[T]hough today the U.S. Senate adopted a resolution offering a formal national apology for slavery and the era of “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws that followed, the legislation stops drastically short at helping to repair the “centuries of economic and social damage” to generations of African Americans.
Rush said because S.CON.RES. 26 does not include the force of law, the gesture may fall on deaf ears when so many African-Americans remain trapped in systemic poverty and suffer from acute health problems due to a lack of access of quality health care. “Blacks in this country have suffered centuries of economic and social exploitation and while this resolution is noted for the spirit in which it was drafted, it falls short in addressing the systemic issues impacting African American communities as a direct result of racial segregation and economic injustice due to racism.
“The resolution further adds insult to injury by including a disclaimer against reparations, “he said. “This can be likened to a child unwrapping Christmas present only to find an empty box.” The non-binding resolution, which does not have the force of law, includes a disclaimer stating that the measure does not authorize or support reparations for the descendants of African slaves brought to the United States before the Civil War.
Also, today, Congressman Rush released a letter to President Barack Obama days before the president will travel to Ghana in what will be his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa since being elected the nation’s highest officer. “I strongly encourage you to expand the commitment of the United States with Sub-Saharan Africa,” he wrote. “Our interest should far transcend the humanitarian concerns that have frequently underpinned U.S. engagement with the continent. Economic development, natural resource management, human security, capacity building and global stability as well as traditional humanitarian assistance are inextricably linked.”
Showing posts with label African American. Show all posts
Showing posts with label African American. Show all posts
Thursday, June 18, 2009
The gift of an "empty box" -- Senate passes hollow apology for slavery and segregation (S.Con.Res.26)
Press release from the office of U.S. Representative Bobby L. Rush (IL-01), on the meaning of the Senate's passage of S. Con. Res. 26, "A concurrent resolution apologizing for the enslavement and racial segregation of African Americans":
Monday, January 19, 2009
Finding Rev. King
Dr. King didn't just have dreams. He had strategy.
SleptOn.org:
With Selma and the voting rights bill one era of our struggle came to a close and a new era came into being. Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't earn enough money to buy a hamburger and cup of coffee?
SleptOn.org:
[The] portrayal of Dr. King has been mass marketed as an accommodationist figure and is now so pervasive in our schools, media, etc. that it threatens to neutralize and placate the most ambitious, daring and challenging of King's critique along with his struggle to confront and organize against not only racism, but economic exploitation and militarism-imperialism as well.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Zionism, Manifest Destiny, and the stake of Black House Reps
Speaking of the woven projects of American Manifest Destiny and Israeli Zionism, the Black Agenda Report's Glen Ford takes note of where African Americans are situated in such obviously racist politics. Ford scrutinizes the roles played by Black Congressional Caucus members in the passing of a House resolution supporting Israeli's war in Gaza.
Glen Ford: Sullying Dr. King's Legacy
Glen Ford: Sullying Dr. King's Legacy
Could it be that Los Angeles Congresswoman Maxine Waters and Milwaukee's Gwen Moore are the only Black Caucus members who remember that Israel was racist South Africa's closest ally, the apartheid regime's hi-tech weapons quartermaster and godfather to its nuclear bomb project? Do the seven members that voted "present" - Donna Edwards (MD), Keith Ellison (MN), Hank Johnson (GA), Carolyn Kilpatrick (MI), Barbara Lee (CA), Donald Payne (NJ), Diane Watson (CA) - believe that by refusing to take a position on Israeli crimes against humanity in Gaza, they somehow salvage the Caucus's claim to be the "conscience of the Congress?"
Where has John Conyers' conscience disappeared to?
**** The Zionist ideology, and especially the chilling effect of Zionist power, is probably the second-greatest impediment to creation of a sustained American peace movement - the first obstacle being the ideology of American Manifest Destiny, which is in practice quite compatible with Zionism.
However, African Americans are least susceptible to the Manifest Destiny/Zionist Mythology combo. Both ideologies wreak of racism, and most Black people know it. The Congressional Black Caucus knows it, too, but they are terrified of offending Israel's innumerable political hit men.
Zionist power helped knock off two CBC members who refused to tow Tel Aviv's line, in 2002. Georgia's Cynthia McKinney and Alabama's Earl Hilliard found themselves heavily outspent and ultimately unseated by otherwise puny challengers in Democratic primary contests. AIPAC bragged of its ability to shut down independent-minded Black politicians who fail to understand that U.S. foreign policy is shaped by whatever is deemed good for Israel. Bullying works, especially against the meek. Except for Maxine Waters and Gwen Moore, the Congressional Black Caucus is out of the anti-war business.
That also goes for the Congressional Progressive Caucus which, with 71 members, claims to be the "single largest partisan caucus" in the U.S. House, but whose members voted overwhelmingly in support of Israeli barbarity. About two-thirds of the voting members of the Black Caucus also belong to the Progressive Caucus - meaning, they are members of two defunct organizations, and doubly useless to the cause of peace.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Uncovering the racism of nativism in the US
Recent reports about the murder of Marcelo Lucero in the TUPOCC Yahoo! group prompted me to ask us to consider how legal activists of color, and our friends, might use critical legal theory and our experiential insights to uncover the racism of US nativism and and change popular understandings of today's anti-immigrant movement.
I referred to a Facing Race conference workshop that some of us attended on this subject last week, and a compañero in New York just mentioned today's Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI)'s conference on Galvanizing our Power for Action: Building Bridges between African-American and Immigrant Communities.
BAJI does great work, and I think we should all learn and talk about the relationship of US racism and nativism. In my Chicanos, Law, and Criminal Justice class at UC Berkeley, I teach about how the US has historically racialized Latinas/os vis-a-vis Indigenous and African peoples. In this post I share some resources and sketch my understanding of the racism of US nativism.
Let's start with the Anglo seizure of Tejas and the US invasion of México in the first half of the 19th century.
(N.B. Before continuing, it's important to acknowledge that all history is highly complicated, and we have imperfect means from fragmented sources to know the past. Certainly some Tejano elites joined Anglos in establishing Texas as an independent republic in 1836; similarly, the US-Mexican War had multiple factors. However, as I have asserted, my critical analysis of these past events has led me to frame them as the Anglo seizure of Tejas y the US invasion de México.)
As many have written, relations between the US and México soured in that early to mid 19th century period. In particular, numerous influential US congressmen railed against México as a nation of degenerate mongrels and expressed fear about incorporating territories with substantial numbers of them (us, colored folks).
I use a few excerpts to teach about this history, including Chapter Four, "Latinas/os" of Perea, Delgado, Harris, Stefancic & Wildman's Race and Races: Cases and Resources for a Diverse America, 2d ed. (2007), and the excerpt of Ian Haney López's The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice in Davis, Johnson & Martínez's A Reader on Race, Civil Rights, and American Law (2001).
The important point vis-a-vis conventional ideas about the "black-white binary" of race in the US today is that Latinas/os--particularly Mexicans and Puerto Ricans--in the 19th century challenged the US Anglo imaginary with a somewhat different dilemma than that posed by "the peculiar institution" of slavery.
Instead of an internal non-white "minority," México y Porto Rico presented the specter of already racially-mixed societies. And, according to the US Anglo conceptualization of race in the 19th century, the inferiority of a racially-mixed mongrel was even greater than that of a non-white Indian or African. Contemporary ideas promulgated at that time held that mixing the races produced an inferior breed to any of the "pure" races.
(Contrast these ideas with the 1990's celebration of multi-racial minorities, or the (re)discovery of bi-raciality. In turn, understand that always already, folks be hella mixed. Racial purity is a lie and an invidious illusion.)
From these first moments when the US incorporated of parts of México (starting with Tejas from 1836 to 1845, then including the lands ceded under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and finally those later acquired in the Compromise of 1850 and the Gadsen Purchase of 1853), the idea of US nativism became even more complexly tied to racism. Previously the notion of US nativism was already fraught with contradictions given the genocide of Indigenous people and the situation of "native-born" African Americans, who were nonetheless legally excluded from enjoying their (our) human rights, including of course U.S. and state citizenship.
In the two decades prior to the Civil War and Reconstruction, however, the US incorporated a massive new territory inhabited by a substantial new "minority," which demaned an evolution in the means of subordination, i.e., the racialization of "Mexicans," first as "Greasers" (as in the infamous California anti-vagrancy law of 1855) and later as "cheap labor."
A foundational resource for understanding this history is Tomás Almaguer's Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (1994, new edition forthcoming 2008). Chapter One, "'We Desire Only a White Population in California' - The Transformation of Mexican California in Historical-Sociological Perspective," is particularly useful. Another useful resource is Gilbert Paul Carrasco's Latinos in the United States: Invitation and Exile in Juan Perea's Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States (1997).
