Afro-Netizen

Juan Crow in Georgia

By Roberto Lovato
Courtesy of The Nation

Justeen Mancha's dream of becoming a psychologist was born of the tropical heat and exploitation that have shaped farmworker life around Reidsville, Georgia, for centuries. The wiry, freckle-faced 17-year-old high school junior has toiled in drought-dry onion fields to help her mother, Maria Christina Martinez. But early one September morning in 2006, Mancha's dream was abruptly deferred.

From the living room of the battered trailer she and her mother call home, Mancha described what happened when she came out of the shower that morning. "My mother went out, and I was alone," she said. "I was getting ready for school, getting dressed, when I heard this noise. I thought it was my mother coming back." She went on in the Tex-Mex Spanish-inflected Georgia accent now heard throughout Dixie: "Some people were slamming car doors outside the trailer. I heard footsteps and then a loud boom and then somebody screaming, asking if we were 'illegals,' 'Mexicans.' These big men were standing in my living room holding guns. One man blocked my doorway. Another guy grabbed a gun on his side. I freaked out. 'Oh, my God!' I yelled."

As more than twenty Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents surrounded the trailer, said Mancha, agents inside interrogated her. They asked her where her mother was; they wanted to know if her mother was "Mexican" and whether she had "papers" or a green card. They told her they were looking for "illegals."

After about five minutes of interrogation, the agents--who, according to the women's lawyer, Mary Bauer of the Southern Poverty Law Center, showed no warrants and had neither probable cause nor consent to enter the home--simply left. They left in all likelihood because Mancha and her mother didn't fit the profile of the workers at the nearby Crider poultry plant, who had been targeted by the raid in nearby Stilwell. They were the wrong kind of "Mexicans"; they were US citizens.

Though she had experienced discrimination before the raid--in the fields, in the supermarket and in school--Mancha, who testified before Congress in February, never imagined such an incident would befall her, since she and her mother had migrated from Texas to Reidsville. Best known for harvesting poultry and agricultural products, Reidsville, a farm town about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, is also known for harvesting Klan culture behind the walls of the state's oldest and largest prison. But its most famous former inmate is Jim Crow slayer and dreamer Martin Luther King Jr. His example inspires Mancha's new dream: lawyering "for the poor."

The toll this increasingly oppressive climate has taken on Mancha represents but a small part of its effects on non-citizen immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, and other Latinos. Mancha and the younger children of the mostly immigrant Latinos in Georgia are learning and internalizing that they are different from white--and black--children not just because they have the wrong skin color but also because many of their parents lack the right papers. They are growing up in a racial and political climate in which Latinos' subordinate status in Georgia and in the Deep South bears more than a passing resemblance to that of African-Americans who were living under Jim Crow.

Call it Juan Crow: the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants. Listening to the effects of Juan Crow on immigrants and citizens like Mancha ("I can't sleep sometimes because of nightmares," she says. "My arms still twitch. I see ICE agents and men in uniform, and it still scares me") reminds me of the trauma I heard among the men, women and children controlled and exploited by state violence in wartime El Salvador. Juan Crow has roots in the US South, but it stirs traumas bred in the hemispheric South.

In fact, the surge in Latino migration (the Southeast is home to the fastest-growing Latino population in the United States) is moving many of the institutions and actors responsible for enforcing Jim Crow to resurrect and reconfigure themselves in line with new demographics. Along with the almost daily arrests, raids and home invasions by federal, state and other authorities, newly resurgent civilian groups like the Ku Klux Klan, in addition to more than 144 new "nativist extremist" groups and 300 anti-immigrant organizations born in the past three years, mostly based in the South, are harassing immigrants as a way to grow their ranks.

Meanwhile, a legal regime of distinctions between the rights of undocumented immigrants and citizens has emerged and is being continually refined and expanded. A 2006 Georgia law denies undocumented immigrants driver's licenses. Federal laws that allowed local and state authorities to pursue blacks under the Fugitive Slave Act appear to be the model for the Bush Administration's Agreements of Cooperation in Communities to Enhance Safety and Security (ACCESS) program, which allows states to deputize law enforcement officials to chase, detain, arrest and jail the undocumented. Georgia's lowest-paid workers, the undocumented, now occupy a separate, unequal and clandestine place that has made it increasingly difficult for them to work, rent homes or attend school.

The pre- and post-Reconstruction regional economic system centered on the stately Southern mansions that once graced Atlanta's storied Peachtree Street has given way to a more global finance-driven system centered on the cold, anonymous skyscrapers that loom over Peachtree today. And in a more hopeful sign, some veterans of the civil rights struggle against Jim Crow are joining Latino immigrants in what will likely be one of the major movements of the twenty-first century.

These and other facets of immigrant life in Georgia, the Deep South and the entire country are but a small part of the labyrinthine institutional and cultural arrangements defining the strange career of Juan Crow.

The immigrant condition in Georgia worsened in the wake of the failed immigration reform proposal last year. The national immigration debate had the effect of further legitimizing and emboldening the most extreme elements of the anti-immigrant movement in places like Georgia. Since the advent of what he terms "Georgiafornia," for example, D.A. King, a former marine and contributor to the anti-immigrant hate site VDARE, has leapfrogged into the national limelight to become one of the major advocates for deportation and security-only "immigration reform." Strengthened by the defeat of national reform, King, State Senator Chip Rogers and a growing galaxy of formerly fringe groups succeeded in getting some of the country's most draconian anti-immigrant laws passed. These new racial codes are disguised by the national security-infused bureaucratic language of laws with names like the Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act (GSICA).

Their efforts were egged on by the Bush Administration's implementation of the ACCESS program last August. ACCESS provided new excuses for state and local officials to pursue the undocumented in states like Georgia. In tandem with the federal government, King and Rogers led the push to pass GSICA, which requires law enforcement officers to investigate the citizenship status of anyone charged with a felony or driving under the influence. GSICA and federal efforts laid the foundation on which the other legal and social structures of Juan Crow grow.

Georgia's estimated 500,000 undocumented immigrants must think twice before seeking emergency support at hospitals or clinics because of laws that require them to prove their legal status before receiving many state benefits. "No-match letter" regulations requiring all employers to confirm the Social Security numbers of their employees have been issued by the Social Security Administration and have resulted in firings and growing fear among immigrants. But even without the no-match letters, undocumented immigrants in Georgia have many reasons to fear going to work. If they work at a company with more than 500 employees, for example (and most undocumented immigrants are employed in meatpacking, agricultural, carpet and other industries with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers), they must worry about laws that punish employers who knowingly hire undocumented immigrants and mandate that firms with state contracts check the immigration status of their employees. Similar laws denying or restricting housing, education, transportation and other aspects of immigrant life are also being instituted across Georgia.

