the black issue

Rahm Is The Mayor. What Did We Learn?

2011-07-11T05:03:00.000-07:00

(Written February 25, 2011)

If you’re one of those people who has been patiently waiting to see whether the "post-racial society" – in the third year of the Obama administration – has finally begun to kick in for black Americans, this was a good week for you.

Is the whole "rising tide lifting all boats" thing finally working for us? Are we moving up or falling further behind?

Let's start in Chicago, to see what we might have learned from the Windy City's mayor’s race, last Tuesday.

By now, it’s not news anymore that Rahm Emanuel, who just a few months ago was supposed to be in the political “fight of his life” with Chicago’s black leadership, actually won that election – by a landslide.

If you recall, black leaders in Chicago, including Rev. Jesse Jackson, in early January, had encouraged two of Emanuel’s leading black opponents to get out of the race, clearing the way for a single, black “consensus” candidate. That candidate, of course, was none other than Carol Moseley Braun, attorney, entrepreneur, first African-American female U.S. Senator, former U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand and former candidate for U.S. President of the United States, in the 2004 Democratic Primary Election.

On paper, it looked like “a plan.”

If all had gone according to that plan, Emanuel, even with a bold, politically risky endorsement from the country’s “first black president,” Bill Clinton, in hand, would have gotten his back kicked out by a unified black vote and there would have been an African-American mayor in Chicago, again, for the first time since Harold Washington’s untimely death in 1987.

That was the plan, anyway, right up until January 30, the day that Moseley Braun, during a Sunday political debate at Trinity United Church, out of the clear blue sky, called a political opponent a “crack head.”

Apparently, the opponent, another black woman, named Patricia Van-Pelt Watkins (who commanded a whopping one percent of the vote in the polls, at the time) angered Moseley Braun when she remarked that the former U.S. Senator had been largely invisible in local Chicago politics, in recent years.

When it was her turn to speak, Braun, the former U.S. presidential candidate, said: “Patricia, the reason you don’t know where I was for the last 20 years is because you were strung out on crack.”

While Watkins had openly admitted to drug use as a teen, there is absolutely no evidence that she ever experimented with or abused crack, at any point in her life.

As they say in the sport of tennis, that statement, coming from a person who wanted to be elected mayor of the second largest city in the U.S., was “game, set and match" for the Carol Moseley Braun election campaign.

At the time she made the comment, Moseley Braun had been running in second place, behind Emanuel with 21 percent of the vote. Just one month after the “crack head comment,” however, her support among likely voters had dropped to 10 percent and, on election day, she finished even lower, at 9 percent of the vote, behind two Hispanic candidates, former Chicago school board president Gery Chico and City Clerk Miguel del Valle and, of course, Emanuel.

Chicago, with more black residents than any other U.S. city (1,019,000) and 600,000 registered black voters, as compared to 500,000 registered white voters and 300,000 registered Hispanic voters, just saw, last week, an opportunity to elect its second African-American mayor “go up in smoke," so to speak.

Emanuel won the election with 317,000 votes, the lowest number of winning mayoral votes in Chicago history. Moseley Braun received a little more than 50,000 votes, and came in fourth, behind Chico with 138,000 votes and Del Valle, who attracted 53,000 voters. Turnout, in an historic Mayor's race, was 40 percent.

Some in Chicago seemed to leap to conclusions about Barack Obama’s impact on the outcome, despite his reluctance to take any side, at all, during the campaign. Straining to make that point, black Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell wrote: “Obama didn’t have to say anything. He just had to be. And from that point on race became a bad word in elections.”

She went on to officially declare that “Carol Moseley Braun's stunning defeat signals the end of the black political empowerment movement in Chicago.”

Really, Ms. Mitchell?

How about the absolute lack of a responsible and credible black candidate? Was that a factor? And, how about the effect of the notorious crack comment? Didn’t any of that matter?

Why, in 2011, when the virtually all-white Tea Party is setting the political agenda in a disproportionately large number of states, including in Wisconsin, where the new governor, Scott Walker, was elected with Tea Party support, are black pundits in such a rush to discredit the value of having a viable, black voting bloc? Have Hispanics stopped voting for their candidates or for their issues, as a collective? And, wasn’t it also just last week when we saw a stunning announcement from the Obama administration that proved that the gay voting bloc was still intact, and operating at full force?

Aside from Chicago, there was also the poll released, this past week, by the Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University that informed us that, despite having the most significant economic barriers to their success, 85 percent of African Americans remain “optimistic” about the U.S. economy – for themselves and for their children.

“The Recession was worse for (blacks), than the previous business cycle … “ said Christian Welle, Professor at The University of Massachusetts and “since then," he said, "things have not gotten any better.”

The Washington Post poll informed us, for example, that in the event of job loss, 16.4 percent of white households wouldn’t have enough net worth to live for three months at the poverty level.” For black households, the poll reported, a stunning 41.7 percent wouldn’t have enough.

In the face of all of that, blacks informed the pollsters that what keeps them optimistic are two things – their “faith in God” and their belief that Barack Obama, as President of the United States, will eventually take steps that will improve economic conditions for them and for their children.

What we have learned from that, I imagine, is that there isn’t very much anyone can do to turn black voters into political pragmatists, the kind of people who hold elected officials accountable, by 2012. The more they suffer during the term of a favored elected official, the more, it seems, they become “optimistic.”

At the same time, I guarantee you the Obama 2012 campaign advisors have learned that it is virtually impossible for the “second black president" to lose African-American support. Therefore, it probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for them to squander valuable political campaign funds to reach out to black voters or to make campaign promises to them. They obviously have no intention of going anywhere else.

Maybe what we need is more of the approach taken by the chaplain in the old WWII song, who said to U.S. troops in the middle of battle:" Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition." The other, more passive approach, relying only on faith, is "killing" us.

Then, there's the growing chorus of “Negro leaders” and political commentators who (get paid to) tell us that voting in a bloc is bad politics for blacks, no matter what whites, other ethnic groups and special interest groups do. That's a recipe for even further black political disaster.

Looks like the 2012 Presidential Election will be another one wherein we believe in the candidate way more than the candidate believes in us, and when not much will have changed for us once it’s over.

That certainly looks like the lesson we should have learned from the Chicago election.

Were we paying attention?

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Americans May Soon Walk Like Egyptians

2011-07-11T04:45:00.000-07:00

(Written February 19, 2011)

Have you had about enough news about Egypt? Is your head starting to spin as you try to figure out whether the next, biggest “unrest” story is coming from Egypt itself, or from the “protest of the day” In Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Libya or Sudan?

Even now, after three consecutive weeks of 24/7 media focus on "Middle East unrest", can you find any of those places, other than Egypt, of course, on a map without a great deal of assistance?

Was it as strange for you as it was for me to see the president of the United States flip-flopping back and forth in his support for Hosni Mubarak, the 30-year U.S. ally? Was it stranger still to see Mubarak quit abruptly and leave Cairo by helicopter, just one day after saying emphatically that he wasn’t going anywhere,, and after he had vowed to “punish” the demonstrators?

Even before events in Egypt came to a head, there had been unrest in Tunisia, and in Jordan, a major recipient of U.S. foreign aid. Also hit with demonstrations has been Sudan, which receives about $300 million annually in U.S. aid. Bahrain, home to a huge U.S. naval base, has also been the target of protestors.

Curiously, even though the U.S. provides $1.75 billion per year in foreign aid to Egypt (second in the region, only behind the $2.75 billion given annually to Israel), a recent poll by Zogby International has made it clear that the unrest in Egypt was probably just as much an anti-U.S. phenomenon, as it was an anti-Mubarak event.

According to the poll, 85 percent of Egyptians had an unfavorable attitude toward the U.S., 87 percent had "no confidence" in the U.S. and 92 percent named the U.S. as one of two nations that are the greatest threat to their country.

Those poll results and these recent events have been clear indicators that the U.S. is going to have to conduct itself much differently in the next few months, and over the coming years, if it ever hopes to regain the respect of people in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Notwithstanding the importance and value of oil, for example, the U.S. is going to have to learn to pursue it without having a total disregard for the lives of those in the countries where it is produced.

I hope it’s become increasingly clear to the president of the United States, and to Congress, that people around the world no longer seem to be impressed by how powerful, rich and influential the United States used to be in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.

It’s apparent that when they look this way, both friends and foes of the U.S. see a country that hasn’t won a major war since 1945, and a nation with a chronic and growing unemployment problem that has seriously diminished its ability to function as a leading global economic power.

They’re also seeing, more and more, a country that has to be increasingly concerned about the potential for addressing its own domestic challenges and protests.

In that regard, it was especially interesting to hear, early during the Egyptian protests, that the people in that country were demonstrating because they had an unemployment rate of 9.75 percent, that the cost of food had grown unacceptably high and because there was a far-too-great economic disparity between rich and poor in the country.

When I heard that, I was struck by the similarities between what was happening in Egypt and what we’re beginning to see here in the “good ole U.S.A.”

If you thought the people in Egypt, Bahrain and Tunisia were angry and frustrated, maybe you should take a closer look at the faces of the 30,0000 people who marched on the Wisconsin legislature last week, protesting a bill that would diminish the power of labor unions over all, and substantially reduce pensions and benefits for members of teachers’ unions.

That protest grew so ugly so quickly that 14 Democratic legislators actually left the State capitol to avoid participating in the vote and to prevent the government from having the quorum needed to pass the legislation.

State troopers were called in and the governor threatened to call in the National Guard.

But it’s not just Wisconsin.

It’s been reported that 40 states across the country are trying to address budget shortfalls that may climb to $140 billion. The resultant budget cuts will have disastrous impacts, among other things, on the country’s 14,000 school districts for at least the next five years. Most states are targeting areas such as health care, public school education, university funding and services to senior citizens and to low- income youths to close their budget gaps.

In November of last year, 500 students converged on Baton Rouge, La. to protest cuts in state education. One student, from the University of New Orleans, was quoted as saying, “The cleaning staff in the Liberal Arts building has been laid off. The classrooms are filthy. It’s not uncommon to see trash all over the room.”

In addition, in March of last year, thousands protested education budget reductions in California, and in May, an estimated 35,000 people, the largest group of protestors ever assembled in the state of New Jersey, gathered in Trenton, the state capital, to protest Governor Christie’s education budget cuts.

Two things bother me about all of this: One, our mainstream media outlets are diligently covering stories about government unrest in the Middle East, and occasionally, in Europe, but seem not to be interested in similar stories right here.

Secondly, our elected officials, especially those who claim to be fiscal conservatives, or who profess affiliation with the so-called Tea Party, seem to be taking an all-too-theoretical and dogmatic approach to the pain their trendy new “deficit reduction-or-bust” ideology is inflicting on the American people. They seem to be really impressed with hearing themselves repeat for Fox Cable Channel and the Wall Street Journal that the only way to improve the economy is to reduce taxes for the extremely rich and to cut services — across the board — for the American people as a whole, especially for those who are most economically vulnerable, including most African Americans.

The idea that they might be able to improve city, state or federal economies solely by reducing the size of governmental budgets is absolutely ludicrous. It’s like trying to convince an already-destitute family that the best way for them to improve their wealth is to stop spending.

Global economic supremacy has shifted over the past decade, from the West to the East. Consequently, the U.S. is suffering through a significant economic crisis. It doesn’t help that our politicians seem not to understand how to stop spewing empty rhetoric about budget cuts and deficit reductions, or how to start changing our national business and economic models so the country and its businesses can go back to generating revenues and creating jobs.

If they can’t learn to do these things, it seems to me, our elected officials, much like those who are being toppled across the Middle East, will simply have to be removed from office as soon as humanly possible.

Too many Americans are already seriously at risk, largely due to conditions they had absolutely no role in creating. We can’t afford to endure indecision, incompetence or empty ideologies very much longer, or to continue to have our elected officials cater irresponsibly to those in our society who absolutely did create these circumstances and who, even at this late date, are still committed to maintaining the status quo.

Pretty soon, the people in Egypt may very well be watching us on their flat-screen TV sets as we’re having our own anti-government demonstrations, here in the U.S.

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Outrage in Ohio Leads To Effective Response

2011-07-11T04:32:00.000-07:00

(Written February 11, 2011)

Outrage in Ohio Leads To Effective Response

An anonymous African-American man once said, in describing the attraction that black folks have for “the blues," as a musical form, that “we've been down so long, getting up don’t even cross our mind.”

I had begun to accept, reluctantly, the fundamental truth in that statement, given the lack of focus and energy I’ve seen, recently, in our local and national community about things that should engage us.

I’ve been disappointed that we seem not to care as much anymore about demonstrating our ability to mobilize around an issue. Sadly, we seem to have lost our interest in confronting those who insult, demean and marginalize us. Not only do we no longer accept the old, established, black leadership organizations, but we publicly denounce the concept that black people need any leadership, at all, to move from “Point A” to "Point B,” as if the laws of management and nature, themselves, no longer apply to us and we’ve, somehow, outgrown the need for them.

Hell, we’ve even lost interest in being “black,” lately, and we seem to join in enthusiastically in every idle discussion about why black self-identity no longer matters.

We’ve stopped defending what has always belonged to us and we have no collective thought about what should be ours in the future.

In the main, black people I see – across all income and educational levels – just seem to be satisfied that they are “here.”

It’s … getting ….really …. depressing.

That being the case, when I see a sign, any sign at all, that we’re beginning to stir, or that we’re ready to fight again for what’s right, to do what needs to be done to preserve our families and our community, I do get a little encouraged.

This past week was one of those times.

I went back to look at a story that had shocked and angered me when it first circulated in late January. It was the one, of course, about a young African-American woman named Kelly Williams-Bolar who, you may recall, seemed, at first glance, to be one of the most admirable models for “bootstrap self-improvement” that our community has seen in a long time.

Not only had she taken steps, back in 2006, to move her two daughters into a much better-quality public school system than the dramatically under-performing one to which her children had been assigned, she also was gainfully employed as a teachers' aide in one of her local high schools. In addition, she was just a few credit hours short of earning her degree in education at the University of Akron.

Do you know what Ms. Williams-Bolar's reward was for doing all of that? She was sentenced by Common Pleas Court in Summit County, Ohio, in late January, to five years in prison- - all but ten days of which were suspended – two years of probation and 80 hours of community service.

Her crime? When she transferred her children out of the Akron Public School system and into the suburban Copley-Fairlawn School District, where the average household income ranges up to $88,000 per year, where more than 90 percent of the residents are white and an astounding 41 percent of the population in one of the District’s townships have at least a bachelor's degree, she told school officials that her daughters lived with her father, Edward Williams, who actually lives within the District’s boundaries. In actuality, however, the primary residence for the young mother and her two daughters was a public housing project in Akron in Ohio.

Uh-oh!

Once that was discovered by the School District, the officials decided to bring criminal charges against Ms. Williams-Bolar.

There is no doubt that what happened in that Summit County court room last month was designed to “send a message” to other poor, non-white families that such behavior is not only unacceptable, but that it would also lead to a conviction for having committed a felony.

That being the case, the Summit County prosecutor, a woman named Sherri Bevan Walsh, who has had a highly controversial career in her own right, also brought charges against Kelly’s father, Edward Williams. The first charge, amazingly, was “grand larceny,” for misappropriating what the prosecutor estimated as $30,000 in tuition for the two girls, over a two-year period; the second was “tampering with records, in connection with a related fraud claim.

The first time I heard about Ms. Williams-Bolar, her father, her two children and the criminal charges, I thought the whole thing was an ill-conceived joke. But, it was absolutely real.

Gradually, however, I began to recognize, as horrendous as all of this has been, that for at least a brief moment, some black people and several whites "of good conscience," actually did wake up and become engaged in pushing back against an abusive legal system in Ohio.

All of a sudden, there was the ubiquitous Rev. Al Sharpton, getting personally involved in raising cash to help defray Ms. Williams-Bolar's legal expenses, through his National Action Network.

There was the equally ubiquitous Rev. Jesse Jackson, threatening to push for a piece of national legislation that would ensure equal access to quality education, regardless of family income.

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution and the recently chastised and more-sensitive-to-black-folks National Public Radio (see “Juan Williams”), even weighed in, calling Ms. Williams-Bolar “the Rosa Parks of education reform.”

Two online advocacy organizations, Change.Org and Color of Change, asked visitors to their web sites to sign petitions requesting Ohio’s Governor John Kasich, who, by the way, until very recently, had been widely criticized, himself, for not having any people of color in his cabinet, to drop the charges against the young mother and her father. It was very good to see more than 165,000 petitions from those two web sites signed in just a very brief period of time.

Hey, even "big-time" P. Diddy took a few minutes off from selling Ciroc and generally “living large” to send out a tweet, asking his 3.2 million followers on Twitter to send messages to the governor. His tweet was very direct and “on time:” “I want all 3m of yall 2 hit up @ johnkasich and tell him Moms shouldn't go to jail for protecting their kids.”

That’s what I’m talking ‘bout!

That’s the kind of coordinated activity, the kind of passion and focus we’ve been missing on our issues, now, for far too long.

And, you know what? It seems to be working.

The Ohio Justice and Policy Center has announced that it is providing a new legal defense team to appeal Ms. Williams-Bolar's’s two felony convictions and to seek a pardon on her behalf so she can return to the pursuit of a teaching career, which had been precluded by her felony conviction.

