Baltimore: Race, Class and Uprisings

A protester on a bicycle thrusts his fist in the air next to a line of police, in front of a burning CVS drug store, during clashes in Baltimore, Maryland April 27, 2015. This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: http:/, Reuters

By Bill Fletcher Jr
TeleSUR via Portside

April 30, 2015 - A broad united front for justice and power, in addition to protesting atrocities, is guided by a sense of hope and a vision of a new day.

It is not enough for us on the Left to comment favorably on the right of oppressed to rebel, to validate the rage that took a very destructive form. Rather, we must support those that engaged in efforts to redirect the rage to preserve their communities as part of a larger movement for justice for Freddie Gray.

A protester on a bicycle thrusts his fist in the air next to a line of police, in front of a burning CVS drug store, during clashes in Baltimore, Maryland April 27, 2015. This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: http:/, Reuters,

There was little about the Baltimore uprising following the funeral of the murdered Freddie Gray that surprised me. Tensions had been building ever since word broke that he had died after his spine was severed while in police custody. It was not just that this atrocity had taken place under the most suspicious of circumstances, but that the city government appeared nothing short of anemic in its response.

It did not surprise me that Black youth took to the streets in rage or that there were opportunists within the mobs that took advantage of the strife in order to carry out thefts. It was a riot or uprising. It was not an insurrection and it had neither an ideology nor coherent leadership.

What I found most noteworthy in recent events is something that received limited coverage: the fact that there were organized groupings of men and women who were actively working to redirect the anger of the youth away from the destruction of their neighborhoods. The Nation of Islam, for instance, deployed its members to walk the streets, speak with the youth, and attempt to dissuade them from violence. It was not alone. There were other groups, including gangs as well as ad hoc community groups that set out to both protest the police killing of Freddie Gray but also to try to convince the young rebels that there needed to be a different path. (Continued)

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Why Baltimore Is Burning

By Kevin Powell
BK Nation

I am from the ghetto. The first 13 years of my life I grew up in the worst slums of Jersey City, New Jersey, my hometown. If you came of age in one of America’s poor inner cities like I did then you know that we are good, decent people: in spite of no money, no resources, little to no services, run down schools, landpersons who only came around to collect rent, and madness and mayhem everywhere, amongst each other, from abusive police officers, and from corrupt politicians and crooked preachers, we still made a way out of no way. We worked hard, we partied hard, we laughed hard, we barbequed hard, we drank hard, we smoked hard, and we praised God, hard.

And we were segregated, hard, by a local power structure that did not want the ghetto to be seen nor heard from, and certainly not to bring its struggles out in plain sight for the world to see.

Indeed my entire world was the block I lived on and maybe five or six blocks north south east west. A long-distance trip was going to Downtown Jersey City on the first of each month so our mothers—our Black and Latina mothers—could cash their welfare checks, buy groceries with their food stamps and, if we were lucky, we got to eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken or some other fast food restaurant on that special day.

When I was about 15 I was badly beaten by a White police officer after me and a Puerto Rican kid had a typical boy fight on the bus. No guns, no knives, just our fists. The Puerto Rican kid, who had White skin to my Black skin, was escorted off the bus gingerly. I was thrown off the bus. Outraged, I said some things to the cop as I sat handcuffed in the back seat of a police car. He proceeded to smash me in the face with the full weight of his fist. Bloodied, terrified, broken in that moment, I would never again view most police officers as we had been taught as children: “Officer Friendly”—

Being poor meant I only was able to go to college because of a full financial aid package to Rutgers University. I did not get on a plane until I was 24-years-old because of that poverty and also because I did not know that was something I could do. These many years later I have visited every single state in America, every city big and small, and every ghetto community you can name. They all look the same.

Abandoned, burnt out buildings. Countless churches, funeral parlors, barber shops, beauty salons, check cashing places, furniture rental stores, fried chicken spots, and Chinese restaurants. Schools that look and feel more like prison holding cells for our youth than centers of learning. Playgrounds littered with broken glass, used condoms, and drug paraphernalia. Liquor stores here there everywhere. Corner stores that sell nothing but candy, cupcakes, potato chips, soda, every kind of beer you can name, loose cigarettes, rolling paper for marijuana, lottery tickets, and gum, lots and lots of gum.

Then there are also the local organizations that claim to serve the people, Black and Latino people. Some mean well, and are doing their best with meager resources. Others only come around when it is time to raise money, to generate some votes for one political candidate or another, or if the police have tragically killed someone. (Continued)

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The Racialization of Murder

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

Z Communications Daily Commentary

I remain very disturbed by the entire set of circumstances surrounding the murder of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina this past February. I cannot seem to shake not only the horror but the anger that has arisen within me in the aftermath of the murder.

It is not simply the brutality of the killings, though that is enough to unsettle anyone. After all, the three students were, in effect, executed with bullets to their heads. What particularly unsettles me has been the manner in which much of the mainstream media (a) initially ignored the murders, and later (b) sought to find a way to explain the murders away as anything but the hate crimes that they were.

The response in the mainstream media and political circles to the killings should not have come as a surprise. It was only an ‘uprising’ on Twitter that compelled the mainstream media to pay attention to the murders in the first place.

Yet what is worth examining is the manner in which the mainstream media and political circles were willing to treat the killings as terrible but unusual. This includes, by the way, the baffling response of the White House whereby they initially refused to issue any specific comment.

Only a few short days later, however, shootings in Copenhagen resulted in an almost instantaneous response by the media as soon as the shooter was identified as carrying out the attacks for political/religious reasons and, of course, was a Muslim. In Chapel Hill, however, we were offered an alternative explanation for the killings focusing on an alleged fight around a parking space. A parking space? Despite evidence offered that the students had earlier been made to feel very uncomfortable by the alleged murderer, the mainstream media proceeded to treat the parking space explanation as if it has any genuine credibility.

There is a consistent pattern in the manner in which racial murder is handled by the mainstream white media and political circles. Although the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 was not exclusively aimed against people of color, what remains fascinating is that the initial assumption was that it was a terrorist attack by a Muslim. When, however, it was discovered that this was a home-grown white, right-wing terrorist attack, the entire discourse on the attack changed.  The mainstream white media became interested in the motivations of the terrorist—Timothy McVeigh—and desperately attempted to seek an explanation as to how and why he would have conducted such an attack. Rather than focusing on the horror of the attack, or the fact that there is a well-organized and well-armed white, right-wing populist movement in the USA, attention was paid to Timothy McVeigh in almost psychological terms.  There is no comparable example when a military or terrorist action has been carried out by a person of color or a Muslim.

There is also something else that does not happen:  there is no generalization whenever there is a terrorist action carried out by a white right-winger. There were no vast and extensive conclusions about white men as a result of the Oklahoma City bombing, nor where there any questions about Christians.  In fact, I have no memory of Christian religious leaders being asked to distance themselves from McVeigh, his actions, or the paramilitary political right-wing.  In almost every case, when terrorism is conducted by white right-wingers, mainstream media and political circles do all that they can in order to isolate the experience; to treat it as if it were exceptional rather than part of a larger pattern.

