Women's Rights Employment Law Blog

A detailed report on EEOC perspective appears on the National Law Journal.

By Tresa Baldas

The federal government has launched an initiative aimed at cracking down on discriminatory hiring practices in the workplace -- a program that could land unsuspecting employers in court, employment attorneys are warning.

That's what happened to Walgreen Co. this month, lawyers note, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission hit the national pharmacy chain with a class action alleging widespread racial bias against thousands of African-American workers. EEOC v. Walgreen Co., No. 07-172, (S.D. Ill.).

The suit came one week after the EEOC announced "E-RACE" (Eradicating Racism and Colorism from Employment), an initiative that will have federal investigators paying much closer attention to how minorities are hired and promoted.

FOCUS ON HIRING

Specifically, the EEOC will focus on hiring decisions that are based on names, arrest and conviction records, employment and personality tests and credit scores -- all of which may disparately impact people of color.

For example, an African-American might be denied a job when an arrest record shows up on a background check or if a credit score turns out to be low. Such criteria, which have a disparate impact on minorities, were not considered in the past. But employers are increasingly considering such factors when hiring, and may unwittingly be denying jobs to large classes of minorities.

Many states have laws that restrict employers from asking about or considering criminal records when hiring. The EEOC holds that if an employer denies a job to an applicant because he or she has a criminal record, it could be considered discrimination if the person is a minority.

The EEOC also has a new specialized task force -- formed last year -- that will handle evidence turned up by E-RACE. Regional attorneys and directors will investigate in more detail and attempt to establish a pattern of discrimination within industries or employers, and present it to headquarters for possible litigation.

"I don't want employers to get the impression that they're some kind of bull's-eye," said EEOC attorney Paula Bruner, special assistant to the EEOC chairwoman. "We want them to be aware they need to step up in terms of their compliance with our laws."

According to the EEOC, race discrimination complaints continue to be the number one complaint made to the EEOC. In 2006, a total of 27,238 such complaints were filed. The EEOC also has seen a substantial increase over the past 15 years in discrimination claims based on color, which have soared from 374 in 1992 to 1,241 in 2006.

Continue reading "EEOC Cracks Down on Discriminatory Hiring Practices" »

New Jersey Police Department has come under fire for having harassed black youths based on their race. And has decided to settle the matter with a big check. The report follows:

Bias suit vs. police settled for $275,000

BY ALESHA WILLIAMS

MANALAPAN — A lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey against the Police Department alleging that three black youths were harassed because of their race has been settled for $275,000.

Court records indicate each of the youths will receive about $62,000, with the remainder, nearly $91,000, going to the ACLU for legal services.

But township police maintain there was no wrongdoing. The decision to settle was made by the attorney for the department's insurance company, department attorney Mitchell Ansell said.

The suit was filed in August 2004 on behalf of Sean Anderson, then 12, of Jersey City, Diamond Yorker, then 17, of Manalapan, and Randy Reina, then 18, of Edison.

It charged that on the night of June 21, 2003, Officers Pete Chalfin and Steve Turner
singled the trio out from three white friends while they were all walking on Parkview Way near Buck's Head Park.

According to the complaint, the officers sent the three white youths home, saying, "You don't have to see this," as they proceeded to search and question only the black youths. Reina allegedly was warned not to set foot in Manalapan again. The police ultimately left without charging anyone.

Continue reading "NJ Police settles race case" »

Seattle Times offers a very insightful critique of race relations in the (post)modern America.

We can't address discrimination with policies that ignore color

By Kenneth Einar Himma

Many whites believe governments shouldn't consider race in making any decisions. They typically believe in colorblindness as a state policy, because they think we have solved all race problems since they don't know anyone who still believes the pernicious view that blacks are inferior.

Although attitudes about race have changed for the better, there are still serious problems of race facing us. A government policy of colorblindness not only ignores these problems, but can make them even worse.

A person can consciously believe all races are equal but still have subconscious preferences that cause discrimination. Discrimination can result from racist attitudes; but it can also result from common prejudices and preferences that people don't' even know they have.

It is common for people who reject racist ideologies to unknowingly harbor disparaging stereotypes about race that affect their behavior. This is what happens when someone immediately thinks of a young black man upon hearing about a violent crime, or when a woman reacts to a young black man's presence by clutching her purse tightly.

An important ongoing study shows that most people have automatic preferences for their own race. Project Implicit administers a series of implicit association tests (IAT) that identify and measure unconscious attitudes about persons belonging to various groups. This study shows that more than 80 percent of whites display a subconscious preference for whites over blacks. In a nation in which whites are disproportionately responsible for making hiring decisions for the most lucrative and desirable positions, this results in unfair affirmative action for whites.

Conscious racial prejudice is much more culpable than subconscious preferences. Conscious prejudice is based on false and malicious views about other races, while these subconscious preferences are the result of a common tendency to mistrust difference and gravitate toward similarity in people.

But the prevalence of such preferences among whites results in much injustice — despite the progress made over the past 50 years. Here are just a few examples of continuing race discrimination.

Continue reading "When the policies ignore color" »

An engineer who specialized in airplanes filed a lawsuit against Boeing, claiming he had to work in a hostile work environment, News 4 WOAI learned Tuesday.

According to the lawsuit, Zuhair Ahmed was working at Boeing here in San Antonio when the September 11th attacks happened in 2001. Ahmed claims after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, his co-workers began making fun of his religion and race.

Ahmed claims in the lawsuit, co-workers and supervisors at Boeing began harassing and discriminating against him because of his African and Sudanese origin. Ahmed is also Muslim, according to the suit.

In March 2005, Ahmed claims in the lawsuit he was fired after a work-related injury.

Boeing officials told News 4 WOAI they cannot comment on the lawsuit because it has not been served yet.

The company has policies in place prohibiting harassment and discrimination, Boeing officials said.

Damned if imprisoned. Doubly damned, if imprisoned. Thats the reality check for the current crisis that posits ethical consequences of incarceration in a country infamously holding records of sorts when it comes to imprisoning the members of minority race.

ZNet has a scholarly and detailed account:

Reverse Reparations: Race, Place, and the Vicious Circle of Mass Incarceration
by Paul Street

“TOWNS PUT DREAMS IN PRISONS”
Sometimes it's the silences that speak the loudest. Consider, for example, a page-one article that appeared in the New York Times in the summer of 2001 under the title "Rural Towns Turn to Prisons to Re-ignite Their Economies." According to this piece, non-metropolitan America was relying like never before on prison construction for jobs and economic development. Formerly, Times reporter Peter Kilborn noted, rural communities had depended for employment and economic development on agriculture, manufacturing, and/or mining. Now, however, they were counting on mass incarceration to deliver the goods. Reporting that “245 prisons sprouted in 212 of the nation’s 2,290 rural counties” during the 1990s, Kilborn quoted the cheerful city manager of Sayre, Oklahoma, which had just opened a prized new maximum-security lockdown. "There's no more recession-proof form of economic development," this local official told Kilborn, than incarceration because "nothing's going to stop crime."

By Kilborn’s account, “prisons have been helping to revive large stretches of rural America. More than a Wal-Mart or a meatpacking plant, state, federal, and private prisons, typically housing 1,000 inmates and providing 300 jobs, can put a town on solid economic footing.” Thanks to money brought in through taxes on prisoners’ telephone calls, sales taxes paid by prisoners and prison staff, and to water, sewer, and landfill fees, Killborn added, Sayre’s city budget increased from $755,000 in 1996 to $1,250,000 in 2001, permitting the town to set aside 15 percent of its revenues for capital improvements. No such savings or investment were possible before the prison, when Sayre “was surviving largely on federal crop support payments to its dwindling farm population” in the wake of the collapse of the state’s oil and gas industry(1).

