The Heritage Foundation announced the resignation of Analyst Jason Richwine citing problems with his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation suggesting Hispanics have naturally lower IQ’s than white Anglo-Saxons do. For whatever reasons he makes in the dissertation it is something that is unacceptable in the growing diversity of the 21st Century. Harvard and the nation would have loved his ideas a little over a century ago when Scientific Racism measured people’s skulls to demonstrate white Anglo-Saxons had the most brain capacity. A racial Anglo-Saxonism characterized America at the end of the nineteenth-century and we were more easily led into the Philippines and our war there between 1898-1903 believing those brown people were unfit to govern themselves at all and making it easier to do away with some 600,000 of them over those years. We ought not go back to that time now. The Heritage Foundation made the correct move asking Dr. Richwine to resign his position. Even they do not concur with his views. (see previous story White Conservatives to Latinos: You have Lower IQ’s and you Cost Too Much to Be Americans.)
The Editors/Struggles for Justice
Archive for the Race Category
Heritage Foundation Reaches the Same Conclusion: Jason Richwine Resigns
Posted in National Affairs, Race on May 10, 2013 by thomassobottkeWhite Conservatives to Latinos: You Have Lower IQ’s and Making You Americans Costs Too Much
Posted in Essays, National Affairs, Race on May 9, 2013 by thomassobottkeA new Heritage Foundation Study on Immigration puts the cost of Immigration Reform at 6.3 trillion dollars, fully half the size of the entire United States economy. The numbers are derived from the assumption that undocumented immigrants as well as those who are here legally will use public services and welfare and other programs at extremely high rates well above the levels they presently use them prior to immigration reform. The study also notably does not factor in immigrants as contributing a single damn thing to economic growth. It is a worst case scenario study whose numbers are just out in thin air. Enough said.
A Co-author of the study, Jason Richwine, wrote what can only be described as a highly racist and white supremacist doctoral dissertation for a public policy Ph.D. he earned at Harvard University. The Heritage Foundation, backtracking from endorsing Richwine’s work, and its own study, points out that they do not endorse Richwine’s doctoral dissertation from Harvard, though they have hired Richwine as a senior analyst at the Heritage Foundation where he works. And he did in fact co-author the study concerned whatever role he played in the completion of the study.
If the guy’s primary contribution to his field is so objectionable, Struggles for Justice asks why you guys at the Heritage Foundation hired him in the first place?
Here is a key argument from Richwine’s doctoral dissertation that makes you wonder what his defense of the dissertation at Harvard was like and what his three member faculty committee thought of the work:
“The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market.”
Richwine went on to comment, “No one knows whether Hispanics will reach IQ parity with whites but that they’ll have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.”
Republican Senator and presumptive 2016 Presidential nominee Marco Rubio of Florida called the Heritage Foundation study “deeply flawed.” Oddly, Jim De Mint, previously one of the most prominent Republican conservative white men in the U.S. Senate and the new director of the Foundation was the key player in managing and helping fund Rubio’s successful Senatorial run in 2010. Historically, the Heritage Foundation has provided the underpinning for a host of Republican policies and positions over the past several decades.
Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah has introduced 23 Amendments to the 844 page Immigration Reform bill now before the United States Senate. One key Amendment would restrict lawfully employed previously undocumented (illegal) immigrants to work in “Domestic Service.” The jobs opened to Latinos are to be the following:
“Cooks, waiters, butlers, housekeepers, governesses, maids, valets, baby sitters, janitors, laundresses, furnacemen, [Sic.]care-takers, handymen, gardeners, footmen, grooms, and chauffeurs of automobiles for family use.”
Now all of these jobs are good jobs and jobs that can and are held with dignity— needed to help fuel the U.S. economy. But nowhere in Senator Lee’s Amendment does he list managerial, entrepreneurial, and jobs requiring college degrees that would make Latinos upwardly mobile in American society.
The Amendment itself is racist on its face and harkens back to jobs available to blacks in the Jim Crow South and even in the De-facto segregated Northern states.
According to Texas Democratic Congressman Ruben Hinojosa, the Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, “The Heritage Foundation has always been a stalwart of conservatism, but this is commonplace, ugly, racism and xenophobia dressed up in economic hyperbole.” Hinojosa went on to say that “Richwine’s assertions show a man with a flawed understanding of human nature and of immigration. Those who come to America to seek freedom and opportunity arrive with the intent to work hard to build a new life.”
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow had New York Magazine columnist Frank Rich on her program and he had this comment:
“It’s a fascinating battle within the base (of the Republican Party) exemplified by these clowns. If I may use that word. How are they going to do this, how are they going to square the circle? They claim to be welcoming Latinos and are literally insulting their intelligence and even their unborn children’s intelligence. Grandchildren that aren’t even here yet are already being called mentally inferior.”
That is just the point. The Republican Party has and is reaching out to Latinos and blacks and other people of color in order to reverse the disastrous 2012 Election. But all of this raises serious doubts about the sincerity of the moves they are making—whether or not they are really serious about broadening the demographic appeal of the Party.
According to The Daily Beast, “The Republican Party isn’t a racist organization, and conservatism isn’t a racist ideology. Nevertheless, over the last four years, the figures and organizations that have hit hot water over racially charged rhetoric have been overwhelmingly right wing. And survey after survey shows a conservative community that is more likely than other Americans to hold negative opinions about blacks.“
Struggles for Justice concludes that white conservatives remain predominantly racially prejudiced and the political party that speaks for them, the Republican Party, has not been truly sincere about making the huge demographic changes in the make-up of the Party that are so needed for America at large.
You can’t convince people who have been traditionally discriminated against that they are welcome in your political party and its policy positions when those same positions and the way you are acting insults the intelligence of those people and displays a racially prejudiced view of American society.
Instead of believing that the Republican Party has turned over a new leaf with its self-evaluation of their own political defeat, it should be concluded here that white conservatives, overwhelmingly concentrated in the Republican and Tea Party groups, remain as they always have been—unwelcoming to people of color and maintaining policies that are simply not in the interest of those same people who have faced discrimination as immigrants or forced migrants first held in slavery and since then dismissed as being lesser beings by the white majority set to drop off the face of the Earth around 2043 or 2045 whatever Census projections you choose to consult.
Racism is alive and well in the United States and we know who the racists are. This is not only great news for the Democratic Party but it does clarify what people of color need to avoid and condemn in the political arena.
White conservatives, you have been caught with your racial prejudice hanging out.
Prisons for Profit: Wisconsin Leads in Prison Incarceration Rate
Posted in Community and Citizen Action, Essays, National Affairs, Race, The Faith Community with tags african american males, milwaukee county, university of wisconsin milwaukee on April 28, 2013 by thomassobottkeWhen your State is the national leader in locking up convicted criminals the first reaction would be to celebrate the superb police work and safe streets. But when the real reasons are a prison industry where private firms handle the overflow of inmates for profit, where the nation’s long- time drug war has targeted entire communities of people of color based on race, and politicians fear being labeled soft on crime there is little if anything to be happy about.
Two categories where the United States of America is the unequaled world leader is the number of citizens per one hundred thousand we imprison, and in our defense budget for the military where we spend six times the next two nations put together. What does that say about us?
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Employment and Training Institute has issued a report written by John Pawasarat and Lois M. Quinn that just over half of African-American males and an increasing number of females from their 30’s to 40’s have already done prison time in troubled Milwaukee County. Too many of them are already felons. Any scholars studying how to employ and train Wisconsin workers would have to be staggered by that statistic. For people who have done prison time, who are African-American, and in many cases are felons, who already are most likely not to have sufficient means of even obtaining family-supporting jobs even with those three strikes against them, are never going to be truly employable. That too becomes a drag on the State’s economy.
