Category: “civil rights”

A nice girl like you . . .

July 16, 2009February 2, 2012 · 16 Comments ·

(This post is part of a series concerning Curtis Flowers, an innocent man convicted of a horrific crime that has divided a small Mississippi town. Information on the Flowers case can be found here.)

Lydia Chassaniol is in trouble. How much trouble remains to be seen, but the Mississippi State Senator (R-Winona) has the regional blogosphere in an uproar.

Remember the mid-to-late 1990s when prominent Mississippi politicians like Bob Barr and Trent Lott got too cozy with the Council of Conservative Citizens? That’s the white separatist hate group the New York Times describes as having “a thinly-veiled white supremacist agenda”. You can buy a “white pride” T-shirt on the CCC website and read headlines like: “The whole world treats Obama as a joke!” and “Mass immigration equals white genocide.”

The CCC platform praises America’s “European” heritage and condemns “mixture of the races”. CCC leaders still like to refer to “Martin Looter Coon” and have described African Americans as “a retrograde species of humanity”. According to Ward Schaefer of the Jackson Free Press, “Columnists in the CofCC’s newsletter have hyperventilated that non-white immigration to the U.S. was transforming the country into a ‘slimy brown mass of glop.'”

You get the picture. (more…)

Empathy and the Law

May 28, 2009May 28, 2009 · 5 Comments ·

President Obama’s remarks about judicial empathy have inspired howls of protest from the right and furrowed the brows of legal traditionalists everywhere.

Sympathy means feeling sorry for another person; empathy means feeling another person’s pain as if it was your own. In a campaign speech in 2007, Obama spelled out the case for judicial empathy: “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

So what could possibly be wrong with that?

Plenty, say the critics. As the image of a blindfolded Lady Justice suggests, the law is supposed to be blind. Judges are to rule strictly on the basis of the evidence before them and “settled law”. In theory, it shouldn’t matter whether the defendant is rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, famous or infamous, black or white, Christian or Muslim–the law treats all defendants and plaintiffs the same.

Judges who feel either empathy or revulsion for the poor wretch quivvering before the bar of justice are departing from the strict canons of judicial objectivity. A judge, the reasoning goes, is a referee who has no interest in the final score; he just wants the players to play by the rules.

So, Texas senator, John Cornyn says that Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s choice to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court, “must prove her commitment to impartially deciding cases based on the law, rather than based on her own personal politics, feelings, and preferences”.

Is it just me, or does this line of reasoning reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland? The Queen of hearts (a spoof on Queen Victoria) is utterly lacking in empathy: “The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. ‘Off with his head!’ she said, without even looking round.”

Fortunately for Alice, the kind-hearted King of Hearts quietly commutes every death sentence his tyrannical wife imposes. In the real world, empathy and good judgement are sisters.

Does anyone really believe that Samuel Alito or John Roberts are never influenced by “personal politics or feelings”? Can anyone imagine John Cornyn showing the slightest concern that the two most recent additions to the Supreme Court might allow their conservative political opinions to influence their rulings? Of course not. The men were selected because they shared the president’s conservative values.

David Souter, the justice Sotomayor has been nominated to replace, has outraged ideological conservatives precisely because he refused to be guided by ideology.

Supreme Court justices certainly strive to leave subjective considerations out of the deliberative process; but the same apriori judgments and impulses that shape personal politics and ideological leanings bubble to the surface when legal issues are being weighed. If you believe abortion is always wrong you will ascribe relatively little constitutional weight to a woman’s right to choose. Why did the Supreme Court value the principal of equal access to education over “state’s rights” in 1954? For the same reason that the same court in earlier generations would have made the opposite call.

Empathy shades into bias only when jurists feel the pain of people like them while demonstrating utter disregard for folks on the opposite end of the social spectrum. The opposite of empathy is ignorance not objectivity. Who wants to be judged by a woman who has no sense of who you are, how you feel, how you have struggled and what you value?

In criminal cases built on circumstantial evidence much depends on how you view the defendant. Is this man capable of such a foul deed? This question must be answered, and a lack of empathy ensures a wrong answer.

Empathy generally fits hand-in-glove with the standards of due process. If you feel the humanity of a defendant you will want that person to get a fair, open and constitutional hearing. Corners are cut when nobody in the courtroom gives a damn.

