Holder Urges States to Repeal Bans on Felon's Voting

The good folks at the Justice and Accountability Center of Louisiana are working on similar issues locally. One of their projects is a Ban the Box campaign in which employers would not be able to learn of their applicants' recorders until after initial interviews and screens.

From The New York Times:
  

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday urged states to repeal laws that prohibit felons from voting, a move that would restore the right to vote to millions of people.

The call was mostly symbolic — Mr. Holder has no authority to enact these changes himself — but it marked the attorney general’s latest effort to eliminate laws that he says disproportionately keep minorities from the polls. “It is unwise, it is unjust, and it is not in keeping with our democratic values,” Mr. Holder said at civil rights conference at Georgetown University. These laws deserve to be not only reconsidered, but repealed.”

 

African-Americans represent more than a third of the estimated 5.8 million people who are prohibited from voting, according to the Sentencing Project, a research group that favors more liberal sentencing policies. And in Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia, more than one in five African-Americans has lost the right to vote.

 

The United States is unique in the democratic world for barring people from voting in such large numbers. Mr. Holder said the laws stemmed from the late 1800s, when states tried keep blacks from voting.

Net Neutrality, Race, Inequality

I took this from Scholars Strategy Network and posted it verbatim below. The title is a bit misleading, as most of the article is more directly about Net Neutrality. It's impact on communities of color, the poor, and those who live in rural areas is not integrated well.  Regardless, the information on Net Neutrality is important.

WHY MINORITIES AND LOW-INCOME AMERICANS HAVE A BIG STAKE IN A FREE AND OPEN INTERNET

by Roderick Graham, Rhode Island College
Advanced technologies spread unevenly to different groups of Americans, with low-income people and minorities lagging behind whites on most measures of access and usage. But recently African Americans and Latinos have been narrowing the digital divide. A 2010 study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project showed that minorities are increasingly active purchasers of Internet enabled phones; two years later, another Pew report documented that minorities are outpacing whites not just in mundane activities like talking on the phone and texting, but also in more sophisticated applications like Internet-banking.

But progress toward closing America’s digital divides could be stalled or reversed by adverse federal government regulations or restrictive interpretations by the Federal Communications Commission. The regulatory details at issue are quite specific, but they have potentially momentous social consequences.

Property Rights and Internet Flexibility
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996 protects the intellectual property rights of inventors and entrepreneurs who create new computer hardware and software programs and content. Producers typically use embedded codes to prevent the copying or modifying of their products, and federal law makes it a crime for users to get around – or “circumvent” – such codes to make modifications beyond those allowed by the original producer.

Race, Stand Your Ground and Inconsistencies

So I just watched a clip of The Daily Show, where John Oliver talks about a black woman in Florida who fired her gun in the air to ward off her abusive husband and was arrested for it.  She was sentenced to 20 years in prison and the jury took 12 minutes to deliberate.  That's justice in the US.

White Like Me author Tim Wise on HuffPost Live

Here's Tim Wise on HuffPost Live addressing white skin privilege -- the unseen, unrecognized benefits to life that come with being seen as white. Tim worked with The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond and graduated from Tulane University.

 

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.

Race, Biology and Medicine

Here's an interesting article in The Atlantic that puts the critiques of Jason Richwine's doctoral dissertation into a larger theoretical perspective. You can go to the original article here, but I copied and pasted it below.

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Race Is Not Biology

By Merlin Chowkwanyun

aspidoscelis / flickr

During the past two weeks, much outrage has arisen over former Heritage Foundation staffer Jason Richwine's Harvard doctoral dissertation, which speculated that IQ differences between "Hispanic" and "non-Hispanic' populations were genetically rooted. The claims mirrored those of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's scurrilous The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which made similar claims about the intelligence of blacks. (Murray receives thanks in Richwine's dissertation acknowledgments and filed a piece recently in defense of Richwine at the National Review Online.)

Melissa Harris-Perry: On Race and Welfare

Tulane University's own Melissa Harris-Perry on her September 1st program where they discuss the image of welfare users and its relationship to welfare support.  She really tears it up.  I'd like to see more people like her contributing to the public sphere.

 

For research on how conservatives (and yes, it was conservatives who did-and continue to do-this, at least at first) worked to create the mental linkages between welfare and people of color see Katherine Beckett's "Making Crime Pay" and Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki's "The Black Image in the White Mind."  Beckett discusses how conservatives worked to link non-whites with crime and welfare abuse in an effort to recruit southern democrats, working class whites across the country, and Catholic European immigrants in the Northeast.  It worked, though it might be breaking up some today.  Part of this was their "Southern Strategy."  Entman and Rojecki talk about the way mass media and representations of blacks in sitcoms, news, and other programs helps encourage mental associations that link them with negative norms and values, and therefore, as undeserving.  Both scholars offer abundant data that was systematically collected to support their argument.  They provide data not only of media content (for Beckett it's media content and political initiatives), but also public opinions (Entman and Rojecki offer a nuanced scale of racial attitudes).  They're both top notch scholarship and support exactly what Harris-Perry is saying.

Race and Prosecution: A Review of the Evidence

The Vera Institute just released a report reviewing the evidence from over 30 published, peer-reviewed studies examining the relationship between race/ethnicity and prosecution.


