ABC News: Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the longest serving Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on "This Week" Sunday that President Barack Obama used "code" for an activist judge this week when describing his ideal nominee to replace retiring Justice David Souter.
"It's a matter of great concern, if he's saying that he wants to pick people who will take sides. He's also said that a judge has to be a person of empathy -- what does that mean? Usually that's a code word for an activist judge," Hatch said on "This Week."
"But he also said that, that, he's going to select judges on the basis of their personal politics, their personal feelings, their personal preferences," Hatch said, "Now, you know those are all code words for an activist judge who's going to be partisan on the bench."
When did Pres. Obama say anything about personal politics, personal feelings, or personal preferences? Get at me!
I have a couple of thoughts about the acquittal of white teenage boys of the beating murder of an undocumented Mexican immigrant. First, I do wish the facts were clear. I do wish I knew exactly what happened. But considering what I do know, I wonder what, besides race, makes these boys any different from the Jena 6. Er, um, no. We ain't forgot.
Some satisfied, others outraged with verdict for immigrant's death Story Highlights
Teens acquitted of murder, aggravated assault, ethnic intimidation
Verdict sends "extremely dangerous" precedent, advocacy group says
Schuylkill County prosecutors alleged the beating was racially motivated
Incident drew national attention to small town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania
By Emanuella Grinberg CNN Friends and relatives of two teens accused in the beating death of a Mexican immigrant struggled to contain their relief as not-guilty verdicts were announced on the most serious charges against the former high school football stars Friday.
Gasps filled the courtroom and some had to be restrained by sheriff's deputies as they tried to rush the defense table after Derrick Donchak, 19, and Brandon Piekarsky, 17, were acquitted of aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and ethnic intimidation for the death of Luis Ramirez.
Piekarsky was also found not guilty of third-degree murder for the death of Ramirez, who died of blunt force injuries after an encounter with the teens last summer.
However, the all-white jury of six men and six women from Schuylkill County jury found Piekarsky and Donchak guilty of simple assault.
The case drew national attention to the small town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, highlighting race relations and polarizing the community on who was to blame for the incident.
Lawyers for the teens never denied that their clients were involved in a physical altercation with Ramirez on a residential street the night of July 12.
Instead, they tried to cast Ramirez as the aggressor, and suggested that the other teens involved in the tangle of punches and blows were to blame.
"In my mind it was the lack of evidence to tie these kids to the serious charges that they brought," defense lawyer Frederick Fanelli said.
A cast of witnesses provided conflicting accounts regarding who initiated the encounter and who exactly did what, complicating prosecutors' efforts to assign blame.
"If you ask most prosecutors who are dealing with multiple defendants, and in this particular case there were at least four, it is extraordinary difficult to clear the fog of a fight," truTV anchor Ashleigh Banfield said.
The 25-year-old Mexican immigrant had settled in Shenandoah a year before his death with his wife, a lifelong resident of the faltering mining town, and their young children.
He was walking down a residential street with a friend when he encountered the group of teens, who had been drinking earlier in the evening. Donchak was convicted of providing alcohol to the other teens who were involved in the confrontation, including a juvenile co-defendant and another teen who pleaded guilty in federal court for his role in the fight.
Prosecutors alleged that the teens baited the Ramirez into a fight with racial epithets, provoking an exchange of punches and kicks that ended with Ramirez convulsing in the street, foaming from the mouth. He died two days later in a hospital.
Piekarsky was accused of delivering a fatal kick to Ramirez's head after he was knocked to the ground.
As they poured out of courthouse, the teens' supporters shouted "I was right from the start" and "I'm glad the jury listened" at cameras that caught the late-night verdict.
But Gladys Limon, a spokeswoman for the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said the jury had sent a troubling message.
"The jurors here [are] sending the message that you can brutally beat a person, without regard to their life, and get away with it, continue with your life uninterrupted," she said.
"In this case, the message is that a person who may not be popular in society based on their national origin or certain characteristic has less value in our society," she said.
The extent of Ramirez's injuries, which had left his brain oozing from his skull, according to medical testimony, should have sufficed for a conviction other than simple assault, Limon said.
"The acts here were egregious in brutality and it's just outrageous and very difficult to understand how any juror could have had reasonable doubt, especially as to the aggravated assault and the reckless enganderment charges," she said.
Limon said her group intends to press the Department of Justice to file federal charges against the teens.
"Luis Ramirez's family deserves vindication for his death," she said. "This incident has not only disrupted Luis Ramirez's family, but the entire community."
CNN's Brian Rokus contributed to this report.
