The Price of American Eugenics

Forty years later, only one state is making reparations for thousands of forced sterilizations. From the early decades of the 20th century until 1974, 32 states in the union mandated the sterilization of more than 65,000 citizens. At the behest of government eugenics boards, girls and women had their tubes tied or uteri removed, and boys and men their vasa deferentia snipped because they had been deemed unfit to reproduce. Still others came under the scalpel of private doctors, and this second group makes the calculations difficult—65,000 represents only the number of sterilizations where there was municipal paperwork. In 2013, the North Carolina General Assembly passed the Eugenics Compensation statute, and last week the state’s department of commerce began the long-awaited disbursement of financial reparations to victims of sterilization. Two hundred twenty living victims will receive checks of $20,000 each—220 checks, out of 768 claims. Between 1929 and 1974, North Carolina sterilized at least 7,600 people. However mortifying the disparity here, we must give the Assembly credit for passing legislation that no other state has so far brought to a vote; by contrast, California has kept positively mum about its own similar history, which accounts for a third of all American sterilizations. READ MORE

Tale of Two Cities: NYPD's Racist Arrests Create Class War in New York

Photo Credit: Sam Grace Lewis on Flickr

This Saturday, May 12, in New York City, an alliance of more than 100 community activists, mothers, city councilmembers and religious leaders marched from Foley Square to One Police Plaza, demanding an end to police tactics they say have resulted in two New Yorks -- or as the action was appropriately titled, “A Tale of Two Cities.”

VOCAL-New York, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), the Drug Policy Alliance, and other groups organized the event to demand an end to the racial segregation they say Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly actively enforce. The demonstration hinged tightly on the power of a united New York. Nine white New Yorkers attempted civil disobedience at the police headquarters, but were (ironically) not arrested.

Fearing for their children’s futures, many mothers in the crowd considered the action -- a day before Mother’s Day -- a timely mechanism to defend their children from injustice at the hands of the NYPD.

Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, said criminal justice is a mother’s issue. “Reproductive justice doesn’t just mean the right to decide to end a pregnancy or to continue to term,“ Paltrow said. ”It means the right to go to term, to have children, and not have to worry that when they are born, they will be arrested because of the color of their skin.”

For the NYPD's stats to add up, they'd have to have stopped every young, black man living in the city once--and then some. Both marijuana arrests and street stops are soaring under Bloomberg’s administration, but the data shows that rise in aggressive policing is only apparent in certain communities. Demonstrators stressed that pot arrests and stop-and-frisk have come to epitomize a city-wide problem requiring urgent redress.    READ MORE

It's Not Just Trayvon: 9 Other Cases That Prove People of Color Can't Safely Walk the Streets of America

Lynchings and racist murders didn't end with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Even in 2012, people of color can't walk in safety in many parts of the country.

March 29, 2012

The death of Trayvon Martin has lit up the media for much of the past month. While there's a certain degree of added tragedy due to Martin's age, people of all ages have good reason to fear vigilantism and police brutality in the United States. It's worth noting that despite nearly 200 attempts, a federal anti-lynching law was never passed in the United States. Further, Florida's controversial "stand your ground" law, and others like it, have led to what is essentially legalized murder in several areas of the country.

Lynchings and racist murders didn't end with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Even in the 21st century, people of color can't walk in safety in many parts of the country. Here are several cases that illustrate this sad truth.

1. Bernard Goetz    READ MORE

The New Southern Strategy: Quote Ayn Rand to Blame the Middle Class

It's a well-documented fact of history that for the past half-century at least, conservatives have used race resentment as a way of cutting the safety net in order to further enrich the already well-to-do. If the objective is to cut Medicaid or food stamps, bring up stories of lazy (black/brown) ne'er-do-wells, young bucks and welfare queens in the to steel the minds of white voters and fool them into destroying their own safety net. It's been a remarkably successful tactic, and one that is still being used with frequency to this day.

One of the keys to the race-baiting attack has been to take the social malaise that develops in economically depressed communities and attribute that malaise to some in-born defect of the people of the communities themselves. By blaming poor outcomes on genetic and cultural moral lassitude rather than pre-existing economic oppression, it becomes much easier to deny social services to those communities while lower taxes on wealthy white "producers."

Throw in some hippie-punching and a blame campaign waged against the cosmopolitan values of the post-60s to account for everything else wrong with America that can be fixed with economic libertarianism mixed with strict religion-based social controls, and you have the basic political and economic program of the Right. It has been very effective.

But that program is now becoming a victim of its own success. As economic libertarianism has dragged down middle-class wages and benefits, suddenly the social malaise that has long gripped minority communities is starting to make itself felt across the entirety of America, including among working-class whites.    READ MORE

Screwing Over Urban America: Why the GOP's Top Contenders Hate Cities

For the Republican contenders, urban areas are out of sight and out of mind.

January 3, 2012

The Republican presidential primary has covered significant ground. Against a backdrop of Iowan cornfields, candidates have debated socialism, capitalism, immigration and American exceptionalism, and have even touched on the finer points of Shariah law and the Federalist Papers. One thing you don’t hear about is America’s cities and the ongoing, and growing, urban crisis.

There are some oblique references, like Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that child labor laws be modified so that poor children can work as school janitors. “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods,” mused Gingrich, “have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works … They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.”

Gingrich’s comment is a surviving dog-whistle politics that include new state laws to drug-test those on public assistance and the ongoing effort to cut food stamps (and Gingrich did call Obama the “food stamp president”). The specter of the black ghetto still scripts urban dwellers as villains (often as thieves robbing the citizen either directly, or as in this Rick Santorum comment, indirectly: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money”). But unlike the era of Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, today cities are more ignored than attacked. And this goes well beyond Iowa.

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