Wednesday, October 17, 2007

The Post-Civil Rights Fallacy

Salim Muwakkil writing in In These Times comments on the notion of a post-civil rights era:

[T]he media has been awash in assessments of a new cohort of black leadership. These neophytes are generally described as well-educated (often Ivy Leaguers), non-ideological coalition builders-in that they were not nurtured in the race-tinged battleground of the civil rights movement.

The star players in this coterie are Obama, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, former Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford, Alabama Rep. Artur Davis, Philadelphia mayoral candidate Michael Nutter and a few others.

These attractive newcomers are being cast as the harbingers of a new America, a nation untroubled by the ogre of rank racism. Race-focused leadership, like that expressed by the Revs. Al Sharpton and Jackson, are to be relegated to another era, a 20th century paradigm.

These ideas are part of a hardening notion that the protest mode is an ineffective way to redress the racial problems of the 21st century. Increasing numbers of commentators are stressing the need for African Americans to place more focus on internal social and moral reform than on external protests for civil rights. This is hardly a new debate. In fact, it was the core disagreement between W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Jena protest revealed that the currency of civil rights remains high in the black community in 2007. And although the protest was remarkably decentralized, many of the young organizers eagerly sought the expertise of the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton and welcomed their participation.

Black America is under assault by a biased criminal justice system, and the Jena protest was a spasm of its collective consciousness. This system, correctly labeled “the prison-industrial complex,” is the primary site of racial oppression today, and one of its most corrosive aspects is what many activists call the “school-to-jail pipeline.”

The Jena Six case revealed that pipeline in all its perverse glory: white students’ punishment for hanging nooses remained within the context of school discipline, while the black students’ cases were exported to the criminal justice system. Protesting this disparity is exactly the role of the civil rights community.

Obama is a black politician seeking national consensus. If he responded to every expression of racial bias, he would alienate his supporters who believe we live in post-civil rights America. However, some African Americans are uncomfortable that Obama’s prospects for success are enhanced by a state of racial denial.

I absolutely think it is too easy and facile of liberals, most especially white liberals, to criticize black Civil Rights leaders “because the current dead shell of a civil rights movement makes them too much money,” as one wrote to me.

For one thing, the white establishment is complicit in keeping them there. (I saw Sharpton on the Today Show this week. There’s no question he was easy to book - they had his number and knew where to send the limo - and he’d be predictably provocative and pithy and neatly fit right into their 3-minute format.) For another, those leaders speak for those whose stories are too messy for the media and the establishment to fathom as legitimate champions of justice.

Someone’s got to; I’m glad they do.

When I say we need a newly imagined Civil Rights movement, I am not criticizing the old; and emphatically NOT urging “African Americans to place more focus on internal social and moral reform than on external protests for civil rights.” Rather, I am acknowledging that the challenge now is much more complex. When there is a thriving middle and upper class of blacks it’s easier for critics to blame the victims and deny the reality of an unjust system; and more difficult for advocates to articulate the gross injustice. Statistics are not nearly so powerful as the iconic images that accompanied the fall of Jim Crow.

When Glenn C. Loury asked in The Boston Review last summer, Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? he observed:

Slavery ended a long time ago, but the institution of chattel slavery and the ideology of racial subordination that accompanied it have cast a long shadow. I speak here of the history of lynching throughout the country; the racially biased policing and judging in the South under Jim Crow and in the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West to which blacks migrated after the First and Second World Wars; and the history of racial apartheid that ended only as a matter of law with the civil-rights movement. It should come as no surprise that in the post-civil rights era, race, far from being peripheral, has been central to the evolution of American social policy.

The political scientist Vesla Mae Weaver, in a recently completed dissertation, examines policy history, public opinion, and media processes in an attempt to understand the role of race in this historic transformation of criminal justice. She argues-persuasively, I think-that the punitive turn represented a political response to the success of the civil-rights movement. Weaver describes a process of “frontlash” in which opponents of the civil-rights revolution sought to regain the upper hand by shifting to a new issue. Rather than reacting directly to civil-rights developments, and thus continuing to fight a battle they had lost, those opponents-consider George Wallace’s campaigns for the presidency, which drew so much support in states like Michigan and Wisconsin-shifted attention to a seemingly race-neutral concern over crime.

We deny the racial cleansing that occurred again and again on American soil and show no signs of the political will to stop the inhumane and unjust incarceration of our black male population.

I like those emerging black leaders and I hope they can move us forward; I think the left took the easy way out in the pivot to the war and away from more forcefully confronting the brutal reality of what happened in New Orleans. I care about the war, I care about gay rights, I care about women’s rights. But because of the particular past of this place, these United States, I believe we must first salve the open wound of race. Then, with our clear national conscience, we can more easily confront and solve those other rights issues.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Sullivan on Lewis, Clinton & Obama.  And feminism.

Andrew Sullivan wonders, did Bill get to him? and in the process posits that John Lewis endorsing Hillary is “another sign of some African-Americans’ hostility to Obama.”

Is a Hillary endorsement a repudiation or a preference?

Andrew calls it a racial body-blow to Obama before moving on to some good old-fashioned Clinton bashing:

Fading memory has helped some to forget about the Clintons, their political machine and their ruthlessness. A rising black politician in the Democratic party is a threat to them and their power over blacks. So they are doing what they can to crush him, and punish any Democrat who associates with him. As Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers rise, her leverage increases. As does the fear of those Democrats who know what follows if they cross the power-couple from Hot Springs. I don’t know what prompted Lewis to back Clinton; he marched between Obama and Clinton in Selma, but worshipped with Obama afterwards ... But I very much doubt that Bill did not have a word with him. Again: the way in which Hillary uses her marriage to advance her own power is striking. No real feminist would do this; only someone who postures as a feminist while using her husband as a tool.

I don’t get that seeking an endorsement and pulling out all the stops to get it is the act of a ruthless machine. Lewis by all accounts has had a long and close relationship with the Clintons. 

And I have to chuckle at Sullivan declaring what a real feminist would or would not do. The Is Hillary a feminist? question is in the same neighborhood as the Is Obama Black? conversation. Inevitable and all well and good I guess but clear as a bell to me.

