Tag Archives: race and ethnicity

Conservatives Are Finally Admitting What Voter Suppression Laws Are All About

by Jay Walker Posted on August 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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North Carolina’s new voter ID law is ostensibly designed to reduce voter fraud. That’s the official story, anyway. But if that’s the case, why did North Carolina also pass a whole bunch of other voting restrictions, including limits on early voting? Phyllis Schlafly, the doyen of right-wing crankery, explains that the reason was simple: “Early voting plays a major role in Obama’s ground game….It is an essential component of the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote campaign.” Steve Benen comments:

Have you ever heard a political figure accidentally read stage direction, unaware that it’s not supposed to repeated out loud? This is what Schlafly’s published column reminds me of.

For North Carolina Republicans, the state’s new voter-suppression measures are ostensibly legitimate — GOP officials are simply worried about non-existent fraud. The response from Democrats and voting-rights advocates is multi-faceted, but emphasizes that some of these measures, including restrictions on early voting, have nothing whatsoever to do with fraud prevention and everything to do with a partisan agenda.

And then there’s Phyllis Schlafly, writing a piece for publication effectively saying Democrats are entirely right — North Carolina had to dramatically cut early voting because it’s not good for Republicans.

Remember, Schlafly’s piece wasn’t intended as criticism; this is her defense of voter suppression in North Carolina. Proponents of voting rights are arguing, “This is a blatantly partisan scheme intended to rig elections,” to which Schlafly is effectively responding, “I know, isn’t it great?”

Actually, I doubt that Schlafly was very far off the reservation here. Generally speaking, I think conservatives have gotten tired of keeping up the pretense on the purpose of their voter suppression laws. Why bother, after all? It might make sense if they needed to convince a few Democrats to join their cause, but that’s obviously hopeless. Alternatively, it might be necessary if they needed to maintain a legal fig leaf for future court cases, but the Supreme Court has ruled that purely partisan motivations for voting laws are A-OK. Finally, they might care about public opinion. And they probably do. But not much.

At this point, the jig is up. Everyone knows what these laws are about, and there’s hardly any use in pretending anymore. In fact, the only real goal of the voter suppression crowd now is to provide a plausible legal argument that what they’re doing isn’t intentionally racist. That’s really the only thing that can derail them at this point, and the best way to fight back is to shrug their shoulders and just admit that they’re being brazenly partisan. That’s what Texas attorney general Greg Abbott did in his brief supporting his state’s voter suppression laws, and he did it with gusto. But if that’s the official argument that you have to make in your legal briefs, there’s not much point in denying it in other forums. You might as well just go with it.

Schlafly wasn’t reading stage directions. She was reading from the script. It’s just a new script, that’s all.

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Conservatives Are Finally Admitting What Voter Suppression Laws Are All About

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Is "Dads" the Year’s Most Racist Sitcom?

by Abraham Lowe Posted on August 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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“Well, you’re lucky your dads are American; my dad beat me with a math book ’til I was 16,” says Veronica, an Asian American character (played by Brenda Song) on the upcoming Fox sitcom Dads. The new series (executive produced by Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy, American Dad!, and Ted fame) premieres on September 17, but it has already generated controversy for its comic portrayal of Asian Americans and the Chinese. The show focuses on two founders of a video game company, and how they deal with their intrusive fathers. Comedy supposedly ensues, some of it at the expense of Asian folk.

In the pilot episode, the main characters (played by Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi) insist that Veronica dress up like a “sexy Asian schoolgirl”—one who giggles like a Japanese teenage stereotype—in order to impress a group of Chinese investors. Chinese people are mocked and declared untrustworthy. The “Asian men have tiny dicks” stereotype is gleefully deployed. The term “Oriental” is used because…funny. And it doesn’t help that Dads co-creator Alec Sulkin once tweeted, “If you wanna feel better about this earthquake in Japan, google ‘Pearl Harbor death toll.'” Sulkin sent this tweet on March 11, 2011, the day a tsunami struck Japan and killed thousands. None of the victims, Japanese or otherwise, was ever implicated in the plot to bomb Americans in the 1940s. (Sulkin soon deleted the comment and apologized via tweet.)

