Tag Archives: civil rights

Top of my Christmas list: Restoring the Right to Vote

Posted on December 13, 2012 by | Leave a comment

The blog e.politics had a post a couple of months ago with a map that I find fairly haunting. (I can’t get it to embed, so click on it. Trust me.)

It shows the concentration of voter identification laws primarily in the states that, at one time, had poll taxes, plus Kansas, which purportedly has the highest concentration of ‘voter fraud’ cases in the country.

At 97 total cases, out of millions of votes cast.

Then, more recently, the Government Accountability Office released a report that failed to document any cases of voter fraud in any of the numerous states that have recently passed stricter voting regulations.

What the GAO did find was a substantial increase in voting requirements over the last 10 years. Twenty-one states passed new voter I.D. laws and seven heightened requirements, bringing the total number of states requiring restrictive identification to 31.

To address a virtually nonexistent problem.

Primarily in a part of the country still grappling with a legacy of restrictive voting laws that denied democracy to millions over generations.

It’s an abomination, and its epicenter, today, is in my home state.

The land of John Brown and Jayhawkers.

So, dear Santa Claus, what do I want for Christmas?

It to not be 1964 anymore.

I want people’s right to vote to be respected, not trampled on under the trumped-up guise of ‘voter fraud’. I want people to stop using totally specious arguments like “but you have to show ID to get into a rated R movie,” like watching a movie is in any way comparable to exercising one’s most fundamental constitutional right. I want us to tackle real problems–there are plenty from which to choose–instead of wringing our hands over mostly made-up statistics.

I want the man who is homeless and lacks a photo ID to be able to vote. Just like me.

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Horrible stuff I wouldn’t even dare to make up

Posted on April 1, 2012 by | 2 Comments

I thought about, for this April Fool’s Day, making up something really awesome in the social policy world. But then I thought that would be super depressing, to find out that it was just a joke.

And, so, then I thought about making something up that’s really horrible, because that would make us feel better, right, to find out that it was a trick?

But, then I worried that I’d never be able to make up something so terrible that it would seem at all suspicious. Which was super depressing, too.

So, then I decided that I’d MUCH rather be angry than sad, about the assaults on social work values and on those we serve. So I scrolled through my email archives to find some of the horrible stuff that sounds so outlandishly awful that it should be made up, that I’ve collected over the past couple of months, for a sort of “should be April Fool’s jokes but we’re not laughing, so let’s do something about it” list.

That was too wordy a title even for me.

In no particular order, here are some completely unfunny, all-too-true examples of why social work advocacy is so needed.

No joke.

  • Tea Party group in my own state of Kansas depicts President Obama as a skunk, in an overtly racist smear. I’m grateful not only to the local NAACP chapter for speaking out on this but also for my good friends at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, for helping us see how this connects to very worrisome trends of anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric (and action) within Tea Party groups.
  • City of Topeka repeals its domestic violence law in order to avoid having to pay to prosecute misdemeanors, after the County DA announced that his office would no longer do so, in order to save money. This was really controversial, with some advocates applauding the City Council’s decision as calling the DA’s bluff, but I side with those who feel that it sent a really dangerous signal, in addition to resulting in the failure to charge at least several perpetrators whose crimes were committed during the time during which they were, essentially, not crimes. Women struggling to flee abuse should not be pawns in an intra-governmental budget showdown. Period.
  • 96-year-old African-American woman who voted even during the Jim Crow era blocked by Tennessee’s “voter ID” law. Honestly, I had hoped that I was just being paranoid about these laws being an attack on our most fundamental democratic rights. Obviously not.
  • Alabama. Enough said.

    It shouldn’t be so hard to come up with a list of totally wild things, pulled from our imaginations, that would be instantly recognizable as fabrications.

    Maybe that’s my new advocacy goal: make “ridiculous” mean something again, in the policy context.

    A year from now, I want to be foolable again.

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We need to win this on the merits

Posted on February 16, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Image credit: americasvoiceonline.org

You know I’m not a fan of taking the easy way out.

