Despite President Barack Obama’s election and other progress in race relations, America is not a “post-racial nation,” a representative from the Department of Justice said on Tuesday.
Tom Perez, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice spoke about how he works to combat the “undeniable headwind of intolerance that has swept this country,” to a group of about 40 people at Harvard University Law School.
He structured his argument around a question he is commonly asked &- “Why do we need a civil rights division in the year 2010?”
Perez noted that many people consider civil rights a “point of pride as a nation” and even suggest that we are in “post-racial America.”
He answers these perspectives simply by stating “I wish you were right.”
As proof of the continued nature of prejudice, Perez said there is one sentence he has had to say that hurts him more than any other.
“Your son or daughter was killed because they are gay and there’s nothing I can do about it,” Perez said.
“Gay-bashing is regrettably on the rise” and this trend will continue, he said.
Discrimination of the mentally ill is also prominent, Perez said.
He spoke about the 1999 Supreme Court decision Olmstead v. L.C., which contributed to the beginning of integration of mentally ill individuals into the community.
The case dealt with a 14-year-old girl, Sarah Crider, who was unnecessarily institutionalized for mental illness in a sub-standard facility. She died of “lethal constipation” as a result of improperly regulated medications.
In this case, segregation resulted in the preventable death of a young girl, he said.
The Supreme Court ruled against this segregation, and as a result, reforms are being made that will help 10,000 people in Georgia to lead better lives, Perez said.
Perez stressed the importance of jail cases in his department.
He said that prisoners “are as marginalized as anyone, but they have rights.”
He also discussed suing Arizona for the new immigration law, SB 1070. He told the audience that only the federal government can lawfully regulate immigration, and Arizona’s attempt to do so must be defined as discrimination.
Perez acknowledged that “I haven’t poll tested any of this stuff, but if I did it wouldn’t be very popular.”
However, he compared the situation to Harry Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces, and said “if he’d done a poll in the 1940’s, he wouldn’t have done it.”
Perez called the Civil Rights Division the “conscience of the federal government.”
“I leave you with homework. I’d like you to write your own obituary. Look at what you’d like your legacy to be,” Perez asked of his audience.
Perez told students that they could not afford to turn a blind eye to discrimination within our own country and quoted civil rights icon and BU alumnus Martin Luther King, Jr.: “A threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
“It’s truly inspiring to have someone so important come here and talk. It’s interesting to hear what’s going on domestically,” said Garrett Link, a graduate student at Harvard University Extension School.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
