Voter Suppression and Provisional Ballots

CNN is reporting “six Republican election board workers in Philadelphia were told to leave their polling precincts” since they lacked authorization such as a court order to work at that particular polling precinct. Apparently, some in the McCain-Palin campaign might respond by taking legal action. Campaign officials are even publicly suggesting that it’s part of an effort to intimidate Republicans in a part of the state where they don’t predominate.

Bill Porritt a campaign spokesperson told CNN “Election board officials guard the legitimacy of the election process and the idea that Republicans are being intimidated and banned for partisan purposes does not allow for an honest and open election process.”

Historically, its been the GOP who has led efforts to intimidate and suppress voter turnout, especially in neighborhoods filled with people of color, naturalized immigrants, and poor people. Coincidentally, 45 percent of the city is African American, 10.5 percent is Hispanic, nine percent is foreign born, and 21 percent lives below the poverty line, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau.

Nevertheless, certain Republican figures, such as former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton are propagating this ridiculous notion of “reverse intimidation” directed at GOP lawyers and officials.

Check it out.

Part of the GOP’s suppression strategy is to challenge votes, or dispute someone’s right to vote on technical grounds, at the polling sites, which inevitably extend wait times on lines. This often results in people having to cast provisional ballots, not regular ballots.

So what’s wrong with provisional ballots? Well, the Brennan Center explains:

In part because of their novelty, in many states, provisional ballots generated confusion before, during, and after the 2004 election. A number of states did not plan for provisional balloting until shortly before the election, and the rules kept changing up until the last minute. Not surprisingly, this led to widespread problems at the polls and afterward.

A report of the Election Protection Coalition found that provisional ballot problems were among the top five complaints registered on its 1-866-Our-Vote hotline. Most of the reported incidents consisted of complaints that provisional ballots were not available at polling sites, that poll workers did not offer or refused to allow voters to cast provisional ballots, and that poll workers were confused about provisional balloting procedures and rules.

Problems in administering provisional ballots may have disenfranchised many eligible voters. For example, where provisional ballots were not available or not offered, eligible voters were turned away from the polls as before HAVA. And provisional ballots also created problems that did not exist before. For example, reports from poll sites across the country suggest that many voters who should have been entitled to cast regular ballots were given provisional ballots—which had a lower chance of being counted—instead.

In addition, in part because of cumbersome procedures, provisional ballots led to delays at many polling places; the resulting long lines peeled off a not insubstantial number of voters.

Reactions to Criticism of the Powell Endorsement

Some of the folks at These Bastards had the following to say about conservatives fuming over Powell’s endorsement of Obama:

Immediately Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, George Will, and Dan Billings fired off e-mails and gave interviews alerting the American populace to this chain of events. More intelligent people would have tried to attack Powell’s credibility based on his tenure in the Bush Administration. But to Rush and the like we are in yet another grand year of the glorious freedom experiment in Iraq, so that’s out. So they did the next best thing, kicked open the front door, strode out onto the porch and yelled “The Negroes is congregatin’ and endorsifyin’!” Because I guess Colin Powell and other black figures aren’t allowed to deviate from the standard line of pasty white guys they’ve endorsed since time immemorial.

So, word to the wise black folks. Endorsing a person of the same race is kinda racist, unless you are white. I think it has something to do with the equinox or the Magna Carta. If I understand it correctly, the only way to move race relations forward is for the black community to rally around the old, white guy. For the 44th time in a row. To prove to us you aren’t voting based on race. We promise to return the favor the next time a black guy runs. Honest.

And Morris O’Kelly at the NYT’s Fifth Down had the following reaction:

It wasn’t enough for Colin Powell to have been a professional soldier and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was “irrelevant” that he was once Secretary of State. When it came down to Powell offering his informed, influential and most important, single-minded opinion, the FIRST criticism leveled at him trumpeted race.

Limbaugh didn’t acknowledge his credentials and couldn’t attack his record.

