What the U.S. should learn from the high cost of protest in Iran

Azadeh Shahshahani is a member of TUPOCC and the chair of the NLG South regional chapter. Today she published this guest column on the struggle for religious freedom among Muslims in the U.S.

Religious freedom unkept vow in U.S.
By Azadeh Shahshahani
Wednesday, June 24, 2009

I have been watching with interest and apprehension the movement reverberating in my birthplace over the past few weeks. The cries of "Azadi" by the people who have poured out in the tens of thousands into the streets of Iran to demand greater freedom have defied the distance between us.

I was born in Iran four days after the 1979 revolution. My name, Azadeh, means free-spirited, signifying the great hopes that my parents and the many other parents who named their daughters Azadeh that year bore for the revolution.

Their hopes were soon dashed, however, as the oppressive regime of the shah was replaced by a theocracy where rules governed every aspect of people's lives in public, and even private, spaces.

In this system, advancement in professional and especially official ranks depends in part on the extent to which one chooses to profess religiosity, as dictated by the regime.

With this background, one of the freedoms that was most appealing to me when I came to the United States at age 16 was the right, free from governmental interference, to practice religion — or no religion at all.

I learned that this right is among the most fundamental of the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. In my trips back to visit family and friends, I often boasted about the guarantee of religious freedom in the United States.

This fundamental right has been increasingly denied, however, to Muslim-Americans in the years after Sept. 11, tarnishing America's reputation as a beacon of religious freedom.

Last week, the ACLU released a report demonstrating how American Muslims' right to practice zakat, or charitable giving, has been violated.

Zakat is a religious obligation for all observant Muslims and is one of the five pillars of Islam. Given annually and in a calculated amount, zakat is a proportionately fixed contribution collected from surplus earnings of Muslims.

The ACLU report shows that U.S. terrorism finance laws and policies have had a chilling effect on Muslim charitable giving by creating an atmosphere of fear.

These laws have authorized executive branch officials to target charities based on secret evidence — without notice, charges, an opportunity to respond or meaningful judicial review.

Closer to home, I recently joined Lisa Valentine and her husband before the Georgia Committee on Access and Fairness in the Courts.

Valentine testified about the experience she faced at a Douglasville courthouse, where she was made to choose between her right to free exercise of religion and her right to access the court.

Valentine, also known by her Islamic name, Miedah, spoke about the experience of being denied access to the courthouse on Dec. 16 because she wore a head scarf, or hijab.

She found herself in handcuffs and in jail with her hijab removed after Douglasville Municipal Court Judge Keith Rollins sentenced her to 10 days in jail for contempt.

Valentine and other Muslim women were denied access to the Douglasville Municipal Court, even after they expressly conveyed to court officials that the wearing of the head scarf is an expression of their faith.

Muslim-Americans, like all people in the United States, should have the right to express their religious beliefs free from discrimination.

As eloquently stated by President Barack Obama in his Cairo speech last month, "freedom in America is indivisible from the freedom to practice one's religion."

The president acknowledged the right of Muslim women and girls to wear the hijab and recognized the adverse effect of terrorism finance laws on Muslim charitable giving.

The administration and governments on the state and local levels need to follow up on this premise by ensuring that our laws, policies and practices are in fact consistent with American values of due process and religious freedom.

These freedoms are too important to be violated, as evidenced by the willingness of people in my birthplace to risk their lives to secure them.

Azadeh Shahshahani is the National Security/Immigrants' Rights Project director for the ACLU of Georgia.

United States to South Africa: white supremacy lingers

Lingering White Supremacy In South Africa Sounds Much Like United States
by Robert Jensen

I learned that even with all the differences in the two countries there are equally important similarities, and as a result the sense of entitlement that so many white people hold onto produces similar dodges and denials.

Those similarities: South Africa and the United States were the two longstanding settler states that maintained legal apartheid long after the post-World War II decolonization process. The crucial term is “settler state,” marking a process by which an invading population exterminates or displaces and exploits the indigenous population to acquire its land and resources, with formal slavery playing a key role at some point in the country’s history. Both strategies were justified with overtly racist doctrines about white supremacy, and both required the white population to discard basic moral and religious principles, leading to a pathological psychology of superiority. Both of those settler strategies have left us with racialized disparities in wealth and well-being long after the formal apartheid is over.

