Monday, May 26, 2008

Post-Law School Debt

"After the JD: First Results of a National Study of Legal Careers," a study of new lawyers recently published by the National Association for Law Placement, finds, among other things, that minorities and women are likely to carry larger debt loads after attending law school than are whites and men. The study can be found at www.nalpfoundation.org.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Trouble In Monroeville

Parents of black junior high school students in Monroeville, Alabama (the hometown of Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird) are the plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging racial slurs, segregation, and the harsher punishment of black students. The school system's attorney has denied what he characterizes as the suit's "baseless" allegations.

Racism In Sports?

Consider William C. Rhoden's column discussing the issue of racism in sports. At one time, Rhoden writes, racial quotas "were a way of life in professional and college sports. Quotas were entrenched: management was pandering to what it thought its fans wanted." Colorblindness on the part of fans reflects an "attitude . . . that racism is something for the archives, especially in professional sports, in which so many black and brown athletes are richly compensated. In fact, racism is a constant irritating hum in contemporary life--too distracting, too draining, too time-consuming to deal with constantly. Ignore the hum and pick your spots. Sometimes the spots pick you."

Spike Lee On Clint Eastwood

Spike on Clint:
"Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen. If you reporters had any balls you'd ask him why. There's no way I know why he did that. That was his vision, not mine. But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know."

Zelma Henderson, The Last Surviving Brown Topeka Plaintiff

Zelma Henderson passed away last week after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Ms. Henderson was the last surviving plaintiff from the Topeka, Kansas litigation that was part of the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. As noted by Barbara Hollingsworth in the Topeka Capital-Journal, "Finally, she saw a black man running for president. And while she welcomed the chance to talk about her place in history, she wasn't one to constantly tout her role as one of Topeka's 13 plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education."

Monday, May 19, 2008

The Birthday Of Malcolm X

Melissa Harris-Lacewell writes, "Malcolm X would have turned 83 today. Do more than buy a T-shirt."

Brown, Age 54

May 17 of this year marked the fifty fourth anniversary of the United States Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Black Smokers, White Smokers, And Menthol

The United States Congress is currently debating granting to the Food and Drug Administration the power to regulate tobacco. In seeking a reduction in youth smoking, the proposed legislation would allow the FDA to ban clove, cinnamon, and other flavored cigarattes, but would exempt from regulation mentholated cigarettes comprising more than one quarter of the $70 billion market in the United States.

Consider this: "Menthol is particularly controversial because public health authorities have worried about its health effects on African-Americans. Nearly 75 percent of black smokers use menthol brands, compared with only one in four white smokers." According to the CDC, menthol "may increase the absorption of harmful smoking constituents," and other evidence suggests that smokers of mentholated cigarettes experience greater difficulty in kicking the habit. Black men get lung cancer at a rate 50 percent higher than white men, according to another report. "One theory suggests that menthol in cigarettes, by providing an additional pleasurable sensory cue to smokers, reinforces addiction."

For more on the marketing of menthol and other cigarettes to African Americans, see this story.

Race And The Race

"I'll never vote for a black person." So said a white person in Muncie, Indiana to Danielle Ross as Ross solicited support for Senator Barack Obama, according to Kevin Merida of the Washington Post in his May 13, 2008 article. Responding to a phone bank call from a retired social studies teacher during the Pennsylvania primary campaign, a caller stated that he could not possibly vote for Obama, concluding "Hang that darky from a tree!" And this from a Pittburh union organizer: "White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people." In an incident occurring at 2 a.m. before the Indiana primary Obama's Vincennes, Indiana office was vandalized; one spray-painted message on a window: "Hamas votes BHO."

And, as the New York Times reports, 2 in 10 white voters in West Virginia stated that race was an important factor in their vote; of those voters, 8 in 10 supported Senator Hillary Clinton.

Ward Connerly's Missouri Ballot Initiative Fails

Ward Connerly's effort to place an anti-affirmative-action measure on the November 2008 ballot in Missouri has failed as he was unable to obtain the number of signatures required for ballot placement. Connerly withdrew the same initiative last month in Oklahoma, and is reportedly facing allegations of fraud in connection with attempts to obtain signatures in Colorado.

