Women's Rights Employment Law Blog

A very timely write up about how the racist policies have been overshadowed by media obsessions with racist speeches. And how dangerous that can be.

Prejudiced policy worse than racist speech
By Ethan Stanislawski

If you’ve been at this school long enough, odds are that you’ve encountered more than a few people who have absolutely no sense of humor when it comes to race. Quote Dave Chappelle or Borat, and that person will not laugh. He or she may even argue that laughing at such jokes is dangerous because there is so much racism and anti-Semitism is still present in our society; laughing at a joke that invokes racial stereotypes only serves to validate those stereotypes.

It’s true that racism is still a glaring problem in this society, but laughing at a Chapelle sketch is the least of our concerns. Over the last 30 years, we’ve seen racial protest in the U.S. switch from addressing growing social problems to addressing isolated incidents of highly public displays of insensitivity. Because we’ve confused prejudice with discrimination, we’ve lost sight of where the real problems lie.

This past year we saw an unusual number of controversies surrounding slurs and comments, be it George Allen’s use of “macaca,” Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic tirade, or Michael Richards’ screaming the N-word during a comedy club meltdown. These stories all got a lot of media coverage, but the most damaging developments in race relations and nation-wide prejudice in this country did not.

In all the talk of the “thumpin’” by Democrats in last November’s election, what got lost was that Michigan voters overwhelmingly decided to overturn affirmative action and that seven more states passed constitutional amendments against same-sex marriage. Say what you will about the effectiveness of affirmative action, but it’s one of the only tools we have to correct centuries of violence, segregation and disenfranchisement of African Americans. As for same-sex marriage, the only hope for possible legal equality of gay couples has been nearly irrevocably damaged in over half the states in the Union. Compared to those developments, whatever Michael Richards or Tim Hardaway have to say seems irrelevant.

The emphasis on prejudice has been no less prominent on this campus either. Last school year, we saw a seemingly unending string of racial incidents, between the May house “straight-thuggin’” party, the Hitchcock whiteboard incident, the Muhammad cartoon in Hoover House, and the military recruiting protest in the Reynolds Club. Based on the amount of attention drawn to those incidents, you’d think black students and Jews on this campus hide in their rooms in fear.

If you want to find the real racism on this campus—don’t look within, look outside. You won’t find racism in May House; You’ll find it on the 55 and the Red Line, where this campus’s relationship with the surrounding community can be summarized in uneasy stares, awkward silences, and condescending comments. This university has historically had an absolutely shameful in relationship with the South Side, and most students’ absolute ignorance of the lives of those west of Cottage Grove or south of 61st Street only perpetuates these biases. Which do you think is a more destructive term: “straight-thuggin’” or “those people”?

Continue reading "Prejudiced policy worse than racist speech" »

Seattle Times offers a very insightful critique of race relations in the (post)modern America.

We can't address discrimination with policies that ignore color

By Kenneth Einar Himma

Many whites believe governments shouldn't consider race in making any decisions. They typically believe in colorblindness as a state policy, because they think we have solved all race problems since they don't know anyone who still believes the pernicious view that blacks are inferior.

Although attitudes about race have changed for the better, there are still serious problems of race facing us. A government policy of colorblindness not only ignores these problems, but can make them even worse.

A person can consciously believe all races are equal but still have subconscious preferences that cause discrimination. Discrimination can result from racist attitudes; but it can also result from common prejudices and preferences that people don't' even know they have.

It is common for people who reject racist ideologies to unknowingly harbor disparaging stereotypes about race that affect their behavior. This is what happens when someone immediately thinks of a young black man upon hearing about a violent crime, or when a woman reacts to a young black man's presence by clutching her purse tightly.

An important ongoing study shows that most people have automatic preferences for their own race. Project Implicit administers a series of implicit association tests (IAT) that identify and measure unconscious attitudes about persons belonging to various groups. This study shows that more than 80 percent of whites display a subconscious preference for whites over blacks. In a nation in which whites are disproportionately responsible for making hiring decisions for the most lucrative and desirable positions, this results in unfair affirmative action for whites.

