“Openly Expressing Prejudice”: Carson’s Bias Against Muslims Breaks Unwritten Rule Of Using Veiled Language
When Republican Ben Carson declared Muslims unfit to be president, he crossed a line that historians say no major White House hopeful has breached since the 1940s — openly expressing prejudice.
Carson is not the first to appeal to voter bias, but he broke with a timeworn tradition of using coded language to avert political backlash.
“I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” Carson said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sept. 20. “I absolutely would not agree with that.”
Carson’s disparagement of Muslims came after months of derogatory remarks about women and Mexicans by rival Donald Trump, who nonetheless has remained the front-runner for the party nomination. Carson is in second place, some polls show.
Some Republican leaders, already worried about Trump’s insults, fear that Carson’s denigration of Muslims will further damage the party’s efforts to expand its base beyond older, conservative white voters.
Civil rights groups and some of Carson’s Republican rivals denounced the retired neurosurgeon, but he stands little risk of harm in the primaries. A 2013 survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants — a key group for Carson, a Seventh-day Adventist — believe Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence.
Historian Thomas S. Kidd, author of “American Christians and Islam,” said Carson was capitalizing on fear of Muslim terrorists. “But then to turn it into a blanket statement that Muslims in general can’t be full participants in the life of the republic — I do think that’s significant, and it’s alarming,” Kidd said.
Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett said the comments were justified because Islam calls for killing gay people (Muslim clerics say that’s untrue), and that’s incompatible with the Constitution (the Constitution says “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States”).
Bennett also said that Carson, as an African-American, “dramatically expands the appeal of the Republican Party.”
Carson later said on CNN that a Muslim would “have to reject the tenets of Islam” to be president.
Presidential candidates typically take pains to avoid showing religious bias. When Republican Mitt Romney, a Mormon, ran in 2008 and 2012, some evangelical Christians were hostile toward his faith. One of his 2008 opponents, Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, apologized to Romney for asking a reporter, “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”
In 1960, Democrat John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, had to reassure Protestants that he would not take orders from the pope. But his main opponents, Hubert Humphrey in the primaries and Republican Richard Nixon in the general election, avoided the topic.
“Humphrey certainly didn’t say anything like what Carson said,” Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek recalled. Nixon didn’t need to stoke doubts about Kennedy’s faith because “there were plenty of people who were doing it for him,” he said.
Since World War II, historians say, the most openly prejudiced presidential candidate was Strom Thurmond, whose racism was unvarnished when he ran in 1948 as an independent.
“There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches,” the South Carolinian said.
Alabama Gov. George Wallace, then a Democrat, was nearly as direct in his 1963 inaugural speech, pledging “segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.” But in his 1964 campaign for president, he was more guarded in appealing to whites outside the South at a time when many were uneasy about a new housing discrimination ban that would enable blacks to move into their neighborhoods.
“You may want to sell your house to someone with blue eyes and green teeth, and that’s all right,” he told a Maryland audience. “I don’t object. But you should not be forced to do it.”
After Romney’s loss in 2012, Republicans vowed to work harder to attract minority voters. The Republican National Committee released a scathing postmortem saying that “many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”
But Trump and Carson are benefiting from the uneasiness of many working-class whites as the nation becomes more diverse.
Their statements alarm strategist Henry Barbour, a co-author of the RNC report.
“When you say a Muslim’s not fit to be president of the United States, you’re a whole lot more than off message,” he said. “We need to stand on principle, but we don’t need to try to run folks off because they have different backgrounds than some traditional Republicans.”
By: Michael Finnegan, Tribune News Service; The National Memo, October 5, 2015
“How Prosecutors Get Away With Cutting Black Jurors”: ‘Articulating Juror Negatives’, A Perpetuation Of Institutional Racism
A curious thing happened at the trial of Timothy Tyrone Foster, a young black man accused of killing an elderly white woman: Every black prospective juror was dismissed. Foster was convicted, and sentenced to death, by an all-white jury.
