A recent decision handed down by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals raises this important question: Can victims of contemporary forms of discrimination and disparity find justice in our courts?

The court ruling came in the case of Sylvia Darensburg, an African-American mother of three who lives in East Oakland. Every day, along with tens of thousands of low-income African-American, Asian and Latino bus riders in the Bay Area, Sylvia experiences the reality of transit inequality.

According to the case, Darensburg v. Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Sylvia relies on the AC Transit bus system as her primary means of transportation to her job during the day and to college classes at night. She endures long waits for the two buses she needs to take, with each trip taking an hour or more each way. On her way home at night, she has to walk 12 blocks from the nearest bus stop in her neighborhood.

Sylvia is not alone in making such an arduous journey—almost 80 percent of AC Transit riders are people of color, and over 70 percent have incomes below $30,000. Nearly 60 percent are entirely dependent on public transit. Click here to read the article.

With more drastic tuition hikes on the horizon, some students of color fear their communities will be hardest hit. KTVU.com story by Lindsey Freeland includes interview with Equal Justice Society staff attorney Sara Jackson.

The promotions for this new show, as well as the show itself, have managed to recklessly imply that the U.S. and Mexico are at war, that the U.S.-Mexico border is a terrorism hot spot, that undocumented immigrants are the terrorists attempting to infiltrate this country, and that U.S. border agents are our soldiers ensuring national security and justice.

These implications are false and dangerous.

What “Border Wars” will not show you are fleeing immigrants being shot, immigrant children being separated from their families, and immigrants being forced to return to lives that include poverty, violence, and despair. That is the reality of the U.S.- Mexico border.

The astounding insensitivity of “Border Wars” is compounded by the show’s website which allows browsers to simulate being a border agent “on the line”, promoting violence toward immigrants and vigilante justice.

This show fosters prejudice, hatred, and violence toward all immigrants, regardless of legal status, that lead to hate crimes like the deaths of Luis Ramirez in Pennsylvania and Raul and Brisenia Flores in Arizona. “Border Wars” should not be allowed to influence its 2.9 million viewers in this manner.

If you would like to contact National Geographic about “Border Wars” to express your disappointment and outrage, you may do so here:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/contact

Or post on the show forum.

“Dead Latinos” by José R. Sánchez (January 2, 2010)

When does one dead Hollywood actor trump another? When does one fierce dead organizer against social injustices trump another? In fact, when does a dead chimp responsible for a hideous attack catapult himself above the life of a dead Mexican anthropologist with over 150 books and articles filled with archaeological and cultural studies about Mayan civilization? For The New York Times the answer seems to be whenever the second option is a Latino.

Travis the chimp was one of the few fortunate deceased to get star billing in the New York Times 2009 annual issue devoted to the passing of important people. Travis, you may remember, was the Connecticut chimpanzee, raised by a woman in Stamford, who was killed after he mauled the face off of his caretaker’s friend. This annual Times compilation included twenty-three essays on this year’s deceased. Like in past years, not one single Latino made it onto this lamentable list of the departed, famous and not-so-famous.

Many Latinos died this year, arguably many of them having led interesting and notable lives. But they apparently were not interesting enough for The New York Times. This newspaper highlighted the death of Karl Malden but not Ricardo Montalbán. The latter was the debonair path-breaking Mexican movie and television star, best known for his roles in the Star Trek series and movie and his commercials for promoting the “soft, Corinthian leather” in Chrysler Motors car seats.

The Times also wrote about the death of Crystal Lee Sutton, a fierce labor organizer in the South. But it ignored the death of Esther Chavez, a Mexican accountant who was one of the first to discover a pattern of murders in the 1990s against Mexican women working in U.S.-owned factories in border cities. Chavez helped to draw public attention and government prosecution against men who kidnapped young Mexican women off the streets, and raped and killed them with impunity. Her advocacy led the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to rule that Mexico had violated the human rights of women.