The killing of the three Muslim students in Chapel Hill is, in fact, part of a larger pattern. We see it in the demagogic attacks on mosque construction; we see it in racial profiling; we see it in harassment and killings; and, yes, we have seen it in the aftermath of killings. In fact, one of the scariest aspects of the Chapel Hill murders were some of the responses on the web where individuals supported the murders, and in some cases, called for more.

And now the Chapel Hill murders seem all but forgotten. It is as if they happened, not a few weeks ago, but more like a few years ago. There has been no further discussion and comment. The White House finally spoke out on the killings, calling them brutal, but was not prepared to address them as hate crimes.

The racialization of murder, which is what we have seen in the case of Chapel Hill, can only take place when the subjected population—in this case Muslims and non-Muslim Arabs—are seen as an indistinguishable mass of scary outsiders.  Their experiences are not legitimate, as far as the mainstream is concerned. It is less a question of whether the ‘Other’—in this case Muslims and non-Muslim Arabs—are considered or thought to be inferior.  It is more, according to the neo-racism with which we live, that this population is unacceptable in that it cannot be absorbed. They are not accepted as “white” but are, in effect, de facto enemy aliens, irrespective of their point of origin.

In this environment there must be responses and not simply the shaking of our heads and hands. First, those who tweeted must be applauded.  Utilizing social media to carry out an ‘uprising’ is proving, time and again, an effective means to contribute to the reshaping of the news. This must be expanded.

Second, progressive opinion-makers in every major media market need to be identified to respond in the mainstream and alternative media in cases such as the Chapel Hill murders. We need letters to the editor, op-eds, call-ins, TV interviews, etc., by progressive opinion-makers on these issues. In doing this, it is critical to reshape the story and, among other things, that means introducing history into our narratives. People in the USA are almost allergic to history…until they are exposed to a genuine, historical analysis. Progressives must put incidents, such as the Chapel Hill murders, in an historical context. We should also identify the manner in which the handling of such incidents contrasts with media and political coverage of actions carried out by ‘suspect populations.’

A third response, particular to the circumstances in Chapel Hill, is that we must develop campaigns that identify such murders as the hate crimes and lynchings that they are. That means more than statements to the media, whether mainstream or social. It means actions that are taken to demand that the authorities prosecute such incidents expeditiously and energetically. We need no repeats of the travesty demonstrated in the case of the Ferguson grand jury whereby the prosecutor, for all intents and purposes, adopted a position of agnosticism.

Nothing will bring back Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salhausband, Deah Shaddy Barakat, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha. Nothing will ease the pain, sorrow and frustration of their families and friends. It is through, however, a struggle around the racialization of murder that we have the opportunity to change not only the manner in which crimes are addressed, but the fact that certain types of crimes are implicitly tolerated by the larger society. You see, after all, the crime only happened to “them”…

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the host of The Global African on Telesur-English. He is a racial justice, labor and global justice writer and activist.  Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and at www.billfletcherjr.com.

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Moral Mondays’ Barber Says America’s Political System Suffers From a ‘Heart Problem’

Saturday’s Moral Mondays march once again brought a multicultural crowd of thousands to Raleigh, N.C., protesting budget cuts and voting restrictions enacted by the state’s Republican Legislature.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Cecile Richards and NAACP National President Cornell Brooks (far right) listen to the North Carolina NAACP’s the Rev. Dr. William Barber speak at the Moral Mondays march in downtown Raleigh, N.C., Feb. 14, 2015.

By David Swerdlick
The Root

Raleigh, N.C., Saturday, Feb. 14: An African-American Muslim imam, Oliver Muhammad, offered the call to prayer; members of black Greek-letter fraternities served as event marshals; and as marchers in North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement began their walk across downtown Raleigh, the state’s capital, Chapel Hill Town Council member Maria Teresa Palmer announced—in Spanish—that “interpreters will be available at the intersection of Hargett and Fayetteville.”

It’s that kind of come-one, come-all event. And even though this year’s ninth annual march wasn’t as big as last year’s—one that The Nation’s Ari Berman reported as “the largest civil rights rally in the South since the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965”—organizers again brought together a diverse coalition of activists on a chilly Valentine’s Day to protest what movement leader and state NAACP President the Rev. Dr. William Barber II described as the state’s—and the nation’s—“heart problem.”

And while the Moral Mondays movement is left-leaning, Barber told supporters that he wanted them to be political “defibrillators” because “we find we’ve got, not a left problem or a right problem or a conservative problem or a liberal problem. We’ve got a heart problem. When money and greed and political hubris and pride and ego and beating your opponent become more important than working together to uplift humanity, we’ve got a heart problem.”

For the movement, the stakes haven’t changed.

Barber called on legislators to “fund Medicaid expansion, raise the minimum wage, index it with inflation—put it on the ballot and let the people vote,” as well as “restore cuts to public education,” reject “the attacks on women’s health and environmental protection, repeal the death penalty, reform the criminal-justice system,” enact “fair immigration reform, and respect the constitutional rights of all humanity, regardless of race, creed, color and sexuality.” (Continued)

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If Voting Means Little, Why Is the Right Working So Hard to Suppress It?

Selma and Shelby: The Fight for the New South

BY JESSE JACKSON
Progressive America Rising

Feb 10, 2015 - What time is it?  It’s important to be clear.  Is it mid-day and our labors still have hours to go?  Or is it evening, our work done, and we can rest our weary heads?  What time is it for the New South?  Is it time to celebrate Selma, Alabama – and the triumph of the Voting Rights Act?  Or is it time to mourn Shelby, Alabama – and the radical backlash against voting rights?

Fifty years after Selma’s Bloody Sunday that led directly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, many will gather to celebrate that victory.  But we should understand that our work is not done. With the Shelby decision of the Supreme Court, the struggle for equal rights must go on.

Too often, we remember the triumph and ignore the backlash.  In 1870, the 15th Amendment, codified in in the blood of the Civil War, was ratified to give African Americans the right to vote.  It declared that the right to vote shall not be denied “on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

But the triumph was immediately challenged by the backlash.  Across the South, states controlled the structure and laws of voting.  They immediately set up seemingly neutral barriers to voting – poll taxes, literacy tests and more – that were used to disenfranchise black voters.  The reconstruction of the South was ended as the Supreme Court ratified legal apartheid, and segregation was brutally enforced.

It took nearly a century, a mighty civil rights movement, Bloody Sunday and other sacrifices, to pass the Voting Rights Act that gave the Justice Department the right to pre-screen any changes to voting laws in states with a history of discrimination, and ban those that would have a discriminatory effect, even if they looked neutral on their face.

Two years ago, however, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, the five conservative judges on the Supreme Court effectively gutted preclearance laws, arguing in essence that there as a new South that had moved beyond racism.

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Black Lives Matter Must Move Beyond Protests — Or Risk Losing the Fight for Racial Justice

 

By Zeeshan Aleem

Mic.com

Witness the rupture.

