Category Archives: Civil Rights

Flossing and the dental hygiene paradigm of race discourse | Nonprofit With Balls

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As always, Vu Le, at Nonprofit with Balls, says it best:

Flossing and the Dental Hygiene Paradigm of Race Discourse

[Quoting Jay Smooth:] “We don’t assume, I’m a clean person therefore I do not need to clean my teeth. Being a clean person is something you maintain and work on every day […] And when someone suggests to us that we’ve got something stuck in our teeth, we don’t say, ‘I have something stuck in my teeth?! But I’m a clean person!’”

Undoing racism and other forms of injustice is a practice we must do every day, like brushing our teeth, according to Jay Smooth. We must look in the mirror constantly. And like brushing, on some days, we’re better at it than on others. On occasion, we don’t spend enough time, and we still have bits of gross stuff stuck in our chompers even though we feel minty fresh. Sometimes we’re lazy and just gargle with some bourbon and call it a night.

…

With all the injustice out there that we are trying to fight, let’s give each other some grace. Let’s admit we don’t know everything and we can’t be perfect. Let’s all lower our defenses and see each other as imperfect human beings trying hard to do some good in a complex world. And when someone says, “Hey, you got a little bit of racism (or sexism, or ableism, or ageism, etc.) stuck in your teeth,” we thank them, do some looking in the mirror to remove it, and continue forward to make our world better.

Source: Flossing and the dental hygiene paradigm of race discourse | Nonprofit With Balls

If people stopped throwing things away, this would lead to less anxiety for garbage collectors, who are only trying to do their job.

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{Image: Clip from facebook. Post says, "Shaun King: Introducing a 25-part series on reducing police brutality. Solutions. Solutions. Solutions. Solutions. Solutions." A comment below the post, by "Robert McGrath," reads "how about people stop breaking the law. this might in turn lead to less anxiety for the police who are only trying to do their job. but then again its easier being the victim than it is admitting more could be done from the american people themselves..."

how about people stop breaking the law. this might in turn lead to less anxiety for the police who are only trying to do their job.

If people stopped breaking the law, there would be no job for the police to do.

It is their job to deal with law-breakers.  Preferably non-lethally.  The problem arises when they (demonstrably) deal with similarly-situated law-breakers breaking similar laws (CD/cigarette sales; traffic violations) or similarly-situated citizens not breaking any damn laws at all (driving with a legal concealed-carry permit; being a behavioral therapist trying to prevent harm to a client) based (demonstrably) on the color of their skin or their disability.

“They were breaking the law” is not an excuse for the unequal application of lethal or even non-lethal force by the police.  “Do your damn job,” is the appropriate response to this excuse.

I get that it is a hard and dangerous job, and I deeply respect the good people who have stepped up to do it.  But it is a job in which we as a society trust you and give you  — yes, give you; it’s not yours without the badge that we give you — the right to use force when appropriate.  If you’re not up for doing that fairly — regardless of how brave or heroic you may be — it is not the job for you.  Take your biases to a job where they are less likely to cause physical harm and death.

Hostile Environment; or Stained Glass What the Fuck?

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For generations, African-American employees and students have had to eat in the dining hall of a residential college — named, then and (stubbornly) now, for slavery advocate John C. Calhoun — and stare up at this stained glass window:

{Image: stained glass window showing a man and woman, both with dark skin, in 19th century clothing, standing in a cotton field, each with a basket of cotton on their head.}

It simply defies comprehension that this was allowed to remain.   The thought of trying to work, learn, teach, or even eat in the presence of this rights-erasing, humanity-denying decor makes me disgusted beyond words.  It would be like having a stained glass window of a gas chamber, torture device, or sanitarium.

I have previously blogged about Things That Are Inexplicably OK, like tenured Princeton professors advocating infanticide of disabled kids or a sports team in our nation’s capital named after a racist epithet.  This is way up there with all that.  Another respected institution of higher learning, this one decorated with a depiction of slavery.

Until today!  Yale dishwasher and civil rights action hero Corey Manafee stuck a broomstick through it.  Window smashed; problem (at least the decor problem) solved.

“I took a broomstick, and it was kind of high, and I climbed up and reached up and broke it,” he said. “It’s 2016, I shouldn’t have to come to work and see things like that.”

“I just said, ‘That thing’s coming down today. I’m tired of it,’” he added. “I put myself in a position to do it, and did it.”

