We Are a Nation of Bullies

Rush Limbaugh's years of bullying may have finally caught up with him. His vicious attack on Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student, was over the top even by Limbaugh's standards. Calling the young woman a "slut" and a "prostitute" for supporting health insurance coverage for contraception has cost the on-air personality and full-time blowhard a number of advertisers, and many hope his radio program as well.

Another conservative personality -- blogger, editor and publisher Andrew Breitbart -- met an untimely passing just days ago. Praised by the right as a hero who stood up for what he believed in, there is no question he was a warrior for his cause, and was very good at what he did. Meanwhile, African Americans, progressives and others will not fail to mention that Breitbart employed methods of deception and dishonesty to bring about the downfall of ACORN. And he ruined the reputation and career of USDA official and civil rights activist Shirley Sherrod by doctoring a video of a speech she made, falsely portraying her as a hater of white people.

This nation has a love-hate relationship with bullies. In one breath, society condemns bullying. And yet our society thrives on it, encourages it and glorifies it.

America names buildings after its bullies. Take J. Edgar Hoover, one of America's most notorious villains. The FBI chief destroyed social justice movements, and led a campaign to "prevent the rise of a black Messiah" through his COINTELPRO program. According to one of his purported black relatives, he was also a black man passing for white. Now, that adds a new layer of complexity to his bullying, if it doesn't actually provide a context to his motivation in declaring a war on black America.

A problem among young people, bullying is a cause of teen suicides and schoolhouse shootouts. First, there is outrage and sadness, then silence, as people resume their daily lives until the next tragedy occurs.

Politicians make a lucrative career out of bullying low income and working people for not being rich, women for wanting control over their own bodies, and Latino immigrants for having brown skin and speaking Spanish.

Bullies make sure that other bullies have as many guns as they want, at home or abroad, making it far easier to shoot someone than to vote for someone. By the way, voter ID laws are a form of bullying against people of color, the poor, students and the disabled.

In today's rancorous political discourse, bullies are afraid of change and want to impose their will. So they rewrite the textbooks to wipe out Latino studies and all traces of the civil rights movement, and would refight the Civil War to get another shot at victory -- a century-and-a-half after the fact. The nation of their dreams is 100 percent white and fully Christian -- but in a Talibanic sense, where women are subservient and powerless -- so they enact legislation to ban Sharia law and monitor women's reproductive organs.

Bullies called police officers brutalize and pepper spray protestors practicing nonviolent civil disobedience, and spy on Muslim students outside of their jurisdiction. These bullies frame people for crimes they didn't commit, and beat scripted confessions out of them. Bullies also known as district attorneys coerce innocent people into taking a plea. Sometimes, they even send innocent people to death row --just to score more points on the tally sheet -- and never have to pay for their crimes.

Now is the time that we all must stand up to these bullies, for our own sake and for America's future.

It's the Old South vs. the New South

The American South can't seem to shake off the Civil War.  Or Jim Crow.  And yet, that region of the U.S. is undergoing some dramatic changes.  How the South responds to these changes will determine how easily it will enter the modern world and usher out the racial demons of its past.

Latinos are on the rise in the new South, with the nation's fastest growing Hispanic populations in the states of the former Confederacy.  Georgia and North Carolina are now among the ten largest Latino communities in the nation.

Further, African Americans are coming back home to the region, reflecting the nation's largest demographic shift.  The South now has its highest share of black folks in half a century.  As northern states and California have witnessed a loss in their black populations, Atlanta has gained half a million black people in a decade.  The largest black city after New York is no longer Chicago, it is Atlanta.

The migration of Latinos and the reverse migration of blacks mean that people of color are poised to become a majority in some areas of the South, as is the case in Texas.  Add to that the influx of white professionals and high-tech workers in states such as North Carolina -- a red state that Obama turned blue in 2008 -- and you have the makings of noticeable change.

Then again, you have Alabama.  After the state enacted the harshest anti-immigration law in the land, Latinos are leaving Alabama.  Now, farmers are hoping to replace migrant workers with prisoners to work the fields because, after all, we know how forced agricultural labor worked out the first time around.

