The New Poor - Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Gains

Josh Anderson for The New York Times

Tyrone Banks in his home in Memphis. He is in danger of losing it after the payments on his mortgage rose and he lost his job at FedEx. More Photos »

By MICHAEL POWELL

MEMPHIS — For two decades, Tyrone Banks was one of many African-Americans who saw his economic prospects brightening in this Mississippi River city.

A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college.

Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure.

“I’m going to tell you the deal, plain-spoken: I’m a black man from the projects and I clean toilets and mop up for a living,” said Mr. Banks, a trim man who looks at least a decade younger than his 50 years. “I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. But my whole life is backfiring.”

Not so long ago, Memphis, a city where a majority of the residents are black, was a symbol of a South where racial history no longer tightly constrained the choices of a rising black working and middle class. Now this city epitomizes something more grim: How rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress.

The median income of black homeowners in Memphis rose steadily until five or six years ago. Now it has receded to a level below that of 1990 — and roughly half that of white Memphis homeowners, according to an analysis conducted by Queens College Sociology Department for The New York Times.

Black middle-class neighborhoods are hollowed out, with prices plummeting and homes standing vacant in places like Orange Mound, White Haven and Cordova. As job losses mount — black unemployment here, mirroring national trends, has risen to 16.9 percent from 9 percent two years ago; it stands at 5.3 percent for whites — many blacks speak of draining savings and retirement accounts in an effort to hold onto their homes. The overall local foreclosure rate is roughly twice the national average.

The repercussions will be long-lasting, in Memphis and nationwide. The most acute economic divide in America remains the steadily widening gap between the wealth of black and white families, according to a recent study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University. For every dollar of wealth owned by a white family, a black or Latino family owns just 16 cents, according to a recent Federal Reserve study.

The Economic Policy Institute’s forthcoming “The State of Working America” analyzed the recession-driven drop in wealth. As of December 2009, median white wealth dipped 34 percent, to $94,600; median black wealth dropped 77 percent, to $2,100. So the chasm widens, and Memphis is left to deal with the consequences.

“This cancer is metastasizing into an economic crisis for the city,” said Mayor A. C. Wharton Jr. in his riverfront office. “It’s done more to set us back than anything since the beginning of the civil rights movement.”

The mayor and former bank loan officers point a finger of blame at large national banks — in particular, Wells Fargo. During the last decade, they say, these banks singled out blacks in Memphis to sell them risky high-cost mortgages and consumer loans.

The City of Memphis and Shelby County sued Wells Fargo late last year, asserting that the bank’s foreclosure rate in predominantly black neighborhoods was nearly seven times that of the foreclosure rate in predominantly white neighborhoods. Other banks, including Citibank and Countrywide, foreclosed in more equal measure.

In a recent regulatory filing, Wells Fargo hinted that its legal troubles could multiply. “Certain government entities are conducting investigations into the mortgage lending practices of various Wells Fargo affiliated entities, including whether borrowers were steered to more costly mortgage products,” the bank stated.

Wells Fargo officials are not backing down in the face of the legal attacks. They say the bank made more prime loans and has foreclosed on fewer homes than most banks, and that the worst offenders — those banks that handed out bushels of no-money-down, negative-amortization loans — have gone out of business.

“The mistake Memphis officials made is that they picked the lender who was doing the most lending as opposed to the lender who was doing the worst lending,” said Brad Blackwell, executive vice president for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage.

Not every recessionary ill can be heaped upon banks. Some black homeowners contracted the buy-a-big-home fever that infected many Americans and took out ill-advised loans. And unemployment has pitched even homeowners who hold conventional mortgages into foreclosure.

Federal and state officials say that high-cost mortgages leave hard-pressed homeowners especially vulnerable and that statistical patterns are inescapable.

“The more segregated a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeowners will face foreclosure because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities,” Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, told a Congressional committee.

The reversal of economic fortune in Memphis is particularly grievous for a black professional class that has taken root here, a group that includes Mr. Wharton, a lawyer who became mayor in 2009. Demographers forecast that Memphis will soon become the nation’s first majority black metropolitan region.

That prospect, noted William Mitchell, a black real estate agent, once augured for a fine future.

“Our home values were up, income up,” he said. He pauses, his frustration palpable. “What we see today, it’s a new world. And not a good one.”

Porch View

“You don’t want to walk up there! That’s the wild, wild west,” a neighbor shouts. “Nothing on that block but foreclosed homes and squatters.”

To roam Soulsville, a neighborhood south of downtown Memphis, is to find a place where bungalows and brick homes stand vacant amid azaleas and dogwoods, where roofs are swaybacked and thieves punch holes through walls to strip the copper piping. The weekly newspaper is swollen with foreclosure notices.

Here and there, homes are burned by arsonists.

Yet just a few years back, Howard Smith felt like a rich man. A 56-year-old African-American engineer with a gray-flecked beard, butter-brown corduroys and red sneakers, he sits with two neighbors on a porch on Richmond Avenue and talks of his miniature real estate empire: He owned a home on this block, another in nearby White Haven and another farther out. His job paid well; a pleasant retirement beckoned.

Then he was laid off. He has sent out 60 applications, obtained a dozen interviews and received no calls back. A bank foreclosed on his biggest house. He will be lucky to get $30,000 for his house here, which was assessed at $80,000 two years ago.

“It all disappeared overnight,” he says.

“Mmm-mm, yes sir, overnight,” says his neighbor, Gwen Ward. In her 50s, she, too, was laid off, from her supervisory job of 15 years, and she moved in with her elderly mother. “It seemed we were headed up and then” — she snaps her fingers — “it all went away.”

Mr. Smith nods. “The banks and Wall Street have taken the middle class and shredded us,” he says.

For the greater part of the last century, racial discrimination crippled black efforts to buy homes and accumulate wealth. During the post-World War II boom years, banks and real estate agents steered blacks to segregated neighborhoods, where home appreciation lagged far behind that of white neighborhoods.

Blacks only recently began to close the home ownership gap with whites, and thus accumulate wealth — progress that now is being erased. In practical terms, this means black families have less money to pay for college tuition, invest in businesses or sustain them through hard times.

