Race Census Aff – mags compiled by Lenny Brahin Jaden Lessnick Jillian Gordners Brian Roche 1AC

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Collection Good

*Racial data collection good – it’s the only way to challenge broader US racist policies. They throw the baby out with the bathwater – this card ends the deb8

Skerry, 2k – PhD from Harvard, former congressional aide and professor of politics (Peter, Why Census Is Right to Ask for Racial and Ethnic Data April 16, 2000 http://www.brookings.edu/experts/skerryp?view=bio)//jml

Is there a solid reason to ask Americans about their racial and ethnic identities on the census? Yes. But first we need to be more realistic about what to expect from census data. Minority advocates and their allies need to recognize that while the minority undercount is real, its consequences—fiscal as well as electoral—have been grossly exaggerated. After all, not being counted in the census is regrettable and arguably has some impact on minority legislative districts, but it hardly deprives minorities of their real source of power: the franchise. On the other hand, Americans disaffected with race-conscious policies need to understand that it is not the census that is causing dissension over race in the United States. The census is merely the messenger. If Americans are upset with affirmative action and similar policies, they should, as they have, attack these policies, not the census. We have all gotten caught up in the notion that demography is destiny. But census numbers are just not as important as what policymakers do with them: whether drawing district lines, constructing funding formulas or setting affirmative-action goals. As Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) once put it: "How many members of the National Rifle Assn. are there? I don't know. I don't think my colleagues know. What's important, politically, is not how many there are, but what you do about it. The extent to which you mobilize enormously outweighs the numbers." Those who think the bureau's multiracial option on the 2000 form is evidence that the entire scheme of counting by race is about to collapse of its own complexity are deceiving themselves. Race and ethnicity are real, if frequently misunderstood, forces in American life. Whatever the future of the multiracial option, race is not about to disappear from U.S. politics. Finally, those most disaffected with the national discourse on race need to realize that data gathered by the census are their best weapon in arguing against policies they find objectionable. If, for example, minority advocates downplay racial progress, census data will help make the case against them. To be sure, those advocates will also rely on the data to make a case. That's the point. Racial and ethnic data from the census allow each of us, individually or as members of groups or organizations, to make self-interested or partisan arguments. This is not always a pretty sight. But, over time, census data used in this way allow us to assess racial progress—or lack of it. The alternatives to the collection of racial and ethnic data by the census are ignorance, malice, paranoia, opportunism and prejudice, of which there is already an abundance across the political spectrum.

Racial census is good – produces policies that beneficially aid racial minorities

Mezey, 3 – Professor of Law at Georgetown University (Naomi, “Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race and the National Imagination”, 97 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1701-1768 (2003) Northwestern University Law Review, 2003)//jml

