I will have the honor of appearing today as part of the confirmation hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee for Loretta Lynch, nominee to serve as United States Attorney General. Below is my written testimony for the hearing today.
Here is the full list of witnesses appearing today:
Sharyl Attkisson
Investigative Journalist
David Barlow
Partner
Sidley Austin LLP
David A. Clarke, Jr.
Sheriff
Milwaukee County, Wisconsin
Catherine Engelbrecht
Founder
True The Vote
Janice K. Fedarcyk
Fedarcyk Consulting LLC
Stephen H. Legomsky
John S. Lehmann University Professor
School of Law at Washington University
The Reverend Doctor Clarence Newsome
Cincinnati , OH
Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz
Professor Of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies Cato Institute
Jonathan Turley
Professor, J.B. And Maurice C. Shapiro Chair Of Public Interest Law
George Washington University Law School
Washington , DC
The full committee hearing resumes this morning at 10 a.m. in Committee Room 216 in the Hart Senate Office Building.
Here is my testimony: Statement.Lynch Nomination.Turley Testimony.Senate
Dust Bunny Queen
po
I suggest you look up what Jim Crow laws are/were.
We do not have such laws on the books today.
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DBQ, I can see how excited you were when you thought I was implying that the original Jim Crow laws were still in the books and were the ones I was referring to.
You might have noticed that my link speaks of NEW Jim crow laws…as in laws that have been passed that attempt to extend the legacy, intent and purposes of the original Jim crow laws.
po – name 5 new “Jim Crow Laws.”
Paul C. Schulte
po – you are like an Englishman writing Irish history. I really would stay out of this discussion, you are in way over your head.
po – it is clear that Alexander has not spent enough time on the “new plantation” because if she had she would not want these people out on the street.</i?
Paul, why not just enlighten us? You are the king of one-liners that suggest much but don't say anything.
Wouldn't it shame you a lil' bit if this Englishman knows more about your Irish history?
Alexander wrote a well researched, well received book, that so far remains unchallenged…and you Paul, supposedly knows more about that topic? Well, go on, friend, share on!
po – here is an attack from the left on Alexander’s book.
“Radical scholars and social justice activists say the popular discourse of The New Jim Crow promotes a false understanding of mass incarceration in the United States and serves to reinforce the status quo by quietly separating mass incarceration from its most defining and central features.
For the last couple of years social justice advocates have loudly sung the praises of Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration the Age of Colorblindness, which has garnered a huge following and spawned an allegedly new designation for racial inequity in the United States. However, former champions of the book and those seeking social change are quickly turning on Alexander’s discourse, which radical scholars and activists say promotes a false understanding of mass incarceration in the United States and serves to reinforce the status quo by quietly separating mass incarceration from its most defining and central features.
I had already read The New Jim Crow upon my recent arrival to San Francisco from Geneva. Having been praised as a “must-read” by nearly all reviewers, from The New York Times and National Public Radio to Socialist Alternative and the International Socialist Review, I was not at all surprised to find the book being heavily championed in social justice circles. During General Assembly at an Occupy Oakland meeting I was handed a printed except from the book framed between the slogans “End The New Jim Crow” and “The New Jim Crow Has Got To Go.” When asked about the praise and popularity of the book the graduate student and activist from the University of California Berkeley explained that social justice advocates had been “anxious to have their claims affirmed by popular research” and that The New Jim Crow had met this need.
Weeks later, on my second visit with Occupy Oakland attitudes toward the book had shifted dramatically. Outside an auditorium where civil rights activist Angela Davis was speaking on police brutality, demonstrators gathered around a table bearing a banner with red letters that read “The New Jim Crow Supports the Status Quo.” Assuming that the table was simply passing out literature on mass-incarceration, I was particularly surprised to find that organizers intended their slogan to mean that support for the status quo was being provided by Alexander’s analysis in The New Jim Crow, rather than by New Jim Crow itself.
