Wade Henderson - Leadership Conference on Civil Rights

Senate Must Act and Fix Ledbetter

2008-04-18T21:54:00Z

It has been a year since I testified in front of the House Committee on Education and Labor - which can be viewed on YouTube - and urged Congress to fix the Supreme Court’s decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber, a decision that severely limited the ability of victims of pay discrimination to successfully sue under Title VII and other anti-discrimination laws -- laws which protect Americans from discrimination based on race, national origin, gender, religion, disability and age.

The Court completely reversed longstanding and well-established precedent. For years, in the context of pay discrimination, courts interpreted Title VII to allow workers to file a claim within 180 days after their last discriminatory paycheck.

But, in Ledbetter, the Supreme Court decided that the clock starts to run when the discriminatory pay-setting decision is made and that workers who are discriminated against only have 180 days from that moment to file a claim.

The Ledbetter decision ignores the reality that most salary information is private, and workers will not be immediately made aware that their employer has decided to pay them less because of their race, gender or other protected status. A 2004 study found that only one in 10 employers have pay openness policies.

In this work environment, many people find out they were discriminated against for years after the behind-closed-doors decision was made. The Ledbetter decision gives them no recourse.

The House has acted quickly by passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007 on July 31, 2007, two months after the Supreme Court decision.

As it is nowadays, the Senate has been much slower. In the Senate, the Fair Pay Act is finally expected to come to the floor for a vote next Wednesday.

Though late, it is somewhat appropriate since next Tuesday, the day before the vote, is Equal Pay Day, a day that highlights pay disparities between men and women. It’s time that the Senate acts.

Ledbetter is really just the latest example of courts narrowing civil rights protections for those average Americans. Over the past decade or so, the courts have limited the civil rights of seniors, narrowed the ability to for people to get lawyer, and weakened labor laws.

Fixing Ledbetter, then, is just the first step. It clarifies Congress' intent. The Senate has an opportunity to do what the House has already done and restore the ability of average Americans to sue if they have been discriminated against. The Senate has an obligation to protect the rights of its most vulnerable citizens.

Relief for American Homeowners? When Is It Coming?

2008-03-18T22:20:00Z

There could not be a less partisan issue than the foreclosure crisis that is devastating the nation in cities like Detroit, Miami and Oakland, California and states like Nevada and Ohio. And yet our nation’s leaders have done very little to actually help American families.

In 2007, the number of foreclosures went up by 79 percent from the previous year.

Experts predict, somewhat conservatively, that as many as 3.5 million mortgage loans will fail. And Blacks and Latinos – losing $213 billion and up to $98 billion, respectively – will be hit hardest.

All this has been reported in the news.

But many still say there is little we can do. The Federal Reserve has cut the interest rate twice this year, most recently yesterday, hoping to stimulate the economy. Congress passed a stimulus package in February, widely considered to be incomplete.

Legislators, financial experts and the Bush Administration argue about what to do to stave off a recession. And while they fuss and fight, the situation gets worse and worse for American families - many of whom entered into these subprime mortgage loans in good faith.

There has been lots of talk about what to do in Washington, but most of it is focused on Wall Street. Very little of it has anything to do with actually helping Americans keep their homes. And in the interim, whole industries have sprung up to handle the foreclosure fallout.

Surely there is more we can do.

One bill in Congress from Rep. John Conyers, D. Mich., and Rep. Steve Chabot, R. Ohio, would extend the same bankruptcy protections that the lending industry enjoys to homeowners. Sounds modest right?

Opponents of these bills claim that "bailing out" homeowners who were "irresponsible" is wrong and that interest rates would go up for all homeowners, thus punishing those who "played by the rules." Apparently, "playing by the rules" doesn't apply to the lending industry as the Bush administration just "bailed out" Bear Stearns – and defended it.

There is ample evidence that most homeowners entered into these loans in good faith and that some were even unfairly targeted for some of the riskiest loans without being adequately educated about how the loans work. Yet our nation's leaders are wasting precious time pointing fingers and worrying more about wealthy investors and lenders instead of American families.

