Afro-Netizen

Supreme Court stalls on Troy Davis death penalty case

According to AP reports yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court has "recessed for summer without acting on his latest appeal, likely delaying any developments in his case until fall".

While this is likely a de facto stay of execution, it is by no means certain.

What is certain, that the elected officials who influence the outcome of this case are moved towards justice by appealing to their self-preservation instincts as incumbents.

What does this mean?

It means that Larry Chisolm who was elected in 2008 as first Black district attorney of Chatham County (which encompasses Savannah, Georgia) presumably wants to get re-elected. A campaign plank of his during his campaign centered on fairness.

Now, with our help on a national level, we can help his constituents keep him accountable to that pledge. Clearly, if he chooses to look the other way, Black voter turn-out the next time around may not be what he'll need to stay in office.

Let's help Troy Davis by signing this petition to DA Chisolm requesting that he reopen Troy's case.

For more information on Troy's case, please visit the AmnestyUSA site.

For more information on the death penality, please visit the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP).

Amateur Klansman & professional Clear Channel radio pundit Jim Quinn lauds slavery for making Blackfolk Americans

H/T to Media Matters for America for capturing this gem from the post-racial world of conservative talk radio . . .

Ever heard (or uttered) the trite expression, "Don't hate the player; hate the game"? Well, in this instance, the player is grand wizard Jim Quinn and the game is media consolidation.

So, if you're feathers are the least bit ruffled over Jim Quinn's racism, you'll know that whatever you're top issue is, your second issue must be media justice.

Afro-Netizen supports boycotting Clear Channel and other serial offenders. But the roots of these democracy-strangling weeds must be yanked from their deeply burrowed home on Capitol Hill that are left untouched by bipartisan complacency and self-preservation.

Media consolidation is anti-democratic and runs against the founding principles of our nation.

If we express righteous indignation about the Iranian government's crackdown on its citizens, journalists and media outlets, then we should have a much better understanding of the paucity of media democracy that exists on a practical, government-sanctioned level in our own country.

Fox News Commentator Juan Williams boldly defends right-wing extremist Bill O'Reilly

H/T to Media Matters for America for capturing this gem of televised Black self-hateration . . .

10-year old boy delivers eloquent, moving Black History Month address about the "n-word"

Aside from young Jonathan E. McCoy's exemplary oratory and critical/analytical skills, what did you like about the content of his address in Baltimore, MD and what would you have changed?

[H/T to Linda Yudin for bringing this to our attention!]

Comedian Pat Buchanan does a hiliarious bit on MSNBC about how President Obama's nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court is like Jim Crow for "white guys"

H/T to Media Matters for capturing Pat Buchanan insane blathering about Judge Sonia Sotomayor's alleged "reverse racism".

Funny how he refers to her selection as an "affirmative action pick" -- as if that was an objectively bad thing. The connotation, of course, is that individuals who benefited from affirmative action were not qualified for the opportunities they received.

According to poll results released today, the majority of American voters are not in favor of affirmative action on the basis of race or gender.

In an article on this poll, Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, stated that "the public clearly opposes the idea that such programs are justified as a way of increasing diversity, which has become the rationale in recent years as opposed to compensating for past discrimination which was the reason when they first began."

Mr. Brown, of course, is factually wrong. Nowhere in either executive orders laying the groundwork for affirmative action mentions these policies in the context of past discrimination. And on a more common sense basis, one doesn't need to be a historian to know that in 1961, when the first executive order was signed by President John F. Kennedy, that current discrimination was what kept (over)qualified people of color and white women from even entry-level positions in corporate and government jobs -- let alone admission to college or graduate school.

And if indeed past discrimination were in fact the basis of affirmative action policy, wouldn't it stand to reason that the only thing that would make this controversial public policy obsolete the comprehensive and proportional representation of people of color and white women in previously white and/or male-dominated spheres (i.e., "increasing diversity")?

If that were the case, affirmative action can be expected to be around a looooooooong time!

Senate hearings on "the future of journalism" misdirected

On May 6, 2009, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation announces the following Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet hearing: The Future of Journalism (video).

Last month, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) sponsored a bill, S. 673, that would extend tax-exempt status to newspapers.

While seemingly innocuous and supportive of the many faltering dailies that abound these days, the legislation has serious defects stemming in part from a set of inaccurate and incomplete assumptions about the news media industry and the state of journalism -- two highly interrelated, but separate considerations.

Interestingly, there appears to be little to no substantive consideration for the struggling Black press and media produced for and by marginalized communities whose daily newspapers begun to die out shortly after desegregation some 40 years ago.

Perhaps if the editorial boards, newsrooms and press pools reflected the increasingly diverse demography of our nation the role of "ethnic media" in this discussion would not be so critical. However, in the years following the Civil Rights Movement, mass media have chosen not to recruit, retain and promote talent from communities of color at the level justice, quality and progress demand.

Fortunately, there exist a growing band of entrepreneurial, civic-minded folks within and beyond Black America who represent the increasingly power netroots community of journalists, artists, technologists, educators, activists, students and others who choosing to be the authors of our own collective fate.

We afro-netizens are leveraging the power of social media for civic advancement as did our abolitionist forbearers who were the proto-journalists of the early 19th Century.

This issue of the future of journalism is a red herring. Journalism is not in crisis; the commercial business model that has sustained modern print journalism is what these senators are most concerned about -- not necessarily about protecting and expanding representative voices of our society in furtherance of democracy.

Our cause must be to hold them (and ourselves) accountable for representing the interests of the people and communities served (poorly or otherwise) by media moguls, too many of whom became over-burdened by debt to remain viable in a fickle, evolving economy and industry.

