In July 2009, a series of violent clashes erupted between Uighurs, Chinese state police, and Han residents in the city of Urumqi resulting in over 200 dead and over one thousand injured. In the weeks following the riots, Chinese state police and security forces rounded up hundreds of Uighurs.

Among several others tried for involvement in the rioting, these nine men were sentenced to death after separate trials in early October. On October 30, an appeals court in Urumqi upheld their death sentences. After apparent review of the sentences by the Supreme People’s Court, the men were executed. Most of the men prosecuted for their involvement in the uprising had Uighur names.

In a recent report, Human Rights Watch documented 43 cases of Uighur men who have disappeared following the Urumqi riots.

According to the article, the response to this trend has been two-fold.  First, legislators in Parliament have begun drafting and debating legislation that would criminalize racial discrimination. Opponents of the legislation believe the law will encourage immigration, drive up crime rates, and push native workers out of their jobs.

Second, following media coverage of the incident, prosecutors charged a man who used racial slurs against a mixed-race group with contempt, signaling the first time such charges have been used to punish an allegedly racist offense. In that case, a Korean man shouted racial slurs at a Korean woman and East Indian man who were traveling together on a bus.

This is evidenced most clearly by Louisiana Justice of Peace Keith Bardwell, who just last week refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple.  In defense of his actions, Bardwell told the AP, “I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” and that “[t]here is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage, I think those children suffer and I won’t help put them through it.”  Bardwell’s objection, particularly as it relates to his stated concern for the children of an interracial marriage, seems ironic.  This is particularly true since it was Barack Obama’s election that caused many in our society to say and even perhaps believe that we have overcome racism in America.  And yet, as we know, Obama himself is the product of an interracial couple.

Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay, the couple denied a license by Bardwell, expressed shock, saying “It’s not something you expect in this day and age.”  Similar sentiments popped up immediately after this story was publicized.  People around the country voiced their astonishment that something like this could happen in our modern society.   Bardwell holds firm in saying he did nothing wrong and even asserts that his action was completely legal because he did not actually prevent Humphrey and McKay from getting married, he just refused to personally perform the ceremony.

The bigger issue here of course is what type of precedent Bardwell’s actions will set.  What happens if all the judges in Louisiana start refusing to perform marriage ceremonies for interracial couples?  Will interracial couples soon have to cross state lines to get married?  Are we back to the days prior to Loving v. Virgina (388 U.S. 1 (1967))?  Now it seems obvious that we do not live in a “post-racial” society, but more importantly it appears that we have also lost significant ground in de-institutionalizing racism.

Both the California Lawyer article and Sacramento News & Review article Deep Impact by Cosmo Garvin report on the Avon and Glen Elder Neighborhood Association’s (AGENA’s) David and Goliath battle to keep billions of cubic feet of volatile natural gas from being placed under their homes. LSNC Staff Attorney Colin Bailey, lead counsel for AGENA, likens placement of the proposed gas storage site under the mostly of color Sacramento neighborhood of middle to lower-income homeowners to “living next to a nuclear facility.” AGENA, led by president Constance Slider (who is featured in the SN&R piece) and represented by LSNC and others, has staved off the gas storage siting for more than one year. GIS mapping has been essential to AGENA’s environmental justice successes as well as in preventing and mitigating cuts in local indigent health care programs in the Sacramento region. Visit LSNC’s GIS mapping page for more information about mapping resources and tutorials.

In another initiative, HUD will commission the first-ever national study of the impact of discrimination against members of the LGBT community in the rental and sale of housing. HUD compares this planned study with research it undertook in 1977, 1989 and 2000 to study the impact of housing discrimination based on race and color. See HUD’s press release on these initiatives for more details and a link to a study by Michigan’s Fair Housing Centers that found that nearly one-third of same sex couples were treated differently from different sex couples when attempting to rent or buy a place to live.

A New York Times article recently highlighted ongoing struggles to create and / or replace affordable housing in New Orleans and neighboring parishes. In both predominately white suburbs and in primarily black neighborhoods in the New Orleans city limits, proposed low- or mixed-income developments have met with staunch opposition, but the opposition has been particularly fierce in St. Bernard Parish east of the city. In September 2009 a federal district judge held the parish in contempt for violation of a consent order and a previous court order enforcing it.

