Cross-posted from ColorLines.com
What the state’s new immigration law teaches us about the dissembling language of bias in the 21st century.
By Daisy Hernández
A few weeks ago, I wrote that we’re in the age of the media-savvy racist. It’s a time in our nation when even the racists know it’s not cool to get caught on a YouTube video slinging the N-word at a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. That would be so…Jim Crow and that would be pretty bad. So pains are taken on MSNBC and Twitter alike to use other words (socialist, illegal) and when needed to even denounce racism.
Welcome, ladies and señores, to the media-savvy race game, where the objective is to say anything to avoid being called a racist.
This explains how last Friday Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed a bill into law that basically says, “Cops can use the color of your skin as one factor for demanding proof of citizenship,” and then went on to tell reporters that “racial profiling is illegal.”
It also explains how President Obama can call the new Arizona law “misguided” while his own administration’s first year in office had the highest levels of deporting immigrants in history.
In the age of the media-savvy racist, racism is not the action of many but the sound byte of a few. It’s pulling out the N-word during a rally or killing someone while calling them “a beaner.” It’s passing a law that says the color of your skin is the sole factor for being detained. And Gov. Brewer wants you to know that having brown skin is not the only reason you’ll be detained in Arizona. That would be racist. Having brown skin is just one reason you’ll be detained. To drive her point home, Gov. Brewer made sure that the new Arizona law had a soulmate.
Executive Order 2010-09 declares (in just a short amount of jargon) that cops must get training on the proper ways to racially profile. Okay, technically it says that police officers must be trained on what constitutes reasonable suspicion. But the point is well taken: Gov. Brewer does not condone racism.
Now, it’s easy to look at the new law, commonly called SB-1070, from the vantage point of New York City or Oakland and sneer, “What racists.” It’s much harder to say that this is where our national conversation on race stands today.
We don’t yell racism when Obama’s administration deports hundreds of thousands of men and women and even teenagers. We didn’t say anything of race in 2008 when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, then Arizona’s governor, signed a law forcing employers to verify every employees’ social security number. We barely mentioned racism in the nineties when federal officials decided to beef up border patrol and force migrants to travel the Arizona desert, where they would either die or be easier to catch in the sweltering heat.
But put it on paper that race will explicitly be one reason why the cop is pulling over brown folks and we’re all screaming “racist!”
This isn’t to suggest that SB-1070 isn’t racist or that we shouldn’t be raising hell. But the real opportunity here is to say that racism is more than one new law dictating you have to show citizenship papers if you have brown skin. It’s a whole set of policies at the state and federal level that has a disproportionate impact on brown people.
If we show up in Arizona to just fight this one new law, then we’re buying into the media-savvy race game ourselves. And we’ll lose.
Cross-posted from ColorLines
From undocumented dads to gay kids, we’d never seen TV like that. Here are five ways the show blew up the small screen—with video to prove it.
By Jorge Rivas
The remarkable “Ugly Betty” ended its five-season, primetime run last Thursday night, and the TV landscape’s a lot flatter for the loss. Say what you will about the ABC dramedy’s quality over the past couple seasons. The show featured a cast of brown-skinned characters that were unprecedented in primetime television. The series featured smart and strong Latinas, a powerful Black woman and even an undocumented father from Mexico. Not to mention the show’s humanistic handling of its gay and transgender characters. Just one of these characters would radicalize most primetime TV shows.
In the end, though, critics say the multiple storylines these characters spawned did the show in, by stealing Betty’s spotlight. During its first three seasons, “Ugly Betty” aired on Thursday nights, where it was mostly successful. However, when viewership dropped ABC shuffled the show around and lost even more viewers. On Jan. 27, 2010, ABC announced it was canceling the series.
That’s a shame, and here are five reasons why—along with a compilation of scenes that make the point better than I can.
No. 1—It was real. Networks are increasingly targeting Latino viewers, but “Ugly Betty” was the first primetime show to address real issues Latinos in the U.S. face—like immigration laws and trying to assimilate to U.S. culture. Lisa Navarrete, a vice president for the National Council of La Raza says “the plot line illustrated the complexity of the lives of many undocumented immigrants who are otherwise integrated into American life.”
No. 2—Betty Suarez was no Jennifer Lopez. And she was the first TV Latina who lived in “both” worlds—the white professional Manhattan world and a Mexican working class home in Queens, NY.
