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In the enclosed writings, Ramsey Muñiz speaks of
regaining the spiritual enlightenment that was
taken from our hearts and minds. Please distribute.–Irma L Muñiz

"Only in the heart of the Mexicano cosmos man
can look for spiritual strength. And if he can
keep his soul in touch with the heart of the world,
then from the heart of the world new blood will beat
strength and stillness into him, fulfilling his
destiny of creation."–Tezcatlipoca

In studying the different religions on this earth
I have come to the conclusion that if we as a race and as
a nation are to become a spiritual power on this earth,
we must return to our ancient spiritual creation. We
were here on this earth long before the Pope, Billy Graham,
or any other spiritual leader. We were so connected
to nature, Mother Earth, heaven, Mictlan, and the
Creator, that it totally amazes me how we have
survived the worst, because the best is yet to come.

I still remember during my youth when everything that
was white was alright, while we, the brown race, were
wrong from the time of our birth. Now after all these
years of suffering and sacrificing, we will become
proud to be brown. It is our duty and responsibility
as Mexicanos to share with the youth of today and
tomorrow our ancient spiritual and cultural creation.
It is written that if we fail to do this, we will
become slaves once again. As humans on this earth we
must accept our Mexicano spiritual enlightenment. We can structure the path of spirituality within
ourselves and become that shining star that our
people will follow.

Yes, I’m a proud Mexicano!
I am so proud that happiness overcomes all this
cruel darkness of America. Who am I?
That is the title of one of our cultural/spiritual
books that will soon be written. In fact, it is
already written in my heart and mind, without data
or notes.

There is much conflict in the world today.
This conflict always comes upon the masses of the
poor, the uneducated, the unemployed, the brown,
black, or yellow man.
Nuestra raza has always demonstrated valor and
courage in defending one’s country. We will witness
many more Mexicanos/Mexicanas fighting the wars and
conflicts of America. It is in our blood!

We have
such a unique sense of respect and honor that even
America has come to understand the true warriors
that we are. Yet we witness the deaths of our
sisters and brothers at the borders of America. We
also witness the highest dropout rate of students
in the educational system of this country. We witness
the population of Mexicano inmates in the federal
and state prisons of America. The saddest thing is
hearing our own Mexicano/Hispanic/Latino politicians
tell us that all is alright. It is not alright, and
it never will be until we return to our beginning
– our spiritual creation, our beliefs in the Creator
of all life on this earth.

Remember that they (different oppressors) took
enlightenment away from our hearts and minds. I was
destined to bring our spiritual enlightenment back
to the masses of our people. Remember that spirituality,
regardless of your religion, comes back to cultura!
Eleven years in these dungeons have been a long
time. Without you and your love I cannot even think
of how I would have survived. It was your love and
spirituality.

Con amor,

Ramsey – Tezcatlipoca

"Only the strong survive."
http://www.freeramsey.com

Received via email from Irma L. Muñiz, 15 July 2005.

By Sonia Santana

The Texas Senate was presented a trojan horse bill in HB2465 last night, and they accepted it. Section 8 barely concealed in the belly of the bill would kill the open public process for vendor certification at the Sectretary of State.

The bill passes the Senate last night on a recorded vote of 31-0. HB2465, authored by Elections Committee Chairwoman Mary Denny (R-Flower Mound), had a carefully worded caption promoting public hearings conducted by the SOS, when in fact the bill does exactly the opposite in closing a process that should be open to the public.

Initially the House bill, was in fact only a requirement for a public hearing, after the examination process, to be conducted by the SOS. Public hearings are great; who would be opposed to a public hearing, right? That was exactly the point of Denny’s strategy. Write a nice little innocuously captioned bill and get all kinds of support for it including the ACLU-TX.

Why was it important for ACLU-TX to be on board supporting the bill? Well because the ACLU-TX and The Electronic Freedom Frontier Foundation (EFF) had sued the Secretary of State last year to open those secret vendor certification meetings, and they had won a temporary injunction in district court.

