Cotton better not come to Harlem
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
We already know quite a bit about Senator Tom Cotton and his willingness to torpedo talks with Iran, spearheading the infamous 47 Senator letter. Since it behooves black folks to also examine candidates (and he is running for something) about where they stand on issues that directly affect us, figured I'd do a little digging into his opining on us.
Took all of about 5 seconds with the google. Thank you Emma Rollins at Slate:
Arkansas Senate candidate Rep. Tom Cotton has earned some flack for his Harvard Crimson columns, in which he at turns compares a golf cup to battle, calls libertarians "sanctimonious," brushes off feminism, and says affirmative action is "superficial" diversity. A new trawl through the archives shows Cotton wrote a review for the Harvard Salient, the university's conservative political journal, of America in Black and White by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom. The thesis of the book seems to be that Democrats refuse to accept how much better life is for black people today (read: in the late '90s) than in the pre-war era.
She quotes from
his piece:
Common sense, however, has never been the forte of race-hustling charlatans like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Unfortunately, it also seems lost on supposedly educated people like Roger Wilkins, Lani Guinier, and Derek Bell.
They and other leaders of the civil-rights establishment—one of those many groups that lives off the capital of a noble heritage—blithely ignore all data on racial attitudes in America, as well as all trends of behavior that prove the sincerity of those attitudes. They state that racism is still "as virulent and as obvious as weeds in a garden," racism is "worse today than it was in the '60s," and that "white men are the most lying creatures on the face of the earth."
These are not unintelligent people. They could pass the QRR and can analyze trends and data. They know, however, that to acknowledge the incontrovertible arguments of this book would be to marginalize themselves even more than has already been done. If race relations are better now than at any time in our history and would almost certainly improve if we stopped emphasizing race in our public life, what would the self-appointed 'civil rights leaders' have to do with themselves? For this reason, they continue to make hysterical and wholly unsubstantiated claims that inflame public opinion and create a gnawing cynicism in the American people.
Um. No. Just no.
After you get past the standard bigot boiler plate terms like "race hustling" and "charlatans" lobbed at Rev. Jackson and Rev. Al, in case you are not aware, the "supposedly" educated folks like Roger Wilkins, Lani Guinier, and Derrick Bell (whose name he got wrong) are brilliant scholars on the subject of race and racism and oh yes, they are black.
Roger Wilkins:
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished professor Roger Wilkins was born in 1932 in Kansas City, Missouri. Wilkins attended the University of Michigan, receiving his B.A. in 1953 and his J.D. in 1956, interning with Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund. Following graduation, Wilkins worked in several capacities as an advocate for justice. Beginning his career as a caseworker in the Ohio Welfare Department, Wilkins went on to work for the U.S. Agency for International Development and then as assistant attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Wilkins' interest in legal issues and equality stems partially from his family's background. His uncle, Roy Wilkins, was executive secretary of the NAACP from 1955 to 1977. In 1972, Wilkins began writing for the editorial page of The Washington Post just as the Watergate scandal was breaking. His critically informed editorials about the issues leading up to President Richard Nixon's resignation won him a shared Pulitzer Prize, along with reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and cartoonist Herb Block. He then moved to The New York Times, where he served as the first African American on its editorial board as well as a columnist. Subsequently, Wilkins worked for the Institute for Policy Studies, The Washington Star, National Public Radio and CBS Radio. He continues to be a major commentator and analyst on American public policy and social justice issues.
Lani Guinier
Lani Guinier is the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She became the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship at the Harvard Law School. Before her Harvard appointment, she was a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School where she had been on the faculty for ten years. Professor Guinier worked in the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice and then headed the voting rights project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1980s. Professor Guinier has published many scholarly articles and books that are accessible to a more general audience, including The Tyranny of the Majority (1994); Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law School and Institutional Change (1997) (with co-authors Michelle Fine and Jane Balin); Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice (1998); The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (2002) (co-authored with Gerald Torres). Professor Lani Guinier has written a new book, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America (forthcoming Beacon Press 2015. In her scholarly writings and in op-ed pieces, she has addressed issues of race, gender, and democratic decision-making, and sought new ways of approaching questions like affirmative action while calling for candid public discourse on these topics. Professor Guinier's leadership on these important issues has been recognized with many awards and by ten honorary degrees, including from Smith College, Spelman College, Swarthmore College and the University of the District of Columbia. Her excellence in teaching was honored by the 1994 Harvey Levin Teaching Award from the graduating class at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the 2002 Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence from Harvard Law School.
Last but certainly not least
Derrick Bell, who we lost to cancer in 2011.
