The Multiracial Activist - www.multiracial.com

 

NAACP 100th Anniversary: Exploiting Color Instead of Erasing It
February 12, 2009 - The Abolitionist Examiner
Jonathan J. Bean

George Orwell famously wrote “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” As the NAACP celebrates its 100th anniversary, its leaders present a past that squares with its present positions on racial preferences, welfare, and a public school monopoly that traps poor children in failed schools.

But that is not the NAACP’s past. The historic achievements of the NAACP—all but forgotten by most Americans—derived from a passionate dedication to colorblindness and individual freedom. From its founding in 1909 until the 1960s, the NAACP fought for a “colorblind Constitution.” Since then, it has become just another interest group pleading for favors. This flip-flop would make splendid material for an Orwellian novel: preference is equality, some “more equal” than others.

The history of the NAACP is usually presented as a story of triumphant radicalism. School children learn about the contributions of NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois but do not learn that DuBois quit the NAACP in the mid-1930s, joined the Communist Party, and left the country for self-exile in Africa.

The forgotten colorblind tradition of the NAACP can be told through the story of other key figures. The NAACP’s cofounders included lawyers Moorfield Storey and Louis Marshall, two white men dedicated to the principle of colorblind law. From 1909 to 1929, the NAACP relied on their legal firepower. As NAACP president, Storey successfully challenged cities that segregated neighborhoods by law. In 1917, the Supreme Court overturned this residential apartheid—a victory that came thirty-seven years before Brown v. Board of Education.

Louis Marshall followed with a victory in Nixon v. Herndon (1927), a decision banning the Democratic Party’s “white-only primaries.” Marshall also won a case in favor of school choice, winning a ruling that laws banning private schools, pushed in many states by the Ku Klux Klan, were unconstitutional. The court ruled in this historic case that private schools could not be banned because children were not “mere creature[s] of the state.” Today’s NAACP ought to take note of the irony: Its opposition to “school choice” is the position once taken by the bigots of the KKK.

Black lawyers took the lead from the 1930s onward. A young Thurgood Marshall, who became NAACP chief counsel at the age of thirty-two, after winning the very first case he argued before the Supreme Court, shared the colorblind sentiments of Storey and Louis Marshall. An aide recalled: “Marshall had a ‘Bible’ to which he turned during his most depressed moments. . . . Marshall would read aloud passages from Harlan’s amazing dissent [in Plessy v. Ferguson]. I do not believe we ever filed a major brief in the pre-Brown days in which a portion of that opinion was not quoted. Marshall’s favorite quotation was, ‘Our Constitution is color-blind.’ It became our basic creed.”

In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), Marshall asked the Supreme Court to desegregate schools and end Plessy’s “separate but equal” standard by declaring the Constitution colorblind. Instead, the court based its decision on dubious sociology.

Nevertheless, into the 1960s the NAACP continued to argue that racial classifications were dangerous. For example, a letter writer asked NAACP attorney Robert L. Carter where the group stood on a bill to repeal racial identification on marriage certificates. Carter responded: “Color designations on birth certificates, marriage licenses and the like can serve no useful purpose whatsoever. If we are prepared to accept the basic postulate of our society—that race or color is an irrelevance—then contentions that race and color statistics are of social science value become sheer sophistical rationalization.”

Likewise, Clarence Mitchell, the NAACP’s chief lobbyist for nearly three decades, declared that “the minute you put race on a civil service form . . . you have opened the door to discrimination.”

Beginning in the 1970s, however, the Supreme Court upheld “benign” discrimination in the name of equality. When President Richard Nixon held out the prospect of racial preferences in jobs and government contracts, the NAACP shifted course and began seeking these favors. Those who still supported colorblind law became the new enemy.

George Orwell was famous for challenging the “smelly little orthodoxies” of his time.

The wayward NAACP needs the smelling salts of dissidents who can recapture the proud tradition that recent leaders have betrayed. They can begin by honestly presenting the history of “the civil rights century.” That history would be marked by the quest for a colorblind society—a legacy of liberty that contemporary NAACP leaders have abandoned.

Be first to comment this article | Add as favourites (365) | Quote this article on your site | Views: 4438

Darwin and the Right
February 11, 2009 - The Abolitionist Examiner
Alvaro Vargas Llosa

WASHINGTON—Polls, particularly in the United States, tell us that many conservatives still distrust Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The bicentennial of his birth should be a fitting occasion for the right to take another look at a man who contributed immensely to some ideas that it holds dear.

Darwin was not an atheist but a Victorian believer. He was not a proto-Marxist but a liberal, which in 19th-century Britain meant someone who favored individual liberty over big government. Darwin was an admirer of John Locke and Adam Smith, two of the greatest thinkers of freedom. And although he was influenced by Malthus, whose writings on overpopulation were later used by critics of capitalism to justify collectivism, Darwin used that political economist’s ideas in biology, not political economy.