Once the worry of minorities and leftists, the ease with which a white man with a badge can end the life of a black person is finally on America's mind. The realization that police practices can be brutish and unfair to black men has become a matter of serious concern for many whites, bourgeois liberals and some conservatives — apparently even George W. Bush. Law enforcement is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy.

But the window of opportunity for the racially equalized institutional changes, which we desperately need, is wider than it's been in decades. The recent non-indictments for police killings in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, have reignited awareness of the systemic nature of racial discrimination. Riot, protest and media pressure has made the White House anxious and piqued the interest of a generally useless Congress. Some modest reform is in the works.

But all of this is fragile. When there is a long enough pause in the rate at which black men are killed by the police, the cameras will point elsewhere. If there is any hope of reaping lasting change from this moment, it must take shape in the form of something more durable than rage.

"Black Lives Matter" is the closest thing we have to a unified rallying cry for this movement. It's a slogan, a website and a Twitter hashtag, which first surfaced in 2012 in response to vigilante George Zimmerman's acquittal after he killed unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin. At this point, the phrase has become shorthand for the various streams of resistance to police brutality across the country.

The Black Lives Matter movement resembles Occupy Wall Street in 2011, which is cause for both celebration and concern: Both establish a polarizing antagonist — police, bankers — who serves as an entry point for structural critique (systemic racism and politico-economic inequality, respectively). Both have given birth to and mobilized highly decentralized, politically diverse and fairly spontaneous protest movements. Both operate amid contentious politics and feed off friction — or the threat of it — with the state. And just as Occupy mostly dissolved during its first winter, so too could Black Lives Matter. 

So now the movement must evolve. Here are three ideas for those interested in carrying on with campaigns under the umbrella of Black Lives Matter:

Public protest is a tactic, not a strategy: Protesting is vital, but it's not a substitute for the organization, discipline and grit needed for long-term change. Groups small and large need to organize locally and coordinate nationally on specific programs with short- and long-term goals. Resources for political, economic, legal and cultural advocacy need to be pooled and employed strategically. Campaigns for reform — whether assigning special prosecutors for police homicide trials, disarming public servants or closing the white-black wealth gap — must be focused. Local community efforts should be paired with efforts engaging the federal political process.

Past efforts with similar agendas provide useful case studies. One example worth considering is the rise of the Black Panther Party in response to police brutality in the late 1960s through the early '70s. Typically depicted as armed separatists, the Black Panthers were antiracist and committed to building interracial coalitions. Their most divisive position, advocacy of armed self-defense, was only one relatively short-lived element of their complex political program. Soon after they developed a nationwide following, they focused on community programs providing free services to neighborhoods; their most popular nationwide initiative was the Free Breakfast for Children Program. The Panthers' other communitarian programs — which included free clothing, medical care, transportation, housing cooperatives and much more — highlighted the shortcomings of the state and economy, while empowering ordinary citizens to conceptualize and participate in an alternative political economy.

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Terror … and Racial Terror

 

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

Progressive America Rising

This article was originally published at ZNet.

With all of the discussion about ISIS/ISIL, Al Qaeda, etc., one would think that the only terror on this planet is that derived from relatively small numbers of criminal fascists roaming the planet who claim to be Muslims.  Yet that is not the only location of terror.  In West Africa, for instance, millions live in terror as the horrific virus, Ebola, spreads, killing more than 3,000 people.  Due in large part to the devastation wrought by neo-liberal policies on the health care systems of West African nations, Ebola has been spreading at an unanticipated rate.

There are other forms of terror, of course.  Environmental devastation and climate change, which capitalism seems unable to stop but has also played a major role in advancing, threatens billions.  Islands across this planet are threatened as water encroaches on coastal regions.  And one need not be a rocket scientist to know that it is the working classes, the farmers and many other impoverished segments of society that will suffer on a scale beyond anything that will afflict the rich and powerful.

There is, however, a form of terror at work within the USA that is not named but are every bit as deadly and destructive as anything that ISIL and Al Qaeda can produce.  This terror is racial terror, a reality that shapes the lives of millions of people of color.  It is racial terror that helps to explain the shortened life spans of African Americans; the prevalence of various illnesses, or at least the high rate of illnesses, such as diabetes and hypertension, among people of color; and the flinch which we of color all experience in the face of racially-inspired insults, humiliations and micro-aggressions.

It is difficult for most white people to appreciate the racial terror with which people of color live.  There are certain things that do not generally concern whites.  They do not, generally, have to worry about the race or ethnicity of the person with whom they are driving.  They rarely have to worry about being pulled over by the police when driving through a neighborhood that is not their own.

I frequently tell the story of attending the first Labor Notes conference in Detroit, Michigan in 1981.  At the end of the conference a blond, Scandinavian woman was looking for a ride back to the East Coast.  I had driven to Detroit from Boston with another African American man.  We were asked if we could take her back to the East Coast.  My friend and I looked at one another and, at about the same time, shook our heads “No.”  It was not personal; the idea of two African American men driving across several states with a very attractive, blond woman was something that set off all sorts of bells and whistles.  Yet, this is an experience that most whites would find difficult to fathom.  In my mind’s eye, and that of my friend, we could imagine being pulled over by the police or being pursued by white men who were not particularly excited about the imagery, let along reality of two black men driving cross country with a white woman.

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The South’s Victim Complex: How Right-Wing Paranoia is Driving New Wave of Radicals

(Credit: AP/Dave Martin)

New wingnut neo-Confederates may be laughed at as they enter Washington, D.C. But here's why their anger is deadly serious

By Matthew Pulver

Progressive America Rising via Salon.com

Southern voters will go to the polls in November 150 years, almost to the day, after Gen. Sherman commenced his March to the Sea, breaking the back of the Confederacy and leaving a burnt scar across the South. The wound never fully healed. Humiliation and resentment would smolder for generations. A sense of persecution has always mingled with the rebellious independence and proud notions of the South’s latent power, the promise that it “will rise again!” Congressman Paul Broun Jr., whose Georgia district spans nearly half of Sherman’s calamitous path to Savannah, evoked the “Great War of Yankee Aggression” in a metaphor to decry the Affordable Care Act on the House floor in 2010. The war, in Broun’s formulation, was not a righteous rebellion so much as a foreign invasion whose force still acts upon the South and its ideological diaspora that increasingly forms the foundation of conservatism.

The persecution narrative deployed by Broun, so woven into Southern culture and politics, has gained national currency. Contemporary conservatism is a Southern politics. Ironically, the Southern persecution narrative, born of defeat, has spread nationwide to form the basis of Republican victories since Reagan and the conservative hegemony that moderated President Clinton, establishing through President George W. Bush nearly 40 years of rightward movement at the national level.

