Tag Archives: black
The President introduces Elena Kagan
Today, it is my great honor to nominate our Solicitor General, and my friend, Elena Kagan, to be the next justice of the United States Supreme Court.
As I send my nomination to the Senps://youtu.be/hDO0W6QxsN
Elena is widely regarded as one of the best legal minds of her generation — earning praise from across the ideological spectrum throughout her career. Above all, she is a trailblazer. She wasn’t just the first woman to serve as dean of Harvard Law School — she was one of its most beloved and successful leaders, building a reputation for openness to other viewpoints and skill in working with others to build consensus. These were some of the many reasons why I selected her to be my Solicitor General, the nation’s chief advocate — the first woman to hold that post as well.
Her work as Solicitor General has allowed me to see firsthand just why Elena is particularly well-suited to the Court: She has not only a keen understanding of the law, but also one that is rooted in a deep awareness of its impact on people’s lives. Last year, she made that clear — choosing the Citizens United case as her first to argue before the Supreme Court, defending bipartisan campaign finance reform against special interests seeking to spend unlimited money to influence our elections.
Now, I look forward to the prospect of Elena taking her seat alongside Justice Ginsberg and Justice Sotomayor. For the first time, our nation’s highest court would include three women, ensuring a Court that would be more inclusive, more representative, more reflective of us as a people than ever before.
When Justice Stevens wrote me to announce his retirement, I knew that the Court would be losing a standard bearer. And I felt a responsibility to nominate an individual capable of being that same guiding force, a consistent voice of reason on the Court.
I am certain I have made the right choice. As you learn more about Elena, I am confident you’ll see what I do — that she is a voice we need on the Supreme Court.
Please watch the message — and share it with others:
http://my.barackobama.com/ElenaKagan
Thank you,
President Barack Obama
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Michelle Obama … Mrs O. Style
WASHINGTON (AP) – Michelle Obama says being criticized is part of the president’s job, and she understands why her husband has been on the receiving end.
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In the Library … the Sunburnt Queen
“The Sunburnt Queen is an extraordinary narrative. The writing’s fresh immediacy brings history to life.”—The Sunday Independent (South Africa)
In the late 1730s, the local inhabitants of South Africa found a seven-year-old girl called Bessie, washed ashore on the beach of the Wild Coast. Bessie was brought up by them, growing into a young woman of legendary beauty and wisdom, and marrying one of the most important tribal chiefs in the area.
Using oral histories and written accounts by early missionaries, Hazel Crampton traces the extraordinary story of Bessie and the turbulent history of the Eastern Cape.
Resource: amazon.com
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in the Library ~ The New Jim Crow – by michelle alexander… Best Seller
so, i read this review of a book that took me back to information given to us in class at the UW …stunning, sad and eye opening information yet this book review revealed much more …
By Leonard Pitts Jr. / Syndicated columnist
Michelle Alexander’s ‘The New Jim Crow,’ a troubling and necessary book
Columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. suggests reading “The New Jim Crow,” by Michelle Alexander, who contends that the mass incarceration of black men for nonviolent drug offenses, combined with sentencing disparities and laws making it legal to discriminate against felons in housing, employment, education and voting, constitute nothing less than a new racial caste system.
Syndicated columnist
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“You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this all while not appearing to.”
— Richard Nixon as quoted by H.R. Haldeman, supporting a get-tough-on drugs strategy
“They give black people time like it’s lunch down there. You go down there looking for justice, that’s what you find: just us.”— Richard Pryor
Michelle Alexander was an ACLU attorney in Oakland, preparing a racial-profiling lawsuit against the California Highway Patrol. The ACLU had put out a request for anyone who had been profiled to get in touch. One day, in walked this black man.
He was maybe 19 and toted a thick sheaf of papers, what Alexander calls an “incredibly detailed” accounting of at least a dozen police stops over a nine-month period, with dates, places and officers’ names. This was, she thought, a “dream plaintiff.”
But it turned out he had a record, a drug felony — and she told him she couldn’t use him; the state’s attorney would eat him alive. He insisted he was innocent, said police had planted drugs and beaten him. But she was no longer listening. Finally, enraged, he snatched the papers back and started shredding them.
“You’re no better than the police,” he cried. “You’re doing what they did to me!” The conviction meant he couldn’t work or go to school, had to live with his grandmother. Did Alexander know how that felt? And she wanted a dream plaintiff? “Just go to my neighborhood,” he said. “See if you can find one black man my age they haven’t gotten to already.”
She saw him again a couple of months later. He gave her a potted plant from his grandmother’s porch — he couldn’t afford flowers — and apologized. A few months after that, a scandal broke: Oakland police officers accused of planting drugs and beating up innocent victims. One of the officers involved was the one named by that young man.
“It was,” says Alexander now, more than 10 years later, “the beginning of me asking some hard questions of myself as a civil-rights lawyer. … What is actually going on in his neighborhood? How is it that they’ve already gotten to all the young African-American men in his neighborhood? I began questioning my own assumptions about how the criminal-justice system works.”
The result is a compelling new book. Others have written of the racial bias of the criminal-injustice system. In “The New Jim Crow,” Alexander goes a provocative step further. She contends that the mass incarceration of black men for nonviolent drug offenses, combined with sentencing disparities and laws making it legal to discriminate against felons in housing, employment, education and voting, constitute nothing less than a new racial caste system. A new segregation.
She has a point. Yes, the War on Drugs is officially race-neutral. So were the grandfather clause and other Jim Crow laws whose intention and effect was nevertheless to restrict black freedom.
The War on Drugs is a war on African-American people and we countenance it because we implicitly accept certain assumptions sold to us by news and entertainment media, chief among them that drug use is rampant in the black community. But. The. Assumption. Is. WRONG.
According to federal figures, blacks and whites use drugs at a roughly equal rate in percentage terms. In terms of raw numbers, whites are far and away the biggest users — and dealers — of illegal drugs.
So why aren’t cops kicking their doors in? Why aren’t their sons pulled over a dozen times in nine months? Why are black men 12 times likelier to be jailed for drugs than white ones? Why aren’t white communities robbed of their fathers, brothers, sons?
With inexorable logic, “The New Jim Crow” propounds an answer many will resist and most have not even considered. It is a troubling and profoundly necessary book.
Please read it.
Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.’s column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: lpitts@miamiherald.com
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