G.K. Chesterton was known for blending morality with good humor (an unusual combination). Exactly 100 years ago, he served as a juror and was not impressed with the professionals in the courtroom. The problem: no empathy.

“Now, it is a terrible business to mark a man out for the vengeance of men,” Cheston observed. “But it is a thing to which a man can grow accustomed, as he can to other terrible things; he can even grow accustomed to the sun. And the horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen, is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid (several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got used to it. Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop.

Unlike legal professionals, Chesterton felt, a good juror empathizes with the victim, the alleged perpetrator and the families of both parties. This doesn’t make them biased. Biased jurors, like biased judges, feel the pain of the victim but give no thought to the humanity of the defendant. Jurors (and judges) get it wrong in capital cases precisely because the facts are so distressing. The blood of the victim calls out for justice with such urgency that no one bothers to ask if the right person has been summoned to the bar of justice. The thought of the crime going unpunished is so disturbing that the humanity of the accused vanishes. The accused must be guilty because the crime is so heinous.

Of course, the desire to punish must be held in abeyance until the guilt-innocence question has been decided. Judges who prejudge a case are tempted to rule for the state at every turn because it hastens the inevitable. Judges without empathy are bad judges.

The empathy debate pits reformers who believe life experience impacts judgement against traditionalists who believe nine white males would be perfectly capable of deciding any legal issue. Was it purely incidental that five of the nine justice who decided the Dred Scott case in 1857 were slave owners? Adding African Americans to the judicial mix would have changed nothing, traditionalists argue. In fact, black judges would have stripped the blindfold from Lady Justice because they identified personally with the travail of American slaves.

George Will dismisses Judge Sotomayor as a conventional liberal: “She embraces identity politics, including the idea of categorical representation: A person is what his or her race, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference is, and members of a particular category can be represented – understood, empathized with – only by persons of the same identity.”

Quite so. None of us are impartial. We enter the world as self-serving tyrants and only painful encounters with other people can change us; that’s why we need religion. Experience gives us the capacity for judgement. Despite the best of intentions and a world of good will, if we know only people who look and think like us we will have a cramped view of the world. As we strive to feel as others feel as others feel we make real moral progress, but our capacity for empathy is tragically limited.

In explaining his vote against John Roberts, then-Senator Barack Obama noted that the well-groomed jurist had “far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak” and “seemed to have consistently sided with those who were dismissive of efforts to eradicate the remnants of racial discrimination in our political process.”

Men like George Will have no problem with “the remnants of racial discrimination”. They assume that standard-issue white American males will make the right call. They can be impartial because they lack empathy.

Teaching our racial history

May 5, 2009May 5, 2009 ·

Leonard Pitts uses a tragic story from Sarasota, FL to decry the growing influence of Neo-Confederate propaganda. With commendable sensitivity, Pitts sifts through a story reminiscent of Jena. There are no heroes and villains in this story, just victims.

Here’s the key insight: “If we were a people with the courage to teach our racial history fearlessly, and the foresight to inculcate in our children a reverence for civil liberties, this tragedy might never have happened.”

Grievance and rage combustible

By LEONARD PITTS JR.

lpitts@miamiherald.com

A few days ago, a high school student in Sarasota failed history and another failed civics. As a result, the one wound up shot in the chest and the other jailed on a charge of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.

Here’s the story, as reported by The Sarasota Herald Tribune: On the last Friday in April, an 18-year-old white kid named Daniel Azeff and a friend went riding downtown in a pickup truck, yelling racially disparaging remarks and waving a Confederate battle flag. Azeff’s grandfather, Joseph Fischer, told the paper he has cautioned his grandson repeatedly about his fascination with that dirty banner. Azeff, he said, does not really understand what the flag means.

If so, he’s hardly alone in his ignorance. A generation of apologists for the wannabe nation symbolized by that flag has done an effective job of convincing the gullible and the willfully ignorant that neither the nation, the flag, nor the Civil War in which both were bloodily repudiated, has anything to do with slavery. It’s just ”heritage,” they say, as though heritage were a synonym for ”good.” As though Nazis, white South Africans and Rwandans did not have heritage, too.

For the record: In explaining its decision to secede, South Carolina cited ”an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.” Georgia noted its grievances against the North ”with reference to the subject of African slavery.” Mississippi said, ”Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.” To which Confederate ”vice president” Alexander Stephens added: “Our new government is founded upon . . . the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”

So the notion that the Confederacy and its symbols have nothing to with slavery is tiresome, silly and delusional. In choosing to adopt one of those symbols that night, David Azeff took a history test of sorts — and failed.