“We’re wiping out whatever wealth blacks have accumulated — it assures racial economic inequality for the next generation,” said Thomas M. Shapiro, director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.

The African-American renaissance in Memphis was halting. Residential housing patterns remain deeply segregated. While big employers — FedEx and AutoZone — have headquarters here, wage growth is not robust. African-American employment is often serial rather than continuous, and many people lack retirement and health plans.

But the recession presents a crisis of a different magnitude.

Mayor Wharton walks across his office to a picture window and stares at a shimmering Mississippi River. He describes a recent drive through ailing neighborhoods. It is akin, he says, to being a doctor “looking for pulse rates in his patients and finding them near death.”

He adds: “I remember riding my bike as a kid through thriving neighborhoods. Now it’s like someone bombed my city.”

Banking on Nothing

Camille Thomas, a 40-year-old African-American, loved working for Wells Fargo. “I felt like I could help people,” she recalled over coffee.

As the subprime market heated up, she said, the bank pressure to move more loans — for autos, for furniture, for houses — edged into mania. “It was all about selling your units and getting your bonus,” she said.

Ms. Thomas and three other Wells Fargo employees have given affidavits for the city’s lawsuit against the bank, and their statements about bank practices reinforce one another.

“Your manager would say, ‘Let me see your cold-call list. I want you to concentrate on these ZIP codes,’ and you knew those were African-American neighborhoods,” she recalled. “We were told, ‘Oh, they aren’t so savvy.’ ”

She described tricks of the trade, several of dubious legality. She said supervisors had told employees to white out incomes on loan applications and substitute higher numbers. Agents went “fishing” for customers, mailing live checks to leads. When a homeowner deposited the check, it became a high-interest loan, with a rate of 20 to 29 percent. Then bank agents tried to talk the customer into refinancing, using the house as collateral.

Several state and city regulators have placed Wells Fargo Bank in their cross hairs, and their lawsuits include similar accusations. In Illinois, the state attorney general has accused the bank of marketing high-cost loans to blacks and Latinos while selling lower-cost loans to white borrowers. John P. Relman, the Washington, D.C., lawyer handling the Memphis case, has sued Wells Fargo on behalf of the City of Baltimore, asserting that the bank systematically exploited black borrowers.

A federal judge in Baltimore dismissed that lawsuit, saying it had made overly broad claims about the damage done by Wells Fargo. City lawyers have refiled papers.

“I don’t think it’s going too far to say that banks are at the core of the disaster here,” said Phyllis G. Betts, director of the Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action at the University of Memphis, which has closely examined bank lending records.

Former employees say Wells Fargo loan officers marketed the most expensive loans to black applicants, even when they should have qualified for prime loans. This practice is known as reverse redlining.

Webb A. Brewer, a Memphis lawyer, recalls poring through piles of loan papers and coming across name after name of blacks with subprime mortgages. “This is money out of their pockets lining the purses of the banks,” he said.

For a $150,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points — the typical spread between a conventional and subprime loan — tacks on $90,000 in interest payments over its 30-year life.

Wells Fargo officials say they rejected the worst subprime products, and they portray their former employees as disgruntled rogues who subverted bank policies.

“They acknowledged that they knowingly worked to defeat our fair lending policies and controls,” said Mr. Blackwell, the bank executive.

Bank officials attribute the surge in black foreclosures in Memphis to the recession. They say that the average credit score in black Census tracts is 108 points lower than in white tracts.

“People who have less are more vulnerable during downturns,” said Andrew L. Sandler of Buckley Sandler, a law firm representing Wells Fargo.

Mr. Relman, the lawyer representing Memphis, is unconvinced. “If a bad economy and poor credit explains it, you’d expect to see other banks with the same ratio of foreclosures in the black community,” he said. “But you don’t. Wells is the outlier.”

Whatever the responsibility, individual or corporate, the detritus is plain to see. Within a two-block radius of that porch in Soulsville, Wells Fargo holds mortgages on nearly a dozen foreclosures. That trail of pain extends right out to the suburbs.

Begging to Stay

To turn into Tyrone Banks’s subdivision in Hickory Ridge is to find his dream in seeming bloom. Stone lions guard his door, the bushes are trimmed and a freshly waxed sport utility vehicle sits in his driveway.

For years, Mr. Banks was assiduous about paying down his debt: he stayed two months ahead on his mortgage, and he helped pay off his mother’s mortgage.

Two years ago, his doorbell rang, and two men from Wells Fargo offered to consolidate his consumer loans into a low-cost mortgage.

“I thought, ‘This is great! ’ ” Mr. Banks says. “When you have four kids, college expenses, you look for any savings.”

What those men did not tell Mr. Banks, he says (and Ms. Thomas, who studied his case, confirms), is that his new mortgage had an adjustable rate. When it reset last year, his payment jumped to $1,700 from $1,200.

Months later, he ruptured his Achilles tendon playing basketball, hindering his work as a janitor. And he lost his job at FedEx. Now foreclosure looms.

He is by nature an optimistic man; his smile is rueful.

“Man, I should I have stayed ‘old school’ with my finances,” he said. “I sat down my youngest son on the couch and I told him, ‘These are rough times.’ ”

Many neighbors are in similar straits. Foreclosure notices flutter like flags on the doors of two nearby homes, and the lawns there are overgrown and mud fills the gutters.

Wells Fargo says it has modified three mortgages for every foreclosure nationwide — although bank officials declined to provide the data for Memphis. A study by the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and six nonprofit groups found that the nation’s four largest banks, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, had cut their prime mortgage refinancing 33 percent in predominantly minority communities, even as prime refinancing in white neighborhoods rose 32 percent from 2006 to 2008.

For Mr. Banks, it is as if he found the door wide open on his way into debt but closed as he tries to get out.

“Some days it feels like everyone I know in Memphis is in trouble,” Mr. Banks says. “We’re all just begging to stay in our homes, basically.”

Muslim radio show talks up the taboo

Image by Ian Hayhurst via Flickr

By Raja Abdulrahim
Saturday, May 29, 2010; B02

LOS ANGELES As jazz music played, setting a relaxed mood, radio hosts Amir Mertaban and Mohamad Ahmad chatted casually with guest Isaac Yerushalmi.

