EthnicMajority

(Washington Post) Antoine Dodson’s angry, head-shaking TV interview about an attempted rape against his younger sister in her bed has turned into a chart-topping iTunes song and YouTube hit and made the 24-year-old Alabama college student an Internet sensation.

“So y’all need to hide your kids, hide your wife and hide your husband, ’cause they raping everybody out here,” the song’s catchy refrain goes.

Dodson plans to use the money from the “Bed Intruder Song” selling for $1.29 a download and T-shirt sales to move his family out of the Lincoln Park housing project where they say the attack happened. But in an era when a viral video clip can rocket anyone to stardom, some suggest that Dodson and his family are being used and that his online rant plays to racial stereotypes.

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(FoxNews) Radio and TV host Glenn Beck said Sunday he doesn’t want to retract his controversial charge last year that President Obama is racist, but does want to amend it since reading more about “liberation theology.”

“I have a big fat mouth sometimes and I say things, and that’s not the way people should behave,” Beck said, adding that he regrets saying a year ago that Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people” because it’s not accurate.

“I didn’t understand, really, his theology,” Beck a Fox News host, told “Fox News Sunday.” “I think that it is much more of a theological question that he is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor and victim.”

Beck described liberation theology, which teaches that salvation for the individual is dependent on salvation for the collective through economic and social justice, as the message that was preached by Obama’s ex-pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

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(NY Times) Mario G. Obledo, who slept on the floor with 12 siblings as the child of illegal immigrants and went on to become the founder and leader of major Hispanic-American organizations, a top state official in California and an acid critic of stereotypical treatment of Mexicans, died Wednesday in Sacramento. He was 78.

The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Keda Alcala-Obledo, said.

Mr. Obledo’s overarching accomplishment was to help usher Hispanics toward the center of the American political discussion, declaring they would no longer “take a back seat to anyone.” Known just as Mario, in the manner of his ally Jesse Jackson, he helped forge alliances with other minorities and build political power by registering hundreds of thousands of Hispanics to vote.

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(Washington Post) Social activists and civil rights leaders, among them the Rev. Al Sharpton, are planning marches and demonstrations — including the unveiling of a nearly four-story-tall original sculpture on the Mall — on Aug. 28 to coincide with a rally organized by Fox News personality Glenn Beck.

Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, with former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin among the scheduled speakers, will take place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, 47 years to the day after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech there.

The conservative talk show host announced in November that he wanted to reveal a “100 year plan for America” at the Lincoln Memorial. More recently, he said that the purpose of his Aug. 28 event is to restore the country’s “values” and to pay tribute to military families.

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(ABC News) The Commission on Civil Rights today approved a motion asking Congress to essentially allow it to take the Justice Department to court if it refuses to enforce the commission’s subpoenas and other “lawful requests” pertaining to a lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party.

In a heated, often unruly meeting where tempers flared, most of the eight-member, conservative-heavy commission accused the Justice Department of failing to enforce the voting rights law in a race-neutral way in the case of the black panthers.

The Bush administration filed a voter intimidation lawsuit against three members of the New Black Panther Party in January 2009, alleging that they intimidated voters outside a polling place in Philadelphia in November 2008 by hurling racial slurs.

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(CNN) A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Thursday indicates that 66 percent of Hispanics say they’ve been a victim of discrimination because of their race or ethnic background. Almost as many African-Americans said the same thing, but only 31 percent of white respondents who said they’ve been the victim of racial discrimination.

Overall, 57 percent of people questioned in the poll say that racial discrimination against blacks is a serious problem, with that figure rising to eight in ten among black respondents. The poll indicates that 62 percent of the public says that racial discrimination against Hispanics is a serious problem, and among Hispanics, that rises to 78 percent.

Looking to the future, the poll suggests that Hispanics are more optimistic than African-Americans when it come to ending racial tensions.

“While most black respondents say that there will never be a solution to racial problems between blacks and whites, a majority of Hispanics say that a solution to their problems with whites will eventually be found,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

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(The Hill) Shirley Sherrod’s firing at the Agriculture Department (USDA) has put the national spotlight on the agency’s troubled civil rights history.

And it reminded several black farmers’ advocates that the USDA has had to address charges of racism in the past.

Anger toward USDA by black farmers is not new. Thousands of civil rights complaints have been filed against the department after many black farmers were denied loans and other federal assistance over the years.

But Sherrod’s swift firing, based on edited video of a speech she gave — something Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has since apologized for — has reignited those feelings.

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(NY Daily News) Arizona’s controversial anti-illegal immigration law is here to stay, at least in some form, a federal judge said Thursday in Phoenix.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton, who is presiding over the federal government’s lawsuit against Arizona over the legislation, said she has no intention of blocking the entire law, though she did not deliver a ruling on the closely watched case.

Bolton did, however, say parts of the 14 sections the law could be removed, the Arizona Republic reported.

Arizona’s law, Senate Bill 1070, gives police the ability to question a suspect’s immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in the U.S. illegally.

The state’s governor, Jan Brewer, signed the law in April and it is scheduled to take effect July 29.

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(Fox News) The Arizona Latino Republican Association will become the first Hispanic organization in the country to actively oppose the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against the state of Arizona’s new immigration law.

Larry Klayman, founder of Freedom Watch, Inc., said he will be joined by ALRA Chairman Jesse Hernandez and members of the Phoenix Law Enforcement
Association at an announcement Thursday morning in Phoenix.

ALRA will become the first group of Latino Americans to “put a foot forward legally” in support of S.B. 1070 by filing a motion to intervene against the Justice Department’s lawsuit challenging Arizona’s immigration policy, Klayman said.

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(Atlanta Journal Constitution) Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said today he is reconsidering his department’s decision to fire a Georgia official in wake of new details about her controversial speech to the NAACP.

Vilsack said in a statement early Wednesday morning that he will “conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts” about his decision to ask Shirley Sherrod to resign. Washington’s apparent reversal came hours after a video of Sherrod’s full speech was released, and the director of rural development in Georgia was defended by the white couple at the center of the controversy.

The full, uncut video of a federal agricultural official’s NAACP speech purporting racial scheming, told a different story than the barely-three-minute snippet that cost Sherrod her job.

Despite admitting in the edited version of the taping that she once withheld help to the couple on the basis of race, Sherrod was defended Tuesday by the wife of a white Georgia farmer.

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