Daryl F. Gates, the rookie cop who rose from driver for a legendary chief to become chief himself, leading the Los Angeles Police Department during a turbulent 14-year period that found him struggling to keep pace with a city undergoing dramatic racial and ethnic changes, died Friday. He was 83.
Don’t let me catch Daryl Gates in traffic;/I gotta have it to peel his cap backwards./I hope he wear a vest, too,/And his best blue,/Goin up against the Zulu.
“Struggling to keep pace” is a nice way of framing Gates’ legacy. Gates was a product of the dominant culture of his time, to be sure, but he was also in a unique position of power over one of the most racially transparent large-scale social systems of the last century: the Los Angeles Police Department. His 14 years as chief, and 30 years on the force prior, lay out all-too-familiar story of policing that targets people instead of actions, and that views some races as inherently more dangerous — and less valuable — than others. In other words, police work as war.
Friday, sweet Friday, has arrived. And as usual, folks are taking to their Twitter accounts to sound off, share headlines, and mobilize people. It’s a jam-packed edition this week. The news that the SEC is charging Goldman Sachs with fraud has delighted many. Is anyone genuinely surprised, or sympathetic?
Sen. Carl Levin spent the morning lashing into former banking regulators who were supposed to have prevented Washington Mutual’s spectacular 2008 failure, which was the largest-ever bank collapse. It’s now clear both the bank and federal regulators knew the subprime loans that triggered that collapse were at best shoddy and in many cases fraudulent. What also ought to be clear is how utterly inadequate the current regulatory structure is for protecting consumers and how destructive that regulatory failure is to the global economy.
Levin’s particularly incensed about the Office of Thrift Supervision’s effort to keep FDIC Chair Sheila Bair out of the regulatory conversation. Bair was among a few, lone voices in the regulatory world who advocated a tough line against the banks. Levin called OTS’ position, on the other hand, “feeble.” He dug up emails in which OTS worked aggressively to keep Bair on the sidelines, including one in which OTS chief John Reich declared, “I cannot believe the continuing audacity of this woman.”
Levin’s chairing a investigative panel into how WaMu failed and how regulators dropped the ball. Earlier this week, the Senate panel’s investigation found that WaMu’s executives knew of rampant fraud in the bank’s massive subprime lending operation, including falsifying documents and steering borrowers to high-cost loans.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on Goodwin Liu’s nomination to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco today and conservatives are on 10 about it. If approved, Liu will be the only Asian-American judge serving in the nation’s appellate courts. But conventional wisdom is that this is a test debate for the coming Supreme Court battle. As Democratic Sen. Ted Kaufman declared as he opened his questioning this morning, “Welcome to the Judiciary Committee and the Supreme Court confirmation process.”
But the appeals court nomination itself is terribly important. For decades, Republican presidents have made a priority of stacking the lower federal courts with ideologues. As a result, conservative legal activists have shaped the lower courts, which rule on far more cases and shape what funnels up to the Supreme Court — including nominees for justices. Indeed, some argue Republicans’ fierce opposition to Liu is about cutting off his road to the high court.
Republicans on the committee argue that Liu deliberately submitted a too-thin response to a questionnaire about his work and views. They’re working hard to define Liu as a radical judicial activist and seem to be stirring speculation he’s got something to hide. Sen. Diane Feintstein countered this morning with a long list of George W. Bush appointees who provided dramatically thin responses to the questionnaire; those included Chief Justice Roberts, who didn’t answer 75 percent of the questions.
Yesterday, more than 800 law enforcement officials conducted the largest raid on border crossers on both sides of the American and Mexican border. The NY Times called it the largest immigrant smuggling raid in U.S. history intended to take down the industry of smugglers that have allowed thousands of people to come to the United States.