For a firsthand look at how the interplay of state and federal policies fuels Juan Crow, one need go no further than the immigrant-heavy area surrounding Buford Highway in DeKalb County, near Atlanta. During the weekend of October 18, 2007, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) and other advocacy groups from across the state reported sharp increases in arrests of immigrants in the area. "This weekend alone we received more than 200 phone calls from people telling horrible stories of arrests," said GLAHR executive director Adelina Nicholls of Mexico City. "There are hundreds of Latinos who've been hunted down like animals, taken to jail, and they don't even know why or whether or not they'll be released," said Nicholls more recently.

Nicholls and other advocates are working feverishly in response to the exponential increase in official and extra-official profiling of immigrants. Last year there were forty-four reported armed robberies of DeKalb County-area Latino immigrants in August alone. One especially outrageous incident took place just west of Atlanta, in the rural town of Carrollton, last June. Emelina Ramirez, a Honduran immigrant, called local police to report that her roommates were attacking her, punching and kicking her in the stomach. Ramirez was pregnant. Locals say that when police got to Ramirez's apartment, officers handcuffed her, took her to jail and then ran her fingerprints through a federal database. After discovering that she was undocumented, they contacted federal authorities as stipulated under ACCESS and GSICA. Ramirez was then deported.

Nicholls says she and GLAHR staff exist in a perpetual state of exhaustion after having to expand their DeKalb County work to deal with cases like Ramirez's. Adding to their load is the situation in nearby Cobb County, where the local jail has 500 adults captured on streets, at work and in their homes. All of these people, says Nicholls, are awaiting deportation.

Beneath the growing fear and intensifying racial tensions of Georgia lies the new, more globalized economic system that sustains Juan Crow. At the core of the economy in Dixie are the financial dealings taking place in the shiny towers of Peachtree Street, buildings constructed atop the ashes of plantation houses.

Lining Peachtree today are SunTrust, Bank of America and other titans of global finance with major operations in downtown Atlanta. Along with the financial players of Charlotte, North Carolina, the companies occupying the towers on Peachtree are among the prime movers behind the transformation and restructuring of the Georgia economy--and of its race relations. On Peachtree you can find US banks and financial firms investing in companies doing business in post-NAFTA Latin America, where nonunion labor and miserably low wages drive immigration to Georgia and other states. The investment portfolios of many of these companies have grown fat with high-yield investments in the poultry, meatpacking, rug, tourism and other Georgia industries employing undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. The need to keep down the wages of these undocumented workers is fulfilled with the legal, political and psychological discipline of Juan Crow. Along with the most visible legacy of Jim Crow--Georgia's massive and growing population of black prisoners, housed in Reidsville and other, mostly rural prisons--the Peachtree State's undocumented immigrants find themselves at the bottom of the South's new political and economic order.

By keeping down wages of the undocumented and documented workforce, Juan Crow doesn't just pit undocumented Latino workers against black and white workers. It also makes possible every investor's dream of merging Third World wages with First World amenities. Promotional brochures put out by the state's Department of Economic Development, for example, tout Georgia's "below average" wages and its status as a "right to work" (nonunion) state. Georgia's infrastructure, its proximity to US markets and its incentives--nonunion labor, low wages, government subsidies, cheap land--allow the state to position itself as an attractive investment opportunity for foreign companies. While the fortunes of Ford, GM and other US companies have declined in the South, the fortunes of foreign automakers here are rising. Companies like Korean car manufacturer Kia, which plans to open a $1.2 billion plant by 2009, see in Georgia and other Southern states a new pool of cheap labor. Of the $5.7 billion of total new investment in Georgia in 2006, more than 36 percent was from international companies--companies that were also responsible for nearly half of the 24,660 jobs created by government-supported foreign ventures that year.

Also critical to the economic strategies formulated in the towers on Peachtree Street is another Latin-centered component: free trade with Latin America. "We are the gateway to the Americas," boasted Kenneth Stewart, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development. Stewart was among the more than 1,000 people, including three US Cabinet members and finance ministers, trade representatives, investors, corporate executives and politicians from thirty-three countries in the hemisphere, who attended the sold-out Americas Competitiveness Forum at the Marriott on Peachtree Street last June. As an organizer of the event, the gregarious Stewart, like many of the region's economic leaders, considers hosting the forum a critical part of Atlanta's bid to become the secretariat of the Free Trade Area of the Americas organization. Local elites support building a $10 million, privately financed FTAA headquarters complex, possibly in the area near Peachtree and the Sweet Auburn neighborhood.

Before being rapidly gentrified by the white-collar employees working in the Peachtree towers, Sweet Auburn, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., was one of the cradles of the African-American freedom struggle. Echoing the connection frequently made here between increased globalization and commerce and improved race relations, Stewart told me that free trade "will benefit citizens of Georgia and the citizens of Mexico and other Latin American countries." But when I asked him about the increased racial tensions, including the murders of some immigrants in Georgia, and about the growing repression of noncitizen Mexican workers, Stewart abruptly ended the interview.

For her part, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin--among the most recent in a long line of African-American Atlanta mayors that includes former Martin Luther King colleague and Wal-Mart consultant Andrew Young (who has an office in a Peachtree high-rise)--also linked local freedom struggles with global free trade. Before the Americas Competitiveness Forum, she and other regional elites distributed splashy brochures promoting the city's FTAA bid. Included in the brochure was a picture of the headstone of King's grave, which bears the inscription Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty I'm Free at last. The brochure promoting "the city too busy to hate" also paints a positive, global Kumbaya picture of the plight of Georgia's migrants: "With its attractive quality of life and rapidly expanding job market, Metro Atlanta draws thousands of newcomers every year and has growing Latin, Asian and African American communities."

"This is the home of Dr. King," said Franklin in her welcome speech at the packed forum. "It is in the spirit of peace, it is in the spirit of collaboration and it is in the spirit of fairness that we attack this issue of [economic] competitiveness," she told her audience in King-like cadences. But had Franklin taken her foreign visitors on the short stroll from their hotel to Sweet Auburn, they would not have found the racial harmony described in the glossy brochures and spirited speeches.

Documented and undocumented Latinos dealing with the economic and political effects of Juan Crow in Georgia (and across the country) find themselves unwitting actors in a centuries-old racial drama, which they must alter if Juan Crow is to be defeated. The major difference today is that Latinos also find themselves having to navigate a racial and political topography that is no longer black and white. Young Latinos, in particular, attend schools that teach them about Jim Crow while giving them a daily dose of Juan Crow.

High school senior Ernesto Chávez (a pseudonym) does not look forward to becoming one of the few undocumented students in Georgia to go to a university like Kennesaw State, which requires them to carry student IDs with special color coding, or to a college that denies them aid and forces them to pay exorbitant, nearly impossible-to-pay out-of-state tuition. He has already learned enough about Jim Crow--and Juan Crow--in high school.

Chávez, who sports a buzz cut and wears baggy clothes, said that when he studied Jim Crow in school, he identified strongly with the heroic generation of African-American youth who rebelled against it. "They couldn't ride in the same trains, they couldn't drink from the same fountains," he said during an interview in a classroom at Miller Grove High School in the Atlanta suburb of Lithonia. "I felt mad when I read about that, even though they weren't my people," said the soft-spoken Mexican, who is part of the small but growing minority of Latinos at Miller Grove (African-American students make up about 93 percent of the student body).