That the census, guardian of state knowledge and power, would come to play an aspirational role is not obvious. While traditionally it has been used to monitor, discipline, and symbolically erase minorities, for racial and ethnic minorities in the late twentieth century, their engagement with the politics of enumeration has been largely voluntary and aspirational. One explanation is that, as Espiritu notes, resurgences of ethnic identification "are strongest when political systems structure political access along ethnic 26 lines and adopt policies that emphasize ethnic differences."" The United States has always emphasized racial differences in some form or another; but since the 1960s racially inclusive statutes more than exclusionary ones have played the spoiler of our mythically colorblind political system. In an effort to reverse centuries of racism, Congress adopted important civil rights laws that require accurate counts of minorities for effective enforce- ment.26' Today, census data on race is used by at least ten federal agencies, not to mention countless state and local governments, to determine things like education grants, affirmative action programs, community reinvestment and development, public health programs, mortgage lending, low-income housing tax credits, voting rights, employment rights, legislative redistrict- ing, government contracting, food stamps, and veteran benefits.262 Each year more than $100 billion in federal funds are allocated based on census data.263 To aid in this endeavor, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) promulgated Statistical Directive 15 in 1977, which laid out four races and two ethnicities to be used in all federal statistics.264 The OMB revised the categories slightly in 1997 by splitting the Asian and Pacific Islander cate- gory into two categories, so now there are five race categories: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawai- ian or Other Pacific Islander, and White.265 The two ethnicity categories remained the same with a slight variation in name, so that the choices for ethnicity are currently "Hispanic or Latino" and "Not Hispanic or La- tino. 266 While OMB insists that these categories do not correspond to mi- nority groups and do not determine eligibility for federal programs,267 the fact is that civil rights laws explicitly link census data with political access for minorities. For example, voting rights enforcement depends on the ra- cial make-up of Congressional districts as determined by census numbers.26" Likewise, many employment discrimination claims depend on comparisons between the defendant's workforce and the racial make-up of the relevant labor pool, as determined by census numbers.269 In addition, census num- bers on racial minorities determine levels of federal funding for myriad programs.27 Indeed, the civil rights laws were the catalyst for the articula- tion of the racial categories that we use today. Not surprisingly, as Espiritu suggests, the motivation for ethnic and racial identification has been par- ticularly strong as civil rights enforcement has been tied to census num- bers.27' Needless to say, the modem census classifications of race, like the nineteenth century classifications before them, have influenced the mean- ings and politics of race. Historian David Hollinger has called Statistical Directive 15 "the single event most responsible for the lines" that configure our understanding of race, an understanding which he calls the ethno-racial pentagon of African American, Asian American, Native American, His- panic, and white.272 Other scholars mark Directive 15 as the point when "the use of racial classification shifted from one of exclusion to one of ex- plicit inclusion of specific groups."2'73 In this context, where the census is one of the primary vehicles for the distribution of certain group protections and entitlements based on race, one sees the strategic investment in the poli- tics of enumeration for many groups in the modem welfare state. The engagement with the politics of enumeration has been not only strategic, but also deeply symbolic for some communities of identity. The symbolic consequences of census inclusion might also be said to derive from the civil rights movement in the sense that it helped give rise to iden- tity politics and multiculturalism, movements in their own right which spawned claims for "official" recognition by many groups. These recogni-tion claims were often made on the basis of color, but as often served as a proxy for culture.274 With the demise of scientific accounts of racial differ- ence, and the ascendancy of social and political explanations, 275 identity politics became the arena in which communities and individuals alike struggled for cultural recognition by society at large. As Charles Taylor has made clear, identities are always dialogical, forged through interactions and relationships with others, and in that sense they rely on recognition by oth- ers (and conversely, can be harmed by misrecognition by others).276 In this way, identity politics emphasized the need to be affirmed by others and the overriding value of recognition by the state, itself symbolic of national in- clusion. Thus the census has been an important mechanism for symbolic inclusion in the nation, quite apart from the material consequences of being counted that have inspired the strategic push for inclusion by groups. However, it is important to note that precisely because identities do not have an independent existence, but rather depend on social and cultural ac- knowledgment to be called into being, the race categories on the census have always played a dual role: of recognizing identity and also of confer- ring it. As Sharon Lee has observed, "One function of official race classifi- cations is to create a sense of group membership or even community where there had been none before. '277 Lee points to the way in which the creation of an official category coalesces a group that may not have understood itself as a group before, or at least was not commonly understood to be a group. For example, "the social construction of a pan-ethnic racial group called White served to minimize ethnic differences among the numerous European ethnic groups while fostering a common racial identity. It also hardened the 27 division between White and Others."" More recently, the census classifi- cation of Asian has had a similar effect of creating, among heterogeneous groups of Asian descent, a common pan-ethnic identity through which peo- ple have come to see themselves and others.27 This was also true much ear- lier of counting the Chinese as Chinese; it created a Chinese identity for people who had not necessarily thought of themselves that way before, and it created a Chinese race, which at least for a time did not include other Asians.28 The National Academy of Sciences report on federal race classi- fication similarly claims that it was the Census Bureau's use of the then un- common designation of "Hispanic" in the early 1970s that led to its wide circulation and use as an identity referent.2"' As that report attests, "[t]here is a symbiotic relationship between categories for the tabulation of data and the processes of group consciousness and social recognition, which in turn can be reflected in specific legislation and social policy.'282

Race question especially important for minority populations

Ahmad and Hagler 15 (CenterForAmericanProgress.com, Farah Z. Ahmad is a senior policy analyst for American Progress with a B.A. from Princeton and Jamal Hagler is the Special Assistant for Progress 2050 and has a B.A. from Harvard. “The Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Classifications in the Decennial Census”, 2-6-2015, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2015/02/06/102798/the-evolution-of-race-and-ethnicity-classifications-in-the-decennial-census/]) JG

The U.S. decennial census is one of the nation’s most important government programs, offering much more than just the population count used to determine each state’s representation in Congress. The decennial census provides essential data, demographic and otherwise, that inform the allocation of vast government resources. Results often serve as the basis for federal, state, and local public policies, ranging from funding new infrastructure projects to providing increased job opportunities for workers. This makes the decennial census particularly important for communities of color, which face significant gaps compared to their non-Hispanic white counterparts in indicators of economic security and opportunity such as education, employment, and health.∂ While the data collected from smaller U.S. Census Bureau surveys—such as the Current Population Survey—are sufficient for some purposes, the decennial census provides a unique opportunity to compile a massive amount of information on many different groups. The resulting data set is large enough for disaggregation—meaning the extrapolation of data by various subgroup characteristics—a process that can provide a much clearer picture of the landscape for specific groups and their particular needs. This is especially relevant for smaller demographic groups—for example, national origin groups within the Asian American and Pacific Islander, or AAPI, community such as Cambodian, Chinese, and Bangladeshi Americans. In the absence of large data sets based on accurate race and ethnicity survey questions, crucial information would remain unknown and investments in communities who could benefit most would potentially be overlooked.∂ As concepts of race and ethnicity have evolved and the population has shifted, the methods and language used to record race and ethnicity in the census have changed as well. Revisions or additions are made each decade, underscoring the complexity of collecting data on identity and classification. As the United States becomes increasingly diverse, the Census Bureau will continue to face challenges to properly classifying the nation’s residents and assessing the state of American households. Changes in both survey content and format should be carefully considered, as they are critical to policy formation and creating an equitable future for all Americans.∂ Over the past two centuries, the Census Bureau has routinely adjusted its survey questions in an attempt to better capture the demographic characteristics of the nation’s population. Many of these changes are illuminated in a 2009 article by Karen Humes and Howard Hogan in the journal Race and Social Problems. In 1960, for example, the Census Bureau replaced the longstanding practice of census enumerators going to households in person and recording observed characteristics of household residents with a process of self-reporting in which individuals receive questionnaires and dictate their own answers. Another major change came with the addition of the Hispanic origin question in 1970, marking the first time the Census Bureau collected data on ethnicity in addition to data on race. Individuals were given the option to select more than one race for the first time in 2000.

