Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use
Vol. 12 Issue 49…Dedicated to the Dialogue on
Race…December 6, 2009
New You Use
A Review: Institutional Racism in Law Schools
By John Burl Smith
When the Founding Fathers
codified slavery in the 3/5 Compromise of Article I Section II in the US
Constitution, they legalized discrimination. This made maintaining segregation,
racism and the hostile environment slave descendants endure a government
function. Federal, state and local governments enacted laws and instituted
policies and procedures that made white supremacy the guiding socioeconomic and
political value of
Whites and many blacks claim that
the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the
Constitution negated the 3/5 Compromise. However, the 3/5 Compromise is the
basis of the Electoral College and the US Senate. Moreover, "strict
construction" of the Constitution is code for honoring the 3/5 Compromise.
It is why the Supreme Court ruled that to give blacks equal access or in any
way level the playing field is "reversed" discrimination.
Consequently, the socioeconomic inequities in education, employment, income,
wealth, etc. are forms of discrimination the Constitution allows.
Vernellia R. Randall (2006)
published a very perceptive study in
"Each year the U.S. News
& World Report publishes its college and university rankings, and as a
result law schools have resorted to discrimination to "raise" their
rank." Their aim is to reduce the talent pool of blacks and minorities
that could become lawyers. Not the blatant "No Blacks Allowed" kind
of discrimination but the subtle "soft bigotry" based on low
expectations."
Institutional racism exists when
institutions adopt policies, practices, or procedures that appear neutral but
impact blacks and other minorities disproportionately. Law schools adopted a
cut-off score (below which few, if any, candidate is admitted) on the Law
School Admissions Test ("LSAT') in the 1990s. Arbitrary cut-off LSAT/UGPA
(Undergraduate Grade Point Average) scores became the sole determining
admission factors since that adoption. Despite an increase in the number of
applications, an increase in average LSAT scores and a rise in average UGPA, black
and Mexican American enrollment in law schools decreased over the last ten
years.
Implementation of such a policy, practice, or procedure is clear evidence of
institutional racism, but it is also evidence of systemic racism since many
institutions - the American Bar Association, National Association of Judges and
U.S. News & World Report- cover up such an unethical and discriminatory
intent. Racism is any conscious or unconscious action or attitude that
subordinates an individual or group based on skin color or race. Such
institutional behavior is inherently racist because policy outcomes effectively
exclude blacks -- disproportionately affecting access to and quality of goods,
services, and opportunities for blacks.
Cultural or systemic racism (3/5 Compromise) forms the basis of institutional
racism. It underlies the value system, supporting and facilitating
discrimination based on perceptions of superiority and inferiority as part of
daily rationale. Randall's study looked at the
University of Dayton School of Law admission director assigned a status of
presumptive admit, presumptive deny, or committee review based primarily on the
applicant's LSAT/UGPA. Beyond this there were no written standard or criteria
against which a prospective candidate's file was reviewed. Files sent for
committee review were evaluated on the basis of a full file review and voted on
by the individual committee members. Each committee member applied his or her
own unarticulated criteria.
For the 2003-2004 admissions committee, the presumptive deny level was set at
any LSAT score below 145. This meant that if two similar files were received by
the admission office, and the only significant difference between the files was
that one had an LSAT of 144 and the other had a 145 and both had a UGPA of
3.49, the file of the applicant with the 145 LSAT would have been sent to
committee review. The other would have been presumptively denied.
The
A 2003 report of the ABA Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the
Profession stated that: Combined African American and Hispanic representation
among lawyers was 7 % in 1998. The
It is not enough to object to the
use of cut-off scores or admission processes that impact blacks and other
minorities disparately. All lawyers must actively oppose using LSAT cut-off
scores (below which no applicants will be considered) to disqualify blacks and
other minorities. "Further, the Law School Admission Council (LSAC)
asserts that '[t]hose who set admission policies and criteria should always
keep in mind the fact that the LSAT does not measure every discipline-related
skill necessary for academic work, nor does it measure other factors important
to academic success' and '[s]chools currently using the [presumptive system]
are encouraged to modify it because such methods may be using the LSAT score
incorrectly.'
Most law schools, like the
Henry A. Giroux
"My work has always been informed by the notion that it is
imperative to make hope practical and despair unconvincing. My focus is
primarily on schools and the roles they play in promoting both success and
failure among different classes and groups of students. I am particularly
interested in the way in which schools mediate--through both the overt and
hidden curricula--those messages and values that serve to privilege some groups
at the expense of others. By viewing schools as political and cultural sites as
well as instructional institutions, I have tried in my writings to provide
educators with the categories and forms of analyses that will help them to
become more critical in their pedagogies and more visionary in their purposes.
