A federal court yesterday rejected the first legal challenge to a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, in a case that legal scholars view as an important test of one of the country’s seminal pieces of civil rights legislation.

The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by a municipal utility board in Texas, which argued that part of the law is costly and unconstitutional. Congress reauthorized the law in 2006.

The utility board is likely to appeal directly to the Supreme Court, offering opponents a chance to test the Voting Rights Act before a court that has grown more conservative in recent years.

“This has been about getting it to the Supreme Court,” said Richard Hasen, a professor at Loyola University Law School in Los Angeles who specializes in election law. “Conservative opponents of the law have put a lot of eggs in this basket. This was set up as a test case.”

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Nearly a decade after the Agriculture Department agreed to settle a discrimination suit brought by black farmers, one of the largest payouts in U.S. history at almost $1 billion so far, the department has yet to develop a system to adequately address hundreds of other bias complaints from farmers and its own employees, the Government Accountability Office said this week.

In blunt testimony before a House subcommittee this week, Lisa Shames, director of natural resources and environment for the GAO, said the department cannot prove that it has reduced its mountainous backlog of discrimination complaints and that its claims to the contrary cannot be trusted.

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The United States prison system keeps marking shameful milestones. In late February, the Pew Center on the States released a report showing that more than 1 in 100 American adults are presently behind bars — an astonishingly high rate of incarceration notably skewed along racial lines. One in nine black men aged 20 to 34 are serving time, as are 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men.

Now, two new reports, by The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch, have turned a critical spotlight on law enforcement’s overwhelming focus on drug use in low-income urban areas. These reports show large disparities in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, despite roughly equal rates of illegal drug use.

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The so-called war on drugs in the United States disproportionately targets racial minorities in urban neighborhoods, two reports said Tuesday.

Human Rights Watch and the judicial equality advocacy group The Sentencing Project announced the release of two reports Tuesday on drug-related arrests saying the so-called war on drugs “disproportionately targets urban minority neighborhoods.”

The Human Rights Watch report, “Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States,” outlines statistics in 34 states saying more black offenders serve prison sentences than white offenders.

The report says the average across those 34 states found black men are 11.8 times more likely to serve time in prison than white men and black women are 4.8 times as likely to be sent to jail than white women.

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Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, annually observed since 1966 to commemorate the Sharpeville massacre of young South African students peacefully protesting apartheid laws. It’s a fitting occasion to examine recent international attention to racism in the U.S.

On Tuesday, the same day as Senator Obama’s speech on race in America in which he proclaimed that “race is an issue that…this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said before a high-level panel convened in Geneva, “48 years after the Sharpeville shootings, no country can claim to be free of racism’s destructive influence.” And earlier this month, in an event that received far less coverage in U.S. media than Obama’s speech, a U.N. human rights body reviewed the United States’ record on racial justice, and found that we are in breach of our human rights obligations to end racial discrimination. After these recent pronouncements from Geneva, it’s clear that we, as a nation, can no longer deny the problems of racial discrimination, from racial profiling to unequal access to educational opportunities, that persist here.

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A group of 15 leading American mortgage lenders is being accused of racism over the way in which the banks lent money to black customers.

For decades, critics of affirmative action on both sides of the aisle have argued that the policy calls into question the talents and qualifications of the minorities who benefit from it. They insisted that it generates a cloud of suspicion around the successful black or Latino student or professional. It makes whites wonder whether their minority colleagues really “earned” their positions.

It turns out those critics are right about the suspicion part. And evidently you don’t even have to be an actual beneficiary of affirmative action to be accused of having an unfair advantage. Geraldine Ferraro’s remark that “if [Barack] Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position” was not racist per se; it did not presume racial inferiority on the part of any person or group. But it was remarkably arrogant, ignorant and, unfortunately, reflective of an all too common and growing sentiment in the post-Civil Rights era.

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For the first time in the nation’s history, 1 in every 100 adults in the United States is behind bars. Fully 1% of the adult population is in prison. The US incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world, including Communist China, with a population more than 4 times the size. The US Justice Dept. calculates incarceration as measure of the total population; by its standard, 1 in every 130 Americans is in prison, including every man, woman, child and senior citizen.

According to the report form the Pew Center on the States: among certain groups, the numbers are even more alarming: among the Hispanic-American population, 1 in 36 adult men is incarcerated; among adult African Americans, 1 in 15 is in prison, while 1 in 9 black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is imprisoned (fully 11% of African American men between 20 and 34).

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There was a time when Supreme Court justices peered into federal statutes outlawing discrimination and found between the lines the right of the aggrieved to take his complaint to court. What good was the law, they reasoned, without a means to enforce it?

Those, Justice Antonin Scalia said last week, were “the bad old days.”

The increasingly conservative court has said often of late that it is getting out of the business of finding a right to sue that is not explicitly stated in the law — what lawyers call an “implied cause of action.”

Two discrimination cases that the court heard last week, both concerning retaliation, made plain that a sizable number of justices are deeply resistant to finding such rights and to expanding those it previously recognized.

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A U.S. delegation has vigorously defended the U.S. record on efforts to combat racial discrimination before the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The committee has just completed a two-day review of the United States compliance with the 1969 International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, which it ratified in 1994. Lisa Schlein reports for VOA from Geneva.The U.N. Committee of 18 independent experts peppered the U.S. delegation with numerous questions. It challenged assertions that the government was doing enough to combat alleged racial discrimination in the detention of African-Americans and other minorities.

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