From a terrific Rebecca Traister piece in Salon last October looking at the complicated relationship that feminists have with Hillary:

“Hillary most certainly was a feminist, when the label and identity could be used strategically to her benefit,” said Rebecca Walker, author and co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation, an organization of young feminists, via e-mail. But identifying herself as a feminist today “would be divisive and undermining to her cause of representing, or seeming to represent, all Americans.” Walker continued that although Clinton “voted for the war and made sympathetic antiabortion statements, my sense is that she stands for a ‘feminist’ agenda.” To Walker, that agenda includes reproductive freedom, pay equity, increased family leave, universal healthcare, environmental preservation and education reform.

Walker broke a big-time taboo by coming out and saying one of those things that is impolite to mention. “I have to be totally honest and say that I would vote for Hillary because of her husband,” she said. “Real partnership, with its mammoth requirements of negotiating power and taking turns, is the next feminist frontier,” and “President Hillary and first gentleman Bill would give the world one hell of a demo.”

Walker’s right. Sullivan’s feminist comment bugs me big-time. If a relationship is a partnership then why not help each other? Do the rules change if one is a feminist?

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Matt Towery editorial (again) for Genarlow

Glad to see he keeps on speaking out:

It can’t be too long now before we learn the Georgia Supreme Court’s decision in the Genarlow Wilson case. His sad and cruel sentence is the result of the poorly-executed merger of a bill I introduced in the Georgia House with an entirely different one in the Georgia Senate.

As an attorney I have too much respect for the Supreme Court to ever imagine that editorials or other extra-judicial exclamations would - or should - have an impact on the court.

That said, as we head into another month of this young man serving a mandatory 10-year sentence for what today would be only a misdemeanor, I reflect the views of a majority of Georgians in stating that the law under which Wilson was sentenced was cruel and unusual - even if was put together by well-intended legislators like me.

Let’s pray that somewhere, someone will give this young man his freedom.

REMEMBER: Towery joins legal fight to free Genarlow, Matt Towery on the letter of the law, and Towery: “the Wilson case result was not our intent”

White media keeps Sharpton & Jackson powerful

Dayo Olopade writing in TNR says the peculiar cult of the black political celebrity--which may have outlived its usefulness to black America--remains weirdly potent among the white-dominated media:

At the September rally in Jena, Sharpton and his counterpart, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, were the marquee speakers, calling for the dismissal of all charges and railing against the prison “industry”. “Mychal Bell, we know you hear us. Hang on a little while longer,” Jackson thundered. But the real story was the crowd, assembled by a flood of black activism on the Internet and on black talk radio. Black blogs like AfroSpear, Mirror On America and Prometheus 6 have written reliably on the story for months. As a result, black churches, historically black colleges and universities, and student groups of all stripes were protesting the Jena case as early as March. This brand of organizing was faster to focus on Jena, and its effectiveness far outstripped that of established groups like the NAACP, Sharpton’s National Action Network, and Jackson’s Rainbow/P.U.S.H. Coalition. The Color of Change, an Internet advocacy group sprung from MoveOn in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, generated an online petition to Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco that boasts over 300,000 signatures. In fact, Sharpton admitted to the Chicago Tribune last month that his own knowledge about Jena had come from the black netroots.

While the black community was galvanized to action through a multiplicity of new-media sources, Sharpton and Jackson retained their monopoly on major-media attention. The black blogosphere had been shouting about Jena for months, but the case gained traditional media momentum only after the anointed spokesmen stepped in. Sharpton first visited Jena in the beginning of August, turning the trickle of news on the incident into a firehose stream. Before then, only a spoonful of national outlets ran pieces on Jena. Since then, celebrities have jumped onboard the cause; and statements from Democratic presidential hopefuls followed--first from Barack Obama, then Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. The GOP had been reliably mute on the case, until President Bush curtly told reporters last month, “the events in Louisiana have saddened me.” And after ten months of dawdling, the swelling noise on Jena forced local District Attorney Reed Walters to account for his actions and, at the end of September, drop his appeal to the state supreme court and release Bell on bail.

Despite the effective e-organizing among blacks, it will be a long haul before the Internet generation makes Sharpton and Jackson’s methods totally obsolete. These famous figures present a unique connection to systems of publicity and power. Their loud harangues brought figures like Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and President Bush into the debate, and brought mainstream media outlets to dutiful--if peripatetic--attention. During a recent O’Reilly Factor appearance, for example, Sharpton’s rehearsed statements about Jena quickly segued into chatty jibes about the many dinners he and O’Reilly have shared. While Jackson performed better the following night on O’Reilly, this piecemeal statesmanship proved the only means for a story like Jena to enter the national conversation. White liberals gasp at what seems like atavism when such standoffs spotlight racial tension in America--yet have made these elder statesmen the only canaries in the mine.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse

Coming in January 08, I’m watching for it:

Today’s race relations,â€Â� law professor Ford demonstrates, “are more complex and contradictory than those of the unambiguously white supremacist past.â€Â� In this journey through a political minefield, he examines dubious charges of racism and other kinds of bias, while acknowledging that exaggerated claims can piggyback on real examples of victimization. But the author’s tenor is often more eye-catching than eye-opening. He revisits Tawana Brawley, Clarence Thomas, O.J. Simpson and Hurricane Katrina, along with Oprah’s Hermès problem, Jay-Z’s with champagne and Danny Glover’s with New York City cabdrivers. Yet at its core, this book raises probing questions about the extent to which “the extraordinary social and legal condemnation of racism and other social prejudices encourages people to recast what are basically run-of-the-mill social conflicts as cases of bigotry.” By analogy, he addresses issues concerning animal liberation, gay marriage, “appearance discrimination,” “sex harassment law” and multiculturalism. In delineating the differences between formal discrimination, discriminatory intent and discriminatory effects, Ford also reviews thorny legal cases involving, for example, McDonnell Douglas and Price Waterhouse. Readers all along the political spectrum will find much to please, annoy and provoke thought about the thin “line between invidious discrimination and plan old unfairness.”

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Let’s demand REAL justice

Xochitl Bervera of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) in Facing South today on the Justice that Jena demands:

Too many of our movements today want to dismiss, minimize, or overlook the necessity for a racial justice movement to prioritize organizing around criminal justice. Too often, our members meet others—even those who should be allies—who hold the entrenched belief that if a child is in prison, he must be “bad,” he must have done something wrong. Even in progressive circles, organizations prefer to focus on the school children who need an education, the families who want affordable housing, the victims of street violence and drive-by shootings. These people are portrayed as “innocent” and deserving while currently and formerly incarcerated people are “guilty”—of something.

