Category: the politics of race

Obama’s problem with white folks

April 8, 2011April 8, 2011 · 3 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

A new Pew Poll shows that Barack Obama isn’t connecting with white voters. This is hardly big news: Obama won just 43% of the white vote in the 2008 election. But his popularity rating with white voters now rests at 38%. Even more chilling, if you’re a Democrat, a full 60% of the white electorate backed Republican candidates in the 2010 midterm election.

What’s going on here? Two things.

First, as we commemorate the 43rd anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, the Republican Party is still advertising itself (surreptitiously, of course) as the Party of White.

In the short run, this makes a lot of political sense. Baby boomers, the demographic currently controlling American politics, are 75% white. But the “Party of White” strategy will shortly run out of gas. From the earliest days of European colonization, America has been a majority white nation. Not for long. A slight majority of Americans 18 and younger are people of color. These rapidly shifting demographic patterns have injected a strong dose of cognitive dissonance into the hearts and minds of white folk. We feel we are losing control. We pull the red lever because we hope it will preserve the white-dominated world we were born into. (more…)

Tulia and the spell of mass incarceration

March 29, 2011April 12, 2011 · 2 Comments ·

Gary Gardner, moments before heading down to a protest at the state capital with Friends of Justice and a bus full of Tulia residents, September 2000

By Alan Bean

This is the text of a speech delivered at a Friends Committee on Legislation of California banquet in Whittier, California, March 26, 2011.

When I arrived in Tulia in the summer of 1998, I didn’t know very much about mass incarceration and the war on drugs. I had no idea that Texas, the state we had just moved to, had almost quadrupled its prison population between 1988 and 1998, or that the number of prisons had grown from 16 in 1980 to 108 in 2000.

Nor did I realize that the average family income of America’s poorest 20 percent increased 116% between 1947 and 1979 and had given back half of those gains between 1983 and 1998.

I didn’t realize that the American incarceration rate once mirrored western democracies like Canada, Great Britain and Germany, but had recently grown to six times the size of other nations.

For twenty years our family had been shuffling around the United States and Canada, and Nancy wanted our children to experience the love and support of family. Everything was going according to plan until we saw the headline in the local newspaper, “Tulia streets cleared of garbage.” (more…)

Perry fiddles while Texas burns

March 11, 2011March 11, 2011 · 2 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

“This is an engineered crisis—a thing that was done on purpose by people who do not mean well for our community, our city, our state or nation.” Jim Schutze

Texas is facing an estimated $27 billion deficit. Governor Rick Perry and his fellow ideologues gutted the state’s property taxes two years ago, then sat back and waited for the inevitable. At the time, according to this terrific article by Jim Schutze of the Dallas Observer, Texas Comptroller, Diane Keaton Strayhorn, predicted that this radical decrease in tax money would create a deficit of $23 billion by 2011 unless new sources of revenue could be found.

Ms. Strayhorn didn’t factor in the worst financial crisis since the great depression, but the accuracy of her numbers suggest that any thinking Texan could have seen the current imbroglio coming. (Thanks to Gerald Britt at Change the Wind for bringing Mr. Schutze’s article to my attention). (more…)

NPR and the American Mainstream

March 9, 2011March 9, 2011 · 1 Comment ·

National Public Radio CEO, Vivian Schiller, has resigned after two high-profile NPR executives were caught on tape saying that the Republican Party had been “hijacked” by the Tea Party and that the Tea Party was essentially a white-only organization dominated by gun-toting zealots on the racist fringes of American society.

Ms. Schiller had been criticized last October for what many considered her ungracious and impolitic response to the Juan Williams fiasco.

Most of the controversial remarks caught on video were nade by Ronald Schiller (no relation to Ms. Schiller). Mr. Schiller had been invited to a fancy luncheon by two Republican provocateurs posing as deep-pocket Muslim activists representing a mythical Muslim group that was supposedly planning to give NPR a $5 million gift.

