The Advancement Project (AP) describes
itself as a “civil
rights law, policy, and communications 'action tank' that advances
universal opportunity and a just democracy for those left behind in
America,” meaning nonwhite minorities. Specifically, the Project works to organize "communities of color" into politically cohesive units while disseminating its leftist worldviews and values as broadly as possible by way of a sophisticated communications department.
AP was
founded in 1999 by veteran civil-rights lawyers seeking
“to dismantle structural barriers to inclusion, secure racial
equity, and expand opportunity for all.” Its major
initiatives consist of the following:
Right
to Vote: AP asserts that while
the U.S. Constitution and the 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibit
discrimination on account of race and ethnicity, individual states
may nonetheless pass “arbitrary” and discriminatory election rules “with
vast consequences.” For instance, the Project cites
Georgia and Indiana laws “limiting the right to vote to citizens
who can show a photo identification, thus disenfranchising elderly
voters who do not have driver's licenses and poor people who cannot
afford a car.” According to AP, “the U.S. is one of only eleven
of the 119 democratic countries in the world that do not explicitly
provide the right to vote in their Constitutions.”
Voter
Protection: Fighting
for “fair elections on behalf of voters of color,” AP
collaborates with other
voter-registration groups to “develop processes for verifying that
applicants are indeed placed on the voting rolls as well as means of
investigating unsuccessful applications.” Its coalition
partners in this effort include the AARP, the ACLU, ACORN, the
AFL-CIO, AFSCME, America Votes, the Brennan Center for Justice,
Citizen Action, Common Cause, Democracy Rising, LatinoJustice/PRLDF,
the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the League of Women
Voters, the NAACP, the National Education Association, the National
Lawyers Guild, Project Vote, the Public Interest Research Group, the
SEIU, the Sierra Club Foundation, UNITE HERE!, and the United States
Student Association.
Felony
Re-enfranchisement: Lamenting that African Americans constitute a
disproportionate share of those individuals who cannot vote due to
prior felony convictions, AP has initiated an “advocacy campaign”
to “eliminate this discriminatory barrier to voting.”
Redistricting:
To “build power in communities of color,” AP supports the
creation of majority-black and -Hispanic congressional voting
districts, so as to virtually ensure that members of those
demographic groups will win election to the House of Representatives.
Immigrant
Justice: In an effort to unite “the
oppressed people in this country” in a broad struggle for “social, racial, and
economic justice,” AP calls for the creation of
“multi-racial and multi-ethnic alliances” between native-born blacks and
illegal immigrants. According to AP, “immigrant offenses” should
be decriminalized in a manner that “recognize[s] the dignity of all
people,” including the “undocumented.” Further, the organization contends that border-control
initiatives unfairly “demoniz[e] people of color while diverting attention
and money from the systemic issues that are much more serious threats
to our national security”; that laws “target[ing] immigrant
populations for harsh treatment” are “modern-day equivalents to
'Jim Crow' laws”; and that “claims that undocumented immigrants are a
drain on social services” are “overblown” and
“counter-factual.”
Quality
Education: AP asserts that low-income, nonwhite students have “tragically low”
high-school graduation rates mainly because
of the “structural and institutional barriers” they face “from
their first day in kindergarten.” These barriers include “academic
tracking of Black and Latino students into low-level classes”; governmental
“failure to provide [educational] resources equitably”; the use
of “high-stakes testing to narrow and distort curricula and turn
students off from learning”; “discriminatory discipline
policies”; and “the pairing of the neediest students with
inexperienced and ineffective teachers.”
Ending
the Schoolhouse-to-Jailhouse Track:
“[O]verly
harsh school policies and an increased role of law enforcement in
schools,” says AP, “has created a 'schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track,' in which
punitive measures such as suspensions, expulsions, and school-based
arrests are increasingly used to deal with student misbehavior, and
huge numbers of youth are pushed out of school and into prisons and
jails.” In AP's calculus, this is “a racial justice crisis,
because the students pushed out through harsh discipline are
disproportionately students of color.”
Reconstructing
Justice Post-Katrina: AP charges that Hurricane Katrina
“exposed not only the consequences of structural racism but also
its repugnant underbelly … the unaddressed racial disparities and
poverty that plague this nation.” The “greed and racism”
allegedly inherent in “market forces,” says AP, have “presented
challenges to [Katrina's] survivors in the area of relief efforts, housing,
contracting and employment.”
Inclusive
Development: In partnership
with community groups across the United States, this program works to
derail “community development” plans which, “in the name of
revitalization,” have had the effect of “uprooting families,
breaking social networks, and destroying political power.”
Economic
Stimulus: AP demands that significant amounts of money from the
American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (i.e., the “stimulus bill”)
be used to “strengthen communities of color” by redistributing
wealth through the public funding of “community development
infrastructure, transportation, schools, and … job
opportunities.”
In 2012, AP urged the Department of Justice (DOJ), headed by Eric Holder, to investigate Florida election officials' efforts to remove the names of non-citizens from the voter rolls of their state (where the names of many tens of thousands of non-citizens and deceased people had already been identified). As AP saw it, the Florida initiative was a thinly veiled attempt to block African Americans and Hispanics from voting. In May 2012 the Justice Department complied with AP's request and ordered Florida to halt the name purge. When Florida secretary of state Ken Detzner defied the DOJ mandate (saying “we have an obligation to make sure the voter rolls are accurate and ... ineligible voters cannot vote”), AP co-director Judith
Browne Dianis accused him of being “recalcitrant.”
The Advancement Project's efforts on a national scale are supplemented by a corollary AP chapter whose scope is limited solely to California
and whose objectives more or less mirror those of the national group.
The California AP's board of directors includes such notables as
Harry Belafonte, Molly Munger (a former counsel for the NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund), Joe Alvarez (a former official with
the AFL-CIO and UNITE HERE!), Gerry Hudson (executive vice president
of the SEIU), and Bill Lann Lee (former Assistant Attorney General
for Civil Rights in the Clinton Administration).
A
key funder of AP National is George Soros's Open Society Institute,
which in 2009 alone gave $500,000
to the organization.