From the website:
Vera’s Prosecution and Racial Justice Program (PRJ) conducted a review of 34 empirical studies on the relationship of race and ethnicity to prosecutorial decision making published between 1990 and 2011 in peer-reviewed journals. The literature review distills the research and provides a reference resource for a diverse audience—including academics, practitioners, and interested generalists—about the current state of the debate on these subjects. The aim of the literature review is to encourage additional empirical research on the relationship between race and prosecution by identifying areas that need further study; provide prosecutors and other criminal justice practitioners with a frame of reference in which to assess their own practices; and strengthen the general public’s understanding of the criminal justice system.


From the Press Release:
“No other actor in the criminal justice system drives case outcomes as profoundly as the prosecutor,” PRJ director Whitney Tymas writes in her introductory note. “Nevertheless, empirical research analyzing racial impacts of prosecutors’ routine choices on the thousands of defendants and victims with whom they interact daily has been scarce.” 

Among the review’s key findings: 

• Defendants’ and victims’ race appear to affect prosecutorial decisions. Most of the 34 studies reviewed found influences on case outcomes, even when other legal and extra-legal factors are taken into account.
• The effect of race and ethnicity on prosecutorial decision making is inconsistent.
• As compared to whites, it is not always blacks or Latinos and Latinas who receive more punitive treatment.

A Serious Conversation on Race Requires Asking the Right Questions

This is from the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University.  The key point is that we're asking the same old, misguided questions about race in the wake of Trayvon Martin's murder and that these questions miss the point.  I cut and pasted the article in it entirety here.  Here's the link to the original.

By now everyone is familiar with the story of 17-year old Trayvon Martin.  Visiting a family friend with his father, Trayvon fatefully walked to the corner store for an ice tea and skittles and never again would see his friends or family after a violent confrontation with self-appointed neighborhood watch captain Robert Zimmerman.

This story, which has now gripped the nation for over two weeks, has progressed from a heart-wrenching tragedy to organized outrage to serious examination of the facts to political drama as competing narratives sediment and the legal process slowly cranks forward.

While the final chapter has yet to be written, the real tragedy of this story is that the death of Travyon Martin has not changed this nation’s conversation on race. In fact, it’s dredged up the same old conversation, revived the same tired narratives and distracting questions that almost every race incident that garners national headlines prompts.  Until we start asking the right questions, we will never change the conversation on race.

The question isn’t whether Robert Zimmerman is a racist. The question is what cultural cues, scripts and neighborhood arrangements prompted Mr. Zimmerman to view Travyon as suspicious.

The question isn’t whether Mr. Zimmerman is a bigot, but rather what hostile territorialism or defensive neighborhood protectionism generated a misguided sense of responsibility to zealously pursue Travyon despite being told by the police to back off?

The question isn’t whether Mr. Zimmerman was chasing down Travyon like a vigilante, but what anxieties contributed to a combustible situation?

The question isn’t whether the police are racist, but rather what narratives exist that motivate police officers and other Americans to view young black men as ‘criminally suspicious’?

The production of racial inequality in contemporary America is less a result of individual racial prejudice than a product of culturally embedded, subconscious racial associations and neighborhood arrangements, which distribute opportunity unevenly across our cities and towns.

It is deep structural forces, like pervasive patterns of residential racial segregation and subconscious implicit biases which make black youth seem alien or criminally suspect in private, largely white gated communities that are at issue.  The tragedy of Travyon Martin perfectly captures this nation’s deepest race problems, and yet almost no one is talking about what those problems really are.

Until we start asking the right questions, I fear there will be more Travyon Martins.

Screening of the Film "Backlash: Race and the American Dream" at the Louisiana Humanities Center

This looks like an interesting film.  March 13th at 6pm.  I pasted the announcement below.


For Immediate Release                                            
LHC Director Brian Boyles at 504.620.2632 or boyles@leh.org

Political enthusiasts, film buffs, historians this is an event just for you.
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities on March 13th at 6 pm Turners' Hall • 938 Lafayette St. will screen Backlash: Race and the American Dream, a film about the controversial candidacy of David Duke's race for the United States Senate.

What if the Tea Party were Black? by Tim Wise

A colleague of mine reminded me of this short article by Tim Wise.  It's a really good way of demonstrating white privilege, especially in the everyday, "normal" issues on the intersections of comfort and race.  Now I'm sure there are plenty of people who will argue that the tea party, especially its more radical, gun-toting arm makes them uncomfortable, but that's not the point.  The point is, imagine if instead of being mostly white, they were mostly black? I think anyone who thinks about this seriously and honestly will come away with the same conclusion. Imagine if a number of black men showed up at a state capital or city hall, or even a bar legally carrying firearms? There's no way that would be allowed.  People would be shitting their pants, the tea party would be cast as a crazy, radical, terrorist organization, many would be thrown in jail and some might even be shot.  We'd be seeing random video clips taken completely out of context that reveal the "real danger these people pose to the safety and security of "normal" Americans.  White folks left and right would be falling in line with the political and media constructed narratives.  Here's the link to the pdf.  Or, you can read it below.

The Political Uses of Crime

For the past few years I've used a book called "Making Crime Pay" by Katherine Beckett in my criminology courses.  I like it because through the combined use of historical research, political discourse, media narratives, and public opinion polls, she shows how both fear of crime and the image many of us have in our heads of the young black male criminal are social and political constructions.  Here's the basic outline/argument: