by Christine A. Scheller | Nov 14, 2011 | Feature, Headline News |
Alabama’s ‘Incredible’ Immigration Law
Alabama’s new immigration law is reportedly the toughest in the nation. The law, HB 56, grants police license to question and arrest crime suspects about their immigration status, and requires renters, car buyers, and those connecting public utilities to verify their legal status, CNN reported.
If the goal is to scare undocumented workers out of Alabama, as critics contend, it’s working when it comes to farm workers and school aged children, some say.
“Incredible” is how National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference President Rev. Samuel Rodriguez described the law in an interview with CNN. “It is a repeat of the chapter lived by African Americans, but now the African Americans are Latinos and immigrants,” said Rodriguez.
A Voice Crying in the Evangelical Wilderness
Although Roman Catholic, Episcopal, and United Methodist churches filed suit to block the law, Rodriguez and other Latino evangelical leaders told CNN that their own voices are missing from the debate. But I know from personal experience that his isn’t one of them.
I interviewed Rodriguez for a 2006 Christianity Today article about how Southern California churches were dealing with the undocumented immigrants in their midst. He said then that protecting our borders is important, but so is Leviticus 19:34, which instructs us to treat the “alien” living among us the same as the native-born, because the people of God were once aliens in Egypt.
Rodriguez has been trying at least since 2005 to convince his white evangelical brethren to stand up for these principles.
“I would like to see the white evangelical church make some clear-cut statements that would resonate with the Leviticus 19 principle alongside with what we are stating: Let’s protect our borders; there is a legitimate border issue. . . . Nonetheless, we need to work at creating programs within our churches that will facilitate the expeditious acquisition of documents, residency, and citizenry requirements for these Hispanic immigrants,” he said.
Minutemen Founder Reconsiders Racism
A key activist in the opposition movement in 2006 was Jim Gilchrist, founder of the controversial border protection group, The Minutemen Project. I met Gilchrist at a meeting of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, where he was a featured guest.
When I interviewed him, he said he hoped churches weren’t ministering to undocumented immigrants “at all,” and amidst the propaganda and conspiracy theorizing at the meeting, one audience member described unauthorized Mexicans as “cockroachs.” If I recall correctly, no one, including Gilchrist, objected.
Gilchrist has apparently had a change of heart. In an Atlantic interview with Conor Friedersdorf, Gilchrist said that after years of infighting in the movement he founded, he realizes that a small percentage of it is “nothing but a bunch of skinheads.”
“From the far right, you get those who were attracted to my movement because they were outright, incurable racists. It’s white power fanatics. But they’re no different than the black power fanatics or the brown berets. Every race, color and creed seems to have their five percent of incurable fascists that are just looking for a place to hide. Or a place to infiltrate and take over,” said Gilchrist.
Gilchrist can’t be convinced that human beings will ever see each other as equals, he said. “There is going to be bias and we need to have those laws to protect us from each other,” he concluded.
What do you think?
Are undocumented immigrants and Latinos the “new African Americans” or does racism know no color as Gilchrist now contends?
by Christine A. Scheller | Nov 10, 2011 | Feature, Headline News |
What if it wasn’t rape?
FALLEN LEGEND: Former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno was fired after failing to take more decisive action away from the field.
Amidst all the horrific stories in the grand jury report about retired Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s alleged sexual assaults on boys he met through his Second Mile charity is the somewhat less sensational story of “Victim 6.”
This boy was 11 years old in 1998 when Sandusky picked him up at his home, rubbed his thigh en route to Penn State, briefly worked out with him (but not hard enough for the boy to break a sweat), and then insisted they shower together.
“While in the shower, Sandusky approached the boy, grabbed him around the waist and said, ‘I’m going to squeeze your guts out.’ Sandusky lathered up the boy, soaping his back because, he said, the boy would not be able to reach it. Sandusky bear-hugged the boy from behind, holding the boy’s back against his chest. Then he picked him up and put him under the showerhead to rinse soap out of his hair,” the report says.
What if it was your child?
The boy testified that the incident felt “very awkward.” When he went home with wet hair, his mother questioned him about it, reported what happened to Penn State police, and later confronted Sandusky with a university police officer listening in the next room. Sandusky confessed to the disturbing and suspicious behavior, but there was no arrest.
