Today's Capital Times reports that "Dane County locks up 97 black drug offenders for each white offender" - making us 3rd in the entire country in terms of racial disparity. I know County Executive Kathleen Falk and the Dane County Board of Supervisors have been at least discussing this issue for quite some time. Hopefully this saddening report will prompt some more action.

...

"It's very sad what the finding is for Dane County," said Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, which issued the report today. "It's equally sad that 97 percent of the counties witnessed racial disparities."

...

The study said that while survey data show that illegal drug usage and sales among blacks and whites for 2002 were similar, blacks, who account for only about 13 percent of the U.S. population, were sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites nationally.

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In January, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency released a study that found that black juvenile offenders in Wisconsin in 2002 were locked up at nearly 20 times the rate of white juvenile offenders, more than twice the national average
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"It's as great at the federal level, but what we see in this report that we've never been able to show before is the pervasiveness of it," he said. "What this confirms is the federal findings that groups like the Sentencing Project have been reporting for some time are not an anomaly. This is something that's playing out in every community in the country."

The study also included Waukesha County, which locked up black drug offenders at 24 times the rate of white offenders, and Milwaukee County, which incarcerated blacks at a rate of 15 for each white.

The two counties that exceeded the Dane County rate were Onondaga County in New York, with 99 blacks incarcerated for every white on drug charges, and Forsyth County North Carolina, which saw a rate of 164 black drug offenders imprisoned for each white drug offender.

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"The fact that African-Americans are admitted for drug offenses at 97 times the rate of whites should give people a moment to pause and think about why that is," he said.

Labels: race

On October 20, Congressman Bobby Jindal was elected Governor of Louisiana. He is the nation's first Indian-American Governor. He is a Republican.

Today's Washington Post has a wonderful piece on the conflicting emotions that Mr. Jindal's election have evoked. I, too, am a first-generation Indian-American. To be honest, at first, I was excited that an Indian-American can be elected in a state like Louisiana, where "less than two decades ago white supremacist David Duke won the votes of a majority of whites during his failed bid for Governor." And even as Chair of the College Democrats of America Asian/Pacific-Islander American (APIA) Caucus, I was thrilled that the APIA community - not the most politically active group - is making strides in electoral politics and government. But then I realized that I disagree wholeheartedly with many of Mr. Jindal's beliefs and policies and that I, as an Indian-American, a woman, and a someone with Democratic values, could not - nay, would not - revel in his election.

Mr. Jindal's election raises questions that are applicable to the 2008 Presidential election, specifically in the cases of Sen. Barack Obama and Gov. Bill Richardson (who, if elected, would become the first African-American and Latino President, respectively). I won't leave Sen. Hillary Clinton out of this argument, either.

Should people vote for candidates just for one reason: if they're black, a woman, Latino, etc.? Why do they do that? Why shouldn't they?

Suresh Gupta, a lifelong Democrat, offered Mr. Jindal his full support and even organized fundraisers for him. Why? "It doesn't matter that Bobby is a Republican," said Gupta, 65. "He is our child, and we need to support this next generation so that they can become leaders of this country and make us proud." And by "our child," he means an Indian-American.

I disagree. Just because I identify with you on one or even two levels doesn't mean that our views and priorities align. In fact, you could be actively fighting my most dearly held beliefs: Jindal is a social conservative, advocating banning abortion and teaching intelligent design in schools. The mere fact that your skin is one color or another or that you have another X chromosome instead of a Y doesn't automatically signify that you understand the perspectives of that group. Maitri Venkat-Ramani (the daughter of immigrants) is quoted in the article, saying to her mother, "I keep telling her, just because [Jindal] looks like you doesn't mean he is you or that he is going to act like you.

Culturally, Jindal is distanced from many Indian-Americans: he changed his name from Piyush to Bobby and has converted from Hinduism to Christianity. The Washington Post calls him a potato, but I think Harold and Kumar would say "twinkie." Sen. Obama can sympathize in a way with Rep. Jindal's plight; he is constantly being criticized as not being "black enough." Yet both have garnered immense support from their respective communities (same goes for Gov. Richardson and Sen. Clinton) merely on that one fact.

I remember back in 2006, during the Dane County Board election (Ashok Kumar vs. David Lapidus) in the campus area, Mr. Kumar came to an UW-Madison Indian Student Association (ISA) meeting to ask for our endorsement. I recall that he spent little to no time talking about the issues but instead dwelled on the fact that he was an Indian-American. ISA endorsed Kumar in the race. Honestly, I don't think many of us even knew who he was or what he would advocate for once on the County Board. But we did know one thing, and that was what we could see.

Russell Wallace, who at the Oct. 24th College Democrats of Madison meeting said, (I may be paraphrasing a bit, as I don't remember the exact wordage) "All other things equal, I would vote for an African-American or a woman over someone else."

We like to think that we can live in a color-blind society. However, society is not like Stephen Colbert, who doesn't "see color." Actually, I prefer that society does at least recognize the differences that come with race and gender; constituencies as a whole do have different priorities (women naturally care more about women's rights, minority caucuses would care more about the DREAM Act, etc.). As Mr. Wallace and Mr. Gupta pointed out, many will and do vote for a candidate just because of that. But, never are "all other things equal." Do the voters see the inequalities? Or do they/we just choose to ignore them?

To borrow from the article, Are we just reinforcing the very color consciousness that we want the rest of American society to reject?

Labels: race, women