Schools are immensely important sites for constituting subjectivities, and I
have and will continue to argue that we need to make them into models of
critical learning, civic courage, and active citizenship." Henry
A. Giroux
Henry A. Giroux was born on September 18, 1943 in
In 1992, Giroux began a 12-year position in the Waterbury Chair Professorship
at
Giroux is an American cultural critic.
He has been an important contributor to the field known as critical pedagogy.
An advocate of radical democracy, vigorously opposing the anti-democratic
tendencies of neoliberalism, militarism, empire, religious fundamentalism, and
the ongoing attacks against the social state, the social wage, youth, the poor,
and public and higher education, his most recent work focuses on public
pedagogy, a term he coined to describe the nature of the spectacle and the new
media, and the political and educational force of global culture.
Giroux has published more than 40
books and 300 academic articles. Since arriving at McMaster, Giroux has been a
featured faculty lecturer, and has published nine books, including his most
recent work, The University in Chains: Confronting
the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex.
Giroux's writing has won many
awards, including Distinguished Scholar (Miami University), Visiting
Distinguished Professor Award for 1987-1988 at the University of
Missouri-Kansas City, the Visiting Asa Knowles Chair Professorship by
Northeastern University in 1995, Tokyo Metropolitan University Fellowship for
Research (1995), Laureate Chapter of Kappa Delta Phi, Distinguished Visiting
Lectureship in art education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in
(1998 and 1999), winner of a Getty Research Institute Visiting Scholar Award
(2000), Hooker Distinguished Visiting Professor at McMaster University (2001),
the James L. Kinneavy Award for the most outstanding article published in JAC
(2001), the Barstow Visiting Scholar at Saginaw Valley State University (2003),
and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by Memorial University of Newfoundland
(2005). Seven of his books have been chosen as significant books of the year by
the American Educational Studies Association.
Giroux was named as one of the
top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to
the Present as part of Routledge's "Key Guides Publication
Series" (2002). (Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org, www.henryagiroux.com, and www.21stcenturyschools.com.
American Youth in the 21st Century: Pathologized, Criminalized and Disposable
By Henry A. Giroux
Punishment and fear have replaced
compassion and social responsibility as the most important modalities mediating
the relationship of youth to the larger social order. Youth within the last two
decades have come to be seen as a source of trouble rather than as a resource
for investing in the future, and in the case of poor black and Hispanic youth
are increasingly treated as either a disposable population, cannon fodder for
barbaric wars abroad, or the source of most of society's problems. Hence, young
people now constitute a crisis that has less to do with improving the future
than with denying it. As Larry Grossberg points out, "It has become common
to think of kids as a threat to the existing social order and for kids to be
blamed for the problems they experience. We slide from kids in trouble, kids
have problems, and kids are threatened, to kids as trouble, kids as problems,
and kids as threatening." This was exemplified when the columnist Bob
Herbert reported in the New York Times that "parts of
Under the reign of neoliberal
politics with its hyped-up social Darwinism and theater of cruelty, the popular
demonization and "dangerousation" of the young now justifies
responses to youth that were unthinkable 20 years ago, including
criminalization and imprisonment, the prescription of psychotropic drugs, psychiatric
confinement, and zero tolerance policies that model schools after prisons.
School has become a model for a punishing society in which children who commit
a rule violation as minor as a dress code infraction or slightly act out in
class can be handcuffed, booked, and put in a jail cell. Racism, inequality,
and poverty are on full display in the growing resegregation of public schools
in the
In
Clearly, there is more at stake under the current regime of neoliberal politics
than an attack on children largely characterized by "negative labels and
characterizations of youth [that] are falsely totalizing" and punitive
laws and public policies. Youth have also become collateral damage for
conservatives and neoliberal advocates who want to dismantle the social state
and in doing so justify themselves by pointing to an alleged rise of a generation
of disorderly and dangerous youth dependent upon government entitlements.
Within this discourse, government support for young people is both undermined
and inappropriately blamed for creating a generation of kids labeled as
psychologically damaged, narcissistic, violent, and out of control.
Scapegoating youth as both a generation of suspects and a threat to the social
order allows conservatives and neoliberals to further privatize those public
spheres that youth need, such as education and health care, while developing
policies that move away from social investment to matters of punishment and
containment. In this instance, the punishing state combines with the logic of
the market to produce priorities and policies that disinvest in the future of
children and assert a ruthlessness that largely treats them as reified
commodities or disposable populations. Both childhood and the state are now
being reimagined in ways that reveal the priorities of a society that has fully
embraced the reckless abandon of casino capitalism, where the only rules that
matter are made to order by powerful corporations and rich investors. How else
to interpret neoliberal-inspired government programs that in the midst of
deepening inequality, rising levels of poverty, catastrophic increases in
failed mortgages, and growing unemployment invest more in prisons than in
public and higher education?
