Category Archives: Race & Ethnicity

Why restrict jury duty to citizens?

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—Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

[This article originally appeared in The Atlantic online. Read it here.]

A few weeks ago, the California Assembly passed legislation that for the first time would make non-citizens eligible for jury service. If passed by the State Senate, California would be the only state to decouple citizenship and jury duty.

A chorus of criticism has been raised over the proposed bill without thinking about the fundamental question it presents. Why do we limit jury service to citizens?

The answer does not lie in history. At the time of the framing of the United States Constitution, jury service was limited to property-owning white men–as, for that matter, were voting rights in most states. Recent immigrants who owned property could sit on juries, but other citizens (women and others without property) could not. Thus, as originally understood, citizenship did not define who could sit on a jury.

Nor is the answer that citizens possess some special civic knowledge. There are no educational requirements for jury service. No special “citizen training” classes. Qualification for federal jury service simply requires that the potential juror “be adequately proficient in English to satisfactorily complete the juror qualification form.” In an era where studies show that most Americans fail basic civic literacy tests (including the official government citizenship test), we can honestly wonder about this collective lack of civic knowledge. Thus, assuming that many non-citizens are equally knowledgeable (or ignorant) about American civics and law, knowledge cannot be the reason for preferring citizens.

Nor, is it about community representation. Juries, of course, have always acted as a community conscience. Community morals and judgments provide both the legitimacy for a jury verdict and a check on government power. The right to a criminal jury trial is a right to a local jury. Yet, including non-citizens on juries would not necessarily change that community dynamic. In fact, including non-citizen members of our community might provide a closer approximation of the actual community sentiment. After all, a lawful permanent resident of California (who has lived in the state for twenty years) might be much more representative of the community than a recent citizen moving from Alabama or New Hampshire.

So why has jury service been limited to citizens? Here are three good reasons.

Citizenship symbolizes and preserves self-government. In a democracy, citizens are the sovereigns and sovereigns have to govern themselves through institutions like the jury. This is a structural power – a reservation of political control to citizens. One cannot outsource the responsibility of self-government, including jury duty. Those who have been entrusted with the responsibility to govern must do the hard work of self-government.

Second, citizenship has come to define our political identity. For much of early American history, we denied full political rights to women and people of color. As a result, the battles for political equality have been framed in terms of citizenship. The Women’s Suffrage Movement explicitly linked jury service and voting in its push for political equality, knowing that just gaining the right to vote would not be enough for women to be considered full constitutional citizens. The Civil Rights Movement in the South began with a series of jury discrimination cases recognizing that jury participation symbolized a measure of constitutional equality. Those victories established that to be a full participant in the constitutional system, one had to identify as a citizen juror.

Finally, citizenship involves a legal and social relationship with the government – a granting of constitutional rights and an acceptance of civic responsibilities. American citizenship is a legal commitment to certain participatory values, including participation in juries. The badge of citizenship marks individuals as belonging to a national community that guarantees certain liberties and opportunity in exchange for democratic participation. As the Supreme Court stated in Powers v. Ohio, jury duty “affords ordinary citizens a valuable opportunity to participate in a process of government, an experience fostering, one hopes, a respect for law. Indeed, with the exception of voting, for most citizens the honor and privilege of jury duty is their most significant opportunity to participate in the democratic process.”

A shift to non-citizen jurors would alter this balance of sovereignty, identity, and the relationship between citizen and government. Of course, many non-citizens would make excellent jurors, just as many actual citizens make poor jurors, but the underlying legal relationships would be significantly affected. This change to non-citizens juries may come, as the history of the jury has always evolved with social norms, but such a change would restructure the current balance of rights and responsibilities in a way that Californians and others should weigh very carefully.

Most importantly, the debate over non-citizen jurors has resulted in new awareness that jury service matters. However the California legislature ultimately decides the issue, the controversy has highlighted a deep-felt sense that jury service goes to the heart of what it means to be an American citizen: It is not patriotism alone, but commitment to the participatory values of democracy. Next time you are asked to serve, wear your juror badge proudly.

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is an assistant professor of law at the UDC David A. Clarke School of Law, and author of Why Jury Duty Matters: A Citizen’s Guide to Constitutional Action (NYU Press, 2013).

Notes from Betsy…on Spring books

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Greetings from NYU Press Publicity! My Instagram account is flooded with images of cherry blossoms, dogs rolling in grass, and ballpark festivities. SPRING HAS SPRUNG! To celebrate the spring season, I thought it would be fun to catch up on a few of the big media hits so far. Some of the tantalizing bits of knowledge you will take away include: can jury duty really be enjoyable?; how does media spread?; why this country needs two presidents; what if the United Nations was based in Detroit?; living in New York City through one reporter’s eyes; is the United States really post-racial?; and exciting titles to look out for.