It is the South’s principal political export, now a necessary ideological substrate in Republican rhetoric. Lee Atwater, the Karl Rove of the Reagan era, explained the nationalization of Southern politics accomplished with the 1980 campaign and election of President Reagan: “The mainstream issues in [the Reagan] campaign had been, quote, ‘Southern’ issues since way back in the Sixties,” Atwater said in 1981. Likely the foremost representative of that Southern mood was Alabama’s George Wallace, who in his 1963 gubernatorial inaugural address, the infamous “Segregation Forever” speech, invoked Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and raged that “government has become our god.” Just months later, that omnipotent force would defeat Wallace when President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and forced desegregation at the University of Alabama. Wallace, though, would be rewarded for his stand, and the governor carried five Deep South states in his 1968 presidential run.

A century after the Civil War and Reconstruction, the 1960s was a sort of second federal invasion, with the White House strong-arming Wallace, Supreme Court decisions finally implementing Brown’s desegregation order, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts radically reshaping Southern politics and culture. “The South went from being behind the times to being the mainstream,” Atwater said. It is helpful to consider the inverse: The mainstream GOP adopted the ’60s-era mood of the South. Atwater does not suggest that the South caught up with a modernized conservatism — i.e., that it ceased to be “behind the times” — but that the larger movement regressed, albeit with rhetorical coding to evade charges of old-school racism.

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Obama’s American Roots Far Deeper Than Most

President Obama Descends from America’s First Slave

Depicted: Three escaped bondservants from the early 1600s in Virginia. Court records show , when the three were captured, the two Europeans had years added to their indenture, but the African, named John Punch, had his term set to life, making him the first recorded slave in what is now the US. Records and DNA show Obama is his 11th GGrandson, according to Ancestry.

By Ancestry.com

We’ve all heard about President Obama’s Irish roots, and we know his father came from Kenya. But a research team from Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online family history resource, has also concluded that the nation’s 44^th president is also the 11^thgreat-grandson of John Punch, the first documented African enslaved for life in American history.And what’s more, the connection comes through President Obama’s Caucasian mother’s family.

This discovery follow years of research by Ancestry.com genealogists who, using early Virginia records and DNA analysis, linked Obama to John Punch. Punch was an indentured servant in Colonial Virginia who fled to escape servitude in 1640. After he was caught, his punishment was enslavement for life. Punch’s is the first documented case of slavery for life in the colonies, occurring decades before slavery laws were enacted in Virginia.

President Obama is traditionally viewed as an African American because of his father’s heritage in Kenya. However, while researching his Caucasian mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, Ancestry.com genealogists found her to have African heritage as well. Their interest piqued, the researchers kept digging. DNA analysis helped confirm that Dunham’s ancestors, known as white landowners in Colonial Virginia, actually descended from an African man.  Existing records suggest that this man, John Punch, had children with a white woman who then passed her free status on to their offspring. Some of Punch’s descendants went on to be free, successful land owners in a Virginia entrenched in slavery.

An expert in Southern research and past president of the Board for Certification of Genealogists, Elizabeth Shown Mills, performed a third-party review of the research and documentation to verify the findings.

“In reviewing Ancestry.com’s conclusions, I weighed not only the actual findings but also Virginia’s laws and social attitudes when John Punch was living,” said Mills. “A careful consideration of the evidence convinces me that the Y-DNA evidence of African origin is indisputable, and the surviving paper trail points solely to John Punch as the logical candidate. Genealogical research on individuals who lived hundreds of years ago can never definitively prove that one man fathered another, but this research meets the highest standards and can be offered with confidence.”

“Two of the most historically significant African Americans in the history of our country are amazingly directly related,” says Ancestry.com genealogist Joseph Shumway. “John Punch was more than likely the genesis of legalized slavery in America.  But after centuries of suffering, the Civil War, and decades of civil rights efforts, his 11th great-grandson became the leader of the free world and the ultimate realization of the American Dream.”

More details and additional research on President Obama’s family lineage can be found at www.ancestry.com/obama.

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Getting Inside the Heads of the GOP Base: Tea Party, Evangelical and Moderate

Inside the GOP: Report on focus groups with Evangelical, Tea Party, and moderate Republicans

By Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert

Democracy Corps / Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research

If you want to understand the government shutdown and crisis in Washington, you need to get inside the base of the Republican Party.  That is what we are doing in the Republican Party Project and these focus groups with Evangelicals, Tea Party, and moderate Republicans. All the passion, nuances and divisions found expression when we conducted this work in the summer.

Over the last two months, we have been releasing initial findings from the first phase of research for Democracy Corps' new Republican Party Project.  This report details findings from six focus groups among Republican partisans-divided into Evangelicals, Tea Party adherents, and moderates.  All participants indicated that they voted only or mostly for Republican candidates and were screened on a battery of ideological and political indicators.  The groups were conducted in Raleigh, North Carolina (moderate and Tea Party), Roanoke, Virginia (Tea Party and Evangelical), and Colorado Springs, Colorado (moderate and Evangelical.)

Understand that the base thinks they are losing politically and losing control of the country - and their starting reaction is "worried," "discouraged," "scared," and "concerned" about the direction of the country - and a little powerless to change course.  They think Obama has imposed his agenda, while Republicans in DC let him get away with it. 

We know that Evangelicals are the largest bloc in the base, with the Tea Party very strong as well.  For them, President Obama is a "liar" and "manipulator" who has fooled the country.  It is hard to miss the deep disdain-they say the president is a socialist, the "worst president in history," and "anti-American."

For all that, this is a deeply divided base.  Moderates are a quarter of those who identify Re-publican, and they are very conscious of their discomfort with other parts of the party base.  Their distance begins with social issues, like gay marriage and homosexuality, but it is also evident on immigration and climate change.  Fiscal conservatives feel isolated in the party. 

Evangelicals who feel most threatened by trends embrace the Tea Party because they are the ones who are fighting back.  They are very in tune politically, but the Tea Party base is very libertarian and not very interested in fighting gay marriage. 

Republicans shutdown the government to defund or delay Obamacare.  This goes to the heart of Republican base thinking about the essential political battle. They think they face a victorious Democratic Party that is intent on expanding government to increase dependency and therefore electoral support.  It starts with food stamps and unemployment benefits; expands further if you legalize the illegals; but insuring the uninsured dramatically grows those de-pendent on government.  They believe this is an electoral strategy-not just a political ideology or economic philosophy.  If Obamacare happens, the Republican Party may be lost, in their view. 

And while few explicitly talk about Obama in racial terms, the base supporters are very conscious of being white in a country with growing minorities.  Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities. Race remains very much alive in the politics of the Republican Party.

These are strong common currents in the Republican base, but the thinking and passions are very distinct and telling among the key blocs - and those have consequences for those who seek to lead. We selected these three groups (Evangelicals, non-Evangelical Tea Party adherents, and moderates) because combined they represent almost all of today's Republican partisans. The focus group locations, demographic characteristics, and participants' ideological characteristics were all selected based on statistical analysis of our first survey for this project.  While these are focus groups, and not statistically representative, this analysis gives a real, robust, and serious snapshot of who these Republicans are, how they think, and what matters to them.

