Happy Fred Korematsu Day!

Also check out the Korematsu Institute: http://korematsuinstitute.org/

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Show me your papers

From Catholic Archbishop of Mobile, Rev. Thomas Rodi (excerpt, full-text at link, emphasis all mine):

This is our right as Americans and as citizens of Alabama. Sometimes people will say that the U.S. Constitution gives us the freedom to worship. Actually, the Constitution gives us the right to the free exercise of our religion. “Freedom to Worship” means that we can come together on Sunday to worship. “Free Exercise” means that, when we leave church on Sunday, we have the right to exercise our faith in our daily lives. This new law prevents us as believers from exercising our life of faith as commanded by the Lord Jesus.

I did not wish to enter into a legal action against the government of Alabama. It is not my temperament to look for an argument. I prayed fervently about this matter, and my prayer kept bringing me back to the motto I chose ten years ago for my bishop’s coat of arms: “The love of Christ impels us” (2 Cor 5:14) Indeed, the love of Christ impels us to “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…” (Matthew 28:19). No law is just which prevents the proclamation of the Gospel, the baptizing of believers, or love shown to neighbor in need. I do not wish to stand before God and, when God asks me if I fed him when he was hungry or gave him to drink when he was thirsty, to reply: yes, Lord, as long as you had the proper documents.

Throughout our history we have been a nation of immigrants. The words of Moses to the Hebrew people should resonate in our own hearts: “You shall not oppress or afflict the alien among you, for you were once aliens residing in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:20) As citizens we have the right to live our Christian faith. As Christians, we have an obligation to do so.

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Race: Are We So Different?

From June 18, 2011, through January 1, 2012, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, will be hosting an exhibit called “Race: Are We So Different?”

The exhibition RACE: Are we so different? brings together the everyday experience of living with race, its history as an idea, the role of science in that history, and the findings of contemporary science that are challenging its foundations.

Interactive exhibit components, historical artifacts, iconic objects, compelling photographs, multimedia presentations, and attractive graphic displays offer visitors to RACE an eye-opening look at its important subject matter.

Developed by the American Anthropological Association in collaboration with the Science Museum of Minnesota, RACE is the first nationally traveling exhibition to tell the stories of race from the biological, cultural, and historical points of view. Combining these perspectives offers an unprecedented look at race and racism in the United States.

Other museums have been and will be hosting this exhibit as well. Current and upcoming locations include Boston, Charlotte, Santa Barbara, New Orleans, Houston, and Durham. Please visit the official website for a virtual tour and the tour schedule.

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A Long History of Racial Preferences… For Whites

Larry Adelman writes:

Many middle-class white people, especially those of us who grew up in the suburbs, like to think that we got to where we are today by virtue of our merit– hard work, intelligence, pluck, and maybe a little luck. And while we may be sympathetic to the plight of others, we close down when we hear the words “affirmative action” or “racial preferences.” We worked hard, we made it on our own, the thinking goes, why don’t “they”? After all, it’s been almost 40 years now since the Civil Rights Act was passed.

What we don’t readily acknowledge is that racial preferences have a long, institutional history in this country– a white history.

Read more.

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Because there are no racists

Marilyn Davenport, a Tea Party activist and member of the Orange County, California, GOP central committee, is under fire for sending a racist email about President Obama to conservative colleagues. The email reads, “Now you know why no birth certificate,” followed by the image below depicting the President as a chimpanzee.

The email perpetuates the birther myth, which seems only to be gathering steam despite having been refuted several times. As Garrett Epps writes for The Atlantic, “The drip-drip-drip of “birther” propaganda is part of a general, persistent assault on the legitimacy of immigrants and non-whites in American culture. Lurking behind the rhetoric of ‘I want my country back’ is a simple refusal to recognize the citizenship, or even the humanity, of anyone but white males.” This dehumanization is reflected in the depiction of the President as an ape, an image echoing historical associations of black people with brutes that were used as “evidence” of white racial superiority:

[ht Sociological Images]

It’s hard to know exactly, but it seems to me that there’s been a resurgence of this kind of imagery since the ’08 general election campaign (a couple examples here and here).

The racist trope of black people as monkeys is universally familiar in American culture. There’s virtually no way someone repeating this trope would not be at least somewhat aware of its racist implications or history. On top of all that, this is not the first time Davenport has been implicated in racist behavior:

Michael J. Schroeder, an Orange County resident and former chairman of the California Republican Party, also said he was disgusted.

“This is a three strikes situation for Marilyn Davenport,” Schroeder said. “She was a passionate defender of former Newport Beach city councilman Dick Nichols who stated that he was voting against putting in more grass at Corona del Mar’s beach because, he said, there were already ‘too many Mexicans on the beach.’ She was also on the wrong side of the fence with the Los Alamitos mayor and his White House watermelon patch picture. Now, she has managed to top both of those incidents by comparing African Americans to monkeys. She has disgraced herself and needs to resign. If she doesn’t, the Republican Party must remove her.” (The OC Weekly)

So you might be as astounded as I was to read that Davenport is claiming there’s nothing racist about the email, and engaging in derailing “I am not a racist” bingo in response to news coverage of this incident:

Reached by telephone and asked if she thought the email was appropriate, Davenport said, “Oh, come on! Everybody who knows me knows that I am not a racist. It was a joke. I have friends who are black. Besides, I only sent it to a few people–mostly people I didn’t think would be upset by it.”