The show could have dissolved into a heated argument between two Muslims and a Jew, but during the inaugural run of "Boiling Point" on what's billed as the nation's first Muslim talk-radio station, Mertaban was absorbed with more mundane matters.

Still wearing his burgundy Fairplex shirt from his day job as a manager for the Los Angeles County Fair, Mertaban looked over the show's introduction. He glanced at Yerushalmi's biography and a few reminders he had jotted down.

"Okay, I can't use the word 'freakin,' " he said to no one in particular.

In the control room, Nour Mattar, one of the founders of One Legacy Radio, clicked off some of the banned words. "I mean we're cool, but we still have Islamic character and morals, especially since we have a lot of kids, 16, 17, listening in. We don't want them to think this is okay." The hosts of "Boiling Point" -- a show that purports to take "taboo topics to the boiling point" -- are allowed one "What the heck" a show, said Ahmad, a UCLA law school graduate.

One Legacy Radio is an online broadcast that officially launched on http://www.onelegacyradio.com in November from a nondescript studio in an office park off the 5 Freeway in Irvine, Calif., with four weekly shows. Its three founders -- Muslims in their late 20s and early 30s who grew up in Britain and the United States -- have slowly increased the station's programming while trying to strike a balance between religious sensibilities and a more edgy, youth-driven conversation.

Although some of the programming is conventional, such as a show about converts and one devoted to parenting, "Boiling Point" and the religiously challenging "Face the Faith" are more provocative. The station owners are even working on a Muslim version of "Loveline," the often sexually charged syndicated call-in show.

It's an area the American Muslim media largely avoid and one the station owners' parents have shied away from or deemed un-Islamic.

"One Legacy is the fingerprint of the young Muslim ummah [community] -- it basically personifies the kind of ummah that we have right now," said Yasmin Bhuj, 31, a founder and marketing director who is married to Mattar. "If the generation before us did a radio station, it would be unrecognizable to what One Legacy is." Mattar said the station receives e-mails daily from young Muslims thanking them for tackling issues that are relevant to them.

"These are taboo topics that people don't talk about, but in Islam, you are allowed to talk about it," said Mattar, 32.

Taboo is a word heard often around the studio. The goal of the station and its founders isn't to ruffle religious feathers -- although that might happen -- but to create an outlet for the younger generation of Muslims in the United States whose parents mostly emigrated from parts of the Middle East and South Asia in the 1970s and '80s.

Saeed Khan, a history professor at Wayne State University who specializes in Muslim identity in the West, said many first-generation immigrants believed that Islam would act as a sort of divine shield against such societal ills as drug abuse and infidelity within the Muslim community.

Outlets like One Legacy, he said, have cropped up because of the limits of existing Muslim media.

During a January taping of "Objection!" -- about political issues and civil rights -- Reem Salahi interviewed a man whose brother, a U.S. citizen, has been held for several years in solitary confinement awaiting trial by the U.S. government. In the control room, Mattar and his brother Sami Matar (who spells his last name differently) sat at the console while browsing an online store for better radio equipment.

The studio has a slightly thrown-together look: prayer rugs draped over regular office tables and mismatched chairs. Most of the walls are painted deep purple and covered with sound-absorbing foam. Electric guitars, two ouds (Middle Eastern guitars) and a Middle Eastern drum lean against a rack.

On a wall there's a print by British street artist Banksy of a smiley-faced grim reaper, which with a long black veil pulled over its head resembles a Muslim woman wearing a hijab.

In an adjacent office, Mattar runs his online company, which sells laptop computer parts and funds the station's slim $7,000-a-month budget -- enough to pay for three part-time employees. They hope to begin selling radio ads soon. Someday, they hope, the station will be profitable.

Mattar, Bhuj and Mohammad Harake formed One Legacy Media in 2008 to publish Islamic books, CDs and DVDs, and hold educational seminars, the first of which was about marriage.

That's when they came up with the idea of a Muslim radio station. Years ago, they considered broadcasting from a low-frequency radio station with a maximum radius of 40 miles but then decided it wasn't practical. In early 2009, they decided to take advantage of the rising popularity of online broadcast and cellphone radio apps.

For much of the first year, the station streamed only Koran and religious lectures.

"Seven to 10 listeners a day, max," said Harake, 26, the sales and promotional director.

"A day? A month," Mattar said.

Since then, they have added iPhone, BlackBerry and Android apps. Mattar wouldn't disclose listenership numbers but said that the figure has doubled each month and that about 4,000 people have downloaded one of their cellphone apps.

The boldest addition to their lineup is likely to be what Harake likes to call "Muslim Loveline." The show would be far less raunchy that the syndicated show but would address such topics as pornography and premarital sex, both banned by Islam.

The hosts have a laundry list of topics to get their listeners riled up: polygamy, temporary marriages, Shiite and Sunni relations, and finding a spouse.

They had expected listeners to object to their pro-Israeli guest on their first show, but the feedback was entirely positive. The conversation mostly revolved around recent events at the University of California at Irvine between Muslim and Jewish students but ended in a non sequitur.

"Before you go, we talk about all the differences, we took it to the boiling point, the house is burning down right now -- I have to call the fire department, but let's talk about something that is very similar," Ahmad said to Yerushalmi.

"You're not doing this, for crying out loud," interjected Mertaban.

"I am doing this, I am gonna go there," Ahmad said, launching into a long-winded, meandering introduction that ended with a simple question to Yerushalmi: "Is your mother trying to find you a good Jewish girl?"

Mertaban jumped in: "Check it out, actions to words. You should marry a crazy Palestinian woman that is hard-core anti-Israel just to make a statement."

-- Los Angeles Times

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Arizona Law Is Stoking Unease Among Latinos

Image via Wikipedia

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

PHOENIX — When Gov. Jan Brewer signed Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law, giving police departments broad power to make immigration checks, she sought to allay concerns from Hispanic citizens and legal residents that they would be singled out for scrutiny.

“We have to trust our law enforcement,” Ms. Brewer said. “It’s simple reality. Police officers are going to be respectful. They understand what their jobs are. They’ve taken an oath, and racial profiling isn’t legal.”