The main difference: The United States struggles with its problem with a white majority, while South Africa has a black majority. But what I found fascinating his how little difference that made in terms of the psychological pathology of so many white people. So, as is typically the case, my trip to South Africa taught me not only about racism in South Africa but also in the United States, which reminded me that perhaps we travel to observe others so that we can learn about ourselves.

Finding Rev. King

Dr. King didn't just have dreams. He had strategy.

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.

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.

Facing Race

Responding to a call by TUPOCC founding co-chair Renée Sánchez, and organized by USF 3L and NLG-SF Student Vice President, Aliya Karmali, about ten TUPOCC members and our friends attended the Applied Research Center's Facing Race: A National Conference in downtown Oakland, California this past weekend.

Attending plenary panels and workshops from Thursday's opening keynote by Sherman Alexie to Saturday's closing plenary on Race and the Global Economy, TUPOCC was present and representing radical "queer, colored" legal activism, as we connected with our friends and allies from other organizations dedicated to interracial justice, as a critical dimension of the people's intergenerational movement toward social justice.

While there were many interesting panels and workshops, I found two workshops particularly helpful to my interests in helping us build TUPOCC and creating community in Oakland.  

BYOB: Build Your Own Blog was led by Liza Sabater of CultureKitchen.com and Chris Rabb of Afro-Netizen.  Beyond an introduction to blogs and blogging, Liza and Chris provided great information about technologies that could substantially help us represent our racial justice work like Utterli (mobile audio/video sharing) Shoebox (photo management) and Drupal.

That last software, an open source package (as in GNU and the free software movement) seems particularly promising in helping us build TUPOCC's infrastructure beyond our previous and present attempts with Yahoo! Groups, the TUPOCC website and our Legal Activists of Color blog.  Liza particularly indicated that Drupal has a module that can realize my idea of literally mapping TUPOCC's membership, by integrating Google Maps with a membership database that we could create based on the 141 folks in our Y! group.

While I have yet to download Drupal and likely won't start learning it until mid-December, I am very excited about its potential for TUPOCC and the several other organizations for which I volunteer, e.g., Latina & Latino Critical Legal Theory, Inc., the East Bay La Raza Lawyers Association, the Berkeley Law Foundation and the National Latina/Latino Law Student Association (NLLSA).

It's been a while since I've focused my energies on non-law and non-text learning and culture making, and I miss photography and film-making a great deal.

The second workshop I attended, Creating a Culture of Racial Justice, was powerfully synergistic.  Moderated by Melanie Cervantes of Dignidad Rebelde and Taller Tupac Amaru, this workshop also featured Favianna Rodriguez, co-founder del mismo taller, Tumi's Design and the Eastside Arts Alliance; and DJ Phatrick and Samantha Chanse -- popular educators, community builders and radical cultural workers of color who are (or in the recent past were) based in the SF Bay Area.

Melanie's prompts and questions were particularly stimulating and merit mentioning three of the most memorable:

• How do people create a racial justice culture to support social justice movement(s)?
• How do folks who have become artists inspire and materially support others who desire to make art but feel unable to do so vis-a-vis their racial subordination and other forms of oppression? 
• How can artists serve as visionaries for the racially just world we want to create?

By themselves these questions may not seem revolutionary to some, but witnessing Favianna, Melanie, Patrick and Samantha share how they have made their lives and their art into living visions of racial, immigrant, gender and sexual justice was deeply inspiring.

I have lived, loved and worked hard to develop mi conciencia (a radical racial, political, sexual and spiritual awareness of my place in people's history), but to study law I stopped making photographs and films, dancing, journaling and writing poesía.  While I tried to remain aware of the importance of "in xochitl, in cuicatl, flor y canto, flower-and-song" (art, poetry, dance, singing), my daily practice of making art basically stopped, as I focused on learning the law, reading critical legal scholarship and organizing students.

Witnessing Favianna, Melanie, Patrick and Samantha, reminded me of the crucial necessity to make soul and face as our elder compañera Gloria Anzaldúa and other radical lesbian Chicana poetas, artistas, scholars y filósofas have written.