It’s tempting, sometimes, to think that we can throw the proverbial Hail Mary pass and move down the field (that’s the right sports metaphor, right?).

But in advocacy, as in life, it’s seldom that simple.

And, I’d argue, even when it might be possible, at least temporarily, it’s just not as good.

This is one of those cases.

Around the country, sparked first by the living nightmare that is now Alabama, anti-immigrant forces have been going after what they’ve long considered the Holy Grail:

Kicking immigrant kids out of Kindergarten.

It was at least 8 years ago that I first heard Kris Kobach’s assertion that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in Plyler v. Doe, which established the right of every child in the U.S. to attend public K-12 schools, was ‘fatally flawed’, I think along with some pronouncement that he could win a different decision if he had a chance to try the case.

Since then, he has been hoping for his chance.

With the Alabama legislature’s approval of a requirement that K-12 schools verify the immigration status of students, that door was opened, even though that provision was pretty quickly enjoined in federal court.

This legislative session has already seen similar debates in other states, and I guarantee that there’s more to come: in the ‘war of attrition’ that the anti-immigrant crowd has been waging for years, barring immigrant kids from going to school would be a really big deal.

Immigrants and their allies, then, are justifiably hell-bent on stopping these attacks. In our fervor, I think we’re vulnerable to make a serious error.

We have to win this battle on the merits. We can’t take a shortcut, point to the Supreme Court, and just argue legal precedent. Yes, scaring legislators with threats of lawsuits and confusing them with references to previous decisions can sometimes work. And, yes, I fully believe that the U.S. Supreme Court (and I mean this specific one) would still decide a similar case the same way. Absolutely. But precedent can change. Winds can shift. And, so, the foundation can fall out from under those arguments that once looked so solid.

Besides, who was ever motivated to stand up and join a cause to fight against something just because it contradicts Justice Brennan’s majority opinion?

Because the truth is, Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, turning our teachers into immigration agents is a horrible idea. Keeping children, most of whom will eventually qualify for U.S. citizenship, out of school and on the streets is really terrible policy. Sending ripple effects through mixed-status families and communities, depressing the educational attainment of an entire generation, just because we hope that it might make some parents leave the country, is a nightmare scenario. Kicking kids out of Kindergarten because we don’t approve of their mom and dad is not an action of a place worthy to be called the United States of America.

Those need to be our arguments, not recitations of precedent, even that which is based on a legal principle as important as the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

We can win this.

I truly believe that a majority of Americans opposes this idea, and that we can convince state lawmakers that this is not the way to prove a point on immigration reform. I think that we can find new allies–in teachers and administrators and law enforcement officers and business leaders–and that we can emerge from this struggle poised for more success on other fronts.

But we’ve got to fight.

It was bad policy in 1982, and it’s bad policy today.

We don’t need a precedent to tell us that.

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Truth and the cult of objectivity

Posted on January 5, 2012 by | Leave a comment

This is going to be one of those not-quite-fully-developed posts, where there are just too many ideas in my head to say something terrifically cogent. As usual, that’s where you all come in.

But my core message (in case it doesn’t come through clearly!) is this:

We can’t let our obsession with objectivity, and our equation of it with “fairness” or “even-handed treatment”, obscure our search for truth.

I thought about this the other day when I was internally railing against coverage of our nation’s ongoing immigration debate. I was reading yet another article that quoted some immigrant students’ stories of their own lives and hopes for meaningful reform in the coming year, followed by a few quotes from a restrictionist group about how the “pro-illegal immigrant” groups were hoping to blackmail members of Congress with electoral threats related to the 2012 elections and the rising prominence of Latino voters. Or some nonsense like that–I kind of stopped reading.

And it reminded me of part of The Race Beat, where some of the reporters charged with covering the civil rights movement found it increasingly difficult to do so to their editors’ satisfaction, because the issue had crystallized to such an extent that, truly, there wasn’t a legitimate “other side.” In their quest to provide the balance that their newsrooms demanded, they were giving voice to actors who truly didn’t have a real place in the debate, morally or politically. I mean, people of color were being killed for trying to register to vote, and we’re somehow supposed to give credence to an alternative explanation–something other than the evil of racism? Really?

