Tag Archives: race and ethnicity

Why CNN Wouldn’t Cut Away From White House Shindig To Cover Huge Freddie Gray Protest

by DonetteCoughlan Posted on April 26, 2015

Mother Jones

As politicians, celebrities, and journalists gathered for the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night in D.C., just miles away in Baltimore, Maryland, a big crowd marched to protest the death in police custody of 25-year-old Freddie Gray. By Saturday evening, 12 people were reported arrested as some in the largely peaceful crowd threw rocks and smashed windows, and the jumbotron at the Baltimore Orioles game warned fans to stay inside.

But you wouldn’t have known any of that from CNN, which chose to stick with live coverage of every second of the White House dinner. “The most powerful man in the world is going to tell some jokes,” contributor Errol Louis explained, with scenes of the gala in the background. If you wanted to know what was going on with the rallies, you could “find a live feed” somewhere, he said—just not, evidently, on America’s 24-hour news network.

“We sort of make our best choices, and we’ll catch up,” Louis said. “They’ll find out all of what happened in the streets of Baltimore by this time tomorrow.”

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Why CNN Wouldn’t Cut Away From White House Shindig To Cover Huge Freddie Gray Protest

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Native American Actors Walk Off Set of New Adam Sandler Movie Over Racist Jokes

by GRTCollett Posted on April 24, 2015

Mother Jones

About a dozen Native American actors quit the set of a new Adam Sandler film, produced by Netflix, to protest the script’s portrayal of Apache culture and what the actors claim are racist jokes about native women and elders.

According to a report by Indian Country, the actors of “The Ridiculous Six,” a spoof of the classic western flick “The Magnificent Seven,” complained to producers about the offensive stereotypes, which include the naming of female characters as Beaver’s Breath and No Bra. One scene also has a native woman “squatting and urinating while smoking a peace pipe.”

Allison Young, a Navajo Nation tribal member and student, said the actors talked to the producers and told them what they found offensive. “They just told us, ‘If you guys are so sensitive, you should leave,'”she said. “I didn’t want to cry but the feeling just came over me. This is supposed to be a comedy that makes you laugh. A film like this should not make someone feel this way.”

Loren Anthony, another tribal member and actor, told Indian Country that while he initially had reservations about appearing in the film, producers had assured him the jokes would not be racist. But from the very beginning, he said, things “started getting weird” and what were supposed to be jokes were simply offensive.

On set, going to brawl out with Nick Nolte. #TheRidiculousSix #NickNolte #NMfilm #NM #film #SAGfilm #LasVegasNM #movies #NativeActor #Acting #Actor #hollywood #Comedy #NativePride #NativeAmerican

A photo posted by Loren Anthony (@lorenanthony) on Apr 21, 2015 at 7:31am PDT

Netflix defends the film as a supposed satire. “The movie has ‘ridiculous’ in the title for a reason: because it is ridiculous,” the company said in a statement. “It is a broad satire of Western movies and the stereotypes they popularized, featuring a diverse cast that is not only part of—but in on—the joke.”

“The Ridiculous Six” follows a string of flops for Sandler, whose recent films include the 2012 movie “Jack and Jill,” which succeeded in winning every single category at the Razzies that year. His latest production stars Nick Nolte, Steve Buscemi, Will Forte, and Vanilla Ice. A preview of what that looks like below:

Awesome time with all my fellow Native’s – Navajo, Apache, Comanche, Choctaw. Cherokee.

A photo posted by Vanilla Ice ✅ (@vanillaiceofficial) on Apr 23, 2015 at 8:14pm PDT

“Nothing has changed,” Young says. “We are still just Hollywood Indians.”

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Native American Actors Walk Off Set of New Adam Sandler Movie Over Racist Jokes

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Just How Racist Are Schoolteachers?

by Leonora68M Posted on April 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s no secret that black kids are more likely to be suspended from school than white kids—three times more likely, according to a 2012 report from the Office of Civil Rights. And now a study published this week in Psychological Science may shed some light on just how much of a role racial bias on the part of educators may play.