So the debate rages on. And until the nation does something, the foreclosure crisis will get worse as millions of homeowners lose their homes and the "spillover" continues to affect other homeowners and wreck havoc on American families. And the economy.

Get Ready for the Digital Television Transition

2008-02-19T23:14:00Z

In a little less than a year, a dramatic change is coming to my television and yours.

There hasn’t been a major technological change in television since the 1940's, but next year television catches up with the digital age.

On February 17, 2009, Congress has mandated that television stations have to switch from analog to digital.

If you're a cable or satellite subscriber, your television will barely notice the change, except perhaps you'll see a better, clearer picture.

But if your television uses rabbit ears or rooftop antennas to pick up over-the-air- broadcast, chances are it simply won't work. No picture, period.

This is especially important information for my community and other communities of color, those who speak another language besides English, the elderly, those living on fixed incomes and people with disabilities.

We will feel the impact of this change more than the general population because we make up a significant part of the 21 million households that receive over-the-air television.

Access to communications in the 21st century is not a luxury; it is a necessity. And we don't intend to get left behind.

That is why the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is working at the local and national level to launch a year-long campaign to educate these communities about the 2009 digital television transition.

The transition is even easy. You don't even have to buy a new television, you can just get a converter box that will help your television get the digital signal.

Congress is even offering $40 coupons to help toward the purchase of the converter boxes. The converter boxes are expected to cost between $40 and $70. Every household can apply for up to two of the free $40 coupons toward the purchase of converter boxes.

Coupons are free, but with only 33 million available, supply is limited.

Yet recent polls have found that millions of Americans who rely on over-the-air television are unaware of, or confused by, the digital shift and the coupon program.

We just have to make sure that the most vulnerable part of the television audience is aware of and guaranteed the opportunity to join the great American switch to digital.

Civil Rights: The Work Continues

2008-01-18T23:39:00Z

On its face, it seems like the 110^th Congress made fairly significant progress on advancing civil rights issues in 2007. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) passed through the House, the District of Columbia Voting Rights Act made it farther than it ever had before, and the House passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act as a remedy to the egregious Supreme Court decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber.

But, these positive outcomes were marked by shortsighted opposition, filibusters, and numerous veto threats by a White House administration that has never been shy about opposing most civil rights bills.

For the DC Voting Rights Act in particular, 2007 was a frustrating year. This bill boasted bipartisan support and a chance to grant the District of Columbia, full of federal tax-paying citizens, voting representation in the House for the first time in history.

Senator Mitch McConnell, R. Ky., led a filibuster against the bill, making ignominious history by helping Congress block the first voting rights bill since segregation. The Senate fell three votes short of the necessary 60 it needed to bring the bill to a vote.

Unfortunately, this is only one of many examples of near misses Congress has dealt the civil rights community in the past year. Every year, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights releases a voting record highlighting the accomplishments and failures of Congress on a sampling of bills, of which the DC Voting Rights Act is cited as a near miss, but a miss nonetheless.

As the civil rights community looks back on 2007 and forward to 2008, it hopes that Congress will follow through on the path it has already begun in enacting civil rights legislation.

Fedup with FedEx? What's Next?

2007-11-19T05:00:00Z

Few things are more important to the American ideal than the dignity of work. Though we've had a rocky road toward enacting fair labor laws and robust enforcement of such laws, all Americans believe that workers should be treated and compensated fairly for work that they do.

For years, the FedEx Corporation has made a mockery of our nation's commitment to fair labor practices. The corporation has deliberately misclassified its FedEx Ground drivers as "independent contractors" in an effort to fatten its bottom line and circumvent federal anti-discrimination laws.

But an October 15 decision by a federal judge in Indiana to grant class-action status to thousands of FedEx drivers suing for owed wages and benefits may signal the beginning of the end of this controversial practice.

At issue in the case is whether or not the contractors should be considered FedEx employees, and entitled to all the protections and benefits associated with it.

Currently, FedEx employs approximately 15,000 so-called independent contractors, but the number of litigants in the class action suit could balloon to 20,000.

