With True/Slant in its final days, I’ve decided to forego the sentimental (at least for now), and share a few more pieces with readers before the lights are turned off. Of the dozens of would-be posts in my publishing queue (and there are many), I’ve been wanting to post this short film, called Borderland, for weeks now.

With the drama coming to a head this week in Arizona over the attempted passage of SB1070 (careful, that’s a PDF), the bill that proposes a crackdown on illegal immigration, a film like this is more timely than ever. In Borderland, filmmakers Drea Cooper & Zackary Canepari (California is a Place) take a nuanced look at border security and illegal immigration from two very personal perspectives:

Dick is right. “Every American should see this.” It is real and it is striking. In some places it stands 18 feet tall and looks like the gates of Mordor. In other places, it is barely 10 feet tall and looks like it was put together with a stapler. It runs from the Colorado River directly into the Pacific. It is big, intense and intimidating. And it is unfinished. Gaping holes are everywhere. Physically it’s confusing. Politically it’s puzzling. Ideologically it’s complicated. But for Dick and Ron, who both live within a few miles of the border, defending it is simply a matter of protecting themselves and preserving their own beliefs. Drug smugglers don’t come to the United States to make an honest living. As the recent killing of Border Patrol Agent Robert Rosas shows, the border is more than a moral line in the sand. The fence is real. We recommend a visit. (via California is a Place)

Watching this film made me feel closer to the issue than any of the television coverage, or the endless ranting blog posts. Hope it helps lend some shred of insight on what’s become a severely divisive issue.

Image by Getty Images North America via @daylife

Since its inception, hip-hop has endured endless attacks – typically, but not always, wrongheaded – mostly because of references to violence and for celebrating a culture that devalues women. When a wealthy, white radio host used a derogatory term to describe members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team, other wealthy, white men rushed to his aid by inexplicably pinning blame on hip-hop.  Perhaps the fever pitch of misdirected blame on rap music was reached when Congress devoted time and resources into hearings probing the genre, another hilariously off-kilter spectacle in which a body of old, wealthy white men who authorize war wagged their fingers at the use of indelicate language.

But perhaps the most ignorant and insulting knock against hip-hop yet – and that’s saying something – is this suggestion from a writer at TheLoop21.com that it in spotlighting the gritty, ravaged neighborhoods from which many rappers emerged, the artists are actually glorifying poverty. It’s a ridiculous premise in virtually every imaginable way – the most obvious being that acknowledging poverty and desperation exist and treating them as if they’re worthy of aspiration are far, far different things.

The author confuses one of the most celebrated notions in hip-hop – pride in one’s roots – as a devastating concept that forces those who make it out of poverty to act as a sort-of one-man welfare agency for his deadbeat friends back home.

“This mentality of dependence is encouraged and glorified by rappers and then forced back upon the potential breadwinners of poor communities. Athletes, politicians and even members of are own family are thrust into positions of sharing with the hood.”

This is about as logical as knocking someone who sits at his mother’s bedside during chemo treatments of enabling cancer.

In other ways, the author simply seems laughably unaware of most popular hip-hop – he makes the bizarre assertion that hip-hop should embrace self-sufficiency, which is essentially the equivalent of suggesting country doesn’t talk enough about pick-ups trucks and American flags. The braggadocio and swagger that exemplifies hip-hop relies on artists reveling in having taken matters into their own hands. Take this Kanye West line from “Bring Me Down”:  “Made a mil myself, and I’m still myself, and I’ma look in the mirror if I need some help.” That type of back-patting is typical of an artist and a genre that rewards those who climb out “tha hood” but who don’t forget those who never made it.

Notably, the suggestion that rap glorifies poverty ignores what has been an enduring – and valid – critique of hip-hop’s materialism. Rappers have long touted their bling, be it cars, clothes, jewelry, houses, whatever, precisely because those things are big, glittering symbols that they have escaped poverty. There are certainly arguments to be made that an obsession with diamonds and Dom shows misplaced priorities, but it’s hard to ignore these rappers’ desire to distance themselves from having very little and what it represents.

Look, don’t get me wrong – much as I love hip-hop, it is ripe for critiques, and indeed, many brilliant ones have been made. It’s a complex community with characters ranging from Soulja Boy to Mos Def, and anything that big, crowded and noisy is bound to have its problems. But this assertion is patently ridiculous – and so blind to even the most obvious and celebrated hallmarks of the genre it purports to want to help that it deserves to get called out.

Image by AFP via @daylife

Arizona, where I live, has become ground zero in one of the most divisive issues of our day: immigration. There are two reasons for this unfortunate distinction.

On the surface, the element that gave the issue traction here was passage of SB1070. The new law, which is due to go into effect on Thursday, would compel law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of individuals who they “reasonably suspect” of being in the U.S. illegally.

The second, and deeper, reason for Arizona’s role is political. Support for SB1070 has become a litmus test for conservatives and particularly for the far-right. The law has galvanized the small but active white supremacist movements here, who have donated money to Governor Jan Brewer’s fund to fight legal challenges to the law, and begun armed patrols near the border with Mexico. The political pressure to embrace SB1070 has become so intense that Barry Wong, a Republican running for re-election to the state commission that regulates utilities, promises to go even further and prevent utilities from selling electricity to undocumented aliens.

With bizarre anti-immigrant proposals like Wong’s now part of mainstream discourse in Arizona, Francis Fukuyama’s thoughtful piece in today’s Wall Street Journal is a much-needed antidote to the toxic politics of the day.

Fukuyama’s argument is that we must have a more nuanced understanding of the issues if we want to solve the real problem of illegal immigration: crime.