I’m not arguing that we’re in exactly the same place with immigrants’ rights. I don’t get into the “whose injustice is worse?” game. Ever.

But I do think that we’re beginning to find ourselves facing some of the same quandries, at least with elements of this debate. Who do you find who is a legitimate voice arguing that amazingly bright and hard-working immigrant youth should be rounded up and sent “back” to a foreign country? Who represents the “other side” in a question about how we should handle the deportation proceedings of mothers with young U.S. citizen children? Where do you put a shrill nativist voice clamoring for sealed borders and harsh detention conditions? And why can’t we have this national conversation without including them?

Truth obviously means being open to inquiry, curious about alternative views, and willing to engage in an earnest dialogue, including with people who disagree with us. But, in order to fuel the knowledge on which we rely for those conversations, I just don’t think there’s any rule that we should have to try to give equal time to those whose views masquerade as opinion, when they are really dangerous attempts to dress hatred up as dissent.

Objectivity is just not necessarily a virtue.

Our values are a valid lens through which to view our world.

And giving more attention to those voices our values compel us to heed does not mean that we’re so hopelessly biased that we cannot think.

That might make me a terrible newspaper editor.

But I think it serves me fairly well as a seeker of truth.

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Making it count: demographics and the “new” electorate

Posted on October 11, 2011 by | 3 Comments

The new Census report on voting in the 2010 elections was released a couple of weeks ago, and there are some interesting trends there.

As our friends at Nonprofit Vote describe it, “Last year, Hispanics comprised 7% of voters, the highest percentage ever for a non-presidential election. The percentage of non-Hispanic white voters was 77.5%, down from 80.4% in 2006. Tiffany Julian of the Census Bureau’s Education and Social Stratification Branch noted that “The electorate looks much different than when we first started collecting these data 37 years ago,” yet turnout and registration rates still do not mirror the nation’s growing diversity. There are persistent voting gaps for many of the populations that nonprofits serve. In addition to racial and ethnic gaps, economic gaps remain stark: People in families who earned $100,000 or more were more than twice as likely to vote as those who lived with families earning less than $20,000. Homeowners were more likely to both register and vote than renters.” Furthermore, people with at least some college education made up 68 percent of voters. Individuals without a high school diploma comprised 6 percent of voters.

These statistics were made all-too-real for me two weeks ago when I facilitated a voter registration and Get-Out-The-Vote training for a local nonprofit organization that serves a primarily low-income Latino community. When we got to the part of the training where I ask people to think of the objections they’re likely to hear from those they’re trying to engage in the electoral process, the responses came fast and furious.

  • “My one vote won’t matter.”
  • “They’ll just steal the elections anyway.”
  • “I couldn’t figure out who to vote for.”
  • “The whole process is corrupt; I don’t want any part of it.”
  • “They’re not even talking about issues that matter to me–it’s a waste of time.”
  • “I have too much going on to spend time figuring out elections and stuff.”

And on and on and on.

These nonprofit employees weren’t off the mark. The Census Bureau reports that the most common reason people did not vote was they were too busy (27 percent). Another 16 percent felt that their vote would not make a difference.

The truth is that there are a lot of barriers that separate the population this organization serves–mostly native Spanish speakers, a lot of recently naturalized citizens who didn’t grow up in our democratic system, families with young children and a million demands on their time and attention–from active and informed participation in our electoral system.

So that’s why, despite great progress, we still don’t have an electorate that fully represents our population. And the implications are profound, serving to perpetuate policy decisions that, in turn, widen the gap between elected officials and those they should serve.

Demographics alone won’t change our destiny. It’s up to us–including nonprofit organizations well-positioned to engage our constituents in our democracy–to make sure that 2012′s statistics on voter turnout continue the trajectory of increasing participation by communities of color, and that low-income communities are present in the voting booth at this critical time in our economic future.

