Good news, civil rights advocates: Late Friday, a Missouri circuit court judge struck down a proposed ballot initiative aimed at amending the state constitution to outlaw equal opportunity programs in the state. This ACLU victory is something to celebrate amidst the Supreme Court’s recent disappointing decision in Ricci v. DeStefano.
The proposed initiative, spearheaded by Timothy Asher of the so-called Missouri Civil Rights Initiative (MoCRI), represents a second failed attempt to eliminate valuable programs that open doors for people of color and women in Missouri. In 2008, and again this year, the MoCRI has attempted to mislead voters by giving them the impression that they would be voting to uphold equal opportunity programs when they would in fact be voting to destroy them. Both times, the ACLU went to court to ensure that, should the initiative appear on the ballot, voters would know the truth about what they were voting on.
Sadly, Asher and his allies — including Ward Connerly of the American "Civil Rights" Institute — relentlessly refuse to be transparent and insist on co-opting civil rights terminology. In 2008, Connerly et al. targeted Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma for anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives, deceptively calling their campaign a "Super Tuesday for Civil Rights."
Fortunately, state after state has rejected Connerly’s underhanded assault on affirmative action. Out of the five states he targeted in 2008, Connerly lost in four (all but Nebraska). In Missouri, after being exposed through litigation and on-the-ground mobilization, Asher withdrew his own petition, stating that it did not likely have enough valid signatures to make it on the ballot. In Oklahoma, the Secretary of State identified the petition submitted by the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative as having an unprecedented number of serious irregularities, including numerous duplicate names and addresses and instances of petitioners signing their own signature sheets multiple times.
In spite of their repeated losses and public knowledge of their dishonest practices, Asher and Connerly have continued their attempts to strip away equal opportunity programs benefitting all Americans. Indeed, the fight in Missouri is far from over: on June 29, Asher filed yet another petition for the 2010 ballot. The ACLU will not allow Asher to deceive the people of Missouri or the people of any other state. Expanding opportunity is a full-time job, but its importance cannot be overstated.
To learn more about the ACLU’s affirmative action efforts, visit: www.aclu.org/racialjustice/aa/index.html.
Think racial profiling — using a person’s race, color, ethnicity or national origin to determine whether to stop, search or investigate him or her for alleged criminal activity — is wrong and ineffective? So do President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, former President George W. Bush, and former Attorney General John Ashcroft.
So why did the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD, the independent group of experts that oversees compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, a treaty the U.S ratified 15 years ago) "note with concern" that racial profiling "continues to be widespread" in the United States? Indeed, when reviewing the United States government’s track record on racial discrimination, the Committee highlighted the persistence of racial profiling as an especially troubling issue.
A new report by the ACLU and the Rights Working Group shows just how pervasive the problem is. The report, submitted today to the Committee, includes information about racial profiling in 22 states and under a variety of federal programs. It tells the story, for example, of how the 287(g) program, designed to permit local police departments to enforce immigration law, has given police officers license to stop, question, harass and detain anyone who looks "foreign." The report also highlights the discriminatory ways in which special registration programs, border stops, airline profiling and other government initiatives have victimized people who are (or appear to be) Arab, Muslim and South Asian. These policies and practices have wrought destruction on individuals, families and communities, tearing them apart through unjust detentions, deportations, raids and more.
We rely on the police to protect us from harm and to promote fairness and justice in our communities. The despicable practice of racial profiling, however, has led countless people to live in fear and created a system of law enforcement that casts entire communities as suspect. Surely the land of the free can do better.
Read the ACLU/RWG report, which includes a long list of recommendations for truly eradicating this troubling (and, study after study shows, ineffective) law enforcement technique.
Listen to a podcast with Dennis Parker, director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program.
And learn more about the ACLU’s work to end racial profiling at our website.
Yesterday, Githu Muigai, the U.N. expert on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and other related forms of intolerance presented his findings on contemporary forms of racism before the U.N. Human Rights Council. As you may remember, the former Special Rapporteur on racism was invited by the Bush administration State Department to tour the U.S. last year as part of a fact-finding mission and the Rapporteur issued his report in April.
This is the first session of the UNHRC in which the U.S. is participating as a member. After the Special Rapporteur’s presentation yesterday, the U.S. government had the opportunity to respond to his report. The U.S. praised the report’s findings, saying this nation “appreciates the Special Rapporteur’s report and its constructive spirit.”
So what did the Rapporteur have to say about the United States?