Conscious racial prejudice is much more culpable than subconscious preferences. Conscious prejudice is based on false and malicious views about other races, while these subconscious preferences are the result of a common tendency to mistrust difference and gravitate toward similarity in people.

But the prevalence of such preferences among whites results in much injustice — despite the progress made over the past 50 years. Here are just a few examples of continuing race discrimination.

Continue reading "When the policies ignore color" »

"Violence against women has yet to receive the priority attention and resources needed at all levels to tackle it with the seriousness and visibility necessary."

UN Secretary-General’s in-depth study on violence against women (2006) (A/61/122/Add.1)

Before we reach another consensus on violence against women, let us examine the existing differences. For, whereas it is far easier (because it is pacifying) to share the knowledge that violence against women continues to exist, it is rather discomforting (because it is agitating) to throw lights on why it is so.

Like every year, academic and administrative reports of all kinds will be generated to commemorate March 8. After all, since we have a non-profit United Nations and we have corporate profiteers, we will eventually need to reach a consensus on issues such as violence against women. And amidst the thousands of articles and hundreds of televised tear-jerkers we will encounter in the coming month, the information overload would have done the damage, if we do not stay alert about few conditions that need addressing:

1. Suspect the Messengers: The kinds of messages about women may be misgivings. Indeed, most channels that provide news about women’s progress and violence are owned and controlled by men. Whereas it is undoubtedly true that many men are truly understanding of their gender positions and many women are too willing to play the assigned roles, it is still wise to suspect the men in the month of IWD message boards.

2. Women’s Rights are Universal Rights: Some will talk about women’s rights as a domain that applies to women only. Indeed, women’s rights are women’s prerogative only as a practice, but everyone’s concern as a scope. Just like they fool us by writing different history books for African-Americans, and the Americans as though American history does not include the minorities, it is highly suspect that women’s rights are not matter of concern for men.

3. Workplace for women vs Women for workplace: Most arguments about women’s rights focus on necessities to prepare the women for the workplace. Its like Amartya Sen saying that the question should not be if democracy is good for a country, but it should be directed towards making the country good for a democracy. Well, frankly speaking, he could be wrong. Just as JFK was while demanding that people give to the country without asking what the country can do for them. That’s the populist tone. The reality is women don’t need to be prepared for workplace. Workplaces need to be geared to serve women.

4. International Woman has a meaning: It means, women identify with each other across different boundaries. This identification has an undertone: that is, they accept the differences across cultures. To be truly international means understanding that there are differences across nations, and hence across women from different nations. There is no place for homogenization of women as one entity. So yes, White women are different from Black women are different from Asian women are different from Latina women are different from Muslim women are different from Hindu women are different from Swahili-speaking women who are different from Greek women. Women have different social locations among themselves, and hence understanding them holds the key. Let no one lead us into an essentialist notion of women’s problem. Different women face oppressions of different nature. The similarity is the most striking: that women are oppressed simply because they are women.

5. Are women human?: MacKinnon’s question is still valid. No amount of cultural excuses (from first world pornography to third world dowry) makes all women full human today. Ruling classes of the world still consider women as accessories to either their power ladder, or to their social justice tokenism. Their domestic adornment or cheap working class market value. Their television anchoring revenue system or their make-up kit industry. Just as Aishwarya Rai cannot be allowed to cry in public because Revlon will probably run into losses, Tamara MaidenName cannot challenge her greedy boss for uneven wages because he will merely retaliate.

International Women’s Day must not be allowed to promote card and gifts companies to indulge in exhibitionism of annual love to the mothers and sisters and wives and friends. It is rather a day to remind all of us in the world that a separate battle is on. This one is a battle of all. A battle that is waged by the true majority of the world, the women. A battle, that addresses the core inconsistencies of capitalism.

Damned if imprisoned. Doubly damned, if imprisoned. Thats the reality check for the current crisis that posits ethical consequences of incarceration in a country infamously holding records of sorts when it comes to imprisoning the members of minority race.