What does that mean for Wisconsin and so many states with similar problems? It means these people will be more likely to re-offend and be imprisoned again at great public expense, and when they are not doing time they will be dependent upon public assistance as they are more likely to be out of work for extended periods and unable to support themselves or a family. The effects on families are incredibly destructive. Both men and women who are in prison cannot be with their children, they often lose custody of those children, and put enormous pressure on the foster care system to say nothing of the sadness and loss the kids themselves experience when they are buffeted about in and out of foster care. The process is both enormously destructive and self-perpetuating.
This is nothing short of a social meltdown so profound that it threatens what is left of any Middle Class in America, it makes a complete mockery of the American Dream, and it reveals that race is still very much a factor. According to Michelle Alexander in her new book The New Jim Crow, blacks are twenty six times more likely to be imprisoned for drug offenses than are their white counterparts who live in communities not targeted specifically for the resource rich war on drugs. Worst of all, a large proportion of these people have their lives ruined by non-violent offenses—many times possession and use of controlled substances where they are the victims of chemical dependencies requiring treatment rather than prison.
According to Joel Gaughan, the leader of WISDOM/MICAH’s 11X15 Program, it costs taxpayers $32,000 a year to incarcerate a person and only $8,000 per year to treat that same person instead. If treatment is the option, parents, and especially women, can hold on to their kids and get the treatment they need, and then emerge to fight another day—perhaps being in a better position to find that rare job and support themselves and their children and get off public assistance.
Gaughan explains the 11 X 15 program this way: the social justice organization seeks to have the Wisconsin prison population down to 11,000 by 2015 the end of a State Biennial Budget year. Presently we are paying $32.000 per prisoner for well over 25,000 people per year. That’s a lot of money.
Wisconsin already has treatment programs in places that cost just $8,000 per year, and keeps families together, and gives people a chance to earn a living and not to become completely dependent upon the taxpayer for their lifetimes. Treatment programs are NOT available to violent or repeat offenders—those people no one wants on the streets at all. Those people are worth spending $32,000 per year to keep away from law abiding citizens. But the tens of thousands of people in Wisconsin prisons alone who are not violent and not a threat to the public safety are ill-served when we lock them up. And the taxpayers foot the entire bill for our fiscal stupidity–even imbecility here.
What the 11 X 15 program wants from the Wisconsin Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee is to simply get spending in treatment programs up to $25 million in the proposed State budget. Gaughan believes that $75 million would be a more realistic figure if we were to do justice to these vulnerable people in our prisons—even that a mere fraction of what we spend on our State prison system in total.
The long view of this issue is the great injustice of our “so called” justice system—a system that is so distorted and racially unjust that it makes the majority of black men in Milwaukee County in particular into criminals instead of productive human beings. It harms women in prison who are adequate if not good mothers—whose kids still want mommy to be there for them and locks them up when they need treatment for their chemical dependency much more. Treatment sets the offender on a path toward being in a much better position to both provide restitution to anyone hurt in a property crime and to become employed and not putting more pressure on the taxpayer.
Marc Mauer the author of Race to Incarcerate and the Director of the Sentencing Project sees clearly how the Prison-Industrial Complex or what Struggles for Justice has referred to as the U.S. Injustice System destroys lives and destroys families too. Mauer sees prisoners as economic commodities where states build prisons in rural areas where land is cheap and the prison system itself becomes a job producer and economic stimulus of the worst kind. That does not include the trend to farm out prisoners to private for profit firms more interested in the bottom line than actual justice and the incarceration of prisoners in a humane and safe way—not to mention a Constitutional way honoring due process under law.
The prison incarceration boom we have been living with in the last twenty plus years is not a product of rising crime rates. “While rising crime rates from the mid-1960’s to the mid-1970’s (in large part a function of the” baby boom” generation coming of age) helps to explain the early part of this rise, since 1980 the prison expansion has been primarily a result of “get tough” policies,” Mauer says. On the Federal level and now the State level too we have been sending more people to prison for ever longer periods of time.
Again it is important to point out that no one among the reform movement here wants to release violent offenders or serious repeat offenders who would be a danger to the public safety and whose crimes are so heinous or so destructive of private property that they must remain incarcerated.
Yet, it is the large number of non-violent, often first-time offenders caught up in the drug war and mandatory sentencing policies in force since the 1980’s or 1990’s. numbers of black and Latino populations live to apply the heat in the war on drugs.
The result is a prison population that reflects a terrible racial bias. The essence of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow is that the Federal government has funneled ever more money to State and local law enforcement that have in tern focused on urban areas where large —racial injustice so huge that it is patently race-based in its application. Alexander uses legions of studies, reports, and statistics to tell her story how a new Jim Crow like system employees the criminal justice system to control people of color where the old system no longer is permitted by law due to the gains in civil rights during the movement peak in the 1950’s and 1960’s landmark civil rights legislation.
Struggles for Justice lifts up the people who are so terribly harmed by these policies and what has truly become a prison for profit, racially determinative, U.S. Injustice System.
What is so self-evident here is that a radical change in our criminal justice prison policies toward restitution and treatment for non-violent offenders is both fiscally more sound and socially just as well. It is time to listen to those advocating programs like 11 X 15 in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Lawmakers tasked with making prison policy have that rare opportunity to both relieve the overburdened taxpayer and do what is right and good and just at the very same time.
From Alex Jones Black Ops, the Glenn Beck Conspiracy Directed World to Fox News and Right Wing Media Calls to Attack Islam by Thomas Martin Sobottke
Posted in Education, Essays, Foreign Policy, National Affairs, Race, The Faith Community on April 25, 2013 by thomassobottkeIf you get your information about the outside world from Alex Jones of Infowars.com everything that happens in our world and in yours individually is some sort of government or Muslim-led conspiracy against everybody else. Just as Abraham Lincoln used pinpoint logic to note that as both the Union and Confederacy prayed to the very same God for victory only one of them or perhaps neither of them would get what they wanted, so it is truth itself that if everything that happens in the world is a conspiracy there would need to be multitudes of conspirators who somehow keep the lid on everything. Our own personal free will and long and direct experience with it would be just an illusion.
When I put my hand on a hot burner on the stove and it gets burned it is not a government conspiracy. Beyond being a rather stupid thing to do the pain and the very real injury caused would be proof of my freedom of action—the base line of reality versus a dangerous fantasy. My government has not conspired to do this. I’ve burned myself cooking numerous times and my own mother told me not to do it just as she told you to look before crossing the street.
General Electric has an ad currently running which plays on this conspiratorial world image with a guy telling us about modern medical technology in shades, with communications device in his ear and a dark suit, a creep me out voice, and offering a kid a choice of a blue or red lollypop. There have been the Men in Black films, and so many thrillers in print and on the screen about huge government plots to destroy us all that we are now buying into it as reality.
NBC’s Brian Williams noted that we’ve failed to see the most obvious thing about the Boston Marathon bombers: they are cold blooded killers—common but extremely dangerous mass murderers–criminals. Endowing them with almost superhuman qualities as sinister behind-the-scenes members of a huge government conspiracy to kill Americans and enslave us is the product of illogic and emotion over crisp, controlled reason.
