Indianapolis Recorder, Indianapolis, Marion County, 7 November 2003 — Page 9

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2003

THE INDIANAPOLIS RECORDER

PAGE A9

Columnist seeing red over the NFLs' "Washington Redskins"

Study indicates SAT is racist

By BILL FLETCHER JR. For NNPA

Football season is now in high gear, and I feel the same way 1 do every autumn. Perhaps it is just that I want to have a team that 1 can follow and root for. I don’t know, but my stomach turns each year with both anger and disappointment. 1 am not going to repeat all of the reasons that the name of the “Washington Redskins” is so offensive to Native Americans and anyone else who believes in respecting human beings. I am not going to remind an audience of African Americans what it would feel like if the team were known as the Washington Niggers, or if there were the New York Coons, or if a WNBA team had been known as the Chicago Aunt Jemimas. These points have all been made time and again. What is striking is that despite these points being made that there is not a broader cry for the altering of the Washington Redskins’ name, and for that matter, the elimination of other names insulting to Native Americans. I am struck that, even among African Americans, there is not a widespread cry that we have had enough of such language, and of such insults. Consider for a moment the outcry from Black America about

the continued use of the Confederate flag in many Southern states. Consider for a moment your reaction when you drive past a truck, car or motorcycle displaying a Confederate flag? For most of us of African descent, a Confederate flag is equivalent to the displaying of a Nazi flag. In response, some white people say that the flag is nothing of the kind, but a symbol of the heritage of the South. I don’t know one thinking African-American who accepts such an explanation. Yet, when it comes to displays insulting to Native Americans, many of us are willing to take a pass. We act as if it were a small thing; at best a minor scratch, not to be addressed. I will remember that the next time I hear someone talk about the Confederate flag. The explanations - actually excuses - offered for why the Redskins cannot change their name are disingenuous to be the point of being absurd. Teams regularly change their names, and not just when they change cities. It is not that difficult. So, then, why no outcry? It feels as if we have become hardened, or perhaps cynical, about the implications of genocide. Perhaps were there many more Native Americans protesting, we would sense that something is absolutely wrong with these insults. Given their relatively small numbers, and the press blackout or, frequently, press marginalization of Native American protests, many of us can sit back comfortably and believe that such outbursts are of little consequence. Yet, when I hear the name

“Redskins,” I not only think of the insults regularly and historically thrown at African Americans, hut I also think about the demonization of the current “enemy” - Arabs and Muslims. In much the same way that Native Americans are not treated as genuine human beings - either romanticized, now that millions of them are dead, or demonized as savages and alcoholics - so, too, have been Arabs and Muslims. Idiotic statements and caricatures can be made of Arabs and Muslims and too many of us don’t bat an eyelid. Jokes are regularly made, turning Arabs and Muslims into something other than human beings; jokes about a religion with more than 1 billion followers. So, when I insist that something needs to be done about the name of the “Washington Redskins,” it is not just that I believe that it is an insult to Native Americans, though that would be enough to demand a change. Rather it is in addition a demand against the continuous and racist demonization of the enemy of the month, or in the case of Native Americans, the enemy of the last five centuries. This is demanding a lot of the United States, I realize, since it is a demand for settling accounts with the actual history of the U.S.A., a history' that involved massive genocide against the original inhabitants of this land, the theft of their land and the destruction of their civilizations. For African Americans it should not be too big a leap for us to realize which side we should be

on. So, if you want to do something other than simply shake your head, I hope you are in agreement with my suggestions: • If you are a resident of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, don’t go to Washington Redskins games until and unless they change the name of the team. • No matter where you live, don’t purchase anything connected with the Washington Redskins. • Send an e-mail comment to the team hy going to their site at www.redskins.com and clicking “Locker Room,” where you can send a personal message. Tell them what you really think. • Have your community organization, school, labor union, or religious institution send an email note or hard copy letter to the Washington Redskins insisting that they change their name. • Contact opinion makers, including but not limited to elected leaders, asking them to speak out on this issue. The time has come to draw the line. Bill Fletcher Jr. is president of TransAfrica Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based non-protit educational and organizing center formed to raise awareness in the United States about issues facing the nations and peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. He also is co-chair of the anti-war coalition, United for Peace and Justice (www.unitedforpeace.org). He can be reached at [email protected].