A different story on the same topic appeared under the title "Ionia Finds Stability in Prisons" in the Detroit News just 12 days before Kilborn’s piece. It told the enlightening tale of how the semi-rural Michigan town of Ionia, located halfway between Lansing and Grand Rapids, had recently become one of the state's fastest growing and "most improved" communities thanks its five thriving penitentiaries together employing 1,584 workers who collectively made $102 million a year. "The state's urban centers dump their felons," the Detroit News reported, "in prison towns and forget about them. Suburbs balk at housing felons, envisioning escapees trampling through their gardens and hiding out in their tool sheds." But "Ionia," the paper noted, "sees things from the other end of the spectrum. The prisons bring, of all things, security." According to Detroit News reporter Francis Donnelly, Ionia’s “penitentiaries, five veritable Great Lakes of cash, provide sustenance to every sector of [Ionia’s] once-dry economy: jobs for residents, customers for stores, revenue for the city government,” including “nearly $1.2 million of the city’s $3.8 million budget” (2).

A February 2001 Chicago Tribune article titled “Towns Put Dreams in Prisons” told a comparable story from Illinois. In “downstate” Hoopeston, Illinois, the Tribune reported, there was “talk of the mothballed canneries that once made this a boom town and whether any of that bustling spirit might return if the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) comes to town.” “You don’t like to think about incarceration,” Hoopeston’s mayor told the Tribune, “but this is an opportunity for Hoopeston. We’ve been plagued by plant closings.” The mayor, the Tribune reported, was lobbying IDOC to permit his town to host a prison so that it could enjoy some of the economic benefits that came to Ina, Illinois when the “Big Muddy” prison was constructed in 1993.

Before “Big Muddy” went up, the Tribune noted, Ina “took in just $17,000 a year in motor fuel tax revenue. Now the figure is more like $72,000. Last year’s municipal budget appropriation was $380,000. More than half of that money is prison revenue. Streets that were paved in chipped gravel and oil for generations soon will all be covered in asphalt. An $850,000 community center that doubles as a gym and computer lab for the school across the street is being paid for with prison money.”

Continue reading "Vicious Circle of Mass Incarceration" »

Johnnie Cochran's law firm has been sued for discrimination:

LOS ANGELES - The law firm founded by the late Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. , who successfully defended O.J. Simpson against murder charges, has been sued for discrimination.

Attorney Shawn Chapman Holley claimed in her lawsuit filed last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court that the firm's leaders discriminated against her because she is black and eventually fired her. After Cochran's death in 2005, the firm's leadership was turned over to white men who discriminated against black lawyers and black clients, the lawsuit said.

"In deference to the memory of Johnnie Cochran and in deference to his family, I do not intend to engage in the public airing of our disagreements," Holley said in a statement through her lawyer. "The lawsuit speaks for itself, and this matter will be litigated in the courts."

A call to the Cochran firm in Los Angeles was not immediately returned. Randy H. McMurray, a partner in the firm, told the Los Angeles Times the allegations were not true and that Holley was not fired.

"We probably have the most diverse law firm in California. I don't know what race we would be discriminating against," he said, adding that he and another partner in the Los Angeles office are black.

According to the lawsuit, Holley was appointed to be a liaison between the civil and criminal sides of the firm two years ago. She had worked with Cochran for 17 years.

Holley became concerned about the firm's criminal representation but when she aired these concerns, she was demoted. Five managers of the firm, four of whom "are Caucasian males" approved the demotion, the suit said.

In January 2006, Holley was fired, the suit said.

Cochran founded the firm in 1965. For years, Cochran was famous in Los Angeles for winning a number of cases that led to historic financial settlements and changes in police procedure.

He became nationally known after successfully defending Simpson against charges he murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.

Saeed Shabazz invokes Dr Dubois to highlight the most lingering issue of contemporary America.

(FinalCall.com) - Eminent scholar, intellectual and founder of the NAACP’s The Crisis news publication, Dr. W.E.B. Dubois wrote the following statement in The Forethought of his book, “The Souls of Black Folk” in 1903: “Here in lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being Black here in the dawning of the 20th century. This meaning is not without interest to you, gentle reader, for the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.”

Observers and analysts say that seven years into the 21st century the problem is still the “color-line” in America.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released in December 2006, stated that “most Americans, White and Black, see racism as a lingering problem in the United States.” CNN also used as a consultant University of Connecticut professor Jack Dovidio, who has researched racism for 30 years, according to his website. He estimated that approximately 80 percent of White Americans have racist feelings they may not recognize.

The survey questioned 328 Blacks and 703 Whites and determined that 84 percent of Blacks and 66 percent of Whites considered racism to be a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem, and 51 percent of Blacks and 26 percent of Whites claim to have “been a victim of discrimination.” Percentages were lower when people were asked if they knew anyone who was “racially biased”—only 31 percent of Blacks and 21 percent of Whites said they did. Only 12 percent of Blacks and 13 percent of Whites surveyed further admitted to being racially-biased themselves.

CNN’s Paula Zahn wrote on Dec. 19 that after comedian Michael Richard’s racist rant at a Los Angeles comedy club in November, she discussed with her staff “what would possibly drive a person to say such vile and hateful things?” She said the discussions with her staff raised a series of questions: Is there an inner racist in most of us?; and, is racism thriving today? So, armed with their poll, they went throughout the nation, holding town hall meetings. According to Prof. Dovidio, the results of CNN’s poll found that “We’ve reached a point that racism is like a virus that has mutated into a new form that we don’t recognize.”

Reaction to the CNN poll was swift. In her article on GOPUSA.com, Star Parker, president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the book “White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay,” asked “what was the point?” concerning the CNN program on racism.

“The point had to be to communicate with White America, because there certainly was no news for Blacks,” she said. “I just couldn’t help wondering if Zahn and the CNN crew really thought any of this was prime-time worthy news,” Ms. Parker stated.

However, on Dec. 14, two days after the poll’s release, a group representing Black conservatives, Project 21, issued a press release that stated: “The CNN report serves only one purpose, and that is to convince the public at large—specifically White people—that they are evil racists. It is a vulgar exercise to try to find racism in the fiber of every White.”

Ms. Zahn continued to raise questions concerning race. On Feb. 2, two days before Super Bowl 41, she devoted program time to the issue of Black coaches in the NFL; Blacks being tasered by police in Houston, and whether the fact that a Black celebrity may face jail-time because of a fatal car accident, when White celebrities in the same situation only faced civil charges.

The Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., founder and president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition; Bob Law, former national radio talk show host and New York State co-chair of the Millions More Movement; and Mychal Massie, Project 21 chairman, were queried on whether CNN was the proper vehicle for the issue of racism in America.

“CNN does not have a single show hosted by an African American,” Rev. Jackson said, throwing the issue of racism right back into CNN’s lap. On whether he felt the shows were having any particular affect on the consciousness of Blacks, he said, “I think Black people look at these shows as just that, shows.” He said that his organization continues to put pressure on all of the networks to step up to the plate and hire more Blacks.

“We are applying pressure and opening doors,” Rev. Jackson said.

Mr. Law stated that “We all know that racism is real, but the real discussion should be centered around the question, ‘What is wrong with White folks?’ Why is it necessary for them to continue to look for White advantage, after decades—no, centuries—of White privilege?”

“Why is it that Whites are still racist—still using race as a tool—anything else is a bogus discussion,” Mr. Law stressed. He also added that CNN isn’t talking about anything that is real, but rather what we get from them are tricks.

CNN is promoting a racial divide and a double-standard, offered Mr. Massie. “And the liberal media is standing by quietly,” he said. “When I speak of credibility of a news organization, I am speaking of an organization that knows its responsibility to provide balanced news. CNN goes out of its way to create a news environment for its own benefit, which is not to show Blacks in a positive light; always there is a stereotypical slant,” Mr. Massie said.

Meanwhile, in New York City, the Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network continues to hammer home the issues of race as they impact on the lives of Blacks.

