No way was Dubya going to let the likes of Mary Frances Berry call him out any longer.
This week in a not-so-shocking move, President George W. Bush replaced Berry, the longtime chairwoman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, with Gerald A. Reynolds, a Kansas City regulatory attorney who, amid protests from women and civil rights groups, served out a recess appointment in 2003 as head of the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education.
Berry, however, is not going gently into the noxious night. She argues that she and fellow commission member and vice chairman Cruz Reynoso, who is also being replaced, have until midnight Jan. 21, 2005 to finish their terms.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Berry, 66, who successfully sued President Ronald Reagan and won her spot back on the commission after he fired her in 1984, sues Bush too. To be sure, I’d look forward to it – because chances are that may be one of the last times that many of us will get to see a black person on that commission put up a fight that is driven by a passion for concerns about what is happening to civil rights in this country.
What’s happening doesn’t bode well for those rights – rights that so many of our forebears lost their lives over.
In a recent 165-page report critiquing the Bush administration’s civil rights record, the commission basically said that Bush has dragged his feet on civil rights enforcement and, in many cases, has worked harder to recast such rights rather than protect them.
For example, it takes Bush to task for trying to attach civil rights relevance to his faith-based initiatives – saying he constantly preaches that churches and religious organizations should not face discrimination in receiving government funding.
What Bush ignores, however, is that some churches and religious groups discriminate against women and blacks as part of their beliefs – and that to allow taxpayers to fund their activities would indeed be promoting discrimination, not curing it.
But the part of the report that I found to be eerily revealing was this: The Bush administration stopped making available to researchers, and to the general public, statistical information on the race, gender, ethnicity and job classification of employees at the nation’s largest companies. That data had been supplied by the Equal Opportunity Commission for more than 30 years, and it helped government agencies do compliance reviews and investigations. It also helped plaintiffs in discrimination lawsuits.
But no more.
Which means that now, instead of making information available to help people battle discrimination and thereby further the success of civil rights in this country, the Bush administration makes it easier for companies to conceal that information. Instead of creating an environment that is geared toward rooting out discrimination, this administration now makes it easier for racism to endure under the cover of ignorance.
And I don’t have high hopes that Reynolds will be inclined to see the problem here. He did, after all, once work as a legal analyst for the Center for Equal Opportunity – a center founded by affirmative action beneficiary-turned-foe Linda Chavez – and is affiliated with a number of right-wing organizations. Organizations that are determined to reshape civil rights in a manner that, for the most part, casts white males as victims and blacks and other minorities as moochers taking up space in a society in which some believe we ought to grateful for the privilege of existing, not participating.
These days, it seems the Bush administration believes that pushing invisibility is the way to cure discrimination. And they’re wrong.
Too bad that we won’t have someone like Berry on the commission any longer to see to it that when it comes to civil rights, we will still be seen and heard.
