By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--August 3, 2017
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NAACP officials say their recent travel advisory for Missouri is the first that the civil rights group has issued for any state. But the warning follows a recent trend of similar alerts issued by other groups for vulnerable people around the United States. The travel advisory, circulated in June by the Missouri NAACP and recently taken up by the national organization, comes after travel alerts began appearing in recent years in light of police shootings in the U.S. and ahead of immigration legislation in Texas and Arizona. The Missouri travel advisory is the first time an NAACP conference has ever made one state the subject of a warning about discrimination and racist attacks, a spokesman for the national organization said Tuesday.
Missouri became the first because of recent legislation making discrimination lawsuits harder to win, and in response to longtime racial disparities in traffic enforcement and a spate of incidents cited as examples of harm coming to minority residents and visitors, state NAACP leaders say. Those incidents included racial slurs against black students at the University of Missouri and the death earlier this year of 28-year-old Tory Sanders, a black man from Tennessee who took a wrong turn while traveling and died in a southeast Missouri jail even though he hadn’t been accused of a crime. “How do you come to Missouri, run out of gas and find yourself dead in a jail cell when you haven’t broken any laws?” asked Rod Chapel, the president of the Missouri NAACP. “You have violations of civil rights that are happening to people. They’re being pulled over because of their skin color, they’re being beaten up or killed,” Chapel said. “We are hearing complaints at a rate we haven’t heard before.” At the same time, Chapel said, the state government is throwing up barriers to people seeking justice in the courts for discrimination. The travel advisory cites legislation signed by Republican Gov. Eric Greitens that will make it more difficult to sue for housing or employment discrimination.Let's first deal with the new law concerning discrimination suits. The NAACP would have you believe the Missouri legislature and Gov. Greitens passed a law giving racist clods a free out when they engage in blatant discrimination. It does no such thing. All it does is require a plaintiff to prove racist intent rather than mere correlation, which is a perfectly reasonable standard to have to meet when you're suing someone and alleging racial discriminination:
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Sen. Gary Romine’s proposal, which would require people to explicitly prove their race, sex or other protected status actually motivated their boss or colleague to mistreat them to win an employment discrimination case, overcame a heated Senate filibuster in February. For about a decade, Missouri workers have needed only prove their status was a “contributing factor” to prevail in court. For example, if a black plaintiff was fired from a job for tardiness, but white employees routinely showed up late and weren’t fired, the black employee could ask a jury to compare the treatment and contend that race “contributed” to the boss’s decision. But if Gov. Eric Greitens signs the bill into law, such an employee would need to meet a higher standard: The worker would have to show that race explicitly “motivated” mistreatment through, for example, written documentation of racist comments.The current law is a boon for trial lawyers, who are able to win massive settlements and judgments without having to prove that racism really motivated the action that's the basis of the suit. The change in the law merely affords the accused the same basic protections we would expect in our legal system. But that's a problem for the NAACP, which wants the mere accusation of racism to be the same as proof of guilt. If a plaintiff has to prove racist intent rather than just tossing the allegation around, litigants risk exposure as abusers of the legal system.
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