Of course, it’s a false dichotomy. Everyone knows that the same communities, the same people, who are most impacted by violence, the lack of health care, education, and housing are those most brutally impacted by policing and prisons. But the idea of the dichotomy has been essential to maintaining the stigma which justifies the system. And it’s been a handy and effective tool to explain away a great deal of racial injustice in this country.

In Jena, when asked about the incident which led to the arrests of the Jena 6, a white librarian confidently explained to the NPR reporter, “It’s not about race. It’s about crime.” Crime—the ultimate proxy for race, the ultimate justification for racism.

What to do about it:

[W]hat we fight for and how we fight will make all the difference. The most obvious principle is that we cannot fight for the system to expand—in any way. Asking for the white kids who hung the nooses to be charged, calling for Hate Crime Legislation—these “solutions” just strengthen the system and give the same players—the D.A., the judge, the jury—more powers and more validation. If we understand that the system, at its core, is not designed to promote justice, then why would we ask for anything that expands its reach or powers? At the very least, we must call only for things which shrink the system—closing prisons, freeing prisoners, cutting correction budgets, eliminating the death penalty and Life Without Parole, prohibiting juvenile transfers, and implementing sentencing reform.

We can also call for accountability from our elected officials. D.A.s and judges who perpetuate injustice, state representatives who are in bed with the corrections department and private prison companies—these people should not be allowed to hold office. They should be ousted whether by recall, regular elections, or public pressure to step down.

I’m with you Xochitl!

I’d like to see progressives take up the issue of willful prosecutors with the same zeal - and achieve the same degree of success - as the Right has with its attack on “activist” judges. 

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Thomas on Georgia and DC

Oh really?

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in a forcefully rendered new autobiography, says he was pilloried during his 1991 confirmation hearings because liberal advocacy groups who feared he would vote to overturn abortion rights were willing to stoop to “the age-old blunt instrument of accusing a black man of sexual misconduct.”

They did so by, he writes, by using untrue sexual harassment claims by Anita F. Hill, a law professor and former subordinate, whom he described as a mediocre but ambitious lawyer and labels as “my most traitorous adversary.” [...]

In large measure, the Thomas book is a lengthier version of his staunch denials at the time. It is notable, however, for his overarching analysis that the abortion issue was the moving force behind the drama. And Justice Thomas’s language is exceptionally vivid, especially when he expands on the phrase he used in his last appearance before the committee, asserting he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching.”

He writes that he had grown up fearing the Ku Klux Klan’s lynch mobs but “my worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia, but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.”

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Bravo Barack!

From Obama’s Howard University speech Friday:

I commend those of you at Howard that have spoken out on Jena Six or traveled to the rally in Louisiana. I commend those of you who have spoken out on the Genarlow Wilson case. I know it can be lonely protesting this kind of injustice. I know there’s not a lot of glamour in it. Because when I was a state senator in Illinois we have a death penalty system that had sent 13 innocent people to their death--13 innocent men that we know. I wanted to reform the system, and I was told by almost everyone that it was not possible, that I wouldn’t be able to get police officers and civil rights activists to work together, Democrats and Republicans to agree that we should videotape confessions to make sure they weren’t coerced. Folks told me that there was too much political risk involved, and it would come to haunt me later, when I ran for higher office. But I believed that it was too risky not to act. And after a while people with opposing views came together and started listening. And we ended up reforming that death penalty system, and we did the same when I passed the law to expose racial profiling.

So don’t let anyone tell you that change is not possible. Don’t let them tell you that standing out and speaking up about injustice is too risky. What’s too risky is keeping quiet. What’s too risky is looking the other way. I don’t want to be here standing and talking about another Jena four years from now because we didn’t have the courage to act today. I don’t want this to be another issue that ends up being ignored when the cameras are turned off and the headlines disappear. It’s time to seek a new dawn of justice in America.

From the day I take office as President of the United States--has a ring to it, doesn’t it? From the day I take office as President America will have a Justice Department that is truly dedicated to justice, the work it began in the days after Little Rock. I will rid the department of idealogues and political cronies, and for the first time in eight years the civil rights division will actually be staffed with civil rights lawyers who prosecute civil rights violations, and employment discrimination and hate crimes.

Andrew Sullivan has the text of the full text. Says he:

A strikingly expansive speech, a reminder of what Obama can deliver when he wants to. My sense is that he is holding back, or rather has been holding back. He is very, very careful not to get too angry as a black candidate. Perhaps too careful for his core message: real change. What he needs to do is find a way to explain how serious he is about change while explaining that he alone can overcome the boomer polarization that has prevented it. And that’s true on the race issue as well. Yesterday, the message got sharper.

RELATED: Newsweek has polling on the Iowa caucuses, Obama 28, Clinton 24, Edwards 22.

Friday, September 28, 2007

The results of anger and racial tension gone awry

I agree with Dawn, as quoted the other night on News & Notes:

I remember in my high school that there were occasionally fights in which one person was jumped by many people..and I lived in a pretty calm town. The issues were settled with suspension or expulsion from school. That is appropriate punishment for 16 year old kids. In an extreme case of battery, it may be appropriate to charge the kids with battery...in JUVENILE court.

Where were the school officials when all of this racial tension was evolving? How did they attempt to solve the problem before it turned into violence?

I don’t believe that these children should have been charged as adults. The crime they allegedly committed is the result of anger and racial tension gone awry and unchecked by authority figures. The reason we have a juvenile court system is because many Americans believe that kids have time to reform and deserve a second chance. Shouldn’t seven boys involved in a horrible school fight be given a chance to reform also?

I understand that certain forms of racist speech are protected under the 1st amendment (which is why we are even allowed to have this discussion forum). BUT, keep in mind that any school that receives federal funds is REQUIRED to protect students from racial harassment and discrimination. Nooses hanging from a tree....racial harassment. A “white only” tree....racial discrimination.

It’s pretty clear that when school officials went to the DA for help, what they got instead was inflammatory rhetoric that made matters worse:

District Attorney Reed Walters warned the students he could be their friend or their worst enemy. He lifted his fountain pen and said, “With one stroke of my pen, I can make your life disappear.”

Unfortunately, Walters is still at it.

Jena 6: Bell out on bail

WaPo:

Mychal Bell’s release on $45,000 bail came hours after a prosecutor confirmed he would no longer seek an adult trial for the 17-year-old. Bell, one of the teenagers known as the Jena Six, still faces trial as a juvenile in the December beating in this small central Louisiana town.