Alabama, as an aside, has a majority black prison population.  African-Americans are 27 percent of the population and 63 percent of the prisoners.   The state is 23rd in the nation in population, but was second in the number of executions in 2011.  And over the past decade, nearly two dozen death penalty cases were overturned because prosecutors illegally struck black jurors.

Last year, like Alabama, South Carolina also passed its own bad anti-immigration law -- modeled after Arizona's SB 1070 -- key parts of which were thrown out by a federal judge in Charleston.  And the U.S. Department of Justice blocked the state's new voter ID law, which would require voters to present a photo idea at the polls, and discriminate against racial minorities in the process.  Under the Voting Rights Act, states such as South Carolina and Texas, because of their history of racial discrimination, require federal approval of any changes to their election laws.

The old South meets the new, as South Carolina's Governor Nikki Haley signed both of these cruel, atrocious pieces of legislation into law, and vows to fight in court to have them upheld.  Governor Haley is the children of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India.  The Sikh-American community has endured its share of discrimination in the post-911 era, branded as terrorists and persecuted for the traditional turban and beard worn by Sikh men. 

And so, a woman of South Asian ancestry, a person of color and darling of the Tea Party, has chosen to channel the angry white segregationist governors that came before her.  Some names that come to mind are George Wallace of Alabama, who stood in the schoolhouse door to block black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama; Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi, who kept blacks from voting, and Ross Barnett, who denied James Meredith, an African-American, admission to the University of Mississippi. 

Haley's policies, not unlike those of her predecessors, are the unjust laws that Martin Luther King discussed in Letter from Birmingham Jail.  As King said, "Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. ... An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal."

Even today, such laws are designed to keep communities of color isolated, scared and disempowered, down and out of the process.  That the dominant party in the South has changed its affiliation from Democratic to Republican since the Civil Rights era really is beside the point.  The old mentality remains.  We're talking old South vs. new South, a steadfast resistance to civil rights, and clinging to a segregationist mindset, even well into the twenty-first century.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, a black man named Troy Davis was executed last year under the rules of the old South -- a justice system of mob rule, in which racial vengeance and scapegoating take precedence over guilt or innocence.  In the end, what mattered was not the evidence pointing to Davis's innocence, or the seven out of nine witnesses who recanted or changed their testimony, but rather that the victim was a white police officer and Davis was a black man.    

Although I was born and raised in New York and now live in Philadelphia, I always regarded the South as a second home, if not something of an ancestral homeland.  My mother was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and my late father was from Augusta, Georgia.  I have lots of family there, not to mention fond childhood memories of visiting cousins.  Many good people in the South, to be sure, but there's a great deal of ugly in the South. 

The problem arises when some people can't pick a century to live in and stick with it.   

Arizona Goddamn

(Click HERE to listen to my January 13 interview on "Make It Plain" with Mark Thompson on Sirius/XM Radio)

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said it all.  "We have become the mecca for racism and bigotry," Dupnik said of the political climate in his state of Arizona.  Of course the sheriff was referring to the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) in Tucson.  Jared Lee Loughner went on a shooting spree in front of a grocery store, wounding at least 18 people, including Giffords his intended target, and killing six, including U.S. District Court Judge John Roll and a 9-year-old girl born on 9-11.  "Mein Kampf" was reportedly listed as one of Loughner's favorite books.

According to Dupnik, the gunman did not act alone.  And he said what needed to be said about this senseless act of violence and the larger implications for Arizona and our nation as a whole.  "It's time to do a little soul searching about the rhetoric we hear on the radio, how our children are being raised," he added.

Contrast this with the empty words of Governor Jan Brewer.  Calling the shooting "this senseless and cruel violence," Brewer said she is "heartbroken," adding that "all of Arizona is shocked and deeply saddened by the horrific tragedy that transpired this morning in Tucson."  Now, I do not claim to know what is in Brewer's mind, nor do I question whether she might actually show genuine sadness for the victims.  That is not the point.  Rather, Governor Brewer is part of the problem in Arizona.  And when you contribute to a harsh political climate full of vitriol, hatred and scapegoating, your words ring hollow when you later condemn those violent acts that climate produced.

