This Week in Arizona Racism II

This is Part II of a potentially never-ending series, apparently. So this week in Arizona, a politician wants to cut off the power to undocumented workers' homes.

"I'm sure there will be criticism about human-rights violations," said Wong, who held a temporary spot on the five-person Commission in 2006. "Is power or natural gas or any type of utility we regulate, is that a right that people have? It is not a right. It is a service."

I guess at this point, being racist and viciously anti-immigrant is just standard political pandering. But you have to admire their creativity.

This Week in Arizona Racism...

It's "Anchor Babies"!!! That's right, those evil brown immigrants are having CHILDREN so that they have an excuse to stay here! This just gives them political cover so that people can cry "think of the children!" when they're deported to their rightful home!

Reminds me of a song:

Anchor Babies, we make our dreams come true
Anchor Babies, we'll do the same for you

They're making their dreams come true at our expense! So what can we do about it?! Pass a law stripping kids of citizenship so they can be deported too, of course! Loving this:

Russell Pearce, meet the first line of the 14th Amendment:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

And apparently it's being tried nationally too.

The Birthright Citizenship Act, a bill currently pending in Congress with 91 co-sponsors (including Long Island’s very own Representative Peter King) would attempt to accomplish the same thing on a national level.

This is getting somewhat tiring.

Further Evidence that "Terrorists" are not White.

The last time I wrote about this, I didn't include anything about counter-terrorism advisor's John Brennan's speech:

Conspicuously absent from Brennan’s list of seven terrorist incidents is any discussion of the “individuals radicalized here at home” by the Christian Hutaree “militia,” a group secretly planning coordinated, deadly attacks in Michigan. Brennan also forgets about the 2009 shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, carried out by a dedicated white supremacist. Brennan’s lengthy speech makes no mention of the danger posed by right wing radicals like Joseph Stack, who flew an airplane into an IRS building. Most tellingly, Brennan didn’t express any concern about terror inflicted against Arab, Muslim, Sikh, and South Asian communities in the form of violent hate crimes, including a pipe bomb that exploded at a mosque in Florida not long before Brennan’s speech.

In short, Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor seems to reserve the use of the word “terrorism” exclusively for violent acts that are carried out by Muslims.

Suddenly lots of stories about interracial dating. Weird.

Not sure what this means, but there sure have been quite a few stories about interracial dating and marriage lately, since the Census estimates in particular (noting, among other things, that interracial marriages are ever so slightly up, and predicting that by 2050, mixed-race people will be a majority in the US (perhaps not though)).

Erasing Arizona? Can We, Please?

Ok, seriously, can we just vote Arizona off the island already? I mean, I know it's illegal to secede and all, but how about straight up kicking them out? The latest:

An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students to be changed to Caucasian skin.

From the Arizona Republic:

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school. The project’s leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children’s ethnicity ….
R.E. Wall, director of Prescott’s Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town’s most prominent intersections.

"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," Wall said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics)."

The racism in Arizona just keeps getting more blatant. A friend's reaction: "Now it feels like they're just being campy." Sounds about right, I guess...

The Nuremberg Defense of Racist Slurs

I'm sorry, but "I was just joking" is never really a defense when you use racist slurs. And it doesn't make you look like less of an idiot when you use them incorrectly, either:

South Carolina [Republican Jake Knotts] on Thursday called a Republican gubernatorial candidate of Indian descent a "raghead," saying we have one in the White House, we don't need one in the governor's mansion.
...
"If it had been recorded, the public would be able to hear firsthand that my 'raghead' comments about Obama and Haley were intended in jest," Knotts said in his statement. "Bear in mind that this is a freewheeling, anything-goes Internet radio show that is broadcast from a pub. It's like local political version of Saturday Night Live, which is actually where the joke came from."

First, even as bad as SNL has become, I somehow doubt this comparison is worth much. Second, if this is true about SNL originating the joke (which I'm not going to bother to check), it can probably safely be said that they are making fun of the racists, and that is the kind of joke that may be acceptable, if any is.

