“Post-Racial” Society? Report Says U.S.Treatment of African Americans, Immigrants “Abysmal”

A new report to the to a United Nations human rights committee criticizes the U.S. government for its “abysmal” treatment of African Americans, immigrants and other racial and ethnic groups.

The report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was delivered to the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in response to a ” flawed U.S. government report that underreported the state of racial discrimination in the United States.” CERD is a U.N.-sanctioned group of internationally recognized human rights experts that oversees compliance with a 2004 treaty on the elimination of racial discrimination. Since the Clinton Administration ratified the treaty in 1994, the U.S. government has used CERD to denounce racism and other discrimination in other countries.

Among the many”shortcomings” in the Bush Adminstration’s more positive report to CERD are the ACLU says, “the minor mention of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the outright omission of issues including the dramatic increase in anti-immigrant acts and practices, exploitation of migrant workers, the escalating problem of police brutality and racial profiling, and the “school to prison pipeline,” whereby the criminal justice system overzealously funnels students of color out of classrooms and on a path toward prison.”

Witnesses joining the ACLU for testimony before CERD in Geneva will include Akif Rahman, a native-born United States citizen who was detained, questioned and abused by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on five separate occasions as he re-entered the country after business or personal trips abroad.

The importance of such reports cannot be underestimated. One of the largely unwritten chapters of civil rights history is about how more internationalist and left-leaning African Americans like WEB Dubois and Paul Robeson used international forums to shame the U.S. government before its peers about Jim Crow. Declassified documents from numerous national security archives reveal that officials at the highest levels of government were, in fact, concerned about the international embarrassment brought on them by such acts of outing.

The ACLU report also provides a healthy antidote to the dangerous absurdity of the “post-racial” talk on the left and right side the Obamamania wave. For these and other reasons, it’s important for social movements to pressure Obama to use his abundant rhetorical gifts to speak about things in the report.

CNN Exit Poll: Obama Sweeps Potomac Primary, Wins Majority of Latino Votes in Virginia

Exit polls taken by CNN appear to indicate that Illinois Senator Barack Obama swept primaries in Delaware, Washington D.C. and Virginia with by winning the votes of a broad majority of voters, including Latino voters in Virginia. Hillary Clinton appears to have won the majority of Latino votes in Maryland. According to the CNN polls, Obama won the majority of the Latino vote in Virginia a margin of 53% to 47% .

Super Duper Discussion on Democracy Now: Race, Empire and the Primaries

After burning the 3am oil trying to get a grasp on the ultimately ineffable workings of the body politic, I got up at 5:30 am (can you hear the roosters?) to join Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman and guests Bill Fletcher and Frances Fox for an out-of-the-corporate-media box discussion about race, empire and the primaries. Thanks to Amy and fellow panelists, this really turned out to be as probing a discussion about the elections as I’ve had the pleasure of participating in. Check it out!

Those of you without audio setup can read the transcript here (just delete the “Uh”’s)

Clinton’s Latino Advantage Decreases, Obama Surges as Latinos Vote Beyond Black and White

Asked on Super Duper Tuesday to choose between a black candidate, Barack Obama, and a white candidate, Hillary Clinton, Latinos chose both -and neither.

In a Democratic race in which the issue of race has played a definitive role, racially fluid and ambiguous Latinos delivered a loud and historic message to the candidates and pundits and to the country as a whole: the black-white electorate of yesteryear is dead.

Preliminary results of the most intense primary in recent memory indicate that predictions of a monolithic Latino “firewall” for Clinton have fallen short. The candidates split key Latino states in different parts of the country. Clinton won states like New York and New Jersey while Obama won states like Colorado and Illinois. Exit poll results also demolished widely-held notions that Latinos are unwilling to support a black candidate. Obama succeeded in dropping Clinton’s Latino advantage from 4-1 (68% to 17% according to a CNN poll conducted last week) to 3-2 last night. And in almost every Latino-heavy state that voted Super Tuesday, Obama received more than the 26 percent of the Latino vote he got in Nevada just 2 weeks ago.

