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racial profiling
For Democrats, Debate Night Means Being Quizzed From the Right by Corporate Media
Dec 23, 2015
The Democratic and Republican debates have this asymmetry: Republican candidates are presumed to need ideological sympathizers among their questioners--Fox News, for example, or Salem Media, which teams up with CNN for GOP debates--while Democrats are thought content to be quizzed by representatives of mainstream corporate media outlets like CNN, CBS and ABC (FAIR Action Alert, 10/9/15).
This setup resulted, on the Republican side, in the spectacle of Salem Media's Hugh Hewitt pressing GOP contender Ben Carson to declare his willingness to "kill innocent children by not the scores, but the hundreds and the thousands." (Carson's response: "You got it. You got it.")
And on the Democratic side, the result is debates like the one we got on December 19.
Although primary debates are ostensibly intended to help members of each major party select their nominee, the questions asked by the debate moderators from ABC--World News Tonight anchor John Muir and national security correspondent Martha Raddatz--consistently posed questions from the right.
When Raddatz pressed Hillary Clinton: "Our latest poll shows that more Americans believe arming people, not stricter gun laws, is the best defense against terrorism. Are they wrong?" Or when she pushed Bernie Sanders on "sending US combat troops to join a coalition to fight ISIS."
She asked a couple of questions "about a new terrorist tool used in the Paris attacks, encryption"--even though, as The Intercept's Dan Froomkin reported, evidence "suggests that the ISIS terror networks involved were communicating in the clear, and that the data on their smartphones was not encrypted." Still, Raddatz was able to use the dubious encryption claims to push Clinton to "force [Apple] to give law enforcement a key to encrypted technology by making it law."
As for Muir, he sought an endorsement of racial profiling from Sanders, citing "a neighbor in San Bernardino who reportedly witnessed packages being delivered to that couple's home, that it set off red flags, but they didn't report it because they were afraid to profile." He also pushed Clinton and Martin O'Malley to endorse "the idea of a halt or a pause" in acceptance of Syrian refugees and challenged Clinton to explain what was wrong with Donald Trump's "proposed ban on Muslims coming to America," given that "36 percent of Americans, more than a third, agree with him."
What about the concerns of the nearly two-thirds of Americans who don't agree with Donald Trump? Progressive perspectives on security and foreign policy were hard to discern in the questioning. As with the most recent Republican debate (FAIR Blog, 12/16/15), "terrorism" was treated as it meant "political violence by Muslims," with right-wing mass killings like the Charleston church massacre and the assault on Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs going unmentioned.
The drone war was ignored by the moderators, as were civilian casualties. The disastrous consequences of the Libyan intervention that Clinton presided over was brought up at one point, but the premise of the question was that Clinton "should have done more to fill the leadership vacuum left behind"--not that the secretary of State shouldn't have been using military force to overthrow governments she disliked.
Even though the world's leaders had reached a landmark climate change just a week before the debate, "climate change" and "global warming" didn't pass the moderators' lips.
ABC News' approach to domestic issues was not much different. Raddatz pressed on the cost of a single-payer healthcare plan-"Can you tell us specifically how much people will be expected to pay?"--and on his plan to make public colleges tuition-free: "How does that really lower the cost other than just shifting the cost to taxpayers?" She tried to get Clinton and O'Malley to promise not to raise takes on households making $250,000 or less--in other words, families who make more than 97 percent of the country.
Muir asked all three candidates a question about Black Lives Matter-but he focused on the "so-called Ferguson effect, police holding back because they're afraid of backlash." Voters who are worried about "a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement" were represented by ABC News--but those who are more worried about police officers killing unarmed African Americans with impunity were out of luck.
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Americans Win Right to Challenge Inclusion on Government's Secret 'No Fly List'
Court ruling seen as a victory against racial profiling, specifically for Arab-Americans
Oct 26, 2015
A federal court on Monday ruled that a Michigan man can challenge his inclusion on the government's "No Fly List," in a move that is being celebrated as a victory for the hundreds of U.S. citizens assigned to that secretive list, as well as the countless Arab-Americans routinely subjected to similar racial profiling.
