Dr. John Henrik Clarke: 'The I Have a Dream Speech was the one speech in which he dealt with fantasy not reality. Integration was never our aim. We wanted justice.'

University of Michigan promises to 'take action' and improve racial diversity on the Ann Arbor campus

MlLive

University of Michigan is promising a renewed focus on diversity.

Black enrollment at the Ann Arbor college has dropped by a third in the past seven years and, last month, hundreds of black students took to twitter and rallied against feeling marginalized and alone on campus. Events on campus in the fall, including a planned fraternity party with racist undertones, intensified those feelings.

The Being Black at Michigan hashtag, #BBUM, was the most trending topic on social media for a time in December. The message from students was clear: They want more diversity and inclusion on campus.

"I was chastened by the comments from the students," U-M President Mary Sue Coleman said in a recent editorial board interview "Our numbers are not where we'd like them to be."

Last week U-M Provost Martha Pollack acknowledged the need to reassess how U-M promotes diversity. 

At MLK breakfast, St. Cloud mayor apologizes for City’s past of racial discrimination

SCTimes

St. Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis apologized Monday for the city’s past of racial discrimination at an event honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The event promoted education and highlighted how far the community has come. Kleis said the city celebrates past accomplishments and must also take responsibility and apologize for past failures.

Hundreds attended the event at St. Cloud State University to discuss how the community needs to work together to ensure equality for all residents. Speakers also addressed improvements in St. Cloud and said the derisive term “White Cloud” no longer applies.

On the Opinion page in the Sunday St. Cloud Times, St. Cloud State University professor and author Christopher Lehman, who has done research on slavery in St. Cloud, called on the city to officially apologize for permitting slavery and segregation.

After Monday’s event, Lehman said he heard the apology and appreciates that Kleis made it. Lehman said it was a “bold and progressive gesture” and an important step in the city coming to terms with its history.

New Speech Found - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1962 Speech in NYC

From [HERE] The New York State Museum has unearthed a long-lost audio recording of a 1962 speech from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., state officials announced Monday.

An intern found the recording as museum staff worked on digitizing thousands of audio and video recordings in its collection, has been posted to the museum's website.

Is the United States a ‘Racial Democracy’? [the white over Black system requires the greater confinement of Blacks]

NyTimes

Plato’s “Republic” is the wellspring from which all subsequent Western philosophy flows, and political philosophy is no exception. According to Plato, liberty is democracy’s greatest good; it is that which “in a democratic city you will hear … is the most precious of all possessions.” Subsequently, two notions of liberty emerged in the writings of democratic political philosophers. The dispute about which of these two notions of liberty is most central to human dignity is at the heart of Western philosophy. Both are central to American democracy. Indeed, it is best to think of these as two different aspects of the conception of liberty at the heart of American democracy, rather than distinct concepts.

The standard source of the distinction between two senses of “liberty” is a speech in 1819 by the great political theorist Benjamin Constant. The first, “the liberty of the ancients,” consists in having a voice into the policies and representatives that govern us. The second, “the liberty of the moderns,” is the right to pursue our private interests free from state oversight or control. Though the liberty of moderns is more familiar to Americans, it is in fact the liberty of the ancients that provides the fundamental justification for the central political ideals of the American Democratic tradition. For example, we have the freedom of speech so that we can express our interests and political views in deliberations about policies and choice of representatives.

Given the centrality of liberty to democracy, one way to assess the democratic health of a state is by the fairness of the laws governing its removal. The fairness of a system of justice is measured by the degree to which its laws are fairly and consistently applied across all citizens. In a fair system, a group is singled out for punishment only insofar as its propensity for unjustified violations of the laws demands. What we call a racial democracy is one that unfairly applies the laws governing the removal of liberty primarily to citizens of one race, thereby singling out its members as especially unworthy of liberty, the coin of human dignity.

There is a vast chasm between democratic political ideals and a state that is a racial democracy. The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues that when political ideals diverge so widely from reality, the ideals themselves may prevent us from seeing the gap. Officially, the laws in the United States that govern when citizens can be sent to prison or questioned by the police are colorblind. But when the official story differs greatly from the reality of practice, the official story becomes a kind of mask that prevents us from perceiving it. And it seems clear that the practical reality of the criminal justice system in the United States is far from colorblind. The evidence suggests that the criminal justice system applies in a radically unbalanced way, placing disproportionate attention on our fellow black citizens. The United States has a legacy of enslavement followed by forced servitude of its black population. The threat that the political ideals of our country veil an underlying reality of racial democracy is therefore particularly disturbing.

