Civil rights leaders should open new front in affirmative action fight

By DeWayne Wickham

My first reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear a challenge to the University of Texas’ admissions policy was to mount a fierce defense of the school’s effort to bandage the gaping wounds in our education system.

In Texas, 90% of all slots in the freshman class are reserved for residents who graduate from high schools in the Lone Star State. The vast majority of these positions (88% in 2008) go to students who finish in the top 10% of their high school class. The rest of the positions reserved for Texas high school graduates go to students who qualify on the basis of a second-tier criteria that permits race to be considered among many other factors.

The case the justices will consider in the fall was brought by Abigail Fisher, a Texas resident whose high school class ranking was too low to get her into the University of Texas through the Top Ten Percent Plan, and her SAT score was too low to position her to be a competitive applicant in the second tier, according to the university.

Nonetheless, the conservative-dominated high court has agreed to hear Fisher’s claim that she was denied admission into the university because of her race — a brash assertion of white privilege that may give the court’s right-wingers the opening they need to strike a death blow to affirmative action in higher education.

It makes sense for civil rights groups to counter this attack with legal briefs and arguments. But it is foolhardy for them to stake a lot on the outcome of this case. Instead, they should treat it like a holding action in a wider war, while preparing for a bigger, more winnable fight. That campaign should be waged over getting rid of all standardized tests as a requirement for college admission. It should seek to replace them with recruitment strategies that aggressively favor creation of a more diverse student body and reflect this nation’s changing demographics.

The standardized tests measure what applicants learned in high school, more than their potential for success in college. They stack the deck against blacks and Hispanics, who disproportionately attend underperforming public schools and favor white students who are more likely to attend better schools and to get coaching for the tests.

A state’s failure to fix the problems of underperforming public schools shouldn’t be allowed to keep deserving minority students from getting a college education. That’s the argument civil rights activists should be making to higher education institutions that continue to use standardized test scores as an entrance requirement.

Bates College long ago made SAT scores an optional requirement for admission. In 2005, it issued a study of the students who attended the Lewiston, Maine, school over a 20-year period and concluded there was virtually no difference in academic achievement between students who submitted SAT scores and those who didn’t. Other schools like Wake Forest and Sarah Lawrence College also have made the SAT an optional part of their admissions process. That’s a good step in the right direction.

But you can expect the fight over access to higher education to heat up as the Supreme Court moves closer to deciding Fisher’s case. It’s time now for civil rights activists to open another front in this battle, one that seeks to redefine the rules for access to higher education, which is one of the most important gateways to opportunity in this society.

Whitney Houston has finally exhaled

By DeWayne Wickham

Whitney Houston finally got to exhale. After a 27-year non-stop, roller-coaster ride to steep heights of fame and the deep canyons of heartbreak, she took one last breath — and then let go of life.

Officially, it will be said death came to the pop music icon at 3:55 p.m. on Saturday in a Beverly Hills hotel room. That's the moment of her medical demise. But Houston's life started slipping away long before then. In the coming days, much will be said about the troubles that warped her time on earth.

Accounts of Houston's musical genius will be laced with talk of the time she spent on life's dark side. You'll hear about Houston's recurring bouts with drugs, her tumultuous marriage to Bobby Brown and her ill-advised stint on his tragically real, reality show.

But I want to remember the Houston who brought joy into the lives of millions of people worldwide, not the one whose troubled life too often kept her from experiencing the bliss she so unselfishly gave others. I want to remember the Houston whose music I loved, the actress who drew me into a Washington, D.C., theater in 1995 to see the film Waiting to Exhale, which I feared was a black-male bashing movie.

I waded into that theater, nearly packed with women, with three buddies for what we only half-jokingly called a reconnaissance mission. I left transformed by the story that unfolded onscreen and by these words from its title song:

Everyone falls in love sometime,
Sometimes it's wrong and sometimes it's right
For every win, someone must fail
But there comes a point when, when we exhale

For nearly a decade-and-a-half, Houston made it possible for a lot of us to exhale — to find an escape from a troubled world through her music and acting. Her voice — both the soft, raspy one she spoke with and the sultry, booming one she took to the recording studio and stage — was intoxicating. Her singing was as soulful as a mouth full of collard greens and as transcending as the rendition of TheStar-Spangled Banner she sang at Super Bowl XXV, just days after the start of the Persian Gulf War.

No doubt, some people will choose to remember Houston by the tragedy of her early death. But I'll remember her as an artist who sold more than 170 million albums, singles and videos and won enough musical awards to fill a museum.