A new book that I will likely incorporate into this section of my class is Laura Gómez's Manifest Destinties: The Making of the Mexican American Race (2008), which provides critical insights into this history beyond the California context. Understanding "Mexican" racialization in New Mexico is particularly important because that region remained a territory for 62 years -- from 1850 to 1912 -- until the Anglo population outnumbered the Hispano population. New Mexico is also important en la conciencia xican@ (in Chicana/o consciousness) because the New Mexico Territory was broken into parts to form Arizona, parts of Colorado and eventually New Mexico; it also has great importance as a site of centurial armed resistance to Anglo domination, from Las Gorras Blancas of the late 19th century through the efforts of Reies López Tijerina y La Alianza Federal de Mercedes in the 1960s.)
As Almaguer argues persuasively, using archival historical sources, the racialization of "Mexicans" in the US extended and evolved earlier forms of US racism against Indigenous and African people. In turn, Carrasco's chapter details how the racialization of "Mexicans" was particularly linked to the evolving labor demands of the 19th and 20th century, e.g., the Gold Rush, agricultural work, World War I, the Great Depression and the so-called "repatriation" campaigns of the 1930s, World War II and the second Bracero Program, "Operation: Wetback" and the H-2 visa program. (Gómez's arguments complement these by advancing her notion of Mexican Americans being "off-white," meaning sometimes defined as legally white but almost always defined as socially non-white, and grounding her concept in the particular history of New Mexico.)
Here is the take away point for folks open to understanding (and interested in articulating clearly) how racism is at the root of US nativism: Anglos evolved and extended US racism from the history of Indigenous genocide and African slavery as the US conquered and annexed the vast Mexican territory now known as the Southwest. In so doing, the US force a terrible Faustian pact onto Mexican Americans (and by implication all Latinas/os): deny your Indigenousness, denigrate your Blackness and aspire to racial Whiteness, or be ready for subjugation like an African and slaughter like an Indian.
Geography, region and social space is the critical factor that blinds some of us from seeing the connections between historical and contemporary racism(s) and nativism(s). Without understanding the foundational historic racialization of "Mexicans" (and the also salient historic racialization of Puerto Ricans) vis-a-vis Anglo American government, citizenship and political economy, it might be confusing to hear me say that US nativism is a form of racism, or and to understand how these ideologies overlap substantially.
However, to one who knows this history, today's nativism--whether it be in Congress, en la frontera or in Long Island--looks like it clearly continues the sorry past.
***
I'll end by citing two more important texts about these ideas. See Robert S. Chang & Keith Aoki, Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination, 85 California Law Review 1395, 10 La Raza Law Journal 309 (1997) (published simultaneously in both journals). While I have not taught it yet, I read Chang & Aoki's explanation of "nativistic racism" during law school and recall it being rich with insights on this subject.
Second, Juan Perea's, Demography and Distrust: An Essay on American Languages, Cultural Pluralism, and Official English, 77 Minnesota Law Review 269 (1992) is a well structured history of the hidden past of US multilingualism, e.g., French, German, Spanish and English, at the founding and throughout the history of the US and its various states.
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Houston police used Tasers more on blacks
Newsvine - Study: Houston police used Tasers more on blacks
Of 1,417 Taser deployments by officers between December 2004 and June 2007, nearly 67 percent were used on black suspects, according to an audit conducted for the city by a team of criminology, statistics and mathematics experts. About 25 percent of Houston's population is black.
The audit was requested by Houston Mayor Bill White in 2006, after several high-profile incidents. ...
Minister Robert Muhammad, with the southwest regional headquarters for The Nation of Islam, said the study shows that police are more apt to use the weapons on black suspects than suspects of other races.
"Can we say it's racism? Yes, and some people would argue no," said Muhammad. "The greater argument is abuse of authority. We give them authority to protect us. But instead of using that authority to protect us, they abuse us with it."
Houston police said their use of Tasers was not tied to race, but to a person's behavior.
"It's not a racial issue. A Taser device is no different from a radar gun. It's race neutral," Executive Assistant Police Chief Charles McClelland said after the Houston City Council meeting during which the report was released.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
How a native-born U.S. citizen became "undocumented" - a cautionary tale
How a native-born U.S. citizen became "undocumented" - a cautionary tale
A Cautionary Tale: Of how a US Citizen became undocumented
http://imagine2050.blogspot.com/2008/06/attacks-against-immigrants-attacks.html
By Eric K. Ward
I'm African-American and my family moved to California almost a hundred years ago after a lynching took place outside their hometown in Kentucky. I'm also undocumented, or in the current anti-immigrant vernacular,"illegal." I don't have the necessary documents to prove my identity.
Therefore, within four years, I won't be able to vote, have access to social services, or receive state identification to travel. Let's start from the beginning:
In May 2006, I lost my passport and Social Security card at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (I don't have a driver's license because of a visual disability). When I went home to Chicago, I learned that in order to receive a state identification card, I needed to obtain a certified copy of my birth certificate, which allows me to apply for a Social Security Card to replace my passport.
Later in the week I contacted the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder and was told that in order to receive my birth certificate, I needed to present a copy of my passport, or driver's license, to verify I was, in actuality, Eric K. Ward. Since it was obvious, after twenty minutes of discussion, that I didn't own a driver's license, a passport, or a social security card, they told me to fill out the proper forms in front of a notary public in Chicago. I quickly opened the phone book and had a co-worker drive me to a notary public. But when I got there, the notary public said I needed a passport, social security card, or driver's license to receive an official notary seal. Lucky for me (when I'm in a pinch) I can become very persuasive. And since I had a number of newspaper articles with photos documenting my identity, the notary public accepted my articles with somewhat dubious satisfaction. Next, before anyone could change their minds, I walked next door to the Post Office and happily mailed my documents to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder and went on with my life. Four weeks later my birth certificate arrived! But when I arrived at the Post Office to pick it up, the attendant asked me to produce a passport, driver's license and, most ironically, a copy of my birth certificate to obtain my birth certificate. After waiting an hour and pleading with two supervisors, I'm proud to say that I now possess a certified birth certificate!
I wish I could say everything went smoothly from this point on, but the adventure only began and came to a screeching halt within a week. A few days later I headed to the Social Security Administration to obtain a replacement social security card. But when I got there, the Social Security Administration said I needed more than just a copy of my birth certificate. They said I also needed a passport, driver's license, or state identification card to prove my identity. But since I went to the Social Security Administration to obtain a new copy of my social security card so I could get a new passport, the Social Security Administration didn't know what to do with me. So, they told me to head across town to the Illinois Secretary of State's office to get my social security card. But when I arrived, the Illinois Secretary of State's office said I needed my social security card to obtain any official document to prove my identity.
Now I'm stuck in a Catch-22 and I'm not alone in this predicament. Almost nine percent of African Americans (18 or older) are unable to document their citizenship. * Roughly 2 million African Americans, eleven million native born citizens, and nearly twice as many low income Americans than citizens with higher incomes don't have a social security card, driver's licenses, passport, birth certificate or proof of naturalization. *
In 1950, Sam Shapiro, now Emeritus Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, conducted a case study for the journal Population Studies, and also found that, due to segregation barring black children from being born in white hospitals, one-fifth of African Americans born between 1939-40 were never issued birth certificates.
When you correlate Shapiro's figures to the 2000 US Census Data on African American Population by Age, Shapiro's figures show that by 2010, nearly half-a-million elderly African Americans born before 1941 may loose their right to vote and access to federal services. Remember, this is only for African Americans born before 1941!
Most recently, Tim Vercelloti, a professor at Rutgers University, found that 5.7% of African Americans are less likely to vote in states that require voter identification. And let's not forget, voting is a right African Americans struggled to secure for all American citizens.
If U. S citizens don't have the "required" documents to prove their identity, an increasingly large portion of U.S. citizens will be denied access to social services and the right to vote at the federal, state, and local level. For example, in 2006, officials in Maricopa County, Arizona denied almost 5,000 US citizens the right to vote because they didn't have the "required" documents. In 2005, The Draft Reduction Act denied anyone re-applying for Medicaid who didn't posses the same "required" documents. And by 2010, the Federal Election Integrity Act (passed in 2006) will deny all American citizens the right to vote if they're can't produce the "required" documents.
What are the "required" documents? You guessed it: a passport, birth certificate or proof of naturalization.