Full disclosure: I am indeed of Asian descent—my parents were born in Bangkok, and I was born in Washington, DC. I rarely have a problem laughing at jokes that invoke Asian/Asian American stereotypes, so long as they are funny and/or have something wise to say. If you’d like my personal opinion of Dads, I’d say that the real problem does not lie with any ethnic or racial stereotypes, but with the fact that it is unoriginal and often a painfully unfunny, lazy waste of production space.

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Is "Dads" the Year’s Most Racist Sitcom?

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If You’ve Ever Traveled to a "Suspicious" Country, This Secret Program May Target You

by wojciechrak75 Posted on August 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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A previously unknown Bush administration program continued under President Barack Obama grants the FBI and other national security agencies broad authority to delay or squash the immigration applications of people from Muslim countries, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Under the program, immigrants can be designated “national security concerns” based on the flimsiest of rationales, such as coming from a “suspicious” country. Other criteria that can earn an immigrant this label include wiring money to relatives abroad, attending mosques the FBI has previously surveilled, or simply appearing in FBI case files.


Our Yearlong Investigation Into the Program to Spy on America’s Muslim Communities


How the Bureau Enlists Foreign Regimes to Detain and Interrogate US Citizens


When Did Lefty Darling Brandon Darby Turn Government Informant?


Charts from Our Terror Trial Database


Watch an FBI Surveillance Video


Documents: FBI Spies and Suspects, in Their Own Words

“This policy is creating a secret exclusion to bar many people who are eligible for citizenship because…of their national origin or religion or associations,” says Jennie Pasquarella, the ACLU lawyer who authored a new report on the program, which is called the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program (CARRP). “It’s doing this without the knowledge of the public, without the knowledge of applicants, and without, we believe, the knowledge of Congress.”

The criteria laid out under CARRP, which took effect in April 2008, are used to process nearly every immigration application. But once the FBI or another government agency flags an immigrant as a potential national security threat, that person’s application for citizenship or permanent residency is shunted off into a separate system, where it lingers and is almost invariably rejected. The immigrants who have been labeled “national security concerns” have no way to know about or contest the decision.

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If You’ve Ever Traveled to a "Suspicious" Country, This Secret Program May Target You

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Race, Lead, and Juvenile Crime

by Joan Rivera Posted on August 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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I know, I know: I’m a broken record on the subject of lead exposure in kids and crime rates 20 years later. But there’s lately been a renewed focus on black crime and black incarceration rates, as well as the racial profiling of blacks and Hispanics in New York City’s stop-and-frisk program. Guess what? The lead theory has something to say about that.

For starters, did you know that arrest rates for violent crime have fallen much faster among black juveniles than among white juveniles? They have, as the charts below show. Rick Nevin explains why:

African-American boys disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system were also disproportionately exposed to lead contaminated dust as young children, because black children were disproportionately concentrated in large cities and older housing. In 1976-1980, 15.3% of black children under the age of three had blood lead above 30 mcg/dl (micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood), when just 2.5% of white children had blood lead that high. In 1988-1991, after the elimination of leaded gasoline, 1.4% of black children and 0.4% of white children under the age of three had blood lead above 25 mcg/dl.

In other words, black juvenile crime rates fell further than white juvenile crime rates because they had been artificially elevated by lead exposure at a much higher rate. In the early 80s, black kids had elevated lead levels at 6x the rate of white kids. After the elimination of leaded gasoline, black kids still had elevated lead levels at 3x the rate of white kids, which explains some of the continued disparity in juvenile crime rates, but that still represented enormous progress. Not only was the ratio lower, but the absolute numbers were far lower too.

There have been, and still are, lots of potential explanations for the disparity in violent crime rates between black and white teens: the toxic legacy of racism and slavery; poverty rates in inner cities; gang culture; and many more. But as Nevin points out, none of the popular theories explains the dramatic rise and fall of crime over the past 50 years, nor in particular why black crime declined more than white crime starting in the early 90s. That’s because none of the usual suspects has varied dramatically in the past 20 years. Family structure in black households has been largely unchanged; poverty went down but then went back up; and incarceration rates haven’t increased.