I'm not really sure why people think "I was just joking" is such a great defense. You're obviously not saying Obama and state Rep. Nikki Haley are literally wearing towels on their heads. And the only people that would think it's "funny" are also racist. So how does this help you?

White Terrorists Have Predictable Behavior, So They Don't Count

Channing Kennedy has a very good post up at RaceWire about the good and the bad about the new National Security Strategy. The good:

There’s a lot improved over the previous version from 2006 (the one that used the word “preemption”), and a lot to praise. The Obama version doesn’t use the phrase the “War on Terror” or “radical Islam,” and it reiterates the administration’s intentions to close Gitmo; it’s not afraid of a “multipolar” world power structure. And it’s not every National Security Strategy that calls to “Promote Dignity by Meeting Basic Needs” via cooperative efforts to eradicate extreme poverty and childhood illness in Africa.

Title VII Liability for Unconscious Discrimination?

This is an interesting post. Patrick Shin, author of the paper that is discussed, wonders whether anti-discrimination laws should take unconscious bias into account. Setting aside practical difficulties at first, the paper starts with the assumption first that unconscious bias exists, and second that it is provable individually, and then posits hypotheticals to get at whether our current employment discrimination laws can get at unconscious bias. It's well worth reading.

When Is a Terrorist Attack Not a Terrorist Attack?

There was a terrorist attack on US soil Monday. I was going to write myself, but Matt Yglesias wrote about it in close to the same tone that I would have, so I'll send you there. Like he does, I'll leave the answer to my headline question as an exercise for the reader.

Hate group VDARE adopts Stephanie Grace as a cause

Remember Stephanie Grace, the Harvard law student who "absolutely [does not] rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent?"  Well, looks like noted paleoconservative, crypto-white-nationalist hate group VDARE has taken up her cause.

They've published several articles referencing or defending Ms. Grace, most recently using Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow's denunciation of Grace's comments as an excuse to oppose her as a potential Supreme Court nominee while positing the idea of asking actual nominee Elena Kagan how she would have reacted to the situation.

As mentioned in a comment on our previous coverage of Ms. Grace's remarks, her inevitable adoption as a poster child by some rather heinous racist groups will likely be the most jarring fallout for this law student.  Words matter.

Obama Contributes to the Noise (Part II - The Not So Good)

This is the second half of the review of President Obama's commencement address at the University of Michigan this past Saturday. The first half is here, and the text of the speech is here.

Ok, so I still think that on the whole Obama's speech was fantastic, but there are two glaring flaws, one of which I'd like to just note - his hypocrisy on our democracy, and the other of which this post is primarily about - the false equivalence between right and left. After that, there's one more side point I'd like to address - the lack of even a mention of other problems with the media - particularly with respect to race.

The Race-Based Case Against Elena Kagan

This piece was originally posted on April 28, 2010 upon speculation that Elena Kagan would be nominated to the supreme court. We are reposting it due to news that she has actually been nominated.

Glenn Greenwald has been busily documenting the case against Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court (and for Diane Wood). Essentially, his main case against Kagan boils down to the fact that we (stunningly, since she's been an academic for twenty years) have no paper record of her, and the little we have shows that she has scary leanings on executive power and would move the court farther to the right on that crucial modern-day issue where Obama is as bad as Bush in every respect.

I believe that critique powerful, as we don't want to go in blind, but I want to highlight another, very troubling bit about Elena Kagan documented by Duke law professor (and Michigan Law grad/Michigan Journal of Race & Law founder and 2010 symposium speaker!) Guy-Uriel Charles (and quoted in yesterday's article by GG)

What does a Harvard 3L's racist email say about law school/legal culture?