--Evangelicals.  Social issues are central for Evangelicals and they feel a deep sense of cultural and political loss.  They believe their towns, communities, and schools are suffering from a deep "culture rot" that has invaded from the outside.  The central focus here is homosexuality, but also the decline of homogenous small towns.  They like the Tea Party because they stand up to the Democrats.

--Tea Party.  Big government, Obama, the loss of liberty, and decline of responsibility are central to the Tea Party worldview.  Obama's America is an unmitigated evil based on big government, regulations, and dependency.  They are not focused on social issues at all.  They like the Tea Party because it is getting "back to basics" and believe it has the potential to reshape the GOP.

--Moderates.  Moderates are deeply concerned with the direction of the country and believe Obama has taken it down the wrong path economically.  They are centrally focused on market-based economics, small government, and eliminating waste and inefficiency.  They are largely open to progressive social policies, including on gay marriage and immigration.  They disdain the Tea Party and have a hard time taking Fox News seriously.

1. Focus groups as real life

When a Macomb County focus group participant shot back, "No wonder they killed him" after I read a statement by Robert Kennedy, that stopped me and led to a whole new analysis of Reagan Democrats - and what were the core blockages to working whites voting Democratic again.  These groups with core Republican voters had similar moments - but more important, these emerged as affinity groups where the participants worked through their alienation and isolation, not just from politically correct-liberal dominated media, but other Republicans, family members, and neighbors.  If you want to know why Republicans are at war internally, start with their voters who are in turmoil.

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Movement Envy: Chicago Looks at North Carolina

Protesters rally during "Moral Monday" demonstrations at Halifax Mall near the General Assembly in Raleigh, N.C., in July. More than 1,000 people have been arrested while protesting against policies being enacted by the North Carolina General Assembly. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)

By Susan Klonsky

I admit it. We have a great movement here in Chicago, but still, I'm jealous of Mondays in North Carolina.

Reviving the spirit and moral compass of the Civil Rights Movement of the ‘60s, protest has become the Monday Lifestyle in NC.  People  put their Monday evening rallies on the calendar. “Mon. 5:30 pm:  Sit in, get arrested @ State Capitol.” It’s becoming sort of normal.

For the past 4 months in Raleigh, every Monday  is Moral Monday. Late in the day, as people get off work, they surround the Statehouse with rings of protesters. Mass arrests are scheduled, followed on Thursdays by well-organized press conferences by those arrested.  Every Monday the protests get larger—now exceeding 15,000 in Raleigh, with big rallies throughout the state. The movement is multiracial and has spread well beyond North Carolina’s capital out to the mountainous west of the state, to small towns and tiny hamlets.

Reverend Dr. William Barber

The leader of this movement is a Disciples of Christ minister, the Reverend Dr. William Barber III.  I had the pleasure of meeting Rev. Barber earlier this week. He is the latest in a bloodline of activist pastors who have fought racial segregation and its ugly siblings, poverty and violence, for generations. Rev. Barber, a giant of an orator, is the state chairman of the North Carolina NAACP. With the NAACP as its nucleus,  the Moral Monday Movement is an expansive coalition embracing an impressive number of organizations in all fields, labor unions, religious congregations, professional societies, and even fraternities and sororities. And they are on a roll.

“We’ve got a strategy. We never expected this thing to take off as it has. But we had to sit down and say, ‘where are we going with this?’” Barber explains. “We started off with one rally, and now we’re at the point of having 13 mass rallies in all 13 Congressional districts across the state. We’ve even had one of the county Republican party chairs renounce his own party,” as the result of the backward legislation the GOP has rammed through the North Carolina Legislature.

The Moral Monday folks have put their heads together and done the math. They’ve cooked up a plan for retaking the Democratic majority in the North Carolina Legislature and the state’s Congressional delegation. To accomplish these objectives will require a massive voter registration effort designed to boost the percentages of African American registered voters as well as a one-percent shift of white voters away from Republican candidates.

More than 1,000 arrests for civil disobedience.

The plan involves mass participation in voter education and mobilization. Unions and professional societies will play a big part, by having their members trained to register voters (and to deal with the new and exceptionally stringent, obstructive regulations about voter identification). “If each of us does 50 registrations, we can make our goal of 45,000 new voters,” Barber explains. “That’s why we must start now. It’s totally attainable.”

I asked Rev. Barber if he feels they can keep these Monday events going indefinitely. He explained that they are building for a few major events this winter. In particular, in December when the remaining major cutbacks to Medicaid in the state kick in, and again in January, he expects an uptick in mass protest against the attacks upon public education, social and health services, including reproductive rights, and state aid to the poor and unemployed.

Last month, Barber told us, the movement spread to some of the whitest, most heavily Republican parts of the state, where the Tea Party had until recently held sway. Now that people are beginning to experience the impact of budget slashing including removal of protections for teachers and other public employees, the picture is changing. “We were invited to speak up in rural Mitchell County, way up in the mountains,” Barber said, “and we found ourselves at a church way up there, in the evening, with at least a thousand people—an all white crowd—waiting for us.”

It used to be  Klu Klux country up there, and Reverend Barber admits he was somewhat apprehensive about what kind of reception he might receive.  He was greeted by the assembled joining together to sing Blessed be the tie that binds/Our hearts in Christian love.  “They were  fired up for Moral Monday.”

What brought them out, at least in part, Barber observed, was the attacks upon teachers. “They have 17 or 18 percent unemployment up there. And the schools are some of the biggest employers in these counties, and now they are having to lay off school personnel because of the state budget cuts to education. Plus, there is no more tenure or job security at all for them. A man got up at that meeting and declared, ‘When they hurt education, they really hurt us mountain people.’”

Moral Monday has lots of religious participants. But it is not a religious movement. “For me, this is a fight to uphold our deepest Constitutional, Biblical and faith values,” says Barber. It is many things to many people. At public meetings throughout the state, people testify to their worries, anger and intention to be part of the fight in North Carolina.

The issues draw them together:

Voting rights, health care, education, jobs and poverty. The movement stands in defense of  LGBT rights including marriage equality. How does Moral Monday deal with religion and religious differences? “We are tired of the Christian Right which is so wrong trying to dominate the moral high ground,” Barber explains. “We challenge them:  Are you really ready for a moral debate? Are you ready to defend what you have done?  Of course they don’t want to debate. It most certainly is a moral issue. Cutting people off from health care, from their jobs, taking food off their tables. They have no integrity and they hide from debate.”

The budget slashing and violations of basic civil rights are shaped by the ALEC agenda--the same ALEC which we protested less than 2 weeks ago in Chicago. The same ALEC which designed Florida’s murderous “Stand Your Ground” law.  These people are extremists, Barber emphasizes. Their policies are dangerous. And people are beginning to see them for what they are.

At the core of the Moral Mondays movement is a strong principle of anti-racism. It is impressive to witness this principle beginning to penetrate a broad swath of the population, as people come together to win back the rights that have been violated and denied.

Yes, we have a great movement here in Chicago, but I’m still a little jealous.