And yes, Struggles for Justice knows that General Electric owns NBC. But that does not mean their latest ad campaign to sell us the latest medical technology is some conspiracy. Its solid capitalistic enterprise and corporate image fluff. The machines are real and are helpful. I’ve used them along with my doctors. They work. If they did not I would be dead and you would not be reading this.
Earlier in life I was a university campus security officer who worked the graveyard shift and with the very sort of wonderful people who responded with such courage and service to the real bombers in Boston. I recall a man we dug out of a university garden one summer night who upon being awakened by me began rambling about the idea that the CIA, the FBI, the United Nations and even the university were all conspiring to kill him. I later heard our dispatcher give us the information on this guy from previous reports and based on the legit photo ID’s he was carrying over our radios. He was a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds. I believe that to this day since both the two responding police officers and I had dealt with these folks for years. They were ill. There is nothing more to it than that.
The conspiracy laden media we presently inhabit makes Alex Jones mirror that guy we dug out of the flower beds on a summer night after midnight—full of filth, with a full growth of beard and who obviously was dehydrated and whose very illness prevented him from seeing reality. I’d seen the guy before on campus: a nice man with an illness that was challenging him to the core.
Reducing the Boston Marathon bombings to a U.S. government conspiracy against its own people or blaming the Earth’s almost two billion Muslims for harboring the same views and behaviors is a denial of reality equal to this man in the garden at midnight on a university campus but on a mass scale. We’ve essentially put this guy on television and radio with a large audience and named him Alex Jones or Glenn Beck. Only here, the two men are a lot better at raking in the cash than the man I encountered in the early 1980’s along with a host of people we all had nicknames for as a kind of code to be able to ID them all the more rapidly. There was Tunnel Man, Angel, and so many more. They had not appeared in our paths by any conspiracy.
The state I worked for had turned loose large numbers of mentally ill people and they no longer had a reliable person to help them stay on their meds and give them the extra help they needed. Despite it all they are a wonderful lot of folks—that is except the blonde nymphomaniac. No, we males did not seek her out. Why? You’d think that would be an attractive combo for any male officer. We did not because she was ill, she never washed. She sought us out and did bizarre things if we did not steer clear. Yet I am proud to tell you it was our job to serve her and protect her too. The government of my state openly told the public they were doing this to cut the budget for the care of these people. End of conspiracy.
Now, Matt Drudge has tweeted that Alex Jones is the coming man in the conservative political pantheon. Glenn Beck persistently makes millions and retains influence out of proportion to his dwindling audience. Fox News and so many conservative radio talkers are convinced that our enemy is Islam itself and the people who espouse that faith.
First, branding an entire religious group as the core of our problem has been tried before. That was German National Socialism and the result was the Holocaust.
Second, the kind of people who know the most about that very small select group of Jihadists that DO exist in our world and who target the United States are Muslims themselves who hail from the very places the Jihadists do. And using the conservative’s twisted illogic we should kill the almost two billion people on this Earth who are Muslims at the first opportunity. That is a great sin to even contemplate. Fox News, Matt Drudge, Alex Jones and Glenn Beck are not reliable purveyors of public information as media outlets. Nativism, and xenophobia are rampant in this America.
What would the Christian, Muslim, or Jewish God say about that? I recall a man from Nazareth by the name of Jesus who preached love for our enemies and turning the other cheek to a slight. Making war on the billions of Muslims to protect us from some imagined threat seems rather extreme and enormously counter-productive to say nothing of the barbarity and immorality of such a thing.
Some who conservative anti-Muslims hate so much even serve in our government. One prominent spook (intelligence operative) that helped our government pinpoint Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden quickly for President George W. Bush is an American citizen and a Muslim. Most of the soldiers that do the most good in Afghanistan are people who can speak the local language from being immigrants from the region and knowing the culture.
Most conservative Fox News or radio talker devotees would be shocked to learn these things. The simple xenophobic response against real or imagined foreigners or minority groups of all kinds is so easy and has such a fatal allure—doesn’t it?
It takes more logic, thought, and native intelligence to see the world for what it is. To see its complexities, its ironies, the common thread of human experience and human nature born of that experience that runs through all societies and cultures.
Most of the bad things that happen in our world are not the result of a conspiracy. They are direct acts of moral wrong inflicted upon the innocent openly in our world. The massive cuts in both Social Security and Medicare that many now want and the real cuts of the Sequestration legislation passed by a very real bi-partisan Congress and used by Republicans to attack the present Administration for political gain are done in the open and are real. They do not require any sort of conspiracy whatsoever.
When two teenagers get drunk and run a car off the road and die in the crash and their high school graduating class mourns them and puts up a little monument to them at the school it is not a conspiracy. They made poor choices. When a fifteen-year-old girl who danced and performed for the President at his second inaugural is gunned down by gang members in Chicago it is not some black ops performed by government. They are real slime ball criminals who were shooting it out over some turf battle and the girl was in the line of fire.
The moon landings are real. 9/11 was not launched by the U.S. against itself. Unfortunately that was a conspiracy of Al Qaeda supported by one element of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But it is not a conspiracy in the sense that it remains hidden from the world. Most conspiracies are revealed usually because somebody talks or makes a mistake—the footprint or forensic trail is clear enough.
That trail was obvious to Boston Police and the FBI in Boston a week ago. It is now. They are doing their jobs to protect us. I know the people who are police officers, firefighters, even some people I know worked for our government covertly (I strongly suspect). They are not conspirators. They are real flesh and blood people dealing with the reality of the world as it is.
It is time for the masses of us to abandon the false prophets and Christ wannabees , and hucksters who know how to sell us the fantastic and simplistic answers to the perplexities and sorrows of life. The variety and sophistication of the old Snake Oil salesmen of America’s past has grown exponentially with our media and its attendant technology. We must be more intelligent consumers of information. Yes, test what we hear, see, and experience. Weigh it, and act using the most factual and logical data available to us in keeping with our own life experience which is genuine.
Let us not give in to our prejudices or hatred. Let us not turn to simplistic emotionally satisfying answers to life’s questions and challenges but turn to critical evaluation of what we see, hear, and know. We’ll find far fewer conspiracies out there and will be closer to the love and kindness commanded by our Creator when we do.
Dr. Thomas Martin Sobottke
for Struggles for Justice
Criminalizing Entire Populations Now Central to U.S. Injustice System
Posted in Community and Citizen Action, Essays, National Affairs, Race, The Faith Community with tags class action lawsuit, new york police on April 5, 2013 by thomassobottke“Then the righteous will answer him, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stanger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?”
“The King will reply, I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”
The Holy Bible, Matthew 25:37-40, NIV Version.
The New York Police Department uses an aggressive “stop and frisk” program to reduce crime in that city. This at first appears an intelligent policy and a laudable goal. But plaintiffs among New York’s minority population are challenging the program via a class action lawsuit.
Unfortunately, 90 percent of those stopped on the street, forced to place their hands against a wall or a police cruiser and spread their legs and be frisked in front of everyone in public in humiliating fashion are Latinos or Blacks. The program is not used in upscale or white neighborhoods at all. Worse yet 90 percent of stop and frisks do not result in an arrest.
Think about it–nine of ten people police simply see and use this procedure on are not seen to be committing any crime. Indeed, they are not in 90 percent of the cases guilty of anything more dangerous than walking down a public street in view of one or more police officers.
One plaintiff in the suit has been stopped and frisked twenty-eight times. If you are a white person who lives in an upscale white urban neighborhood or who lives in the suburbs how many times have police motioned you to come over and asked you to submit to a search of your person—especially when you have no criminal record at all? Think about that.
