Monroe Anderson

Who arrested religion in Indiana?

 

    Indiana's Religious Freedom law has triggered a spirited debate throughout the nation and may be the next right wing attack on civil rights. Here's my Chicago Defender Column on the controversy.

 

What’s bad for the gays will be bad for the Blacks

 

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

If you haven’t been paying attention to the firestorm over Indiana’s “freedom of religion” law, it’s time that you do. Our neighboring state’s new legislation reflects Black America’s past and could easily come to mirror our future.

The bill is rightly being described as a license to discriminate. It allows anyone with a business to not do business with anyone they choose by claiming they believe it violates their religious values.

We’ve seen this play before.

God and religion have been used as the guiding principle in overt discrimination against Blacks throughout virtually all of our nation’s history. The KKK burned crosses before lynching Black men.  Bigoted Christians cited the curse of Ham, the father of Canaan in Genesis, to justify slavery. “Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”

Ham is believed to have been a Black man.

Unequal public schools for Blacks were the will of the Almighty opined Georgia Gov. Allen Candler in 1901, “God made them negroes and we cannot by education make them white folks.”

Nor did God cotton to miscegenation.  Richard Loving, a white man, was sentenced to one year in prison for marrying Mildred Jeter, a Black woman. The couple had broken Virginia's law, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, by going to Washington, D.C. to get married then naively returning to home.

Apparently the Lovings had broken the Holy Father’s law as well. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” wrote Judge Leon M. Bazile in his 1959 ruling. “The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act does not mention same-sex mixing but it’s arguably aimed at those with a certain sexual orientation. Last year, the same-sex marriage ban was overturned by a federal court. Some pouting proponents, who wanted the ban to stand, headed straight for the governor and the Indiana General Assembly to make sure there would be a freedom of religion law on guard to protect bigotry, as they knew it.

The state’s RFRA is yet another Republican head-fake where conservatives pretend that they’re not doing anything wrong while they’re definitely doing something wrong. Just like the GOP’s scheme to suppress Black participation at the ballot box through voter I.D. laws, the religious freedom law would allow business owners the right to use their faith as an excuse not to serve lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals, aka LGBTs--or hire or rent to them.

Black Americans know all too well how that game is played and if the new rules remain legalized then it won’t be long before it’s played on us. Again.

The legislation Gov. Pence signed last week prohibits state laws that “substantially burden” a religious institution, businesses and associations from following religious beliefs. The new law in effect serves as a legal shield for people, associations and businesses big and small from being sued for discrimination if they claim their religion made them do it.

    The uproar that followed caught Indiana’s governor off guard. He reflectively characterized it as a battle between religious freedom and gay rights, assuming he knew who’d win that fight.

Gov. Pence, and his overly weighted Republican General Assembly, quickly discovered that they were wrong. Besides the sign-carrying LGBT protesters, Indiana’s state lawmakers heard disapproval from other states, businesses, sports organizations, future conventioneers and social media.   

The CEOs from Eli Lilly and Co., Anthem and Indiana University Health were among nine of Indiana’s largest employers pointing out that discriminatory legislation was bad for business. Seattle’s mayor and Connecticut’s governor banned their employees from traveling to Indiana to do business. Indianapolis-based Angie’s List CEO announced that his company was going to halt plans for a $40 million expansion in the state’s capital. The president of NCAA, whose Final Four competition takes place in Indianapolis this weekend, said yesterday  that Indiana's new "religious freedom" law goes against what higher education and America is all about. And there is, of course, a social media response: On Twitter the hashtag is #boycottindiana.

All that outrage has focused Gov. Pence’s mind like a hanging. He was claiming that Indiana’s RFRA law was no different from the one in Illinois and the other 18 states that passed one. Pence left out the part about those other states having a separate law that specifically protected LGBTs from discrimination, while his state does not. You can be fired in Indiana for being gay.

Over the weekend, he was asserting that the law wouldn’t be changed. Yesterday he held a press conference to announce that maybe it would. He’s having his legislature revamp the onerous law.

