† 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 2
by nancy a heitzeg

Editors Note: As I write this, my Twitter feed is exploding in debate over the NSA/Prism spying program and the attendant leaks. I am seeing the Right decry the same policies they supported — hey voted for — under BushCo because.. well, the President is Black and must be ceaselessly criminalized. I am witnessing liberals defend USA PATRIOT ACT policies that they rejected under Bush because.. well, the President is Black and must be defended for what he  “represents”, at least to some. I am seeing the purity left and libertarians in outrage over governmental intrusion, because… well, White Privilege and now it matters since the target is not just people of color via COINTELPRO or NYPD Stop and Frisk.. But  never mind, let’s co-opt Rosa Parks and MLK..

This is exactly to the heart of my post: Overt racism v. Color-blind racism, an epic battle between two false choices all played out on a personalized level. No structural analysis, nor attendance to systemic racism/classism, and no ability to draw the straight line to consideration of race class gender in the law and its’ enforcement….There is another way..

Last week in Part 1, CI examined a recent report from 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. The report illustrated, in the extreme, how the criminalizing archetype – as  attached to Black Men in particular-  becomes the excuse for, quite frankly, Genocide.

MXGM makes it plain  that ” the practice of executing Black people without pretense of a trial, jury, or judge is an integral part of the government’s current overall strategy of containing the Black community in a state of perpetual colonial subjugation and exploitation.”

It is a War Against Black People, and certainly, extra-judicial killings represent just one aspect of this criminalizing war:

These killings come on top of other forms of oppression black people face. Mass incarceration of nonwhites is one of them. While African-Americans constitute 13.1% of the nation’s population, they make up nearly 40% of the prison population. Even though African-Americans use or sell drugs about the same rate as whites, they are 2.8 to 5.5 times more likely to be arrested for drugs than whites. Black offenders also receive longer sentences compared to whites. Most offenders are in prison for nonviolent drug offenses

And how does this War persist without national outrage?  With no declared State of Emergency? With so few proposed remedies?

Short answer: White Supremacy.

The devil, of course, is always in the longer details, and so today we turn to a deeper exploration of  “color-blind” racism, the central role of criminalizing archetypes, the complicity of Left, Center and Right, and dare we hope?? – a way out of the color-blind fog..

(more…)

From NYT:

In a formal Rose Garden ceremony normally reserved for Supreme Court nominees and prominent cabinet members, Mr. Obama announced plans to nominate three people to fill the remaining vacancies on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The president called on Republicans to abandon what he called partisan obstruction of his judicial nominees and approve his nominees quickly.

“This is not about principled opposition. It’s about partisan obstruction,” Mr. Obama said. “What’s happening now is unprecedented. For the good of the American people it has to stop.”

“What I’m doing today is my job,” Mr. Obama said as he announced the nominations. “What I need is the Senate to do its job.”

By nominating the judges as a group, the president is trying to restore what his allies consider to be ideological balance on a crucial court that has overturned some important parts of his first-term agenda. And he hopes to heighten public anger at Republicans for repeatedly using the threat of filibuster to block his choices for the cabinet and the courts.

…

The president named Cornelia T.L. Pillard, a law professor; Patricia Ann Millett, an appellate lawyer; and Robert L. Wilkins, a federal district judge, as his choices to fill the three open spots on the 11-member court. The three joined Mr. Obama in the Rose Garden on Tuesday morning.

From ThinkProgress:

Though Republican election officials in battleground states sought to dampen voter turn out of traditionally Democratic voters through by instituting identification requirements and limiting early voting hours, a new analysis of census data by the Associated Press shows that African Americans “voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time.”

…

More significantly, the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida and Colorado would have tipped in favor of Romney, handing him the presidency if the outcome of other states remained the same.

African Americans outperformed their voter share, representing 13 percent of total votes cast in 2012
while making up 12 percent of the population — despite facing great obstacles to exercising the franchise.
A poll conducted by Hart Research poll immediately after the election reported that 22 percent of African-Americans waited 30 minutes or more to vote, compared to just 9 percent of white voters. A more thorough analysis from Massachusetts Institute of Technology confirmed that black and hispanic voters waited nearly twice as long to vote as whites. In Florida, home to the longest lines, at least 201,000 people may have been deterred from voting by the long waits.

Black youth was also far more likely to be asked to show ID, a study by professors at the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis found, and many did not even try to vote because they lacked the required identification.