The FIRST criticism leveled at Powell trumpeted race, and Powell’s previous service to America was summarily dismissed. This, despite the fact that Powell had never made any overture to appease or please African-Americans.

Nobody publicly accused Republicans Susan Eisenhower or Christopher Buckley of being “race traitors” when they endorsed Obama, or alleged Joe Lieberman was a race loyalist after switching parties and kowtowing to McCain. So when a respected and reputable black uber-American is first characterized as a race loyalist…it’s at best questionable.

By every Republican measure, Powell (like McCain) had put “country first.”

Others, such as Pat Buchanan, took an even lower road, alleging that other, “more qualified” generals were passed over in favor of Powell as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You know, “affirmative action” at the highest level.

Even after all these years, the credit Powell deserved still escaped him.

No such questions were posed of Dr. Henry Kissinger as to whether his support of Senator John McCain was also based in race. Buchanan didn’t accuse Senator McCain of gender affirmative action with the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Constitution and Citizenship Day Blogging

Origins of Citizenship and Constitution Day

On September 17, 1787, the final draft of the U.S. Constitution was signed by 39 delegates to articulate our freedoms and the broad parameters on which Americans would govern themselves as a country.  In celebration of the day Congress made September 17th Constitution Day/Citizenship Day in 2004 and mandated the teaching of the Constitution in schools that receive federal funds.  The week in which Constitution Day falls is also known as Constitution Week. According to Wikipedia, prior to the enactment of the law it was also known as Citizenship Day.

Click here to read the full text of the U.S. Constitution.

Report: Expensive Fees Cause Dip in Citizenship Applications
According to a new report published last week by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrants and Refugee Rights entitled, “Priced Out: U.S. Citizenship A Privilege for the Rich and the Educated” the Bush administration has made citizenship less accessible and expensive for immigrants. Since the last fee increase in July 2007, 59 percent fewer immigrants applied for citizenship. Advocates cite the corresponding increasing in application fees as a reason, which went from $400 to $675 in July of 2007. The report also notes how while there has been a 27 percent increase in the minimum wage in the last decade, citizenship application fees went up 610 percent. There has also been dramatic drop in the number of citizenship applications filed during the past year in many if not all states with large population of foreign born people.

The report recommends experimenting with microloans and employer assistance programs to make the application process more affordable. The authors also recommend the passage of the Obama-Gutierrez Citizenship Promotion Act of 2007, which among other things, would require a study of the sluggishness of the FBI background check process and to identify obstacles to timely completion of the checks. It would also authorize funds for the USCIS to grant to community-based organizations to help prepare immigrants to become citizens.

Anti-immigrant Activists Lobby Congress
In response to recent lobbying efforts by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an ant-immigrant organization with ties to white supremacists, the Service Employees International Union, the National Council on La Raza placed a full page ad in Roll Call and Politico. The ad featured images of white nationalists and other hate groups and quotes from prominent FAIR supporters. “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?” asks John Tanton the organization’s founder and top donor. “Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible?” asks FAIR’s current president Dan Stein. “New cultures…[in the U.S. are] diluting what we are and who we are,” warns another FAIR supporter.

The sponsors of the ad ask the reader “When Did Extreme Become Mainstream?” Good strong stuff.  Strong enough in fact to put FAIR on the defensive to issue a response where it called the ad “vitriolic” and said the ads sponsors were nearly calling all Americans one big hate group. I suppose FAIR believes they feel as if they speak on the behalf of all Americans.

National Polls Say Most Americans Approve of Immigration
Interestingly enough, despite the tenor of anti-immigrant sentiment during the past year, more than 60 percent of all Americans have consistently said immigration is a good thing for the country ever since mid-2005.

What about Immigration?

