Is Racism Worse in the South? John Roberts's question frames the Voting Rights Act case. Too bad there's no answer.

[Draggingtree]

New Republic:

THE SOUTH MARCH 5, 2013

Is Racism Worse in the South? John Roberts's question frames the Voting Rights Act case. Too bad there's no answer.

 

BY CHUCK THOMPSON

In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court arguments over the Voting Rights Act, the geography of racism is once again a topic of debate. None other than Chief Justice John Roberts kicked things off when he asked the act’s defenders—that would be the U.S. government—a 20-word question that brilliantly framed the entire debate: “Is it the government’s submission that the citizens of the South are more racist than the citizens of the North?” Roberts asked, pinning a very ragged tail on a very ugly donkey.

 

Unlike most debates about this question, this one has real implications. The landmark act requires that areas of the country with a particularly virulent history of racial discrimination must receive federal approval before making changes in their voting laws. To no one’s surprise, the majority of the states covered by Section 5 are located in the South. If the answer is “yes,” then a reasonable case can be made for upholding the existing law.

When you are on the field of battle and you find a battlefield map (read/study/learn)

[Valin]

New Republic:

THE SOUTH MARCH 5, 2013

Is Racism Worse in the South? John Roberts's question frames the Voting Rights Act case. Too bad there's no answer.

 

BY CHUCK THOMPSON

 

 

As someone who grew up in Duluth Mn. I will say Racism was there.

[Valin]

Simple question: Is it racist to prefer to live/associate with people like yourself?

[righteousmomma]

Well, Valin if it is racist, then most of the lack population today is very racist.

Edited to say I meant "black" not "lack"

 

 

 

 

 

[Valin]

Well, Valin if it is racist, then most of the lack population today is very racist.

 

Point is most people are more comfortable around people like themselves....thus it has always been.

 

[righteousmomma]

True dat. However it does not change the fact that most blacks today do not want to assimilate.

[Valin]

True dat. However it does not change the fact that most blacks today do not want to assimilate.

 

Assimilate?

[Draggingtree]

March 6, 2013, 6:33 p.m. ET

Daniel Henninger

Henninger: Is the South Still Racist?

A Supreme Court case reveals the divide between liberals and conservatives in the U.S.

At times even a chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court finds it useful, as the saying goes, to put the hay down where the goats can get it. And so it was last week in oral arguments over a big voting-rights case.

 

At issue in Shelby County v. Holder was whether some states in the American South, unlike many states in the North, must still submit any change in voting practices to the Justice Department for approval, as required by one section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted, the practical enforcement of this provision is mainly directed at Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

 

After listening to his liberal colleagues argue that Alabama's election practices, as interpreted by various legal formulas four decades after the law's passage, still discriminate against blacks, Chief Justice John Roberts put the hay down in front of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324128504578344402346135858.html

[Draggingtree]

Just in Case New York Times Readers Don’t Feel Enough White Guilt Yet …

Posted on | March 8, 2013 |

 

. . . Ta-Nehisi Coates is there on the op-ed pages with a stern sermonette for them. It involves the fact that an employee of a New York deli didn’t recognize the actor Forest Whitaker and accused him of shoplifting. Coates offers a few more examples — including from before he was born — of a racism that ”haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence.”

 

And also haunts them, we might add, with dramatic prose.

Far be it from me to say that New York deli employees aren’t in the thrall of atavistic ethnic prejudice, their minds crowded with ignorant racial stereotypes and hateful bigotry. But, on closer inspection, that doesn’t seem to be Coates’s point:

 

In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist.

Who is this “we”?

Membership in the Not a Racist Club is exclusive to white kids

http://theothermccain.com/2013/03/08/just-in-case-new-york-times-readers-dont-feel-enough-white-guilt-yet/

[Draggingtree]

CBC's Fudge Escalates Push for Obama Cabinet Diversity

 

By Jonathan Strong

Roll Call Staff

March 11, 2013, 6:41 p.m.

 

Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Marcia L. Fudge is escalating her campaign to urge President Barack Obama to pick African Americans for his cabinet, publicly releasing a letter that slams the first black president for a lack of diversity among his closest advisers.

 

“The people you have chosen to appoint in this new term have hardly been reflective of this country’s diversity,” the Ohio Democrat said in the March 11 letter.

 

Fudge adds that CBC members’ offices have received phone calls from angry constituents questioning why Obama hasn’t nominated anyone with the ability “to speak to the unique needs of African Americans. Their ire is compounded by the overwhelming support you’ve received from the African American community.”

 

By releasing the letter, Fudge is escalating a campaign by the CBC to push Obama on his cabinet diversity and continuing to demonstrate her willingness to push Obama aggressively to embrace her group’s priorities. http://www.rollcall.com/news/cbcs_fudge_escalates_push_for_obama_cabinet_diversity-223009-1.html?pos=hln

I knew, I knew he was

[Draggingtree]

‘The Good, Racist People’ of Manhattan

 

March 11th, 2013 - 2:14 am

by Ed Driscoll

 

Most of the items we link to here are bread and butter examples of media bias, misguided energy policy, or Obama, Biden or another member of the left putting his proverbial John Lobb wingtip in his mouth and twisting.

 

But every once in a while, something that a prominent “liberal” says, when he or she believes he’s making a Profound Statement on the State of Mankind, just jumps out as being remarkably misanthropic. Even more so because it’s not a hit piece on conservatives (we’ve become increasingly inured to those, if only out of their sheer volume), but an attack on the writer’s fellow liberals.

 

(As they colloquially define themselves. Or at least used to, from around the 1930s, when Progressivism became a dirty word after the excesses of the original Progressives, particularly during WWI, until about five or six years ago, when Liberal had become a dirty word, after the excesses of the previous 50 years, when they decided to be called “Progressives” again.)

 

We saw it in 2008, when the late Nora Ephron, kicking back with some light blogging at the Huffington Post in between, we assume, crafting screenplays or lining up the next directing gig, decided to play wannabe pundit and wrote:

 

This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men. http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2013/03/11/the-good-racist-people-of-manhattan/

[Draggingtree]

12Mar

 

More Racism From the Left [Reader Post]

 

By: Brother Bob

 

Over at Bretbart.com, Jim Nolte had an interesting take on how the lefiverse got all wee-ee’d up last week over something that Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes said regarding President Obama in an excerpt from his upcoming book that appeared in Vanity Fair. The quote that started this controversy was this:

 

“Obama’s the one who never worked a day in his life. He never earned a penny that wasn’t public money. How many fund-raisers does he attend every week? How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish I had that kind of time. He’s lazy, but the media won’t report that.’ He noticed my arched eyebrows and added, ‘I didn’t come up with that. Obama said that, to Barbara Walters"

 

What Ailes was referring to was an interview that Obama did with Barbara Walters back in 2011:

BARBARA WALTERS: Okay.

http://floppingaces....ft-reader-post/

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