Those words ring hollow to many Latinos, including Jesus Ruiz, 25, a college student in Mesa, Ariz., who, like many Latinos here, believes that all too often the police view them suspiciously and single them out for what they consider questionable stops or harassment.

In one stop in 2004, Mr. Ruiz said, an officer pulled him over for speeding 10 miles over the limit and went on to question him on where he was going to school and whether he lived with his parents, and finally asked for his Social Security number.

“I was thinking, is he supposed to be asking me for that and all these questions for a speeding ticket?” said Mr. Ruiz, who spray painted himself white and wrote on his body, “Am I reasonably suspicious?” at a recent protest against the new law, which goes into effect in late July.

But it is not just young people.

Judge Jose Padilla of Maricopa County Superior Court in Phoenix, says that twice since he became a judge in 2006, the police have pulled him over, alleging minor traffic infractions. Even though Judge Padilla, 60, did not disclose his occupation, he ended up not receiving a ticket. He said his complaints to the police department led to sensitivity training for the officers.

Judge Padilla believes the stops were based on his Hispanic ancestry and the fact that his 1988 pickup truck has large wheels and resembles a low rider, a customized car popular in Mexican-American culture but also favored by some street gangs.

Image via Wikipedia

“This has been lifelong, these stops,” he said, “and it is not just me.”

Now, Latinos and several police chiefs say they worry that the law, which requires the police, “when practicable” and if they have reasonable suspicion, to check the immigration status of people they stop, detain or arrest for another reason, will widen a chasm of trust that they have struggled to close.

Those concerns have reached the Justice Department, which is considering challenging the law in court, out of a concern, as Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on ABC’s “This Week,” that “we could potentially get on a slippery slope where people will be picked on because of how they look as opposed to what they have done.”

Though President Obama again criticized the law at a news conference Thursday, a majority of Americans support it, according to a CBS News poll released Tuesday. But recent surveys suggest a split along ethnic lines, with a majority of Latinos opposed to it. An Associated Press-Univision poll released May 13 showed nearly two-thirds of Hispanics opposed the Arizona law, compared with just 20 percent of non-Hispanics (45 percent favored it and 30 percent were neutral).

Antonio Bustamante, a veteran civil rights lawyer here who is helping organize protests against the law, explained by saying, “The majority in the country has not experienced being profiled so they don’t perceive it as an issue, just like they don’t accept discrimination in the country because they have not been discriminated against.”

Roberto Villaseñor, the chief of police in Tucson, said in a recent conference call with reporters that his city “is divided about this issue,” and he worries that immigrants will not report crimes or turn in criminals out of fear, justified or not, they will end up deported.

The law, Chief Villaseñor said, will instill “a level of mistrust” particularly in immigrant communities and break down years of efforts to combat the perception that the police collaborate with immigration agents.

Already, he said, there are anecdotal reports that some police departments in the state are asking people for their papers. He said his department had received a picture of a patrol car near a Border Patrol vehicle, as if proximity proved that officers were already collaborating to carry out the law.

Tensions between law enforcement and some Latinos have deep roots but have been aggravated by a spate of recent incidents and lawsuits.

A study conducted as part of the settlement of a racial profiling suit brought against the Arizona State Police found that over a one-year period ending in 2007, blacks and Hispanics were two and a half times more likely than whites to be searched by highway patrol officers even though the rate of seizure of contraband among whites was higher than for Hispanics and about the same as for blacks.

Memories also burn strong here of the so-called Chandler roundup, where the police in that Phoenix suburb worked with immigration agents to arrest more than 400 illegal immigrants — stopping scores of Latino citizens and legal residents to check their papers, in the process. The city settled a subsequent lawsuit for $500,000.

Today, a federal lawsuit and a Justice Department investigation continue against Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, who has been criticized for using stops for traffic offenses in a series of “crime suppression operations” to check people’s immigration status throughout metropolitan Phoenix.

It remains unclear what criteria the police will use in deciding what is a reasonable suspicion a person they stop is an illegal immigrant.

The new state law says the police cannot use race, color or ethnicity “except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona Constitution.”

Some civil rights lawyers find that clause worrisome.

They note that federal courts and the Arizona Supreme Court have upheld the right of federal agents enforcing immigration law to consider someone’s ethnicity, especially at or near the border, when deciding to question someone suspected of being an illegal immigrant.

A training manual as part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement program known as 287(g), which deputizes specially trained state and local police as immigration officers, lists a number of factors that can be used to make an immigration query, including “Does the subject have a thick foreign accent or appear not to speak English?” and “Does the subject’s appearance look like it is ‘out of place’ or as though the subject has just traveled?” and “Is the area known for its attraction to illegal aliens?”

Federal officials said the manual was being revised to clarify the criteria and emphasize that several other factors must be considered.

David Salgado, a Phoenix police officer who has filed one of five lawsuits to block the law, said it would be impossible not to take race or ethnicity into account to develop reasonable suspicion, given the proximity to the border and region’s large Hispanic population.

Officer Salgado said the fact that officers can check immigration status only after a stop for another reason is essentially meaningless because “you drive two or three blocks down the street I will find something to pull you over for — going over the double line, forgetting to signal for a lane change, it’s not hard.”

Nina Perales, a lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which also has sued, said non-Hispanic illegal immigrants would get a free pass.

“How does law enforcement form a reasonable suspicion that a white person is an alien absent a flat-out admission they are?” Ms. Perales asked.

Still, many Arizonans who support the law believe racial profiling concerns are overblown or a smokescreen to hide a belief that borders should be wide open.

“The police will do the right thing. The majority of them do,” said Sunday Schwein, a retired nurse in Payson, Ariz. “I really doubt they will pick people out just because of their race.”

Under an executive order signed by Ms. Brewer, the state’s police training board is developing a training course designed to guide officers in developing reasonable suspicion that somebody is an illegal immigrant.

A letter from the board to the governor last week indicated the training, in the form of a DVD with handouts for every officer in the state, would reflect that given to federal immigration officers as well as the state’s Department of Public Safety.

While several police chiefs oppose the law, groups representing rank-and-file officers support it and play down the concerns about racial profiling.

The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, a union representing police officers that supports the law, said some factors that might provoke reasonable suspicion include someone not carrying identification or using fake identification or possessing foreign identification without a visa.

But many Latinos remain unconvinced.

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China Aims to Stifle Tibet’s Photocopiers

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Published: May 20, 2010

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

BEIJING — The authorities have identified a new threat to political stability in the restive region of Tibet: photocopiers. Fearful that Tibetans might mass-copy incendiary material, public security officials intend to more tightly control printing and photocopying shops, according to reports from the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.

A regulation now in the works will require the operators of printing and photocopying shops to obtain a new permit from the government, the Lhasa Evening News reported this month. They will also be required to take down identifying information about their clients and the specific documents printed or copied, the newspaper said.

A public security official in Lhasa, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the regulation “is being implemented right now,” but on a preliminary basis. The official hung up the phone without providing further details.

Tibetan activists said the new controls were part of a broader effort to constrain Tibetan intellectuals after a March 2008 uprising that led to scores of deaths. Since the riots, more than 30 Tibetan writers, artists and other intellectuals have been detained for song lyrics, essays, telephone conversations and e-mail messages deemed to pose a threat to Chinese rule, according to a report issued this week by the International Campaign for Tibet, a human rights group based in Washington.

“Basically, the main purpose is to instill fear into people’s hearts,” said Woeser, an activist who, like many Tibetans, goes by one name. “In the past, the authorities tried to control ordinary people at the grass-roots level. But they have gradually changed their target to intellectuals in order to try to control thought.”

Ms. Woeser said she was also a target of the authorities for her views. She lost her job in Lhasa after her book “Notes on Tibet” was banned in 2003. She now lives in Beijing, but she said she was carefully watched by the authorities.

China’s leaders contend that their only goal is to guarantee stability, ethnic unity and better living standards for Tibetans. Officials say that as long as separatist leaders are kept firmly in check, continued economic development will win Tibetans over to Chinese rule.

But the International Campaign for Tibet’s report contends that the authorities are not merely punishing separatists, but also dissidents of all stripes who dare to criticize the government and defend Tibetans’ cultural and religious identity. A 47-year-old writer named Tragyal was arrested in April after he published a book calling on Tibetans to defend their rights through peaceful demonstrations, the report states. His current whereabouts is unknown, it said.

A popular Tibetan singer, Tashi Dhondup, was sentenced to 15 months at a labor camp in January after he released a new CD with a song calling for the return of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, according to the report. He had been arrested on suspicion of “incitement to split the nation,” the report states.

The Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 after a failed uprising against the Chinese authorities. He says he supports greater autonomy for Tibet but not secession. China says the Dalai Lama’s goal is an independent Tibet.

The authorities in Tibet apparently see printing and photocopying shops as potential channels through which unrest can spread. One Chinese print shop operator in Lhasa, who is of the majority Han ethnicity rather than Tibetan, said that her husband had been summoned to a meeting last week on the new requirements.

“You know sometimes people print documents in the Tibetan language, which we don’t understand,” said the woman, who gave her last name as Wu. “These might be illegal pamphlets.”

Tanzen Lhundup, a research fellow at the government-backed China Tibetology Research Center, which typically follows the government line on Tibet, said in an interview that “the regulation itself is not wrong.” But he said that it should have been put before the public before it was put in place.

“They have never issued such a regulation before,” he said. “On what grounds do they want to issue it? I think citizens should be consulted first.”

Zhang Jing contributed research.

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Guitar Heroes

Can a battle of the bands help end a brutal insurgency in India?

By Jeremy Kahn

Image credit: Sanjit Das

The young man warming his hands over a bucket of coals looks nervous. He opens his mouth wide, like a python swallowing a deer, then snaps it shut. “I’m trying to relax my jaw,” Lui Tzudir says. Tzudir is the 26-year-old front man for an alternative-rock band called Original Fire Factor, or OFF. Huddled nearby, the band’s two guitarists—one with dreadlocks, the other with headbanger-long hair—tune and retune their instruments while the drummer beats out a rhythm on the back of a chair. In little clusters around the cold, concrete room, other bands perform similar preshow rituals. The air smells of adrenaline, like a locker room before a high-school track meet.

The members of OFF look like the sort of Asian cool kids you might find jamming in a garage in Palo Alto or Seoul—but those places are worlds away. I am backstage at the Hornbill National Rock Contest, a battle of the bands held each December in Kohima, the capital of Nagaland, a forgotten corner of northeast India near the border with Burma. The contest seeks to crown India’s best unsigned rock act. For OFF and the other bands, winning means $10,000 and a chance at national recognition—perhaps even a record deal. But the stakes are higher for the state government, which set up the competition. It is betting that rock and roll might help end one of the longest-running insurgencies in Asia.

The rock contest is a modern addition to the larger Hornbill cultural festival, a kind of anthropological fair designed to showcase the folkways of the Nagas, the 30 or so related tribes that inhabit this region of mist-and-jungle-clad hills. The Nagas once had a fearsome reputation as warriors and headhunters. (At the festival, men of the Konyak tribe wear distinctive family heirlooms called yanra—necklaces strung with little human heads made of brass, one for every enemy decapitated in battle.) They resisted British rule until 1880, when they reached an uneasy accommodation with the colonial administration. As the British prepared to leave after World War II, the Nagas sought to establish their own country, and when neither London nor the newly independent India consented, they started an armed insurrection that has lasted 55 years, claiming thousands of lives. Today, convoys of the Assam Rifles—the Indian paramilitary force whose heavy-handed tactics have turned its motto, “Friends of the Hill People,” into an Orwellian joke—patrol Kohima with their faces hidden by black scarves, assault rifles at the ready.

Ending the insurgency is a priority for New Delhi. Naga tribes have become involved in rebellions in other northeastern states, and their example has encouraged other ethnic groups in the region to take up arms. India’s strategic rivals, Pakistan and China, have at times helped to arm and train the Naga rebels, using them as proxy fighters.

But a lasting peace settlement has proved elusive, and with the conflict deadlocked, the rebels have resorted to drug-running, kidnapping, extortion, and fratricidal killings among splinter groups. The violence has scared off desperately needed outside investment. The state’s only heavy industry, a paper mill, shut down in 1992, and nothing has taken its place. (Signs lining the route to the festival promote gathering honey from the forest as “sustainable development.”) With a population of just 2 million, Nagaland has 40,000 unemployed secondary-school graduates—offering the rebels a pool of angry young men without other prospects. In rural villages, the insurgents simply draft farmers’ sons into their ranks.

The members of OFF claim to care little about the separatist movement or its dream of an independent Greater Nagaland. “We are meant to believe certain things,” Tzudir says. “But the younger generation are not interested.”

Nagaland’s popular chief minister, Neiphiu Rio, wants to give these young Nagas alternatives. He has quixotic dreams of turning Kohima into India’s answer to Nashville or Motown. The rock contest is part of that plan. It is designed to connect Nagaland’s musicians to the outside world and, just maybe, to help reconcile feuding Naga tribes. “Any festival brings people together,” Rio tells me. “And when they start working together, moving together, doing things together, that brings people closer and brings understanding and unity.”

Tzudir and his band mates remain cynical. (“It’s nonsense,” Akum Aier, OFF’s long-haired bassist, says when I ask him about a new peace overture from the Indian government.) And yet, in one respect, Rio’s plan is already working. The guys in OFF don’t feel compelled to join an underground faction, and they are beginning to see rock and roll as a ticket out of Nagaland.

The question is: Where to go? Young Nagas feel alienated from “mainland India,” as they call the rest of the country. Most Nagas look East Asian, not South Asian, and those who travel to other Indian cities for education or work sometimes face discrimination or assault. Nagas speak English or Nagamese, not Hindi. They prefer Korean pop or American death metal to Bollywood or Bhangra. In a nation of Hindus, Jains, and Muslims, most Nagas are Baptist, thanks to American missionaries who ventured here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“Every morning, I get up wishing I had been born somewhere else,” a 31-year-old engineer confesses to me during a party one night in Kohima.

OFF opens its first set at the festival with “Free Me,” a song that captures this longing for escape and the impossibility of realizing it: “Take me to some place where I can never be / Where I’ll become who I was meant to be,” Tzudir sings, his face aglow in multicolored stage lights. “Politics and sermons, you can’t move me.”

It is sometimes said that the Nagas have lived “10,000 years in a lifetime.” And on the competition’s last night, all 10,000 years seem to go by in a glance: girls in skinny jeans furiously thumb text messages while rubbing shoulders with guys in loincloths and headdresses who carry machetes and wicker baskets decorated with monkey skulls. Thousands of teenagers pack the outdoor amphitheater. The crowd is raucous, fueled by copious local rice beer. A wave of delighted screams washes over OFF, among the hometown favorites, as they take the stage. Throughout their set, fans in the front leap up and down like the colored balls in a toy corn popper.

When the machine-generated fog of rock war finally lifts, OFF emerges as the winner. “We still can’t believe it,” Tzudir texts me from backstage. The next morning I ask him what the band plans to do with the prize money. “Most will go to paying off the loans on our instruments,” Tzudir says, his voice still hoarse. “Then to make a recording of our songs and maybe upload it to the Net, or something like that.”

For a moment, it is easy to believe in the transformative power of rock and roll. The leaders of the largest Naga rebel faction recently met with top Indian officials, and both sides say they are serious about reaching a settlement. But they remain far apart on the details—and in Nagaland, gunfire has a way of drowning out a rocking bass line.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/guitar-heroes/8108/

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Compassion, prejudice and American Muslims

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Walied Shater
Saturday, May 15, 2010; A15

I woke up early on Sept. 12, 2001, to get ready for work. I put on my best suit, my only custom-made shirt, my most expensive Nordstrom tie. I shined my shoes. I was tense and nervous and did not know what to expect from my co-workers. I had, by chance, been off duty the day before, the day of the horrific attacks on the United States, and of course by late evening on Sept. 11, the names of the suspected hijackers began to come out. All were Arabic or Muslim names like mine.

Since January 2000, I had been assigned to the most important division in the U.S. Secret Service: the Presidential Protective Division, commonly known as PPD. I held a top-secret clearance, reported to the White House daily, and traveled routinely on Air Force One or Marine One with the president. I loved the experience. I had never felt discriminated against at work or socially, except for a few "terrorist" jokes. I was a welcomed and trusted member of the division.

Sept. 12 was different, though. Nineteen men had killed close to 3,000 Americans the day before in the name of my religion.

As I entered the White House, I prepared myself mentally for the verbal barrage to come. I had grown up a tough kid in Brooklyn and had been raised a proud American Muslim.

As I walked to the office for agents on the president's detail, I was intercepted by a supervisor named Ron. When he asked to speak with me, I said I had to put my equipment bag in the office and would come right back. I was trying to buy time to get ready for what might come. As I approached Ron, a tall and strong man in his early 50s, I thought, "Here it comes, stay cool."

Image via Wikipedia

Ron put his hand on my right shoulder and said: "Walied, I am glad you are here with us today." My defenses crumbled, and my eyes welled up at this simple act of compassion. I said thanks and excused myself.

Ron stood up as a preemptive strike to anyone who might have said something to me that day. He told me I belonged. He embodied what was great about America. As the day went on I felt ashamed of the fears I had felt earlier.

When I concluded my five-year assignment on the PPD in 2005, managers told me I had led more presidential security advance teams than any other agent since 2000. My wife and I were proud of my work and proud for a nation in which an American Muslim can achieve anything. That is America.

Today, though, American Muslims feel under siege. Too many feel the American dream is not for them. For a few, radicalization is the next step. Anti-Muslim rhetoric has reached epic proportions in broader U.S. society -- largely tolerated, rarely condemned. While "terrorism experts" cite frequent travel to Muslim countries or Internet videos as primers for radicalization, the core primer, which is largely unremarked upon, is the siege mentality surrounding American Muslims.