Chávez said he came to know the limits of his physical, social and psychic mobility, thanks to the Georgia law that requires people to show proof of citizenship or legal status in order to obtain a driver's license. "It's hard to describe what it feels like to be 'illegal' here in Georgia. It's like you can't move," he said, his voice cracking slightly. "It feels scary because you know that when you go out to a public place, you might never know if you're going to come back. I'm really scared because my mother drives without a license. She's scared too."

Chávez and other Latino students also expressed their shock and dismay at being discriminated against by some of the descendants of those discriminated against by Jim Crow.

"When I first got here, I was confused. I went to a mostly white school in Gwinnett County and started noticing the fifth-grade kids saying things to me, racial stuff, asking me questions like, 'Are you illegal?'" said Chávez as he fidgeted nervously in one of those ubiquitous and visibly uncomfortable school desks. "But when I was in seventh grade, I went to Richards Middle School, where it wasn't the white people saying things, it was black people. They didn't like Mexican kids. They would call us 'Mexican border hoppers,' 'wetbacks' and all these things. Every time they'd see me, they yelled at me, threatened to beat me up after school for no reason at all." Asked how it felt, he said, "It's like, now since they have rights, they can discriminate [against] others."

Chávez's family, along with many immigrant families in Georgia, will be watching closely to see how the state's justice system deals with the still-pending 2005 case of six Mexican farmworkers killed execution-style in their trailers, which were parked near the cotton and peanut farms they toiled on in Tifton. Pretrial motions began last July in the case, in which prosecutors allege that four African-American men bludgeoned five of the immigrants to death with aluminum baseball bats and shot one in the head while robbing them in their trailer home. Though the face of anti-immigrant racism in the Juan Crow South is still overwhelmingly identified as white by the immigrants I interviewed, some immigrants also see a black face on anti-immigrant hate.

Politically, a growing divide has emerged between pro- and anti-immigrant blacks in Georgia. The African-American face of Juan Crow is embodied by State Senator and probable Democratic Atlanta mayoral candidate Kasim Reed (he's also considering a gubernatorial bid). Reed proposed a five-year prison sentence for anyone caught trying to secure employment with a false ID. Local Latino and African-American activists have criticized Reed for what Bruce Dixon of the online Black Agenda Report called his "morally bankrupt attempt to outflank Republicans on the right."

Activists like Janvieve Williams of the US Human Rights Network, based in Atlanta, counter the anti-immigrant tide by elevating the tone of the debate and shifting the terms to human rights. As an Afro-Panamanian immigrant, Williams says she feels discrimination from many whites in Georgia, but she also experiences discrimination from mestizo immigrants. Her perception of anti-immigrant sentiments among African-Americans adds another layer to the complex racial dynamics unleashed by Juan Crow. "I'm caught between African-Americans who don't want to understand immigration and immigrants and Latinos who use words like 'moreno,' 'negritos,' 'los negros' and other terms that are not good," says Williams.

But rather than see her Afro-Latino identity and her Latin American political experience as a barrier between communities, Williams--who co-hosts Radio Diaspora, a weekly Afro-Latino program that helped promote the 50,000-plus immigrants' rights marches in 2006--uses Latin American media and organizing experience to cross linguistic and political borders. "We need to move from civil rights to human rights. We need to start using the language and tools of human rights around the issue of immigration. It's an international issue that needs an international framework," says Williams, whose organization co-sponsored the visit to Atlanta last May by the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants. Williams's organization brought together many groups who shared stories of Juan Crow with the special rapporteur, who took his report to the UN General Assembly.

In the same way that the concept of civil rights grew as a response to Jim Crow, the human rights framework advocated by Williams and other immigrants' rights activists in the South and across the country challenges traditional approaches to race and rights. "Some civil rights leaders here don't think human rights affects us in the United States," says Williams. "A lot of the [civil rights] elders of that movement are not linked to the human rights movement, and that also gets in the way of working together."

Not all of Georgia's civil rights elders fit thirtysomething Williams's description. The Rev. Joseph Lowery, the lieutenant to Martin Luther King Jr., says he did not perceive the threat that some whites and African-American Georgians felt from the massive immigrant marches of 2006; instead he sees in the millions marching in Atlanta and across the country "instruments of God's will to change this country."

Reverend Lowery, who now leads the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda, has spoken eloquently and vociferously against what he considers "wicked" immigration policies and has attended pro-immigrant rallies. He believes that massive immigration to the United States came about because of the workings within the tall buildings like those in spitting distance of his office in the historic Atlanta Life building on Auburn Avenue. "We've globalized money, we've globalized trade and commerce, but we haven't globalized fairness toward work and labor. The solution to the 'problem' of immigration and other problems is globalization of justice," he said.

Speaking of the relationship between American blacks and Latino immigrants, Lowery said, "There are many differences between our experience and that of immigrant Latinos--but there is a family resemblance between Jim Crow and what is being experienced by immigrants. Both met economic oppression. Both met racial and ethnic hostility.

"But the most important thing to remember," said Lowery, as if casting out the demons of Juan and Jim Crow, "is that, though we may have come over on different ships, we're all in the same damn boat now."

Roberto Lovato, a frequent Nation contributor, is a New York-based writer with New America Media.

Clinton’s Diminishing of Black Voters

By Derrick Z. Jackson
Courtesy of CommonDreams.org

In her long, sad self-diminution to being merely a white candidate for subsegments of white people, Hillary Clinton claimed to USA Today this week, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” Clinton exploited an Associated Press poll to say how “Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me . . . There’s a pattern emerging here."

“This was on top of Democratic strategist and Clinton supporter Paul Begala saying this week on CNN, “We cannot win with eggheads and African-Americans. OK. That’s the Dukakis coalition, which carried 10 states and gave us four years of the first George Bush. President Clinton, you know, reached across and got a whole lot of Republicans and independents to come.”

This reaches across the aisle all right, straight to right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh, who has been urging people to vote for Clinton to prolong the Democratic primaries, said this week, “Barack Obama has shown he cannot get the votes that Democrats need to win: blue-collar working people. He can get effete snobs. He can get wealthy academics and he can get the young, he can get the black vote, that’s about it.”

Obama just got done being tarred and feathered as an elitist by Clinton and the talk shows for belittling “bitter” people in jobless small towns who “cling to guns or religion.” Yes, that was dumb.

Yet here is Clinton dancing all over stereotypes. There is no way you can say in the same sentence, “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” without diminishing black Americans as lazy.

Can you imagine the Jeremiah Wright-level furor if Obama turned Begala’s words upside down and said: “We cannot win with the working class and white people. OK. That’s the Reagan coalition?”