No. 3—It was queer. Betty’s family accepted her brother Justin’s love for musicals and fashion from a very young age and never discouraged him from following his interests—which included Austin, his boyfriend. The show also provided a compelling and human portrait of Alex Meade, who transformed into Alexis.
No. 4—It opened other closets, too. Ignacio Suarez’s undocumented immigration status had its own storyline. That’s a coming out tale for 2010.
No. 5—And still, it was a family affair. “Ugly Betty” did all of this while still bridging the generational divide. Tias and Ninas alike were glued to Betty La Fea.
Originally published on ColorLines
By Jamilah King and Jorge Rivas
John McCain. Newt Gingrich. CNBC. Fox News. Even poor old Michael Steele. It’s taken a whole lotta leaders to keep this party going. Click your way down memory lane.
Ironically, it all started with a quintessentially Black oratorical device: the call and response. John McCain asked his campaign rally if they knew who Barack Obama was. Somebody shouted back, “A terrorist!” And so it began: About thirteen months of madness in a public square dominated by the Tea Party’s wild, demonstrably false but still lasting claims about both the president and his agenda. But they didn’t do it on their own. Conservative think tanks and lobby groups, corporate media outlets and the Republican Party have all kept the party jumping—and profited from it.
We’ve put together an interactive timeline of that dismal history. Watch the videos, follow the links, then forward along.
Cross-posted from ColorLines
Stories abound of programs that turn out workers with new, promising skills—who can’t find jobs.
By Yvonne Liu
Jason Smith needs a job. For two years, he’s been submitting applications and waiting by the phone for a callback. Sometimes, he gets a response, but the ratio of applicants to openings is at historic highs, so he hasn’t been hired. That wouldn’t make Smith much different from the 15 million Americans who are out of work, except that he was supposed to be among those leading us into a promising 21st century economy.
Originally posted on ColorLines.com
Our economic crisis is about a lot more than lost jobs and evaporating 401Ks. It’s closing off options for women in abusive relationships.
By Daisy Hernández
Today marks the end of Women’s History Month and I spent these last couple of weeks at colleges across the country talking about feminism, racial justice and media. From Michigan to Florida to Minnesota, I heard students debate what activism looks like for their generation while fielding their questions about immigration and hearing their fears that when graduation comes they might not find a job.
The conversation that stayed with me though took place in Michigan, a state where the economy has imploded spectacularly.
A student at Eastern Michigan University, Laura Hoehner, 24, works part-time counseling women who are getting beat up by their boyfriends or husbands. Sometimes the violence is physical; always it’s emotional and psychological. Increasingly, she says, it’s economic.
“He has the job; she doesn’t. She has to ask for an allowance,” says Laura. “He gives her X amount for groceries. He’s the dad in the picture.”
She points to one of her clients as an example. The woman had given birth to the couple’s first child and her partner’s family gave him $300 to help with groceries. But her partner, who received the cash, lied and said it was only $100, only enough to buy milk, eggs, juice and a Swifter mop. The new mom was left to dip into what money she had to provide groceries for the family of three. Money had become one more weapon for the abuser.
Advocates call it “economic abuse” and it’s part of the rise in domestic violence that they report happening nationwide in this recession. The last data available on the issue is a 2004 report by the National Institute of Justice, an agency of the Department of Justice, which found that when unemployment rates go up among men so does violence against women. This is of particular significance for Black and Latino communities where unemployment rates are in the double digits.
Stats on domestic violence though aren’t released every month along with unemployment data. As such, we’re trained to place the major issues of the day into their little silos: Women’s rights over here. Job issues over there. Health care to the left and the war in Afghanistan to the right.
But the stories Laura shared with me suggest that if we don’t pay attention to the so-called women’s issues then our chances at a real economic recovery are nil because creating more Dunkin Donuts-type jobs isn’t going to save women (or anyone else for that matter).
Last month, for example, our ColorLines video team released a half hour TV show on race and the economy. In it, Tisha, a single Black mom in Connecticut, spoke about reaching a point where she had to go back to her child’s father, an abusive partner. In one of the show’s most poignant moments, she said she felt she had no other option because she knew he could help pay the bills.
Low-wage jobs—in the absence of access to higher education, child care and a political education—simply keeps women vulnerable.