ICE targeted shuttle vans that are run by private companies that provide cross-border transport for commuters and migrants alike. Indeed, yesterday’s raid ended in 50 arrests, but only 17 turned out to be entering the U.S. without papers—proof, if it was ever unclear before, that ICE relies on racial profiling to round up those who are suspected of entering the country without papers. John Morton, the director of ICE whose resignation many in immigrant rights circles have been calling for, said the raid was a long-planned campaign to root out the infrastructure of transport that migrants rely on.
“We are taking out the whole industry and giving such a shock to individuals that they won’t recover as they have in the past,” Morton said to the NY Times.
Yesterday’s raid is exactly the kind of immigration enforcement tactic that Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, was quick to distance herself from early in her tenure. After the Bellingham raids in Washington state in early 2009, Napolitano promptly ordered a review of the raid, and dispatched an anonymous staffer to tell the press: “She was not happy about it because it’s inconsistent with her position, and the president’s position on these matters.”
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Leaders from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) are meeting in Raleigh, N.C., this week to celebrate the group’s 50th anniversary. The conference also marks the launch of the SNCC Legacy Program, a historical preservation project that aims to collect oral histories, photos, and publications by SNCC members, many of whom are now in their late 60s and early 70s.
A quick look at SNCC’s history shows exactly why it needs to be preserved. Decades before tea party protestors branded their own form of “grassroots activism,” SNCC changed the face of the civil rights movement by sending young organizers into some of the most dangerous parts of the Delta to register poor Black voters and help change the political landscape of the South. Over at The Root, former SNCC member Charles Cobb, Jr., offers a compelling first-person history of that harrowing work. It’s one of a few historical pauses in the media this week.
Yesterday’s New York Times poll of “tea party” supporters shows that while their most important concern is the economy, they often view this issue through the lens of racially tinted glasses. Not surprisingly, no public figure is more distorted in their perception than President Obama. The racial perceptions are subtle, but nonetheless striking in several ways. For example,
Fifty-four percent believe that the Obama administration’s policies favor the poor over the middle class. But with unemployment rates in Black and Latino neighborhoods hovering at twice the national average, and in some areas going as high as 25 to 30 percent, it’s hard to see how that belief is based on anything other than vast misperceptions about life in communities of color.
While 73 percent of the tea party supporters believe that Blacks and whites have equal opportunity in society, 52 percent feel that too much has been made of the problems facing Black people. The roll that race plays in shaping these perceptions is further revealed by the 30 percent who still believe that Obama was born in another country and the 92 percent that think the president is a socialist.
While a great deal of their anger is focused at Congress, they are overwhelmingly antagonistic toward President Obama. Approximately 88 percent disapprove of the way he is handling his job. That disapproval rating is 93 percent on health care and 91 percent on issues affecting the deficit, even though Obama inherited these massive problems (including $1 trillion in war spending) from the Bush/Cheney administration.
Meanwhile, President Bush continues to get a 57 percent approval rating despite the fact that he presided over the collapse of Wall Street and the big bank bailout, both issues that the tea party supporters are furious about.
Yet, despite these racially tinted perceptions, there does seem to be a strain of pragmatism that runs through this group. By significant majorities (65 percent) they continue to support abortion rights (45 percent with limits), are close to supporting civil unions (41 percent) and surprisingly 53 percent support either present levels or increased levels of immigration. And despite their very strong anti-big government sentiments, significant majorities of tea partiers support both Medicare and Social Security.
What’s it all mean? It’s the economy stupid! But it’s also that Black guy that they still just can’t seem to connect with.
Victor M. Goode is an associate professor of law at the City University of New York and a board member of the Applied Research Center.