WHY JURY DUTY MATTERS

Author Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is on a quest to convince us that jury duty is fun, and at the very least, our most important civic duty apart from voting. Listen to his convincing interviews on WAMU’s “The Kojo Nmadi Show”; KPCC’s “Airtalk” and WYPR’s “Mid-Day.” The Baltimore Sun makes mention—and Greta Van Susteren knows a good thing when she sees one. Also, May is Juror Appreciation Month! See Andrew’s piece on The Atlantic’s website.

SPREADABLE MEDIA

The name Henry Jenkins will stop any media junkie, cos-play boy or girl, and Comi-con regular in their tracks. Find out what all the hype is about: Jenkins and co-author, Sam Ford, on KBOO-FM; Sam Ford’s article on WSJ.com’s “Speakeasy;” an interview with the authors on New Books in Journalism; and a shout-out on Mediabistro’s journalism & tech blog, 10,000 Words. Jenkins and his co-authors also made an appearance at SXSW!


TWO PRESIDENTS ARE BETTER THAN ONE

Two heads are better than one; good things come in pairs; and according to our author, two presidents would be better than one. Need some convincing? No problem! See author David Orentlicher’s interview with the Chicago Tribune; his appearance on C-SPAN’s “Book TV”; and his radio interviews with KPCC’s “Airtalk” and Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Joy Cardin Show.”


CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

Probably the coolest coverage so far for Capital of the World was the essay Foreign Policy commissioned from author Charlene Mires—they asked her to imagine if Detroit had won the bid to become the home of the United Nations, and how that would have affected the future of the city. Other coverage included a review in the Wall Street Journal; an interview on C-SPAN’s “Book TV”; a feature in PRI’s “The World” ; a spot in the New York Times‘ Bookshelf; and an hour with KERA’s “Think.”

HABITATS

New Yorkers are obsessed with where other New Yorkers live. In Habitats, New York Times writer, Constance Rosenblum gives readers that fly-on-the-wall experience in some of the most fabulous, wild, and unbelievable homes across the 5 boroughs. The New Republic reviewed the book and our sadistic history of real estate voyeurism, while NY1 raved about the collection here. And if you’re in Manhattan next Tuesday, 5/14, stop by the 92Y Tribeca at noon to hear Connie read from some of her favorite sections!

GHOSTS OF JIM CROW

Electing an African American president had many declaring that the United States had finally moved beyond race. F. Michael Higginbotham argues we still have a long way to go in his new book, Ghosts of Jim Crow. You can hear more of what he has to say in interviews with Oregon Public Radio; Dallas Public Radio; and Balitmore Public Radio.

Look out for the next round-up coming soon!  We have some exciting titles pubbing in the next few months including We Will Shoot Back, A Death at Crooked Creek, and Rebels at the Bar, so more fantastic coverage is surely on the way.

“I’m Black and I’m Gay”: The everydayness of Jason Collins

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—Mark Anthony Neal

As a lifetime New York Mets fan, I rarely need to be reminded that spring training signaled the beginning of a new baseball season. Yet, for a few years, I could have been reminded by the seemingly annual press conferences from Mets catcher Mike Piazza in which he announced to the world that he was not gay. That Piazza felt compelled to hold a press conference to announce such non-matters, speaks both to the proverbial stakes for male professional athletes (particularly in the so-called four “major” sports), and the absurdity of the national discourse regarding sexual identity.

There was no such press conference for Jason Collins, a twelve-year journey man in the National Basketball Association—just a Sports Illustrated cover story in which he admitted that he was “Black” and “Gay.” Indeed there was a mundane quality to Collins’ admission—it’s not like Collins is the first Black and Gay person to walk the earth. Perhaps, far more remarkable is that Collins has survived the last few seasons as a Black athlete who sits on the end of the bench, in a position that long served as the NBA’s quota program for a league that is still to visibly “Black” for some.

This is not to say that Collins’ “coming out”—a term that really just reproduces the very marginalization that homophobia constructs in the first place—was not brave and that the kudos that he’s received from Team Obama and high-profile colleagues like Kobe Bryant (only a few years removed from his own courtside use of a pejorative directed at Gays) and the always-already surreal Metta World Peace, were not thoughtful. It stands to reason, though, that President Obama will not be making a call to every Black man or women who will admit to a friend, family member, clergy leader or employer that he or she is gay—or more importantly, he won’t be calling those who will be shunned from the comforts of family and community because they did.

But what exactly are we really celebrating in highlighting the decision of one Black and Gay man to tell the world how he has lived everyday for much of his mature life?

As is too often the case in these matters, the attention that Jason Collins is getting is really about the need of our society to pat ourselves on the collective back for being open and tolerant enough to allow a veteran basketball player, close to the end of his career, to tell us that he is Black and Gay. In this regard, I’m not impressed. Nevada State Senator Keith Atkinson recently also admitted that he was “Black” and “Gay” to his legislative colleagues during a debate on Same-Sex marriage, which apparently doesn’t make us feel as good.

To be sure, Jason Collins represents an important moment in professional sport in the United States. As he symbolically raised his hand, hopefully he will find others willing to raise their hands alongside him and encourage a generation of younger athletes to be comfortable enough in their own skins to feel free to express whoever “they be.”  Until then I’m just waiting for the press conference or cover story that announces that such things no longer matter.

Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of several books, including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (NYU Press, 2013), and the host of the weekly webcast Left of Black.

Book giveaways!

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It finally feels like spring! We’re celebrating the season by hosting Goodreads giveaways for two new titles from our spring catalog. Check ‘em out below, and enter to win a copy of one—or both!

A powerful examination of the portrayal of black men in popular culture

LOOKING FOR LEROY
Illegible Black Masculinities
by Mark Anthony Neal

Released April 22, 2013

“[N]o one but Neal would manage to produce a theory of black masculinity capable of explaining the smoothness of Luther Vandross, the cosmopolitan genius of Jay-Z, the enigma of Leroy from Fame, and the sheer brute force of Snoop from The Wire. Genius.“—Jack Halberstam, author of Gaga Feminism

2 copies available. Giveaway ends on May 10, 2013. Enter to win!

 

A creative reinvestigation of murder, insurance fraud, and a Supreme Court ruling

A DEATH AT CROOKED CREEK
The Case of the Cowboy, the Cigarmaker, and the Love Letter
by Marianne Wesson

Releases May 24, 2013

“Known for her legal thrillers, University of Colorado law professor Wesson employs her expertise to great effect in this exhaustive study… [A] true crime drama that’s well researched, easy to read, and oddly compelling.”
—Publishers Weekly

3 copies available. Giveaway ends on May 24, 2013. Enter to win!

Good luck, and spread the word!

Marathon bombers’ refugee roots shed light on trajectories

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Silvia Domínguez, author of Getting Ahead (NYU Press, 2010), recently appeared on the Huffington Post with an excellent piece on the refugee roots of the Boston Marathon bombers. An excerpt appears below.

Dzhokhar was eight years old and Tamerlan was 15 when they arrived in the U.S. Both brothers became involved in sports, attended a mosque on Prospect Street, and enrolled in Cambridge Rindge and Latin School — perhaps the most culturally accepting secondary school in the nation. In this environment, Dzhokhar thrived. Emigrating at a young age, he attended schools with the same friends he grew up with, gradually lost his accent, and became a well-liked and respected student. On the other hand, Tamerlan emigrated as a teenager, arguably the most difficult age of transition for adolescents. Although he became an excellent boxer according to his trainers in Lowell, he never lost his accent and his English was difficult to understand, opening himself up to discrimination.

Refugees are often from areas where conflict is historically embedded and marked in ideology and injustice. The Tsarnaev family emigrated from the Chechen diaspora in Kyrgzstan, a region Stalin deported the Chechens to in 1943. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991, Chechens engaged in a battle for independence from Russia that led to the Tsarnaevs’ petition for refugee status in the early 2000s. While Dzhokhar was only a child during this strife, Tamerlan experienced that civil conflict as an adolescent, shaping his identity as participant in the conflict. Once in the U.S., Tamerlan could not find kinship with American youth who are naïve about civil armed struggles. As he posted on Facebook, he did not understand Americans and had no friends. Americans often assumed that they were Russian, forcing the brothers to clarify that they were actually Chechen. Being confused with the offender, Russia, may have caused young Dzhokhar’s curiosity about his Chechen heritage, but it likely enraged Tamerlan in a cumulative alienating manner.

Read the full post here.

Words do matter in the immigration debate

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—Ediberto Román and Bobby Joe Bracy

[This post originally appeared on the Latinovations blog. Read it here.]

After decades of inaction, this week’s unveiling of the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” immigration proposal suggests that Congress may finally be prepared to reform our immigration system. It is of no surprise that this renewed vigor comes on the heels of a presidential election where an overwhelming majority of Hispanic voters rejected the Republican solution was self-deportation. Yet, despite this crucial and potentially transformative moment, Republican leaders, such as Senator John McCain, one of the Group of Eight, has continued to use of ‘illegal immigrant’ when addressing the subjects of reform. He and many other Republicans who oppose immigration reform continue to use the more provocative yet inaccurate term–“illegal alien”(a term still used by the federal immigration agency, ICE). Conservative Senator Jeff Sessions for his part derided the Gang of Eight’s efforts as “making nearly impossible for ICE officials to distinguish between ‘illegal immigrants’ eligible for legal status and those simply asserting they are amnesty eligible.”

Notwithstanding the insistence to label human beings as “illegal” merely because they have committed what under federal law is a misdemeanor, other important avenues of communication and education are beginning to change the heretofore tone of the debate. Just over a week ago the Associated Press (AP) came to a decision that has gone virtually unnoticed in legal and political circles. Yet the decision was profound. The AP “no longer sanctions the term ‘illegal immigrant’ or the use of ‘illegal’ to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that “illegal” should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally.”

A week later, USA Today made a similar decision to refrain from using the term, concluding that: “the term illegal immigration is acceptable, but do not label people as illegal immigrants, except in direct quotes. Undocumented immigrant, undocumented worker and unauthorized immigrant are acceptable terms — depending on accuracy, clarity and context… Do not use illegal or illegals as a noun. It is considered pejorative by most immigrants.”

