In theGrio this week: Holder on sentencing reform, and civil rights families in shambles

Check out my two contributions to theGrio this week, including a report on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement on sentencing reform for low-level drug offenses, and a commentary on the sad state of affairs with the children of civil rights families.

Why Clinton’s Jeremiah Wright Strategy Failed

By David A. Love
Published by The Black Commentator
April 17, 2008

It is fitting that Lanny J. Davis - former special counsel to President Bill Clinton and supporter of presidential candidate, Senator Hillary Clinton, chose the right-wing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal once again to attack Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor and mentor.

And it reflects the actions of a desperate campaign eager to use the time-honored race card, but this time few are listening.

In an April 9, 2008 editorial titled, Obama’s Minister Problem, Davis erroneously argued that Obama still has questions to answer regarding his ties to the “extremist” pastor, and that this is a problem that will not go away.

Enlisting the help of the Journal’s editorial page, Davis has found a willing and eager participant in the racial scapegoating of an African American man with a long record of service to his country and to his community. For the far-right Wall Street Journal, along with the New York Post, its sister publication, and Fox News - all a part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire - trashing Black people is their bread and butter.

This is particularly true of the “fair and balanced” Fox News, with their daily racist tirades against people of color, on the air and on their website. In a recent post to the Fox News website, where comments are moderated, one person declared: “You blacks would be naked and eating bugs if it weren’t for white people. Name ONE successful society started by blacks. Any sign of civilization in Africa was started by Europeans. Any city in America with predominately black leaders is a cesspool. Look at New Orleans, Philadelphia, D.C., Detroit…”

Another person commented: “No wonder most whites have the opinion that blacks are worthless, lazy sloths who know only how to make more babies and steal everything not nailed down. Barak (sic) Lenin Obama, the big eared Muslim, is only fostering this “wo is me” attitude with his obvious prejudices. I, for one, like my white race over that of any other, so does that make me a racist? I don’t thing so. The black man will not break free from his self-imposed shackles until he picks himself up, dusts himself off and begins to provide for himself just like every other race has done who came to this country. Before the blacks can do this, however, they have to rid themselves of the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Farakan (sic), and the good reverend Wright.”

So, it is no surprise that the right-wing media would take the opportunity to race bait. And in the 24-hour news cycle of cable television, stories such as the Wright “controversy” are promoted for their entertainment value and the advertising revenue they can generate.

And in presidential politics, the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy - winning elections by appealing to White nationalism and White racial anxieties - has helped many a politician up the political ladder. In his 1988 presidential bid against Michael Dukakis, George Bush Sr. used the infamous Willie Horton ad. Horton, a convicted murderer, was the embodiment of the menacing Black man. After being released from prison on a furlough, while Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, Horton raped a White woman.

In the 2000 presidential primaries, Bush Jr.’s campaign spread rumors that his then-rival, Senator John McCain, fathered a Black baby out of wedlock. Oddly, in his second quest for the presidency eight years later, McCain embraces Bush, an unpopular president who has waged an equally unpopular war in Iraq.

To the cynical race-card dealer, operating under the old political paradigm, Barack Obama should have provided the perfect target. After all, he is a Black man with Black affiliations running for the nation’s highest office, and blackness scares some Whites. The Clinton campaign, knowing their candidate could not take the nomination from an ascendant Obama except through graft, placed their hopes in conjuring an image of his wild-eyed, hate-spewing, anti-American, anti-White, and anti-Semitic B lack preacher.

But this time, it didn’t work. And the frustration is reflected in Davis’ embarrassing and unfortunate Wall Street Journal tirade.