But the problem continues:

An estimated 20,000 to 25,000 protesters marched in Jena last week in a scene that evoked the early years of the civil rights movement.

[District Attorney Reed] Walters said the demonstration had no influence on his decision not to press the adult charges, and ended his news conference by saying that only God kept the protest peaceful.

“The only way _ let me stress that _ the only way that I believe that me or this community has been able to endure the trauma that has been thrust upon us is through the prayers of the Christian people who have sent them up in this community,” Walters said.

“I firmly believe and am confident of the fact that had it not been for the direct intervention of the Lord Jesus Christ last Thursday, a disaster would have happened. You can quote me on that.”

The Rev. Donald Sibley, a black Jena pastor, called it a “shame” that Walters credited divine intervention for the protesters acting responsibly.

If you don’t see the problem with the DA’s inflammatory statement _ let me stress that _ then you are part of the problem too.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

On the O’Reilly/Media Matters contretemps

Media Matters had an O’Reilly-is-a-racist report on Friday that immediately caught fire in the blogosphere.

I’m glad I missed it. While, generally speaking, I shy away from calling people racist, had I seen it I may have been swept up in it.

I am no fan of Bill O’Reilly; I am a fan of Media Matters.

I only caught up and tuned in when I happened on to this morning’s Matt Lauer Today Show interview of Media Matters’ Paul Waldman. I was wholly unimpressed with Waldman. When asked by Lauer about the possibility that O’Reilly’s comments could be understood in a more benign light, Waldman said:

WALDMAN: Well that’s fine for [O’Reilly] to give that message but what I think is really instructive was the reaction that he had when people started to raise some objections or raise their eyebrows at this… he lashed out… he criticized Media Matters. He said we smeared him just because we put up his words on a website…

LAUER: Well wait a second are you criticizing now for his reaction to the controversy? Shouldn’t we stick to the controversy in the first place?

WALDMAN:..and he attacked CNN and he attacked MSNBC and NBC. This is what Fox News does. They reacted as though they were partisan political actors and not somebody, people who are trying to be a legitimate news organization. They said it was all liberal news outlets who were trying to drum up ratings.

Forgive me, but don’t we have here a pot calling a kettle black? I’m all for liberals calling out Conservatives for any racist proclivities, but I am not looking to manufacture faux controversies by taking advantage of or purposefully misconstruing someone’s words.

Waldman never claimed there was anything demonstrably racist in what O’Reilly said - in fact, he specifically said, “it’s not about whether he’s making racist statements” - he kept the focus on O’Reilly’s incendiary reaction. That is a tried and true Right Wing media strategy; and not one I admire or respect. It’s not legitimate and not something I like seeing my liberal fellows mimic.

We claim we want a dialog on race but then pounce on anyone who dares to try. That is not a recipe for successfully addressing the race problem in America.

LATER: Crooks and Liars disagrees. And has the video. 

Monday, September 24, 2007

Jena 6 complexities

I’m aware of them. I’ve not seen them articulated in a way that I’m comfortable with so if I’m going to err it will be on the side of the Jena 6.

Then I came upon Richard Thompson Ford writing in Slate, “the racial problems facing this town-and many others-are more complex than simple prejudice, and finding solutions will necessarily require more nuance than a mass protest can offer...”

[T]he demonstrators have plenty to be upset about: racial segregation; racially disproportionate arrest, prosecution, and incarceration rates; and a pervasive societal racism that is passed from generation to generation. But because none of these sadly common racial injustices have a discrete cause, none are likely to respond to the type of quick and specific reform that a demonstration can demand. As a result, the march on Jena was a bit unfocused. It’s telling that the demonstrators moved between the courthouse where Bell was tried for an offense no one denies he committed and the site of the “white tree” that, with all-too-fitting symbolism, has since been cut down. “Free the Jena 6” has become a rallying cry, perhaps because, “Stop Informal Segregation and Prosecutorial Overzealousness That Disproportionately Affects African-Americans Here and Elsewhere” won’t fit on T-shirt or a placard. (And the Rev. Sharpton, who has led rallies in support of self-segregation in ethnic theme houses at Cornell University, is especially ill-positioned to lead the way forward in this respect.)

The 21^st century’s civil rights movement will need more sympathetic poster children than the Jena 6. These young men weren’t exactly engaged in peaceful civil disobedience when they ran afoul of the law. The injustice here is not that they are being prosecuted for their crime-it is that the many other wrongs that preceded the assault have been inadequately addressed. When you think about it, the logic that underlies the demand to free the Jena 6 comes down to this: These six young men were justified in kicking their lone victim senseless because other people who shared his race committed offenses against other black students. This sort of racial vendetta is diametrically opposed to the message of social justice and cross-racial understanding that underlies the civil rights movement of the last century.

And yet, all along, Jena has had a better symbol for civil rights on offer. The anonymous black students who defied the informal segregation at the high school and sat under the perversely misnamed “white tree” are the movement’s true legatees. They have received so little attention that I don’t even know their names or how many such brave and defiant young people there were.

I’m seeing a lot of nuanced, sophisticated and innovative thinking about race and race issues by Blacks; reflexive old-style civil rights rhetoric from liberal Whites. If someone can point me in a different direction I’d be appreciative. We’ve got to address the problem of racism together.

LATER - Mark Sorkin:

I know at least one of them, Mr. Ford. His name is Bryant Purvis, and he stands accused of aggravated second-degree battery.

Fighting the first backlash is a matter for the authorities. Fighting the second requires some rhetorical skill. It seems crucial to me to make sure that the story begins with those nooses, not with the fight. And to acknowledge that the Jena Six are not angels; they don’t have to be.

Er, or maybe they shouldn’t have to be.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Racial disparities in charging and sentencing

A biased justice system:

Nationally, black youths are significantly more likely to be tried as adults than are white youths, according to a January report from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. The same report states that while black youths make up 16 percent of the general adolescent population, they make up 38 percent of the approximately 100,000 youths being held in local and state detention facilities.

The irony, some say, is that mass outpouring of support in cases like the Jena 6 may, in fact, obscure the real issues, where many criminal-defense lawyers can point to examples of prosecutorial zeal when dealing with black defendants.