I pull this story out from the more vile ones in the report because it illustrates what kind of behavior and outcomes most mandatory reporters face, and because it’s important to highlight the fact that it mattered a whole lot that one mother stood up to Sandusky and Penn State, thereby establishing an initial record of an alleged sexual predator’s deviant behavior.
What if it was your best friend?
At The Washington Post, columnist Sally Jenkins provocatively asks readers to forgive Sandusky’s boss, coaching legend Joe Paterno, for not reporting his assistant to police, because, she reasons, Paterno’s friendship with Sandusky blinded him. A friendship that close probably would have blinded you too, she implies.
As former FBI agent and pedophile profiler Ken Lanning tells her: “A hallmark of ‘acquaintance molesters’ is that they tend to be deeply trusted and even beloved. They are not strangers, but ‘one of us.’ They are expert at seducing children and are almost as expert at seducing adults, including parents, into believing in them.”
I’ve seen this happen. That it does isn’t an excuse for Paterno or anyone else who fails to act; it may just explain their initial self-deception. (Men’s Health editor Bill Philips suggests some other possible explanations here.)
What if it was your institution?
Amidst a bevy of posts on this story, American Conservative blogger Rod Dreher said the situation “causes us to reflect on the meaning of loyalty, and the meaning of courage.”
“Loyalty is only a virtue depending on the object of one’s loyalty. A mafioso is loyal, but his is a criminal loyalty,” he says. “The difficulty comes when one is asked to be loyal to a worthy cause or institution that is perpetuating or harboring evil.”
What if it was your culture?
Then Dreher turns the inquisitor’s lamp on himself and compares the Penn State situation to 1950s Jim Crow racism in the Deep South, where he grew up.
“I am seeing every day black people discriminated against, by law. Do I stand up against it? I am sorry to say that I am virtually certain that I would not. To have done so would have required going against … well, everybody in my own community.” But then Dreher imagines how he might’ve reacted had he witnessed a white man raping a black boy. “I think it almost certain that … I would have intervened, even violently,” he says, before confessing candidly: “But unless I was confronted directly with something that heinous, I probably would have euphemized and abstracted the evil away, because I couldn’t have faced my own moral responsibility.”
What if it wasn’t so blatant?
It’s easy to condemn a large, muscular man who doesn’t rip a rapist off a child, and other self-serving bystanders who fail to act. It’s much less clear what to do when the man’s behavior, like Sandusky’s thwarted attempt at “grooming” Victim 6, is wrapped in a fuzzy blanket of ambiguity, friendship, and good deeds.
What would you do?
Ask yourself: Would I have reported that?
by Christine A. Scheller | Nov 7, 2011 | Feature, Headline News |
African Americans Are Better Off
African Americans are not as impoverished as the United States Census Bureau’s 2011 Official Poverty Measure (OPM) stated, according to the bureau’s new Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM).
“This is a group whose families have incomes that are often below the poverty line, so the starting point is an issue for African Americans,” Census Bureau research economist Kathleen Short told UrbanFaith via tele-conference after she presented her SPM report at a Brookings Institution press conference this morning.
“They’re starting with low income, so we’re going to see the benefits received by those families will be effective either in moving them across the poverty line or from the bottom of an income distribution,” she said.
African Americans are also more likely to live in alternative housing arrangements that are taken into account in the new measure, Short said. “When we create these new units, we’re bringing together people who have income who aren’t in the official measure,” she explained.
Addressing Criticisms of Bureau’s Official Poverty Measure
At the press conference, Short introduced the SPM as an “experimental measure” that addresses criticisms of the OPM, but said it “will not be used to estimate eligibility for programs or allocate funds.”
The SPM measures poverty by calculating resources that include cash income and federal government “in-kind” benefits that families can use to meet basic needs. Necessary expenses including, but not limited to taxes, clothing, housing, utilities, child care, child support, and out-out-of-pocket medical expenses are subtracted from the income total in the new measure.
It also assumes that un-related members of a household share resources as an economic unit, takes in to account the cost of living in different geographic regions and community types, and divides households into homeowners with mortgages, homeowners without mortgages, and renters.
The OPM was adopted in 1969 and is based on cash income, the cost of a minimum diet multiplied by three, and household units that only include members related by birth, marriage, or adoption. Unrelated members of the same household over the age of fifteen are treated as individuals in the OPM.