Some people will focus on her struggles with drug abuse and a bad marriage, two tragic chapters in her life. I want to remember Houston for the comeback she was making in Sparkle, the remake of a 1976 movie she just completed with American Idol winner Jordin Sparks. I want to think of what might have been had she lived to star in the Waiting to Exhale sequel, which was in the works.

Asked during a 1986 Rolling Stone interview about the acclaim she got after the release of her breakthrough album Whitney Houston, she said confidently, "It was time, time for singing to come back again, to listen to words, to feel what somebody was saying."

From then on, Houston's life was a non-stop journey that propelled her into that Beverly Hills hotel room — where she finally got her chance to exhale.

Romney's election hopes shrink with lower unemployment rate

By DeWayne Wickham

In a turn of events that threatens to lay waste to the central theme of the GOP challenge to Barack Obama’s presidency, the nation’s economy appears to be solidly on a path to recovery.

The unemployment rate in January dropped to 8.3%, the fifth consecutive month that it has declined and the lowest it has been in three years. Last month, 243,000 jobs were created. That’s significantly more than the 155,000 new jobs economists predicted, according to the Associated Press.

In the wake of this report of an improving jobs market, Mitt Romney, the front-runner in the campaign to win the GOP’s presidential nomination, tried to put a bad face on this good picture.

“This recovery has been slower than it should have been,” he said while trolling the Silver State for votes on the eve of Nevada’s Republican caucuses last weekend. “People have been suffering for longer than they should have had to suffer. Will it get better? I think it’ll get better. But this president has not helped the process. He’s hurt it.”

After months of blaming Obama for the nation’s bad economic news, Romney now gives him no credit for the turnabout that seems to be underway. Instead, the former Massachusetts governor and one-time head of a private equity firm, argues that he — not Obama — has the business acumen to speed up the recovery from the economic recession.

This is the same Romney who in November 2008 opposed giving U.S. automakers about $85 billion of bailout money to avoid their collapse and a devastating ripple effect of other business failures. “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday,” Romney predicted in a New York Times op-ed, “you can kiss the American automobile industry goodbye.”

He was wrong. GM is again the world’s top automaker with sales of more than 9 million cars worldwide in 2011. And Chrysler, which also is back in the black, saw its U.S. sales increase 44% in January. Ford, which overtook Toyota as the nation’s second leading seller in 2010, had earnings of $20.2 billion in 2011 — its second highest earnings year ever. Even Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, credits the bailout for the auto industry’s resurrection.

Having largely made his case for replacing Obama by claiming he’d be a better steward of the nation’s economy, Romney has, at least for now, been reduced to arguing nebulously that the improving economy would be even better if he were at the nation’s helm.

Of course, a lot can change between now and November. The decline in the jobless rate could stall. The forecasted turnaround in the housing market, which is tied to the growing economic confidence of Americans, might not materialize. Or a game-changing event, such as an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, could dramatically alter the focus of the presidential campaign from domestic to foreign affairs.

Romney wants voters to think Obama is in over his head when it comes to lifting this nation’s recovery from the deep economic hole that George W. Bush, his Republican predecessor, dug. He’s betting that despite the president’s deft handling of the war on terror, which was once a greater concern than the nation’s unemployment rate, the state of the nation’s economy will determine the outcome of the November election.

For many voters, the job market is the leading indicator of economic recovery. And as the unemployment rate shrinks, so too does Romney’s chance of defeating Obama.

Arizona gov. uses old racist dodge to explain bad treatment of President Obama

By DeWayne Wickham

I really wanted to ignore the dust up over President Obama’s recent ugly encounter with Arizona’s Republican Gov. Jan Brewer. As troubling as it was to see the picture of her wagging her finger in his face, the shock value of such a showing of disrespect towards the president has by now worn off on me.

Brewer was just the most recent in a growing list of right-wingers to publicly display their contempt for him. My outrage over how she got up in Obama’s face like an irate mother lecturing an overgrown son also was tempered by the president’s attempt to downplay the incident, which centered on how he was portrayed in Brewer’s recent book.

“This is not a big deal,” Obama told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer about the incident that occurred on the tarmac of Phoenix’s airport moments after he stepped off of Air Force One a few days ago. “I think this is a classic example of things getting blown out of proportion.”

Brewer’s actions would have been disrespectful to any president, but the fact that Obama is our first black president raises questions of her real motives. That’s because the Arizona governor seemed to be channeling Willa Jean Boswell when she said she “felt a little bit threatened” by the president during her terse exchange with him, which occurred in front of two local mayors, Secret Service agents, a knot of journalists and a small group of people who stood in a nearby receiving line.

Threatened, really? I don’t think so.