While Fox News subsequently accused the AP of trying to influence immigration debate, the fact is the AP and the USA Today decisions were sound on several fronts, not the least of which is the accurate use of the English language as well as the legal and social impact of a discrediting imprecise term such as “illegal immigrant.”

Legal scholars have long recognized the inappropriateness of the use of the term. University of California, at Davis, Dean Kevin Johnson, for instance, observes: The most damning terminology for noncitizens is “illegal alien…‘Illegal aliens’ is a pejorative term that implies criminality, thereby suggesting that the persons who fall in this category deserve punishment, not legal protection.” Johnson further notes, “The illegal alien label…suffers from inaccuracies and inadequacies at several levels. [In fact,] many nuances of immigration law make it extremely difficult to distinguish between an ‘illegal’ and a ‘legal’ alien.”

Leading linguists agree, and last year a group of 24 scholars criticized the Associated Press’ previous assertion that the term “illegal immigrant” was accurate and neutral. These experts noted: “This misleading construction of illegality is tied to the circulation of troublesome stereotypes about the migration status of different ethnoracial groups. Specifically, assessments of illegality are often associated with unreliable signs of one’s migration status, such as language, religion, and physical appearance. These presumptions lead not only to law enforcers’ regular misidentification of people’s migration status based on wrongful assumptions about ethnolinguistic markers, but also to the broader public stigmatization of those markers.”

As the leading law dictionary, Black’s makes clear, no person, including an alien, is “illegal.” The word “illegal” is an adjective, or “a word … typically serving as a modifier of a noun to denote a quality of the thing named.” Thus, no person, including an alien, is illegal. Accordingly, an alien is “a person resident in one country, but owing allegiance to another.” In other words, our laws regulate the legality of the “conduct” of persons, but do not attempt to classify human beings in such a manner. We do not, for instance, classify a seven year old that steals something as an “illegal child.” Such a label would not only be deemed absurd, but also morally bankrupt. Our laws have never gone as far as to make the persons involved “illegal.” The idea that a person might be “illegal” is thus not only inhumane; it is also grammatically inaccurate, as well as legally incoherent. There are simply no laws adequately governing the issue of “illegal personhood.” As Johnson points out, although “alien” appears repeatedly in the Immigration and Nationality Act, the term “illegal alien” is not once defined.

In sum, substances and other objects can be illegal, and conduct can be illegal—but a person cannot. As Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel aptly noted years ago, “No human being is illegal.”

The AP’s decision is couched in bedrock ethical and professional concerns about accuracy in reporting. As AP’s Kathleen Carroll explains…”Will the new guidance make it harder for writers? Perhaps just a bit at first. But while labels may be more facile, they are not accurate.”

Social justice and civil rights advocates have long fought similar battles over truth and accuracy, which is not an easy battle when facility makes ignorance so appealing. As the AP now calls for: Specify wherever possible how someone entered the country illegally and from where. Crossed the border? Overstayed a visa? What nationality?

In other words: do your homework, and describe the action or conduct that is illegal.

The decision is the only fit response to critics who dismiss this issue as “political correctness” or “censorship.” The aim evidently was not to “censor” ideas or speech, but to be critical of terms that bury a great deal of important information. In almost any context, these questions are not only significant for reporting, but legally significant. People’s rights are in the balance. As a federal court recently observed in U.S. v. Cruz-Padilla, where the court held that the defendant was entitled to a new trial because the prosecution relied on the term “illegal alien” in their closing arguments in front of a jury. Citing the Supreme Court’s earlier decisions (holding that the Constitution’s “due process” clause prohibits the use of “racially biased prosecutorial arguments”), the Cruz-Padilla Court characterized the “improper” use of the term “illegal alien” as a “foul.”

Law and psychology experts likewise have long recognized, markers or labels, especially politically loaded negative labels, have the ability to shape public policy and laws. Such labels help shape what is described as implicit bias, or mental shortcuts that allow us to make negative associations of groups that are undeserving of such negative categorizations. Stereotypes, for instance, allow society to use mental shortcuts, or schema, to associate individuals with a discrediting quality. These discrediting qualities in turn make it easier for policy makers to enact laws that seek to protect us from those with such qualities.

Sadly, history is replete with such efforts. For instance, one of the first and easiest ways for the Third Reich to enact its laws and policies was to stigmatize the Jewish community with similar discrediting qualities. These efforts paved the way to pass laws and enact horrific policies to allegedly protect society from these dangerous contagions. The use of the label illegal alien has a similar social effect. It has labeled a group of persons, who under our criminal and immigration laws have committed typically nothing more than a misdemeanor, as a group of hardened criminals that we should fear and exclude. As more and more Americans are realizing, and opinion polls reflect such realization, this label conflicts with reality.

