links for 2011-04-29

“'The filing of this charge is very rare,' said Jack Levin, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston and director of the school’s Brudnick Center on Conflict and Violence. That rarity is because hate crimes usually are prosecuted under state law, with 49 states having some form of hate crime statute, Levin said. But even under state laws, only a 'very small percentage of perpetrators are ever charged with hate crimes,' said Levin, a criminologist and author of several books on crime."

(tags: via:carleadriacook violence lawsuit rightwing hategroups)

"In California, San Francisco, Santa Clara County and San Jose, did not want to participate. On Monday, in an editorial board meeting with the San Francisco Chronicle, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said communities could not decide to exclude themselves from sharing fingerprints with her agency. The 'opt-in, opt-out thing was a misunderstanding from the get-go … and we have tried to correct that,' she said."

(tags: via:carleandriacook immigrants immigrationlaw policy)

"Aside from the politically-charged debate surrounding President Barack Obama’s decision to reveal his long-form birth certificate this week, the story highlighted something for me on a highly personal level: questioning the 'Americanness' of second-generation Americans."

(tags: via:elahe barackobama immigration rightwing identity identitydocuments)

"That's why so many of us are disturbed by the president's decision to give in and release the long-form document. We understand and respect that painful decision to try to refocus the country's attention away from these absurd distractions and on to the critical problems we face. But we also know that his gesture will do little to quell the ongoing challenges to his authority from people who will never accept his leadership. It's not about whether he was born in Hawaii. It's the imposition of never-ending hurdles, and it's motivated by the idea that racial minorities are 'others' who must prove their right to have a real place in the leadership of American institutions."

(tags: via:robschmidt barackobama rightwing racism)

"Analyzing individual relationships to make a broader political point can be tricky, as Ta-Nehisi Coates notes. He wrote last year that one big problem when talking about black men dating white women is the 'kind of collectivist approach toward something as individual and private as marriage.'”

(tags: via:elahe interracialrelationships sports blackmen whitewomen)