Why is this happening? Strict ID requirements that target immigrant and refugee communities also target African Americans, poor, and elderly communities. Federal, state, and local laws that attack undocumented immigrants and refugees threaten Americans' voting rights, the right to travel without fear of imprisonment, and access to social services. Anti-immigrant activists say strict ID requirements are a necessary burden that folks should be happy to shoulder in the fight against "illegal"
immigration. But that's pretty easy to say when you're not African American, poor, or a member of the elderly community.
As African Americans we should be deeply concerned about the ongoing attack on immigrants and refugees. Why? We know what it's like to be second-class citizens---and it's about to happen again.
A Cautionary Tale: Of how a US Citizen became undocumented
http://imagine2050.blogspot.com/2008/06/attacks-against-immigrants-attacks.html
By Eric K. Ward
I'm African-American and my family moved to California almost a hundred years ago after a lynching took place outside their hometown in Kentucky. I'm also undocumented, or in the current anti-immigrant vernacular,"illegal." I don't have the necessary documents to prove my identity.
Therefore, within four years, I won't be able to vote, have access to social services, or receive state identification to travel. Let's start from the beginning:
In May 2006, I lost my passport and Social Security card at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (I don't have a driver's license because of a visual disability). When I went home to Chicago, I learned that in order to receive a state identification card, I needed to obtain a certified copy of my birth certificate, which allows me to apply for a Social Security Card to replace my passport.
Later in the week I contacted the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder and was told that in order to receive my birth certificate, I needed to present a copy of my passport, or driver's license, to verify I was, in actuality, Eric K. Ward. Since it was obvious, after twenty minutes of discussion, that I didn't own a driver's license, a passport, or a social security card, they told me to fill out the proper forms in front of a notary public in Chicago. I quickly opened the phone book and had a co-worker drive me to a notary public. But when I got there, the notary public said I needed a passport, social security card, or driver's license to receive an official notary seal. Lucky for me (when I'm in a pinch) I can become very persuasive. And since I had a number of newspaper articles with photos documenting my identity, the notary public accepted my articles with somewhat dubious satisfaction. Next, before anyone could change their minds, I walked next door to the Post Office and happily mailed my documents to the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder and went on with my life. Four weeks later my birth certificate arrived! But when I arrived at the Post Office to pick it up, the attendant asked me to produce a passport, driver's license and, most ironically, a copy of my birth certificate to obtain my birth certificate. After waiting an hour and pleading with two supervisors, I'm proud to say that I now possess a certified birth certificate!
I wish I could say everything went smoothly from this point on, but the adventure only began and came to a screeching halt within a week. A few days later I headed to the Social Security Administration to obtain a replacement social security card. But when I got there, the Social Security Administration said I needed more than just a copy of my birth certificate. They said I also needed a passport, driver's license, or state identification card to prove my identity. But since I went to the Social Security Administration to obtain a new copy of my social security card so I could get a new passport, the Social Security Administration didn't know what to do with me. So, they told me to head across town to the Illinois Secretary of State's office to get my social security card. But when I arrived, the Illinois Secretary of State's office said I needed my social security card to obtain any official document to prove my identity.
Now I'm stuck in a Catch-22 and I'm not alone in this predicament. Almost nine percent of African Americans (18 or older) are unable to document their citizenship. * Roughly 2 million African Americans, eleven million native born citizens, and nearly twice as many low income Americans than citizens with higher incomes don't have a social security card, driver's licenses, passport, birth certificate or proof of naturalization. *
In 1950, Sam Shapiro, now Emeritus Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, conducted a case study for the journal Population Studies, and also found that, due to segregation barring black children from being born in white hospitals, one-fifth of African Americans born between 1939-40 were never issued birth certificates.
When you correlate Shapiro's figures to the 2000 US Census Data on African American Population by Age, Shapiro's figures show that by 2010, nearly half-a-million elderly African Americans born before 1941 may loose their right to vote and access to federal services. Remember, this is only for African Americans born before 1941!
Most recently, Tim Vercelloti, a professor at Rutgers University, found that 5.7% of African Americans are less likely to vote in states that require voter identification. And let's not forget, voting is a right African Americans struggled to secure for all American citizens.
If U. S citizens don't have the "required" documents to prove their identity, an increasingly large portion of U.S. citizens will be denied access to social services and the right to vote at the federal, state, and local level. For example, in 2006, officials in Maricopa County, Arizona denied almost 5,000 US citizens the right to vote because they didn't have the "required" documents. In 2005, The Draft Reduction Act denied anyone re-applying for Medicaid who didn't posses the same "required" documents. And by 2010, the Federal Election Integrity Act (passed in 2006) will deny all American citizens the right to vote if they're can't produce the "required" documents.
What are the "required" documents? You guessed it: a passport, birth certificate or proof of naturalization.
Why is this happening? Strict ID requirements that target immigrant and refugee communities also target African Americans, poor, and elderly communities. Federal, state, and local laws that attack undocumented immigrants and refugees threaten Americans' voting rights, the right to travel without fear of imprisonment, and access to social services. Anti-immigrant activists say strict ID requirements are a necessary burden that folks should be happy to shoulder in the fight against "illegal"
immigration. But that's pretty easy to say when you're not African American, poor, or a member of the elderly community.
As African Americans we should be deeply concerned about the ongoing attack on immigrants and refugees. Why? We know what it's like to be second-class citizens---and it's about to happen again.
Friday, April 11, 2008
...The Struggle Against Racism, Inequality and War by by Manning Marable
African-American Peacemakers - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, and
the Struggle Against Racism, Inequality and War
by Manning Marable
BlackCommentator.com
[This speech was delivered at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, sponsored by the Great Cities
Institute on April 4, 2008]
4 April 2008 marks the fortieth anniversary of the
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We still
tend to focus our image of Martin delivering his "I Have
A Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial, at the 1963
March on Washington, D.C. However, civil rights was not
the only issue that divided America in the 1960s. By
1966, U.S. military forces in South Vietnam amounted to
184,000; by January 1969, 536,000 U.S. troops were
stationed in that country. For black Americans, the war
had a direct impact upon every community. African
Americans comprised about one out of every seven U.S.
soldiers stationed in Vietnam, and because African
Americans tended to be placed in "combat units" more
often than middle-class whites. They also bore unfairly
higher risks of being killed and wounded. From January
through November 1966, over one-fifth of all army
casualties were black.
By 1965, however, a small number of black progressives
had begun to speak in opposition to the war. Julian
Bond, elected to the Georgia State House of
Representatives, defended the right of "the Vietnamese
peasants who . have expressed a real desire to govern
themselves." The "gunboat diplomacy of the past" had
little place in contemporary world affairs. Perhaps the
most articulate opponent of the US war effort holding
public office was US Representative Ronald V. Dellums.
From the floor of Congress, Dellums declared:
"I consider our involvement in Indochina illegal,
immoral and insane. We are in a war which is the
greatest human and economic drain on American
resources in modern times - a war disproportionately
waged on the backs of blacks and browns and reds and
yellows and poor and working class whites, a war
resulting in an untold number of deaths of the
Vietnamese people, a war that is justified only by
the notion that we as a nation, must save face . M
of people in the country are no longer willing to
engage in such folly and be cannon fodder, and go
across the water to spill their blood on foreign
soil in a cause many of them do not even
understand."
Black activists and intellectuals, who were part of the
Black Power movement, had serious reservations about
participating in anti-war organizations dominated by
white liberals and leftists. But almost all of them
opposed the Vietnam War; some even drew an analogy
between the suffering of the Vietnamese as a "colonial
people", and the "domestic colonialism" experienced by
African Americans.
During the bitter national debate on Vietnam, nearly all
major all public leaders within black America were
forced to choose sides. As a dedicated pacifist, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. could not look upon the conflict
benignly without taking some kind of public stand
against the war. At the annual Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) executive board meeting
held in Baltimore on 1-2 April 1965, Dr. King expressed
the need to criticize the Johnson Administration's
policies in Southeast Asia. His old colleagues, fearful
that Dr. King's support for the anti-war movement would
hurt the SCLC financially and politically, voted to
allow him to do so only as a private person, without
organizational endorsement. Bayard Rustin, the key
organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, still
maintained close ties with King, and tried to pressure
the SCLC leader into a position of neutrality on
Vietnam. On 10 September 1965, Rustin, Dr. King, and
SCLC aides Andrew Young and Bernard Lee met with the US
Ambassador to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg.
Goldberg managed to convince Dr. King, for the moment,
that the Johnson Administration had every intention of
bringing the conflict to a peaceful resolution. For
several months, Dr. King watched anxiously as the number
of US troops stationed in Vietnam increased. Finally in
January 1966, Dr. King published his criticisms about
the Vietnam War.