Back in 1951, Boswell, a 17-year-old white girl, had Matt Ingram thrown in jail for something akin to what Brewer claims the president did. Boswell complained the 44-year-old black farmer looked at her in a frightening way. Charged with rape by leer, Ingram was found guilty by an all-white jury that convicted him of looking at Boswell in a way that constituted an assault — even though he never said a word or came within 75 feet of her.

Just as Ingram was jailed for “reckless eyeballing,” Brewer wants us to believe that in her encounter with the president — in which she appeared to do most of the talking — he somehow managed to threaten her. Maybe she was intimidated by his calm demeanor as he voiced his objection to what she wrote in her book about a White House meeting she had with the president last year.

Or maybe she was alarmed by his wry smile as she leaned into him and put her finger in his face. It could be she was frightened by Obama’s decision to walk away from her in mid-sentence as she was giving the president his comeuppance in front of a bank of news photographers?

But I suspect the feisty governor didn’t feel a pang of fear until the picture of her tongue-wagging, finger-shaking assault on the president of the United States was flashed around the world and generated a lot of negative reactions.

What she did on that airport tarmac was by any reasonable standard a gross act of disrespect to the president. But what she said in defense of her bad behavior was even worse. It was a less than subtle appeal to the well-worn racial stereotype of a black man who can assault a white woman with little more than a glance.

And for that Brewer deserves to be called out.

"Red Tails" set in an America Gingrich wants to bring back

By DeWayne Wickham

ORLANDO — By the time Newt Gingrich claimed victory in the South Carolina primary, I was in a crowded theater watching the movie about a kind of untold “American exceptionalism” that the Republican candidate seems to dismiss, if not disdain.

The newly released Red Tails tells the story of the black pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group, who before facing Hitler’s Luftwaffe had to overcome their countrymen’s implacable and groundless belief that they lacked the intelligence and courage to be fighter pilots during World War II. Overcoming an obstacle no white trainee faced, the pilots of the 332nd dealt the Luftwaffe a blow that once again underscored the vital contributions of blacks to America ’s greatness.

This is not what Gingrich “the historian” seems to have in mind when he speaks of “returning to the America we love.” If you listen to the former Georgia congressman’s campaign rhetoric, he makes subtle but unmistakable references to race, whether labeling the nation’s first black president a “food-stamp president” or insinuating that African Americans don’t have a work ethic. His solution? Let urban school children be in-house janitors. But of course.

Ahhh, the good ol’ days, when whites had job security and white picket fences and couldn’t be bossed around by uppity blacks, and African-Americans had to suffer gross indignities in order to put their lives on the line to defend their country. Gingrich doesn’t say this, but he doesn’t have to. A not-too-distant history, as seen in Red Tails, takes us back to that time. We don’t need Gingrich’s help.

The film documents the Tuskegee Airmen, Army aviators who were part of a U.S. government experiment to train black combat pilots in the 1940s. They were initially forced to fly second-hand planes and then derided by white superiors who thought blacks were unfit for duty. Eventually the airmen were allowed to fly better fighters and given critical missions.

Red Tails is a fictional account of this unit that gives moviegoers a basic lesson in the courage and heroism of these young black pilots. Heroically, several Tuskegee Airmen who stayed in the military after the war rose to the rank of general, including Daniel “Chappie” James, who became this nation’s first black four-star general — the kind of “exceptionalism” few of any race who serve in the U.S. military ever achieve.

In his effort to replace Obama as president, Gingrich pledges to his right-wing backers that, if elected, he will “rebuild the America we love.” He paints Obama as an enemy of “the classical America ” from which he draws his understanding of what it is to be an American. Think Leave It To Beaver.

As movies go, Red Tails, which Obama recently viewed at the White House along with some of the film’s cast, is an enthralling look at a history many Americans would rather forget. But we can’t and shouldn’t. The thing that is truly exceptional about America is not its democratic idealism, but the willingness of those who have been denied its promise to still believe in the vision of the “more perfect union” enshrined in the Constitution’s preamble, if not in the actual text.

What is truly exceptional about this country is that just two generations after many questioned the ability of blacks to come to the nation’s defense, Americans elected a black man to lead them.

That’s a history lesson Gingrich seems determined to undo at any cost.

Barbour deserves praise, not silence for pardons that restored voting rights

By DeWayne Wickham

When former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour got around to offering an explanation for the pardons and clemencies he granted 215 convicted felons shortly before leaving office this month, you'd think there might have been a few loud voices of support.

But despite the claim that his actions were motivated, at least in part, by a desire to let the felons — 27 of whom were convicted of manslaughter or murder — regain their right to vote, not a discernible peep has been heard from proponents of returning that most precious of American rights to ex-convicts.