Arizona is ground zero for hatred and intolerance in America.  Brewer signed SB1070 into law, which allows for the racial profiling of Latinos and those suspected of being undocumented aliens.  It is a pure public policy expression of racial hatred and intolerance, and was drafted by an anti-immigrant hate group, with input from the private prison lobby.  In addition, Russell Pearce, the bill's cosponsor in the Arizona state senate, has ties to white supremacist groups.  Similar in spirit to SB1070 is Arizona's new ethnic studies ban, which the state legislature passed and Brewer signed into law.  The law prohibits the teaching of Mexican-American studies in the Tucson public schools and throughout the state--even as similar courses in Asian, black and Native American studied remain unaffected by the ban.  Schools will lose funding if they dare to teach Chicano studies in Arizona, and that's a crime unto itself.  

This codification of hate is made possible in a state such as Arizona, where a climate of anti-immigrant sentiment emboldens those who would take matters into their own hands.  Lax gun laws don't exactly help things, either.  Arizona allows almost everyone who passes a federal background check to buy a gun, and a new law allows people to carry concealed weapons without a permit.  Really?

Opportunistic and unscrupulous politicians such as Jan Brewer never have to raise a fist to contribute to a climate of violence.  They don't have to own or use a gun, or wish anyone harm.  Similarly, the Southern Dixiecrats who hoped to preserve segregation kept their hands clean, as did the White Citizens Councils, also known as the "white-collar Klan."  But through their rhetoric, these politicians gave a wink and a nod to those unbalanced, hate-filled members of the unwashed masses who have no qualms about using their gun to assassinate someone.  

On the national scene, the anti-Obama rhetoric of the Birther and Tea Party movements encourages death threats against the President, and the carrying of loaded weapons to Obama events.  Some political candidates such as Nevada Sharron Angle stir the pot when they call for "Second Amendment" remedies if they don't get what they want.  Meanwhile, some congressional lawmakers openly question the President's citizenship and legitimacy, dangerously crossing the line and going far beyond an honest disagreement over policies.

"There has never been one unkind, angry or cross word come between us," said Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) of his colleague Giffords.  Calling the assailant "either deranged or evil beyond words" and concluding that "someone has stepped out of bounds of humanity," Giffords added that Giffords is "a precious, decent human being and this tragedy is beyond my ability to articulate. ...She was just out there doing her job."  And yet, while Franks certainly must appreciate the security risks and threats of physical violence public figures face, he has participated in venomous attacks against President Obama.  Franks called President Obama an "enemy of humanity," and his stance on abortion "insane" and godless.  He once demanded that Obama release his birth certificate to prove his citizenship and eligibility to hold the office.  At a town hall meeting Rep. Franks said he was terrified of Obama, and came within three days of filing an Obama citizenship lawsuit.    

Giffords--a moderate who happens to be the first Jewish congresswoman from Arizona-- has been no stranger to threats.  Her office was vandalized, and she received death threats after voting for the health reform package.  On her Facebook page, Sarah Palin targeted 20 House Democrats, including Giffords, with a map featuring 20 gun sights.  Palin has been scrubbing those graphics from her website, the way you try to put toothpaste back in a tube.  Moreover, in June 2010, Gifford's Tea Party opponent Jesse Kelly hosted a campaign event to "Get on Target for Victory in November," "Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office" and "Shoot a fully automatic M15 with Jesse Kelly."  And Judge Roll was a target of death threats from the far right, receiving 200 threatening phone calls in one afternoon.

Looking at all of this from a purely political vantage point, the shooting puts a crimp in the plans of Congressional Republicans.  Thriving on the politics of scapegoating, GOP lawmakers seek whipping boys to detract attention from their conservative policies of upward wealth redistribution.  They throw red meat to uneducated whites in their base by blaming Muslims, Mexican immigrants, gay marriage and black and Latino homeowners for America's woes.  Before the Giffords shooting, Republicans in Congress started to tar and feather public unions as the cause of our problems.  And attack dog Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) had plans to vilify President Obama, using the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to wage a witch hunt of investigations against the administrations.  Issa is a Lebanese-American, and his party routinely depicts the President as an Arab and Muslim terrorist.

There's an old saying that God don't like ugly.  Well, there's a lot of ugly coming out of Arizona.  The state is in a bad way.  In the middle of the desert, Arizona languishes in a sea of putrid waters.  And yet, Arizona is very American.