Starting in the 1970s, the United States has witnessed a drastic increase in the rate of black imprisonment, both absolutely and relative to whites. Just from 1980 to 2006, the black rate of incarceration (jail and prison) increased four times as much as the increase in the white rate. The increase in black prison admissions from 1960 to 1997 is 517 percent. In 1968, 15 percent of black adult males had been convicted of a felony and 7 percent had been to prison; by 2004, the numbers had risen to 33 percent and 17 percent, respectively.

About 9 percent of the world’s prison population is black American (combining these two studies). If the system of justice in the United States were fair, and if the 38 million black Americans were as prone to crime as the average ethnic group in the world (where an ethnic group is, for example, the 61 million Italians, or the 45 million Hindu Gujarati), you would expect that black Americans would also be about 9 percent of the 2013 estimated world population of 7.135 billion people. There would then be well over 600 million black Americans in the world. If you think that black Americans are like anybody else, then the nation of black America should be the third largest nation on earth, twice as large as the United States. You can of course still think, in the face of these facts, that the United States prison laws are fairly applied and colorblind. But if you do, you almost certainly must accept that black Americans are among the most dangerous groups in the multithousand year history of human civilization.

The Columbia professor Herbert Schneider told the following story about John Dewey. One day, in an ethics course, Dewey was trying to develop a theme about the criteria by which you should judge a culture. After having some trouble saying what he was trying to say, he stopped, looked out the window, paused for a long time and then said, “What I mean to say is that the best way to judge a culture is to see what kind of people are in the jails.” Suppose you were a citizen of another country, looking from the outside at the composition of the United States prison population. Would you think that the formerly enslaved population of the United States was one of the most dangerous groups in history? Or would you rather suspect that tendrils of past mind-sets still remain?

Our view is that the system that has emerged in the United States over the past few decades is a racial democracy. It is widely thought that the civil rights movement in the 1960s at last realized the remarkable political ideals of the United States Constitution. If political ideals have the tendency to mask the reality of their violation, it will be especially difficult for our fellow American citizens to acknowledge that we are correct. More argument is required, which we supply in making the case for the following two claims.

First, encountering the police or the courts causes people to lose their status as participants in the political process, either officially, by incarceration and its consequences, or unofficially, via the strong correlation that exists between such encounters and withdrawal from political life. Secondly, blacks are unfairly and disproportionately the targets of the police and the courts. We briefly summarize part of the case for these claims here; they are substantiated at length elsewhere.

In the United States, 5.85 million people cannot vote because they are in prison or jail, currently under supervision (probation, for example), or live in one of the two states, Virginia and Kentucky, with lifetime bans on voting for those with felony convictions (nonviolent first time drug offenders are no longer disenfranchised for life in the former). Yet the effects also extend to the large and growing ranks of the nation’s citizens who experience involuntary contact with police regardless of whether their right to vote is formally eliminated.

As one of us has helped document in a forthcoming book, punishment and surveillance by itself causes people to withdraw from political participation — acts of engagement like voting or political activism. In fact, the effect on political participation of having been in jail or prison dwarfs other known factors affecting political participation, such as the impact of having a college-educated parent, being in the military or being in poverty.

In a large survey of mostly marginal men in American cities, the probability of voting declined by 8 percent for those who had been stopped and questioned by the police; by 16 percent for those who had experienced arrest; by 18 percent for those with a conviction; by 22 percent for those serving time in jail or prison; and, if this prison sentence was a year or more in duration, the probability of voting declined by an overwhelming 26 percent, even after accounting for race, socioeconomic position, self-reported engagement in criminal behavior and other factors. Citizens who have been subject to prison, jail or merely police surveillance not only withdrew but actively avoided dealings with government, preferring instead to “stay below the radar.” As subjects, they learned that government was something to be avoided, not participated in.  Fearful avoidance is not the mark of a democratic citizen.

“Man is by nature a political animal,” declares Aristotle in the first book of his “Politics.” “Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech … the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and the inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust.” Aristotle here means that humans fully realize their nature in political participation, in the form of discussions and decision making with their fellow citizens about the affairs of state. To be barred from political participation is, for Aristotle, the most grievous possible affront to human dignity.