From his biography on the website dedicated in his honor:
In 1969, Derrick joined the faculty of Harvard Law School; in 1971, he became the first black tenured professor on the faculty of the law school. In 1973, Derrick published the casebook that would help define the focus of his scholarship for the next 38 years: Race, Racism and American Law. The publication of Race, Racism and American Law, now in its sixth edition, heralded an emerging era in American legal studies, the academic study of race and the law.
In 1980, Derrick became the Dean of the University of Oregon School of Law, becoming one of the first African Americans to serve as dean. That same year, he published a seminal work Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest Convergence Dilemma, 93 Harv. L. Rev. 518 (1980), in which he argued that white Americans would only support racial and social justice to the extent that it benefits them. His argument that the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown was driven, not by concerns over genuine equality and progress for black Americans, but rather by concerns over the nation’s emerging role as an anti-Communist military superpower, sent tremors through the legal academy. In 1986, Derrick resigned his position as Dean of Oregon Law in protest of the faculty’s refusal to hire an Asian American female professor. He returned that same year to Harvard.
...
In 1992, Derrick was invited to join the faculty of New York University School of Law as a visiting professor by John Sexton, his former student at Harvard and then Dean of the law school at NYU. Derrick loved teaching and was a beloved and popular professor and advisor at NYU Law. He taught his introductory and advanced constitutional law courses in a non-traditional and non-Socratic style, that Derrick called “participatory learning.” This pedagogy builds on the important work of Paulo Freire, and features each student as an active participant in learning. Derrick’s students were empowered, through their participation in a series of mock judicial cases, to teach themselves and one another the law.
In 1995, in honor of Derrick’s 65th birthday, Janet Dewart Bell established the Derrick Bell Lecture on Race in American Society at New York University School of Law. The Bell Lecture has the distinction of being one of the nation’s leading forums on race and the law. The 16th Annual Lecture, scheduled for November 2, 2011, will feature a presentation by Ian F. Haney López, the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where he teaches in the areas of race and constitutional law. Previous speakers include: Charles Ogletree, Charles Lawrence III, Patricia J. Williams, Richard Delgado, Lani Guinier, John O. Calmore, Cheryl I. Harris, Mari Matsuda, Frank Michelman, Anita Allen, Kendall Thomas, Robert A. Williams, Paul Butler, Emma Coleman Jordan, Devon Carbado, and Derrick Bell himself.
During his long academic career, Derrick wrote prolifically, integrating legal scholarship with parables, allegories, and personal reflections that illuminated some of America’s most profound inequalities, particularly around the pervasive racism permeating and characterizing much of American law and society. Derrick is often credited as a founder of Critical Race Theory, a school of thought and scholarship that critically engages questions of race and racism in the law, investigating how even those legal institutions purporting to remedy racism can more profoundly entrench it.
Roll out the excuses.
Emma Roller reports:
Update: Here's a comment from Cotton's campaign: "Most college students think they know it all, and most who later look back on what they wrote in college—including Tom—would probably put things differently today."
Um.
Oh no. He's worse. 'Cause we have a voting record to look at which proves just where this cotton-pickin' bale of bull dung's priorities are. He's considered to be extreme,
even for a Republican.
David Atkins wrote in "The not-so-soft racism of Tom Cotton"
GOP representative Tom Cotton, telling a gross lie:
“(My dad) taught me early: farmers can’t spend more than they take in, and I listened,” Cotton said in the ad. “When President Obama hijacked the farm bill, turned it into a food stamp bill, with billions more in spending, I voted no.”
Of course, Cotton isn’t even in the ballpark of truth here. Food stamp bills have long been attached to farm bills in a cat’s cradle knot to encourage urban and rural legislators to vote for each others’ programs. It was the GOP who dissociated them in the hope of cutting food stamps. Obama had nothing to do with it.
But it’s worse than that. It’s no secret that food stamps (now called the SNAP program) have long been racial code for Republicans, even though a large plurality of SNAP recipients are white. When a Republican politician tells his base that he favors cutting food stamps but not farm subsidies, he’s using Atwater’s dog whistle, promising to deliver the pork to rich (white) agribusiness to boost their profits, while stiffing a lot of minorities (most of whom do work at least part-time) who would actually benefit the broader economy by receiving spending money.
Republicans bristle at being called racist in their policies: they feel that Democrats use every opportunity brand any conservative policy as racist. But that’s because they’ve grown so used to their own dog whistles that they don’t even realize that other people can hear them and take offense.
Sadly, to those white folks who sit glazed-eyed staring at Fox News, dog whistles are the sound of music, with Cotton as one of the new kids on the block pipers. Maybe one day, they will wake up and realize that following the sound and scent of
l'eau de merde, has mired them in deeper and deeper economic shit.
Until that time... you listen up Tom Cotton. When you start running for president, or veep, don't bother to make a truck stop in Harlem...or any other location where we descendents of slaves abide.
