Tagged: 1 percent
it’s RACIST and PITIFUL individuals like “Hon.” Robert P. Patterson, “Hon.” P. Kevin Castel & “Chief Judge” Loretta A. Preska of the Southern District of New York, the majority white members of Congress, etc. that are holding America back from reaching its FULL POTENTIAL.
“The Supreme Court’s decision in University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar[, 133 S. Ct. 2517 (2013)] represents a watershed moment in employment discrimination litigation. The majority opinion posited that an employee might try to avoid termination by filing a fake retaliation claim against his employer. It also expressed fears about courts, administrative agencies, and employers being subjected to floodgates of litigation. It then explicitly used these concerns about fakers and floodgates to tip substantive discrimination law in an employer-friendly direction.”
Nassar expresses three ideas about employees and their claims. First, the sheer volume of cases is enough to favor a more onerous causal standard. Second, enough employees will bring false claims that substantive retaliation doctrine needs to protect courts, administrative agencies, and employers from fakers. Third, existing procedural mechanisms are not adequate to ferret out these false claims. Rather, they must be dealt with by altering the substantive law.
This Article responds to the alleged fakers and floodgates problem. First, it argues that the Court has created reasons to alter the law that are not grounded in congressional intent. Title VII contains numerous provisions that limit the reach of the statute. Beyond these restrictions, Congress never expressed any intention to limit the number of claims heard by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) or the courts based on concerns about the sheer volume of such claims. Nor did Congress express any intent that the courts use the substantive law to screen for false retaliation cases. Through various provisions in Title VII, Congress established a statute designed to protect employers, employees, and courts. Multiple provisions establish a mechanism to ensure that employees are able to bring claims, that employers can adequately defend against claims, and that courts do not hear claims that can be resolved by the EEOC. Moreover, Title VII was enacted in the presence of several existing devices that can be employed to stem any false claims and any related floodgates of litigation. These devices allow judges to sanction parties who file false claims and to dismiss these cases. While the Supreme Court considers these devices to be adequate to handle the misbehavior of employers, in Nassar the Court rejected the possibility that procedural mechanisms are sufficient to deal with false claims filed by employees.
Second, although we argue that the Court’s fakers and floodgates arguments are improper, they are also problematic because they are not supported by empirical or other evidence. To the contrary, available evidence shows that the number of employment-related civil rights claims is decreasing both in raw numbers and in proportion to the number of civil claims filed in federal court.” This Article questions whether the judiciary generally, and the Supreme Court in particular, is the best institution to make factual claims about fakers and floodgates.
Third, this Article also challenges the accuracy of the Court’s assertion that changing the substantive law will reduce the number of spurious claims. At best, such a change is a blunt instrument for handling frivolous claims. Most importantly, changing the law represents a choice about what counts as legal retaliation and what does not. By requiring plaintiffs to establish but for cause, the Supreme Court has declared that an employer does not retaliate against an employee (in a legal sense) if the causal connection is less strong. In other words, if an employee can show only that retaliatory motive was a motivating factor in her termination, she has not suffered retaliation under Title VII.
Fourth, we discuss the dangers of the floodgates and fakers arguments becoming explicitly embedded in judicial doctrine. Such a default position distracts from the larger congressional goal of preventing retaliation and confuses the underlying legal doctrine. Thus far, two courts have already cited the Court’s concerns in their opinions. This Article calls for the EEOC and other organizations concerned with employment discrimination to develop a factual response to arguments about fakers and floodgates before these myths develop into an uncontestable judicial narrative that courts can use to justify other changes in the law.
Finally, we argue that the fakers and floodgates arguments are consistent with a broader problem-courts’ infusion of their own views of evidence of discrimination into procedure and substance. Courts use these devices to prevent juries from hearing factually intensive civil rights cases, even when a plaintiff presents evidence of a colorable claim. (emphasis added)
Smh…
Source: Sandra F. Sperino and Suja A. Thomas. Fakers and Floodgates. Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties. pg. 223-225. June 2014.