Yes, people crossing the border into the U.S. are, by definition, committing a crime. That is vastly different, however, from the notion that once here, they live the lives of criminals. Most immigrants, documented and undocumented, come here to work and to give their children a chance at a better life.

“The gardeners and maids and busboys,” Fukuyama writes, “are indeed breaking the law. But they are in a very different category from the tattooed Salvatrucha gang member who lives by extortion and drug-dealing.”

The broad-brush approach demagogued by Brewer, Wong and Senator John McCain, has nothing to do with reducing crime and border violence and everything to do with stirring up fears to get votes. It is a sad fact that politics, not logic, funnels resources. The pro-SB1070 crowd will take money that could be used to fight narco-traffickers and direct it to identifying, incarcerating and deporting people who, at worst, are guilty of over-pruning, inadequate vacuuming and failure to clear a table with all deliberate speed.

The people of Arizona would be better served by politicians who actually want to fight violent crime, than by demagogues who will settle for the farce of hunting down “illegals” and declaring “Mission Accomplished.”

The problem of gangs and drug violence should not be confounded with the behavior of the vast majority of illegal immigrants to the U.S., who by and large are seeking the same thing that every immigrant to America has wanted since the time of the Mayflower: to better their condition and that of their families. They are not criminals in the sense of people who make a living by breaking the law. They would be happy to live legally, but they come from societies in which legal rules were never quite extended to them. They are therefore better described as “informal” rather than “illegal.”

via Immigrants and Crime: Time for a Sensible Debate – WSJ.com.

Image via Wikipedia

Everyone now knows that Department of Agriculture employee Sheryl Sherrod was unjustly forced to resign and vilified as a “reverse racist” by the Obama Administration and even the NAACP.  Ms. Sherrod, who is Black,  was filmed giving a speech at an NAACP banquet in March where she recounted how her work with a poor white farmer taught her to care about the have-nots of this country, regardless of race.  This speech was then edited into a version that looked as if Sherrod was saying she discriminated against this farmer because he was white.

And who ran this highly edited and completely untrue version?  None other than Andrew Breitbart and our friends at Big Government.  The same lovely people who created the total lie that ACORN was not an anti-poverty group, but rather a human trafficking ring!  And the result was what?  Oh yeah, the defunding of ACORN by Congress, the vilification of the organization in the mainstream media, and the long lasting lesson on the part of the far-right that the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are so easily scared into submission that all it takes is some bad video and some ridiculous lies to get them to comply.

Over at Big Government, they’re not even apologizing for the “mistake” they made with the video.  Instead, they’re saying there is all sorts of proof that the NAACP encourages racism and that the mainstream media is ignoring it.  And although the Department of Agriculture has apologized to Sherrod as has the head of the NAACP, I don’t hear the mainstream media that ran with this story- AGAIN- even after they realized the ACORN story was highly orchestrated propaganda- apologizing?

Although CNN and the Atlanta Constitution Journal correctly reported that the video was a misrepresentation of the full speech, Fox News and the right-wing GOP noise machine started the drum beat and the Dems did what they always do- they caved.  According to Yosi Sergant, it is time for Obama and the Dems to “grow a pair.” Sergant would know what it’s like to be thrown under the bus by the Dems and this administration, since he himself was also misrepresented by Breitbart of Big Government when Breitbart misrepresented his work as trying to use the National Endowment for the Arts to support the Obama Administration.

Let’s pretend that the Dems are actually capable of learning from their past mistakes (no evidence yet) and say they do learn to “grow a pair” or perhaps more accurately and less sexist- get a spine- and begin to stand up to the absolute hate and propaganda that is Big Government, Fox “News,” and the rest of the noise machine.  It could involve not just funding good organizations like ACORN and holding onto good employees like Sherrod, but perhaps even not caving on Afghanistan, Iraq, Gitmo, Iran, healthcare, financial reform and whatever other disasters the right seems intent on getting us into.

Now that would be worth the pain of living with this spinelessness.  To find that the Dems actually can find their spine and stand up to the ballsy nut jobs over at Big Government and Fox News.

Earlier today, Mayor Bloomberg responded to my comments about the planned mosque at Ground Zero by suggesting that a decision not to allow the building of a mosque at that sacred place would somehow violate American principles of tolerance and openness.

Right. Well, we’re about to see how much those principles matter to Palin:

No one is disputing that America stands for – and should stand for – religious tolerance. It is a foundation of our republic. This is not an issue of religious tolerance but of common moral sense. To build a mosque at Ground Zero is a stab in the heart of the families of the innocent victims of those horrific attacks.

Wait a minute. I thought it was supposed to be the left that exalts feelings above everything else. Yet here’s Sarah Palin, heroine of the right wing, saying that people’s feelings take precedence over religious tolerance, openness, and the Constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom of religion.

And believe it or not, there are families of 9/11 victims who are not opposed to the community center two blocks from Ground Zero. Sarah Palin takes it on herself to speak for all of these families, but she has no moral right to do so.

When the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed by Al Qaeda, some of the innocent victims that day were also Muslims. But in Palin’s netherworld of fear and hate, they simply don’t count.

Her first post about this, using the non-word “refudiate,” got a lot of attention because of its utter stupidity. But the much more important point about this Palin position is that she is openly coming out as an anti-Muslim bigot of the worst kind. She’s not simply opposed to radical Islamists, which any decent person would and should be. She’s opposed to Islam itself, and Muslims themselves.

Here you have the modern right wing in a nutshell. Fear and bigotry trumps everything else — the Constitution, the rule of law, religious freedom, everything.

