What is Racism?

Below is a brief I wrote for an organization that is trying to make social science research more accessible to journalists.  My goals were to provide some fundamental insights on race and to move the conversation of racism beyond its focus on the individual and intentional.

 “A National Conversation on Racism: Beyond the Intentional Individual”

Tragic events such as the Trayvon Martin murder occasionally garner wider public attention and open up opportunities to have what people call a “national conversation” on race.  These conversations are typically grounded in a certain understanding of racism, one that sees racism as the result of individual attitude and intent. Yet, decades of research reveal that racism is much more.  What should a more thorough “national conversation” on race look like? What understandings of race and racism should be recognized and incorporated?

An informed national conversation on race would recognize several factors.  First and foremost, it would recognize that race is a social construction. There is no biological or cultural validity to the term.  Second, it would move beyond the common focus on individuals and intentions to recognize the variety of ways that racism is manifest in US society.

Obama Commutes Sentences of 8 Federal Inmates Serving Time for Crack Cocaine Charges

From NBC News:

By Carrie Dann, NBC News

President Barack Obama has commuted the sentences of eight individuals convicted of crack cocaine offenses.

In a statement, Obama said the commutation “is an important step toward restoring fundamental ideals of justice and fairness” and noted that he signed legislation in 2010 to narrow the disparity between penalties for crimes related to powder and crack cocaine.

Obama has pushed to change criminal justice policy to correct what his administration calls unfairness in sentencing and to keep down the cost of lengthy incarcerations for non-violent crimes.
“If they had been sentenced under the current law, many of them would have already served their time and paid their debt to society,” he said of inmates sentenced before the passage of the Fair Sentencing Act. “Instead, because of a disparity in the law that is now recognized as unjust, they remain in prison, separated from their families and their communities, at a cost of millions of taxpayer dollars each year."

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney is asked Thursday about the administration's decision to shorten the sentences of a group of individuals convicted of crack cocaine offenses.

 

Obama also called on Congress to pass pending legislation that would make the Fair Sentencing Act retroactive for some offenders.

Each of the eight offenders has served over 15 years in prison for the drug crimes.
One of the individuals, Clarence Aaron of Mobile, Ala., was convicted in the early 1990s at the age of 22 for conspiracy to distribute cocaine. Aaron's lawyer Margaret Love told NBC News that Aaron was "overcome" with emotion and that he will head to a halfway house in his hometown in coming weeks.

The president also pardoned thirteen other individuals for crimes ranging from drug offenses to money laundering to theft.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund praised the decision in a statement.
"The president's ability to commute sentences is an extraordinary power, and his decision to exercise that power in these cases sends a powerful signal that the White House is committed to reducing mass incarceration and working to restore fairness to the criminal justice system," said Sherrilyn A. Ifill, the group's president.

The Obama administration has been vocal about the need to reduce the sentencing disparity and to avoid triggering mandatory minimum sentences in drug cases.

In August, Attorney General Eric Holder directed federal prosecutors not to report the amount of drugs involved in an arrest if it would trigger mandatory minimums. The order applied to non-violent offenders who have no ties to drug cartels or gangs and who did not sell to children.

The attorney general said too many Americans get long prison sentences that don't fit the crime. "With an outsized, unnecessarily large prison population, we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, deter, and rehabilitate -- not merely to warehouse and forget."

 The number of inmates in federal prison, roughly 219,000, is eight times what it was 30 years ago, and 40 percent over capacity. Nearly half are there for drug related crimes and roughly one-fourth of them were low-level offenders.

We Are All George Zimmerman

I taught a course titled Race, Crime and Control this past semester. It was an upperlevel course that highlighted the role of the US criminal justice system as a mechanism for White's control over racialized others, Blacks in particular.  Among a number of other things, we read a book by Victor Rios called "Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys." Rios is a former gang member from Oakland, CA who through some fortuitous events and opportunities was able to put his life on a more positive and fruitful trajectory.  He's not a sociologist at UC Santa Barbara.  Pretty impressive. 

Below is a copied and pasted blog post he wrote for NYU Press on Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman (click here for the original).

We are all George Zimmerman: Trayvon Martin and the youth control complex

Posted on July 22, 2013 by nyupressblog

—Victor Rios
In ten years of studying inner city boys labeled at-risk by law enforcement and schools, I have found that poor Black Americans and Latinos are often deemed as culprits, lost causes, and menaces to society. One Black American boy in my study reported that on the day he was born nurses at the hospital commented in front of his mother, “Poor boy. He’s destined to become a dope dealer or drug addict just like his mother.”