What if you had been stopped and frisked ten or twelve times in the last four or five years by your local police simply because you were on the street in an area where crime is higher or where poverty is higher. In many minority neighborhoods—crime is not entirely but largely a by-product of poverty.
Mayor Bloomberg in New York has praised the program. Other cities across the United States have adopted an aggressive stop and frisk program in minority neighborhoods. Data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the American Civil Liberties Union shows that a number of cities with large minority populations where stop and frisk is NOT used have crime rates as low or even lower than New York.
Old fashioned police work where officers have “probable cause” to believe a crime is in progress or about to be committed via protection in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution still works.
We must ask why stop and frisk is NOT utilized in white middle and upper class neighborhoods? Whites are often criminals too.
Patricia Williams, in an article in The Nation writes, “a consistent theme in all these disparate news stories [cited in the article] is the demise of the presumption of innocence. For those in already criminalized communities, this loss amounts to the abandonment of due process under the law.”
The nation’s long bitter fight against substance abuse, The War on Drugs, has for years featured heavy law enforcement action in minority communities and much less concentrated action in white communities. This is not to say that no white people or affluent Americans are arrested and convicted of using or selling illegal drugs and sent to prison—they are. But the main enforcement is centered in Black and Latino communities.
Michelle Alexander, in a book that Americans must read, The New Jim Crow, offers some statistics about those sent to prison in The Drug War that can only be accounted for simply due to the racial background of the individual or the racial group concerned.
The most shocking yet salient fact we must know before the following shameful crime statistics to be cited here is to know that whites offend or use illegal drugs at precisely the same rate as minorities according to a number of well-funded and long-time sociological studies. That’s right, the typical drug user is by raw number a white person who is middle class or affluent simply because they use illegal drugs and sell them at the same rates as people of color do but unlike them they are a majority of Americans and less often the object of the attention of law enforcement. It is that simple. That is hard to get your head around.
The common media image of an illegal drug user is an urban, inner city poverty-stricken high school dropout who is Latino or is Black and who is using guns to get what they want. Sometimes that is dead on. But it is a stereotype that prevents us from understanding just what our criminal injustice system does—how it operates.
The big drug sweeps, Alexander notes, are paid for with additional Federal money to police departments, to be used in poverty-ridden high crime areas. More affluent whites are not the objects of this intense portion of the nation’s drug war.
Now the grim statistics:
First, a black youth in the United States today is more likely to have done a year or more of hard time in prison and become a felon for life, than to have gone to college or technical school.
Since 62 percent of the U.S. population is white, they are in truth a mathematical majority of illegal drug users and sellers. But three fourths of all people imprisoned and made felons for illegal drug use are Blacks and Latinos. Two of three drug offenders of all racial backgrounds are merely in prison for drug use and not sale and have not done anything violent.
Yes whites sent to prison for drug offenses increased eight times between 1983 and 2000. On the other hand, shockingly, Blacks and Latinos who do not use drugs at rates any higher than whites saw their rate of imprisonment increase twenty-six times in that same period.
In short, Blacks and Latinos are being disproportionately put in prison for drug violations compared to whites. It is clear from reading The New Jim Crow and Alexander’s impeccable research and data that were the same drug sweeps and resources devoted to white communities the arrest numbers for white offenders would skyrocket beyond anything we have ever seen. But stop and frisk and drug sweeps where police squads abandon due process of law and any sort of probable cause are not seen there.
Again, a majority of Americans remain white. Politicians who provide the money for the drug war and the police who make the drug arrests refuse to make most of them in white communities. The only explanation is that a person’s socio-economic status, the place where they live, and their race is highly determinative in predicting whether or not they become convicted felons and do hard prison time.
Of course these people must pay the price for using illegal drugs and especially selling them. But if you merely have used a given drug and been busted for it by the police minus any violent act or threatening act against any other person how does locking so many people up in America to do hard time in prison help matters?
Two thirds of drug offenders have not harmed anyone but themselves. They are otherwise law abiding citizens. What they obviously need more than $25,000 plus per prison bed and more each year to incarcerate them is some form of community restitution for property related crime associated with drug use, and especially intensive drug treatment. Following that, they most need the real prospect of work with dignity and the ability to support themselves or their families.
We worry in this nation so much about keeping families strong and together. We should continue that. It is vastly important. But many women caught in the drug war for nonviolent drug use are in prison too long to hold on to their children or to be there for them. Often they are single mothers. Usually that means long-term or permanent placement in the foster care system.
The United States as a proportion of its population imprisons more people than any other nation on this earth. That is shameful and nothing less. The justice system ends up taking millions of people in the Black and Latino communities and converting them into convicted felons who return to poverty-stricken neighborhoods where the few jobs available are not going to a felon.
Michelle Alexander argues powerfully in The New Jim Crow that the effect is to criminalize whole populations of people of color and not proportionate numbers of white people who would be caught in the drug war’s net if stop and frisk, increased traffic stops with stop and frisk, and drug sweeps were common to more affluent white communities.
What we get is a nation where consciously or perhaps sometimes sub-consciously, the white majority that remains for the moment is able to use the mass incarceration of vulnerable populations in terms of their socio-economic and geographic status and use that as a means of control every bit as limiting to the aspirations of these people as the old Jim Crow system that was broken up in the Southern states of the Old Confederacy in the middle 1960’s.
On a practical level, all Americans will be quick to see that prisons cost us a lot of money. We lock up more people per thousand than anybody. It costs at least $25,000 to lock up somebody in prison for a year, just about the minimum hard time somebody is going to do.
A non-violent drug offender who has a family would be likely better served and better serve his community or her nation and that family by doing some sort of community act of restitution to show they understand and respect the rule of law. And to get the drug treatment and often treatment for mental illness or therapy to help put their lives in order.
The United States today has a distinctly racial criminal justice system that daily does grave injustice to a majority of those incarcerated. Violent and dangerous and repeat offenders must be isolated from the rest of us. But so many lives are being unnecessarily ruined among those who are not violent and otherwise law abiding outside of illegal use of a drug.
When you have paid your debt to society that society must welcome you back into its arms and there should be opportunities for you to employ yourself gainfully to support yourself, your family and to recover your self- worth and personal dignity. That is justice. But today we have an injustice system and not anything like social justice for human beings on a mass scale.
The New War Between The States: North Carolina To Declare Christianity Official State Religion
Posted in National Affairs, Race with tags first amendment to the constitution, north carolina general assembly on April 3, 2013 by thomassobottkeContrary to and in defiance of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the State of South Carolina is prepared to declare itself to be Sovereign on any matters it chooses to take up in relation to the Federal Government.
Two Rowan County white conservative Republican lawmakers have introduced the following bill:
SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.
SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.
The Constitution of the United States of America’s Response:
Article VI Section 2
This Constitution and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of he United States shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby , anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
This is a stark and clear cut case. The proposed North Carolina legislation violates the Constitution of the United States. It is manifest that all fifty States in the Union must abide by the Constitution of the United States. States cannot be “sovereign” when the national Constitution, Federal laws, treaties, and court decisions contradict State laws and those of any smaller units of government.
In Mississippi there is a proposal to create a State Board that would examine Federal laws and Supreme Court Decisions and nullify any it felt ought to be ignored and to apply those decisions to the State of Mississippi as a whole.
The bill was the result of the Rowan County Board of Commissioners being prohibited from opening each meeting with a distinctly Christian prayer. This is no moment of silence for reflection.
In February the Salisbury Post reports a bill was introduced that would permit North Carolina to completely ignore the Health Care Affordability Act commonly known as Obamacare and to include concealed carry in order “to fight Federal tyranny.”