Reversing a previous district court ruling, Circuit Judge Julia Smith Gibbons ordered (pdf) "further proceedings" in the case of Saeb Mokdad, a Lebanese-American who has been prohibited three times from boarding a plane to visit his family in Lebanon since September 2012.
The Arab-American Civil Rights League (ACRL), which is defending Mokdad, argues that his placement on the terrorist screening list is unconstitutional. The suit specifically singles out the U.S. Attorney General, the director of the FBI, and the director of the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), who are charged with placing people on the list. The ACRL also argues that the government must explain why Mokdad is included on the Terrorist Screening list and allow for a "meaningful opportunity" to contest his status.
Gibbons also ruled that a district court does have the authority to decide on such a case, which, as Salon reporter Ben Norton notes, "establish[es] a precedent for courts throughout the country."
There are as many as 47,000 people on the U.S. government's "No Fly List," according to documents leaked to The Intercept last year, including 800 Americans.
Following the court ruling, Mokdad's attorney, Nabih Ayad, said, "Today is a good day for our Constitution, a good day for Arab-Americans, and a good day for justice across this nation." Ayad added that the ruling confirms the ACRL's belief that "the unwarranted and unconstitutional profiling of an entire group of people simply based on their ethnicity must be struck down as a violation of this nation's highest law: the Constitution."
He continued, "By issuing today's ruling, the U.S. Sixth Circuit has dealt a huge blow against the continued and unjustifiable intimidation and harassment by the federal government against Arab Americans."
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Standardized Tests are a Form of Racial Profiling
Oct 26, 2015
Several days before writing this blog post, I visited a 12th-grade class I have followed since the beginning of their 11th-grade year. I am a researcher studying how education policy affects teachers and students daily. The youth I work with are all immigrants and students of color learning English as a second language. I sat beside a student I didn't recognize and asked the teacher who he was. The teacher explained that the boy was simply in class to try to pass the NY Regents' exam- the test all high schoolers in New York state have to take to graduate from high school.
The boy had all the credits necessary for high school graduation but hadn't passed the Regents' exams in math and English. Without passing scores, youth do not receive a high school diploma, their only other option to study for the GED. Now in his fifth year in the high school, the teachers had created a specialized plan for the young man so he only had to attend math and English classes to prep for the Regents'. "He isn't going to graduate," the teacher whispered to me. The teacher continued, "he is going to age out of high school in January when he turns 21. He won't be able to get his scores up in time, his English is too weak. He has only been in the country for three years, and we think he may also have some special needs."
"Frankly, the situation has nothing to do with these youths' willingness to work hard and attempt the American Dream, and everything to do with how we treat people of color and immigrants in this country."
I asked the teacher what would happen to a young man of color and English Learner with no high school diploma in a neoliberal city like New York with a shrinking middle class. "I don't know," he said. "It breaks my heart. And guess who is going to have to tell him that he won't graduate? Me. The policy makers won't tell him. The people who are in the classroom with these kids have to deliver the news. After they moved here, got to class, did the work and learned English ... that they won't graduate. And then they evaluate me based on my students' test scores when my kids barely speak English ... it is not fair. The system is designed for these kids to fail."
Of the 22 young people in the class of students I have been studying for 14 months, 22 will attempt the English Language Arts Regents' exam for the 3rd time in January, having received non-passing scores on their first two attempts. Some of them, their teachers predict, will take the test seven or eight times. English Language Learners -- who are currently 14.4% of the student population in NYC- have the highest drop out rates of any student sub-group population in the city. Only 39.1% of ELLs graduate from high school according to data from 2013. Something is deeply wrong when we create a system that causes 60% of youth to leave high school without a diploma.