Repeal of 14th Amendment is un-American

From The Progressive:

The call by some conservative lawmakers to repeal the 14th Amendment represents the worst of America.At a time of economic hardship when we should be uniting people and making them whole, such an idea will only serve to sow the seeds of hate and division.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., — who does not think that the children of undocumented immigrants should automatically become citizens — has proposed a piece of legislation to begin repealing the amendment. And Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., has called for hearings into the matter.

Adopted on July 9, 1868, and championed by the so-called “Radical Republicans” in Congress, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution grants citizenship as a birthright. The citizenship clause states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

This clause was important because it thwarted attempts by Southern states to deny citizenships to former slaves.

But little of these details on the history or the importance of the 14th Amendment mean much to those who would repeal it. Rather, they only seem to care about scoring political points.

And while they could develop positive solutions in the area of immigration reform, they choose to divide people along lines of color, race, ethnicity, class, language and national origin.

In the current economic recession, people are in despair and are looking for scapegoats. People blame immigrants — particularly Latinos and undocumented workers — for losing their jobs and livelihoods. Patriot and militia groups patrol the border and harass and threaten Latinos. And while hate groups and the tea party movement exploit these insecurities, some unscrupulous lawmakers are trying to codify this hatred.

This is such a bad idea that even Lou Dobbs disagrees with it.

“I part ways with the senators on that because I believe the 14th Amendment, particularly in its due process and equal protection clauses, is so important,” Dobbs said. “It lays the foundation for the entire Bill of Rights being applied to the states.”

Giving away the 14th Amendment is giving up on America. Citizenship should remain a birthright in this nation of immigrants. But that right was a secured only by fighting a bloody Civil War and overcoming a brutal legacy of slavery.

Sadly, some people want us to turn the clock back to the antebellum days.

Dysfunctional Politics Begets Suicidal Policies

America is in a whole lotta trouble, but I'm not telling you anything you didn't already know.

We unleash the so-called free market, and then once that free market has destroyed millions of lives and livelihoods, government must come to the rescue to save the system from itself.  And once the oil company despoils the oceans with millions of gallons of black goop, or the criminally greedy mining company allows its workers to perish in an unsafe mine, government must intervene to restore a regulatory framework and rein in corporate excess.

And yet, the guardians of the status quo would seemingly fight reform, even if it meant bringing down the entire country.

The standoff in the Senate over the extension of unemployment benefits is a perfect example of the depths of the problem.  To be sure, they did pass unemployment benefits for the 2.5 million people whose checks ran out in May.  But there will be another standoff in the months to come.  And the fundamentals of the political dysfunction will be the same.

In a normal world, helping out distressed families in a virtual depression is a no-brainer.  It is the right thing to do from a moral standpoint, but it also makes good sense to use unemployment benefits to help stimulate an anemic economy.

But Congress, particularly in the Senate side, is being held hostage by a minority party that clings to a failed economic philosophy known as trickle-down economics.  This is the theory that if you give the wealthy more money in the form of tax cuts, subsidies, corporate welfare and the like, those benefits will trickle down to the lower rungs of the population, and everyone will be happy and prosper in the end.  Remember the Reagan years?  In simpler lay terms, trickle down is also known as theft.

That is what the $1.6 trillion in Bush tax cuts have amounted to--theft of the middle and working classes, the poor, and everyone else at the bottom.  The top 1 percent now owns about 35 percent of America's wealth, and the top 20 percent owns 85 percent.

This gross disparity was exacerbated by horrendous policies such as the Bush tax cuts, of which half went to the top 5 percent of U.S. households, while the bottom 60 percent of Americans received a mere 15 percent of the leftovers.  No investment, no economic growth, no jobs--just highway robbery, the way it was meant to be in the first place.

The Republican party faithful care little about the lives of everyday people. But they do care about their corporate benefactors.  They claim to care so much about deficit reduction that they do not want to extend unemployment benefits, yet they want to extend the very tax cuts that wrecked the U.S. economy.  Three GOP-inspired policies-- financial ruin, the senseless yet costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and tax cuts for the rich--put us in this mess that turned a Clinton-era surplus into a $1.4 trillion deficit.