In my observations at schools I witnessed a teacher tell a truant Latino eighth grade boy, “You have a prison cell waiting for when you turn eighteen.” On the streets I witnessed a police officer tell a seventeen year old Black American boy, “We want you to kill each other off, that way we don’t have to deal with locking you up.” These kinds of examples are countless in the lives of over 200 boys that I have interviewed and shadowed.

The reality is that poor urban boys grow up surrounded by a system of punitive social control that sees them as deficient students and criminal suspects that must be controlled and contained from young ages. School officials, law enforcement personnel, neighborhood watch volunteers, store clerks, jurors, and everyday citizens perceive and interact with these young people with fear, disdain, and circumspection. This youth control complex, a collective system of negative treatment based on racialized fears of young people of color, is responsible for the criminalization and systematic stripping of dignity that many young people like Trayvon Martin encounter on a day-to-day basis.



George Zimmerman is not just an outlying overzealous rogue vigilante that hunted down an innocent Black American boy. He very much represents mainstream America. We–schools, law enforcement, the media, intellectuals, politicians, and everyday citizens–are all involved in a system that creates and perpetuates fear and outcaste of a vulnerable, marginalized segment of our population. These young people grow up feeling hopeless, undignified, and failed by the system.

As Ronny, a seventeen year old Black American boy I followed for three years puts it, “It’s like I’m invisible, like I don’t exist, like people see me as good for nothing but to be in jail.” This youth control complex produces social death among many young people of color; they are alive but are not recognized as fellow human beings with the right to live productive lives. Instead we rely on surveillance, policing, prison bars, and stand your grounds laws to control, contain, incapacitate, and eliminate them.

The difference between George Zimmerman and the rest of us is that he pulled the trigger. We simply continue to mundanely mete out punitive treatment, stigma, and systematic stripping of dignity to young people of color, slowly killing their soul and their right to pursue happiness. By the time we sit in a courtroom to determine whether Trayvon Martin’s life is worth imposing a sanction on George Zimmerman, five white jurors have already been socialized and acculturated to criminalize young racialized bodies and to view the victim as a culprit.

Politicians and school and law enforcement administrators (including those that supervise neighborhood watch programs) must demand that individuals who interact with a diverse population be trained in understanding their cognitive biases and how these inform the treatment they impose on others. We must train ourselves to recognize and eliminate our inclinations to perceive and treat young people of color as suspects and instead treat them with the dignity they deserve. Listening to the voices of young people themselves who have lived a lifetime of encounters with the youth control complex might be a good first step.

Dr. Victor Rios is a  Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (NYU Press, 2011) and Street Life: Poverty, Gangs, and a Ph.D.

Angola: A Modern Day Slave Plantation

From Truthout. An interview with Terry Kupers and Robert King Wilkerson.

Blacks Who "Stand Their Ground" are Often Imprisoned

From AlterNet, "Defendants in Florida who employ the "Stand Your Ground" defense are more successful when white and victim is black."

Not in the least bit surprised.

Click here for the whole story.

Shelby County v. Holder: The US Supreme Court's Ruling on the Voting Rights Act

On Tuesday, June 25 in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Shelby vs. Holder. This case revolved around Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which established the requirement of federal oversight to changes in voting requirements for a number of mostly southern states with a history of racial discrimination. Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act identified which states were to need federal preclearance while Section 5 established the need of preclearance and federal oversight to changes in state level voting laws. Without Section 4 in place, Section 5 becomes irrelevant, as there are no states identified as requiring oversight.  Some changes to state voter laws include voter ID laws, restrictions on early voting, and voter redistricting lines, all of which will disproportionately affect African Americans living in urban environments.  Now, changes to voting laws will only be subject to “after-the-fact” litigation.  In other words, these states can now implement changes but they can’t be subject to legal challenges until after election periods.  Hours after this decision was announced, officials in Texas, North Carolina, and Mississippi pledged to immediately implement photo identification laws for voting. Florida will likely set new early voting rules and Georgia will implement new voting districts.

Below I offer some statements on this decision from the court (courtesy of the NYTimes):

“In 1965, the states could be divided into two groups: those with a recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout, and those without those characteristics,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “Congress based its coverage formula on that distinction. Today the nation is no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were.”

She [Ginsberg] said the focus of the Voting Rights Act had properly changed from “first-generation barriers to ballot access” to “second-generation barriers” like racial gerrymandering and laws requiring at-large voting in places with a sizable black minority. She said Section 5 [which becomes irrelevant with the removal of Section 4] had been effective in thwarting such efforts.