These facts lead Adam to ask a question I’ve been pondering for the past few days – has the Commission outlived its usefulness? He makes this point that I think should really make conservatives who trumpet the Commission’s latest work sit up straight and think:

Still, civil-rights experts concede that the politicization of the commission hardly began during the Bush administration. “The Civil Rights Commission has become extremely politicized over the last 15 years or so,” Greenbaum says. “At one point you had the Democrats that had the numbers, and now you have Republicans that had the numbers.” Indeed, during Berry’s tenure, it was conservatives who complained about being railroaded and left out of the loop on important matters. The irony is that the commission was arguably more effective at its fact-finding duties back in the 1950s, when there were segregationists on it. That may be because back then, regardless of what side you were on, the struggle for civil rights was central to American life. Now, for many Americans, civil-rights issues are a more abstract affair.

via Do We Need a Commission on Civil Rights? | The American Prospect.

It’s nice and all for conservative culture warriors that the Commission is doing the yeoman’s work of the loyal Bushies who once squatted in the Justice Department. But how much longer will that last? For instance, Gerald Reynolds and Ashley Taylor, both Bush appointees in 2004, see their six-year terms end this year. Do you think President Obama is going to appoint anyone nearly palatable to Republicans to replace them? And moreover, when a new Democratic-leaning Commission disavows the earlier findings on NBPP as sound and fury signifying nothing, can they really credibly say that the body’s new findings are any less meaningful than they were when it was dominated by loyal Republicans?

The Justice Department’s New Black Panther Party case may deserve some scrutiny. Probably not, but a little bit of sunlight never hurts. The appropriate venues would be the non-partisan Offices of the Inspector General and Professional Responsibility in the Justice Department. Their findings can then be screamed about by the House Judiciary Committee’s Lamar Smith or the House Oversight Committee’s Darrell Issa, or both.

But the Commission is an extra-governmental entity that’s clearly been captured by our political process, its findings deployed now only for partisan gain. Pretending on the left or on the right that any work it does is useful does a disservice to all Americans concerned with racial equality whether conservative, moderate, or liberal. Shut ‘em down.

Norma Lopez went missing on her way home from summer school. Photo via KTLA News.

When 7-year-old Kyron Horman went missing from his Portland, Ore. school early last month, news outlets ranging from blogs to newspapers to TV stations raced to cover the story. His name quickly climbed up most-searched term lists and People magazine has been relentless in its documentation of each break in the case. Meanwhile, the case of another young boy who went missing at nearly the exact same time as Horman, Anthony Thomas, generated only a fraction of the coverage.

It was only a yet another example of the media’s crush to report on abductions and foul play involving white women and children, while giving little coverage to minorities who disappear: The latest example is 17-year-old Norma Lopez, who appears to have been kidnapped on her way home from summer school in Moreno Valley, Calif. Most of the coverage of Lopez’s disappearance has come from local news outlets, while the national attention to the case by places like the Los Angeles Times and CNN has been restricted to short blog posts — rising nowhere near the level that dominated the disappearances of girls like Elizabeth Smart and Natalee Holloway.

Media coverage is crucial to the cases of people who go missing because it is often vigilant members of the public who can play a role in helping law enforcement find the victim. Certainly a young, beautiful girl like Lopez and the eery circumstances surrounding her going missing — some of her belongings and “evidence of a struggle” were found in a field Lopez would walk through as a shortcut — are just as deserving of coverage as any other person — white, female or otherwise.

Image via Wikipedia

Hatred is corrosive, it almost always hurts the hater. While you don’t always see it, sometimes the foundation of someone’s character can get so worn away that the person’s facade cracks and falls: like Mel Gibson. The story of his well-documented flame-out into a hate-filled, abusive former movie-star would benefit from understanding more about how hatred can destroy a hater.

His abusive behavior didn’t start with current money troubles and stresses. Nor is it simply a narcissist running amok. It comes from hate.  Hate that was amply foreshadowed by the virulent anti-Semitism about which we all worked so hard not to know we knew. Four years ago at the time of Gibson’s anti-Semetic rant during a DUI arrest, Christopher Hitchens didn’t work not to know the obvious, he shoved it in our face:

And it has been obvious for some time to the most meager intelligence that he is sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred.

This is not just proved by his twistedly homoerotic spank-movie The Passion of the Christ, even though that ghastly production did focus obsessively on the one passage in the one of the four Gospels that tries to convict the Jewish people en masse of the hysterical charge of Christ-killing or “deicide.” It is validated by his fealty to his earthly father, a crackpot who belongs to a Catholic splinter group of which our Mel is a member. This group more or less lives off the stench of medieval anti-Semitism.

via Is Mel Gibson an anti-Semite? – By Christopher Hitchens – Slate Magazine.

Empty core? That is hopefully just Hitchens’ rhetorical excess; if Gibson’s core was empty we’d have little useful to learn from him. He’s a person not a monster, even though he acts monstrously. Gibson has inside of him the same all-too human unconscious processes through which we all live our lives.

In trying to learn something from Gibson’s behavior I am not some sort of pollyanna closing his eyes or trying to make lemonade from an oil slick. I slow down to rubberneck at car-crashes as much as anyone, and if I see something I end up feeling the same fascinated horror I felt reading about Gibson’s catastrophic crash. And the truth is that there is no bigger celebrity crash out there than Gibson (sorry LeBron and Lindsay, but Mel journeyed alone into the realm of the unredeemable: all you need LeBron is a championship—or two—to be a hero again and Lindsay, well, you’ll be America’s sweetheart as soon as you get sober and make a good movie—or two).