But the number of kids with toxic levels of exposure has decreased steadily throughout the entire period, and it decreased far more among black kids than white kids. It’s true that black juvenile crime rates are still higher than white juvenile crime rates, but they’re nowhere near the levels that caused so many people to live in fear in the 70s and 80s. Nevin wishes more people knew about this:

If the public were more aware of the magnitude of the ongoing changes in juvenile arrest rates, then law-abiding youths might not be unfairly viewed as interchangeable with juvenile criminals….The fact that black children still had disproportionately elevated blood lead in 2007-2010 is an egregious racial injustice. The fact that the news media fails to recognize the magnitude of ongoing declines in juvenile arrest rates creates other injustices, sometimes veiled in a cloak of sympathy, sometimes in the form of an ominous lecture, and sometimes in the form of arrest rate trends for minor offenses.

No one pretends that lead exposure is the only source of crime, or the only source of disparity in crime rates. But it’s a big part of the picture, and the plain fact is that a lot of people are still living in the past when it comes to fear of black teens. Thanks to falling lead exposure, both black and white teens are far less violent than in the past, and the fall has been most pronounced among blacks. If we wanted to, we could produce even further declines by reducing lead exposure among black toddlers to the same levels as white toddlers, but we’re not there yet because blacks still live disproportionately in old housing and in areas where lead dust from nearby highways settled into the soil decades ago. That’s due to the toxic legacy of racism, redlining, poverty, and more. But we could fix it, even if we can’t entirely overcome racism itself.

The bottom line is simple: We poisoned them. We owe it to them to clean up the poison, not just lock up their kids.

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Race, Lead, and Juvenile Crime

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Lobbyist Secretly Wrote House Dems’ Letter Urging Weaker Investor Protections

by KetaHeadraf Posted on August 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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A letter that a group of progressive Democrats sent to federal regulators opposing new protections for millions of Americans’ retirement accounts was drafted by a financial industry lobbyist, according to documents obtained by Mother Jones.

The Department of Labor (DoL), which oversees the federal law setting minimum standards for many retirement plans, would like to require retirement investment advisers to act in the best interest of their customers, as opposed to their own best interest.

But 28 out of the 43 members of the Congressional Black Caucus—a group of African-American members of Congress that advocates for the interests of low-income people and minorities—signed onto a June 14 letter opposing the rule. So did Democratic lawmakers Pedro Pierluisi of Puerto Rico, Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, Ed Pastor of Arizona, and Jim Costa of California.

The letter’s metadata indicates it was drafted by Robert Lewis, a lobbyist who works for the Financial Services Institute (FSI), an investment industry trade group:

Together, the liberal lawmakers who signed the letter have received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign money from the securities and investment industry in recent years.

In the letter, the lawmakers caution the DoL against proposing new regulations, warning that a strict new rule on retirement advisers may cause many of them to leave the market, and thus “could severely limit access to low-cost investment advice” for “the minority communities we represent.”

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Lobbyist Secretly Wrote House Dems’ Letter Urging Weaker Investor Protections

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Is America’s Biggest Liquor Racket About to Go Out of Business?

by 0df53x21 Posted on August 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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Whiteclay, Nebraska, sells more beer per capita than any town in America. In 2009, the most recent year for which we have statistics, the four liquor stores in the town of about a dozen full-time residents sold 4.6 million cans of beer. Or roughly 383,333 cans per person. Or 1,009 cans of beer per resident, per day. But the beer isn’t being consumed by the residents of Whiteclay. The town’s economy is built on the flow of booze two miles across the South Dakota border into the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge reservation, where the sale and possession of alcohol has been illegal for more than a century. On Tuesday, the residents of Pine Ridge will hold a referendum on whether to put Whiteclay out of business.

Activists in Pine Ridge and their allies have tried for years to shut down Whiteclay. For the most part, those efforts have focused on the creation of a dry buffer zone that would extend across into Nebraska (the reservation ends at the state line). Congress had mandated the 50-mile buffer upon creation of the reservation in 1889, but in 1904, the liquor lobby successfully persuaded President Theodore Roosevelt to eliminate that buffer by executive order (which may have not been legal). Lawmakers could have extended the buffer on their own but chose not to, and despite repeated requests, no administration in Washington has been willing to consider reversing Roosevelt’s order.