Many factors contribute to this mentality, including rhetoric from fringe hate groups, the demonization of Muslims by Hollywood and repeated questions of loyalty by (conservative)

commentators. Nothing is more debilitating to the psyche of American Muslims than to have those in positions of authority remain silent after such

comments or, worse, contribute to the hostility.

American Muslims notice when, as happened last week, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service stopped using an anti-Muslim film "Obsession: Radical Islam's Obsession with the West" to train agents. But American Muslims also notice when a Florida Republican candidate for Congress, Dan Fanelli, runs television ads in which he points to a white man and asks, "Does this look like a terrorist?" and then turns to an Arab-looking man and asks, "Or this?"

Or when Congress invites the preacher Franklin Graham to speak at the National Day of Prayer event on Capitol Hill despite Graham's infamous remarks about Islam as a "very evil and wicked religion."

U.S. leaders need to do much more to help bring American Muslims into the mainstream. The president and others should follow the example set by former secretary of state Colin Powell when he endorsed then-candidate Barack Obama on "Meet the Press." Reacting to assertions that Obama was Muslim, Powell asked, "Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president?"

Not just American Muslims but all Americans need to see and hear examples of people like my former supervisor and Colin Powell.

The writer served as a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service from 1995 to 2007.

View all comments that have been posted about this article.

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God and democracy - Inside Indonesia

A Christian church is asserting its democratic rights by suing the mayor of Depok

Melissa Crouch

The construction of the church has been on hold Sukron Hadi

Places of worship are an extremely sensitive subject in contemporary Indonesia. Recent years have seen radical Islamic groups take the law into their own hands as they damage the places of worship of religious minorities, or force others to close by threats of violence. Local government leaders are also becoming more proactive against religious minorities, sometimes cancelling permits for places of worship that have already been granted. One of the first victims was the Christian Batak Protestant Congregation of Cinere, a town in the province of West Java. In May 2009, the mayor of Depok cancelled their permit to build a place of worship, despite the fact that construction of the building had already commenced. In response, the church asserted their democratic rights by filing a legal case in the Administrative Court of Bandung.

This case is significant for two main reasons. First, it is highly symbolic because the church belongs to the largest protestant denomination in Indonesia, with an estimated 3.5 million members across Indonesia. Second, this is one of the first court actions taken by a church against a mayor in relation to a dispute over a permit for a place of worship in Indonesia.

History of the dispute

On 13 June 1998, the mayor of Bogor granted the church a permit to build a place of worship. Four months later, the construction of the church commenced. Throughout 1999, however, large demonstrations by various radical Islamic groups such as the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) were held in opposition to the building of the church. In July 2000, the then mayor of Depok, Badrul Kamal, sent a letter to the church recommending that construction cease temporarily until the opposition died down. This effectively caused all construction works to grind to a halt until 2008, when the church decided to recommence building. The church wrote to the mayor of Depok, Nur Mahmudi Ismail, on three separate occasions asking for clarification of the validity of their permit and for protection. They had only completed the foundations and the first level of the building before their plans were again thwarted by demonstrations held in opposition to the church.

Then on 27 March 2009, with no prior warning to the church, the mayor issued a decision which cancelled the church’s original permit. Betty Sitorus, the current deputy chair of the church building committee, suspects that this decision was made to gain support for the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) in the 2010 local elections in the city of Depok. According to her, when the church questioned the mayor about his decision, he emphasised the fact that he made the decision as a Muslim and as a representative (and former chair) of PKS.

Local groups opposed to the building of the church Sukron Hadi

The mayor’s decision was based on submissions from various government bodies and community groups, such as the Muslim Community Solidarity Forum, an Islamic group that claims to represent the aspirations of local Muslims in Depok. According to the forum head, they demanded that the church permit be revoked because it had acted unfairly by failing to comply with the Joint Regulation of 2006 on Places of Worship, which outlines the process to obtain a permit.

The mayor also relied on letters from the local branch of the Ministry of Religion and from the newly-established Inter-religious Harmony Forum, a body established by the reforms introduced by the 2006 joint regulation at the provincial and city/district level to facilitate the application process for permits for establishing places of worship and to assist in the prevention and resolution of disputes. In fact, the ministry’s brief letter simply recommended that it was the responsibility of the mayor to take action to resolve the conflict. Similarly, the Inter-religious Harmony Forum of Depok in fact did not suggest that the mayor cancel the existing permit, as explained by Dr Lodewijk Gultom, one of the forum’s two Protestant representatives. According to Gultom, the forum has been unable to prevent escalating tensions and, through a misinterpretation of its recommendation, was used by the mayor to legitimise his decision. This eventually led the church to take court action.

Resistance through the courts

The church, represented by its current national leader, Reverend Bonar Napitupulu, and the Cinere church pastor, Reverend Mori Sihombing, filed a lawsuit in the State Administrative Court of Bandung on 6 May 2009 challenging the decision of the mayor to cancel the building permit. Represented by lawyer Junimart, they argued that the church had obtained the permit legally and had fulfilled the conditions of both national and local building laws. They claimed that the mayor had no legal basis on which to cancel their permit, and that his decision was against the right to freedom of religion under Indonesia’s constitution. Junimart pointed out that the church had obtained the signatures of over 100 local residents as evidence of local support for the court – more than is required under Joint Regulation of 2006.

The mayor tells a different story. In responding to the church’s allegations, he referred to the changes that have taken place since decentralisation and the introduction of the joint regulation. He points out that the village of Cinere was only formed in 1999 as part of the process of decentralisation, and that the permit was obtained before this time. This means the head of the village of Cinere never had the opportunity to consider the application. Further, he argues that the original permit could no longer be valid because it was issued under an old regulation concerning places of worship that is no longer in operation.

However, Joint Regulation of 2006 confirms that permits issued prior to 2006 are still valid and legal. According to Fatmawati Djugo, lawyer for the Indonesian Christian Church of Bogor in a similar case in 2008, this provision clarifies that a place of worship which holds a permit under the old system does not need to obtain another permit. In addition, she emphasised that a mayor or district head does not have the power to cancel permits merely because there is opposition from the local community. A clear dispute resolution process is set out under the Joint Regulation. If there is dispute over a proposal for a place of worship, a meeting must first be held by the local community. If that fails to resolve the dispute, consultations are to be arranged with the local division of the Ministry of Religion and the local Inter-religious Harmony Forum. If that is not successful, the case can then be taken to court.

