Alabama's reason-blind tribalism
The Strange Career of Juan Crow
By DIANE McWHORTER, NYT
THE depth of my alienation from home hit me last January, when Alabama shut out Louisiana State for the college football championship. Even in the familiar afterglow of ’Bama’s second title in three years, I had to ask myself, what right did my state have to brag, about anything?
The pride of the Crimson Tide fan is just the relatively fun side of the state’s reason-blind tribalism, the same hard-wiring that produced its other recent superlative, the “toughest in the nation” immigration law that made criminal suspects of an entire class of human beings — and turned those who tolerated their presence into felon accessories. Thanks to H.B. 56 (the “Beason-Hammon Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act”), passed a year ago by the state’s first Republican Legislature since Reconstruction, I am ashamed of being from Alabama.
The contagion of Alabama’s shame became apparent in April, during the oral argument before the Supreme Court on Arizona’s immigration legislation, the test case for several similar state laws aimed primarily at Hispanics. All have been substantially blocked by federal courts, except Alabama’s, most of which went into effect last fall, catastrophically achieving the goal Arizona calls “attrition through enforcement” — also known as “self-deportation.”
As the court seemed to cast a benign eye on the linchpin of the Arizona law — the requirement that the police determine the immigration status of anyone they stop who invites “reasonable suspicion” of illegal residency — I realized how dismayingly reliable Alabama remained as the country’s moral X-ray, exposing the broken places. So on the eve of the Arizona decision, expected this month, it is useful to review what the imposition of “states’ rights” on federal immigration policy looks like in the one state where this has been accomplished. If Alabama, the cradle of the civil rights movement, can retool Jim Crow as Juan Crow, what have we learned?
(More here.)
By DIANE McWHORTER, NYT
THE depth of my alienation from home hit me last January, when Alabama shut out Louisiana State for the college football championship. Even in the familiar afterglow of ’Bama’s second title in three years, I had to ask myself, what right did my state have to brag, about anything?
The pride of the Crimson Tide fan is just the relatively fun side of the state’s reason-blind tribalism, the same hard-wiring that produced its other recent superlative, the “toughest in the nation” immigration law that made criminal suspects of an entire class of human beings — and turned those who tolerated their presence into felon accessories. Thanks to H.B. 56 (the “Beason-Hammon Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act”), passed a year ago by the state’s first Republican Legislature since Reconstruction, I am ashamed of being from Alabama.
The contagion of Alabama’s shame became apparent in April, during the oral argument before the Supreme Court on Arizona’s immigration legislation, the test case for several similar state laws aimed primarily at Hispanics. All have been substantially blocked by federal courts, except Alabama’s, most of which went into effect last fall, catastrophically achieving the goal Arizona calls “attrition through enforcement” — also known as “self-deportation.”
As the court seemed to cast a benign eye on the linchpin of the Arizona law — the requirement that the police determine the immigration status of anyone they stop who invites “reasonable suspicion” of illegal residency — I realized how dismayingly reliable Alabama remained as the country’s moral X-ray, exposing the broken places. So on the eve of the Arizona decision, expected this month, it is useful to review what the imposition of “states’ rights” on federal immigration policy looks like in the one state where this has been accomplished. If Alabama, the cradle of the civil rights movement, can retool Jim Crow as Juan Crow, what have we learned?
(More here.)
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