The truth is that Clinton is in denial about one of the key reasons for her slide from inevitability. She choked on the black vote. Conveniently forgotten in her reinvention in Pennsylvania as Rocky Balboa (who conveniently was a white working-class boxer trying to beat down a black champion), is that this white woman led Obama in an October 2007 CNN poll, 68 percent to 25 percent among black women and was nearly dead even with Obama among black men.

It was not just that Obama stunned the conventional political world. It was also, as this column has pointed out, because of steady dollops of racial and religious innuendo from surrogates, most notably husband Bill Clinton and former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. All the love built up between the Clintons and black folks became love and war when a black man stood between them and their castle.

The problem for Clinton is that this is another case in which her math does not add up. Yes, every voter the Democrats can get their hands on is critical. But all this talk about Obama not connecting with salt of the earth white folks cynically forgets that white leaders in the Democratic Party have not solved this problem since Jimmy Carter’s 48 percent of the white vote in 1976, yet want to make Obama the poster child for it despite his multi-racial crowds and record turnouts of voters. In the late throes of her insurgency, to borrow from Dick Cheney, Clinton is playing “divide and doubt” about Obama getting “only” 37 percent of the white vote in North Carolina and Pennsylvania and 40 percent in Indiana.

But in a year in which Republican enthusiasm is in doubt with a bad war and a bummer economy, it must be remembered that Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992 in three-way races with a grand total of 39 percent of the white vote and 83 percent of the black vote and 61 percent of the Hispanic vote and besting the first President Bush and Ross Perot among all age groups.

Ironically, Obama got to where he is by not being the “black” candidate. It is Clinton who is now the race candidate, diminishing black voters and eggheads, her final hopes resting on the thinnest of eggshells..

Hearts & Minds

By Thomas Sugrue
Courtesy of The Nation

"So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds," proclaimed Barack Obama in January from the pulpit at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, in a speech marking the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Obama's high-minded words echo those of Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, whose 1944 book An American Dilemma still defines the basic dynamics of racial politics in America. In a lengthy italicized passage in his introduction, Myrdal provided the essence of his argument for readers who did not want to slog through its 1,483 data-laden pages: "The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the American. It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the decisive struggle goes on." For its unflinching accounts of patterns of segregation, the rhetoric and practice of Jim Crow, and pervasive racial violence, Myrdal's book is indispensable. But the book's longest-lived contribution was its argument--one that resonated with American religious and therapeutic culture--that racial inequality was fundamentally a moral and psychological problem that would be resolved only when Americans' hearts and minds were untainted by prejudice.

Myrdal had many detractors, most of them on the left. Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker criticized him for downplaying the long history of black resistance to inequality. Oliver Cromwell Cox, the West Indian-born sociologist whose brilliant but mostly neglected book Caste, Class, and Race was published just a few years after An American Dilemma, took Myrdal to task for downplaying the connection between race and economic exploitation. Cox singled out Myrdal's "mystical" belief that changing individual attitudes would end the "exploitation" at the heart of racial inequality. "In the end," wrote Cox, "the social system is exculpated." Myrdal's critics grew more numerous in the 1960s. In their 1968 manifesto Black Power, Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton offered their own challenge to individualistic understandings of race relations and coined the term "institutional racism" to account for the ways that racial inequality was not solely or even primarily a matter of beliefs or attitudes. They pinpointed "conditions of poverty and discrimination" rooted in unequal relationships of power and privilege, like the healthcare system that failed urban blacks and that "destroyed and maimed" lives every bit as effectively as the actions of the most brutal individual racists.

Aptheker, Cox, Carmichael and Hamilton were swimming against strong political and cultural currents. Most Americans now, as then--black and white, leftist, liberal or conservative--take for granted that racial inequality is predominantly a problem of hearts and minds, of bad attitudes, deeply felt prejudices, irrational thinking, intolerance and immorality. They aren't wholly wrong. Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., overt racism (Klan marches, Denny's restaurants rebuffing black customers and noose-laden trees in Jena, Louisiana) still plagues America. But hooded Klansmen, bigoted waitresses and perverted youth who romanticize lynching (of which there are still all too many) are not the prime causes of racial inequality in America today. Nor are the many whites who still trade in vile stereotypes of blacks.

The obsession with individual culpability has created an impasse in our thinking about race, right down to the widely used misnomers "postracial" and "post-civil rights era." Explaining racial inequality in America--especially the most enduring form of it, that between blacks and whites--flummoxes even those most devoted to analyzing and eradicating it. How do we make sense out of a country where racial inequality is deeply entrenched but where racism is seldom overt? How can we square evidence of racial progress with the grim reality of persistent racialized poverty, unemployment, health and wealth gaps and educational disparities?

There are two prevailing answers to these questions. Racial optimists emphasize the extraordinary progress blacks have made in the United States over the last half-century. In their view, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s--and the related shift in white attitudes--removed the formal legal obstacles to black advancement. As a result of the society-wide delegitimation of racism, most whites are now truly colorblind. The market rewards blacks and whites alike on their merit. Racial separation is the result of the inexorable expression of freedom of choice. Any remaining inequality is the result of blacks' cultural pathologies and moral deficiencies, not racism. Only African-Americans themselves can solve their problems, by dealing with the dysfunctional behaviors and self-defeating attitudes that keep them down.

Racial pessimists, by contrast, argue that racism is pervasive but well hidden. Peel away whites' colorblind rhetoric and beneath it you will find deep-rooted, perhaps subconscious, evidence of racial hatred. When white public officials criticize blacks (think Bill Clinton and Sister Souljah or the recent fracas between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama about Martin Luther King Jr., Lyndon Johnson and civil rights legislation), they face charges of racism. And the horrible and still all-too-frequent acts of racist violence are regularly interpreted as the tip of an iceberg of white hatred. Racially tinged insults or crimes become the moral equivalent of lynchings. Racial justice, in this view, requires constant vigilance against veiled and hooded racism. And it requires an ongoing struggle for hearts and minds--exhortation and education to reveal and overcome hidden biases. Two Harvard psychologists, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, have even gone so far as to devise a cognitive test that correlates rapid flashes of black and white faces and words with positive or negative connotations to uncover "implicit bias" (what a skeptical critic calls measuring "prejudice in milliseconds"). They have recast racism as a problem in the amygdala of the American.

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Supreme Court voter ID ruling steeped in history of willfull negligence

When I read on my cell phone this morning that the Supreme Court in a 6-3 ruling supported the state of Indiana's law that requires voters to present either a driver's license or passport in order to vote, I got a cold chill down my spine.

On the surface, it seems like a pretty reasonable ruling: folks need to prove who they are when they go to vote to avoid potential voter fraud. The reality is that what is reasonable for many white collar and blue collar voters is not so reasonable for those invisible Americans who have not earned that amorphous  moniker of "middle class".

These invisible souls are our country's poorest citizens who do not travel internationally (and thus, do no have passports) and who often cannot afford to own cars, the insurance on them or the gas in them (and thus, are far less likely to have a driver's license).