Even more curious: There were 42 prospective jurors that morning, five of whom were black. All dismissed, four of whom by “peremptory challenge,” in which the prosecutor strikes a juror at his or her discretion. In Georgia, where Foster’s trial took place, prosecutors have 10 such options.
Peremptory challenges were entirely unreviewable for most of American history. That was their function: In addition to dismissals with reasons, they were meant to give prosecutors and defense attorneys (in Georgia, defense attorneys get 20 such challenges) leeway to strike potentially problematic jurors without explanation.
That changed somewhat in 1986, when the Supreme Court decided Batson v. Kentucky. In Batson, the court held that using peremptory challenges to strike jurors on the basis of race was unconstitutional.
Foster’s trial, though, took place after Batson. How is that possible? Because Batson has proven to be almost worthless in practice. All a prosecutor must do is provide some race-neutral reason for striking jurors, and that is extremely easy to do. Maybe the juror didn’t make eye contact. Maybe she was female. Maybe he looked bored or inattentive—as most of us are at the end of hours of jury duty.
Any of these reasons will do, and so, in Foster’s case and countless others, winning a “Batson challenge” is basically impossible.
Except Foster’s case has turned out to be different. During the lengthy appeals process (nearly 30 years and counting), the prosecutor’s notes were made public. And they are laughable and tragic at the same time. Black prospective jurors are annotated as B#1, B#2, et cetera. Weighing the different options, the prosecutor noted that one has “the most potential to choose from out of the four remaining blacks.” And so on.
And then there were the absurd pretexts the prosecutor provided to satisfy Batson. First, he listed over 30 different reasons, basically throwing everything against the wall to see what would stick. He said three didn’t make enough eye contact. He said another was a social worker, which in fact she was not. He said one was close in age to the 18-year-old defendant; she was 34.
All this make it abundantly clear that race was the predominant factor in striking these jurors, notwithstanding the pretexts given for their dismissals.
And that’s why Foster’s case is now at the Supreme Court, which will have an opportunity to update Batson, and perhaps give it some teeth. The court will also, of course, determine the fate of Foster, who is developmentally disabled and who has now spent nearly 30 years on death row.
“Batson has failed miserably to prevent race discrimination,” says Stephen Bright, who is Foster’s lawyer, a professor at Yale Law School, president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, and one of the leading advocates for criminal justice reform, including abolition of the death penalty. Bright has been down this road before, having won two Supreme Court cases on race discrimination and jury selection. And he says that Foster’s case is not unusual in the least.
“What went on at trial was typical,” he told The Daily Beast. “What’s unusual is we know what’s in the prosecutor’s files. These notes that show not just a consciousness of race but an obsession with race.”
Batson has failed to prevent discrimination, says Bright, for at least three reasons.
First, “every prosecutor has a handy-dandy list of race-neutral reasons that they give. They even distribute reasons in advance. Some state training programs even distribute a list called ‘Articulating Juror Negatives.’”
That’s right, all prosecutors have to do is read from a prewritten list of reasons, and they’ll prevail. “They just say, ‘Take a lot of notes when you strike a black juror.’”
Second, Bright notes the awkward dynamic that Batson challenges present. “When you challenge a prosecutor’s strike, you’re saying the prosecutor intentionally discriminated on the basis of race and lied about it. The psychological dynamics between judge and prosecutor are such that it’ll be very hard for the judge to make either one of those findings. You deal with the prosecutor day in and day out—you’re gonna call the guy a liar and a racist?”
Third, and most damningly, “elected judges in the state courts are not known for recognizing constitutional violations, especially in cases of race. The local judge would’ve been voted out of office had he found a Batson violation. He and the district attorney work together all the time. There’s just no chance that’s going to happen.”
As a result, says Bright, “A lot of defense lawyers have quit making Batson objections because they just don’t think there’s any point.”
The result is a perpetuation of the institutional racism of the judicial system itself.
First, of course, individual cases are influenced. In the case of Foster, Bright says “this kid got sentenced to death because he was a black kid who committed a horrible crime against a white woman. If it had been a black woman, it wouldn’t have been a death penalty case.”