Alexander’s support for the status quo, wrapped in social-justice anti-drug-war packaging, became all the more clear to me once annoyed former supporters of the book pointed me toward the first serious challenge to Alexander’s work, a radical polemical review entitled “Black Out: Michelle Alexander’s Operational Whitewash,” written by Joseph D. Osel, a political sociologist and independent researcher. Following his review, other intellectuals have also made contentious assessments of the book and organizations that seek to decolonize movements of social change, People of Color Organize!, for example, have discredited the book, urging a re-thinking of The New Jim Crow and arguing that its conceptual framework has been “made malleable for white-middle class consumption,” calling it a “white liberal consumer product.”
In his second devastating analysis, “The Strange Career of The New Jim Crow,” Osel shows how and why The New Jim Crow uses clever rhetoric and research to mask its allegiance to power and makes the case that the book’s discourse seriously “misleads its readers, mystifying and obscuring the true coordinates of the problem and its potential solutions,” calling the book a “counterrevolutionary protest.”
A harder look at the book’s rhetoric and a close reading of other radical critiques, Greg Thomas’ “Why Some Like The New Jim Crow So Much,” for example,confirms Osel’s contentious hypothesis and reveals that The New Jim Crow takes as natural and apolitical that which is in reality problematic and political. It reveals that the book obscures the most basic economic mechanisms of mass incarceration, excludes or dismisses more radical and revolutionary perspectives on the subject, and serves the emotional interests of wanting social justice advocates while limiting actual disruption of the system of American mass incarceration. The book seems to be, as one occupier put it, “white capitalist bourgeoisie rhetoric, dressed-up as black social concern.”
The great success of The New Jim Crow rests on the fact that it provides a cathartic release for its readers without seriously threatening oppressive hegemonic assumptions. The book, for example, doesn’t even contain the word “capitalism” and excludes the voices of all radical black thinkers, political prisoners, anti-prison activists, black power advocates, and the most useful philosophies to the subject of mass incarceration. Like many others I was admittedly an unsuspecting victim of this rhetoric, was drawn in easily by the book’s memorable title and by my own desire to see my concerns realized. Furthermore, like other former champions of the text I now consider a re-thinking of New Jim Crow essential and indications are that this re-thinking is now underway. The larger more perplexing problem, however, is that The New Jim Crow was ever acceptable in the first place.”
http://libcom.org/news/new-jim-crow-discredited-advocates-demand-revision-03022013
po
I suggest you look up what Jim Crow laws are/were.
We do not have such laws on the books today.
Then again, you are not subject to them, so you are excused for not knowing
And you know my situation and that of my family….how?
NOWHERE do black people have a worse life than in the northern cities run entirely by Dems for decades. The wave of black people from the south to the north last century now finds 2nd, 3rd generation blacks moving back south. Hmmm!
Nick, every once in a while Christopher’s voice is repeating in my brain what is being discussed on radio and TV. I loved his book. How easily he talked about his treatments with no self pity. I had a dear friend that became a lab animal also. Try everything. I think I’ll switch to Amazon and see what they have on tape.
Chris Hitchens was a gifted individual. I’m so glad he shared those gifts with us.
And, DBQ, to say that we don’t have Jim crow laws is to be blind to the facts and their causes. Then again, you are not subject to them, so you are excused for not knowing…here is a summary:
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http://www.cflj.org/new-jim-crow/
Summary of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
More African Americans are under the control of the criminal justice system today – in prison or jail, on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850. Discrimination in housing, education, employment, and voting rights, which many Americans thought was wiped out by the civil rights laws of the 1960s, is now perfectly legal against anyone labeled a “felon.” And since many more people of color than whites are made felons by the entire system of mass incarceration, racial discrimination remains as powerful as it was under slavery or under the post-slavery era of Jim Crow segregation.
This is the premise of a book which has sparked a new social movement: Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, New York 2010). Alexander describes how mass incarceration today serves the same purpose as pre-Civil War slavery and the post-Civil War Jim Crow laws: to maintain a racial caste system. Alexander defines “racial caste” as a racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom. She asserts that Jim Crow and slavery were caste systems, and that our current system of mass incarceration is also a caste system: “The New Jim Crow.” The original Jim Crow laws, after slavery ended, promoted racial discrimination in public housing, employment, voting, and education. The powerful Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s seemingly ended the Jim Crow era by winning the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The book demonstrates, however, that the racial caste system has not ended; it has simply been redesigned.
