Washington Report • March/April 2007

Hate Groups Have Found a New Purpose

by Elenora Giddings Ivory

A February 7, 2007, Associated Press article has alerted us to the fact that hate groups have found a new purpose as they fuel anti-immigrant activity with their rhetoric. As the pro-comprehensive immigration demonstrations became visible in the news last spring and summer, they seem to have re-energized groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Skinheads, the Neo-Nazis and other white supremacist organizations. 

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is also following this disturbing development and is quoted in the Associated Press article, thusly: “Extremist groups are good at seizing on whatever the hot button is of the day and twisting the message to get new members,” Deborah M. Lauter, ADL civil rights director, said, “This one seems to be taking hold with more of mainstream America than we’d like to see.” Posters with words like, “Let’s get rid of the Mexicans!” are appearing at anti-immigrant rallies.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, another well-known group that monitors the activity of these hate groups, has reported that between the years of 2000 and 2005, hate groups have grown 33 percent and Klan chapters by 63 percent, as best as can be determined from limited information, since these groups are secretive.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there may be “as many as 150 Klan chapters with up to 8,000 members nationwide. More than 800 hate groups exist around the country.”

From about the 1920s through the 1960s civil rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan has traditionally targeted and terrorized the African American population. It is now expanding its reach to other ethnic populations, particularly those from Mexico and Central America who might be seen as undocumented workers and who are fearful of going to the authorities for protection out of concern for possible deportation.

Skin Color Still Matters in U.S.

A fairly recent study by Dr. Joni Hersch, a Vanderbilt University professor of law and economics, has concluded that taller and lighter skin color immigrants in the U.S. receive higher salaries than their shorter and darker skinned counterparts. The federally funded study, conducted in 2003, observed 2,084 recently immigrating men and women.

The Vanderbilt press release stated that:

An interviewer reported the person’s skin color using an 11-point scale where 0 represented the absence of color and 10 represented the darkest possible skin color. Even when taking into consideration characteristics that might affect wages, such as English language proficiency, work experience and education, Hersch found immigrants with the lightest skin color earned, on average, 8 percent to 15 percent more than immigrants with the darkest skin tone.

Even with all the civil rights laws of the 1960s and affirmative action policies in many of our industries and organizations, we still find discrimination based on skin color to be a barrier to successful employment and other aspects of day-to-day life.

The Vanderbilt release went on to report that:

Hersch said the effect of skin color even persisted among workers with the same ethnicity, race and country of origin. Hersch’s research also found height played a part in salary. Taller immigrants earned more, with every inch adding an additional 1 percent to wages.

The study controlled for the factor of darker skin that results from outdoor employment, but still found that higher salaries were seen among lighter-skinned workers.

The study also took into consideration factors related to education level, language skills, work history, work visa type and whether a spouse was a U.S. citizen; but even considering those factors, skin color meant about 8 to 15 percent more salary for the lighter-skinned immigrant.

Congress will have various bills before it in this session regarding the plight of the immigrant and crimes against those who are historically oppressed economically. The experiences of the new immigrant as the subject of both hate crime and employment discrimination would indicate that we need to maintain public and private affirmative action policies and that we need to safeguard laws that identify crimes that may result from hatred.

Prior to the approval of the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, jurisdictions were not obligated to distinguish, in reporting criminal statistics, between an attack that may have been the result of hatred and one that was simply a violent assault on a person.

During the 1960s, African Americans used to describe this skin color phenomenon as, “If you’re White, you’re alright;  If you are brown stick around;  If you’re Black, get back.”  The resurgence of the KKK and the findings of this study would indicate some truth to this little axiom.

Remembering the Lessons of Hurricane Katrina

by Leslie G Woods

In January 2007, riding on a bus down St. Claude Avenue, which cuts across the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, I was struck that the Lower Ninth hasn’t changed much since I started visiting almost a year ago. To my left was the neighborhood of Holy Cross, where small, respectable houses that had clearly once been lovely and well-kept homes, were slowly being gutted. To my right was utter devastation.