In Michigan, one of Laura’s clients left her abuser and moved in with a sister. Now that her sister’s losing her house in a foreclosure, the young woman is trying to decide if she should go back to the abusive ex or move to a shelter.
And then there’s the safety plan.
Safety plans are what advocates create with women in domestic violence situations. The idea is to have a plan in place for when a woman is ready to leave. This can mean putting an extra set of keys, copies of birth certificates and clothes in a safe spot like the trunk of the car. Ideally of course it means putting aside any little bit of money, a task that’s hard with low-wage jobs and impossible when those jobs disappear.
These problems won’t go away because Walmart or Starbucks start opening more stores and hiring more people. As Siobhan Brooks wrote in a ColorLines essay years ago, when she took part in union negotiations she realized she had never thought of making demands on any system. It was a classic moment of the feminist personal is political ethos, of realizing that what a person can fight for at work is closely tied to what they believe they can have in their personal lives.
And men need this just as much.
The year my own father started working as a janitor after almost two decades in manufacturing as a union member, he seemed to come undone in new ways, snapping at me when I just asked about his work. I don’t think it was that cleaning other people’s dirty plates alone hurt his self-esteem, although clearly it did, but it was also that there was no collective work, no union, no organizing, no sense that he could do anything about what was happening.
In the end, economic problems, as well as domestic violence, are expansive and complex. If our solutions are going to last—and if we really want to honor the histories of the women who’ve come before—then we need to step outside the silos and start thinking about these problems in ways that are much more intricate.
Originally published on ColorLines
Yes, if you think of it as a first step toward fixing a broken system rather than landmark legislation.
By Flávio Casoy
The health care bill that President Obama is signing today is a far cry from our initial vision for universal medical coverage. Undocumented immigrants remain excluded; anti-choice forces cynically use health care to advance their misogynist agenda; and the paradigm that health care is about profit, not people, remains unchallenged.
Did we lose? Have we failed?
No. This legislation is a first step in fixing a broken health care system and improving the lives of millions of people of color.
When it goes into effect, the law will expand the eligibility of the Medicaid program to people earning 133 percent of the Federal Poverty Level or less (currently that’s set at $18,310 in yearly income for a family of three). Many states have more generous eligibilities than the federal one, but others do not. The federal expansion then sets a new floor for states. This will be especially meaningful in conservative states since now everyone in every state earning 133 percent of the Federal Poverty Level or less is eligible for Medicaid.
The legislation will also expand Medicaid eligibility to adults who have no children and who’ve faced more restricted access in the past; this will be especially important for younger Americans and men of color. According to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, almost a quarter of Americans who don’t have health insurance today will be covered under Medicaid over the next 10 years.
The Medicaid expansion is critical for communities of color. More than a half of the country’s uninsured are people of color, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, and that rate would be even higher if it weren’t for public insurance programs such as Medicaid. Twenty percent of nonelderly Blacks are uninsured and 30 percent depend on Medicaid or other public programs. The numbers are comparable among Latinos and Native Americans: 26 percent and 28 percent, respectively, use Medicaid or similar programs. Whites, by comparison, have greater access to jobs and as a result to employer-based insurance. Only 13 percent of whites depend on public programs and only 13 percent live without insurance.
What the new law doesn’t do for Medicaid unfortunately is resolve problems at the state level.
Each state decides how to administer the program with federal dollars. While the legislation increases how much the federal government is spending on Medicaid it doesn’t alter how much or how little states are putting in. The program’s chronic budget problems have to do with states not being ale to afford their piece of the pie and the federal law doesn’t address this. This also means that depending on the state they’re in, patients may still find it hard to get a doctor who takes Medicaid.
Two other features of the new law will be important for communities of color.
Employers with more than 200 employees will now have to offer health benefits to all of them, even low-income ones, and those with at least 50 employees would be required to pay a fine if they don’t offer health insurance. Also, businesses with at least 50 employees who impose a waiting period before employees can enroll in coverage would have a sliding scale fine based on the length of the waiting period. This will be important for people of color who are overrepresented in these low-income jobs.
One of the most discussed elements of the new legislation is a ban on denying or rescinding coverage based on pre-existing conditions. As it stands now, private insurance companies may deny or cut off people who are older or sicker if they had a medical illness prior to application or enrollment. Given that communities of color are more likely to experience chronic illness because of a lifetime of being denied health care access, these insurance industry practices disproportionately harm them. The proposal would ban this practice and make it easier for people to get and to keep health insurance.
