† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Kay Whitlock, co-author of Queer (In)Justice, is contributing editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm.

Unpacking “Chiraq”: Repression, RICO, and War on Terror Tactics
by nancy a heitzeg

Editors Note: Wrote this one for my people at Prison Culture and Project NIA. Located in Chicago, a city increasingly labeled -  by both friend and foe – as “Chiraq”. This piece is a follow-up to Unpacking ‘Chiraq’ #1: Chief Keef, Badges of Honor, and Capitalism – please read it. It is brilliant analysis of how “Chiraq” is claimed in “elegies of survival” by those who live through it everyday. “Chiraq” is normalizing while pathologizing, glorifying while vilifying, the total link between domestic/foreign “enemies”.  Today we explore the latter…

What does it mean to call a city a War Zone? To write entire Black and Brown neighborhoods – and all their inhabitants – out of the United States of America and into a script that so effectively “others” them that they are now a foreign enemy state? What does it mean for public perception? What does it mean for police state response?

While the term “Chiraq” may have one set of meanings for those who survive Chicago’s high gun violence rate (see Unpacking ‘Chiraq’ #1: Chief Keef, Badges of Honor, and Capitalism), it serves to legitimate, without question, already solidified stereotypes of youth of color. “Chiraq” also links, per usual this violence to gangs. “Chiraq” implies that the already draconian domestic police approach to gangs is insufficient, and that a military response is now needed.

What other message could one take from the recent edition of HBO’s Vice Episode #9 Chiraq ? Where segments of a major US city are described like this — “The South Side of Chicago is basically a failed state within the borders of the U.S.”? Where viewers are blithely taken from Chicago’s Southside to then “hunting oil pirates in Nigeria”?

The lethal combination of gangs and guns has turned Chicago into a war zone. To see why the Windy City, now dubbed “Chiraq,” had the country’s highest homicide rate in 2012, VICE visits Chicago’s most dangerous areas, where handguns are plentiful and the police and community leaders are fighting a losing battle against gang violence. In the neighborhood of Englewood, we patrol with police, visit with religious leaders, and hang out with members of gangs – soldiers in a turf war that has spread into new communities as projects are destroyed and residents are forced to move elsewhere.

“Chiraq” means War. Literally.

(more…)

From Bitch Magazine:

While “colorblindness” in adoption has been widely challenged, however, not everyone is convinced – like the adoptive mother who recently told me, “I don’t see my son’s color. Race is just not an issue for us.”What do you think?

Some people maintain that any cultural loss is unimportant compared to what children gain through adoption. But in both mainstream media and personal conversations about adoption, cultural and racial identity need not be pitted against a child’s right to love, safety, and security.

This unfortunate “either-or” framing of the issue finds frequent expression in discussions of transracial adoption. Michael Gerson—whose wife is a Korean adoptee—wrote in the Washington Post: “Ethnicity is an abstraction…. Every culture or race is outweighed when the life of a child is placed on the other side of the balance.” In a National Review article criticizing Kathryn Joyce’s book The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, adoptive father David French dismissed “the ‘culture’” (note the mocking quotation marks) of internationally adopted children as “the culture of starvation, of rags, of disease, and of abandonment.”What do you think?

George Wallace stands in front of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama (AFP/Getty Images)

From The Root:

Fifteen years after Vivian Malone and James Hood successfully enrolled at the University of Alabama, I had my first day of classes in August of 1978 at the “Capstone of Higher Education” — the state’s flagship.

On June 11, 1963, Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, an iconic segregationist, stood in the door of Foster Auditorium to prevent Malone and Hood from enrolling as undergraduates at the university. Wallace stepped aside only after President John F. Kennedy activated the Alabama National Guard, which ordered him to allow Hood and Malone to enroll. They began classes on June 12.

I entered in the summer of 1978 fully aware of the institution’s racist past and with a quiet commitment to single-handedly tearing down any remaining vestiges of segregation. I exited four years later, with a crimson-covered diploma in hand, a few battle scars and dozens of lifelong friends, including many who grew up along winding roads in the countryside instead of on urban streets and asphalt courts.

Educated in the inner-city schools of Birmingham — where the works of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni had been woven into my tapestry — I put on my Levi’s jeans, sneakers and an Izod knit top and dashed off for a 9 a.m. Biology 101 class with Dr. Graham. In the huge auditorium filled with about 350 students, I counted five blacks.

It’s always hot in Alabama in August. On that Monday morning, I quickly made my way on foot from my residence at Tutwiler Hall, passing Denny Chimes and crossing the huge quad along the way. A photographer had captured Malone making a similar trek in 1963. But on this day, there was no need for photographers or an escort. After the first two black students successfully entered and began classes at the university in 1963, thousands more would follow.

† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Kay Whitlock, co-author of Queer (In)Justice, is contributing editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm.

The War on Black ~ “Color-blindness” and Criminalization, Part 1
by nancy a heitzeg

For Kimani Gray, Cary Ball, Jr., and too many more…

As we brace ourselves for the George Zimmerman murder trial — where the defense will continue attempts to paint teen-aged Trayvon Martin as the stereotypical danger, not the victim – we have no shortage of brutalizing images to remind of us of the toxic power of that criminalizing narrative.