On my first visit, the right side of St. Claude looked like a war zone. Houses were washed away, trees uprooted, and debris littered, piled as high as the houses that no longer stood there.

Today, on the Holy Cross side, there are more trailers, indicating that a few more residents have begun the arduous process of reclaiming their homes from the water, mold and sludge left behind by the receding water. On the other side of St. Claude, some debris has been cleared away, leaving concrete slabs where houses once stood. For the most part, however, it looks unchanged and forgotten.

One year and a half since Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast, the recovery has barely begun. More than half of the city’s pre-Katrina population has still not returned home, and some never will. Affordable housing units are incredibly hard to come by, as are jobs, doctors, schools, and the other basic necessities that make it possible to live and thrive in a place.

The public safety net that failed so dismally as the storm approached the city, and when the levies broke letting the flood rush in, is in shambles. The Lower Ninth Ward did not have running water until October 2006, over a year after the storm. But even worse than seeing what little progress has been made on the surface, is examining the issues that run deep below the surface of an economically and racially divided city — and nation.

As Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans, the residents who could, fled. Those who owned cars, trucks and vans jammed the northbound highways, while those who didn’t own a vehicle stayed at home. Not until Sunday, August 28, 2005, the day before the storm made landfall, was a mandatory evacuation order issued and by this time, alternate modes of transportation like buses and planes had ceased functioning.

According to the 2000 census, New Orleans was tied for sixth poorest large city in the nation, with a staggering poverty rate of 28 percent. More than half of the poor households in pre-Katrina New Orleans did not own a vehicle, including almost 60 percent of poor African American households and 65 percent of the elderly.

Many people who remained at home as the hurricane barreled toward their city had no choice; they couldn’t leave. Of the 5.8 million people who lived in the areas of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama that were hardest hit by the hurricanes, more than a million were living in poverty, and one in every three was African American. Those who were most egregiously impacted by the hurricanes and their aftermath disproportionately were poor, elderly and African American; and we — all of us — left them behind.

In the systemic poverty and racism that was brought so forcefully into the public consciousness by Hurricane Katrina, there is a microcosm of the systemic injustice that plagues this nation. Every day, in every town and city, the storms of poverty, racism and injustice are leaving this same group of people behind.

The tragedies and loss that followed Hurricane Katrina were not the result of a natural disaster; they were the result of a human disaster — systemic neglect and failure at every level of the public safety net, from the local governments that failed to issue mandatory evacuation orders and help the poor leave the city, to the federal agencies charged with maintenance of the levies, disaster response and a host of other “safety net” functions. There was nothing “natural” about the disaster that followed the hurricane.

And now, a year and a half later — as families still wait on lists thousands of names long to get trailers so that they have a place to live while rebuilding their homes — we must ask, “How could we let this happen?”  In the richest nation in the world, how can the system have failed so utterly, resulting in so much death, dislocation and devastation? 

As the 2007 legislative season shifts into high gear, and as the fate of poverty alleviation and environmental programs is decided on the federal budget’s pages, the lessons and revelations of Hurricane Katrina must not sink below the polluted waters that we failed to hold back.

We must not forget, and we must call upon our legislators to remember our nation’s responsibility to the poor, the elderly, the sick and the neglected.

Legal Aspects of the “War On Terror”

by Catherine Gordon

The U.S.-led “war on terror” and the subsequent detention of suspects without trial has started a debate in the U.S. and around the world about how far a democratic society can compromise the right to a fair trial in the name of security. An essential part of the foundation of democratic societies is the right to a fair trial.

How someone is treated when accused of a crime reveals how far a state respects human rights. A fair trial is essential in order to protect human rights such as the right to freedom from torture, the right to life and the right to freedom of expression. 

With the passage of legislation at the end of last year setting up questionable military courts for detainees and stripping these individuals of the right of habeas corpus, civil liberties in the U.S. have been seriously eroded. 