Solvency

Can’t solve – only the office of management and budget has jurisdiction

TLC, 14 – The Leadership Conference is a 501(c)(4) organization that engages in legislative advocacy (Collecting Race and Ethnicity Data in the Census http://www.civilrights.org/publications/reports/census-report-2014/chapter-i-collecting-race.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/)//jml

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), not the Census Bureau, defines the race and ethnicity categories used for federal government purposes. The Census Bureau may collect and publish more detailed data, as long as it can aggregate the results to fit the standard categories. By law, the Census Bureau must submit topics to be covered in the next decennial census to Congress three years before the enumeration (i.e. by April 1, 2017) and the actual questions to be included on the census form two years before the count (i.e. by April 1, 2018). The law does not require congressional approval of the submissions, but as a practical matter, Congress could express its disapproval informally and urge the bureau to make changes, or it could pass legislation to require changes in topics or question wording, as happened before the 1990 census.

BW binary Good

Transcending the black/white binary obscures a violent history and makes their impacts inevitable

Smith, 6 - Phd from UC Santa Cruz (Andrea, Heteropatriarchy and the three pillars of whaite supremacy- Color of Violence-Incite! The anthology- p. 69-70)//jml

Our organizing can also reflect anti-Black racism. Recently, with the outgrowth of “multiculturalism” there have been calls to “go beyond the black/white binary” and include other communities of color in our analysis, as presented in the third scenario. There are a number of flaws with this analysis. First, it replaces an analysis of white supremacy with a politics of multicultural representation; if we just included more people, then our practices will be less racist. Not true. This model does not address the nuanced structure of white supremacy, such as through these distinct logics of slavery, genocide, and Orientalism. Second, it obscures the centrality of the slavery logic in the system of white supremacy, which is based on a black/white binary. The black/white binary is not the only binary which characterizes white supremacy, but it is still a central one that we cannot “go beyond” in our racial justice organizing efforts. If we do not look at how the logic of slaveability inflects our society and our thinking, it will be evident in our work as well. For example, other communities of color often appropriate the cultural work and organizing strategies of African American civil rights or Black Power movements without corresponding assumptions that we should also be in solidarity with Black communities. We assume that this work is the common “property” of all oppressed groups, and we can appropriate it without being accountable.

Strategic essentialism is good – it allows us to recognize the fluidity of identity while also creating strategies to resist racist practices

Gosine, 2 - Professor in the Sociology department at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON (Kevin, Essentialism Versus Complexity: Conceptions of Racial Identity Construction in Educational Scholarship, 2002, Google Scholar)//jml

At the same time, I urge academics, activists, educators, human service providers, and policy makers to recognize the limits of such collective identities and wrestle with the reality that members of racialized and other communities do not experience and negotiate communal identities or the larger society in a uniform or consistent fashion, however much communities may sometimes attempt to foster such an impression. Instead, the forces of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality combine in unique ways at different moments for different individuals, resulting in individuals constantly making different kinds of identifications with aspects of their own communities as well as the broader society. Put differently, while marginalized people constantly strive for a coherent sense of community, communal members are continually arguing over what their community ought to look like and who is to be included/excluded. This negotiation takes place in the in-between spaces where cultural and ethnoracial boundaries separate as well as overlap (Bhabha, 1990; Walcott, 1997), resulting in cultural identity being an inevitably hybrid entity. The fact that identity construction can be viewed as a process rather than a product should make change more foreseeable and open up many new political and interventionist possibilities. When essentialist categories are invoked for political purposes, critics plead that they be invoked strategically, that is, with a clear and explicit recognition that they are temporary and contingent, not fixed for all time (Spivak, 1993; see also Sooknanan, 2000). The idea of a strategic essentialism differs from a defensively situated essentialism in that the former actively engages rather than suppresses difference and is perennially conscious of the fact that the appeal to essentialism is always a political and conditional act.