What is being fought here is a re-litigation of the American Civil War of 1861-1865 and a paranoiac reaction of GOP lawmakers in that state to having to live in the year 2013 rather than 1860. It is time for the State of North Carolina and all the States of the Old –so-called” Confederacy to jump from the Nineteenth century into the present—the Twenty-first century. All over the nation the GOP is “freaking out” at the demographic and social changes taking place in America and increasing numbers of people of color.
It is presumed that the GOP dominated States within the larger United States still remain part of the United States and accept its Constitution and the laws and court decisions and treaties that spring from it as a constituent part of the country.
Texas still shows a marked proclivity to secede from the Union. The GOP can’t unite itself. They are faced with defeat politically nationally and so they seek to create their own little fiefdoms where GOP rule can flourish.
The endpoint of all this is rebellion and treason against the government of the United States of America.
What’s Hot: Restraining Orders Don’t Stop Ex-Husbands Threatening Ex-Wives with Guns Not Relinquished to Authorities. And An Arizona Law Requiring a Birth Certificate or Passport for Citizens to Vote Exceeds Federal 1993 Motor Voter Law and Threatens One Man One Vote Principle
Posted in Community and Citizen Action, National Affairs, Race on March 18, 2013 by thomassobottkeStephanie Holten was confronted by her ex-husband who had been lying in wait next to her home as she returned from a date with their two children present. Corey Holten brandished a semi-automatic rifle, slammed the muzzle into the woman’s chest and pushed her into the house yelling he was going to kill her. What the two children thought of their dad with a gun saying he was going to kill their mom is not recorded.
“I remember thinking, ‘Cops I need the cops,’” was what Stephanie Holten wrote in her statement to Police in Spokane, Washington. “He’s going to kill me in my own house I’m going to die!”
The New York Times features a long investigative report by Michael Luo in its March 18th edition that forms the basis for much of what is discussed here.
Corey Holten had been served with a protective court order that required that he stay at least two blocks from the home of his ex-wife just 12 hours earlier. He violated that order and the situation was made more immediately dangerous to all present due to the presence of a firearm.
Just why State Governments and Judges do not order husbands or for that matter wives who have been ordered by the court to end harassment and violence against their former spouses when it is obvious that some of these scenarios end in death and shooting victims rushed to hospitals is the big question. This is not to mention the PTSD sort of traumatic stress on those threatened.
The answer is the National Rifle Association (NRA) fights any legislation that forces spouses, almost all of them husbands, to relinquish firearms as part of protective court orders in domestic violence situations. The NRA’s argument is that Second Amendment Rights of citizens ought not be limited by anything less than a felony. Most court orders regarding threats and actual domestic violence against women occupy a place just below a felony in most cases. So the danger of domestic violence is greater and not less.
Barbara Dianne Dye divorced her husband Raymond Dye, a firefighter. Mrs. Dye filed a protection order the same day she field divorce papers citing the presence of numerous guns in the home. Mrs. Dye got the court order but it required her to go into hiding in Texas for several weeks to accomplish this.
Just two weeks after obtaining the restraining order ordering her husband not to have contact with her Mr. Dye cornered his divorcing wife in a bank parking lot and forced her into his truck using a .357 revolver and shot her in the leg. He shot her several more times saying “I love you, I love you.” Using a second hand gun, a .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol Mr. Dye shot himself in the chest collapsing dead onto his wife.”
“We kept telling them, ‘He’s got all of these weapons,’” Ms. Dye’s mother Barbara Burk, who is a local official that has fought unsuccessfully in Oklahoma for a measure that would grant judges the power to both issue a protective order in domestic violence situations and empower the sheriffs to confiscate weapons and hold them for a “cooling off” period.
Struggles for Justice recommends you go on-line or to the newsstand and purchase the New York Times and read this very well researched and disturbing piece of journalism. With the recent passage of the Violence Against Women Act the issue presented by husbands who carry arsenals with them as they are emboldened to violate court orders protecting their former spouses from being victims of domestic violence is brought into sharp relief.
In Arizona a law in place since 2004 is being challenged in the United States Supreme Court. A 1993 Federal Motor Voter Registration Act has successfully encouraged hundreds of thousands of voters to register as they obtain driver’s licenses or have old ones renewed. But the Arizona State Law conflicts with the Federal Law requiring that new voters produce a birth certificate or passport that proves U.S. Citizenship. State officials admit that about 90 percent of Arizona’s voters can simply write in their driver’s license number on the Federal form in order to vote. These people would be long-established residents of Arizona who likely have previously established their right to vote there. The remaining ten percent are almost entirely people of color—Latinos who have in a roughly 31 thousand cases could have voted but were not permitted to under the law. Hence the challenge.
If you are looking for voter fraud remember that all voters sign in and identify themselves when voting under penalty of perjury. The same standard is present for those registering under Federal Motor Voter Registration. Is voting illegally really worth being dragged into court and potentially exposed to becoming a felon if not at least putting a Misdemeanor on your new criminal record? Are people going to do that just to vote illegally? Think again. In addition, the undocumented community rarely if ever even tries to vote. Along with being basically honest as most people are, illegal immigrants seek to remain in the shadows so as not to attract undue attention from any unit of government.
Nationally, 28 million Americans used Federal Motor Voter Registration to register to vote in 2008 so how the high court rules could do serious damage to the right to vote nationwide. For if this limitation or obstacle to voting is permitted, a state like Arizona could erect other restrictions to suppress the vote, something that always benefits Republicans over Democrats.
Fraudulent voting cases are rare. In Colorado 0.004 percent of votes were fraudulent out of 3.5 million voters. 207 cases of Fraud in Florida for 0.001 percent of the states 11.4 million reisterd voters. North Carolina had 79 people admit they were ineligible and were not citizens and were removed from the rolls. 331 others were not allowed to vote as they did not respond to repeated inquiries about their address and citizen status.
Proposition 200, the Arizona Law being challenged by a Tribal Council of Native Americans have support from the Obama Administration Justice Department. The law “was never intended to combat voter fraud,” said Democratic state Sen. Steve Gallardo of Phoenix. “It was intended to keep minorities from voting.”
Struggles for Justice can only note with worry and dismay that the so-called New Republican Party and its outreach to minorities is just smoke and mirrors; a chimera. Voter Suppression of likely Democratic minority voters is what is happening all over the nation.
The Supreme Court is also hearing a case challenging the validity of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act just re-extended in 2006 by overwhelming super majorities in Congress. Justice Antonin Scalia indicated that most of the votes were by Congressman too timid to say no. He offers no proof of that. There is the argument coming from proponents of gutting the Voting Rights Act and its heart, Section 5, simply saying it is no longer needed.
If that were even true, then the law is no harm to anyone. It would sit there and come up in the next generation for review and re-passage. Five constitutional amendments now part of the Constitution of the United States and the Supreme Law of the land grant to Congress the power to pass legislation strengthening those portions of the Constitution. In this case the Fifteenth Amendment is front and center. The Fourteenth Amendment is also a supporting door into the Constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act.
The Republican Party needs to stop trying to keep American citizens from voting when so many of our citizens died on distant beaches, in towns and hamlets, on naval ships and in the air in combat in large measure to ensure the survival of our democracy. What a disgrace it is and an injustice both to the citizen blocked from voting by some new obstacle or requirement that is needless. And we must ask if our war dead all died in vain. It is not a question any of us want answered but we know that answer already if voter suppression laws go into effect all over the country prior to the 2014 and 2016 elections and beyond.