Karen Bass, Speaker Of The California Assembly

On Tuesday of this week Karen Bass, Democrat of Los Angeles, was sworn in as the speaker of the California Assembly. The second woman to hold that position, Bass is the first African-American woman to hold the position, and "the Assembly becomes the first state legislative body in the nation to be led by a black woman".

The Rise In Hate Groups

According to this Southern Poverty Law Center report, the number of hate groups in the United States rose from 844 in 2006 to 888 in 2007. In addition, hate crimes against Latinos increased 35% between 2003 and 2006.

In the "it's all relative" "good news" category, the number of chapters of the Ku Klux Klan fell from 165 in 2006 to 155 in 2007.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

The "Confrontational" MLK Sculpture

Take a look at this model of what was to be a 2 1/2 story sculpture of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. and the centerpiece of the King memorial in Washington, D.C. The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts has determined that the sculpture is too "confrontational" in character, is reminiscent of the "Social Realist style" of political sculptures recently pulled down in other countries, and must be reworked so as to display "a more sympathetic idea" of King.

Further work on the memorial cannot proceed without the commission's approval of the sculpture.

Historical Event At Morehouse

Joshua Packwood is this year's valedictorian at Morehouse College, "the country's only institution of higher education dedicated to the education of black men." Packwood, the first white valedictorian in the school's 141-year history, was a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship and will be working at Goldman Sachs in New York.

Packwood's comment on attending Morehouse when he could have gone to an Ivy League school: "I've been forced to see the world in a different perspective that I don't think I could've gotten anywwhere else. None of the Ivies, no matter how large their enrolment is, no matter how many Nobel lauerates they have on their faculty . . . none of them could've provided me with the perspective I have now."

One of Packwood's Morehouse colleagues remarked, "You don't see skin color with him anymore. You start looking more at his character."

Monday, May 12, 2008

It Can Be Done

Check out this great column on the Mississippi Freedom Project, " nonprofit program, tucked into an obscure corner of an obscure place, offering academic enrichment, martial arts, media production classes, mentoring, exposure to writers like Rudyard Kipling, Alice Walker, Albert Camus and field trips to such far-flung places as Mexico, Washington, D.C., and Orlando." Median family income in the Mississippi Delta: $25,000. Teen pregnancy rate: 25 percent. Youth growing up in poverty: 50 percent.

According to the project's executive director, Greg McCoy, "Students who stick with the program and make it to that sixth year thus far have had 100 percent college enrollment and high school graduation rates." It can (it must) be done.

Justice Thomas On Being Segregated

Speaking at the University of Georgia's commencement this past Saturday, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told the audience that, but for racial segregation, he would have been that university's first black graduate. "Forty-one years ago, when I graduated from high school in Savannah, attending the University of Georgia was not an option. Thankfully, much has changed in my lifetime. Knowing what I know today, I would go to school here in a heartbeat. Georgia is home and Georgia is where I belong." Thomas received a standing ovation; twelve hundred persons had signed an online petition protesting his selection as commencement speaker.

The "Stuff White People Like" Blog

No, seriously. Check it out here.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

The Secret Service's No Longer Secret Racist Jokes

Discovery in a federal lawsuit brought by black agents in their discrimination action against the Secret Service reveals racist and sexist messages sent to and from the accounts of Secret Service supervisors. The "jokes" included a message about a "Harlem Spelling Bee" and so-called black slang. Another message about Rev. Jesse Jackson (referred to as the "Righteous Reverend") referred to a missile striking an airplane carrying Jackson and his wife and concluded that it "certainly wouldn't be a great loss and it probably wouldn't be an accident either."

E. Desmond Hogan, the black agents' lawyer, commented that his clients were "shocked but not surprised by the late production of significant evidence of racism at high levels in the Secret Service."

Adolp Reed: Not An Obama Fan

Click here for Adolph Reed's views on Barack Obama. As you will see, Reed, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, warms up by describing the senator as a "vacuous performer with an ear how to make white liberals like him."

Blacklash

Darryl Fears' Washington Post article describes the ways in which Bill Clinton, Tavis Smiley, and Rev. Jeremiah Wright "landed in the black community's doghouse after being viewed as endangering Sen. Barack Obama's chances of being elected president."