In the United States, blacks are by far the most likely to experience punishment and surveillance and thus are most likely to be prevented from realizing human dignity. One in 9 young black American men experienced the historic 2008 election from their prison and jail cells; 13 percent of black adult men could not cast a vote in the election because of a felony conviction. And among blacks lacking a high school degree, only one-fifth voted in that election because of incarceration, according to research conducted by Becky Pettit, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington. We do not know how many others did not get involved because they were trying to keep a low profile where matters of government are concerned.

If the American criminal justice system were colorblind, we would expect a tight link between committing crime and encountering the police. Yet most people stopped by police are not arrested, and most of those who are arrested are not found guilty; of those who are convicted, felons are the smallest group; and of those, many are nonserious offenders. Thus a large proportion of those who involuntarily encounter criminal justice — indeed, the majority of this group — have never been found guilty of a serious crime (or any crime) in a court of law. An involuntary encounter with the police by itself leads to withdrawal from political participation. If one group has an unjustifiably large rate of involuntary encounters, that group can be fairly regarded as being targeted for removal from the political process.

Evidence suggests that minorities experience contact with the police at rates that far outstrip their share of crime. One study found that the probability that a black male 18 or 19 years of age will be stopped by police in New York City at least once during 2006 is 92 percent. The probability for a Latino male of the same age group is 50 percent. For a young white man, it is 20 percent. In 90 percent of the stops of young minorities in 2011, there wasn’t evidence of wrongdoing, and no arrest or citation occurred. In over half of the stops of minorities, the reason given for the stop was that the person made “furtive movements.” In 60 percent of the stops, an additional reason listed for the stop was that the person was in a “high crime area.”

Blacks are not necessarily having these encounters at greater rates than their white counterparts because they are more criminal. National surveys show that, with the exception of crack cocaine, blacks consistently report using drugs at lower levels than whites. Some studies also suggest that blacks are engaged in drug trafficking at lower levels. Yet once we account for their share of the population, blacks are 10 times as likely to spend time in prison for offenses related to drugs.

Fairness would also lead to the expectation that once arrested, blacks would be equally likely to be convicted and sentenced as whites. But again, the evidence shows that black incarceration is out of step with black offending. Most of the large racial differences in sentencing for drugs and assault remain unexplained even once we take into account the black arrest rates for those crimes.

The founding political ideals of our country are, as ideals, some of the most admirable in history. They set a high moral standard, one that in the past we have failed even to approximate. We must not let their majestic glow blind us to the possibility that now is not so different from then. The gap between American ideals and American reality may remain just as cavernous as our nation’s troubled history suggests.

Dog Whistle Politics: How Politicians Use Coded Racism to Push Through Policies

DemocracyNow

Two months after 47 million food stamp recipients were hit with $5 billion in cuts, more are on the way as lawmakers finalize a new farm bill. The measure is likely to slash another $9 billion in food stamps over the next decade, depriving more than 800,000 households of up to $90 in aid per month. We look at how politicians have used coded racial appeals to win support for cuts like these and similar efforts since the 1960s with Ian Haney López, author of the new book, "Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class." A senior fellow at Demos and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, López argues that "this is about race as it wrecks the whole middle class. This sort of racism is being used to fool a lot of whites into voting for Republicans whose main allegiance is to corporate interests."

Study: Racism Can Kill You, and Make You Old Fast

IndianCountry

David H. Chae, a social epidemiologist at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, set out to measure how the psycho-social strain of discrimination may be a reason that African-American men die six to seven years earlier than white men, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

He hypothesized that the stress of dealing with prejudice accelerates aging at a cellular level, reported PBS.

"We can all relate to how the experience of being treated unfairly impacts us physiologically," Chae said. "There's a cascade of biochemical reactions. Your heart rate rises, your muscles clench."

According to study results that Chae and his colleagues published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine last week, racial discrimination and how African-American men internalized that prejudice to form an anti-black bias were directly related to premature aging.

Out of  92 African-American men between the ages of 30 and 50, Chae found that men who experienced more frequent discrimination and developed an anti-black bias were one to three years older biologically than those who had not (pro-black bias), even when controlling for other factors including chronologic age, socioeconomic status and overall health.

"This is part of biological pathway that translates social adversity into poor health," said Nancy Krieger, a social epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and Chae's former advisor.

New study shows racial disparities in Rhode Island traffic stops

ProvidenceJournal 

The police are more likely to pull over people of color than white drivers in a majority of Rhode Island communities, but less likely to give them a ticket, according to a new report on racial disparities in traffic stops.