"Some of my friends of both races, and others who do not
consider themselves my friends, have expressed
disapproval because I have been voicing concern over the
war in Vietnam," Dr. King explained. But as a Christian,
Dr. King believed that he had no choice except to
"declare that war is wrong." Black leaders could not
become blind to the rest of the world's issues, while
engaged solely in problems of domestic race relations.
Martin argued, "The Negro must not allow himself to
become a victim of the self-serving philosophy of those
who manufacture war that the survival of the world is
the white man's business alone." The negative response
to Dr. King's anti-war statement was swift. SCLC leaders
in Chattanooga, Tennessee, severed relations with the
national organization in protest. National Urban League
director Whitney Young replied that blacks were not
interested in the Vietnam issue. Martin vigorously
lobbied among his allies in the SCLC to back his
position on Vietnam, and in the spring of 1966 the
organization's executive board came out officially
against the war.
Increasingly, as Dr. King's attention was drawn to the
Vietnam war, he also began to consider the necessity for
black Americans to devise a more radical strategy for
domestic reforms. Dr. King was beginning to articulate a
radical democratic vision for American society: the
nationalization of basic industries; massive federal
expenditures to revive central cities and to provide
jobs for ghetto residents; programs to address rural
poverty; a job or guaranteed income for every adult
American.
On April 4, 1967, exactly one year to the day before his
assassination, Martin delivered his eloquent, yet
controversial address, "Beyond Vietnam," at New York
City's Riverside Church. In his sermon, Dr. King
advanced his strongest denunciation yet of the U.S.
military escalation in Vietnam.
"I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight,"
Dr. King began, "because my conscience leaves me no
other choice." Martin noted that the presence of
hundreds of thousands of US troops in southeast Asia had
only led to the deaths of thousands of innocent victims,
and had cost American taxpayers billions of dollars. "A
nation that continues year after year to spend more
money on military defense than on programs of social
uplift is approaching spiritual death," Dr. King
observed. It was impossible for the administration of
then-President Lyndon Johnson to carry out his "Great
Society" social programs, or his "War On Poverty," when
billions of dollars were being reallocated to destroy
Vietnamese villages, towns and homes. King announced
that "it would be very inconsistent for me to teach and
preach nonviolence in this situation and applaud
violence when thousands and thousands of people, both
adults and children, are being maimed and many killed in
this war."
Despite these criticisms, eleven days later, in New York
City's Central Park, Dr. King led a rally of 125,000 in
protest against the Vietnam War. As New York Times
journalist Bob Herbert observed, Dr. King's "Beyond
Vietnam" address "unleashed a hurricane of criticism."
The NAACP and other moderate civil rights leaders, such
as Bayard Rustin, sharply criticized King for "stepping
out of his perceived area of expertise, civil rights, to
raise his voice against the evil of the war." The New
York Times joined these critics, proclaiming in an
editorial headline, "Dr. King's Error."
Four decades later, the US was once again confronted
with a controversial, unwinnable ground war in Asia, and
a domestic debate over our military involvement there.
In the immediate wake of the terrorist attacks after
9/11 back in 2001, African Americans, like other
Americans, were morally and politically outraged by Al
Qaeda's terrorist attacks. Yet they were deeply troubled
by the immediate groundswell of patriotic fervor,
national chauvinism and numerous acts of violence and
harassment targeting individual Muslims and Arab
Americans. They recognized that behind this mass
upsurgence of American patriotism was xenophobia, ethnic
and religious intolerance that could potentially
reinforce traditional white racism against all people of
color, particularly themselves. They questioned the Bush
administration's "Patriot Act of 2001" and other legal
measures that severely restricted Americans' civil
liberties and privacy rights. For these reasons, the
majority of black leaders sought to uphold Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr.'s tradition of civil rights and civic
liberties, and boldly challenged the US rationale for
its military incursions in both Afghanistan, and later
Iraq.
The pastor of New York City's Riverside Church, the
Reverend James A. Forbes, Jr., proposed that African
Americans embrace a critical, "prophetic patriotism. You
will hold America to the values of freedom, justice,
compassion, equality, respect for all, patience and care
for the needy, a world where everyone counts." Norman
Hill, an African-American labor leader, observed in the
New Pittsburgh Courier: "Threatening or attacking people
because of their ethnic or religious background helps
the terrorists by dividing the country. African
Americans should remember this: after 300 years of
oppression and discrimination, we are making progress in
taking our full place in American society, thanks to the
struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. The last thing
we want to see is a revival of hatred and discrimination
based on race, ethnicity, religion or nationality."
Urban League President Hugh Price argued that black
Americans must "vigorously support the federal
government's efforts to root out the terrorists wherever
they hide around the globe . . ." However, Price also
insisted that "black America's mission, as it has always
been, is to fight against the forces of hatred and
injustice, to fight for the right of all human beings to
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
As the U.S. Justice Department began to arrest and hold
without trial hundreds of Muslims and Arab Americans,
Islamic groups urgently appealed to the Nation of Islam,
NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus for assistance.
Approximately 40 percent of the U.S.'s Islamic
population is African American, and hundreds of native-
born blacks, because of their religious affiliations,
also found themselves under surveillance or were
arrested, despite having no links to terrorist groups.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson openly condemned the police
practice of ethnic/religious "profiling," by declaring
that the U.S. needed to focus its resources toward the
"building of understanding and building a just peace,"
instead of resorting to warfare to "root out terrorism."
In March, 2003, as the U.S. military invaded Iraq, a Pew
Research Center opinion poll found that only 44 percent
of African Americans favored the war. By contrast, white
Americans endorsed the invasion by 73 percent, with
Latinos favoring military conflict by 66 percent.
African-American clergy, led by Brooklyn activist, the
Reverend Herbert Daughtry, organized daily "vigils for
peace" near the United Nations. The black ministers
created a "Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Now Movement,"
which actively participated in the growing anti-war
mobilization throughout the U.S. Black arts
poet/publisher Haki Madhubti explained to the press why
the majority of African Americans opposed the Iraq War,
stating, "We've lived under terror since our forced
migration to this country. We've been able to build a
life around terror."
By early April 2003 the U.S. had successfully toppled
the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein, and over one
hundred thousand U.S. troops occupied the country. No
"weapons of mass destruction," the justification for the
U.S. invasion, were found. The military invasion of an
Islamic country strengthened the network of
fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, by creating a vivid
example of imperialist aggression aimed against the
entire Islamic world. In a 4 April 2003 Gallup opinion
poll, 78 percent of white Americans supported the
military invasion; African-American support for the war
had plummeted to only 29 percent.
In this presidential campaign year, the candidate
speaking most decisively within the antiwar tradition of
Dr. King's Riverside Church peace address is Illinois
Senator Barack Obama. In a major address on 20 March
2008 at the University of Charleston, Obama urged the
electorate to consider the destructive impact that
Bush's five-year-long war in Iraq has had on the
economy. Obama observed: "The more than $10 billion
we're spending each month in Iraq is money we could be
investing here at home. Just think about what battles we
could be fighting instead of fighting this misguided
war." Obama showed the ability to break down the $10
billion Iraq War bill to illustrate how every U.S.
family was bearing part of the financial burden. "When
Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month,
you're paying a price for this war," Obama declared. "No
matter what the costs, no matter what the consequences,
John McCain seems determined to carry out a third [Bush]
term. That's an outcome America can't afford."
Every day, the nation is currently slipping further into
a serious economic crisis, while President Bush
mindlessly tap dances outside the White House. Between
September, 2007 and January, 2008, the median price for
a U.S. home fell 6 percent compared to one year earlier.
The private sector economy lost 26,000 jobs in January,
2008, and another 101,000 jobs in February.
Obama's immediate challenge, therefore, is to link the
current economic and mortgage crisis being experienced
by millions of Americans, with the political economy of
the Iraq War. The place for Obama to start would be to
remind voters of the distance between Bush's promises
about the projected economic costs of the conflict vs.
the reality. The federal government is incapable of
addressing domestic economic problems, he might argue,
because the Iraq War cost is so expensive.
Five years ago, the Bush administration promised
Americans that the cost for invading and occupying Iraq
militarily would be approximately $50 to $60 billion. By
the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, this March,
the Pentagon admitted that military expenditures now
exceed $600 billion. The Congressional Budget Office, a
nonpartisan center, sets the real cost somewhere between
$1 trillion and $2 trillion.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, my
faculty colleague at Columbia University, estimates that
the long term cost for Bush's war in Iraq could exceed
$4 trillion. The best way to comprehend this enormous
waste of money and human lives that the United States
government has carried out is to measure the unmet needs
and obligations we are failing to address. Several days
ago, for example, Democratic Presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton estimated the cost of the Iraq War at
well over $1 trillion: "That is enough to provide health
care to all 47 million uninsured Americans and quality
pre-kindergarten for every American child, solve the
housing crisis once and for all, make college affordable
for every American student and provide tax relief to
tens of millions of middle-class families."
