Because racial profiling is not a thing of the past, we’ve cross-posted this infographic from Jacke Kelle’s website Top Criminal Justice Degrees.
Source: TopCriminalJusticeDegrees.org
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The previous post, entitled “A Lesson in Systematic Racism: Stand Your Ground, the NRA, and the American Legislative Council (ALEC),” examined the connection between the untimely death of Trayvon Martin and the powerful lobbying groups that made laws like “Stand Your Ground” possible. This post expands on the previous one by highlighting ALEC’s connection to school closures and the privatization of education.
Arlington, VA – On Thursday, July 18, 2013, a coalition of faith, labor, education and anti-gun violence groups staged a rally at the newly relocated headquarters of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC gained notoriety last year after the revelation that it was instrumental in writing the “Stand Your Ground” law used in Florida and other discriminatory legislation. In light of the recent not-guilty verdict for George Zimmerman, the protesters demanded the repeal of Stand Your Ground (aka “kill at will”) in Florida, aiming to change the system that killed Trayvon Martin. In addition to seeking justice for Trayvon, speakers at the event drew attention to the corporate influence ALEC has on government. By bringing together business leaders and state lawmakers to write laws before they are even passed, ALEC ensures the advancement of a corporate agenda at the state level. This affects everything from worker’s rights to safety net programs. Speakers at the event talked about how ALEC’s laws perpetuate school closures, low wage jobs, and gun violence. Josh Horwitz, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence: Josh Horwitz “With the George Zimmerman trial we saw that now what was once murder is no more. Saving human life is not valued. That’s not Virginia values, that’s not American values, and that’s not legal values. Instead of sitting upstairs and drinking wine and eating snacks and celebrating their move to Virginia, ALEC and the corporations that support it should humble themselves and work as hard as they can to repeal the stand your ground laws before one more kid is killed.” Brendan Fischer, Center for Media and Democracy (publisher of ALECexposed.org): Brendan Fischer “This is much more than ‘Stand your ground.’ It includes efforts to push voter ID to make it harder to vote. Efforts to prohibit cities from banning ammunition or banning dangerous machine guns. They’ve also pushed harsh sentencing laws like ‘three strikes you’re out.” At the same time that they were pushing private prisons, which, as more people were flowing into prison, the profits were increasing for private prison industries like Correction Corporation of America, which just happen to be ALEC members. Not surprisingly, these bills do have a disproportionate impact on people of color. And you are probably not surprised to know that many of the people who are in these ALEC meetings deciding to adopt these bills and spread them around the country, are White.” Sabrina Stevens, American Federation of Teachers (AFT): Sabrina Stevens “When we look at organizations like ALEC, especially what they have done to our entire society, that comes into classrooms every day. So, whether it’s children who are tired because they are struggling to find a place to live with their parents who don’t get paid enough, whether it’s people who because of the three strikes laws and other that they’ve helped to pass that make it easier to incarcerate people than to let them vote. All of those things show up in our classrooms. And then, they exploit that perception of failure to create even more excuses to profitize and privatize schools. Those schools in turn don’t hold teachers or the companies accountable for actually tracking students, keeping track of where they are. They do make a lot of profit. And we end up with undereducated children who are fed right into the school to prison pipeline. We have to say no. We have to stand up to this.” ALECexposed.org lists detailed information about how ALEC has led the fight to de-fund public schools and privatize education: “Through ALEC, corporations, ideologues, and their politician allies voted to spend public tax dollars to subsidize private K-12 education and attack professional teachers and teachers’ unions by…promoting voucher programs…segregating students with disabilities…setting up low-income students for failure in college…[and] undermining teacher’s unions.” We’ve seen this at the local level here in DC through past and current public school closures. At the national level, school closures are happening across the country in major cities like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York. It’s clear there is . . . → Read More: A Lesson in Systemic Racism, Part II: ALEC, School Closures, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline  2 comments - (Comments are closed)  DC School Closures, Education  American Legislative Exchange Council, DC Public Schools, education, Noelle Galos, school closings 
The Florida law that allowed five white jurors and one Latina juror to exonerate George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin is called the Justifiable Use of Force Statute. It sounds harmless enough. Every state has a law that defines when the use of force is justifiable. These are commonly known as self-defense laws, except when they have a clause that removes a person’s obligation to retreat. This clause, which was first suggested by the National Rifle Association and later backed and promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, is responsible for turning Florida’s self-defense law into Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law. Here’s the part of the law that was relevant in Zimmerman’s case: A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony. It’s clear to me that this stand your ground clause should have applied to Trayvon Martin and not to the man who stalked and then murdered him. It’s clear also to Jose V-quez, who posted this video on Facebook. The defense didn’t present it the way Jose does and certainly Juror B37 didn’t see it that way. The case will not be heard again in the criminal court, so there’s not much point in retrying it except perhaps in an examination of the law itself. Is the verdict bad or is the law itself bad? If the verdict is bad then the judge has the right and should have overturned the verdict. If the verdict meets the requirements of the law then the law itself is defective. In Florida and other states that have added the stand your ground clause to their self-defense laws, it’s legal for person A to kill person B if person A is “reasonably” afraid that person B might be capable and intending to kill them first. This should be good news for victims of domestic violence whose abusers repeatedly threaten to kill them and quite often do. In the US, at least three women are murdered everyday by their husbands or boyfriends. But this law is not helping victims of domestic violence because (surprise, surprise) Florida’s judges don’t apply the law evenly. The case of Marissa Alexander, the domestic violence victim who defended herself from her abuser by shooting a warning shot in the air, is a clear example of this. This law is helping white people who are persistently afraid of “the other.” We live in a nation where it is commonly believed that people with dark skin are unjustifiably and spontaneously violent. This is of course a stereotype and cannot be applied to all dark-skinned people, but racists are notoriously unable to recognize their racists beliefs as inaccurate. Because of this, when person A is a light-skinned person and person B is a dark-skinned person juries (whose members are not immune to commonly held racist beliefs) are likely to conclude that person A has a “legitimate” reason to fear that person B is a homicidal maniac; therefore, person A is acting reasonably when he pulls out a gun and shoots person B in the the chest even if person B is completely unarmed. Juries don’t check the statistics, they check their guts. “Would I be afraid of that scary Black man?,” they ask. “Would I be afraid of that scary Muslim, that scary transgender person… Yes, I would be afraid. I’ve seen on television and in the news how those people are violent and they hate people like me. So, I’d be afraid.” As PR Watch makes clear in their report, Seven Faces of NRA/ALEC-Approved “Stand Your Ground” Law, the stand your ground defense is very effective when used by white defendants. African-Americans are not the only victims but they are the most common. In other words, it’s Open Season on Black Boys After a Verdict Like This. If applied evenly, self defense laws with a stand your ground clause might work but they are not applied evenly. Like Jim Crow and voter suppression laws, they provide a legal framework for the oppression of African-Americans. The Justice Department should bring civil . . . → Read More: A Lesson in Systemic Racism: Stand Your Ground, the NRA and the American Legislative Exchange Council |
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