The Secretary of State and the Texas Attorney General contend that this appointed board of examiners is not subject to the Open Meetings Act because they aren’t a governmental body. District Court Judge Stephen Yelenosky reviewed
the documentation and recorded tapes of those secret meetings and disagreed with the Attorney General. Yelenosky ruled that these meetings were subject to the Texas Open Meetings Act.

When a substitute HB2465 was voted out of the Elections committee, it contained a poisoned pill in Section 8 that reads “An examination conducted or determination made under Chapter 122, Election Code, before or after the amendments made by this Act, was and continues to be not subject to Chapter 551, Government Code.”

That single word “not” in that section has now created a very bad law for Texas voters. Texas voters now do not have the right to substantive review and input into the examination process of our voting systems. You just have to trust the Secretary of State to do the right thing, a sort of “faith based” public policy.

I do encourage Texas voters to come to the next examination hearing. It will be the last time they get to view the examination meeting in an open and transparent process, the way it was supposed to be.

Texas voters may get an interim study for a verified paper ballot trail. That amendment was successfully added to the Senate version of the bill. Hopefully that will be acceptable to the author Mary Denny. [Stay tuned for the date.]

As a footnote Representative Eddie Rodriguez (D-Austin), authored House bill HB3383 that specifically wrote into our election code the right of the public to view this examination process. That bill was killed in committee by Representative Mary Denny.

Change of Data Sources Yields Anomalies

By Greg Moses

A Texas agency charged with taking over Civil Rights analysis has decided to stop basing its civilian workforce report on data collected by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Instead of basing its analysis on data collected for civil rights purposes, the Division of Civil Rights at the Texas Workforce Commission in its debut report this year used less precise figures reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

In the past, noted the report, the Texas Commission on Human Rights had compiled the civil rights report from data provided by the EEOC. As a result of the switch in data sources, the first table of the Texas Equal Employment Opportunity Report shows some civil rights anomalies.

For example, Caucasian Americans, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans collectively represented 128 percent of all Texas workers; and all three categories of race-ethnicity cited were under-represented in Administration jobs. While these anomalies are common in reports from the BLS, they make a poor basis for analyzing civil rights.

Since the civil rights report is supposed to compare state agency employment figures with civilian workforce numbers, the choice of BLS data as a baseline raises further questions about the “comparison charts” presented in the report.

Chart One for instance (not Table One) presents numbers on the employment of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Females in the Statewide Civilian Workforce. Numbers used in the chart for race and ethnicity are taken from the overlapping BLS categories.

Chart One in turn is compared to employment of protected classes in state agency employment. From attachments, it appears that state agency employment is calculated according to more rigorous EEOC standards, where protected classes do not overlap.

Throughout the report, numbers are presented in such isolation that it is difficult to scan for internal consistency or disparate impact. Why does no chart present a complete spectrum of protected classes including Asian Americans or Native Americans. Why do colorful graphs of employment rates not also show comparison bars for Anglos or Males? Why are women rarely considered as various races or ethnicities? Why are discussions, analyses, and footnotes so scarce?*

In the end, the reader wants to know, what purpose is this report intended to serve beyond simply complying with some law that says a report is to be issued? Do the laws themselves not have a civil rights context that can serve as the basis for stating the purposes, findings, and recommendations of this report?

Perfunctory is the word that would most charitably describe this report. Evasive is the word I would rather use. From start to finish, the reader gets the impression that no one has really set out to present the condition of equal employment opportunity in Texas in a way that the plain language of civil rights demands.

NOTES:

The Texas Equal Employment Opportunity Report:
http://www.tchr.state.tx.us/EEOrptsum205.pdf

The BLS distribution of employment report 2003:
http://www.bls.gov/opub/gp/pdf/gp97_complete.pdf

The EEO-1 Aggregate Report for 2002:
http://eeoc.gov/stats/jobpat/2002/state/48.html
[What a Civil Rights report looks like.]