Last Tuesday, Governor Kasich ordered the Ohio State Parole Board to investigate the validity of the felony conviction. At the end of the day, the only person of note who should have, but who hasn’t, weighed in on this subject is, of course, your President of the United States. It was an appropriate issue and it might have helped.

At the end of the day, what this case has shown us is that there still is great value in activism and in raising the public profile of racial and social injustice. Clearly, it has also shown us that there is an important role that social media can and must play in our efforts going forward.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks, I’m sure, for the Williams family, but maybe we all learned something in the process.

I hope so.

And, by the way, don’t forget to send out your own tweet to Governor Kasich.

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Pew's Philadelphia City Council Report: Research or Agenda-Setting?

2011-07-11T04:09:00.000-07:00

(Written on February 3, 2011)

I can't help myself.

Every time I see one of those Pew Charitable Trust Philadelphia Research Initiative announcements, such as the one last week called "City Councils in Philadelphia and Other Major Cities," I get flashbacks to the old Peter Paul "Mounds/Almond Joy" commercials. Sometimes I feel like I should believe what they're telling me... and, sometimes, I just don't.

I must admit, it's hard for me to forget that the Pew Charitable Trust was established by the same family that founded the Sun Oil Company (Sunoco, today) and that the company and its patriarch, Joseph Pew, made no secret of their genuine distaste for Franklin D. Roosevelt, for his Depression-busting New Deal program or for organized labor, of any kind.

Somehow, I also can't seem to forget that Mr. Pew was known during his heyday as a source of millions of dollars of political funding and that he consequently became recognized as the "political boss" of Pennsylvania, influencing the outcomes of both statewide and national elections.

I remember each time I see a communication from Pew that it was known as a funder, primarily, of extremely conservative issues and organizations, including the John Birch Society, and I wonder how much the organization has really changed, today. More recently and, perhaps, this is my most troublesome Pew association, it was also the Charitable Trust that led the effort to manipulate the transfer of the $25 billion Barnes Art Collection away from historically black Lincoln University's control, as Dr. Barnes, himself, had stipulated in his will, and into the control of Pew, and other major, mainstream non-profits.

To further complicate all of this, I'm also aware that Pew Research Center has been called the third-most-powerful think tank in Washington, D.C., and that there is a related entity called the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, which, over the last 17 years or so, has ingratiated itself with( Dare we say "compromised?") an impressive list of print and broadcast media outlets by funding their local community outreach projects. As a result, Pew probably has many more friends, if they need them, in the mainstream media than most of the others of us have, all put together.

So, given all of that, whenever I see an announcement about Pew having sponsored a political project, I tend to hold it up to the light, and shake it, to make sure I haven't missed the "real story."

After the second reading of last week's "Philadelphia City Council Report," I began to feel that, perhaps, the people at Pew weren't so much interested in just sharing comparative data about Councilmanic bodies nationwide. Rather, I got the distinct impression that they were more interested in getting Philadelphians "fired up" and anxious to "throw out the scoundrels" in City Council, who had clearly, from the way the data were reported, "stayed too long at the party." And, I couldn't help wondering...if the people at Pew are so adamant about getting rid of the Councilpeople we have now, just who would they like to see elected in their places? It's hard to imagine, knowing the organization's history, that they don't have some idea, and that someone over there isn't working to have that done, even as we speak.

That's not good.

In the opening statement of the report, Pew noted, "The 17 current members of City Council have served longer (an average of 15.5 years), than their peers in 14 other cities," and they comprise "Philadelphia's longest-tenured Council in at least the past six decades."

The report moved quickly thereafter to a discussion of the benefits of term limits for City Council elections. Looks as though the people at Pew's Philadelphia Research Initiative are just as anxious to make a case for throwing out the City's incumbent Council members as their former colleagues at the Inquirer and Daily News seem to be.

Also troubling was the dramatic flourish, in the report, of dividing the Council's annual budget by the number of Council persons and coming up with the meaningless "roughly $1.1 million per seat" figure that taxpayers expend every year for each Councilperson. Using that same logic, are we then expected to divide the 100 U.S. Senators into the $3.8 trillion federal budget and call each of their offices a "$38 billion seat?" Ridiculous, huh?

Especially during the ongoing Great Recession, Pew's mention of the $121,107 salary of the average Philadelphia Councilperson was probably expected to raise eyebrows and drop jaws all over the City. I do believe, however, that our friends at Pew lost a bit of intended impact when they also noted that Philadelphia City Council salaries are the fourth-largest out of fifteen City Councils that were reviewed nationwide. Most Philadelphians, I'm sure, recognizing that their city is the nation's sixth-largest, don't have very much of a problem seeing that their Council representatives are fourth-best compensated.

I was ready to get incensed by the section of the report that said our Council people have access to city-owned cars, until I got to the part that explained that only seven out of 17 Council members actually take a car from the City, at all.

Despite the generally lackluster quality of the overall "findings," there was one section of the Pew report that did get my attention. That was the section of the document that raised the issue of "redistricting," and how it will almost certainly create more difficulty for residents who are interested in doing political organizing and make it easier for incumbents to hold onto their seats. If done in the old, politically self-serving way in which it is usually handled, that process could produce absolutely disastrous results for Philadelphia's 625,000 black residents.

Pew was very careful to pinpoint the dual responsibility of the Mayor and City Council, itself, for ensuring that "redistricting" is done on a fair and equitable basis. The report writers also pointed out that neither the Mayor, nor the Council, has given any indication, as of yet, as to how they plan to ensure the sanctity of that process. We should all pay attention to that and follow up with the mayor and our district councilpeople to make sure they pay proper attention to this issue.

Then, Pew, surprisingly, brought up the issue of assuring that the "underserved" continue to be fairly represented on City Councils, nationwide. In most cities, they reported, the percentage of blacks in City Council is about the same as in the city's general population. As proof, they offered that blacks make up 43 percent of Philadelphia's population and they comprise 41 percent of the City Council's members. What they chose not to mention, however, is that while whites represent 45 percent of the City's population, the nine members of City Council who happen to be white, comprise 53 percent of all Council seats. Similarly, in Boston, a city which is now 51.6 percent comprised of Black, Hispanic, Asian and mixed-race persons, whites continue to be overrepresented in that City Council, holding 75% of the twelve filled seats.

I know, I know.. the race or ethnicity of a Councilperson really shouldn't matter, but since Pew brought it up...let's tell the whole truth, and find out if it really does make a difference --politically-- and if so, why it does, in the first place.

Sounds like a good topic for Pew to include in one of its civic journalism programs. Have we come far enough as a society that the race of our elected officials, the race and ethnicity of our journalists and the race and ethnicity of the leaders of our think tanks and foundations no longer matter in political decision-making?

Now, that's a report I would read right away.

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Keep an Eye on the Glib and Dangerous Haley Barbour.

2011-01-11T08:18:00.000-08:00

It’s starting to appear that, over the next year or so, we in the black community may have to start paying a great deal more attention to what’s taking place in Yazoo City, and especially to the words of one of its most famous native sons, a glib, repackaged white-supremacist sympathizer named Haley Barbour.

Don’t pretend you never heard of Yazoo City … it’s only about an hour and a half’s drive from Philadelphia. No, not Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – Philadelphia, Mississippi.
For those who think Philadelphia, Pennsylvania could stand improvement, let me remind you that Philadelphia, Mississippi is a place where just 19.8 percent of the population has a high school diploma, where the per-capita income is $25,807, where there is just one commercial bank and where the population is 46.2 percent black and 48.1 percent white.

The town became forever infamous when three "Freedom Riders" – two, white and Jewish, and the other black, were murdered at the height of the Civil Rights era, right before their bodies were set on fire.

That happened just down the road from where Haley Barbour was born and raised. It was the case wherein FBI investigators, while looking for the hidden remains of the three murdered young men, uncovered the bodies of seven other black lynching victims, whose deaths hadn’t even been reported. That was the same case wherein officials in Mississippi refused to even prosecute the killers.

Just two years before that, a black Air Force veteran named James Meredith put his own life at risk and had to be escorted to class by federal marshals after winning a lawsuit to desegregate the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), a school whose history includes having its entire student body and many faculty members walk off the campus and enlist in the Confederate Army, during the Civil War.

“Ole Miss” is located in Oxford Mississippi, only about 116 miles from Haley Barbour's Yazoo City. At the time of the desegregation effort, Barbour, future Mississippi Governor, future chair of the Republican National Committee and, now, an extremely likely and loquacious candidate for President of the United States, in 2012, was 15 years old. At the time of the murder of the Civil Rights workers, Mr. Barbour was 17 years of age– certainly old enough to have a full comprehension of what was going on around him, certainly old enough to understand that much of the most violent and unrelenting resistance to Civil Rights and equal opportunity for blacks in the South had come from the Ku Klux Klan and from Mississippi’s own White Citizens' Council.

Barbour, until last month, seemed to have successfully re-made himself as a racially sensitive,"new Southerner." In an interview, in December, however, in The Weekly Standard, Mr. Barbour, whose company Barbour Griffin, and Rogers, was described by Fortune Magazine, in 2001, as the most powerful lobbying firm in America, mentioned that he “just (didn’t) remember (the Civil Rights struggle in Yahoo City) as being that bad." He then went on to say that, as he recalled it, rather than being protectors for “European-American heritage,” as was the Council’s expressed mission, the White Citizens' Council was simply “an organization of town leaders.”

What Barbour glossed over, or conveniently forgot, during his interview, is that, during those years, the White Citizens' Council functioned very much like the Ku Klux Klan, in his town and across his state, except that its members, many of whom were also Klan members, refrained from wearing hoods and robes in public. Even without hoods, they somehow, managed to aggressively resist integration, to create white-only private schools to blunt the impact of Brown vs. Board of Education, and to run, successfully, for numerous public offices.

Barbour also was a staunch supporter of Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s declaration of Confederate History Month, last April, when McDonnell got all sentimental about the wonderfulness of the Confederacy without feeling the need to offer a single mention of the institution of slavery, whatsoever.

Bringing up slavery in a discussion about the Confederacy, presidential-hopeful Barbour said, at the time, was very much like trying to "make a big deal out of something that doesn’t amount to diddly."

"Diddly," Governor Barbour?

A conservatively estimated 11 million Africans shipped from their own continent to the West, resulting in loss of language, culture and their own economic resources, and contributing directly to the deaths of an also-conservatively-estimated 2.5 million of them, in the process--is that what you call “diddly?"

Barbour's comments have made it very clear that gross, racial insensitivity is not dead, yet, in America, even at the highest levels of government. His words and actions also constitute evidence that we need to step up our activities directed at supporting politicians who are actually committed to assisting us in achieving our reasonable political and economic objectives. His very existence on the political landscape is a sign that we really do need to elect and support politicians who reject, as we do, the long-held assumption that it is normal, in America, for blacks to have substantially higher unemployment levels, for us to suffer significant negative disparities with regard to health care, for us to be satisfied to have low, single-digit participation in the national economy, and for us to have substantially lower median household incomes and net worth levels.

These conditions used to make us angry – today, somehow, they no longer do. These conditions used to cause us to make demands of the private sector and of elected officials. In 2011, we seem strangely contented and satisfied to be “marginal” Americans” and, even, ashamed to bring such topics up, in public. As a consequence , other folks are "eating our lunches," taking jobs we formerly held, and winning the contracts in which we deserve to participate.

Despite the fact that Americans of European descent have routinely received more than 95 percent of contract dollars from local, state and federal governments, we don’t get upset when “Judas Goat” black elected officials chide us for not "making it on our own" as they inaccurately say white businesses do.

Hey, if we somehow,"flipped the script" and black-owned businesses began to win 95 percent of the contracts that comprise the country’s $3.8 trillion annual budget, and if our most successful business leaders and our largest corporations routinely got away with paying little or no taxes, with the full support of the government, as we've recently seen in the mainstream business community, then we, too, would be just fine, socially and economically.

It is an absolute fact that when local, state and federal governments, or the private sector buy paper clips, computers, vehicles, new construction or even agricultural products, they rarely, if ever, buy them from black suppliers, putting our community well behind the economic "eight ball." It's easy to understand why black businesses participate in less than one half of one percent of gross receipts in this country.

Here we are, faced with another two-year cycle of intensive campaigning for presidential office and, so far, neither party and none of the candidates, seem to be thinking, at all, about the things that could, and should, be done to finally make blacks in this country “full-fledged Americans,” with all the power, privilege, economic resources and authority related thereto. They do, however, want us to vote for them, anyway.

We’ve got our "friends" in the Democratic Party, on the one side, wanting us, for their own political advantage, to say nothing, at all, about what we need to bring about the inclusion we so sorely need.

And, on the other side, we’ve got an early Republican challenger, in an increasingly "Red" America, who has said, among other dubious things, that the White Citizens' Council's actions and the Civil Rights struggles “weren’t that bad,” and that slavery, as he recalls, wasn’t “diddly.”

Looks like, even in the midst of holding both major parties accountable, leading up to 2012, we're going to have to watch this guy, Haley Barbour, very closely. He seems dangerous.

He also may very well be...the next President of the United States.
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Short-Sighted Harrisburg Democrats "Cut Off Their Own Noses."

2011-01-09T05:46:00.000-08:00

By one definition, “Cutting off your nose to spite your face” is “...a needlessly self-destructive over-reaction to a problem...or pursuing revenge in a way that would damage oneself more than the source of one’s anger.”

How else would you describe a situation wherein State Representative Dwight Evans' re-election bid for chairman of the House Appropriations Committee was rejected by 50 out of 89 Democratic members of the Pennsylvania House, including what has been described, by people who were there, as a “surprisingly large number” of Philadelphia-based representatives.

They joined in stripping Evans of the seat he had held for 20 years, even though he had demonstrated, throughout his tenure, great sensitivity and support for Philadelphia and southeastern Pennsylvania issues. They also ensured that the power in that seat, held by a Philadelphian for so long that most Philadelphia-area observers had taken that invaluable resource for granted, would be shifted to Rep. Joseph Markosek of Allegheny County. Good "looking out," huh?

Sadly, I got the impression that there had been far too little focus by Philadelphia’s legislators or, even, by their constituents in the private sector and civic leadership community, on crafting a strategy that would preserve meaningful leadership representation in the House for our part of the State.

The local media were certainly not innocent bystanders in southeastern Pennsylvania's "meltdown," focusing as they did,on the titillating prospect of the powerful Evans being deposed, and spelling out why such a thing might be feasible or understandable. That created an environment, in my opinion, that emboldened the anti-Evans/anti-Philadelphia co-conspirators.

There were stories that indicated that Evans had been perceived as “arrogant” by his peers, and rumors about his reluctance to support the convening of the legislature's “lame duck” session (that which is scheduled after the actual election in early November, but before the newly elected members of the House and Senate take office).It was said that Evans wanted to avoid the "lame duck" session because of his concern that a Fiscal Oversight Office would be approved, limiting the power of Appropriations chairs. It was offered as “common knowledge” that the “lame duck thing" had really “ticked off” Evans' Democratic colleagues and sealed his fate.

Evans was not entirely without blame in contributing to some of these negative perceptions and, as the anti-Evans “feeding frenzy” grew, his colleagues – most “off-the-record,” but some few, on-the-record” – even protested the former chairman’s handling of "WAM money" (those off-the-budget allocations to rank-and-file legislators for their own Districts' projects). "WAM's" are not inconsequential, having been estimated for just the last six months of 2008, alone, at $110 million, in a June 2009 article by the Associated Press. That amount, according to the AP, was equivalent to “$438,000, on average, for each of Pennsylvania’s lawmakers.” Tied to that was the implication that Evans funneled a disproportionately large number of such dollars back to his own district and didn’t share enough of those funds with his fellow-House members.

Then, there was the “Bill DeWeese issue,” wherein the “smart people” said that Evans had seriously miscalculated by supporting a challenger to former House Speaker and long-time Greene County Rep. Bill DeWeese, during the last elections. DeWeese won anyway. A wily, verbose, ex-Marine, a student of warfare, military leadership styles and political strategies, with an earned “eye-for-an-eye” reputation, DeWeese, it was said, took Evans’ lack of support very personally, and committed himself to doing everything reasonably or unreasonably possible to ensure Dwight’s defeat in the leadership elections.

Ironically, even during this era of Tea Party/Republican resurgence, it's clear that these leadership election outcomes had virtually nothing to do with partisanship and almost everything to do with geography. This was a political strategy that the"West" had clearly prepared for, while the "East," unfortunately, seemed to be absolutely unprepared and defenseless.

As a result, not only is Pennsylvania’s Governor-elect an Allegheny County resident, by vote of the statewide electorate, but so are, both, the Democratic and Republican floor leaders in the Pennsylvania House (for the first time in 40 years), the minority leader in the Senate and the newly elected Caucus Chair in the House. In addition, Sen. Scarnati, nominated by the Republican Caucus to serve as President Pro Tempore, hails from Jefferson County, in the West, and the House Whip Michael Hanna Sr. and Rep. Ron Buxton, the Caucus Administrator, are from Central Pennsylvania. And , then, of course, there is Markosek, as we said, also from Allegheny County.