The Times also wrote about Robert Rines, an MIT scientist who spent most of his life pursuing evidence to prove the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. It ignored Dennis deLeon, a former New York City human rights commissioner, who created the premiere Latino advocacy group against AIDS. A Mexican American, deLeon created the Latino Commission on AIDS in 1994 and made it into a very effective tool against the spread of AIDS in the Latino community.

Why should we care that the Times ignored so many of Latinos in death? Some say this slight is one more example of the invisibility Latinos experience in life in the U.S. Death, apparently, does not redeem the living. Some Latinos, like Montalbán and deLeon, did get obituaries in the Times’ daily paper at the time of their death.

These annual compilations are done for many, often valid, editorial reasons. Some of the people the Times chose to celebrate led unusual lives, enough to have books or movies done about them. The Times also specifically selected each author to write these obit articles. Some were Times writers while others came from outside the paper. Who they chose to write about sprung from their individual “passions, quirks and curiosities” as writers and editors. The Times, in that sense, did not attempt to provide a comprehensive listing. All of this, however, simply underscores an even more troubling reality for Latinos. It’s one thing to be invisible, to not be seen; it is quite another to be in plain sight and yet not spark much interest or curiosity from others.

Public recognition of the dead provides a rough indication of the difference that person made in life, how much they were able to change the way others thought, behaved, or felt. Rines, the scientist who spent a large part of his life chasing the Loch Ness monster never found her, at least not conclusively. He inspired others by his quixotic efforts, however. He pushed the limits of how much we know and how much faith is warranted in the myth of her existence.

Omitting Latinos from this kind of recognition carries a message — that Latino lives do not really matter and did not have an impact. Is this a legitimate conclusion? The Times also omitted any recognition of Canadians, Jamaicans, Muslims and many others. But they did include two African Americans, Naomi Sims the model, and Reverend Ike, the irrepressible minister who built a church based on greed and hope. They also included a Trinidadian, the chili restaurant owner Ben Ali. Are these choices the product of simple editorial decisions, the play of curiosity, or pure whimsy? Are these news sources simply responding to audiences who have little interest in Latinos?

Latinos, obviously, did make a difference in this world before they passed on. We don’t need the Times to tell us so. But do we need the Times to tell others? How much do other Americans know about Latinos, the “fastest growing minority group” in the country? The Times treatment of Latino deaths is symptomatic of a wider neglect of Latinos in the media. Most mainstream newspapers and magazines also systematically ignored Latino accomplishments in their end-of-year appraisals.

The Chicago Tribune’s list of notable deaths in 2009 contained two Latinos out of 104. This included Mercedes Sosa, the Grammy Award winning Argentinean singer, and Alex Arguello, the Nicaraguan boxer. If we wanted to be generous, we could give them a third in Gidget, the Taco Bell dog featured in their commercials. The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, listed about 120 notable deaths, only 3 of which were Latinos. This included Arguello, Montalbán and Ismael Valenzuela, the Mexican horse jockey. One last example is the Baltimore Sun. It listed only Montalbán, Rafael Antonio Caldera, the two-time Venezuelan president, as well as the baseball manager Preston Gomez, among the 134 notable deaths in 2009.

The wide reach of this neglect is probably driven by the current media structure. Most newspapers in the U.S. are part of a handful of media monopolies that share the same sources of information or rely on syndicated sources like the Associated Press. In this vein, the AP listed only Montalbán among the 91 notable deaths it chose to feature in 2009. Five or six media conglomerates control the majority of newspapers in the United States. Editorial decisions, thus, tend to accumulate and spread with this kind of centralization. Most of the end-of-year reviews of the deceased were simply replicated by each newspaper in the chain. Recent research confirms this disturbing reality.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Hispanic Center reported recently that in one six-month sample period only “2.9% of the news content studied contained substantial references to Hispanics.” Most of that coverage was focused on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Otherwise, the media attention focused on Latinos only in the context of discussing issues like immigration and the recession. Clearly, a population that is now almost 16 percent of the population deserves more widespread and direct media attention focused on Latino lives and accomplishments.

The complaint here is not just about recognition and publicity. It is, to a great extent, also about power. Nothing happens simply because any one group or person has taken action. The world does not function so linearly. The success of health care reform or the results of the 2008 elections have many contributors. A group that is either not seen or that draws little interest will find its contributions minimized or dismissed. But this is about power in an even more important way.