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America’s Descent Into Madness

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

    – John le Carré

By Henry A. Giroux
Progressive America Rising via Counterpunch

August 13, 2013 - The stories it now tells are filled with cruelty, deceit, lies, and legitimate all manner of corruption and mayhem.  The mainstream media spins stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible —stories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging its pedagogical influence under the cheap veneer of entertainment.

Unethical grammars of violence now offer the only currency with any enduring value for mediating relationships, addressing problems, and offering instant pleasure. A predatory culture celebrates a narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest in or compassion and responsibility for others. Anti-public intellectuals dominate the screen and aural cultures urging us to shop more, indulge more, and make a virtue out of the pursuit of personal gain, all the while promoting a depoliticizing culture of consumerism.

Undermining life-affirming social solidarities and any viable notion of the public good, right-wing politicians trade in forms of idiocy and superstition that mesmerize the illiterate and render the thoughtful cynical and disengaged.   Military forces armed with the latest weapons from Afghanistan play out their hyper-militarized fantasies on the home front by forming robo SWAT teams who willfully beat youthful protesters and raid neighborhood poker games.  Congressional lobbyists for the big corporations and defense contractors create conditions in which war zones abroad can be recreated at home in order to provide endless consumer products, such as high tech weapons and surveillance tools for gated communities and for prisons alike.

The issue of who gets to define the future, own the nation’s wealth, shape the reach of state resources, control of the global flows of goods and humans, and invest in institutions that educate an engaged and socially responsible citizens has become largely invisible.  And yet these are precisely these issues that offer up new categories for defining how matters of representations, education, economic justice, and politics are to be defined and fought over. The stories told by corporate liars and crooks do serious harm to the body politic, and the damage they cause together with the idiocy they reinforce are becoming more apparent as America descends into authoritarianism, accompanied by the pervasive fear and paranoia that sustains it.

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From the Deep South to the Midwest, a Generation Demands Justice

 

Members of Dream Defenders sit-in at Rick Scott’s office. (AP Photo)

From Student Nation at The Nation, July 23, 2013

E-mail questions, tips or proposals to studentmovement@thenation.com. For earlier dispatches, check out posts from January 18, February 1, February 15, March 1, March 15, April 2, April 15, April 26, May 10, May 24, June 7, June 21 and July 9.

1. Dream Defenders Occupy the Florida Capitol

On Saturday, July 13, George Zimmerman was found not guilty. This was the moment Florida showed the world that it does not care about its youth, especially young black and brown people. If neighborhood watch vigilantes are given the license to kill, what instructions are given to black and brown youth such as me? How do I stand my ground when I feel threatened? Am I not allowed to defend myself? Dream Defenders have been joined by community members and students from Jacksonville, Gainesville, Orlando, Miami, FAMU, FSU, UF, FAU and UCF, as well as the Advancement Project, Power U and USSA. We are occupying the state capitol until Governor Rick Scott meets our demand to convene a special session of the legislature. During this session, we want a new Trayvon Martin Civil Rights Act to be passed. It will focus on the Stand Your Ground law, racial profiling and the war on youth. This is deeper than just the Zimmerman murder case. This is a movement to unravel the system that allowed Trayvon to be criminalized, profiled and killed in the first place. We will stay in the capitol until the governor meets our demands. We have gotten support from across the country and around the world. This is what the student movement looks like.

—Melanie Andrade

2. Black Youth Strategize in Chicago

Black Youth Project 100 is a group of 100 young black activists from across the country convened by the Black Youth Project to mobilize communities of color beyond electoral politics. As we convened for our first Beyond November Movement gathering, we collectively mourned over the Zimmerman trial verdict and produced this video response to affirm the humanity of black life. We are committed to connecting the tragic loss of Travyon Martin and this recent miscarriage of justice in Florida to countless other examples of American systemic racism and injustice. Moving forward, we will be mobilizing a black youth contingency to attend the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and offering civic engagement training to young people. We are organizing local chapters to build political power nationwide while simultaneously supporting the efforts of other youth-led organizations such as Dream Defenders. As stated in our video, we see the hopelessness of a generation that has been broken trying to find its place in this world, and we understand that we need to turn anger into action and pain into power.

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One Race, and It’s Human

One Graphic, 10,000 Words: Skin and Sun

The distribution of skin color and the amount of sunlight

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Original Sin: Why the GOP Is and Will Continue To Be the Party of White People

 

BY SAM TANENHAUS
Progressive America Rising via The New Republic

Feb 10, 2013 - With Barack Obama sworn in for a second term—the first president in either party since Ronald Reagan to be elected twice with popular majorities—the GOP is in jeopardy, the gravest since 1964, of ceasing to be a national party. The civil rights pageantry of the inauguration—Abraham Lincoln's Bible and Martin Luther King's, Justice Sonia Sotomayor's swearing in of Joe Biden, Beyoncé's slinky glamor, the verses read by the gay Cuban poet Richard Blanco—seemed not just an assertion of Democratic solidarity, but also a reminder of the GOP's ever-narrowing identity and of how long it has been in the making.

"Who needs Manhattan when we can get the electoral votes of eleven Southern states?" Kevin Phillips, the prophet of "the emerging Republican majority," asked in 1968, when he was piecing together Richard Nixon's electoral map. The eleven states, he meant, of the Old Confederacy. "Put those together with the Farm Belt and the Rocky Mountains, and we don't need the big cities. We don't even want them. Sure, Hubert [Humphrey] will carry Riverside Drive in November. La-de-dah. What will he do in Oklahoma?"

Forty-five years later, the GOP safely has Oklahoma, and Dixie, too. But Phillips's Sunbelt strategy was built for a different time, and a different America. Many have noted Mitt Romney's failure to collect a single vote in 91 precincts in New York City and 59 precincts in Philadelphia. More telling is his defeat in eleven more of the nation's 15 largest cities. Not just Chicago and Columbus, but also Indianapolis, San Diego, Houston, even Dallas—this last a reason the GOP fears that, within a generation Texas will become a swing state. Remove Texas from the vast, lightly populated Republican expanse west of the Mississippi, and the remaining 13 states yield fewer electoral votes than the West Coast triad of California, Oregon, and Washington. If those trends continue, the GOP could find itself unable to count on a single state that has as many as 20 electoral votes.

It won't do to blame it all on Romney. No doubt he was a weak candidate, but he was the best the party could muster, as the GOP's leaders insisted till the end, many of them convinced he would win, possibly in a landslide. Neither can Romney be blamed for the party's whiter-shade-of-pale legislative Rotary Club: the four Republicans among the record 20 women in the Senate, the absence of Republicans among the 42 African Americans in the House (and the GOP's absence as well among the six new members who are openly gay or lesbian). These are remarkable totals in a two-party system, and they reflect not only a failure of strategy or "outreach," but also a history of long-standing indifference, at times outright hostility, to the nation's diverse constituencies—blacks, women, Latinos, Asians, gays.

But that history, with its repeated instances of racialist political strategy dating back many decades, only partially accounts for the party's electoral woes.

