oldviolin wrote: 
We probably all want to think the best of both people and organizations we admire, and are ready to think the worst of organizations we don't like. I remember hearing the NPR story on the Red Cross' efforts in Haiti where they spent 500 million with little to show for it. People have brought this up in suggesting that folks not donate to ARC to help Houston victims of Harvey. Established in 1881 by Clara Barton, it has, as someone pointed out, "name recognition to die for". Morris Dees, who founded SPLC, has a similarly heroic stature in the mind of the public. His personal story paints him as a Saint Paul type convert to the fight against racism.

Maybe too much success, growth, and attendant bureaucracy is likely to diminish the virtue and effectiveness of any public service organization over time.

 aflanigan wrote: 
A reasonably intelligent person would have to ask themselves if any of this 'hit piece' is true outside of the side show equivocation and resourceful apologetics...It's a bit disturbing and disappointing if not illuminating. Wish I had the time to look further. I always respected this organization for taking on the 'Klan' but it seems like as in everything else, money spoils the day again...
Admittedly I'm not clearly informed if my shallow perception is askew to reality in this case.

 miamizsun wrote: 
This strikes me as more of a hit piece than credible journalism.

He's got some tepid scare quotes, but where is the context? He could have easily done some digging on the hundreds/thousands of other 501(c)3 nonprofits in the US, both conservative, progressive, nonpartisan, etc. to buttress his insinuations, i.e. to find out if other such orgs. hold offshore assets, how much their salaries for top employees tend to be, etc.

The inclusion of editorializing comments and criticisms from anti-LGBT organizations it has labeled "Hate groups" (not sure how that's not true) seems to be fairly irrelevant to the issue of whether what they are doing is a) unusual, b) illegal, or c) unethical.

They seem to have been upfront about wanting to have a nest egg stashed away to deal with the vagaries of fundraising, and started decades ago. Not surprising that like many businesses and entities, they want to shelter their assets from taxes if possible. From Wikipedia:

"The SPLC's activities, including litigation, are supported by fundraising efforts, and it does not accept any fees or share in legal judgements awarded to clients it represents in court. Starting in 1974, the SPLC set aside money for its endowment stating that it was "convinced that the day come when non-profit groups no longer be able to rely on support through mail because of posting and printing costs".^<117> For 2016, its endowment was approximately $319 million per its annual report and SPLC spent 68% of its revenue on programs.^<1>"

 

uh oh, the jig is up...

Southern Poverty Law Center Transfers Millions in Cash to Offshore Entities

Left-wing nonprofit pays lucrative six-figure salaries to top management

Tax experts expressed confusion when being told of the transfer.

"I've never known a US-based nonprofit dealing in human rights or social services to have any foreign bank accounts," said Amy Sterling Casil, CEO of Pacific Human Capital, a California-based nonprofit consulting firm. "My impression based on prior interactions is that they have a small, modestly paid staff, and were regarded by most in the industry as frugal and reliable. I am stunned to learn of transfers of millions to offshore bank accounts. It is a huge red flag and would have been completely unacceptable to any wealthy, responsible, experienced board member who was committed to a charitable mission who I ever worked with."

"It is unethical for any US-based charity to invest large sums of money overseas," said Casil. "I know of no legitimate reason for any US-based nonprofit to put money in overseas, unregulated bank accounts."

"It seems extremely unusual for a ‘501(c)(3)' concentrating upon reducing poverty in the American South to have multiple bank accounts in tax haven nations," Charles Ortel, a former Wall Street analyst and financial advisor who helped uncover a 2009 financial scandal at General Electric, told the Free Beacon.

 R_P wrote: 

When a black fighter won ‘the fight of the century,’ race riots erupted across America

(...) The fight itself made for an odd pairing. Jack Johnson was the world’s premier up-and-comer. Born in Galveston, Texas, the son of two former slaves, he had shaken the sporting public when he won the heavyweight championship in Sydney, Australia two years before.

Johnson - witty, charismatic, rich, well-dressed, and apparently unstoppable - practically dared an uneasy white public to find a counterweight. “But one thing remains,” wrote novelist Jack London who reported with dread on the boxer’s Australian victory, “(retired boxer Jim) Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farm and wipe that smile from Johnson’s face.”

