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IN THIS ISSUE

Table of Contents

Letter from the President: From Imus to Virginia Tech to Berkeley to Mississippi

Notes on the Right:
Connerly's Super Tuesday

EJS Scholar Advocate Program Launches at Boalt and Hawai'i Law Schools

Fall Symposium on the Impact of Prop 209

Immigrant Rights Marches Not a ‘New Beginning’ but Next Chapter in Civil Rights Struggle

Framing Race and Class in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina

A Triptych of Race, Rights, and Praxis: The Law & Social Change

New Promising African American Landownership Initiatives

National Conference for Media Reform intersects with Civil Rights

EJS Rallies Against Hate Speech

Interns Reflect on Experience at EJS

$100,000 challenge gift launches Major Donor campaign; Ford Foundation awards two-year grant

Staff News and Notes

Newsletter Editors:
Miguel Gavaldón
Keith Kamisugi

Email Feedback

 From Eva Paterson

From Imus to Virginia Tech to Berkeley to Mississippi

Earlier today I was told that a nominee to the federal appellate court had ruled that calling a Black person a nigger was like calling someone the teachers' pet. My jaw dropped. The Equal Justice Society since its inception has fought to resist and refute such nonsense. The judge, who is on the state court in Mississippi, was nominated by President Bush. A priority of EJS is to challenge the legal requirement that racial animus must exist before racial discrimination can be proven. I am certain that if asked this judge would have said that saying nigger was not evidence of racial animus. This is further proof of the fallacy of this requirement.

The past few months have been filled with incidents of mind-boggling racism. Don Imus paid the price for his offensive comments. I was struck by a particularly poignant letter in The New York Times from a woman who said she had listened to Imus' racist comments for years but had never thought to say anything about it. She talked of her shame at her silence. Nationally known and respected media figures also made the same comment. They had been on his show for years and just went along with the racist and sexist comments casually spoken as a matter of course.

We next were confronted with a different type of racial phenomenon. Seung Hui Cho's rampage at Virginia Tech had different racial consequences. A few days after the event, I ran into a buddy of mine at the nail salon. She is Japanese-American. We talked about Cho and she said the most remarkable thing. "This will just reinforce negative stereotypes about Asians. We are seen as cold and uncaring about human life." I found this statement startling and sad.

A few weeks later, I received an e-mail from a young graduate of UC-Berkeley. One of her friends was walking down the street near the campus and spied a number of racist t-shirts in the window of a local store. One of the
t-shirts depicted Black people hanging from trees in a pose that conjured up images of lynched Black people. When contacted, the designers of the t-shirts asserted their right to free speech forgetting that while you might say what you please, a store does not have to stock your wares. After mounting a national campaign, the young African American woman was successful in getting the t-shirts removed from the store.

Call me naïve, but it still shocks me that such bias still exists in the year 2007. EJS remains committed to resistance and education.

This issue of our newsletter is full of hopeful and informative articles. The fabulous, talented, and committed members of the staff have traveled across the country to conferences and events. We are learning from our colleagues and hope to work closely with them in an effort to make the world a more just place. Our friend Lee Cokorinos has discovered what our old sparring partner Ward Connerly has up his sleeve for the election cycle in November of 2008. We also have an informative article about the effort of Black farmers to retain their land. The efforts to expose the racism of the "Why I Hate Blacks" column is also described.

We have a number of exciting projects that we hope you join in the coming months. An interactive luncheon on unconscious bias will take place in July. We are taking the EJS show on the road to Chicago in October. We will be part of conferences on dismantling the intent doctrine at UC Berkeley and the impact of Prop 209 at UCLA. We will be traveling to join our colleague Erwin Chermerinsky at Duke Law School later this year for a gathering on litigating before the Roberts court. Many ideas that were part of the formation of EJS are blooming and bearing fruit. Please join us for the ride.

We'd like to include you in our upcoming events. Become a member or join our mailing list today.

Stay strong. Life is good!!!!

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