Tag: race and ethnicity
After Tyre Nichols, Can They Finally Say Those Three Simple Words?

After Tyre Nichols, Can They Finally Say Those Three Simple Words?

Black Lives Matter.

Now, can everyone understand the desperate, defiant power of those three words? Can all those who tried to act as though they didn’t get why the phrase needed to be said — over and over — finally stop pretending?

After viewing, listening to, reading about the video that laid bare the torture of Tyre Nichols by an armed gang, operating under the cover of law in Memphis, can anyone honestly insist that it’s the slogan that’s the problem?

Is there anyone out there still wondering that if only protesters’ signs had read “All Lives Matter,” the police would have looked at Tyre Nichols and seen a son and a father, a handsome young man who loved his mother’s home-cooked meals, who photographed sunsets and practiced skateboard tricks?

Would tacking a “too” onto the phrase have made the police listen to the 29-year-old on the night of January 7, or answer his questions about why he was being detained? Would it have stopped the police from barking out 71 confusing, conflicting commands in 13 minutes, as The New York Times calculated, from punishing his slight body mercilessly when he was unable to comply?

When politicians call for nonviolence from those weary of being treated as “less than,” where are the calls for nonviolence from those charged with keeping the peace?

America is a country steeped in violence — no explanation needed after a litany of mass shootings in this new year. And now, the country has experienced a countdown to the release of a horrific video of a Black man being treated, as one of his lawyers put it, like a “human piñata.”

More proof, though none was needed, that Black Lives Matter is not in the training in any of the 18,000 police departments with different rules and regulations but depressingly similar outcomes.

Just listen to the officers’ profane bragging about getting their piece of the disgusting action, all while the barely conscious body of Tyre Nichols leans slumped against a police car and no one bothers to render aid or comfort.

Who could be shocked, when this kind of behavior has been celebrated far beyond the confines of an “elite” unit of supposed crime-stoppers?

America may no longer advertise the public lynchings of Black citizens — as it did in a past that is not as distant as some would like to think — so whites could tote picnic lunches and children to public spectacles, memorialized and fetishized, with postcards and pieces of bodies saved as souvenirs.

But in the first month of 2023, the Republican Women’s Club of South Central Kentucky thought it was a great idea to promote and feature as guest speaker one of the officers who fired shots in the no-knock raid that resulted in the death of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor. This is after admissions that information that led to the warrant’s approval was falsified.

When these genteel, I’ll wager churchgoing, ladies brought in Jonathan Mattingly — formerly of the Louisville Metro Police Department — to share his tale of being as much of a victim as Taylor, unsuspecting patrons of the restaurant where the event was held were subjected to the amplified sounds of gunshots and images of that night. And the club’s statement to Spectrum News that Mattingly “has the right to share his experience” makes pretty clear their members’ regard for Breonna Taylor’s life — and death.

In Memphis, the responding officers, most of them Black, obviously have absorbed the lessons on who counts in America, and have proved that something is fundamentally wrong with the culture of policing, when “law and order” too often becomes the rationale for how officers see and oversee minority communities that only want to be served and protected.

A change in how Americans view one another and how too many police see Black citizens as perps, even when they’re calling for their mothers, might be a long time coming, at least if legislation is part of the solution.

After George Floyd was murdered by law enforcement in Minneapolis, Americans marched, and there were calls for police reform. Then, attention waned. Republicans returned to a “soft on crime” attack on opponents in the other party, and with a weaponized “defund the police” charge that the majority of Democrats never supported but still feared, it was predictable that all but the most committed would back off.

Talks and action plans on police reform led by Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and then-Rep. Karen Bass of California, both Democrats, and GOP Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina fell apart in 2021, with the issue of “qualified immunity” — how much and whether to hold officers responsible for civil rights violations — a sticking point.

In a divided Congress, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) forecast future progress when he dismissed the effectiveness and, presumably, the need for any new laws on Meet the Press. Jordan, like most everyone except those on the fringe who will always blame the victim when the victim is Black, said he thinks the videos were awful.

But Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, also said, "I don’t know that there’s any law that can stop that evil that we saw,” perhaps forgetting Dr. Martin Luther King’s quote that “while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.”

If something does not change, expect more heartlessness, perhaps not captured on videos, but experienced by those who have been witness for far too long. The Tyre Nichols video hopefully will be the “this time” that will help his mother heal, knowing her son’s death made some difference, even in the hearts and minds of those who can’t imagine such scenes in “their” America.

But know that for many, those scenes were no surprise.

The surprise is that anyone ever doubted the necessity of a chant asserting the basic humanity of Black Americans.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call “Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis” podcast. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

Is ‘Ban The Box’ Doing More Harm Than Good?

Is ‘Ban The Box’ Doing More Harm Than Good?

The United States leads the world in many categories that evoke pride and one that should not: We lock people up at a higher rate than any other country. We also have a lot of ex-offenders who have a hard time finding legitimate work. And an ex-offender with no job and no money is a crime waiting to happen.