From Feet in Two Worlds:

While Obama’s voter registration drive will target Americans all of backgrounds, the Obama campaign has previously pledged 20 million dollars on Latino outreach efforts including voter registration and paid media. The campaign has 400 Latino organizers and is training hundreds of volunteers to increase turnout among Latinos in key battleground states. In New Mexico alone, where an estimated 40,000 registered Latino voters didn’t got to the polls in 2004, Figueroa said the campaign has 29 field offices staffed by Latinos.

As interesting as that is, we are still left with the question why very few at the convention have said anything about immigration and hope to win over Latino voters. According to a December 2007 Pew Hispanic Center poll, 53 percent of all Latinos worry about being deported mainly because of harsher immigration enforcement measures, 75 percent of all Latinos disapprove of workplace raids, and 64 percent of all Latinos said the debate over immigration policy and the failure of Congress to enact an immigration reform bill have made life more difficult for them to live in the U.S.

And ever since mid-2005 more than 60 percent of all Americans have consistently said immigration is a good thing for the country.

Yet even with this summer’s newspapers filled with news about raids across the nation causing people to flee into the shadows and disrupting families, factory workers being exploited at meat packing plants, detainees dying in ICE custody, so little has been said about immigration at the Democratic Convention in Denver.

Its as if Democrats feel as if they can stay mum on the topic and still win over Latino voters simply because so many Republicans and other conservatives are willing to race bait the immigration issue. I realize that Barack Obama has been polling well among Latino voters lately, and thereby creating less of an incentive to be as forceful in his support for comprehensive immigration reform, and path to citizenship in particular, but the Dems cannot afford to maintain this silence and still energize Latino voters. That’s just not going to do it in November against McCain.

Take Care of Lupita, Lou

Mixed Race Marriages By State

While doing some work related research the other day, I stumbled upon an interesting graphic (see below) as I was reading a 2003 report analyzing 2000 U.S. Census racial data by the demographer William Frey.

Not surprisingly, Frey found that interracial marriages went up from 4.4 percent in 1990 to 6.7 percent in 2000. But what I found fascinating was how disproportionate the rates of intermarriage was among different races. According to Frey, prevalence of mixed marriages nationally among Hispanics and Asians was roughly the same at 29.7 percent and 28.9 respectively, whereas only 12.9 percent of black folk overall were involved in an interracial marriage.

To provide some perspective here, in 2000, Asians accounted for 3.4 percent of the U.S. population, while Hispanics and African Americans both accounted for 12 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau numbers.

Another unsurprising yet still very interesting factoid was that California, Texas, Florida, and New York had the most mixed race marriages. In fact, California led the nation in being home “to one in four of all mixed-race marriages involving Latinos, and nearly one in three involving Asians.”

Clicking on the map will give you a slightly better resolution of the graphic, but I recommend reviewing the 10-page report to get superior image quality as well as a better understanding the data. The report consists of mostly graphs anyway.

(H/T: William Frey)

Update: This post has been updated with additional demographic information.

Who’s Afraid of Diversity?

In December of 2007, the fire breathing conservative writer Pat Buchanan penned an op-ed entitled, “Can Diversity Destroy Us?” As the provocative title of the opinion piece implies, the former Nixon speechwriter set out to attack those who promote diversity as a democratic good and portrayed those defending the interests of the historically marginalized as those actively seeking to balkanize America.

To Buchanan the threats to our national identity are numerous.

For one, he laments the spike in the number of immigrants and people of color in the country. Apparently, their numbers alone have made his longing for the tranquil pastures of Mayberry all too unreachable. Buchanan warns us that “….in the last seven years 10.3 million people, almost all from the Third World, entered the United States, more than half illegally. The nation that was one-tenth minority in 1960 is now one-third minority. European-Americans will soon be a minority in the nation, as they are today in California, Texas and most large American cities.” Lock your doors. Close the borders.

He also abhors the proliferation of multilingual speakers and media outlets that catered to them, “No longer are we united by a common language, as the fastest growing radio and TV stations are Hispanic,” he laments.