Alexander explains how the criminal justice system functions as a new system of racial control by targeting black men through the “War on Drugs.” The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, for example, included far more severe punishment for distribution of crack (associated with blacks) than powder cocaine (associated with whites). Civil penalties, such as not being able to live in public housing and not being able to get student loans, have been added to the already harsh prison sentences.
“Today,” says Alexander, “a criminal freed from prison has scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a freed slave or a black person living ‘free’ inMississippiat the height of Jim Crow.”
The author argues that nothing short of a major social movement can end the new caste system. Alexander challenges us to establish a grass-roots movement to deal with the very foundation of the mass incarceration system: “If the movement that emerges to end mass incarceration does not meaningfully address the racial divisions and resentments that gave rise to mass incarceration, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care, compassion and concern for every human being – of every class, race, and nationality – within our nation’s borders, including poor whites, who are often pitted against poor people of color, the collapse of mass incarceration will not mean the death of racial caste in America. Inevitably a new system of racialized social control will emerge … No task is more urgent for racial justice today than ensuring thatAmerica’s current racial caste system is its last.”
Alexander’s call is being answered through the rise of a new movement to end mass incarceration and its racial underpinnings. The New Jim Crow movement is formed of loosely-linked local study groups reading and discussing The New Jim Crow, and beginning to develop a grass-roots strategy first for exposing the injustice of mass incarceration, and then for challenging and ultimately ending it. At this moment of global awakening in the face of injustice, the focus on mass incarceration and racial injustice could not be more timely.
po – it is clear that Alexander has not spent enough time on the “new plantation” because if she had she would not want these people out on the street.
Sorry DBQ, you are stretching mightily here.
That was not my topic, I was responding to David who was responding to Inga who was not responding about this topic.
To say that Obama and Holder are racial grief merchants is to be less than honest. Obama has gone out of his way to be just not that, and Holder has acknowledged both his race and his son’s. I guess that qualifies him. And in that, it qualifies DeBiaso too, I guess.
To then tie it to Lynch, who has not shown any inkling to be no more than a hardworking person (not woman, not black woman) who has earned kudos from both sides of the aisle as very capable and very professional, is again, very much dishonest.
Again, you are jumping on the idea of redistribution of wealth. All of our laws, whether financial or not are geared towards ensuring that the rich stay richer and the poor get crumbs. To then hate on the poor for the crumbs they get is rather extreme.
We are war again, as we have been for over a decade. That period has been Christmas for some and lent for many others. Your time is better spent ensuring that our money isn’t wasted elsewhere and is used here so that the children of those “takers” can have opportunities to be “workers”.
What is more important, is that the legacy of slavery, jim crow laws, housing and work discrimination…all off those be addressed so the playing field is level for everyone.
We have been addressing this for 50 years. We don’t have Jim Crow laws so THAT is a red herring.
However, I do agree with you that there should be a chance for everyone to participate in life a level playing field, as best we can..
The issue that the liberals can’t seem to grasp is that this ….level playing field while nice….is not a guarantee of a level of outcomes. People are not equal. One person is not like the other. So you will never ever have equal outcomes and to try to make it so is a fool’s errand.
You can give people the same opportunities. You will never have the same outcome.
You can’t level the playing field by chopping off the feet of the other team.
@ po
Actually, we were responding to your comment regarding topic. And since everything about Obama, Holder and the rest of the racial grief merchants IN the Democrat party is about slavery and equality for….as Holder says “his” people. (Not the rest of us, I might add….but HIS people ) Redistribution of wealth from those who work to those who don’t and won’t.
And since the testimony of Professor Turley was about THIS candidate for the Attorney General’s office…. And whether she will fairly administer the Constitution or continue with Holder’s and Obama’s shredding of the Constitution in the name of racial fairness (or something)…….the subject of just WHO is the party of slavery in the past (Democrat) And which party in the present produces policies to keep the blacks in poverty and on the Democrat plantation….