From NYT:

Setting out to sell his second-term agenda, President Obama planned to travel to an engine-parts factory here on Wednesday to promote the revival of American manufacturing, one of the core messages of his State of the Union speech on Tuesday evening.

It was the first of three stops this week in which Mr. Obama, having spoken to a divided Congress, will now try to build popular support for his proposals to invest in manufacturing and education, and raising the minimum wage — an agenda that he claims will help secure the prosperity of the middle class.

In visiting a production plant owned by the Canadian auto-parts maker, Linamar, Mr. Obama hopes to showcase his goal of making the United States a magnet for manufacturing jobs. That was one of three economic pillars of his address to a joint session of Congress.

Linamar Corporation, which makes parts for heavy-duty engines, recently opened its fourth American manufacturing plant in this small town on the outskirts of Asheville, occupying a closed Volvo construction equipment factory. The plant has hired 160 workers, according to the White House, and plans to take on 40 more by the end of 2013.

In his speech on Tuesday, Mr. Obama reiterated his ideas for making the United States more attractive for manufacturing, which include eliminating tax breaks for companies that move jobs overseas and offering incentives for them to build factories in the United States.

From Reuters:

In invalidating Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the three-judge panel issued a troubling decision. And one that should spark a response. For it shows us, yet again, that it matters who sits on our courts.

First, this decision flies in the face of 150 years of practice by presidents of both parties. It represents the judicial overreach that Republican politicians usually decry. There were a total of 260 intra-session recess appointments made between 1867 and 2000, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. President George W. Bush made 141 intra-session recess appointments, and Obama has now made a total of 26.

The court’s additional ruling that a vacancy must arise during a recess for a president to make a recess appointment is also contrary to 190 years of precedent – as another federal appeals court ruled in 2004.

The judges went well beyond the question they were asked to resolve, issuing a ruling that was far more sweeping than necessary, or expected. The court essentially eliminated the president’s constitutionally mandated power to make recess appointments. Yet is is ever more difficult to move nominees – even consensus nominees – through the Senate confirmation process.

From The Grio:

This past week, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that the Pentagon will drop its ban on women serving in combat. With this historic announcement, coming just a year and a half after the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the Obama administration has once again sent a clear message that the United States is committed to fielding a military that reflects the fundamental American values of fairness and equal opportunity.

And just days into his second term, President Obama has reinforced his legacy; he will be remembered for transforming our armed forces more profoundly than any president since Harry Truman, who desegregated the U.S. military and provided a permanent place in the military for women.

By repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and opening all combat positions to women, the Obama administration has eliminated two of the most egregious examples of modern government-sanctioned discrimination. But these decisions were not based in political correctness or moral probity—dropping these unnecessary and discriminatory restrictions is in our national interest. With the overturning of these bans, the American military will no longer lose talented service members due to their gender or sexual orientation, and our armed forces will be stronger due to their diversity.

Yet these reforms did not come easily, nor are they without political risk, as President Clinton discovered when he tried to end the ban on gays in the military. The U.S. military is highly resistant to change, and to achieve these reforms, the Obama administration had to expend considerable political capital and assemble a wide alliance of committed experts and advocates to overcome significant resistance from some active and retired military officers as well as social conservatives in the Congress. Still, these changes will stand the test of history, and by more fully opening the force to minority groups, President Obama has put a commitment to equality, inclusive government, and military readiness at the heart of his legacy.

See also: Defense must be part of debate to reduce spending

From NYT:

There were hints in Mr. Obama’s speech of potential fault lines in the debate. He declared, for example, that there must be a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants “from the outset.” That would seem at odds with the assertion by some senators that citizenship must be tied to tighter border security.

Although Mr. Obama did not say it in his speech, the White House is also proposing that the United States treat same-sex couples the same as other families, meaning that people would be able to use their relationship as a basis to obtain a visa.

Mr. Obama offered a familiar list of proposals: tightening security on borders, cracking down on employers who hire undocumented workers and temporarily issuing more visas to clear the huge backlog of people applying for legal status in the country.

His speech, on the heels of the bipartisan Senate proposal, sets the terms for one of the year’s landmark legislative debates. These are only the opening steps in a complicated dance, and the effort could still founder, as did the effort to overhaul immigration laws in the George W. Bush administration.

But the flurry of activity underscores the powerful new momentum behind an overhaul of the immigration system, after an election that dramatized the vulnerability of Republicans on the issue, with Mr. Obama piling up lopsided majorities over Mitt Romney among Hispanic voters.