Darwin did not set out to deny God. Anyone who has read “The Origin of Species,” “The Descent of Man” or his correspondence is immediately struck by how careful Darwin was to avoid what we would today call an “ideological agenda.” But this diligent student of nature did make one shattering discovery: not the theory of evolution itself, which had been proposed many times and can be traced back to the Greeks, but the fact that evolution is a random process of natural selection whereby certain variations that become well-adapted to the environment are gradually preserved through hereditary transmission. Ultimately, all species have a common origin.

This finding posed a cataclysmic challenge to the established church, comparable to the re-examination of Aristotle in the 12th and 13th centuries or the displacement of the Earth from the center of the universe in the 16th and 17th centuries. But unlike the teachings of Aristotle, which were absorbed by the church through Thomas Aquinas, and the findings of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, which were reconciled with religion by rational Christianity and Deism, Darwin’s books have remained anathema to many believers. The pope finally accepted his teachings in the 1990s and the Anglican Church recently apologized to him. But for millions of Christians, Darwin remains unacceptable.

And yet science has confirmed and expanded Darwin’s theory, using it to great advantage. What he called the “mystery” of variation in offspring was explained by modern genetics. DNA sequencing and molecular biology have helped to understand the evolution of viruses and therefore to protect people from diseases.

Darwin’s teachings have been caricatured and grossly distorted. Social Darwinism, which turned his biological theory into a sociopolitical one to justify eugenics, harmed his reputation. But Darwin was an early opponent of slavery and, precisely because he identified a common origin in nature, he did more than anybody to debunk the notion that different races belong to different species.

Herein should lie Darwin’s appeal to the right: The English naturalist gave scientific validity to the revolutionary idea that order can be spontaneous, neither designed by nor beholden to an all-powerful authority. The struggle for existence that drives natural selection according to Darwin has nothing predetermined about it. In fact, he maintained that the presence of certain habits, values and institutions, including religion—themselves part of man’s adaptation to the environment—can impact evolution. The instinct of sympathy, for instance, drives some stronger members of the human species to help weaker ones, thereby mitigating the struggle for existence.

It is fascinating that conservatives who advocate for a spontaneous order—the free market—in political economy and decry social engineering as a threat to progress and civilization should resent Darwin’s overwhelming case for the idea that order can design itself. In an essay in the British publication The Spectator, the conservative science writer Matt Ridley reflects on the paradox that the left has claimed Darwin even though leftist political ideas contradict his basic teaching: “In the average European biology laboratory you will find fervent believers in the individualist, emergent, decentralized properties of genomes who prefer dirigiste determinism to bring order to the economy.”

The bicentennial of Darwin’s birth is a good opportunity for those on the right who trash him as an icon of the left to give the author of “The Origin of Species” another chance.

New from Alvaro Vargas Llosa! The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty Nearly four decades after his death, the legend of Che Guevara has grown worldwide. In this new book, Alvaro Vargas Llosa separates myth from reality and shows that Che’s ideals re-hashed centralized power—long the major source of suffering and misery for the poor. Learn More »»

Be first to comment this article | Add as favourites (344) | Quote this article on your site | Views: 3917

Marcella Chester has an interesting posting on the Timothy Cole case and the backlash the rape victim has received by some. She and I agree on much with regard to this case, but there is one key sticking point.  As Marcella and I are both rape survivors, we have our own internal biases and emotions to bring to this subject.  I have tried to balance my own feelings as rape survivor with regard to what this woman endured vs. the travesty of justice that occurred to Timothy Cole.  I believe there is room for understanding and compassion for both sides without unduly expecting one party to ignore current realities in the process.

The facts are this:

• A white woman (Michelle Malin) was raped by a black man.
• Police put an innocent, non-smoking asthmatic black man (Timothy Cole) in the lineup knowing full well that the perp was a chain-smoker.
• A white woman ID'd said innocent black man in lineup for said crime.
• Innocent black man was sentenced to 25 years and died in prison while having an asthma attack.

It is not uncommon for the police to orchestrate a witness ID to achieve a pre-determined result, especially if the perp is black and the victim is white. It sounds like this was likely the case here.

In addition, cross-racial witness IDs are notoriously unreliable. Both police and prosecutors know this well and exploit same regularly. The prosecutorial staff and police involved in this case need to be investigated thoroughly by an independent entity and the guilty parties should serve some real time. An "oops my bad" does not suffice when someone's life is ruined, regardless of what crime they were investigating at the time. The legal system is supposed to be about punishing the guilty and securing justice for the victim(s), not ensuring a win for the prosecution the facts be damned as it is all about today. The police and prosecutors murdered this man by ignoring key pieces of evidence, like his status as an asthmatic. He should have been ruled out as a suspect in 5 seconds. PERIOD.