And yet, we're in a recession, a Great Recession, and perhaps even for another ten years.  This year, foreclosures could reach one million or more.  Still, conservatives are on the deficit reduction bandwagon.  The Obama administration, having learned nothing from the lessons of history, is drinking the Hooverade as well, saying there is "no great appetite" for aid to the states.

Now that's just dumb.  Stressing deficits over job creation is suicidal in a broke economy.  This strategy speaks to an administration that, however brilliant and accomplished, expends too much energy appeasing its adversaries and protecting those of its advisors who rate in the mediocre-to-incompetent range, even as it throws good people under the bus amidst right-wing smear campaigns.

Speaking of good people, it is speculated that the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will use his authority under the newly-minted financial reform and block Elizabeth Warren as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Perhaps he doesn't want anyone to learn where the bodies are buried, in a metaphorical sense, and he knows the Harvard law professor will protect consumers and not allow banks to continue their abusive practices.  For an administration that has backtracked and settled for second best when faced with the prospects of great reform (i.e., single payer and the public option in the healthcare debate) this would be the last straw.  But time will tell.

In the meantime, when presented with viable options to fix our problems, there is this tendency for America to take the road to ruin.  You have no choice but to come to this conclusion when you look at this country's military spending. While other nations seek to achieve economic and technological superiority, the United States aspires to win the Cold War.

Expensive, deadly and pointless, America's exploits in Iraq and Afghanistan, at a price tag of $1 trillion, have amounted to the second most expensive military action after World War II.  And with hundreds of military bases around the world, the U.S. spends far more on its military than any other nation, and about as much as all other nations combined, for that matter.      

Slaves to our dysfunctional politics, America treats a dysfunctional and racist movement as legitimate.  We walk a fine line when dealing with the Tea Party--pay too much attention and we give them more publicity than they deserve, but ignore them and we fail to learn the lessons of our troubled racial history.  But in any case we must "refudiate" them.

Not actually a movement, the Tea Party is little more than a corporate lobbyist-supported project of the GOP, with a pseudo-populist overlay.  Their aversion to taxes, to government spending, social programs such as universal healthcare, and their visceral hatred of a black president, have their origins in the Republican Southern Strategy.

Lee Atwater taught them well, though he repented on his deathbed.  Taxes, big government, social programs, all of these were code words for fear of black people, when it was no longer acceptable to use the "N" word.  Atwater was able to finesse the racist sensibilities of the Dixiecrat legacy in order to secure Republican victories.  The strategy worked, but the moderates left the policy and the base remained.  Some of the base has aligned with white supremacists, militias and jingoists, with a hate group helping to write Arizona's anti-immigrant law, and white supremacists donating money to defend the law.  These are the folks who are providing the energy in the Republican Party today, and some conservative politicians hope to harness this energy, racism and all.  

So, the question is, why does America allow dysfunctional politics to result in horrible, even suicidal policies?  The question is not rhetorical, I really want to know.              

Let Us Expand the Definition of Terrorism

I begin this commentary by looking up the word terrorism.

One dictionary defines terrorism as follows:

The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.

Similarly, the U.S. military says terrorism is:

The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.

Practically speaking, however, terrorism is defined differently in everyday American life. Terrorism is synonymous with Muslim and Arab extremism, and affiliated persons, organizations and nations. The threats they pose are either real, perceived, or purely conjured up. The terrorist-as-enemy-of-America is like the bogeyman of Red Scare fame, ubiquitous yet elusive, and you can't quite put your finger on them because they're tricky. The definition of terrorism itself can serve as a political weapon--a form of terrorism itself, dare I say. Call someone a terrorist, or a communist or socialist or supporter thereof, and you delegitimize everything that person has to say. You marginalize everything that person represents.

In these days of extremism at home, we cling to a narrow, selective definition of terrorism, while ignoring blatant forms of terrorism in our own midst. In doing so, we can't see the forest for the trees.

