Washington Informer

White people in America have a real penchant for transferring their guilty behavior onto other people. What's more they are constantly getting away with it. It's called blaming the victims for the crimes.

In the realm of electoral politics they say that the only reason Black people support President Barack Obama is because he's Black. While in fact they've already run the numbers to figure out what percentage of the White vote former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will have to get in order to offset Obama's 96 percent approval from Blacks.

So there may be more than a kernel of truth in that supposition, because the President has done much more to help all people in this society than he has to help the neediest. And wouldn't you know it; Black people are disproportionately represented at the bottom of this country's food chain, and are therefore suffering disproportionately. But there is no special relief coming for them, not from this White House. And Black people still support him overwhelmingly.

If White folks said Bill Clinton was the first "Black President," then they've said that Barack Obama is the first Jewish President, and now he's the first "Gay President."

Black people still support President Obama, even though he hasn't thrown them a special lifeline, for one thing because he hasn't messed up (yet), horrendously betraying the public trust with a young intern, or by launching an unjust and un-winnable war.

Maybe it's the "coolness factor." When Obama did the "brush-off" thing like entertainer Jay-Z in a video, the President won the hearts of all Black folks younger than 35. When he turned around and crooned a few bars of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together," he permanently won the hearts of all Black folks older than 45. Had he done his version of Michael Jackson's "Moonwalk" when he was giving the Barnard College commencement address he would have gotten more views on YouTube than Kony.

The fact of the matter is that "a new large-scale study shows that racial attitudes have already played a substantial role in 2012, during the Republican primaries. They may play an even larger role in this year's presidential election," Molly McElroy wrote for the University of Washington, according to Richard Prince's online column "Journal-isms." The notion that Obama's election ushered in the "post-racial" age is just a myth to lull Black people to sleep about ongoing racism in this country.

"The study, led by psychologists at the University of Washington, shows that between January and April 2012 eligible voters who favored whites over blacks – either consciously or unconsciously – also favored Republican candidates relative to Barack Obama," according to McElroy.

White folks might say they don't like Obama because of the economy, or because of this, that, or the other, but the real deal is their conscious or unconscious racial attitudes influencing the way they'll vote.

"In the study, a majority of White eligible voters showed a pattern labeled 'automatic white preference' on a widely used measure of unconscious race bias. Previous studies indicate that close to 75 percent of white Americans show this implicit bias," Mahzarin Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard University and one of the study's collaborators wrote.

So the President – like all Democratic presidential candidates since 1972 – lost the "White vote" in 2008. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) carried the White vote by a margin of 55 percent to 43 percent over then Sen. Obama. An analysis in the Daily Kos has done the math. Gov. Romney will have to keep the President from winning more than 38 percent of the White vote in order for him to win.

So now it's all starting to make sense. Voter suppression efforts have gone from individual voting precincts to statewide legislative campaigns in at least 20 states where so-called Voter ID laws have been put into place. So now, Black people who were "American enough" to chop and pick cotton for generations, and to perform every other kind of undesirable task for little or no pay, are now all of a sudden ineligible to vote because they don't have some state issued driver's license or other ID card? Right!

And now, all of Gov. Romney's code-switching, dog-whistle, race-based campaign jingles, which resonate in the bosom of all true genetically-recessive White folks make sense. White voters get it all right. Those Black voters are only going to vote for President Obama because he's Black, and if we leave it to those Muslim-Communist, Black voters, they'll put Kenya-born Obama back into the White House, and he'll just ruin this country that was getting along just fine when White people were solidly in charge and Black people knew that their place was behind Whites, and they politely stayed there, thank you.

Of the seven years I was editor of Emerge: Black America's Newsmagazine in the 1990s, I am proudest of our national campaign to win the release of Kemba Smith, a 24-year-old former Hampton University student who was sentenced to a mandatory 24 ½ years in prison for her minor role in a drug ring.

Our first story, written by Reginald Stuart in May 1996, featured a high school graduation photo of Kemba, decked in cap and gown, with the words: "Kemba's Nighmare: A Model Student Becomes Prisoner #26370-083." We published two additional stories on Kemba, both written by Stuart.

The original Emerge story caught the attention of Elaine Jones, then director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She began representing Kemba in court and eventually filed a petition for clemency. In late 2000, President Bill Clinton granted LDF's request and Kemba was released after serving 7 ½ years in federal prison.

I've said all along that Kemba wasn't the only victim of our criminal injustice system. Add the Wilmington Ten to that list.

Most Black newspapers are carrying a NNPA News Service story this week by Cash Michaels of the Wilmington Journal describing a national campaign to win pardons for the Wilmington Ten – nine African-Americans and a White female – unfairly convicted in connection with urban unrest. The NNPA is helping spearhead this movement.

In a nutshell, racial strife accompanied the desegregation of New Hanover County, N.C. schools. The all-Black high school was closed under the desegregation plan and its students were transferred to the previously all-White high school, where they received a hostile reception.

In February 1971, the United Church of Christ assigned Benjamin Chavis Jr., a native of Oxford, N.C., to help students organize a school boycott.

Amid the racial turmoil, someone firebombed Mike's Grocery, a White-owned business located a block away from Gregory Congregational Church, where Chavis had set up headquarters. When fire fighters and police officers arrived on the scene, they were attacked by snipers stationed on the roof of the church. At the time, Chavis and other activists had barricaded themselves inside the building. A riot erupted the next day that resulted in two deaths and six injuries.

Chavis and nine others were charged and convicted of arson and conspiracy in connection with the firebombing incident. Most of the defendants received a sentence of 29 years, with Ann Shepard, the White woman from Auburn, N.Y., receiving the lightest sentence of 15 years and 24-year-old Chavis getting the longest sentence, 34 years.

All nine maintained that they were innocent. In 1980, a federal appeals court overturned their convictions, noting that the trial judge restricted defense attorneys from cross-examining witnesses who had received special treatment in exchange for their testimony against the Wilmington Ten.

Defense attorneys, in their petition to reverse the convictions, noted that the prosecutor failed to disclose "inducement for testimony and special favorable treatment offered to each of three important witnesses including leniency, accommodations at a beach hotel and beach cottage paid for by the prosecution, an expense-paid trip for the girlfriend of the chief witness, and the gift of a mini-bike made after the trial."

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled that the prosecution violated due process rights by failing to turn over evidence that was favorable to the defense, including information that would have impeached the testimony of its chief witness, Allen Hall. It was Hall who had leveled the most serious charges against Chavis, depicting him as the chief architect of the violence and claiming that he taught others to assemble firebombs and use firearms.

However, despite more than a half-dozen requests from defense attorneys, the prosecutor refused to turn over a second statement made by Allen that directly contradicted at least 15 of his earlier charges.

The prosecutor also failed to turn over a mental evaluation of Hall.

"Significant to this case are the statements in the report that 'psychological tests reveal an IQ of 82 placing him in the range of borderline defective,'" the appeals court judges wrote. They said Hall's limited intelligence raised questions about Hall's "ability to recall in minute detail events that occurred at least one and one-half years prior to the time he was testifying."

This was the criminal justice system at its worse. The least North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue should do is issue a long overdue pardon and heartfelt apology to the Wilmington Ten.

George E. Curry is editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service (NNPA) and editorial director of Heart & Soul magazine. Curry can be reached through his Web site, www.georgecurry.com. You can also follow him at www.twitter.com/currygeorge.