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Nothing but a Northern Lynching: The Assassination of Fred Hampton, Dec 4, 1969

 

By G. Flint Taylor
Progressive America Rising via People's Law Office

At 4:30 in the morning of December 4, 1969, 14 heavily armed Chicago police officers, acting at the direction of Cook County State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan, raided a tiny apartment on the west side of Chicago where local Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and eight Party members were sleeping. Minutes later, Hampton and Peoria, Illinois BPP leader Mark Clark lay dead, several of the other Panthers were seriously wounded, and the survivors were hauled off to jail on attempted murder charges. http://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/1970.Hampton-.Search-And-Destroy..pdf

I was a second year Northwestern law student working at the fledgling People’s Law Office when I received a call that “the Chairman had been murdered” and was directed to come to the apartment. The crime scene was shocking - - - the plasterboard walls looked like swiss cheese, ripped by scores of bullets from police weapons that included a machine gun, a semi automatic rifle, and several shotguns. A large pool of blood stained the floor at the doorway where Hampton’s body had been dragged after he was shot in the head, and there were fresh blood stains on all the beds in the apartment. I had met Chairman Fred only months before when I escorted him to the Law School to speak to the student body in venerable Lincoln Hall. He was only 21 years old, but he captivated the audience, as he always did, with his dynamic and analytical speaking skill, a mixture of Malcolm X, Dr. King, and Lupe Fiasco. http://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Hampton.-20th-Anniversary-Booklet-1989.pdf

It was his unique leadership, together with the revolutionary politics he so convincingly espoused, http://www.blackpanther.org/TenPoint.htm that made him a primary target of law enforcement. Directly after the raid, State’s Attorney Hanrahan and his police loudly proclaimed that the “vicious Black Panthers” had instigated a “shootout” during which they fired a fuselage of shots at the raiders. http://mike-gray.org/multimedia/hampton.htm The cold and bloody crime scene made lie of this official story, and Panther members led thousands of people on tours of the apartment for the next ten days while People’s Law Office lawyers and staff documented the evidence that would later establish that the police fired 99 bullets while the Panthers fired but one. http://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Hampton.-1970-FGJ-Report.pdf

A elderly African American lady best captured this reality when she said, while sadly shaking her head during the tour, that the raid was “nothing but a Northern lynching.” Confronted with the ballistics evidence, Hanrahan was forced to drop the attempted murder charges against the surviving Panthers. The Richard Nixon Justice Department investigated, but refused to indict. In response to community outrage, a specially appointed Cook County Prosecutor subsequently indicted Hanrahan, his first assistant, and a number of the raiding officers, not for murder or attempted murder, but rather only for obstruction of justice. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-chicagodays-pantherraid-story,0,3414208.

A Democratic machine judge acquitted Hanrahan and his co-conspirators on the eve of the 1972 election, but an inflamed African American electorate voted Hanrahan out of office, a story spawning a movement that paved the way for the election of Mayor Harold Washington a decade later. All the while, the People’s Law Office continued to litigate a civil rights lawsuit in federal court on behalf of the Hampton and Clark families and the survivors of the raid. Through the discovery process, we unearthed FBI documents showing that the FBI’s secret COINTELPRO program was behind the raid. http://watchamericangangster.com/american-gangster-season-3-episode-5-j-edgar-hoover/

The documents, which were suppressed by the FBI for years, together with independent toxicological tests, further revealed that an FBI COINTELPRO agent supplied a floor plan of the Panther apartment, complete with markings where Hampton slept, to Hanrahan’s raiders; that William O’Neal, the COINTELPRO informant who drew the floor plan, most likely drugged Hampton so that he could not defend himself; and that after the raid FBI director J. Edgar Hoover rewarded O’Neal with a $300 bonus for making the raid a “success.” http://peopleslawoffice.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Hampton.7th-Cir-Brief.pdf

In 1983, after an 18 month trial http://openjurist.org/600/f2d/600/hampton-v-hanrahan and 13 years of litigation, the City of Chicago, Cook County and the Federal Government all finally settled with the Hampton and Clark families and the survivors of the raid. http://peopleslawoffice.com/issues-and-cases/panthers/ While this financial settlement brought some modicum of justice, no one, except the Panther survivors, ever spent a day in jail. But the murderous raid, once falsely depicted as a shootout, is now rightly considered not only to be a northern lynching, but also an official assassination that was instigated by the FBI. http://www.hamptonbook.com/Hampton_Book/Home.html

And while we will never know what heights Fred Hampton would have reached as a leader had he lived, we do know, in the words first spoken in eulogy by People’s Law Office attorney Francis Andrew nearly forty three years ago, that the spirit of Fred Hampton continues to live on.

Flint Taylor is one of the lawyers for the family of slain Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.. For more information on the Hampton/Clark case, the history of Black Panther Party, and the FBI’s Program to destroy it, visit peopleslawoffice.com

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How the Left Can Become a True Political Force to Be Reckoned With

By Bill Fletcher & Carl Davidson
Progressive America Rising via Alternet.org

Nov 13, 2012 - The 2012 elections may prove to have been a watershed in several different respects.  Despite the efforts by the political Right to suppress the Democratic electorate, something very strange happened: voters, angered by the attacks on their rights, turned out in even greater force in favor of Democratic candidates. The deeper phenomenon is that the changing demographics of the USA also became more evident—45% of Obama voters were people of color, and young voters turned out in large numbers in key counties.

Unfortunately for the political Left, these events unfolded with the Left having limited visibility and a limited impact—except indirectly through certain mass organizations—on the outcome.

The setting

On one level it is easy to understand why many Republicans found it difficult to believe that Mitt Romney did not win the election.  First, the US remains in the grip of an economic crisis with an official unemployment rate of 7.9%.  In some communities, the unemployment is closer to 20%.  While the Obama administration had taken certain steps to address the economic crisis, the steps have been insufficient in light of the global nature of the crisis.  The steps were also limited by the political orientation of the Obama administration, i.e., corporate liberal, and the general support by many in the administration for neo-liberal economics.

The second factor that made the election a ‘nail biter’ was the amount of money poured into this contest.  Approximately $6 billion was spent in the entire election.  In the Presidential race it was more than $2 billion raised and spent, but this does not include independent expenditures.  In either case, this was the first post-Citizen United Presidential campaign, meaning that money was flowing into this election like a flood after a dam bursts.  Republican so-called Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs) went all out to defeat President Obama.

Third, the Republicans engaged in a process of what came to be known as “voter suppression” activity.  Particularly in the aftermath of the 2010 midterm elections, the Republicans created a false crisis of alleged voter fraud as a justification for various draconian steps aimed at allegedly cleansing the election process of illegitimate voters.  Despite the fact that the Republicans could not substantiate their claims that voter fraud was a problem on any scale, let alone a significant problem, they were able to build up a clamor for restrictive changes in the process, thereby permitting the introduction of various laws to make it more difficult for voters to cast their ballots.  This included photographic voter identification, more difficult processes for voter registration, and the shortening of early voting.  Though many of these steps were overturned through the intervention of courts, they were aimed at causing a chilling impact on the voters, specifically, the Democratic electorate.[1]

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White Racial Resentment: The Elephant in the Room

AP Poll: A Slight Majority of Americans Are Now Expressing Negative View Of Blacks

By Associated Press
October 27, 2012

WASHINGTON — Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not.