ZNet has a scholarly and detailed account:

Reverse Reparations: Race, Place, and the Vicious Circle of Mass Incarceration
by Paul Street

“TOWNS PUT DREAMS IN PRISONS”
Sometimes it's the silences that speak the loudest. Consider, for example, a page-one article that appeared in the New York Times in the summer of 2001 under the title "Rural Towns Turn to Prisons to Re-ignite Their Economies." According to this piece, non-metropolitan America was relying like never before on prison construction for jobs and economic development. Formerly, Times reporter Peter Kilborn noted, rural communities had depended for employment and economic development on agriculture, manufacturing, and/or mining. Now, however, they were counting on mass incarceration to deliver the goods. Reporting that “245 prisons sprouted in 212 of the nation’s 2,290 rural counties” during the 1990s, Kilborn quoted the cheerful city manager of Sayre, Oklahoma, which had just opened a prized new maximum-security lockdown. "There's no more recession-proof form of economic development," this local official told Kilborn, than incarceration because "nothing's going to stop crime."

By Kilborn’s account, “prisons have been helping to revive large stretches of rural America. More than a Wal-Mart or a meatpacking plant, state, federal, and private prisons, typically housing 1,000 inmates and providing 300 jobs, can put a town on solid economic footing.” Thanks to money brought in through taxes on prisoners’ telephone calls, sales taxes paid by prisoners and prison staff, and to water, sewer, and landfill fees, Killborn added, Sayre’s city budget increased from $755,000 in 1996 to $1,250,000 in 2001, permitting the town to set aside 15 percent of its revenues for capital improvements. No such savings or investment were possible before the prison, when Sayre “was surviving largely on federal crop support payments to its dwindling farm population” in the wake of the collapse of the state’s oil and gas industry(1).

A different story on the same topic appeared under the title "Ionia Finds Stability in Prisons" in the Detroit News just 12 days before Kilborn’s piece. It told the enlightening tale of how the semi-rural Michigan town of Ionia, located halfway between Lansing and Grand Rapids, had recently become one of the state's fastest growing and "most improved" communities thanks its five thriving penitentiaries together employing 1,584 workers who collectively made $102 million a year. "The state's urban centers dump their felons," the Detroit News reported, "in prison towns and forget about them. Suburbs balk at housing felons, envisioning escapees trampling through their gardens and hiding out in their tool sheds." But "Ionia," the paper noted, "sees things from the other end of the spectrum. The prisons bring, of all things, security." According to Detroit News reporter Francis Donnelly, Ionia’s “penitentiaries, five veritable Great Lakes of cash, provide sustenance to every sector of [Ionia’s] once-dry economy: jobs for residents, customers for stores, revenue for the city government,” including “nearly $1.2 million of the city’s $3.8 million budget” (2).

A February 2001 Chicago Tribune article titled “Towns Put Dreams in Prisons” told a comparable story from Illinois. In “downstate” Hoopeston, Illinois, the Tribune reported, there was “talk of the mothballed canneries that once made this a boom town and whether any of that bustling spirit might return if the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) comes to town.” “You don’t like to think about incarceration,” Hoopeston’s mayor told the Tribune, “but this is an opportunity for Hoopeston. We’ve been plagued by plant closings.” The mayor, the Tribune reported, was lobbying IDOC to permit his town to host a prison so that it could enjoy some of the economic benefits that came to Ina, Illinois when the “Big Muddy” prison was constructed in 1993.

Before “Big Muddy” went up, the Tribune noted, Ina “took in just $17,000 a year in motor fuel tax revenue. Now the figure is more like $72,000. Last year’s municipal budget appropriation was $380,000. More than half of that money is prison revenue. Streets that were paved in chipped gravel and oil for generations soon will all be covered in asphalt. An $850,000 community center that doubles as a gym and computer lab for the school across the street is being paid for with prison money.”

Continue reading "Vicious Circle of Mass Incarceration" »

A uniquely inspiring narration about the travel from the "world of religion" to the "world of reason", Infidel has been reviewed by NY Times. The book written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is poised to receive the kind of attention that Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran did. If Nafisi found inspiration in Austen and Nabakov to write about women plights in Iran, Hirsi Ali took cue from Nancy Drew mysteries to sketch emancipation of Muslim women from Somalia to Netherlands. Worth a read. At least William Grimes recommends it highly.