The NYT’s poll of Tea Partiers today offered some concrete answers to the question of who these folks are. More detail on that later, but the top line is they’re often white, male and at least consider their finances to be in good shape. Maybe that’s why Glenn Beck has turned his financial empire toward them so aggressively. Forbes magazine’s current issue has an excellent cover story on Beck’s “cash machine.” “We’re an entertainment company,” Beck tells Forbes bluntly. He made $32 million over the 12 months ending March 1. As Forbes reports,
He has managed to monetize virtually everything that comes out of his mouth. He gets $13 million a year from print (books plus the ten-issue-a-year magazine Fusion). Radio brings in $10 million. Digital (including a newsletter, the ad-supported Glennbeck.com and merchandise) pulls in $4 million. Speaking and events are good for $3 million and television for $2 million. Over several days in mid-March Beck allowed a reporter to follow him through his multimedia incarnations, with one exception, his 5 p.m. daily show on Fox News, which attracts just under 3 million viewers. (FORBES has a relationship with that channel via Forbes on Fox.)
It’s fun to focus on the anger and the wacko stuff both Beck and the loudest Tea Parties have introduced to the public conversation. But the reality is a lot of folks are plain profiteering. Beck’s clearly among them. Check out our timeline of Tea Party history for examples of others.
As the Tea Party takes center stage this week, yet again, ColorLines paused to review how we arrived at this bizarre moment in political history. The answer: Not by accident. John McCain. Newt Gingrich. CNBC. Fox News. Even poor old Michael Steele. It’s taken a whole lotta leaders to keep this party going. So we put together an interactive timeline of those moments when some politician or corporation figured they had more to gain from stoking the fire than tamping it down. Click your way down memory lane here.
Oprah Winfrey, that enigmatic media mogul, that high-powered television host with the Midas touch, the purveyor of hopes and dreams and refrigerators, is the subject of everyone’s fascination. And these days more than ever, what with Kitty Kelley’s latest unauthorized biography of her and on the eve of Winfrey’s OWN cable television network.
So there’s no reason to be so surprised that this has inspired minor celebrities to take to their Huffington Post accounts to pile on. I admit when I heard about what she had to say about Oprah, I had to Google Erica Jong’s name to refresh my memory about who she is.
Famous byline or no, Jong reveals herself to be little more than just another crazy white lady as she writes about the Oprah she once knew, or thought she knew:
But Oprah seems to have gotten more mistrustful with fame, not less. And she seems to have gotten more race conscious than she was when she was younger. You never felt that Oprah was a professional Negro. She seemed totally unaware of race — but what do I know about being black? It’s not like being Jewish with a Chinese nom de plume.
The Department of Justice announced that a federal judge ordered a Mississippi county to stop the illegal practice of allowing white students to transfer out of their assigned high schools to the county’s only white-majority high school.
The Washington Post reports that over the years, Whitehall County in Mississippi had allowed hundreds of white students to transfer out of their Tylertown high schools that have a 75 percent Black student population to the smaller Salem Attendance Center, with a 66 percent white student population.
The Department of Justice, which moved to enforce the law against Whitehall County, said schools also had a practice of clustering white students together in classrooms, which led to all-Black classes in every grade. From the DOJ press release:
“Indeed, evidence in the case suggested that the community regarded certain schools in the district as “white schools” or “black schools.”
But lest people cluck their tongues at sad, backwards Mississippi, the resegregation of American public schools is not a new trend, and certainly not one confined to Mississippi.
Advocates in the state of Arizona are streaming into Phoenix today to urge Republican Gov. Jan Brewer to veto what might be the most draconian state immigration law ever passed. The Arizona legislature yesterday voted 21-to-35 along party lines to make it a criminal offense simply to be an undocumented immigrant on Arizona soil, and to require local cops to determine a person’s immigration status if there is any “reasonable suspicion” the person is undocumented. The law would essentially require police to racially profile Latinos, and threatens to terrorize immigrant communities already struggling to survive in what is arguably the country’s most anti-immigrant state.
The bill, which has been the target of a concerted campaign by immigrant and civil rights groups for months, expands the criminalization of immigrants. Arizona, the home of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, is already a cradle of harsh and sometimes legally suspect immigration policy — policy that then crawls to other states. Brewer is expected to sign the bill today, and if she does, immigrant communities will face an intensified and steady siege as local police will be required to check immigration status.