Census Race Data Good

Government racial categories backfire and have a transformative effect—even if they are arbitrary, collective labeling can create a basis for political organization

Kertzer and Arel, 2 - PhD, Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University **PhD, Associate Professor of Political Science and Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada (David and Dominique, “Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses,” 2002)//jml

The requirement that each individual be pigeon-holed in a culturally defined category had major implications for how people came to think of themselves, implications that would have a tremendous impact on the creation of politically important interest groups. Bernard Cohn tells how, beginning with the intellectuals of Bengal in the nineteenth century and then spreading to all of the educated Indians in the twentieth century, people began to objectify their culture. Not least influential in this process was the need to employ half a million literate Indians to carry out the census of the late nineteenth century. These census-takers were taught to think of the people around them as divisible into clear-cut cultural categories, and taught as well what the crucial distinguishing marks were to be. What previously had been part of the complex web of relationships, practices, and beliefs they shared now became something quite different. An identifiable, distinct culture was distinguished, allowing people to “stand back and look at themselves, their ideas, their symbols and culture and see it as an entity. ” Once they conceived of themselves as part of a culture in this objectified sense, they could then, as part of the political process, select aspects of that culture, and polish and reformulate them in pursuing their goals (Cohn 1987: 228–29). The case of Soviet Central Asia is also instructive regarding the impact of state categorizations on the formation of identities. Abramson (this volume) shows how the Soviet system of dividing its population into mutually exclusive cultural nationalities in the 1920s was appropriated by Uzbek elites. After Soviet officials decreed, in 1924, that the “Uzbeks” were a “nationality, ” it took four years for local elites to agree on who, among the population, should be classified as Uzbeks, largely on the basis of dialects. When Moscow established Soviet republics on the basis of nationality, some newly self-defined Uzbeks ended up on the wrong side of the border. Hirsch (2000: 216) tells the story of Uzbek-identified border villages, assigned to neighboring Kirgizia, whose inhabitants petitioned Moscow to be included in Uzbekistan. She is struck by how adept the petitioners were at using the rhetoric of nationality, which until a few years before had been foreign to the region: Did the petitioners really believe that they were members of a discrete Uzbek nationality? We can never really know. The point is that the petitioners used the language of nationality in their interactions with the state and in doing so helped make official nationality categories real. Indeed, perhaps what is most remarkable is that the petitioners did not question the official assumption that “national identity” was linked to land, water, and other resources. Many of the residents of the new Central Asian republics themselves expressed surprise about how quickly nationality categories took root after national-territorial delimitation. Even more boldly, Appadurai (1993: 317) has argued that colonial census practices themselves “helped to ignite communitarian and nationalist identities that in fact undermined colonial rule. ” In the same vein, Kateb has shown how the French colonial state, by denying French nationality (in the sense of citizenship) to Muslims, paradoxically created a national Algerian Muslim identity from a hodgepodge of local affiliations (1998: 105). Zeman (1994: 31), in his study of the Imperial Austrian censuses of this period, observes that the effort to record a cultural nationality for each individual “made a direct contribution to the conflict… between the nationalities. A device designed by the civil servants to make the Monarchy more easily governable in fact created a large new area of civil strife. ” What the relationship is between the modern project of exercising firmer control over populations by extending a more thorough statistical gaze over them and the eventual mobilization of these populations against the imperial/colonial regimes remains a provocative question. Whether in colonial settings, or in other places where centralized state power is supreme, state-defined identity categories can have a substantial impact on people, altering pre-existing lines of identity divisions within the society. “State officials, ” writes James Scott, “can often make their categories stick and impose their simplifications. ” The categories used by the state, he argues, “begun as the artificial inventions of cadastral surveyors, census-takers [etc.]… can end by becoming categories that organize people's daily experiences precisely because they are embedded in state-created institutions that structure that experience. ” The classification of ethnicity, and other forms of state-mandated identity categorization, “acquire their force from the fact that these synoptic data are the points of departure for reality as state officials apprehend and shape it. ” Where the state is powerful, the “categories used by state agents are not merely means to make their environment legible; they are an authoritative tune to which most of the population must dance” (1998: 81–83). The realization that governmental statistics-gathering and census taking have been influential in creating and manipulating identities has led to a new look in the scholarly community at government statistical agencies. In a movement that can be traced in part to the influence of Foucault, some of those social analysts and historians who had previously been least interested in statistics, demography, or governmental recordkeeping, have recently come to see the production of statistics as of central importance. When preparations for the 2000 US census got underway, few topics generated more protest and anguish than the requirement that an individual place him or herself in a single racial category. Revealingly, however, this protest was less politically successful than other, much less visible protests, because it was not linked to any well-organized political lobbying group. Indeed, the demands that have filled the letters-to-the-editor sections of many newspapers, asking that people not be forced to place themselves in a single, neat racial or ethnic category, have been met by strong opposition from those who represent ethnic and racial organizations. This is a point of great interest in understanding the evolution of censuses and the role they have played in constructing collective identities. What is curious, yet highly revealing, is that while many individuals who feel violated by these rules and practices have voiced strong opposition to them, the leaders of organizations that define themselves in racial terms have strongly backed them. Ironically, given the history of race relations in the US, the continued use of a fundamentally racist ideology ('one drop of Negro blood makes a Negro') has been most effectively championed by African-American organizations. Similarly, both the creation of the ethnic group “Hispanic” and its continued use in the census have been primarily the product of political interest groups who define their membership through such ethnic constructions. Anthropologists have long been intrigued by the human compulsion to divide the observed world into categories, and by people's discomfort with those people, animals, or other objects who do not seem to fit into a single category (Levi-Strauss 1966; Douglas 1966). This human drive lies behind the universal efforts not only of elites and state officials but also of people of all kinds to divide the social universe into neat categories. In this context, those preferring the blurring of categories confront not only actors whose interests lie in championing their own categorical identities, but a more general difficulty of promulgating identities that fail to fall in any simple category at all.