Those views could cost President Barack Obama votes as he tries for re-election, the survey found, though the effects are mitigated by some people’s more favorable views of blacks.

Racial prejudice has increased slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through an experimental test that measured implicit views toward race without asking questions about that topic directly.

In all, 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.

“As much as we’d hope the impact of race would decline over time ... it appears the impact of anti-black sentiment on voting is about the same as it was four years ago,” said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who worked with AP to develop the survey.

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Can We Defeat the Racist Southern Strategy in 2012?

By Bob Wing*

Progressive America Rising

*Bob Wing has been an organizer since 1968 and was the founding editor of ColorLines magazine and War Times/Tiempo de Guerras newspaper. He lives in Durham, N.C. and can be contacted on Facebook. Thanks to Max Elbaum for his always insightful suggestions. This article was posted on Oct. 11, 2012.

The 2012 election is a pitched battle with race at the center.

It may not be “polite” to say this, but far from an era of “post racialism”, the United States is in a period of aggravated racial conflict. Though often denied and certainly more complex than the frontal racial confrontations of the past, race is the pivot of the tit-for-tat political struggle that has gripped the country for the past twelve years and, indeed, for decades prior.

The modern era of this conflict jumped off with the white conservative backlash against the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and has been deepened by their decades-long fearful reaction to the dramatic change in the color of the U.S. that resulted from the civil rights-motivated immigration reform act of 1965.

The conflict heated to a boil when white conservatives flatly rejected the legitimacy of the “premature” victory of our first Black president in 2008. Nearly 40 percent of Republicans are so enraged they cannot even admit that Obama is a U.S. citizen. Isn’t this really another way of saying they refuse to recognize a Black man as the president? Or perhaps it is the white conservatives’ modern day Dred Scott decision declaring Obama a Black man that has no rights that they are bound to respect?

The bottom line is that we have now come to a point where voters of color are so numerous and so united behind Obama that, to be victorious, Mitt Romney must carry a higher percentage of the white vote than any modern Republican candidate has ever won. If recent trends among voters of color hold, he must carry about 63 percent of white voters. Not even Reagan won more than 61 percent.

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How Racist Laws Suppress Voting

Voting’s Outcasts: Why One in Five Blacks in Kentucky Can’t Cast a Ballot

By Aura Bogado, Meta Mendel-Reyes and Voting Rights Watch 2012
Progressive America Rising via The Nation

September 18, 2012 - One of every thirteen African-Americans are already disenfranchised, and it’s not because of voter ID laws, voter purges or cut-offs to early voting but because they’re caught up in the criminal justice system. According to a new study released this summer by the Sentencing Project, in 2010, 5.85 million otherwise eligible voters were disenfranchised because they’re current or former felons. Of these, a full 75 percent were already out on parole or probation or had already completed their complete sentence. Nationwide, nearly 8 percent of African-Americans have lost their right to vote, compared to nearly 2 percent for non-African-Americans—illustrating the lasting effects of a racially biased criminal justice system.

Kentucky is one state that makes it nearly impossible for former felons to vote, and a grassroots group there has been challenging this form of disenfranchisement. If the numbers nationwide are dismal, it’s even worse in Kentucky, where nearly a quarter million people have lost their right to cast a ballot.

Meet Meta Mendel-Reyes. She’s on the Steering Committee of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a statewide, grassroots social justice organization that seeks to restore the right of former felons to vote. She explains that former felons who have already served their time are subjected to an onerous process to attempt to get their voting rights restored—but even that process doesn’t guarantee they’ll be able to cast a ballot.

—Aura Bogado

Go to Jail, Lose Your Vote

Rev. Damon Horton wasn’t always a minister. More than a decade ago, he was a gang member, and a dealer who was arrested in 2003 and 2004 for drug trafficking. He was convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison. While Horton was incarcerated, he felt the call to the ministry. After completing 20 percent of his sentence, he was released on parole in 2006. Soon after, he married, started a family and became a minister. Yet despite turning his life around, there is one act of citizenship closed to him: he is not allowed to vote. “I can pay taxes again,” Horton says, “but I can’t vote or have a real voice in the government.”

And Horton is not alone. More than one in five African-Americans in Kentucky can’t vote because they have been convicted of a felony. In most states, after people have served their time, they are given their voting rights back. Not in Kentucky, where more than 243,000 residents have lost the right to participate in democracy.

Under the state constitution, former felons have to petition the governor in order to have their rights restored. It’s a tricky process that takes time and doesn’t guarantee a result, partly because each governor sets up his or her own procedure during his or her tenure.

Under current Governor Steve Breshear, former felons have to wait until they have served out all their prison time, probation and parole. Then, they have to get the signature of a probation or police officer, and have that notarized. Then, their paperwork gets kicked around a bit between Corrections, the local Commonwealth Attorney and the governor. If everything goes well, the applicant can get the right to vote back in as little as sixty days.

But the Commonwealth Attorney has a lot of leeway. Some give back rights easily, while others approve only a few. Making the process even more complicated is the fact that many elections officials and corrections staff don’t know the process themselves. According to Dave Newton, KFTC organizer, “Many former felons don’t even realize that they can get their voting rights back.”

Restoration of voting rights is not only a matter of democracy. Former felons who vote are half as likely to recidivate than former felons who don’t vote. It makes sense—when a former felon feels like part of the community, he or she is less likely to act out against that community.

Under the state constitution, former felons have to petition the governor for a pardon in order to have their voting rights restored. This makes Kentucky one of the four most difficult states, along with Virginia, Florida and Iowa, for former felons to regain their full citizenship rights.

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a statewide, multi-issue, grassroots organization has been leading the fight to restore voting rights to former felons like Reverend Horton. House Bill 70, introduced earlier this year, would allow Kentucky voters to decide whether to grant automatic restoration of voting rights to most former felons once they have paid their debt to society (the law would exclude former felons convicted of treason, murder, sex crimes or bribery). Although the bill has passed overwhelmingly in the House, it has been stalled in the State Senate, largely due to the efforts of one hostile Committee Chairman. Sympathetic legislators plan to introduce it again in 2013.

State Senator Gerald Neal, a longtime supporter of the restoration of voting rights, eloquently asked, “Why would you give them a life sentence from democracy? It makes no sense. It’s inconsistent with our system of democracy.”

Kentucky effectively targets African-Americans, other people of color and low-income folks who will be unable to cast a ballot because of a past conviction for which they have already served their time. With an upcoming election that threatens to disenfranchise people through voter ID laws, let’s not forget the millions of former felons who have already been kept from voting.

—Meta Mendel-Reyes

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