Kobe Bryant's deep pockets needed to buy justice

By EARL 0FARI HUTCHINSON Colorado’s Eagle County District Attorney Mark Hurlbert called the nearly $300,000 he requested to prosecute superstar athlete Kobe Bryant on rape charges, “bargain basement.” But the money that Bryant must shell out to beat the charges against him is anything but bargain basement. There are two reasons why. Despite his superstar status, race often lurks just beneath the surface in criminal cases involving Black defendants and white victims. In times past, a rape case against an African American has been loaded with the racial and sexual stereotype of Black men as inherently criminal and Sexually menacing. I n two USAToday/Gallup polls in August and July, far more Blacks than whites said they were sympathetic to Bryant, and believed the charges against him were false. The same gaping Black-white divide in race and gender tinged criminal cases was glaringly evident in the Mike Tyson and O.J. Simpson trials. This volatile mix of race and class is the second reason Bryant’s deep pockets are crucial in determining his legal fate. While his wealth and sports fame can’t entirely cancel out the highly charged racial and sexual issues in the case, he can buy a measure of justice that most defendants facing similar charges can never dream of. In major felony cases, the defendant generally will face the best prosecutors in the district attorney’s office who have many years experience in trying criminal cases. I n Bryant’s case the DA, and an assistant DA expert in sexual assault eases were prepared to handle the prosecution.

Most prosecutors stay current on legal changes, precedents, decisions, techniques, and courtroom strategy. They have unlimited resources, teams of investigators, clerical, and technical staff. They depend on skilled medical, forensic, and mental health experts to present and interpret facts and evidence. They have local police and FBI crime labs with state of the art technology' to uncover and analyze the evidence they present. More important, prosecutors have public consensus about crime on their side. Much of the public equates an individual’s arrest with guilt. When a defendant is released because of police error, insufficient evidence, constitutional or procedural violations, many politicians and much of the public howl that weak laws and bleedingheart judges permit criminals to escape justice. Some state and local court judges who have tried to uphold the law fairly and impartially have been defeated at the polls or have been the targets of successful recall campaigns. Prosecutors also have the jury system. The mostly middle-class white men and women who make up most juries often reflect middle-class attitudes, and biases, and that can include hidden racial bias. To have a fighting chance against the Eagle County DA’s powerful legal arsenal, Bryant had to pay top dollar for a top-flight defense team capable of demolishing the prosecution’s evidence and preventing the case from going to trial. If it went to trial, he would have to shell out a king’s ransom to match the DA’s army of experts with his own, and to hire jury consultants to try and figure how to weed out potential jurors

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who might be biased against him, and hope the expense was enough to create “reasonable doubt” in the minds of jurors to win acquittal. This type of defense is far outside the reach of poor defendants. A large percentage of felony defendants are represented by grossly overworked, underpaid public defenders or court appointed attorneys. In a study examining the quality of legal representation in capital and major felony cases, the National Law Journal found that some states do not even maintain public defender offices, let alone allocate the funds to hire investigafofs, clerks or secretaries for poor defendants. Only a tiny percent of indigent defendants see an attorney before their first court appearance. The shoddy, or non-existent, legal representation for many poor defendants has resulted in shocking and embarrassing legal foul-ups. According to the Innocence Project, more than l. r >() defendants, mostly Black or Latino men, have been wrongly convicted of murder or rape, and freed. The men spent years behind bars.

A notorious example was the four young Black and Latino men convicted in the famed New York Central Park jogger case in 198.9. They languished in prison for more than a decade before being exonerated. The Supreme Court has done little to ensure that poor Blacks or Latinos get the kind of quality defense that Bryant can buy. It has refused to require states to spend money to provide competent, trained counsel and staff for poor defendants. In some states paralegals and law clerks that work on civil rights and civil litigation cases are paid more than attorneys who represent indigents in capital cases. Bryant, however, won’t have to worry about any of this. If tried and convicted, he would appeal. It would cost plenty. But bis deep pockets would give him another chance to buy justice. A chance most poor defendants don’t have. Fail Ofari Hutchinson is a noted author of nine books about the African-American experience in America. 11c is a radii > host anil T\'commentator. His Web site is thchutchinsonrcpoi1.com.

By RON WALTERS blamed or their schools are reFor NNPA garded as “failed” or the school