“The public at large basically thinks that these cases are aberrations, and that’s one reason why so much attention is paid to them,” says Professor Nunn. “It’s the idea that it’s the redneck sheriff doing this and not the way we sort of stack the odds against black criminal defendants. We can point to a few bad apples, say, ‘See, it’s them,’ and the rest of us feel great because we’re demonstrating how we disagree with racism.”

Via a public defender who questions the assumption in the Jena 6 Mychal Bell trial that the public defender called no witnesses because he was angry:

Surely there’s a transcript out there somewhere.

But a defendant doesn’t always have to call witnesses. The State bears the burden of proof and the defendant can choose to leave the State to its burden. This is a frequent jury instruction and almost always a question during voir dire in a criminal case.

It is counter-intuitive, for sure. You have been accused of doing something, you tell your side of the story. If you have a defense, an alibi, you will present it. Prospective jurors, upon question, usually state that they understand why the defendant can choose not to present a defense. But do they believe it? I think the Jena Six coverage has a hint of that. He didn’t call any witnesses!?! is the incredulous tone.

He’s also the first place I’ve seen it noted that it was not just an all white jury, “the jury pool was all white. Which included a friend of the victim’s father.”

RELATED: Bell did not receive bail Friday. And Are the whites in Jena racist?

Racial disparities in death penalty in GA

The AJC’s special report on the death penalty in Georgia found there are indeed racial disparities:

The death penalty carries a racial bias in Georgia, but it’s not what most people think.

White killers are more likely to face capital prosecution and land on death row, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found. The reason: White killers are more likely to kill white people.

A statistical analysis shows Georgia prosecutors were more than twice as likely to seek the death penalty when the victim was white. [...]

“Black victims have to be really, really brutalized before they’re treated the same as a white-victim case,” [University of Maryland criminologist Ray] Paternoster said. [...]

The analysis showed a similar difference in sentencing. When facing capital prosecution, killers of whites were more than twice as likely to land on death row. Eighteen of the last 20 murderers executed in Georgia were white. All but one killed white people.

Friday, September 21, 2007

Echo the old or herald the new?

The NYTimes says the protest in Jena echoes the old civil rights era:

In a slow-moving march that filled streets, spilled onto sidewalks and stretched for miles, more than 10,000 demonstrators rallied Thursday in this small town to protest the treatment of six black teenagers arrested in the beating of a white schoolmate last year.

Chanting slogans from the civil rights era and waving signs, protesters from around the nation converged in central Louisiana, where the charges have made this otherwise anonymous town of 3,000 people a high-profile arena in the debate on racial bias in the judicial system. [...]

Students, particularly those at historically black colleges, have also had a pivotal role in spreading the details. They poured into town after all-night bus rides. Many said they were happy to pick up the torch of the civil rights struggle.

“This is the first time something like this has happened for our generation,” said Eric Depradine, 24, a senior at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “You always heard about it from history books and relatives. This is a chance to experience it for ourselves.”

In those students I find promise and hope because from great problems greatness grows. This problem is as big an intractable as any we got. I believe this generation has what it takes to solve it.

In a Bill Moyers’ Journal interview last spring, Melissa Harris-Lacewell explained that you can’t use a hammer on a screw:

“What I’m suggesting is we are experiencing a new form of racial inequality. We could think of Jim Crow as a nail. And the protest against Jim Crow were a hammer. And a hammer is an extremely effective tool when you’re dealing with a nail. Contemporary racial inequality is structural. It’s undercover. It is connected with also with sort of black achievement which is also going on at the same time. Contemporary racial inequality is a screw, and if you take a hammer and start pounding on a screw, you just end up with a mess which means we have to live with the fact that a new generation is going to have to innovate a screwdriver to deal with the new problem. And that screwdriver might not look anything like the hammer. And we can’t keep yelling at them to use a hammer for a new problem.”

To me that looks like the beginnings of a screwdriver down in Jena Louisiana.

Are the whites in Jena racist?

And, while we’re on the topic, what about the liberal blogoshphere?

On All Things Considered last July, Jena school board member Bill Fowler said:

As far as racial problems, our community is no different from any other community… I’m appalled at - announce that media coming in here painting us as the most racist community in the world. That is totally inaccurate and not true.

I am thinking Fowler’s right. But therein lies the real problem.

I’ve pointed time and time again to the 2005 South by Southwest keynote address by Malcolm Gladwell. If ever there was a time his point needed to be heard, it is now.

As Malcolm tells it, the great conductors of the world once innocently believed that men were innately better musicians than women and orchestras were male bastions. When, one day, through a set of fortuitous circumstances, a male maestro auditioned a woman he thought was a man (she auditioned from behind a screen) he hired her. And when screens were broadly adopted it became clear to everyone that women were every bit as talented musicians as men.

What once was “obvious,” that men were better musicians, is now obviously not.

His story is to illustrate the power and peril of subliminal snap judgments. Says Gladwell [@48:38]:

There are certain things about somebody that all of us are really really good at knowing right away, and certain things that we may think we’re good at knowing that we are profoundly not…

Sexual attractiveness, you can do like that…

When we have real experience with something we are good at making profoundly good snap judgments, but in almost every other situation where we do not have that level of expertise our snap judgments are bad. And as a society I feel we are way too cavalier about the products of our snap judgments.

After his talk, during the questions, Gladwell made this observation that I still have seen made no place else [@50:29]:

I have become convinced since writing this book that juries should never be able to see the defendants in a jury trial; that that is just crazy. Why? Because the kind of snap judgments a jury is likely to make about a defendant from seeing the defendant are all irrelevant…

Every year someone stands up and points out that there are huge differentials in the conviction rates and sentences for blacks and whites convicted of the same crime. And yet we make that observation and kind of shrug and say, “Well, that’s America.”

We don’t have to live with that. Why don’t we do something about it?

I would bet every dollar I own that if we put the defendant in a backroom and had the defendant answer all questions by email that the gap between black and white defendants, the sentences and conviction rates would shrink.

I absolutely believe that.

I do too.

SEE ALSO: From “activist judges” to taking on “willfull prosecutorsâ€Â�

Thursday, September 20, 2007

From “activist judges” to taking on “willfull prosecutors”

Former state representative E. Wycliff Orr, a lawyer in Gainesville, GA, has an OpEd in the AJC today headlined, For a change, Georgia needs to choose justice. Starting with the quoted question, “Where’s the justice?” he looks at the outcomes in the Genarlow Wilson case and the Troy Davis case now before Georgia’s Supreme Court and calls for a more empowered judiciary:

For all the cries against “judicial activism” and for mandatory sentences that tie judges’ hands, do we really want judges who are reduced to the rigid, ritualistic application of “one-size-fits-all” outcomes? Do we want judges rendered powerless to create fair results based on the inevitable differences between cases?