And as if invoking the spirit of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Buchanan underscored the perceived threat American religious and moral values posed by certain groups. “For the last 40 years has seen a large influx of Muslims, the rise of a rabid secularism and the break-up of Christian churches — the Episcopalians most recently — over issues of morality: abortion, civil unions, homosexual bishops, assisted suicide, stem cell research, Darwin, creationism.” He also goes on to solemnly declare, “This generation is witnessing the Deconstruction of America. Out of one, many.”

Perhaps this is even more proof that paleo-conservatives of the culture warrior variety have effectively married the “war on terror” at home paradigm to the ‘moral clarity’ of the anti-science, anti-gay marriage, anti-feminism efforts of the 80’s and 90’s. Or perhaps its just another sign of conservatives groping their way through the political wilderness only to embrace the worst of their tradition. Whatever the status or genesis of the sentiment is, it is not dead.

Consider Rep. Russell Pearce in the Arizona state house.

According to the Arizona Republic, Rep. Russell Pearce (picture right) recently introduced an amendment to a Homeland Security bill in the Arizona statehouse that would withhold state funding for schools that encourage “dissent from the values of American democracy and Western civilization.” Funding would cease for colleges and universities that have student associations that are based “in whole or in part” on racial affiliation, such as local chapters for historically black or Hispanic engineers or business associations for students of color. It should be noted that nearly all such associations on college campuses throughout the country permit anyone of any race to join.

If signed into state law, educators must submit their course plans and syllabi to school superintendents or a designee to ensure compliance with the measure. Ironically enough, judging by the language of the amendment the purpose of the proposal is to inculcate values of American citizenship and promote democracy, pluralism, and religious tolerance.

Rep. Pearce’s amendment not only infringes on the First Amendment rights of Arizonians by limiting their freedom to associate with whatever group they choose, their freedom of speech to criticize the gulf between American practice and ideals in the class room, but its also counter productive.

Diversity can serve to strengthen a society, but its not an unalloyed good. In any given society there will be demagogues eager to exploit the unthinking prejudices of others. But that’s precisely why a diverse society needs to have its laws and policies reflect genuine a commitment to tolerance and inclusiveness. This means not merely telling other people what to think and how they can socialize, but actually allowing them the freedoms to decide that for themselves. It also means learning to be accepting of the traditions and perspectives others bring to table and how they can improve our society, even if it comes in the bitter pill of dissent.

Despite being widely heralded for his work as a civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King was frequently decried as an anti-American rabble rouser closet communist. But it was through his efforts, and those of many others, as a dissenter and critic of America that he exposed American racial contradictions, and yes changed the country. Before Congress mustered the courage to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 Dr. King was jailed and brutalized for because of his profile acts of civil disobedience and dissenting opinions.

Taylor Branch writing in the New York Times noted that the movement’s ripple effects touched other segments of society too.

The movement also de-stigmatized white Southern politics, creating two-party competition. It opened doors for the disabled, and began to lift fear from homosexuals before the modern notion of “gay” was in use. Not for 2,000 years of rabbinic Judaism had there been much thought of female rabbis, but the first ordination took place soon after the movement shed its fresh light on the meaning of equal souls. Now we think nothing of female rabbis and cantors and, yes, female Episcopal priests and bishops, with their colleagues of every background.

Branch also observed that newly enacted civil rights laws yielded unexpected fruit too:

The movement spread prosperity in a region previously unfit even for professional sports teams. My mayor in Atlanta during the civil rights era, Ivan Allen Jr., said that as soon as the civil rights bill was signed in 1964, we built a baseball stadium on land we didn’t own, with money we didn’t have, for a team we hadn’t found, and quickly lured the Milwaukee Braves. Miami organized a football team called the Dolphins.

Who knows how much the civil rights and social justice movements would have achieved much if people were prohibited or strongly discouraged from associating with one another based on race, religion, and so on and had their criticism of America muzzled? Probably not much. Organizing among people of the same interests is crucial to building critical mass for a movement to even take place. Sometimes that takes place on college campuses, and churches, among other places.

