. The testing showed huge disparities:

On the lieutenant exam, the pass rate for African-American candidates was about one-half the rate for Caucasian candidates; the pass rate for Hispanic candidates was even lower. … More striking still, although nearly half of the 77 lieutenant candidates were African-American or Hispanic, none would have been eligible for promotion to the eight positions then vacant. … As for the seven then-vacant captain positions, two Hispanic candidates would have been eligible, but no African-Americans.

She notes that numerous white firefighters had important social networks that helped them with the exams, including getting books and other materials quicker and cheaper than the first-generation African American and Latino firefighters. She then cites fairly extensively the testimony in the case of Dr. Christopher Hornick, an industrial psychologist with 25 years’ experience in firefighter testing. He testified that New Havens’ testing had a “relatively high adverse impact” and questioned the heavy emphasis on written over oral and related leadership exams:

We know that it’s not as valid as other procedures that exist. . . I think a person’s leadership skills, their command presence, their interpersonal skills, their management skills, their tactical skills could have been identified and evaluated in a much more appropriate way.

Ginsburg points out that the right-wing majority ignores Congress’s intent to accent both “disparate treatment” and “disparate impact” in its various civil rights laws:

Title VII’s original text, it was plain to the [1971 Griggs] Court, “proscribe[d] not only overt discrimination but also practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation.” …Only by ignoring Griggs could one maintain that intentionally disparate treatment alone was Title VII’s “original, foundational prohibition,” and disparate impact a mere afterthought. …Yet the Court today sets at odds the statute’s core directives. When an employer changes an employment practice in an effort to comply with Title VII’s disparate-impact provision, the Court reasons, it acts “because of race”— something Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision, .. generally forbids. ..This characterization of an employer’s compliance-directed action shows little attention to Congress’ design or to the Griggs line of cases Congress recognized as pathmarking. In keeping with Congress’ design, employers who reject such criteria due to reasonable doubts about their reliability can hardly be held to have engaged in discrimination “because of” race. …. Title VII, in contrast, aims to eliminate all forms of employment discrimination, unintentional as well as deliberate. Until today [Scalia’s concurring opinion] . . this Court has never questioned the constitutionality of the disparate-impact component of Title VII, and for good reason. By instructing employers to avoid needlessly exclusionary selection processes, Title VII’s disparate-impact provision calls for a “race-neutral means to increase minority . . . participation”—something this Court’s equal protection precedents also encourage.

This is the heart of the case. She is siding with the 1971 Griggs case that argued that practices that are fair in form, but discriminatory in operation (that is, have a serious disparate impact) are in fact banned by the civil rights laws–especially if alternative procedures can be found, as is easily the case in this firefighters’ case. Bridgeport, Connecticut, is mentioned as having solved the problem with fairer testing for firefighters and getting the needed social-racial diversity–a 20-miles-nearby example. Why not New Haven?

The Supreme Court is an undemocratic institution provided to us in 1787 by some white male slaveholders and their merchant friends, and today it is heavily skewed in a right-wing direction and populated by a quite unrepresentative group of folks–not unlike the skew in the fire captain’s class in New Haven. These justices have here provided another good example of how contemporary racism works. The right-wing majority is operating out of the old white racial frame and pretending that we live in a country with little institutional discrimination, and no centuries-old history of slavery and Jim Crow. We have been an officially “free” country only since 1969, and all the justices on the court grew up under a very undemocratic country with official racial apartheid. Yet cases like this one operate to deny that recent apartheid reality and its continuing consequences in public and private employment settings.

Supreme Court Does Not Invalidate the Voting Rights Act: At Least for Now

• • Jim Crow Segregation, judicial system, politics, systemic racism



At the excellent Election Law blog / Rick Hasen has a very good analysis of the Supreme Court decision today on the Texas municipal utility district’s fight to get out from under the voting rights law (rarely achieved)–which was to give the district a possibility to get out but not to deal with the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act. This law is a centerpiece of the 1960s civil rights movement and is a continuing barrier to various attempts to restrict the rights of voters of color–which white-conservative groups still often try to do.