Instead, it is Republicans themselves who have to change. They must become not only more tolerant, but embrace people of different skin colors and backgrounds than the white, old, and male profile of most of their party. There must be real empathy and a fire in the belly to offer Republican solutions to problems these people face that are workable and practical and meet their needs in the real world.
Will they change? Don’t bet on it—especially don’t bet your house or the ranch. The base of the party is charting an even more conservative—truly reactionary and retrograde path that simply ignores people of color and people of minority religious faiths and over half the population—women. About the only good to come from this sorry situation is that if the Voting Rights Act is upheld and the Arizona Law struck down as well we might see more progressive legislators and a more progressive minded president put into office in 2014 and 2016.
Republicans are going to lose most if not all of the future elections if they themselves do not change from within their very hearts. What is vital to Latinos, Asians, Women, and Blacks must become vital to the Party as well. Not halfway pretend solutions but real ones.
These people have built in Republican shit detectors so you Republicans need to go all the way to a new party that embraces the demographic changes taking place in the darkening of America skin wise. It won’t hurt you. White, Red, Yellow, Brown or Black we are all human beings and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among those lifted up for us are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We could say it is justice for all and not justice for just some.
And we note the cornerstone of our nation’s very identity: “All men are created equal,” is a self-evident proposition. Has been since 1776 and still earlier. And by it we mean “all humanity is made equal by God. Anyone want to challenge the highest power in the universe? So great that we still fail to comprehend; we cannot comprehend the fullness of her majesty and power and reach and capabilities.
So why not accept the self-evident proposition of equality for all Americans and that the right to vote is a sacred birthright to us all!
Anne Coulter–House Republicans’ Path to Nowhere on Immigration Reform by Thomas Martin Sobottke
Posted in Community and Citizen Action, Essays, National Affairs, Race, The Faith Community with tags current-events, government, human-rights, politics on February 23, 2013 by thomassobottkeAnne Coulter in a recent piece on immigration reform and the GOP has chucked any interest in bringing in the some 10 to 12 million undocumented long-term Latino immigrants into the American family at any time in the future.
“Why do Republicans want to create up to 20 million more Democratic voters, especially if it involves flouting the law?” writes Coulter.
Virginia Representative Rob Goodlatte the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee has come out against any immigration reform bill that would provide any kind of path to citizenship for the undocumented.
“People have a pathway to citizenship right now: It’s to abide by the immigration laws, and if they have a family relationship, if they have a job skill that allows them to do that, they can obtain citizenship,” Goodlatte told National Public Radio (NPR). “But simply someone who broke the law, came here, [to] say,’ I’ll give you citizenship now,’ that is not going to happen.
Idaho Representative Raul Labrador, another Republican in the House told NPR “the people that came here illegally knowingly—I don’t think they should have a path to citizenship. “ Labrador added, “if you knowingly violated our law, you violated our sovereignty, I think we should normalize your status but we should not give you a pathway to citizenship.”
The basic Republican objection to comprehensive immigration reform that gives a path to citizenship to the overwhelming majority of undocumented immigrants—not every one of them Latino–is based on the deep objection to the breaking of U.S. immigration law with foreknowledge and premeditation.
If this is such a deep and abiding violation of the law then the punishment must be banishment from the United States or long-term imprisonment. These people then would have to be located and deported and imprisoned in a manner that makes the U.S. commitment to human rights and democracy a standing joke and repudiation of what we profess to believe as Americans. It is the very antithesis of what it is to be an American.
There are two legal measures taken against those who have entered the United States illegally. First, it is a civil and not a criminal violation when those caught violating immigration law are not themselves possessing a criminal record. This civil violation is acknowledged in front of a Federal judge and then the violator is deported to their country of origin. Second, a fine may also be levied against undocumented persons.
But if we are going to reform our immigration law in a way that respects these long-time residents of the United States doing that or placing them in a second-class, non-citizen status on a permanent basis will shackle them and prevent the full exercise of the rights all people need to realize their dreams and fully contribute to the United States and its future strength and prosperity. It is also doubtful most of the undocumented would come forward and identify themselves, making some kind of police-state racially profiled hunt for undocumented Latinos, violating the rights of millions of documented American citizens among the Latino population here more likely.
Why come forward and receive a status that is little better than you have staying underground?
Almost no one even knows that aliens who illegally enter the United States or violate provisions of their Visas without any prior criminal record either here or in their country of origin are given punishment that does not involve criminal prosecution. A civil violation cannot be a permanent bar to improving their status in the United States. We reserve life without parole and the death penalty and outright deportation for people who are not those that immigration reform would touch.
What President Obama and the Democrats have suggested allows for the undocumented to come forward and admit before a court of law that they violated our immigration law at some point in the past and to pay a suitable fine for what is at present and ought remain a civil violation. It is not a death sentence. By admitting before our courts that they violated the law and paying a civil fine the law breaking is on their record and they have made restitution to all American citizens and the United States Government and they show respect for the rule of law.
Thus the undocumented would have paid their full debt to our society and ought to be welcomed in as full citizens subject to the prescribed immigration and naturalization process as prescribed in our Supreme Law the Constitution of the United States. How can Republicans fail to grasp this? Well let’s see.
Everybody agrees that any path to citizenship must place the undocumented who would come forward under a new immigration law at the back of the line for citizenship—behind all those who up to that moment have come to the United States legally.
Oddly, the President’s own plan has them wait for eight years before even beginning to get to the back of the line. Why not put them there as soon as their case is adjudicated in a court of law? The record would not bar them from employment or be a stain on their citizen status and full restitution is their admission to breaking the law and the fine they pay, which would be according to their ability to pay.
President Obama has correctly pointed out, most recently in his State of the Union message earlier this month that our five-year immigration path to American citizenship as spelled out in the United States Constitution does not provide it to legal immigrants within five years due to the back up in the system as it is: it is broken here too.
Republicans often characterize Latinos or Hispanics as “lazy and dependent” people who overuse Federal welfare, Food stamps, and both Federal and State services such as police, fire, healthcare, and especially the public education of their children.
The truth is just the opposite. Republicans, outside of President George W. Bush in his 2000 campaign and previously as Governor of Texas, don’t know that Latinos are extremely hard-working and often do work the rest of us would never consider and certainly not at the below minimum wage people who are undocumented and off the charts are forced to accept. Those millions of Latinos who are citizens are like the newcomers– extremely entrepreneurial and overwhelmingly Catholic and conservative on at least some social questions—presumably a pro-life anti-abortion stance of their church.
This makes hash of Anne Coulter’s suggestion that a path to citizenship will create twenty million new Democrats. These people are more likely to be most comfortable with the Republican Party and its strong pro-business, hard work get-ahead ideology and respect for human life. All that prevents Republicans from once again getting forty percent of the Latino vote like Bush did in 2000 or that Reagan did when he ran for President (specifically 37%) and even more is to get out in front of the immigration issue and be more liberal in getting the some 11.1 million undocumented Latinos in this nation onto a quick path to citizenship. With that removed, and with a true welcoming stance to these people, the Democratic Party advantage of gaining seventy percent and more of the Latino vote would even up quickly.
But that would be smart and the Republican Party in 2013 is as Republican Governor of Louisiana and 2016 Presidential Hopeful Bobby Jindal remains solidly entrenched as “The Party of Stupid.”
