EthnicMajority

(Kansas City Star) Calling education “the civil rights issue of our generation,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Wednesday issued a national challenge for whole communities to get involved in improving public education.

“The only way to achieve equality in society is to achieve it in the classroom,” Duncan told NAACP delegates meeting in Kansas City for the group’s annual convention.

“This is not just a moral obligation; it is our economic imperative,” he said. “Everyone has a responsibility. Everyone can step up. Education is our national mission. Education is our best hope.”

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(CNN) The NAACP has passed a resolution that condemns what it feels is rampant racism in the Tea Party movement. Members passed the measure on Tuesday at the organization’s 101st annual convention in Kansas City, Missouri.

Tea Party activists have swiftly denounced the action as unfounded and unfair.

The resolution pits the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, with its storied history of wins on behalf of racial justice, against a grassroots conservative movement that has won some recent political races and is flexing its muscle in Republican circles.

“We take no issue with the Tea Party. We believe in freedom of assembly and people raising their voices in a democracy,” Ben Jealous, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said in a statement.

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(Fox News) Attorney General Eric Holder, just days after filing a federal lawsuit against Arizona’s immigration law, on Sunday floated the possibility of filing another court challenge on racial profiling grounds.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Arizona claimed the state was infringing on federal immigration responsibilities and urged the judge to prevent the law from going into effect at the end of July. Despite some officials’ claims that the law could lead to racial profiling, that concern was not cited as grounds for the suit.

However, Holder said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the federal government was leading with its “strongest” argument in the suit filed Tuesday and would not rule out a second suit months down the road — if the law ends up going into effect.

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(Washington Post) The Justice Department filed suit Tuesday against Arizona, charging that the state’s new immigration law is unconstitutional and requesting a preliminary injunction to stop the legislation from taking effect.

The lawsuit says the law illegally intrudes on federal prerogatives, invoking as its main argument the legal doctrine of “preemption,” which is based on the Constitution’s supremacy clause and says that federal law trumps state statutes. The Justice Department argues that enforcing immigration laws is a federal responsibility.

But the filing also asserts that the Arizona law would harm people’s civil rights, leading to police harassment of U.S. citizens and foreigners. President Obama has warned that the law could violate citizens’ civil rights, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has expressed concern that it could drive a wedge between police and immigrant communities.

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(Los Angeles Times) Civil rights activists are strongly condemning actor and director Mel Gibson’s alleged use of the N-word during a recorded argument with the mother of his child publicized by two tabloid media websites.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Institute, is calling for a boycott of Gibson’s movies while the Southern Christian Leadership Conference California said that Gibson has shown a pattern of racism and sexism in prior remarks.

Rev. Eric P. Lee, president of the California branch of SCLC, said Gibson’s statements are sexist and racist.

Gibson has shown “patterns of racism, sexism and anti-Semitism, because this is not the first time he has been publicly heard making extremely offensive comments about other races, and now about women,” Lee said.

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(Los Angeles Times) Saying that prohibition takes a heavy toll on minorities, leaders of the NAACP’s California chapter announced Monday that they are backing passage of a marijuana legalization initiative on the November ballot.

The war on drugs is a failure and disproportionately targets young men and women of color, particularly African-American males, said Alice Huffman, president of the NAACP’s state conference.

The group cited statistics from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice showing that in 2009, 62% of the state’s marijuana arrests were of nonwhite suspects and that 42% were under 20.

The pattern was consistent in the state’s 25 largest counties, with arrests of African Americans at double, triple and quadruple the rate of whites even though studies show that blacks use marijuana at lower rates than whites, NAACP officials said.

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(Law.com) What is it like to be arrested in your own home and taken to jail — and to feel that it is because you are black?

At a benefit for The Southern Center for Human Rights on Monday evening, Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree talked about his experience representing his colleague Henry Louis Gates last July in just such an incident.

Gates, a University Professor at Harvard and nationally known scholar on race, was on his porch when he was arrested for disorderly conduct by a Cambridge police officer who had responded to a call from a neighbor saying that someone had forced his way into the front door of Gates’ house.

The ensuing national brouhaha about racial profiling prompted Ogletree to write a book about the incident, “The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class, and Crime in America,” which was just published on June 18.

Ogletree, who has been the chairman of the Southern Center’s board since 1982, said that America has a long way to go to become a post-racial society, citing the disproportionate number of black men in prison.

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(CNN, Andrea Lyon) Some subjects are just plain hard to talk about. Religion, politics and money — maybe sex, too. But try talking about race and then add the emotional context of a death penalty trial, and no one will talk at all.

If you try to broach the subject during jury selection, asking all the racists to please raise their hands is not an option. We, as a nation, have to find a way to face the dirty secret of criminal justice — that prejudice often carries the day.

The issue of racial disparity in the administration of the death penalty has been a part of modern law. Starting with Furman v. Georgia and continuing on to McCleskey v. Zant, courts have struggled to come to grips with this issue as have those of us defending the most despised amongst us.

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(Asian Journal) More than a hundred Asian American workers gathered last week to make their voices heard about the unique challenges that Asian Americans face on the job. In a historic meeting arranged by the New York chapter of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), workers defined the barriers to organizing, the need for improved community and labor partnerships, and shared successful organizing strategies.

“When my rich employer gave me a stale pizza, threw it in the kitchen table without a plate, I was convinced then that after the apartheid era, slavery and racism still exist in this country,” Mona Lunot, a Filipina domestic worker said in the hearing.

Lunot added that she directly experienced slavery, abuse, discrimination, sexual harassment and other violations of human rights from the moment that she left her life in the Philippines in 2000 to become a domestic worker for a diplomat here in the United States.

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(Boston Globe) When Henry Louis Gates Jr., a prominent Harvard professor of African-American studies, was arrested for disorderly conduct by a white Cambridge police officer last summer, President Obama led a chorus of critics denouncing the local Police Department.

Gates, who is African-American, described his arrest as a “teaching moment’’ about race relations in America.

His case drew national attention to the relationship between policing and race. Obama wound up hosting Gates and the officer who arrested him for a so-called beer summit at the White House. And the arrest, for some, raised the question of whether officers disproportionately arrest blacks for disorderly conduct, considered one of the most discretionary and most abused charges in the nation’s criminal justice system.

But a review of the Cambridge department’s handling of disorderly conduct cases from 2004 to 2009 finds no evidence of racial profiling. Instead, the analysis by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting finds that the most common factor linking people who are arrested in Cambridge for disorderly conduct is that they were allegedly screaming or cursing in front of police.

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