Thora Institute: August 2009

8/24/2009

Defending Affirmative Action; Post-Racialism Is Dead

Tim Wise Defends Affirmative Action

Post-Racialism is Dead

For those of us who actually looked at the data on racial discrimination [PDF], "post-racialism" never made any sense. But for a moment, many people actually seriously considered that we might be a post-racial nation. Now, as charges of racism fly left and right, it is finally clear that we are not there yet. Not only are we not post-racial, but it seems that we need to worry about the re-emergence of the Confederacy. Below are statements by major columnists renouncing post-racialism.

The one lesson that everyone took away from the latest “national conversation about race” is the same one we’ve taken away from every other “national conversation” in the past couple of years. America has not transcended race. America is not postracial. So we can all say that again. But it must also be said that we’re just at the start of what may be a 30-year struggle. Beer won’t cool the fury of those who can’t accept the reality that America’s racial profile will no longer reflect their own. (Frank Rich, "Small Beer, Big Hangover," New York Times, August 1, 2009)

But today's Palinoidal Republicans have lost most of the professionals, much of Wall Street and an increasing chunk of suburbia. What they can claim is the allegiance of the white South and the almost entirely white, non-urban parts of the Mountain West. Of the 40 Republican members of the Senate, fully half -- 20 -- come from the old Confederacy, the Civil War border states where slavery was legal or Oklahoma, which politically is an extension of Texas without Texas's racial minorities. Ten others come from the Mountain West. The rest of the nation -- that is, of course, most of the nation -- has become an ever-smaller share of Republican ranks.

All parties are home to distinct subcultures with distinct beliefs. What's different about today's GOP is that increasingly, it is home to just one, and a whole sector of the media -- Fox News, talk radio -- makes its money by emphasizing this subculture's sense of separateness, grievance and alarm, and by creating its own set of "facts." Asked in late July whether they believed Barack Obama was born in the United States, 93 percent of Democrats and 83 percent of independents said yes, but just 42 percent of Republicans agreed. Behind those numbers, 93 percent, 90 percent and 87 percent of Northeasterners, Midwesterners and Westerners, respectively, said yes, but just 47 percent of Southerners said they believed the president was born in this country. Obama, the Republican base is saying, personifies an America that is increasingly alien to them. It's multiracial, as they are not. It puts Sonia Sotomayor, who sure doesn't come from their America, on the Supreme Court. Increasingly, the Republicans have descended into white identity politics. (Harold Meyerson, "Lincoln's Prophecy for the GOP," Washington Post, August 20, 2009)

On the contrary, violence and the threat of violence have always been used by those who wanted to bypass democratic procedures and the rule of law. Lynching was the act of those who refused to let the legal system do its work. Guns were used on election days in the Deep South during and after Reconstruction to intimidate black voters and take control of state governments.

Yes, I have raised the racial issue, and it is profoundly troubling that firearms should begin to appear with some frequency at a president's public events only now, when the president is black. Race is not the only thing at stake here, and I have no knowledge of the personal motivations of those carrying the weapons. But our country has a tortured history on these questions, and we need to be honest about it. Those with the guns should know what memories they are stirring.(E. J. Dionne, "Leave the Guns at Home," Washington Post, August 20, 2009)

8/17/2009

Worth Reading: On the Drug War and Post-Racialism

It's Time to Legalize Drugs

Excerpts from Peter Moskos and Stanford "Neill" Franklin, The Washington Post, August 17, 2009:

. . .

When it makes sense to deal drugs in public, a neighborhood becomes home to drug violence. For a low-level drug dealer, working the street means more money and fewer economic risks. If police come, and they will, some young kid will be left holding the bag while the dealer walks around the block. But if the dealer sells inside, one raid, by either police or robbers, can put him out of business for good. Only those virtually immune from arrests (much less imprisonment) -- college students, the wealthy and those who never buy or sell from strangers -- can deal indoors.

. . .

Only after years of witnessing the ineffectiveness of drug policies -- and the disproportionate impact the drug war has on young black men -- have we and other police officers begun to question the system.

Cities and states license beer and tobacco sellers to control where, when and to whom drugs are sold. Ending Prohibition saved lives because it took gangsters out of the game. Regulated alcohol doesn't work perfectly, but it works well enough. Prescription drugs are regulated, and while there is a huge problem with abuse, at least a system of distribution involving doctors and pharmacists works without violence and high-volume incarceration. Regulating drugs would work similarly: not a cure-all, but a vast improvement on the status quo.

Why the Right is Winning Its War Against Obama

Excerpts from Earl Ofari Hutchinson, The Huffington Post, August 15, 2009:

Obama's worst mistake has been to misread the election results. Much is made that he got more white votes than John Kerry or Al Gore, revved up young whites, and totally exorcised race from the campaign. Obama's win supposedly was final proof that America had finally kicked the racial syndrome. This is the stuff of media talk and wishful thinking. Despite a GOP racked by sex and corruption scandals, an anemic presidential opponent, a laughingstock vice presidential candidate, a collapsed economy and an outgoing GOP president with a rating worse than Herbert Hoover's, McCain still crushed Obama by a twelve point spread among white voters.

The route was not just among old, Deep South unreconstructed or latent bigoted white male voters, but in virtually every voter demographic among whites, including a dead heat with Obama among a majority of younger white voters. This doesn't tell the whole story of the sharp racial divide Obama faces. A sizeable percentage of whites were disgusted enough with Bush's policies to stay home on Election Day, but not disgusted enough with him and his policies to vote for Obama. The Henry Louis Gate's affair and the right's town hall rabble rousing have made more whites wary of Obama's policies. Polls after the Gates outburst showed that a majority of whites condemned Obama for backing Gates and even more ominous expressed grave doubts about his policies. A painful reality is that the crushing majority of whites who oppose Obama or disavow his policies for racial, party, or ideological reasons or personal prejudices, are fast forming the backbone of the radical right's counter insurgency against him.