Meanwhile, in Jena, LA right now there is underway what has the potential to be one of the most important civil rights protests in recent history:

Fanon Brown, 16, is one of [the protesters]: He told [Richard G. Jones, a reporter for The New York Times] that he left Philadelphia at 3 a.m. Wednesday and got to Jena 27 hours later. He is here, he says, not just for the six black boys who were arrested for beating a white classmate after a series of incidents in the town, but for the larger things he said the case represents about race and justice in America:

I can’t believe that after all these years we still have deformities in our justice system. We have to free the Jena Six but we’ve got to go home and take care of this racism thing.’

What all of these cases have in common is a prosecutor who has used his discretion (and in all of the cases mentioned, the prosecutor was a white male) to bring charges that are demonstrably out of whack with what is the norm; or, rather, the norm for similar offenses committed by similar white individuals.

Conservatives have successfully thrust the “activist judge” moniker into the popular lexicon. Worse, they have successfully codified it into onerous limits on judicial discretion to right obvious wrongs. Liberals should not just fight back this challenge, but they should take on willful prosecutors who fight on beyond all evidence, reason and rationality and build a justice system that includes real safeguards against willfully discriminatory prosecutions.

The indisputable fact is that the very large majority of all cases prosecuted never get to court. They are, instead, settled in negotiated plea bargains. And the decision of how, what and whether to prosecute is decided entirely through Prosecutorial Discretion:

Courts recognize a prosecutor’s broad discretion to initiate and conduct criminal prosecutions, in part out of regard for the separation of powers doctrine and in part because “the decision to prosecute is particularly ill-suited to judicial review.” In the absence of contrary evidence, courts presume that criminal prosecutions are undertaken in good faith and in a nondiscriminatory manner. So long as a prosecutor has probable cause to believe that the accused has committed an offense, the decision to prosecute rests within her discretion. A prosecutor has broad authority to decide whether to investigate, grant immunity, or permit a plea bargain, and to determine whether to bring charges, what charges to bring, when to bring charges, and where to bring charges. [...]

There are other limits to a prosecutor’s discretion, and the judiciary has a responsibility to protect individuals from prosecutorial conduct that violates constitutional rights. Such conduct usually involves either selective prosecution, which denies equal protection of the law, or vindictive prosecution, which violates due process.

Emphasis mine. It’s time that liberals right the wrong of willfully discriminatory prosecutors and do it in a manner similar to - and with as much vehemence as - the way big ‘C’ Conservatives have taken on activist judges. To those who point to Mike Nifong as evidence that the system works, I point to Nifong, too, to contrast him with David McDade.

Nifong is not the only out of control rogue prosecutor. The question is whether the only reason we caught him, the only reason we stopped him, is because he went after three white guys at the eighth ranked university in the nation.

David McDade went after a 17-year-old black kid engaged in the kind of behavior that is objectionable and makes most of us uncomfortable but is, unfortunately, more common than we’d like to admit. He successfully prosecuted that kid for consensual sex and fought fiercely against reconsideration.

That fierce fight includes McDade calling the kid a rapist even after a jury found him innocent of the charge. That fierce fight meant that when the girl’s mother spoke out in defense of Genarlow, she was subject to a visit that reeks of intimidation from an assistant DA and an investigator with a tape recorder. That fierce fight lead McDade to widely distribute a sex tape - an ethically dubious act intended to preserve the conviction and turn public opinion against the accused - that was judged by the U.S. Attorney in Atlanta to be a violation of federal child pornography laws so quite possibly, a criminal act. 

Jimmy Carter is only the most prominent among those to observe:

The racial dimension of the case is likewise hard to ignore and perhaps unfortunately has had an impact on the final outcome of the case… There is some statistical evidence reported by various non-profit agencies in Georgia, leading me to believe that white minor defendants in the same circumstances as Mr. Wilson’s receive far lesser forms of punishment.

In the Boston Review last summer, Glenn C. Loury asks, Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Despite a sharp national decline in crime, American criminal justice has become crueler and less caring than it has been at any other time in our modern history. Why?

The question has no simple answer, but the racial composition of prisons is a good place to start. The punitive turn in the nation’s social policy-intimately connected with public rhetoric about responsibility, dependency, social hygiene, and the reclamation of public order-can be fully grasped only when viewed against the backdrop of America’s often ugly and violent racial history… This historical resonance between the stigma of race and the stigma of imprisonment serves to keep alive in our public culture the subordinating social meanings that have always been associated with blackness. Race helps to explain why the United States is exceptional among the democratic industrial societies in the severity and extent of its punitive policy and in the paucity of its social-welfare institutions.

Slavery ended a long time ago, but the institution of chattel slavery and the ideology of racial subordination that accompanied it have cast a long shadow. I speak here of the history of lynching throughout the country; the racially biased policing and judging in the South under Jim Crow and in the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West to which blacks migrated after the First and Second World Wars; and the history of racial apartheid that ended only as a matter of law with the civil-rights movement. It should come as no surprise that in the post-civil rights era, race, far from being peripheral, has been central to the evolution of American social policy.

The political scientist Vesla Mae Weaver, in a recently completed dissertation, examines policy history, public opinion, and media processes in an attempt to understand the role of race in this historic transformation of criminal justice. She argues-persuasively, I think-that the punitive turn represented a political response to the success of the civil-rights movement. Weaver describes a process of “frontlash” in which opponents of the civil-rights revolution sought to regain the upper hand by shifting to a new issue. Rather than reacting directly to civil-rights developments, and thus continuing to fight a battle they had lost, those opponents-consider George Wallace’s campaigns for the presidency, which drew so much support in states like Michigan and Wisconsin-shifted attention to a seemingly race-neutral concern over crime.

Whether or not you agree with Loury - and I believe his piece makes a powerfull case - Richard Moran, a professor of sociology and criminology at Mount Holyoke College, has documented that there is malicious prosecution:

My recently completed study of the 124 exonerations of death row inmates in America from 1973 to 2007 indicated that 80, or about two-thirds, of their so-called wrongful convictions resulted not from good-faith mistakes or errors but from intentional, willful, malicious prosecutions by criminal justice personnel.

