discrimination

by Jeremy Leaming

While a large public school district in Minnesota has taken steps, prompted by legal action, to combat discrimination against LGBT students, the U.S. Department of Education has released information, which perhaps not surprisingly, reveals persistent discrimination against black students in public schools nationwide.

Reporting for the Pioneer Press, Sarah Horner details the Anoka-Hennepin school district board’s vote, with one member resigning in protest, to “accept a settlement agreement with [Dylon] Frei and five other former and current district students who had filed two lawsuits over a policy requiring staff to remain neutral when the topic of sexual orientation came up in the classroom.” As Horner notes Frei and the other students had repeatedly faced sexual harassment and gender stereotyping. Frei, Horner reports, told a crown outside the school board offices that his peers had repeatedly called him “fag,” and physically harmed him.

The school board voting 5-1 approved a consent decree that will resolve the students’ lawsuit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. The decree also resolves a separate complaint lodged in Nov. 2010 by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education.

The consent decree filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota includes a number of requirements that Anoka-Hennepin school officials will have to undertake to ensure they comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which bar harassment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students.

For example the school district, the largest in Minnesota, must retain a consultant to review the district’s policy on harassment, create and implement “a comprehensive plan for preventing and addressing student-on-student sex-based harassment,” and improve “its system for maintaining records of investigation and responding to allegations of harassment.”

Some good news came out of Washington Tuesday.

Sound unlikely? That's because the news comes from the STATE of Washington, where the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals essentially struck down the state's felon disenfranchisement law because it's racially discriminatory and violates the federal Voting Rights Act.

The case, Farrakhan v. Gregoire, has been in the federal courts since 1996, when the plaintiffs -- all minority citizens who had been convicted of felonies -- sued the state, claiming that the disenfranchisement law discriminated on the basis of race because Washington disproportionately prosecutes and sentences minorities. They produced some compelling social science research to show that disparities in Washington's rates of criminal investigation, vehicle searches, arrest, bail recommendations, and confinement could not be explained by "legitimate" factors, such as the higher rate of minority involvement in criminal activity. Rather, the court concluded, the state's criminal justice system is riddled with racial discrimination at every stage.

Amazingly, the state didn't dispute the social science evidence, but merely claimed that, even assuming its validity, it is legally insufficient to sustain the plaintiffs' claim under the Voting Rights Act that the felon disenfranchisement law results in the denial of the right to vote on account of race. The court disagreed.

So now what?