Amazingly, in front of his all-white jury, the prosecutor in Foster’s case told the jury in his closing argument to “give Foster the death penalty to deter people in the projects”—which Bright calculated to be 94 percent black at the time. “That’s a pretty racist appeal to say to an all-white jury.”
Second, the net effect of blocking black jurors from service, in addition to the discrimination they experience, is to diminish the integrity of the judicial system. Says Bright, “A person comes to a courtroom where you may have a 30-40% black population, and the average citizen sees all-white juries. Not only that: everybody’s white up there in the front: the prosecutor, the judge, the jury. The only person of color is the person on trial.” (As reported in an earlier installment of Out of Order, 95 percent of prosecutors are white.)
As a result, says Bright, “black people know they are not part of the criminal justice system. It’s an all-white system. And white people know it too.”
What happens now? In Bright’s opinion, the Foster case will likely be decided on its specific facts: with this evidence, the Supreme Court may well decide that there is a clear inference of racial discrimination.
But Foster may turn out to be too easy a case. Most prosecutors don’t leave smoking guns lying around—as Bright said to me, the mistake this one made was not shredding his notes afterwards. So what about the more numerous cases where racial discrimination takes place without smoking guns like this one?
One option would be to reduce the number of peremptory challenges available to prosecutors—but that is a matter of state law, with each state having different regimes in place. (Bright says there is no appetite for eliminating peremptory challenges altogether because prosecutors, needing unanimous verdicts, are “scared to death there’ll be that one eccentric person on the jury who’s going to hang the jury.”) At the very least, that would limit prosecutors’ capacity to use challenges to stack all-white juries.
Another could be to change the evidentiary standard for finding racial discrimination. The current standard requires that the prosecutor have a “mind to discriminate”—basically, that a prosecutor be found racist. But the court could set out a standard that looks more like disparate impact. Without making any inference as to what’s in a given prosecutor’s head, the bare statistical imbalance could enable a defendant’s challenge to prevail.
Disparate impact reasoning was recently (barely) upheld by the Supreme Court in the last term in the context of the Fair Housing Act. To be sure, it is imperfect and can lead to quotas, thus increasing, rather than decreasing, race-based decisionmaking. But it also eliminates Batson’s embrace of the ridiculous pretext, and the uncomfortable inference that a legal colleague is a liar and a racist.
It’s also possible that, amazingly, Foster could lose. If the court finds that the race discrimination at issue was a harmless error—in particular, if the new evidence of discrimination is not a “relevant circumstance” that the appeals court should have considered—Foster could still face execution. Given the current composition of the Supreme Court, this is a very real possibility.
But even if Foster gets a new trial, the phenomenon of the “all-white jury,” which Bob Dylan sang about in 1975, will remain as long as prosecutors can exercise challenges on a pretext, and bar people of color from sitting on a jury of one’s peers.
In Bright’s words, “When one part of the community is systematically kept off the juries undermines the respect that people pay to the courts’ decisions. Something needs to be done about it.”
By: Jay Michaelson, The Daily Beast, September 28, 2015
“Toxic Anti-American Talk”: The GOP’ers Just Don’t Get What America Is About
In the fall of 1943, a remarkable football game was played on the Eastern Plains of Colorado, the open, desolate, sparsely-populated landscape that pulls up to the great Rocky Mountains like the ebb of an inland sea they once were.
Dotted with small towns and grain towers, among the other installations on Colorado’s Eastern Plains during World War II was the Granada Relocation Center for Japanese Americans, colloquially known as Amache after a Cheyenne Indian Chief’s daughter. Like the communities around it, Amache was too small to field a full 11-man football team so instead they played six-man, including against a squad from the nearby town of Holly, the Holly High School Wildcats. They were prisoners and designated not-Americans, yet played that most American of sports.
The Amache team won that six-man football game in 1943, 7-0. Among the players on the Holly team was a teenage farm boy named Roy Romer. “We felt strange,” he recalled. “Why were folks herded here?”
Romer would go on to become four-term governor of Colorado and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He talked about growing up in the shadow of Amache as a lifelong influence on his support for civil rights and treating people equally. Romer was part of the Colorado contingent that marched on the last day from Selma to Montgomery with Dr. King, and he was one of the first national figures to support LGBT rights by opposing Colorado’s anti-gay Amendment 2.