Analysis of Latino voting patterns indicates that Latinos did not, as predicted, march monolithically into the voting booths to vote racially black or white. Instead, the Latino vote segmented along other vectors, the most interesting of which is the regional vector.

In what appears to be the development of a Latino voter regionalism, the vote varied depending on what part of the country (and in some cases what part of a state) the vote was cast. For example, while Clinton secured 74% of the Latino vote in her home state of New York, available data also indicates that Obama won 59% of the 30-44 year olds, the largest age bloc, in his home state of Illinois’ Latino electorate.

Obama won important Latino votes - and delegates- in Colorado, Arizona and other states where Clinton was expected to overwhelm him. With the support of New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez and other members of the Latino political machine nurtured by her husband, the former President, Clinton won more than 60% of the Latino electorate in states like New Jersey and New York. And regardless of the final tallies in California, the Latino electorate has already proven to be a powerful, new and greatly misunderstood segment of the no longer solely black and white electorate of the United States.

“Candidates are spending tens of millions of dollars trying to capture the attention of Latino voters, mostly in the Spanish language media” said Maria Teresa Petersen, the Executive Director of Voto Latino, a nonpartisan voter registration organization that also uses technology and pop culture to promote the political participation of new Latino voters. “But what the campaigns haven’t figured out is that 79% of the 18 million eligible Latino voters consume media in English” said Petersen adding, “So, it’s terrific that they’re targeting 21% of the voters with Latino messages, but when will they learn to target us with Latino ads in English?”

Analysts like Petersen, whose organization registered more than 7,500 young voters this past January, agree that the youthfulness of the Latino vote guarantees that this vote will both continue to see great flux. “Exactly 50% of the 18 million voters eligible to vote are under 50 years old. And this is a generation growing up in the era of anti-immigrant politics. This is why they marched and this is why they are voting. Immigration is more than an issue. It’s a great catalyst. The candidate who understands this will win the Latino vote in the future, including the near future.”

As the highly contested Democratic primary rages beyond Super Duper Tuesday states, Latinos will continue to play critical roles, especially in tight races, according to Antonio Gonzalez, the President of the California-based William C. Velasquez Institute.

“The big enchilada will be Texas, followed by mid-sized states where Latinos are about 5% of the vote, states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland and Washington” said Gonzalez. “It’s going to continue to be very interesting” said a smiling Gonzalez. “On the one hand,” he added, “Latinos are clearly trending towards Obama who overcame a 27 point difference nationally. But, on the other hand, Clinton still won several states with (Latino) margins of more than 50%.” If estimates of a 61 to 38 percent Latino advantage for Clinton hold and if the trend, especially the youthful Latino trend, favoring Obama continues, understanding the fluidity of the very racially and ethnically diverse Latino electorate will be mission critical to success well into November’s general election.

Standing outside Public School 24 in Brooklyn’s diverse working class neighborhood of Sunset Park, one sees and hears the political future in the opinions - and votes- of Latino voters like 31 year-old Smithe Celestrin. She and millions of other Latinos made clear to the country how far it has moved beyond the black-white electorate of yesteryear. “The candidates need to understand where Latinos stand” says Celestrin, a dark-skinned Puerto Rican-French-Chinese digital advertising manager whose main issues are the war, the economy and immigration. “This is our country and we will have our say in it.”

NPR Interview: Is There Really a Black/Latino Divide?

Would that we lived in a world with more journalists like Farai Chideya, the consequential host of NPR’s News and Notes. Guest Earl Ofari Hutchison, Congresswoman Maxine Waters and yours truly joined Farai in this brief, but quite cool deconstruction of the categories “Latino” and “Black/Latino divide”.

Something to think about while we await the results of the most racialized election in U.S. history, an election in which historic Latino participation heralds the beginning of the end of the “Black/white electorate”.