On Nov. 23, Rev. Sharpton explained to CNN why he wouldn’t accept an apology from Mr. Richards: “This is not about accepting an apology. This is about starting a process to really deal with racism in this country.” Rev. Sharpton spoke out again when U.S. Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) recently referred to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as “articulate and clean.” Rev. Sharpton, on Feb. 4, again tackled the issue of race, when he told reporters he may seek to file a class-action lawsuit over a report from The New York Times (NYT) that the New York Police Department (NYPD) had “stopped more than 500,000 people in 2006, more than five times as many as they did four years ago.”

The NYT reported that 55 percent of the people stopped were Black, while 30 percent were Latino. “Is there a measure of profiling based on race that permeates in the NYPD?” Rev. Sharpton asked.

There are other reports that observers say reflect a racist trend. On Feb. 1, the federal office of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released a report stating that federal job discrimination complaints by workers against private employers rose in 2006 for the first time in four years. Allegations of racial discrimination rose 35 percent with over 27,000 charges. “These figures tell us that discrimination remains a persistent problem in the 21st century workplace,” stated an official of the EEOC.

Continue reading "The problem of the Continuing Color Line" »

Target Corp. has agreed to pay $775,000 to settle a lawsuit charging that the retailer created and condoned a racially hostile work environment at its store in Springfield, Pennsylvania.

The suit, filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleged that 14 black employees at the store were subjected to inappropriate comments and verbal berating by a white manager. The suit also claimed that Michael Hill, who was training to be a store manager, was forced to resign as a result of retaliation he faced after complaining about the racial harassment.

As part of the settlement, Target will provide managers and supervisors at the Springfield store with training regarding Target's company's equal employment opportunity policy. Target will also post a notice about the settlement, ensure that its complaint procedure is effectively communicated to the workforce, and take remedial action if an employee violates its equal employment opportunity policy. In settling the lawsuit, Target denied any wrongdoing.

District Chronicles discusses intersection between race and domestic violence.

Marie Tessier

Activists in the growing movement to support battered African-American women agree on what's needed to stem domestic violence: more services that are culturally informed and integrated into victims' communities.

''Color blindness is not what you need if you're trying to serve diverse communities,'' says Oliver Williams, executive director of the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African-American Community at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. ''The trend is toward an increase in community-based, faith-based and grassroots services.''

While the battered women's movement has long strived to serve all women, few projects can identify specific programs designed to reach out to diverse communities. That can be a barrier to safety for Black women, who tend to reach out for help through informal networks in their communities, such as a church, rather than consulting a shelter or hotline, according to experts.

African-American women face a higher risk for experiencing domestic violence than other women, according to the most recent data from the Justice Department. In fact, they are more than twice as likely to die at the hands of a spouse or a boyfriend. They are also at greater risk of more severe violence, according to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and the Bureau of Justice Statistics in Washington, D.C.

Continue reading "Domestic violence: Is it a Black thing?" »

A new Yale University study has found that discrimination against black doctors is pervasive and results in demoralization.

Black doctors often feel devalued, stereotyped and rejected on the job, a new Yale study has found, and pervasive discrimination can leave them demoralized and likely to seek career change.

Although race allowed them to connect better with some colleagues, patients and staff, the doctors said they were left out of crucial information and social networks that could lead to promotion.

"I do not see us in those leadership pipelines," one doctor told the researchers. "We're not in the corridors of power and it has nothing to do with intellectual capacity or ambition."

"Increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the physician workforce is a national priority and has been offered as one solution to addressing health inequities," says researcher Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, who authored the study. "But any efforts to increase numbers also needs to address the role of race within health-care institutions to successfully recruit and retain ethnic and racial minority physicians."

The study was based on interviews with 25 doctors of African, African-American and Afro-Caribbean descent and published in this month's Annals of Internal Medicine.

In her column “Broadly Speaking”, Adda Birnir compares sexism with racism in an instructive manner, while making the intersections appear as relevant as they actually are:

Sexual harassment is tricky because of three considerations: the nature of the activity, whether the action is welcome and, most importantly, the context. Noam Rudnick, writing for the Hippolytic blog, compared Schlessinger’s actions to instances of unwanted sexual advances perpetrated on a female undergraduate by a male undergraduate at Toad’s Place. But unwanted sexual advances and sexual harassment are not the same. A guy inappropriately grabbing a girl at Toad’s is not an example of sexual harassment because Toad’s is a social space where it is reasonable and expected that people are making sexual advances toward one another. Because of its context, such an action is harassment of a sexual nature, not sexual harassment.

Basha Rubin, writing for the Broad Recognition blog, countered Rudnick’s comments by saying that it does a disservice to women in the workplace to compare Schlessinger’s actions to sexual advances at a nightclub, because it gives credence to the idea that a male boss who sexually harasses a female employee is simply incapable of controlling his sexual desire. The workplace is not a space where it is typically appropriate to express one’s sexual interest. For this reason, harassment at the workplace is critically different from harassment at Toad’s.

So if sexual harassment is based on a drive for power, why does it so often take a sexual form? I find that comparing sexism to racism is instructive because it allows for a case study in which sexual desire is not a factor. To answer this question, I would like to compare these instances of sexual harassment to the Michael Richards case. This past November, Richards, who played Kramer on “Seinfeld,” gained notoriety for shouting racist slurs at audience members during a stand-up comedy performance. Apparently frustrated by what he deemed to be rude interruptions by a group of black male audience members, Richards stopped his act to yell angrily at the men, calling them all sorts of names, including the N-word.

Continue reading "Sexism’s power struggle mirrors historical racism" »

The Virginian-Pilot reports that two patrons have sued a Virginia Beach nightclub alleging race discrimination.

Two patrons who were turned away from a Virginia Beach nightclub have filed a federal discrimination lawsuit alleging they were denied entry because of their race.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court, seeks unspecified monetary damages and an injunction stopping the owner of Kokoamos from enforcing his entry rules.

Kokoamos owner Barry Davis has said he was simply enforcing a dress code, which prohibits cornrows, dreadlocks and braids.

However, the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the suit on behalf of Kim Hines and Myron Evans, says the rule essentially prohibits mostly blacks from entering the club, located on Marina Shores Drive, off North Great Neck Road.

ACLU attorney Rebecca K. Glenberg said Thursday that efforts to resolve the issue outside of court have been unsuccessful since the hairstyle issue came to light last summer.

“We are concerned that dress codes can be used as a pretext for racial discrimination,” she said. “This sort of restriction obviously excludes a lot of African Americans.”

Continue reading "Nightclub sued for race discrimination" »

A Virginia state legislator Frank D. Hargrove told a Charlottesville newspaper, "Slavery ended nearly 140 years ago with the Civil War, and our black citizens should get over it." "Terrence Says" blog responds to the statement by asking some pertinent questions:

While I don't obsess, and quite truthfully, rarely think of African Captivity in America, usually when a racist like Hargrove and people of his ilk tell Black people, whose ancestors were captives in America, to "get over slavery" it is usually a pitiful attempt to belittle and transfer blame.

The State of Virginia, as did many other states, allowed African captivity to flourish. Instead of perceiving an apology as an act of reconciliation for the advancement of humanity, unfortunately, antagonists are reminded of the dastardly deeds of their forefathers. Telling Blacks "to get over slavery" is blame reversal and a coping mechanism for them.

Should we (Blacks) be paralyzed by such events in American history? Certainly not. But even for Blacks, like me, who could care less about an apology and are not holding our breaths for an apology for our ancestors, admonishing Blacks to "get over slavery" is counterproductive to improving race relations and mean-spirited.

What they also fail to realize is that true efforts by America to make all citizens equal didn't occur until the mid-to-late 60's. Are we supposed to forget that too? In reality, if Hargrove and people of his ilk had their way, African Captivity would still be very much an institution in America.