Further, a woman who was raped was set up by the system to make a bad ID and she will now be haunted by that for a long time.  Cole should never have been presented to her as a possible suspect.  She couldn't have ID'd him if he had not been shown to her in the first place by the police who knew he was not a smoker.

I am glad to see that she was helping to clear his name upon learning of his innocence. She could easily have been drowning in PTSD and self-guilt right now or even denied that an innocent man was convicted, as sometimes happens in cases of wrongful convictions for any violent crime. I also have to say that I am impressed by Cole's family for not being angry with her over the ID. Regardless of what happened to her (which is not their fault or concern), their child was innocent and he is dead forever. They very easily could have blamed her and justified it to themselves without little effort. It would be misdirected blame, but it would ridiculous of anyone to expect them to be superhuman in their grief for a son who was murdered by the Texas justice system for the sole crime of sharing the same skin color as Mallin's rapist.

I'm going to guess that Cole, given his asthma was not some big, tough athletic guy and probably did not fare well behind bars. While there has been no disclosure in such regard, I'd not be surprised if he was raped in prison as well - given his asthma was not treated properly by the state and eventually led to his death behind bars.

In the end, we have a rape victim who is going to be haunted by the role that authorities orchestrated her into playing by including this innocent man in the lineup and then relying on a cross-racial witness ID, and a dead man who may have endured the same crime he died in prison for after so many years.

This is a horrible tragedy no matter what angle we examine it from.

Marcella takes exception to the idea of Cole's family having any justification for being angry with her for the false ID in her response to my comments on her blog entry. I disagree and point out the fact that many black men have served decades in prison for crimes they did not commit after being accused by white women. I went into great detail about how the police and prosecution should have never put Cole in front of her in the first place. There is some serious racial baggage involved with such cases that Marcella is clearly not grasping and is falsely labeling disagreement in that regard as victim-blaming. Pretending that such baggage does not exist is a form of skin color privilege that only those clueless to the reality would/could assert in such a cavalier manner. 

As Marcella pointed out, the ID was bad. The victim did not intend to ID the wrong man. We both agree there.

However, and this is important and some may not understand this or want to, but the point that has many upset is not just that an innocent man went to jail, but an innocent black man was, once again by a white victim ID, incarcerated for a crime he did not commit and only later found to be innocent decades after it was too late. There is a bit more to it than just a bad witness ID. It would be a form of victim-blaming itself to expect the Coles to live in a vacuum with regard to how black males are treated in the criminal justice system. Having been married to a black woman for 15 years, I understand this on a level cannot be easily discerned by someone outside of such experiences.

It is not as simple as just understanding how witness IDs work as Marcella asserts in her comment responses to me. The same understanding she grants to the victim for the bad ID she is denying to the family of Cole for any anger they could be feeling for that bad ID.

As the father of two multiracial (half-black) sons, I am aware of this on a daily basis as my boys go out into the world. I have to worry not only about how justice can be miscarried without malicious intent, but how it can happen in conjunction with skin color prejudices.

This case is about more than the misuse of witness IDs. It was also about race, which the Coles have very good reason to be angry about. To be perfectly clear, once again because I am being falsely accused of such, I did not say they should blame her for being raped, which is what Marcella's reference to victim-blaming clearly seems to imply. Disagreeing with Marcella's assertion that the Coles should be expected to only be angry at the police and prosecution and ignore the role the victim who ID'd him played in the process does not equal blaming the victim for being raped.  Do I think they should blame her?  No, but I recognize that while there should be understanding toward this woman for this mistaken ID, there should also be a requisite amount of understanding given any of his family members who were angry about the ID.

Being angry about a bad witness ID that cost a man his life is not the same thing as blaming a woman for being raped or claiming she was never raped, contrary to Marcella's ridiculous assertions. The two concepts are not even close and I consider any inference to the contrary to be a deliberate misrepresentation of my comments. One cannot possibly confuse the two without trying.

Further, had this country not had a history of incarcerating black men for crimes they did not commit, there would be no need for the Coles to have a very large emotional hill to climb in order to not be angry about the ID. To expect them to ignore this history is unrealistic. Marcella may not see it that way, but to imply that equals victim-blaming is simply false and something that requires further education for many who don't have to worry about such things on a regular basis.