The numbers may be on “our” side–those of us who want a diverse electorate that invigorates our national conversation about the kind of future we want to build–but history is replete with examples when numbers were not enough.

We’re the missing link, and we’ve got some chasms to hurdle. And not-quite-13-months to get leaping.

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Wherever they are, that’s where I am, too

Posted on May 5, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Sunday is Mothers’ Day.

I think about motherhood all the time, honestly, so, for me, a set-aside day to think even more about being a mom isn’t too big of a deal.

And I’m not exactly the breakfast-in-bed type.

This year, instead, as I approach Mothers’ Day, I’m reflecting on the kind of mother I am, and the kind of mother I want to be.

And I’m remembering my favorite passage from one of the most marvelous books I’ve ever read, The Children, the story of the youth in the civil rights movement.

There’s no way to do justice to the passage without quoting it, and, so, to briefly introduce it (and acknowledge that it’s actually about a father and his son, but it still speaks to me as a mother), it tells the story of a parent whose son was arrested for participating in a sit-in. The father lived in a rural community and, as an African American, was vulnerable to reprisals from the white power structure for his son’s audacious behavior while away at school. When the father first found out that his son was participating in the sit-in movement, he visited him in jail and told him to worry about himself, not about the family back home, giving his implicit approval for behavior that must have been quite frightening to contemplate.

This scene is what reverberates in my mind:

“Everyone in Whiteville, it seemed, knew what Curtis had done; the story was big news there. A few days after Curtis’s arrest, Buck (the father) was walking down a street in Whiteville when a white man he knew yelled over at him. “How’s that jailbird son of yours doing?” “He’s doing just fine,” Buck had answered. “Where is he?” the man said, mocking him. “Is he still in the Nashville jail?”

“Wherever he is, I am too,” Buck Murphy had answered, and when Curtis heard that story a few days later, he knew that whatever else happened during the sit-ins, he might never again feel so close to his father.”

I know that my children will take on battles that I cannot join, and that I may not even understand.

I know that their journeys will take them away from me, and that I cannot hope to follow.

I know that they will have their own struggles, and that they may, in fact, sometimes struggle against me.

And I know, above all else, that “wherever they are, I am too.”

Happy Mothers’ Day, to the three wonderful kids who let me be a mom.

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Of economic justice and dreams unfulfilled

Posted on January 17, 2011 by | 1 Comment

When my oldest son and I were in Washington, D.C. for a vacation last fall, we passed a tour group at the Lincoln Memorial. There, we overheard the tour guide explain to his guests, “Here, a man said he had a dream. That dream came true.”

It struck me that this rather stunningly incomplete and, indeed, extraordinarily inaccurate, statement is, in fact, not that far from how many Americans perceive Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy: a sort of fuzzy, feel-good, “can’t we all just get along” dream, that, for the most part (since there aren’t many lynchings anymore, and African-Americans can use whichever public restroom they choose, and, for crying outloud, we have a black president) is a resoundingly successful piece of our country’s history. While we’re at it, much of that history counts the civil rights movement, and the gains it achieved, as a shared victory for Blacks and Whites alike, ignoring the years of violent, organized, and entrenched opposition and oppression endured by freedom fighters and ordinary folks.

I would certainly never seek to deny the tremendous progress we’ve made on racial justice, although King’s dream, as I understand it, is far from totally realized. But what I lament even more than the uncritical characterization of our society as “color-blind” is the almost complete forgetting of Dr. King’s stance on economic injustice and the violence that poverty wreaks on the lives of people of all racial backgrounds, even in this, the richest society in the world.

While not the Communist that many, including powerful figures in the U.S. government, tried to paint him, he had admittedly “anti-capitalistic feelings”, and he was as deeply troubled by unemployment, hunger, and economic desperation among African-American households and communities as by the overtly racist policies and practices to which they were subjected. He moved his entire family into a tenement in Chicago to dramatize the poor housing conditions, and, of course, he gave his life during a witness for the economic and human rights of garbage collectors in Memphis.