As noted, Michael Mitchell’s test was in civics. Police say Mitchell, who is 18, black and a student at Sarasota Military Academy, saw Azeff’s flag, took offense and, when the white kid parked and walked down the street, confronted him. Azeff denied being a racist; he was, he said, just exercising his First Amendment rights. Police say the argument escalated, until Mitchell pulled a gun and shot Azeff in the chest.

Thus did Mitchell fail his own test. This is America. Daniel Azeff has a perfect right to express virtually any opinion he chooses, no matter how asinine or provocative, without being shot for it.

Thankfully, Azeff is expected to make a full recovery. Meantime, Mitchell, said to be a good kid who has never been in trouble before, remains jailed in lieu of $50,000 bail. It is difficult not to see a certain symmetry.

That’s not an argument of moral equivalence: Mitchell allegedly pulled a gun, so the moral weight for what happened rests squarely upon his shoulders.

And yet it’s also true that each teenager had what the other lacked. One knew his rights, the other, his history. But neither realized that you cannot fully appreciate the one without understanding the other. So each young man fell into the other’s blind spot.

If we were a people with the courage to teach our racial history fearlessly, and the foresight to inculcate in our children a reverence for civil liberties, this tragedy might never have happened. We are not those people. And because we aren’t, these two boys hurtled toward collision, hopped up on grievances and rage they were ill-equipped to speak — or hear. They took a test that night in Sarasota, and let no one be surprised they failed.

They never had a chance.

Torture and Religion

May 2, 2009May 4, 2009 · 10 Comments ·

A new Pew Survey suggests that support for the use of torture is positively correlated with religious devotion. Not surprisingly, white mainline Christians (Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, etc.) are less inclined to support the use of torture than white evangelicals with white Catholics hovering somewhere in between.

But the non-religious are less likely to support the use of torture than the folks in any religious category.

As a person of faith, I find this disturbing.

Question: what about the Hispanic catholics and black evangelicals? Why did the Pew study leave them out, or did they simply drop them from the published summary? Either way, the ommission is disturbing.

This is a subject we have dealt with in this space before. In “Who would Jesus torture?” Lydia Bean interacted with the views of a conservative Christian blogger. But the torture issue also relates to my “The religious roots of Southern punitiveness”.

Why are conservative Christians so enamored of torture, mass incarceration and capital punishment? Why are incarceration rates in the cluster of southern states to the east of Texas twice the national average? And why have over 80% of the executions perpetrated since the re-introduction of the death penalty in 1979 occurred in the South?

Conversely, why are incarceration rates relatively low in Yankee New England, a region that hardly ever resorts to the ultimate penalty?

The same torture divide is apparent between democrats and republicans, of course, but as the GOP lurches rightward, religious and political conservatives are becoming indistinguishable.

Jesus of Nazareth taught non-violence and provided no escape clause. The philosophical distance between the canonical Gospels and traditional “Just War” theory is astonishing. When learned evangelicals seek to justify their support for torture they eschew the words of their Master and cleave to the dictates of St. Augustine.

For better or worse, religious traditions take on a life of their own. Southern Baptists, like every other other religious group, have their own distinctive ethos. Established norms, not sacred scripture, shape beliefs and attitudes. Religious texts can be found in support of almost any position and are tacked on as an afterthought. This explains why Christians who love the Bible can trample on its core affirmations without a twinge of conscience.

CNN covers the story here; and Brian McLaren has some excellent thoughts here.

The Will to Secede

April 27, 2009December 10, 2009 · 5 Comments ·

(Readers of this post will be interested in the story of Curtis Flowers, a native of Winona, Mississippi who will soon go on trial for the sixth time on the same murder charges.)

According to a Rasmussen poll, only 18% of Texans would vote to secede from the United States of America if the vote were taken today.

An additional 7% would like time to mull it over.

In short, one quarter of the Texas voting population is willing to follow Governor Rick Perry into a new Texas Republic.

My guess is that the overwhelming majority of the secessionist folks are Republicans. Since the solid Republican base has been estimated at about 39% of the electorate it could be argued that Perry’s party is evenly split on the issue.