Ron Haskins, a Brookings Institution senior fellow for economic studies, said the Census Bureau “has done exactly the right thing” by producing the SPM, which he speculated will now be the “focus of attention,” even though he fears the OPM will not change.
“Anybody who has ever been involved in a congressional fight on a formula will agree with me,” said Haskins.
Comparing the Old and the New
The Census Bureau’s September 2011 poverty report estimated that there were 46.6 million Americans living in poverty in 2010. The SPM estimates that number to be 49.1 million. The OPM calculated the poverty threshold for 2010 at $22,113, while the SPM calculates the threshold at $24,343.
The SPM estimates lower poverty rates than the OPM for individuals included in new SPM household units, for children, Blacks, renters, those living outside of metropolitan areas, those living in the Midwest and the South, and those covered by only public health insurance.
It shows higher poverty rates for those 18 to 64 years of age, those 65 years of age and older, married-couple families, Whites, Asians, the foreign born, homeowners with mortgages, those with private health insurance, and residents of metropolitan areas, the Northeast, and the West. It also shows an increase in poverty rates for male householders, but no change from the OPM for females.
Short attributed geographic differences to differences in housing costs and said increased poverty rates among the elderly reflect the inclusion of out-of-pocket medical expenses in the SPM.
The initial starting point of cash income is important in determining poverty rates, she said, as are poverty thresholds, federal in-kind benefits, and basic living expenses.
“If a group typically has cash income below the poverty line, then we will find that in-kind benefits are effective at bringing them above that line and few expenses will be effective at bringing them below the poverty line. On the other hand, if we have a group that has income just above the poverty line, we will see expenses that are very effective at raising poverty rates and few effective benefits since many are already above the line,” Short concluded.
An NPR reporter on the conference call asked why other reports show an increase in poverty rates for children and a decrease for the elderly.
“What is reflected in this measure is the fact that transfers the elderly get are in cash for the most part, so you have Social Security benefits that are already in the official measure, while the benefits that children receive, and the families of children, are in-kind benefits that were not typically included in the official measure,” said Short.
Bearing in Mind New Measure’s “Moving Parts”
It’s important to bear in mind the “many moving parts” in the new measure when “making comparisons across measures, across groups, or over time,” Short said in her presentation, and indeed journalists participating in the tele-conference questioned its veracity for reasons already mentioned and because its accuracy is based on the truthfulness of government survey respondents.
“The measure is not perfect,” Short told reporters. She said ongoing research will seek to correct for reporting inaccuracies.
“Some of the parts increase poverty rates and other parts decrease rates,” Short told the Brookings Institution audience. “Determining one reason or finding one smoking gun for differences is difficult.”
The Census Bureau’s hope is that the SPM will provide a more accurate reflection of poverty statistics, she said, and it plans to release an improved SPM one year from now. Its long term goal is to release the SPM with the OPM as “complimentary statistic that provides additional insight.”
What do you think?
Are you surprised to hear that African Americans are in better economic shape than previously reported? Is the new measure an improvement?
by Christine A. Scheller | Nov 2, 2011 | Feature, Headline News |
For anyone who has read Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander’s deeply disturbing book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration
in the Age of Colorblindness, the conviction yesterday of a Brooklyn detective for planting drugs on Yvelisse DeLeon and her boyfriend, Juan Figueroa, should be a welcome one.
“Before announcing the verdict, Justice [Gustin L.] Reichbach scolded the department for what he described as a widespread culture of corruption endemic in its drug units,” The New York Times reported.
“I thought I was not naïve,” Reichbach reportedly said. “But even this court was shocked, not only by the seeming pervasive scope of misconduct but even more distressingly by the seeming casualness by which such conduct is employed.”
I’ve been reading Alexander’s book at bedtime, and it’s not a comforting read. As previously reported in our interview with the author, she contends that mass incarceration of people of color like DeLeon and Figueroa represents a new “racial caste system,” and nothing short of a social revolution can dismantle it.
I heard Alexander speak at the Princeton University “Imprisonment of a Race” conference earlier this year and something she said there has been nagging at me since I picked up her book again. She said the civil rights era strategy of shining a light on model black citizens and distancing ourselves from those with criminal records was a tragic mistake and is no longer viable.