Indeed, over the last few decades, black voters have continued to face attempts to reduce the efficacy of their political participation. Research by Chandler Davidson and Frank Parker has demonstrated that electoral discrimination persists in such forms as vote dilution, gerrymandering, the changing of elective offices into appointive offices, and unnecessary revisions in qualifications for office. Numerous strategies have been seen in each of the presidential elections in recent years.

Considering today’s decision, Hasen recalls his worried commentary not long ago at Slate:

“Under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has not been friendly to voting rights or reasonable campaign finance laws. But so far, its retrenchment has been incremental….What’s especially worrying about NAMUDNO is that the case does not provide the court with an easy incremental way out: If a majority of the justices want to side with the challengers to the Voting Rights Act, there’s not much they can do short of holding the act as broadly unconstitutional….The statute allows jurisdictions that can prove they no longer engage in racial discrimination in voting to petition to bail out from coverage under Section 5. The utility district wants such a bailout. But the statute clearly says that only the entire state like Texas or a political subdivision that registers voters (which the utility district does not do), can ask for a bailout. Since there’s no good statutory loophole, the larger constitutional question seems unavoidable.”)

On today’s decision, Hasen see Chief Justice Roberts as backing off on his hostile view of the Voting Rights Act, for now:

It is clear he thinks the Act is unconstitutional under the “congruence and proportional” standard, and he’s on record as believing that the plain meaning of a statute (backed by a Supreme Court interpretation no less) should generally control. So what happened here? As I’ve repeatedly said, the Voting Rights Act is a crown jewel of the civil rights movement, and it would be symbolically monumental to strike it down. Clearly such an opinion would have been a 5-4 decision. Either the Chief wanted to avoid the political divisiveness of such a ruling (while still getting a result he wanted) or perhaps Justice Kennedy was going to go in this direction, and the Chief thought it would be more politically expedient for the entire Court (or most of the Court) to go in that same direction. That buys him judicial minimalist credibility without costing much of anything. The biggest cost is punting on the question of the standard to apply when the constitutional question reemerges in a future case.

Thus,

Despite Chief Justice Roberts’ longstanding skepticism of the Voting Rights Act and his blistering set of questions to supporters of section 5’s constitutionality during oral argument, the Chief has managed to put together a coalition of 8 of 9 Justices to put the question off for another day.

It is significant that, even with Democrats in control of Congress and an African American president, that a few unelected right-wing judges can threaten to end the civil rights progress in voting and other areas. This shows how fragile some civil rights gains really are, and how easily this often undemocratic system of ours can backtrack.

Jim Crow Racism in a “Post-Racial” U.S.

• • African Americans, education, family, Jim Crow Segregation, racism, stereotyping, systemic racism, whites

The New York Times has yet another story on how segregated life often is in this supposedly “post-racial” United States. The reporter describes the “tradition” of a white prom and a black prom in Georgia Affirms States' RightsGeorgia’s Montgomery County (Creative Commons License photo credit: Caveman 92223), an area with several small towns:

The future looms large. But for the 54 students in the class of 2009 at Montgomery County High School, so, too, does the past. On May 1… the white students held their senior prom. And the following night … the black students had theirs.

This is not a new reality. This has mostly been the pattern now for nearly three decades of “school desegregation.” And this town is not unusual, for Jim Crow proms are still the rule in various small-town areas of the South. In this county the proms are regularly referred to by students and parents as “the black-folks prom” and “the white-folks prom.” The driving force, not surprisingly, is white not black:

All students are welcome at the black prom, though generally few if any white students show up. The white prom, students say, remains governed by a largely unspoken set of rules about who may come.