Damn right you shouldn’t have to come to work and see things like that.  My view is: every African-American who has had to work or study in that space has a hostile environment claim.

But Corey Menafee enters my personal Civil Rights Getting Shit Done Hall of Fame, along with Bree Newsome, who climbed up a flagpole and took down the Confederate flag, and the mayor of New Paltz, New York, who started issuing marriage licenses to gay couples (for a brief time until he was ordered to stop) in 2004.

Don’t wait for permission to do the right thing; just get shit done.

#googlemapsprivilege

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All of my anger today is for cops who murder Black people and evil fucks who murder cops. In the wake of this, as every, police shooting, we remember the others.  Michael Brown. Tamir Rice.  Eric Garner. Sandra Bland.  #blacklivesmatter

But some of the stories and posts I’m seeing brought to mind a different hashtag:

#googlemapsprivilege

The ability to take a simple drive and get to your destination at about the time Google Maps says you will, that is, without being randomly stopped, suspected, delayed, and generally fucked with simply because you are (1) Black and (2) in a car.

Last night, a professional woman who sits on the board of our non-profit recounted this story in a Facebook comment:

I was pulled over right outside Denver Botanic Gardens by a cop who said I “looked like I was trying too hard to get away from him” after leaving the drive-thru at Wendy’s. I had on a really menacing business suit.

Ed Garnes — who I don’t know but whose post was shared enough times that I got to read it — recounts this incident:

Black Death is a sport. This is a fact with history on it’s side. When the police are involved my “fancy” education, two parent household upbringing, and clean criminal record will not save me. This year alone I have been followed by police over 10 times. I have paid over 400 dollars in tickets that were not warranted. This past weekend I was followed for 5 miles by an officer in Douglasville. Luckily, I was able to find a “safe area” with people as the officer pulled up beside my car and stared me down. I called a friend who then escorted me back to the highway so I could return to the south side. A few months ago, someone called the police on me for merely retrieving items from my vehicle at the univ of Tennessee, a campus where I work and attend school. My 4.0 gpa meant nothing. In Knoxville the past 3 weeks, someone has spit in my food at a local eatery and spit on my car leaving tangible evidence of hate. This is my reality as a Black man dodging death like some super hero who never knows if this minute is my last. If I die today, y’all better fight for me. Fuck a hashtag.

Same with this astonishing list from John Fleming:

Have you ever:

1) Been accused of being a drug dealer in a neighborhood b/c you’re driving a nice car and get racial profiled?

2) Been stopped and detained in a parking garage in downtown Austin by EIGHT state troopers and be accused of being an alleged rapist (who they then said was a white red head male after they finally let me go) from Georgetown, TX?

3)Had a gun drawn on you b/c you went to reach for your WALLET for a traffic stop?

4) Lived your entire life wondering how from when I was a little boy until this very post how your cousin, who was a State Marshall in Texas, (whom you looked up to and admired) was found dead in his East Texas home and his death was never solved?

5) Been WALKING from your office after a day’s work to the parking garage and get stopped by a UTPD Police officer and asked for your ID without cause at the Blanton Parking Garage b/c someone reported that an African American male was seen strung out on drugs selling drugs in the garage? I was held and detained for approximately 30 mins while they ran my license with UTPD, APD, State and Nation.

6) Been pulled over traveling south on I-35 in Oklahoma just a few miles before crossing back into Texas and have a Oklahoma State Trooper pull you over for TRAVELING 60 in a 70mph area for speeding, get asked to step out of your car while your sister and her 3 daughters are in the car and be escorted back to the front seat of the Troopers K-9 Ford Expedition with a barking vigilant German Shepard in the back seat as you are interrogated and then released for a warning when he learns that your cousin is STATE SENATOR FOR THE STATE OF OKLAHOMA?

All of the above are true and they HAPPENED TO ME!

It’s a privilege to stay alive and it’s another privilege to get to your fucking destination without having to pull over and have a discussion about the way you drove out of the Wendy’s drive thru, or what sort of car you’re driving, or the fact that no, except for skin color, you do not look like the robber/rapist/drug dealer they are looking for, or your broken tail-light, or your expired plates.  I’ve been driving on expired plates since February, it was recently pointed out to me BY A FRIEND, NOT BY A COP.

I have been pulled over approximately five times in my life.  All but one of them were for my admitted habit of driving 10-25 mph over the speed limit.  In other words: righteous stops, for which I got tickets and points.   The other was for making a right turn without signaling.  Suburban Minnesota.  Late at night.  Officer shined the flashlight in my eyes.  I kept my hands on the wheel.  I got a warning not to do that again and was sent on my way.