While directly serving the people as a community lawyer in West Oakland's Homeless Action Center is a powerful practice of transgression against class norms and teaches me daily about solidarity across the many dimensions of power and identity (especially interracial and gender justice), Creating a Culture of Racial Justice reminded me that I also need to regularly practice love-inspired art-making -- in order to feel joyful and strong enough to serve nuestra lucha por justicia para el pobre (our struggle for justice for the poor), as the old La Raza Law Students Association slogan goes.

I have a lot more to write but more has already been reported.

I will end by mentioning four mujeres with whom I spoke briefly on the last day of Facing Race.

First, I briefly saw Tiny, aka Lisa Gray-Garcia, the fierce and fearless poverty scholar and co-founder of San Francisco-based POOR Magazine / Poor News Network.  Tiny mentioned that POOR is on the move to the Mission District, after having resisted its threatened eviction, naming "development" for the 21st century colonization that it recapitulates and organizing the people to take back the land by holding a ceremony that calls upon the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.

I also caught a glimpse of Evelyn Sanchez of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition (BAIRC), whom I spoken with briefly at Friday afternoon's plenary on The Race Debate: Challenging Colorblindness with Race Conscious Solutions.

Next, I took the opportunity to speak with Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez, who was book-signing at the AK Press table and whose sixth book, 500 Years of Chicana Women's History / 500 Años de la Mujer Chicana, was recently published.  

I first read Betita's work while surviving law school: as I did at least once a semester, I left campus and got lost until I found myself in a bookstore, seeking words to nurture my spirit against the profound alienation of formal legal education.  

In San Francisco's Mission District, I came across De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views for a Multi-Colored Century, which introduced me to Betita's profound writings on mujerista and youth activism from New Mexico a California and across much of the twentieth century.  I had most recently seen Betita across the table during La Raza Centro Legal's 35th anniversary dinner earlier this year, and when I mentioned it, she told me that she recalled how I was sitting to her right and asked about my work in West Oakland and the meaning of my middle name, Tizoc.

As she carefully composed the brief inscription she wrote on the book's frontispiece, I waited, kneeling before the table and feeling ever more deeply the significance of our brief momento conjuntos.  I thought of my dad y abuelitas and my mom y tías and knew I was exactly where I should be.  

Afterwards, thanking her and moving on, I was pleased to share the book con alguna de nuestras compañeras, Teague Briscoe (an El Paso homegirl and president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild - San Francisco Bay Area Chapter).

Finally, I had the fortune of seeing Tommy Escarcega, another El Paso Tejana and long time community activist who was organizing in support of the voting rights of people in county jails this past election.  

We first met four or five years ago when she knocked on the door of La Raza Law Students Association at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), saying she had heard there were Raza law students and asking for our support of her work in Proyecto Common Touch, which she founded to protect the due process rights of convicted women on parole or in custody.   

Since then I've seen La Tommy a few times over the years, like when her project was based at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland's Fruitvale District.  We spoke briefly about her recent work on the voting rights of people in jail, and I introduced her to other TUPOCC xicanas as the conference ended.

+++

As I've tried to show, the ARC's Facing Race was a powerful meeting of what Liepollo L. Pheko, of The Trade Collective, dubbed "the manys" who remain committed to the compact for racial justice.  I encourage you to read more reporting on Facing Race.

Muchismas gracias a Renée y Aliya for motivating and organizing TUPOCC to represent at Facing Race.  We did good outreach work in identifying allies and nurtured relationships con nuestr@s compañer@s across the law / non-law divide.

As Betita wrote, "Thank you for your good work, ¡Adelante juntos!"

New FBI Guidelines: race as a 'generalized threat'

From the ACLU...

New FBI Guidelines Open Door to Further Abuse (9/12/2008)

Washington, DC - Following a briefing today at the Department of Justice (DOJ), the American Civil Liberties Union reiterated its deep concern over new guidelines that would govern FBI investigations. The new guidelines would lower standards for beginning "assessments" (precursors to investigations), conducting surveillance and gathering evidence, and would replace existing guidelines for five types of existing guidelines: general criminal, national security, foreign intelligence, civil disorders and demonstrations.