With the recent announcements by the AP and the USA Today, we hopefully begin a path of engaging in narratives based on accurate depictions, and not stigmatizing labels. No longer is it ethical or responsible to use the discrediting marker “an illegal human being”—if indeed it ever was.

Ediberto Román is a nationally-acclaimed scholar and an award-winning educator with broad teaching interests and an extensive scholarship portfolio. He is the author of several books, including Citizenship and Its Exclusions: Classical, Constitutional, and Critical Race Perspectives (NYU Press, 2010) and Those Damn Immigrants: America’s Hysteria Over Immigration (NYU Press, 2013).

Bobby Joe Bracy is a law student at Florida International University and an immigrant rights advocate. He is currently a research assistant for Ediberto Román, and the President of the National Lawyers Guild at FIU Law.

Marriage equality and the law, 1967 and 2013

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—Howard Ball

In 1967, when a good cigar only cost five cents, a very different U.S. Supreme Court, led by a very different Chief Justice (Earl Warren), faced a choice between a states rights and an equal protection of the laws argument. The same choices face the Justices this term, but I am fearful that the outcome will be very different in 2013.

In 1967, the case Loving v. Virginia came to the Court because Virginia (and 15 other states) enforced its anti-miscegenation statute prohibiting marriage between Caucasians and blacks. At this time, the jurists formed an exceedingly diverse group, much more so than the sitting Court. For one thing, the majority of them had political careers prior to joining. Thus, this intimate contact with politics gave them a much greater sense of the real world than the cloistered world of arcane legalism would have.

Also of note was that the Court was mostly composed of either moderate or liberal jurists; there were no arch conservative “originalists” such as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito sitting as we see in the current Court. And the Loving decision was but one example of the Court’s rock solid commitment to civil rights and civil liberties in the mid-20th century (1953-1969).

Virginia’s lawyers argued that in a federal system, the state has the power in the 10th Amendment to establish rights and limits regarding marriage. The lower federal courts accepted this argument, yet without a dissent, Chief Justice Warren categorically rejected it. He wrote that “the 14th Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.” The Court’s commitment to racial marriage equality in Loving came even though 72% of the American public opposed inter-racial marriage that year. (In 2011, 97% of persons under 30 years approved of inter-racial marriage. Clearly, values evolved towards equality.)

In 2013, two cases are in the Supreme Court. One, U.S. v. Windsor, the plaintiff, an octogenarian lesbian whose wife of more than four decades died and who had to pay over $300,000 to the IRS because the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) denied federal benefits to same-sex married couples, argued that the law was an unconstitutional violation of the right of gay and lesbian couples to marry. In the second case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, lawyers challenged the constitutionality of Proposition 8, passed in 2008 by the voters in California. It invalidated an earlier California Supreme Court decision that allowed same sex marriage. The arguments by the lawyers for the gay and lesbian petitioners are based on the concept of equality in the Constitution and are reminiscent of the Loving decision.

In contrast to the expectations of petitioners in 1967, however, the outcome in 2013 is uncertain. First of all, only one sitting Justice, Elena Kagan, has any prior experience outside of the judiciary (she was the U.S. Solicitor General in the first Obama Administration). Two had prior work on the Senate judiciary committee (Stephen Breyer) and as counsel for the ACLU (Ruth B. Ginsburg). All the other members came to the Court from lower federal appellate courts, having no real political world experiences to draw upon. Furthermore, unlike the Warren Court, there is a hard and fast ideological split on the Court: five very conservative jurists and four moderates. And there has been, for more than a decade, an “appreciation” by the conservative majority of the primacy of states’ rights vis-á-vis federal power, a general wariness about the Court moving too hastily when deciding controversial social issues, and an originalist commitment to the historic values and traditions of the American society.

There are only a few options available to the Court in deciding the same-sex cases:

  1. Dismiss the cases as improvidently granted, which would leave DOMA in place and have the 9CA overturn of Proposition 8 restored,
  2. (a) Overturn DOMA, ending a federal imposition and enabling, in the 9 states and the D.C. that allow same sex marriage, all married couples to receive federal benefits, and (b) validate California’s Proposition 8, enhancing, in both cases, the principle of states’ rights in the face of federal laws.
  3. Overturn Proposition 8 and DOMA on individual rights, privacy and “equal protection” grounds, using Loving as precedent.

I am not holding my breath that the last option will be the majority’s choice. It will be one of the first two possibilities; either one will sadden but not surprise me and most Court observers. Paradoxically, unlike public opposition to racial intermarriage in 1967 rejected by a unanimous Court, in 2013, although 58% of Americans support same-sex marriage, it may be rejected by a five person majority. Oh, for the return of a good five cent cigar and the Warren Court!

Howard Ball is Emeritus Professor of Political Science and University Scholar at the University of Vermont and Adjunct Professor of Law at Vermont Law School. He is the author of At Liberty to Die: The Battle for Death with Dignity in America (NYU Press, 2012) and The Supreme Court in the Intimate Lives of Americans (NYU Press, 2002).