In fact, in 2011, there will be no Philadelphia members serving in the Pennsylvania House leadership – none.

There is little doubt that the votes of the Democratic Caucus members were also influenced by the long-standing perception of a strong southeastern bias by Governor Edward G.Rendell, a man some had come to call the “Governor of Philadelphia,” and who had gone so far as to hold down a "part-time job" as a broadcaster for Eagles' games, in a state blessed with, both, eastern and western Pennsylvania NFL franchises.

No one should have been surprised by the western Pennsylvania move. What was surprising, however, is that the Philadelphia-based legislators came to the table without an apparent strategy of their own. Even if they, themselves, had, somehow, developed a distaste for Dwight Evans' leadership style, the shame is that they seemed not to have a cohesive "Plan B."

This is where the “cutting off your nose …” part comes into play.

In media interviews, both, Philadelphia legislators Mike O’Brien and Angel Cruz made it clear that they voted against Evans and, in so doing, opted to diminish Philadelphia and southeastern Pennsylvania influence in the General Assembly and in discretionary aspects of the State's $28 billion budget. While they weren't the only two, they seemed to gloat the most about having played such an important role in unseating a Philadelphia-based decision-maker.
My question to O’Brien and Cruz, and to the other Philadelphia co-conspirators, is this: Now what?

With no Philadelphia-sensitive voice now in the House leadership and with a Governor-elect who will, as an Allegheny County resident, understandably be very much attuned to Western Pennsylvania issues and projects, where do Philadelphians go, in the House, when "juice" is needed? My hunch is that the members of the Philadelphia delegation and most politically savvy southeast Pennsylvanians will start missing Dwight Evans' chairmanship role in about two weeks. By that time, of course, it will be too late.

When Philadelphians went to the polls on November 2, we didn't intend to come away with less support from our state government. But that’s exactly what just happened, as result of the brilliant and ruthless geographic strategy by Western elected officials, and the all-too-spiteful, disjointed and passive reaction by Philadelphia's own legislators.

Next time you go up to Harrisburg, take a peek into the House chambers and get a good look at the legislators who voted to reduce Philadelphia’s influence in the House. You’ll be able to recognize them; they’ll be the ones without the noses.

Oh, and by the way, while you’re out at the State Capitol building, also make a point of stopping into the Senate chambers to say hello to the Hon. Vincent Hughes, the newly elected minority chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Hon. Anthony Hardy Williams, the new Minority Caucus Chair, in the Senate.

Senators Hughes and Williams are the only African-American legislators who will be holding leadership positions in either the House or the Senate, in the coming year, and two of only three Philadelphians with such a role in the Senate. Looks like, at least, a couple of people were wide awake.

Congratulations, Senators Hughes and Williams, but, as you do your jobs in the State Capitol Building, this year, please make sure that you take the time, every now and then, to “count all the noses” in the room.
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"Flying While Black" is also Becoming an Issue.

2011-01-08T06:57:00.000-08:00

If you thought DWB (Driving While Black) was an issue for African Americans, get ready for FWB (Flying While Black) and maybe, even, BMYOBWB (Breathing and Minding Your Own Business While Black).

Why do I say that?

Let’s just start with the fact that, recently, U.S. mainstream media reports have been obsessed, in the main, with three stories – the ongoing military tension between North and South Korea, the impending “Royal Wedding” of Prince William and the overwhelming headline-grabber: the continuing, Transportation Security Administration(TSA) "scanner" and "pat down" saga.

Despite the fact that the North Korea issue may very well be the precursor to World War III, most news reports have not provided the detail and sense of urgency the issue truly deserves, allowing the Obama administration to get away with empty statements about having a "unified" response from "world leaders."

Most astute observers know that the attack by North Korea had very little to do with "the world" and almost everything to do with that country testing U.S. resolve to defend one of its most visible allies in Asia. There will definitely be more to talk about on that issue, but, so far, our news coverage has been consistently skimpy, with no real difference between that offered by left-leaning or right-leaning media outlets. This is one to watch.

Frankly speaking, the "royal wedding" story is absolutely irrelevant – not just to African Americans, but to virtually everyone else in this country. Let’s face it, the U.S. hasn’t been a British Colony for more than 200 years, now, and the ongoing obsession, by American media, with all things British – especially the country's “royal family,” seems more than a bit odd.

So, let’s move on to the "Big Kahuna" – the "pat down" story. Everywhere you looked, over the past few months, there were people being scanned and people complaining about being scanned. There was the guy who coined the now-viral and ubiquitous “Don’t touch my junk” phrase, who threatened to sue the TSA for sexual harassment. Making things things even livelier were the TSA’s own threats to cause travelers to miss their flights, or to be fined, if they didn’t submit to potentially dangerous "x-ray" scans, or intrusive “pat-downs.”

Regrettably, in the midst of all of this frenzy, what was being missed was the ominous and growing discussion about “racial profiling” as the alternative form of airline security, if people continue to insist on being, neither, scanned, nor patted.

A syndicated columnist named Delaney Murdock wrote recently: “The current threat to passengers and airlines comes almost exclusively from one source, and we all know what it is, young males , between 18 and 35… from the Middle East, as well as largely Muslim nations in Africa and south Asia.” Indeed, according to CBS News, in November, a growing number of people across the country are wondering whether "the time has come to consider using racial and other profiling as a security measure."

In the wake of the constant barrage of “Don’t Touch My Junk” stories, including video of toddlers being aggressively and intrusively searched in airports, we're beginning to see a shift in attitudes toward a greater public acceptance of racial profiling at those checkpoints. In fact, in a recent CBS News poll, 37 percent of Americans reported that they now believe that “it would be justified for people of certain racial or ethnic groups to be subjected to additional security checks at airport checkpoints.”

Even scarier were the results of a Washington Post-ABC News poll, wherein 70 percent of respondents agreed with selecting certain passengers for extra security screening at airports. Perhaps the most surprising part of that survey was that 32 percent said a person’s sex should be a factor in deciding whether they should be screened; 39 percent said a person’s religion should be a factor and 40 percent said a person’s race should be a factor, when profiling is actually done. Are Americans more nervous about flying with any type of black person than they are about flying with any type of Muslim? Looks that way.

Perhaps someone should pass that bit of information along to our friend, the African-American journalist Juan Williams, who disclosed in his now-infamous interview on Fox Cable Network that seeing people in Muslim garb on a plane made him nervous. As a result, of course, Mr. Williams was fired from his job as a news analyst at NPR, but received a new, lucrative contract from the conservative-leaning Fox Network.

Do you think it would be a surprise to Juan to learn that his co-workers at Fox are probably more afraid to fly with other Williamses than they are to fly with people with Arabic names and burnooses?

Unlike our good brother Juan, seeing Muslims on planes doesn"t make me especially nervous. What does make me nervous, however, is the prospect of greater levels of racial profiling on airlines in the wake of a growing pattern of black, African terrorists being splashed across our newspaper covers, on broadcast outlets and on the Internet. Have you noticed, or is it just me?

About 11 months ago, there was young Umar Farouk Adbulmutallab, the Nigerian who boarded a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit and allegedly tried to activate an explosive device inside his own underwear. The face of terrorism, I thought, right then and there, was starting to be changed. No more stereotypical, Semitic, Middle Eastern-looking people; now the "bad guys" were people who looked just like people in my own family. That made me nervous.

In that same vein, recently, there was the widely circulated story of the Tanzanian-born, Guantanamo Bay detainee Ahmed Ghailani, who we’re told, was instrumental in attacks in 1998 on the U.S. embassies in both Kenya and in his native country.

The larger issue for African Americans is that the media focus on Ghailani stands as further, visible affirmation that black folks on planes shouldn’t be trusted quite as much as they used to be and, in fact, that they probably need to be treated as significant security risks.

As I implied earlier, that's becoming more and more uncomfortable every day for me and for anyone who looks like me. Things are becoming as unfair for us in the air as they have been, for so long, on the ground. This is all unfolding, and the "racial-profiling mob" is being formed, even as the country is fully aware of the fundamental unfairness of such policies, and that they simply don’t work.

In 2006, for example, the NYC Police Department stopped a half-million pedestrians for suspected criminal involvement; 89 percent of the stops involved non-whites. And right here, in Philadelphia , in 2010, the ACLU recently filed a lawsuit against the City’s "Stop and Frisk" policy of random "pat downs" of “suspicious” individuals, because it’s been found that 72 percent of pedestrians that were stopped were African Americans.

Drug-related and weapons-related crimes are far and away the leading causes for arrests and convictions in this country. This move to racial profiling is happening, however, despite clear evidence that young blacks are significantly less inclined to be drug abusers than whites (3% vs. 10%) and despite the fact that Opinion Research Center has informed us that U.S.gun owners are predominantly “white, Protestant, rural and of middle and upper middle class.”

None of those facts, apparently, prevented black male incarceration rates, in 2007, from standing at 4,618 per 100,000 persons vs. 773 per 100,000 persons, for white males.

Thanks to the growing movement toward legitimization of airline-based racial profiling, we, in the black community, should probably get prepared to experience even more onerous treatment right here on the ground than we've seen in the past.

For black folks, it seems, it’s going to be more and more difficult to find “the friendly skies” ...or the friendly streets.
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Blacks Are “Happier." Says Who?

2011-01-03T14:07:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, what passes for serious academic research is so insulting to your intelligence that you just want to track down the report writers and snatch them by their rumpled, Ivy League collars. The purpose, of course, would not be to inflict bodily harm of any kind on the good researchers, but rather to ask them, face-to-face, if their entire report hadn’t really been some huge, overly-long, bad joke, like that recent movie, Jackass 3D.

I felt just like that after reading a recent report by two University of Pennsylvania economists – Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. Their study “proved,” they said, that much of (the) “racial gap in happiness” between blacks and whites “has closed over the past 35 years." They went on to say that most of the black gains in "happiness" had actually been “concentrated among women and those living in the South.”

As if that hadn't already been enough, Professor Wolfers was then quoted in a national periodical as saying that the study was “…the largest and most important change in happiness for any population I have ever seen.”

Can you spell “hype,” Professor Wolfers?

The Penn Professor had the courage to say all of that, even though the unemployment gap between blacks and whites continues to grow – to the detriment of black folks, even though the earnings gap between black and white households stands at about 40 cents out of each dollar, and even though huge healthcare disparities between blacks and whites have been well documented.

The first time I read about the survey results, I was dumbfounded. The third, fifth, ninth and tenth times I read it, I felt exactly the same way.

Black "happiness?" Images of minstrels, banjoes and watermelon came immediately to mind.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, "happiness" is defined as “good fortune, prosperity or a state of well-being and contentment.” Having read that, and realizing that most African Americans were experiencing very few of those things, I wondered, more than ever, what was happening across Black America (Can we still say "Black America" without offending the current president?) that was causing black people to be so damned happy.

The second thing I wondered was what, aside from having too much funding and too much time on their hands, had led two Wharton School economists, of decidedly European descent, to express their “expert” opinions on the “happiness of black people in America?” On what grounds do they claim a knowledge of what constitutes "happiness" for African Americans? Sounds like a case wherein they could have used the services of a good, black psychologist, as part of their team.

In any event, journalists at the New York Times deduced, in that paper’s coverage of the story, that the whole report was probably explainable by the direct correlation between "black happiness" and the decrease in “day-to-day racism” in America. In trying to make that case, however, it’s clear that the Times and the two Penn professors haven't kept abreast of situations currently being played out all across the country, such as the throw-back, race-based tensions that have been experienced recently in Macon, Georgia, and that have been especially evident in the town’s City Council meetings.

It’s also fair to say, I would guess, that if they had known about that situation, the researchers would have begun to understand that, outside of the walls of the Wharton School, where this study was done, black folks in this country still don’t seem to have a whole lot to be "happy" about.

Essentially, what happened in Macon, was this: There was an acrimonious political debate being waged between a white City Councilman named John Williams and a black City Councilman named Daron Lee. At one point in the discussion, Lee, protesting what he thought had been unfair and racist treatment by Williams and other City Council colleagues at earlier meetings, told Williams that he was tired of being treated disrespectfully. He, then, reminded Williams that he (Lee) did not work in a “cotton field.” Williams paused just a second before looking Lee straight in the eye and responding, “You should be.”

Do you think that statement contributed to Councilman Lee’s “happiness?" Do you think it made black citizens throughout Macon, Georgia any "happier" than they usually are at this time of year?

In that same regard, I would want to know if the U.of P. researchers had looked up from their computer terminals long enough to take note of radio psychologist Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s insult to a black female caller to her show, recently? That was the time when Dr. Laura essentially told the caller, right in the middle of this wonderful “post-racial” era that we’re all living through, that if the caller wanted to avoid racial insults, she probably shouldn’t have married a white man.

I wonder if that little piece of friendly advice made the black caller “happy?” How about the millions of black folks who saw the story repeated over and over on cable news shows over that following week? Were they also “happy?”

And, how about all the African Americans who had to hear, immediately thereafter, the news about Sarah Palin’s “tweet” to Dr. Laura, supporting her racist commentary? It went like this: “Don’t retreat, reload.”

Many more millions of black Americans were also subjected to that exchange and I’m pretty confident that none of them were made much “happier,” as a result.

But maybe the two good professors at Penn didn’t include the opinions of any of these kinds of black Americans in their survey.

From virtually all of the data I’ve seen about current economic, social, housing and health conditions, “happy” would be one of the last words I would use to describe how black people are feeling, right about now.. With the country turning more and more every day toward right-wing conservatism, with the cries for “smaller government” constituting a virtual guarantee that predominantly poor blacks will be even further shut out of much-needed government services, what in the world do Negroes have to be “happy” about?

I don’t know about you, but when I want to know what credible research has been done on the subject of “happiness,” I tend to rely more on the 2006 report on the topic by the PEW Research Center. For a number of reasons, it seems a great deal more in keeping with the reality I see every day across America.

In summary, here’s what PEW found: Rich people (50 percent) are happier than poor people (23 percent); Republicans (45 percent), who, not coincidentally, tend to be richer, are happier than Democrats (30 percent); married people (43 percent) are happier than unmarried people (24 percent); and people who worship frequently (43 percent) are happier than those who don’t (26 percent).

More specifically, the people at PEW also found that both whites and Hispanics are happier than blacks, which would seem to make sense, given the strong correlation between income and happiness, and the fact that the poverty rate for black children, which stands at about 34 percent, is greater than that of Hispanic, Asian or white children.

But, if the PEW findings are accurate, and it’s very difficult to disagree with them, if you’re wide awake and are familiar at all with the black community, then where did the Wharton School professors come up with their stunning conclusion that blacks are becoming more “happy” every day?

To nobody’s great surprise, the University of Pennsylvania’s “Black Happiness Report” hit with a loud, incredulous thud across the country, and was quickly dismissed, much in the same way that the recent report that informed us that the Great Recession in the United States had actually come to an end, in 2009.

We didn’t believe that one either, for equally good reasons.

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Women’s Wage Disparities? How About Ours?

2010-10-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

As I was surfing through the cable news channels the other night, I saw a video by the Women’s Law Center, whose fundamental message would do wonders for bringing greater economic equity to black Americans.

It's called “Women Are Not Worth Less.” It's on YouTube.

It's actually a very slick and effective presentation. In it, a young woman of European descent looks directly into the camera and makes the point that “Women are not worth less” (Please note, she doesn’t say “worthless,” but “worth less”). Her issue, of course, and that of the Law Center, is that, according to the most recent U.S. Census data, as of 2009, women earned 77 percent of what men earned. White women’s median annual income, according to that Census report, was cited at $36,276.

During the fast-paced presentation, you see the spokeswoman and other female actors holding large, bright-red signs in front of themselves that read: “23% less.” In one scene, the spokeswoman is shown standing back-to-back with a young white man and she says to him, sarcastically, over her shoulder: “You’re taller, maybe that’s why I make 23 percent less than you.” In another, she’s seen haggling with a fruit vendor on the sidewalk, trying to get a 23 percent discount on the purchase of an apple, because she earns less money. During morning rush hour, in another scene, she shouts out to female passers-by that she knows “It’s hard coming to work, when you make 23 percent less than a man does.”

At the close, the video encourages the U.S. Senate to move quickly to pass the “Paycheck Fairness Act,” which is designed to eliminate gender-based pay inequality and make it easier for women to file class-action suits against employers accused of sex-based pay discrimination. The bill was passed in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2008, but is still awaiting a positive vote in the Senate. President Obama, with much fanfare, called it a “common sense bill,” in July of this year.

Wow!

Hold up signs with “23 % less” splashed across them…get supportive statements from the President of the United States… do slick video/YouTube campaigns, putting pressure on the U.S. Senate…why can’t we do that?

I raise the question because there’s another piece of income inequality data in the most recent Census report, i.e.,that the median black household earned 59.8 percent as much as the median white household earned in 2009. That compares to 1975, when the median black household earned 59.6 cents for every dollar earned by the median white household.

That’s a two-tenths of one cent improvement over 35 years. Is that the great economic progress that so many of our national leaders--black and white--have said we should be so grateful for, in all of their public pronouncements about "black conditions" in America?

At that rate, it will take us 175 years to make up a whole penny in the black-white wage gap. At that rate, it will take us more than 7000 years to make up the 40.2 percent gap between black and white income levels, assuming that whites don’t continue to expand their absolute income, at all, over the period.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have 7,000 years to wait for income equity for black folks.