So, what can we learn about ourselves from Gibson’s hatred more interesting than the soporific tautology, “people are people.” Can we learn anything useful?

Ken Eisold, a friend and colleague, has written a terrific new book What You Don’t Know Your Know. He pulls together a story about a “new unconscious” from research done in a variety of different fields. What he says about prejudice is helpful. He writes that “prejudice is a universal process rooted in normal development” that come from “how our brains create categories as part of our adaption to reality.” Furthermore, these prejudices and stereotypes can become malignant when we start to protect our identity by putting all the crap into other groups. They—whoever “they” may be—are the ones who are lazy, cheap, avaricious, or devious; we’re not, we’re fine!

But prejudice gets worse, much worse; ordinary bigotry is still pretty far from Gibson’s behavior. Our unconscious process of creating categories and attaching identity-protective values to those categories can degrade further to the level of rape and abuse, genocide, and ethnic cleansing when we dehumanize other people. That’s how a neighbor becomes vermin to be extinguished, a President becomes an anti-American Muslim/socialist/noncitizen, or a woman gets attacked for being nothing more than a “bitch” or a “cunt” (to use two of the more unsavory terms from Gibson’s latest taped rage).

Unconscious dehumanization drives much that we call evil and understanding how it operates in each of our lives is the lesson from ”The Hatred of the Gibson.”

Staring with his hatred of Jews and ending with recordings of verbal abuse and allegations of much worse, we can see that when you nurture processes of dehumanization instead of fighting them you end up dehumanizing yourself. Out of control dehumanization is like a cancer that needs to be caught early and aggressively fought. Luckily, traffic with the new unconscious moves in both directions. So, when what you don’t know you know sends up a flare—be it in a dream, a confusing feeling, an out of character behavior, or a train of thought arriving at a perplexing station—pay attention. You’re trying to tell yourself something important you don’t know you know.

And if you think you’re immune to dehumanization, that it is something you would never ever do, that it is something “they”—the evil others—do but not you, think again. It is something that happens inside our unconscious all the time. We couldn’t get through a day without it, full human awareness would just be too painful. We adaptively dehumanize others when we blind ourselves to the homeless guy sleeping by the train station, to events in Darfur, or even to the suffering of future generations because of our addiction to burning fossil fuels. In fact, we even entertain ourselves with it by putting the LeBrons and Lindsays of the world up on celebrity pedestals.

Like rubberneckers at the highway crash relieved that what could have happened to them happened to someone else, our fascination with Gibson’s hatred includes some relief that he was the one that crashed, not us. What we don’t know we know is that any of us could have been Mel, it’s all a matter of degree. He’s not “other,” he’s us.

The fear mongering is so completely over the top in this little piece of hate propaganda, there’s not much to say about it. I’ll just point out that contrary to what the ad says, this is not a “mega-mosque” overlooking Ground Zero. It’s three blocks away, and it’s a pre-existing 13-story building that will be remodeled into a community center with an auditorium, swimming pool, restaurants, and … gasp … a mosque.

Here’s a Google Maps view of the area, showing a couple of large buildings in between the proposed community center at 45 Park Place and Ground Zero.

The only thing it will actually “overlook” is the Amish Market. Don’t they realize the terrible danger they’re in? You can’t fight off Osama bin Laden with a butter churn!

Why not fight racism with reverse racism? If a racist and corrupt system discriminates against minorities then one means of righting this wrong is to reverse the racism by discriminating for instead of against said minorities. This is precisely what the University of California system did in its admissions policy until Proposition 209 passed 54% to 45% in 1996, prohibiting the state from discriminating against or giving preferences to anyone on the basis of “race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”

Here we have the basis for a social experiment in which one set of variables is altered: before 1996 the University of California system discriminated against whites and in favor of minorities in their admissions policy; after 1996 students were admitted based on their merits alone. Opponents of Prop 209—believing that minorities lack the merits to make it on their own—predicted that minority admissions would decrease after 1996. Proponents of 209—believing that minorities are just as smart, creative, and hard working as any other group—predicted the opposite. What happened?

Admissions for the Fall of 2010 for the University of California reveals that the number of minorities in both absolute numbers and percentages exceeds that of 1996:

African American            1996: 4% (1,628)                  2010: 4.2% (2,624)

Latino                         1996: 15.4% (5,744)             2010: 23% (14,081)

Asians                         1996: 29.8% (11,085)                       2010: 37.5% (22,877)

Native Americans            1996: 0.9% (360)                  2010: 0.8% (531)

Whites                         1996: 44% (16,465)              2010: 34% (20,807)

So it would appear that a meritocracy in educational admissions works, and in this (the University of California), one of the largest educational laboratories in the world. Blacks and Latinos in particular do not need affirmative action, special favors, handouts, proportional set asides, or any other discriminatory practice in order to succeed. And how insulting to ever to have implied that they do! Did anyone believe that the only way minorities could succeed in American education would be for the government to step in and order educational institutions to discriminate on their behalf? Yes, they did, and they still are: the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action filed a lawsuit this year to overturn Prop 209. Why? According to the suit: “The percentage of Latina/o, black and Native American students in the UC as a whole has not kept pace with the rising percentage of those groups among high school graduates of the state.”

So the purpose of higher education is to be an extension of K-12 education, matching percentages precisely or else? And that “or else” should include a top-down, government enforced racist policy of discrimination based on high school racial demographics? Is this what American higher education has come down to? If the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action has its way it will, because, in fact, the full name and mission of this organization, according to it’s web page, is: “The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) is building the new civil rights movement. We are a primarily student- and youth-based organization of leaders in our schools and communities, committed to making real the promises of American democracy and equality.” Read that ominous acronym again: By Any Means Necessary. If the law is not overturned, what other means do these folks have in mind? Violence? The threat of violence?