Beyond the Mama’s Chi-chi Theory: Latino Vote Lust Previews Growing National Sophistication

It’s both scary and exciting to watch the media and political frenzy building around the Latino vote next Super Duper Tuesday and beyond. Scary because never have so many known so little about so large a population as Latinos. Yet, this hasn’t hastened the exponential growth of the cottage porn industry of Latino vote expertise being displayed in all its perverse glory this election year. It’s also exciting to watch the new Latino watchers because we as a society will only benefit from the growth in genuine information and knowledge mixed in with the dross of many news reports and campaign statements.

My favorite from among the numerous and stunningly simplistic explanations for why, for example, Latino voters appear to be heavily inclined towards Border Wall supporter and driver’s license flip-flopper, Hillary Clinton, actually comes from an elected official - a Latino elected official no less.

As the world watched and waited to see how Latinos would vote in Nevada last week, widely-quoted Nevada Assemblyman Ruben Kihuen used the global spotlight to unveil for the first time his Mama’s Chi-chi Theory of Latino Political Participation, and he did so in no less a venue than the New York Times, the nation’s newspaper of record:

“The Hispanic community is very family oriented, and we respect our mothers,” said Ruben Kihuen, an influential Democratic assemblyman from Las Vegas who supported Mrs. Clinton. “A lot of middle-aged women see her as a mother, a head of the household, and they can identify with this. Especially when they see her daughter, Chelsea, with her.”

Though not as pernicious as the now thoroughly discredited “anti-black-Latinos-are-the- rearguard-of-white-racism” theory of the Clinton vote, Kihuen’s Chi-chi theory does reflect the unprecedented -and often prurient- interest in Latino politics.

Despite being left out of the mainstream discussion of the Latino vote, many, more thoughtful Latinos in the blogosphere, alternative and other media and in the body politic generally have seized the political moment to offer insights that anticipate the eventual demise of the Mama’s Chi-chi Theory and other, less-absurd media constructs.

And the collective and relatively new interest of news organizations, pollsters, bloggers, politicos and other interested parties from across the political and geographic spectrum also previews the future sophistication about things Latino. Over the past several months, I have, for example, spoken with and become aware of numerous national and international (and not just Latin American) media outlets planning or actually doing more in-depth reporting on the U.S. Latino vote.

For all its frustrating simplicity, the coverage of and interest in the Latino electorate may well be remembered as one of the most important new developments of this year in media and politics.

We will, for the time being, have to suffer the flatulence and bad taste of the burrito logic informing Kihuen’s Chi-chi Theory. Still, some of the current attention and reporting found in some Spanish language and English language media and other outlets does give one cause for optimism about the new national conversation around Latino and U.S. politics.

Radio Nation Interview: “Black-Latino Tensions” in the Electorate

check out this interview I did with Laura Flanders on Radio Nation. It goes 20,000 leagues deeper than the silliness that current passes for race reporting in the U.S. Guest Amy Alexander and I take a more serious look at this part of the most racialized election in recent memory. Hope you like it:

Sean Bell Murder Case: What Obama and Clinton Should Speak to in S.C. and all 50 States

This article from the New York Times reminds me of another issue you won’t see or hear during the primaries and general election: police brutality and murder. Despite the continued abuse and even murder committed by police across the country, you won’t be hearing much about cases like that of Sean Bell on the campaign trail anytime soon. Bell was shot 50 times on his wedding day by NYPD cops who now want to bypass a jury and go straight to a judge, according to the NYT piece.

I interviewed friends of Bell along with witnesses who described how the cops who killed him had been drinking the night of the incident. I took the pic above at the makeshift memorial friends, family and community members built just after the shooting on 25th of November, 2006. The picture is of a piece of a larger list of young, mostly black, mostly male victims, who, like Bell were shot by NYPD.

Whatever the outcome of the trial, the case provides a good measure of the kinds of things the electoral and political system (and the privately-funded echo chamber, the MSM) either hides or ignores. I may be wrong, but my research does not seem to indicate that Sen. Clinton has made any comments about the high profile case involving victims and killers -the cops- from her home state of New York.