Tuesday’s vote would lift the prohibition on beer sales in Pine Ridge entirely (hard liquor would still be prohibited), and put the tribe in charge of sales, the profits from which it could invest in things like alcoholism treatment centers. The theory is pretty straightforward, and consistent with the idea behind repealing prohibition everywhere else: the current legal structure has only served to enrich distributors in Whiteclay while doing nothing to curb addiction. With eight out of 10 households on the reservation (which has a population of somewhere between 18,000 and 40,000) impacted by alcoholism, it’s hard to imagine legalization making things much worse.

Or maybe it’s not. The success of the measure is no sure thing, with a number of powerful opponents, such as tribe president Bryan Brewer, opposing legalization on the grounds that it would bring the worst of Whiteclay to the community’s doorstep. If the referendum passes, one opponent told the Rapid City Journal, “we would have a Whiteclay in every district in this reservation.”

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Is America’s Biggest Liquor Racket About to Go Out of Business?

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Time to Retire the R-Word

by Aale Thomas Posted on August 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Mother Jones has joined the ranks of publications that refuse to utter the name of Washington DC’s pro football team. In fact, that’s now what our style guide calls them: “Washington’s pro football team.” Personally, I’d prefer the Victorian era affectation of using initials. I never quite understood why old novels were littered with things like Mr. K—- or Bishop M—–, but why not make use of it anyway? We could refer to Washington’s pro football team as the R—–s. This has the added advantage of automatically giving it the veneer of vulgarity. Dan Snyder’s team would be the R-word, to go along with the N-word and the C-word and all the others.

But here’s a question: Is there a similar movement afoot to change the name of Cleveland’s pro baseball team and Atlanta’s pro baseball team? It’s true that the I-word and the B-word are less offensive than the R-word, but on the other hand, the team logo in Cleveland sure beats Washington for offensiveness. And that hatchet thing in Atlanta is just plain annoying. I know that both those teams have taken some heat for their names, but not as much as Washington. Anyone know if that’s changing?

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Time to Retire the R-Word

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Ditching the Redskins, Once and for All

by Sheeritwern Posted on August 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Over at Slate yesterday, editor David Plotz wrote about the site’s decision to never again refer to Washington’s professional football team as the Redskins. In explaining the change, Plotz argued that although the franchise’s (racist) first owner, George Preston Marshall, likely chose the name in an effort “to invoke Indian bravery and toughness, not to impugn Indians,” ultimately “the world changes, and all of a sudden a well-intentioned symbol is an embarrassment.”

It is an absolute embarrassment—for the NFL, for the nation’s capital, and for nanny-underpayer/owner Dan Snyder, who has stubbornly vowed never to change the team’s name, even in the face of common decency and a federal trademark suit.

And so, in an admittedly small gesture, Mother Jones is also tweaking our house style guide, joining Slate and a group of other publications, from The New Republic to Washington City Paper. From here on out, we will refer to the team online and in print as “Washington” or “Washington’s pro football team” or, if we get sassy, “the Washington Redacted.”

For those of you who come to Mother Jones for your breaking NFL news…never mind, I can’t even.

There is a chance, however, that the term will end up back on our pages. We certainly won’t strike it from a quote. And if we end up writing a post or two about how Snyder still hasn’t changed the name, despite increasing scrutiny, we reserve the right to use it again—if only to highlight how incredibly out-of-touch and backward the Washington football team’s owner truly is.

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Ditching the Redskins, Once and for All

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5 Terrible Acts of Voter Discrimination the Voting Rights Act Prevented—But Won’t Anymore

by marsxxzaa Posted on August 6, 2013

Mother Jones

President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law 48 years ago today. But this June, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court struck down a major section of the law, freeing jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to change their voting laws without federal permission. For decades, Section 5 of the VRA required a number of jurisdictions, mostly in the South, to seek the feds’ approval—called preclearance, in legal parlance—before modifying voting rules. The Supreme Court’s decision gutted Section 5, paving the way for new discriminatory laws.

Since the high court ruling, North Carolina has passed what critics have called the worst voter-ID law in the country, Texas pushed ahead with a voter-ID law and redistricting plan that the VRA blocked last year, and Attorney General Eric Holder has vowed to continue to challenge discriminatory voting laws despite the Supreme Court ruling. Florida’s Republican Governor Rick Scott announced this week that he would renew his efforts to purge “non-citizens” from the voter rolls, a messy, inaccurate practice that the Justice Department says violates the VRA and unfairly targets black and Hispanic voters.