I am white. My “race” lost a full 10 percentage points in U.C. admissions after the passage of Prop 209. Will BAMN step up and demand that the U.C. admissions office set aside a fixed number of admits for whites regardless of SAT scores, GPAs, student essays, and the like? Somehow I doubt it, but if they did, and I were applying to college, I would give the same response that any self-respecting individual should today to such racist policies:

“No thanks. I don’t need your racist discriminatory policies to succeed in life. And how insulting that you would think otherwise—I can make it on my own without your snobby elitist attitude that without your help I will fail. I don’t need you or any other patronizing thugs to threaten a university to let me in or else they will be in violation of a law that could land them in jail for choosing to not admit me. And if that were the reason they did let me in, I wouldn’t go. I am smart. I am creative. I am hard working. I am responsible for my actions. I will make my own way in life, and if I succeed then I succeed on my own merits, and if I fail then I fail on my own lack of merits. Period. If you don’t understand that, then get lost.”

Image via Wikipedia

Despite its tendency to sometimes dwell on bitches and bling, and despite its status as arguably the most dominant force in pop culture, hip-hop remains the mainstream musical genre that most willingly delves into politics – and nothing has made that clearer recently than Arizona’s controversial immigration law.

Racial profiling and disparate treatment from police helped launch hip-hop from the start, and has been a consistent thread for decades, from N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police” to Tupac Shakur lamenting “Cops give a damn about a Negro, pull the trigger, kill a n—-, he’s a hero,” in “Changes” to Jay-Z speculating in “99 Problems” that he got pulled over because “I’m young and I’m black and my hat’s real low.”

After spending much of 2008 and 2009 celebrating the candidacy, and win, of President Barack Obama, rap artists are getting back to the business of calling foul on disparate treament of minorities. Kanye West and others already joined a group of musicians – including rap troupe Cypress Hill - under the banner Sound Strike, all of whom promised not to play in Arizona because of SB 1070, which gives law enforcement officers broad authority in stopping and demanding documentation from anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally.

The Washington Post points out that Brooklyn rapper Talib Kweli has also taken Arizona to task in his song “Papers Please,” aimed squarely at Arizona, rapping “I could never support a law that don’t respect humanity.” Kweli told the Post that he felt a personal connection with what Arizona minorities will be dealing with when the law takes effect:

“I grew up with my mother telling me . . . you are never supposed to leave your house without ID,” Kweli said in an interview Friday. “This is something I’d grown up used to as a young black person. I’ve been stopped and been detained.”

Indeed, such encounters with the police are enduring hallmarks of some timeless hip-hop tracks. Chuck D and Toki Wright have also released Arizona-themed songs – not to mention the tracks like Public Enemy’s original “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” which took issue with the state back in 1991 when it refused to honor Martin Luther King Jr. with a national holiday.

The University of Texas at Austin is one step closer to removing the name of a Ku Klux Klan leader from a dormitory on the campus. According to an announcement today, the university’s president, William Powers Jr., endorsed the recommendations of a review panel and will recommend to the Board of Regents that the building, Simkins Residence Hall, be renamed Creekside Dormitory. The 55-year-old building was named for William Stewart Simkins, a law professor at the university in the early 20th century and former organizer for the Klan.

via Klan Leader’s Name Should Be Dropped From Dorm, U. of Texas President Says | The Ticker | Chronicle of Higher Education.

Ha ha. Well it is really great to know the University of Texas is taking all the necessary steps before deciding on something so difficult and controversial. We look forward to the final decision, in ten years, after it is tabled by the Board of Regents and goes back to the Ad Hoc Subcommittee On Renaming Dormitories Named After KKK MEMBERS for further review, for the 1,000th time.

Image by Wonderlane via Flickr

Update: The Washington Post shares the text of the Justice Department’s lawsuit.

The AP is reporting that the Justice Department will sue the state of Arizona over its controversial anti-illegal immigrant law, which orders police to check immigration status in the course of other law enforcement activities:

The planned lawsuit was confirmed to The Associated Press by a Justice Department official with knowledge of the plans. The official didn’t want to be identified before a public announcement planned for later Tuesday.

The lawsuit will argue that Arizona’s new measure requiring state and local police to question and possibly arrest illegal immigrants during the enforcement of other laws, like traffic stops, usurps federal authority.

via News from The Associated Press.

Clearly we’re seeing a return to a big debate about federalism in the United States. On the one hand, you’ve got this lawsuit in which the feds are arguing that a state law, which may be mimicked soon in other jurisdictions, encroaches on a key federal law enforcement power – the regulation of immigration.

On the other hand, the federal government is asserting in its defense of the health care reform legislation that the federal government can mandate the purchase of health insurance by the American population. States are arguing that this is an invasion of commerce that is not of an inter-state nature.

It will be an interesting exercise to compare the briefs submitted by the government in these two cases, and find if the feds contradict themselves in any key areas. These two cases also guarantee an exciting term next year for the Supreme Court, which will probably feature an Associate Justice Elena Kagan. But really, where in an era where we lack political imagination by such an alarming degree that the courts have to settle an increasing number of our political disputes.  That’s the greatest shame of all in our republic.

Photo by D Sharon Pruitt

Maybe you didn’t need research to tell you this fact about America: if you’re born poor, you’re likely to stay that way.

New research out of the Urban Institute confirms it. But what it also reveals is a very different future path for white children that are born poor, compared with black children.