"Racism and racial discrimination have profoundly and lastingly marked and structured American society. The U.S. has made decisive progress… However, the historical, cultural and human depth of racism still permeates all dimensions of life and American society."
We couldn’t agree more!
Chandra Bhatnagar, staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program, joined other human rights advocates yesterday on GRITtv with Laura Flanders. Chandra spoke of how the Special Rapporteur on racism’s findings provided a “real roadmap forward” for the United States to address racism.
Learn more about our work with the Special Rapporteur on Racism.
Tomorrow morning, the U.N. expert on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and other related forms of intolerance, Githu Muigai, will present his annual report findings on contemporary forms of racism before the Human Rights Council. This is following a fact-finding mission in various countries, which included a visit to the U.S. by Muigai’s predecessor, Doudou Diène, that took place in May and June 2008 at the invitation of the Bush administration’s State Department.
The rapporteur’s report is available online, and highlights racism in the criminal justice system, the disparity between sentencing for crack and powder cocaine, abuses facing immigrant and African-American workers in the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the overall vulnerability of immigrant workers and the need to meaningfully address the "school-to-prison pipeline." The report also calls on Congress to pass the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA) and create a bipartisan commission to evaluate the on-going fight against racism.
The report’s findings also highlight U.S. failures to fight racism and protect equality for all. By abiding by the Rapportuer’s recommendations, we can address the ongoing issues of racism inside our own borders — thereby leading by example and enforcing critical civil and human rights laws.
You can watch the presentation online, starting at 9 a.m. (EDT) at: http://www.un.org/webcast/unhrc/index.asp
More information about the ACLU’s work with the special rapporteur is available online.
Each landmark anniversary of the historic Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education invites us to answer two questions. The first involves a retrospective focus on Brown in the context of the decisions that came before it and the social changes that it engendered. This question seeks to find out how important Brown really was. The second question requires taking stock of where we are now and how far we have come since 1954 in our pursuit of racial justice. This week marked the 55th anniversary of the first Brown decision. Coming as it does in a year that witnessed the inauguration of the first African-American president, those questions seem even more important. At the same time, the answers become more complicated and nuanced.
Brown was decided at a time when most American schools were segregated as a result of explicit legal requirements, or by a series of policies and practices — including rampant housing segregation — that imposed a virtual system of apartheid upon American society. Segregation in education was just one manifestation of that system. Restrictions based on race, color and ethnicity created barriers to housing, patronizing restaurants and other public accommodations, voting and even marriage. By confronting and rejecting the dishonesty and hypocrisy in the doctrine of "separate but equal" in the area of public education, the decision became a keystone in the civil rights movement of the succeeding decades, which saw court decisions and legislation aimed at addressing discrimination in its many forms. Brown was instrumental in initiating many of the civil rights advances that occurred in its wake. It is also true that but for it and measures like the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act and the scores of cases interpreting the 14th Amendment, the conditions that lead to the election of an African-American president could not have occurred.
But what, exactly, does Barack Obama’s election say about how much we’ve progressed since Brown? Having an African-American in the nation’s highest office suggests we have travelled an enormous distance. A careful look at the state of race in the United States, however, suggests we still have a long way to go to achieve the level of equality envisioned by Brown. Sadly, many of the concerns raised during previous Brown anniversaries — about injustices like racial profiling and the absence of equal access to quality education, employment and housing — are still too much with us.
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"The historical, cultural and human depth of racism still permeates all dimensions of life in American society," says Doudou Diène, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.
Diène, a Senegalese attorney appointed to his post by the United Nations Human Rights Council, toured the United States last year for approximately three weeks, meeting with local, state and federal officials and non-governmental organizations, including the ACLU. He just issued a report of his findings based on that visit.
Given that his mandate spans the globe, Diène’s recommendations for the U.S. are remarkably spot-on. For instance, to remedy racial discrimination in law enforcement — where "instances of direct discrimination and concrete bias…are most pronounced" — Diène suggests the U.S. should adopt the federal End Racial Profiling Act, pass state legislation prohibiting racial profiling, and take other steps to monitor and address profiling by police. The U.S. should also review mandatory minimum sentences, improve public defender services, and eliminate life without parole sentences for people convicted of crimes committed as juveniles, all of which contribute to the over-criminalization of people of color.
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Jack Kemp, the former football star turned congressman who served as secretary of housing and urban development under the first President Bush and was the 1996 Republican vice-presidential nominee, passed away May 2. Much has been made of his work to include more people of color in the Republican Party, but less attention has been paid his work that had little to do with party politics: his support for voting rights for the formerly incarcerated.