What Duke and Genarlow and Jena all have in common is willful prosecutorial intent. It’s time we on the Left do something about it!

Monday, September 17, 2007

Black and White and Dems all over

Tom Schaller, of Whistling Past Dixie fame, says the Dems should not bother with white male voters, and with that says the Dems should ignore the South, win with the West and the East and then ultimately the South will see the error of its ways and come around to the Democratic position.

The thing I just don’t get about that abandon the South philosophy is that the South has seen an influx of African Americans and has some of the wealthiest, healthiest black communities in the country. So, if the Dems ignore the South, aren’t they ignoring that key constituency?

Schaller writing in Salon today:

Democrats are able to neutralize their white male voter problem with votes from African-Americans—even though the latter group is only about one-third the size of the former. While Galston was right in 2000 about the “more than offsets” effect of white male votes relative to black votes, by 2004 the share of all votes cast by white men had shrunk by 3 percent while the share cast by African-American voters has increased by 2 percent; today, the black vote fully compensates for the Democrats’ deficit among white men.

So how about this Tom Schaller, rather than writing off the Southern White Male why not focus on empowering African American people in the South and moving their issues front and center nationwide?

SEE ALSO: Whistle past Schaller! and Blacks get screwed. It’s time we build a screwdriver.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Jena 6: LA appeals court overturns Mychal Bell conviction

Bell had been convicted on the charge of aggravated-battery. The state’s 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal said that the 17-year-old should not have been tried as an adult. Five other black youngsters who, with Bell, make up the “Jena 6” still face charges. WaPo:

The youngsters were accused of kicking and punching a fellow student at Jena High School. The victim, Justin Barker, was knocked out and received a black eye but suffered no permanent injuries.

[LaSalle Parish District Attorney J. Reed] Walters first charged the attackers with attempted second-degree murder. He reduced the charges against five of the defendants as the case drew national attention.

Racial tension rose in Jena after white students hung three nooses in a tree at the school. Black parents wanted the students expelled, but the superintendent of schools opted to suspend them for three days.

In subsequent weeks, an arsonist torched a wing of the school, and racial fighting roiled the town. Only the black high school students were arrested and charged in the fights. Walters vowed to try them as adults.

Facing South has stayed on top of this case. Here’s the WaPo story that first brought it to my attention last summer. Here’s a petition with nearly 300,000 signatures to date.

A Collateral News video telling. An NBC News story on the case.

SEE ALSO: Blacks get screwed. It’s time we build a screwdriver.

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Max Blumenthal on the “crisis of blackness”

I keep wishing and wanting the democratic party to do something more about addressing the issue of race in America. I finally got around to reading the Veracifier Max Blumenthal interview from the week before last:

Do you think America’s ready to elect a black man?

I don’t know the answer to that. My answer to that is that racism is still very real and that particular black man is stuck between a rock and a hard place because he has to be black enough; he has to be authentically black. His blackness has been challenged because he’s biracial, at the same time he can’t be too black or he’ll be pigeon-holed as Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, and he won’t win over voters in Iowa. So I just think there’s a crisis of blackness in the political arena right now that Barack Obama embodies, and if he is elected, he will redefine America’s concept of blackness; it’s an interesting issue. [...]

Do you think Hillary’s going to face the same thing being a woman?

Max: I think Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are really distractions from the real question, which is: Is America willing to embrace women’s rights and is America willing to embrace black men on their own terms? Which means talking about issues like abortion, which democrats are scared to talk about, and issues like prison, which Democrats, particularly at the state level; a lot are in the pocket of the prison guard’s union. So you have an enormous amount of black males basically warehoused in prisons for non-violent crimes, over 50 percent of the federal prison population is in jail for nonviolent drug offenses, what’s basically going on is a war on young black men.

It’s a quiet war that everyone’s afraid to talk about, and America is not, I don’t know if America’s ready to resolve this war in a just fashion. And Barack Obama’s election isn’t going to do it, if anything, it’s just going to be a way of papering over what mainstream America’s opinions are of black males. And I’m speaking as a white Jew.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Jena 6 update

Jena high school in rural Louisiana:

It all began this time last year, when black students decided that they would begin sharing the shade offered by the tree with their white counterparts, some of whom regarded it as their exclusive preserve.

The next morning three nooses were hanging from the boughs, an image intended to remind blacks of the lynchings once inflicted on their forebears. The white boys found responsible were given three days of in-school suspension after the education chiefs decided that their actions were nothing more than an adolescent prank.

But the incident prompted simmering violence between the two groups, which came to a head during the Thanksgiving holiday last November, when a fire at the school triggered a wave of fights and beatings.

Lawyers representing Mychal Bell, a 17-year-old black student, appealed yesterday to courts to set aside his conviction by an all-white jury over an incident in which a white boy was knocked unconscious. Another five black teenagers were charged with attempted murder relating to the same incident.

Two of them, Carwin Jones and Theo Shaw, had their charges reduced to aggravated assault yesterday, which means that, like Bell, they face a maximum 22-year jail sentence.

Civil rights leaders are incensed by the apparent double standards, and are planning a march through the town in support of the “Jena Six” on September 20, when Bell is due to be sentenced. They say that white youths involved in the same cycle of violence faced significantly lesser charges or have been released on probation.

Here’s the WaPo story that first brought the story to my attention last summer. Here’s a petition with over 160,000 signatures to date, and another with over 134,000.

A Collateral News video telling. An NBC News story on the case.

SEE ALSO: Blacks get screwed. It’s time we build a screwdriver.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Nazis out of Knoxville!

Digby calls it “the funniest thing I’ve read in years.” From Asheville Indymedia:

Saturday May 26th the VNN Vanguard Nazi/KKK group attempted to host a hate rally to try to take advantage of the brutal murder of a white couple for media and recruitment purposes. http://www.volunteertv.com/special

Unfortunately for them the 100th ARA (Anti Racist Action) clown block came and handed them their asses by making them appear like the asses they were.

Alex Linder the founder of VNN and the lead organizer of the rally kicked off events by rushing the clowns in a fit of rage, and was promptly arrested by 4 Knoxville police officers who dropped him to the ground when he resisted and dragged him off past the red shiny shoes of the clowns. http://www.volunteertv.com/home/headlines/7704982.html

“White Power!” the Nazi’s shouted, “White Flour?â€Â� the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, “ohhhhhh!” the clowns yelled “Tight Shower!” and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan’s directions.