Misclassifying drivers as independent contractors allows FedEx to wiggle out of paying health insurance, pension benefits and complying with labor laws. This means the contractors do not have the right to unionize nor are they protected by federal employment laws. Contractors are in no-man’s land because they are neither their own bosses nor do they have the legal rights of FedEx employees.

Workplace rights are civil rights. American Rights at Work and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights released a report, FedUp with FedEx: How FedEx Ground Tramples Workers’ Rights and Civil Rights, late last month that highlights the civil rights implications of FedEx’s practices and contains a number of personal testimonies from FedEx employees.

Bottom line?

FedEx's tactics are part of a larger effort on their part to stymie union organizing.

Just a few weeks ago, FedEx paid a settlement of $253,000 to five former or present drivers to settle charges of illegally harassing and intimidating the drivers. FedEx had also allegedly terminated the contracts of four of the drivers to prevent a local union election in Northboro, Massachusetts.

What we need from Congress is a commitment to fair labor practices. Civil rights groups and labor are united in our call for Congress to strengthen labor and employment laws to make it more difficult for companies like FedEx to misclassify workers. Legislation like the Employee Free Choice Actwould restore fairness to the process by which employees choose union representation and go a long way toward protecting the nation’s workers from unscrupulous employers.

Ending Poverty: More Is Needed

2007-10-19T16:13:00Z

Conquering persistent poverty in America is our greatest, and most important, challenge.

Recent IRS data found that the gap between the richest Americans and the poorest Americans is at its widest in 25 years. The richest the one percent of Americans earned 21.2 percent of all U.S. income earned in 2005 – a record high.

The American Dream is not working for all Americans.

How can it? Not when the bottom half of the nation accounts for only 12.5 percent of the nation's wealth. That's a lot of people with little to no money to save for, let alone buy, a home.

The civil rights community has long been concerned with poverty, as many of the Americans that make up the nation's poor are minorities. The image of America as a land of rising opportunity, widely shared prosperity, and intergenerational advancement is evaporating.

Hurricane Katrina highlighted that for the nation and the world because many of the hardest hit Gulf Coast residents were those without options -- a car, a friend with a car, a relative with a car -- trapped as a result of their poverty. Our inability to break the cycle of poverty in inner cities, rural towns, and suburbs challenges our nation’s most cherished democratic and moral principles.

Tackling a problem as multifaceted as poverty is no small feat, but one of the most important things we can do for all Americans is ensure they have a high-quality education in order to give them the greatest chance of making a livable wage.

President Bush, in responding to concerns about the income gap, made a good point about the importance of education. He told the Wall Street Journal that, "[s]kills gaps yield income gaps. And what needs to be done about the inequality of income is to make sure people have got good education." He is right.

My organization, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, joined a coalition of civil rights groups and the Alliance for Excellent Education and launched a campaign to ensure that American high-school students, particularly students of color, receive the highest-quality education.

In addition, we are working with ACORN, the Center for American Progress, and the Coalition on Human Needs on a public education campaign to cut poverty in half in 10 years.

It's an ambitious campaign and we do not take it lightly. We'll need concrete solutions.

Recent research into corporate 401(k)s found that Blacks participate in retirement plans at far lower rates than Whites and are much less likely than Whites to invest in the stock market.

Though no industry-wide study of 401(k) plan activity by race has ever been conducted, studies like this – coupled with the knowledge that many of the Americans who are losing their homes in the current foreclosure crisis entered into mortgage loans they perhaps did not understand – suggest that there are significant numbers of Americans, particularly minorities, who could use financial education.

Providing Americans with the tools to manage their lives, both financially and educationally, will help break a cycle of poverty by empowering more people to make decisions that will better their chances of moving up the socioeconomic ladder.

DC Vote: Far from Finished

2007-09-19T23:17:00Z

Yesterday, a bill that would have given the residents of the District of Columbia a vote in Congress for the first time in modern history was temporarily delayed before senators even had a chance to debate its merits.