The data comes from Caroline Ratcliffe and Signe-Mary McKernan, who used a longitudinal study that documented kids from 1968 to 2005, taking note of family income levels throughout childhood and into adulthood.What they found illustrates the huge gulf between being born white and being born black in this country.

If you’re born poor and white, there’s a 31 percent chance you will be poor as an adult. Not great, for sure. A third of all poor white children end up being poor white adults, while the other two thirds seem to escape.

And for black children? It’s the reverse. Over two-thirds of black children – 69 percent – are born poor and end up being poor adults.

Black children, the study shows, are 2.5 times more likely than white children to ever be poor. They’re seven times more likely to spend more than half of their childhood years in poverty. And the longer a kid spends in poverty, the worse their adult lives are going to be. High school drop out rates, adult poverty rates, unsteady employment, and teen nonmarital births go up with the number of years a kid spends in poverty. That means a new generation of black children, born into the same circumstances their parents could not escape.

The difference between being born black and being born white in America could not be more stark. And, yet, I feel most of us have stopped caring. We’ve created justifications for why this is so, and those justifications let us off the hook.

I can’t help but think of John Rawls’s  idea of the veil of ignorance - the idea that society’s roles were completely redistributed, and you had no idea which side you would end up on. You have no idea whether you or your child will be born white or black, able to escape the grip of poverty or consistently pulled down by it. As Rawls said, “no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like.”

That’s the only way to consider the morality of an issue, says Rawls. Until you consider that something had an equally likely chance of happening to you as to someone else, we can’t really fairly consider how we’ve set things up.

Our justifications don’t work under the veil of ignorance because any of the arguments we’ve set up for ourselves – that groups in society are lazy, uneducated, unintelligent, or just don’t want to succeed – are moot. You’re talking about yourself now, so you better hold your tongue.

Imagine your child was growing up in a society today where they had only a one-third chance of making it.

Now, let’s change the way we think, talk and what we’re doing about child poverty.

Wow! A woman, and a black! Now all we need is a gay.

I called because I was fed up, and also because I was a little scared.

Three men were sitting in the alley below my second floor apartment. Listening to one young man have a cell phone conversation with his mother where an expletive was every other word had just annoyed me. But when two others arrived and started shooting dice, I picked up the phone.

I’ve never had to call the police before because I live in a pretty quiet neighborhood. Lincoln Square is no Englewood. The most I’ve encountered in street crime is someone stealing the seat off my bike, and that was my own fault for leaving it chained up outside three nights in a row.

We live in a white neighborhood. Yes, we have some Hispanic neighbors, but by and large, the people of Lincoln Square are white, upper-to-middle class, mini-cooper drivers with medium-sized condos and brick bungalows.

In the last six months, I’ve noticed the neighborhood changing. To be frank, we have black families living on our block now when we never did before. I’d be a liar if I said I hadn’t noticed.

I wasn’t upset about it. In fact, I was a little excited. For one, I’ve wanted to live in a neighborhood that’s more diverse. But we’re comfortable here, and I hate moving. Two, I know that it’s not likely a coincidence. Many of these black families are probably using Section 8 vouchers to find an apartment in a nice area of the city that’s low on crime, has good schools and is close to transit.** A two flat nearby even posted “CHA welcome” on their “For Rent” sign. Because I know what a good neighborhood can do for a family, I’m overjoyed that some families are benefitting from our safe, friendly block.

But I also know enough about the urban experience to recognize trouble when I see it, and trouble often comes in the form of young men standing around. In fact, the day I called the police, I was chatting with a Cabrini rowhouse resident for a story, and she was telling me the same thing about where she lives.

“They don’t stand in front of my house,” she told me. “Around here, some people think I’m real mean, and I am to certain people. What are you standing around for? Do you even live here?”

Go to any sketchy neighborhood in the city and you’ll see them – groups of young men, lurking on corners, in entryways, in hallways, on stairs. Certainly, I’m not saying they’re all criminals, but the groups seem to be the primordial soup out of which crime oozes. I’ve passed by my fair share of these groups in public housing, and I’ve learned – be polite, look confident, but most of all, stay the hell away.

Which is why I called the police. Because criminal goo ain’t happening on my block. Across the street, we have a lovely neighborhood park where children play all day during the summer months. It’s lovely now, but 10 years ago, it was Latin Kings territory, prime recruiting ground for young people looking for a place to belong. It’s safe now because of the hard work of police and residents in the area, and as long as I live here, I’ll do my part to keep it that way.

So I called the police and reported three young men of unknown race shooting dice in the alley. The community member in me wanted to be able to go down there myself or yell out the window, asking them politely to move. But I was a young woman alone in my apartment, and I wasn’t about to risk my safety. The police must have come and shooed them away. They came again later in the week, but the freak storm kept them from staying.

The hardest part for me was psychological. I’ve written endlessly about the need for decent housing in nice neighborhoods and the need for people like me to understand that the adjustment – from living in a public housing high rise or on the streets of Englewood – will take time and understanding. I don’t want to be a person who talks about “them,” like all Section 8 voucher holders are one class of people, determined to make my life a living hell. I want to be open, welcoming and encouraging. But I don’t want young men shooting dice and swearing in my alley while I’m making dinner.

I’m hoping there’s a way to do this well – to combat crime and create opportunities in my neighborhood without becoming a person who can’t see the bigger picture. Although if my car had been stolen or house broken into, I know it wouldn’t be so easy to be open-minded.

I’m still excited that there’s more diversity in our neighborhood. I wish “CHA welcome” would appear more places than just apartment signs. Before, this was just a situation I was writing about. Now, it’s one I’m living out. Ultimately, that’s the best thing that can happen to me.