If white females feel justified in going to the House, the Senate, the President and, potentially, to the highest courts in the land to eliminate their wage gap, where’s our campaign? Where are our “40 % less” signs? Where is the Congressional vote in favor of wiping out the black-white pay disparity in this country, which has existed, at least, since the Constitution was signed in 1787?

We need to wake up and get off our backsides.

Even black people who have consistently been opposed to the concept of reparations “because none of the contemporary, mainstream institutions are currently engaged in, or were responsible for, slavery,” should understand that the concern about the black-white earnings disparity is not based on correcting some 150-year-old historical injustice. Rather, it's based on a current, daily and ongoing unfairness, traceable to the fact that some of us happen to be black.

And don’t fall for the tired old rhetoric that “if black people would simply get an education, their income disparity would disappear." That’s simply not true.

According to a recent report, “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2005,” black high school grads earned $23,498, as compared to $30,197 for white high school grads. Blacks with bachelors degrees earned $42,342, as compared to $53,411 for white bachelors degree holders, and blacks with doctoral degrees earned $82,615, as compared to $94,426 for white doctoral degree holders. So much for the education argument; that's clearly not the whole answer.

Isn’t this an issue, then, for the Black Caucus, the guys who just had that great, upscale party in D.C. in September?

Over a single, four-day period, in late September, mainstream media carried two very conflicting stories – one said that the U.S poverty rate had risen to 14.3 percent in 2009, the highest rate since 1994, and that the 43.6 million Americans living in poverty is the highest level in the 51 years since such records have been kept. The other story, which I’m sure you all saw, informed us that the “Great Recession” has officially ended.

As deeply unsettling as the overall poverty rate news was, if you dug a little deeper, you learned that the poverty rate for black Americans is nearly twice the white rate, at 25.8 percent. That has a great deal to do with the fact that our families earn, on average, only 59 percent of white household income.

I don’t know about you, but, as I’ve mentioned previously, I’m really beginning to get a little nervous about the integrity and credibility of the economic information that we get fed every day. It’s starting to smell.

I know, I know….technically, a recession ends after a declining economy hits its low point and starts to head back up in a positive direction. The economists usually determine all of that by looking at factors that comprise the nation's Gross Domestic Product, including private consumption levels, business investment rates, government spending and the national trade balance.

The U.S. economy still seems to be "sucking wind" by every one of those measures, with the lone exception of government spending. I’ll go out on a limb and predict that, with the rising influence of the Tea Party, fiscal and social conservativism and the Republican Party, in general, there will be a budget reduction mania sweeping the country that will sharply reduce government spending as a contributor to GDP, in the months to come, bringing back our friend, the Great Recession, for a second "dip." The housing market is dead in the water, businesses are reluctant to expand or hire, large corporations continue to send investments and jobs overseas, unemployment is at historically high levels – especially in black communities – and banks are only lending money to people who are so well off that they don’t need any loans.

The recession is over? They can't honestly expect us--especially us-- to believe that.

We've got eyes don’t we?

When will our government leaders realize that until we significantly modify our business model, until we reduce the incentive for businesses to cut costs by sending jobs overseas, and until we reduce the incentive to generate unending streams of quarterly profits--no matter what-- there is scant probability that there will be a credible economic recovery here in the U.S., in the foreseeable future?

And, finally, with other demographic groups, whose economic issues are nowhere near as desperate or as urgent as ours, already in the streets, in the Halls of Congress and on the Internet fighting for a larger share of the "American economic pie," what in God’s name are we waiting for?

Let’s start flashing our “40 % less" signs, on a regular basis, whenever we choose to gather to make a political point, and let’s put our own black-white wage disparity video on YouTube.

It’s way past time that we did so.

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It's Hard Out Here For An “Assimilator.”

2010-09-20T12:53:00.000-07:00

The current, distressed U.S. economy is making it very difficult for people in our community who count residential assimilation among their top-priority life’s goals.

What happens in our individual households and neighborhoods--black or white-- is often driven by larger, even global, forces that we’ve been taught to take pretty much for granted.

In a perverse way, as an example, we’ve grown almost “comfortable” with hearing every month that the overall unemployment rate in this country continues to be just below 10 percent. When unemployment rates have come close to that range in other "developed"nations, people have, literally, “taken to the streets.”

In fact, over the 2008-2010 period, the comparably calculated unemployment rate in Greece was 9.5 percent; in France, 9.1 percent, in the UK, 7.7 percent, and Italy reported 7.9 percent as its unemployment rate. Each of these countries has had to deal with angry mobs of their own citizens staging violent, and sometimes lethal, demonstrations in opposition to their country's economic policies.

Last week, the U.S. Labor Department disclosed that, as of August, there were 14.9 million unemployed persons in the United States and that the country's unemployment rate had increased from 9.5 percent to 9.6 percent, that white male unemployment now stood at 8.9 percent and that black male unemployment was almost twice that level, at 17.3 percent.

Virtually no one in the country seemed to bat an eye – certainly not many in the economically depressed black community.

A large part of the national “sleep walk” on what should be dramatically unsettling numbers for all of us, has to be attributed to the “spin” with which we get immediately bombarded as soon as sensitive economic data such as the unemployment rates are released.

In July, it was "U.S. News and World Report" that informed us that “...a rising unemployment rate is actually one of the best signs yet that the economy is bouncing back.”

Huh?

Last week, when the increased August unemployment rate was announced, President Obama said the report represented “positive news,” somehow. At the same time, a new, hotshot Wall Street economist, who coincidentally admits to being a member of the Democratic Party, was rolled out to say, right on cue, that the latest unemployment rate increase “solidifies that economic recovery is going to remain intact.”

Wow!

What will they say if the unemployment numbers actually ever do go down? Will that be a BAD sign for the economy?

At least in Europe, they seem to be willing to “call a spade a spade,” as it were. Here, so far, we’ve apparently decided, at the very highest levels of our government, to lie our way through our economic challenges, to just "make it up."

For far too many of us, however, it should be growing more and more difficult to swallow the “party line.” We see, now, that the state of the economy is having a more and more immediate impact on our own families, on whether we'll have healthcare, and whether we'll have a choice of where we want to live. We've got to start paying more attention and letting our voices be heard.

In that regard, a recent study by United for a Fair Economy has disclosed that the subprime lending crisis has resulted in the “greatest loss of wealth to blacks and Latinos in modern history,” with black borrowers, alone, having lost between $72 and $93 billion.

While we’re on the subject of wealth, according to the New York Times, white families saw dramatic growth in their financial assets – from a $22,000 median value in 1983 to $100,000 in median value in 2007, just before the onset of the “Great Recession.” By comparison, high-income black families reported median assets of just $18,000 in the same year. During that period, the Times continued, at least 25 percent of black families had absolutely no assets whatsoever to rely upon in the event of an economic crisis, such as a job loss or business failure.

All of this explains very clearly why African Americans have consistently had less money to invest in colleges for their children, in business opportunities, or in real estate. It also goes a long way to explain why, even today, blacks represent 13 percent of the U.S. population, but constitute 46 percent of public housing residents, nationwide.

On that subject, with all of the recent news about the reduction of public housing residential density over the past 20 years or so, it is clear that there has been a nationally directed and funded plan in place to reclaim what had been red-lined, significantly undervalued, predominantly black central city neighborhoods: "We'll rebuild, and we'll do it with nicer homes, but we'll end up with far fewer than ever existed before," clearly seemed to be the plan. As part of that process, upper-income whites began to sell their suburban homesteads and rush back into what had been called the inner city, in places such as Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, DC and New York City.

In the process, they drove up home prices and tax levels and made affordable properties so scarce that African Americans, in far too many cases, could no longer afford to live in the neighborhoods in which they were born and raised. Many of them were forced, by these gentrification/”neighborhood improvement" plans, to move out to the more-affordable edges of their cities and, even, into the suburbs. If you think I'm kidding, take a look at how the demographics of Philadelphia's own "Great Northeast" and the neighborhood around Temple University have changed over the past 20 years, or so.

At the same time, many newly upwardly mobile African Americans, eyes steadily fixed on achieving the “American Dream” of a fine suburban home (and, I guess, a daily 90-minute commute) also headed to the “burbs,” certainly not to the same sections of the suburbs as their lower-income, former black neighbors, but into the suburbs, nonetheless.

So there you had it: Blacks forced, or otherwise motivated, to move out of the cities, and whites, no less motivated to move back in. Their moving vans probably passed each other on many an evening, going in opposite directions, to their new homes. As an example of that very phenomenon, over the past decade, the city of Atlanta experienced the greatest growth of its white resident base of any major city in the country –- blacks moving out, whites moving in.

On that subject, did you happen to notice how close that last mayor’s race was in Maynard Jackson's old hometown? The next one, I'll go way out on a limb and predict, will be even closer.

Apparently, the upwardly mobile African Americans who were breaking their necks to move out to the "fine homes" in the suburbs across the country didn’t get the email. Most arrived just in time, over the past decade, to pay the very highest prices for the homes they purchased, just in time to pay $3.50 and $4.00 per gallon for the gas they needed for their new, daily commute, and just in time to pay exorbitant, infrastructure-related tax increases for the maintenance now required for their recently over-populated suburban communities.

What a cruel hoax!

With their mortgage balances now higher than their property values, many won’t be able to move back into the new, trendy urban centers they just left, for quite awhile. The collapse of the mortgage market and the resulting financial crisis has put an unexpected crimp in any plans they might have had in that regard.

Economies like the one we’re experiencing make it very, very difficult for African Americans who haven't been paying close attention to the fundamental shifts in our national economy and whose primary goal has been to be residentially assimilated into the mainstream.

They're learning, much to their dismay, how difficult it can be, actually, to effect that assimilation when the people with whom they want to assimilate always seem to stay one step ahead of them in the age-old game of neighborhood "musical chairs."

Somehow, it seems unfair.

I almost feel sorry for them.

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Buried In The Scandal, PHA’s Missed Opportunity For Meaningful Black Economic Inclusion

2010-09-03T12:51:00.000-07:00

I'm sure it doesn't matter much to him, in the grand scheme of things, but the more I think about it, I must admit that I, too, have a serious issue with Carl Greene.

Why?

A mainstream contractor, last week, stepped forward to tell a Daily News reporter that, in Carl Greene’s Philadelphia Housing Authority, if a large contractor was having difficulty meeting the authority’s published, Power-Pointed and highly promoted minority participation guidelines, the contractor could simply contribute some cash to the “Carl Greene Scholarship Fund” and the PHA would make the mainstream contractor’s minority participation “hassle” go away.

That piece of hypocrisy – that the PHA has simply “winked” at white contractors and dismissed minority inclusion requirements in exchange for a few bucks contributed to a questionably established not-for-profit organization--is absolutely outrageous.

Where else are we in the African-American community supposed to turn to achieve fair levels of inclusion, finally, in the local construction industry, other than to entities that have substantial budgets, that do a great deal of work in our very own communities, whose majority clientele is African- American and that are headed by a black executive? If even those institutions and their leadership are “gaming us,” too, what’s left for us to believe?

The initial reaction to the Inquirer's "mortgage foreclosure story," on August 13, probably went like this: “Wow, how ironic! A guy who makes more than $300,000 a year and who has already invested nearly $230,000 in his $615,000 property, has gotten into a "beef” with his bank about payments due on his …house."

Many Philadelphians thought that Carl Greene was too big to lose a personal mortgage dispute, that he knew too much about the housing industry not to have done his homework on this issue and that it would only be a matter of time before he would mobilize his $300,000+ salary, his $44,000+ one-year bonus and his cadre of lawyers and high-ranking friends to bring the impudent Wells Fargo Bank to its knees

That, of course, was before all the other shoes began to drop, before there was full recognition of the extent of the sexual harassment allegations, before we learned of the $50,000+ in IRS tax liens, before the stunning revelation of the $33 million in fees paid to outside legal counsel since 2007, before the disclosure that, even as we were reading about the mortgage foreclosure debacle, there was, yet, another personal sexual harassment case in the process of being settled.

Right after that, the Inquirer carried an editorial page cartoon depicting Greene as the “Dirty Old Man who lived in a (Gucci) shoe.”

The paper’s editorial went on record as saying that the “PHA board seems out of the loop,” and reminded us all, in that early Wednesday edition, that “Mayor Nutter has had nothing to say … ditto for City Controller Alan Butkovitz,” each of whom, by the way, have two appointments to the PHA’s five-person board.

Finally, the Inquirer said it was time for the Mayor to “step up and exert his power.” Michael Nutter must have read it.

Shortly thereafter, and right on schedule, the Mayor released copies of a letter in which he condemned his longtime nemesis and the incumbent chairman of the PHA board, John Street, by saying, “Sadly (PHA) may be suffering from a lack of appropriate oversight," and “I am baffled, like most Philadelphians, to learn of your contention that you, as board chairman, had no knowledge of the sexual harassment cases brought against Mr. Greene.”

In the same letter, the Mayor suggested that Street and his fellow PHA board members should terminate Greene if the allegations of sexual harassment are "accurate" and if payments were made without the Board’s knowledge.

And, knowing just how much Nutter and Street “love and respect" each other, I’m sure that Mayor Nutter enjoyed adding, as part of his letter, that it appears that “the very leadership of PHA is in doubt.”

Responding to Nutter’s letter, Street was predictably dismissive. “He’s just talking,” he said.” He has to say something.”

Ouch! If you were standing close enough, you, too, might have gotten hit with a pie.

The Daily News editorial page also joined the fun, asserting that the PHA board “has been asleep at the switch” and that "it’s clear that no one has really been in control of PHA for a long time.”

After saying all of that, the editors added: “Carl Greene should do the right thing, and resign.”

Despite all of that, what has been uncovered about the PHA and its leadership is not the fault of the media, at all. It clearly is the fault of elected and appointed officials and the people who work with and for them, who grew entirely too comfortable in believing that there were no rules that couldn’t be ignored, bent or broken, no person who couldn’t be disrespected..

Even worse, in my opinion, even though most of the agency’s work was done in historically black communities and involved a largely African-American tenant base, there was a curious belief, somehow, that the economic benefits – the jobs and the contracts – should be reserved for the same, privileged, non-minority segment of the population that controls economic benefits in every other part of the city.

With the hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds he used to change the landscape of neighborhoods across the city, Greene also had a substantial opportunity, and a commensurate obligation, to impact the rules of economic engagement and to ensure, finally, that African Americans and other minorities would gain meaningful, legal access to the dollars that were spent over the 12 years of his tenure.

He chose, instead, to play the same game that his predecessors played, but with noble-sounding, largely hollow, inclusion statements, and misleading Power Point presentations that raised hopes, but delivered well below the agency’s potential.

According to a Tribune story at the time, by Larry Miller, Schenecqua Butts, a PHA tenant, and union carpenter, testified on June 27, 2008, at a public hearing on the Mayor’s Commission on Construction Industry Diversity that, “I went to school for four years and I’ve faced constant discrimination on job sites.”

When she was laid off at one site after just one day of work, she said the safety inspector on the site told her “Well, you know how it is, we have to take care of our own first.”

“If I had known how it really is," said a highly qualified but underutilized Ms. Butts, "I would never have gotten into this industry, in the first place.”

At the same public hearing, Pierce Keating, whose firm, Daniel J. Keating Company, is a listed PHA contractor, told the Commission that he was aware that minorities didn’t get a lot of opportunities in the construction industry and that the reason why was that contractors like him preferred dealing with the “old guard” (meaning people of European descent, he later admitted) as workers and sub-contractors.

I don’t know if Carl Greene can somehow survive the current media and political frenzy surrounding him and the PHA, but the sad fact is that if Mr. Greene finally does have to “get his hat,” it, sadly, won’t be seen as that great a loss to the African-American business community, to black construction workers or to black-owned construction companies.

The work done by PHA, over all those years of Carl Greene's tenure, could have and should have been a launching pad for a new generation of emerging black and minority contractors, who could have grown their portfolios and expanded their size, their capacity and their work forces.

Maybe the next PHA executive director will understand that.

##########

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Newsweek's "Best Countries" Ranking: A Poor Joke.

2010-08-27T09:02:00.000-07:00

I’ve seen dumb lists before, but the one recently published in Newsweek, ranking the “World's Best Countries,” certainly “takes the cake.”

In a way, you almost feel sorry for Newsweek. We all know that the magazine has been “up against it” lately. In fact, the owners of the venerable periodical announced, just three weeks ago, that it had reached an agreement to sell the magazine, effective next month, to Sidney Harman, who made his millions in the audio equipment business. (You remember Harmon-Kardon stereo sets? Same guy.)

This came about after the magazine dropped from 3.2 million to 1.5 million subscribers, and after it reported a $47.5 million operating loss in 2009.

It appears that, in one more effort at reviving its fading fortunes, Newsweek decided to “swing for the roof,” and create its first-time-ever “World’s Best Countries” ranking.

After all, the editors must have thought, “U.S. News and World Report” seems to be doing well with its strategy of publishing U.S. college, university and healthcare rankings. How can we lose if we develop our own ranking of the entire world?"