UB Law’s Higginbotham takes on the lingering effects of Jim Crow

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[Note: This article originally appeared in the Daily Record here. ]

In May 2004, University of Baltimore School of Law professor F. Michael Higginbotham gave a speech to mark the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s historic ruling that found segregated public schools were inherently unequal.

Despite the dismantling of the Jim Crow laws, “people need to clearly understand that there are separations that still exist in society,” F. Michael Higginbotham says.

“I started to think about how far we have come and how much progress we have made, but also how much further we needed to go,” Higginbotham said.

That was the spark that led to an almost nine-year journey culminating with the publication of his new book, Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America.

At the core of the book is the existence of what Higginbotham called a “racial model” — created during slavery and nurtured by the segregationist Jim Crow laws and practices after the Civil War — that still exists in our society, with many people of both races still desiring isolation.

“What I am trying to do is get those individual people with those views to begin a conversation about how to recognize those views and how to end this racial model,” Higginbotham said.

There is also an element of racial victimization — both internally, among African-Americans, and externally, in laws and practices that discriminate against them, said Higginbotham, who served as the law school’s interim dean last year.

“It’s a failure of blacks themselves to value education and other upward-mobility vehicles and they turn to crime because of these perceived notions,” Higginbotham said.

Higginbotham has been at UB Law for about 25 years and teaches a class on race law. He grew up in Ohio and Beverly Hills, Calif., and attended Brown University for his bachelor’s degree before Yale Law School.

Some of the ideas in the book stem from his childhood in Beverly Hills. In the book’s preface, he recounts an evening riding his bike home as a 13-year-old when he was stopped by police. He was told he was out after curfew, but later discovered from friends that there was, in fact, no curfew in the neighborhood.

Higginbotham published his first and only other book in 2010. The textbook, Race Law: Cases, Commentary, and Questions explores race in the legal process from 1787 to the present.

“The difference in writing this one was I was able to put more of my own opinions into Ghosts,” Higginbotham said. “[Ghosts] was more of a reflection of what I believe from a personal standpoint, whereas a textbook must be a reflection of others.”

In the first part of the book, Higginbotham maps out these ideas, supported with historical and recent examples.

“I thought we had dealt with this,” Higginbotham said. “People need to clearly understand that there are separations that still exist in society that reflect what we think [happened] in the Jim Crow days,” Higginbotham said.

Once he decided to write the book, what followed was extensive research: reading cases, legislation and historic documents, Higginbotham said.

The writing, he said, he tried to make clear and concise, steering away from complicated legal prose. Higginbotham said he wrote mostly during winter and summer breaks and on weekends during the school year.

“I tried to break cases and legislation down so that anyone interested in race relations today and racial inadequacies, whether it’s junior high students, high school students or simply people who personally enjoy reading, that this would be something they could enjoy,” Higginbotham said.

Higginbotham went through several drafts, which he had colleagues read and edit, then sent it to publishers in early 2008 — about eight months before the presidential election. A publisher who was interested told Higginbotham the company liked the book, but told him he needed to factor in then-presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

Higginbotham spent the next several years weaving the effects of Obama’s presidency on race relations into his book, which was published by NYU Press and released on March 18.

The last part of the book focuses on Higginbotham’s ideas on how to shepherd in a new era of racial relations. Higginbotham suggests that people need to recognize there is a problem, empower the black community and equally integrate society.

“I’m not suggesting I have all the answers,” Higginbotham said. “I am saying the solutions I put forward would help eliminate the racial paradigm.”

Celebrating women of color, one girl at a time

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—Andreana Clay

Last month, when The Onion magazine posted a tweet calling nine year old Quvenzhané Wallis the c-word, I tweeted a reply, “No Black girl is safe.”  And that’s how I felt, and often do feel, even though it’s a bit bleak. But, let’s think about this: in addition to the ways that adult women are denigrated in society, it has become acceptable to make jokes about a (Black) girl. The safety of young girls from sexism is something that I became familiar with as a researcher/working with teenagers in Oakland, CA. Half of the youth activists I worked closely with in The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back were young women, many of whom led the efforts.

This Women’s History Month, I think it’s important to turn our attention to young women, particularly young women of color. The Onion comment aside, young women of color are simultaneously heavily scrutinized and ignored. Take, for instance, the dual experience of some of the young Black and Latina women I worked with who were singled out for being presumed to be on the road to (teenage) pregnancy, so they were not taken seriously as students. Literally, one teacher commented that “I don’t really call on Latina or African American females. . . They’re gonna get pregnant and drop out anyways, so what’s the point?”

This discourse, as NYU author Lorena Garcia has pointed out, exists both in and outside of the classroom and has significant impacts on young women of color. This is something I urge us to think about during Women’s History Month: the ways that “women” as a universal term continues to privilege white, heterosexual, cis women; a long-standing feminist critique. However, the discourse around women primarily and solely focuses on adult women. The women we celebrate during this month, the women’s issues we collectively organize around, and the laws we pass are targeted at and specifically benefit adult women.