The authors of the study, experts from Northeastern University’s Institute on Race and Justice, reviewed nearly 153,891 traffic stops made by 39 Rhode Island police agencies between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, 2013, and say that initial findings reflect similar statewide patterns as found in the 2004-05 study. The Rhode Island Department of Transportation and Traffic Stop Data Committee announced the findings Thursday.

Seventy-seven percent of stops involved white drivers, 11 percent Hispanic drivers, nearly 10 percent black drivers and 2 percent Asian/Pacific Island drivers. But researchers found that minorities were pulled over at a disproportionate rate when they compared the driver’s race to the racial makeup of the town where they were stopped.

The report said that, when compared with the results in the previous study, the difference in non-white traffic stops, compared with the driving population estimates in the communities, decreased in 20 communities and increased in 17.

According to the study, the police most frequently stopped males under 31 who were not driving in their hometown.

The police stopped most drivers for speeding — 38 percent — and 57.1 percent received a citation, according to the report.

The authors made the recommendation that each town review the findings for areas of concern, share the information with officers in its agency and the community to start a conversation about biased policing and continue collecting data of traffic stops to monitor patterns and disparities in stops.

To some, the findings were all too familiar and they called for legislation to prevent racial profiling.

“Nearly ten years after racial profiling was banned in Rhode Island, minority drivers continue to be disproportionately stopped by the police, but are paradoxically less likely to receive a citation, raising serious questions as to the appropriateness of these stops to begin with. Even more troubling, minority drivers remain much more likely to be searched when stopped,” said Hillary Davis, policy associate at the Rhode Island Affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, in a news release.

“Rhode Islanders can no longer afford to wait for more data to confirm what we have known to be true for a decade. Racial disparities in traffic stops unequivocally exist, and laudable efforts of the police and the community over the last ten years have failed to solve the problem. We cannot wait another ten years to find these numbers unchanged; it is time for meaningful action against these disparities, through passage of comprehensive racial profiling prevention legislation by the General Assembly, ” said Davis.

you can't run from racism: Ignorant Kanye West Fails to Understand that White Supremacy is a Global System of Oppression

PJMedia and ProduceJustice

German racist candy pulled from shelves

NyDailyNews

A German candy-maker has had to pull "racist" sweets from the shelves.

Haribo has removed the blackface liqorice designs after customer complained in Sweden.

"I understand the criticism and think it's important to listen to the customers," said the company's director, Ola Dagliden, reported The Local, citing Swedish website Nyheter24.

Mr Dagliden said: 'We decided that we could keep the product while removing the parts that certain consumers found offensive.' 'It wasn't something we saw as having negative connotations.'

The designs which have been accused of being racist were meant to represent a sailor's trip around the world and some of the people he encountered. [MORE] 

Unreal how white people, here this reporter, can write this stuff with a straight face. These designs were meant to deman and degrade Black people. 

Report finds 'extreme' racial disparities in Wisconsin compared to other states

CapTimes

The state of Wisconsin is home to “extreme racial disparity” compared to other states in economic opportunity, education and incarceration, says a new report by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy.

“Wisconsin has the regrettable distinction of ranking among the worst states in the nation in terms of racial equality,” begins the report by COWS, a nonprofit think tank based at UW-Madison.

The report pulls together data from public sources to illustrate the depth and breadth of racial disparities in the state.

For example, the African-American unemployment rate in Wisconsin was 19 percent in 2012 — three times that of whites. That disparity was exceeded by only two states, Nebraska and Iowa.

Wisconsin has the highest level of disparity in drop-out rates. Only 1.2 percent of whites in the state dropped out of high school in 2009-2010, compared to 7.5 percent of African Americans. No state came anywhere near that level of disparity.

And only Minnesota has a worse disparity in the rate of incarceration among men. Wisconsin locks up 12.8 percent of African-American men, the highest rate in the country, and just 1.2 percent of white men at 1.2 percent, just below the national average.

The COWS report also looks at poverty rate, health insurance coverage, high school graduation rates and other measures.

The stark racial disparities are the result of both relatively good outcomes for white Wisconsin and worse than the national average outcomes for black residents of the state, say the study’s authors.

“The vitality of our economy, the prosperity of our state, and the health and well-being of all our communities are threatened by the racial disparity that plagues Wisconsin,” they conclude.

Their “litany” of poor outcomes may add urgency to efforts to close the gap, they say.