But a few years back, we came up with a remedy for that problem: forbidding employers from asking applicants about their criminal records at the start of the hiring process. Only after candidates have been found qualified and offered interviews may the employer request this information.

Illinois and dozens of other states have enacted “ban the box” laws to improve the job prospects of correctional alumni. (The term refers to the square you check if you have a criminal record.) In December, President Donald Trump signed a measure imposing a similar rule on federal agencies and contractors. These laws are particularly relevant to black men, who have far higher rates of imprisonment than other men — and higher unemployment rates.

Even in today’s hot job market, African American men from age 20 to 34 are twice as likely to be out of work as their white peers. Ex-offenders are typically five times likelier to be unemployed than other people. Their neighbors would be safer if those ex-offenders could find steady jobs that would divert them from felonious activity.

Banning the box was a plausible reform. “This law will help ensure that people across Illinois get a fair shot to reach their full potential through their skills and qualifications, rather than past history,” said Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn when he signed the bill in 2014. The assumption was that if ex-offenders could clear the initial screen, employers would be more likely to excuse their past transgressions.

But all these changes in state laws didn’t account for a powerful and immutable law: the law of unintended consequences. The evidence about banning the box is piling up, and it’s not pretty. Instead of helping ex-offenders and black men, they have backfired on both.

Last year, Jennifer Doleac, an economics professor at Texas A&M who is affiliated with the University of Chicago Crime Lab, gave written testimony to a U.S. House committee on these laws. Her conclusions were sobering.

“Current evidence suggests that Ban the Box may not increase employment for people with criminal records, and might even reduce it,” she said. “Delaying information about job applicants’ criminal histories leads employers to statistically discriminate against groups that are more likely to have a recent conviction.” In a triumph of perversity, the people who were supposed to gain ended up worse off.

The latest evidence, assembled by University of California, Santa Barbara, economist Ryan Sherrard, confirms the detrimental consequences. After such a law is passed, his study found, African American men get fewer job callbacks — and white applicants get more. In places that “ban the box,” black ex-offenders are likelier to end up back in jail than before.

The reasons for these unwanted results are not hard to guess. When employers can’t find out whether applicants have criminal histories, they don’t assume the best about black men; they assume the worst.

An employer who would hire an unskilled young African American man who has never been in trouble, but not one with a rap sheet, can no longer tell one from the other until late in the process. The applicant with a spotless record has no way to distinguish himself from the onetime Gangster Disciple.

So hiring managers may decide to avoid the hassle by not considering many, or any, young black men. Under “ban the box” laws, employers seem to develop a greater preference for white candidates.

This effect works to the disadvantage of African Americans who haven’t been in trouble with the cops. It’s also no favor to those who have. Sherrard thinks the increase in recidivism may stem from the discouragement that arises when an ex-offender gets a callback and an interview, only to then be rejected because of his past. Raising false hopes is corrosive.

Doleac offers a few alternatives to make it easier for former inmates to get jobs, including education and training to improve their skills, authorizing judges to issue them certificates of work readiness and giving employers legal protection if such employees commit crimes on the job.

But the priority should be to repeal these laws, which have hindered the people they were meant to help. Sometimes the best way to do good is to stop doing harm.

Steve Chapman blogs at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman. Follow him on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Surprise! Bigots Running For Senate In Alabama

Surprise! Bigots Running For Senate In Alabama

In the final third of his political career, George Wallace retreated from the politics of rage and resentment, apologizing to black Alabamians for his support of white supremacy and winning the votes of many of them. But he is remembered, still, as the fiery segregationist who stood in the schoolhouse door, the politician who insisted “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” His legacy is stubbornly resistant to a makeover.

White Southern politicians of the 21st century ought to think long and hard about the Wallace legacy and whether they want to be remembered for more than their political expediency and prejudices. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne, R-Ala., seem to be ignoring the lessons of the Wallace era.

Both men are seeking a seat in the U.S. Senate that is currently held by an Alabama Democrat, Doug Jones. And in a hotly contested Republican primary, both men are appealing to a right-wing Republican base that remains resentful of the social and cultural changes wrought by the civil rights movement. To do so, Sessions and Byrne are diving unabashedly into hoary stereotypes and offensive rhetoric.

For Sessions, this is familiar territory. (He is seeking to win back the seat he gave up to become Trump’s first attorney general.) He is a dyed-in-the-wool bigot who has long fought to curtail voting rights for black citizens and who wants to limit even legal immigration. When Sessions was in the Senate, one of his chief aides was the infamous Stephen Miller, now an aide to President Donald Trump. Miller has a long history of trafficking in white nationalist beliefs and supporting the views of self-avowed racists.

So it’s no great surprise that Sessions has a new campaign ad in which he not only denounces Democratic politicians as “socialists” — a time-honored tactic by conservatives — but also accuses them of wanting “open borders” and having a plan to give “free health care to illegal immigrants.” Never mind that the claims don’t bear scrutiny.

