EthnicMajority

(All Voices) Racial profiling has a negative impact on communities around the U.S., and Congress will face that reality at a briefing this morning. The Rights Working Group brings their short documentary film (top of post) and a report on the effects of the unconstitutional practice of racial profiling on various U.S. communities to the Reyburn Office House Building to brief Congress. Both the video and report urge Congress to pass the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA),

Racial, ethnic, religious and national origin profiling (“racial profiling”) exists across the country and the report finds that the patchwork of laws dealing with racial profiling is too burdensome for victims of profiling to navigate. Faces of Racial Profiling: A Report from Communities Across America gives voice to some of these individuals by featuring testimonies from the Face the Truth hearings, a series of community gatherings held across the nation this year.

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(Contra Costa Times) As he sailed on a ferry to Angel Island State Park last week, clad in the hooded, brown robe of a Franciscan friar, the Rev. Franklin Fong imagined his ancestors who landed on the island some 80 years ago.

“It takes every generation of native-born folks to recognize, you know, there’s something to learn from our own history,” Fong said. “Because if we don’t know our history, we’re destined to repeat it.”

The friar at Oakland’s St. Elizabeth Catholic Church was one of about 350 people, nearly all of them Chinese-Americans, who took a pilgrimage Saturday to the island’s old immigration station. They prayed, shared stories and sought to make connections between the plight of Asian immigrants who faced discrimination a century ago and the challenges faced by newcomers today.

“I think the challenges are very similar,” Fong said. “Obviously, the time is different. The circumstances are different. The nations providing the immigrants are different, but in many ways we have the same fears, the same anxieties about why these people are coming and what are we going to do about them.”

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(Examiner.com) On his popular talk show on Monday, Taliaferro, who is African-American blasted those in the African-American community who are antigay.

“It is inhumane to do what black people do when they approach the issue of homosexuality,” Taliaferro said.

“Why is it that black people, my people, feel they got to get up in the pulpit and they have to to condemn a very active segment of the population of our society who happen to be gay, who happen to be homosexual?”

Taliaferro is a former San Francisco NAACP president and has been a choir director for years at several churches in San Francisco.

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(Los Angeles Times) A Los Angeles jury returned a death penalty verdict Monday for a 22-year-old Latino gang member convicted in the hate-crime killing of a 14-year-old black girl and a potential witness in Harbor Gateway.

Jonathan Fajardo, who was 18 at the time of the killings, nonchalantly looked around the courtroom as the verdict was read.

The jury found he should receive death for both of his first-degree murder convictions for the slayings of Cheryl Green and Christopher Ash.

Fajardo was eligible for the death penalty because the jury found true special circumstance allegations, including multiple murder, killing of a witness, committing a hate crime based on race and committing the crime for a gang.
Fajardo was a member of the 204th Street gang, which prosecutors said intimidated and attacked African Americans in the Harbor Gateway area of Los Angeles.

Green was gunned down in December 2006 as she stood on a driveway hanging out with friends when Fajardo walked up and opened fire at the group of young blacks.

Ash was found on a roadside two weeks later, stabbed more than 60 times.

Prosecutors said a group of gang members killed him because they suspected he was cooperating with authorities about Green’s death.

Green’s mother clutched her hands together tightly as the verdict was read and later wiped away tears.

“Justice was served for my baby,” she said afterward. “I feel her here right now.”

(Kansas City Star) Margaret Cho, who broke ground with a short-lived show about an Asian-American family, has found her way back to the medium that wasn’t ready to embrace her 16 years ago.

Appearing now on Lifetime’s “Drop Dead Diva” and ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars,” the 41-year-old actress whose stand-up comedy about her Korean family led to 1994′s “All-American Girl” has returned to prime-time TV with the same tongue-in-cheek hilarity that has kept her in the spotlight for nearly 20 years.

Cho is also back on the road with her “Cho Dependent Tour.” She is as serious as she is comical – famous for addressing the pressure she felt in 1994 to adjust her weight and her Asian-ness to be more palatable for network executives and audiences.

As a longtime advocate for social justice, her comedy forcefully confronts homophobia, racism and other discrimination with witty, blunt derision. She also talks frankly about sex with men and women, employing descriptive candor meant to make audiences squirm a bit.

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(Examiner.com) While speaking to three members of Eddie Long’s congregation over the weekend, CNN anchor Don Lemon dropped a bombshell: as a child, he was the victim of sexual abuse. By now, you’re well aware that Bishop Eddie Long is being accused of forcing four young men into sexual relationships. For Lemon, this story wasn’t merely a hot topic or a potential ratings-getter. It was personal.

“I have never admitted this on TV,” said Lemon. “I’m a victim of a pedophile when I was a kid. Someone who was much older than me.”

Later in the interview, Lemon said that these kinds of serious issues often get swept under the rug in the black community.

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(KSWT) Arizona voters will decide in November whether to ban state and local governments from discrimination or preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity and sex.

The state constitutional amendment doesn’t use the term “affirmative action,” but there is no disputing that is what Proposition 107 is aimed at eliminating. Such programs generally give preferences to minorities.

Proponents include Ward Connerly, a businessman and former California education official who has championed the cause for years. He argues that affirmative action is no longer needed.

Opponents argue that Arizona eliminated affirmative action years ago and now only has programs that help qualified people succeed in their fields.

Voters in four states have approved similar measures in recent years.

Online:

Yes on 107: http://arizonacri.org/Home.aspx

No on 107: http://www.protectarizonafreedom.com/

(New York Times) In many of the nation’s middle schools, black boys were nearly three times as likely to be suspended as white boys, according to a new study, which also found that black girls were suspended at four times the rate of white girls.

School authorities also suspended Hispanic and American Indian middle school students at higher rates than white students, though not at such disproportionate rates as for black children, the study found. Asian students were less likely to be suspended than whites.

The study analyzed four decades of federal Department of Education data on suspensions, with a special focus on figures from 2002 and 2006, that were drawn from 9,220 of the nation’s 16,000 public middle schools.

The study, “Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis,” was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights organization.

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(Bloomberg) The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued DHL Express (USA) Inc., alleging it discriminated against black Chicago-area employees by giving them worse assignments than their white counterparts.

The EEOC has received more than 20 complaints of discrimination against the U.S. unit of Bonn-based Deutsche Post AG, including the allegation that black drivers were dispatched to predominently black neighborhoods, and white drivers to white neighborhoods, according to a statement issued by the agency today.

“DHL assigned more difficult and dangerous work to black employees than white employees,” violating federal civil rights laws, EEOC regional attorney John Hendrickson said in the statement.

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(Los Angeles Times) A former Justice Department official on Friday accused his superiors of discouraging “race-neutral” voting enforcement and gutting a controversial 2008 voter intimidation case in which suspects were part of an African American militant group accused of violating the rights of white voters.

Over the objections of Justice Departments officials, former Voting Chief Christopher Coates testified before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Coates said that the Obama administration discouraged pursuing minority perpetrators and instead focused on prosecuting white voters accused of racially motivated acts.

“The election of President Obama brought to positions of influence and power within the [Civil Rights Division] many of the very people who had demonstrated hostility to the concept of equal enforcement of the [Voting Rights Act],” Coates said. Coates recently transferred to a position in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Carolina.

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