“People of color are no more likely to use or sell drugs than whites. The color blind veneer of the system has made us blind to how racial bias permeates the system. We have to deal with the shame and stigma that keeps people silent,” said Alexander. “We’ve got to make safe places in churches, schools, etc.”
WILD YOUTH: Christine A. Scheller, third from left, in 1979 at age 15.
When I was a drug-using teenager, I was arrested two or three times for nonviolent crimes that were committed when I was under the influence. I spent a couple hours in a jail cell after one arrest and a life-transforming month in a juvenile shelter after a parental conflict over my incorrigibility. Both experiences convinced me that I never wanted to be locked up again.
I’m fortunate that I surrendered my life to Jesus when I was 17, because if it had been another year or two, and I had gotten into the same kind of trouble, I, like other members of my family, would have been saddled with an arrest record that could have limited my choices for far longer than justice would demand.
One of these loved ones spent eight months in prison, and became a Christian there, after police coerced his “friend” into falsely testifying against him. He went straight to Bible College when he was released and has been, for 25 years, a Bible teacher, elder, and pastor, but still can’t work in certain industries because he has a felony conviction on his record.
Another was stopped by California police, ostensibly because of a broken tail light on the car someone else was driving, and was arrested for possession of a hash pipe. No drugs, just a pipe. Bail was set at $20,000. This young man spent two days in jail and never used drugs again, but still isn’t sure if the felony conviction was dropped or not after he completed a diversion program and probation.
Alexander said, “Felon is the new n-word” and we should stop labeling people with it. She also disavowed “repeat offender” and “career criminal,” saying these terms mask the struggle of cycling in and out of an unjust system.
The members of my family with arrest records have managed to learn from and overcome our histories, in part because of the support of our middle class families and in part because we are white.
In a CNN column today about the decline of black political conservatism, Baptist preacher and former Atlanta Journal editorial board member Frederick Johnson said that he used to tell his son that if a racist cop pulled him over because he was black, that was the cop’s fault; but if the cop found drugs in the car, that was his son’s fault.
“Unlike some conservatives, I don’t wish to let either party off the hook,” said Johnson. Amen to that.
According to Alexander, if we were to return to the days before the war on drugs, we would have to release four-out-of-five prisoners who are currently incarcerated. That’s unlikely to happen, she said, because one million people are employed by prisons.
“This system is so deeply rooted now that it’s not going down without a major fight,” Alexander said.
She advocated movement building that includes the work of artists, students, and law enforcement personnel, and said there needs to be consciousness raising within the black community and an eradication of class divisions that keep middle class blacks from advocating for poor ones.
“Activists take the risks, while advocates are professional tinkerers with the system,” she said. “What’s necessary is for those who are advocates to support those who are activists and to envision themselves as activists.”
I’ve taken a small risk here by announcing that there are drug arrests in my personal and family history. I don’t enjoy doing it, but as a Christian I’m so deeply, personally unsettled by the injustice of “mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness” that I feel compelled to confront disabling shame by admitting that I too have been a criminal.
by Christine A. Scheller | Oct 31, 2011 | Feature, Headline News |
A Fiery Debate Breaks Out
CNN’s “Black in America 4: The New Promised Land — Silicon Valley” hasn’t even aired yet and it has already ignited a fierce debate about whether or not tech start-ups succeed based on a pure meritocracy or the culture is tainted by racism like the rest of society. The documentary posits that Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs are mostly young, white and male and follows eight Black entrepreneurs who live together for a two-month immersion program called the NewMe Accelerator.
Online War of Words
As a largely African-American audience watched a screening of the documentary at the Time-Warner building in New York City October 26, a Twitter feud between two tech entrepreneurs featured in the program broke out. The debate started when an audience member tweeted that she wondered what TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington would think of Duke University scholar and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa’s advice to the group that they hire white men to front their companies.
Both in the theater and on the internet, people expressed displeasure with statements Arrington makes in the film. He says, for example, that he doesn’t know a single Black entrepreneur and that he was so eager to promote diversity that he would have put a Black guy onstage at a tech demo event he hosted even if the guy presented a “clown show.”
CNN fanned the flames with an article about the debate on its website Friday and Arrington followed with a response on his blog accusing CNN and journalist Soledad O’Brien of deception and gotcha’ journalism.