“Clearly. Clearly, there’s been misunderstanding and confusion and mischaracterization of this law,” Gov. Pence said. “I abhor discrimination.”

Right. Don’t stop paying attention yet. Arkansas passed its own religious freedom law yesterday.

Post post-racial America

 

Half a century after the Selma March, race still matters in America as events in Selma, Alabama, Madison, Wisconsin and Norman, Oklahoma demonstrated. Here's my take in my Chicago Defender column

 

From Selma to Madison to Norman

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

 

The march, a shooting and a song summed up this past weekend just how far this nation has gone and just how far it has yet to go.

 

The nation’s first African American president stood near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to mark the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” one of the most important feats of the Civil Rights Movement. Out of the epic confrontation between forces of peace and progress and the agents of brute force, Blacks won the right to vote in the South.

 

“We just need to open our eyes and our ears and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still cast it’s long shadow upon us,” President Barack Obama told the integrated crowd of thousands who had gathered to commemorate, along with him, the Selma to Montgomery March. “We know the march is not yet over. We know the race is not yet won.”

 

As if to underscore the president’s point, some 898 miles north from Selma, in Madison, Wisconsin, another white cop shot and killed another unarmed black teenager and some 783 miles northwest of Selma, in Norman, Oklahoma, a YouTube video went viral exposing tuxedo-clad white frat boys chanting a bus-trip song about racial exclusion and lynching.

 

The lyrics to the song were not exactly surprising, considering that Sigma Alpha Epsilon is 159 years old and is the only national fraternity founded in the Antebellum South. The fraternity boasts on its website that during the Civil War 92 percent of SAE members fought for the Confederate states.

 

In case you missed the video or didn’t catch the lyrics, here they are in all of their good ol’ boy, old-fashioned, garden-variety racist glory:

"There will never be a ni**** in SAE.

There will never be a ni**** in SAE.

You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me

There will never be a ni**** in SAE."

 

I find this alarming because this isn’t a bunch of curmudgeonly, bitter old white men hating on hope and change but young guys who are white America’s future. After these frat boys graduate from college, they’ll move on into the corporate pipeline where some day some of them will have the power to hire and fire with “there will never be a ni**** “ playing like the soundtrack to their lives in their heads.

 

The SAE chanters may represent a throwback to mid-century American racism, but times have changed. Rather than stonewall the Unheard, a group of Black student activists at OU who had learned of the video and posted it online, or buy time with a three-month investigation, David Boren, the university president, immediately shut the fraternity down.

 

The national headquarters of SAE, which prides itself in having a membership of “gentlemen and leaders.” followed Boren’s lead and immediately suspended the OU chapter.

 

With no blood thirsty state troopers or Selma police waiting to do battle, what was supposed to be a march was so well attended by so many movers and shakers that it turned into an extravaganza. Not only was America’s current president there but also former President George W. Bush, along with Capitol Hill lawmakers galore.

 

It was plainly easier to take photo-ops  than it has been to pass a new voter’s rights law that would repair the damage the five right wing activists on the Supreme Court did two years ago to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that southern states that had historically suppressed the Black vote no longer had to prove they were no longer suppressing the Black vote. Since then, southern states like Texas has come up with all sorts of creative, new-fangled ways to diminish the number of Blacks and Browns casting their votes at the ballot box.

 

We can vote now but we can’t stop the unjustifiable killings of black men and boys by frightened or ferocious cops.

 

Even with the “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protests becoming this generation’s civil rights movement, policemen across the nation continue to create more martyrs.

 

Friday night a Madison policeman shot Tony Robinson, an unarmed biracial teen, five times in the chest. The 19-year-old Robinson had a file on his with a conviction last year for armed robbery and a diagnosis that he suffered from attention-deficit disorder and anxiety and depression.

 

Officer Matt Kenny, a 12-year veteran, has been put on paid administrative leave while the Wisconsin Department of Justice investigates the Robinson’s death. Kenny was involved in another fatal shooting in 2007, that was found justified; a so-called suicide by cop case.