Even some honest Republicans who supported the Iraq War
now recognize how terribly wrong their estimates were
for how much the conflict would cost. Take the case of
economist Lawrence B. Lindsey, Bush's first chief
economic adviser. Lindsey was fired from his post years
ago because he estimated that the war could cost $100
billion to $200 billion. Lindsay's preliminary figures
were right, but he underestimated how long U.S. troops
would be stationed and fighting in Iraq. Now, Republican
Presidential candidate John McCain promises us that
American troops could be stationed and fighting in Iraq
for one hundred years.
The Iraq War fosters a culture of intolerance and
violence that has infected domestic politics. Militarism
and imperialism abroad have produced at home a "National
Security State," a government that now routinely
suppresses civil liberties and civil rights. As poverty
and class inequality grow exponentially, prisons become
the last bastion for preserving the social hierarchy of
class, race and gender privilege and unfairness.
As of 2008, one out of every one hundred American adults
is living behind bars. According to a December 2007
study of the American Civil Liberties Union, "Race and
Ethnicity in America," in the past thirty years there
has been a 500 percent increase in the number of
Americans behind bars, amounting to 2.2 million people,
which represent 25 percent of the world's prison
population. This prison population is disproportionately
black and brown. As of 2006, the U.S. penal population
was 46 percent white, 41 percent African American, and
19 percent Latino. In practical terms, by 2001, about
one out of every six African-American males had
experienced jail or imprisonment. Based on current
trends, over one out of three black men will experience
imprisonment during their lives.
There is overwhelming evidence that the
overrepresentation of blacks in prisons is largely due
to discrimination in every phase of the criminal justice
system. According to the 2007 ACLU study, for example,
African Americans comprised 11 percent of Texas's
population, but 40 percent of the state's prisoners.
Blacks in Texas are incarcerated at roughly five times
the rate of whites. Despite the fact that blacks
statistically represent fewer than 10 percent of drug
abusers, in Texas 50 percent of all prisoners
incarcerated in state prisons and two-thirds of all
those in jails for "drug delivery offenses" are African
Americans.
A similar pattern is found within the juvenile justice
system. African-American youth represent 15 percent of
all American juveniles. However, they represent 26
percent of all juveniles who are arrested by the police
nationwide. They are 58 percent of all youth who are
sentenced to serve time in state prisons. In California,
Latino youth are two times more likely than whites to be
sentenced to prison; for African-American youth in
California, it is six times the incarceration rate.
What are the practical political consequences of the
mass incarceration of black Americans? In New York
State, for example, the prison populations play a
significant role in how some state legislative districts
are drawn up. In New York's 45th senatorial district,
located in the extreme northern corner of upstate New
York, there are thirteen state prisons, with 1,000
prisoners, all of whom are counted as residents.
Prisoners in New York are disenfranchised - they cannot
vote - yet their numbers help to create a Republican
state senatorial district. These "prison districts" now
exist all over the United States.
The most obscene dimension of the national compulsion to
incarcerate has been the deliberate Criminalization of
young black people, with the construction of a "school-
to-prison pipeline." Under the cover of "zero
tolerance" for all forms of "disobedience," too many
school administrators are aggressively and unfairly
removing black youth from schools. Statistically,
African-American youths are two to three times more
likely than whites to be suspended, and far more likely
to be corporally punished or expelled. According to the
ACLU's 2007 study, "nationally, African American
students comprise 17 percent of the student population,
but account for 36 percent of school suspensions and 31
percent of expulsions. In New Jersey, for example, black
students are nearly 60 times more likely to be expelled
than their white counterparts. In Iowa, blacks make up
just 5 percent of the statewide public school
enrollment, but account for 22 percent of suspensions."
Too many black children are taught at an early age that
their only future resides in a prison or jail. Those who
escape prison might find themselves fighting or even
dying in an unwinnable war in Iraq.
Meanwhile, as our military adventures abroad continue,
states are reducing their investments in education,
while expanding expenditures in their correctional
facilities. Between 1987 and 2007, states spent an
average of a 21 percent increase on higher education,
but expanded their corrections budgets by an average of
127 percent. Today, for the first time in recent
history, there are now five states that spend more state
money on prisons than on public colleges - Connecticut,
Delaware, Michigan, Oregon, and Vermont. The ugly
tradeoff not to educate but to incarcerate continues.
The ever-expanding prison industrial complex lies at the
center of America's National Security State. Now is the
time to return America's government to democratic
processes and the rule of law. Now is the time to break
with the culture of violence - militarism abroad and
mass incarceration at home. Now is the time to "give
peace a chance."
Obama's biggest challenge, therefore, must be to explain
to the American people that both imperialist wars
abroad, the construction of a "National Security State"
mass incarcerations and prisons, and periodic economic
crises at home, all represent a profound structural
failure within America's legal, economic and political
systems. This is the political economy of institutional
violence. This was, of course, the realization of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., just before his assassination.
"For years I labored with the idea of reforming the
existing institutions of society," Dr. King declared in
1966, "a little change here, a little change there. Now
I feel quite differently." Let us summon the courage of
Dr. King, by opposing this immoral war. Let us join the
great tradition of African-American peacemakers by
rejecting and dismantling our prison industrial complex
and mass incarceration. Let us imagine a world without
racism and a nation dedicated to peace and freedom.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Manning
Marable, PhD is one of America's most influential and
widely read scholars. Since 1993, Dr. Marable has been
Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History
and African-American Studies at Columbia University in
New York City. For ten years, Dr. Marable was founding
director of the Institute for Research in African-
American Studies at Columbia University, from 1993 to
2003. Dr. Marable is an author or editor of over 20
books, including Living Black History: How Reimagining
the African-American Past Can Remake America's Racial
Future (2006); The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A
Hero's Life And Legacy Revealed Through His Writings,
Letters, And Speeches (2005); Freedom: A Photographic
History of the African American Struggle (2002); Black
Leadership: Four Great American Leaders and the Struggle
for Civil Rights (1998); Beyond Black and White:
Transforming African-American Politics (1995); and How
Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in
Race, Political Economy, and Society (South End Press
Classics Series) (1983). His current project is a major
biography of Malcolm X, entitled Malcolm X: A Life of
Reinvention, to be published by Viking Press in 2009.
Click here to contact Dr. Marable or visit his Website
manningmarable.net.
_____________________________________________
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the Struggle Against Racism, Inequality and War
by Manning Marable
BlackCommentator.com
[This speech was delivered at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, sponsored by the Great Cities
Institute on April 4, 2008]
4 April 2008 marks the fortieth anniversary of the
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We still
tend to focus our image of Martin delivering his "I Have
A Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial, at the 1963
March on Washington, D.C. However, civil rights was not
the only issue that divided America in the 1960s. By
1966, U.S. military forces in South Vietnam amounted to
184,000; by January 1969, 536,000 U.S. troops were
stationed in that country. For black Americans, the war
had a direct impact upon every community. African
Americans comprised about one out of every seven U.S.
soldiers stationed in Vietnam, and because African
Americans tended to be placed in "combat units" more
often than middle-class whites. They also bore unfairly
higher risks of being killed and wounded. From January
through November 1966, over one-fifth of all army
casualties were black.
By 1965, however, a small number of black progressives
had begun to speak in opposition to the war. Julian
Bond, elected to the Georgia State House of
Representatives, defended the right of "the Vietnamese
peasants who . have expressed a real desire to govern
themselves." The "gunboat diplomacy of the past" had
little place in contemporary world affairs. Perhaps the
most articulate opponent of the US war effort holding
public office was US Representative Ronald V. Dellums.
From the floor of Congress, Dellums declared:
"I consider our involvement in Indochina illegal,
immoral and insane. We are in a war which is the
greatest human and economic drain on American
resources in modern times - a war disproportionately
waged on the backs of blacks and browns and reds and
yellows and poor and working class whites, a war
resulting in an untold number of deaths of the
Vietnamese people, a war that is justified only by
the notion that we as a nation, must save face . M
of people in the country are no longer willing to
engage in such folly and be cannon fodder, and go
across the water to spill their blood on foreign
soil in a cause many of them do not even
understand."
Black activists and intellectuals, who were part of the
Black Power movement, had serious reservations about
participating in anti-war organizations dominated by
white liberals and leftists. But almost all of them
opposed the Vietnam War; some even drew an analogy
between the suffering of the Vietnamese as a "colonial
people", and the "domestic colonialism" experienced by
African Americans.