If Newsweek had taken its “World’s Best Countries” project a bit more seriously, if their editors had made just a modest effort to develop the new ranking without the highly political, substantially subjective, European-skewed criteria they obviously used, maybe the “world” would have taken their product seriously.

But, in my opinion, they didn’t do any of that and they clearly blew it.

I found Newsweek’s “Best Countries” ranking no more credible than the steady stream of other nonsensical, gimmicky lists that seem to be published at least once a week, by other desperate media outlets, in a vain attempt to attract “eyeballs.”

In recent years, for example, there have been published rankings of: “The Top 10 Dumbest Pet Products” list, the “Top 10 College Drop Outs,” (almost interesting because Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Avatar director James Cameron, Harrison Ford and Tiger Woods all made the list), the “Top 10 Screen Vampires” and the “Top 10 Angry Comedians.”

Like David Letterman’s far-funnier trademark “Top 10 List” routine, these rankings hold our interest for only a minute or so. That happens because, very much like the Letterman “bit,” we see them as comic relief, a “mental health break” before we move back to the things we have to do every day to earn a living.

I felt that way about the Top 100 “Best Countries ranking,” by Newsweek.

Intentionally or unintentionally, it was clearly a joke.

The project’s advisory board included A Nobel laureate economist, the director of McGill University’s Institute of Health and Social Policy, the director of Columbia University’s Global Center for East Asia and, most importantly and revealingly, two high-ranking representatives of McKinsey and Co., the world’s largest management consulting firm.

On the surface, such a group would appear to be credible, until you realize that McKinsey, a $6 billion company, has a client list that includes 90 of the world’s leading, global corporations and more than 35 (nearly one in every six) of the world’s countries. Do you think the interests of their clients might have been factored into the final rankings and the discussions about who made the list in the first place? You think?

Why else would a ranking of the “World’s 100 Best Countries” include every single European Union nation, but exclude 67 percent of the countries in Africa, altogether?

How would 15 of the Top 25 Best Countries be drawn from the ranks of the European Union, including Greece, (#26), Spain (#21), Ireland (#17) and the United Kingdom (#14), each of which is in imminent danger of being declared financially insolvent? How did any of these countries make the list, in the first place?

Without a strong political “tweak” of the data, how would Israel wind up at #22, overall, and be listed as the “Best Country” among all of the 14 countries classified as “Middle East / North Africa”? Aside from purely political considerations, why else did Newsweek rate Israel as “better” than Kuwait (#40), oil-rich Saudi Arabia (#64), and Iran (#79), among others?

Why, other than lingering colonialist attitudes, does the report include Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Egypt, four countries located squarely on the African continent, together with “Middle East” countries? Is it geographic proximity to Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria that has led political consultants such as McKinsey to continue to “lump” Northern Africa into the Middle East?

Can’t be.

If that were the case, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia, all located within 200 miles or less across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia and Yemen, would, logically, be considered Middle Eastern Countries, also. For the world’s sake, and all of our collective sanity, let’s hope that those countries being “relegated” to “African” rather than “Middle East” status had nothing to do with the darker complexion of their inhabitants.

By the way, Spain is less than 50 miles from African Morocco. At a certain point, should Spain, also, be considered a Middle Eastern country, or a part of Northern Africa?? Who decides these things, anyway?

Subjective….totally subjective…so much so, as to be humorous.

If Newsweek and its consultants at McKinsey weren’t trying to be funny, or to simply reinforce well-worn, negative global stereotypes, why were the 14 “sub-Saharan” African Nations all placed within the last 21 places in the rankings – from 80 to 100?

Wait, it gets better…in developing its rationale for the U.S. to be ranked as high as #11, even in the midst of one of its very deepest economic crises, Newsweek clearly used inflated, misleading data to improve the case for that ranking.

Even though a 2006 report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education disclosed that 46 – 51 percent of U.S. adults read so poorly that they earn significantly below the poverty level, the U.S. literacy rate used in the “Best Countries” calculation was the highly inaccurate 99 percent, the one drawn from the CIA World Fact book.

There's more...even though the U.S. Census Bureau lists the average per-capita income in the U.S. at $33,070, Newsweek’s #11 ranking for the U.S. was arrived at by using a per-capita income level of $47,200. Why?

Finally, it was very interesting to see which of the world’s total of 194 countries were left off the Newsweek list entirely, in order to get down to the “100 Best.” That unranked group of 94 countries included, of course, a significant number of Central and South East Asian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean countries, and 36 African nations, such as Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, Libya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe.

Even more glaring, why was China, the world’s second-largest economy, ranked #59, Brazil ranked #58, India #78 and Russia #51? Aren’t those "BRIC Nations" the emerging global economic players? By whose strange logic at Newsweek do these clearly powerful G-20 players rank below Latvia, Costa Rica, Poland, Slovenia and Newsweek’s #1, Finland?

Was Newsweek’s entire “Best Countries” announcement all just one more dumb “David Letterman Top 10 List” joke, or were the magazine’s editors simply trying to re-affirm the outdated, Western, global management policy that “if we say so, it must be true?”

When are we in the U.S., and in the entire West, going to finally take our heads out of the sand?

When are we going to start to use accurate, comparable data sets to arrive at more honest analyses of our true, economic and military condition? When are we going to understand that if we don’t recognize the underlying reasons for the loss of our economic, quality-of-life and military advantages, then we won’t really be able to address them, or to retain the U.S.’s world leadership?

When I finally stopped laughing at Newsweek's "Best Countries" list, I began to worry that our country and its formerly all-powerful opinion - making apparatus has gotten so far off track that we may not recover in time to prevent the inevitable crash.

####

What Happens To Black Folks During A “Second American Revolution?”

2010-08-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

Over the past month or so, the genie has clearly been let out of the bottle with regard to the topic of race in America and, along with many other formerly taboo issues, overt racism appears to be firmly back in style. In fact, it’s a rare newscast that doesn’t prominently feature a new, recent, race-based controversy.

Immediately on the heels of the disgraceful treatment of Shirley Sherrod, for example, there was a lazer-like media focus on “ethics violations” by two black U.S. Congresspeople, Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters. Throw in the news about Kwame Kilpatrick’s mom, seven-term Michigan Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, losing her recent re-election bid and you’ve got a negative, media “three-fer” for the Black Caucus.

Still focusing on black-related news out of D.C., we’ve seen the Senate vote against providing the $1.2 billion in government support that has been owed to black farmers since the 1990’s, even as the Obama administration has promised $1.5 billion in farm aid to Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln. (Go figure).

We also hear Democratic U.S. Senators and high-ranking Democratic Congresspeople making noises about eliminating all federally funded diversity programs, and a New York Times columnist charging that, perhaps, the Obama White House is “too white.”

As if all of this hasn’t been “black enough for you,” take the case of former Memphis Tennessee mayor and holder of a doctorate degree from Southern Illinois University, Willie Herenton. Dr. Herenton had been prominently mentioned in national news stories for including as part of his “Just One” campaign theme for the 9th Congressional District seat in Tennessee, the fact that, out of nine Congressional seats in that state, none are held by an African American, even though the state’s population is 16 percent black, even though the City of Memphis, which is included in the district, is 61.4 percent black, and even though the 9th Congressional District is the only African-American-majority district in the state of Tennessee.

Despite all of that, Dr. Herenton was presented in national mainstream media accounts as being somehow irrational and, even, racist, himself, for emphasizing these pieces of information as part of his campaign.

Was Herenton, who is also a former head of the Memphis School District, wrong when he said that the state’s 1,058,000 black residents seemed to lack representation?

By the way, the incumbent U.S. Congressman, Steve Cohen, who happens not to be African American, was endorsed by Barack Obama. Cohen won.

It really does appear that the issue of race relations is being moved back onto mainstream media’s “front burner” once again, right where we need to keep it, until the issue is finally resolved.

I’m all for that.

For far too long, even pre-dating the election of the first black president, it seemed that there had been some curious unwritten agreement between black folks and the national media that if we didn’t bring up our own issues, if we wanted to pretend that race-based inequities had disappeared, then they would function accordingly.

It went like this: A significant percentage of African Americans would all agree that, no matter how desperate the conditions for the mass of black people, no matter how unfair the incarceration and sentencing procedures were for African Americans, no matter how high our poverty and unemployment rates grew, as compared to the mainstream, and no matter how much we were disproportionately abused by financial services companies, we would simply look the other way, and pretend it wasn’t happening, at all.

It was almost as if we thought that, by remaining quiet in the midst of sweeping black adversity, some of us would be able to move more easily into the mainstream. You remember the old lines from the Stepin Fetchit movie era: “Sh-h-h, don’t say nothin’…ya’ll goin’ to get us in trouble.” Regrettably, it seemed a lot like that.

Unfortunately, that approach didn’t work for blacks in the 1930’s, and it hasn’t worked for us now, in the 21st century.

In any event, if you’ve been listening really closely you would have heard far too many trusting, hopeful and, regrettably, naive black folks saying that racism in America was an outdated, "60’s" phenomenon, that all those run-down black communities across the country looked that way simply because the “irresponsible black men and women” who lived there “really didn’t want to work,” and were “choosing to live that way.”

With blinders tightly affixed, and heads firmly planted in the ground, or elsewhere, some black intellectuals even began to publicly criticize African-American activists, offering that black protests were passé, and that demonstrating for economic access had gone out with the “Afro.” They even began to agree with media pundits that any claims of race-based injustice, no matter how valid, were simply cases of “playing the race card.”

Sadly, the “race card” terminology has been no more than a slick, verbal sleight-of-hand created to make African Americans feel guilty about discussing their own issues. Unfortunately, it has worked beyond all reasonable expectations, for the past 15 years or so.

With all of that as backdrop, our challenge, now, is to mount a political, economic and communications strategy that will allow us to deal effectively with the return of the harsh new, race-driven reality before it consumes all of us – blacks, white, red, brown and yellow. While still demanding the respect our ethnicity has always deserved, we need to work to finally eliminate the "artificial heirarchy of race," which has been concocted to keep whites at the top of the pyramid, Hispanics and Asians in the middle and blacks solidly at the bottom. Pretending that this is no longer an issue is not only non-productive, it's self-defeating.

As I see it, everything is “on the political table” in the months leading to the mid-term elections and in the two years leading to the presidential elections. There are even political factions that are ready to further amend or eliminate, entirely, the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. In addition, the U.S. government is embroiled in an immigration-related lawsuit against the state of Arizona that has attracted a growing number of other states to join forces against a sitting U.S. president in a fashion that has not been seen since the Civil War.

Perhaps, as a direct result of all of this, the president’s approval rating dropped to 41 percent, recently, the lowest at any time since he took office.

Even worse, CNN pundit Jack Cafferty, two weeks ago, raised the question of whether “the time is ripe for the second American Revolution?” In making his case, Cafferty quoted an editorial in “Investor’s Business Daily” that offered that, perhaps, the government is, now, under Obama, doing “more harm than good.” The commentary went on to accuse him of conducting an “imperial presidency” and made the point that he is “diminishing America from within.”

Wow!

On top of all that, a number of states around the country, most notably Missouri, two weeks ago, are challenging the federal government’s right to impose the Healthcare Reform Bill that was, by all accounts, legally passed by both houses of the U.S. Legislature and signed by the president of the United States.

In my opinion, we’re living now through one of the most volatile political periods in this young nation’s history. Racial animosity and scape-goating are growing phenomena, people are broke, a significant number of them have lost their homes and jobs, along with their hopes for a better future…and thanks to the National Rifle Association, an overwhelming number of them – black and white – are heavily armed.

In the midst of all of this uncertainly, it is of the utmost importance that we in the black community remain vigilant and engaged. When overt racism has raised its ugly head, again, and there is a growing willingness among media pundits to “go negative” on racial topics, when there is talk about fundamental changes in the U.S. Constitution, discussions about the feasibility of a “Second American Revolution,” and outright, direct challenges to the power of the Presidency, we need to ensure that we remain focused and not be reluctant to speak forthrightly on behalf of our own issues.

Everyone else already seems to be doing so.

#####

What Lessons Should the First Black President Take Away from the "Shirley Sherrod Incident?"

2010-07-28T13:56:00.000-07:00

Did this conversation take place?

“Your mission, Mr. Jealous, if you choose to accept it, is to assist in solidifying now-much-needed black voter support for the president, by raising the issue of right-wing racism among groups such as the Tea Party, while at the same time, diverting attention from the ongoing lack of support of black issues by the government, itself.

“By the way, while you’re doing all of this, you will earn, at least, our special appreciation if you can also prove that there are such things as ‘black racists,’ and if you can point them out for the entire country to see. We will, of course, be supporting you in these efforts, from behind the scenes...way behind the scenes.

“As always, should you or any of your Impossible Mission Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.

“This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.”

Sound familiar?

It should. It was taken almost entirely, with just a few topical updates, from the opening scripts of the Mission Impossible TV series and movies.

When you think about it for a minute, it may not seem so far-fetched, after all.

Take what happened last week: The NAACP, claiming to be working alone, uncharacteristically accused the Tea Party of having some racist members and some racist ideologies (which, by the way, happens to be absolutely true).

The next thing you know, a right-wing blogger named Breitbart shows up, wanting to defend the Tea Party and bring shame upon the NAACP by proving that the civil rights organization condones “black racism.”

Breitbart’s very flawed plan was to release a maliciously edited four-month-old video of a hard-working, dignified black woman named Shirley Sherrod, who works for the Department of Agriculture. The video was taken as Mrs. Sherrod made a speech in which she reflected on an incident that took place nearly 25 years ago. As edited, the video gave the impression that Mrs. Sherrod discriminates against whites in providing government services.

As, perhaps, my only old, non-cursing friend from the Richard Allen Projects, named Leonard Small, would have said, “That’s when all ‘heck’ broke lose; that’s when the ‘shunk’ hit the fan.”

The Agriculture Department, fearing that it and the White House would be damaged by association with Mrs. Sherrod, quickly acted to remove her from the government’s payroll, so that they could say, I guess, “Sherrod? Sherrod? She doesn’t even work here."

Indeed, the Agriculture Department was so anxious to move forward with that line of reasoning that the Undersecretary for Rural Development, a Mrs. Cheryl Cook, placed a series of increasingly curt and demanding phone calls to Ms. Sherrod as she drove her car along the highway, after a visit to a farm served by her agency.

Finally, Ms. Cook exasperatedly explained that the White House was concerned that the story was going to “break” that night on Glenn Beck’s FOX TV show. She then insisted that Mrs. Sherrod pull over onto the side of the highway, immediately, and submit her resignation on her Blackberry, which she did.

It didn’t stop there.

That evening, Bill O’Reilly was the first anchor on the FOX News Channel to demand that Mrs. Sherrod resign or be fired.

Shortly thereafter, CNN, not wanting to be accused again of missing a high-profile, FOX-originated story, also began to criticize Mrs. Sherrod. Notably, one of the network's African-American pundits, Roland Martin, was the most aggressive in that regard, implying that the videotape gave the impression that she might be, in fact, a black racist, or simply unsophisticated about the challenges of the modern news cycle. Martin further implied that, just as the racially offensive Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams had been removed from his job in recent days for racially insensitive commentary, so unfortunately, should Mrs. Sherrod.

That's when Mrs. Sherrod told Martin on the air that he was “dead wrong” and that he must live in a “different world” than the one that she inhabits.

Here’s a question, while we're on that subject: Are some black journalists so fearful about losing their jobs in mainstream media that they seem to leap at every opportunity to show their white peers that they agree fully with mainstream journalistic perspectives, and that they have no special sensitivity or insight, whatsoever, with regard to black subjects or topics? Is that why people in the black community fought so hard to provide opportunities for those journalists in mainstream print and broadcast outlets, in the first place?

Excuse me, I digress...

While all this was going on, it didn’t take much time for NAACP President Ben Jealous to weigh in. He especially seemed intent on disproving recent charges by conservatives that his organization had been soft on the alleged “white voter intimidation” activities by the New Black Panther Party, and I guess, in his mind, Ms. Sherrod presented a perfect opportunity for him to do so.

Unfortunately, however, for the Agriculture Department, for FOX, for CNN, and the NAACP, they really didn’t know who they were dealing with when they decided to move against Shirley Sherrod.

Mrs. Sherrod, who served as the Agriculture Department’s Rural Development Director, in Georgia,
happens to be married to one of the founding members of the legendarily effective civil rights organization, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Her father happened to have been murdered in 1965 in an “unsolved” racially motivated attack, as he fought for the rights of black farmers.

Following her father’s murder, Mrs. Sherrod made a vow to stay in the South and continue to fight for the rights of black farmers and the black community, in general.

While she worked as an official in a non-profit that was committed to advancing the interests of black farmers – not the U.S. Agriculture Department – Sherrod was approached by two white farmers, Mr. and Mrs. Spooner, who asked if she could help save them from losing their farm. Even though such a request was outside the mission of her organization, Mrs. Sherrod wound up assisting the couple. In the words of Mrs. Spooner, last week, “If we hadn’t have found her, we would have lost everything.”

Interestingly, once the kindly white couple vouched for her character, and the complete version of the previously-edited tape was reviewed by all concerned, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and the NAACP, both, publicly apologized. The Agriculture Department even offered Mrs. Sherrod a new, more impactful job at the agency.

To her deep credit, she said she’d think about it and get back to them.