And that’s the part of Dr. King’s dream I’m spending the most time thinking about today, because it’s the part that we have not only failed to reach but, really, failed to keep reaching for. It’s the part that we’re all too willing to forget, to wash out of this memory we want to claim for ourselves, even though it was in the middle of this struggle that he gave his life.

This video clip features some of Dr. King’s thinking on poverty in the United States, and its evils, overlaid with video footage of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, uninsured people waiting in line for health care, and other images of economic injustice in modern-day America.

This year, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, here’s to his dream.

All of it.

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History will see this as injustice, too

Posted on December 2, 2010 by | 2 Comments

Yesterday, December 1, was the 55th anniversary of the day that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.

Despite my oldest son’s obsession with her (in part, I think, because he lives in constant hope that he’ll get to ride a bus to school some day, so he gets it that boycotting bus rides is a really, really, really big deal), and the fact that I can never resist that picture, this isn’t a post about Mrs. Parks, or the role that she played in the civil rights movement, or even about that movement itself.

It’s really more of a promise broken, on my part, I guess–a promise, after I read Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s completely spot-on and utterly amazing editorial about Arizona’s racial profiling law (SB1070), that I wouldn’t write a post about it, since that really deserved to be the last word.

But the anti-immigrant atmosphere that has infected our country (and our policies, and our elections) has been foremost on my mind every single day for the past eight months or so. And when I read in The Political Brain about how campaign after campaign shows that racist candidates lose when their opponents shine a light on their racism (but prevail when they’re allowed to fly under the radar), and when I stood in solidarity with young NAACP members at a pro-immigrant protest, and when my 84-year-old grandfather-in-law pointed to a headline about Arizona and said, “they’d probably arrest me down there”…

it just has to be said: The way that we are treating immigrants in this country is wrong.

No surprise to any of you, I know.

But what really made me break my vow of silence on this is perhaps more of a revelation:

it will, I truly and fervently believe, be judged to be wrong, too.

The same way that majority opinion and public law about equality for African Americans is vastly different in the United States today (even though, quite obviously, we’ve yet to reach real racial justice) than when Mrs. Parks sat down so others could rise up, one day people in this country will look back on the actions we’re taking against immigrants today (not just Arizona, but the abuses in detention, the inhumane workplace raids, the long family separations) and think, for shame.

My friend and former Kansas state senator David Adkins said during his passionate defense of gay marriage, “I’m confident I’m standing on the right side of history,” and those of us standing up for immigrant rights today can take the same comfort. Just 6 years after he was excoriated for his courageous position, he’s being proven correct (again, it bears mentioning that the struggle continues), if not yet in our state, then with actions elsewhere in the U.S. and around the world.

I don’t know exactly when, or exactly how, the tide will change. But then, of course, neither did Mrs. Parks.

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The next frontiers for voting rights

Posted on November 9, 2010 by | Leave a comment

President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Amidst rather uniformly dismal election results for those of us committed to a vigorous collective response to the challenges that face us, including the truly concerning recall of judges over disputes of ideology in Iowa (a major blow to the doctrine of judicial impartiality and separation of powers), there was one bright spot:

Kansas voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment to strip the legislature of the power to deny Kansas citizens with mental illnesses the right to vote.

It’s one of those things that I can’t imagine 289,740 people voting against really, but it’s still encouraging that 482,222 voted for it, and especially rewarding to see the grassroots campaign that mental health advocates, including a strong consumer contingent, put together to take advantage of this opportunity to educate the public about mental illness, civil rights, and the importance of equality.

So, see–something good from November 2, 2010.

But, especially in the aftermath of Election Day, we’ve got serious work to do, and not just to protect critical policies and continue to push for progressive advances in tax policy, the social safety net, economic recovery, entitlement reform, health care reform, K-12 and higher education and, well, just about every other aspect of American life.

We’ve also got to make voting rights a top priority.

We need to expand suffrage, and vigorously defend it, not just because increasing the number of people who can and do vote is a good way to ensure that we’ll be happier with the outcome. We need to prioritize voting rights, too, because it restores the American ideal of an engaged citizenry, and it makes us proud of who we are and what we can do, together.