During the bitter national debate on Vietnam, nearly all
major all public leaders within black America were
forced to choose sides. As a dedicated pacifist, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. could not look upon the conflict
benignly without taking some kind of public stand
against the war. At the annual Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) executive board meeting
held in Baltimore on 1-2 April 1965, Dr. King expressed
the need to criticize the Johnson Administration's
policies in Southeast Asia. His old colleagues, fearful
that Dr. King's support for the anti-war movement would
hurt the SCLC financially and politically, voted to
allow him to do so only as a private person, without
organizational endorsement. Bayard Rustin, the key
organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, still
maintained close ties with King, and tried to pressure
the SCLC leader into a position of neutrality on
Vietnam. On 10 September 1965, Rustin, Dr. King, and
SCLC aides Andrew Young and Bernard Lee met with the US
Ambassador to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg.
Goldberg managed to convince Dr. King, for the moment,
that the Johnson Administration had every intention of
bringing the conflict to a peaceful resolution. For
several months, Dr. King watched anxiously as the number
of US troops stationed in Vietnam increased. Finally in
January 1966, Dr. King published his criticisms about
the Vietnam War.
"Some of my friends of both races, and others who do not
consider themselves my friends, have expressed
disapproval because I have been voicing concern over the
war in Vietnam," Dr. King explained. But as a Christian,
Dr. King believed that he had no choice except to
"declare that war is wrong." Black leaders could not
become blind to the rest of the world's issues, while
engaged solely in problems of domestic race relations.
Martin argued, "The Negro must not allow himself to
become a victim of the self-serving philosophy of those
who manufacture war that the survival of the world is
the white man's business alone." The negative response
to Dr. King's anti-war statement was swift. SCLC leaders
in Chattanooga, Tennessee, severed relations with the
national organization in protest. National Urban League
director Whitney Young replied that blacks were not
interested in the Vietnam issue. Martin vigorously
lobbied among his allies in the SCLC to back his
position on Vietnam, and in the spring of 1966 the
organization's executive board came out officially
against the war.
Increasingly, as Dr. King's attention was drawn to the
Vietnam war, he also began to consider the necessity for
black Americans to devise a more radical strategy for
domestic reforms. Dr. King was beginning to articulate a
radical democratic vision for American society: the
nationalization of basic industries; massive federal
expenditures to revive central cities and to provide
jobs for ghetto residents; programs to address rural
poverty; a job or guaranteed income for every adult
American.
On April 4, 1967, exactly one year to the day before his
assassination, Martin delivered his eloquent, yet
controversial address, "Beyond Vietnam," at New York
City's Riverside Church. In his sermon, Dr. King
advanced his strongest denunciation yet of the U.S.
military escalation in Vietnam.
"I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight,"
Dr. King began, "because my conscience leaves me no
other choice." Martin noted that the presence of
hundreds of thousands of US troops in southeast Asia had
only led to the deaths of thousands of innocent victims,
and had cost American taxpayers billions of dollars. "A
nation that continues year after year to spend more
money on military defense than on programs of social
uplift is approaching spiritual death," Dr. King
observed. It was impossible for the administration of
then-President Lyndon Johnson to carry out his "Great
Society" social programs, or his "War On Poverty," when
billions of dollars were being reallocated to destroy
Vietnamese villages, towns and homes. King announced
that "it would be very inconsistent for me to teach and
preach nonviolence in this situation and applaud
violence when thousands and thousands of people, both
adults and children, are being maimed and many killed in
this war."
Despite these criticisms, eleven days later, in New York
City's Central Park, Dr. King led a rally of 125,000 in
protest against the Vietnam War. As New York Times
journalist Bob Herbert observed, Dr. King's "Beyond
Vietnam" address "unleashed a hurricane of criticism."
The NAACP and other moderate civil rights leaders, such
as Bayard Rustin, sharply criticized King for "stepping
out of his perceived area of expertise, civil rights, to
raise his voice against the evil of the war." The New
York Times joined these critics, proclaiming in an
editorial headline, "Dr. King's Error."
Four decades later, the US was once again confronted
with a controversial, unwinnable ground war in Asia, and
a domestic debate over our military involvement there.
In the immediate wake of the terrorist attacks after
9/11 back in 2001, African Americans, like other
Americans, were morally and politically outraged by Al
Qaeda's terrorist attacks. Yet they were deeply troubled
by the immediate groundswell of patriotic fervor,
national chauvinism and numerous acts of violence and
harassment targeting individual Muslims and Arab
Americans. They recognized that behind this mass
upsurgence of American patriotism was xenophobia, ethnic
and religious intolerance that could potentially
reinforce traditional white racism against all people of
color, particularly themselves. They questioned the Bush
administration's "Patriot Act of 2001" and other legal
measures that severely restricted Americans' civil
liberties and privacy rights. For these reasons, the
majority of black leaders sought to uphold Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr.'s tradition of civil rights and civic
liberties, and boldly challenged the US rationale for
its military incursions in both Afghanistan, and later
Iraq.
The pastor of New York City's Riverside Church, the
Reverend James A. Forbes, Jr., proposed that African
Americans embrace a critical, "prophetic patriotism. You
will hold America to the values of freedom, justice,
compassion, equality, respect for all, patience and care
for the needy, a world where everyone counts." Norman
Hill, an African-American labor leader, observed in the
New Pittsburgh Courier: "Threatening or attacking people
because of their ethnic or religious background helps
the terrorists by dividing the country. African
Americans should remember this: after 300 years of
oppression and discrimination, we are making progress in
taking our full place in American society, thanks to the
struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. The last thing
we want to see is a revival of hatred and discrimination
based on race, ethnicity, religion or nationality."
Urban League President Hugh Price argued that black
Americans must "vigorously support the federal
government's efforts to root out the terrorists wherever
they hide around the globe . . ." However, Price also
insisted that "black America's mission, as it has always
been, is to fight against the forces of hatred and
injustice, to fight for the right of all human beings to
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
As the U.S. Justice Department began to arrest and hold
without trial hundreds of Muslims and Arab Americans,
Islamic groups urgently appealed to the Nation of Islam,
NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus for assistance.
Approximately 40 percent of the U.S.'s Islamic
population is African American, and hundreds of native-
born blacks, because of their religious affiliations,
also found themselves under surveillance or were
arrested, despite having no links to terrorist groups.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson openly condemned the police
practice of ethnic/religious "profiling," by declaring
that the U.S. needed to focus its resources toward the
"building of understanding and building a just peace,"
instead of resorting to warfare to "root out terrorism."
In March, 2003, as the U.S. military invaded Iraq, a Pew
Research Center opinion poll found that only 44 percent
of African Americans favored the war. By contrast, white
Americans endorsed the invasion by 73 percent, with
Latinos favoring military conflict by 66 percent.
African-American clergy, led by Brooklyn activist, the
Reverend Herbert Daughtry, organized daily "vigils for
peace" near the United Nations. The black ministers
created a "Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Now Movement,"
which actively participated in the growing anti-war
mobilization throughout the U.S. Black arts
poet/publisher Haki Madhubti explained to the press why
the majority of African Americans opposed the Iraq War,
stating, "We've lived under terror since our forced
migration to this country. We've been able to build a
life around terror."
By early April 2003 the U.S. had successfully toppled
the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein, and over one
hundred thousand U.S. troops occupied the country. No
"weapons of mass destruction," the justification for the
U.S. invasion, were found. The military invasion of an
Islamic country strengthened the network of
fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, by creating a vivid
example of imperialist aggression aimed against the
entire Islamic world. In a 4 April 2003 Gallup opinion
poll, 78 percent of white Americans supported the
military invasion; African-American support for the war
had plummeted to only 29 percent.
In this presidential campaign year, the candidate
speaking most decisively within the antiwar tradition of
Dr. King's Riverside Church peace address is Illinois
Senator Barack Obama. In a major address on 20 March
2008 at the University of Charleston, Obama urged the
electorate to consider the destructive impact that
Bush's five-year-long war in Iraq has had on the
economy. Obama observed: "The more than $10 billion
we're spending each month in Iraq is money we could be
investing here at home. Just think about what battles we
could be fighting instead of fighting this misguided
war." Obama showed the ability to break down the $10
billion Iraq War bill to illustrate how every U.S.
family was bearing part of the financial burden. "When
Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month,
you're paying a price for this war," Obama declared. "No
matter what the costs, no matter what the consequences,
John McCain seems determined to carry out a third [Bush]
term. That's an outcome America can't afford."
Every day, the nation is currently slipping further into
a serious economic crisis, while President Bush
mindlessly tap dances outside the White House. Between
September, 2007 and January, 2008, the median price for
a U.S. home fell 6 percent compared to one year earlier.