White People Upset because Obama said, “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President”

According to the New Yorker,  

"Obama’s election was one of the great markers in the black freedom struggle. In the electoral realm, ironically, the country may be more racially divided than it has been in a generation. Obama lost among white voters in 2012 by a margin greater than any victor in American history. The popular opposition to the Administration comes largely from older whites who feel threatened, underemployed, overlooked, and disdained in a globalized economy and in an increasingly diverse country. Obama’s drop in the polls in 2013 was especially grave among white voters. “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama said. “Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black President.” The latter group has been less in evidence of late."[MORE] and [MORE]

There is a grim irony in Obama, the son of a Kenyan, quoting Roosevelt, who said Africans “are ape-like naked savages, who… prey on creatures not much wilder or lower than themselves”

Telegraph

Call him Eddy Roosevelt. When Ed Miliband declared his war on the big banks, Labour insiders let the media know that he was channelling the spirit of Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt – the US president who fought the monopolists and earned himself a spot on Mount Rushmore. And who wouldn’t want to model themselves on history’s toughest progressive? In 1912, Teddy visited Wisconsin to give a speech on behalf of his “Bull Moose” campaign for the presidency – and was greeted by an assassin who shot him in the chest. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the crowd, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!” Only when Roosevelt had finished his 80-minute-long talk did he calmly descend the stage and go to the nearest hospital.

So, superficially, Teddy is a great example to follow for a British politician seeking to blend idealism and hardy populism. But a little light reading beyond Wikipedia should tell Miliband’s advisers that the comparison isn’t quite as flattering as it might at first seem.

Those advisers probably belong to the international book club of Left-wingers, among whom the author du jour is Doris Kearns Goodwin (Barack Obama is a notable fan). Last year, Goodwin published a history of the Roosevelt years called The Bully Pulpit – an influential book that draws comparisons between early 20th-century America and today. Grinding poverty, a middle class feeling the pinch, giant monopolies crowding out the marketplace. Millions of Americans found a champion in Teddy, the scion of a wealthy family, a war hero and Republican president from 1901-09.

Back then, many Republicans embraced the reformism of the progressive movement. Roosevelt spoke of “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him”. During the 2012 presidential election, Obama, a Democrat, offered himself as the 21st-century Teddy, arguing that: “Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free licence to take whatever you want from whoever you can. It only works when there are rules of the road to ensure that competition is fair, open and honest.”

Obama was trying to say that because his interventionist policies were similar to a celebrated Republican’s, they couldn’t be that radical. As president, Teddy had backed legislation that introduced new standards to food production and the proper labelling of drugs. He also went to war against giant corporations, using “trust busting” to try to end monopolies and help smaller businesses compete in the market.

Sound familiar? Ed Miliband hates bigness in business, too: he wants to freeze the energy prices of the Big Six, and now to limit how much of the high street can be dominated by the big banks. Like Obama, he is using the comparison with Roosevelt to show that he is a centrist tapping into a tradition that seeks not revolution but reform. “The conservatives who want to leave everything to the free market are the real radicals,” he might say.

The problem with invoking Roosevelt is that he wasn’t motivated by the egalitarianism of the 21st century, but rather the prejudices common to the 19th. He saw life as a violent struggle between the strong and the weak. And, like many people of his time, he regarded this battle in racial terms. In 1905, he stated that whites were “the forward race”, who could raise the living standards of “the backward race[s]” through “industrial efficiency, political capacity and domestic morality”. There is a grim irony in Obama, the son of a Kenyan, quoting a man who once said that some Africans “are ape-like naked savages, who… prey on creatures not much wilder or lower than themselves”. To protect civilisation from the wild things, Roosevelt urged whites to breed as much as possible – otherwise they risked “race suicide”. Whites who threatened the health of the stock were best isolated. In 1914, Roosevelt opined that “criminals should be sterilised and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them”.

Non-whites could even be an impediment to progress. Native Americans (“squalid savages”, a “weaker race”) lived on land that whites desperately wanted to exploit. Roosevelt joked: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of 10 are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the 10th.” Under his watch, a large number of Native Americans were kicked off their territory to make way for developers and national parks.

At the heart of this ideology was a thirst for power, because the strong prove their strength by dominating others. Big government was their instrument of divine rule. Upon leaving office, Roosevelt reflected on all he had done and said: “I believe in power… The biggest [presidential] matters I managed without consultation with anyone, for when a matter is of capital importance, it is well to have it handled by one man only… I don’t think that any harm comes from the concentration of power in one man’s hands.”