A progressive voice for peace, Rabbi Michael Lerner, was almost certainly a victim of terrorism on the night of May 2 and early morning of May 3. Right-wing Zionists attacked his home and threatened his life. The attackers attached posters to his door and property with a strong glue. And the posters attacked Lerner personally, as well as liberals and progressives as being supporters of terrorism and "Islamo-fascism." They posted a bumper sticker which read "fight terror--support Israel" next to a caricature of Judge Goldstone, the South African jurist who issued a UN report on Israeli human rights violations during the military campaign in Gaza. The Goldstone report called on Israel to do an independent investigation into Operation Cast Lead, and punish those elements of the IDF who were responsible. The report was denounced by rightists in the U.S. and Israel as "anti-Semitic" and "pro-terror."

The crime against Rabbi Lerner came after a week of Lerner and his staff at Tikkun magazine receiving hate mail. These acts stemmed from Tikkun's announcement that if South African Zionists made good on their threat to prevent Judge Goldstone from attending his grandson's bar mitzvah, Lerner would hold the bar mitzvah in the Bay Area instead. Tikkun is presenting an award to Goldstone next year for his commitment to human rights in Israel, and apparently some people don't like that.

Although Lerner has received death threats and hate mail over the years, this recent attack is troubling because they targeted his home. "By linking Lerner to alleged terrorism, they provide for themselves and other extremists a 'right-wing justification' to use violence against Lerner, even though Lerner has been a prominent advocate of non-violence", Tikkun said in an official statement. Lerner speaks out against violence everywhere around the world, including Palestinian acts against Israelis. But when he and groups such as J Street advocate a pro-peace solution, they are branded as anti-Israel. This comes as a group of over 3,000 European Jews signed a petition criticizing Israeli settlement policies, and warning of the dangers of systematic support for the Israeli government.

Turning the page a bit, we are witnessing state-sponsored terrorism within our borders, most prominently coming from the state of Arizona. Arizona's legislature passed--and the governor signed into law--a bill which makes it a crime under state law to be in the U.S. illegally. The law allows police to stop anyone with a "reasonable suspicion" of being undocumented, and demand proof of citizenship. Those who cannot produce the documentation face arrest, a $2,500 fine, and 6 months in jail.

I submit that Arizona's anti-immigrant law is nothing more than Juan Crow racism, a codification of xenophobia, specifically designed to intimidate Latinos regardless of their citizenship status. Although its proponents will tell us it does not racially profile, the law is part of the mix that makes people with Spanish surnames feel unwelcome and unsafe, in an environment of heightened anti-Latino violence and discrimination. After all, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a hate group with ties to the eugenics movement and white supremacists, assisted in drafting the bill. An honest, vigorous debate on immigration and border security is one thing. Bad people passing a law with cruel intentions is another.

But Arizona did not stop there. They are banning ethnic studies in the schools, characterizing such programs as "ethnic chauvinism" and "high treason." Under the policy, schools will lose state funding if they offer courses that "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals." And the Arizona Department of Education is removing teachers with heavy accents.

Ethnic Studies were part of the civil rights movement--born in the late 1960s and early 1970s at a time of increased cultural awareness among people of color--to counter a Eurocentric perspective of history. State governments in Arizona and Texas feed into white extremist antipathy towards diversity by denigrating and eliminating people of color in their school curricula, "taking the country back" so to speak, via the textbooks.

A vibrant democracy should allow for differences of opinion, free from demonization and threats of violence against those who disagree. We may have differences of opinion with people, even those within our own family, but we don't resort to terrorist attacks against them.

What In The Sam Hill Is Wrong With Arizona?

Let's start out by saying that Arizona's new anti-immigrant law is unconstitutional and cannot stand in any reasonable society. The worst in the nation, the law allows police to stop anyone suspected of being undocumented, and demand proof of citizenship. Those unable to produce documents showing they are "legal" can be arrested, fined $2,500 and locked up for up to 6 months. The law makes it a crime under state law to be in the U.S. illegally, whatever illegal means.

It is a wretched and regressive piece of legislation, to be sure, in a state that will become majority of color in ten to fifteen years, and in a nation that is browning by the day. After all, the reality that a majority of the babies born in this nation will soon be of a darker hue unsettles some people.

No doubt, Gov. Jan Brewer has scored some points among the shrinking base that remains the party faithful, not to mention the anti-immigrant hate groups such as the nativist Minutemen that harass and beat "suspected" immigrants, a.k.a. Latinos. Just looking at it from a purely common sense point of view, it is utter political suicide to spit in the face of a soon-to-be majority of your state, in order to garner the support of an increasingly unhinged, extremist base. And yet, apparently this is what it takes to shine in the GOP these days.