This delay of the D.C Voting Rights Bill was the first filibuster of a voting rights bill since the days of legal segregation. The Washington Post called the filibuster, led by Republican Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Trent Lott of Mississippi, “heartbreaking and infuriating.”

The Post is right, but we in the civil rights community who have been working this bill for years are heartened by the fact that a majority of senators – 57, including 8 Republicans who broke with their party – were in favor of bringing the bill to the floor for a vote. We are confident that the bill would have passed had it gone to the floor.

The bill has bipartisan support, including notable figures like Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, D. Nev., Sen. Joe Lieberman, I. Conn., and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R. Utah, who championed the bill in the Senate. The House passed the bill overwhelmingly without incident in April.

So it is important that we understand that the bill’s delay in the Senate was not on its merits. It was a tactical move by the Republican leadership to kill a bill that President Bush had threatened to veto. By filibustering the bill, Republicans protected the President from a difficult decision – either become the first president to veto a voting rights bill or sign a bill that extended voting rights to our nation’s capital’s majority black population. Apparently, either decision is untenable for him.

Voting is the language of democracy; and the right to vote is an American birthright, not a partisan issue. It’s unfortunate to think that race could be a factor in the White House’s thinking on DC voting rights.

Even JC Watts, a former Republican member of the House from Oklahoma, and Michael Steele, former Republican lieutenant governor of Maryland, urged the President to aspire to a higher ideal.

This is the farthest we’ve come to passing a bill to enfranchise D.C. residents and that should be celebrated. And it is not the last chance we will get to rectify a problem that makes WashingtonD.C. the only Western capital whose citizens don’t have the right to vote in the nation’s legislature.

The LCCR is launching an 8-state campaign with organizations like the NAACP and the League of Women voters to turn this result around. Next year’s elections give us the perfect setting to challenge those who would deny a vote in Congress to the citizens of the nation’s capital.

Hate Crimes Legislation: A Matter of Basic Fairness

2007-08-17T15:29:00Z

"The qualifications [in the bill] are so broad that virtually any crime involving a homosexual individual has potential to have hate crimes elements."
--White House spokesman Tony Fratto, The Washington Times 8/4/07

This is the White House's latest rationale for threatening a Presidential veto to the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a new federal hate crimes bill that passed the House overwhelmingly in May and is currently pending in the Senate.

The right is pulling out all the stops on this one. People who have never cared a whit about civil rights – or African Americans for that matter – have rounded up a couple of compliant black ministers to oppose the bill by claiming it will stifle their ability to condemn homosexuality from the pulpit and thus, inhibits their freedom of speech and freedom of religion. They're claiming the hate crimes bill would make the murder of a gay somehow more significant than the murder of someone who isn't gay. And they are claiming now the bill is overreaching, despite the fact that the bill addresses violence.

This is utter nonsense.

This reasoning ignores the matter of intent as a motivating factor in criminal actions. Our legal system has long understood that crimes are committed for a variety of reasons – and it has responded accordingly. The murder of a person over money or for their possessions is different from the murder of a person for being gay or disabled. It is intended to be. This is no different than the distinction between manslaughter and first-degree murder, two types of murder that are distinguished by the intent of the person committing the act.

Hate crimes laws protecting black Americans and people of faith are already on the books because our society recognized that the kind of attacks these groups suffered were designed to terrorize entire categories of people, not just the victim.

This is the same situation for sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and disability. Passing this bill sends a powerful message about the importance of all our nation’s citizens, regardless of who they are or their sexual orientation.

The statistics bear repeating again. Hate crimes committed against people because of their sexual orientation have remained a significant percentage of total hate crimes committed in the U.S. each year -- between 14 and 20 percent a year for the past 9 years. And hate crimes against people with disabilities, though small, went up in the past two years for which we have statistics.

Hate crimes are being committed and local law enforcement is sometimes unable to adequately address the problem. This legislation will make it easier for federal officials to go in and help local officials prosecute these cases. In fact, local law enforcement overwhelmingly support this legislation because they want the help.

They understand that hate crimes are underreported. In 2005, the number of agencies reporting hate crimes to the FBI dropped by 300 from 2004. In addition, cities like New York and Phoenix didn’t bother to report at all.