All this IS relevant to the topic and not a red herring or side track.
Also , DBQ, those asking for reparations are a very small minority…so small in fact that it is not worthy of a debate.
What is more important, is that the legacy of slavery, jim crow laws, housing and work discrimination…all off those be addressed so the playing field is level for everyone.
po – you are like an Englishman writing Irish history. I really would stay out of this discussion, you are in way over your head.
po, LBJ did say “Nigger” later he said neegra. Democratic Senators did not vote yes on the Civil Rights Bill. It passed because Republicans voted for it. So the south became Republican, and rightly so.
If you skipped the video of the girl rapping, go back and listen. Find out what your tax dollars do, thanks to LBJ and the Democrats.
What a red herring! All of sudden we are debating whether the Democrats were the party of slavery!
Slavery is the Democrat’s original sin. Their enslavement of the black vote, by what LBJ called his “Nigger Bill,” the Voting Rights Act, is more subtle, but no less pernicious.
as if this current democratic party is forever tainted by that, and this republican party is forever enobled by that.
Of course, what happened in the past does not “tar” or taint a group of people in perpetuity. Neither do the good deeds of your ancestors give you an honorary halo.
This is my biggest resistance to the people who want reparations for something that happened over a hundred and fifty years ago. This is the past and the people who were saints and sinners then are long long gone. Punishing people who have nothing whatsoever to do with the actions that you are trying to appease is not the way to solve the problem or smooth the path. In fact, it will (I guaranteed you) have the exact opposite result. Want a race war? Do this.
However, the past should be studied and acknowledged so that we don’t repeat the mistakes and learn by the good and bad.
The Democrat party WAS the party of slavery and after the Civil War was the party that promoted and codified discrimination, Jim Crow laws, sponsored the KKK. The Democrats had a strangle hold on the South until just recently. The civil rights movement was opposed tooth and nail by the Southern Democrats. The Republican party was created (in part, not in whole) to combat slavery and did the heavy lifting in getting civil rights.
The Democrat party today and individual Democrats are not the party of the past. The past actions of the party are not yours. However, you cannot deny those actions existed.
To deny this history because a person might have bias TODAY against one party or the other is to firmly plant your head in the dark damp fundament. of your anatomy. You may not LIKE the history that has occurred, but you deny it at your peril. The ignorance of history guarantees that we will be repeating it again.
Published February 1864:
“Protest as they may, the fact will go into history that the Democratic party in its later years gave itself to Slavery, hand and heart, and that it adhered to Slavery, when dead, with a stubbornness of fond infatuation such as the world has seldom seen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/1864/02/20/news/slavery-and-the-democratic-party.html
“Equally problematic was the view of most southern Democrats, who interpreted popular sovereignty to permit and even protect slavery in the territories throughout the entire territorial stage. Southerners insisted that slaveholders had the same constitutional right as nonslaveholders to bring their property, including slaves, into the territories…Southern Democrats insisted that the party endorse the idea of a federal slave code for the territories. This would secure the rights of slaveholders to enter the territories throughout the territorial period.”
http://www.tulane.edu/~latner/Background/BackgroundElection.html
This information does, in no way, forever taint the Democrats, just as it does not absolve the Republicans of any foolish things they’ve done.
David, You just wasted 2 minutes of your life replying to vapidity. You won’t get the time back, but you will get more vapidity. Just sayn’.
Republican party fighting injustices.
SHHEESSSSHHHH!
Definition of injustice by GOP –
——————– “anything that doesn’t give money/power to me/GOP”!
Laser wrote: “Republican party fighting injustices. SHHEESSSSHHHH!
Definition of injustice by GOP – ——————– “anything that doesn’t give money/power to me/GOP”!”
No. One example of an injustice is lying about the Republican party, claiming that we only care about money/power to me/GOP. What you claim about me is simply false.
Just detected a whopper of a lie.
I’m not surprised….