Though a fearsome heavyweight boxer in his day, Jim Jeffries’s prime was behind him, having quit boxing six years before to spend his days on his Burbank ranch. Yet Jeffries, who had always refused to fight black opponents, was finally persuaded to come out of retirement (the $101,000 purse ($3.7 million today) helped). He was billed as “the great white hope.”

It was easy for a fighter in his prime like Johnson to welcome the high-profile fight. He loved the spotlight, and was known for his sharp dressing and wit, and in some sense anticipated the time when star athletes would become above all entertainers, ready to perform on stage and pose for the camera. (In Johnson’s case, he appeared in a string of vaudeville shows in the months leading up to the fight.) And this new match was shaping up to be the fight of his career. (...)

 haresfur wrote: 

You might want to read up on the history of court-ordered busing in Boston during the 70s. AFAICT it generally didn't improve educational achievement for minority students bused to better schools. It also lead to a lot of white families moving their kids out of the Boston school system, either to the suburbs or into private and parochial schools. Busing also really worsened racial relations in Boston. IIRC it also didn't prevent eventual re-segregation of schools in the city. 

I think it's generally better to move funding, resources and effective government oversight into underperforming schools than to bus kids out of them. 


Today, it seems that Boston uses a lottery system to help parents choose schools for their kids.

The new system, approved by the School Committee last March after more than a year of research and debate, is quite different from the old one. For 25 years, the city divided schools into three sprawling geographic-based zones, under a plan to comply with court-ordered desegregation that offered families a choice of about two dozen schools.

Schools are no longer divided into assignment zones. Instead, a computer algorithm generates a list of schools that considers such factors as distance from a family’s home, school capacity, and MCAS performance. The algorithm guarantees a minimum of six school choices, including at least four of medium or high quality. But in many cases, families in densely populated neighborhoods with many nearby schools are receiving more than a dozen options.

But it's not fully successful:


The city uses a lottery system that was intended to give all students access to high-achieving classrooms, regardless of neighborhood or life circumstance. But families fixate on a collection of well-known, fiercely sought-after schools, largely ignoring those with lesser reputations. And over the past two decades, popularity has often become a proxy for quality, making it even harder for schools to get off that second rung. 
...

Popular schools have become synonymous with the choices of white middle-class families, principals and families say. And the demand report reflects the choices of families who choose early.

Oliver said parents of color and those in low-income communities “don’t always go in to make choices when the lottery starts. We have a lot of people who can’t make a commitment until June or even Labor Day.’’

...

School choice is “pretty complicated stuff, and people are always eager to come up with pretty simple solutions,’’ said Curt Dudley-Marling, a Boston College professor who studies patterns of school failure and success. “It always seems to me that it’s rigged for parents who have the most resources.’’

Not all families have the benefit of active parent groups that organize school tours to help families vet their options, which in Boston could mean as many as 20 public school options, not including charters. Single parents, families new to the country, parents of disabled children, or families struggling with the demands of life often are unable to investigate every option.

“I can’t imagine they have time, much less the resources, to go to fairs and all these things,’’ Dudley-Marling said. Instead, they, like most people, default to what they have heard within their circle of influence.

...


Boston is seeking to overhaul its school assignment process, but city officials are adamant that parents will always have some degree of choice. “The question,’’ said Superintendent Carol R. Johnson, “is how much choice is enough and what are the . . . choices parents have?’’ 

 

The racial formula was a condition imposed by court decisions dealing with desegregation in the 1970s.

Being unexpectedly on the receiving end of discrimination opens eyes and mouths...

 kurtster wrote: 
Base it on the census.

 haresfur wrote: 
How would that work ?  Seriously.  A brand new approach I've never heard before.

 miamizsun wrote: 
Note this is in response to a court order addressing the lack of resources for predominantly black schools. So the obvious solution is to provide enough funding for everyone, rather than cutting to a win-lose level.

If the school board was smart, they would encourage busing white students to schools where they are putting more funding and to bus black students to the white schools to balance the demographics. Maybe at some point they could change it so the funding is based on parental education levels rather than race.

 miamizsun wrote: 
They'll have to put all the white people on boats and ship them back east where they came from ....

NoHo school budget cuts due to high white student percentage sparks outrage

Outrage has grown at Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, as the school faces layoffs and increased class sizes due to a law limiting funds for schools with a higher white student body.