The Times reporter portrays the situation as one of white parents’ fully in control of the Jim Crow reality:

Black and white students also date one another, though often out of sight of judgmental parents. “Most of the students do want to have a prom together,” says Terra Fountain, a white 18-year-old who graduated from Montgomery County High School.

And a white male senior is quoted thus:

“I have as many black friends as I do white friends. We do everything else together. We hang out. We play sports together. We go to class together. I don’t think anybody at our school is racist.” Trying to explain the continued existence of segregated proms, Edge falls back on the same reasoning offered by a number of white students and their parents. “It’s how it’s always been,” he says. “It’s just a tradition.”

Well, there are no young whites there who are racist, even as they collaborate in old racist stuff. Reminds me of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism without Racists book and data from interviewing whites.

Interestingly, seven black high school students did go to this year’s white prom, and watched from the sidelines. After the ceremonies, they were ushered out with other bystanders. They went to a restaurant and talked about the prom segregation. The black students, according to the reporter, talked about

whether white parents really believed that by keeping black people out of the prom, it would keep them out of their children’s lives . . . . And finally, more somberly, they questioned their white friends’ professed helplessness in the face of their parents’ prejudice (“You’re 18 years old! You’re old enough to smoke, drive, do whatever else you want to. Why aren’t you able to step up and say, ‘I want to have my senior prom with the people I’m graduating with?’ ”). . . . Angel checked her cellphone to see if any of the white kids had texted from inside their prom. They hadn’t. Angel shrugged. “I really don’t understand,” she said. “Because I’m thinking that these people love me and I love them, but I don’t know.

This Jim Crow reality seems to be about a lot more than some white parents’ desires for their children to go to separate proms. There is nearly complete white student conformity to the Jim Crow “tradition,” yet the reporter portrays the youth as being quite different in their racial interactions (they have “black friends”) from their parents. But, for three decades now, each new group of parents (which includes many who were once students at this “integrated” high school) has maintained the old Jim Crow tradition. And then there is the likely segregated reality of much else that goes on in this town, and many others across the South. One can step into areas like this in numerous southern states where everyday life in many ways does seem more like the 1950s than like 2009 is supposed to be — as my graduate students from these areas regularly report. (Hint for grad students and other researchers: We really need some in-depth studies of everyday Jim-Crowing in these small towns across the South today, and probably in other US areas as well.)

There is also some naïveté in the black students viewing white students as liking, even “loving” them. Is this a case of many white young people just being “nice” in public frontstage settings, and professing not to be racist, and yet more like most of their parents – that is, more openly racist — in the private backstage settings?

And then, of course, there is the deepest aspect of the old white racial frame – white fears of black sexuality, as a “threat” especially to white girls and women. Proms have great symbolic significance when it comes to teenage sexuality.

What do you make of this?

The Dream and the Election

• • African Americans, Jim Crow Segregation, politics, racism

Art Gallery window, GeorgetownToday, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the first black president of the United States (Creative Commons License photo credit: runneralan2004 ). The inauguration ceremony will take place the day after the nation commemorates the birth of our greatest civil rights leaders, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  As Jessie noted in her post yesterday, many of us are contemplating this confluence of events.   What would Dr. King say about the nation now that it has elected a black man as its forty-fourth president?  Would he say that “the Dream” has been fulfilled, that America has finally become a post-racial society? Would he advise little black boys and girls that they no longer have to deal with the unspoken or spoken belief that opportunities are limited by race?

If Dr. King were alive today, he certainly would have a front row seat at the inauguration ceremony. His mind would probably race through the defining moments in African American history.  He would see generations after generations of blacks in the prime of their lives being hunted down like animals, separated from their families and villages, and loaded onto ships anchored off the coast of West African. We would feel the pain of his ancestors who were packed like sardines into the belly of these ships for the long voyage to America and then forced to work from dawn to dusk for over two centuries just to provide economic and social comfort for white Americans. Going through the mind of the very old Dr. King would be the words of the nation’s highest court written with such unabashed racism in the Dred Scott decision (1856):

“the negro had  for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and so the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”

Dr. King might remind himself that Chief Justice Taney’s words were merely reflective of the attitudes of the vast majority of white Americans toward blacks at the time. He might quiver as he thought about the magnitude of the hatred whites had for blacks and the incredible amount of social disadvantage that racism placed in the lives of blacks both enslaved and free blacks alike.