And, for his part, Barack Obama made at least one rather tepid reference to the case according to the New York Times:

Later, in questions from reporters, Senator Obama also weighed in on the fatal shooting of Sean Bell, noting that the matter was still under investigation but saying that 50 shots seemed “excessive.” Most of the time, police officers act with restraint, he said, but “This may be one of the times when they didn’t.”

Both candidates appear to spend time in South Carolina besotted by Martin Luther King, a black man shot many years ago, all the while saying little to nothing about another black man shot and killed by men in uniform a little over a year ago.

I’m waiting to see who will step up and bring “change” to the reality behind that painfully long list in the pic.

Everyone’s an Expert on the Latino Vote, Except Latinos

Everyone’s an Expert on the Latino Vote, Except Latinos

New America Media, Commentary, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Jan 22, 2008

Editor’s Note: The newly minted experts on the Latino vote are using the old paradigms to explain the Nevada vote results says NAM writer Roberto Lovato.

NEW YORK – The most interesting development out of this weekend’s Nevada caucus votes had little to do with Hillary Clinton winning a large percentage of the Latino vote – that was predictable. More fascinating was the sudden and exponential surge in the number of experts in Latino politics.

It was tragicomic to watch non-Spanish speaking pundits explain the ‘reality’ of the Nevada vote while standing in the artificial light of the casinos during one of the first caucus meetings held entirely in Spanish. Reporters had to wait for translators to tell them what campaign workers were saying before they could report it to us. Understanding the electoral needs of casino, hotel, restaurant and other workers who labor in a new economy – and require new hours for voting – proved very difficult for many in the media to understand.

It was no less difficult having to watch the white, and some African American, political commentators on MSNBC, CNN and other networks tell us that the Latino vote for Clinton reflected “Black-Latino tensions.” The New York Times newspaper had earlier echoed these observations in a story that caused frustration in the Latino blogosphere. In a recent issue of The New Yorker, a publication that has no Latino editorial staff and publishes very few stories a year about the country’s 46 million Latinos, the magazine showed off its newfound expertise in a story which detailed how Latinos are Clinton’s electoral “firewall,” thanks to the “lingering tensions between the Hispanic and black communities.” It’s hard to know how they know this when only one serious polling organization in the country conducts polls in a language other than English.

Yet everybody, it seems, has something to say about Latino politics. Everybody that is, except Latinos.

The awkwardness and simplicity seen and heard in the coverage of the Latino electorate illustrates how ill-equipped the news organizations, the political parties and the society as a whole are to understand and deal with the historic political shift previewed in Nevada: the death of the black-white electorate. Simplistic talk about the Latino vote provides another example of how we live when the ‘experts’ and their organizations are increasingly out of touch with the dynamism and complexity of the electorate and the general populace.

As a result, the growth of the very diverse Latino electorate will likely force the revelation of more inconvenient truths. Principle among them is the media’s conclusion that anti-black racism among Latinos explains why they voted Clinton and not Obama in Nevada. Story after story tries to fit the Latino vote into the procrustean bed of old-school, black v. white politics.

Typical of these conclusions are statements by the liberal New Republic’s John Judis. He explained Latino support for Clinton this way: “Latino immigrants hold negative stereotypical views of blacks and feel that they have more in common with whites than with blacks.” Judis backed his claims with a modicum of academic seriousness as he quoted “experts” like Duke University political scientist Paula D. McClain. McClain told me in an interview that she neither speaks Spanish nor watches the primary source of Latino news and political information, saying: “I don’t watch Univision.” Quoting her makes little practical sense.

It only makes sense when we consider how ever-expanding Latino power in Nevada and across the country is pushing up against people’s fraying sense of nationhood and citizenship. Latino citizens and voters, not undocumented immigrants, are the targets of many liberals. These liberals long for the simpler days of a black-white electorate, a less-globalized country. Like Clinton, Obama and all Republican candidates, they support the political and racial equivalents of the anti-immigrant, anti-Latino border wall.