The day has finally arrived. It’s not enough to hear the N-word screamed at you in public and to report it. You must have a YouTube video to prove it and preferably the audio transcript—all of which goes to remind us that this country still thinks racism is just saying something, well, racist.
As you’ll recall, last month in the health care debate, three Black congressmen said that tea partiers outside of the Capitol screamed the N-word at them. One of the Black Congressmen was spit on, and in a separate incident, a gay congressman told reporters that he was called the F-Word.
But conservatives claim that videos like the one posted above show that no racial slur was ever uttered. Furthermore, conservatives insist, they wouldn’t be so stupid as to say something racist: “This is 2010. Even a racist is media-savvy enough not to yell the N-word.”
Those choice words are from none other than Andrew Breitbart, who if he is a racist is, indeed, a media-savvy one.
Just three days after promising immediate action on an immigration bill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters today that it will have to wait. The about-face exposes what was already pretty clear: Reid’s promise last weekend in front of a 6,000 person Las Vegas immigration reform rally was little more than an attempt to garner Latino support as he approaches a hotly-contested November Senate race. The retreat raises serious questions about the Democrat’s commitment to immigration reform and its Latino base.
Reid’s announcement in Las Vegas came as a surprise to many, since the White House and congressional Democrats have showed no signs they plan to fast-track an immigration bill. Reid’s aides are now saying that he never meant that a bill would be unfurled during this work session, but when he told the audience, “We’re going to come back, we’re going to have comprehensive immigration reform now,” it’s hard to see what else he might have meant.
The move clearly pulls the veil off the Democrat’s Janus-faced stance on immigration. They promise immigration reform as a token in exchange for votes, and avoid meaningful action out of fear that the issue is too contentious Meanwhile, Obama and his Department of Homeland Security bolster immigration enforcement practices that tear communities apart.
The map above shows the ratio of grocery stores to liquor stores in East Oakland, Calif. It’s probably a map that looks similar to most Black communities in the country. And the disparities it shows are noticeably missing from the latest round of “Teens Gone Wild: Kicking Black Folks Out of Grocery Stores” edition.
For the second time in as many months another, presumably white, teenager in New Jersey walked up to a store’s courtesy desk, grabbed a microphone, and told all the black people to leave.
This time it was a 14-year-old girl at Whole Foods, in what police are calling a copy-cat of last month’s incident at a nearby Wal-Mart. In this latest case, police arrested the girl and charged her with bias intimidation and harassment, the same charges levied in the previous incident. And in both cases, much was made of the fact that these were individual acts of racism:
“Whole Foods Market has a zero-tolerance policy regarding all matters of prejudice and continues to work with local law enforcement on this issue,” said Whole Foods spokesman Michael Sinatra, in an interview with the Record.
Of course, this superficial discussion of individual acts of racism takes away from what could be something useful, like Wal-Mart’s shady treatment of black and low-income workers, or the fact that many Black folks don’t have access to quality, affordable produce.
Consider Oakland a case study. Local outlet Oakland North recently reported that in the mostly low-income Black and Latino flatlands areas of East Oakland, there’s only one grocery store for every 93,126 residents. For wealthier — and whiter — neighbors in the Hills, there’s an average of one grocery store for every 13,778 residents (see map here). How’s that for a “matter of prejudice?”
So sure, sometimes words hurt. But so does diabetes. Pick your battle.
After an afternoon of long-winded speeches from both sides of the aisle, the Senate voted to move forward with the extension of unemployment benefits. The vote comes after the Senate failed to pass an extension before going on break more than two weeks ago. In that time, more than 200,000 people were pushed off of unemployment benefits.
Four Republicans broke with their party and voted to move forward with the final passage of an extension. Several more procedural hurdles remain and a final extension is likely to be voted on Thursday. Republicans could still block passage though procedural challenges. If the Senate fails to act though, another 200,000 will lose benefits next week.