To be sure, vast reservoirs of racism still exist in the United States. There are some voters in this country who do not like Black people, and will not vote for a person of color, nor anyone who is not a White man, for that matter. But given that those votes never were for the taking, let us focus on the real issue at hand. Obama’s campaign is bringing millions of new people into the process, a multiracial and intergenerational coalition of democrats, republicans, independents, and young people. For these voters, the racial buttons simply are not working. And for young people in particular, who did not grow up in a segregated America, they do not share the bigoted hang-ups of their parents. A generation of Whites who grew up listening to and embracing Public Enemy is not fazed by this notion of righteous Black anger a la Jeremiah Wright. In fact, many who have lived under the injustices of the Bush regime, the worst administration in American history, must share Dr. Wright’s sense of indignation. Perhaps, forty years after The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Black rage, justified and historically contextual, is not so foreign and shocking a concept to mainstream America. And since when did anger, filled with constructive criticism and a patriotic demand that one’s country do better, amount to hatred? It is far easier to paint the truth-teller as a loathsome crackpot - and compel African American leaders to repudiate their own in the process - than to deal with the sobering realities they articulate.

Wright said “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.”

In his rant, Davis claims that “If my rabbi ever uttered such hateful words from the pulpit about America and declared all Palestinians to be terrorists, I have no doubt I would have withdrawn immediately from his congregation.”

Interestingly, Wright’s words on American foreign policy were inspired by Ambassador Edward Peck, retired career diplomat who was chief of the U.S. mission to Iraq under President Carter. Peck’s words, in turn, were inspired by Malcolm X’s 1963 “Chickens Coming Home to Roost” speech, which placed the assassination of President Kennedy within the context of America’s role as a purveyor of violence. Malcolm, of course, was vilified in life and labeled a hatemonger, yet was commemorated with a U.S. postage stamp in death.

Rev. Wright said “The government…wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, no. God damn America; that's in the bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.” Lest we become guilty of historical amnesia, Dr. King, when he was assassinated, was working on a Sunday sermon entitled “Why America May Go To Hell.” In the sermon, King wrote that “If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell.”

In his April 30, 1967 sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church titled, “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam,” King declared: “And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, ‘You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God.’”

The Dr. King who called for a revolution of values against the triple threats of racism, materialism and militarism, was a far cry from the watered-down image of the innocuous dreamer which today’s mass media have created. In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, King wrote, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Perhaps if Dr. King were alive today, Lanny Davis would ask us to repudiate him, and disassociate ourselves from his hateful, divisive speech.

Some people say that all is fair in politics. Unfortunately, the race card has been an accepted part of politics for years, primarily because that’s the way people liked it. The politics of division worked because of the willingness of bitter and frustrated working-class Whites to act against their own self interests, placing racial solidarity with White elites above economic solidarity with struggling Americans of all backgrounds. The emergence of the Rev. Wright issue as a non-issue - and the public rejection of Clinton’s attempts to render Wright the boogeyman, shows that all is not lost, and perhaps issues really do matter.

America’s Racism is a Human Rights Violation

By David A. Love
Published in Black Commentator
January 10, 2008

In 1964, Malcolm X called Uncle Sam “the earth's number-one hypocrite” on the issue of human rights. It's nearly four and a half decades later; some things never change.

On December 10, 2007, International Human Rights Day, a broad coalition of 200 human rights groups and social justice organizations sounded the alarm on the state of racism and discrimination in America.

According to a report by the US Human Rights Network (USHRN), which includes such groups as Amnesty International, the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, America is failing to comply with its obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (Race Convention).

The Race Convention, a United Nations treaty ratified in 1969, defines racial discrimination (art. 1, paragraph 1) as “any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.” The convention is enforceable as a part of U.S. law. But you wouldn’t know it, looking at the conduct of the U.S. government.

Pointing to such events as the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, the nooses hanging in Jena, Louisiana, and the epidemic of hate crimes on college campuses across the country – not to mention continuing racism in voting rights, housing, health and education, and a hostile environment to immigrants - USHRN says that the Bush administration’s track record on race has been an abysmal failure. And the group notes that the U.S. government whitewashed its report to the UN on its compliance with the Race Convention (or lack thereof). For example:

• The U.S. government’s report, issued by the State Department, chose to ignore the racially-tinged issue of police brutality.