Our finest moments have been when we realize that the rights of citizenship are the most secure, and the most honored, when they’re extended broadly and valued deeply.

On the list that demands our attention:

  • Commitment to easing the process of re-entry for ex-felons, and revisiting the process of even temporarily denying voting rights to those who commit crimes–this is important not just because it expands the right to vote but also because it sends a message to those who are incarcerated: “we don’t want you cut off from the society into which we’ll expect you to successfully reintegrate”
  • Defense against restrictive photo ID requirements–I want to scream every time someone says, “but you even need to show ID to see a movie.” Um, last time I checked, seeing an R-rated movie is NOT a constitutionally-protected right. Voting is. Unless we’re going to provide free, easily available photo identification to all American citizens, with exceptions for those with religious objections to photographs, requiring photo identification to vote is a poll tax, it’s abhorrent, and we can’t stand for this attack on democracy masquerading as concern with (largely invented) “voter fraud”. I almost wrecked my car when I heard about the Obama Administration dropping its legal challenge to Georgia’s voter identification requirements. This could move us back to 1964, and our nation can’t afford that.
  • Aggressive protection of voter privacy and the integrity of the election system–I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t think that the private companies that manufacture voting machines are intent on overtaking our elections. But I am very concerned about two things: first, that there’s enough truth to the threat of that scenario to make some people wary of the election process and, second, that it does represent another example of turning some of our most sacred public functions over to private companies. There are some things that government should just do itself, whether or not it’s the most efficient, because to farm it out just looks bad and, well, running the democratic process is one of those.
  • A constitutional amendment specifically guaranteeing the right to vote–108 democratic nations have this language, while the U.S. and 10 others don’t. Words do matter, and having these words in the U.S. Constitution could provide the legal foundation for challenges to all of the exclusions above, too, setting the stage for a reorientation towards an affirmative right to civic participation that has to be disproven, rather than the effective opposite, which is the status quo.

    It’s time for a national conversation not just about the results of our elections but the process of them: do we want paper ballots again? what about open-source electronic voting technology? should we have mandatory public audits of elections? if so, who should conduct them? how would we engage the public in oversight of elections, and how could this make a difference in how people engage in the acts of democracy? why can’t people register to vote on Election Day?

    Did you see any violations of voting rights this past Election Day? Did your clients vote? If not, why not? What changes to voting laws might facilitate their participation? What are your thoughts about expanding suffrage rights in the next decade?

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    Posted in Analysis and Commentary, Events and Calls to Action, My New Favorite Thing

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    Why direct practice will always matter

    Posted on October 5, 2010 by | Leave a comment

    Lyndon Johnson was no social worker.

    But it is a speech of his, or rather a section of one, made on March 15, 1965, one week after the march in Selma, Alabama that drew the nation’s attention to the urgency of the struggle for racial justice, that, for me, best highlights why it is so critical that policymakers, in any profession, be rooted in the lives of those who will be most touched by the policies they create.

    Towards the end of his speech outlining for Congress his vision for The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which remains, in 2010, an essential piece of civil rights legislation and one of the core victories of the African-American struggle for equality, he said:

    “My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican-American school. Few of them could speak English, and I couldn’t speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry. They knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their eyes. I often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished, wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew, hoping that it might help them against the hardships that lay ahead.

    Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.

    I never thought, then, in 1928, that I would be standing here, in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country.

    But now I do have that chance–and I’ll let you in on a secret–I mean to use it.

    And I hope that you will use it with me.”

    We will not all become President, certainly, nor wield the kind of power that Lyndon Johnson did at his peak, but we can cultivate positions of power and authority in our pursuit of social justice, in the expectation that we will, too, someday have the chance to do great things on behalf of those who have touched our lives by allowing us to walk with them.

    Failing to seek that power gives up that chance. And it’s inexcusable.

    As is forgetting those faces once we’re in a position to do something to help them.

    And, for all his many, many failings, that’s something Lyndon Johnson, the teacher and the President, can help us remember.

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