Habeas Corpus

Habeas corpus literally means “to have the body.” This concept has served historically as the vehicle for prisoners to challenge unlawful detention by an executive.

The writ of habeas corpus protects people from arbitrary disappearance and indefinite detention without charge. This right has been a part of Anglo-Saxon legal tradition for 800 years and allows prisoners to ask the courts why they have been put in prison and whether or not the detention is legal.

The Supreme Court has recognized this writ as fundamental to protecting individual freedom from lawless state action. The Court has stated that habeas corpus must be administered with initiative and flexibility in order to insure that miscarriages of justice do not occur.

The Military Commissions Act

In June of 2006, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the President’s military tribunal system, set up to try detainees in Guantanamo, as well as other “enemy combatants,” is illegal under U.S. law because it does not follow U.S. statute embodied in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). This code sets forth the procedures and rules governing all military trials.

In response to the Court’s ruling, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act in September of 2006. This legislation sets up military commissions that do not conform to the UCMJ and are blatantly unjust.

For example, the Commissions can only be used for those charged with a crime. Being charged with a crime, however, is optional; so detainees can languish in prison for life without ever being charged.

If there is a trial, evidence obtained through coercion and hearsay can be used, which opens the door for evidence obtained by torture. Secret evidence can be used to convict the defendant and there is no means of appeal. The only thing that can be appealed is whether the military commissions followed their own rules.

In addition, The Military Commissions Act permits the President to name anyone — even U.S. citizens inside the U.S. — as enemy combatants and detain them. These detentions can be kept secret, and there may be gaps in Red Cross monitoring so that detainees can be indefinitely “disappeared.” Brutal interrogation techniques can be used by CIA and civilian contractors with impunity.

The legislation took away the right of detainees held in Guantanamo Bay and any non-citizen designated by the President as an “enemy combatant” to habeas corpus, and, thus, removed their right to challenge their detention in federal court.

During debate on the bill, the constitutionality of removing this safeguard was challenged, and Senators Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) introduced an amendment that would have preserved habeas corpus. It was narrowly rejected by a vote of 51-48. 

Next Steps

It is important for the public to stay informed on these issues and to voice their concerns to members of Congress. If they do not hear from constituents, legislators will not act.

On January 4, 2007, Senators Specter and Leahy introduced the “Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007” (S. 185). This legislation is a meaningful step toward restoring safeguards for detainees being held under U.S. jurisdiction. It currently has only seven cosponsors. 

A companion bill, H.R. 267), was introduced in the House by Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX). It has no cosponsors. Please go to the Presbyterian Legislative Action Center and ask your Representative to support this legislation.

Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) has introduced S. 576 to correct the worst problems of the Military Commission Act of 2006. The bill, called “Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007,” would restore judicial review and prohibit use of evidence obtained through torture or coercion during trials of terrorist suspects.

Upcoming Events

Churches For Middle East Peace Advocacy Conference:
For the Peace of Jerusalem

May 6-8, 2007 • Washington, DC

Join Middle East peace advocates from across the country and a range of Christian Churches to learn about current issues related to Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking and the sharing of Jerusalem, and lobby Congress with up-to-date, specific talking points designed to make your voice heard. At the conference, church leaders, issue analysts, policy experts and government officials will provide important insights and updates and prepare conference participants to meet with elected officials.  For more information, visit the Churches for Middle East Peace Web site.

Churches for Middle East Peace, a coalition of 22 U.S. churches and church-related organizations, is positioned to guide church members and clergy in effective advocacy, grounded in the principles of our faith.

Step It Up 2007

April 14, 2007

The Presbyterian Hunger Program, Presbyterians for Restoring Creation, the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program, and the Presbyterian Washington Office urge you to involve your church community in the Step It Up events, and to join in this movement to bring healing to God’s creation.
On Saturday, April 14, in communities all across the United States, Step It Up rallies will call on the U.S. Congress to act to reduce our country’s contribution to global warming. At every rally, the call will be for an 80% reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.  For more information, visit the Step It Up Web site.