For example, the recent passage of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was celebrated because of its inclusion of Native American, lesbian, queer, and transgender women. However, a notable absence and hard-fought exclusion was the protection and decriminalization of human trafficking subjects—many of whom are minors and young women of color. More specifically, this group often includes women who are runaways, homeless, or thrown out of their homes as teenagers for their emerging sexuality.

And these young women are no different than the young women in my book: a young queer Latina who was routinely thrown out of her home and once boarded a bus to New York for a week, just so she’d have a place to stay; another queer Chicana, who was often threatened by boys for “looking like a white boy” when she was out with her African American girlfriend; still another young, African American woman, who had to take out a restraining order against her boyfriend for beating her up, a restraint he often ignored.

And these are the young women that we think are “protected” or “safe” because they are involved in organizing activities, ones specifically addressing the surveillance they experience as it relates to racism, sexism, and homophobia. However, we need to step into this battle with these young women in order to make our lives, as women, better. We must fight for the Quvenzhané Wallis’ of the world, the young women we have in our lives and know, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the ones that we don’t. And while we may want to think of these women as “our future,” let’s make this Women’s History Month about contributing to the history they—and we—are making now.

Andreana Clay is Associate Professor of Sociology at San Francisco State University and author of The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back: Youth, Activism, and Post-Civil Rights Politics (NYU Press, 2012).

In memoriam: Hugo Chávez

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—Michael D. Yates

The death of Hugo Chávez saddens those struggling for a better world. He was a great champion of the impoverished workers and peasants of both Venezuela and the world, and a steadfast and bold critic of the rapacious and murderous imperialism of the United States.

Monthly Review Press is proud of the books we have published on Venezuela, books which describe, analyze, and show solidarity with the Venezuelan road to democratic socialism. A key element in building a revolutionary, new society is to ensure the health of the people. This has been one of Chávez’s singular achievements; millions of poor Venezuelans have received (free) medical care for the first time. In cooperation with Cuba, Venezuela has begun to construct a system of patient-centered, decentralized, and preventive health care, a process examined in Steve Brouwer’s Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care. Remarkably, peasants and workers are themselves trained to be doctors, in a work and study program pioneered by Cuba.

Under Chávez, Venezuela has striven to secure its political and economic independence from the United States, which has had a sordid history of intervention in the country and in all of Latin America. Not only did he help to engineer a strong economy not dependent on the United States, he never hesitated to challenge with words and deeds its imperialist practices. Given the implacable hostility of the United States to Venezuela, examined with great care by Eva Golinger in Bush versus Chávez: Washington’s War on Venezuela, it is remarkable that Chávez remained in power, winning democratic elections and surviving a Bush-engineered coup. This is a testament to the depth of his revolution and the growing power of Latin American governments to steer a course independent of the United States, a power inspired by Venezuela.

Following the failed coup in April 2002, when massive popular protest propelled him back to the presidency, Chávez sat down with Marta Harnecker and provided insights into his own political trajectory and the nature of what he called “socialism for the twenty-first century.” His words were later published in Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 2005).

While Monthly Review Press must sell books to remain in operation, our main purpose has always been to promote radical thought and action in the world. We have published books in which authors have expressed the deepest admiration for Hugo Chávez, but praise for a radical leader is never our goal; it is the empowerment of the masses of workers and peasants we want to help achieve. And yet, it must be said that our love for Chávez has been amply repaid.

In April 2009, at the Summit of the Americas meeting in Trinidad, Chávez arose from his seat, walked over to Barack Obama and handed him a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s classic work of the centuries-long exploitation of Latin America by the great imperialist nations (including, of course, the United States): Open Veins of Latin America. He inscribed the book, “For Obama, with affection.” As word of this spread around the world, the English edition of the book reached #2 on Amazon’s sales charts. This was a great boon to Monthly Review Press and to our distributor, NYU Press. We were inundated with emails and phone calls, and I remember having to quickly re-read the book (which I had used in my classes when I was a teacher), so that I could write and deliver, within one day, a review to an Australian magazine.

Let us hope that as the Venezuelan revolution continues and as the imperial power of the United States someday diminishes in response to popular revolt here, it won’t be necessary for the president of one country to give such a book to the leader of another. Because Hugo Chávez’s dream and that of every revolutionary person will have been realized… That there be no rich and poor, that there be no exploiter and exploited, that there be only one healthy and happy humanity.

Michael D. Yates is a writer, editor, and labor educator. He is Associate Editor of Monthly Review and Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press.

Which women’s histories? Feminism, race, and Women’s History Month

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—Alison Piepmeier

To tell you the truth, I’m a bit skeptical of Women’s History Month. I’m skeptical of all the themed months. In part, I’m skeptical because they encourage us to see things in terms of stereotypes. During Black History Month, folks are often focused on the standard heroic figures—many of whom are black men and the women who gain prominence because of their connection with them. And during Women’s History Month, we’re often focused on white women, with the occasional woman of color thrown in to mix things up.