Sitting in the January cold, the elderly Dr. King would also reflect upon post-slavery America.  Especially now, it is difficult to fathom that, but for a brief period of reconstruction, slavery was not replaced by a system of equal rights. The system of racial savery folded into a regime of racially repressive laws in the South and racially repressive social norms in the North. These Jim Crow laws and customs were constitutionalized by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).  Jim Crow forced blacks into the worst jobs, the worst housing, the worst educational systems, and the worst social position.

Dr. King must feel a warm sensation as he thinks about mid-twentieth century America. After the Second World War (the war to save free societies), most intelligent Americans knew that Jim Crow’s days were numbered. Dr. King played a central role in the eventual death of Jim Crow. But the Supreme Court struck the first significant blow against this regime of racial oppression when in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) the Court overturned school segregation laws in every state of the Union. With the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s and early 1970s, Congress struck the final blow, killing de jure segregation and outlawing racial discrimination in most segments of American life.

The death of Jim Crow has brought unprecedented racial opportunities for blacks. There are many wealthy and influential black Americans (such as the oft-cited Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, and the black captains of industry) as well as many political successes, including black congresspersons, governors, presidential appointees, and now, of course, the presidency itself with the election of Barack Obama.

Dr. King would certainly acknowledge African-American racial progress. But he would probably be more concerned about the great racial challenges still facing the nation. He would be troubled by the fact that, even as the first black president of the United States is being sworn in: about 21% of black families (compared to only 6% of white families) live below the poverty line, the median annual family income for whites is $26,000 higher than that for blacks; white males with bachelor or advanced degrees earn about $20,000 a year more than their black male counterparts; young black men are seven times more likely to go to prison than young white men, and less than half as likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than young white men; and the median net worth (bank accounts, stocks, bonds,  real estate, and other assets) of white families is ten time more than that of black families.

As the very old and very wise Dr. King takes in the events of this historic day, he can only conclude that America is far from being a post-racial society.  The election does not complete “the Dream,” it only keeps it alive.

~ Roy L. Brooks
Warren Distinguished Professor of Law
University of San Diego – School of Law

Change? Don’t Count on It: American Racism is on Full Display: Open Thread for Comments

• • African Americans, anti-racism, Jim Crow Segregation, language, popular culture, white racial frame



The Sun Journal on September 13, 2008 reported that

activists at a conservative political forum snapped up boxes of waffle mix depicting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as a racial stereotype on its front and wearing Arab-like headdress on its top flap. (Source: AP News)

The conference where the product was first introduced to the public was at the Values Vote Summit which was co-sponsored by the conservative American Values and Focus on the Family Action.

Values Voter Summit organizers cut off sales of Obama Waffles boxes on Saturday, saying they had not realized the boxes displayed “offensive material.”

The Summit and the exhibit hall where the boxes were sold had been open since Thursday afternoon. On the back of the box, Obama is depicted in stereotypical Mexican dress, including a sombrero, above a recipe for “Open Border Fiesta Waffles” that says it can serve “4 or more illegal aliens.” The recipe includes a tip: “While waiting for these zesty treats to invade your home, why not learn a foreign language?” The article goes on to note that the boxes were simply “political satire” and that the waffle reference was “poking fun at [Obama’s] public remarks and positions.” Even though the product was reportedly pulled, I noticed one could still purchase the boxes from a sponsored website.

On the site it is noted that

Obama Waffles are selling like, well, like hot cakes!