It just might mean a few more calls to the 20th district about shooting dice.

** Technically, I don’t “know” that black families living on my block are Section 8 families. It’s just my educated guess, based on the fact that we live in one of the most segregated cities in the nation and people rarely cross those lines without a really good reason, which is one of the reasons we need Section 8 in the first place. By saying this, I don’t mean to imply that all black families are poor or that only black families use Section 8 vouchers – again, these are generalizations that have limitations, but are based on trends.

Image via Wikipedia

Parenting mag has unveiled its newest list of Best Cities for Families – and Arlington, Virginia has landed the top spot. It’s not too surprising – the article praises the city’s school system, its home values, and for having numerous historical sites nearby, “including the Arlington National Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial and a World War II Memorial.”

It doesn’t take a geography whiz to realize that the latter two attractions are in nearby Washington D.C., the nation’s capital, which despite a resurgence of coolness that has attracted “The Real World,” “Top Chef” and “The Real Housewives” franchises, is waaaaay further down on the list, at No. 71.

P.J. Orvetti of NBCWashington.com rightly takes Parenting to task for the rankings differential, noting that Arlington is praised for many things that are true of D.C., and is lauded for many historical treasures that actually belong to the District:

D.C. is great — and Arlington is great, and Alexandria and Silver Spring and all the surrounding cities and towns are great — precisely because we have such a unique mix of the urban and the rural, the cultural and the pastoral. This whole region deserves to top any parent’s list.

Orvetti also wonders how other cities earned praise for their parks and open spaces, when D.C. has both, and is situated close to numerous outdoor recreation areas and forests.

But what Orvetti doesn’t touch on is the obvious implication – particularly when Parenting applauds Arlington’s schools system – is the race differential involved. Now, no one is questioning that D.C. schools have long struggled. But they are improving, particularly under Michelle Rhee’s leadership, and the fact that Arlington is a mostly white suburb, while middle-class families whose kids attend D.C. public schools are mostly black makes me wonder if race was a silent factor in ranking two cities so similar, that enjoy so many of the same advantages.

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So how did you celebrate Emancipation Day, or Juneteenth, on Saturday? Chances are if you’re not an African American, you didn’t. Take a look at this news clip from Austin News 8, in the state where the celebrations began, or peruse pictures of Juneteenth celebrations around America, detailed by papers such as San Francisco Chronicle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Boston Globe. But it was the Globe’s lede that really caught my eye.

All Americans may have July Fourth, but African-Americans have June 19, too.

“It is our Independence Day,’’ said Stephen Smith, 70, a lifetime Roxbury resident who has helped organize the annual Juneteenth celebration in Franklin Park since it was first held there 14 years ago. “It’s when we were finally free.’’

Yesterday, thousands celebrated the 145th anniversary of the effective end of slavery in America. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers liberated the country’s last slaves in Galveston, Texas, where residents still held slaves more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed them.

“Of course this is bigger [than July Fourth], because it’s our own,’’ said Paul Janey, 60, a Roxbury native with a white beard, dark sunglasses, and a pipe out of Sherlock Holmes. “It’s a good day to have family around.’’

As I read this, I had a gut reaction that can roughly be captured thus: Whaaaaaaaaa?

Juneteenth, by the way, is an official holiday in 36 states but apparently that’s not good enough. Because if most Americans, including African Americans, really think this should just be a segregated holiday then the memory of that moment in Texas 145 years ago is lost. It was the day all Americans became free.

Since I was a child and first learned about slavery, the story of Independence Day struck me as profoundly strange. How could a nation sign a proclamation of liberation with one hand and shackle other human beings with another? How could Thomas Jefferson write such a profound statement of the irrepressible right to freedom and still hold slaves? To me, because of this, the Fourth of July will forever be packed with a complication most of us choose to ignore.

The words first uttered publicly on June 19, 1865 are a powerful remedy:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.

Those sentences not only materialized the decree of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, but they begin to fulfill of the vision of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.

It is time for a new tradition; one that connects the two federal holidays–Emancipation to Liberty, 15 days that connect spring and summer, in which Americans celebrate the full implications of freedom. To remember not only those patriots who died to free us from the constraints of a monarchy, but also to remember those who died to free us of from the constraints of ourselves.

No, I’m not talking about days of service or symposiums. I’m talking about a two-week holiday, a time for the country to slow down and celebrate. I’m talking about food and music from all the traditions and some flag-waving that comes with an understanding that we’re not a perfect country, but our ultimate aims are very, very noble and that we are still trying to get there. I’m talking about Americans of all races gathering in parks and having party after party to celebrate this country.

I have no doubt that Stephen Smith of Roxbury is a wiser man than I, but if he really means that Juneteenth is African Americans’ Independence Day, he is wrong. The Globe’s lede is wrong. All Americans have June 19th and should recognize that.

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• Obama: Juneteenth turning 145, time to reflect (cnn.com)
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I was listening to an old favorite yesterday morning, Randy Newman’s Twelve Songs album, we while we were getting the kid ready for school. I was packing his lunch box into his backpack when he came out into the living room and asked me, “What song is this?”

I had to pause. The song was called “Yellow Man.” It’s a satirical song, a send-up of a less than well-educated American viewpoint around the time of the Vietnam War, when it was recorded. It’s sung in the voice of a less than well-educated American.

It’s catchy, though, and simple, and I quickly imagined the kid singing the chorus in his kindergarten class, sitting next to Lungta or Lian or Leila or any of his other non-white classmates. “Got to have a yellow woman/When you’re a yellow man,” it goes. Every second of every day of parenthood is complicated.

