deerstalker

As Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh continues to make rounds of congressional courtesy calls seeking support, civil rights groups have been turning up the heat to push the U.S. Senate to either “press pause on the nomination” or reject President Trump’s pick outright. To achieve that end, representatives from such organizations—The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, National Urban League, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, National Council of Asian Pacific Americans and Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)—are rallying their multicultural constituencies to speak out. Under the banner, “#WhatsAtStake for Voting Rights in SCOTUS Fight,” this collective held a press briefing Monday to strongly communicate how Kavanaugh’s addition to the conservative-leaning high court would further undermine the franchise of people of color.

With midterms less than five months away and the 2020 presidential election in the wings, the civil rights leaders asserted that the stakes couldn’t be higher. “We consider his nomination an immediate threat to our community’s right to vote that is already under daring attacks,” says Suzanne Bergeron, senior director of civil rights and workforce policy for NUL, one of several organizations urging voters to call their senators in an effort to halt the confirmation process. “Having Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court to rule on voter rights cases could leave African-American voters even more vulnerable to voter intimidation and added suppressive tactics that negatively impact black voter turnout.”

The rapidly changing voter demographics have added intensity to this battle. “I will remind that the U.S. electorate is diversifying racially and ethnically at warp speed. Last year was the country’s most racially and ethnically diverse electorate ever, with nearly one in three eligible voters on election day being a person of color,” says Janai Nelson, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “And the 2018 and 2020 elections promise to continue this trend with voters of colors comprising 44% of millennial voters, which is the largest generation of eligible voters.”

Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference, which organized the call, argued that the Senate “must demand the release and full review of Kavanaugh’s records.” Declaring that “if confirmed, Kavanaugh would undermine voting rights enforcement in our nation,” she cited one of the decisions he made in his role as a judge of the D.C. Court of Appeals. In 2011, he wrote an opinion upholding South Carolina’s voter ID law that the Department of Justice had blocked, deeming the measure as being discriminatory to minorities in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“He refused to include language put forward by the other judges on the panel that acknowledged the critical role of the Voting Rights Act in preventing racial discrimination in voting,” she said. “It is telling and troubling that Kavanaugh refused to recognize the importance of the historic Voting Rights Act. Kavanaugh backed the spurious claim that the voter ID law would prevent voter fraud. But given that South Carolina could not produce any evidence of fraud, it’s clear the law’s real purpose was to suppress voting, plain and simple. What we know so far about Kavanaugh’s record is that he has been a partisan, politician operative. So we need to know more.”

Gupta, along with the group, also raised concerns about the nominee based on the track record of Trump’s previous Supreme Court appointment Justice Neil Gorsuch, who served as “the fifth and deciding vote in two devastating anti-voting rights decisions. One decision allowed voter purging in Ohio and the other upheld racial gerrymandering in Texas.”

Even before the Trump administration came to power, the Supreme Court tilted right in such cases. With the 5-4 decision in Shelby v. Holder in 2013, the court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that stripped the law’s formula to require all or jurisdictions of states with a history of electoral discrimination—many of them located in the South—to get “pre-cleared” by the federal government before making any adjustments to voting laws.

“It is quite clear that we are at a critical point in time in our history of defense of civil rights. For the last five years, because of Congress’ failure to act following the decision in Shelby County by the Supreme Court…we are evaluating proposals to change voting rights laws in important regions across the country,” Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of MALDEF, said. “Without pre-clearance, we are left with federal court as the last resort to ensure that our laws reflect the constitutional rights of every individual who is eligible to vote.”

Nelson agrees: “Voting rights protect every other right we enjoy and it is essential that the next Supreme Court justice has a clear commitment to protecting access to the ballot box.”

The post What’s At Stake in the Fight to Save SCOTUS and Voting Rights in America appeared first on Black Enterprise.

Anime studio Toei Animation is bringing Japanese enthusiasts of the art form an awesome new place to go and bask in all its glory. The company is opening up a new museum in […]

The post Tokyo Gets a Brand-New Anime Museum from World-Renowned Toei Animation Studio appeared first on Geek.com.

Writer: Cullen Bunn / Artist: Jonas Scharf / Boom! Studios

Be Not Proud

The first act of Bone Parish feels familiar. A drug user in the middle of the street experiences a high quite unlike anything else in his life. The hallucinations are vivid beyond compare: bright neon lights and aural bliss, as he relives the last lyrics of some rockstar. The macabre lyrics and contrasting illustration create a magnificent dissonance, and it’s utterly captivating the same way as watching a train wreck as it happens.

The dealer of the latest drug takes the stage, but barely has to make his sales pitch about “The Ash” before his customers buy up the remaining stock in short order. Immediately after this exposition, Bunn and Scharf decide to up the stakes and makes things much more interesting.

On the surface, Bone Parish seems like a story about a criminal drug enterprise and the family behind it. Elements of horror appear, yet before the halfway point Bunn makes it clear that this is a much more involved narrative. “Ash” is not just a supernatural drug, it is a drug with very specific ingredients, side effects, and a foreboding cultural history that haunts the people with the knowledge on how to craft it. While the standard drug / criminal narrative emerge, the anchoring of the Ash as a familial secret embedded within the culture is a fascinating way to merge the typical crime family tropes with your magical inheritance tropes. It posits questions about culture transmission and how far we’ll go to cling to the past. This only gets better the more these questions are meditated upon.

Scharf’s artwork is a perfect compliment to the dark narrative. It captures both the urban and supernatural elements of the story, integrating them to great effect. In the best way, it is often unnerving to turn the next page.

This is a strong opening chapter, serving as a tantalizing start to the series. A lot of the more exciting developments occur in the second half of the issue, but it still remains a fun read and another example of excellent horror coming out this year.

9.0 “Bags of Ash” out of 10

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The post Bone Parish #1 Review appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.

It has been an experience watching people twist and bend, trying to slot Sorry to Bother You into some kind of familiar category. “It’s Michel Gondry married to Spike Jonze,” or “Wes Anderson by way of Charlie Kaufman.” Not only do these comparisons try to position this flawed masterpiece in a white filmmaker pantheon, but […]