White people accounted for almost 64 percent of the population in 2010 and received 69 percent of entitlement benefits. Latinos are 16 percent of the population yet receive 12 percent of entitlement benefits. This is hardly over dependent. On that basis it raises questions about the dominant white citizen population that should be even more troubling to Republicans but which is not.
Lazy is a characterization that has no scientific measurement index that is reliable. It is a measure of the opinion of those who watch others work and strive to succeed in our nation over their lifetimes.
It has to be said that professional American historians of immigration have long noted the common label of laziness and shiftlessness applied to both new immigrants from the Irish to the Italians and to the people from the Caribbean and most prominantly African-Americans.
Somehow the Germans escaped this label but they were thought to be overly clannish, keeping to themselves, obtaining citizenship and voting rights in the Republican Party during the Civil War Era and Reconstruction much too quickly for Democrats, and drinking entirely too much beer; Scandinavians too.
But Gilded Age immigrants of all backgrounds were routinely exploited for their low-wage labor under horrendous conditions—something the undocumented of our own time are all too well acquainted with.
And it is a commonplace of our history and of white prejudice against African-Americans that they remain lazy and shiftless and awaiting gifts from Obama if re-elected as Mitt Romney has recently charged and that they are all poor, and over dependent on Federal support. That is racial prejudice plainly visible to anyone who cares to look.This view of Latinos is rooted in racial and ethnic prejudice and bigotry too, and it suggests strongly that the Republican Party base has a great hostility for Latinos in general due to this racial and ethnic stereotype so magnified and so out of line with reality.
Republicans view of the undocumented as lawbreakers who have committed such a serious breach of the law to never be given a chance at citizenship is so harsh as to suggest that it too is rooted in the Republican’s own view that these people of color and who speak a different language to start with are the permanent “stranger” “other” and are dangerous to public order.
Anne Coulter’s assumption embedded deeply in what she has just written is that Republicans, overwhelmingly white and older and with a male tilt will never accept Latinos as their full equals. And they will never be comfortable with people of color becoming in aggregate as numerous as white people in the demographic future of America somewhere around 2040 according to the latest projection of the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
Why not instead make as many of these people full American citizens as soon as possible? That would be five to six years from the moment immigration reform takes effect. Then we would add 11.1 million new payers of Federal Income Taxes and State Income Taxes and not just sales taxes. Paying for what we need and balancing the budget becomes easier. And we unleash the full potential of these people and can better harness them to the full American economy and the civic life of the nation. Their children will fill out the ranks of our military, they will go to college and be some of the people who provide the innovation and edge we always want for the United States.
Dare we say, this is an ass-backward and stupid stance on the part of Republicans on this issue of immigration reform?
Of course any comprehensive immigration reform bill will include penalizing employers that hire undocumented people and mercilessly exploit them in the process and thus spurring more illegal immigration. Many of the undocumented are that desperate to find any kind of employment and freedom to support themselves and their families.
And we will maintain even heavier border patrols using all of the available technology to secure our borders.
Even George W. Bush was wise enough to seek agreement with Mexican and Central-American leaders on economic development that would make the very dangerous migration of desperate people from those countries less likely and less necessary.
So Anne Coulter and so many key leaders in the House of Representatives on the Republican side of the aisle: your immigration reform plans are a path to nowhere. And your sobriquet as “The Party of Stupid” is in no danger of being eclipsed by any more flattering characterization of what it means to be a Republican Conservative in the United States in the Twenty-first century.
Dr. Thomas Martin Sobottke
For Struggles for Justice
House Re-Divided: A New American Civil War? by Thomas Martin Sobottke (Writing Fiction Under the Anglicized Thomas Martin Saturday)
Posted in Essays, Gender, Race with tags civil rights revolution, irrepressible conflict, michael lind on February 7, 2013 by thomassobottkeMichael Lind has written a provocative and insightful piece of journalism in the February 5th issue of Salon.com where he argues, and argues persuasively, that it is not the Liberal/ Conservative axis of conflict but the Northern section of the country politically polarized and dysfunctional from the Southern section, particularly the old white supremacist South that troubles the nation.Writing in “The White South’s Last Defeat,” Lind says “the long, drawn-out, agonizing identity crisis of white Southerners is having effects that reverberate throughout our federal union. The transmission mechanism is the Republican Party, an originally Northern party that has now replaced the Southern wing of the Democratic Party as the vehicle for the dwindling Southern tribe.”
Within the larger demographic change toward greater racial and ethnic and religious diversity and the civil rights revolution and the white South’s legacy of defeat going back to the War Between the States, Jim Crow apartheid and its defeat in the Twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement is the growing realization of white Southerners that they will be a minority even in the heart of the South very soon and they do not like it.
Lind pinpoints the problem as the inability of white Southerners who have always viewed themselves as the “real Americans,” most connected to the their geographical regional identity along with white British Protestantism that pulls in race and ethnicity in direct conflict with a Northeast, Midwest, and coastal West that has experienced diverse and extensive migration of non-British Protestant people of many colors.
Those sections of the nation had extensive waves of immigration where so many of our Northern ancestors are hyphenated-Americans. In my case it could be German-American, Norwegian-American, Polish-American, Swiss-American. For white Southerners it has always been just “American.”
This new irrepressible conflict pits a Tea Party Republican faction that has its real base in the traditional white South among highly conservative Protestants making a sort of last ditch attempt to resurrect a kind of new Confederacy to challenge the rest of the nation and the changes within it. Many Southern states are seeing an explosion in the Latino population along with previous migrants and African-American Southerners who tilt on the more liberal Democrat axis these days shifting the future balance of power against the white South.
This pure Scottish, Celtic, and English Protestant settler past and an attempt to achieve real independence from Britain, a growing industrial and powerful North in the Civil War that threatened slavery, and the inability to re-impose a racial caste system in the South following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 are all defeats that still sting and the Lost Cause even today unites the tribe with a bond stronger than anything. New Recruits from the plains states where whites traditionally dominate entirely make up Red State America. And in some parts of the West, those areas were first settled by people from the old Confederacy.
This mighty chasm between where poll after poll on issue after issue shows roughly two thirds of Americans to be on one side, and a deeply conservative white Southern based angry and dissatisfied minority on the other, may be the real divide that brings on a new kind of civil war.
Struggles for Justice has previously argued and pointed out the many parallels to the American Civil War and Reconstruction with new battles over States’ Rights, demands for secession from the Union in 2012 and 2013, and such strange emanations from the Republican Tea Party tribe that make them seem so out of touch and of another century. That’s because they literally are.
Lind prophesies still one more and final defeat for the Confederacy as it is forced to yield to the reality that white Southerners will not be able to use their racial and ethnic solidarity to dominate any region of the nation as it is simply becoming and has become too diverse.
That group of Americans who support universal background checks for gun sales, no longer freak out at gay marriage, understand the importance of a woman’s privacy and her right to control her own body, and either voted for Obama or do not spend their time hating him, are more likely to be younger, more female, of color, and live in the Northeast, the upper Midwest, and the Western coastal regions where the largest concentration of the population now live in urban areas.
The history of the American Civil War, the modern Civil Rights Struggle, and new anxieties among a broad section of whites in the nation but particularly among Southern white protestant evangelicals and rural conservative white Christians in the Plains states, long Red in color on the political map might be more useful in understanding why we are so at each other’s throats and cannot understand each other.
We are a House Re-Divided that sheer force of numbers, resources, and the experiences two thirds of us have had will ensure that rather than Lincoln’s “it will become all one thing or all the other,” it inevitably will become one thing and that is not a white supremacist Protestant evangelical nation of yesteryear. No racial or ethnic group will be a majority yet the traditional white dominance of the population which ran in 2010 at 62.5% will be down to 48% between 2040 and 2045 with the potential for it to occur a little earlier than that.