Race data key to public assistance programs

US Census Bureau 13 [Census.gov, “About Race”, 7-8-13, http://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html] JG

Reasons for collecting information on race∂ Information on race is required for many Federal programs and is critical in making policy decisions, particularly for civil rights. States use these data to meet legislative redistricting principles. Race data also are used to promote equal employment opportunities and to assess racial disparities in health and environmental risks.

Race data good – civil rights, education, health, reapportionment

Politics DA Link

**If there was some possible Politics DA we wrote these could be links

Latino and Hispanic groups like the race question on the census

Dade 12 [Corey Dade “Census Bureau Rethinks The Best Way To Measure Race” NPR.org, 12-27-2012, http://www.npr.org/2012/12/26/168077473/census-bureau-rethinks-the-best-way-to-measure-race] JG

The stakes surrounding population counts are high. Race data collected in the census are used for many purposes, including enforcement of civil rights laws and monitoring of racial disparities in education, health and other areas.∂ In addition, the information is used to redraw state legislative and local school districts, and in the reapportioning of congressional seats. The strong Latino growth found in the 2010 census guaranteed additional seats in Congress for eight states.∂ Latino leaders say changing the Hispanic origin question could create confusion and lead some Latinos not to mark their ethnicity, shrinking the overall Hispanic numbers.∂ The wording in the 2010 census question, which asked people if they are of Latino origin and then provided a space to fill in their race, yielded a strong response and a record count of 50 million Latinos. Their growth moved them ahead of African-Americans as the nation's largest minority group.∂ "We're the only group in the country that has our own question? Why give it up?" says Angelo Falcon, director of the National Institute for Latino Policy. "A lot of Latino researchers like the question the way it is now because it shows those differences. The way the Census Bureau is thinking about combining the questions, it might take away that information in terms of how we fit within the American racial hierarchy."∂ Falcon co-chairs a group of about 30 Latino civil rights and advocacy groups that recently met with the Census Bureau about the potential changes.∂ For many years, the accuracy of census data on some minorities has been questioned because many respondents don't report being a member of one of the five official government racial categories: white, black or African-American, Asian, American Indian/Alaska Native and Pacific Islander.∂ When respondents don't choose a race, the Census Bureau assigns them one, based on the racial makeup of their neighborhood, among other factors. The method leads to a less accurate count.∂ Broadly, the nation's demographic shifts underscore the fact that many people, particularly Latinos and immigrants, don't identify with the American concept of race.∂

Hispanic and Latino groups are key for 2016 election

Metla 15 [Valeriya Metla works in international relations, immigration issues, and social and criminal justice. She holds two Bachelor Degrees in regional studies and international criminal justice. “What Part Will Hispanic Voters Play in the 2016 Elections?” Law Street Media.com 5-2-2015, http://lawstreetmedia.com/issues/politics/part-will-hispanic-voters-play-2016-elections/] JG

As the Hispanic population in the United States rapidly grows, so does its influence on the electorate. As Hispanic voters turn out in greater numbers, both Republicans and Democrats are trying to appeal to these communities across the country. Even if Democrats tend to be more favored by Hispanic voters, Republicans still have a chance to change the odds. One thing is clear: the Hispanic vote will matter a great deal in 2016.∂ THE HISPANIC POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES∂ Hispanics are the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. In 1990, the Hispanic population amounted to 22 million, or only nine percent of the total population. In 2000, there were 35 million Hispanics, while in 2010 their numbers reached 51 million, or 13 percent of the total population. On average, one million Hispanic people are added to the American population yearly. As of 2013, Hispanics in the United States numbered 54 million, or 17 percent of the total population. Recent projections estimate that by 2060 Hispanics will account for 31 percent of the total popula tion.∂ The largest group of Hispanic people is found in New Mexico (47.3 percent), followed by California with 14.4 million. They are also heavily represented in Texas (10 million) and Florida (4.5 million). In addition, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York all have more than one million Hispan

Racial Profiling Good (terrorism DA)

Census taking is used by the FBI to map populations and target communities who are believed to be a threat

Markon 11 [Jerry, "ACLU says FBI uses racial profiling against Muslims, other minorities", The Washington Post, 10/20/11, "www.washingtonpost.com/politics/aclu-says-fbi-uses-racial-profiling-against-muslims-other-minorities/2011/10/20/gIQAN3Ob1L_story.html] // SKY