As we have written here before, the Black Man as Dangerous is a lethal idea, ironically, not to those who perpetrate and fear, but to those to whom it is attached. It is also a very old idea, one that has evolved over centuries. The Savage, The Brute, the Defiler of White Women — honed and solidified in the Post Civil Rights Era into an archetype that scholars and activists now refer to in aggregate short-hand: The Criminal-Black-Man.

This image is ubiquitous — it is the text and subtext of all crime-reporting and “reality” cop/prison programing. It shapes the contours of everyday racism, the school to prison pipeline, police patrols and profiles; it offers the framework for both creating and then perversely justifying the demographics of both the prison industrial complex and the face of death row.

The Criminal-Black-Man archetype is the centerpiece of the Post-Civil Rights Era’s reliance on color-blind coding to re-constitute the Old Jim Crow into the New – with The War on Drugs, The War on Gangs, and coming soon to a city near you, The War on Guns. Race need never be explicitly named but  “high crime neighborhoods”, “gangs”, “thugs”, ghettos, “hoods and “hoodies” all evoke a racialized image. As intended. All people of color — Latino/as and Native American especially-  the poor, the queer are targets here too – but it is Blackness that provides the paradigm.

And the Criminal Black Man need not be a literal “man” — Black women are deemed threatening too (See Kiera Wilmot), as are Black children. From the Scottsboro Boys to Emmet Till to Trayvon Martin, age has offered no mitigation for the irrational fear triggered in some by the presence of Black.

Just this week, 14 year old Tremaine McMillian was violently restrained by police for “dehumanizing stares” and was charged with a felony count of resisting arrest with violence and disorderly conduct.

Driving While Black, Walking While Black, Standing While Black, Carrying Skittles While Black, Doing Science While Black, Now Looking While Black are supposed rationale for a series of disproportionate responses from law enforcement, security personnel and every day would-be vigilantes.

Often these encounters are lethal. Too often. A recent report issued by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report on the extrajudicial killing of 313 Black people by police, security guards and vigilantes , notes this:

Every 28 hours in 2012 someone employed or protected by the US government killed a Black man, woman, or child.

(more…)

Outrageous.

From Salon:

Alabama high school graduate Chelsey Ramer was fined $1,ooo and denied her diploma and transcripts after wearing an eagle feather attached to her mortarboard as a symbol of her Native American heritage.

Ramer is a member of the Poarch Creek Band of Indians, and had previously attempted to appeal the school policy banning students from wearing “extraneous items” with the school’s headmaster, but her request was denied. “About two months ago, me and the other Indian seniors from the graduating class asked our headmaster if we could wear the feathers on our caps,” Ramer told Indian Country Today Media Network. “She told us ‘no’ and that if we did, she would pull us off the field.”

Ramer wore the feather anyway, saying it was important to her to represent her heritage. “Being honored with a feather for graduation is a wonderful experience. It’s a lot more than showing off your culture. It has ties into our spirituality as well,” Ramer’s former teacher Alex Alvarez told WMPI-TV.

Now, more than a week since the graduation ceremony took place, Escambia Academy High School is still withholding Ramer’s diploma. Ramer has appealed the fine and may seek legal counsel, but says she does not regret the decision to wear the feather in her cap: ”It was worth it. It means a lot to me,” she said.

From NYT:

Nearly a half-century after a Texan, President Lyndon B. Johnson, helped usher in the era of affirmative action, the Supreme Court is poised to rule as early as this week on whether the University of Texas can continue to consider race as one of many factors in its admissions policy. It is a case that could have a profound impact on race-based affirmative action programs across the nation, and it has reignited a discussion of how much progress minorities, blacks in particular, have made in integrating into some of the most sought-after professions, especially since the recession.

Only a little more than 1 percent of the nation’s Fortune 500 companies have black chief executives, although there are some prominent exceptions, like Kenneth I. Chenault of American Express and Ursula M. Burns of Xerox. At the nation’s biggest companies, about 3.2 percent of senior executive positions are held by African-Americans, according to an estimate by the Executive Leadership Council, an organization of current and former black senior executives.

While about 12 percent of the nation’s working-age population is black, about 5 percent of physicians and dentists in the United States are black — a share that has not grown since 1990, according to an analysis of census data that was prepared for The New York Times by sociologists at Queens College of the City University of New York. The analysis found that 3 percent of American architects are black, another field where the share has not increased in more than two decades.

The share of the nation’s lawyers who are minorities and women, which had been growing slowly but steadily for years, fell in 2010 for the first time since NALP, the National Association for Law Placement, began keeping statistics in 1993. The deep recession not only disproportionately hurt African-Americans in many fields, but it also led businesses to make diversity programs less of a priority. And a growing number of states — including Arizona, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Oklahoma — have moved to ban race-based affirmative action in recent years. California, Florida and Washington did so in the 1990s.