But let us not be coy about why certain forms of intolerance can now operate in the open. Anti-immigrant sentiment is as high as it has ever been in a generation. States seeing a surge in immigrations, and border states ones such as Arizona, and have enacted draconian enforcement only laws in part to contain the change in way of life associated with the change in demographics of the state. The Grand Canyon State has led the nation with some of worst anti-immigrant racial profiling practices, and deportation and employer sanction laws. Now the recent tide of hysteria has reached a point where lawmakers are finding new ways to threaten the rights and liberties of citizens and non-citizens alike. Proposals like Rep. Pearce’s seek to squash criticisms of these efforts.

The gnawing fear of losing the fictional Mayberry of yesterday is now endangering the very same rights and liberties that can help us narrow the chasm between American ideals and our lived experience.

(H/T Pic:Jeremiah Armenta of The Arizona Republic)

Troubling Parallels

Delivering one of the greatest speeches of our era does not render anyone immune from criticism. Consider Michael Gerson. WaPo columnist and former George W. Bush speech writer, Gerson objected to a certain comparison Senator Barack Obama made in his landmark speech on race in Philly on Tuesday. Gerson took issue with how Obama suggested Rev. Wright’s comments condemning America were somehow parallel in scope or in degree to his grandmother’s prejudicial views.

Reverend Wright’s controversial remarks strongly condemn America for intentionally flooding drugs into black neighborhoods, the spread of HIV/AIDS, and other destructive ideas. Obama has gone on record as denouncing these remarks as divisive and inaccurate.

In his speech, Obama described his grandmother as someone “who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

In response, Gerson wrote that perhaps “Grandma may have had some issues to work through, Wright is accusing the American government of trying to kill every member of a race. There is a difference.” Sure there is. But in my opinion those pushing this criticism are missing the real point of Obama’s speech.

Obama sought to convey the very visceral nature of how racial prejudice is experienced in America. The anger, the frustration, and the resentment that Rev. Wright and others like him feel is inextricably linked to the often causal and other times very explicit prejudice evinced by whites like Obama’s grandmother. In fact, each response and counter response feed off the other in subtle ways most of us fail to appreciate, until we are segregated into our own small corners.

Obviously, this can hit close to home. In other words, Obama was telling us the prejudice afflicts America writ large can be found in his own family as much as it can be in yours and mine. And it is this prejudice that serves to “to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality,” as Obama noted in his speech.

This intimate knowledge of the negative effects racial bias is what was referring to when he said, “These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

And while such an admission does not absolve people of the magnitude of their sins it does attempt to grapple with the full measure of who we are as people. In my mind, this key insight provides Obama’s speech so much of its raw power and its uncommon wisdom.

The Wright Race Stuff

In his Huffington Post opinion piece on Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s controversial remarks Barack Obama condemned his pastor’s remarks yet not the figure himself. This is bound to strike some people as fitting and others woefully insufficient. It’s stronger than saying “an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with,” but not wholesale rejection of the Reverend’s entire ministry.

That’s going to be a problem for those who find Rev. Wrights statements comparing Israel treatment of Palestians to South African apartheid government, saying the U.S. manufactured AIDS, or that 9/11 was an a direct consequence of American foreign policy too objectionable to give Obama a second look.

But from Obama’s point of view that’s an entirely understandable position to take given his history with Rev. Wright. Rev. Wright is probably the most important figure responsible for Obama becoming a devout Christian at all. He also married the Illinois Senator and his wife, Michelle, and baptized both their daughters. The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s most recent book, also bears the title of one of Rev. Wright’s sermons on the Christian message of hope. Obama would come off as a fraud and a panderer if he said he wanted nothing to do with the man from now on.