“Revolution and Religion”: A Pictorial Recap
Today, I attended the “Revolution and Religion: A Fight For Emancipation and the Role Religion” event hosted by Dr. Cornel West and Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, Bob Avakian. Here is a pictorial recap of my day:
The event took place at the historic Riverside Church — the same church Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his infamous 1967 speech titled “A Time to Break Silence,” in which Dr. King publicly condemned the U.S.’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The event was attended by people from all over the United States (e.g. New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Ferguson, Atlanta, etc.), and I even met a couple who traveled all the way from the United Kingdom. Harry Belafonte was also in the building [although he left before Dr. West was able to speak].
For more than four hours, West and Avakian engaged the audience with a powerful dialogue about the current, intolerable state of the world and the things that we, as members of the hue-man race, must do in order to eradicate global white supremacy (racism) and our nation’s parasitic and divisive capitalistic system. This must be done so that we can actually create a future grounded love for all of humanity and void of racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination. It felt great being amongst an audience of like-minded people, who ultimately believe that transformative change is possible. So many great things were said by both speakers, and ultimately, their messages reaffirmed that I am doing the right thing by challenging William Morris’ institutionally racist employment practices, policies and procedures, as well as challenging institutionalized racism throughout Hollywood, our judicial system and ultimately, society as a whole.
And while waiting for the train to head back to Brooklyn, I saw the latest cover of TIME, in which the magazine mocks Obama’s “HOPE” campaign from the 2008 presidential election by putting Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell on the cover, with the word “CHANGE.” After seeing this, I almost lost hope for humanity again. Smdh!
“Like all aspirants to leadership among Negroes, Malcolm was bound by the conflicts and contradictions of Negro life. He was saddled by a truncated view of the society current among Afro-Americans and victimized by status needs and the lack of a relevant strategy needed to bring about a change. The single issue protest activity that Afro-Americans employ is predicated on the illusion of a concerned public opinion and a power order that is responsive, when in reality there is essentially an apathetic mass manipulated by an unsympathetic power circle.”
Source: Charles E. Wilson, “Leadership: Triumph in Leadership Tragedy.” Malcolm X: The Man and His Times. 1990. pg. 36.
Lauryn Hill — “BLACK RAGE” (sketch)
Lauryn released a more sped up version of “Black Rage” around the time she went on the road with Nas in the fall of 2012, but late Wednesday night, she released a more stripped down “sketch” of the song, in response to the social unrest that’s occurring in Missouri (and throughout the world). I love this version so much more!!
15 FACTS which “prove” that AmeriKKKa has NEVER gotten “over racism” and that “post-racial liberalism,” as advocated by President Obama, is NOT the solution to eradicating global white supremacy (racism).
On July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, officially banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It also ended racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and in general public facilities. Fifty years removed from that milestone, it’s apparently easy to think that we’re over racism. Here are 15 facts that prove that’s not the case.
1) Affluent blacks and Hispanics still live in poorer neighborhoods than whites with working class incomes.
An analysis of census data conducted by researchers at Brown University found that income isn’t the main driving factor in the segregation of U.S. cities. “With only one exception (the most affluent Asians), minorities at every income level live in poorer neighborhoods than do whites with comparable incomes,” the researchers found.
2) There’s a big disparity in wealth between white Americans and non-white Americans.
White Americans held more than 88 percent of the country’s wealth in 2010, according to a Demos analysis of Federal Reserve data, though they made up 64 percent of the population. Black Americans held 2.7 percent of the country’s wealth, though they made up 13 percent of the population.
3) The racial wealth gap kept widening well after the Civil Rights era.
It nearly tripled between 1984 and 2009, according to a Brandeis study.
4) The Great Recession didn’t hit everyone equally.
Between 2007 and 2010, Hispanic families’ wealth fell by 44 percent, and black families’ by 31 percent, compared to 11 percent for white families.
5) In the years before the financial crisis, people of color were much more likely to be targeted for subprime loans than their white counterparts, even when they had similar credit scores.