8/09/2009

Health Care for All?

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com
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[re-post]

Blacks are more likely to be uninsured than nonblacks. In 2004, 19.7 percent of black Americans did not have health insurance, according to the Census Bureau. It was 15.7 percent for all Americans in 2004. For Americans generally, the percent without health insurance has been rising.

The growing number of uninsured is only one of several critical problems facing the American health care system. The New York Times highlighted another problem in its series of articles on diabetes in January of last year: the American health care system does far too little in terms of preventive care.

Consider treatment for diabetes. Blacks are more likely than nonblacks to be diabetic. Diabetes is the fourth leading cause of death among blacks. The New York Times ("In the Treatment of Diabetes, Success Often Does Not Pay" by Ian Urbina, January 11, 2006) illustrated how dysfunctional the American health care system is. Effective diabetes treatment centers were closed down because they did not make money, and they did not make money because they provided good preventative medicine. Urbina writes:

[The diabetes treatment centers] were victims of the byzantine world of American health care, in which the real profit is made not by controlling chronic diseases like diabetes but by treating their many complications.

Insurers, for example, will often refuse to pay $150 for a diabetic to see a podiatrist, who can help prevent foot ailments associated with the disease. Nearly all of them, though, cover amputations, which typically cost more than $30,000.

Patients have trouble securing a reimbursement for a $75 visit to the nutritionist who counsels them on controlling their diabetes. Insurers do not balk, however, at paying $315 for a single session of dialysis, which treats one of the disease's serious complications.

The United States spends a greater proportion of its wealth on health care than any other county, but Americans have rather little to show for it. In international comparisons, American health care ranks highly for treating some specific diseases, but overall the American system tends to fall near or at the bottom of developed Western nations (see the World Health Organization's 2000 ranking).

Beyond the Public-Private Debate: An Examination of Quality, Access and Cost in the Health-Care Systems of Eight Countries (Vancouver, BC: Western Sky Communications, Ltd., 2001) by Cynthia Ramsay, a health economist, produced the following overall rankings after a detailed analysis of eight health care systems:

Singapore
United Kingdom
Switzerland
Germany
Australia
Canada
United States
South Africa

In December of 2005, the New York Times had another important article on the American health care system. Eduardo Porter (in "Health Care for All, Just a (Big) Step Away," December 18, 2005), explained that, from a purely economic standpoint, the U.S. could fairly easily shift to a universal health care system that would provide health insurance for everyone.

What Porter argued was that the federal government provides about $130 billion to businesses in tax breaks to encourage them to provide health insurance to their employees. If the federal government collected these taxes and added a little more revenue, it could provide health care for all. The 20 percent of blacks without health care would be much better off under this system.

Randolph K. Quaye (African Americans’ Health Care Practices, Perspectives, and Needs (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 2005), 50-51) comes to this conclusion after assessing the American health care system and the needs of black Americans:

Countries that have provided universal health care coverage for all their citizens have realized the massive health care cost savings associated with such a policy. As we in the United States struggle to contain health care costs, it is time to recognize that tax incentives for health care coverage only to big corporations will in the long run not be in the best interests of this country. As has been demonstrated, the loss of manufacturing jobs overseas and the high cost of prescription drugs in the face of a potentially bankrupt Medicaid and Medicare systems will in the end frustrate the aspirations of younger and older Americans. The time to act is now, and act we must.

8/03/2009

Barbarism Posing as Justice

A New Lecture: “Anti-Black Discrimination in the Age of Obama” by Dr. Algernon Austin

The simplistic idea that impoverished African Americans have only themselves to blame for their poverty, due to their poor cultural values—a notion advanced by many, including black public figures such as Bill Cosby—is believable only if a blind eye is turned to those inconvenient things social scientists like to call “facts.” Algernon Austin soundly refutes the “culture of poverty” argument by paying careful attention to marco-economic data about long-term poverty trends and sociological case studies about persistent discrimination. In other words, unlike the glib punditry, Austin actually looks at the “facts.”
--Dr. Andrew Hartman, professor and audience member, Illinois State University

Contact Dr. Austin to arrange a speaking engagement.
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Not only does the United States have the highest incarceration rate in the world, it is also the only country in the world that sentences juveniles to life in prison without parole. Because of this inhumane treatment of juveniles, the United States is in violation of international law.

A new report from the Sentencing Project, No Exit: The Expanding Use of Life Sentences in America documents the rise of life sentences in America. It also reveals the too common use of life sentences and life sentences without parole against juveniles.

Blacks are overrepresented among those receiving life sentences. Blacks make up about 12 percent of the U.S. population, but makeup 48.3 percent of individuals serving a life sentence and 56.4 percent of individuals serving a life sentence without parole. Among juveniles serving life sentences, 47.3 percent are black, and 56.1 percent of juveniles serving sentences for life without parole are black.

The Sentencing Project points out that many of the juveniles serving life sentences without parole are quite far from being "the worst of the worst." Nearly 6 in 10 of them were sentenced so harshly for their very first criminal offense. The authors note:

This fact runs contrary to the commonly-held assumption that individuals serving LWOP [life without parole] sentences are chronic, repeat offenders. In addition, in 26% of cases, the juvenile serving an LWOP sentence was not the primary assailant and, in many cases, was present but only minimally involved in the crime. However, because of state law, they were automatically given a sentence of life without the possibility of parole.

In many cases, therefore, our society mindlessly and without any reasonable justification discards the civil life of juveniles and disproportionately juveniles who are black.

These findings are among a long list showing that tough-on-crime policies have produced an extremely illogical, inhumane and anti-black criminal justice system.

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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

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