In the end, Marcella ignores the fact that even Michelle Mallin disagrees with her on the point of anger as far as Cole's family is concerned.  She went to Cole's mother to seek forgiveness for the multiple bad IDs and testimony that contributed to her son's death in prison.  Clearly, Mallin recognized that the Coles may have cause for anger too, and not just at the legal system.  Cole's mother refused the apology as she said none is necessary choosing to focus on getting her son exonerated completely.  I say they are both to be applauded and that Mallin should not be second-guessed.  Clearly, Mallin's own feelings on the matter are not in alignment with Marcella Chester.  I think Mallin, as the victim, gets the final say.

With regard to his dying in prison not being murder, I wholeheartedly disagree with Marcella on this point.  I understand her point, but disagree.  Unless however, there is evidence that he received far better treatment for his asthma on the inside than he would have as an employed college graduate on the outside had his life continued without interruption by the criminal justice system. Downplaying his death in prison by calling it something other than murder seems abhorrent and callous to me. The man died in prison serving time for a crime he didn't commit.

I'd call that murder any day of the week.

Sincerely,

James A. Landrith, Jr.
Founder and Publisher,
The Multiracial Activist

Be first to comment this article | Add as favourites (392) | Quote this article on your site | Views: 5307

February 2, 2009

Honorable Harry Reid
Majority Leader
United States Senate
522 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator Reid:

Congress has taken critical steps to protect Americans’ jobs and opportunities by including essential privacy protections with the promotion of health information technology (health IT) in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, S.1. These common sense consumer protections address many of the issues that the Coalition for Patient Privacy, representing millions of Americans, brought to your attention. The protections in the bill are the bare minimum required to accomplish two critical goals:

1. Ensure consumer confidence with health IT, thereby protecting our $20 billion investment.
2. Ensure that above all we "do no harm" to patients when using their most intimate information in the digital age.

We all want to innovate and improve health care. This simply cannot occur without consumer confidence that their private medical records are protected and under their control. We urge you to maintain the practical consumer protections that both consumer and privacy advocates strongly support and reject calls from industry to spend taxpayer dollars without accountability, control or transparency. We should not continue to allow business as usual when it harms the American public. If fact, the only way to achieve President Obama’s vision for health care and health IT is to ensure privacy now.

By far the most important provision is the prohibition on the sale of protected health information (SEC. 13405(e)). Personal health information should not be sold and shared as a typical commodity. Health information is different; it is extremely sensitive and can directly impact jobs, credit, and insurance coverage. It is critical to put a stop to current data sales and misuse, but also to prevent the development of future businesses that sell personal health information as a commodity while doing nothing to improve Americans’ health.

All additional privacy provisions in S. 1 provide an important piece in protecting individuals.

These include:

• Limitations on marketing, audit trails of electronic health record transactions, requiring the Secretary to revisit and narrow the definition of "health care operations", and rights to electronic copies of our records;
• Improved enforcement provisions such as breach notification, required periodic audits, state attorneys general enforcement, a compensation scheme for privacy victims and applying security and privacy provisions and penalties to business associates;
• Requiring the HIT Policy Committee to make recommendations regarding segmentation of specific and sensitive information;
• Funding for consumer advocacy groups and not for profit entities to participate in the regulatory process and a study of health technology that can be used to meet the needs of seniors and individuals with disabilities.

We also support the provision included in the House bill that was proposed by Congressman Markey, SEC. 3002(b)(2)(B)(vi) that requires the HIT Policy Committee to make recommendations regarding technologies that allow individually identifiable health information to be rendered unusable, unreadable, or indecipherable to unauthorized individuals when transmitted or physically transported.

There is no more sensitive information on earth than our health records. Congress will need to build on the basic privacy protections in this bill and we move forward. We continue to advocate that our right to health information privacy be explicitly reaffirmed in statute, and much more can be done to ensure Americans have greater control over the uses of their health information. Nevertheless, the privacy provisions included in the bill are critical first steps to protecting consumers. We must couple health IT promotion with privacy protections. Working together we are making great progress and we thank you for your commitment to protect consumers.

Sincerely,

The Coalition for Patient Privacy

cc: United States Senate

The Coalition for Patient Privacy

AIDS Action

Alliance for Patient Safety

American Association of People with

Disabilities

American Foundation for the Blind

Bill of Rights Defense Committee

Citizens for Health

Citizen Outreach Project

Clinical Social Work Association

Confederation of Independent Psychoanalytic

Societies

Consumer Action

Ethics in Government Group

Fairfax County Privacy Council

Georgians for Open Government

Government Accountability Project

Health Integrity Project

International Association of Whistleblowers

Just Health

The Multiracial Activist

National Center for Transgender Equality

National Coalition for Mental Health

Professionals & Consumers

New Grady Coalition

Patient Privacy Rights

Private Citizen, Inc.

Student Health Integrity Project

Tolven

U.S. Bill of Rights Foundation

Be first to comment this article | Add as favourites (4) | Quote this article on your site | Views: 9