So instead of considering that Latinos reflect the new complexities of our political age, we should, experts tell us, simply swallow the black-white political logic of the previous era, like the half-moon cookies our grandmothers made. Ignore whatever you think of the Clintons - they have more than 15 years of relationships, name-recognition and history in the Latino electorate. Outside of Chicago, Obama has less than two years. Never mind that Latinos may still be wondering about why Obama did not, until recently, secure the support of most black voters. Never mind about the political amnesia about how the country’s last black candidate of national stature – Jesse Jackson- defied the prevailing racial logic during the Presidential primaries of 1988, when his Rainbow Coalition secured almost 50 percent of the Latino vote in Latino-heavy New Mexico counties like Santa Fe and San Miguel and 36 percent of the Latino vote in the largest Latino state in the country: California.

The Latino experience of the right-of-center Clintons and the left-of-center Jackson, who the Illinois senator did not ask to campaign for him, raises questions about Mr. Obama’s political operation and his political agenda. Time will tell us what was behind the Latino support for Clinton in Nevada. And who knows, maybe the experts telling us about Obama, Clinton and other candidates’ fortunes in upcoming primaries will do so without the black and white lens that has proven obsolete in the face of a new country.

King Anniversary: Celebrating the “Failure” of Non-Violence?

Whether you end up agreeing with or absolutely loathing it, this piece from the UK Guardian will provide a provocative and quite different perspective on the MLK legacy we’ll all be meditating on this weekend.

Written by Jonathan Farley, a math professor who loves the work of anti-colonial revolutionary, Franz Fanon (as do I), the article (below), “I Have a Nightmare”, argues that the “aims and the character of the civil rights movement were flawed” and that the non-violent approach advocated by King and others may not have been what was best for accomplishing real change.

I’m putting this out there, not necessarily because I agree with it, but because it echoes an important part of the political milieu King inhabited; It says things that King surely had to contend with. More left-leaning veteran 60’s activist friends of mine have a somewhat similar take on the King movement, one we’re not so much as even supposed to say in polite company these days .

These friends argue that, were it not for the more militant forces of the black community in the 60’s, the non-violent civil rights movement might not have been as successful in gaining elite acceptance. Or, if you prefer, getting to where, in the words of the “first Black First Lady”, “Dr King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.” Whatever.

Say what you will about the article, it does say things that we’re not even given the option to even hear, much less discuss, which is why I wrote this piece.

While never stating outright that he supports armed struggle as one of several options for social change here in the U.S. (as did the Panthers and other groups in the 60’s), he does make some insightful, important points about who monopolizes violence and how we view them as when he says,

And despite our absolute hatred and fear of groups such as the Black Panther party because they refused to espouse non-violence, we have no problem honouring “heroes” such as General Colin Powell, who may have killed as many as 100,000 Iraqis during the Gulf war. Apparently it is evil to take up arms in defence of black people, as the Panthers did, but perfectly Christian behaviour to take up arms in defence of oil companies’ profits.

Why is it that the global and domestic violence of the state is O.K., while any attempt for countries, groups or individuals to defend themselves against uniformed agressors are greeted with denunciations followed by increased violence, which is, in turn, followed by official justifications for state violence? Just a thought.

So, when you’re digesting that hefty serving of official MLK propaganda (as opposed to more nuanced and informed perspectives on MLK, the movement and the legacy), think about what this piece says as it echoes things he surely heard and had to grapple with in his search for the holy grail of real change.