It is more necessary than ever to
register youth as a theoretical, moral, and political center of concern, even
as it is increasingly evident that youth are one of our lowest national
priorities. It is crucial to connect the current crisis in democracy to the war
against young people. Doing so will remind adults of their ethical and
political responsibility to invest in youth as a symbol for not only securing a
democratic future but also keeping alive those elements of civic imagination,
culture, and education that subordinate economic principles to democratic
values. The category of youth may be one of the most important referents for
beginning a critical examination about the pernicious consequences of a society
driven by market values, one that not only abstracts young people from the
future but shapes the present in a theater of war in which youth become the
most innocent victims. Youth provide a powerful touchstone for a critical
discussion about the long-term consequences of neoliberal policies, which
undermine any viable notion of justice, equality, and freedom, while also
gesturing toward those conditions that make a democratic future possible. Many
young people are part of social movements that not only address these crucial
issues but also provide a politics, modes of resistance, and connective
relations that adults should take seriously as part of their own civic and
political formation at the beginning of the new millennium.
About
Me: The above passage comes from the book, Youth in a Suspect Society:
Democracy or Disposability? By Henry A. Giroux, who currently chairs the Global
TV Network Professorship at
Ugly Truth: Most
By Liliana Segura
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court
heard two cases that could have major implications for the way juvenile
offenders are treated in our criminal justice system. Sullivan v. Florida and
Graham v. Florida both involve men who are serving life without the possibility
of parole for crimes they were convicted of as teenagers -- crimes in which no
one was killed.
Monday's oral arguments covered a
lot of ground, including whether life-without-parole is comparable to the death
penalty (which has been banned for juveniles); whether the purpose, ultimately,
is about deterrence or retribution -- "What is the State's interest in
keeping ... the defendant in custody for the rest of his life if he has been
rehabilitated and is no longer a real danger?" -- whether, for sentencing
purposes, there's any practical difference between a 13-year-old or a
10-year-old -- or, for that matter, an 18-year-old and a 17-and-11-month-old
("the line has to be drawn somewhere.") At points, it got downright
philosophical ("Why does a juvenile have a constitutional right to hope,
but an adult does not?" asked Justice Kennedy.) But at the center of the
argument was the question of whether children -- and their potential for
rehabilitation -- should be judged by the same standards as that of grown-ups.
"To not recognize the difference between a child and an adult is cruel and
unusual," defense attorney Bryan Stevenson told Justice Antonin Scalia.
Conspicuously absent from the oral arguments, however, was any discussion of
race. The one time Stevenson attempted to mention it, as one of the
"arbitrary features" of the distribution of life-without-parole
sentences -- these prisoners are "disproportionately kids of color,"
Stevenson said -- he was interrupted by Justice Alito, who questioned the
reliability of his statistics. ("What is your response to the State's
argument that these statistics are not peer-reviewed?" he asked.)
It can be tricky to pin down exact numbers when it comes to specific prison
populations from state to state, particularly given the differences between
sentencing statutes across the country. And states have not traditionally kept
track of how many juveniles are in their adult prisons. But when it comes to
juvenile lifers, there are some figures that have been widely accepted (and not
contested by the state of
"There are 73 children 14 and younger who have been imprisoned for life
without parole," Stevenson told the Court. "...For the age of 13 and
younger, there are only nine kids, and that's including both kids convicted of
homicide and non-homicide. For non-homicide, there are only two. They are both
in
What he did not get to say is that of the vast majority of kids who are
sentenced to die in prison are black. This is unfortunate. Racism has been
central to the policies that led to the rise in life sentences for juveniles in
the first place -- and not just in
Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency,
wrote in 2005 that in the years that followed the hysteria over superpredators,
"More than 40 states made it easier to transfer children to adult criminal
courts. Educators enacted 'zero-tolerance' policies to make it easier to expel
youngsters from school, and numerous communities adopted youth curfews. Many
jurisdictions turned to metal detectors in public schools, random locker
searches, drug tests for athletes and mandatory school uniforms.
The panic was bipartisan. Every crime bill debated by Congress during the
Paving the way was the
Today, the results are a bit perverse. According to Florida State Law Professor
Paolo Annino, "
Annino and Harper both point to what Harper calls the "unintended
consequences" of
Florida Attorney General Bill
McCollum agrees. In his brief filed in Graham, McCollum argues that it was
"As a member of Congress in the 1990s," they wrote, "[McCollum]
promised the
The "superpredator"
myth -- and the racism that breathed life into it -- has been a driving force
behind the rush to incarcerate youths of color across the country for years.
That the human effects would go undiscussed by the Court may come as no
surprise given the justices' routine upholding of other laws that
disproportionately affect people and families of color. But in a country with
2.3 million prisoners, leaving race completely out of the decision would not
just be willful ignorance; it would amount to what Bryan Stevenson has called
an "appalling silence."