Plus, Obama has also noted in Huff Post piece that Rev. Wright has served as a U.S. Marine, is a respected biblical scholar, and is considered a pillar in Chicago for his “ranging from housing the homeless to reaching out to those with HIV/AIDS.” This suggests that Obama’s appreciate of the full measure of Rev. Wright’s ministry went beyond the fiery rhetoric that’s been heavy rotation on the cable networks throughout the week.

But by the same token, Rev. Wright’s comments, on racial matters in particular, do speak to a simmering rage in black America among that can be found in many barbershops, beauty and nail salons, blogs, and, apparently at the pulpit too. “Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run,” Wright once said. Obama’s days as a community organizer in South Side Chicago must have been made him all too familiar with those sentiments, but he still found a way not to have his career shaped by that perspective. This much is true for those who care to examine his record.

Whether originating from his supporters or his detractors, Obama has been making the case that such sentiments, and oftentimes the reaction to them, frequently lead to the type of divisiveness he purports to campaign against. In the video clip below, watch him make precisely this point in a recent speech in Plainfield, Indiana.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FsqDTVmlKk]

To be sure, Obama’s condemnation of Wright’s remarks was justified as well as being a political necessity. He can’t win the Democratic nomination much less the presidency by being tacitly or explicitly approval of them. But I am not so sure this will be sufficient in the long run when Republicans start running ads against Obama with Wright’s incendiary remarks in them. In the long run, the negative campaign and heighten media scrutiny will drive up his negative polling up and begin to erase some of his cross over appeal among independents and Republicans.

If the persistent attacks go unanswered, they will cause many people to question how much of Obama’s cool head has been influenced by Wright’s belly of fire. And for most people it will not be enough to say he was just my pastor, not a policy adviser. Inquiring minds will want to know how many sermons and private conversations has Obama had with Rev. Wright about racism and politics? What were they about? And why did he remain at Rev. Wright’s church so long?

As I have said in a previous post, to quell these anxieties and doubts, Obama will take these legitimate concerns head on in a speech in the very near future similar to what John F. Kennedy did in 1960. He should be truthful about the role of faith in his personal and public life. And among other things, he should categorically reject divisive statements and openly discuss the importance of the social gospel without alienating atheists and persons of other faiths. In other words, the religion speech that Mitt Romney should have given.

But something else is at work he too. Even if Obama lives this down, the sheen of his so-called post-racial candidacy will fade. Until now, Obama has successfully dodged the bullet on serious efforts to tag him as the black politician, who is only interested in black issues or seemingly too tethered to the black community. Media reports last year noted tension within Obama’s campaign as he navigated the world of presidential politics and maintaining support within the black community.

The New York Times reported in April of last year:

The dynamic began the first day of Mr. Obama’s presidential bid, when white advisers encouraged him to withdraw an invitation to his pastor, whose Afro-centric sermons have been construed as antiwhite, to deliver the invocation at the official campaign kickoff. Then, when his candidacy was met by a wave of African-American suspicion, the senator’s black aides pulled in prominent black scholars, business leaders and elected officials as advisers.

During the last year, Obama has found ways to amass white and black support by actively associating himself with elements of black America that palatable to mainstream electorate. He won the enthusiastic endorsement of Oprah Winfrey and often invokes Dr. King’s language and the valiant efforts of civil rights generation of activists. As a result he appeared as safe and non-threatening to many voters.

The Reverend Wright controversy is starting to change all of that. And now we see Obama’s rhetoric changing a bit. On Countdown with Keith Olberman he said:

Now, one thing that I do hope to do is to use some of these issues to talk more fully about the question of race in our society, because part of what we’re seeing here is Reverend Wright represents a generation that came of age in the 60s.

He’s an African-American man, who, because of his life experience continues to have a lot of anger and frustration, and will express that in ways that are very different from me and my generation, partly because I benefited from the struggles of that early generation. And so, part of what we’re seeing here is a transition from the past to the future. And I hope that our politics represents the future.

