Democrats and Republicans battle over tough, new election laws in Florida, and the outcome of the 2012 presidential election may hang in the balance. “Voters in America: Who Counts,” 7/15 8pm ET, CNN.
Editor's note: Sherrilyn A. Ifill is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law and the chairwoman of the U.S. Programs Board of the Open Society Foundations. She is the author of "On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century."
By Sherrilyn A. Ifill, Special to CNN
(CNN) – The United States has a dignity problem. The concept of dignity is recognized by law in countries all over the world. It is a cornerstone of both international humanitarian law, which governs the treatment of prisoners of war, and international human rights law.
But it has little power in American jurisprudence. A robust recognition and protection of dignity is precisely what we need, particularly if we are to understand how racism has broken its tether and become enshrined again in state laws and policies across the United States.
Take racial profiling - the single most explicit manifestation of racial prejudice in the United States today. Nearly 700,000 individuals a year are subject to the brutal indignity of the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy. The vast majority are young African-American and Latino men. In a New York Times op-ed in December, 23-year-old Nicholas Peart heart-rendingly described his initiation into the world of stop-and-frisk beginning at age 14. This rite of passage for innocent young black men requires submitting without complaint or question to being harassed and targeted by the police. Even showing an "attitude" can escalate encounters into an arrest or even death.
Stop-and-frisk policing is only one aspect of the national indignity of racial profiling. Police surveillance of law-abiding Muslims (here again the New York police play a central role) and the pulling over of motorists for "driving while black" are two others. Rather than recognize how these practices strike at our bedrock constitutional rights to due process, equal protection and freedom from unreasonable searches, the Supreme Court recently doubled down on racial profiling. It decided that the discretion of police may be complemented by the discretion of jail officials to strip-search the 14 million Americans who are arrested each year.
Editor's note: Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a CNN.com contributor and a nationally syndicated columnist.
By Ruben Navarrette Jr. , CNN Contributor
San Diego (CNN) - You've probably read those articles about how, in the United States, minorities are becoming the majority. That's a polite way of describing what is really going on. Namely, that the U.S. population is becoming more Latino and less white. More than any other group, it is Latinos who are driving demographic changes.
Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that, of all the babies born in the United States in 2011, more than half were members of minority groups. Latinos, Asians, African-Americans and other minorities accounted for 50.4% of births last year, marking the first time in U.S. history this has happened.
Immigration is a driving force. So is the fact that Latinos have higher birthrates because they tend to be younger and starting families. According to the report, Latinos have a median age of 27; with whites, it's 42.
When I read these kinds of stories, I wince. Some people assume that making lawmakers, media and corporations aware of population trends will persuade them to see the value in diversity and cause them to reach out to nonwhite populations. In my experience, it doesn't have that effect at all. People tend to do what they want to do the way they've always done it.
But what you can set your watch by is the backlash to these stories. It's rooted in fear, but also in human nature. No one likes being told they're being displaced or pushed aside, or that they're not going to be as relevant as time goes on.
By Halimah Abdullah, CNN
Washington (CNN) - When presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney appears before Latino small-business owners in Washington on Wednesday, he'll address a group whose explosive birth rates foreshadow a seismic political shift in GOP strongholds in the Deep South and Southwest.
"The Republicans' problem is their voters are white, aging and dying off," said David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, who studies minority political engagement.
"There will come a time when they suffer catastrophic losses with the realization of the population changes."
Over the next several generations, the wave of minority voters - who, according to U.S. Census figures released this week, now represent more than half of the nation's population born in the past year - will become more of a power base in places like Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. That hold will extend across the Southwest all the way to California, experts say.
The coming political revolution could result in a massive changing of the guard on nearly every level of government, potential cultural clashes, and the type of political alliances that are now considered rare.
Editor’s Note: Rinku Sen is the President and Executive Director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) and the publisher of Colorlines.com.
By Rinku Sen, Special to CNN
(CNN) –With the news that, for the first time in U.S. history, the majority of American babies are not white, it should put to rest use of the term “minorities” as a reference to America’s black, Latino, Asian and Native American residents.
Nearly 30 years ago, I learned to think of myself as a person of color, and that shift changed my view of myself and my relationship to the people around me.
It is time for the entire nation, and our media in particular, to make the same move.
By Joe Sutton and Gustavo Valdes, CNN
(CNN) - Alabama lawmakers passed a new bill Wednesday aimed at improving the state's controversial immigration law, but critics said the new measure might make things worse.