No Rest for a Feminist Fighting Radical Islam By WILLIAM GRIMES

Ayaan Hirsi Ali came to the attention of the wider world in an extraordinary way. In 2004 a Muslim fanatic, after shooting the filmmaker Theo van Gogh dead on an Amsterdam street, pinned a letter to Mr. van Gogh’s chest with a knife. Addressed to Ms. Hirsi Ali, the letter called for holy war against the West and, more specifically, for her death.

A Somali by birth and a recently elected member of the Dutch Parliament, Ms. Hirsi Ali had waged a personal crusade to improve the lot of Muslim women. Her warnings about the dangers posed to the Netherlands by unassimilated Muslims made her Public Enemy No. 1 for Muslim extremists, a feminist counterpart to Salman Rushdie.

The circuitous, violence-filled path that led Ms. Hirsi Ali from Somalia to the Netherlands is the subject of “Infidel,” her brave, inspiring and beautifully written memoir. Narrated in clear, vigorous prose, it traces the author’s geographical journey from Mogadishu to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and her desperate flight to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage.

At the same time, Ms. Hirsi Ali describes a journey “from the world of faith to the world of reason,” a long, often bitter struggle to come to terms with her religion and the clan-based traditional society that defined her world and that of millions of Muslims all over.

Ms. Hirsi Ali, now 37, belongs to the Osman Mahamud subclan of the Darod clan. Its members, by tradition, are born to rule, which may explain the author’s self-possessed, imperious gaze on the cover of her book. Her mother came from a family of nomads, and Ms. Hirsi Ali grew up listening to desert folk tales narrated by her grandmother, who, like many Somalis, followed a “diluted, relaxed” version of Islam that included traditional magic spirits and genies. It also required that young girls undergo genital mutilation, which Ms. Hirsi Ali, a victim of the practice, describes in horrific detail.

Somalia’s troubled politics provided Ms. Hirsi Ali with an eventful childhood. Her father, an opponent of the country’s Soviet-backed dictator, spent years in prison. The family, living on clan charity, moved to Saudi Arabia, where Ms. Hirsi Ali recoiled at the local interpretation of Islam, and later to Ethiopia and Kenya, where Ms. Hirsi Ali added Swahili and English to her growing list of languages. Without knowing it, she was becoming a permanent outsider, a misfit wherever she traveled.

Continue reading "Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Journy of an Infidel " »

Speech codes squelching campus speech, survey shows
By Melanie Bengtson

Speech codes at America’s colleges and universities are inhibiting students’ freedom of expression, according to a recent report released by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

“The state of the First Amendment on campuses is not in good shape,” said Samantha Harris, FIRE’s director of legal and public advocacy.

The report, Spotlight on Speech Codes 2006: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s Campuses, compiles FIRE’s analysis of policies at more than 330 schools nationwide. The report, released Dec. 6, concluded that more than 68% of schools had policies that “clearly and substantially restrict freedom of speech.”

Continue reading "Speech codes squelching campus speech" »

Just about time for someone like Christopher Edley Jr. to challenge the race-blind populist policies, for the anti-affirmative action amendments may be populist, but certainly not popular.

At Berkeley Law, a Challenge to Overcome All Barriers

By JONATHAN D. GLATER

BERKELEY, Calif.: Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1960s, Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the flagship law school of the University of California, learned early about racial discrimination. After all, his father, one of the few African-American graduates in Harvard Law School’s class of 1953, could not get a job in a Philadelphia law firm.

“They’d hired William T. Coleman from Harvard a couple of years earlier,” Mr. Edley recalled, referring to the former transportation secretary, and ardent defender of civil rights. “And they were waiting to see how that experiment worked out before hiring another one.”

Mr. Edley’s father went on to become a prosecutor in Philadelphia, then the first black program officer at the Ford Foundation and president of the United Negro College Fund. He was never, Mr. Edley said, bitter about the obstacles in his way. But civil rights and related subjects were the topics of discussion around the dinner table. From age 5, the son wanted to be a lawyer.