superintendent is blamed and

A few tossed out - all for a racist result, weeks ago, I The existence of unreal expecgave a tations - that Black children will speech in he able to adapt to tests that are Baltimore in configured on the white cultural which I sug- norm - is rampant in the Black gested that community. And it is supported the Scholas- hy researchers and policy-mak-tic Assess- ers who argue that all it takes is a ment Test little more effort hy Black chil(SAT) score dren. In other words, the chilgap between Black and white dren are vilified by some in their students did not measure the own community as being at fault, intelligence of Black students, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washbut the rate of Black to white ington Post columnist William cultural assimilation. Raspberry, an African American When the speech was over, who has written for many years some worried parents came up on the Black-white test score gap, to say that they knew all along recently relied on a faulty study that their child was smart, hut by Berkeley education professor that they didn’t know what was John Ogbu. The study focused on wrong. Others were concerned Black students in Shaker Heights, because they had bought the Ohio, who appeared to have had a line that something that we have dismissive attitude about acaconstructed in this country demic achievement although they known as “education” is objec- came from middle-class families, tive and that if children don’t Raspberry, however, like so many achieve it, there is something others, apparently did not know wrong with them. of a more extensive study by the Well, now comes a study by Minority Student Achievement Jay Rosner of the Princeton Network of 40,000 students in Review Foundation that finds high achieving school districts, that since the Educational Test- who had the same attitudes as ing Service, which makes up the their white and Asian counterSAT, the major test required by parts about seeking high achievecollege entrance officials, is con- ment levels, cerned most of all with the reli- I am beginning to think that ability of the test, the majority with the research continuing to of the questions in it are geared come out which shows that there to “white preference.” are problems with the framework A reliable question isoneon of “education” and educational which those who score posi- testingtowhichwearesubjected, tively do well in college and that we should begin a new civil those who score negatively do rights movement aimed at edupoorly. The Princeton Review cation. We should start to correct Foundation, which helps mi- the assumption that many Black nority students in taking the parents have, that African-Ameri-test, says that in the 2000 ver- can culture is worthless as a subsion of the SAT, every one of the ject of study and all that matters 138 questions selected for it fa- is whether their children test near vored white students and none as well as white kids. They reason favored Black students. that good test scores is the route A retired Educational Test- to better employment and ecoing Service researcher, Roy A. ndmic security. Freedle, also published an ar- But what ifour youth just don’t tide in the Harvard Educational test nearlv as well as whites under Review stating that the SAT this present the system? The test tests contained racial bias. score gap on the SAT is about 200 His point was that Black stu- points and has remained in that dents often do better on more vicinity in recent years. What if difficult questions than easier their objective for their children ones because easier questions can be achieved by their demanduse a common (or “street”) vo- ingthatthetestingisfairenoughto cabulary that can be interpreted take into consideration the cultural differently by different groups experienceofthechildrenthatleave according to their cultural ex- their house every morning? periences. Something has to change and Most important, Jay Rosner it starts in the heads of our parstated that researchers did not ents and teachers, not with the know why some questions were students. The rationalization for more difficult for Black students keeping the present system is ofthan for white students, but that ten based on some studies that the testing company knewdn show a minuscule percentage of advance that there are many children in poor K-12 schools have more questions that appeared achieved scores above the norm to favor whites than either on various tests. But without subBlacks or Latinos in making up stantial changes in tests at the Kthe tests. 12 and college entrance levels - At a time when the use of paying particular attention to the educational testing has become educational environment and a weapon used by the right wing economic status of most Black to eliminate the jobs of Black children in America - the scores teachers and the thousands of simply will not equalize, degrees earned by Black high Moreover, with the “Leave No school students, it is distressing Child Behind" legislation that that Black parents and policy emphasizestesting, Black parents makers are not more aggressive are in danger of having their chilin attacking these tests. dren left far behind. More than Instead, they appear to have 100,00 students in Florida did accepted them and the infer- not pass state achievement tests ence that Black kids just have to for high school graduation. Maybe master them. That is a falla- now. Blacks will start to take this cions idea w hen all that may be situation seriously. I hope that it involved is that someone or is not too late,

some entity fairly seleets the

questions that appear on a test p c)n Walters is the Distin-

and does make the examinations so skewed tow aid the normative culture of whites that Blacks kids are penalized. The stakes of just assuming that the tests are correct is that if Black kids tlo not achieve, they are blamed or their parents are

guished Leadership Scholar, director of the African American Leadership Institute in the Academy of Leadership and professor of government and politics at the University of Manland-College Park.

READERS RESPOND

Write congressman about museum Did you know that: • H8 years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, aged African-Ameri-can veterans who fought for the Union Army began a movement to build a national museum dedicated to African-American history and culture in Washington, D.C.?

• In April of this year, a bipartisan presidential commission unanimously recommended that "the time has come" to finally create this museum and that it should be located on the National Mall to counter the “subjugation and segregation of the past"? • In June of thisyear, based on the report oft he presidential com mission, the Senate unanimously passed legislation tucstnhlish the National Museum of African American History and Culture as

part of the Smithsonian on or adjacent to the National Mall? • Despite this long felt need anil bipartisan support, the museum legislation is stuck in the House of Representatives due to opposition by the bill’s critics? 1! you want to see this museum tinalh happen, send your representative in the I louse and e-mail by clicking the following link http: www house.gov writerep/ . fell your representative that you agree with the unanimous rec-

ommendation of the bipartisan, presidential commission that it's time to build the National Museum of African-American History and Culture on the National Mall and that your representative should help ensure that H R. 2205 is passed by the I louse as soon as possible. You can get further background information at WAvw.aamuseum.org. Robert L. Wilkins President, \ A AMCC Inc.