 

So while Selma was throwing a grand party, 2,000 protesters, mainly Wisconsin students, have been peacefully marching in Madison while chanting, “Black lives matter.”

 

Some students’ chants are far better than others.

 

The Senate's sorry, just in time for the 144th Juneteeth Day

On this Juneteenth Day, all of America ought to be celebrating like it's 1999. Yesterday, after 144 years of emancipation commemorations by African Americans in Texas, and progressively over time, many other states, the United States Senate finally got around to--Tweet this--apologizing for slavery and racial segregation. The formal sorry say was voted on by the Senate yesterday.

Talk about too little, too late. 

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862. And although it went into effect on January 1, 1883, more than 618,000 Americans had to die in the Civil War before the slaves were freed. 

Back then, good news traveled slow, so it wasn't until June 19, 1865 that word got around to the state of Texas that slavery had been abolished. And even after everyone knew that slavery was the great American evil, there were those in the South who chose not to know. Slavery By Another Name, a book published last year, revealed that the enslavement of African Americans continued in the deep South until the dawn of World War II. This nation's free black labor habit finally ended eight decades after Emancipation when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered that it stop immediately. FDR was fearful that the Japanese propaganda machine would put the fact that neoslavery was still going on in the U.S. to great use against America's war effort.

Up until then, it was the practice below the Mason-Dixon line for sheriffs to arrest black men on trumped up charges, jail them, then sell them to plantations, mines, railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories in the deep South. In other cases, southern blacks were kidnapped by southern landowners and  forced into involuntary labor. This happened to thousands of African Americans from one generation to the next to the one after that.

And I won't even mention the thousands who were murdered by lynchings.

But to quote Shakespeare, "All's well that ends well." The senate has apologized for slavery and segregation. The U.S. House is expected to follow suit. There's a black family living in White House.

African American no longer have to worry about forced labor. Unfortunately, black unemployment rates, at 11.5, are higher than those of any of group in the nation. About a third of the descendants of America's enslaved still live below the poverty line.

It doesn't matter. The Senate is sorry. I wonder if any of them are sorry that we never got our 40 acres and a mule. It's not too late to make it up. Congress could declare reparations a stimulus program and pass it just in time for next year's Juneteeth Day.

Now that would be a cause for celebration.

(This post was also published on Newsvine.)

Tall tales from the black right

    In rare moments of weakness, I try to give black Republicans the benefit of the doubt. I tell myself they are hanging out with those who don’t want us in their country clubs, board rooms or places of worship because some of us need to be in the party for some semblance of balance—a don’t put all your political eggs in one basket strategy. I tell myself that the tainted tenth that belong to the GOP are there because they are naturally conservative and have a right to join up with some of their kind, regardless of race, creed or national origin. I tell myself that anyone who is a black Republican must be a true believer—not exactly the type that’s interested in thinking things through.
    Before I get anywhere close to convincing myself, the benefit of doubt gets beat down by reality: These bee-oh-cons are terribly twisted. Logically challenged, too.
    As conservatives, what do these African Americans want to conserve? The enduring legacy of the white masters?  Jim Crow?  Lynching?  The modern-day justice system that disproportionately warehouses young black men in prisons? An educational system that fails black youth long before it flunks them out?
    It seems to me that the greatest challenge for black Republicans is to rationalize why they're part of a party--the party of Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Helms--that can barely disguise its disdain for most black folks. Why bother with reality when you can do this: Substitute the Nights with Uncle Remus for One Thousand and One Nights.
    With bold-faced brashness and a willy-nilly wistfulness that would put President Bush and Karl Rove to shame, the National Black Republican Association has posted their billboard proclaiming that Dr. Martin Luther King was a Republican.
    But wait, there’s more. I don’t want to spoil it for you. I’ll let you see for yourself. So I’m sharing their lame YouTube anti-Obama video with you. But, before you watch it, you’ll need the appropriate mood music.  Try “Bring in the Clowns.”
    In case you don’t know the lyrics, here’s one stanza from the Judy Collins classic:

Don’t you love farce?
My fault, I fear
I thought that you’d want what I want
Sorry, my dear
But where are the clowns
Send in the clowns
Don’t bother, they’re here

Racism: Creationism or Evolution?