I think this is some of what Justice Sotomayor was talking about when she use the term “civil death.”

We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are “isolated.” They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere. See L. Guinier & G. Torres, The Miner’s Canary 274–283 (2002). They are the ones who recognize that unlawful police stops corrode all our civil liberties and threaten all our lives. Until their voices matter too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.

Utah v. Strieff, No. 14-1373, 2016 WL 3369419, at *16 (U.S. June 20, 2016) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).

#whiteprivilegeisreal.  So is #googlemapsprivilege.

I’llRideWithYou?

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After North Carolina made the brilliant decision to police its citizens’ bathroom habits, a movement arose urging cis folks to be available to accompany trans or genderqueer folks to the restroom or other gendered spaces.  It’s called “I’ll Go With You.”   It has a website … and buttons!

This week, two more Black men were assassinated by the police under circumstances that defy rational understanding, but that share with so many other similar murders this feature:  they would not have happened to a white person.

What can a random middle age white lady do about all this killing?  I can march, shout, post . . . all things that announce my horror, anger, and sadness.  But I can’t force grand juries to indict murderous cops or juries to convict them.  And worst of all, I can’t stop the shooting from happening in the first place.

Or can I?   What if I were there?  Could enough of us be there for our Black friends, allies, and fellow citizens to stop some of the random killing?  If we’re willing to go to the bathroom as a show of solidarity with our trans and genderqueer friends, is there a way we ride along with our Black friends to show solidarity or, y’know, be a human shield?  Call it the White-People Ride-Along program*, placing random white people in the cars of random African-Americans while they drive to work, run errands, go out to dinner, stay up late, joy ride, and other things white people can do in cars without risking death at the hands of law enforcement.  It would work like a sort of reverse Uber. When the Black driver is ready to go somewhere, he or she enters the information in the WPRA app and connects with an available white passenger.  Voila!  Instant, if unfounded, respectability and potential survival.

Wild-ass idea, right?  Or maybe not.  Anyone with the balls & tech skills to get this rolling:  I’m in.

***************

*Yes, I’m intending to copy the police “Ride-Along” label.

Racial prejudice is driving opposition to paying college athletes. – The Washington Post

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The article makes very interesting points about the racial disparities in our views of paying college athletes.  But to a sorta kinda labor lawyer, the most striking sentence is this:

In survey after survey, strong national majorities oppose paying college athletes. In March 2015, for example, an HBO Real Sports/Marist Poll found that 65 percent of Americans do not think college athletes in top men’s football and basketball programs should be paid.

Image: Three football players, two in light blue uniforms, one in an orange uniform. The one in orange is African-American. He is carrying the football and jumping to avoid a tackle by one of the players in blue, who is also African-American. Another player in blue, race unknown, watches from the right. I have an idea:  let’s take a poll about whether we want other people who entertain us to be paid.  I’ll bet that if actors weren’t paid, Tim and I would not have had to spend $39.98 to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens.   While we’re asking whether we should pay college athletes, let’s also take a vote on whether college coaches should be paid.  How about other college employees?  Just think how cheap college would be if professors worked for free!

This poll should be dismissed as silly, but apparently asking consumers of entertainment whether the entertainers should be paid is not only a thing but a thing that is taken seriously by the potential payors.

 

Texas Governor Orders Founding Fathers/Constitution Display Removed from State Capitol (but the Nativity Can Stay)

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The governor of Texas removed an approved display involving the Statue of Liberty because . . . Texas has a budget surplus that it would like to redistribute to ACLU lawyers?

Source: Texas Governor Orders Atheist Display Removed from State Capitol (but the Nativity Can Stay)

BTW the headline originally read, “Texas Governor Orders Atheist Display Removed  . . .” but there’s nothing anti-God there, just pro-America and pro-Constitution.  Honestly, the full-support-for-civil-liberties-lawyers theory is the only one that really fits.

White Affirmative Action

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I wrote this op-ed for the Denver Post* after we got a flyer under the door of our law office.  It was published on January 18, 1998.  Given that we have just recently been treated to the clownshow of a white Supreme Court justice announcing that African-American students would be better off in “less-advanced” or “slower track” schools, rather than the University of Texas, I thought it would be fun to re-run this.  The Post called it “Clear the bench (and bar) of privilege.”  I thought of titling it “Gimme a Fucking Break,” but went for the more descriptive “White Affirmative Action.”