"The pardons were intended to allow them to find gainful employment or acquire professional licenses as well as hunt and vote," said Barbour, a once-idolized conservative who once served as Republican National Committee chairman

Mississippi is one of 13 states where convicted felons do not automatically regain the right to vote after being released from incarceration, probation or parole. Undoing this obstacle to voting is a cause célèbre for many left-wing activists. Last month, two civil rights groups — the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund Inc. —jointly released a report on barriers to voting. Denying felons the right to vote "is one of the most significant barriers to political participation in this country," the report concluded.

Of the 5.3 million American felons who have lost the right to vote, nearly 2 million are black, the report states. Though Barbour's pardons and clemencies won't put a dent in that number, they could have an impact of a different sort. They are a break in the ideological picket lines between left-wing opponents of voter disenfranchisement and right-wing advocates of permanently stripping ex-convicts of the right to vote.

By resorting to an extraordinary use of executive power to return the right to vote to some of Mississippi's citizens, Barbour seems to agree with the NAACP groups that in our democracy, voting is an immutable right. Whether that was his intended message or not, voting rights proponents should have scrambled to his side. Instead, they have remained silent.

That's a pity.

In place of their voices, we now hear Jim Hood, Mississippi's Democratic attorney general, who is challenging the constitutionality of Barbour's action. Piling on, Democratic state lawmakers are pushing legislation that would make it harder for a governor to grant pardons and clemencies.

There may be reason to object to the process by which Barbour exercised his clemency and pardoning authority, but voting rights advocates should separate that from his intent. They shouldn't abandon a Southern conservative who sides with them on this issue because they agree with him on little else.

They shouldn't have to be reminded that while blacks are 37% of Mississippi's population, they're 66% of its prison inmates. So anything that's done to make it harder for ex-convicts to regain their voting rights will have a disproportionately negative impact on the political fortunes of Mississippi blacks.

Restoring the voting rights of the 2 million blacks nationwide who have a felony conviction is a fight that must be waged state by state. Common sense, rather than ideology, should be the driving force in this effort.

Unfortunately, the battle over Barbour's action is just the latest proof that in America today, partisan hang-ups too often keep people who ought to know better from doing the right thing.

Ron Paul exposes GOP tolerance for unequal justice

By DeWayne Wickham

Ron Paul must have known the question was coming. For weeks, he had been dogged by charges that newsletters published in his name in the 1980s and 1990s contained racist content.

So he probably wasn't surprised when ABC News' George Stephanopoulos asked him during a televised debate three days before the New Hampshire primary how that could have happened without his knowledge. But no one on the stage with the Texas congressman — not the other contenders for the Republican Party's presidential nomination who bristle with contempt for their libertarian colleague or the panel of journalists wielding the questions — was ready for Paul's answer.

Dwelling on something he didn't write but has assumed responsibility for and apologized, Paul said, diverts attention away from the "true racism" in this nation's judicial system that disproportionately imprisons blacks for their involvement in drug crimes.

And when Paul finished what the Associated Press later called "a positively leftist rant," there were no follow-up questions, no clamoring from the other candidates to have their say on the issue. There was just a moment of uneasy silence — and then a commercial break. When the debate resumed, there was no return to Paul's charge of unequal justice, an indifference that is a haunting metaphor for the nation's failure to address an issue that is even worse than Paul suggests.

In 2010, 69 percent of all people arrested in this country for committing crimes were white. Blacks were just 28 percent, according to the FBI. These percentages have remained steady every year of the past decade. During this same period, roughly twice as many whites as blacks were arrested each year for drug crimes, according to the FBI annual Crime in the United States report.

Despite this, nearly half of all persons incarcerated throughout the first decade of this century were black. More than a liberal rant, that's the ugly reality of a criminal justice system that, as Paul correctly noted, prosecutes and imprisons blacks in disproportionate numbers.

That none of the other Republicans — who are champing at the bit for the right to challenge President Obama's re-election — would align themselves with Paul on this issue doesn't surprise me. The GOP's strategy for winning back the White House is devoid of any serious appeal to black voters and lacks any real concern about the lingering vestiges of racism inflicted upon blacks, who are overwhelmingly Democrats.

Forget all their pious talk about being Americans first. Paul's unanswered "rant" exposed them all —Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry— as crass partisans who won't risk upending the conventional wisdom about crime and punishment in this country when their political butts are on the line. They don't want to derail their campaigns by giving any credence to an issue that many right-wing voters they are courting would likely discount.

“If we truly want to be concerned about racism, you ought to look at a few of those issues and look at the drug laws, which are being so unfairly enforced,” Paul said as the network cut to commercials, and all the presidential wannabes on stage with him undoubtedly heaved a big sigh of relief.