“Maybe now some of you can begin to understand why I never wanted to be called a ‘journalist’ at TechCrunch. It is a shameful profession,” Arrington said.
O’Brien fired back today with this measured response:
“I didn’t ambush Arrington and I don’t think he’s a racist. He’s a realist. What has everyone upset is that what he is saying is true — there are not many blacks entrepreneurs succeeding in Silicon Valley. Fewer than 1% of funded tech startups are run by African-Americans.”
In the Time-Warner Theater
While the internet debate raises interesting and important questions, the discussion that O’Brien hosted after the screening is worth recounting.That discussion included one of the entrepreneurs from the documentary, Hank Williams, “digital lifestyle expert” and NPR contributor Mario Armstrong, CNN producer and New York University journalism professor Jason Samuels, and Interactive One Chief Technology Officer Navarrow Wright.
Highlighting a Cross-Section of Black Entrepreneurs
Samuels said he was fascinated by the idea of featuring eight African Americans who represent an economic, social, and educational cross-section of America.
What stuck with Armstrong from the documentary was a statement by tech investor Ron Conway, who said he didn’t know how to recruit Black entrepreneurs. Armstrong wasn’t alone in his response.* The room erupted in indignation and laughter when Conway made this statement on screen.
“I can tell you kids right now that want to be future technologists, but they don’t get the exposure, they don’t have the access, and they don’t have the role models like we’re trying to present. … It’s an inherent problem with the mindset of people holding the purse strings when they say, ‘We can’t recruit; we don’t know how,’ ” said Armstrong.
Helping African Americans Navigate Silicon Valley
Wright was an advisor to the NewMe entrepreneurs and said he focused 60 percent of his time on helping them navigate the race issues they would face in Silicon Valley.
“I had a unique perspective in making them understand the unique challenges they had as African Americans in the valley. Understanding that merit is one thing, but you kind of have to navigate. You have to be ready for the VC [venture capitalist] conversation when the VC brings up, ‘Hey, I’ve watched “Martin,”’ to create a commonality between you in the meeting, because he’s as uncomfortable as you are,” said Wright.
Comparing Experiences
Williams, the oldest and most experienced of the entrepreneurs featured in the documentary, compared his own efforts to those of an nineteen year old Israeli entrepreneur who received $5 million in funding for an undeveloped idea.
“That’s not my experience. I’ve never been able to go and convince somebody to give me money based on a dream. It had to be the train leaving the station,” said Williams.
Consumers, not Creators
The most passionate and vocal member of the panel was Armstrong. He argued that African Americans were early consumers of tech products and made them cool, but said they have generally not been creators.
“It’s not that we don’t want to create. Clearly that’s not the issue. We know how to hustle. We know how to pitch our ideas. We know how to wear multiple hats and be effective in that realm,” said Armstrong.
The technology gap, as he sees it, is because the so-called “digital divide,” focused on everyone gaining access to technology at the expense of asking how it would be used.
The Skill Gap
A budding tech entrepreneur in the audience wanted to know how to make up for a lack of programming skills.
“Get a partner or get a book. Literally, you either have to learn how to do it yourself or have to be the business guy and find a technology guy to partner with to build your company,” said Williams.
Armstrong concurred, advising the young man to learn enough coding to earn the respect of programmers and to gain the knowledge necessary to avoid getting ripped off by them.
“When you hear Michael Arrington talk about the meritocracy and how everything’s equal, they use data and they use those things to keep us shut out, but we have to own the fact that to a certain degree we shut ourselves out,” added Wright. “The reality is if you want to be in this business, you have some onus that there are skills you need to have to gain entry. …Today the barriers are lower than they’ve ever been.”
Armstrong likewise expressed irritation with Arrington, saying, “Out of these eight people, that damn Michael Arrington needs to answer that question and get one out of this so he doesn’t have to say, ‘I don’t know where they are’ anymore.”
Waiting to See What Happens
We weren’t shown the conclusion of “The New Promised Land — Silicon Valley,” so I’ll be watching when it airs November 13 at 8 pm ET on CNN.
How about you? Will you be watching? If you have any thoughts on the debate, please share them with us in the comments section.
*Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed this statement by Mario Armstrong to Jason Samuels.
Go to page 2 for our bonus interview with Soledad O’Brien.