Kemp was a strong and forceful supporter of voting rights for the millions of men and women around the country who, even after being released from incarceration, are still barred from voting. He simply believed restoring their voting rights was the correct thing to do. Kemp first spoke out on the issue when testifying at a House judiciary hearing on the re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act. When asked by a member of Congress if he supported the right to vote for the formerly incarcerated, he unhesitatingly responded “yes,” saying “voting in America is the quintessential part of our democracy.”
After he made that statement, voting rights advocates reached out to Kemp to involve him in felon enfranchisement work throughout the country, and he became an important partner in the fight to expand the right to vote to all Americans. Inspired by his and his wife’s work with Prison Fellowship and because the issue, in his words, “is a matter of simple fairness,” he advocated for reform in Florida, Maryland, Kentucky and Virginia, and nationally with the Democracy Restoration Act, urging legislators to take action on what he deemed a “historic civil rights reform.”
Let us honor Kemp’s memory by continuing to expand the franchise to all Americans. We offer our deepest condolences to the Kemp family and leave you with his words:
For a nation that depends on the participation of its citizens, it is fundamentally un-American to deny the vote to people who are living and working as law-abiding citizens…The continuing expansion of the franchise — to the poor, women, minorities and young people - is one of the greatest stories in our country’s history.
(Originally posted in Daily Kos.)
Washington state Gov. Chris Gregoire today is signing a bill that reforms the state’s unfair and unworkable system for restoring voting rights. The action eliminates the requirement that citizens with felony convictions pay off all legal financial obligations before regaining their right to vote, and aligns the state with the overwhelming majority of other states in this country who recognize such requirements as being nothing more than a modern-day version of the poll tax.
Under the previous law, citizens with prior felony convictions could not vote until they had completely paid off fees and other costs associated with their sentence, which accrue at an annual percentage rate of 12 percent. An overwhelming majority of felony defendants are indigent at the time of sentencing, and many could never fully pay off their legal system debts — and as a result could not vote.
This system unfairly tied people’s right to vote to their financial means. As Gov. Gregoire put it last year, "Once they have served their time, withholding certain rights due to fines becomes a virtual debtors’ prison." It also disproportionately impacted people of color — the disenfranchisement rate among African-Americans in Washington is five times that of the general population, and roughly three times as high among Latinos.
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At an April 2 hearing by two House Judiciary Committee subcommittees entitled "The Public Safety and Civil Rights Implications of State and Local Enforcement of Federal Immigration Laws," Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) raced through a rapid tangled and convoluted litany of immigration laws. His bottom line? Racial profiling is a good thing.
Both he and Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas) used scare tactics to justify profiling, conflating undocumented immigrants and terrorists, invoking 9/11, and telling stories of immigrant criminals. Of course, the facts just don’t support their conclusions. In fact, immigrant men are five times less likely to be incarcerated than native-born men.
It was a while before we were able to hear the witnesses rebut King and Smith’s opening arguments. The committee recessed for over an hour for votes. During that time, we discovered what a rock star witness the ACLU helped bring to the hearing. Julio Cesar Mora, a 19-year-old citizen from Avondale, Virginia, fielded rapid-fire questions in English and Spanish from journalists for nearly the entire recess.
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Consider this set of facts, courtesy of the Pew Center on the States: between 1987 and 2007, state spending on corrections rose by a whopping 127 percent. During that same time period, spending on higher education increased by a mere 21 percent; in some states, higher education spending actually decreased while corrections spending increased.
Where are our country’s priorities? Spending such large amounts on incarceration leaves less in the pot for other critical goals, like educating our nation’s youth. Far too many young people are trapped in under-resourced public schools, plagued by inadequate resources — a lack of qualified teachers, counselors, special education services, and even textbooks — and the prioritization of discipline over instruction. Overly broad zero tolerance policies and an increased use of police in schools have criminalized a wide variety of behaviors previously dealt with by teachers and principals, and funneled countless youth out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems — a phenomenon advocates have termed the "school-to-prison pipeline."
Youth of color are hit particularly hard by this divestment in education and over-reliance on discipline, harsh punishment and incarceration. Indeed, when African-American and white youth misbehave in school, the African-American students are far more likely than their white peers to be suspended, expelled, or arrested for the same kind of conduct. This over-criminalization extends to the justice system, where youth and adults of color are arrested, detained and incarcerated at disproportionate rates.
Now — in the midst of our economic tailspin — is our opportunity to do things differently, to rebuild our communities according to more equitable principles and a respect for human rights.
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