Marijuana Arrests in Black and White

The ACLU recently came out with its report on differential usage and arrest rates for marijuana based on race.  The report found that both Blacks and Whites use pot at roughly the same rates, which is similar to other research on drug use.  But, while usage rates are similar, Blacks are three to four times more likely to be arrested for pot than are Whites.  Some of their other key findings include:

• 52% of all drug arrests in 2010 were for marijuana (mostly small amounts of pot, not drug king pins).
• Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana.
• Blacks are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than are Whites.
• The over 8 million pot arrests between 2001 and 2010 equals roughly one arrest every 37 seconds.
• Enforcing marijuana laws cost about $3.6 billion dollars a year, but has done virtually nothing to stop use, availability or quality.

You can read the entire report here.

Now, if you were to combine this report (as well as the other scholarly research on law enforcement and arrests) with research on the court system (ability to afford bail and quality legal counsel) and sentencing policies (mandatory minimums, school zone drug laws, truth in sentencing laws, get tough policies, etc.) you start to see an entire criminal justice system that discriminates against people of color and the poor; poor Blacks in particular.  And, if you study the history of race and racism in the US, you will come to see present day drug laws and enforcement practices as a contemporary version of a long history of racial control that goes back to European expansionism, where the social categories of race that we continue to use today were first created.

Democrats and Non-Whites Experience Longer Voter Lines

I'm not in the least bit surprised by this.  Courtesy of TalkingPointsMemo. We can critique the source of the study all we want, but lets not pretend that these changes in voting polices don't have any real effect and that it's not random.  Plus, we should pay attention to who's calling for shorter early voting periods. Nobody's gonna support policy that hurts their own parties or groups.  This needs to be fixed.  Plus, I always wondered why election day is not a national holiday.  Seems like it's important enough to warrant time off so we can take care of our civic duties.

Eugene Jarecki: The War on Drugs

Here's Jon Stewart's interview with Eugene Jarecki on the war on drugs and his new documentary "The House we Live In."

Part 1:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Eugene Jarecki Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Part 2:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Eugene Jarecki Extended Interview Pt. 2
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Bill Maher on Racist Voter ID Laws

Courtesy of Crooks & Liars:

Interview with Michelle Alexander: Author of The New Jim Crow

Here's an interview with Michelle Alexander on Fresh Air.  She recently wrote a book called "The New Jim Crow" in which she discusses the way the U.S. uses it's criminal justice system to continue controlling people of color, particularly African American men.   She offers a detailed and insightful critique of the War on Drugs and how it's impacted poor, urban communities of color, and the consequences of this for future trajectories.  She links this to past systems of control and as a conservative outgrowth of the Civil Rights movement and the GOP's "Southern Strategy."

Racist Alabama Republicans Get Busted

I blogged before about how many of the new voting laws that we see popping up in states across the country are effectively ways to disenfranchise people of color.  It's really hard to actually catch politicians openly admitting this as a political strategy.  Usually these are couched in narratives of protecting the institution of voting, and after all, who can be against that.  But often these arguments are based on mythical threats.  They're effective at scaring people and generating public support, but again, they're usually not based on any real threat.  In the report below,  however, these folks are caught red-handed.  A rare accomplishment.

Courtesy of TalkingPointsMemo by way of the Birmingham News: Here's the key paragraph:

Beason, Lewis, and their political allies sought to defeat SB380 partly because they believed the absence of the referendum on the ballot would lower African-American voter turnout during the 2010 elections. One of the government’s recordings captured Beason and Lewis discussing political strategy with other influential Republican legislative allies. A confederate warned: “Just keep in mind if [a pro-gambling] bill passes and we have a referendum in November, every black in this state will be bused to the polls. And that ain’t gonna help.”

 Click here for more.

The School ReSegregation Movement

Here's a trailer from the latest Robert Greenwald and the Brave New Foundation film on the role of the Koch brothers, their organization Americans for Prosperity, and school segregation courtesy of Crooks and Liars.  Notice the code words, things like "neighborhood schools."  Ahh, who could be against neighborhood schools?  That sounds so sweet and everything.  As someone who studies media, crime and racism, I've learned that you always have to look behind these words, to the policy, its inducements and the pressures it produces, to see what they mean in reality.  Throughout the 80s and 90s we heard (and still do) similar code words on crime.  Words like "thug," "urban," "gangster," and "crackhead" served as replacement words for black, hispanic and asian youth because using those words is not pc.  Instead, code words are used to generate support for policies that in practice will further institutionalize racism and other forms of discrimination.  Racism through the back door.