While the legislation President Obama is signing today is less than our desired ideal, this will be a lifeline for millions of people of color who are now blocked from getting health care services they desperately need. The real danger moving forward will be in thinking that the work is done when in fact it has just begun.
Flávio Casoy, MD is a resident psychiatrist in San Francisco, CA
Re-printed from ColorLines
By Erasmo Guerra
Despite Mexico’s bad press, one writer finds that the border spirit lives on.
February 19, 2010
At the San Antonio bus station, the Americanos bus idled in lane two. I got on line behind a young guy on crutches, a desert-camouflage rucksack on his back that read “National Guardsmen Since 1836.” Overhead announcements continued to blare for the McAllen/Brownsville/Matamoros route now boarding.
A second-generation Texas-Mexican, I grew up on the U.S.-Mexico border and have been living in New York City for the past 16 years. All last year I kept up with the papers and watched the nightly reports about the increasing border violence and the spread of swine flu. I endured the fear mongers who insisted on more agents, even troops, and those who made taco jokes at our expense. Even my mother, who still lived in the Rio Grande Valley, made me wince when she admitted in her Sunday night phone calls that things back home had “gotten bien ugly.”
I remembered a different place, where panaderías sold gingerbread pig cookies and going across the border was just a routine, care-free activity to buy birthday piñatas and string puppets for us kids, discount cartons of Salems for my father and sacks of candied pumpkin for my mother.
So while I was in San Antonio recently, I decided to head back to see just how bad and broken the border was.
Cross-posted to Jack and Jill Politics
President Obama says the stimulus saved or created 2 million jobs in 2009. But is the recovery really working? The American dream of good jobs and strong communities is still just a dream for too many. The unfair economy hurts certain groups more, and that ends up hurting everyone. From the bottom line to the unemployment line to the color line, watch a new in-depth program from Link TV and Applied Research Center for a closer look.
“ColorLines: Race and Economic Recovery” follows communities making ends meet in The Great Recession. The program narrates the moving story of Tisha, mother of three in Connecticut, facing a social safety net shredded further by the crisis. Then the program goes to Los Angeles where community-based organization SCOPE has mobilized to win green jobs for communities of color.
This half-hour magazine-style show is hosted by Chris Rabb, founder of Afro-Netizen and author of forthcoming book Invisible Capital: How Unseen Forces Shape Entrepreneurial Opportunity.
The in-studio guest is Tram Nguyen, a journalist who has written extensively on racial justice and author of We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant America After 9/11. Tram is former editor of ColorLines magazine and now works at the California Reinvestment Coalition.
Orginally posted on ColorLines.com
By Jordan Flaherty
Can a social justice candidate win an election in the new New Orleans?
January 28, 2010
On New Year’s Eve in 2004, nine months before Hurricane Katrina hit, bouncers in the Bourbon Street club Razzoo’s killed a Black college student named Levon Jones. The outrage led to near-daily protests outside the club, threats of a Black tourist boycott of the city and a mayor’s commission to explore the issue of racism in the French Quarter. Despite widely publicized advance warning, a “secret shopper” audit of the Quarter found rampant discrimination in local businesses. Bars had different dress codes, admission charges and drink prices—all based on whether the patron was Black or white.
James Perry oversaw that audit as director of the organization Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center and he’s now running for mayor of New Orleans.
The election will be on Saturday, February 6 (with a run-off in March if no candidate wins more than 50 percent) and is shaping up to be an historic milestone in the city’s post-Katrina political realignment. After more than 30 years of Black mayors, the best-funded and highest-polling of the 11 candidates in this election, Mitch Landrieu, is white, and the seven-person city council may be heading towards a 5-2 white majority.
Outside of New Orleans, progressives and liberals are excited about Perry. They’re receiving emails, Tweets and FaceBook updates about his progressive platform. But in New Orleans, the candidate who seems to have the most to offer the city is relatively unknown.
That’s surprising given Perry’s work over the years. Since Hurricane Katrina, he’s testified before Congress about the obstacles to rebuilding New Orleans and the larger Gulf Coast region. He’s also overseen lawsuits and reports that have challenged housing discrimination in the city and its surrounding suburbs. A charismatic speaker with a broad and deep knowledge of the issues facing the city, Perry has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars—mostly through small donations—over the last year.