This kind of segmented thinking affects our understanding of history more broadly. White feminists often say that women started speaking out about and against rape in the 1970s—but have a look at the writings of nineteenth-century journalist (and African American woman) Ida B. Wells. Wells documented rapes like that of a white man raping an eight-year-old black girl: “The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this case; she was black,” and in another case, “a white man…inflicted such injuries upon another Afro-American child that she died. He was not punished.” As Wells’ work demonstrates, black women had been speaking out against rape for over a hundred years before white feminist activism took on this issue.

As Danielle McGuire points out in her excellent book At the Dark End of the Street, the familiar understanding of the Civil Rights movement is that Martin Luther King, Jr., was the person who initiated it—but in fact, ass-kicking investigator and activist Rosa Parks was initiating resistance while King was still in high school. She wasn’t an elderly woman who happened to sit on the bus: she was a radical activist who saw what needed to be done, and then kept her mouth shut so that she could become a strategic symbol.

We need the same kinds of sensitivity as McGuire when we’re examining more recent history. In my book Girl Zines, I discuss the ways women of color use zines to offer scathing critiques of their erasure from discussions of feminism, as when Chandra Ray writes in the zine Evolution of a Race Riot,

Many white girls talk about sisterhood.  They really mean:  you’re my sister as long as you don’t confront me on my bigotry.  You’re my sister as long as you know your place.  (Which usually means underneath or behind you, hidden from view or maybe as a token to show how diverse your movement is.)  I don’t give a shit about how many meetings you’ve been to or how many unlearning racism workshops you’ve undergone….Until you stop expecting women of color to conform to the white-girl ideal of feminism, I don’t want anything to do with you.

If we’re going to celebrate Women’s History Month, let’s celebrate a truly diverse, intersectional, complex history, full of identities that don’t fit into the neat narratives we’ve been told.

Alison Piepmeier is the author of Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (NYU Press, 2009).

Supreme Court must protect minority rights

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—F. Michael Higginbotham

Recently, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, examining the constitutionality of Section 5 “pre-clearance” provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Section 5 mandates that states or portions thereof with a history of discriminatory voting laws get prior approval by the Department of Justice for any changes to their election laws. In 2009, the Supreme Court upheld Section 5, but Chief Justice Roberts indicated that the section creates “serious constitutional questions” and should be “justified by current needs.”

For 47 years, the Voting Rights Act has prohibited certain racially discriminatory election practices and given the federal government supervisory powers over jurisdictions that used such practices. This supervisory role has proven crucial to ensuring protections for racial minorities previously excluded from their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.

In signing the bill, President Lyndon Johnson termed it “a monumental law in the history of American freedom.” He was right. Shortly after the law was enacted, 800,000 blacks registered to vote in covered jurisdictions. Few minorities were registered prior to its passage. Today, there are over 10,000 elected black officials; in 1965, there were approximately 300.

Because of this progress, some question whether Section 5 is still needed. Recent voting irregularities in the covered jurisdictions, where allegations of minority voter suppression have been lodged due to faulty election machines, purges in voter rolls, burdensome voter identification requirements, and winner-take-all at-large districting mandates, suggest that it is.

It is in this last category where Section 5 has been most effective preventing changes in election practices that would undermine the voting power of racial minorities.  The Shelby County case provides insight. Prior to local elections in 2008, the City of Calera, located in Shelby County, redrew its jurisdictional boundaries. The redrawn boundary eliminated the City Council’s only majority-black district by adding several white subdivisions adjacent to Calera while refusing to incorporate a black area located nearby. The lone majority-black district was reduced from 70 to 30 percent black, resulting in the election loss of Ernest Montgomery, the only black city councilperson.  The Justice Department would not approve the redistricting plan and, after extensive negotiations, Calera adopted a more inclusive at-large election system. A system that prevented a white numerical majority from controlling 100 percent of the six positions on the city council and that resulted in Montgomery receiving the most votes of all council candidates.

While much progress has been made over the last few decades including black registration rates equivalent to whites, racially polarized voting patterns coupled with vote prevention and dilution practices suggest a continued need for vigilance.  In  2001, the white mayor and all white city council in Kilmichael, Mississippi cancelled elections shortly after blacks became a majority of registered voters. Last year in Texas, two federal courts identified multiple examples of more sophisticated, yet equally outrageous, discriminatory redistricting practices including removing economic centers from majority-minority districts and placing them in white districts without any financial reasons for doing so, and removing minorities from such districts who have voted in prior elections  and replacing them with minorities who have not recently voted in order to maintain the appearance of a majority-minority district without the likelihood of minorities casting the most ballots. In each situation, Section 5 was used to prohibit the discriminatory practice. With so many clearly identified problems, it is hard to believe that five justices of the Supreme Court would decide that anti-discrimination protections in Section 5 are no longer “justified by current needs”.

F. Michael Higginbotham is the Wilson H. Elkins Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law. He is the author of Race Law: Cases, Commentary, and Questions and Ghosts of Jim Crow: Ending Racism in Post-Racial America (NYU Press, 2013).