All AboutPennsylvania • Hate Crimes • Murder and Homicide
Plus, you're probably just plain ol' racist. ~ No1KState
"What we found was that students were more likely to choose the white confederate as a partner (63 per cent), despite the fact that the white person had made a racist comment about the black person," said Kawakami. "And the racist comments ranged from moderate to one of the most powerful anti-black slurs in the English language."
ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2009) — One reason racism persists is that many people imagine they would respond strongly to a racist act but actually respond with indifference, a new study led by York University shows.
The research examines why acts of blatant racism against blacks still occur with alarming regularity, even though being labeled as a racist in modern society has become a powerful stigma.
"People do not think of themselves as prejudiced, and they predict that they would be very upset by a racist act and would take action," said lead author Kerry Kawakami, a psychology professor in York's Faculty of Health. "However, we found that their responses are much more muted than they expect when they are actually faced with an overtly racist comment."
Kawakami led the study at York with graduate student Francine Karmali. University of British Columbia professor Elizabeth Dunn, an expert on people's ability to predict their future emotional responses, and Yale University professor John Dovidio, an expert on prejudice, are co-authors.
In the study, students who think they are waiting for an experiment to begin are exposed to racism. Specifically, a white confederate makes a racist comment about a black confederate when he briefly leaves the room. When he returns, the actual participant is asked to choose a partner to work with on a subsequent exercise.
The researchers studied 120 non-black participants who volunteered for the experiment and either directly experienced a racial incident or had the incident described to them. The first group watched a black man, posing as a fellow participant, slightly bump a white confederate also posing as a participant. After the black man left the room, the white confederate either said nothing, or "I hate it when black people do that," or said, "clumsy n____." Other groups did not directly experience the event but either read about it or watched it on videotape and were asked to predict their responses to the events.
The subjects who didn't experience the event were much more likely to report that they were upset at the white worker's slurs and to say they would not work with such a person. Those who actually experienced the event were less distressed and were as willing to work with the person who made racist comments as someone who did not.
Dovidio argues that participants who witness racism were much less willing to pay the emotional cost of confronting a racist than they thought they would be. That in turn means the racist pays less of a cost in social ostracism by expressing bias, he said.
"What we found was that students were more likely to choose the white confederate as a partner (63 per cent), despite the fact that the white person had made a racist comment about the black person," said Kawakami. "And the racist comments ranged from moderate to one of the most powerful anti-black slurs in the English language."
The findings may seem surprising at a time when America is about to inaugurate its first black president, but the election of one black man does not mean that racism is dead or that people will no longer tolerate acts of racism, Kawakami said.
Notably, there has been little research done on how people respond to prejudice toward others. However, University of British Columbia professor Elizabeth Dunn, one of the authors of the Science article, studies people's ability to predict their own affective and behavioural reactions.
"People often make inaccurate forecasts about how they would respond emotionally to negative events. They vastly overestimate how upset they would feel in bad situations such as hearing a racial slur," said Dunn. "One of the ways that people may stem the tide of negative emotions related to witnessing a racial slur is to re-construe the comment as a joke or as a harmless remark."
Further studies currently being conducted by these researchers are investigating how characteristics related to the racists and the target of prejudice increases or decreases emotional, behavioral, and physiological reactions to racial slurs. Examining people's perceptions of both the white and black confederate may provide important clues as to when people do and do not stand up against racism.
When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, they wrote Section 5 of the act which singled out Southern states for special federal oversight. Now, conservatives, including the conservative justices, are arguing that it should maybe overturned for unfairly attacking states' rights. Even though Congress just recently reauthorized Section 5 in 2006, and according to conservatives it's not the job of judges to "legislate from the bench," if proponents of voting rights can't sway Justice Kennedy to their perspective, Section 5 just might be overturned. What makes Section 5 particularly insulting to Dixie is that there're are northern states who track much worse than they do. (I have to add here that that's an odd, historical argument - that Dixie should not be judged because there are places in the north that are much more virulently racist.) At least, that's how I understand it.
I have a suggestion. Why not place all 50 states under Section 5?
Study examined physical characteristics as a predictor of obtaining and maintaining leadership roles
Evanston, Ill. (April 30, 2009) – As President Barack Obama commemorates his 100th day as the country's first black commander-in-chief, a new study by Kellogg School of Management researchers examines the intersection of race and power in corporate America. While many traits of successful leaders transcend racial or ethnic bounds, this study sought to focus on one particular facet of blacks' ascensions to power: the physical characteristics of so-called "babyfaces," and their influence on perception and achievement.