Modest federal intervention can help change these kinds of statistics.

But still our policy opponents lie about the possibility that their First Amendment rights will be violated. And the most important rebuttal to any of these claims lies in the bill itself, which says:

"Nothing in this Act, or the amendments made by this Act, shall be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition by, or any activities protected by the free speech or free exercise clauses of, the First Amendment to the Constitution."

Despite the media's coverage of a few black ministers opposed to the bill, there are many members of the religious community who support this law. Nearly 1400 ministers of all faiths have signed a letter of support for the bill at ClergyAgainstHate.org. And that list continues to grow.

The Senate will consider this important legislation when they return from August recess. It is important that supporters of this bill speak up in support of civil rights and simple justice.

More on the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

High Court's Integration Ruling Presents New Challenges

2007-07-19T22:22:00Z

Despite the Supreme Court's recent decision to strike down voluntary school desegregation programs in Seattle and Louisville, some on the Court recognized that high-quality, racially diverse education remains a critical national priority.

We must be careful not to overstate the positive, but far from totally banning the use of race as a tool to promote educational diversity - as some recidivists had hoped - a majority of the Court reaffirmed diversity as an important goal, specifically stating that schools can continue to use race-conscious measures where necessary and when narrowly tailored.

In the controlling opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy said that if school districts are concerned about how segregated schools affect their ability to provide quality education, then "they are free to devise race-conscious measures to address the problem."

This is good news for the nation's 17,000 school districts.

But we are not out of the woods yet. There are still nearly 1,000 school districts that still use race-conscious measures in some way in their assignment plans and they will have to look at them to be sure they will pass the constitutional muster.

Some will have to retool their plans and some won't. But we must support schools in both instances. We must ensure that all schools have the resources they need to educate their student bodies, whatever the racial makeup may be.

Schools are where the real world begins. Schools are tasked with preparing the next generation of Americans to live and work in a 21st century global economy, a far different world than the one their parents and grandparents occupied.

Today's youth will cross borders, either literally or virtually, to work with foreign nationals from diverse cultures. They will be competing with tens of millions of workers around the world, people with equal or better skills and long acquaintance with diversity and difference.

If not adequately addressed through high-quality, diverse education, American students, no matter their race or color, will be at a disadvantage and the United States' economic potential will be threatened.

That future is already being called into question by low graduation and high drop out rates. High school graduation rates have been stalled at 70 percent since 1990, according to a 2005 Manhattan Institute for Policy Research study; with the rate for minorities closer to 50 percent.

Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens saved the nation from further slide by keeping open the use of race-conscious measures to attain high-quality education for all students.

Today, high-quality schools are linked to high property value areas because local property taxes fund schools. Segregated housing patterns have meant that, historically, less well-off residents are concentrated in lower property value areas, leading to fewer resources, and, less well-funded schools.

This is a housing pattern that holds sway across the nation and the reason that Seattle and Louisville, in an effort to give all their students high-quality, diverse education, created their programs in the first place.

The Supreme Court struck down these two cities programs, but Justice Kennedy's opinion means that they, and other school districts, can still turn to other tools that take race into consideration – redrawing , for example, school and district boundaries or using inter-district transfer programs to achieve high-quality, diverse education.

Opponents of integration claim that any use of race to place students in schools, particularly outside their neighborhood, is unconstitutional.

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race," wrote Chief Justice John Roberts.

It is highly disturbing, and suggests a deep hostility to voluntary desegregation, that Chief Justice Roberts -- joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito -- would have overturned almost all of the most effective efforts to promote inclusion in our nation's schools.

It would have been tragic for the nation's future if the other Justices had let them.

Southwick - Bush's Latest Blunder

2007-06-18T23:13:00Z

Judge Leslie H. Southwick, nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, is President Bush's latest bad nominee to our federal courts.

The civil rights community rightfully opposes his nomination because he has a troubling record in cases that raise too many questions about his commitment to civil and human rights.