The only question is what sort of conflict we are going to have with these socio-physiological mind games as the backdrop to a new Civil War. We know already that total obstruction of a black President and what most Americans want is there already. A stiff-necked refusal to embrace the long and ongoing changes in the demographic structure and people’s attitudes by this white Southern led minority could break out into outright civil insurrection and armed conflict that might bring down a government or seriously threaten it so we would repeat the struggle of 1861-65 only this time it is anti-big government insular localism and race and religious identity that makes us enemies when we have no reason to be so.
Can white Southerners embrace change and change themselves to accommodate the reality of a Twenty-first Century America? Can we all reduce their anxieties at growing racial, ethnic, and religious diversity that does not require the vandalizing of a Mosque in the South or an attack on a Palestinian-American in New York City or the blocking of voting for eligible citizens who are of color? Can they realize that most people want women to have the full range of health care if and how THEY choose? And if two people who are not you or your spouse love each other can you accept it if they are a same-sex couple? Background checks for guns don’t mean confiscation of firearms from law-abiding gun owners or their imprisonment by some Socialist-Communist Black or Brown Red orYellow horde.
We’ve journeyed a long way from the struggle against imperial Britain in 1776. We’ve added a second Constitution that provides for a “more perfect Union” where a stronger national government is designed right into the document. We’ve fought a terrible Civil War to decide whether we will allow slavery to exist side-by-side with the “all men are created equal” cornerstone ideal that founded our nation and guides it to this very moment. We’ve realized that many immigrant groups who were not here from Britain and native people who were here before Euro-Americans were and so many more who came later provide most of us with a vastly different experience and national perspective than many white Southerners have.
Happily, it won’t mean white Southrons will ever have to be ashamed of who their ancestors were, what they did to build the nation, and the fine stuff they are made of. But accepting the rest of us and the totality of what the nation continues to evolve to be with the old Declaration, the Constitution and the English language and Western law and precedent to be the point of the arch does not threaten them at all. And Southerners of all colors can enjoy and flaunt their regional identity in style.
The other alternative is a long, protracted and bitter struggle over our culture, our national agenda that will spill into violent conflict of some sort reminiscent of the old Confederacy and Union in the Nineteenth century. The secession movement, the extreme anti-woman legal offensive in many Red States and anti-worker legislation in many states elsewhere; the bull-headed and hot-headed wish to obstruct even at the expense of the national interest of all of us is plain to see.
Will we have a second American Civil War? Will blood be shed? Will the Southern white tribe have to be defeated decisively by force of arms to maintain that “more perfect Union” or will we all have the common sense to take a deep breath, see the commonality of what at the core it means to be or become an American and embrace each other in brotherly and sisterly love and move the nation forward together.
White Southern British Protestant nation the ball is in your court.
Immigration Reform Must Recognize a Fact That Already Is: Full Citizenship and Not Mere Residency
Posted in Community and Citizen Action, National Affairs, Race with tags human-rights, immigration reform legislation on February 6, 2013 by thomassobottkeHouse Republicans are labeling any immigration reform legislation that gives the some twelve million undocumented immigrants present in the United States even a tortuous and long path to citizenship as “Toxic” and “Extreme.”
They suggest “Residency” status which would not be citizenship at all but merely a legal environment where they would be allowed to remain in the United States and we could exploit them as they have all the responsibilities of citizens but few of the benefits.
A fact that already exists is that these people are this moment here with us in the United States. Most have been here with us working, obeying our laws, paying sales taxes, raising families, and being frightened should someone find out they entered the nation illegally. Others have and are serving in our military and of these a few have made the supreme sacrifice for a nation of which they are not a citizen.
“When you take [on] comprehensive, then we’re dealing with certain issues like full citizenship,” said Rep. Spencer Bachus (R) Alabama. “Whatever else we disagree on, I think we can agree on that’s a more toxic and contentious issue—ramming through full amnesty.”
Bachus and the House Republicans make a false assumption here. No one is contemplating not having undocumented people now in the United States escape the law. Illegal entry into the United States is a civil violation and not criminal. That is the first disagreeable fact these people must face. Every reform proposal by Democrats involves some form of restitution on the part of undocumented immigrants for this violation of the law. In most cases it would involve admitting openly in court that you entered the nation illegally, having your guilty plea entered into the public record, and then paying the appropriate civil fine to show a respect for the rule of law. This is not Amnesty, merely forgiving a lawbreaker of their violation of the law without penalty.
Struggles for Justice believes as does the Obama Administration that undocumented Americans who entered the nation illegally should acknowledge that they broke the law and pay the civil fine associated with that violation. Then they should be given documentation and sent to the very back of the line of those awaiting citizenship.
Should the persons concerned be convicted criminals either here or in their homelands they would of course not be eligible for the reform path to citizenship at all. They most often would be deported. But millions more would now be able to achieve citizenship and to share the benefits as well as the work and dangers of maintaining and carrying forward our republican form of government as embodied in our Constitution and the nation state known as the United States of America.
Our Constitution rooted so much in the civil rights of equal treatment under the law cannot and must not create two or more classes of citizens, some with superior citizen rights and others without. It will not stand Constitutional muster. This idea of second class citizenship in the form of residency and another class with real citizenship violates the principal of our founding document that says triumphantly that the Creator has made us to be born free and equal.
Those who see this move of including these people as leading to the United States having wide open and uncontrolled borders are really hiding their fears of the other, the foreigner, the different—racial and ethnic bigotry.
A man said to the editor of Struggles for Justice just yesterday that “all the blacks in the inner city are just dope dealers and criminals.” He failed to grasp that many millions of African-Americans hold gainful employment, obey the laws, and are capable of family commitments of the first order. He and others like them assume that people of color or people who are both of color and undocumented must be criminals beyond the single civil violation of our immigration law. That they are not making a contribution to our economy and that their children must be resigned to second-class status.
How at odds this is with Twenty-first Century standards of human rights and dignity and our Constitutional assurances of equal treatment under the law. The House Republicans inability to take the obvious step and recognize that these millions of undocumented people present here for at least a few years and maybe a generation and now more are going to stay and be made citizens or work here under green card status shows us they refuse to recognize a fact that already is. Those who are dangerous and criminal will be sent home.
We can do this and heavily patrol and police all of our borders and maintain a tighter watch on visitors to the country in the interests of our national security and sovereign ability as a nation state to control our borders. We should do these things and assert that very sovereignty.
And the process to become a citizen must be streamlined. Not in terms of the Constitutional requirements met by so many of our ancestors, but in terms of the bureaucratic maze we’ve created so that even legal immigrants face long and daunting paths to citizenship that disrespects their human dignity and the burning desire for freedom and to be what we are: Americans.
No, it must be full immigration reform—the full Monty or Republicans must admit what they wish in their heart of hearts: that “those people” should be rounded up and thrown out entirely or exploited more mercilessly as second or third tier citizens or “resident” oppressed classes of victimhood.
They may be shocked to find that once documented and as citizens they will not just pay sales taxes on the sly but they will pay income taxes and property taxes enriching and swelling the revenue taken in by our government at all levels and spreading the tax burden more evenly.
And they may be shocked to find many talented and vital people to America’s future already among us; that their children are so very American and loyal to our nation and its cherished ideals. Let’s welcome them and get them out of the shadows and out of fear and into the light of full participation in our democratic experiment.