The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (GNO) brought the original lawsuit, which the consent order settled. The suit challenged several ordinances enacted by the St. Bernard Parish Council. Most notable was the infamous “blood-relative” ordinance of September 2006. This ordinance would have required application for a permissive use permit to allow occupancy of any single-family residence by anyone other than a family member “within the first, second or third direct ascending or descending generation(s).” Since whites owned 93% of the houses in St. Bernard Parish before Katrina, the ordinance had glaring racial implications. The consent order, approved by the district court in February 2008, enjoined the parish from violating the Fair Housing Act and enforcing the discriminatory ordinances.

In September 2008, however, St. Bernard Parish enacted a twelve-month moratorium on multi-family development in the parish. At the time of the introduction and passage of this moratorium, a real estate developer (Provident) had begun the process of constructing four affordable housing developments in St. Bernard Parish.  GNO argued that the moratorium violated the consent order and filed a motion to enforce the order.  Judge Berrigan agreed, finding ample evidence of disparate impact, discriminatory intent, and discriminatory effect of the moratorium. In March, 2009, she enjoined enforcement of the moratorium and ordered St. Bernard Parish to rescind it. [Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center v. St. Bernard Parish, 2009 WL 2399999, E.D.La., 2009.]

The parish’s fight against the affordable housing projects continued. After the court’s March order, St. Bernard Parish denied or delayed the Provident’s applications to re-subdivide the site of the the proposed projects. In August 2009, Judge Berrigan granted GNO / Provident’s motion for contempt and, again, enforced the consent order, finding that “[t]he objections raised [to the applications for minor re-subdivision], by both the Planning Commission and the Parish Council, [were] irrelevant to the re-subdivision process and pretextual.” (2009 WL 2567186, 16, E.D.La., 2009.) Amazingly, that didn’t stop the Planning Commission from denying the application again, construing it as a “major re-subdivision.”

GNO went back to court with yet another motion for contempt and to enforce the consent order. “This is the third time that this Court is called upon to determine whether or not defendants violated orders governing this case,” Judge Berrigan said in her opinion granting the motion. She applauded the immediate and earnest recovery efforts of the parish, one of the areas hit hardest by Katrina, pointing out the incongruity between the parish’s actions to block the affordable housing development, and its otherwise valiant “spirit of recovery”:

[W]hen parish officials were initially approached by Provident, they appeared to welcome their offer of affordable housing, and for good reason. The four modestly sized housing units would bring $60 million of investment into the parish, without any cost to the parish…. Each project was estimated to produce $40,000 in annual property taxes, for a total of $160,000 a year…. Each development was mixed-income with thirty percent of the units rented at fair market rates, fifty percent at 60% of Area Median Income and twenty percent at 30% of Area Median Income. These rents were targeted to the incomes of the St. Bernard Parish workforce, such as teachers, policemen, firemen, nurses, refinery workers, dock workers, cooks, waiters, and retail sales people….

Plaintiff’s expert in affordable housing, Kalima Rose, opined
that even if St. Bernard proceeded with all the currently available federal resources and projects, including Provident, that only twenty percent of the lost rental stock would be replaced. Provident’s projects clearly promise long and short term gains for the parish.

Nevertheless, since the fall of 2008, certain St. Bernard Parish officials have repeatedly taken actions to thwart, delay and derail the proposed developments…. [Id.]

Judge Berrigan’s September order deemed the re-subdivision applications approved, and imposed monetary sanctions if the Parish fails, without good cause, to meet any of the deadlines in the opinion. The sanctions would begin at $5,000 for the first day, “increasing to $10,000 each day thereafter per each individual missed deadline…” With this latest hammer, it appears that the affordable housing project can move forward.

As most REP blog readers know, Matthew Shepard, a gay twenty-one year old college student, was tortured and brutally murdered in 1998 because of his sexual orientation. His death inspired a national movement to expand federal hate crimes law. Eleven years after Matthew’s death, members of his family will attend the signing ceremony at the White House tomorrow.