EthnicMajority

(New York Daily News) City Council Speaker Christine Quinn will oppose a bill that would allow New Yorkers to sue if they are racially profiled by cops, she said Wednesday.

In a speech outlining her public safety agenda, the mayoral contender came out against the bill to rein in stop and frisk by creating the right to sue in state court if cops  stop them because of  race, gender, sexual orientation, religion or other factors – even as she defended her support for a related measure to create an NYPD inspector general.

“I believe this presents a real risk that a multitude of state court judges issue rulings that could take control of police policy decisions away from the mayor and commissioner,” she said.

“Just as importantly, it could hamstring individual police officers, and make them fearful of the decisions they have to make on a moment’s notice, putting both their safety and the public’s safety at risk,” she said.

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(News&Observer) The group representing 6,000 Latino elected and appointed officials across the country is urging North Carolina's legislature not to adopt a photo voter ID law.

The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund wrote a letter to Tar Heel lawmakers saying the bill would likely have a disproportionate impact on Hispanic voters.

"The voter ID mandate this legislation proposes would weaken democracy by preventing eligible North Carolina voters from participating in elections," said the letter signed by Arturo Vargas, the group's executive director.

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(The Root) — The cynic might say that except for a small number of exceptional figures like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey or Michael Jordan, America is not much interested in truly full inclusion for African Americans. Any fair assessment must concede that the black road to full citizenship in America has been marked by a lot of rough patches and more than a few major detours, and in some important respects remains an incomplete journey.

To begin with, one need only think about the most recent era in this journey. Black communities and leadership are deeply preoccupied, even today, with trying to find a path out of unacceptably high rates of poverty and unemployment, as well as unacceptably high rates of school dropouts and poor achievement. The civil rights and black activist communities must, tragically, also remain mobilized to defend an effective right to vote in many places, including before an apparently skeptical United States Supreme Court. And, of course, the scourges of racial profiling, arbitrary stop-and-frisk policies, mass incarceration and an utterly failed drug war could be added to this list of major detours and bad stretches still remaining on the path to full black citizenship.

None of these, however, would be the top exhibit in the cynic's case for bemoaning the persistently marginalized status of blacks in America. No. As a number of recent reports have underscored, the ultimate marker of the hard road that blacks have traveled in America is the wealth gap. When pioneering sociologists Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro first reshaped the academic and policy-making landscape with their book Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality in 1995, they identified a white-to-black wealth gap, a ratio of roughly 11-to-1. For every dollar of wealth in white hands, blacks had a mere 10 cents.

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(Huffington Post) For years, education advocates have highlighted the dire importance of closing the achievement gap of academic performance between students of different ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Now, another group of advocates is drawing attention to the discipline gap of unequal punishments to different groups of students.

The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles Civil Rights Project, released two reports on Monday that show the increasing gap between suspension rates of black and white students. One million – or one in nine — middle school and high school students were suspended in 2009-2010, including 24 percent of black students and 7.1 percent of white students.

Most of the suspensions came not in response to violent behavior, but for minor infractions such as dress code violations or lateness. The research also found that suspensions increase the likelihood kids will drop out of school and commit crimes.

School districts that suspend students are hurting themselves, said Damon Hewitt, the director of education practice for the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund. "You can't close achievement gaps if you have a discipline gap at the same time," he said.

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(NEWSER) – As controversy continues over New York City's stop-and-frisk law, a state senator—and former cop—has testified in federal court that the police commissioner aimed to "instill fear" in the black and Hispanic communities. State Sen. Eric Adams, a police officer for 22 years, said that during a 2010 meeting, police commissioner Raymond Kelly "stated that he targeted … that group because he wanted to instill fear in them that every time that they left their homes they could be targeted by police," the Guardian reports. The court case has been brought by plaintiffs trying to end the stop-and-frisk practice.

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(StarTribune Op-Ed) Has the nation lived down its history of racism and should the law become colorblind?

Addressing two pivotal legal issues, one on affirmative action and a second on voting rights, a divided Supreme Court is poised to answer those questions.

In one case, the issue is whether race preferences in university admissions undermine equal opportunity more than they promote the benefits of racial diversity. Just this past week, justices signaled their interest in scrutinizing affirmative action very intensely, expanding their review as well to a Michigan law passed by voters that bars "preferential treatment" to students based on race. Separately in a second case, the court must decide whether race relations — in the South, particularly — have improved to the point that federal laws protecting minority voting rights are no longer warranted.

The questions are apt as the United States closes in on a demographic tipping point, when nonwhites will become a majority of the nation's population for the first time. That dramatic shift is expected to be reached within the next generation, and how the Supreme Court rules could go a long way in determining what civil rights and equality mean in an America long divided by race.

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(Huffington Post) A black LA police officer was awarded $1.2 million by a jury Tuesday for being the target of vulgar racial harassment by a white supervisor and other officers.

Officer Earl Wright, a 23-year LAPD veteran, alleged that the department did not take his complaints seriously, which caused him to be hospitalized and miss seven months of work because of stress and anxiety.

In one instance detailed in the lawsuit documents, Wright was given a 20-year anniversary cake with a fried chicken leg and slice of watermelon on top. The cake was presented to him by Sgt. Peter Foster, a white officer who supervised the Community Relations Office in Central Division, the Los Angeles Times reports.

In another instance, when Wright asked Foster for permission to leave work early, Foster responded, "Why? You gotta go pick watermelons?"

In 2010, Foster sent Wright a text message depicting one yellow duckling with its arms raised above its head while standing in front of five black ducklings, according to the lawsuit, NBC reports. Under the depiction was a message that used a slang version of the "N" word to ask Wright what he was up to.

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(Daily Mail) Two members of the White Student Union at Towson University in Maryland are refusing to apologize after advocating for racial segregation and defending slavery during the school’s Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday.

The two student group members, Scott Terry and Matthew Heimbach, took their incendiary stances while Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans was delivering a presentation at the university event about how Republicans could reach minorities more effectively. 

In the midst of Smith’s presentation, Terry began challenging him about the inclusion of blacks in the Republican Party.

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(NY Daily News) He denies being slaphappy.

Joe Rickey Hundley, the Idaho businessman accused of hurling a racial slur and swatting a crying infant aboard a Feb. 8 flight, pleaded not guilty to assault Wednesday in federal court.

While the former exec at Unitech Composites and Structures denied hitting 19-month-old Jonah Bennett, he did admit to using a racial epithet.

Jonah and his mother, Jessica Bennett, were sitting next to Hundley when she claims in court documents that the 60-year-old had been drinking and told her to, “Shut that n—-r baby up!”

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(ABC News) A black student at a Texas junior high school was the victim of routine racial taunts and bullying, including his receiving a fake invitation to a KKK birthday party to be held in his honor, his mother says.

Justin Howard, a seventh-grader at Tomball Junior High School in Tomball, Texas, has been harassed by a group of white students who bullied him because he is black, according to his mother, Tahiyyah Howard.

"I'm just, really, you know, sick of it," Howard told ABC News affiliate KTRK-TV. "A girl wrote on the board 'Black Justin' and my son was really upset."

The most egregious example, the boy's mother said, came when Justin received a fake birthday party invitation from two classmates with a Ku Klux Klan theme. It is unclear about how the boy became aware of the note.

"[They] put it on his desk and said that he was invited to a KKK birthday party with lots of fun and games," said Howard, who has not sought action outside the school.

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