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Tucson rampage: UC Berkeley chancellor's e-mail linking Tucson rampage to immigration issues draws fire - latimes.com He continued, postulating on factors that may have motivated Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged gunman in Saturday's shootings, in which six people died, including a 9-year-old girl, and 13 were injured, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.): "I believe that it is not a coincidence that this calamity has occurred in a state which has legislated discrimination against undocumented persons."

The New Jim Crow | The American Prospect In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as justification for discrimination, exclusion, or social contempt. Rather, we use our criminal-justice system to associate criminality with people of color and then engage in the prejudiced practices we supposedly left behind. Today, it is legal to discriminate against ex-offenders in ways it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, depending on the state you're in, the old forms of discrimination -- employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, and exclusion from jury service -- are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights and arguably less respect than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.