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NPR reported earlier this week that UCLA has created an Economic Crisis Response Team to assist students who are at risk of hunger or homelessness.
The university became aware of the problem the economic crisis of the fall of 2008, and the ECR now coordinates advising, counseling, financial support, and other resources for such students. It even maintains a food pantry on campus where students can anonymously get access to donated food.
By now everyone who might remotely have an interest already knows that Jeffrey Lord’s attack on Shirley Sherrod was utterly wrongheaded. His attempt to discredit her story of a relative’s lynching was both factually erroneous and morally obtuse. He’s been rightly vilified by commentators from across the political spectrum, from Media Matters to Radley Balko to his own colleagues at the American Spectator. This kind of brouhaha has a life cycle, and this one has reached its end.
So why did I take the time to write a 1700-word exegesis of an obscure 1945 court case last night, and why am I back at it today?
Because lynching, as it turns out, matters.
Race is, of course, a vexed topic in America today. And it’s one on which reasonable people may disagree. People of goodwill can differ sharply on affirmative action, on the use of race in the census, on the place of the NAACP in the country’s national discourse, on the extent of racism in contemporary society.
But if we’re going to have a productive dialogue on race in the 21st century, we need to understand how it operated in the 20th and before. The history of race is, as I said in my first post on the Spectator scandal, a subject of which no decent American has the right to remain ignorant.
A federal judge this morning blocked enforcement of the most controversial components of Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law, just one day before the law was to go into effect.
SB 1070 has been the target of considerable student protest and organizing nationally since it was passed this spring, and is expected to be a flash point for activism when students return to campus in the fall.
Judge Susan Bolton found a “substantial likelihood” that legal residents would be subject to wrongful arrest under the law, and ruled that the statute would thus “impose a ‘distinct, unusual and extraordinary’ burden on legal resident aliens that only the federal government has the authority to impose.”
Update | Here’s the text of the judge’s order.
Last year I reported on the story of Julea Ward, a counseling student at Eastern Michigan University who was expelled from EMU’s counseling program after she declined to treat a gay client and refused to comply with the American Counseling Association’s ethical guidelines on how to address homosexuality within a therapeutic relationship. (See also my follow-up piece here, in which I addressed the two sides claims in greater detail.)
Ward sued, and her case became a huge cause celebre among Christian conservatives. But yesterday a federal judge ruled in EMU’s favor.
I’ve downloaded a copy of the decision, and I’ll be reading and commenting on it soon.
So yesterday morning Jeffrey Lord of the American Spectator put up a long post claiming that Shirley Sherrod had lied when she said that a relative of hers was lynched in Georgia in 1943.
Specifically, Lord claimed that the term “lynching” refers exclusively to murder by hanging. Since Sherrod’s relative was merely arrested, handcuffed, publicly beaten for as much as half an hour by three police officers, dragged feet-first across a courthouse lawn, and then left to die, Lord said, he wasn’t lynched.
Informed that lynching does not refer, and has never referred, exclusively to hangings, Lord has tried a variety of new lines of attack in the last 36 hours. He’s argued that three assailants is too few for a lynch mob (it isn’t), that the Supreme Court declared the crime to not be a lynching (they didn’t), and even — most recently — that because lynching wasn’t articulated as a specific criminal offense in the Jim Crow era, the term cannot be properly applied to any historical event.
Yeah. It’s a train wreck.
Lord’s comments on his and others’ posts on the American Spectator site have become increasingly erratic over the last two days, so I’m not going to even try to parse and refute them all. But his repeated references to a Supreme Court case that arose from the incident prompted me to take a look at the decision in question, and it turns out that it’s a fascinating and important one.
Grab a snack. This is going to take a while.
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