I could not agree more. Let see if the country is ready for it.

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Racial Justice, Counterspeech, and Media

On February 21st and 22nd of this past week, the United States government defended its human rights record regarding racial justice during the last 7 years before a United Nations expert committee in Geneva, Switzerland. The U.S. government’s periodic report on its spotty record of compliance with the International Convention to End all Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) was closely scrutinized due to egregiously omitting or minimizing the impact of discriminatory it overlooked or willfully perpetuated.

Much of the racial discrimination in the wake of the 9/11 or during and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina violated international and U.S. law. Human rights advocates, for example, have pointed to how the U.S. devoted a mere single paragraph to Hurricane Katrina in its 124-page periodic report while also claiming the deaths of the victims was not due to “discrimination per se.” Unsurprisingly, the U.S. had nothing substantive to say about its flawed Katrina evacuation plan, or the NOLA housing crisis, or the depleted public defender system, all of which have disproportionately affected black people in New Orleans.

Nor did the U.S. report discuss in any great detail the racial dimension of it post-9/11 immigration policies. In particular, the U.S. government found a way to omit any mention of the Bush administration’s abusive detention polices and harassment by law enforcement of Latin American and Arab or South Asian immigrants, whether documented or not.

Yet few of us, including those in the American media, have given much thought to how in addition to outright violating U.S. domestic law these abuses also amount to human rights violations, such as the right to return, the right to nationality, and the right to challenge your detention. This is precisely why the United States should adopt a system where people are informed about their rights, why human rights should in fact be considered the cornerstone of democracy. Our sense of justice should go beyond the lofty rhetoric about how freedom is on the march that finds its way out of Bush’s mouth primarily when delivering a speech on Iraq.

Public education campaigns on human or civil rights simply don’t exist in the U.S., though the government would have us think otherwise. In a very confused passage of its U.N. report the government on the hand claims on page 15 that its citizens are well informed as to what their rights are by arguing:

Information about human rights is readily available in the United States. As a general matter, persons are well informed about their civil and political rights, including the rights of equal protection, due process, and non-discrimination. The scope and meaning of – and issues concerning enforcement of – individual rights are openly and vigorously discussed in the media, freely debated within the various political parties and representative institutions, and litigated before the courts at all levels.

But yet in another paragraph on page 16 after admitting so much subtle forms of racial discrimination still persist it conceded that not many people know what their rights are.

Subtle, and in some cases overt, forms of discrimination against minority individuals and groups continue to plague American society, reflecting attitudes that persist from a legacy of segregation, ignorant stereotyping, and disparities in opportunity and achievement. Such problems are compounded by factors such as inadequate understanding by the public of the problem of racial discrimination, lack of awareness of the government-funded programs and activities designed to address it, lack of resources for enforcement, and other factors.

So either the debate about what our rights are not terribly informative or American society is so beleaguered by racism that most of its citizenry are too confused to truly make sense out of them. Either way it does not sound as if we are that well informed about our rights.

(More after the jump.)

Hip Hop Caucus Video of Hate Crimes March

Remember the protest march against hate crimes and police misconduct on the Department of Justice organized by the Hip Hop Caucus in November 2007? Well, there’s a cool video of it now.

Check it out.

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Black and Latino Law School Applicants Rise Yet Matriculants Dwindle

This is so not encouraging.

The number of minority applicants to law school has skyrocketed over the past decade, but the proportion of black and Mexican-American law students has not.

Over the past 15 years, research by Law School professor Conrad Johnson and his clinic notes that as the number of total law school students nationally has risen—with an increase of about 4,000 matriculants—black and Mexican Americans have been applying to law school in constant numbers. These applicants, over time, are performing better on two of the determining factors for law school: grade point averages and Law School Assessment Test scores. But since 1992, the representation of both groups has decreased as a proportion of the population of law school students as a whole.

(H/T: Columbia Spectator)

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