Maybe the Governor is just talking like a proud Texan. Everybody knows that native Texans feel more tied to their state than to their country. But successionist talk has been a common staple of the Southern neo-Confederate movement since the days of Brown vs. Board. Successionist rhetoric has traditionally been the province of those who long for the restoration of the Confederacy.

I just finished reading Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction: a fascinating study of the most sophisticated strain of Southern racism written by a group of authors, many of them at least loosley affiliated with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Edward Sebesta, a Dallas-based researcher who is probably the national authority on the issue, was part of the editorial team. I had never heard of either Sebesta or neo-Confederates until he contacted me a few weeks ago.

You can find Ed Sebesta’s blog here and his extensive essay on the prevelance of neo-Confederate mythology here. It’s pretty dense stuff, but the Dallas writer breaks some important new ground and deserves a hearing.

Sebesta has coined the term “banal white nationalism” to describe the unexamined assumption, especially common in the South, that America is a white nation, created by white folks primarily for white folks.

Banal white nationalism is contrasted to the kind of explicit white nationalism you will get from hardcore neo-conferate groups like the League of the South, the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

There is nothing faintly banal about these organizations. They are committed to the values of the Old South, they feel utter contempt for the civil rights movement, they associate northerners with godless socialism and the Southland with orthodox Christianity, and they are committed to the principle of white supremacy. If neo-Confederates had their way in this wicked world they would re-establish the Confederacy in a heartbeat. Non-caucasians wouldbe allowed to live in this new-old realm so long as they understood that white is the color of normal.

Failing that, neo-Confederates will settle for “states rights”.

Banal white nationalism is a largely unexamined and unacknowledged creed rooted in the assumption that white people are normal Americans.

White nationalism is shaped by the kind of Confederate mythology usually associated with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and D.W. Griffith’s the Birth of a Nation: a highly sentimental and idealized vision of a pristine Southland despoiled by the Yankee invader. In the popular mind, this mythos is wedded to public school mythology about Plymouth Rock Puritans, the heroes of the Revolutionary War, and the glories of Manifest Destiny.

When all of the heroes you read about in the history books are white you naturally assume that America is essentially a white nation. You will continue to think this way even if you are told repeatedly that you live in a pluralistic nation united by a common adherence to the American Constitution.

Stories trump abstractions every time.

I see three varieties of white nationalism.

First, there are crude racists of the KKK variety; the folks that attract attention by dressing funny and mouthing slogans that are no longer palatable in the public square. These are the people Americans love to hate. In fact, they are the only species of racist most people acknowledge.

Then you have the explicit white nationalists who are dedicated to the principle of white supremacy and dream dreams of a new Southern Confederacy. Explicit white nationalists denounce the civil rights movement as a federal conspiracy, lament the profligacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and perpetuate every minority stereotype in the book. However, since they are well educated, write and speak standard English and don’t dress up in funny clothes most white Americans see them as normal Americans no matter how undemocratic and intemperate their rhetoric becomes.

Finally, we have Sebesta’s banal white nationalists, everyday Americans who see white as the color of normal. Although these people tend to be non-ideological, they have imbibed the public school historical mythology and embraced its implications. The television teaches them to honor civil rights icons like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and they willingly comply. Banal white nationalists see American as a white nation that is friendly to racial minorities.

A solid majority of white Americans fall into one of these three categories. Banal white nationalism is dominant in the Northern states. In the Deep South it’s okay to embrace explicit white nationalism so long as you choose your nouns and adjectives with care.

Suppose I am right; what impact would the prevelance of white nationalism have on the behavior of police officers and how would it impact the legal system?

Black defendants would be at a huge disadvantage with white prosecutors, judges and juries. At best, they are seen as resident aliens with only provisional rights.

If the tenets of white nationalism are fundamentally patriarchal, anti-egalitarian (and therefore undemocratic) what is the practical import of the due process protections hallowed by the US Constitution. As a practical matter, do these lofty principle really apply to black and brown people?

Now, where does Governor Rick Perry fall on the ideological continuum I have just described? Does he see America as a gloriously pluralistic mix of color, culture and ethnicity, or is he some species of white nationalist.

In the tradition of the Southern governers who have gone before, Perry is speaking the language of state’s rights. That doesn’t necessarily make him a racist or a white supremacist. There is nothing inherently racist about seeking a balance between federal and state power. But we all know what Southern governers meant by state’s rights in 1860 and 1957, and concerns should be raised when politicians toss around this kind of rhetoric.