The rewritten guidelines have been drafted in a way to give the FBI the ability to begin surveillance without factual evidence, stating that a generalized "threat" is enough to use certain techniques. Also under the new guidelines, a person's race or ethnic background could be used as a factor in opening an investigation, a move the ACLU believes will institute racial profiling as a matter of policy. The guidelines would also give the FBI the ability to use intrusive investigative techniques in advance of public demonstrations. These techniques would allow agents to conduct pre-textual (undercover) interviews, use informants and conduct physical surveillance in connection with First Amendment protected activities.

Florida to enforce 'no-match, no-vote' law for Nov. election

Florida has apparently ended felony disenfranchisement (de jure, of course), but how about tossing out your vote because of a misspelling in the state's voter database? Sounds frivolous and unconstitutional, but Flordia will likely get its way (compare with the US Supreme Court's decision earlier this year re: Indiana's voter-I.D. requirements, William Crawford et al. v. Marion County Election Board, et al.
). State officials are ready to pick off thousands of people of color from the voting lines in November... you know, because our names are so gosh-darn hard to spell!

Florida Voting Law May Disenfranchise Thousands | AlterNet

Voting rights advocates are alarmed over the Florida Secretary of State's September 8th decision to enforce the state's "no-match, no-vote" law, a voter registration law that previously blocked more than 16,000 eligible Florida citizens from registering to vote, through no fault of their own, and could disenfranchise tens of thousands more voters in November.

Secretary of State Kurt Browning's last-minute decision to implement the law in the final month before the registration deadline will post a significant hurdle to eligible Florida citizens hoping to vote in November. It will disenfranchise voters who do not send or bring a photocopy of their driver's license to county election officials' offices after voting, even though these voters will have shown their driver's licenses when they went to vote at the polls.

"This 11th-hour decision is an ill-advised move to apply a policy the state has never enforced in its current form, at a time when registration activity is at its highest," stated Beverlye Neal, director of the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, a plaintiff in a lawsuit that challenges Florida's matching law. "The Secretary's decision will put thousands of real Florida citizens at risk due to bureaucratic typos that under the 'no-match, no-vote' law will prevent them from voting this November," said Alvaro Fernandez of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, another plaintiff in the case.

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.

Terror watchlist "upgrade" is "imploding," legislator says

Need another reason to oppose "watchlists," besides racial profiling? The Bush Admin has bungled everything from the administration to the coding. Caught this on slashdot, sourcing from ars technica:

Terror watchlist "upgrade" is "imploding," legislator says
By Julian Sanchez
| Published: August 25, 2008 - 12:03PM CT

The database used to produce the government's terror watch lists is "crippled by technical flaws," according to the chairman of a House technology oversight subcommittee—and the system designed to replace it may be even worse.

In a letter to the inspector general at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence last week, Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) complained that the National Counterterrorism Center's "Railhead" initiative, designed to upgrade the government's master database of suspected terrorists, "if actually deployed will leave our country more vulnerable than the existing yet flawed system in operation today."

Miller, who chairs the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, cited "severe technical troubles, poor contractor management, and weak government oversight," which he said had brought the Railhead program to the "verge of collapse."

The NCTC's Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, established pursuant to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, is the government's centralized master database of people with suspected terror links. Containing some half a million names, it is used to create more specific watchlists used by other government agencies, such as the Transportation Security Administration's much-derided "no-fly" list.

NYT: Blacks Debate Civil Rights Risk in Obama’s Rise

Not exactly a revelation, but ...

Blacks Debate Civil Rights Risk in Obama’s Rise - NYTimes.com

Mr. Obama has received overwhelming support from black voters, many of whom believe he will help bridge the nation’s racial divide. But even as they cheer him on, some black scholars, bloggers and others who closely follow the race worry that Mr. Obama’s historic achievements might make it harder to rally support for policies intended to combat racial discrimination, racial inequities and urban poverty.

They fear that growing numbers of white voters and policy makers will decide that eradicating racial discrimination and ensuring equal opportunity have largely been done.

“I worry that there is a segment of the population that might be harder to reach, average citizens who will say: ‘Come on. We might have a black president, so we must be over it,’ ” said Mr. Harrison, 59, a sociologist at Howard University and a consultant for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies here.