None of this should suggest that Obama and Miliband share any of Roosevelt’s bigoted megalomania. On the contrary, while he sometimes sought power for its own sake, they do so with the ambition of reform. But they make a mistake when they imagine that there is some seamless progressive tradition from which they can draw: history is not a pure well to be tapped by contemporary politicians. And they see only the good in the progressive past, forgetting its many evils and errors. Trust busting, for example, does not always work, and very often is about one powerful industry using the government to break up an advantage held by another. Monopolies emerge naturally because a company is good at doing what it does; and they eventually collapse because smaller firms adapt faster to change. There is no innate benefit to building up the government in the way that Roosevelt, Obama and Miliband – all for very different reasons – have sought to do. Somewhere along the way, the market gets distorted and the individual loses power. [MORE]

Racism speeds aging in black men, study finds

Allvoices

There is now hard science supporting the long held belief that racism shortens the lifes pan of black people. Even more, a new study provides medical evidence that being the victim of racism and internalizing racist beliefs may indeed accelerate the aging process.

Forbes Magazine cites the study, pointing out that, interestingly, those black men who were more often victims of racial discrimination also internalized the strongest negative attitudes about black people as a group. These men demonstrated markedly shorter lengths of “telomeres,” the nucleotides found at the end of a chromosome which serves to protect DNA and other genetic material from premature deterioration.

A shorter telomere is a known marker of cellular aging. They may be likened to the caps at the end of shoelaces which keep the entire string from fraying. As individual cells age, the telomeres become shorter, providing less protection for the DNA and other essential genetic components.

Shorter telomeres are also indicators of potential with life-shortening diseases such as diabetes, stroke, heart disease and dementia.

The average human being irrespective of “race,” loses 50-100 base pairs of DNA a year as we age.

The findings of the instant study were published last week in the “American Journal of Preventive Medicine.”

What do these results mean in terms of everyday, on-the-ground, lived experiences of black people, black men especially?

They show that white racism/white supremacy causes serious and deleterious physical effects in black people which accumulate over time and ultimately contribute to premature death.

Lead investigator for the study is Dr. David H. Chae. He is also an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, according to the Huffington Post. Professor Chae bottom-lined the research for us.

“Despite the limitations of our study, we contribute to a growing body of research showing that social toxins disproportionately impacting African-American men are harmful to health. Our findings suggest that racism literally makes people old.” (Emphasis added).

Wisconsin Lawmakers Target Institutional Racism - without addressing the system of white supremacy?

TheRoot

Wisconsin leads the nation in the percentage of incarcerated African Americans, according to a report released this week by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy.

While African-American men made up 4.8 percent of the total adult male population in Dane County, whose county seat is Madison, Wis., which is also the state capital, they accounted for more than 43 percent of all new adult prison placements during the year, according to the Race to Equity report released by Wisconsin Council on Children and Families in October. 

Additionally, African-American adults were arrested in Dane County at a rate that was eight times that of whites, the Cap Times reports. That compares to a black-white arrest disparity of about 4 to 1 for the rest of Wisconsin and 2.5 to 1 across the country as a whole.

Now, lawmakers are seeking to turn the tide of the longstanding problem through legislation. The Minority Impact Statement bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Nikiya Harris and Rep. Sandy Pasch seeks to reverse what Pasch calls “institutionalized racism” by requiring a legislative committee to prepare a racial-impact statement any time a new crime is created or a criminal penalty for an existing crime is modified, the Times reports.

If the committee finds that a proposed measure would have a disparate impact on racial minority groups the lawmaker must either amend it, reduce the disparate impact or provide in writing their reason for advancing the bill that will negatively impact minorities, the Times reports. 

Clearly those involved do not understand what racism is. The criminal code is not the problem - white supremacy is. [MORE] -bw

“We really have to look at why we are passing laws that create this environment and what these laws are accomplishing,” Pasch said told the Times. “Wisconsin leads the nation in incarcerating minority men. That puts a responsibility on us to start addressing this in a meaningful way.”

Lawmakers have until the end of Wednesday to sign on and support the bill as co-sponsors. Passage of the bill would make Wisconsin the fourth state to require minority impact statements on criminal legislation. Iowa, Connecticut and Oregon have passed similar laws, the report says.

Pasch told the Times that too many young, minority males begin their adult lives with criminal records, which prevents them from voting, makes it difficult to get a job, find housing and tears families apart.

“An affluent white man who gets the right attorney will be able to plea bargain down a criminal charge to a misdemeanor while a poor African-American man who can’t afford an attorney will more than likely end up with the felony charge and end up in prison,” she told the Times.