To me that simply signal that those running the machine of oppression are simply feeding the hunger that is the heart of many Americans. We as a nation should be mortified.

[Open Thread: What Do You Make of This Story and the Image?]

UPDATE: Courtesy of M. in comments, and of stuffwhitepeope do, here is a video of the white guys who did this.

The House Apologizes for Slavery and Segregation

• • African Americans, Jim Crow Segregation, law, popular culture, slavery

This commentary was prepared for this site by Roy L. Brooks, Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law

On July 29th, the House of Representatives passed a resolution apologizing for centuries of American slavery and another 100 years of racial segregation mandated and sanctioned by the federal government’s Jim Crow laws. This first-time-ever resolution holds forth the promise of a post-atonement America; a society marked by racial healing and reconciliation.

But envisioning a post-atonement American is not easy. The difficulty does not lie in visualizing the acts of atonement themselves. Other governments have atoned for their past atrocities, including Germany (for its persecution of Jewish and other the victims of the Holocaust) and South Africa (for its subordination and murder of blacks under Apartheid). The U. S. government has itself atoned for a least one of its past atrocities. Congress and the President passed legislation in 1988 apologizing for the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Congress and the President made the government’s official apology believable by including in the legislation a $20,0000 reparation to the 60,000 detainees who were alive in 1988.
The problem in envisioning a post-atonement America lies in the more abstract and elusive aspect of understanding the true shift in perception that comes when a person, or in this case a government, feels genuine remorse for the atrocities it has committed.

Like all atrocities, slavery and Jim Crow were not historical accidents or mishaps. Founded upon the principle of liberty, the government of Washington and Jefferson—the government formed under our extant Constitution—denied liberty in a most blatant way. More than that, the U.S. government perpetuated a practice that was clearly in decline. The founding fathers breathed new life into the morally moribund institution of human bondage. Adding insult to injury, slavery was soon followed by a calculated attempt to impose the badges of slavery on 4 million manumitted blacks. Slavery and Jim Crow, in short, were committed knowingly and purposely. The U.S. government was not simply a passive receiver of illicit traditions

The volition with which atrocities of the magnitude of slavery and Jim Crow were conceived and executed raises doubts about the willingness of our government to pursue atonement. Will the government make only a perfunctory effort? Judging by the House Resolution, the early indications are that the government’s atonement might indeed be half-hearted.

Perusing the Resolution, one must come to the sad conclusion that the U.S. government has yet to tender a meaningful apology, let alone propose a single reparation, for slavery or Jim Crow. While Congress and the President have issued a formal, binding legislative apology for the internment of Japanese Americans, the House Resolution offers but a feeble apology. The apology is “nonbinding” and no other organ of government is considering a similar resolution. In addition, while the government’s internment apology was prologue to its internment reparations, the House’s apology is a preface to nothing—it is not followed by a single reparation. Without being backed by reparations, apologies are meaningless. They lack concreteness. Reparations, in other words, turn the rhetoric of apology into a material reality. They make apologies believable, more than mere words.

Curiously, the House Resolution itself makes the case for reparations. It expressly acknowledges not only the “injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity” of slavery, but also that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow are still present today. The victims of Jim Crow are as alive today as were the victims of internment in 1988.

By failing to atone for slavery and Jim Crow, our government reinforces white ignorance and complacency about the racial hierarchies we see in our society today. By failing to atone, the government makes it clear that, despite its words of apology, if fails to see slavery and Jim Crow “as the basic reality, the grim and irrepressible theme governing both the settlement of the Western hemisphere and the emergence of a government and society in the United States that white people regard as ‘free.’”
It is the government’s steadfast resistance to undergoing this mental transformation that creates conceptual difficulty in envisioning a post-atonement America. What does this shift in the understanding of the significance of slavery and Jim Crow mean for our citizens? What does it means in terms of the organizing principles–mainly law and politics—-that shape our society?

Judging by the House Resolution, it means very little. Continue reading…