If you haven't heard about this, well the story is in the posts. But basically, Stephanie Grace (pictured above), a Harvard 3L who's clerking for Kozinsky on the 9th Circuit next year, wrote an email idly wondering if maybe black people are genetically less intelligent than white people. She at least hasn't seen conclusive evidence that they're not... Sigh. Ok, then people like David Lat over at ATL proceed to say that all discussions should be open for rational debate, and we shouldn't overreact and try to ruin her life and such, and especially shouldn't name her. (Whoops?)

The Race-Based Case Against Elena Kagan

Glenn Greenwald has been busily documenting the case against Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court (and for Diane Wood). Essentially, his main case against Kagan boils down to the fact that we (stunningly, since she's been an academic for twenty years) have no paper record of her, and the little we have shows that she has scary leanings on executive power and would move the court farther to the right on that crucial modern-day issue where Obama is as bad as Bush in every respect.

I believe that critique powerful, as we don't want to go in blind, but I want to highlight another, very troubling bit about Elena Kagan documented by Duke law professor (and Michigan Law grad/Michigan Journal of Race & Law founder and 2010 symposium speaker!) Guy-Uriel Charles (and quoted in yesterday's article by GG)

Updated Constitution-Free Zone

Absurd immigration and national security laws are not new, but Arizona's is just more blatant than most. The ACLU already had a map of the "Constitution-Free Zone" within 100 miles of any border. A redditor just updated it to reflect SB1070. Much more accurate.

(Original here.)

Arizona's Racist, But Minnesota's Like Your Loopy Crazy Uncle

I'm amused. This week, we thought Arizona had the unconstitutionally crazy achievement award. But we might have to limit that state to the unconstitutionally racist award, because Minnesota just threw in its bid for the crazy award.

Senate Republicans introduced a constitutional amendment Wednesday that would make Minnesota the first state to require a two-thirds majority vote in the legislature to approve federal laws affecting the state. “Minnesotans enjoy inherent, natural, God-given rights,” the bill states, and “Citizens of Minnesota are sovereign individuals, subject to Minnesota law and immune from any federal laws that exceed the federal government’s enumerated constitutional powers.”

Good luck with that.

(via The Debate Link)

Tea Partiers Are a Great Model of White Privilege

Tim Wise just wrote a post titled "Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black." It's a long thought experiment that pretty well documents the meaning of white privilege, as he explains as the end. Here's a small snippet, but it's worth the read:

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Evolving away from racism?

Children with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that makes them lack normal social anxiety, have no racial biases.

Hate Speech and the Tea Party

(updated below)

Another post on language? Is this a theme? Ok, so I think about language a lot, perhaps as intertwined with the general concepts of speech and First Amendment rights. And judging from conservations with all other members of this blog, we'll go back and forth responding to similar ideas. Personally, I really struggle with that line on the First Amendment where hate speech falls - is it an action designed solely to injure? Is it political speech in any sense? Lately I've become more sympathetic to the Critical Race Theory approach, which is that hate speech is particular should be punishable in some way, but I'm still not sure. For all our liberal readers that have not yet explored the radical, Words That Wound is a collection of the seminal critical race essays on the subject, by Mari Matsuda, Kim Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Charles Lawrence III, and well worth the mind-opening read.

Anyway, so this post was prompted by that oh so wonderful new-ish political movement, the Tea Party, and protestors' decisions to call Rep. John Lewis one of the words Jacob says we should have removed from our vocabularies loooong ago, and call Rep. Barney Frank another. I agree completely with Jacob that we need to monitor our own speech and be conscious of the results of it, but the difficulty is in the next step - can law be involved?

The Appropriateness of Adjectival Nouns

Ok, so this is probably a slightly different subject from what many of my other posts will be, but I'm a huge linguistics nerd too, so I thought I'd kick it off with this, based on a discussion a few of us had a couple weeks ago.

So here's the main question: Is calling someone an "[adjective]" as a noun versus an "[adjective] person," inherently offensive labeling, or is this usage somewhat an accident of language? For example, we can all pretty much agree that calling someone a "schizophrenic" versus "a schizophrenic person" or "person with schizophrenia," is offensive, but is it always the case?