The private sector economy lost 26,000 jobs in January,
2008, and another 101,000 jobs in February.
Obama's immediate challenge, therefore, is to link the
current economic and mortgage crisis being experienced
by millions of Americans, with the political economy of
the Iraq War. The place for Obama to start would be to
remind voters of the distance between Bush's promises
about the projected economic costs of the conflict vs.
the reality. The federal government is incapable of
addressing domestic economic problems, he might argue,
because the Iraq War cost is so expensive.
Five years ago, the Bush administration promised
Americans that the cost for invading and occupying Iraq
militarily would be approximately $50 to $60 billion. By
the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, this March,
the Pentagon admitted that military expenditures now
exceed $600 billion. The Congressional Budget Office, a
nonpartisan center, sets the real cost somewhere between
$1 trillion and $2 trillion.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, my
faculty colleague at Columbia University, estimates that
the long term cost for Bush's war in Iraq could exceed
$4 trillion. The best way to comprehend this enormous
waste of money and human lives that the United States
government has carried out is to measure the unmet needs
and obligations we are failing to address. Several days
ago, for example, Democratic Presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton estimated the cost of the Iraq War at
well over $1 trillion: "That is enough to provide health
care to all 47 million uninsured Americans and quality
pre-kindergarten for every American child, solve the
housing crisis once and for all, make college affordable
for every American student and provide tax relief to
tens of millions of middle-class families."
Even some honest Republicans who supported the Iraq War
now recognize how terribly wrong their estimates were
for how much the conflict would cost. Take the case of
economist Lawrence B. Lindsey, Bush's first chief
economic adviser. Lindsey was fired from his post years
ago because he estimated that the war could cost $100
billion to $200 billion. Lindsay's preliminary figures
were right, but he underestimated how long U.S. troops
would be stationed and fighting in Iraq. Now, Republican
Presidential candidate John McCain promises us that
American troops could be stationed and fighting in Iraq
for one hundred years.
The Iraq War fosters a culture of intolerance and
violence that has infected domestic politics. Militarism
and imperialism abroad have produced at home a "National
Security State," a government that now routinely
suppresses civil liberties and civil rights. As poverty
and class inequality grow exponentially, prisons become
the last bastion for preserving the social hierarchy of
class, race and gender privilege and unfairness.
As of 2008, one out of every one hundred American adults
is living behind bars. According to a December 2007
study of the American Civil Liberties Union, "Race and
Ethnicity in America," in the past thirty years there
has been a 500 percent increase in the number of
Americans behind bars, amounting to 2.2 million people,
which represent 25 percent of the world's prison
population. This prison population is disproportionately
black and brown. As of 2006, the U.S. penal population
was 46 percent white, 41 percent African American, and
19 percent Latino. In practical terms, by 2001, about
one out of every six African-American males had
experienced jail or imprisonment. Based on current
trends, over one out of three black men will experience
imprisonment during their lives.
There is overwhelming evidence that the
overrepresentation of blacks in prisons is largely due
to discrimination in every phase of the criminal justice
system. According to the 2007 ACLU study, for example,
African Americans comprised 11 percent of Texas's
population, but 40 percent of the state's prisoners.
Blacks in Texas are incarcerated at roughly five times
the rate of whites. Despite the fact that blacks
statistically represent fewer than 10 percent of drug
abusers, in Texas 50 percent of all prisoners
incarcerated in state prisons and two-thirds of all
those in jails for "drug delivery offenses" are African
Americans.
A similar pattern is found within the juvenile justice
system. African-American youth represent 15 percent of
all American juveniles. However, they represent 26
percent of all juveniles who are arrested by the police
nationwide. They are 58 percent of all youth who are
sentenced to serve time in state prisons. In California,
Latino youth are two times more likely than whites to be
sentenced to prison; for African-American youth in
California, it is six times the incarceration rate.
What are the practical political consequences of the
mass incarceration of black Americans? In New York
State, for example, the prison populations play a
significant role in how some state legislative districts
are drawn up. In New York's 45th senatorial district,
located in the extreme northern corner of upstate New
York, there are thirteen state prisons, with 1,000
prisoners, all of whom are counted as residents.
Prisoners in New York are disenfranchised - they cannot
vote - yet their numbers help to create a Republican
state senatorial district. These "prison districts" now
exist all over the United States.
The most obscene dimension of the national compulsion to
incarcerate has been the deliberate Criminalization of
young black people, with the construction of a "school-
to-prison pipeline." Under the cover of "zero
tolerance" for all forms of "disobedience," too many
school administrators are aggressively and unfairly
removing black youth from schools. Statistically,
African-American youths are two to three times more
likely than whites to be suspended, and far more likely
to be corporally punished or expelled. According to the
ACLU's 2007 study, "nationally, African American
students comprise 17 percent of the student population,
but account for 36 percent of school suspensions and 31
percent of expulsions. In New Jersey, for example, black
students are nearly 60 times more likely to be expelled
than their white counterparts. In Iowa, blacks make up
just 5 percent of the statewide public school
enrollment, but account for 22 percent of suspensions."
Too many black children are taught at an early age that
their only future resides in a prison or jail. Those who
escape prison might find themselves fighting or even
dying in an unwinnable war in Iraq.
Meanwhile, as our military adventures abroad continue,
states are reducing their investments in education,
while expanding expenditures in their correctional
facilities. Between 1987 and 2007, states spent an
average of a 21 percent increase on higher education,
but expanded their corrections budgets by an average of
127 percent. Today, for the first time in recent
history, there are now five states that spend more state
money on prisons than on public colleges - Connecticut,
Delaware, Michigan, Oregon, and Vermont. The ugly
tradeoff not to educate but to incarcerate continues.
The ever-expanding prison industrial complex lies at the
center of America's National Security State. Now is the
time to return America's government to democratic
processes and the rule of law. Now is the time to break
with the culture of violence - militarism abroad and
mass incarceration at home. Now is the time to "give
peace a chance."
Obama's biggest challenge, therefore, must be to explain
to the American people that both imperialist wars
abroad, the construction of a "National Security State"
mass incarcerations and prisons, and periodic economic
crises at home, all represent a profound structural
failure within America's legal, economic and political
systems. This is the political economy of institutional
violence. This was, of course, the realization of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., just before his assassination.
"For years I labored with the idea of reforming the
existing institutions of society," Dr. King declared in
1966, "a little change here, a little change there. Now
I feel quite differently." Let us summon the courage of
Dr. King, by opposing this immoral war. Let us join the
great tradition of African-American peacemakers by
rejecting and dismantling our prison industrial complex
and mass incarceration. Let us imagine a world without
racism and a nation dedicated to peace and freedom.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Manning
Marable, PhD is one of America's most influential and
widely read scholars. Since 1993, Dr. Marable has been
Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History
and African-American Studies at Columbia University in
New York City. For ten years, Dr. Marable was founding
director of the Institute for Research in African-
American Studies at Columbia University, from 1993 to
2003. Dr. Marable is an author or editor of over 20
books, including Living Black History: How Reimagining
the African-American Past Can Remake America's Racial
Future (2006); The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A
Hero's Life And Legacy Revealed Through His Writings,
Letters, And Speeches (2005); Freedom: A Photographic
History of the African American Struggle (2002); Black
Leadership: Four Great American Leaders and the Struggle
for Civil Rights (1998); Beyond Black and White:
Transforming African-American Politics (1995); and How
Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in
Race, Political Economy, and Society (South End Press
Classics Series) (1983). His current project is a major
biography of Malcolm X, entitled Malcolm X: A Life of
Reinvention, to be published by Viking Press in 2009.
Click here to contact Dr. Marable or visit his Website
manningmarable.net.
_____________________________________________
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Tuesday, December 04, 2007
African Americans in NYC imprisoned five times rate of whites (pdf)
African Americans in NYC imprisoned five times rate of whites.
Groundbreaking Study Examines Drug Imprisonment in 198 Counties; 97 Percent Experienced Racial Disparities
WASHINGTON—A new report released today by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) finds that 97 percent of the nation’s large-population counties imprisoned African Americans at a higher rate than whites. The report documents racial disparities in the use of prison for drug offenses in 193 of the 198 counties that reported to government entities.