The timing of this latest fiasco couldn’t be worse. Leading Republicans have been arguing that NPR was far too left-of-center to receive federal support. According to this argument, it’s okay for FOX News to slant its reporting to the right because it is a private agency. The liberal bias of NPR is a more serious matter, critics contend, because the organization is feeding at the federal teat. (more…)

Careful Mike, your true colors are shining through

March 2, 2011March 2, 2011 · 1 Comment ·

By Alan Bean

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Mark 8:36

Last Thursday, potential presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee assured Stephen Colbert that Barack Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim (as 31% of Republicans believe). An encouraging sign, don’t you think? It’s nice to know that the leading Republican candidate in the South sides with the sane two-thirds of his party on this important issue.

Then, four days later, Mr. Huckabee informed a conservative radio talk show host that Obama was raised in Kenya and that anti-imperialistic stories about the Mau-Mau uprising in the early 1950s, imbibed from his father and grandfather, likely account for the president’s liberal politics. (more…)

McWhorter: end the drug war and racial tension evaporates

February 17, 2011February 18, 2011 · 3 Comments ·

John McWhorter is a conservative African-American who enjoys needling white liberals and the “racism-is-still-real” brand of civil rights advocacy. For over a year now McWhorter’s take on race has taken on a decidedly libertarian tone. He’s for legalizing drugs; all of them.

The Cato Institute’s current newsletter contains a PDF version of McWhorter’s new message. The version I have pasted below appeared last year in The New Republic.

If you are a fan of HBO’s The Wire (the best television of all time in my opinion), the essential features of McWhorter’s argument will come as no surprise. African-American youth have little incentive to look for conventional work because drug money comes so easy. As a result, hundreds of thousands of black males are doing time on drug charges, inner city street gangs slaughter one another in turf battles, black children have no fathers, black women give up on finding a marriage partner, and everything goes to hell. (more…)

Haley Barbour won’t denounce KKK license plate

February 17, 2011 · 2 Comments ·

Haley Barbour would like to take a run at the presidency, but his close identification with Old Dixie keeps getting in the way. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the Sons of Confederate Veterans are sponsoring a vanity license plate venerating the memory of Confederate commander Nathan Bedford Forrest. By all accounts, Forrest was a bold and ruthless leader with a gift for guerilla warfare, but he comes with a little baggage. (more…)

Texas history texts ripped by conservative group

February 16, 2011February 16, 2011 · 1 Comment ·

By Alan Bean

“If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'” – George Orwell, 1984

George Orwell learned how easily the past is misremembered as a combatant in the Spanish Civil War and during his years with the BBC in WWII. Orwell is a hero to both the left and the right because he believed in relating historical fact as objectively and honestly as fallible flesh is able.

As the culture wars rage, it is incumbent upon partisans on the left and right to police their own side of the conflict. When 57% of Republicans believe the president is a Muslim, 45% believe he was born outside the United States, and 24% believe Mr. Obama may be the antiChrist, we’ve got a problem that only Republican leaders can effectively address. We aren’t selling out when we critique our own people; we’re ensuring that the game is fairly played.

That is precisely what the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute has done in its report on the historical curricula taught in American schools. Their dissection of the Texas State Board of Education’s distorted historical vision is utterly devastating. I have pasted some of the pithy highlights below, but I urge you to read the entire report. (more…)

North Carolina poised to repeal Racial Justice Act

February 12, 2011February 15, 2011 · 2 Comments ·

By Alan Bean

In the dwindling days of the 2009 legislative session, lawmakers in North Carolina, voting along party lines, passed a Racial Justice Act that allows death row defendants to use statistics to corroborate claims of racial bias in the criminal justice system. Then came the 2010 election. With the Republicans now in control of the state legislature, prosecutors from across the state are calling for the repeal of the Racial Justice Act.

The controversy centers in a study by the Michigan State University Law School finding that qualified black jurors in North Carolina are more than twice as likely to be excluded from juries as qualified white jurors.

Of the 154 inmates currently on death row in North Carolina, 33 were tried by all-white juries and 40 had juries with only one person of color. The state is approximately 70% white and 25% African-American. (more…)