Stanford psychology grad student Jason Okonofua and professor Jennifer Eberhardt designed a study where active K-12 teachers from across the country were presented with mocked-up disciplinary records showing a student who had misbehaved twice. Both infractions were relatively minor: one was for insubordination, the other for class disturbance. The records’ substance never changed, but some bore stereotypically black names (Darnell or Deshawn) while others had stereotypically white names (Jake or Greg). Teachers answered a series of questions about how troubled they were by the infractions reflected in the documents, how severe the appropriate discipline should be, and the likelihood that the student was “a troublemaker.”

The teachers’ responses after learning about the first infraction were about equal, regardless of the student’s perceived race. But after hearing about the second infraction, a gap in discipline emerged: On a scale of one to seven, teachers rated the appropriate severity of discipline at just over five for students perceived to be black, compared to just over four for students perceived to be white. That may not seem like a big difference, but on one-to-seven scale, a single point is a 14 percent increase—well beyond what is typically accepted as statistically significant.

A follow-up experiment of over 200 teachers took the questioning further, and found that teachers were more likely (though by smaller margins) to judge students perceived as black as engaging in a pattern of misbehavior, and were more likely to say they could “imagine themselves suspending the student at some point in the future.”

Okonofua and Eberhart, Association for Psychological Science

“Most school teachers likely work hard at treating their students equally and justly,” says Okonofua. “And yet even amongst these well-intentioned and hard-working people, we find cultural stereotypes about black people are bending their perceptions towards less favorable interpretations of behavior.”

Many studies have looked at the subconscious racial prejudice of snap judgments—my former colleague, Chris Mooney, wrote an excellent feature on the subject last December. But according to the authors, this is the first study to look at the psychology behind the racial gap in school discipline. And, as Okonofua said, “The research shows that even if there’s no race effect for an initial interaction, the stereotyping can play out over time. That’s really important because in the real world, there are sustained relationships.”

And the research may have implications for other kinds of sustained relationships between two levels of authority: say a boss and an employee, a prison guard and a prisoner, or a judge and a repeat offender.

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Just How Racist Are Schoolteachers?

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Watch Obama Explain Ferguson in Under 5 Minutes

by WCEKellyld Posted on March 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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During his appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel show on Thursday night, President Obama perfectly distilled what’s at stake in Ferguson, and what needs to be done next. “In the same way that you can’t generalize about police officers who do an extraordinarily tough job—overwhelmingly they do it professionally,” he said, “you can’t generalize about protestors who, it turns out, had some very legitimate grievances.”

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Watch Obama Explain Ferguson in Under 5 Minutes

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The NYPD Is Editing the Wikipedia Pages of Eric Garner, Sean Bell

by HildegaHarms Posted on March 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Edits to the Wikipedia entries of several high-profile police brutality cases, including those of Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo, and Sean Bell, trace back to the headquarters of the New York Police Department, Capital New York reports this morning. The pages have been edited to cast the NYPD in a more favorable light and lessen allegations of police misconduct. The edits are currently the subject of an NYPD internal review.

In the case of Garner, who died while placed in a chokehold by a NYPD officer last summer, the word “chokehold” was swapped for “respiratory distress” and the line “Garner, who was considerably larger than any of the officers, continued to struggle with them” was added. The changes ostensibly suggest Garner’s death was his own fault.

Such modifications echo the views of NYPD supporters, including Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) who adamantly declared Garner would not have died had he not been so “obese.” In August, the city’s medical examiner officially ruled Garner’s death a homicide due to the chokehold.

The Wikipedia activity brewing at 1 Police Plaza took a distinctly more bizarre turn with edits to the pages “Ice Cream Soda,” “Who Moved My Cheese?” “Chumbawamba,” and “Stone Cold Steve Austin.”

Following Capital New York’s story on Friday, the Twitter account “NYPD Edits” was created to keep tabs on any future changes authored by the NYPD.

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The NYPD Is Editing the Wikipedia Pages of Eric Garner, Sean Bell

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White Men Are Overdosing on Heroin at a Record Rate

by Juliane84J Posted on March 9, 2015

Mother Jones

A decades-long surge in heroin use has left behind a trail of overdose victims. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released this week found that the number of heroin overdoses quadrupled from 1,842 in 2000 to 8,257 in 2013—with a significant boost among people between the ages of 18 and 44, particularly white men.