In the wake of all of the "vouching" and "reviewing", it quickly became clear that Mrs. Sherrod is a very special person. Despite all that has happened in her life, she is someone who has amazingly been able to rise above all of the insanity and, even, to recommend and demonstrate close working relationships between blacks and whites.

Here’s my take on all of this … the joke about Mission Impossible, notwithstanding, we really do need to know, now, how much of all of this has been a self-inflicted wound by the NAACP and the Obama Administration.

How high up in the "Administration," for example, was the order given to have Mrs. Sherrod "resign?" Was the "Administration" also engaged in conversations with Mr. Jealous prior to his "Tea Party racism" resolution? And, while we're at it, where in the world is Cheryl Cook, the Agriculture Department manager who said she was only calling to obtain Mrs. Sherrod's "resignation because the "White House" ordered that she do so?

No matter how all of this is eventually resolved, I’d feel a lot more comfortable, going forward, if I knew that the NAACP was planning to recommit itself to issues that will enhance their ability to serve black citizens of this country. I'd feel better if I knew that they were now prepared to challenge both liberals and conservatives, black and white, to do for us what we need.

I’d be ecstatic if I knew that the first black President would no longer allow his own administration to over-react against good, hard-working black people, simply because he wants to continue to prove, to the few white voters who still support him, that he is not "President of Black America," whatever that means.

It was a bit reassuring to see the president, late last week, finally get around to extending a long-overdue, personal apology to Mrs. Sherrod

It was, clearly, the right thing to do.

The next step, of course, is for the president to start sending two consistent messages: One, that black voters and their issues are no longer to be considered "toxic," no longer to be avoided and ignored, by him, or by his administration; the second, that the right-wing should no longer routinely expect that black people who happen to offend them, from time to time, will be immediately and callously "thrown overboard" by the "Good Ship Obama."

Seems like we all might avoid a great deal of future embarrassment if those two simple concepts are adopted.

########

The News Hasn't Been Great for Black Americans.

2010-07-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

After months and months of immigration-focused, Arizona-focused, mid-term election-focused, Lindsay Lohan-focused, World Cup-focused and BP-focused news coverage, mainstream newspapers and the broadcast and cable networks, apparently, have rediscovered black people.

Seriously … it seems as though we really are "back." Not, necessarily, "back" in a positive way, yet, but, clearly, “back.”

A few weeks ago, the media were convinced that it was "impossible" for a largely unknown, reportedly incompetent, virtually homeless, 32 year-old black man named Alvin Greene to have actually won the Democratic U.S. Senate primary election, in South Carolina.

This past week, however, the same skeptical media outlets had to admit that Mr. Green actually had amassed a 13-year history of service in the U.S. military, including the South Carolina Air National Guard, the U.S. Air Force, the Army National Guard and the U.S. Army. Then they reluctantly had to report, much to their chagrin, that he actually holds a degree – in political science, no less – from the University of South Carolina. Probably most damaging to the convenient and irresponsibly biased case they had built, was the discovery that Alvin Greene really does have all the appropriate records to prove that the $10,400 Primary Election filing fee they believed he absolutely did not have, was paid for with his own money, from his own back account, from his own savings.

All of a sudden, the Alvin Greene story didn’t seem to have the same kind of appeal for our friends in mainstream media and the histrionics and “knee-jerk negativism” -- even, and especially, on the part of black reporters/pundits at mainstream cable outlets and on radio (you know who you are, Don Lemon, Roland Martin and Tom Joyner) --appeared, last week, to lose some of their steam.

Next came the round-the-clock showings of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) videos and the charges that Eric Holder, the nation’s first black Attorney General, had been reluctant to prosecute the NBPP for “intimidation of white voters" at a polling place, at 1221 Fairmount Avenue, right here, in North Central Philadelphia.

I must admit that I don’t know the New Black Panther Party very well. In fact, I’m not entirely sure that I have always understood their motivation when they’ve shown up at rallies and demonstrations focused on jobs, economic development and housing issues for black people. At the same time, I'm finding it hard to believe that those two men, one of whom, it turns out, was an elected Democratic Party committeeman, went to a polling place in predominantly black North Central Philadelphia, situated on the first floor of an overwhelmingly black-populated senior center, to intimidate white voters.

It seems that if that was, in fact, their purpose, if they really wanted to find white voters to intimidate, the NBPP could have found a great number of such voters a lot more quickly and easily at predominantly white polling places in parts of South Philly, in the Greater North East, in Center City, in Manayunk, Chestnut Hill or in the River Wards.

I mean … if that’s what they really wanted to do…

Then there was the story that the NAACP, at its national convention, had passed a resolution condemning the fiscally and socially conservative "Tea Party" organization for condoning racist membership and activities. That move, by a national civil rights organization that, until recently, had been very reluctant to address black-specific issues and that has been even more reluctant to ask the President of the United States to do so, came out of left field.

So surprising was this announcement, in fact, that people wondered if the public condemnation was really a product of the NAACP’s own agenda or whether it was a project assigned to the organization by the “recently-interested-in-retaining-black-votes” Obama communications team. Didn't poor Mr. Jealous look as though he was reading someone else's words, that day?

Deep down inside, I’d like to believe that the NAACP’s own rank-and-file members finally grew tired of the black-issue ambivalence of their national leaders, and that they really were the ones who forced that “Tea Party move." But, then, I remembered that Mr. Jealous’ friend, Barack Obama, opted not to personally attend the NAACP’s national convention, this year, and received no public “push back” about that decision from the organization, or from Jealous, himself.

Hey, maybe Ben Jealous woke up last week and realized that there still needs to be a national advocacy organization for black-specific interests, after all – especially given the fact that all of the other “colored people,” or “people of color,” already have such a group of their own, and maybe he decided to make the NAACP relevant and productive, again, for African Americans.

We’ll see.

Finally, just when I was convinced that we couldn’t possibly see another, single national black-focused news story, for at least another six months – bam!--the Census Bureau issues its “Preliminary Estimates of Business Ownership by Gender, Ethnicity, Race and Veterans Status, 2007."

Predictably, they put the usual “significant minority growth rate” spin on the survey results. Consequently, most news coverage led with items such as the fact that the number of black businesses grew, from about 1.2 million to about 1.9 million (60.5%), over the five-year period.
If you'll recall, the same kind of upbeat news releases accompanied distribution of the 2002 data, the last time the survey was done. Just like the 2002 report, however, those headlines painted a grossly misleading, overly optimistic picture of black participation in the overall economy.
For example, even though black-owned firms constituted 7 percent of all U.S. businesses, only 5.5 percent of those businesses (106,779) have any employees, at all, and the 1,815,128 black firms without employees (94.5 % of them) generated average gross receipts, in 2007, of just $21,271.

In addition, even though the sales receipts by African-American-owned businesses did increase, from $89 billion to $137 billion over the five-year-period, that total still represents less than one-half of one percent (.45%) of the $30.2 trillion in sales generated by all publicly-and privately-held businesses in the U.S., in 2007. Also disturbing is the fact that, over the five-year period, the average annual sales receipts of black-owned firms actually decreased, from $74,000 in 2002, to $71,000 in 2007.

To make matters worse, many believe that, in far too many cases, the growth in black business start-ups isn't, necessarily, a reflection of people with a solid business plan and a burning desire to "run their own show." Rather, more and more, they are simply people who have been laid off, who can't find work and who have turned to printing their own business cards, as a last resort.
Also noteworthy is the fact that these most recent Census data were compiled during what appeared to be, at least, the most robust U.S. economy in modern history. Those conditions, absolutely, no longer exist.

In fact, David Hinson, director of the Commerce Department's Minority Business Development Agency, commenting to a Washington Post reporter, predicted an increase in bankruptcies and failures for minority firms, especially those run by African Americans, if special, preventive and corrective steps aren't taken, soon.

There is no question that whatever steps we decide to take, we should certainly include an effort to concentrate more of Black America's annual $900 billion in spending power within our own community, as the Asians and Hispanics already do so well. We currently do a lousy job of that, by the way, spending our money--food budgets, household construction, retail purchases, etc,-- with virtually any other business other than those that happen to be owned by African Americans. I guess we still believe that "our" ice still isn't as cold, "our" sugar still isn't as sweet...

Perhaps, that's why, with nearly 400,000 fewer firms than blacks, the Asian business community is able to generate nearly four times as much annual revenue ($513 billion vs. $137 billion).

Whew! If you believe what you see and hear in mainstream news about us, there's clearly a great deal of work to be done, if we're ever going to get this thing right.

Before I get started, again, however, I'm going to take a little break.

I'm learning that a man can only stand so much national, black-focused news during a single week--especially when it's not all good.

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Zombie Politics: What Has Happened After "Post-Racial."

2010-07-13T12:47:00.000-07:00

“It was a Zombie Jamboree
Took place in a New York Cemetery...
Back-to-back, belly-to-belly
I don’t give a damn, I done dead already.”
-Zombie Jamboree, Harry Belafonte

I finally figured it all out.

Black voters really have moved to a new political approach, discarding a race-based, economic and issues-focused style for what I’m calling “zombie politics.”

Stay with me for a minute…

In Haiti, according to legend, a zombie is someone who has annoyed the members of his or her community and they respond by hiring a bokor (voodoo sorcerer) to turn the person into a zombie.

According to those same legends, zombies are recognizable because they “would appear to die, insofar as their heart rate would slow to a near stop, their breathing patterns would be greatly subdued and their body temperature would significantly decrease … although their physicality remained intact, their memory would be erased and they would be transformed into mindless drones.”

Hm-m-m, sounds like African-American voters...

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that, like many legendarily unfortunate Haitian citizens, black voters in America really have lost their political “memories” and they have, indeed, begun to operate like "mindless drones."

How else can any of this be explained, other than by political zombie-iism?

I had been wondering how to explain the curious and blind devotion by African Americans to the country's "first black president." In those first 18 months since Barack Obama’s election, it has seemed that nothing that he would ever do or say, negatively, to his black base would actually discourage them.

Negative, condescending comments to black males during that infamous 2009 Fathers’ Day speech? No problem.

Overseeing, very dispassionately, an economy wherein black unemployment rates are nearly double the “white- only” unemployment rate? Watching as the rate of black home foreclosures soars above that of other ethnic groups? No problem.

Watching the president-elect use every political "chip" available to him to move the $700 billion financial institution "bailout package" – even prior to his inauguration? Waiting as those same financial institutions and their "fat-cat" owners – who contributed significantly to the onset of the Great Recession – got paid, while our own pockets were turned inside out? No problem.

Hearing the president repeatedly deny any “special responsibility” to address black-specific issues, on the grounds that he didn’t want to be confused with being the "President of Black America?” No problem.

Watching patiently, on the other hand, as the president bent over backwards to reaffirm his personal – and the nation’s overall – commitment to the state of Israel? No problem.

Waiting since the president's inauguration as he moved to address virtually every key, gay community-related issue before he could reasonably get around to discussing ours? No problem.

Watching naively as the president pushed through a nearly $800 billion Stimulus Bill that has, by all accounts, stimulated virtually nothing within the national African-American economy? Still…somehow…no problem.

Being eyewitnesses to the president’s frantic activities--including bringing a lawsuit against one of the 50 states – in an effort to retain support from millions of documented and undocumented Hispanic voters? Seeing those same Hispanic voters being treated like an absolute mid-term election and Presidential Re-election priority -- even though the president received just 66 percent of their vote in November, 2008, as compared to the 96 percent that was dutifully given to him by blacks? No problem …no problem…. no problem.

We, as black people don’t seem to mind. We’ll respectfully, and mindlessly, wait our turn, thank you.

Unfortunately, virtually no other race, no other ethnic group, no other religious group, no other age, income, or occupational demographic in this country has done the same. They all still clearly want precisely what they want, they want it all right now, and they are “d-double-daring” the president, under threat of losing their precious votes, to refuse their requests in any way.

It seems to be working for them. Most of those groups are getting exactly what they’ve demanded. In spite of all that, they still seem grossly dissatisfied with everything the president says or does.

If you think I’m kidding, check out the latest poll results.

Despite the president’s habit of throwing blacks and their issues under the “political bus” at the expense of mainstream, left- and right-wing issues, it’s curious to see that, in a very recent Washington Post/ABC poll, Obama’s approval rating among white voters has dropped from more than 60 percent, to just above 40 percent. In addition, a recent ABC/Wall Street Journal poll disclosed that, among white voters, the president's approval rating is now strikingly similar to that enjoyed by the deeply discredited George W. Bush, about two years ago. (37% approval for Bush among white men in June 2008, as compared to an identical 37% white male approval rating for Obama, in 2010).

There is even more recent bad ratings news for the president and his party: In a Gallup poll conducted June 28 to July 4, 2010, only 38 percent of Independents said they approve of the job the president is doing, the first time Independents have expressed less than a 40 percent level of support for Obama. This reflects a drop of 18 points from the 56 percent support level Obama enjoyed among Independents just a year ago. In addition, the president’s Democratic support stands at 81 percent, thanks largely to huge numbers of ever-loyal blacks who are registered in that Party, but down, nevertheless, from last year’s 90 percent support among Democratic voters.
Similarly, the president’s Republican support has fallen by eight percent, bringing him down from last year’s 20 percent support among GOP members.

In summary, President Obama’s job approval is down to 46 percent, across the board, just one point above his previous lowest weekly average, and it hasn’t been above 50 percent in five months.

Who would have thought this could happen, given all that has been done by this president to support the business, political and economic interests of white voters and white men, specifically, to date, in blatant disregard of his own base?

At the same time, President Obama’s job approval rating among Hispanics is down this year, and it and has been--even before the late-April signing of the new anti-immigration law in Arizona. This drop was especially evident, according to pollsters, among Hispanics who insisted on being interviewed only in the Spanish language.

While all of this has been going on, while the president has taken care of everyone’s issues but ours, and while his approval ratings are down among Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Hispanics and whites, black folks have remained loyal to him and have consistently given him job approval ratings in the low-to-mid 90’s, no matter what.

With all of that being the case, can you still deny my premise that there must be millions of black political zombies in this country? How much more evidence do you need?

Quick … call a Haitian voodoo practitioner … maybe it’s not too late. There must be something we can do to break this spell.

As bad as “post-racial” used to seem, this “zombie politics” thing, including the prevalence of “zombie” national elected officials,” zombie national black leaders” and "zombie black political TV and cable pundits” is clearly a whole lot worse.

"A lot of world leaders talking bout war
And I’m afraid they’re going too far
So it’s up to us, you and me
To put an end to catastrophe...
Back to back, belly to belly
I don’t give a damn, I done dead already.
Back to back, belly to belly
At the Zombie Jamboree."
-Harry Belafonte

#######

Whites Are "Tanning," Blacks and Others Are Using Skin-Whiteners. What's Up?

2010-07-09T13:40:00.000-07:00

What is it with people?

Why, please tell me, do we still suffer so much race-based antagonism, here in the U.S. and around the world, when, apparently, what many of us really want is to look exactly like our so-called “enemies” in those other races? Is confusion about, and lack of comfort with, our own skin color and racial identity “hard-wired” into our psychological makeup as human beings?

The other day I read in the Wall Street Journal that the federal government, as part of the recently passed health care reform legislation, will now begin to tax tanning salons, at 10 percent per customer usage. The government estimates that, at that rate, the country’s 20,000 tanning salons will generate an additional $2.7 billion for the IRS, over the next ten years.

This is clearly historical.

We have long complained in our community about the subtle ways in which African Americans are subjected to the “black tax,” i.e., higher insurance rates, higher neighborhood food costs, higher interest rates for loans, lower wages, etc. But, as I see it, this is the first time in the 223-year history of our great country that any of its citizens ever had to bear an additional financial burden simply because they were pale-skinned or white.

I have to admit that my first reaction was that the "tanning tax" was a clear case of things that “go around” finally “coming around.” But that was petty, and I stopped thinking like that, immediately.

On a more serious note, however, this development did make me curious about why whites in America – given this nation’s longstanding discomfort with people of darker skin – ever wanted to be “tanned," themselves, in the first place. Why, indeed, do they expose themselves to dangerous ultra-violent lamps in tanning beds and booths, even though such behavior has been proved to contribute to a 74 percent greater incidence of skin cancer?

A National Health Interview Survey, in 2005, disclosed that 20.4 percent of whites aged 18-29 and 13.6 percent of whites aged 30-49 were frequent users of indoor tanning facilities. The heaviest users were those who were younger, living in the Northeast or Midwest, who were female or Caucasian, and who had a higher level of education.

A more recent study by Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, found that, among tanning salon users, the average number of annual visits was 23.

According to the survey, there is more pressure for women and whites to tan for “appearance enhancement...while darker-skinned individuals do not perceive tanning as culturally appropriate.”

It's not just American whites who are interested in darkening their complexions, from time to time. A survey by the German Federal Office of Radiation Protection found that more than one fourth (28 percent) of the German population had used tanning beds at least once, and that 11 percent of the population can be defined as high-frequency users of tanning services (more than 10 times a year).

The German researchers found that, in their country, also, “tanned skin is considered socially desirable and attractive.” In fact, they discovered that survey respondents who felt that “tanning was attractive” were 75 percent more likely to use tanning beds.

Hm-m-m-m.