I believe that any success at influencing or changing how others think, behave or feel depends directly on our ability to offer something that others value. Those who attribute power to objects like money or weapons can’t easily explain why these things sometimes fail to deliver power. The rich don’t always get what they want and, historically, much poorer-equipped opponents have often defeated the largest and best-equipped armies. Vietnam for the U.S. and Afghanistan for the U.S.S.R. are the best examples of the latter. The “War against Terrorism” may, eventually, prove to be another.

Power is a transaction, an exchange between parties in which each side has input. This is true no matter the situation. A mugger can get me to turn over my valuables only because my health and life mean so much more to me than my watch and money. The key here is that the threat of assault gets victims to move only because I, like the vast majority of us, fear getting hurt or killed. When that is not the case, when I am reckless or suicidal, for instance, the mugger’s threat often falls flat. The mugger’s attempt to extract valuables from me then gets stalled, jeopardized, and, possibly, defeated. I may get killed but the mugger will have failed to influence my behavior.

I cannot teach my students or change the way they think unless they want knowledge or grades or something else from me. I cannot influence how an elected official decides policy issues unless I can provide the votes, money or information they need. The ability to influence becomes extremely difficult, however, if the others around me do not see me or have no interest in me when they do. The exclusion of Latinos from the list of notable deaths reflects a community whose life remains lived apart from the main cultural, economic, and political currents of this society.

Latinos lag behind other groups in voting rates, average age, high school graduation, college attendance, employment rates, corporate and professional employment, income, housing conditions, two parent families, and residential integration. These conditions not only produce deprivations and obstacles to individual mobility. They also produce a community that still lives, despite all the progress, largely apart from the rest of society. This life apart results in very limited opportunities for Latinos to develop power with and influence other sectors U.S. society.

The neglect of Latinos in death is, thus, a reflection not just of how much Latinos are neglected in life but also of how few opportunities they have for power while alive. The Times is, thus, justified to omit any Latinos from its annual “How They Lived” magazine compilation. After all, it would be hypocritical to pay attention in death to a group that they and society have mostly ignored, overlooked, dismissed, and brushed off in life.

José Ramon Sánchez is Associate Professor of Politics and Chair of Urban Studies at Long Island University – Brooklyn; he is also Chair of the Board of the National Institute for Latino Policy, Inc. He is the author of “Boricua Power: A Political History of Puerto Ricans in the U.S.” (2007) and co-author of “The Iraq Papers” (2010). He can be reached at jose.sanchez@liu.edu.

In recent weeks, Mr. Lloyd has been unfairly attacked on cable TV and radio talk shows with false and misleading information about his role and responsibilities at the FCC. A respected scholar and public servant, Lloyd was hired by the agency to expand media opportunities for women, people of color, small businesses, and those living in rural areas.

The full text of the letter and a list of signatories is below:

September 16, 2009

To: FCC Commissioners and Congressional Leaders

We, the undersigned, ask you to speak out against the falsehoods and misinformation that are threatening to derail important work by Congress and the Federal Communications Commission on media and technology policies that would benefit all Americans.

In recent weeks, Mark Lloyd, the associate general counsel and chief diversity officer of the FCC, has come under attack by prominent cable TV and radio hosts, and even by some members of Congress, who have made false and misleading claims about his work at the agency.

Mr. Lloyd is a respected historian, an experienced civil rights leader, and a dedicated public servant. He was hired by the FCC to “collaborate on the policies and legal framework necessary to expand opportunities for women, minorities, and small businesses to participate in the communications marketplace.” His important work should not be hindered by lies and innuendo.

As the leading media policymakers in Washington, we ask you to speak out against these unfounded attacks, stand publicly behind Mr. Lloyd, and make clear your commitment to carrying out the core mandate of the FCC — as enshrined in the Communications Act of 1934 — to promote localism, diversity and competition in the media.