Colorado’s Republican governor at the time, Ralph Carr, opposed Executive Order 9066, the internment of Japanese Americans and said of them, “the Japanese are protected by the same Constitution that protects us. An American citizen of Japanese descent has the same rights as any other citizen. … If you harm them, you must first harm me. I was brought up in small towns where I knew the shame and dishonor of race hatred. I grew to despise it.”
Considered a rising star in the national Republican Party, Carr’s pro-civil rights stand provoked a firestorm of ugly criticism and cost him the 1942 Colorado Senate race. Amache ended Ralph Carr’s career. It began Roy Romer’s.
So when I hear the ugly rhetoric around Muslims not being real Americans from Donald Trump and Ben Carson, and the pejorative “anchor babies” from Jeb Bush, I think, have we learned nothing from Amache? I witness the hateful, divisive venom from Trump and Carson and the “birthers” and I wonder, what makes your family any better or different? What entitles you to separate yourself from people named Khan and Rodriguez and Obama – and for that matter, Reince Priebus?
This is toxic and anti-American. Rep. Mike Honda and his family were interned at Amache. The late Sen. Dan Inouye lost an arm for this country serving in a Japanese-American combat unit. He was awarded the Medal of Honor along with 20 other Nisei solders who were members of the 442nd Infantry Regiment, many of whom had family members in internment camps. Sometimes the “hyphenated” citizens of this country give us better than the non-hyphenated ones deserve.
If there’s one thing that defines this country above all others, it is that we are made up of people who wanted to come here. E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one.
The people in Amache were Americans. So are 3 million Muslim Americans. So is Jorge Ramos. When it comes to our values, Trump, Carson and the racist birther idiots they feed in the hopes of becoming president, I’m not so sure.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, September 23, 2015
“Quick Lesson In Political Language”: The Resurgence Of The America George Wallace Once Knew
A quick lesson in political language.
In 1958, Democrat George Wallace, running as a candidate for governor of Alabama and racially moderate enough to be endorsed by the NAACP, was swamped by a strident white supremacist whose campaign played shamelessly to the basest hatreds of the electorate. Afterward, Wallace complained bitterly to a room full of fellow politicians that the other guy had “out-n—-red me.” And he vowed he would never let it happen again.
As history knows, of course, he never did.
But the point here is that, 10 years later, the social and political landscape had changed so dramatically that no serious politician would have ever thought of using such intemperate language so openly. Mind you, they were not above making appeals to base animosities, but the language became benign and opaque, a “dog whistle” pitched for those with ears to hear.
Thus, Nixon had no need to curse unruly militants and longhairs. He simply spoke of “law and order.” Reagan didn’t call anyone a lazy N-word. He spoke of “welfare queens.” The Bushes didn’t have to slur gay people. They spoke of “family values.”
But for some of us, it appears coded language is no longer enough.
“We have a problem in this country,” said a man in the audience last week during a Q&A session with GOP frontrunner Donald Trump in New Hampshire. “It’s called Muslims.” He went on to ask, “When can we get rid of (them)?”
Trump’s flaccid response: “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things.”
Nor is that even the most appalling recent bit of Islamophobia from the campaign trail. That dishonor goes to Ben Carson, who said Sunday on Meet the Press that no Muslim should be president. “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” he said. “I absolutely would not agree with that.”
Later, facing a firestorm of criticism, Carson told Sean Hannity of Fox “News” that he would accept a Muslim who rejects Islam “and clearly will swear to place our Constitution above their religion.” Given that “our” Constitution explicitly forbids a religious litmus test for elective office, that hypothetical Muslim should respond to Carson as follows: You first.
In tacitly endorsing bigotry on the one hand and enthusiastically embracing it on the other, Trump and Carson provide redundant proof that they are manifestly unfit for the presidency. One is sobered, however, by the renewed reminder that such bigotry no longer automatically disqualifies them from it. Indeed, experience suggests that some people will even see it as the sign of authentic truth-telling unencumbered by political correctness.