The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday accused the FBI of profiling Muslims and other minorities and targeting them for investigation, allegations that FBI officials quickly disputed. Unveiling a new project called “Mapping the FBI,’’ the ACLU used internal bureau documents to portray the FBI as linking criminal behavior to racial and ethnic groups and using U.S. census data to “map” those communities so they can be investigated. The civil liberties group posted the documents on the Internet and vowed to further expose what it called unconstitutional FBI tactics. In one document that was highlighted, a 2009 memo in the FBI’s Detroit field office sought permission to collect information on Middle East terrorist groups in Michigan, noting that: “Because Michigan has a large Middle Eastern and Muslim population, it is prime territory for attempted radicalization and recruitment by these terrorist groups.’’ But the same memo pointed out that the terrorist groups “use an extreme and violent interpretation of the Muslim faith,’’ appearing to make a distinction between extremists and other Muslims. And each document was heavily redacted, leaving unclear what agents did with any information they collected. Taken together, the memos “confirm some of our worst fears” about FBI surveillance, Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, said in a conference call with reporters. “The FBI has targeted American communities for investigation based not on suspicion of wrongdoing but on the crudest stereotypes.’’ FBI spokesman Michael P. Kortan rejected that interpretation of the documents, which the bureau turned over to the ACLU in legal proceedings. He said that the FBI opposes discrimination against minorities but that “certain terrorist and criminal groups target particular ethnic and geographic communities for victimization and/or recruitment purposes. This reality must be taken into account when determining if there are threats to the United States.” Kortan added that mapping is widely used by law enforcement and is essential to protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. “Just as putting push pins on a map will allow a local police chief to see clearly where the highest crime areas are, combining data that is lawfully collected into one place allows connections to be identified that might otherwise go unnoticed,” he said. FBI officials characterized the use of census data as one factor that helps field offices identify potential threats in their regions, their top priority as the bureau continues its post-Sept. 11, 2001, transformation into an organization able to detect and dismantle terrorism plots. The debate reflects the FBI’s ongoing challenges in balancing its fight against terrorism with respect for civil liberties. The bureau’s tactics have long been controversial, and civil liberties groups have accused agents of overreacting to the Sept. 11 hijackings. FBI officials say they have helped safeguard the nation from another attack. The documents released Thursday emerged from requests filed last year with the FBI by 34 ACLU affiliates nationwide under the Freedom of Information Act. The ACLU, which is seeking to uncover evidence of racial profiling, has sued the bureau in three states, seeking to compel production of more materials. Other documents show FBI offices collecting census data and linking it to perceived threats from groups, such as the National Black Panther Party, Chinese and Russian organized crime, and the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, street gang. Documents from offices in Alabama, New Jersey and Georgia, for example, cite concerns that MS-13 members are committing more crimes. Noting that members are typically from El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras, the memos break down population data for local people born in those and other Latin American countries. They also cite other material that agents say justifies investigative activity, but much of it is redacted.

Racial profiling is legal and important for national security purposes - Korematsu v. US proves

Tucker 10 [Nathan Tucker is a Davenport attorney and author of We The People: The Only Cure to Judicial Activism. “Can We Use Racial Profiling to Stop Terrorists?”, TheIowaRepublican, 5-30-2010,http://theiowarepublican.com/2010/can-we-use-racial-profiling-to-stop-terrorists/] JG

However, unlike affirmative action, the Supreme Court has traditionally held that there is only one valid exception to race-neutral policies—when national security demands it. As the Court put it in Korematsu v. United States (1944), “[p]ressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of [racial discrimination], racial antagonism never can.”∂ The federal government had, in the months after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, temporarily excluded Korematsu and others of Japanese descent from portions of the West Coast out of fear of espionage and sabotage. The Court ruled that this was constitutional “because we are at war with the Japanese Empire [and] because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures.”∂ Today we are at war not with the Japanese Empire, but with radical Muslims from the Middle East. This war, unfortunately, is not easily defined, has no obvious battle ground, and has an indefinite duration. Because of the sporadic nature of the war on terror, the government would not be justified in using the expansive use of race that was upheld in Korematsu.∂ The ongoing threat to national security posed by terrorists, however, would justify the limited use of race by law enforcement. A country cannot effectively fight and win a war if it must pretend that it doesn’t know who its enemy is. If Britain had to pretend that the IRA was not Irish, or Israel that the PLO was not Arab, many innocent civilians would have perished from the subsequent inability of those governments to foil terrorist attacks.∂ We know who our enemy is, and we know most of them are from the Middle East and must find a way to enter our country, legally or otherwise, to commit terrorist attacks on our soil. Therefore, border and customs agents must be able to use race as one of several factors (example—race plus mildly suspicious behavior) when determining possible threats.

**Following card if there was some Terror DA

DA turns case – instances of war and terrorism allow the government to justify racial profiling for national security

Siggins 02 [Peter Siggins is Chief Deputy Attorney General for the State of California, “Racial Profiling in an Age of Terrorism, “Racial Profiling in an Age of Terrorism”, 3-12-02, http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/ethicalperspectives/profiling.html] JG