The fact that this quietly pernicious law may become federal law one day if Democrats capitulate is one matter of concern. The other is how this may impact next month's Indiana Democratic primary (and elections beyond this season) is quite another, given that the poor tend to be disproportionately Black and Democratic.

All this aside, the shudder of dread I felt when reading about this ruling came not from what may yet come, but what has already been inflicted on generations of marginalized Americans before and after the 15th and 19th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

In today's Washington Post article on this subject, reporter Robert Barnes quotes Justice Stevens as follows:

Stevens noted that it is "fair" to infer that "partisan considerations may have played a significant role" in Indiana's decision to pass the law.

"But if a nondiscriminatory law is supported by valid neutral justifications, those justifications should not be disregarded simply because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of individual legislators," he wrote.

"Valid neutral justifications".

As a genealogist, family historian, student of history and scion of enslaved Americans, an image immediately came to mind: that of letter my great aunt Mary showed me that was addressed to my great-great grandfather, Abraham Miller of Louisivlle, Kentucky, who was denied his Civil War veteran's pension despite having served honorably, and having attained the rank of sergeant, because he could not produce his birth certificate.

Clearly, to ensure that the U.S. treasury's funds were not depleted due to mass fraud by undeserving individuals claiming to have served in the Civil War, this measure was a "valid neutral justification".

The problem? My ancestor was the property of his White uncle, Dr. Warrick Miller, from whom he inherited his surname, a quarter of his DNA, and the grave disadvantage of being born Black in America.

Sgt. Miller was denied his due as one of over 200,000 Black soldiers who served in the Civil War because while he was given the "privilege" to serve his country, no such privilege was conferred to him as a veteran when seeking the promised remuneration he so desperately needed as an infirmed husband and father of nine.

He could not produce a birth certificate because he was born into slavery, and official birth certificates were not issued to human chattel in Kentucky or elsewhere in antebellum America. The policy requiring birth certificates for veterans' pensions was a much higher standard than what was required to give one's life to save the union. This was not by accident; it was by design. And there's nothing neutral about that. His government willfully neglected him because he was Black, less-than, other, powerless. Veteran or not, he did not count (anymore). He was disposable like the lives and rights of today's poor.

My ancestor died a miserable death and in poverty right before the outbreak of World War I, exacerbated by the "valid neutral justifications" of the government for which he fought.

Indeed, there are "partisan" motivations, as Justice Stevens so graciously concedes, and then there are the long shadows of evil that have cast darkness on the systemic injustices these so-called "neutral" laws & policies will not soon address, let alone cure.

So-called neutrality cannot continue to be the presumptive default for laws and public policy in a nation with such persistent inequality; such measures must be reparatory, equitable and most of all, humane.

A message from Color of Change on what "net neutrality" means for civic-minded Blackfolk (and everyone else)

In a country where most of what we read, watch, and listen to is controlled by a handful of conglomerates, "network neutrality" is an issue that is vital to our democracy. that most Americans know little to nothing about. And in the Black community which is significantly underrepresented in terms of media ownership, saving the soul of the Internet

Afro-Netizen is charter member of the ideologically diverse Save The Internet Coalition. Please click here for more information on why we need to be more media literate and how by so doing, we build a stronger, more equitable democracy for all.

Politics is local

I've opined digitally and privately since (at least) 2004 that America was nowhere near ready to elect a Black person president.

I have demurred that my vote would most certainly count much less than those lucky Democrats who voted on Super-Duper Tuesday this past February.

I have often said that society and corporate media over-emphasize presidential (and electoral) politics to the detriment of local races and other forms of meaningful civic engagement.

In less than two hours in my adoptive Philadelphia, I may be proven wrong on all counts.

I think if Obama wins the Pennsylvania Primary tonight, we may be that much closer to inaugurating an African American president on January 20, 2009. While I do not believe that Billary will concede tonight -- or perhaps at any point before the Democratic National Convention in August -- I believe all, but the most loyal Clintonistas will jump ship within days or weeks (if not seconds or minutes) from an Obama victory tonight.

I did not believe early on that Pennsylvania would be in play this far along in the race for the Democratic nomination. But it has. And it was only within the past two months that I realized my state of Pennsylvania might decide if the Democrats nationwide would usher in the first Black person or the first White woman Democratic "presumptive" nominee.

If Obama wins this primary, it will be in no small part due to the new and previously disaffected and marginalized voters who for election after election the national Democratic Party and Philadelphia's Democratic machine has systematically ignored. These marginalized folks are Philadelphia's poor Black and Latino voters who live in forgotten communities of poverty and hopelessness.

But there has been a glimmer of hope that has sparked an amazing energy among young and Black people, in particular, that I have not seen in the 20 years I have been voting in presidential elections. An energy that will surely die if Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination.

I live in a predominantly Black precinct in a multi-racial neighborhood in Northwest Philadelphia.

I have worked the polls in my community for the past two years, and have colleagues who have been doing so since the New Deal who haven't seen such civic fervor, attributable to the candidacy and unique campaign of Barack Obama.

In a local state representative race I have been working on since this summer, the Democratic electorate has grown by one fifth since the last presidential primary in 2004.

I see a diversity of people buying, wearing (making and selling) iconic Obama t-shirts whose metaphorical value far exceed their street value.

I voted for Barack Obama this afternoon and felt a unique tingly feeling I will not soon forget. It was a uniquely powerful and symbolically rich moment for me as a Black voter born two years after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King and exactly five years after the assassination of Malcolm X.

I voted for a Black man who has lived to be older than these two great Black men and who may do what they could not likely have even fathomed: that a Black person could be nominated by either party as their candidate for president.

I do believe that structural inequality and institutional racism exist in this country despite this auspicious political feat. However, I also believe that the means by which Obama has catalyzed and organized his supporters, more people may participate in electing him president in November (if he wins the Democratic nomination) than any other president in U.S. history. And like the Civil War that definitively reunited a fractured nation, the people who will be responsible for electing the first Black president will not be the same old, predominantly White electorate. Rather, it might be a very different looking demographic mix of voters that may influence 21st Century civic engagement as it relates to not just presidential politics, but local races like the one I've been working on all these months and non-electoral activism so crucial to strengthen our still fragile democracy.

Long-time social activist in Chicago, Father Phleger, defends Rev. Jeremiah Wright in FOX News interview

Imus attacks Obama (Surprise, surprise)

(Hat Tip to Dallas Progress blogger, Michael Davis.)

Baracky: The Movie

On judges, Hillary Clinton has some very bad "experience"

By David Kairys

Sen. Hillary Clinton has much to offer as a presidential candidate. But her main campaign theme (experience and action, rather than eloquent speeches) is troubling, particularly when it comes to the crucial question of judicial appointments.

It would be offensive to judge Sen. Clinton based on her husband's record - if she weren't asking us to do exactly that. Her "35 years of experience" rest heavily on her eight as first lady, which she discusses as if she were co-president.  She presents the Clinton administration as what we can expect from her presidency.