For instance, in Richmond v. Mississippi Dep't of Human Services, Judge Southwick joined a 5-4 ruling upholding the reinstatement of a white state social worker who had been fired for calling an African-American co-worker "a good ole nigger." He joined the majority ruling which declared that, taken in context, the use of the word "nigger" was not motivated "out of racial hatred or racial animosity" and therefore the white plaintiff should not have been fired.

The four dissenting judges disagreed. They understood that the word "nigger" has always been "inherently derogatory."

This is only one example in a troubling record in cases involving race. He has routinely rejected defense claims that prosecutors didn't select African-American jurors based on their race. At the same time, he has usually upheld allegations by prosecutors that defendants tried to strike white jurors on the basis of their race.

One of Southwick's own colleagues, in response, accused him of "establishing one level of obligation for the State, and a higher one for defendants on an identical issue."

Southwick's rulings on race are particularly important because the 5th Circuit has the highest percentage of minorities – particularly African Americans – of all the circuit courts. Minorities in the 5th Circuit deserve to know that the court will support them if they are discriminated against.

Judge Southwick's record shows that this is unlikely if he were to be on the court.

And if that isn't bad enough, consider the fact that Judge Southwick has an 89 percent pro-business voting record. He tends, in employment law and tort cases, to favor business and insurance interests over individual citizens.

We have to demand more from President Bush on judicial nominations. Nominating judges who favor big business over the little guy or white people over minorities is not going to make America the nation it aspires to be.

This is not a partisan issue. Former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Justice Anthony Kennedy are conservatives who have shown that they can interpret our nation's laws in ways that are beneficial to all Americans.

This should be the standard for all nominees.

It is time Congress take a stand. No more ultra-conservative judges who are hostile to civil and human rights.

Gimme My Vote!

2007-05-18T21:12:00Z

DC Voting Rights March - April 16, 2007

I have lived in Washington D.C. all of my life.

And as a lifelong civil rights lobbyist, I have always spoken out on Capitol Hill on behalf of my fellow Americans. In fact, I probably spend more time on Capitol Hill than anywhere else.

Yet, as a lifelong resident of Washington, D.C., I have never had my own representative to speak out on Capitol Hill on my behalf.

For over 200 years, more than half a million District of Columbia residents have lacked any voting representation in Congress, even though we pay federal taxes and meet all of the other responsibilities of citizenship. When Congress votes on matters such as war and peace, taxes and spending, health care, education, and the environment, we are given no role in the process.

I doubt seriously that the authors of our Constitution – who founded the nation, in part, out of disdain for "taxation without representation" – could have possibly intended to impose it all over again by denying the capital's citizens the right to vote. The District was created to keep any one state from controlling the seat of the federal government, not to create a "no man's land" where the most important civil right we have would simply not apply.

In an attempt to correct this oversight, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, D. D.C., and Rep. Tom Davis, R. Va., have been working to enact a bill, which passed in the House, that would give District residents a vote in the House, and would give Utah an additional representative until the next census.

I believe this to be a workable solution, in part, because the bill would also keep either political party from taking advantage of the situation – a problem that has stymied efforts to bring democracy to the capital for far too long.

But some have argued that under the Constitution, Congress cannot treat the District as a "state" in order to grant it the representation it deserves. They argue that Congress must pass a constitutional amendment. President Bush has even threatened to veto the bill for just this reason.

However, Congress defines the District as a state in over 500 provisions of the U.S. Code, and treats the District as if it were a state in every way except with respect to political and civil rights and basic power of self-government.

So it is not a matter of what Congress can do, but what it is willing to do, as Rep. Davis stated in his House floor speech.

Nearly 60 percent of District residents are African American. Given our nation's long history of denying blacks the right to vote, this de facto disenfranchisement of black District residents is especially alarming. If the statistic applied to whites, it is unlikely we'd see the same resistance.

On principle, we cannot continue to have this kind of widely acknowledged inequality when there is a remedy like this bill that was crafted to benefit everyone involved.

Bring All to the Table on Immigration Reform

2007-04-19T13:48:00Z

Ellis Island, Examination Hall

Immigration reform is a civil rights issue – perhaps the most pressing civil rights issue of the 21st century.