Kate Menken, a linguist and professor at CUNY has studied the Regents' at length, and determined that the exam is not a valid measure of academic content knowledge for youth learning English, given that the oft-idiomatic or culturally-specific English used on the test is challenging to someone newly learning the language. Consider this passage by Margaret Atwood from p. 5 of the Aug. 2015 Comprehensive English Exam:
Invitations to perform cascaded over us. All the best places wanted us, and all at once, for, as people said--though not to me--my voice would thrive only for a certain term. Then, as voices do, it would begin to shrivel. Finally it would drop off, and I would be left alone, denuded--a dead shrub, a footnote. It's begun to happen, the shrivelling.
Cascaded. Thrive only for a certain term. Denuded. Shrivelling.
I am a memoirist and poet, as well as a researcher. It behooves me, with a Ph.D., to use language in sophisticated and creative ways. But what are we trying to prove with 17 and 18-year old youth? What are we actually testing?
It would be easy enough to provide these youth with a different kind of test that more accurately assesses what they know and can do and is still rigorous and standards-based. My argument isn't to dumb down the tests, but provide them with reasonable tests where the majority can actually show off what they can do well and get credit for their hard work in high school. But we don't. Frankly, the situation has nothing to do with these youths' willingness to work hard and attempt the American Dream, and everything to do with how we treat people of color and immigrants in this country. If 60% of immigrant youth, who are also people of color, do not graduate in New York state then the white power elite is maintained.
The power elite is preserved because in a time of shrinking opportunities, a filter that eliminates large numbers of English learners from the mix gives white students an advantage. Let us be clear: the promises of the civil rights era have not come true. Both the workforce and schools remain segregated with a significant white power elite that is both about class and about race. Today, Blacks make up less than 4% of practicing physicians, and Latinos about 5%- similar percentages to 1960. Schools are not desegregated, and maintain the same rates of segregation since landmark Brown v. Board policy in 1954. Today, Black and Latino students tend to be in schools with a substantial majority of poor children, while white and Asian students typically attend middle class schools.
I think we should "call a spade a spade": standardized tests are a function of white supremacy and a method of racial profiling in schools.
Racial profiling is understood as the act of targeting particular groups of people because of their race. We usually think of the targeting as done by law enforcement, and racial profiling is usually thought of as traffic and pedestrian stops, raids on immigrant communities, and the ejection of Muslim Americans and South Asians on airlines and at airports.
Tests are a form of racial profiling because they provide a way for school districts and education reformers to frame black, brown and immigrant youth as "failing" and target the education services that these youth then receive. When a child's knowledge, worth and assets are reduced to a test score, assumptions can be made about that child's intelligence (and by extension the intelligence of the child's racial group). The low intelligence of people of color and immigrants is a regular trope in this country. The assumed superiority of the white brain means that we norm all "standards" (aka tests) to bizarre and out-of-touch expectations that only youth with an array of special services can pass.
Let's talk about those special services. Once youth of color get low scores on bad tests, they are framed as "failing" and targeted to receive an array of expensive for-profit services put into place at the expense of recess and social studies and fun and joy. Effectively, their educational opportunities are reduced to passing math and English. In fact, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), part of the U.S. Department of Education, released the findingsof the first nationwide arts survey reportingan "equity gap" between the availability of arts instruction as well as the richness of course offerings for students in low-poverty schools compared to those in high-poverty schools, leading students who are economically disadvantaged not to get the enrichment experiences of affluent students.
Frame and target. Frame and target. This is at the center of racial profiling.
Standardized tests create test scores that target students of color by limiting the creative depth, intellectual wealth, and variety of their education. Producing test scores is an act of racial profiling. The alternative here is to opt young people out of tests, which means opting children out of this particular form of racial profiling. If they (the district, the power elite, the mayor, the education corporate reformers) do not have a young person's test score, then they cannot assign value or worth to that particular young person. Test refusal is refusing racial profiling and saying yes to dignity and anti-racist, humanizing schooling.
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