Anonymous Comrade writes:

The Peculiar State

John Chuckman

A lawyer gave a brief opinion piece on Canada's public radio, the CBC, in which he flatly said that criticism of Israel is a form of anti-Semitism.

I guess we should be grateful that people in Canada are much less violent in their opinions than people in the U.S. where one lawyer wrote an essay, published on the Internet, seriously advocating the execution of the families of those who commit terrorist acts in Israel. Another American lawyer, a very prominent one, has advocated protocols governing the legal use of torture in the United States.

Bernie Roddy writes:

Texas' 5th Circuit Intent on Allowing Racist Capital Punishment

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas has been battling the Supreme Court over whether racism accounts for various questionable practices in capital cases.

In the case of Thomas Miller-El, 53, ten of the eleven qualified black candidates for the jury were excluded from the jury pool. The only black admitted volunteered that in his opinion simple execution was not sufficient punishment for people who commit murder, that we should “pour some honey on them and stake them out over an ant bed.” One of the three prosecutors in Miller-El’s case was found by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to have engaged in intentional racial discrimination in the jury selection of a black man sentenced to death, Ronald Curtis Chambers.

On Feb. 25, 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled eight to one in favor of Miller-El. Nevertheless, the 5th Circuit fixated on the lone dissenter in the Supreme Court decision, that of Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, and denied Miller-El’s claim.

More recently, Tyrone Williams was one of fourteen indicted in the deaths of seventeen immigrants in a truck near Victoria, TX. U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore required that prosecutors show why of the fourteen eligible for the death penalty (twelve Hispanics and two African-Americans) they had selected only one of the black defendants. When she submitted her request in writing to Attorney General Ashcroft she was accused of trying to punish the prosecutors.

Predictably, Gilmore was overruled by the 5th Circuit. Her concern about the racial biases of prosecutors in Texas will likely be shared by the U.S. Supreme Court, but whether the highest court’s decisions have a serious impact on the conduct of the 5th Circuit is yet to be determined.

Civil Rights Leader James Forman Dies

Joe Holley, Washington Post

James Forman, 76, who as executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s dispatched cadres of organizers, demonstrators and Freedom Riders into the most dangerous redoubts of the Deep South, died Jan. 10 of colon cancer at Washington House, a local hospice.

At the height of the civil rights movement, Mr. Forman hammered out a role for SNCC among the so-called Big Five, the established civil rights organizations that included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. SNCC in those years was the edgier, more aggressive organization, pushing the South specifically and the nation generally toward change.

Seth Sandronsky writes:

"Critical Whiteness Studies"

Seth Sandronsky

Reviewing:

Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past

David R. Roediger

University of California Press (2002), 288 pp. $16.00 pb.

David Roediger’s most recent book, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past, is a gem. This collection of readable essays helps us to better appreciate what W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American scholar, called the “color line” in the U.S. Colored White builds on two earlier collections of Roediger’s essays. The first is The Wages of Whiteness: Race & the Making of the American Working Class (Verso, 1991). That was followed by Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, & Working Class History (Verso, 1994). Roediger is arguably America’s top scholar of critical whiteness studies.