Then, in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, by January and February 1942, Attorney General Warren directed the preparation of maps showing all Japanese-owned lands in California, called upon the state's district attorneys to enforce the Alien Land Law against Japanese landowners, and said the presence of Japanese in California provided the opportunity for a repetition of Pearl Harbor. And by March he advocated the exclusion of all Japanese from within 200 miles of the California coast.∂ Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the interest in preserving the safety and security of the nation was put in direct conflict with the American democratic ideal of racial equality. The noble cause of equality in that circumstance yielded to our concern for security. Subsequent experience shows that exclusion to be one of the great injustices of WWII visited upon American residents. Congress has since passed laws ordering reparations from those American residents separated from their homes, businesses and lands. Although the Supreme Court's holding in Korematsu, that the Government in time of war had justified racial discrimination in the name of national security is still the law of the land, many lower courts have recognized the injustice wrought by the Japanese internment and we should not forget it.∂ It is against this historical backdrop that we encounter post-9/11 efforts to combat terrorist acts on American soil, and examine the role that race should play in an effective effort to deter future attacks. But before assessing whether our government's response to the events of 9/11 betray a pattern of racial profiling, I first want to identify what it is.∂ In 1968, the Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Terry v. Ohio. Then Chief Justice Warren, joined by seven other members of the Court, held that it is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment for an officer to detain and search a man's person for a weapon in absence of a search warrant, so long as the officer acts upon a reasonable belief based upon objective factors that the man is armed and dangerous. The Court's decision in Terry has been interpreted by lower courts countless times over the years to allow the brief detention and search of persons by law enforcement officials when officers are acting upon reasonable suspicion that criminality is afoot. The lexicon of the criminal justice community now refers very casually to such stop and frisk encounters as "Terry" stops, and over the years these brief detentions have been relied upon by officers with ever increasing frequency to stop and investigate suspicious characters. In 1996 in Whren v. United States, amid growing concern over the use of Terry stops as a prophylactic law enforcement tool, the Supreme Court reiterated the objective nature of the inquiry into a law officer's basis for a Terry stop. The Court held that an officer's subjective motivation has no part to play in the Fourth Amendment analysis of justification for a stop and search when the officer can articulate objective reasons.∂ Out of the Terry line of cases, as fortified by the Court's decision in Whren, law enforcement agencies all over the country advocated pre-textual stops and encounters with citizens as good proactive policing. The practices are most often deployed through a casual traffic stop occasioned by a burned out taillight or some other minor vehicle code violation. But in recent years, at first anecdotally, then more empirically, it has been demonstrated that the Terry procedure has been used disparately to detain and interrogate black or brown people. In late 1999, the New Jersey state police became the first major law enforcement agency to admit to the stop and detention of disproportionate numbers of black men. Since then, state legislatures all over the country have wrestled with legislation aimed at banning racial profiling, and there has been tremendous outcry to study its effect and occurrence among major law enforcement agencies. For example, the LAPD has been required as part of a consent decree with the USDOJ to collect data that may reveal patterns of racial profiling by officers in traffic stops. Just this year Governor Davis vetoed a bill designed to require local police agencies to report statistics on traffic stops in order to detect patterns of racial profiling. After litigation was field by the ACLU over the veto of this bill, the Governor and Highway Patrol have instituted the program by executive order. As recently as March 2001, Attorney General Ashcroft condemned racial profiling as "[A]n unconstitutional deprivation of equal protection under our Constitution."∂ So, racial profiling as the term has been employed in recent public debate, refers to government activity directed at a suspect or group of suspects because of their race, whether intentional or because of the disproportionate numbers of contacts based upon other pre-textual reasons. Under Fourth Amendment analysis, objective factors measure whether law enforcement action is constitutional, and under the Fourteenth Amendment challenges to the practice are assessed under the customary strict scrutiny test for racial classifications. In the weeks following September 11, federal, state and local law enforcement officials worked feverishly to investigate those responsible for the most reprehensible crime on American Soil and to assess our state of vulnerability to further acts of terrorism. As part of those efforts conclusions about the ethnicity and national origin of the prime suspects was inescapable. This crime was committed by a group of foreign nationals of middle eastern descent.∂ Immediately law enforcement officials focused special investigative efforts upon foreign nationals from middle eastern countries, often in disregard of any other factors warranting suspicion. In December, federal investigators began voluntary interviews with more than 5,000 young middle eastern men who entered the United States within the last two years from countries that were linked to terrorism. Federal officials have contacted administrators at more than two hundred colleges and universities to gain information about students from middle eastern countries. What are their majors? Where do they live? How often do they miss class? They have followed up these efforts with unannounced visits and interviews with the students. Some local police chiefs who have worked hard to rebut concerns over racial profiling have resisted cooperation with these federal efforts on the ground that the interviews appear to violate departmental policy or state and local laws.∂ In California, by September 25, 2001, the governor and attorney general along with the Highway Patrol and the Office of Emergency Services formed the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center. The Center is created to analyze and process the thousands of tips and leads of suspicious activity that began pouring into state law enforcement agencies in the days following September 11th. The effort has been to separate the wheat from the chaff and disseminate to law enforcement information that truly reflects suspicious activity or reliably warrants concern. In just January and February of this year, 1,615 subjects were reported to the database. Two Hundred and twenty eight of them had criminal histories and 330 were the subjects of ongoing investigations. The center services an average of 56 law enforcement agencies per week, and monitors 40 open anti-terrorist investigations.∂ Significant information continues to be received by the Center every day reporting the conduct of males of apparent middle east extraction that hardly qualifies for the designation of suspicious or dangerous activity. The job of responsible law enforcement officials is to cull form the many innocuous reports received by the center, those that combine ethnic or national origin with a multiple of indicators to reveal persons who may be a concern or possible threat.∂ The U.S. Congress, in the days following September 11th, passed The USA Patriot Act, an omnibus bill containing numerous reforms to federal criminal procedure, laws relating to foreign intelligence surveillance, wiretaps and interception of electronic communications, laws relating to the gathering of documentary evidence, and DNA and immigration laws. In a very general sense, the Act makes it easier for federal investigative agencies to obtain wiretaps on multiple electronic devices, and procure electronic and documentary evidence from sources like internet service providers and cable and telephone companies. It also relaxes prohibitions on the sharing of information obtained in investigations by different federal agencies. While the latitude afforded law enforcement activities under the act and relaxed standards for information sharing may give rise to concern for the protection of civil liberties, the provisions most relevant to our discussion today are in the area of immigration and naturalization.∂ Section 412 of the Patriot Act permits the attorney general of the United States to detain aliens he certifies as threats to national security for up to seven days without bringing charges. The standard to establish grounds for detention is the familiar reasonable suspicion standard enunciated by the Supreme Court in Terry. The certification by the attorney general must set forth that he has "reasonable grounds to believe" the person being detained will commit espionage or sabotage, try to overthrow the government, commit terrorist acts, or otherwise engage in acts that would endanger national security. At the conclusion of seven days, the detention may continue in the event the alien is charged with a crime or violation of visa conditions. But if circumstances prohibit the repatriation of a person for an immigration offense, the detention may continue indefinitely so long as certified by the attorney general every six months. Under the USA Patriot Act, the prospect exists that a person who is confined for a violation of conditions of entry into the US, but cannot be deported to his or her country of origin, may be indefinitely confined here without criminal charges ever filed against them.∂ Thurgood Marshall wrote that, "History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure." Recent surveys indicate that 66% of whites and 71% of African-Americans support the ethnic profiling of people who look to be of middle-eastern descent. But we also know that hate motivated violence against middle eastern people and members of California's sikh community, often mistakenly thought to be Arabs, spiked in the weeks after the September 11th attack. There are currently 150 open federal hate crime investigations for incidents following the September 11th attack.∂ The mission of responsible law enforcement officials in combating domestic terrorism is to take what they know to be true about the ethnic identity of the September 11th assailants, and combine it with other factors developed through investigation and analysis to focus investigative efforts and avoid casting a net too wide. Have the subjects passed bad checks? Do they multiple forms of identification with different names? Do they live in groups with no visible means of support? Does a subject use credit cards with different names on them? Ethnicity alone is not enough. If ethnic profiling of middle eastern men is enough to warrant disparate treatment, we accept that all or most middle eastern men have a proclivity for terrorism, just as during World War II all resident Japanese had a proclivity for espionage.∂ The Israeli airline El Al has a policy of singling out young Arabs for extensive search procedures, but is quick to point out that, in spite of ongoing war in the middle east, it has not had a hijacking in over thirty years. Perhaps there is a need to adjust our expectations in a time of national emergency. Con. Richard Gephardt has said of post-September 11th America that, "We're in a new world where we have to rebalance freedom and security." And Sen. Trent Lott said that, "When you're in this type of conflict, when you're at war, civil liberties are treated differently." The real question for us is how differently and whether differently for all or only a select few.∂ I agree with the sentiments of Walter Dellinger, former Acting Solicitor General during the Clinton Administration, "I am more willing to entertain restrictions that affect all of us like identity cards and more intrusive X-ray procedures at airports - and am somewhat more skeptical of restrictions that affect only some of us, like those that focus on immigrants or single out people by nationality." It will be impossible to physically protect every location that could be the subject of a terrorist attack. Protection is going to have to be accomplished through infiltration and surveillance, so all of us have to get used to new levels of government intrusion.