In the bigger scheme of things, I think that it is important for African-Americans to not get terribly bent-out-of-shape ie. offended by such comments. We should not surrender too much of our power to these racist idiots - especially one's that have one foot in the grave. Hopefully, they'll be going back to the hell they came from in (over) due time.

Almost a perfectionist in his profession, but his dirty spots are beginning to be noticed now. A classic case of race bias in the invisible workplaces.


A Top Chef’s Kitchen Is Far Too Hot, Some Workers Say

By KIM SEVERSON and ADAM B. ELLICK

DANIEL BOULUD can’t stand to see a detail out of place. As pans slam around him during dinner service in the Upper East Side restaurant that bears his first name, he will pause to request that a spoon be polished. How best to marry braised endive to seared beef can absorb him as utterly as the lilies in the dining room that haven’t opened on schedule.

He’s also a man who has cultivated the news media over his 23 years in New York. He is quick to get on the phone with a writer and can engineer a smart publicity move, like creating the world’s most expensive hamburger, which won him worldwide attention in 2003.

Outside the restaurant, Mr. Boulud is known for his generosity. Last year he helped raise nearly $2 million, much of it for Citymeals-on-Wheels, on whose board he sits.

On top of all that, Mr. Boulud is a social animal. His fellow four-star chefs would vote him the guy most likely to lead the conga line.

In short, he is a perfectionist who is accustomed to being liked. All of which helps explain why Mr. Boulud, 51, cannot grasp why a group of restaurant-worker advocates keep showing up outside Daniel with a 12-foot inflatable cockroach, singing “We Shall Overcome” and chanting that he is a racist.

“Racism is a vicious charge,” Mr. Boulud said in an interview. “It is too easy to accuse someone of that, and it is very hard to defend yourself.”

And yet Mr. Boulud is being forced to do just that. In December, seven current and former employees filed suit in Federal District Court in Manhattan accusing him of discrimination. Similar charges against Mr. Boulud are before the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

According to the lawsuit, dining room workers at Daniel have been denied promotion because they were Latino or Bangladeshi. The employees also say that Mr. Boulud and other managers yelled racial slurs. At one point, they say, Spanish was banned among employees; only English and French were allowed. Those are examples, they say, of how the working culture at Daniel favors white Europeans at the expense of other groups.

Continue reading "A Top Chef’s Kitchen Is Far Too Hot" »

Just about time for someone like Christopher Edley Jr. to challenge the race-blind populist policies, for the anti-affirmative action amendments may be populist, but certainly not popular.

At Berkeley Law, a Challenge to Overcome All Barriers

By JONATHAN D. GLATER

BERKELEY, Calif.: Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1960s, Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the flagship law school of the University of California, learned early about racial discrimination. After all, his father, one of the few African-American graduates in Harvard Law School’s class of 1953, could not get a job in a Philadelphia law firm.

“They’d hired William T. Coleman from Harvard a couple of years earlier,” Mr. Edley recalled, referring to the former transportation secretary, and ardent defender of civil rights. “And they were waiting to see how that experiment worked out before hiring another one.”

Mr. Edley’s father went on to become a prosecutor in Philadelphia, then the first black program officer at the Ford Foundation and president of the United Negro College Fund. He was never, Mr. Edley said, bitter about the obstacles in his way. But civil rights and related subjects were the topics of discussion around the dinner table. From age 5, the son wanted to be a lawyer.

Now Mr. Edley, in his third year at Boalt Hall, as the law school here is known, finds himself defending affirmative action policies intended to overcome barriers like those his father confronted.

The job is a challenge; under California law, the law school cannot use race as a factor in admissions. But tackling that challenge was an important reason he took it.

Continue reading "An alternative discourse at Berkeley Law" »

Boston Globe editorializes:
Ideally, the nation's public schools should be havens where discrimination and poverty are overcome by hard academic work. But many public schools are dragging along, starved for books, anemic from high drop out rates, and struggling to boost students to grade-level achievement.

The full article:

IN NOVEMBER, Michigan voters faced a ballot question drenched in controversy. Proposal 2 called for changing the state constitution to ban programs that discriminate against or give "preferential treatment" to people based on race, gender, ethnicity, or national origin. In other words, a constitutional ban on affirmative action.

The choice was reduced to one dimension: Either America treats everyone fairly or it doesn't.

"Vote YES . . . if you are sick and tired of handouts and unfair quotas," one blogger advised. On Election Day, 58 percent voted yes.

A blow for education

It was a hard slap for Michigan's public colleges and universities. In 2003, affirmative action survived a tough legal fight when the Supreme Court ruled in two cases that the University of Michigan could, in limited ways, consider race in its admissions processes. Notably, Sandra Day O'Connor said that, yes, race still matters, and deliberately seeking racial diversity is still a social good. But she warned that race shouldn't matter forever; in 25 years, society should have moved on.

Then Ward Connerly showed up. A former University of California regent and an African-American, he led a successful fight to end affirmative action in California. He supported Proposal 2 in Michigan. And last month, he said he would be visiting nine other states -- Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah -- to consider launching similar campaigns.

Continue reading "Affirmatively active" »

Racism against American Indians is well alive. A recent meet highlighted the issue.

American Indians address racism

BY JOHN R. CRANE
Racism against American Indians is alive and well in Cortez and the Four Corners and a solution must be found, said attendees at a meeting Wednesday night to address prejudice against American Indians.

Violence and prejudice against American Indians has been a fact of life in Montezuma County for too long, said Art Neskahi, founder and director of Southwest Intertribal Voice.

Three attacks on American Indians occurred in Cortez around Thanksgiving. One involved a homeless man who suffered fractured ribs after being assaulted by two Hispanic male youths. In the others, two white males attacked two homeless American Indian men, and two white males assaulted an American Indian couple from Luckachukai, Ariz., throwing the female on the ground and kicking her.

No one has been charged in the attacks, mostly due to lack of victims' identification of suspects.

"This has been going on a long time," Neskahi said. "I'm hoping to figure out what we can do so our children don't have to go through this."

Continue reading "American Indians address racism" »

Taylor Mason of New Music First, writes about the discrimination suit pending against Sony-BMG.

Former BMG marketing rep Tamieka Blair is expected to file a racial discrimination lawsuit against Sony BMG Music, alleging her wrongful termination upon the merging of Sony and BMG in 2004, according to Billboard.

The suit follows on the heels of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's (EEOC) finding that Blair was "a victim of race discrimination" last fall when an investigation by the EEOC revealed that 42 percent of African American employees of the sales enterprise unit were involuntarily terminated after the merger. Though Sony offered their employees a voluntary separation package, Blair was under the impression that her field marketing position in the BMG sales unit was secure and hesitated to accept the package out of fear that it might signal that she wanted to leave. The EEOC’s investigation concluded that Sony BMG "failed to provide a verifiable explanation for the overwhelmingly negative impact on black BMG employees, that is, that 42 percent of blacks and no whites were involuntarily terminated," the letter states. Officials at Sony BMG told the EEOC that they "sought to retain the 'best players,' but there is no documented procedure regarding the retention of said 'best players.'" At this time, there are no related claims pending on Sony BMG with the EEOC. The EEOC stated that they worked with associated parties after the conclusion, but there was no settlement.

Diverse Issues in Higher Education quotes a new study by a UCLA Professor which may prompt a lawsuit. The reason: Hollywood’s institutionalized discriminations.

“Spiderperson 4”— Coming to a Theater Near You
Hollywood has given us “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967) and “Crash” (2005) — just two of the several movies that have tackled issues of race. But now a California scholar is hurling charges of racism and sexism against casting directors for “gender and race-based casting.” A Title VII lawsuit is just around the corner.

The study, “Hollywood's Race/Ethnicity and Gender-Based Casting: Prospects for a Title VII Lawsuit,” conducted by Russell K. Robinson, acting professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, is intended to confront hidden discrimination — but is he taking political correctness to the extreme? The study points out that 82 percent of lead roles in major motion pictures are filled by Whites, while Blacks claim only 11 percent of the roles. That stat would be hard to argue, but the same report also considers denying an actress a role intended for a man to be discriminatory.
Just imagine British actor Hugh Grant in “Big Momma’s House” or Halle Berry as “The Terminator.” It just doesn’t work.