Back in the U.S., those who are concerned about the dangers of tanning salons have begun to explore other options for skin-darkening, including tanning sprays. According to one report, however, to be safe, tanning spray users are advised to prevent the “chemical mist from entering (their) blood stream, to wear goggles, to avoid getting any of the mist in (their) mouth and to be careful not to inhale the fumes.”

Wow!

Seems a lot of trouble to go through to look more like people you have long said were your cultural, intellectual and biological inferiors.

Another study by Cynthia Frisby at University of Missouri – Columbia revealed that people perceive a light brown skin tone to be more physically attractive than a pale or dark skin tone. An associate professor of advertising at the University, Frisby found that “without regard to physical features, people prefer light brown skin over dark brown skin or pale skin.”

Who knew?

Certainly not the late, great Michael Jackson... and, clearly, no one ever mentioned any of this to Sammy Sosa, the Dominican baseball legend of African descent, who recently subjected himself to a highly embarrassing round of media coverage because of his use of a skin-whitening product. According to a Chicago dermatologist, the "whitening cream" that Sosa used resulted in changing his original skin color by “at least six shades."

Surprisingly, at this late date, even in Africa, itself, people have been engaged in this curious behavior. Indeed, a study conducted in Pretoria, South Africa, found that 35.5 percent of the participants had used topical steroids to lighten their skin.

In Asia, four out of ten women, in places such as Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan, are also now using skin- lighteners. In Thailand, that government’s Food and Drug Administration recently published a list of 70 dangerous skin-lightening creams sold illegally, there. Similarly, 50 such products are banned in Indonesia, but are still briskly sold.

Most observers believe that the interest in skin-whitening on the part of Asians can be traced back to the long history of Asian countries being dominated and occupied by European and American invaders. Subjecting themselves to cancer-causing, skin-lightening chemicals is part of a lingering belief that the more they can look like those powerful invaders, the higher they will move up the social ladder in their own Asian countries, and the easier their lives will be.

Regrettably, even in the 21st century, in Thailand, most celebrities and movie stars are white-skinned, and the average citizen strives to look as much like them as possible.

In Japan, a country long known for its disdain of all things “foreign” and for foreigners, themselves, the international fashion coordinator at Vogue Nippon, the Japanese edition of the iconic American fashion magazine, has been quoted as saying:” Everybody (with few exceptions) basically wants white skin.”

It’s going to be interesting to see, with so much of the desire to have lighter, whiter skin traceable directly back to the perception of American/European military and economic invincibility, how the sale of skin whiteners will hold up here and abroad, given the emergence of the Chinese, Indians, Brazilians and Middle Easterners as the new, world economic and military powers.

Will Indonesians, Taiwanese, Thais, and South Koreans still want so readily to assimilate into the old power structure, if the new big kid on the international block is actually Chinese?

Will black people here in our own country still be interested in being "less dark" when they begin to realize just how much potential, global economic clout Nigerians and Ghanaians now have?

Will people who are "mixed race" increasingly feel more comfortable in claiming the Latin American, Asian or black parts of their identities--not because society has forced them to do so as part of a Census count--but because, in this changing global environment, they believe it conveys increasing levels of cultural pride and a long-overdue recognition of their own self-worth?

I hope this all works out.

I hope whites in this country begin to feel more free to express a growing respect for darker skinned peoples, one that they can demonstrate by taking down the barriers to greater economic access for blacks and other people of color, throughout the society, at every level.

After all, the research informs us that Europeans and Americans believe that being tanned makes people more attractive. Now it’s time to move beyond that superficiality and to start doing serious work together, building an economy that will include, finally, severely underutilized black Americans, and others.

Hey, maybe the "tanning tax" will be just enough of an irritant to get our collective attention and become the first step in the world moving beyond the lingering effects of the "artificial hierarchy of race."

I can dream, can't I?

########

#######

In The World Cup, Race-Based Rooting Patterns Go Out The Window.

2010-07-06T13:28:00.000-07:00

I know, I know …if I had a shred of dignity and sophistication, I would have written last week about the McChrystal "resignation," or the shocking realization across America that there really may be significantly more black voters in South Carolina than the Census Bureau has ever disclosed.

How else could a black man named Alvin Greene have done so well in that state's recent primary election for the U.S. Senate?

The presumption by most mainstream pundits is that Greene, somehow, must have “rigged” South Carolina’s entire electoral apparatus. It couldn’t simply be that he got the most votes from the state's surprisingly large, and recently more active, black voting base, could it?

Hey, I could have even talked about the Iranian ship that had been headed with breakneck speed toward Gaza, brazenly inviting direct confrontation with, and testing the resolve of, the entire Israeli military machine.

I could have speculated about who might be the 2012 mayoral hopefuls, here in Philly, now that one, little-known Republican committeeman, named John Featherman, has already announced his candidacy.

Yeah, those could have been my topics but it turned out that they all took a clear, second priority to my new-found interest in World Cup Soccer.

I found myself attracted to the World Cup for two reasons: One, I really do believe that national, athletic competition is routinely seen as a proxy for war, and, in my opinion, war, among the members of humankind, is inevitable. As Chairman Mao was fond of saying, “war is the continuation of politics, by other means.” Done right, then, victory in national team sports has been about as close as you could come to gaining “bragging rights” over another country or demonstrating your national superiority -- without having to fire a single shot, drop a single bomb or draw a single sword.

The Greeks understood that very well when they introduced the first Olympic Games, back in 776 B.C. As strange as it may seem now, the original concept of the Olympics had very little to do with TV ratings points, advertising revenues, or athletes positioning themselves for multi-million dollar product endorsements.

No, the idea was: Each invited country brought their strongest soldiers to compete in a series of military-related events, including running, boxing, wrestling, jumping and weapons accuracy. The objective was to determine which country would probably win if the various nations actually had to resort to war.

Fast forward to 2010 and we see a great deal of that same approach evident in the World Cup athletes, in their sponsoring nations and, certainly on the eerie, nationalistically painted faces of their fans. This is all about as serious as it gets in athletic competition, during peace-time. From the very heads of the participating governments, down to the last player on each team, winning in these matches is of paramount importance and losing is absolutely unacceptable

This is not the artificial competition engaged in by professional sports teams in the U.S. This isn't the “Chargers” against the “Ravens,” the “Eagles” against the “Cardinals” or the “”Phillies” against the “Dodgers.” No, in the World Cup, it was Portugal and Brazil, in succession, against North Korea. The scary part was that the teams that actually won against the soccer-challenged North Koreans, and observers from other countries, began to read all kinds of things into their victories, wondering, for example, whether North Korea really is a serious, global, military power, after all. How tough can the North Koreans actually be, they led themselves to think, if the members of their soccer team are so defenseless, so inept and so uncoordinated?

Notwithstanding the fact that North Korea reportedly has a one-million-man standing army, that’s what they were thinking. Some of the broadcast sports analysts even said as much, out loud, between the matches.

The World Cup, unlike your average Major League Baseball game, pits the former colonial powers – England, France, Germany, Portugal and Italy – against their former colonies, Nigeria, Ghana, Brazil, Cameroon and the Ivory Coast, among others.

Do you really think it was “just a game” when the South African team competed against the French team, recently?

If you thought so, you would, of course, be dead wrong.

Even though South Africa's host team was eliminated in the first-level “group stage,” a French media outlet accurately reported that “the manner of their victory over former champion France meant they could exit the tournament standing proud.”

On the other hand, once the French team was also ignominiously bounced from the competition in that same, first stage and returned to Paris, Thierry Henry, one of the team leaders, was immediately summoned to a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who demanded a “wholesale” review of French soccer, so as to prevent a re-occurence of the nation's embarrassment on the world stage, in the future.

No, in countries around the world, this is way more than a game.

Why have we in the U.S. been so late to figure that out?

When he was very young, I taught my son to watch and listen intently to sports coverage so that he might gain a gut-level understanding of America’s cultural and racial dynamic. In that regard, the World Cup is filled with a number of interesting and contradictory subtexts.

Like many African-Americans, I'm constantly on the lookout for situations, in all walks of life, in which I can see “our people” excel and further prove their worth. Accordingly, over the years, I frequently found myself, as a sports fan, rooting, first, for the pro football team with the most black players, then, for the team with the rare black quarterback, then, for the team with the even-more-rare black head coach.

That approach hasn't been based on a desire, necessarily, to see white-dominated teams do poorly, but rather, on a sincere interest in having yet another, far-too-infrequent, public demonstration that we, as black Americans, are a lot more capable, a lot smarter, than we are generally given credit for being.

Despite the curious denials by this year's NBA Finals broadcasters – including by some former African-American players who absolutely do know better – black basketball fans, back during the Larry Bird era, did root, overwhelmingly, against the Boston Celtics. That was in direct reaction to NBA announcers, who found it necessary to repeat incessantly, during games, that, among all players in the entire league, Larry Bird, one of the Celtics' several Caucasian stars, was an especially “smart” player, an especially “intelligent” player, a remarkably “unselfish” player and one who “made all of his team members better” by his mere presence on the court. The implication, of course, was that Mr. Bird was, somehow, a superior athlete, even though he had obvious physical and skill-set disadvantages, as compared to the league's black players.

Wanting desperately to add a differing perspective to those observations, but not having access to our own airwaves, we responded by rooting for any team other than the Celtics, throughout Larry Bird’s entire career. If the Celtics played the Pistons, we went right out and bought a Pistons hat. If the Celtics played the Lakers, we became instant L.A. fans, and when the Celtics played the Sixers, the Philly team received our unquestioned and absolute support.

I’m finding, however, that such a simplistic approach is harder to apply in the World Cup.

Just when all of us new, U.S.-based, black soccer fans wanted to root automatically for an African nation, we found that the U.S.’s opponent in one game, Algeria, had only one Negroid member, its goal keeper; while the U.S. team, itself, had eight black players. Consequently, many of us found ourselves rooting energetically against the African Algerians as the U.S. sent them to defeat, in overtime.

And just when we wanted to root aggressively against the old “colonizers” in these televised, streaming videoed "virtual wars," we discovered that more than half of the 23 players on the French World Cup team and the same percentage of players on the English national team were also of Negroid African descent.

Finally, thoroughly confused about these numbers and about which team we really "ought" to have rooted for, we decided to do the patriotic thing and support the surging, "never-say-die” U.S. team, the one with Tim Howard, the half-Hungarian/half African-American goal keeper, and seven other “brothers.”

Then, along came the schedule makers at FIFA, World Soccer’s coordinating organization, who announced that the next U.S. opponent in the World Cup was going to be Ghana, the last African nation still competing in the tournament, at the time.

That was when confusion really set in.

Maybe, just maybe, it's time for us, and the rest of the world, to move away from the lingering, race-based, and ethnic/nationalistic, proxy-for-war-based approaches to sports competition, if we can.

Maybe it’s finally safe to go back to rooting for the team that plays the hardest, or the team whose uniform colors we prefer.

Can we learn that from the World Cup?

Are we there, yet?

####

BP's Pledges to the Gulf Coast: Can a Leopard Change its Spots?

2010-06-25T07:55:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, President Obama sat down with the chairman and the CEO of BP and emerged from that meeting with a pledge that the company would establish a $20 billion fund to help pay for losses experienced by residents during the recent Gulf Coast oil spill.

The president also announced that he had obtained a further commitment that BP would make an additional $100 million available to compensate unemployed oil-rig workers affected by the stoppage in deepwater drilling.

Here’s where all of this starts to get interesting: Under U.S. Federal law, total corporate liability related to oil-spill losses is limited to $75 million.

It seems to me that what the U.S. expects in the way of corporate responsibility from BP, a notorious, bottom-line-oriented, public-be-damned industrial bully, is very much akin to expecting a leopard to “change its spots.”

In the year 2000, for example, British Petroleum, as part of an embarrassingly transparent, “lipstick-on-a-pig” image campaign, changed its official name to BP (Beyond Petroleum) to imply that it was going to be, in the future, no longer wedded to fossil fuel development and would work to become a leading participant in the development of clean, more ecologically friendly energy sources, including “solar.” The image campaign came complete with a spanking new green-and-yellow sunburst logo color scheme and an investment, from 2000 to 2002, of $600 million in new signage, stationery and a global multi-media advertising campaign.

One of my old communications professors was fond of saying that “good PR is not what you say, it’s what you do."

Someone should have mentioned that to BP. They probably could have saved themselves several hundreds of millions of dollars.

It turns out, of course, that the company’s problem was not limited, at all, to the color of its signs or the appeal of its TV commercials. The real issue was that BP had amassed a long, uninterrupted history of being grossly insensitive to people, wherever it happened to do its business – all over the globe – and that it simply never has seemed to care very much about what the public thought about any of that.

In fact, BP’s corporate style has been to say anything that might be expedient to move past an uncomfortable situation, or to temporarily divert responsibility. We’ve seen evidence of that dozens of times already, just since April. That’s probably why the company’s CEO, Tony Hayward, seems to contradict himself so much, to otherwise misspeak, and to have a problem looking straight into a camera.

It’s clear, now, given what we’ve seen of its “half-stepping" reaction to the damage being done every second of every minute, every hour of every day, for the past two months, in the Gulf Coast, that the “new BP" is still very much the same organization that has acted so irresponsibly toward its neighbors and to the global ecology since the London-based company discovered its first oil reserves in Iran, in 1908, and began to operate, in 1909, as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

Though most Americans had been only vaguely familiar with BP, other than through seeing its brightly lit gas stations along the highway, the company has $130 billion in assets, and happens to be the world’s third-largest energy company, behind only Exxon-Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell.

Establishing its rapacious business model early on, the company, which drew absolutely all of its revenue from those early Iranian wells, returned only 16 percent of that money to the people of Iran. In 1935, after Persia changed its name to Iran, the company renamed itself, becoming the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, but still maintained total and absolute control over every drop of oil that flowed from Iran.

In 1951, Iranian Prime Minister Mossadeq nationalized the country’s oil industry and forced BP out of his country’s oil-producing operations. Shortly thereafter, in 1953, perhaps not coincidentally, Mossadeq was overthrown in a coup and replaced by a man who happened to be exceptionally supportive of the U.S. and British, Shah Pahlavi, known to most Americans, simply, as the Shah of Iran.

The next year, the company changed its name again, this time to "British Petroleum."

Shortly after the Shah assumed power, the British began to share their oil revenues with the Americans, and BP began to expand its oil drilling operations beyond Iran and into Alaska and to the North Sea. It also assumed control of the old, U.S.-based, Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) Energy Company.

The company eventually expanded its drilling operations into Colombia, where it has long been accused of human rights violations.

In case you didn’t know, BP also maintained extensive business relationships with the apartheid South African government, prior to that country’s “democratization,” in 1994, which saw Nelson Mandela elected president. Because the company had continued to refine crude oil in pre-1994 South Africa, despite an international oil embargo, it was high on the global “anti-apartheid” movement’s list of “corporate enemies.”

BP also ignored a U.N. oil embargo against pre-Mugabe Zimbabwe, then known as Rhodesia. In that capacity, the company supplied the oppressive, white-minority-controlled government with oil that was illegally shipped in through South Africa.

Not surprisingly, the company's record of insensitivity has extended far beyond geo-political and human rights issues.

As far back as 1991, nearly 20 years ago, the Washington DC-based Citizens Action organization named BP among the top ten environmental polluters in the United States. In Ohio, the Public Interest Campaign, in 1988, said the company’s two plants in Lima, Ohio, were far and away the “biggest polluters" in the state. The company’s chemical plant and refinery, the group found, “produced 60 million pounds of toxic pollution” in the year before the report was written, including 8.2 million pounds released into the air, 58.2 million pounds injected under ground, 380,000 pounds dumped into the Ottawa River and one million pounds disposed on the land.

When you look at the company’s shameful record, it’s hard to imagine that it could have any, real, corporate-level concern for the residents of the Gulf Coast--what may become of the them, their families, their homes or their very way of life.

In that regard, I'm especially concerned about the well-being of the region’s black fishermen. Up until two months ago, they had been able to earn a self-sufficient living in the Gulf, dating back, at least, to the early part of the 20th Century. Now that the spill has decimated their industry, will they and others really receive the support they need from BP to make themselves whole?

It is clear, however, that such a principled response is entirely inconsistent with the company’s 101-year track record.

While we wonder about that, we should also remember that the Gulf oil spill, as horrible as it continues to be, is not the largest such spill on record – not yet anyway. At an estimated 2.7 million barrels spilled to date, it still ranks behind the 3.3 million-barrel Ixtoc I spill in Mexico in 1979, the 5.5 million-barrel Gulf War oil spill in Iraq, in 1991, and the 9 million-barrel Lake View Gusher spill, in Kern County, California, in 1910. Give it time, though. With 40,000 gallons a day being pumped into the Gulf of Mexico, this one still may very well top them all.

But while you’re waiting for BP and the U.S. Government to “plug the hole,” don’t hold your breath about the company actually stepping up to the plate and doing anything substantially more for Gulf residents and wildlife than the law absolutely requires it to do.

As welcome as that kind of corporate cooperation would be, such behavior would be entirely out of character for the company which now calls itself BP.

############

Being in Denial about Race Sometimes Extends to Religious Matters.

2010-06-22T07:19:00.000-07:00

Here they go, again!