At this point several of the Nazi’s and Klan members began clutching their hearts as if they were about to have a heart attack. Their beady eyes bulged, and the veins in their tiny narrow foreheads beat in rage. One last time they screamed “White Power!”

The clown women thought they finally understood what the Klan was trying to say. “Ohhhhh…” the women clowns said. “Now we understand…”, “WIFE POWER!” they lifted the letters up in the air, grabbed the nearest male clowns and lifted them in their arms and ran about merrily chanting “WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER!” [...]

In the end the 20 or so sad VNNers left with their tails between their legs. At this point over 150 counter demonstraters were present. The clowns seeing how dejected and sad the Nazi’s looked began singing to cheer them up.

“hey hey hey hey, ho ho ho ho-good bye, good bye” everyone sang waving their arms in the air in unison.

After the VNNers left in their shiny SUVs to go back to Alabama and all the other states that they were from the clowns and counter demonstrators began to march out of the area chanting ‘WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS!”

But the cops stopped the clowns and counter protestors. “Hey, do you want an escort” an African-American police officer on a motorcycle asked. “Yes” a clown replied. “We are walking to Market Square in the center of town to celebrate.”

The police officers got in front of the now anti racist parade and blocked the entire road for the march through the heart of Knoxville.

Please note, these clowns were southerners. In this WVLT report we learn that not all of the Klansmen were:

“I came down her to say no to savage black crime!” said Hal Turner, who hosts a radio show based out of the New York City area. “Nothing can help the dead people, but it can alert the white people out there that there are terrible savages here in the city and that they have to be a little more racially aware.”

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Katrina as Democratic Party failure

Last week on Bill Moyers Journal, Princeton’s Melissa Harris-Lacewell explained that up until Katrina the Democratic Party and the traditional media were “quite timid” in critiquing the Bush administration for fear of being labeled unpatriotic. The bungling of Katrina opened the door to criticism, but with that opening the Democratic Party chose to go after the president on Iraq.

Democrats could have used the opportunity to stand up for New Orleans and hold our government accountable for the “urbanism, race, class, environmentalism which were the true core issues that made Katrina possible.”

Instead we know, as Mike Tidwell tells us in the same program, that “the city of New Orleans is effectively being abandoned. It really is. And we’re not doing what we know we can do to save it.”

In that, Katrina was a Big ‘D’ Democratic party failure:

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: If someone had looked at that coverage and instead of saying, oh, my God, look at all these refugees on the roof of their home. If someone had said look at all those Democratic voters trapped out there in the water because that’s what they are. There a bunch of Democratic voters. Then maybe the party would have thought, okay, if George Bush isn’t here every day, then we should be. We should be standing in Jackson Square every day and holding accountable. I don’t allow or accept that simply because it was a party in power, even more so therefore that the Democrats who were in local power there. Not just at the city level, but the state level and even at the national level, could have started to provide leadership.

BILL MOYERS: Are you saying that the response to Katrina on the part of the democratic party should have been we can win the election in 2008 if we exploit this?

MELISSA HARRIS-LACEWELL: No. It should have been, here, standing here at this moment is the questions of why the Democratic Party, from its own understandings of itself as a progressive liberal institution, should be able to do better. That this was a moment where you had national outrage. Where you had southerners together in solidarity from the experience that they had just had. Where you had environmentalism which is Al Gore’s central key issue, where you had urban issues coming-- all of the things that the Democrats say that they’re good at, this is the moment to provide leadership. I won’t talk-- I’m not talking about exploitation. I’m saying, you claim this is what you’re good at. Let’s see you do it. Let’s see you talk about how we build a progressive coalition of working people in the South.

Emphasis mine. I note that she emphasizes “the South” and take the opportunity to complain again that the Democratic Party bears some responsibility for our southern heritage and should be redoubling its efforts here.

After the jump, why handing out checks to Katrina victims is wrong…

Read the rest of "Katrina as Democratic Party failure" in the extended entry.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Gay Unions and Black Chruches

The The WaPo looks at Covenant Baptist, a DC area church where co-pastors Dennis and Christine Wiley have begun to conduct same-sex union ceremonies:

For years, disputes over homosexuality have convulsed predominantly white Protestant denominations—Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopalian and Presbyterian—but they have only recently hit black churches.

“It’s going to be a real challenge,” said the Rev. Carlton W. Veazey, minister at Fellowship Baptist Church in the District and founder of the annual National Black Religious Summit on Sexuality. “We’re just beginning to really deal with it.”

Most major historically black denominations have taken strong stances against homosexuality. [...]

[E]mbracing gays can come at a cost. Victory Church, a black megachurch near Atlanta, lost 2,500 members—half of its congregation—after its pastor, the Rev. Kenneth L. Samuel, started preaching acceptance of gays several years ago.

“I did not know that my theological view would be so negatively reacted to,” Samuel said. Even now, he said, “we are ostracized and criticized throughout the city by pastors and religious people of all types, certainly within the black community.”

A problem that would go away immediately if only more congregations - black, white or whatever - would embrace the lesbian and gay people among them:

The gays flocking to Covenant say the church’s deep Baptist roots link them with the rituals and traditions of their childhood. [...]

And that was fine with church member Martha Battle, who said she didn’t mind Covenant’s outreach to gays at first, because “everybody needs to be saved.”

But now, “straight people are leaving and gay people are coming in,” said Battle, who left the church with her 13-year-old grandson after the Wileys began performing same-sex union ceremonies. “They’re taking over. I’m sick to my stomach over this mess. It’s not right. Why should we have to leave and let them come in and take over the church?”

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Cory Booker’s Atlanta connection

I am hoping that Cory Booker is one of those who can re-ignite and re-imagine a Civil Rights movement for our era.

In an AP article about his renewed sense of purpose in the face of a horrible setback, I learned today that he has an Atlanta connection:

Booker was born in Washington, D.C., and the family moved to the north Jersey suburb of Harrington Park when his father earned a promotion. Both parents worked as executives at IBM and helped to integrate the company.

To ensure that they could buy their home, a white couple posed as Booker’s parents.

Cary and Carolyn Booker instilled the values of respect and hard work.

“You’ve got to give 110 percent,” said Carolyn Booker, who now lives with her husband in suburban Atlanta.

Cory Booker, their youngest of two sons, left New Jersey for California, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University and played football.

RELATED: More arrests and a look at the role of race, immigration, and the conservative bandwagon forming around the Newark murders.