Demonstrators protested outside the chambers of the Alabama state House and Senate. Seven of them were arrested, said Justin Cox, staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants Rights Project.
The Southern Poverty Law Center's legal director was among those arrested, said Marion Steinfels, a representative of the organization.
Police could not be immediately reached for comment.
The center is one of the plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against Alabama's immigration law.
The new immigration bill, known as HB 658, was approved by the state House and Senate Wednesday.
The state's governor will have the final say, with the power to sign the bill into law or veto it.
By Stephanie Siek and Joe Sterling, CNN
(CNN)– U.S. minorities now represent more than half of America's population under the age of 1, the Census Bureau said, a historic demographic milestone with profound political, economic and social implications.
The bureau - defining a minority as anyone who is not "single race white" and "not Hispanic" - released estimates on Thursday showing that 50.4% of children younger than 1 were minorities as of July 1, 2011, up from 49.5% from the 2010 Census taken in April 2010.
"2011 is the first time the population of infants under age 1 is majority minority," said Robert Bernstein, a Census Bureau spokesman.
The latest statistics - which also count the national population younger than 5 as 49.7% minority in 2011, an increase from 49% in 2010 - portend a future of a more racially diverse America, with new and growing populations playing more important roles politically and economically in years to come, analysts say.
By Stephanie Siek, CNN
(CNN) – The United States is becoming increasingly international, according to data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau in the 2010 American Community Survey Thursday.
The number of foreign-born people in the United States is at an all-time high, at 40 million - an increase of about 9 million since the 2000 census. The 2010 census put the total U.S. population at almost 309 million.
But the foreign born comprise a smaller proportion of the total population (13%) than they did during the peak immigration years of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The 2010 American Community Survey also reveals that more than half of the nation’s foreign-born population lives in just four states: California, New York, Texas and Florida. FULL POST
Editor's note: Maria Cardona is a Democratic strategist, a principal at the Dewey Square Group, a former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton and former communications director for the Democratic National Committee.
By Maria Cardona, CNN Contributor
(CNN) - President Obama is indeed a profile in courage. He has made history yet again with his announcement that he supports full marriage equality for gay and lesbian Americans. Bravo, Mr. President.
Now comes all the warnings and predictions of what this will mean for the election in November. One of those dire warnings is that this will hurt him with his supporters among Latino communities. This will not be the case and here's why:
For so long, Republicans have loved to push the meme, famously touted by Ronald Reagan, that Latinos are, by their nature, more conservative on religious and social issues and therefore will be open to the Republican point of view.
While it is true that Latinos are more conservative on these issues - Republicans love to use gay marriage and abortion as the key examples - they historically do not base their vote on these issues. That is why no GOP presidential candidate in history has ever been able to attract a majority of Latino voters.
By Jose Pagliery, CNNMoney
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Roger Chinchilla and Grimaldy Dominguez grew up watching Latin American families struggle in Queens, New York. As entrepreneurs, the two have created a free mobile banking system to help Hispanics keep track of their money.
Chinchilla came as a toddler from Honduras in 1986, and Dominguez arrived from the Dominican Republic as a child in 1993. As they tell it, both grew tired of watching workers pay sharp fees to cash paychecks at check cashers.
In 2009, two years after they launched the accounting software company Rushtax, they realized an opportunity to help their underserved area.
Many of the customers who turned to them for tax preparation didn't have a bank account to deposit their tax return. The guys decided to stem the money flow to check cashers by establishing bank accounts their clients could access from their cell phones.
By the CNN Wire Staff
(CNN)– The U.S. Justice Department plans to file a civil lawsuit against Maricopa County, Arizona, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio over civil rights violations.
In a letter sent Wednesday to an attorney for the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas Perez writes that the county's failure to address racial discrimination and other violations found by the federal government in December will go to litigation.
The sheriff's policies are unconstitutional and in violation of federal law, and compliance "cannot be secured through voluntary means," the letter said.
As a result, the Justice Department will file suit against the county, the sheriff's office and Arpaio.
What defines you? Maybe it’s the shade of your skin, the place you grew up, the accent in your words, the make up of your family, the gender you were born with, the intimate relationships you chose to have or your generation? As the American identity changes we will be there to report it. In America is a venue for creative and timely sharing of news that explores who we are. Reach us at inamerica@cnn.com.
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