But I decided to tell him. “It’s called ‘Yellow Man,’” I said.

“Yellow Man?!” he said. He liked that. “That’s silly.”

“Yeah,” I said.

He went to school and came home and we haven’t heard more about it. Which is good. A friend of mine recently got a phone call home about the upset her son had caused in his second-grade class by using a black crayon to color in a picture he’d drawn of president Obama’s face. What a bummer of a talk to have to sit an eight-year-old down for: that because of history and the unfairness of society, the color of people’s skin is a subject to be careful about. He cried, she said.

Sad truth, certainly. But in that, important to impart. I’m sure there’s a similar conversation in my future. Up to this point, my wife and I have just tried to teach the kid that it’s not nice to talk about the way people look in general. This after the time a couple years ago when he pointed at a Hasidic Jew with sidelocks on the subway and said, “That man has funny hair.” (A common occurrence in New York, to be sure.)

I learned my first lesson about race when I was four. I’d just sat down at the dinner table with my parents and I decided to tell my father a joke an older kid had told me that day at school. I held out my hand to him, palm up. “Slap me five,” I said. He did, smiling.

Then I turned my hand over, so my palm was facing down. “Nigger side,” I said.

My father’s eyes went wide. I remember the disappointment I felt when his smile turned into a frown. Then, without warning, he grabbed my fingers tight and slapped the back of my hand hard enough to make me burst into tears, jump up from the table, and run screaming into his office. He didn’t hit me as a practice. He’d spanked me only once before then, on my butt, after I’d bit my mom hard enough to draw blood. So my tears were as much the result of shock as they were pain. I felt betrayed.

I didn’t know what the word “nigger” meant when I’d told him the joke. I was simply repeating what the older kid—who was just a kindergartener himself, the same age my son is now—had told me. I suppose I thought it meant the backside of one’s hand.

My father let me cry in his office for a minute before coming to find me. Then he knelt down and told me to look him straight in the eye. “Do you know why I hit you?” He asked. I shook my head, still crying. “I hit you because I want you to know that that’s what happens if you say that word. If you say that word, you get hit. You get hurt. So I wanted to teach you that. I never want you to say that word.”

I told him I didn’t even know what the word meant. And that it wasn’t fair that he’d hit me so hard. He explained what it meant and agreed that it wasn’t fair. But he said it was an important lesson he wanted me to learn.

He was right, I think. Beyond the history behind it, and the politics, and the deeper stuff that’s too complicated for kids my kid’s age to understand, that’s a good first thing to learn: Some words are different from others. Some words carry a bigger price. Some words hurt.

Image by AFP via @daylife

First came the law that mandates racial profiling in Arizona. Now an Arizona legislator is working on a plan that would defy the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by denying citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants born in this country.

Republican State Sen. Russell Pearce wants to withhold birth certificates of children born in his state unless at least one parent can prove legal status, according to an AP article in my Boston Globe today.

Never mind that the language and intent of the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, are crystal clear: “All persons born … in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.’’

Today’s article in The Globe follows by less than a week one the paper wrote about 19-year-old Harvard sophomore Eric Balderas. The son of a single mother who left an abusive husband, he grew up in San Antonio, Texas, where he was valedictorian of his high school. Harvard offered him a full scholarship.

But none of that made a damn bit of difference to immigration officials who handcuffed him on a visit home. Why?  Balderas entered this country illegally — at Age 4.  He faces deportation to a country, Mexico, he left before he entered kindergarten.

Reading these two articles, one word comes to mind: Enough.

I believe it’s time for Americans to choose a side on immigration rather than to stand on the sidelines.  This isn’t someone else’s battle.  The immigration wars touch this country’s soul.

Are we going to reaffirm the American spirit that welcomed generations of displaced, poor and persecuted so they could build better lives and, along the way, a better United States?  Or are we going to watch as bigots build walls and fences, spread fear of illegals stealing jobs and selling drugs, and — let’s speak the truth — do all they can to keep American predominantly white for as long as possible.

Do we wish to side with the Russell Pearces of the world, who in their frenzy to keep out Latinos, have conveniently forgotten that the Irish, the Italians,  the Poles, the German and Eastern European Jews — heck, even indentured servants who made their way here on the Mayflower — all endured bigotry in their time to built a better country?

Or do we want to stand with young people like Eric Balderas, people with dreams, passion and promise, even when they arrive in this country with little but the clothes on their back. For it is only the smart and determined who manage to get here in the first place, whether their path is legal or not. They hunger for a better life.

Harvard spokeswoman Christine Heenan said this to The Globe:

“Eric Balderas has already demonstrated the discipline and work ethic required for rigorous university work and has, like so many of our undergraduates, expressed an interest in making a difference in the world … These dedicated young people are vital to our nation’s future …

The so-called Dream Act stalled in Congress would give students like Balderas a chance to have an impact legally. Among other things, The Globe notes, it would “create a path to legal residency for youths who arrived before they turned 16 and have lived here for five years. They would have to complete two years of college or the military, among other requirements to qualify.”

Men like Pearce instead would shut the door even on those who under the Constitution have a legal right to contribute to this country — citizens whose parents may have come here illegally precisely to give their children the opportunity they lacked.

If men like Pearce can divide us with fear, if we support laws that force some Americans to carry documents just as the Jews of Germany did before they were shipped to concentration camps,  it is not only American immigrants who stand in jeopardy but the very foundations of our country and political system.

That’s why the next time opponents of Arizona’s anti-immigration law organize a protest, I don’t plan to clap discreetly from my office window. I’ll shut down my computer, lock arms and march beside them.