Now Mr. Edley, in his third year at Boalt Hall, as the law school here is known, finds himself defending affirmative action policies intended to overcome barriers like those his father confronted.

The job is a challenge; under California law, the law school cannot use race as a factor in admissions. But tackling that challenge was an important reason he took it.

Continue reading "An alternative discourse at Berkeley Law" »

Boston Globe editorializes:
Ideally, the nation's public schools should be havens where discrimination and poverty are overcome by hard academic work. But many public schools are dragging along, starved for books, anemic from high drop out rates, and struggling to boost students to grade-level achievement.

The full article:

IN NOVEMBER, Michigan voters faced a ballot question drenched in controversy. Proposal 2 called for changing the state constitution to ban programs that discriminate against or give "preferential treatment" to people based on race, gender, ethnicity, or national origin. In other words, a constitutional ban on affirmative action.

The choice was reduced to one dimension: Either America treats everyone fairly or it doesn't.

"Vote YES . . . if you are sick and tired of handouts and unfair quotas," one blogger advised. On Election Day, 58 percent voted yes.

A blow for education

It was a hard slap for Michigan's public colleges and universities. In 2003, affirmative action survived a tough legal fight when the Supreme Court ruled in two cases that the University of Michigan could, in limited ways, consider race in its admissions processes. Notably, Sandra Day O'Connor said that, yes, race still matters, and deliberately seeking racial diversity is still a social good. But she warned that race shouldn't matter forever; in 25 years, society should have moved on.

Then Ward Connerly showed up. A former University of California regent and an African-American, he led a successful fight to end affirmative action in California. He supported Proposal 2 in Michigan. And last month, he said he would be visiting nine other states -- Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah -- to consider launching similar campaigns.

Continue reading "Affirmatively active" »

Pentagon has concerns over the judiciary. And none at all heartening. The senior official who recently expressed his dismay at nation's top law firms, is a victim of his own motives that are suspect.

Looked from another angle, here is an official who actually wants that human rights be denied to people under the country's legal system that claims to espouse freedom and justice. Is it typical of "responsible" officials at power corridors, or is he an exception? Considering that Charles Stimson is a senior Pentagon official, either of the case appears to be dangerous.

New York Times has a detailed report today:

Official Attacks Top Law Firms Over Detainees
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.

“This is prejudicial to the administration of justice,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an authority on legal ethics. “It’s possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients.

“We have a senior government official suggesting that representing these people somehow compromises American interests, and he even names the firms, giving a target to corporate America.”

Mr. Stimson made his remarks in an interview on Thursday with Federal News Radio, a local Washington-based station that is aimed at an audience of government employees.

Continue reading "Pentagon Official Upset with Law Firms" »

An interesting dialogue is initiated by Inside Higher Ed that deals with who have the responsibility to teach America about race relations.

One thing is certain: Americans have strong perceptions — and misperceptions — about the meaning and significance of race. Attempting to poke holes in prejudices and provide the latest scientific and scholarly understanding of the issue, the American Anthropological Association has created an interactive educational program called RACE: Are We So Different? Also featured is a traveling museum exhibition, and project organizers are developing educational materials for teachers and organizing future conferences.

“We have taken a comprehensive look at race in America and have spent five and a half years pulling this together,” said Peggy Overbey, the program’s project director.

The project’s Web site presents quizzes, timelines and other interactive activities designed to consider questions on the history of race in America, human variation across the planet, and race as a “lived experience.”

Continue reading "To Teach America About Race" »

New York City is still languishing in poverty, and the infant mortality continues to be a matter of concern. And yet, this is one of the least spoken truth.
Helen Klein for Courier-Life decides to break a story about Brooklyn’s darkest shame, its dying babies.

A human tragedy continues to unfold in central Brooklyn.

The communities at the heart of the borough persist as an epicenter of infant mortality, due in large part to the fact that access to quality, timely health care is limited, both for mothers-to-be and their young infants.

Sadly, this situation endures despite the fact that there have been some gains made in certain areas, thanks to intensive grass-roots efforts at working with mothers-to-be in neighborhoods traditionally under-served in the arena of health.