Dr. Len Paulozzi, a medical epidemiologist who studies drug overdoses at the CDC’s Injury Center, says that both the growing availability of heroin nationwide and the shift among prescription drug users to heroin use may have contributed to the dramatic rise in deaths. “Thirty years ago, people snorting heroin never used OxyContin or Vicodin before” using heroin, says Paulozzi, who did not contribute to the CDC report. But now the drug’s abusers start with prescription drugs, he says, turning these meds into gateway drugs. A National Survey on Drug Use and Health study found that heroin abuse was 19 times higher among people who had previously abused pain relievers.

The increase in overdoses follows a federal crackdown on prescription painkillers, beginning toward the end of the Clinton era and lasting through the Bush administration, that resulted in a rash of arrests for illegal use during the mid-2000s. While the rate of deaths involving prescription painkillers like OxyContin appears to have leveled off, heroin overdoses have risen 348 percent. Most of the deaths occurred after 2010. That year, a new tamper-resistant form of Oxy hit the market, making it less potent and harder to abuse.

The rate of heroin deaths accelerated among people between the ages of 18 and 24, from 0.8 deaths per 100,000 people in 2000 to 3.9 deaths per 100,000 in 2013. For people between 25 and 44 years old, the rate jumped from 1.3 deaths per 100,000 people in 2000 to 5.4 per 100,000 in 2013. Among young and middle-aged white people, that death rate reached 7.0 per 100,000 by 2013.

The CDC report also highlighted the stark gender and regional disparities among those who overdose. Deaths among men from heroin overdoses were four times higher than those among women between 2000 and 2013. While heroin overdoses increased throughout the country, the greatest number occurred in the Northeast and Midwest. In those regions, particularly near cities, the Justice Department observed the illicit drug as a rising threat—especially given the reported spike in the use of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid some 30 times more potent than heroin.

According to the Washington Post, the Justice Department predicted the emerging trend in 2002: “As initiatives taken to curb the abuse of OxyContin are successfully implemented, abusers of OxyContin…also may begin to use heroin, especially if it is readily available, pure, and relatively inexpensive.” A flood of heroin from Mexico, the world’s third-largest opium producer, also factored into the drug’s availability in the United States. In 2013, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized 2,196 kilograms of powder and black tar at the US-Mexico border, a nearly 160 percent bump from 2009.

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White Men Are Overdosing on Heroin at a Record Rate

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On the Selma Anniversary, These North Carolina Activists Will March Backwards

by MinnieBCHogplu Posted on March 7, 2015

Mother Jones

Activists, politicians, and luminaries from across the nation will flock to Selma, Alabama, this weekend to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the nonviolent voting-rights march that was undermined by police-sanctioned attacks, presaging the passage, six months later, of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But this year’s events, which include a reenactment of the fateful march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, are shaping up to have a more activist edge than past commemorations.

Some black leaders, such as North Carolina NAACP president Rev. Doctor William Barber II, will use the day to highlight the assault on black voting rights in the wake of a 2013 Supreme Court decision that rolled back a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Rather than make it across the bridge, Barber and his delegation plan to turn around and march back toward Selma.

“For the last fifty years we’ve been walking across that bridge to celebrate how the civil rights leaders pushed us forward. This year, we have to turn around,” he told me. This change in routine, he says, is a response to the politicians who “will come down to Selma and give all these platitudes and talk about how they love the people of the past, but won’t ensure a Voting Rights Act that meets the test of history today.” And that “is a step backward.”

Prior to the Supreme Court ruling, the VRA required nine historically racist states, including North Carolina, along with several counties, to get permission from the Department of Justice before modifying their voting laws. It paid off. In 2012, for instance, North Carolina ranked 11th out of 50 states in voter turnout, with 65 percent of registered voters casting a ballot.

But the gains, ironically enough, helped influence the court’s decision in the case of Shelby County v. Holder. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. held that it was unconstitutional to single out just a few states for these voting requirements, especially after all this time—”nearly 50 years later,” he wrote, “things have changed dramatically.”