It’s true, more often than not, that Hollywood promotes stereotypes; and Robinson, a former entertainment lawyer, sees sinister forces lurking behind the camera.
“What appears to be audience preferences for White, male protagonists are socially constructed choices based in part on the industry’s history of discrimination and stereotyping in casting,” he says. 
Let the legal battle begin.

An interesting dialogue is initiated by Inside Higher Ed that deals with who have the responsibility to teach America about race relations.

One thing is certain: Americans have strong perceptions — and misperceptions — about the meaning and significance of race. Attempting to poke holes in prejudices and provide the latest scientific and scholarly understanding of the issue, the American Anthropological Association has created an interactive educational program called RACE: Are We So Different? Also featured is a traveling museum exhibition, and project organizers are developing educational materials for teachers and organizing future conferences.

“We have taken a comprehensive look at race in America and have spent five and a half years pulling this together,” said Peggy Overbey, the program’s project director.

The project’s Web site presents quizzes, timelines and other interactive activities designed to consider questions on the history of race in America, human variation across the planet, and race as a “lived experience.”

Continue reading "To Teach America About Race" »

Supreme Court has agreed to hear Coca-Cola's appeal in a race discrimination case. 0

The Supreme Court Friday agreed to consider a discrimination case in which a Coca-Cola bottling company fired a black employee, one of seven cases the court added to its docket. Coca-Cola asked the Supreme Court to hear the lawsuit, which involves allegations that a supervisor of employee Stephen Peters was motivated by racial bias and influenced a human resources manager to fire the worker.

Such circumstances are sometimes referred to as "cat's paw" or "rubber stamp" liability. Coca-Cola fired Peters for insubordination after he refused a request to work on a weekend during his scheduled days off.

A federal appeals court reinstated a lawsuit brought on Peters' behalf by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The appeals court said a federal judge placed too much emphasis on the fact that Peters' immediate supervisor made no express recommendation to fire him.

In asking the court to hear the case, the company asked the justices to consider when an employer may be held liable for intentional discrimination when the person who fired an employee harbored no discriminatory bias. Peters worked at the Coca-Cola facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The case is BCI Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Los Angeles v. EEOC, 06-341.

Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a former Dean has accused University of Wisconsin at Whitewater of race bias. A federal lawsuit has been filed.

A former dean at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater has filed a federal racial-discrimination lawsuit against the university, after campus officials demoted him when an audit found he had misspent university money, the Associated Press reported late Tuesday.

Lee J. Jones began working as dean of graduate studies and continuing education at Whitewater in 2004. In the fall of 2005 the university completed the audit and stripped him of his dean’s position, reassigning him as a tenured professor of education. Mr. Jones then filed a racial-discrimination complaint with Wisconsin’s Equal Rights Division, saying the audit had “found no intentional wrongdoing” and charging that his demotion had been “motivated by unlawful race discrimination.” He resigned from the university last April.

In 1999 Mr. Jones helped found Brothers of the Academy, a nationwide group aimed at increasing the number of black men who earn Ph.D.’s and work in academe.

The colorblind anti-affirmative action crusader is on the prowl. And this time, he aims at 9 more states to replicate what Washington, California and Michigan have done in recent past to ignore the need to consider race and gender as decisive factors in American life.

For Ward Connerly, the architect of reversal in the 1954 desegregation ruling, recent triumph in Michigan came about even as it houses 80% whiter, 14% black, 2.3% Asian American and 3.8% Latino population. And this man’s famous opening line: "It is not essential that black kid sits next to white kid. That's where we went wrong with Brown vs. Board.”

San Francisco Chronicle interviews Connerly about his wider crusade:

Connerly gearing up for wider crusade: Affirmative action foe considers launching campaigns in 9 states

Leslie Fulbright, Chronicle Staff Writer

Ward Connerly, the anti-affirmative action crusader who helped persuade voters to ban race and gender from consideration in public hiring, contracting and school admissions in California, Washington and Michigan, said Wednesday he is exploring moves into nine other states.

The former University of California regent, whose campaign first saw success in 1996 with Proposition 209 in California, seems to be following through on his often-repeated promise that he will persist until affirmative action is banned nationwide.

Connerly said he will visit Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Wyoming and Utah over the next 60 days and then decide how many campaigns to launch.

Twenty-three states have systems for putting laws directly before voters in the form of ballot initiatives.

"Three down and 20 to go," Connerly said during a conference call. "We don't need to do them all, but if we do a significant number, we will have demonstrated that race preferences are antithetical to the popular will of the American people."

Continue reading "Connerly gearing up for wider crusade" »

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As the Brown v. Board of Education is being revisited in a manner that may lay a foundation for "discrimination" to be perceived entirely from different lenses than ever before, two major strands of opinion develop.

One hints at the positive outcome of integration that should uphold the judgments. The other categorically refutes the need of the judgments (even while being considered as noble) to sway official policies, as long as people make voluntary decisions to segregate, if one may call it thus.

But, I think both major opinions leave out a significant “other” question: Is the so-called voluntary segregation a natural outcome of human preferences as now being adjudged, or is it thus, as a result of an effete, ineffective and reactionary tradition of official policies that have alienated the racial categories of people so much as to install distrusts among themselves?

If the latter is true, its not merely that the 1954 decision needs to be upheld, but in fact, the state and its citizens through progressive public policies will do well to recognize that the socio-economic foundation of American society needs a fresh breath of radical change for the economic emancipation of peoples eventually to be developed into proactive communities, than isolated racial groups posited against plutocratic dominations.

New York Times today has an opinion piece worth a note:

Brown v. Board of Education, Second Round By ADAM LIPTAK

IF there is a sacred text in the American legal canon, it is the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. It is the court’s one undisputed triumph, and no Supreme Court nominee who expressed doubt about the decision would ever be confirmed. Who can argue, after all, with the wisdom of putting an end to state-sanctioned racial segregation in the public schools?
But, as an extraordinary two-hour Supreme Court argument last week demonstrated, the meaning and legacy of Brown remain up for grabs. The court was considering whether school systems in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., could take account of students’ races to ensure racial balance.

Continue reading "Revisiting Brown v. Board: What it entails? " »

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The Contemporary Moral Problems Blog found the following article from LA Times pertinent to the ongoing discussion on Affirmative Action.

Court to Revisit Historic Brown Decision By David G. Savage (c) 2006, Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON -- For the first time in a decade, the Supreme Court will revisit the legacy of a landmark: the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 that declared unconstitutional the racial segregation of public schools.

Separate schools for black and white children are "inherently unequal,'' Chief Justice Earl Warren said in an opinion that helped launch the civil-rights movement.

State-enforced segregation laws are long gone, but for school officials today, a key question remains: Did the historic decision commit them to a policy of seeking integrated schools, or did it tell them not to assign students to a school based on their race?

Monday, lawyers in a pair of integration cases will debate whether school boards may use racial guidelines to assign students. Both sides will rely on the Brown decision to make their case.

With the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., civil-rights lawyers believe there may be a five-member majority determined to strike down race-based integration programs.

In Seattle, the school board adopted a policy -- now suspended -- that gave "nonwhite'' students an edge if they sought to enroll in a popular, mostly white high school. In Jefferson County, Ky., which includes Louisville, the school district said black children should make up between 15 percent and 50 percent of the enrollment at each elementary school.

In both cities, several white parents sued to have the plans declared unconstitutional after their children were barred from enrolling in the school of their choice because of their race. Although they lost in the lower courts, the Supreme Court voted in June to hear their appeals, leading many to predict the justices are poised to outlaw "racial balancing'' in the public schools.