The Cinere case is among the first examples of a church congregation taking its case to court

In the Depok court case, the evidence was inconclusive at best. Both sides produced local Muslim residents as witnesses. Those for the plaintiff testified that they did not have any objections to the construction of the church, while the witnesses for the defence testified to the history of opposition to the church. Large crowds of people turned up in force at the court hearings demanding the closure of the church, many wearing clothes bearing the words ‘Front Pembela Islam’ (Islamic Defenders Front), the name of a radical Islamic group infamous for its use of violence.

After ten years of uncertainty, the court stepped in. On 29 October 2009, the court found that the church had obtained the permit legally under the old regulation and that the building fulfilled the requirements of national and local building laws. The court found that the church was not misusing the permit, which is the only ground on which a mayor could legitimately cancel a permit. On this basis, the court ruled in favour of the church. The mayor has since appealed the decision.

Regulating places of worship

As this incident suggests, local authorities continue to use conflict over places of worship as opportunities for political gain in the highly competitive political atmosphere that has developed since the downfall of Suharto in 1998. The church in Cinere is not the only example. The permit of the Indonesian Christian Church of Bogor was cancelled in 2008, as was the permit of the Santa Maria Catholic church of Purwakarta in October 2009. Both of these incidents occurred in the province of West Java, which has a high rate of church closures by radical Islamic groups. According to the Indonesian Christian Communication Forum, 70 of the 400 churches closed under the New Order (1966-98) occurred in West Java. In 2005 alone, the National Indonesian Communion of Churches recorded that about 50 churches were destroyed or forced to close in the province. Against this background, this case is notable because a religious minority turned to the legal process to assert their newly-found democratic rights. It is even more significant that they won the case.

Regulating the construction of places of worship and containing conflicts arising in the process remains a significant challenge for the national government. As these cases show, the Joint Regulation introduced in 2006 has largely failed to prevent attacks or closures on the places of worship of religious minorities. The outcome of the mayor’s appeal against the church in Cinere is a significant test case in this regard – even if the church is successful, the real issue is whether the court decision will have any effect in practice.

Melissa Crouch (m.crouch@unimelb.edu.au) is writing a PhD at the University of Melbourne’s Law School. She is a research assistant on Professor Tim Lindsey’s Federation Fellowship project, ‘Islam and Modernity’ in the same faculty.

Inside Indonesia 100: Apr-Jun 2010

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Arizona Government Is Racist

Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via Flickr

City Brights: Michael Yaki : Arizona law banning Ethnic Studies: Arizona Gov't is the real racist.

by Michael Yaki

Arizona once again delves into uncharted constitutional waters by seeking to ban courses catering to minority--again, in this case, primarily Hispanic -- students. Indeed, the Arizona State Superintendent, Tom Horne, said it was written to target Mexican or Chicano ethnic studies classes, which he claims divides students by race and promotes race resentment.

The statute bans courses that "promote resentment toward a race or class of people . . . are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group . . and advocate ethnic solidarity." The statute then goes onto exempt courses on the Holocaust because, of course, without that exemption, every class that shows Schindler's List where at the conclusion you resent the Nazis (a class of people) and wanting to save the Jews (promoting solidarity), you would have violated Horne's law.

Horne's dilemma is that enforcement will be so arbitrary, so capricious, relying, most likely, on Horne's particular biases and whims that the statute is begging for a First Amendment challenge. How do you quantify or measure "resentment." "Ethnic solidarity?" If two Latino students, hearing about the plight of migrant workers in the lettuce fields of California, feel that they should send a donation to the United Farm Workers to help them combat the agrigrower owners, has that crossed a line? If a teacher shows "Roots" and black students feel compelled to talk about the anger they still feel at the legacy of slavery, is that a violation? If students leave a classroom finally understanding the prejudice and struggles of their parents of whatever race or religion or background, and feeling justifiably angry, will Tom Horne be there with a questionnaire to gauge whether their teacher fueled their discontent so he can yank their funding?

Image by aprilzosia via Flickr

And let's not forget Arizona's participation in one of the most shameful acts of racism in American history: the incarceration of over 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. The Arizona desert was a lovely place for west coast Americans to spend their time simply because of their ethnic heritage. If a Park Ranger spoke at a class in Arizona about Gila River and Poston, and condemned the paranoia and racism at the time, and several Asian American students petitioned their school to form an afterschool group for Asian Americans, is that the "ethnic solidarity" deemed a no-no by the law?

I remember a history class at UC Berkeley I took on American history. It left me shaken, and angry, and ultimately disappointed that my high school history glossed over the tremendous struggles that workers and minorities suffered through in the rise of the industrial age. If anything, shouldn't Tom Horne be targeting universities, the real hot-beds of controversial thinking? On-line education? Any Learning Annex lecture given by a minority lecturer? Isn't Horne, Brewer, and the entire Arizona Legislature, plain and simple, engaging in censorship and whitewashing promoted by a state government?

If the Governor, legislature, and education departments of Arizona are worried about "resentment" towards them by the substantial Latino population in the state, there are greater things to worry about than simply 1984'ing the state curriculum. Perhaps if they addressed the inequities in health care, living conditions, the standard of living for many Latinos living there the "resentment" level might just die down. Perhaps if they didn't pass laws targeting Latinos, regardless of citizenship, for racial profiling and police interrogations on the "suspicion" that they may be undocumented persons there wouldn't be any fears of "resentment."

Learning about your heritage and your roots is part of who we are as Americans. Perhaps if the Arizona government recognized that undeniable, indisputable fact, if they just behaved like human beings who should care about other human beings, without regard to skin color, ethnicity, or nationality, then maybe, just maybe, their claims about "ethnic chauvinism" wouldn't sound so hypocritical. Because, right now, everything they have done in the past month bears the ugly stain of racism.

Posted By: Michael Yaki (Email) | May 15 2010 at 08:33 AM

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/yaki/detail??blogid=68&entry_id=63669#ixzz0o1NW8oCg