We don't pick Cotton. (could not resist using that line as a closer again)
And we can smell your scent and intent from miles away.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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In an emotional keynote speech at the annual festival, the Selma director discussed being grateful and being open to the larger moments. The Root: Ava DuVernay at SXSW: ‘If Your Dream Only Includes You, It’s Too Small’
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From Selma, Ala. to South by Southwest, filmmaker Ava DuVernay took her message of living in the moment and being grateful for what she has to the masses in her keynote address Saturday at the annual festival in Austin, Texas.
The director, whose film Selma was nominated for a best picture Oscar, took time from a busy schedule to speak at SXSW; she’s currently working on two TV shows. One is a series for Oprah Winfrey’s network, OWN. The other, which she is working on now, is a network series called For Justice. DuVernay described the show as a procedural featuring a Justice Department civil rights investigator played by Anika Noni Rose.
DuVernay started her talk by sharing how bad her week had been and how she turned that around into something positive. DuVernay said she has picked up a habit of writing down five things she is grateful for each week.
"A certain woman whose initials are O.W. got me into the habit of doing that," she told the audience. DuVernay talked about what she called "the intention of our attention" and the importance of leaving yourself open to larger possibilities that you may miss if you’re only focused on the small things.
Ava DuVernay at South by Southwest on Saturday in Austin, Texas.
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This case is one of the most outrageous stories I have ever read. Slate: Cops on an 11-Year-Old Who Says She Was Raped: “Child’s Promiscuous Behavior Caused This”.
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When Danielle Hicks-Best was only 11 years old, she says a group of two or three young men took her to a house to sexually assault her. Her parents reported this to the police, and Hicks-Best was taken to the hospital, where the doctor discovered vaginal tears and scrapes. A few days later, when Hicks-Best was walking to the store, she says, the same group of young men grabbed her and did it again. Again, the rape kit showed evidence of assault.
Despite all this, no young men were arrested for the crime. Instead, Hicks-Best was arrested six weeks later and charged with filing a false police report. She had just turned 12 years old. Hicks-Best denied any guilt but apparently exhausted with fighting according to the Post, allowed an Alford plea, where the defendant accepts “that there was enough evidence for a conviction — in effect, consenting to the court’s finding of guilt,” Walters writes. Hicks-Best spent the next few years spiraling out of control, running away and acting out. Now, at age 18, she's trying to get her life back on track and is speaking out about what happened to her.
In 2009, the police and courts thought Hicks-Best was a false rape accuser who was lying to cover up for her naughty behavior. “All sex was consensual,”" one police officer wrote in an email discussing this case with his colleagues. “Parents are unable to accept the fact of this child’s promiscuous behavior caused this situation.”
If you're flinching at the phrase “child's promiscuous behavior,” you should be. A child, after all, cannot be promiscuous. To be promiscuous requires consent, and 11-year-olds cannot give meaningful consent. The young men accused in this case range from their late teens to 21 years of age, but apparently the idea that women—and girls—are the gatekeepers of sex is so ingrained that the police in this situation thought little of pinning the responsibility for this situation on a girl who is still young enough to play with Barbies.
As Walters reports, Hicks-Best was abused as a small child before she was adopted by her parents, Veronica and Mayo Best. She certainly had emotional problems and spent much of her childhood in therapy. While she denies that she went willingly with the young men, it's also not hard to believe that an emotionally unstable 11-year-old might have been easy to lure. But that a victim was easy to manipulate doesn't mean she's any less a victim or that her assailants are any less predatory. That's why we have statutory rape laws. But for some reason, the police in this case just couldn't see an 11-year-old for the child that she was, instead painting her with the hoary old stereotype of the slut who cries “rape” to cover up her sexual transgressions. And, because of it, treating her like she is the criminal here.
That the police and prosecutors could see a child as “promiscuous” may be about race. Hicks-Best is black, and research published last spring shows that people, including police officers, tend to perceive black children as older than they are, and therefore more responsible for their behavior. The study looked at boys and criminal behavior, but it's not a great leap to suggest that something similar could be at play when it comes to perceptions of girls and their responsibility for sexual behavior.
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Racist fraternities and sororities should have their tax-exempt status revoked. Slate: Subsidized Injustice.
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If universities and the Greek system will not address the inequitable nature of the organizations, other systems need to step up. Unless universities, fraternities, and sororities address the problem head on, next pledge season we will likely be presented with another incident of this same kind of injustice.