When they’re talking secession it just gets worse.

Two points. First, Governor Rick Perry is a proud member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Second, the SCV has been moving in a radical, neo-confederate direction since 2002 and is now run by blatant racists.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Perry can be identified with the SCV’s recent extremism. In the 1990s, the group had a strong anti-racist faction and received commendations from Bill Clinton. Maybe Governor Perry would be shocked if he knew what was going on.

But until the Governor’s allegiance to an increasingly racist organization is clarified friends of justice will be left with an uneasy feeling.

A bold stride down a good road

January 20, 2009January 22, 2009 · 3 Comments ·

I know this sort of bipartisan gesture stimulates a lot of eye-rolling and longsuffering sighs in progressive quarters, but Barack Obama’s willingness to honor John McCain on the eve of his own big day is a refreshing sign of hope. We can’t sacrifice everything for unity, but we must sacrifice much if we are serious about dragging America out of the culture war quicksand. Years will pass before we see the end of our current economic woes. Our involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan will bring great sorrow and no glory at all. We are spending trillions of dollars we don’t have on self-indulgent addicts to instant gratification. No one understands the military and economic challenges before us. Mr. Obama has no simple solutions and he knows it.

We no longer have the luxury of a culture war; the challenges we face are too grave. And so I thank God for a president with the grace and wisdom to reach out to the people who didn’t vote for him. By embracing John McCain, Barack Obama is making himself America’s president. The good will soon dissipate, but moments like this come rarely and will live in memory when the petty squabbling is mercifully forgotten. (more…)

Obama opens the door

January 15, 2009January 22, 2009 · 2 Comments ·

Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint have been barnstorming the country ever since they released their diatribe against the Hip Hop generation, “Come on, People!” They were on a panel at Howard University a week or two after the massive march on Jena. Howard students were polite and defenential toward Cosby and Poussaint, but they were much more enthusiastic a few hours later when I joined several Jena 6 parents on stage.

This all started back in 2004 when Cosby addressed a Washington gala on the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education. Instead of honoring the ground-breaking world of Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund, Cosby lit into “the lower income folk” in the black community. Black people needed to stop blaming white folks for all their problems, Cosby said. The time had come to move beyond the victim mentality.

Ted Shaw, the newly minted lead counsel for the Legal Defense Fund, followed the Coz to the podium. Scrapping the polite speech he had prepared for the occasion, Shaw launched into an impromptu call for a modern civil rights movement. As a case in point, he cited Tulia, Texas, where, he told the audience, 47 innocent black people were arrested on the word of a racist white police officer. In other words, some poor black people really are victims.

When I ran into Ted Shaw in Jena last year, I reminded him of his run-in with Bill Cosby. I could see the pain in his eyes. No one enjoys mixing it up with a cultural icon.

That hasn’t protected Cosby from the wrath of the black intelligentsia, however. He has been accused of selling out the civil rights movement, for blaming the victim, and for aiding and abetting white conservatives. Michael Eric Dyson’s “Is Bill Cosby Right? Or has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind” may have offered the most scorching critique. (more…)

“Can We Talk?”: This Saturday in Austin, TX

May 27, 2008 ·

Here’s a great event coming up this Saturday in Austin, Texas:

BridgeBuilders “Can We Talk?” Guided Conversation on Race in America

Please join us on Saturday, May 31 in a guided conversation on Race in America inspired by the issues raised in Barack Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia. Participants will enjoy dessert and coffee while focusing on specific questions in small table groups, followed by sharing and discussion by the whole group. Mr. Bill Adams, former Rector at St. James Episcopal Church in Austin, and Jennifer and Ashton Cumberbatch, long-time friends of the BridgeBuilders ministry, will be our facilitators for the evening. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for meet and greet and refreshments. The formal program will start at 7:00 p.m. and end at 8:30 p.m. Location: Wesley UMC at 1160 San Bernard. For directions to the church, contact the Wesley church office at 478-7007 or visit the church website (http://www.wesleyunited.org/). BridgeBuilders member churches include Berkeley, St. Luke, St. Peter’s, University, and Wesley UMC.

Friends of Justice

building a common peace community

Category: “civil rights”

Torture and Religion

A bold stride down a good road

“Can We Talk?”: This Saturday in Austin, TX