EthnicMajority

(NewsBusters) If you thought media coverage of the Aug. 28 “Restoring Honor” rally hosted in Washington D.C. by Fox News host Glenn Beck seemed like just another attack on conservatives, you’re not alone. As noted by the Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher, much of the coverage had a common thread: describing the crowd as “overwhelmingly white.”

While the term was certainly used in coverage of Beck’s rally, it’s not a new label. “Overwhelmingly white” is a prime example of the media’s groupthink on Beck, Tea Parties, and the conservative movement in general. Virtually every major “mainstream” media outlet has used the phrase in just the past year to describe conservative events.

But even as the media criticize Tea Party and other conservative rallies for an apparent lack of diversity, they struggle to bring minority voices into their own operations.

All three broadcast networks have described the Tea Parties as “overwhelmingly white.” So have CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the Agence France Presse, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Journal and US News & World Report. Many of those organizations are the very ones the news industry discusses as having failed to make diversity goals for staff.

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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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(Guardian) The demand for large numbers of Spanish translators in America’s war on drugs will come as no surprise given the route cocaine takes to the US.

But an attempt to recruit people who speak what some controversially regard as a homegrown United States language has put the Drug Enforcement Administration in the unique position of seeking translators to understand what African Americans are saying to each other.

The administration is hiring nine speakers of Ebonics – a term that appeared in the mid-1970s to describe US black vernacular English – to translate wiretaps and video surveillance tapes to a standard that will allow government agents to “follow the money” and that will stand up in court.

Ebonics is described by some linguists as English incorporating the grammar of African languages, but as it also includes many words invented on the streets, it is dismissed by others as mere slang.

Nonetheless, the administration is confused enough to ask firms providing translation services to provide the nine Ebonics translators to cover an area from Washington DC to New Orleans and Miami and even the Caribbean.

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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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(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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(CBS News) Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Tuesday made an appeal to Latino voters that conservatives are saying smacks of racial insensitivity.

At a Nevada campaign event with Latino supporters, Reid blasted Republicans for blocking comprehensive immigration reform, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports.

“I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, OK,” Reid said. “Do I need to say more?”

Conservatives are pushing back on that remark, at a time when immigration reform has become an increasingly divisive issue. It could be a particularly important issue in Nevada, where Hispanics make up about 25 percent of the state population and accounted for 15 percent of the electorate in 2008, according to the Review-Journal.

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(Christian Science Monitor) As if the Democrats didn’t have enough headwind going into the November elections, now two of the most prominent and longest-serving black Democrats in the country – Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York and Rep. Maxine Waters of California – are now reportedly both set to fight ethics charges at open House trials before Election Day.

Congressman Rangel faces 13 ethics charges, including allegations of improper fundraising and tax evasion, which were released this week.

Congresswoman Waters, a House ethics subcommittee is reportedly about to allege, broke ethics rules by lobbying Treasury officials for a $25 million bailout of OneUnited Bank in Boston, in which her husband, former NFL player Sidney Williams, has a financial stake.

Both House members have reportedly turned down plea offers for relatively light reprimands in order to fight the charges. Both ordeals promise to be showcase trials in the critical days before an election that Republicans are painting as a referendum on the agenda of the Democrat-controlled Congress and White House.

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(Daily Press) Former U.S. Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod said Thursday that a lack of diversity in the Obama administration might have led to her hasty dismissal after a doctored video of one of her speeches made her a target of conservative bloggers.

Sherrod said no African-Americans were involved in the direct discussions prior to her being forced to drive to the side of a Georgia highway and submit her resignation.

“There was no black person in his inner circle who could even talk about this, to say, ‘hey, you ought to look into this.’”

She said that the lack of the diversity ran from her bosses at U.S.D.A. all the way to the White House and that no person of color was among the dozen people who discussed her fate.

Instead, Sherrod said her dismissal came after a series of phone calls from U.S.D.A. deputy Under Secretary for Rural Development, Cheryl Cook, who eventually told her that the White House wanted her resignation.

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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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(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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