We recently received — under the front door of our law firm’s office, sans postage — an interesting missive announcing the organization of a group called VICTIMS OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION (all caps in the original).  This group (we’ll call them VAA) opposes affirmative action  — from context, the race-based variety — and proposes to shed light on “the appointment of lawyers holding unmerited law degrees to the federal court bench” (underline in the original) and to “deny . . . admission of scholasically unfit ‘minorities’ to law schools.”  The letter concludes by asking for our “assistance, financial or otherwise.”  I choose “otherwise” and offer my invaluable assistance through the formation of what VAA will surely recognize as an important allied organization:  VICTIMS OF PRIVILEGE AND NEPOTISM.

VAA argues that their group is necessary because they have found at least two black judges they claim are unqualified for the federal bench:  one because the judge invented a story about his youth in Mississippi; the other because the judge — at the trial court level — had no previous judicial experience.  (The letter does not mention the law board scores, law school grades, scholastic honors, professional experience or judicial competence of either man.) This got me thinking:  In my ten years of legal practice, I have encountered not only a few incompetent white judges but scores of incompetent white attorneys and I have begun to suspect that these lawyers, too, are the recipients of unmerited law degrees.

To remedy this situation, VAA will have to agree, will require our new group to deny law school admission to scholastically unfit white applicants who rely on such illegitimate factors as where their parents went to law school, who their parents know in the admissions department, or how much money their families have contributed to the school over the years.  Also in our cross-hairs will be such system-abusers as white kids with lower-than-acceptable scores who try to get admitted based on international travel, internships with friends of the family, political work with same, and other life-enhancing experiences open only to those of wealth and connection.  Practicing lawyers who were admitted to law school based on any of these factors must be deemed to hold “unmerited law degrees,” right VAA?

And it doesn’t stop with law school.  We’ll also have to get rid of any white lawyer who got his job because he or his parents knew someone at the firm, because his family attended a church or country club with one of the partners, or because the supervisor from a previous — nepotistically-acquired — job made a recommendation.  Any white judge appointed based on political connections developed through contact with other privileged white lawyers or contributions to the campaigns of privileged white senators cannot be considered qualified to serve.  Finally, of course, any white lawyer who has received the benefit of the doubt based simply on having white skin, good clothes or a standard accent or because a boss or judge of the same ethnic background felt “comfortable” around him — where an equally talented minority lawyer would have been passed over — must step aside.

Well, I’m outta here.  And so are most of the white lawyers and judges I’ve worked with over the years — the good, the bad and the ugly.  Truth is, it is we who benefit from affirmative action and always has been.  Sure merit matters — that’s why we have a bar exam.  But if we think merit was ever all that mattered or that affirmative action was invented in the 1970s to assist minorities and women, we are living in a fantasy world.

We white people have been enjoying the fruits of affirmative action ever since a white skin was all you needed to not be enslaved.  Even after discrimination was declared officially illegal, our prospects in the school-admissions and job markets still benefit overwhelmingly from affirmative action through nepotism, connection, economic privilege and — above all — the largely subconscious sense of most white bosses and faculty that we are like them, that we fit in, that they are comfortable around us, or that we remind them of their kids.  Affirmative action that favors minorities — both the type that requires outreach to non-white populations and, on a larger scale, the type that keeps an eye on the numbers — is necessary and will be until our economy and workforce are sufficiently diverse that the affirmative action working against minorities has faded away.

So whaddya say, VAA?  Are you ready to address the plight of all VICTIMS OF NON-MERIT-BASED SELECTION PROCEDURES?  We’d like your assistance  . . . but skip the “otherwise,” I’ll take financial assistance.

The Post asked me to add a one-sentence biographical description.  I chose confession and tribute:

Amy Farr Robertson is a Denver lawyer who graduated from Yale Law School 28 years after her father, who taught her to appreciate all the ways she has benefited from affirmative action.

*****************

*The link will make you pay $2.95 to read the above.

Therapeutic Disclaimer: Not ungrammatical. Non-binary aware.

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I need a therapeutic disclaimer in emails and other media that goes like this:

 . . .  [blah blah blah] they* [blah blah blah] them* [blah blah blah] their* . . .

*Non-binary-aware, not ungrammatical.

I need this because I was raised on grammatical correction.  It was how we expressed love in our family, just as many families express love by overfeeding one another, or teaching their young’uns to hunt or catch a spiral pass.