That's the problem. What we got from Bill Clinton, besides the easy jokes on late-night TV, was what she criticizes Sen. Obama for - stirring speeches on major issues but little meaningful action or improvement for middle-class and poor people. That's not Obama's record, but it sure fits Bill.

Bill Clinton talked a good game - eloquently "feeling our pain" in speeches - but he gave us mostly pro-corporate, GOP policies and soothing rhetoric without meaningful action. His Democratic version of Republican policies lost control of Congress and set the stage on which George W. Bush could look appealing.

It's usually assumed that President Clinton was principled and stood his ground, as he promised in campaign rhetoric, at least in the area of courts, justice and judicial appointments. He didn't.
Clinton's appointees were diverse, but he didn't appoint judges with a record of concern for civil rights and civil liberties, the plight of working or poor people, the environment, the need for constraints on corporations.

His best Supreme Court appointee was Ruth Ginsburg, who he said at the time "cannot be called either liberal or conservative." Instead of restoring balance after the extremely conservative picks of Reagan and Bush I, as Clinton promised, he picked centrists, and sometimes conservatives.

He elevated to the appeals courts a number of Reagan and Bush I lower-court appointees. He left many seats vacant, and had the lowest number of appointees per term in recent times.

Instead of fighting the GOP majority in Congress for what he told us he most dearly believed, he actually turned over the whole judge-selection process to the Republicans by having all judicial candidates vetted by Sen. Orrin Hatch, the conservative Utah Republican who chaired the Judiciary Committee. If Hatch's response was "liberal" or "activist" - terms he seemed to apply to almost anyone not as conservative as Justices Scalia and Thomas - Clinton dropped the nominations.

For example, Clinton suggested Peter Edelman, an accomplished law professor and close friend of the Clintons. Hatch called him a "liberal activist." Clinton didn't make the nomination.

Clinton nominated Judith McConnell, a qualified California judge with a record as a moderate. Republicans objected. A decade earlier, McConnell granted the request of a 16-year-old boy that he live in the custody of his dead father's gay partner rather than with his mother because the mother had been found unfit. Clinton withdrew the nomination.

One of Clinton's best nominations was Lani Guinier, another friend of the Clintons, to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Guinier, a black law professor at Penn (now at Harvard), was an advocate for creative solutions to the long-standing problem of gerrymandered congressional districts.
District lines were (and often still are) drawn so every district had a white majority, making it impossible for an African-American to win as long as whites voted for white candidates.

In North Carolina, there had been no blacks sent to Congress since just after the Civil War, despite a large black population. Guinier proposed that instead of redrawing districts to create some majority-black districts, the winner-take-all and other undemocratic features of our existing two-century-old electoral system should be updated, which would also open the system to blacks and other minorities.

Republicans attacked her, calling her a "quota queen." Clinton's response? He claimed, probably falsely, that he wasn't familiar with her writings and positions. He withdrew her nomination just before her Senate hearing, which would have been a great opportunity for a national discussion of these issues whether or not she was confirmed.

Bill Clinton did what he thought was most likely to gain and maintain his power. His values, personal loyalties or principles, even those of American justice, meant little or nothing.

If Hillary Clinton doesn't plan to walk down the same destructive path, she should put aside all the Clinton-administration experience talk and tell us where her husband went wrong, and what she would do differently.

David Kairys is a professor of constitutional law at Temple law school. His memoir, "Philadelphia Freedom: Memoir of a Civil Rights Lawyer," is due in the fall.

Friendly reminder to Obama: "Do you."

By Chris Rabb

I am not a high-priced, nationally-recognized Democratic political guru like Mark Penn, James Carville, or David Axelrod.

I am a mere mortal not blessed with modest intelligence wrapped in the seductive candy-coating of white male privilege.

I do, however, know this: Obama needs to dunk on camera . . . often!

No, I don't mean dunking donuts in a good cup of "joe" at the corner diner in Smalltown, Pennsylvania just before it's time for the hard-scrabbled blue collar folk have to clock in at the local factory and whose votes Obama covets on April 22nd and beyond.

I mean: Take that rock to the hole, Black man!

Assuredly, his various advisors don't want to draw too much attention to him being Black and all -- particularly since the Pastor Wright debacle. But if there's one kind of Black guy almost all White working class guys like, it's ballers.

In fact, if you looked on the walls of 10,000 random rec rooms of White working class homes in exurbia and rural America, I'd bet you'd find nearly as many Black sports heroes on their walls than you would see White swimsuit models.

More importantly, you'd find more Black ballers posterizing White boys than White boys holding black bowling balls.

I get it: working class White guys bowl.

Guess what? Obama's no working class White guy.

He can spend the rest of his campaign through the Democratic Convention working on his form. But no matter how much he improves his bowling game, it will still be bowling.

And say what you like about what White working classfolk are in to. The simple fact remains that White guys do not live vicariously through professional bowlers -- be they White or Black (assuming there were Black professional bowlers).

Quiet as it's kept, many millions of White guys dream of being Black basketball players. And whatever draw bowling may have on that demographic, it will never surpass the beauty and catharsis of basketball. And it is this game that will indelibly mark Obama's viability and unique vitality in this race for president.

Simply put, Obama's got game and needs to show it. Racial stereotypes be damned!

I remember that scene on the tarmac back in the spring of 2004 when John Kerry and John Edwards tossed around the pigskin between campaign stops. It was Camelot 2.0. It was a thing of beauty, perhaps shallow beauty. But I knew that for many Americans -- men in particular, I think -- it was a reassuring thing to see otherwise rich Beltway politicos do what so many guys are programmed from pre-pubescence to learn: how to throw a good spiral. I'm not saying this highly gendered programming is right. I'm stating that it is what it is. And if Obama's true to himself, he'd be gripping a basketball -- not clumsily flinging a bowling ball.

Wind-surfing? Not so much.

Yes, basketball is a highly racialized sport. Yes, seeing Obama dunk on some unsuspecting Secret Service agent may make some subset of the White male electorate a bit self-conscious. But for the majority of American voting-age men, seeing Obama handle his business on the court will not in the least bit alienate him from his faux image as the first (Black) post-racial presidential candidate. In fact, it will racialize him in a way that insulates him the most from the vicissitudes of modern American racism. It will make Obama that Black guy who's the best positioned for White America to love: that charismatic, non-threatening Black athlete (who just happens to be smart).

Forget Obama the constitutional law professor. Forget Obama the civil rights attorney or community organizer. Forget the Ivy-educated Halfrican whose long-time pastor too many Whitefolk believe hates America.

Just let him clutch that rock, and all else will fade away when Obama drains it from the top of the key.

NOTE TO AXELROD: Let Obama shoot every chance he gets -- and in front of as many cameras that can fit into whatever high school gymnasium he visits in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana and Kentucky.

Leave the bowling to Billary and McCain.

Why? Because Obama's athleticism on the court will be a slam dunk for him in at the polls. It ain't rocket science. But that doesn't make it any less true.