I have a nightmare

To liken Barack Obama to Martin Luther King does him no favours: non-violence failed us
Jonathan Farley
Thursday January 17, 2008
The Guardian

As America prepares to celebrate Martin Luther King Day next week, black presidential candidate Barack Obama stands in a strong position to become the country’s 44th president. Some view Obama’s remarkable popularity as the realisation of King’s dream, the final victory of the civil rights movement. Others view it, their respect for Obama notwithstanding, as a testament to its remarkable failure.Both the aims and the character of the civil rights movement were flawed. One aim was clearly desegregration. But the movement should never have been about integration. It should have been about demanding the respect that is due to free human beings; about ending the physical, spiritual and economic violence that had been perpetrated against African-Americans since the end of the American civil war. What’s the value in begging for the right to spend money in a store owned by a racist who would rather kill you than serve you?

Lest we forget, integration was the death knell for black teachers and principals. Thousands lost their jobs. “The movement” moved us from the back of the bus into the unemployment line.

Almost 40 years after King’s death, we still haven’t reached the promised land. King lamented that, in 1963, only 9% of black students attended integrated schools. But, to give just one example, Atlanta’s Grove Park elementary school is now 99.99% black.

King complains in Why We Can’t Wait that “there were two and one-half times as many jobless Negroes as whites in 1963, and their median income was half that of the white man”. Black median income in 2003 was 62% that of whites, and the black unemployment rate in 2004 was 10.8%, 2.3 times the white rate. The numbers have barely changed.

Following Mahatma Gandhi, the chief characteristic of the civil rights movement was non-violence. In order to combat violent racists, King speaks of meeting “physical force with soul force”. One wonders how well it would work against, say, Hitler’s Panzer divisions. Civil rights marchers had to pledge to “observe with both friend and foe the ordinary rules of courtesy”, promising to “refrain from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart”. Said King: “Remember always that the non-violent movement in Birmingham seeks justice and reconciliation - not victory.” Not victory? Whose side was King on?

The riots that occurred in a hundred cities after King’s death were the ultimate testament to his failure. Black people never believed in non-violence after all. Despite our love affair with King, African-Americans are not a non-violent people. Black Americans kill 5,000 other black people every year. (Instead of urging us to love our enemies, King should have taught us to love ourselves.)

And despite our absolute hatred and fear of groups such as the Black Panther party because they refused to espouse non-violence, we have no problem honouring “heroes” such as General Colin Powell, who may have killed as many as 100,000 Iraqis during the Gulf war. Apparently it is evil to take up arms in defence of black people, as the Panthers did, but perfectly Christian behaviour to take up arms in defence of oil companies’ profits.

King’s many worshippers are fond of Gandhian quotes such as “If blood be shed, let it be our blood”. Which is fine if you are merely sacrificing yourself. But King was sending out women, children and old people to be beaten and blown up. Even at the time, as King notes, there were many who viewed this as monstrous. When those little girls were murdered in Birmingham, why should black people not have booted King out and hunted the killers down, like al-Qaida? As King himself said: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.”

King also needs a history lesson. He writes, in The Sword That Heals, that “non-violence in the form of boycotts and protests had confounded the British monarchy and laid the basis for freeing the colonies from unjust domination”. Yes, that, and colonial minutemen with rifles.

Which brings us to Obama, a black candidate who refuses even to say whether he supports reparations for slavery. One of the worst aspects of the King legacy is that, thanks to him, no African-American today is allowed to bring up racism, even in the most objective fashion, without severe repercussions. You will be instantly labelled a radical, a Black Panther (a bad thing), or a Mau Mau (a very bad thing) who wants to kill the white man. King has eliminated the possibility of other black people speaking out, people with other philosophies, who do not necessarily want to hug racists. Obama can succeed only insofar as he makes it plain that, like the British trade unionist Bill Morris, he is “not the black candidate”, that he can be counted on neither to be a champion for, nor to defend the rights of, black people.

Our love for King notwithstanding, if we are honest we will concede that King built nothing, and taught us only how to take a beating. As Gandhi said: “I have admitted my mistake. I thought our struggle was based on non-violence, whereas in reality it was no more than passive resistance, which is essentially a weapon of the weak.”

It is time we all admitted our mistake. A black King did not redeem us. And neither will a black president.

· Jonathan David Farley is a former Martin Luther King Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lattice@caltech.edu