Continue reading "Is there a need to revisit Affirmative Action policies? " »

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Racist supremacism is not just alive. Its kicking around right on the popular culture public sphere. Kramer just went honest about his feelings.

A San Francisco Jury has awarded a total of $950,000 to a Federal Express Ramp Transport Driver Operations Manager who sued the delivery service company for race discrimination and retaliation in the United States District Court, Case No. C-04-0098-SI. Mr. Pernell Evans currently works for Federal Express in San Leandro, California and has been an employee with Federal Express for over 17 years, beginning his employment in January of 1990, compiling a good employment record over those years.

Wall Street Journal editorial is comprehensive about how the University of Michigan lost the case for affirmative action. But the opinion clearly is one of great rejoice at the defeat of pro-affirmative action proponents.

This is shocking to hear the collective voices condemning affirmative action all of a sudden following a juridical decision, despite their earlier stances to the contrary. This speaks of intellectual opportunism or hidden agenda of wish fulfillment, I am not aware of. But certainly, in a country of media agenda-setting and mainstream propaganda, its not difficult to imagine the euphoria. Ironic, that Michigan State failed for the baits.

Not all movements are progress, Frederick Douglas needs to remind the ‘majority’ that fails to see the fruits of affirmative action and its relevance till progress has been attained. But in a celebrity laden fast food nation, who has the time to think?

(Click below to read the entire editorial).

Continue reading "Michigan Loses. But no one wins." »

The Islamic Workplace Blog has well documented various facets related to religious accommodation, harassment and hiring/discharge issues that have been addressed by the EEOC. The three case studies cited in this entry are as follows:

I am a South Asian woman from Bangladesh. I applied for a job at a bakery and had a phone interview with the manager. She seemed to like me a lot and she offered me the job over the phone. When I came in to work the first day, she appeared to be startled by my appearance. I have dark skin and wear a hijab. She brusquely stated that she had found someone “better suited to the job” and sent me home. I don’t know what to do about this.
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I am an Arab American man and have been a salesman at a large car retailer for five years. After September 11, my coworkers stopped talking to me, and there has been a lot of tension. One coworker started calling me names like “camel jockey” and “the local terrorist.” I used to have a good relationship with my coworkers and enjoyed my job, but now I dread coming to work each day. What can I do about my situation?
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I am a computer specialist at a software company downtown. As a devout Muslim, I am required to attend prayer services at my mosque for a short period on Friday afternoons. Obviously this conflicts with my work hours. Can I ask for the time off to attend services?

What does the Senate minority whip’s comeback mean for the racial minorities?

Media Matters for America takes note of Trent Lott’s “numerous” racially insensitive statements, and not just the most infamous one that the mainstream media recently revisited.

Bloggers had rightly taken the credit for highlighting Lott’s statements back at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party on December 5, 2002, when Lott quipped of Thurmond's 1948 campaign: “I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.”

Quoting from Scripps Howard News Service, Media Matters outlines the racist past of Lott:

In 1982, Lott voted against the extension of the Voting Rights Act, which authorizes the Justice Department to review election law changes in Mississippi and other Deep South states and to monitor elections.

In 1983, he was one of 90 House members who voted against creating a national holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Six years later, Lott was one of seven senators who voted to abolish the King holiday commission, and in 1994, he was one of 28 who favored scrapping its federal funding.

Lott was one of 34 senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1990, which reversed five Supreme Court rulings that had limited the ability of minorities to win job discrimination lawsuits and damages. After President George H. W. Bush vetoed the bill, Lott voted for a different version in 1991.

And in 2001, Lott was the only senator who opposed President George W. Bush's nomination of Roger Gregory, an African-American from Virginia, to the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
[...]

In 1999, when Lott was embroiled in another racial controversy, he had only one African-American worker, a mail clerk, out of a staff of 65.

In 1981, Lott filed a brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit seeking to overturn an IRS decision to deny a tax exemption to Bob Jones University because of the school's ban on interracial dating.

In 1995, Lott criticized Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) for intervening with 39 other lawmakers to get the FBI to release documents in the 1966 death of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer to Forrest County prosecutors.

In 1999, it was reported that Lott had spoken to and met with the segregationist Council of Concerned Citizens on a few occasions. Lott then condemned the group.

Last year, Lott and the other white members of the Mississippi congressional delegation refused an entreaty from former Netscape president James Barksdale to declare that they would vote in favor of a statewide referendum to remove the Confederate emblem from the state flag. The proposal lost.

According to the latest US Census Bureau report released today, racial disparities in income, education and home ownership have been growing in the United States. CBS News quotes the report to indicate that white households had incomes that were two-thirds higher than blacks and 40 percent higher than Hispanics last year.

CBS News story has more:

White adults were also more likely than black and Hispanic adults to have college degrees and to own their own homes. They were less likely to live in poverty.

"Race is so associated with class in the United States that it may not be direct discrimination, but it still matters indirectly," said Dalton Conley, a sociology professor at New York University and the author of "Being Black, Living in the Red."

"It doesn't mean it's any less powerful just because it's indirect," he said.

Home ownership grew among white middle-class families after World War II when access to credit and government programs made buying houses affordable. Black families were largely left out because of discrimination, and the effects are still being felt today, said Lance Freeman, assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University and author of "There Goes the 'Hood."

Home ownership creates wealth, which enables families to live in good neighborhoods with good schools. It also helps families finance college, which leads to better-paying jobs, perpetuating the cycle, Freeman said.

"If your parents own their own home they can leave it to you when they pass on or they can use the equity to help you with a down payment on yours," Freeman said.

Three-fourths of white households owned their homes in 2005, compared with 46 percent of black households and 48 percent of Hispanic households. Home ownership is near an all-time high in the United States, but racial gaps have increased in the past 25 years.

Black families have also been hurt by the decline of manufacturing jobs — the same jobs that helped propel many white families into the middle class after World War II, said Hilary Shelton, director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Washington office.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was sure called in to examine claims of racial discrimination by state agencies in Iowa, but most ironically, the famed organization itself faced challenges!

NAACP has been refrained from reviewing specific cases thereby causing potential conflicts of interests. This may not lead anywhere, despite the state having already paid around $850,000 to nine people and their lawyers who had filed race discriminations lawsuits.

According to a report by Wall Street Journal, Princeton University faces a fresh federal civil rights complaint from Yale freshman Jian Li for having rejected his application for admission on alleged ground of racial discrimination.

Princetonian Daily reports that Li, despite having a perfect 2400 SAT score and near-perfect SAT II scores, was rejected this past year from five of the nine universities he applied to — Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania.

Li cites a recent study conducted by two Princeton professors as evidence for his case. The study, published in June 2005, concluded that removing consideration of race would have little effect on white students, but that Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five places in admitted classes that are currently taken by African-American or Hispanic students.

Race and gender based affirmative action is back into news since Michigan has become a battle place for debate. The dubious claims of Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) were decidedly refuted by the progressive circles in the state, although with elections approaching, more populist policies are raising heads back again.

But the most interesting corollary to the debate is the almost identical California Civil Rights Initiative, known as Proposition 209. In its tallest claim to make the state a colorblind model, 209 is shrouded with controversies. Dawson Bell of Detroit Free Press has offered an elaborate critique of comparative statistics and draws insightful inferences. With the number of black and Hispanic students enrolled at Berkeley falling sharply after 209 passed -- from 7.2% of all freshmen in 1995 to 3.2% three years later, it is worth the debate.

And with due compliment to Dubois, the problem of the 21st century still continues to be determined by the color line.

White House is against race-based admissions policies in educational institutions and the president has made it very clear. His administration had even filed a brief against the University of Michigan for considering race as an admission criterion. Fortunately, the Supreme Court had rejected White House logic in favor of the university.

More recently, the republicans have been harping on the need to oppose race-based admissions policies in K-12 schools. And Washington Post columnist Charles Lane has offered a comprehensive commentary today elaborating why the administration is opposing such policies.