• Failing to comply with the convention by providing statistics on racism at the state level, the government report only provided full information on Oregon, South Carolina, Illinois and New Mexico, and chose to ignore states with large populations of immigrants and people of color, including New York, California, Texas and Florida.

• The report pointed to programs that encourage sensitivity by law enforcement to Arab and Muslim communities, yet failed to acknowledge the racial profiling and targeting of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians by law enforcement in the post-9/11 era.

• The State Department report failed to address the “school to prison pipeline” that funnels Black and Brown children into prison through discriminatory policies and under-funded public schools. And the government report dared to suggest that the wide disparities in the criminal justice system (African Americans and Latinos are 60 percent of the nation’s prison population) are not due to the effects of racist policies, but are “related to differential involvement in crime.”

Certainly, those who oppose equality and justice for all, including the Bush administration, are inclined to say that people of color should stop complaining and learn to take personal responsibility. They should top whining, stop playing the victim, and learn to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, the argument goes.

And certainly, the fox has been known to lecture the residents of the henhouse on the virtues of personal responsibility.

The Bush administration has proven itself unable and unwilling to promote equality in America, to make the land whole. On a regular basis, this column and others provide a detailed account of the crisis of racial injustice in America, and the ways in which this administration, in criminal fashion, has stoked the fires of racial hatred, trampled on the civil rights and voting rights of people of color, and encouraged the widening gap of inequality in the land of the free. This country has failed to come to terms with its devastating legacy of genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, and its present-day incarnations.

Although USHRN calls on the U.S. to address this abysmal track record and to take action to bring the U.S. in compliance with its international obligations, it does not seem likely that much can be expected in the final year of the Bush regime. Perhaps we can begin to heal the land once the “compassionate conservative” crowd in Washington leaves the White House and takes their white sheets and brown shirts with them.

America, your record on racism drips with hypocrisy. As the self-proclaimed beacon of human rights, yet a chronically habitual human rights offender and purveyor of wolf tickets, now is the time to clean up your act and practice what you preach. International standards demand no less.

Got Questions? Ask a Smart Black Guy

MLK/Malcolm X photo © Associated Press

By David A. Love
Published by The Black Commentator

September 27, 2007

With fascination, I've noted the recent popularity of these television commercials featuring the smart Black guy. You know what I mean, the intelligent, "articulate" and "clean" man of color, someone you wouldn't mind inviting to your home for dinner. In the commercial, he is invariably called upon to provide technical expertise on some complex matter, whether it involves the specifications of the latest model computer, information on selecting an insurance policy, or giving crucial investment advice.

I suppose I should be satisfied that we have improved in the media depictions of people of color, somewhat, that Black men are finally portrayed as something other than criminals, buffoons, the hired help, etc. To be sure, these ads, creations of Madison Avenue, rightly suggest that there are many Black men out there from which society could learn a great deal. However, in the real world in which most of us live, Black men are rarely heard. Most of society has very little to say to Black men, and believes there is very little, if nothing, that they can learn from them.

To be sure, there have been many who were willing and eager to give advice, but society has refused to heed their message. For example, in the 1960s, Dr. King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Medgar Evers and others had much to say to America, and much advice to give. But their message was unwelcome, and the messengers were assassinated. And a number of whites at that time who openly asserted that society must listen to what Black people have to say, were murdered, maimed or otherwise discredited.

African American men are the nation's universal scapegoat. They are the most likely to die, the most likely to be undereducated and the most likely to be unemployed. Many whites fled the cities to get away from them, so that their children would not go to school with them, or even worse, date them.

Through unjust laws, Black men, along with their Latino counterparts, are the majority of the nation's prisoners. And they comprise the most incarcerated demographic in the world, America's attempt to lock up its race problem — out of sight and out of mind — and throw away the key. In a country where each of the 50 states bans dog fighting, and rightly so, men of color are chained up and put down like dogs, and men and women of color often are not even respected as much as dogs.