In honor of the VRA’s anniversary, here are five recent and egregious examples of of minority discrimination that were blocked by Section 5, the part of the law the Supreme Court eviscerated in June:

In 2001, the all-white board of aldermen in the town of Kilmichael, Miss. (pop. 830), canceled town elections after an unprecedented number of black candidates made it onto the ballot. When the DOJ forced an election and the town finally voted, it elected its first black mayor and three black aldermen.
During a 2004 city council primary in Bayou La Batre, Ala., a Vietnamese-American candidate, Phuong Thanh Huynh, ran against white incumbent Jackie Ladnier. Ladnier and his supporters challenged about 50 Asian-American voters at the polls. Their reason? If they couldn’t speak English well, they might not be citizens. The DOJ intervened, and Huynh became the first Asian-American on the city council.
Texas is perfect example of the continued need for the VRA. The state has been repeatedly blocked from implementing both local and statewide changes that blatantly disenfranchise minority voters, from redistricting schemes to the elimination of polling places and early voting in minority districts. A report from Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund found that the between 1982 and 2006 Texas was second only to Mississippi in the number of DOJ objections under Section 5. One example: In 2007, officials in Waller County, home to the historically black Prairie View A&M University, enacted strict voter registration rules (without federal approval) that allowed them to reject voter registration applications, mostly from PVAMU students, for minor errors or omissions. After the Justice Department sued the county, a local judge told the Houston Chronicle that registrars “were maybe being a little picky with some of the things they were rejecting for.”
In 2008, Alaska submitted for federal preclearance a plan that would have required some Native Alaskan voters to travel by air or boat to cast a ballot. The state withdrew its submission after it was challenged by the DOJ.
After the 2010 census indicated that blacks had become the majority of the voting-age population in Georgia’s Augusta-Richmond, a consolidated city and county, the state legislature passed a bill that rescheduled voting from November, which had a traditionally high black voter turnout, to July, which had a low turnout overall, but especially for blacks. The change only affected Augusta-Richmond, and, not surprisingly, was rejected under Section 5.

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5 Terrible Acts of Voter Discrimination the Voting Rights Act Prevented—But Won’t Anymore

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Neo-Confederates to Install 15-foot Battle Flag on Virginia’s I-95

by 07ld5ksl Posted on August 6, 2013

Mother Jones

Coming this fall to I-95 in Richmond: A 15-foot-wide Confederate battle flag.

On Saturday, Virginia Flaggers, a small organization dedicated to promoting the state’s Confederate heritage, announced that it is leasing a small patch of land adjacent to the highway just outside the state capital, from which it plans to fly the stars-and-bars, “24/7, 365 days of the year.”

In a post on the Flaggers’ website, spokeswoman Susan Hathaway announced that the flag “will serve to welcome visitors and commuters to Richmond, and remind them of our honorable Confederate history and heritage.” The group’s members are going to start work on the project this week, with a formal unveiling slated for September 28; in the meantime, they have launched a fundraising campaign to bring in the $3,000 they need to put the thing up.

Prior to the I-95 project, the Virginia Flaggers had spent most of their energy protesting the decision by two museums, the Museum of the Confederacy in Appomattox and Richmond’s Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, not to fly the Confederate flag outside. In an interview with the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Hathaway explained that the flag’s positive message had been distorted by groups like the Ku Klux Klan. (Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest, whom Hathaway is a fan of, was the Klan’s first grand wizard.)

The Confederate States of America was a dysfunctional coalition of 11 states formed in 1861 around a unifying principle of white supremacy. Member states initiated a four-year-long armed conflict against the Union that resulted in 600,000 deaths. Post-Civil War, the Confederate battle flag was a largely dormant symbol of the Old South until the 1950s, when opponents of federal action against racial segregation adopted it once again—sometimes in places, such as Kentucky, that had remained under Union control throughout the war.

Hathaway did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones, but on the Flaggers’ website, the group does weigh in on the relevance of the Confederate flag in the age of Obama. On July 4th, Virginia Flaggers posted a special Independence Day message: “God bless America…and God bless those who have the courage to stand in the face of tyranny…whether it be in 1776…1861…or 2013!”

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Neo-Confederates to Install 15-foot Battle Flag on Virginia’s I-95

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