They can change back, too. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg likened the majority’s reasoning to throwing away an umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

Prescient words: Freed from DOJ oversight, several of those states quickly reversed course, enacting a deluge of new, restrictive voting laws. Within two months of the ruling, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed a package of legislation that was, for anyone who favors access to the ballot box, a nightmare: Same day registration? Gone. Pre-registration for for 16- and 17-year-olds? Also gone. A shorter early registration period? Check. Extended voting hours when voting demand exceeds the availability of voting machines? Nixed. The ability to vote in a precinct outside of where one resides? Nope. Then there’s the most contested provision: the requirement for voters to present a state-approved ID starting in 2016. Without a valid driver’s license, state ID card, US military ID, veteran card, or passport, North Carolina voters are out of luck.

“Voting should not difficult. It should not be something that we have to jump over hurdles to do,” says Donita Judge, a senior attorney at the Advancement Project, a civil rights nonprofit. She and her colleagues promptly sued the state over the new voting restrictions. A number of other groups, including the League of Women Voters, has joined the lawsuit, which is set for a trial in July.

A similar lawsuit filed by the DOJ not long after prompted sneers from Gov. McCrory: “I believe if showing a voter ID is good enough and fair enough for our own president in Illinois, then it’s good enough for the people in North Carolina.” The package, he said, is “common sense reform” aimed at curbing voter fraud and maintaining democratic integrity. Never mind that, between 2000 and 2010, there were 47,000 reported UFO sightings, but only 13 credible cases of someone trying to impersonate a voter. “It’s a red herring. It’s been proven time and time again that there is very minimal voting fraud,” Judge says. “What we do have is politicians manipulating elections—it’s more election fraud then voting fraud.”

Indeed, the sorts of restrictions North Carolina has put in place have been shown time and again to have a disproportionate impact on minority voters. The Advancement Project notes that black turnout leaped from 42 percent in 2000 to 69 percent in 2012 after same-day registration and early voting were implemented. (Granted, there wasn’t an electable black guy running in 2000.) But in 2013, Democracy North Carolina released a report showing that 34 percent of the state’s registered black voters lacked a state-issued ID—overall, 318,000 registered voters lack one, according to data from the state board of elections.

“When people can’t vote, they lack the ability to choose who represents them and therefore who has their best interest at heart, but they also lack the ability to weigh in on important issues, like the criminal justice system,” Judge says. “If you can’t vote, you’re not going to end up on juries, so you don’t have a voice.”

Hence the backward march. “Fifty years ago, they didn’t settle in the face of death, in the face of the Klan, in the face of accepted police brutality. And if they didn’t accept then, we can’t accept now,” Rev. Barber explains. “If they died for us to have these rights, there is no way in the world we can be afraid of the Koch Brothers, of the Tea Party, of regressive politicians.”

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On the Selma Anniversary, These North Carolina Activists Will March Backwards

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DOJ Finds Pervasive Racial Bias at Ferguson Police Department

by MellissR13 Posted on March 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Department of Justice has concluded that the Ferguson Police Department engaged in racially biased practices, including disproportionately arresting African-Americans during routine traffic stops. The findings are the result of an investigation launched back in September, which found that systematic biased behavior, including “racist jokes about blacks” on police email accounts, have resulted in fractured race relations in the Missouri community and a deep mistrust of police officials. From the Times:

In compiling the report, federal investigators conducted hundreds of interviews, reviewed 35,000 pages of police records and analyzed race data compiled for every police stop. They concluded that, over the past two years, African-Americans made up about two-thirds of the city’s population but accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of citations, 93 percent of arrests and 88 percent of cases in which the police used force.

The full report is expected to be released on Wednesday.

The findings are separate from an FBI investigation focused on Darren Wilson, the police officer who fatally shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown last August. According to previous reports, the Justice Department is planning to clear Wilson of civil rights charges.

Brown’s shooting death and a Ferguson grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson sparked a national debate on police brutality and racist police practices.