The Los Angeles Unified School District provides more funding for schools where the white population is below 30 percent.

 

"Thankfully we're going to keep our librarian. We're going to keep our nurse, but we may lose a few teachers, but not as many as we once thought," said Sheila Edmiston, one student's parent.

Several jobs will still be lost and class sizes could grow. For many parents, the race-based reason of "too many white students" has made the cuts more difficult to swallow.

Recalling an Era When the Color of Your Skin Meant You Paid to Vote
Celebrating the 50th anniversary of a ruling that made the poll tax unconstitutional

In January 1955 in Hardin County, Texas, Leo Carr had to pay $1.50 to vote. That receipt for Carr's "poll tax" now resides in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. In today’s dollars, Carr paid roughly $13.

“It’s a day’s wages,” explains William Pretzer, the museum’s senior history curator. “You’re asking someone to pay a day’s wages in order to be able to vote.”

Pretzer says the museum accepted the donation of the receipt from Carr’s family as a vivid and a significant example of the way that voting rights were denied to African Americans. Poll taxes, quite simply a tax to pay to vote, were enacted in the post-reconstruction era from the late 19th to the very early 20th century. But they remained in effect until the 1960s. (...)

Alabama Sends a Message

Black Students In The U.S. Get Criminalized While White Students Get Treatment
The same misbehavior is treated in very different ways

Trumping America - Henry Giroux

Donald Trump lit up the mainstream media spectacle by stating in his presidential candidacy announcement, "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best.... They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." (1) The mainstream press could not let such an opportune racist outburst go unnoticed. After all, it was perfect fodder for fueling the corporate media's never-ending spectacle of entertainment. Mouthed from one of America’s favorite billionaire buffoons, his racist and xenophobic statements have been defended as brave, dismissed as uncivil, or set aside  as the colorful discourse of a cantankerous, rich eccentric. Such commentary collapses into the realm of the personal by privatizing racism. That is, it ignores the deep seated contours of systemic racism and xenophobia and the conditions that promote it, instead focusing on the individual who spouts such poisonous racist language. Rather than viewing Trump’s comments as a political virus that has deep roots in nativist apoplexy and a long legacy of racism and state violence, his despicable remarks are reduced to an uncivil rant by a bullying member of the billionaire class with no reference to the unmarked status of white privilege and its underlying logic of white supremacy.  Such commentary at its core is superficial, duplicitous, and represents a flight from responsibility and a politics of denial.

Not only did mainstream media replay Trump's statements over and over again, without any serious criticism, but also they filled the 24/7 news cycle with endless interviews in which Trump defended his remarks, proving the obvious about his arrogance and stupidity. Treated more as an indication of Trump's no-holds-barred personality than as another example of the myth of the United States' claim to the comfortable status of an alleged postracial society, Trump's remarks were viewed as indiscrete and colorful rather than symptomatic of the racial hatred lying beneath the culture of dominant politics.

The real issue that needs to be examined is what kind of society produces a Donald Trump.

The racial cleansing machine was in full operating mode as the dominant media apparatuses rushed to interview a variety of faux commentators about how they felt about Trump's remarks with little attempt to take the high ground and challenge many of the remarks that were made. On the contrary, the only truth or sense of injustice displayed by CNN, NBC, CBS and other major news outlets lies in the assumption that the meaning of any issue rests with making sure that the public is exposed to a narrow array of views in the interest of balance and journalistic objectivity.

According to this logic, balance - not morality, justice or evidence - is the ultimate arbiter of truth. Hence, Trump's vicious, racist remarks enabled the mainstream media to let the American people hear from Sen. Ted Cruz who argued that he liked Donald Trump and was glad he was bringing attention to the issue of "illegal immigration." (2) Former Sen. Rick Santorum joined Cruz in praising Trump for focusing on "illegal immigration," absent of any serious criticism of his racist remarks. (3) Other conservative politicians such as Sen. Lindsey Graham and former Gov. Rick Perry condemned Trump's remarks but nothing was said in the press about how they had played a key role in supporting legislation that was both vicious and racist. (4) (...)

 Steely_D wrote:
"Nothing. I just don't like the lifestyle."

I'm sorry I haven't been keeping up with this thread but I think the only people that feel there isn't racism in America are the racists themselves.