If Barack Obama gets elected next week, there are a lot of people who think this is proof positive that America is now color-blind, or at least that racial discrimination has been reduced to a minimal level.

While electing the first African American President would be ground-breaking progress in race relations, let’s not overreact. Should Obama win, he will have had to counter the roughly 6% of the public who would not in any circumstances vote for him because he is black. In comparing him with John McCain, it is amazing the race is even close.

Might the “Obama effect” lead to an end to affirmative action? I think this is very much a possibility. There are several examples of high-profile people of color in the Bush administration - Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Alberto Gonzales, Norman Mineta come to mind. If an African American is elected President, there will be significant pressure to abolish Affirmative Action programs under the mis-guided assumption that they are no longer needed. Several states have passed ballot initiatives prohibiting race conscious programs, and more are certain to try it if Obama is elected.

Just because there are a few high-profile minorities in positions of power does not mean racial discrimination does not exist in the workplace. Affirmative action programs exist to correct evidence of historical discrimination, and should be sun-setted when racial parity is achieved for the entire workforce, not just the top position.

LAS VEGAS — As testimony in O.J. Simpson’s trial on robbery charges gets underway this week, one thing is already abundantly clear: When the former football star enters a courtroom, so does a debate about race.

In jury selection last week, defense attorneys repeatedly tried to dismiss the mostly white jury pool and accused prosecutors of systematically excluding blacks. The allegation prompted Clark County Dist. Atty. David Roger to insist that his choice of jurors had “nothing to do with race.”

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The chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County Michigan, a key swing county in a key swing state, is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of the state GOP’s effort to challenge some voters on Election Day.

 

‘We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses,’ party chairman James Carabelli told Michigan Messenger in a telephone interview earlier this week. He said the local party wanted to make sure that proper electoral procedures were followed.

 

State election rules allow parties to assign ‘election challengers’ to polls to monitor the election. In addition to observing the poll workers, these volunteers can challenge the eligibility of any voter provided they ‘have a good reason to believe’ that the person is not eligible to vote. One allowable reason is that the person is not a ‘true resident of the city or township.’

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The U.S. House of Representatives on July 30 passed a resolution honoring Asian American and Pacific Islander soldiers who fought in the Civil War, culminating a five-year battle to help correct the historical record.Historians have recently uncovered evidence that hundreds of soldiers of AAPI heritage fought on both the Union and Confederate sides, continuing a long tradition of significant AAPI contribu­tions to the history of the United States. House Resolution 415 posthumously honors Edward Day Cohota and Joseph L. Pierce, both of Chinese ancestry, as examples of this overlooked group of men.

“The history of America would be to­tally different without the contributions of Asian Americans. Asian Americans have been an integral part of making our country great,” said Rep. Mike Honda, who introduced the bill. “I am pleased that heroes such as Pierce and Cohota will finally take the place they deserve in our nation’s memory.”

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Aging Americans, like other age groups, are feeling the effects of the declining real estate and stock markets, as well as soaring fuel and food prices. Seniors’ economic security will only increase in importance as the U.S. population ages. The nation’s health and social services resources will face unprecedented demand as 75 million people in the baby boomer generation reach retirement age—some with eroded savings and retirement accounts.

Fighting elderly poverty

Between 1959 and 1974, the elderly poverty rate fell from 35 percent to 15 percent. This was largely attributable to a set of increases in Social Security benefits. The elderly poverty rate has continued to decline in subsequent decades, reaching 9.4 percent in 2006. Social Security and Supplemental Security Income benefits continue to play a key role in reducing elderly poverty, especially among women and people of color. If Social Security benefits did not exist, an estimated 44 percent of the elderly would be poor today, assuming no changes in behavior.

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BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - A black professor at Columbia University tells Soledad O’Brien that he instructs his 11-year-old son to fear the police.

“When you are stopped, whether you have done something or not, you cower. I want you to cower because I want you to live,” he says.

The CNN special-projects anchor says black parents from all social and economic classes told her the same thing.

“It was stunning and disturbing,” she said in an interview last week. “What is the impact of that on the psyche of these young children? What does it say about our society?

“And what’s interesting to me about that is white people do not have those conversations with their children, but every black person does,” she adds. “And the gap between those two things is where our story lies. What is happening in America? Why is that difference there?”

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THIS WEEK, THE NATION’S largest organization of physicians — the American Medical Association, or AMA, — formally apologized for its history of racial transgressions against African-American physicians.

In its related publication in the July 16 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the AMA acknowledged its discrimination against black physicians well into the era of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. The association hopes that by “confronting the past we can embrace the future.”

The association’s transgressions against African-American doctors were severe. For example, the AMA had allowed its state and local subsidiaries to exclude black physicians from membership, effectively banning them from its politically powerful national group. As recently as 1954, it refused membership to a local medical society made up of black physicians in North Carolina.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Barack Obama’s political success might claim an unintended victim: affirmative action, a much-debated policy that he supports.

Already weakened by several court rulings and state referendums, affirmative action now confronts a challenge to its very reason for existing. If Americans make a black person the leading contender for president, as nationwide polls suggest, how can racial prejudice be so prevalent and potent that it justifies special efforts to place minorities in coveted jobs and schools?

“The primary rationale for affirmative action is that America is institutionally racist and institutionally sexist,” said Ward Connerly, the leader of state-by-state efforts to end what he and others consider policies of reverse discrimination. “That rationale is undercut in a major way when you look at the success of Senator Clinton and Senator Obama.” Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York battled Obama to the end of the Democratic primary process.

Other critics of affirmative action agree. “Obama is further evidence that the great majority of Americans reject discrimination, reject prejudice,” said Todd F. Gaziano, a scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Not so fast, say supporters of affirmative action. Just because Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and other minorities have reached the top of their professions does not mean that ordinary blacks, Latinos or women are free from day-to-day biases that deny them equal access to top schools or jobs, they say.

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Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., met Wednesday evening with Hispanic Republicans in Chicago.

In an Associated Press story  about the meeting, one quote jumped out at me: “He’s one John McCain in front of white Republicans. And he’s a different John McCain in front of Hispanics,” Rosanna Pulido, a Latina who heads the Illinois Minuteman Project, told the AP. “He’s having his private meetings to rally Hispanics and to tell them what they want to hear,” she said. “I’m outraged that he would reach out to me as a Hispanic but not as a conservative.”

Pulido seemed to be in a rather interesting position to talk about McCain and immigration, so I gave her a call.

An advocate and escort for seniors professionally, Pulido told me that she’s one of the original Minutemen who stood on the border between Arizona and Mexico in 2005 and she’s also Illinois spokesperson for “You Don’t Speak For Me, American Hispanics Speaking Out On Illegal Immigration.”

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Legal scholars, health-care advocates and public officials participating in the Freedom’s Voice Conference in April depicted a health and prison crisis that is limiting opportunities for people of color and devastating our communities. The three-day conference, which was sponsored by the Morehouse School of Medicine’s Community Voices program, offered recommendations on how to address many of the problems. But the esteemed panelists also sent a clear message that there must be decisive action to reverse public policies sending record numbers of people to prison, leaving those outside prison walls without access to health care and restricting people of color to segregated communities.

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