EJS has long wanted to engage in the next level of overturning the Intent Doctrine. Finding just the right Director of Law and Policy was critical to achieving this goal. And Reggie is the perfect fit.

Reggie is currently a senior staff counsel in the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation’s Racial Justice Program. An attorney with the ACLU since 1995, he helped pioneer legal challenges to racial profiling practices nationwide and is the ACLU’s chief litigator in challenges to racial profiling, leading national litigation efforts and consulting with ACLU state affiliates and others in cases of “driving while black or brown,” airport profiling, and profiling related to the war on terror.

Shuford’s advocacy to promote affirmative action includes leading recent efforts in Missouri and Oklahoma to defeat anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives, similar to California’s Prop. 209. Those initiatives were also sponsored by Ward Connerly and his supporters.

His docket has also included cases involving educational adequacy and equity, the school to prison pipeline, and the right to counsel for indigents. He also has been involved in advocacy against racism in the use of the death penalty.

Since September 11, 2001, working with colleagues around the country, he has filed a half dozen landmark lawsuits against major airlines alleging racial discrimination, as well as a nationwide challenge to the Transportation Security Administration’s management of the No-Fly List.

He has authored numerous petitions and briefs for cases that were presented to the U.S. Supreme Court dealing with matters of discrimination, the Equal Protection Clause and First and Fourth Amendment rights. He has published articles related to racial profiling, affirmative action, and violence in the African American community.

Reggie also teaches and speaks regularly around the country and internationally, including Moscow, Geneva, and Canada, on issues of racial justice, profiling, discrimination, national security, and other topics, and has appeared on numerous television programs, including CNN’s Burden of Proof and Talk Back Live, ABC’s 20/20, Court TV’s Pros and Cons and Crier Today, NBC’s Nightly News and Dateline, an MTV documentary, True Life: I Am Driving While Black, and was featured in Leading the Way: The History of Black Lawyers and Judges in America Throughout the Twentieth Century, on Court TV.

He has been interviewed on various radio and TV programs, including National Public Radio and MSNBC, and has been quoted in major newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and the Guardian. In addition to his litigation responsibilities, Shuford is the ACLU’s Recruitment and Retention Officer for attorneys of color on the national legal staff.

Prior to the ACLU, Reggie worked in private practice in Raleigh, N.C., with the firm Richard Schwartz & Associates, specializing in education law. Just after graduating law school, he clerked with the Hon. Henry E. Frye of the Supreme Court of North Carolina. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Law, in Chapel Hill, where he was his graduating class president. He is a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School for the 2009-10 academic year and the recent recipient of the University of North Carolina School of Law’s Distinguished Alumnus Award.

We’re elated that Reggie’s joining the EJS team and hope that you have a chance to meet him (or see him again) after he joins us in mid-May.

It depicts Judge Sotomayor strung up by a rope, likening itself to lynching images or a piñata, with President Barack Obama wearing a sombrero, holding a stick and asking a crowd of elephants (Republicans) “Now, who wants to be first?”

The cartoon is captioned “Fiesta time at the confirmation hearing.” See the cartoon here on our ConfirmSotomayor.org blog.

Piñatas are actually of Mexican tradition and Judge Sotomayor is of Puerto Rican descent. Clearly, either the artist confused his stereotypes or sees the Latino community as one homogenous race without distinction.

Too much damage has been done to our communities under the guise of “satire” and this recent publication marches to the same drum as did the cartoon of the chimp in the New York Post and the Danish cartoon depicting Mohammed as a terrorist.

We’ve re-posted below a statement from Jean Warner, chair of the Oklahoma Women’s Coalition, in response to the vicious editorial cartoon.

Please read Ms. Warner’s post and write to the publisher of the newspaper (see end of the post).”

Regarding today’s political cartoon in the OKC paper: What was The Oklahoman thinking?

Oklahoma ranks as the 3rd worst state in the nation for women.

Much of what holds Oklahoma women and girls back is linked to our state’s culture of violence and disresepct for women. Oklahoma ranks #4 in women murdered by men, #1 in child abuse and our domestic violence shelters are full of women escaping violence.

So The Oklahoman today runs a cartoon showing Sonia Sotomayor – a brilliant Hispanic woman scholar, lawyer and judge – strung up by a rope while men with clubs prepare to have at her for believing she’s qualified to serve on the US. Supreme Court.

Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, received a JD from Yale Law School where she was an editor at the Yale Law Journal (but she grew up in the projects; obviously “that girl doesn’t know her place” – right? wink, wink). President George H.W. Bush nominated her to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York where she served with distinction (but she’s a woman and, worst yet, ambitious – right? wink, wink). She’s served on the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit for 10 years, heard over 3,000 cases and written over 380 opinions (but she’s of Puerto Rican descent ~~ ergo the piñata image – right? wink, wink).

Not funny; actually stupid and damaging. A picture speaks louder than words and that cartoon sends a message to women of all ages: “Back off. Know your place. Or we’ll take a stick to you and teach you a lesson.”

Shame on The Oklahoman and its publisher, David Thompson!

Write to publisher David Thompson, let him know this kind of journalism is irresponsible and demand a retraction

]]> http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/2009/06/editorial-cartoon-on-judge-sotomayor-has-subtext-of-lynching-stereotypes-latinos/feed/ 1