State Focus Bad

The demand for solutions in a legal framework forces us to take the law as our client and perpetuate current social and economic injustices

HARRIS 1994 (Angela, Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, California Law Review, July)

This awareness of the role of universities and professional academics in keeping a particular set of political and economic relations in place is one effect of postmodernist disenchantment, and it brings us back to the critique of normativity. As Gerald Wetlaufer has noted, the pressure of legal normativity - the demand that legal academics propose solutions that can be implemented within the existing legal system - impels legal scholars to take the law as their client. 189 A disenchanted jurisprudence of reconstruction would not conclude that providing legal answers to legal questions is therefore futile or "counterrevolutionary"; but as Spivak suggests, it would put on the agenda the need to keep in mind the larger political and economic context of law professing as race-crits continue their theory-building. One consequence might be a reconsideration of the "race for theory" itself. If the price for admission to the academy (say, the admission by Richard Posner that CRT really does have an idea or two to offer, after all) 190 is a hyperabstract theorizing that makes a public debate about race and racism impossible, race-crits may want to hold assimilation into the [*780] bureaucracy of the university at arm's length. Here CRT's engagement in the politics of difference may help keep it suspended in creative balance. A jurisprudence of reconstruction cannot afford to become enchanted with either "theory" or "practice"; its work instead is to refuse that dichotomy.

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