The governor has assured us that there will be no racial profiling permitted under this law. That assertion is utter foolishness. This law is nothing more and nothing less than an expression of hate, a codification of xenophobia and the legalization of racial profiling. Taking it a step further, this is the criminalization of Latinos and presumed Latinos. To take the racial profiling out of a racial profiling law is to accomplish the impossible. That's like trying to take the racial profiling out of the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, or extract the "unequal" from Jim Crow laws. That's the whole point of it, after all. You can't have it both ways when you dabble in racist policies. Someone, apparently a supporter of the new law, decorated the Arizona capitol steps with a swastika made of refried beans. And South Carolina's lieutenant governor blamed a lazy workforce for allowing illegal immigrants to thrive in his state. That is what you'd expect in this environment. This is what we're dealing here.

I don't know what it is exactly about Arizona, but I do know that the state needs to be boycotted like a Montgomery bus. That state must realize that you cannot treat any group of people as lesser than the rest, nor can you disrespect the country's largest minority group and expect to emerge unscathed. There must be a price to pay this time, and what better place to start than with the Arizona economy? When an Arizona lawmaker wants to boycott his own state, you know how bad it is.

I had to google my brain to retrieve some information on another controversial, racially-tinged episode in Arizona political history. I came up with the 1980s and the Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday. In 1987, then-newly elected Arizona Governor Evan Mecham - who defended his use of the term "pickaninnies" for blacks - rescinded the King holiday in Arizona. John McCain, who himself had voted against the holiday in 1983, defended the governor's decision to rescind the holiday on the grounds that it was an imposition on states' rights. Not unlike today with his support of the horrid immigration law, McCain was dabbling in racial politics and shoring up his mavericky rightwing bonafides.

I wonder what Dr. King would have said about Arizona's racial profiling law. Certainly, he would have called it an unjust law, one which is "out of harmony with the moral law," and "degrades human personality". As King articulated in Letter from Birmingham Jail, "One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'"

And indeed, the Arizona law is an unjust law not even worth the paper on which it was written. Certainly, this is not the first anti-immigration law, and sadly it likely won't be the last, in this nation with a long history of thriving on both immigrants and jingoism. But we must not participate in the madness, and we must not let the promulgators of such junk think they can get away with it.

Lou Dobbs has finally been deported from CNN

From theGrio:

http://www.thegrio.com/2009/11/lou-dobbs-recently-announced-that.php

Broken Immigration System Breaks Up A Jamerican Family

On July 7, 2009, Roxroy Salmon - a Jamaican immigrant, activist and Brooklyn, New York resident - appeared before an immigration judge to determine his future in this country. In a worst case scenario, Salmon, a longtime resident of the U.S. with deep roots here, was ordered deported.

What is his crime, you might ask? Two decades ago, he pleaded guilty to two minor drug charges, and served no time. But that doesn’t matter under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRAIRA), an unjust federal law which allows for the mandatory deportation of immigrants for past offenses, no matter how minor the offense, or how long ago it was committed.

The threat of deportation is bad enough for Salmon, 53, who came to the U.S. in 1977, undocumented, to better himself and get an education. He also has a family in America. This is a man who has lived the so-called American dream - he has worked hard and raised four girls with his wife, and also has a granddaughter, all of whom are U.S. citizens. And Roxroy’s mother, also a U.S. citizen, petitioned for U.S. citizenship for her son. But his minor drug charges from over a generation ago stood in his way. He applied for deferred action from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in the hopes that the government will not enforce his deportation and separate him from his family.

“I'm asking Congressman [Ed] Towns and Senator [Charles] Schumer to please save me and my family and other families that are in the same situation,” Mr. Salmon said as he left his hearing at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan. “Because we have children - here are my children - we need to stay together. Don't put me in exile!”