"The Teddy Bear Effect: Does babyfaceness benefit Black CEOs?" will appear in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science and is co-authored by Robert Livingston and Nicholas Pearce of the Kellogg School.
Searching for traits common to black CEOs who have successfully navigated treacherous cultural and corporate terrain, the researchers demonstrate that babyfaces – and perceived warmer physical appearances and personality traits – can benefit black CEOs and act as disarming mechanisms within the social hierarchy. Black CEOs categorized as having a babyface tend to be at the helm of more prestigious corporations than black CEOs who have a more mature appearance.
"Prior research has shown babyface-type traits are a liability for those striving for a leadership role because they undermine perceptions of competence, but these studies focused on white males," said Livingston, lead author and assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. "Because a babyface is disarming, we hypothesized that it would provide an advantage to black leaders who have a history of being stigmatized as too threatening to occupy positions of high power."
Methodology
Non-black women and men were shown 40 headshot photos of black men and white women and men. Though the faces were not recognized by participants, all were current or former CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
Participants were asked to rate how babyfaced, how attractive, and also how old, each person appeared. They also rated each in terms of perceived personality traits. For example, how warm did a person appear? How competent would they be as a leader? Participants were then asked to use those same personality criteria to rate, in general, how they perceive blacks and whites. Finally, participants guessed how much money each person earned.
Babyface Definition
The researchers have identified several traits associated with "babyfaceness" including a rounder face, larger forehead, smaller nose, larger ears and fuller, pouty lips. Despite these individual features, babyface is a "gestalt" or whole that is easily recognizable by people. Babyfaceness is an attribute that generalizes across regions, ethnicities, gender and even species, as identified by social psychologists. There is a universal, evolutionary response to babies across all cultures because infants require special care, attention, and nurturing in order to survive.
This adaptive response to infants is over-generalized to adults who have features that resemble babies. The result is that babyfaced adults are treated differently compared with maturefaced adults: babyfaced adults are considered more warm, innocent and trustworthy.
The hypothesis of the current study was that babyfaceness could serve as a "disarming mechanism" that would attenuate the fear, hostility and aggression typically associated with black males. Thus babyfaceness would facilitate the ascension of black males but not white males.
Results
Babyface features had a clear influence on professional achievement, both perceived and real. Black CEOs were rated as being more babyfaced, and having warmer personalities, than whites.
The more babyfaced the black CEO, the more he was also thought to earn. In terms of real, not just perceived, earnings and achievement, the more babyfaced the black CEO, the more prestigious was the company he actually led, reflected by both Fortune 500 ranking and annual corporate revenue. These perceived and real professional benefits were correlated with physical appearance, not to perceptions of age, which was not found to be linked to babyfaceness.
Livingston pointed out that while the 10 black CEO faces were considered warmer than the white faces, blacks as a group were considered less warm than whites overall. Thus, the visual influence of babyfaceness clearly shifted perception, and the playing field. He said, "To function effectively as an African American male in the U.S. it helps to have a disarming mechanism." A disarming mechanism is a physical or behavioral trait, noted Livingston, that eases perceptions of threat—it signals to whites that they do not have a reason to fear this particular black individual. Babyfaceness is but one example: political conservatism, style of speech or dress, smiling behavior, or even a Harvard education might also serve a similar disarming function.
The research notes disarming mechanisms, like warmth, are only necessary for groups that are perceived to be hostile or threatening by default. Prior research has shown warmth to be counterproductive for white male leaders and women leaders. "Female leaders are already 'disarmed' because of traditional caregiver roles and stereotypes," said Livingston. "Women leaders must prove to be strong and assertive, frequently at the expensive of being perceived as lacking warmth." The implication is that black leaders may have to adopt a gentler leadership style compared with white males who can get angry or pound their fists in order to accomplish leadership objectives.
Beyond the Babyface
While facial features may present natural advantages or obstacles to some, other behavioral traits can be developed and used by most anyone. "There are other mechanisms thought to help minorities function and achieve without stoking envy, resentment, fear," said Livingston. "For example, some point to Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice as someone who internalizes shared ideology with the dominant group, and is therefore seen as non-threatening." Livingston adds that although Barack Obama does not possess all of the typical features associated with babyfaceness per se, he does have a disarming appearance. "Big ears or a simple smile can disarm one's appearance from suggested perceptions of threat that might otherwise be associated with black males. This could serve to increase the appeal of the president or even one of Hollywood's most successful actors—Will Smith," he said.
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To read the full article or speak with Kellogg School of Management professor Robert Livingston, e-mail Meg Washburn at m-washburn@kellogg.northwestern.edu.