At a point slightly before I was able to consume solid food, my mother taught me — and corrected me — on the difference between “which” and “that.”  If you said something was “more unique” in our household, you got a quick lecture on how the thing could be unique or not, but could not be comparatively unique because that suggested there was more than one of whatever it was.  I believe my mother stopped drinking Pepsi for a while (actually, I don’t recall her ever drinking Pepsi; Fresca was her soft drink of choice) when they advertised it as “The Refreshingest!”  One year, she corrected a typo in my home-made holiday card.   That year was 2007.

Perhaps my favorite story, demonstrating the inter-generational quality to this bonding-through-grammar, was when — at the know-it-all age of approximately 12 — I wrote a letter to the editor of the Washington Post suggesting that some article or another was “male chauvinist.”  My grandfather read it and provided this encouraging comment for my early efforts at politico-journalistic participation:  “I believe the adjectival form is ‘chauvinistic.'”  Seriously.  I am not making that up.

I have to add, of course, that I love my mother and grandfather, and that they prepared me well for a world in which you are in fact judged on your grammar.  No one taught me how to dress fashionably or wear make-up — we just weren’t a fashion-forward family

Image: three white people leaning on the side of a ferry boat. The young girl, around 9 years old, is wearing red shorts, a blue shirt and knee socks, the woman (holding a small dog) is wearing blue pants and a red shirt, and the man (with a scruffy beard) is wearing a short-sleeve button-down shirt and brown work pants.

— but dammit I know how to sound edumacated.

As an act of rebellion, I became a linguistics major and basked in the glow of descriptive grammar.  As an adult, I relish hearing and constructing neologisms, making prefixes and suffixes go where they have never gone before, and generally observing the way our brains interact with language when left on their own.  For all of this linguistic liberation, however, I still have a very severe case of GIS:  Grammatical Insecurity Syndrome.

One of the things I was taught alongside “which,” “that,” and never, ever “most unique,” is that singular verbs take singular pronouns, and that “they, them, and their” are plural pronouns.  I learned to police my language for this possible mismatch, and either change the number — that is, rearrange the entire sentence to be plural rather than singular — or change the pronoun.   And of course since I was a good feminist, I balked at the generic “he” and used the hell out of “he or she,”  “his/hers,” etc.  The random use of the generic “she” — which become popular when I was in law school in the 1980s — always seemed sort of strained to me, especially when used by male professors whose approach was otherwise pretty chauvinist . . .  I mean, of course, chauvinistic.

It’s time to leave all that binary shit behind.  It’s time to embrace they/them/their as singular, non-binary, pronouns.  And most of all, it’s time not to care if many people think I’m just ungrammatical.  As always, XKCD says it best:

Image: 9 panel comic, two stick figures conversing. Person #1:

Alabama WTF?

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First Alabama passed a law requiring a driver’s license or similar state-issued ID to vote.  Then they closed all but four DMVs in the state, and all of the DMVs in majority African-American counties.  Sounds bad.  It’s worse than that.

The whole process disproportionately disenfranchises African-Americans, rural voters of all races (who are generally more distant from DMVs), poor people of all races (who may not have the means to take time off work and travel across the state), and people with disabilities (who also may not have the ability to travel long distances, in public or borrowed transportation, to get a license).  It’s racist and it ultimately limits the franchise to middle-class urban and suburban non-disabled folks of any race.

But wait! There’s more!

[T]he agency says by next March there may only be four driver’s license offices open in the state.

“Well unfortunately what citizens you know could expect is longer lines, or often times scheduling way in advance to get an opportunity, and probably the worst is some have to travel a significant distance to be able to get that driver’s license serviced,” Spencer Collier, Alabama Law Enforcement Agency Secretary said.

The focus has naturally been on the effect this has on voting, without stopping to think about the effect this has on DRIVING.  That’s right, that privilege the state grants you to get behind the wheel of a vehicle and do things like drive to your job, drive the equipment you might need to be able to drive to DO your job, drive to hospitals and doctors’ offices, drive to the grocery store, and of course drive down the highway with the radio up and the windows down trying to forget that YOU LIVE IN THE MOST BACKWARD STATE IN THE NATION.

The economic impact of the inability to drive is huge, and will now fall disproportionately on African-Americans, and people of any race who are disabled and/or poor and/or live in rural areas.

Not just Mississippi Goddam, but Alabama WTF?

Source: Alabama DMV closings draw call for federal voting rights probe | MSNBC