Wow. To share an email depicting a black man as a chimp and then take offense at the suggestion that one might be racist is…bold? Clueless? Disingenuous? I don’t know. Like Ta-Nehisi Coates says, it seems these days that despite increasingly vocal and widespread expressions of white racial resentment, there are no racists.

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Tennessee lawmaker compares immigrants to rats

The latest disturbing development in the conservative attack on the 14th amendment: last week Tennessee state legislator and Republican Curry Todd argued against birthright citizenship on the grounds that it would cause immigrants to “go out there like rats and multiply.”

Todd . . .  made the comments at a legislative committee meeting earlier this week after being told that federal law requires the state to extend prenatal care to women regardless of their citizenship status because all children born in the U.S. are citizens.

Rep. Todd is standing by his comments and refuses to apologize for them, but says he used the “wrong terminology” and should have said “anchor babies” instead – a term not quite as fully dehumanizing as “rats,” but dehumanizing nonetheless.  Try again, buddy.

Scary part #1: An elected state official feels perfectly comfortable spouting such hateful, nativist, racist rhetoric in public.  And he’s totally unrepentant.
Scary part #2: His comments represent the views of a large minority (at least, I hope it’s a minority!) of Americans.
Scary part #3: Like most xenophobic, anti-immigration Americans, Todd seems entirely ignorant that he’s reproducing dangerous tropes and stereotypes about immigrants that have a long, LONG history in this country:  The assumption that immigrants, and particularly non-white and/or non-Protestant Christian immigrants are hyperfecund (like animals) and threaten to overrun white Protestant America with their numerous offspring (again, like animals); the implication that immigrants are like vermin, or diseased; the insistence that immigrants pose an imminent threat to the metaphorical or actual health and safety of the country.

These are all very old ideas, and they’re ideas that have serious and potentially very dangerous consequences.  It’s a short step from paranoia about “multiplying” immigrant populations to manipulating or coercing sterilizations or the use of birth control (see, for example, the marketing of Norplant as a method of birth control in communities of color, and the higher rates of tubal ligation in black and Hispanic populations).  It’s a short step from nebulous fears about public health or national security to forced quarantines, unlawful detention, persecution, and even extermination (it’s not a coincidence that the metaphor of Jews as vermin or pests was commonplace for years before the Holocaust started).  Closer to home we can point to the internment of Japanese Americans during WWI and other numerous examples of how nativist rhetoric poses a concrete danger to immigrant populations:

Restrictionists have sought to link certain countries of origin (especially Asian and Latin American countries) to disease outbreaks and crime. They have claimed nonwhite immigrants are a menace to public health. Throughout the course of the bracero program (1942–1964), Mexican workers were periodically sprayed and washed for body lice and other vermin. There was widespread fear that Mexicans carried contagious diseases like tuberculosis. In April and May 1980 more than 125,000 Cubans were boat-lifted to the United States; the boat refugees included six hundred former asylum inmates and twelve hundred former prison inmates or people suspected of serious crimes in Cuba who had been released by Fidel Castro. These boat refugees came to be known as the Marielitos, and they were promptly typecast as a criminal and deviant population that threatened the United States with diseases and illicit behavior. A New York Times headline read, “Retarded People and Criminals” (Ojito). By 1987 thirty-eight hundred Mariel refugees were serving sentences for crimes committed in the United States, and another thirty-eight hundred were subject to indefinite detention after completing sentences or for suspicion of crimes. In January 2005 the U.S. Supreme ruled that this detention was unlawful and that the U.S. government could no longer detain Cuban refugees who had served their time or were simply deemed to have suspicious backgrounds. In another example of this type of racist construct, Haitian immigrants (boat refugees) were detained at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay naval base in the 1990s, presumably because they constituted an HIV/AIDS menace.

This is serious, scary stuff, and it’s a sign of how dangerous the current climate is for all immigrants and Americans assumed to be immigrants, especially (but not limited to) Hispanics and Muslims.

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Uncle Sam’s Shameful Treatment of Today’s American Indians

Last year for Columbus Day I looked back into history. This year I would like to draw your attention to the present by recommending Walt Rodgers’ recent article “Uncle Sam’s Shameful Treatment of Today’s American Indians.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Jim Adams, a historian and former editor of the national weekly newspaper Indian Country Today, says the maltreatment of the Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West “is directly proportional to their resistance to migrating whites in the 19th century. Those who took arms and gave the US Cavalry its greatest thrashings have been treated most harshly from the 1876 Custer massacre until today.”

Americans fancy themselves a fair and forgiving people. Today, we are one of Vietnam’s largest trading partners. The US and Vietnamese navies recently conducted joint naval maneuvers. But our discrimination against the victorious tribes at Little Bighorn is unconscionable. We treat Iraqis and Afghans better than native Americans.

If you associate reservations with shiny casinos, go look up tribal health and poverty statistics. From unemployment to disease and suicide, they paint a picture of third-world conditions.

The Oglala Sioux who spearheaded resistance in the 1860s and ’70s may feel the punishment worst. Some still live in tar-paper shacks. The White Man’s vengeance is often subtle. We took proud, self-sufficient people and condemned them to a dependent reservation culture. Then we arrogantly ask “Why are they lazy? Why do they drink?”

A white woman who works at a Sioux school said, “There’s a part of me that asks, ‘How long is this going to go on?’”

Read the rest of the article.

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