Indeed, the risk of death is more than three times as high for a black baby in his or her first year of life as it is for that baby’s white counterpart, and more than twice as high for a Puerto Rican infant as for a Caucasian infant, according to Ngosi Moses, the executive director of the Brooklyn Perinatal Network (BPN).

The impact of this on Brooklyn residents is anything but theoretic. The borough is second to the Bronx in the rate of infant mortality (with an average of 6.6 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, compared to 7.1 in the Bronx), according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH).

In addition, Moses stressed, six of the 10 community districts in the city with the highest infant mortality rates are in Brooklyn, with five in central Brooklyn. “Some parts have had improvements, but not what we would like to see,” noted Moses.

Even more frightening, while New York City infant mortality rates have decreased overall (to 6.1 per 1,000 live births in 2004, a six percent reduction from 2003), the rate for black infants has risen, particularly in certain neighborhoods, Moses said.

“One of our big concerns is that national trends in black infant mortality went up, and it also went up in New York City,” she explained. “We have seen disparities increase from two-fold to three-fold.”

Increasing Disparity

Using DOHMH statistics from 2004, Moses pointed out that the disparity in infant mortality rate between blacks and whites, “Has been increasing over the past four years as blacks’ infant mortality rate increased by 16 percent while the white infant mortality rate declined by almost the same amount (15 percent) over the same period.”

Continue reading "Brooklyn's darkest shame: Its dying babies" »

Click on the picture to visit the irrepressible Mark Fiore's Annual "Twelve Days of Whoopsmas!" Happy New Year, 2007.

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

According to the National Priorities Project, which maintains a cost-of-war counter, as of today, the disgraceful Iraqi occupation has cost us 354 billion dollars and counting. If we wanted to use the money differently, we could have medically insured 212 million children for a year, hired over 6 million public school teachers, built over 3 million additional housing units, provided over 17 million four year college scholarships for deserving youth. In today's New York Times, Michael Wines reports an all too familiar story that we regularly read, cluck our tongues while eating our breakfast cereal and promptly forget in our mad rush to keep up with the bills and our kids' extracurricular soccer schedules. So--a brief New Year's reminder of how wacked-out we all are in our priorities as individuals, as a nation, as a species.

According to the article, 10,000 children under the age of five died last year in Ethiopia alone from malnutrition-related causes. Imagine the gut-wrenching awfulness of being one of those kids' parents, let alone what's it's like to be one of the many dying children. Possibly worse, almost half of Ethiopia's children are malnourished, and most don't die. Instead, they grow up sickly, weak and physically and intellectually stunted in a land that runs on manual labor. "Their hunger is neither a temporary inconvenience nor a quick death sentence. Rather, it is a chronic, lifelong, irreversible handicap that scuttles their futures and cripples Ethiopia's hopes to join the developed world." And Ethiopia has one of the most comprehensive programs on the continent to alleviate starvation.

We can all point to profound impoverishment, slavery, sex-selective violence, religious war carnage, speciesism, global deforestation and genocide to rationalize our collective inertia: the planet earth has always been a place of pervasive suffering and a brief, hardscrabble life for most of its inhabitants since we modern homo sapiens first walked upright out of our caves a mere 150,000 years ago. In geologic time, that's a blink of an eye but more than enough time for us to screw up the planet and create such ravishingly impressive inequities among ourselves that most of the world lives still lives in misery and despair, we've killed 260 million of our own men, women and children up to and excluding the atrocities of the 20th century (according to Professor Emeritus of Political Science Rudolf Rummel of the University of Hawaii) and all of it in the equally obscene and spiritually indefensible names of organized religion and power accumulation in one form or another.