Black men in particular are stressed over the badge of criminality they must bear. The nation's tough-on-crime, law and order apparatus is mobilized primarily against them. When they are born, there is a presumption of their guilt. Society places an insurmountable burden on Black men to prove that they are not a criminal element, which is why they are likely to receive longer sentences for the same crime than white men.

Even the clothes associated with young Black men of the hip hop generation - saggy jeans - have been prohibited by law in some parts of the U.S .

A white man with a criminal record has an easier time finding a job than a Black man who has had no brushes with the law. And as anti-racism activist and writer, Tim Wise notes, a Black man with a college degree makes nearly $20,000 less, or nearly half his white counterpart, while a white with a masters degree earns 10 percent more, and a white with a professional degree earns $30,000 more.

Based on the longstanding assumption that two or more Black males gathering together in public constitutes a criminal conspiracy, the Black Codes were enacted during Jim Crow in order to control Black men's daily affairs. Studies have been funded to prove that Black men possess an innate wolfpack mentality and penchant for violence. America is the department store within which African American men must navigate, constantly monitored, followed and scrutinized, and always presumed to be up to no good.

And today, we can see the intergenerational nature of this criminalization process. As six Black teens were arrested and indicted in Jena, Louisiana, facing hard time for fighting against raw racism under the "white" tree, eight former Black Panthers were arrested and indicted, based on illegal evidence, old, unsettled scores and trumped up charges, four decades in the making.

In this election season, it is plausible that almost none of the interchangeable empty suits that are the Republican presidential candidates will have any contact with Black men, much less acknowledge their existence. That is why many of them have run away from the presidential debates on Black and Latino issues. It is doubtful that a number of Democratic candidates have a clue as well.

Certainly, an individual such as Mitt Romney, marketed as the whitest man with the whitest family in the land, has no need to concern himself with what Black men are thinking. And surely Rudy "9-11" Giuliani had no concern for the many Black and Latino men who were killed by the police under his watch as mayor of New York. For this crowd — which, curiously, seems to believe it can win by playing to the base and ignoring this nation's ascending majority — policy towards people of color is of a punitive nature, whether it is war against Arabs and Muslims at home and abroad (and apparent Arabs and Muslims), deportation for Latinos, elimination of civil rights, voting rights and affirmative action for people of color in general, and more imprisonment for all of the above.

(Of course, our white brothers and sisters of meager means do not fare any better under a hypothetical G.O.P. administration. However, the regressive conservatives throw a bone to that segment of the electorate in the form of the race card, naked homophobia and criminalization of women's rights, the war on terror, the war on crime, creationism, guns, and other divisive distractions.)

The Black guy in the commercial seems to serve a role for a society that is in denial. He soothes the collective guilty conscience by reminding America of the progress we've made, and providing proof that racism and racial inequity are a thing of the past. "This smart Black guy is managing my stock portfolio and building me a computer, he's doing well, so why does he need affirmative action?" the argument goes. "The civil rights movement was a long time ago, and we live in a colorblind society, so why should this guy get any breaks over my kid?"

There is a racial disconnect in America, and it is enormous. A recent study by Ohio State University of white people's understanding of the black experience suggests that many whites are clueless. When given a hypothetical involving an oppressed minority group in a fictional country that mirrors the Black experience, whites estimated that the group deserved, on average, $1 million in compensation. But when posed the same question with regard to African Americans, the estimate dropped to $10,000.

And according to a survey by the Associated Press and MTV, 72 percent of whites between ages 13-24 say they are generally happy with life, as opposed to 56 percent of Blacks and 51 percent of Latinos. Among participants of color in the survey, the most important key to happiness was lack of money woes, while whites said that a good family was the most important factor. Further, 28 percent of people of color believe race will hurt them in their search for a better life, while 20 percent of whites feel their race will help them get ahead.

So, the next time you see a smart Black guy in a TV commercial, ask yourself a question: how much better would this country be if we actually listened to what the real-life Black people have to say?

Copyright © 2007 by David A. Love