Several Republican Senators held up the benefit extension before the Congressional recess, arguing that the Senate should find ways to pay for it without adding to the deficit. Democrats insist that the extensions should be paid for on an emergency basis and should therefore be exempt from pay-as-you-go rules. They’ve also argued that unemployment insurance acts as a boon to the economy.
Yesterday’s vote is an important step, however the one-month extension essentially sets Congress up for another round of the same debate next month.
Last year, ColorLines reported on a proposed new rule from the NCAA that would require sickle cell testing for all Division I athletes. The NY Times reports that NCAA member conferences are set to vote sometime this week in Indianapolis, and it’s uncertain whether the controversial rule will pass.
Sickle cell traits appear unevenly in different racial groups: 1 in 12 Black people in the U.S. carries the trait, which, when agitated by high altitudes and physical activity, is thought to contribute to illness and even death. Less than one percent of white people carry the trait.
In the last decade, 21 football players have fallen ill during training and later died, and eight of those athletes was found to have sickle cell traits. The research so far is inconclusive.
Aisha De Avila-Shin, reporting for ColorLines, wrote:
“We don’t have any empirical evidence showing who [and] at what altitudes has perished from physical exertion,” said Troy Duster, a professor of sociology at New York University who has worked on the Human Genome Project and is the author of Backdoor to Eugenics. “The important point here is that there are a lot of Black athletes with sickle cell trait who have no problems at high altitudes. So the question is, ‘What are the policy implications of screening people with sickle cell trait?’”
Some fear that Black athletes will be excluded from college sports as a result of the new policy. But it’s not just a matter of knowing, because four of the athletes who died as a result of extreme training actually had already been screened. Their coaches knew their players’ vulnerability.
The proposed rule came out as part of a settlement after the 2006 death of Dale Lloyd II, a student at Rice University who was 19 when he collapsed on the football field and later died from sickle cell complications.
It’s been a week since more than 200,000 people were booted off unemployment insurance, because the Senate failed to extend the program before taking a vacation. Senate leadership has promised to take up the issue today but Republicans are showing no signs they’ll budge on demands that the extension be funded without adding to the deficit. Some have even said that unemployment benefits are causing high unemployment, blaming the jobless for the jobs crisis.
Last week, ColorLines went out on the street to hear from folks facing cutoffs. For the hundreds of thousands already without benefits, the lapse has been trying — and if the Senate delays passage of an extension, even more will lose benefits.
At a rally for immigration reform in Las Vegas, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised that Congress would start work on an overhaul when it returns from break today. The announcement came as a surprise, especially after other Democratic leaders have said they would wait to press for immigration reform until after the November elections. Last week, New Jersey Democrat Sen. Robert Menendez, a key reform supporter, said Washington was too heated for an overhaul and that Congress should be put off until things cool down after November.
Rallies for immigration reform were held in at least seven cities on Saturday, including Las Vegas, Seattle and Chicago, and were meant to maintain momentum from the massive march in Washington last month.
Looks like Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s on a roll. Fresh off of praising the federal response to Katrina as “generous” — in a speech in New Orleans, no less — the chair of the Republican Governors Association tells CNN that slavery “goes without saying.” On CNN’s Sunday morning show, Candy Crowley asked Barbour about Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s Confederate History Month debacle, in which he revived the state’s celebration of the Confederacy but originally omitted from his proclamation any reference to slavery. (McDonnell later apologized and rewrote the proclamation.) Barbour said those angry about McDonnell’s slavery blackout were “trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn’t amount to diddly” and that is like a “nit.” The Daily Beast has the video, above.
As a 501(c)3 tax-exempt charitable organization, the Applied Research Center, and its projects RaceWire.org and ColorLines.com, do not advocate for or endorse political candidates. Our intent is to discuss important underlying public policy issues, not to comment on the position of any particular candidate nor impact any local or national elections.
From the LA Times today:
The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on Goodwin Liu’s nomination to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco today and 
The 
Just three days after 
After an afternoon of long-winded speeches from both sides of the aisle, the 
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