First posted 3/27. *Paragraph revised 3/29 to include “disparate impact,” Asian Americans, and Native Americans.

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch

Faithful reader Lynn Chadderdon sends a link to the Sean Gonsalves article posted at “Working for Change” in which the columnist counsels against careless use of the word “racism.” For example, he lives at Cape Cod where there aren’t many black folks, so when local movie theaters fail to schedule black movies, he hears the complaint: “It’s Racism.”

“Well, yeah, this is America,” answers Gonsalves. “The ripple effects left behind in the wake of white supremacy are still with us, even if not overtly. But locales that are mostly white are not going to ‘get black movies’ at the local theater. And it’s not racism. It’s supply and demand. The almighty dollar, to borrow a phrase from the O’Jays famous song ‘For the Love of Money.’ “

To comment on this article please visit the comment blog.

To which we reply one more time: everything follows from where one begins. Gonsalves begins with a concept of racism that can be separated from a concept of supply and demand. That’s how he defines racism in the first place. So, of course. one must choose between racism and economics.

Yet Gonsalves recognizes that his own conceptual map is more influenced by “white” conceptions of racism than by “black” ones. Or to speak more directly to the concepts involved, Gonsalves recognizes that there is a big difference in defining racism as “intent” (the ‘white’ usage) or as “effect” (the ‘black’ usage).

When black folks at Cape Cod diagnose their movie choices as effects of “racism”, Gonsalves says that they are unintentionally communicating a concept of “intent” to their predominately white Cape Cod audience. However, it is not “racist intent” that moves movie managers but “intent to make money.”

But what if black folks at Cape Cod are asking their predominately white audience to “listen up”? That is, what if black folks at Cape Cod in sharing their discontent over racism at the movie theaters are seeking from the community some recognition of the ways that even the so-called “level playing field of supply and demand” is a racist field after all? That there is no way to separate “supply and demand” from racist effects in a racist economy?

What if black folks at Cape Cod are making use of “black usage” in order to raise issues that run much deeper than “white usage” allows? In that case, we would encourage columnist Gonsalves to not lead the retreat into “white usage.” Rather we would encourage attention to the cover story at Black Commentator this week and, “Reject the Language of White Supremacy.”

Once upon a time I taught Northern students. And Northern white students have a way of speaking that is just too precious. For example, some will say: “We live in an all white town, so there is no racism where I live.” You gotta admit that’s cute stuff. Neither beautiful nor true, but quite cute indeed.

On the other hand, I have been driving my spouse to work this week and my favorite morning radio is “Wake Up Call” with Rev. Frank Garrett, Jr. This show reminds me that even if one adopts the “black usage” of racism and does not try to revert to cute white language, there is still a limit to the value of the term.

In Rev. Garrett’s analysis of the social and political scene in Texas, I hear no retreat from “black usage” of “racism as effect” yet there is a point where in the judgment of the wise reverend one must find some way to move forward “in spite of.” This is what I take to be the deeper meaning of the recent counsels of Bill Cosby. It’s a way of saying, especially to young people, “look you have to make a way here — you cannot carry your analysis of racism around like a crutch, because it will not help you take your next step.”

In the worlds of “white usage” and “black usage” the Cosby talk is what I call “family talk” — it is a talk that wisdom adopts among families who are undergoing hard times. Yes, says the family, we are living in hard times, but we cannot let that knowledge impair our creative effort. Despite the world, we must proceed to succeed.

There is a great existential courage in the Cosby talk, especially if it remains logically connected to “black usage” in the wider analysis of racism. There is also a sugar-coated delusion in the Cosby talk if it simultaneously links itself logically to “white usage” where racism has no “effects”.

But the problem of succumbing to “white usage” is that it demands nothing more from white America than that they merrily pursue their beloved laws of “supply and demand.” And what that comes down to may be best remembered by all Americans as we review what Frederick Douglass said when he was asked to give his thoughts on the Fourth of July.