So, Barack: Lace up and "do you," bruh!

Blacks Against Immigrants? Don’t Believe the Conservative Hype

By Mark Winston Griffith & Andrea Batista Schlesinger
Guest Contributors

There’s a corrosive idea currently being spread by the conservative right. Designed to enlist African Americans in a race battle against immigrants by intentionally exploiting current economic anxieties, The Manhattan Institute’s recent publication of “The Rainbow Coalition Evaporates,” by Steven Malanga, argues that black people are fed up with illegal immigrants taking their jobs, committing crime in their neighborhoods, and messing up their schools.

Before this toxic narrative seeps further down into the public debate, it’s important to set the record straight on the Manhattan Institute and their opposition to a policy agenda that promotes the best interests of Black, Latino and White communities alike.

Like a petty gossip trying to instigate a school yard cat fight, the Manhattan Institute uses the Malanga article to pose as a friend and ally to black folk by whispering warnings about Latino people out to get them. But what’s the skin in the game for them? It certainly isn’t a deep commitment to improving the prospects of the African-American community.

The Manhattan Institute is the well oiled think tank based here in New York City that published “The Bell Curve” by Charles Murray, arguing that African-Americans have lower IQ’s.  It’s the hatchery of “welfare reform,”, “’compassionate’ conservatism,” the end of open admissions at CUNY, and the “broken windows theory” that formed the basis of Rudy Giuliani’s crime-fighting strategy of aggressive policing of poor communities of color. The Manhattan Institute, like much of the conservative movement, has identified the problem of cities to be the moral deficiency of the dark and poor people who inhabit them. To paraphrase the words of Manhattan Institute “scholar” Heather MacDonald, if the poor had “bourgeoisie values”, they wouldn’t be poor.

Malanga’s intentions are consistent with this view.  In his article he argues that Latinos have brought violence, in the same way conservatives have depicted African-Africans as criminal animals wreaking havoc in New York City.  He interviews one Black parent frustrated with the overwhelming Latino presence in his child’s school, with no ironic or historic sense of the cultural arguments against integration.

Malanga concludes that Black people are fed up with their own leadership for opposing “immigrant restrictions” and makes a call to action, suggesting that “Blacks could play a far more decisive role, though, if their political leaders felt threatened enough to pursue tougher immigration policies actively.”

And there we have it.  Malanga’s article isn’t about improving African-American neighborhoods, schools or prospects – or even immigration policies that could strengthen African-American communities. It’s about enlisting African-Americans in the politics of a racist, draconian position on immigration. Nothing more, nothing less.

Malanga tips his hand when he quotes a political scientist as saying that “some Republicans have positions on immigration that would resonate in the black community, but only a few have tried to take advantage of black anger of immigration.” Take advantage is right. The Manhattan Institute and their conservative movement must believe it is in their best interests to devise a political strategy based on black and Latino division, lest they face an America in which all of those on the fringes of our new economy – from African Americans to laid off white workers – demand something better than a sorry agenda of tax cutting for the wealthy and trade policy for the few. Why else would this article hint with glee at the misguided idea that there is no Black-Latino political coalition?

Fear mongering is the last gasp of the ideologically bankrupt. Rather than try to hawk an unrealistic policy of mass deportation, or actually devise a way to bring millions of immigrants out of the shadows by providing a road to legal status and employment protection, it’s easier to try to convince socially and economically vulnerable voters that immigrants are looking to take their jobs, victimize them, and overtake their schools.

One thing is for sure.  The immigration policy status quo isn’t working for anyone, no matter what community you live in. Race-baiting and racial scapegoating won’t change that. The only immigration policy that will allow this nation to move forward is one that squarely addresses the legal status and the working conditions of the 12 million undocumented immigrants who are here, a policy that recognizes that no matter what color you may be, our fates are all inextricably bound.

 

Mark Winston Griffith is a community economic justice activist, journalist and Senior Fellow in Economic Justice at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. From 2005 to 2007, Mr. Griffith served as the co-director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, a policy and community resource organization that promotes economic justice in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Prior to that Mr. Griffith served for twelve years as the founding Executive Director of the Central Brooklyn Partnership, a neighborhood-based organization that builds the capacity of local people to exert political and economic power. While directing the Partnership he also served as the founding Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Central Brooklyn Federal Credit Union, which at the time was the country’s largest Black-owned, community-based financial cooperative.

Since 2002, Andrea Batista Schlesinger has applied her background in public policy, politics and communications to lead the effort to turn the Drum Major Institute into a progressive policy institute with national impact.  She has doubled DMI's staff, capacity and budget, making it a leading source for progressive ideas.  She has been profiled in publications including the New York Times, New Yorker magazine, and Latina Magazine. She has appeared on television shows including CNN's 'Lou Dobbs Tonight' and has been published in publications including The Nation, New York Newsday, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Mississippi Sun Herald, New York Daily News, Alternet, Tom Paine.com, New York Sun, Colorlines Magazine, The Chief-Leader, and City Limits magazine. She serves on the Editorial Board of The Nation, the New York City Traffic Mitigation Congestion Commission, and the boards of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, WireTap and the Applied Research Center. 

The path to "a more perfect union"

By Maya Wiley
Guest Contributor

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama made two critical points in his historic March 18th speech to the nation. He said, “[R]ace is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.” He also said, “Most working- and middle-class white Americans do not feel that they have been privileged by their race…[T]hey feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.” These two points are critical and related. Here’s why.

The White middle and working classes see their dreams slipping away because of policy decisions we have been making in this country since the 1970s. These policy decisions include deregulation, reducing public resources to invest in people and communities, and privatization. And for the most part, these have not operated in a race-neutral way. They have been produced from misconceptions about opportunities for people of color. Our broken systems have hurt first or hardest communities of color, but are also harming Whites. Let us take one case in point – the current mortgage crisis. It effects us all. It is shaking our sense of security and making national prosperity a dim memory. But the multi-lane highway that got us here included a race discrimination lane.

The sub-prime mortgage market is not new, but its size and growth since the 1990s has been exponential. Between 1994 and 2005, sub-prime loans jumped from 5% to 20% of the entire mortgage market.  In 1996, sub-prime lenders reported $90 billion in lending. By 2004, the sub-prime mortgage market had grown to $401 billion.  One reason? Redlining – the practice of drawing red lines around communities of color on a map and refusing to write mortgages or provide mortgage insurance in them – helped produce the demand for the sub-prime mortgage market. If you can’t get conventional loans, you have to go to the loan sharks.

Deregulation and the retreat on demands that banks invest in communities through the Community Reinvestment Act were also lanes on the highway. Market incentives, largely unregulated, drive mortgage brokers to prey on first-time homebuyers or folks looking to refinance, because they get bank commissions. Banks see profits in packaging sub-prime loans to Wall Street investors. Feeding on poverty and reduced access to credit in communities of color, we produce a sick economy that ultimately spreads the disease. While the sub-prime crisis affects all of us, communities of color are hurt more deeply. 