Indeed, nothing to be surprised here since the talk about “equality” has almost become a rhetoric of the privileged in this country. But what's indeed dangerous here are the myths that are floating in the mainstream media through exaggeration of the issue. Let us try to deconstruct some of the issues.

Firstly, race-based admissions policies are not pro-segregation, as the media often assume. Indeed they are consciously integrative as they ensure that there be proportional representation, and students of a specific race do not get oversubscribed at high volumes.

Secondly, these policies are neither universal nor enforced. In fact, just like University of Michigan was the only practicing institute for higher education, Louisville and Seattle are the only cities that are applying race-based admissions for public schools. Why race-based admissions criteria must not be applicable to all institutes (private and public) is a question worth reflecting over considering the statistics of public schools in certain regions today indicating overwhelmingly black population and private schools in general overwhelmingly white.

Thirdly, the national debates are mostly focusing on race-based admissions when it comes to ensuring students of color in an institute. It’s usually lost to notice that the normal process of admissions in fact encourages active segregation. Anti-segregation does not mean a competitive platform for all irrespective of race, rather it should imply a fair and conscious attempts to integrate students from marginalized racial groups along with the white students. And as long as such attempts are not made, it is unlikely that a classroom will reflect diverse population. There have been numerous studies indicating the wide segregation in practice today under the existing ‘equal’ rules. Affirmative action must apply in its positive spirit (proactive enforcement) and not just in its negative scopes (to bar discriminations).

Fourth, the long-term effects of non-enforced school environment has damaging consequences, those that lead to sustenance of a racist society since students from childhood begin life with minimal contacts with multicultural population in a country that’s house to most number of ethnic groups in the world. The mismatch between the years of growing up with the exposure to the professional world creates serious levels of identity politics that usually targets those groups with whom one has had least contacts. This fosters serious stereotypes as well as renders most people ignorant of how to deal with diverse cultural groups with distinct languages, codes and unique ethos.

Lastly, only with the race-based admissions policies can the educational institutes force themselves to radically replace their textbooks (that overwhelmingly speaks of a dominant history), teaching methods (which is today more of instructional style than dialogic pedagogy), and contextualization (equating individual achievement as success is not the normative for many racial groups which stress on cooperative progress as success).

Whereas it may sound politically correct to oppose race-based admissions policies and equate it with racism, one needs to acknowledge that since race do matter in a racist society, its high time, the effects are minimized with some proactive, rather than idealistic, policies that work towards forcing proportionate representation. The society outside the ivory tower windows should not look very different from how it looks inside the classroom. Sooner we realize, the easier the path towards social justice shall be.

Florida’s Jacksonville Fire Rescue Department was under storm over several allegations of race and sex discrimination during the first week of August. An in-depth investigative report by the Human Rights Commission had found that many staff members were openly passing racial remarks aimed at black employees and women employees were routinely sexually harassed by an officer of Captain rank and some other male co-workers of his. The report initially suggested that the Mayor look into replacing the Fire Chief Rick Barrett and his staff. There were “widespread negative perceptions among African-American and female employees of inequities and favoritism throughout the department," the report stated.

The Commission upon discovering more cases of blatant sexual harassment, explicit racist comments by supervisors/managers and complete lack of disciplinary measures against the “white males” of the department, a couple of days later concluded that Barrett must be asked to resign.

However, Mayor John Peyton decided to stand by Rick Barrett! "These are my picks to lead this department. I think they do a great job in the balance," Peyton said.

Today, the Mayor’s picks are going to face some more heat. As an employee of 24 years with the department, Elizabeth Henderson has openly come out with an account of blatant harassment that should stir up the country’s assertion of “inclusiveness”.

“They do what they want to do, to whomever they want to do it to," Henderson said, who has faced two and a half years of ongoing harassment. "Once I heard the mayor say he gives the administration his 100-percent backing, that told me they now have the green light to continue doing what they have done all along. Leaving this current administration in control of correcting this issue is like leaving the fox in charge of the hen house. They are the ones doing it," Henderson said.

Indeed, with the Mayor proudly patting his “picks”’ backs, the fox needs to be focused on now.

A Washington spa faces racial discrimination lawsuit stemming from a bad hair day.

Seandria Denny, right, says that when she requested a hair coloring for her mother, Jean, a Vienna salon told her, "We don't do black people's hair." (By Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)

Federal appeals court has ruled there was "direct evidence" that the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon in Alexandria intended to discriminate when its employees balked at and then botched a hair styling for an African-American woman.

"It is hard to imagine plainer evidence of purposeful discrimination than when services are denied expressly because the purchaser is African-American," said the ruling from the three-judge panel.

The Washington Post which covered the story said the suit related to a spa employee who allegedly told Jean Denny they "don't do black people's hair."

What does one do with former elected representatives who have a lavish time off the peoples’ tax money, and seats of power through hypocritical speeches? Worse, what does one do with such misguided missiles who still expound their debased racist theories of merit, success and competition?

Richard ‘Dick’ Lamm who served Colorado as a Governor for three terms, is one such illustrious manipulator of reactionary words. And incidentally, each time at office, he ran as a Democrat. Yet he always believed that Blacks and Hispanics are both underclass whose cultures were not “success-producing”.

In a Denver Post column yesterday titled, Minorities must look inward, he says,

“American students generally face educational challenges, but there is every reason to specifically examine minority underperformance. Blacks and Hispanics are not succeeding in numbers great enough to keep America competitive. I am increasingly convinced the key to prosperity for black and Hispanic America lies mostly in their own hands and by their own efforts.”

‘Their’ hands and ‘their’ efforts were well said. Only that, Lamm forgets to mention about our political economy creating an ugly class society, our biased law and order system, our educational system geared to teach exclusively historical lies that often are not understood to be relevant by Blacks and Hispanics etc etc. The list could go on. But let the likes of Richard Lamm first think inward.

A black employee has been racially discriminated against at a historically black school, according to a new federal lawsuit.

A federal lawsuit against Delaware State University alleges that a white state legislator promoted a white employee over a qualified black employee. DSU , which ironically is a historically black school (HBUC) has denied the charges and forwarded that the reassignment was not a promotion, but a merit-based selection.

In this case, the white employee was recommended for promotion despite having been disciplined on several occasions. The legislator Richard C Cathcart is running for re-election in the state House representing 9th District. Rory Lewis, who has filed this lawsuit, had been favored by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in November when this complaint was first initiated.

The school didn't advertise a facilities shop leader position when it opened in 2004 and then overlooked Lewis, who had the necessary qualifications, because he is black, the lawsuit claims.

During the reassignment, on one hand there was Rory Lewis, who was nominated for “Facilities Employee of the Year” award and had no disciplinary record; and on the other, was his co-worker Charles Dougherty who in the same position as Lewis, had received written reprimands for missed time at work and insubordination. He was also suspended for misuse of a company vehicle. And yet, after his suspension ended, Dougherty was promoted and given a 7 percent raise, the suit claims. Dougherty, who no longer works at DSU, admitted that work environment at DSU was racially charged.

For those who live in “post-race” America, its time to acknowledge the rose-colored spectacles. Racism must be well and alive in the country where even a mayor at his position of responsibility uses supremacist slurs while addressing racial minorities.
Coopertown in Tennessee has a mayor Danny Crosby who while swearing in a new police officer on Martin Luther King Day said, “Happy James Earl Ray Day” as a reference to King’s assassin. Crosby has displayed highest form of despicable behavior if the 17-page complaint against him filed by the attorney general of the district after one-sixth of the entire town brought a petition is to be believed. While making the town a “traffic trap” to earn ticket revenues, his targets are easily Hispanic drivers, who he thinks are “mostly illegal anyway”.
He has three weeks to respond to the charges.