The Center For Responsible Lending came to that conclusion after analyzing government-provided mortgage data for the year 2004, supplemented with information from a propriety subprime loan database.
“For many types of loans, borrowers of color in our database were more than 30 percent more likely to receive a higher-rate loan than white borrowers, even after accounting for differences in risk,” the authors of the report wrote.
6) Minority borrowers are still more likely to get turned down for conventional mortgage loans than white people with similar credit scores.
An Urban Insititute data analysis found that mortgage denial rates from government-sponsored servicers are higher for black applicants with bad credit than for white applicants with bad credit:
7) Black and Latino students are more likely to attend poorly funded schools.
“A 10 percentage-point increase in the share of nonwhite students in a school is associated with a $75 decrease in per student spending,” a 2012 analysis of Department Education data by the Center For American Progress found.
8) School segregation is still widespread.
80 percent of Latino students attend segregated schools and 43 percent attend intensely segregated schools — ones with only up to 10 percent of white students. 74 percent of black students attend segregated schools, and 38 percent attend intensely segregated schools.
9) As early as preschool, black students are punished more frequently, and more harshly, for misbehaving than their white counterparts.
“Black children represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment, but 42 percent of the preschool children suspended once, and 48 percent of the preschool children suspended more than once,” a Department of Education report, released in March, noted.
10) Perceptions of the innocence of children are still often racially skewed.
A study published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that participants estimated black boys to be older and less innocent than white boys of the same age.
When participants were told that the boys, both black and white, were suspected of crimes, the disparity in perceptions of age and innocence became more stark:
Separate research by Stanford psychologists suggests that these kinds of racialized perceptions of innocence contribute to non-white juvenile offenders receiving harsher sentences than their white peers.
11) White Americans use drugs more than black Americans, but black people are arrested for drug possession more than three times as often as whites.
This contributes to the fact that 1 in 3 black males born today can expect to go to prison in their lifetimes, based on current incarceration trends.
12) Black men receive prison sentences 19.5 percent longer than those of white men who committed similar crimes, a 2013 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found.
13) A clean record doesn’t protect young black men from discrimination when they’re looking for work.
Young white men with felony convictions are more likely to get called back after a job interview than young black men with similar qualifications and clean records,a 2003 study published in the American Journal of Sociology found.
14) Black job seekers are often turned away by U.S. companies on the assumption that they do drugs.
The presence of drug testing may actually help to correct this and increase black job seekers’ chances, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study released in May.
15) Employers are more likely to turn away job seekers if they have African-American-sounding names.
Applicants with white-sounding names get one callback per 10 resumes sent while those with African-American-sounding names get one callback per 15 resumes, according to a 2003 National Bureau of Economic Research report. “Based on our estimates,” the researchers wrote, “a White name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience.”
Check out the link to see the graphs that accompanied this article. This list is definitely not exhaustive, but it clearly demonstrates that much “progress” hasn’t actually been made, although from the outside looking in, it appears that way. Until we acknowledge and address the role institutionalized forms of racism play in maintaining these various race-based disparities, our nation will never achieve the intended goals of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
ALL of our “God-given rights” include “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The Declaration of Independence states, in part:
We hold these truths to be self-evidence. That all men are created equal;
That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;
That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;
That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
The elite, white “Founders” who wrote this document knew how parasitic, evil and corrupt they were and knew that eventually, they would self-destruct, like Rome and other empires before them, if conditions were not set to alter or abolish a destructive government unable to secure the basic, human and “unalienable rights” of its people. The group in power, including those that wrote the Declaration of Independence, cannot think that they are superior to “Negroes” because of their “race,” then simultaneously say that “all men are created equal.” That’s a clear contradiction…unless you factor in the fact that many whites, especially during that time, consider[ed] people of African descent to be sub-human, “three-fifths a person,” descendants of monkeys or other animals, savages, barbarians, niggers, etc. It is ridiculous to think that ANY government dominated by a group of people like this, can “secure the[ ] rights” of ALL MEN and create a society and institutions that promote principles such as truth, justice and democracy and ensure that they prevail, irregardless of one’s “race.” They failed from the very beginning and it’s clear by this country’s (and the world’s) many problems today, due to their conspiracy to maintain the myth of white/”Jewish” superiority (racism), that we, “the people,” need to “alter or abolish” this “evil system” and “institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing power in such form, as to them shall seem likely to effect the[ ] safety and happiness” of ALL “HUE-MAN” BEINGS.
how color discrimination began according to J.A. Rogers.