   

    Contrary to what many black Americans believe, not every white American is a racist.  After half a century of desegregation, Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey and soul music, there has been a seismic shift in racial perceptions.
    But there’s still a ways to go. That’s why I find Tim Wise so refreshing. Not only is he an enlightened white man; he’s making it his mission to enlighten others. The aptly named Mr. Wise correctly bills himself as among the most prominent anti-racist writers and activists in the U.S. He explains white privilege in a way that only the most calcitrant can’t or won’t understand it.
    Here’s his condensed explanation of how white racism evolved and stubbornly endures in America. It’s a touch of true American history. Check it out.

Obama's Philsophy of Hope

    This is my last post from South Carolina. Since the Afro American News is a weekly, the next publication is next Wednesday. The polls are giving Obama a 7-10 point lead, so it looks like he may win tomorrow--but we won't know for sure until the polls close.

    Here's a transcript of an answer the Illinois senator gave to a black woman during a stop Wednesday in Rock Hill. She wanted to know what she could say to her 77-year-old father would doubted that an African American president would be able to govern because racism will hamper his effectiveness.

 

Obama’s response to a question which speaks from defeated Southern Black hopes of the past

By Monroe Anderson

AFRO Staff Writer

ROCK HILL, S.C. -- Rita Moore-Johnson asked the question that caught everybody’s attention.  It was a question rooted in the darkest days of America’s history and years of Southern oppression.

Moore-Johnson, 45, a medical lab technician, had come to Rock Hill to hear presidential candidate Barack Obama speak at one of the many rallies here before Saturday’s  Democratic primary.

Her father, she explained, is 77 years old. He is the grandson of a former slave. 

He, like his father, and his father, has spent all his life in South Carolina, where the Confederate flag still flies outside the state capital.

Segregation, lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan are real memories for him, not just something out of a history book.  He repeatedly has seen Black aspirations beaten down; he repeatedly has seen Black efforts met by irrational White resistance.

" I don't want to perpetuate this notion in our kids that there's a limit to what their dream is..."

And for those reasons, he is afraid to vote for Barack Obama.

So, during a question and answer session following Obama’s speech at Winthrop University,  Moore-Johnson, an Obama supporter, explained to the candidate that her father "feels that a Black president will not be able to do what he needs to  do in Washington to get change done.”

And then she asked, “What do I tell him and people like him, in a small sense that will change his mind?"

Obama responded:

“Tell him this. First of all, people said I couldn't win the United States senate race. Illinois is only 12 percent African American. And everybody said, 'wow, this black guy with the funny name. People will not  vote for him. We won by 20 percent in the primary and 30, 40 percent in the general election.

“Number one, we have shown that we can win. I am absolutely convinced that the American people, right now, they don't care if you are black, white, brown…green.

“What they care about is, are you going to help them. If I came here and I had polka dots and you were convinced that I was going to put more money in your pockets and help you pay for college and help keep America safe, you'd say

"Okay, I wish he didn't have polka dots, but I'll still vote for him."

“The thing I want you to tell him is this. This goes to what I said about hope earlier. What if Dr. King looked over 400,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial and said, ‘Y’all go home, this is too hard, we're not going to change people's attitudes’ What if John Kennedy looked up at the moon and said, ‘That's too hard. We can't go.’

“Part of the test of leadership is breaking through barriers. And most of the barriers are not barriers outside us, but barriers inside us, in our heads. We tell ourselves we can't do something. And part of what I want to do is to say "yes, we can" and I want to send that message to our children. I don't want to perpetuate this notion in our kids that there's a limit to what their dream is.

“Tell your father that he's got to be thinking of making sure he doesn’t pass that mindset on to his grandchildren and even their grandchildren. If they try, they may succeed. It's always possible that they won't succeed, but you definitely won't succeed if you don't try.”