Print publications will be around for awhile. Blogs and other web-based newspapers and such will continue to grow in popularity. But what matters most how well and quickly our news media represent the diverse demography and perspectives of the American people. If that's not part of their business model going forward, they deserve to wither on the vine, while those with more enlightened and sustainable models continue to flourish.

Afro-Netizen joins PCCC in testing the waters for a Democratic challenger to Sen. Arlen Specter

Afro-Netizen has joined several other leading bloggers in supporting the Progressive Change Campaign Committee's online initiative to determine the how interested the progressive netroots is in Pennsylvania and nationally for fielding a Democratic challenger to Sen. Arlen Specter.

We encourage you to PCCC's straw poll at its newly launched website.

Click here to read Politico's take on this bold netroots campaign or here to read what the Philadelphia Inquirer has to say.

Stats guru Nate Silver opines on racism, demography and voting patterns

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com makes a concise, 10-minute presentation at TED last month on matters of race, voting & geography.

What I wouldn't give to put Nate in the room with the good folks at the Applied Research Center and see what happens! While I like the intent of Silver's presentation, it a revised version could be made that much more compelling if he understood and borrowed from ARC's Compact for Racial Justice. (Disclosure: Afro-Netizen founder, Chris Rabb, is an ARC board member.)

Anyway, enjoy!

H/T to David Whettstone

UN Conference on Racism, Botany, Animal Husbandry & Sodoku can't help but succeed

With anti-racist stalwarts including such nations as USA and Israel not in attendance, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the event's opening comedy act, the United Nations Conference on Racism, Botany, Spelunking, Animal Husbandry & Sodoku began on Monday, April 20, 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland, 8 years after the World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophia, Related Intolerance and Lint convened in Durban, South Africa.

With white male patriarchy fully dissolved domestically and abroad upon the historic inauguration of U.S. President Barack Obama, the remaining vestiges of intolerance will most certainly be wiped out by year's end.

Writing the Next Chapter on Race

By Judith Browne-Dianis
Guest Contributor

(Also published by the Applied Research Center's blog: Racewire.org here.)

For several months, the media has been pushing the fairy tale that the United States moved beyond racism with the election of President Obama. As untrue as that is, there are people who started acting on their post-racial fantasies years ago, eight years in fact, as the Bush Administration used that excuse to essentially stop enforcing the civil rights laws we already have. President Obama and his administration have the opportunity to take dramatic steps towards dismantling institutional racism and inequality by simply enforcing the laws that are already on the books. Rather than blindness or silence, taking this action requires us to live in reality so that we can change that reality.

On November 5th, 2008, we woke up in a nation where people of color are nearly twice as likely as Whites to live near toxic waste dumps. We woke up in a nation where healthcare inequities mean that a Black child is more than twice as likely as a White child to die before age one. We woke up in a nation where Black and Latino students are more than 20 percent less likely to graduate from school than their White classmates and more than twice as likely to be arrested when they are at school. All of these disparities exist with government support or permission.

Despite these glaring inequalities, for the past eight years the federal government did nothing, living in the comfort of the post-racial fairytale. Thus, our government largely pursued a “hear no evil, see no evil” approach to structural racism and injustice. The Supreme Court has refused to “hear” the evil of discrimination through decades of narrowing discrimination protections and taking away citizens’ rights to bring their complaints to the ears of the courts. In complicity with the Court, the Bush Administration willfully refused to “see” the discrimination around the country. Although the executive branch has broad power to intervene against structural racism and injustice, it turned a blind eye and stood idly as though nothing were wrong.

There is hope, however. As the Obama Administration opens its eyes and ears, we have a chance to reverse some of these terrible trends by enforcing laws we already have on the books. Let’s start with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which authorizes federal agencies to prevent discrimination by recipients of federal funding. That discrimination can be proven either by pointing to bad intentions or by revealing disparate outcomes.

This potent statute laid dormant for eight long years during which the Environmental Protection Agency could have stopped the disproportionate placement of toxic waste dumps in communities of color or construction of major highways through these communities. The Department of Education could have ended the school-to-prison pipeline that disproportionately affects children of color through racially discriminatory school discipline policies or discredited the academic tracking that puts youth of color on the road to dropping out rather than to college. The Department of Health and Human Services could have done its part to end health disparities by halting the closure of hospitals that serve communities of color. The list could go on for pages.

We didn’t achieve this new direction in the last decade for two reasons. First, the Supreme Court stripped citizens of the right to enforce this law, leaving it to the federal government to do the job. In turn, the Bush Administration shirked the federal government’s obligation to weed out such discrimination. Thus, significant structural racism did not stand a chance of being eradicated. President Obama has a chance to restore public faith in the government, and he can take no stronger step in that direction than by eliminating racial inequities and barriers to opportunity through enforcement of existing civil rights laws and regulations.

Simply enforcing the law will no more end racism than the election did. However, it can put us on a path toward eliminating structures that perpetuate mass inequities that contradict America’s promise. Just as Title VI would have prohibited funding of racially segregated schools and public swimming pools with our tax dollars decades ago, it should be used to weed out today’s federally-funded injustices. In 1970, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights wrote that the enforcement of “Title VI had failed to match the law’s promise.” The time has come to write a new script. President Obama can initiate another chapter of history by vigorously enforcing Title VI and ensuring that government is no longer part of the disease but rather part of the cure. We have come too far to stop our progress toward equality for all.

Judith Browne-Dianis is Co-Director of Advancement Project, a policy, communications and legal action group founded by a team of veteran civil rights lawyers in 1998 that is committed to racial justice.