And the system is clearly not interested in addressing the root problem. While it removed SAE, the University of Oklahoma still hosts a chapter of Kappa Alpha, perhaps the most outwardly troublesome fraternity at the university. For those unfamiliar with Kappa Alpha, the fraternity reveres Robert E. Lee as its “spiritual founder.” Its members call themselves Southern Gentlemen, dress up in Confederate garb both for “Old South” days as well as for dances and other events. If the University of Oklahoma sees no problems in these activities and attitudes, the system is at best apathetic.
As tax law professors, we naturally see solutions through the prism of the tax law. Policymakers often use the tax law to provide both carrots and sticks, encouraging certain societally beneficial behavior while deterring behavior we deem detrimental. With apparently endemic discrimination bubbling to the surface of Greek organizations, the tax law may be able to help nudge these organizations to either integrate or clearly signal their discriminatory tendency.
What does tax law have to do with discriminatory fraternities and sororities? All these Greek organizations have been granted tax-exempt status. The SAE chapter in Oklahoma files under the national SAE grant of tax-exemption. By granting a tax-exemption to the fraternity, we, as a society, are subsidizing actions we purport to despise.
If these actions are not societally acceptable, we should not be granting this tax benefit to the organizations. In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that tax-exempt organizations could lose their tax-exempt status when their practices are contrary to a compelling public policy. One such policy is preventing racial discrimination. Under the Reagan administration, the IRS revoked Bob Jones University’s tax exemption because of its racially discriminatory policies, including not admitting black students. In Bob Jones University v. U.S., the university contested the IRS’s decision. The Supreme Court upheld the IRS’s revocation, deciding that, notwithstanding the university’s sincere interpretation of biblical mandates, the government’s “overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education” outweighed any burden on the university from denial of tax-exempt status based on its exercise of its religious beliefs.
Bob Jones University was exempt from tax as a public charity; fraternities are exempt as social clubs. And, in fact, in the 1970s, the same district court that originally found racial discrimination to be inappropriate for universities found it permissible for tax-exempt social clubs. Congress disagreed, changing the law to expressly forbid social clubs with official policies condoning or requiring racial discrimination from qualifying as tax-exempt. It should be noted that in both examples, the raced-based policies were explicit. In the events at hand, we have the other version, de facto discrimination. The Supreme Court has found both versions of discrimination equally pernicious.
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NYPD computers were used in attempts to edit or delete Wikipedia entries for prominent cases of police brutality, including pages for Eric Garner, Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo. The Grio: NYPD busted for editing Eric Garner and Sean Bell’s Wikipedia pages.
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“The matter is under internal review,” said NYPD spokeswoman Detective Cheryl Crispin when confronted with the claims.
85 IP addresses were identified as being connected to the edits and changes, though it is unclear how many users that actually translates into, since computers on the NYPD network can operate on a range of IP addresses.
Edits to the Eric Garner Wikipedia article were made as follows:
“Garner raised both his arms in the air” was changed to “Garner flailed his arms about as he spoke.”
“[P]ush Garner’s face into the sidewalk” was changed to “push Garner’s head down into the sidewalk.”
“Use of the chokehold has been prohibited” was changed to “Use of the chokehold is legal, but has been prohibited.”
The sentence, “Garner, who was considerably larger than any of the officers, continued to struggle with them,” was added to the incident description.
Instances of the word “chokehold” were replaced twice, once to “chokehold or headlock,” and once to “respiratory distress.”
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Serena Williams’ decision to return to Indian Wells was inspiring, magnanimous, and totally unnecessary. Slate: No Apologies.
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Fourteen years ago, the boos grew louder when she hugged her father and sister. The pigtailed teenager had just won the biggest tournament in her home state, but the anger in the stands only swelled.
Serena Williams was just 19 when she won the Indian Wells final in 2001, in front of perhaps the most hostile crowd in tennis history.
The loudest boos from the predominantly white crowd were reserved for Williams’ father, Richard, and sister, Venus, as they walked down the stairs to their courtside seats at the beginning of the match. Venus had withdrawn from her semifinal match against Serena two days earlier, citing knee tendinitis, and the withdrawal was announced only minutes before the match had been scheduled to start.
Still rattled by the Williams family’s unexpected, unrelenting, and unapologetic arrival into the stilted world of tennis from their home of Compton—just a two hour drive from Indian Wells but practically a different universe from the extremely white desert enclave of wealth—some fans and media suspected that the withdrawal had been orchestrated by Richard, who had been previously accused in tabloids of fixing matches between his two daughters. Some other players also indulged in that speculation, especially after losing to one of the sisters.
Many of those in attendance for the final took their grievances out on Serena—who was not herself accused of any wrongdoing—vociferously booing her and cheering her unforced errors. Richard Williams claimed that the worst jeers directed at him and Venus included racial slurs and threats. (At least one fan in attendance at the semifinal, but not the final, recently told ESPNW that he heard “all kinds of nasty racial slurs” at the tournament.)
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