But we can not deal with immigration reform successfully if we pit American worker against immigrant worker, Black against Latino, liberal against conservative.

Obviously, any reform should consider the impact of immigration on workers already here. However, it is disingenuous to insinuate – as many anti-immigrant folks do -- that treating immigrants humanely automatically means we are mistreating native-born workers.

Low-wage indigenous workers and immigrant workers historically are played off against one another – usually by people in power who are neither. Every immigrant group that came to the United States was pitted against those at the bottom of the nation’s economic ladder, most of whom were Black.

But we should not repeat past behavior by treating the problem as an either/or proposition. Our immigration laws can be and should be reformed with the best interests of all in mind.

The reality is that all low-wage workers are exploited. And for a nation that struggled in its commitment to ensuring civil rights for all, it is time that we stop looking at immigrants as them and start looking at them as us.

Immigrants are not free labor to be exploited. Similarly, immigrants do not come here to use up resources, vote in elections, and commit felonies. We must not fall for the bait and switch. Most immigrants work hard for very little and often send money to their home countries by way of support.

The civil rights community – black, brown, Asians, and Native Americans – want to make sure that the discussion around immigration reform includes all workers, both immigrant and homegrown.

Doing so is the first step toward fixing the problem in a humane way that benefits the nation as a whole.

Getting Affirmative about Affirmative Action

2007-03-19T17:39:00Z

A new study out of Stanford found that whites are willing to support affirmative action policies as long as they are not harmful to white people. More importantly, it suggests that white people are willing to support policies that help minorities.

The study debunks the long-held belief that whites simply don’t care about helping blacks and other minorities. They do, they just don’t want to lose anything for that support.

This has important implications for how the civil right community promotes and discusses affirmative action in the 21st century.

Initially, affirmative action was seen as a way to right the wrongs that a segregated America perpetuated on blacks. Then in the 80’s and 90’s, affirmative action was talked of as a tool for fostering diversity, which benefits everyone.

But lately, we’ve been unsuccessful in making the case for affirmative action.

Opponents of affirmative action have managed to twist the affirmative action argument into something that disenfranchises whites.

They package their stance in simple messages that play to white people’s fears that they are losing something when affirmative action goes into effect.

The progressive community knows this is not the case, but we haven’t done the best job in marketing the benefits and the advantages to the whole society of a diverse society. That also means that whites have had the opportunity to support affirmative action taken away from them, a loss to the general society.

The Stanford study makes the important point that the impulse to support policies that benefit minorities exists. We just have to reframe the issue in ways that emphasize that whites don’t lose anything in the process.

In fact, support of affirmative action not only returns it to its original purpose – to help historically disadvantaged minorities – that support makes it better for every citizen across the nation.

Civil Rights Agenda Must Be Present

2007-01-23T23:05:00Z

On November 7^th, the American people said, “we want change.”

Well, the civil rights community also wants change. After six years of a Congress that practically ignored civil rights, those of us who work on these issues that affect millions of Americans’ day-to-day lives are hopeful. The 110^th Congress looks like it will embrace and handle civil rights issues with the time and seriousness they deserve.

And theHouse is off to a great start. As part of its “100 hours” promise to America, it passed not only a bill to raise the minimum wage but one that slashed interest rates on student loans. Both were long overdue.

But there is so much more that Congress can do. The civil rights community has a laundry list of priorities that we’d also like to see addressed: renewed enforcement of fair housing laws; full funding for the Census Bureau; and stronger legislation to combat predatory lending, hate crimes, and racial profiling.

This new Congress also offers the opportunity to regain lost ground on the effective enforcement of our civil rights laws, which will be our number one priority. These are the laws that protect the basic rights of every citizen.

The new Democratic House delivered on their “100 hours” promise with time to spare. The civil rights community expects to do the same. It is our job to push Congress – Democrats and Republicans -- and to inform them of the impact of the laws they pass.

We all have so much work to do. And for the first time in a long time, that work has a chance to bear fruit.