For instance, Fears reports, when Smiley expressed his irritation that Obama did not attend Smiley's Covenant With Black America program in New Orleans, the "resulting backlash left Smiley feeling 'hammered' and 'barbequed' by black Americans." "There's all this talk of 'hater,' 'sellout' and 'traitor,'" Smiley said at the time. "They are harassing my mama, harassing my brother." Smiley recently announced that he will be discontinuing his commentaries on the Tom Joyner Morning Show. And one African-American woman's take on Bill and Hillary Clinton: "The more he opened his mouth, the more I was against her."

1 In 100, 1 In 9, 1 In 36

As noted in a New York Times editorial, 1 in 100 adults in the United States are currently in prison; the rate for African-American men is 1 in 9, for adult "Hispanic" men, 1 in 36. From the editorial:
--Reports by The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch "show large disparities in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, despite roughly equal rates of drug use."
--"Black men are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men . . ."
--"Between 1980 and 2003, drug arests for African-Americans in the nation's largest cities rose at three times the rate for whites, a disparity 'not explained by corresponding changes in rates of drug use,' The Sentencing Project finds."
--Four in 10 drug arrests are for possession of marijuana, and in 2006 there were 1.86 million drug-related arrests nationwide.
This is a crisis.

Friday, May 9, 2008

Is Obama The Antichrist? COME ON CNN!

CNN Headline News (?) host Glenn Beck, chatting with Reverend John Hagee, made the following lunatic observation: "There are people--and they said this about Bill Clinton--that actually believe he might be the Antichrist. Odds that Barack Obama is the Antichrist?" CNN, the most trusted name in news. Yeah, right.

Nelson Mandela: Terrorist????

As recently reported, Nobel Prize recipient and freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, along with other members of South Africa's African National Congress, are included in the United States government's terrorist watch lists. Describing the listing as "embarrassing," Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and members of Congress have vowed to correct the problem.

What Did She Mean?

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, quoted in USA Today, made clear her view that "Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again," while "whites in [Indiana and North Carolina] who had not completed college were supporting me."

Monday, May 5, 2008

Remember . . .

New Orleans. Darfur.

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Colson Whitehead's "Visible Man"

For an interesting, insightful, inciteful and (for me) funny take on race and Amnerica in this political silly season, see Colson Whitehead's recent op-ed in the New York Times.

On Jeremiah Wright and Frederick Douglass

As the Reverend Jeremiah Wright saga continues in all its opportunistic glory, Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell reminds us that Frederick Douglass, "speaking in the tradition of the biblical prophets," was also "a master of the jeremiad." Consider the professor's quotation of the following exemplar of Douglass' prophetic pronoucements:

"Statesmen of America beware what you do! The soil is in readiness, and the seed-time has come. Nations, not less than individuals, reap as they sow.
"The dreadful calamities of the past few years came not by accident, nor unbidden, from the ground. You shudder today at the harvest of blood sown in the springtime of the Republic by your patriot fathers."

Laurence Fishburne On "Thurgood"

Check out this root.com interview with Laurence Fishburne, currently starring on Broadway in the one-man play "Thurgood."

Pat Buchanan On Those Lucky Black Folks

In a recent post on his blog entitled "A Brief for Whitey," Pat Buchanan, regular contributor to MSNBC's filling-air-time chatterfests, recently shared with the world his view that "America has been the best country on earth for black folks." How so? Buchanan: "It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known."
Wait, there's more: white Americans have spent "untold trillions" on "welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream."
He's not done: "Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America" or that "illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?"
For those who hold (but won't openly express) the repugnant belief that ungrateful and inferior Negroes just don't know how lucky they are, good old Pat has your back.

When The Professor Sues The Student

As reported here in the New York Times, University of Arkansas at Little Rock law professor Richard Peltz, "an authority on freedom of speech," has filed a lawsuit against two third-year students at the law school as well as other defendants (including the law school's chapter of the Black Law Students Association). According to the Times article, the professor alleges that the students "defamed him by unfairly describing him on campus as a racist" after he displayed a satirical article belittling Rosa Parks, criticized affirmative action, and "promised to award black students who scored as high as white students on an exam an extra point." Peltz is seeking monetary and punitive damages.