Yet we continue as a nation to blithely accept the perverted corruption that passes for policy that is our current leadership (informed as it is by our own apathy, lethargia and culture of indulgence), because we only see the world through the prism of our consumer-driven, might-makes-right, jingoistic American lens. So, Goldman Sachs financial traders rake in record bonuses (average $650,000.00 per man--almost all of them men--what do these people actually do for a living--I always forget--how do they add value commensurate with these windfalls?)--while homelessness surges, 5 million US kids don't have health insurance and the rich pols in Washington again vote down a raise in the minimum wage so working people can actually earn a "living" wage. How many children might be saved in Africa--how much civilization could we purchase internationally and domestically for the rapidly increasing $354,000,000,000.00 it's cost us so far to perpetrate an illegal war on a blameless people, killing, maiming and destroying the infrastructure of a beautiful and ancient civilization, unleashing all holy hell in the process, minting thousands of righteously driven new terrorists and cultivating an international revulsion for our barbarous and piratical ways, and all with nary a high-level decision making, unelected rich person being held accountable. Nobody. Nothing. Oh well. Fast fade to commercial then back for more "reality" television viewing to distract us from reality.

One day--there'll be a backlash. Given our corporate media's penchant for serving its hegemonous, insatiable, unidimensional, ethically-compromised masters we can't expect the truth to make it through that US-currency-driven vetting process. Ultimately, the righteous anger of the world's dispossessed (and their conscious supporters everywhere) will move the earth to a place of less abject suffering and more true intelligence-driven-equality for all of us as well as this sorely abused old planet. It may take a cataclysm of sorts (full-blown economic depression, nuclear terrorism, global warming catastrophe, etc.) to catalyze such times but indeed it's coming. In the interim, we'd all serve our progeny if we daily asked ourselves what we can do to speak truth to power, to serve and empower the powerless, in whatever form that may take, and to question authority relentlessly with a view toward righting some fundamental wrongs, before it's too late--before we find ourselves, in the words of Bill Maher, totally screwed, blued and tattooed.

The complete story from NYT:

Malnutrition Is Cheating Its Survivors, and Africa’s Future

Continue reading "Our indifference, their malnutrition" »

The colorblind anti-affirmative action crusader is on the prowl. And this time, he aims at 9 more states to replicate what Washington, California and Michigan have done in recent past to ignore the need to consider race and gender as decisive factors in American life.

For Ward Connerly, the architect of reversal in the 1954 desegregation ruling, recent triumph in Michigan came about even as it houses 80% whiter, 14% black, 2.3% Asian American and 3.8% Latino population. And this man’s famous opening line: "It is not essential that black kid sits next to white kid. That's where we went wrong with Brown vs. Board.”

San Francisco Chronicle interviews Connerly about his wider crusade:

Connerly gearing up for wider crusade: Affirmative action foe considers launching campaigns in 9 states

Leslie Fulbright, Chronicle Staff Writer

Ward Connerly, the anti-affirmative action crusader who helped persuade voters to ban race and gender from consideration in public hiring, contracting and school admissions in California, Washington and Michigan, said Wednesday he is exploring moves into nine other states.

The former University of California regent, whose campaign first saw success in 1996 with Proposition 209 in California, seems to be following through on his often-repeated promise that he will persist until affirmative action is banned nationwide.

Connerly said he will visit Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Wyoming and Utah over the next 60 days and then decide how many campaigns to launch.

Twenty-three states have systems for putting laws directly before voters in the form of ballot initiatives.

"Three down and 20 to go," Connerly said during a conference call. "We don't need to do them all, but if we do a significant number, we will have demonstrated that race preferences are antithetical to the popular will of the American people."

Continue reading "Connerly gearing up for wider crusade" »

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Posted In: Discrimination, News, Politics, Race

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As the Brown v. Board of Education is being revisited in a manner that may lay a foundation for "discrimination" to be perceived entirely from different lenses than ever before, two major strands of opinion develop.

One hints at the positive outcome of integration that should uphold the judgments. The other categorically refutes the need of the judgments (even while being considered as noble) to sway official policies, as long as people make voluntary decisions to segregate, if one may call it thus.

But, I think both major opinions leave out a significant “other” question: Is the so-called voluntary segregation a natural outcome of human preferences as now being adjudged, or is it thus, as a result of an effete, ineffective and reactionary tradition of official policies that have alienated the racial categories of people so much as to install distrusts among themselves?

If the latt