Such numbers raise the question of whether the private sector’s commitment to affirmative action and diversity programs is eroding, even as the Supreme Court again considers a high-profile case involving a public university.

…

While blacks made up only 2.65 percent of the partners at Houston firms last year, that figure represents progress as the share of black partners more than doubled over the past decade, according to statistics kept by NALP, the law placement association. At the lower levels of firms, black lawyers have lost some ground, however. Houston firms reported that 4.74 percent of their associates last year were black, down from 4.96 percent in 2002, the association said.

Surprise, surprise.

From NYT:

When CVFC, a conservative veterans’ group in California, applied for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service, its biggest expenditure that year was several thousand dollars in radio ads backing a Republican candidate for Congress.

The Wetumpka Tea Party, from Alabama, sponsored training for a get-out-the-vote initiative dedicated to the “defeat of President Barack Obama” while the I.R.S. was weighing its application.

And the head of the Ohio Liberty Coalition, whose application languished with the I.R.S. for more than two years, sent out e-mails to members about Mitt Romney campaign events and organized members to distribute Mr. Romney’s presidential campaign literature.

Representatives of these organizations have cried foul in recent weeks about their treatment by the I.R.S., saying they were among dozens of conservative groups unfairly targeted by the agency, harassed with inappropriate questionnaires and put off for months or years as the agency delayed decisions on their applications.

But a close examination of these groups and others reveals an array of election activities that tax experts and former I.R.S. officials said would provide a legitimate basis for flagging them for closer review.

“Money is not the only thing that matters,” said Donald B. Tobin, a former lawyer with the Justice Department’s tax division who is a law professor at Ohio State University. “While some of the I.R.S. questions may have been overbroad, you can look at some of these groups and understand why these questions were being asked.”

The stakes are high for both the I.R.S. and lawmakers in Congress, whose election fortunes next year will hinge in no small part on a flood of political spending by such advocacy groups. They are often favored by strategists and donors not for the tax benefits — they typically do not have significant income subject to tax — but because they do not have to reveal their donors, allowing them to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into elections without disclosing where the money came from.

The I.R.S. is already separately reviewing roughly 300 tax-exempt groups that may have engaged in improper campaign activity in past years, according to agency planning documents. Some election lawyers said they believed a wave of lawsuits against the I.R.S. and intensifying Congressional criticism of its handling of applications were intended in part to derail those audits, giving political nonprofit organizations a freer hand during the 2014 campaign.

From Indian Country Today:

Anthropology has from the beginning been influenced and dominated by European males. They set the criteria of hierarchically ordered level descriptions, giving themselves the power to dictate the boundaries of group membership by defining race in terms of biology. As a consequence, the last Indian dies not by blunt force, expulsion or disease, but by the social construction of race imposed upon us— terminating our existence by blood.

…

As the history of the world proves, false constructs give life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, a reason to define the power between individuals and groups of people, instead of intellectual understanding. During the Age of Enlightenment, European philosophers sought to reform society by using reason, faith and the science available during that time, drawing lines and boundaries to discriminate against people who appeared and acted different then themselves (left-over from theories of the earlier Catholic interpretation of Biblical continental positions and the knowledge that then existed of the peoples of their known world).

Their conclusions however, are still with us hundreds of years later.

Starting with the predominant colonial theory of race, The Great Chain of Being was the idea that human races could be lined up from most superior to most inferior. The Chain originates with God at the pinnacle, and progresses downward through angels, demons, stars, moon, kings (the summit of humanity’s social order), princes, nobles, men, animals, trees, other plants, precious stones, metals, minerals, and then an arrangement of non-white people, with blacks at the bottom. There is no mention of Indians in the Chain because New World explorers had not yet encountered them; but upon meeting, Europeans considered them proto-human and not descendant from the original Biblical pair (Adam and Eve).

…

Samuel George Morton, provided “scientific evidence” of Indian inferiority. In his 1839 study, Crania Americana, and concluded from collected statistical data that the brain size of Europeans was far greater than that of Native people and thus reflected a correspondingly greater intellectual capacity. Even anti-racist Franz Boaz, is now believed by many as having promoted Jewish interests. According to Herbert S. Lewis’ The Passion of Franz Boas, published in “American Anthropologist” journal Volume 103, Issue 2, pages 447–467, June 2001, “Boas did great service at the start of this progression. His hand-waving and smoke-blowing was, as usual for Jews, used to obscure the Who/Whom – who was served by whom and at whose expense – behind a pretense that everyone benefited.”

The article continues, “Anthropology, though a cryptically Eurocentric culture of critique, has pathologized and demonized and prevailed (at least in intellectual/academic circles) not only over “racist” Nordic champions such as Madison Grant, who was responsible for one of the most famous works of scientific racism (a.k.a. eugenics) and played an active role in crafting strict immigration and anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, but of “Whites in general.” Further, “ These men, along with others, shifted the understanding of race from real, to insignificant, to imaginary, to the self-contradictory anti-White/anti-”racism” of today. Race is a construct of the evil White race, who used (and still uses) it to exploit and oppress all the other, innocent ‘people of color.’”