Let us be clear as to what “localism” actually means. Broadcasters get hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies in exchange for a basic commitment to serve the public interest. Broadcasters are expected to be responsive to their local communities. Localism has been a cornerstone of broadcast regulation as long as there has been broadcast regulation. It has nothing to do with censorship or interference with local programming decisions. Localism is simply about public service, not about any political viewpoint. Local public service programming and political talk radio, whether liberal or conservative, are not mutually exclusive.

Likewise, as the Supreme Court has recognized, “Safeguarding the public’s right to receive a diversity of views and information over the airwaves is … an integral component of the FCC’s mission.” Diversity of media ownership is a crucial issue, and the agency must address the fact that women and people of color are vastly underrepresented among media owners using the public airwaves.

But diversity is also about closing the digital divide: People of color, the poor, and rural Americans are far less likely to have high-speed Internet access at home or share in the benefits of broadband. Diversity is about creating opportunities and broadening participation; it should go without saying, but it has absolutely nothing to do with censorship.

The third tenet of the FCC’s mission is competition. Those using their media megaphones to slander and distort the views of Mr. Lloyd and others may not want competition. But the FCC’s job, in its own words, is “to strengthen the diverse and robust marketplace of ideas that is essential to our democracy.” The overriding goal must be more speech, not less — more radio stations, more cable channels and more Web sites.

At the core of President Obama’s media and technology agenda is a commitment to “diversity in the ownership of broadcast media” and a pledge to “promote the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse viewpoints.” Now is the time to further that agenda, not to retreat from it.

We ask you, as leaders on these key media issues, to draw a line in the sand now, speak out against the unfounded attacks, and redouble your efforts to enact a policy agenda that will strengthen our economy, our society and our democracy.

Sincerely,

Josh Silver
Free Press

Wade Henderson
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights

Winnie Stachelberg
Center for American Progress

James Rucker
ColorOfChange.org

Stephanie Jones
National Urban League Policy Institute

Brent Wilkes
League of United Latin American Citizens

Larry Cohen
Communications Workers of America

Alex Nogales
National Hispanic Media Coalition

Bernie Lunzer
The Newspaper Guild
Communications Workers of America

Kimberly Marcus
Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s Public Policy Institute

Malkia Cyril
Center for Media Justice

Andrew Schwartzman
Media Access Project

John Kosinski
Writers Guild of America West

Sandy Close
New America Media

Amalia Deloney
Media Action Grassroots Network

Angelo Falcon
National Institute for Latino Policy

Michael Calabrese
New America Foundation

Gigi Sohn
Public Knowledge

Rinku Sen
Applied Research Center

John Clark
National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians
Communications Workers of America

Graciela Sanchez
Esperanza Peace and Justice Center

Mimi Pickering
Appalshop

Steven Renderos
Main Street Project

Hal Ponder
American Federation of Musicians

Tracy Rosenberg
Media Alliance

Terry O’Neill
National Organization for Women

Roger Hickey
Campaign for America’s Future

Andrea Quijada
New Mexico Media Literacy Project

Jonathan Lawson
Reclaim the Media

DeAnne Cuellar
Texas Media Empowerment Project

Chris Rabb
Afro-Netizen

Loris Ann Taylor

Lisa Fager Bediako
Industry Ears

O. Ricardo Pimentel
National Association of Hispanic Journalists

Todd Wolfson
Media Mobilizing Project

Erica Williams
Campus Progress

Gary Flowers
Black Leadership Forum

Eva Paterson
Equal Justice Society

Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr
Hip Hop Caucus

Cheryl Contee
Jack and Jill Politics

Dr. E. Faye Williams
National Congress of Black Women

Emily Sheketoff
American Library Association

Ari Rabin-Havt
Media Matters Action Network

Kathryn Galan
National Association of Latino Independent Producers

Roberto Lovato
Presente

Joshua Breitbart
People’s Production House

Karen Bond
National Black Coalition for Media Justice

Tracy Van Slyke
Media Consortium

Shireen Mitchell
Digital Sisters, Inc
Media and Technology Task Force
National Council of Women’s Organizations

Ariel Dougherty
Media Equity Collaborative