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DOJ Finds Pervasive Racial Bias at Ferguson Police Department

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Report: Justice Department to Condemn Racially Biased Policing in Ferguson

by DeniseLoymlz Posted on March 2, 2015

Mother Jones

The US Department of Justice may have passed on filing federal charges against former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson after he shot and killed Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb last summer, but the department isn’t letting the city’s police force totally off the hook. According to the New York Times, the DOJ is about to release a report that accuses the Ferguson Police Department—and the city itself—of systemically mistreating the community’s African American population with discriminatory traffic stops; disproportionate ticketing, arrests, and court fines; and physical abuse at the hands of police officers.

According to the Times‘ Matt Apuzzo, the DOJ will recommend a series of changes at the department. If the city doesn’t agree, the DOJ could sue to force reforms. The DOJ has court-backed agreements with nearly two dozen police departments around the country (including the island-wide force in Puerto Rico), and is fighting four other departments in court over proposed changes.

If the Times is right, the report will bolster and likely add to information that has been documented in the past by activists, advocates, and at least one state-level agency in Missouri. As Mother Jones reported in September 2014, fines and court fees are Ferguson’s second-larges revenue source, and warrants were issued in 2013 at a rate of three per household (25,000 in a city of 21,000 people).

Another Mother Jones report—based off findings from the Missouri Attorney General’s office—noted that in 2013 in Ferguson, 86 percent of traffic stops and 92 percent of searches of individuals involved African American. That’s in a city that’s around 60% black (and one that had, at the time of Brown’s death, just three black police officers). Despite the cops’ focus on Ferguson’s black residents, just one in five black people police searched were found to be carrying contraband. For white people, that number was one in three.

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Report: Justice Department to Condemn Racially Biased Policing in Ferguson

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Saying Goodbye to Dean Smith, College Basketball’s Liberal Conscience

by JenniSmerd Posted on February 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Famed college basketball coach Dean Smith died Saturday night at the age of 83, after years of decline. His on-court prowess as the frontman at North Carolina from 1961 to 1997 is unforgettable: 879 wins, two national championships, 11 Final Four appearances, and a lasting legacy as a hoops innovator. But for many, it’s his off-court example—which manifested itself in something people in Chapel Hill still call the Carolina Way—that made him a legend.

Smith was an outspoken liberal Democrat who was anti-nukes, anti-death-penalty, and pro-gay-rights in a state that sent Jesse Helms to the Senate for five terms. (In fact, North Carolina Dems even tried to convince Smith to run against Helms.) His father, Alfred, integrated his high school basketball team in 1930s Kansas; years later, Smith would do the same at UNC, recruiting Charlie Scott in the mid-1960s to become the first African American player on scholarship there and one of the first in the entire South.

This story, from a 2014 piece by the Washington Post‘s John Feinstein, has been making the rounds today. It’s worth re-reading:

…In 1981, Smith very grudgingly agreed to cooperate with me on a profile for this newspaper. He kept insisting I should write about his players, but I said I had written about them. I wanted to write about him. He finally agreed.

One of the people I interviewed for the story was Rev. Robert Seymour, who had been Smith’s pastor at the Binkley Baptist Church since 1958, when he first arrived in Chapel Hill. Seymour told me a story about how upset Smith was to learn that Chapel Hill’s restaurants were still segregated. He and Seymour came up with an idea: Smith would walk into a restaurant with a black member of the church.

“You have to remember,” Reverend Seymour said. “Back then, he wasn’t Dean Smith. He was an assistant coach. Nothing more.”

Smith agreed and went to a restaurant where management knew him. He and his companion sat down and were served. That was the beginning of desegregation in Chapel Hill.

When I circled back to Smith and asked him to tell me more about that night, he shot me an angry look. “Who told you about that?” he asked.

“Reverend Seymour,” I said.

“I wish he hadn’t done that.”

“Why? You should be proud of doing something like that.”

He leaned forward in his chair and in a very quiet voice said something I’ve never forgotten: “You should never be proud of doing what’s right. You should just do what’s right.”

RIP, Dean.

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Saying Goodbye to Dean Smith, College Basketball’s Liberal Conscience

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