African Americans and Latinos are much more likely to have sub-prime mortgages than their White neighbors because of the discriminatory origins of the problem coupled with gutting the few weak provisions we had to create incentives for investment in communities of color. Even if we compare African American and White homeowners who have the same income, African Americans are more likely to have sub-prime loans.  In fact, there is a larger subprime-prime gap between Blacks and Whites at higher income levels.

The lesson here is that the path to a more perfect nation that invests in all of us requires policies that do so. The white middle class actually exists as a result of such policies. The New Deal and Fair Deal policies of the 1930s and 1940s invested in the creation of the middle class. It not only create a social safety net (the Social Security Act of 1935), it created government programs that produced homeownership. By the 1950s half of all home mortgages were guaranteed by the federal government. And it was not a race neutral investment. It discriminated against people of color and even refused to guarantee mortgages in integrated communities.

What we need today is a President and a Congressional leaders who recognize that we must produce public dollars for investment in people. This requires government action and it requires paying attention to race to make sure that all communities benefit from the investments we make. In that way we can meet the challenge of addressing race and the slipping dreams of White Americans as well . . . and our union will be more perfect.

Maya Wiley is the director of the Center for Social Inclusion, a non-profit organization that works             to build a fair and just society by dismantling structural racism. The Center partners with communities of color and other allies to create strategies             and build policy reform models to end racial disparity and promote             equal opportunity.

Obama's ground-breaking "More Perfect Union" speech

Click here to read the full transcript.

Comic montage on former sane person/VP candidate Ferraro

Bravo, TPM for sharing this priceless homage to former Congresswoman Geraldine "Hannity" Ferraro.

Sane White Democrats rise up!

Keep diggin' that ditch, Gerry!

 

Brave New Films releases 'Fox Attacks Obama, Pt. II'

Ferraro's Affirmative Action Offense

By Imani Perry
Guest Contributor

Geraldine Ferraro's formulation that Barack Obama wouldn't have the success he's experiencing if he were a white man is troubling.  She obviously was trying to apply an affirmative action image to Obama, an image of unmerited acclaim and achievement. Leaving aside the race-baiting and incorrect information that enters almost all discussions of affirmative action, I just have to say: C'mon, Geraldine. Get real.

To begin with, at best this would be the pot calling the kettle black. When Ferraro was a mere 43 years old and had spent six years in Congress, she became the Democratic party vice presidential nominee. Despite the experience at the top of the ticket, Ferraro with her relative inexperience undoubtedly helped the campaign. She was a better candidate than Mondale. But I wonder if she considered herself just an unqualified woman candidate, a female novelty disrupting the legitimate meritocracy of American politics.

See how offensive such formulations are?

But let's return to the question raised by Ferraro. What if Barack Obama were a white man? If Barack Obama were a white man with his extraordinary intellect, commitment to excellence and charisma, people would be far less likely to raise questions about his "funny name" (he calls it that) and unpreparedness. (JFK anyone?)

No one gets to be president of the Harvard Law Review by being an "unqualified minority". He's the frontrunner on the Democratic side because he is a superb politician  and because more people have voted for him than for Hillary Clinton.

But we can look at this another way: If Barack Obama were a white man, these gifts he possesses might not have developed in the way they did. Each person comes into the world with a unique spirit. The interface of that spirit with the body into which he or she is born and the society and family in which he or she lives and grows, creates the human personality. Perhaps Obama's encounters with bigotry and the diversity of his experiences shaped many of the qualities we admire in him. Perhaps being born on American soil as Barack Hussein Obama, a biracial second generation American in a body that is always perceived as a "Black man", gifted him with a second sight that voters are looking to in troubled times.

I often think of the experience with inequality and adversity as one that cuts at least two ways. It can be demoralizing, devastating and wounding. On the other hand it can build extraordinary character, insight and strength. I have taken great pains in my own life to channel it to the latter kind of development and perhaps I have chosen to support Barack Obama because I see that in him as well. I never denounce those who buckle under the pressure of inequality, but I believe we must also champion those who thrive in spite of it.

All that to say: It is perverse and dishonest to present Barack Obama as the privileged one in this equation. We know why Hillary Clinton doesn't want to reveal her tax returns. The image of her as a working class champion will suffer with the revelation that her power is not simply a product of being a political insider and public servant. She also has enormous personal wealth.

There is no affirmative action in politics besides that which comes from nepotism, wealth, and inside connections. If there is an affirmative action candidate in this election it is Hillary Clinton. And if there is a bootstraps candidate, it is Barack Obama.

Imani Perry, Ph.D., J.D. is a professor at the Rutgers School of Law-Camden and visiting professor at the Princeton University Center for African American Studies.

New York May Soon Have a Black Governor

On Monday afternoon, March 10, 2008, The New York Times has reported that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is allegedly linked to a prostitution ring supposedly corroborated by recorded request on a federal wiretap to meet with a high-priced prostitute.

Gov. Spitzer has already apologized to his family and the public at a press conference.  At the moment, CNN reports that his aides indicate he will resign.

No one wants to make a gain or advance in life due to unfortunate events, but if Gov. Spitzer resigns, New York will have its first Black governor, the state's current Lieutenant Governor David A. Paterson, who would also become the first legally blind elected official of such stature.

Conceding the point

Last night, Barack Obama conceded Hillary Clinton's point during their 20th candidate debate that if indeed reject is a stauncher word than denounce, then Obama both rejects and denounces Minister Louis Farrakhan's endorsement of his candidacy.

This seemed to draw quite a few laughs from the studio audience. But it was no laughing matter to many of us Blackfolk who have seen this zero sum game played time and time again against Black public figures in and out of politics.

Simply put, this denunciation was made to prove that Obama is not an "anti-Semite" and a true friend of Israel.

Attack-dog Tim Russert casually paraphrased a conveniently and ubiquitously unconfirmed quote attributed to Minister Farrakhan in which many mainstream journalists believe he called Judaism a "gutter religion". In the 74 minutes before Russert's racist and hypocritical inquiry of Obama regarding whether he will publicly repudiate Minister Farrakhan, it was the only time he made either candidate respond to a question based on a quote for which he himself did not provide a source.

And because the only answer a viable Black candidate seeking the support of a predominantly White electorate can give is one that Obama proffered last night, an opportunity for real dialogue about real issues of race and culture was missed -- an opportunity that could have better served the interests of society than the nefarious litmus tests forced upon Black public figures to remain socially acceptable by having to denigrate controversial Blackfolk who may sometimes powerfully express the legitimately complex and diverse sentiments of segments of Black America whose views are so often marginalized and/or purposely misrepresented.

In a parallel universe, wouldn't it have been wonderful if Obama said:

"Tim, you have no standing to ask me that question about denouncing Farrakhan as long as NBC continues to employ hate-mongerering commentators like Pat Buchanan. In fact, CNN has no st