Interest in the origin of the so-called race arose into the 17th century when the white “race” was in the ascendant; hence it was naturally assumed that the white race was the original, and that the Ham story was true. In the latter part of the 18th century, however, Blumenbach, a German anthropologist , improved on this theory, declaring that while it was true that the white race was the first, yet the other so-called races were in no way inherently inferior, and that the difference was due to environment. He stressed particularly, the equality of the Negro with the rest of the human race.
For the white race, Blumenbach coined the word “Caucasian,” and he did it in a manner characteristic of much of what still passes for science in all matters of race. In his collection of skulls was one of a woman found on Mt. Caucasus in Georgia, Asiatic Russia. It was a shapely, handsome skull, and Blumenbach thinking it was typical of the white race dubbed it “Caucasian.”
Later, this proceeding vastly amused Thomas Huxley, who ranks near to Darwin in his efforts to solve the riddle of Man. “Of all the odd myths that have arisen in the scientific world,” said Huxley, “the ‘Caucasian mystery’ invented quite innocently by Blumenbach, is the oddest. A Georgian woman’s skull was the handsomest in his collection. Hence it became his model exemplar of human skulls from which all others might be regarded as deviations; and out of this by some strange intellectual hocus-pocus grew up the notion that the Caucasian man is the proto-typic ‘Adamic’ man and his country the primitive centre of our kind.”
Huxley, on his part, declared that there were only two “races,” the ulotrician or woolly-haired, and the lissotrichian, or silky-haired. Color, features, and the rest didn’t count, he said. Haddon agreed with him but name a third, the frizzly-haired. Others have named as many as sixty-three races.
And there you are. When you enter the field of anthropology, you are right back in the intellectual bogs of the Middle Ages when learned theologians used to argue where Cain got his wife; or how many angels could dance on the point of a needle; or if Christ was the Son of God how could he be as old as God. In time the theologian came to be regarded as a symbol of boredom and asininity. The word, ethnologist, is rapidly drifting into the same category.
The so-called races do have points in physical difference, but so also do all individuals of which these races are composed. Nevertheless, certain professors and doctors of philosophy under the influence of capitalism and also to satisfy their own egos insisted that there were hard and fast and even air-tight divisions. Fair-skinned humanity was then encroaching on the lands of dark-skinned ones and the capitalists had to have some theory to quiet the conscientious victims of their own race and also to keep their own status right with God. Moreover, the colleges were maintained by the richer whites who looked down on the poorer whites. From looking down on poor whites to looking down on darker peoples is but a step.
Color discrimination thus began. Tobacco and cotton were needed in Virginia for sale to Europe. Tobacco was at one time currency in Virginia. White serfs were growing it. These were not succeeding very well. Black men were then imported. They proved capable and willing workers. The doctrine of upper class white superiority over lower-class whites which had been operating alone for thousands of years suddenly moved then into larger quarters so to speak, and took in the Negro, putting him in the lowest rank because of his difference in color. Had the Negro been an incompetent and an unwilling worker, like the Indian, he would never have got the very bad name he did. It was his very assimilability, his capacity for progress that caused the slave-holders to invent the doctrine of inferiority in order to keep him down. Fifty-one years after the Negro’s arrival in Virginia, a law was passed to prevent his buying white people. Louisiana passed such a law as late as 1818.
Source: J.A. Rogers, Sex & Race. Vol. 1. p. 24-5. 1941.
Me Against Iniquity: Understanding the Complexities of Global White Supremacy (Racism) Through The Eyes of an Unapologetically BLACK Intellectual 