Roxroy Salmon’s case is by no means unique. The group Families For Freedom notes that nearly 10% of American families are of mixed immigration status, that is, with at least one parent who is a non-citizen, and one child who is a citizen. And 3.1 million children who are U.S. citizens have at least one undocumented parent. In the end, 200,000 non-citizens are deported every year and separated from their families, even if the judge believes they should stay. As Human Rights Watch noted in a recent report, 72% of noncitizens who were deported had committed nonviolent offenses such as drug possession or traffic offenses. Of those legal noncitizens who were deported, 77 percent were thrown out for nonviolent offenses, meaning that only 23 percent had committed violent acts. As a result of this misguided policy of criminalizing immigration status, at least 1 million children and spouses have been separated from their family members.

Human Rights Watch concludes that U.S. deportation law fails to safeguard human rights, and “is far out of step with international human rights standards and the practices of other nations, particularly nations that it considers to be its peers” - the law lacks proportionality (after all, deportation is a severe penalty for petty infractions, including the charges to which Mr. Salmon pleaded guilty); disregards the importance of family unity (deprives one of the right to live with close family members, including minor children); fails to consider the individual’s ties to the U.S., and gives no consideration to the threat to the deportee’s life or freedom if he or she is deported to the country of origin. The report makes it plain:

Deportation, though not technically recognized under US law as a form of punishment, is a coercive exercise of state power that can cause a person to lose her ability to live with close family members in a country she may reasonably view as "home." Most deportees are barred, either for decades or in many cases for the rest of their lives, from ever reentering the United States. A governmental decision to deprive a person of connection to the place she considers home raises serious human rights concerns. Human rights law at a minimum requires that the decision to deport be carefully considered, with all relevant impacts and potential rights violations weighed by an independent decision maker. Unfortunately, the US fails to do this on a daily basis.

Civil rights practitioners and immigrant rights advocates agree. “The United States’ immigration policies and practices that aggressively seek to deport individuals, especially based on convictions where the sentences have been long ago been served, are draconian and unjust,” says Su Ming Yeh, a staff attorney at the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, an organization that represents indigent prisoners and detainees whose rights have been violated. “Frequently, the ones who suffer the most are the family members and children left behind. Immigration judges should, at a minimum, be permitted discretion to consider the best interests of the children and the overall contributions of the immigrant.”

In a nation that claims to uphold family values, this legalized separation of families boggles the mind. And in a nation of immigrants - excluding indigenous peoples and descendants of kidnapped Africans, of course - immigrants have a history of being scapegoated, hated, discriminated against, and otherwise singled out and targeted for ridicule, abuse, humiliation and degradation. And very often, the law played a fundamental role in the oppression of immigrants.

At first, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, some European immigrant groups were viewed as inferior to Anglo-Saxons, and often competed with African Americans to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. In those days, it was not uncommon to see signs such as “Irish Need Not Apply” or “No Irish or Dogs Allowed” or “No Dogs, Negroes or Mexicans” for that matter. Jewish Americans faced discrimination, rigid quotas in college admissions, and in the case of Leo Frank, lynching. Then there were the laws, regulations and ordinances targeting Asian immigrants, especially Chinese and Japanese Americans. This was a manifestation of xenophobic and racist sentiment and a White fear of the “Yellow Peril”, which culminated in the internment of Japanese Americans on U.S. soil during World War II.

And today, many immigrants come from the so-called Third World, from the nations of the South, places with warm, tropical climates, and people with brown or black skin, very often Caribbean and Latin American people, and many Spanish-speaking people. The current anti-immigrant fervor - complete with anti-Latino violence and calls for building a giant fence on the U.S.-Mexico border - must be understood within the context of changing demographics and resistance to the browning of America. Throw in the color-coded war on drugs, and the implications of the war on terror, and you get the immigration mess in which we find ourselves today.

For those who are threatened with deportation, there is hope on the horizon. New York Congressman José Serrano has introduced the Child Citizen Protection Act (HR182), which would allow immigration judges to consider the best interests of U.S. citizen children in deportation cases. The law would essentially allow children to be heard before their parents are taken away from them. The New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City and Families for Freedom, members of Mr. Salmon’s defense committee, support the immediate passage of HR182 by Congress.

And as for Roxroy Salmon, his fate is in the hands of ICE Field Office Director Chris Shanahan, who can be reached at (212) 264-2413.

(Published in Black Commentator).