Commissioner Gail Heriot Statement and Rebuttal in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ An Assessment of Minority Voting Rights Access in the United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail L. Heriot
2018 ◽  
Vol 677 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Lee ◽  
Karthick Ramakrishnan ◽  
Janelle Wong

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing group in the United States, increasing from 0.7 percent in 1970 to nearly 6 percent in 2016. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2065, Asian Americans will constitute 14 percent of the U.S. population. Immigration is fueling this growth: China and India have passed Mexico as the top countries sending immigrants to the United States since 2013. Today, two of three Asian Americans are foreign born—a figure that increases to nearly four of five among Asian American adults. The rise in numbers is accompanied by a rise in diversity: Asian Americans are the most diverse U.S. racial group, comprising twenty-four detailed origins with vastly different migration histories and socioeconomic profiles. In this article, we explain how the unique characteristics of Asian Americans affect their patterns of ethnic and racial self-identification, which, in turn, present challenges for accurately counting this population. We conclude by discussing policy ramifications of our findings, and explain why data disaggregation is a civil rights issue.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Myra Mendible

This article focuses attention on the pivotal role that stigmatization processes play on both legal and discursive fronts, that is, in justifying restrictive policies affecting ethnic minorities and in framing reactionary discourses in support of such measures. It argues that racial stigmatization is the key component in ongoing efforts to exclude Black and Latino citizens from full cultural citizenship in the United States, setting the groundwork for punitive and exclusionary policies aimed at disenfranchising and undermining their political agency. While legal documents record the rights and privileges accorded citizens within the nation’s physical spaces, the politics of stigma, I contend, maps a moral geography: it sets the contours and limits of communal obligation, disrupting affective bonds and attachments that can spur social change. As an instrument of power, stigmatizing processes today are helping to reinstate the kinds of policies and attitudes that the Voting Rights Act intended to redress, engendering a hostile climate for Blacks and Latinos in the United States and threatening hard-won civil rights and political gains.


2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin D.G. Kelley

During the summer of 2014, the U.S. government once again offered the State of Israel unwavering support for its aggression against the Palestinian people. Among the U.S. public, however, there was growing disenchantment with Israel. The information explosion on social media has provided the public globally with much greater access to the Palestinian narrative unfiltered by the Israeli lens. In the United States, this has translated into a growing political split on the question of Palestine between a more diverse and engaged younger population and an older generation reared on the long-standing tropes of Israel's discourse. Drawing analogies between this paradigm shift and the turning point in the civil rights movement enshrined in Mississippi's 1964 Freedom Summer, author and scholar Robin Kelley goes on to ask whether the outrage of the summer of 2014 can be galvanized to transform official U.S. policy.


2005 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Benson

Forty years ago, civil rights activists across the country rejoiced in the passing of the Voting Rights Act1 (“VRA” or “the Act”). The Act was a crowning achievement of the classical civil rights movement and the culmination of a bloody series of events seeking political empowerment for African-Americans in the United States.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cottrell ◽  
Michael C. Herron ◽  
Javier M. Rodriguez ◽  
Daniel A. Smith

On account of poor living conditions, African Americans in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of mortality and incarceration compared with Whites. This has profoundly diminished the number of voting-eligible African Americans in the country, costing, as of 2010, approximately 3.9 million African American men and women the right to vote and amounting to a national African American disenfranchisement rate of 13.2%. Although many disenfranchised African Americans have been stripped of voting rights by laws targeting felons and ex-felons, the majority are literally “missing” from their communities due to premature death and incarceration. Leveraging variation in gender ratios across the United States, we show that missing African Americans are concentrated in the country’s Southeast and that African American disenfranchisement rates in some legislative districts lie between 20% and 40%. Despite the many successes of the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement, high levels of African American disenfranchisement remain a continuing feature of the American polity.