Make no mistake: Every adult American who uses language — and particularly, those who do so for a living — has at one point or another been bedeviled by political correctness, by the sometimes persnickety mandate to craft what you say in ways that are fair and respectful to everyone who might hear it. What Carson and Trump represent, however, is not solely about language, but about the ideas language encodes.
Which means it is ultimately about what kind of country we are and want to be.
Land of the free, except for Muslims?
With liberty and justice for all, except for Muslims?
All men are created equal, except for Muslims?
Any little girl might grow up to be president, provided she is not a Muslim?
If it is sad that some of us think that way, it is appalling that prominent aspirants to the nation’s highest office can now think that way openly. It suggests the resurgence of the America George Wallace once knew. In that America, there was no need of racial and religious double entendres.
In that America, one entendre was enough.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, September 23, 2015
“Ornery People R Us”: Anxiety Is Pervasive On Both Sides Of Political Spectrum
In achieving their improbable surges in presidential polling, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have profited from the same wellspring of anxiety, a deep-seated fear about the future that is rising across the land. Their answers to that anxiety are very different — as their followers are very different — but they have both tapped into an undercurrent of unease that affects a broad swath of American voters.
And that unease is well-founded. In mid-September, the U.S. Census Bureau issued its annual report on wages, poverty, and health insurance. Its findings come as no surprise: Though the official unemployment rate is down to its lowest level in seven years, the percentage of people living in poverty — around 14 percent — hasn’t budged in four years.
Equally worrisome is the stagnation in wages, which haven’t risen significantly for more than a decade. “Anyone wondering why people in this country are feeling so ornery need look no further than this report. Wages have been broadly stagnant for a dozen years, and median household income peaked in 1999,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a research group, told The Associated Press.
And ornery people are. That’s the only thing that explains Trump, who for weeks has enjoyed the top spot in GOP presidential primary polls. Full of bombast, narcissism, and blame, the real estate titan has pinned Mexican immigrants as the purveyors of all that is destructive to the American way of life. It’s astonishing how much support he’s received for his proposal to deport the estimated 11 million who are here illegally.
There’s no doubt a good portion of racism and xenophobia among the Trump crowd; they are largely voters uncomfortable with the country’s increasing diversity. But they are also anxious about a future in which the American dream is out of reach for their children and grandchildren.
On the other side of the political spectrum, Sanders, Vermont’s self-described socialist in the U.S. Senate, is giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money, attracting large crowds, and leading in New Hampshire, which holds the first presidential primary vote. His answers, at least, are not xenophobic: Among other things, he would increase taxes on the wealthy and end some longstanding trade agreements.
Sanders has long warned about income inequality, which has been growing for decades but was exacerbated by the Great Recession. Suddenly, ordinary workers saw their jobs disappear, their savings evaporate, their homes taken by the bank. Many of them have not recovered the ground they lost, and their traumas have invited fear bordering on panic.
Meanwhile, the rich have only gotten richer. The top 1 percent own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, and they hold a larger share of income than at any time since the 1920s and the Great Depression.
These trends are evident throughout the industrialized world; they’re not the fault of any single politician or ideological philosophy. According to economists, they’ve grown from a convergence of factors, including the technological revolution and the globalization of labor.
Still, the wealth gap is quite worrisome. It’s a recipe for revolution, the sort of gulf between the haves and have-nots that is characteristic of developing countries, where the ties of the civic and social fabric do not bind. It’s hard to overstate the potential for upheaval in a country such as this, where a diverse population is not held together by a single language or race or religion, but rather by the belief that opportunity is available to all. What happens when a majority of the people no longer believes that?
You’d think, then, that income inequality would dominate the campaign trail. But the subject was hardly mentioned during Wednesday’s marathon GOP presidential primary debate, where such pressing priorities as possible Secret Service code names were discussed.
That’s not good. While it’s hard to see either Trump (his bubble may already be bursting) or Sanders as a presidential nominee, the voters they represent aren’t going away. Neither is their anxiety, which could prove a disruptive force in American political and civic life.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, September 19, 2015
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