The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) is a misnomer. It is deliberately misleading so as to hijack the spirit of civil rights movement by naming itself similarly. At its best, it’s a right wing effort (funded by businessmen like Ward Connerly) to sabotage the ongoing demands to implement affirmative action more proactively. At its worst, it’s a highly reactionary movement aimed at systematically promote discrimination at workplaces.

This fall, Michigan voters are going to decide on the fate of use of affirmative action policies in the state. It’s especially alarming because the MCRI is proposing to outlaw race, gender and other personal demographic data as criteria for public institutions including Michigan's public universities to use in furtherance of civil rights initiative. Only in 1997, University of Michigan spearheaded the movement of affirmative action to be applicable in colleges, but over the last many years, continues to be the prime target.

The irony is that MCRI is not a new initiative by the right-wingers. Indeed, President Bush has echoed similar sentiments before. On January 15, 2003, the President said,

"..the Michigan policies amount to a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes perspective students, based solely on their race. So, tomorrow my administration will file a brief with the court arguing that the University of Michigan's admissions policies, which award students a significant number of extra points based solely on their race, and establishes numerical targets for incoming minority students, are unconstitutional."

However, after a week, the President’s pleas also did not bear fruits for the reactionaries. In its first ruling on affirmative action in higher education admissions in 25 years, the Supreme Court justices voted 5-4 to uphold the University of Michigan's law school affirmative action policy by ruling that race can indeed be used in university admission decisions.

Detroit Free Press today runs two columns to provide voice to both schools of thoughts. Whereas Roger Clegg finds Affirmative Action an ambiguous term to deal with, Paul Hillegonds says we will roll back to the 60’s again if reactionaries had their way.

Black historian and author Lawrence Otis Graham says US Senate displays some of the same racist attitudes it displayed a century ago. His new book, “The Senator and The Socialite” (HarperCollins), surveys the internal racial hiring practices of the US Senate offices, which he thinks is pathetically below mark.

Graham says, “It is outrageous enough that this nation will only elect one black person to the U.S. Senate, but it is a true disgrace that the Senators, themselves, are unwilling to hire blacks and other minorities to run or assist in their offices.” He cites a study which shows that 94% of the Senate employees are white and not a single one of the 100 Senators has a black person in a chief of staff leadership post.

In a press release today, Graham says, “Nothing has changed on the Senate side of the Capitol building since 1874 when Senator Blanche Bruce became the first black elected to a full Senate term. There was 1 black in the Senate then, and there's still only 1 black there today. And none of the Senators seem to really care about that level of racial exclusion.”

East Lansing teachers’ union President Edwina Marshall has raised objection to possible discriminatory stance by the school district in hiring of the principal of MacDonald Middle School. The finalist principal in question who was dropped was a black internal candidate.

In face of obvious defense from the district officials, what substantiates the claim by Marshall is the discrimination she was subjected to herself during the interview process. During the event, Marshall, who is black, was incidentally seated next to the only minority candidate, Andy Wells. At that point, the human resource director of the district passed a comment to her that she should move so as to “balance the color in the room”.

Although Wells has since accepted an offer of becoming principal in another high school, Marshall has rightly brought this matter to light. Firstly, out of a total of 240 teacher body, the school has only 14 who are black (6%), whereas 17% of the student body is black. In other words, proportionately speaking, minority teachers are three times less than the minority students. Secondly, in an effort to “work together”, the school might end up overlooking the serious nature of allegation.

In defense of the human resource director, an attorney has said, “It has been Ms. Peatross' practice to strategically place members of an interview team throughout the interview room to 'balance' the room by position, gender and race, thus creating a welcoming environment for interviewees.”

But the reality is maintaining ‘balance’ often times germinates from deliberate assumptions too. Considering that Wells was the only minority candidate, there was no way a balance could have been anyway established. But what was established in the process was a suspicion that two people of color sitting by each other can influence fairness. Now that is ridiculous.

In Pleasant Grove, Utah, a police officer Ernesto Ferron feels he has been wronged by being treated with contempt at work. In what constitutes a classic case of race discrimination at workplace Ferron says his Mexican-American heritage was never welcomed by his former supervisor.

In a lawsuit filed recently, he cited his supervisor saying him, “Mexicans are merely here to serve others,” and “Mexicans are better with weedeaters in their hands.”

The lawsuit names as defendants Ferron’s former supervisors Kelly Liddiard and Jim Taufer, former Mayor James Dankleff and City Attorney Christine Petersen.

The suit asks $900,000 in damages, removal of Peterson as city attorney and establishment of an effective harassment reporting mechanism for all employees. In addition to verbal insults, Ferron said he was also subjected to undesirable shifts and denied advancement opportunity because of his ethnicity.

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) has documented widespread and costly unequal treatment of minority loan applicants compared with whites. After a 28-month investigation in six metropolitan areas using “paired testers,” or mystery shoppers, NCRC has filed its first complaint against the largest brokerage network in the country -- Houston-based Allied Home Mortgage Capital Corp.

Columnist Kenneth Harney says, “despite higher credit scores and incomes, minority shoppers often were quoted higher rates and presented fewer loan options than whites.” The investigation among other things, found that:

a) Brokers didn’t discuss their fees -- a key expense in any mortgage transaction -- as often with minority shoppers as they did with white shoppers. Nearly 74 percent of white shoppers received information about fees, but only 31 percent of minority shoppers received disclosures.

b) Brokers offered twice as many loan alternatives to whites than to minorities. Ninety percent of whites were offered a fixed-rate first mortgage, compared with 56 percent of minorities.

c) Twice as many white shoppers were offered lower-cost conventional mortgages, while minorities more often were steered to subprime loan deals.

d) Brokers spent more time discussing loan options and terms with whites -- 39 minutes on average -- compared with 27 minutes with minorities.

A restaurant employee gets a phone call from someone asking him to place money in a trash bag and place it outside. The person on the phone warns that he has four armed accomplices inside the restaurant.

One employee alerts the police. The police officers arrive, notice seven black men on a table, make super assumptions regarding them, and on gun point make them kneel down outside, then go ahead to check their recent phone call records, only to find out that these men had no business with the threats.

That the police officers assumed being black meant being potentially criminal is clearly indicative of highly insensitive attitude and complete lack of minimum diversity training. Of course the court dismissed the race discrimination lawsuit with a $100,000 settlement, an apology and a pledge from the city to improve officer training.

Last week, federal judge John Gleeson of US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn, handed down a 99-page ruling in Turkmen v. Ashcroft, a class-action lawsuit against US government officials, brought by Muslim immigrants detained after Sept. 11, 2001. This was the first time that the issue of Muslim detention and discrimination was addressed by a federal judge.

And considering the systematic infringement of detainees’ human rights following 9/11, one would have expected a sympathetic and humane understanding on part of the judiciary.

However, perfectly in tandem with the administration’s whims, the federal judge expanded the scope for the government to further abuse power. Now, what was possible in the Cuban territory under international watch now, is going to take place right here inside the free land: Government now has wider latitude under immigration law to detain non-citizens on basis of religion, race or national origin, and to hold them indefinitely without explanation!

Without explanation? Indefinite imprisonment? On the basis of religious, race or national origin? At times, we need to read the rulings time and again to get sense of the most devious reactionary designs that the administrations can have access of implementation in the name of patriotism or by any other term.

“The executive is free to single out 'nationals of a particular country' and focus enforcement efforts on them,” the judge wrote. Judge Gleeson also admitted that if such profiling were "applied to citizens, our courts would be highly suspicious." In a New York Times report, David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and a co-counsel in the lawsuit, said the ruling was the only one of its kind and made New York “an equal protection-free zone” because the government can detain immigrants wherever it chooses. “What this decision says is the next time there is a terror attack, the government is free to round up every Muslim immigrant in the U.S., based solely on their ethnic and religious identity, and hold them on immigration pretexts for as long as it desires,” he said. “We saw after 9/11 what the government did in an era of uncertainty about how far it can go. Judge Gleeson has essentially given them a green light to go much further.”