2002 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-45
Author(s):  
Francis E. McGovern

There is virtually universal acceptance for the proposition that political questions in the United States have a propensity to morph into judicial questions. The use of litigation as a method of governing the body politic has repeatedly manifested itself since the formation of our nation. Congress vs. the legislature; federal vs. state authority; voting rights; civil rights; universal rights — the list is pervasive.


2021 ◽  
pp. 019145372199873
Author(s):  
Ramin Jahanbegloo

The protests which followed the death of Black citizens killed by White police officers in the United States show us clearly that the question of non-violent democratic theory is on the table as it was 60 years ago. Martin Luther King, Jr. was well aware of this issue when he became the most important leader of America’s Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. King’s recognition of Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy of non-violence helped him in his campaigns for integration and voting rights, while guiding him to democratize the American democracy and re-evaluate the two concepts of ‘individual’ and ‘community’.


Author(s):  
Patrisia Macías-Rojas

Prominent Arizona conservatives and, some would argue, liberal reformers helped spearhead law and order policies that exploded the U.S. prison population and created a crisis of prison overcrowding. This chapter argues that the scramble for prison beds was a major force behind the Criminal Alien Program (CAP), which Congress pushed as a way to purge noncitizens from jails and prisons in order to free up prison beds. CAP gave primacy to criminal enforcement targets and unleashed an onslaught of measures that restructured immigrant detention and deportation, spawned similar programs like “absconder” initiatives, “fugitive” operations, Security Communities, and immigrant prosecution programs like Operation Streamline—in other words, many of the punitive policies we associate with the criminalization of migration in the United States today. However, punitive policies are not necessarily a “backlash” against rights and protections that reformers fought for for over a century. Rather, they operate within post–civil rights “antidiscrimination” constitutional frameworks in ways that recognize rights for certain “victims,” while aggressively punishing and banishing those branded as criminal.


Author(s):  
Martha Minow

Even before it was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education had a global profile. Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal in a work that the Carnegie Corporation commissioned in 1944 in search of an unbiased view of American race relations, supplied a searing indictment of America’s treatment of the “Negro,” and his work, An American Dilemma, became a key citation in the Court’s famous footnote eleven. Initially, President Dwight D. Eisenhower showed no sympathy for the school integration project and expressed suspicion that the United Nations and international economic and social rights activists were betraying socialist or even communist leanings in supporting the brief. But as the United States tried to position itself as a leader in human rights and supporter of the United Nations, the Cold War orientation of President Eisenhower’s Republican administration gave rise to interest in ending official segregation, lynchings, and cross burnings in order to elevate the American image internationally. The Department of Justice consulted with the State Department on the drafting of an amicus brief in Brown that argued that ending racially segregated schools would halt the Soviet critique of racial abuses tolerated by the U.S. system of government and thereby help combat global communism. Ending segregation emerged as part of a strategy to win more influence than the Soviet Union in the “Third World.” African-American civil rights leader and journalist Roger Wilkins later recalled that ending official segregation became urgent as black ambassadors started to visit Washington, D.C., and the United Nations in New York City. Tracking the influence of Brown in other countries is thornier than tracking its influence inside the United States where the topic has motivated a cottage industry in academic scholarship. As this book has considered, the litigation has by now a well-known and complicated relationship to actual racial integration within American schools. Some argue that the case exacerbated tensions and slowed gradual reform that was already under way.


This essay is a response to Sabine Broeck’s essay in this book, Global Perspectives on the United States. Mariani concurs with Broeck that the teaching and studying of U.S. culture and history is more complicated these days than some decades ago, but he differs with her assessment that this is new throughout Europe. In fact, he argues that “subversive Americanization” had become operative in Italy by the late 1960s, and he wonders about Broeck’s example of the German response to the U.S. Civil Rights movement. In this Second Look, he argues that to operate within a transnational framework is not ipso facto to have gained a liberating perspective that grants scholars access to necessarily pleasant, edifying truths. Instead, he argues that a transnational perspective just as much as an arguably global perspective is a perspective that deserves to be mobilized precisely because of its contradictory status, and certainly not despite it.


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