This excerpt comes from the second part of a two-part series posted by Liliana
Segura, an AlterNet staff writer and editor of Rights & Liberties and World
Special Coverage. Her work can be found at http://twitter.com/LilianaSegura.
Stacking the Deck Against Kids
By Bob Herbert
Every year at Thanksgiving, parts
of the Upper West Side of
The weather isn't always kind. I've seen the kids out there in snow, in
freezing rain, in winds that threaten to send the balloons and their handlers
soaring to distant venues. It doesn't seem to matter. The children come into
the neighborhood in waves, holding the hands of adults or riding atop their
shoulders, smiling, laughing, playing hide-and-seek among the police
barricades. Finally, inevitably, they end up staring in absolute open-mouthed,
wide-eyed awe as the mammoth, colorful helium-filled creations of their
favorite characters begin making their majestic way down Central Park West.
We have an obligation and an opportunity at this special moment in history to
do right by these youngsters, and all the rest of
The American economy is broken,
ruined by the greed and irresponsibility of fabulously wealthy corporate
chieftains and their shabby acolytes and enablers in government. While Wall
Street is handing out billions in bonuses, American families are struggling
with joblessness, home foreclosures and rampant debt. The economic woes are
exacting a fierce toll on family life, and children are taking a big hit -
emotionally, psychologically and otherwise.
One effect of the Great
Recession, according to a recent series in The Times, has been a big jump in
the number of runaway children, many of them living in dangerous conditions on
the street.
Family homelessness is also up, and poverty is increasing. More than a third of
all black children in
A sense of urgency may be starting to emerge. With President Obama's jobs
summit approaching, representatives from labor and progressive organizations
gathered in
Millions of youngsters like those who were suffused with such delight at the
Thanksgiving Day parade are being buffeted by an economy that is eroding their
quality of life, curtailing their educational opportunities and undermining
their prospects for economic success as adults. That more attention is not
being paid to this growing disaster is criminal.
Groups represented at the meeting in
All of that, in my view, would amount to just a first step. We remain stuck in
an economic model that not only permits but encourages the continued existence
of financial institutions that are too big to fail, which means that when one
or more of them fail - as will surely happen at some point - we'll again be
rushing to "save the system" by bailing them out at taxpayers'
expense.
The system remains grotesquely unfair, with the deck stacked against working
people, even as we're desperate to have them sustain the economy with nonstop
consumer purchases. Keep in mind that at the start of the recession the
collective wealth of the richest 1 percent of Americans was greater than that
of the bottom 90 percent combined. The economic and political clout of that
bottom 90 percent has only weakened since then.
We still have a hideously
dysfunctional public education system, one that has mastered the art of
manufacturing dropouts and functional illiterates. We have not even begun to
turn that around.
We still keep fighting tragic, futile, stupid wars, squandering lives and
resources and creative energies that could be put to use right here at home,
where the need for nation-building is beyond critical.
The
Disgruntled wants to know: On November 16,
the Australian government offered an official apology to the Forgotten
Australians, survivors of the roughly 500,000 children who were sent to
orphanages or Homes between 1930 and 1970. These children, who were separated
from their families, endured neglect, exploitation, brutality and, in some
instances, sexual abuse, poor health care and education; many came from British
families struggling with severe poverty or from institutions in the UK. Once in
Disgruntled
says: Nobody was surprised when President Obama ordered an additional
30,000 troops to
Disgruntled
feels: Desperation! The black middle class has all but disappeared down
the rabbit hole of the Great Recession. There is a great deal of speculation
that this class of blacks will not reappear any time soon. And, with its
absence from the
Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and
Phone Calls
Email Nightwolfjw@aol.com... Jay Winter
Nightwolf's Native American Winter Relief Project 2009 Continues ...We Need
Your Help NOW!!! The poorest people in
Email www.nytimes.com ...In Job Hunt, College
Degree Can't Close Racial Gap...By Michael Luo...That race remains a serious
obstacle in the job market for African-Americans, even those with degrees from
respected colleges, may seem to some people a jarring contrast to decades of
progress by blacks, culminating in President Obama's election. But there is
ample evidence that racial inequities remain when it comes to employment. Black
joblessness has long far outstripped that of whites. And strikingly, the
disparity for the first 10 months of this year, as the recession has dragged
on, has been even more pronounced for those with college degrees, compared with
those without. Education, it seems, does not level the playing field - in fact,
it appears to have made it more uneven. College-educated black men, especially,
have struggled relative to their white counterparts in this downturn, according
to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate for black
male college graduates 25 and older in 2009 has been nearly twice that of white
male college graduates - 8.4 percent compared with 4.4 percent.