“The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties,” found that counties with higher poverty rates, larger African-American populations and larger police or judicial budgets imprison people for drug offenses at higher rates than counties without these characteristics. These relationships were found to be independent of whether the county actually had a higher rate of crime. (The findings for the 198 counties.)
http://www.justicepolicy.org/content.php?hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=69#a281
"African Americans in New York City are admitted to prison for drug offenses at five times the rate of whites."
http://juliel.mm-tools.us/justicepolicyinstitute/images/upload/NY-New-York-City.pdf
Groundbreaking Study Examines Drug Imprisonment in 198 Counties; 97 Percent Experienced Racial Disparities
WASHINGTON—A new report released today by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) finds that 97 percent of the nation’s large-population counties imprisoned African Americans at a higher rate than whites. The report documents racial disparities in the use of prison for drug offenses in 193 of the 198 counties that reported to government entities.
“The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties,” found that counties with higher poverty rates, larger African-American populations and larger police or judicial budgets imprison people for drug offenses at higher rates than counties without these characteristics. These relationships were found to be independent of whether the county actually had a higher rate of crime. (The findings for the 198 counties.)
http://www.justicepolicy.org/content.php?hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=69#a281
"African Americans in New York City are admitted to prison for drug offenses at five times the rate of whites."
http://juliel.mm-tools.us/justicepolicyinstitute/images/upload/NY-New-York-City.pdf
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Injustice in Jena by Bill Quigley
Published on Tuesday, July 3, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Injustice in Jena: The 'White Tree', A White Judge, White Jury, and White Prosecutor Calling White Witnesses Leads To Conviction of Black Youth
by Bill Quigley
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/03/2260/
Injustice in Jena: The 'White Tree', A White Judge, White Jury, and White Prosecutor Calling White Witnesses Leads To Conviction of Black Youth
by Bill Quigley
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/03/2260/
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Release: Legal Groups Condemn Racist-themed Law Student Party
For immediate release October 21, 2006
Legal Groups Condemn Racist-themed Law Student Party
Contact Carlos Villarreal at 415.377.6961
The United People of Color Caucus (TUPOCC) of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), the NLG, and the National Latina/Latino Law Student Association (NLLSA) condemn the recent law student "ghetto" party and the weak response from the UT Law administration. The groups are demanding that the University take more aggressive steps to educate students and adopt an anti-racist curriculum.
The party in question became public when photographs from the event were posted online. According to news reports, the event included students holding 40-ounce bottles, wearing Afro wigs, bandanas, and wearing name tags with names like "Tanika" or "Jesus." Dean Larry Sager responded with an email that did not adequately address the racism involved in the event or the harm caused. Among other things, Sager addressed, "the extraordinary damage [the students] could do to their own careers."
"This act and the weak response from the administration is a reflection and product of the deeply-rooted institutionalized and systematic racism still plaguing the US and virtually all of its educational institutions - not just UT," said Mercedes Castillo of the NLLSA. "UT does have a unique history of segregation and racist attitudes, however, that add important context to this childish display."
Until 1950 the University of Texas School of Law denied admission to African Americans and was only forced to integrate after the Sweatt v. Painter decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was many years later that the University began to correct the wrongs of the past through limited affirmative action admission policies. It was only 40 years after Sweatt that the University was forced to abandon affirmative action following the Hopwood decision, though unlike the earlier decision, the law school quickly swept away its policies rather than attempt to narrowly construe the High Court's ruling.
One of the Law School's most well-known "scholars," Lino Graglia, has devoted much of his career to justifying inequality and a second-class status for people of color. Adding insult to injury soon after the Hopwood decision in 1997 he said publicly, "blacks and Mexican-Americans can't compete academically with whites." He claimed there was a cultural reason for this, not an inherent or genetic reason. His statement was followed with an enormous rally in support of affirmative action and a sit-in at the law school.
While the party was a single event, it demonstrates an attitude that undoubtedly pervades the work of law students and graduates. It demonstrates, further, an environment at the law school that remains hostile and unequal. Finally it demonstrates the emptiness of mere "respect for diversity" as a tool to combat centuries of oppression.
"One wonders if some of these law students raised in what some call a post-civil rights era considered the costumes and party theme an example of the diversity that we are all supposed to embrace as we reject affirmative action as 'reverse racism,'" said Carlos Villarreal, NLG member and UT Law alumnus. "This kind of act is a reflection on the law school and a stronger response is in order from the administration."
###
Thursday, September 14, 2006
African-Americans Will Lead Demonstration Against Torture Sept. 15th @ 11:00 a.m.
African-Americans Will Lead Demonstration Against Torture Sept. 15th @ 11:00
a.m.
Dear Colleagues,
African-Americans under the leadership of the National Conference of Black
Lawyers have been meeting every Thursday for the last several weeks in order
to formulate a response to the torture, with impunity, of over 100 Black men
and women.
As you may be already aware, the torture of African-American people by the
Chicago police is well established. During the period from 1972 to 1991,
primarily at a south side police station known as Area 2 Headquarters, a
group of police officers under the leadership of former Chicago Police
Commander Jon Burge systematically committed brutal acts of torture against
citizens of African descent who were in police custody. The torture included
the administration of electric shocks to the victims' ears and/or exposed
genitalia using a cattle prod or a hand-cranked generator; conducting mock
executions with unloaded firearms; suffocating victims with plastic
typewriter covers; and burning victims by holding them against hot
radiators, among other techniques. Such treatment fits the definition of
"torture" as delineated in Article 1 of the Convention Against Torture.
To date, over 100 Black men and women have been identified as having been
victimized by the police torture described above. [1] Typically, confessions
to serious crimes were extracted from the victims for use at a criminal
trial prosecuted by the Cook County State's Attorney's office. These
involuntary confessions were the basis, partly or wholly, for criminal
convictions.
Of the Area 2 victims, it is estimated that several dozen remain in prison
today. Some of the victims were sentenced to death and spent many years on
Illinois' Death Row, until their sentences and those of all other Illinois
Death Row inmates were commuted in 2003 by former Illinois Governor George
Ryan. Governor Ryan also pardoned four of the Burge torture victims on the
grounds of actual innocence: Aaron Patterson, Madison Hobley, Leroy Orange,
and Stanley Howard.
A number of judgments acknowledging torture have been rendered in civil
cases brought by victims, as well as by appellate courts reviewing some of
the victims' criminal convictions. Furthermore, Chicago Police investigators
have admitted the systematic nature of the practice in a 1990 report by the
Office of Professional Standards (OPS) which cited 50 cases of the torture
and abuse at Area 2. In a document known as the Goldstone Report, the OPS
concluded that abuse was "systematic", "methodical", and "included
psychological techniques and planned torture." Further, the United Nations
has found that the United States violated the human rights of the men and
women tortured at Area 2. Nevertheless, the perpetrators of the torture
continue to enjoy impunity with regard to their crimes. To date, none have
ever been charged with a crime.
Since private parties or victims to crimes do not have the right to
institute criminal proceedings under our legal system, the victims and their
families must rely on the prosecutor exercising their discretion to bring
criminal charges against the officers. Despite numerous requests by victims,
civil society organizations, and the media, none of the police officers or
higher level officials responsible for established incidents of torture has
ever been charged with a crime. The responsible local authority for the
initiation of criminal charges in these cases is the Cook County State's
Attorney. Richard M. Daley, the Cook County State's Attorney at the time
Area 2 abuses were first brought to public attention, is now Mayor of the
City of Chicago. Neither State's Attorney Daley nor his successor Richard
Devine, ever instituted a criminal prosecution against any of the officials
responsible for torture in Area 2. Nor has the United State's Attorney for
the Northern District of Illinois (an office of the federal government with
authority over federal crimes) ever charged any of those responsible.
Since the Special Prosecutor's report documents the torture, but fails to
anything about it, the question then becomes what are we, the
African-American community, going to do about it? We must do something and
that is why the National Conference of Black Lawyers, along with many other
individuals and organizations, have come together under the banner of "Black
People Against Police Torture" to demand that something be done. The purpose
of this letter is to invite you and your group to join us on September 15,
2006 @ 11:00 a.m. at the Federal Plaza on Jackson and Dearborn, and
participate in a Silent Mass Demonstration in protest of police torture.
The Mass demonstration is not the only action that we are undertaking. Of
the judges seeking retention in this November's election, eight were
actively involved in the torture conspiracy or acquiesced to the torture of
Black people. We shall mobilize to deny their retention. Further, we have
drafted a bill providing for a comprehensive Reparations law for torture
victims. This bill will provide a process that will facilitate the release
of the remaining 27 torture victims from Illinois prisons.
It is time we step up and let our voices (votes) be heard. It is not too
late, criminal charges can still be brought if we demand them! Come, join us
on September 15th. Be proud to be Black. We must channel our outrage into
action.
_____
[1] Victims have been located by attorneys, civil society organizations, and
by the Special Prosecutor appointed by the Circuit Court of Cook County who
in July 2006 reported a total of 135 documented cases of torture and abuse
by police under the command of Jon Burge.
[
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