Byrne, however, is a more recent convert to the politics of racism and resentment. Once upon a time, he was a moderate Republican with a track record of working within the mainstream. Not anymore. Since Trump’s rise to power, Byrne has been busy tacking to the right, courting ultraconservative extremists, enmeshing his campaign in racially charged rhetoric.

His latest campaign ad is incendiary, featuring images of women of color in Congress and, of all people, former professional football player Colin Kaepernick. At least Sessions has the decency to denounce some white Democrats. Byrne doesn’t. He homes in, instead, on a picture of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., wearing the hijab, and attempts to associate her with terrorism. Kaepernick, who is famous for refusing to stand for the national anthem, is supposedly a traitor to his country. The ad may delight Alabama’s white bigots, but it also makes Byrne appear to be one of them.

And his cynicism shows through as he looks solemnly into the camera to declare that he will not let the people whom he targets in the ad “tear the country apart.” That’s precisely what Byrne is doing with a campaign that takes its cue from the George Wallace who ran for president in 1968, pledging to “Stand Up for America.” In “The Politics of Rage,” a seminal work analyzing Wallace’s appeal, historian Dan Carter writes: “In speech after speech, Wallace knit together the strands of racism with those of a deeply rooted xenophobic ‘plain folk’ cultural outlook which equated social change with moral corruption.”

It is quite likely that a Republican will win the race for the Senate. Jones won a special election in crimson-red Alabama only because the winner of the Republican primary was Roy Moore, a former jurist who was damaged by credible accusations of sexual misconduct with teenage girls. Trump remains hugely popular here in my home state.

But like neighboring Mississippi, Alabama has serious challenges, including high rates of infant and maternal mortality and a poor system of public education. It deserves to be represented by politicians prepared to meet the future, not those mired in the reprehensible politics of the past.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

New Poll: Black Voters Say Trump Has Made Racism Worse

New Poll: Black Voters Say Trump Has Made Racism Worse

Donald Trump is racist and has made racism in the United States worse, according to the overwhelming majority of African Americans in a new Washington Post -Ipsos poll.

When asked directly whether Trump is a racist, 83 percent of black Americans said yes, with just 13 percent saying no. Another 4 percent had no opinion.

Asked if Trump had made racism a bigger or smaller problem in the United States since taking office, 83 percent said Trump had made it a bigger problem, 2 percent said he’d made it smaller, and 15 percent said Trump had made no difference or didn’t share an opinion.

The poll comes just ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which celebrates the life and accomplishments of the iconic Civil Rights hero.

Since the beginning of his tenure, Trump has struggled to gain the approval of the black community. His decision to hire a white supremacist as a top White House adviser and his referral to neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville as “very fine people” did nothing to help his cause.

Trump has “taken hatred against people of color, in general, from the closet to the front porch,” one respondent told pollsters this week. Another respondent said Trump had “created an atmosphere of division and overt racism and fear of immigrants unseen in many years.”

In 2018, Trump referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and several African nations as “shithole countries,” saying the United States should instead “bring more [immigrants] from countries such as Norway,” according to the Washington Post. In 2019 he repeatedly attacked black Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who was born in Somalia and who Trump suggested should “go back” to her home country, a common racist trope.

In rallies and statements, Trump often points to historically low African American unemployment as a key reason black voters should support him.

“The African American people have been calling the White House,” Trump said in July 2019. “They have never been so happy at what a president has done. Not only the lowest unemployment in history for African Americans, not only opportunity zones for really the biggest beneficiary, the inner cities, and not only criminal justice reform, but they’re so happy that I pointed out the corrupt politics of Baltimore. It’s filthy dirty, it’s so horrible, they are happy as hell.”

Trump was referring to his racist attacks on the late Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, whose home district Trump claimed was a “disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess.”

According to this week’s Post poll, only one in five respondents believes Trump deserves credit for the unemployment number, while 77 percent say he deserves less credit.

“I don’t think [Trump] has anything to do with unemployment among African Americans,” Ethel Smith, a 72-year-old nanny from Georgia, told the Post. “I’ve always been a working poor person. That’s just who I am.”

The lack of Trump support from black Americans has is echoed in previous polling. In a September CNN poll, just 3 percent of African American women approved of Trump’s job performance. A July Hill-Harris poll showed Trump’s approval rating among African Americans at just 13 percent.

The Post poll also looked at potential 2020 matchups, showing African Americans overwhelmingly supporting any potential Democratic nominee over Trump.

Former Vice President Joe Biden came out on top, defeating Trump by a margin of 82 percent to four percent among African American voters if the election were held today. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) came in second and third, respectively, followed by South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

In each of those matchups, Trump never received more than 4 percent support.

When asked about President Obama, 73 percent of Post poll respondents said he was good for African Americans, with only five percent saying he was bad.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.