WHAT CAN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION CELEBRATE ON HUMAN RIGHTS DAY?

It also faults the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for failing to reopen public health care facilities in the Gulf Coast communities devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, thereby contributing to “an increase in the number of deaths due to the lack of medical services.” 

Housing discrimination is another area underlined in the USHRN report. It says the government “has not adequately responded to private acts of housing discrimination.  African Americans and Latinos frequently encounter discrimination when attempting to rent or purchase a home, or when attempting to secure funding or insurance for a home purchase.”

The report also links race with predatory and subprime lending. “The subprime mortgage market clearly adversely impacts members of minority groups seeking mortgages within the U.S. Women of color have been victimized by subprime lending abuses more than any other group of homeowners.”

The culprits, it says, include “federally regulated depository institutions, state regulated institutions, non-regulated independent mortgage bankers and brokers, secondary market institutions, private investors, rating agencies, and appraisers.”

The report singles out police brutality and the negative experiences of racial and ethnic minorities in the criminal justice system as examples of racist practices. It says, “Disparities generated by racial profiling and concentration of law enforcement efforts in communities of color are exacerbated by racially discriminatory exercises of broad prosecutorial discretion in charging, plea bargaining, and prosecution of criminal offenses.”

Law enforcement officers “known to have engaged in even the most egregious forms of racist police torture and violence often go unprosecuted and unpunished, and lack of transparency and effectiveness in complaint and disciplinary mechanisms allows widespread abuses to go undeterred,” the report says.

It points out that “Disadvantages faced by defendants of color are aggravated by profound failures in the fragmented, patchwork public defense system in the U.S. Notwithstanding the U.S. government’s claims that the right to counsel is guaranteed to all without discrimination based on race, public defense services in most parts of the United States, disproportionately relied up on by people of color, are dramatically under-funded and lacking in oversight. The federal government provides minimal to no financial support for indigent defense in state courts.”

Education is another target of USHRN’s criticism of the government report. It says, “More than five decades since the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education the U.S. has failed to provide equal educational opportunity and a high quality, inclusive education to all students. Public schools today are more segregated than they were in 1970.”

It says that major factors contributing to racial inequality in educational opportunities include “under-performing, poorly financed schools that perpetuate minority students’ underachievement due to lower teacher quality, larger class size, and inadequate facilities; student assignment policies that promote segregation.”

It adds, “The legislative and executive branches of the federal government have all but abandoned school integration and diversity as a matter of policy. The public school system has become an entry point into the juvenile justice system, in particular for youth of color. It says this ‘school to prison pipeline’ is fed by “historical inequities, such as segregated education, concentrated poverty, and racial disparities in law enforcement. Racial disparities exist in suspension, expulsion and arrest rates in school which contribute to disproportionately high dropout rates and referrals to the justice system.”

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