What must they be drinking or smoking in Arizona?

That’s what people across the country and around the world surely must be thinking.

All of a sudden, a state that was formerly known for having clean air, warm weather and the Phoenix Suns, is now better known for harsh anti-immigration laws, angry street demonstrations, the threat of racial profiling, “border wars,” and “white-only” curriculums in its public schools.

As bad as all of that has been, two weeks ago, Arizona tried to shoot itself in its other foot.

It happened in Prescott Arizona, a town of 42,000 people, of whom about 200 are black and 8.2 percent are Hispanic. A local elementary school wanted to teach its students about ecology and energy conservation and commissioned the painting of a huge mural on one of its exterior walls. The design of the artwork was approved by the students and the faculty, and it featured the faces of young people who actually attend the school, including some from ethnically and racially diverse backgrounds.

For some reason, that didn’t sit well with a guy named Steve Blair, a resident of Prescott, who also happens to be a member of its City Council and the host of a Fox-affiliated daily radio show, there.

How much didn’t Blair like the mural?

Well, first, he called for its immediate removal, because it was an attempt, he said, to “indoctrinate” young children and to promote “a specific diversity agenda that was unnecessary in (his) city.”

“I’m not a racist by any stretch of the imagination,” said Blair, “but whenever people start talking about diversity, it’s a word I can’t stand…What these people (in Prescott) don’t like is somebody forcing diversity down their throats.”

Blair went on to say, “To depict the biggest picture on the building as a black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?”

It turns out that like many racists, Mr. Blair began his assault by being largely uninformed about his topic. In fact, the “biggest picture” Blair was ranting about wasn’t actually a “black person,” at all, but a young Mexican-American student, named Mario, whom, I imagine, was still too “dark” for Blair’s tastes.

No matter that Blair was dead wrong, he was also loud, and had access to an official audience in City Council and a broadcast audience through the radio station.

The next thing you know, residents of Prescott, were driving past the still-developing mural project, honking their car horns and shouting racially insensitive comments. All of this led to the school’s “backbone-challenged” principal, a guy named Jeff Lane, deciding to advise the mural painters that the darker-skinned students depicted on the mural had to have their faces “lightened.”

Seriously...lightened.

With that input, the painters went back to that part of the wall that included young Mario's face to make it lighter, closer to white, and more acceptable to certain Prescott residents.

I wonder how the students themselves felt about that.

I wonder how I would have felt, back when I was in the fifth grade at Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament School, at Broad and Parrish Street, in North Central Philadelphia, if some of my teachers had offered to post my face on the school’s wall–but only if they could paint me as a white person.

What would that have done to my 11-year-old mind? It’s scary to imagine.

At the same time, if we want to be absolutely honest with ourselves, we have to admit that this kind of behavior is not limited to Arizona. It’s still way too prevalent in our society, as a whole.

If you’ll recall, a tremendous controversy erupted immediately after the “9/11 tragedy,” when the artist commissioned to create a sculpture as a memorial to three “Ground Zero” firefighters wanted to make one of the firefighters black, one Hispanic and one white.

Shockingly, even though about 24 black and Hispanic firefighters lost their lives in the line of duty that day, the members of the New York Fire Department vehemently objected to having “firemen of color” in their memorial depiction and demanded that all three of the firefighters be “white.”

Sounds a bit like “Arizona Syndrome” to me. What do you think?

And, finally, let’s move to a substantially more sensitive area of artistic expression. Unfortunately, it seems, the need for some people to “lighten up” images, paintings, and statues also extends to religious representations.

For example, even though they are virtually unknown here in the United States, some of the most venerated religious images in all of Christianity and Catholicism are the so-called “Black Madonnas,” found in Spain, Germany, Poland, France, Switzerland and other countries, some of which date back more than 1600 years.

According to University of Detroit Mercy, Spain’s best-known Black Madonna, Our Lady of Montserrat, is thought to have been carved by St. Luke in Jerusalem and subsequently taken to Barcelona, where it was discovered in 880 A.D.

There is also the Fedorovo Virgin, a Black Madonna of 18th Century Russia, Poland’s Black Madonna of Czestochowa and more than 300 various black Madonnas in France ―even today. All in all, according to one expert on the subject, there are countless numbers of Madonna sculptures and paintings that scholars suspect were once black, but are now white, “most likely from being lightened or repainted.”

Very simplistically, there seems to be more than sufficient evidence that a direct connection can be made to Christian history and a heritage related to African people.

This is known from the people and places described in much of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and, certainly, from Moses asking Pharaoh to “Let my people go.” (His “people” must have, obviously, been in Africa at the time); and from the Egyptian-based statuettes of Black Isis holding the black infant Horus on her lap, which were the precursor images of the Black Madonnas and, originally, all Madonnas.

But, even with all of that information available to us, here, in the United States, it is still extremely rare to find an image of a Black Madonna and her black infant son, Jesus.

Perhaps it’s possible, in scattered, progressive black churches, but certainly not in predominantly mainstream denominations or congregations.

It’s as if the entire country has been in racial denial on this issue, too. What difference should it make to true believers, if the man-made image of their God is not Caucasian? Nevertheless, it does, somehow, seem to make a difference, here in North America.

Clearly, this kind of thinking has, over the years, given encouragement to people such as the New York firefighters who insist on having only white images in their memorials to their fallen comrades and to people in Arizona who insist on having only white children depicted as part of their elementary school murals.

As we try to sort all of this out, the only encouraging sign is that Steve Blair, the councilman and talk show host, who launched all of the insanity in Prescott, in the first place, has been fired by his radio station. In addition, the school’s principal and the school district superintendent have publicly admitted that asking the painters to “lighten” the faces of the students, in retrospect, was a “mistake”.

Maybe there is hope for Arizona―and for all of us, after all.

I guess there really is a God – regardless of the narrow racial boxes in which we in America want to confine him/her.

###

Black Alabama Voters Wake Up and End a Post-Racial Political Career

2010-06-21T13:19:00.000-07:00

Maybe you saw it: A black congressman from Alabama's 7th Congressional District named Artur Davis recently lost his bid to become Alabama’s first black governor.

It wasn’t so bad that Davis lost; the problem was that his opponent in the state’s Democratic Primary, Ron Sparks, the incumbent Alabama Agricultural Commissioner, “kicked Davis’ back out,” crushing him among both black and white voters.

Davis, as you may recall, was yet another in a long line of “new," black elected officials who have been persuaded by mainstream media that the fundamental laws of politics no longer apply to black candidates.

Usually, a political candidate needs to establish a strong, mutually supportive relationship with his/her "base." If, for example, you are an Hispanic political candidate, your prospects for success are significantly enhanced if you start your campaign by being able to count on the members of your Hispanic "base," people who feel a fundamental kinship with you, through a shared language, culture, appearance, residence or, even, religion.

Former Philadelphia Mayor Frank L. Rizzo, understood that. He always took great care of his South Philly, River Ward and Northeast Philadelphia base and, therefore, entered every election campaign with a built-in electoral "edge." Whether we, in the black community, or anybody else, liked it or not, he never turned on the members of his base and they never failed to vote for him, even switching parties, by the thousands, to ensure that they could still be there when he needed them.

It’s not really “rocket science.”

Successful politicians – even if they don’t happen to have law degrees from prestigious universities – have pretty much figured that out. Consequently, they usually take great pains to reach out to the members of their most important voting base to find out what they need, and to promise them that, if elected, they’ll do their best to deliver precisely that.

So, how do you explain Artur Davis?

When you’re an ambitious black candidate or elected official, do the flattering words coming from the New York Times, Washington Post, Time and Newsweek actually drown out your common sense? Does all the talk about your unique qualifications to appeal to white voters actually make you ineffective at doing fundamental political appeals to your own base? When they praise you for not being "burdened" with having lived through the Civil Rights Era, does that make it easier to forget the struggles and the sacrifices that paved the way for your entrance onto previously segregated university campuses, in the first place, and that give you the “right," even now, to run for very recently segregated political offices?

It certainly seems to be the case.

Why else would Davis, who launched his political career by being elected to Congress in 2002, behave as he did during his disastrously unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign? Did he get caught up in the hype and forget that his 7th Congressional District’s boundaries had been specifically drawn in 1992 to provide an opportunity for greater African-American political representation, following the passage of the Voting Rights Act?

Having been born and raised in Montgomery Alabama, Davis certainly was fully aware that nine of the 12 counties in that 7th District make up Alabama’s infamous “Black Belt,” a desperately poor, still predominantly black section of the state that was the site of Alabama’s largest and most profitable cotton plantations. Many of the residents today are the descendants of the slaves who “worked” those plantations.

As the 7th District’s congressman, Davis knew full well that the residents of the “Black Belt” endure exceptionally low levels of access to health care and a per capita income of $15,633, and that they are among those in the nation who are most seriously in need of sensitive support and assistance from their government.

But with his Harvard law degree clutched tightly in hand and his "post-racial standard-bearer" designation from the New York Times ringing incessantly in his ears, Artur Davis decided, somehow, that he would try to be elected governor of Alabama without making a direct appeal, at all, to the State’s black voters. In fact, over the past year, as he prepared for his gubernatorial campaign, Davis’ congressional voting record began to lean more conservative, more mainstream and less black, from an issues perspective.

Even though the people of the 7th comprised the only Congressional District in the entire state of Alabama to vote for Barack Obama in 2008, Davis, in a coldly calculated manner, thought it would, somehow, be politically expedient and decidedly "post-racial" to be the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus to vote against Barack Obama’s Health Care Reform Bill.

In one of the most damaging responses to Davis’ vote, the old lion, Jesse Jackson, said late last year, “You can’t vote against health care and call yourself a black man.” That certainly seemed to resonate with African-American voters during the Alabama gubernatorial election.

But that wasn’t all. In a misguided attempt to further appease white Alabama voters, Davis also went to great lengths to separate himself from established black political organizations across the state, such as The Alabama Democratic Conference and the Alabama New South Coalition.

Davis, publicly and grandiosely, opted not even to participate in the regularly scheduled political candidate interviews that the groups invited him to attend. He was sending a message. But, they sent one right back, when they endorsed his white opponent, Ron Sparks.

Davis’ handlers always made it very clear that, in his race to become governor of Alabama, the candidate was emulating Barack Obama’s presidential campaign strategy. You remember that one, don’t you? That campaign focused exclusively on appeals to white voters. The goal was to win a significant white voting bloc (in Obama’s case, it was the Iowa Caucus) and then sit back and wait for black voters to get caught up in the candidate's "cross-over appeal" and flock to the campaign – even without a direct appeal to them.

It certainly appears that, back then, black voters were a bit more trusting, a great deal “more hopeful” and significantly more willing to accept such cynical treatment.

Thank God, on election day, black voters in Alabama gave Mr. Davis exactly what he deserved-- an embarrassingly lop-sided defeat.

Despite leading by eight points over Sparks in a widely publicized poll a week prior to the election, Davis wound up losing to Sparks, 62 percent to 38 percent.

According to the Tuscaloosa News, Sparks wound up winning in 61 of Alabama’s 67 counties. It wasn’t just that white voters, whom Davis loved so much, rejected him (and they did, overwhelmingly), the real reason for his defeat was that black voters, who had supported him with 98 percent of their vote as recently as 2008, appropriately decided to make him pay for turning his back on them.

Consider this: Davis won just two out of twelve counties in his own Congressional District and was defeated by his white opponent in the nine “Black Belt” counties. In performing as he did, Davis became the first African-American candidate in a state-wide Alabama election to lose the black vote.

In predominantly black Wilcox and Perry Counties, for example, Sparks received more than 70 percent of the vote. Davis even lost the vote in Jefferson County, his home county, and at his own polling place. Even his neighbors voted against him.

As one Alabama political observer pointed out, “You can’t thumb your nose at your base; and that is what Artur did … it’s just staggering.”

Fittingly, Davis, who passed up an opportunity to run again for his Congressional seat so that he could seek the Governor’s Office, announced, following his loss, that he had “no interest in running for political office again.”

Good.

I just hope that Davis’ close friend and fellow-Harvard Law School alumnus, Barack Obama, was paying attention.

There’s a message in there somewhere.

#######

It's Time for the Black Community to Get John Stossel's Attention.

2010-06-16T12:58:00.000-07:00

Where are my post-racial friends when I need them?

Recently, Rand Paul, the son of congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul, said that, while he supported the portion of the Civil Rights Act that banned discrimination in public places and institutions, he also thought that private businesses should be permitted to discriminate, by race.

Even before most of us could fully digest Paul’s misguided, Tea Party-pandering comments, along came John Stossel. Stossel, the former ABC News correspondent and current Fox News Channel contributor, rushed to Paul’s defense and went a huge, racially backward step further when he said it was “time to repeal” that part of the Civil Rights Act that mandates that all citizens – regardless of race – should have access to public accommodations, even in privately owned businesses.

Stossel’s outrageous position was that businesses should have “the right to be racist.” In fact, in a follow-up interview on his new network, he added that, “It’s time now to repeal the (Civil Rights Act's) Public Accommodations section because private businesses ought to get to discriminate."

It’s not just unsettling that a person running for one of the very highest political offices in the United States(Paul), and a person who happens to work for the most-watched cable news channel(Stossel) have, in the same week, become comfortable with publicly espousing their racial insensitivity. No, the most unsettling part of all of this is that the issues have been dispassionately discussed on the nation’s broadcast media outlets, if at all, as if they were merely a topic in a high school debating class.

This was two extraordinarily high-profile Americans talking casually about bringing back “Jim Crow,” and no one seemed to be very much concerned about it – especially not black people.

Perhaps we shouldn’t have expected much better from Stossel. This, after all, is the same guy who wrote a column a year-and-a-half ago, in which he liberally quoted noted black apologist Shelby Steele in saying that white “preoccupation with guilt and compensation, such as Affirmative Action, is actually a subtle form of racism.” Indeed, Stossel latched right onto Steele’s premise that, in this country, there is such a thing as “black privilege” that facilitates even the meager levels of black political and economic success, far beyond the levels to which our talent and hard work entitle us.

That’s the same John Stossel who just, two months ago, criticized black professional baseball players who took a public stand against the disproportionately low percentage of African Americans in major league baseball and their inability to receive contracts commensurate with those given to their white peers.

Stossel, one of the world’s most visible non-athletes, went on to say about black professional ballplayers who were dumped from major league baseball rosters this year, “They’re unemployed because they asked for more money than their skills warrant.” He offered no opinion, curiously, on the dramatic and systematic decline in the percentage of African-American players in major league baseball over the past 30 years, money notwithstanding.

The saddest part of all this is that because Stossel works in a highly competitive broadcast news industry, non-Fox television and cable news coverage of his negative, race-baiting message will be far more difficult to find than "Rand Paul" stories.

Even though Stossel’s comments were much more harmful and mean-spirited than Paul’s, a Google search shows 206 million results for “Rand Paul, Civil Rights Act,” and just 31,500 for a search of the topic “John Stossel, Civil Rights Act."

It has also been interesting to measure, online, what the response from our “national black Civil Rights” leaders has been. Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, has moved right into the fray, launching an online campaign to invite Rand Paul to participate in a public debate with him on the history and significance of the Civil Rights Act. Google showed 504,000 results for “Rand Paul/NAACP” topics, but again, only 14,400 for “John Stossel/NAACP.” The National Urban League, by comparison, has been decidedly late out of the gate on this issue, with only 54,000 results for its interaction with Rand Paul, and only 3,920 for Urban League/Stossel-related news.

I’d like to believe that Rand Paul will break down and agree to debate the NAACP President, but I’m getting the feeling that his “handlers” have already lost confidence in his ability to defend himself, publicly, on this and other issues. The first clue in that regard was hearing that, over the past week, Paul had cancelled a previously scheduled appearance on "Meet the Press," becoming only the third person to have cancelled a "Meet the Press" interview in the show’s 62-year history.

Getting back to Stossel, there’s a movement to have FOX fire him for his remarks. Chances of that happening, in my opinion, are probably "slim" and "none." Stossel, who seemed to be floundering at FOX since his move from ABC has, for the first time, actually said something in his "anti-Civil Rights" statement that seems to resonate with the network’s primarily conservative, predominantly white, audience. It appears that the more he attacks the rights of blacks and other minorities, the more he says publicly what so many in the FOX audience wish they had the courage to say, the more job security he creates for himself.

The most curious part in all of this is how Stossel, who was born into a prominent Jewish family in Illinois, could have arrived in such a contentious position with regard to the Civil Rights Act. Even if he has absolutely no respect for black history or sensitivity to contemporary black-white disparities, I would think that Stossel would be keenly aware of the role that the Jewish community played in the Civil Rights movement and the drafting of the Civil Rights Act, itself.

Maybe Stossel, so caught up now in living the life of a high-profile, "mainstream," media personality, wants to forget that the Ku Klux Klan, historically, targeted not only blacks, but also Catholics and Jews.

Maybe now that he’s at FOX and integrally involved in "Tea Party world," Mr. Stossel has also conveniently forgotten that of the three men murdered by the Klan, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964, one, James Chaney was black, and two, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, were Jewish.

Stossel, no doubt, is trying really hard to forget that an estimated one-half of all white Freedom Riders were Jewish and that Jewish people were instrumental in drafting not only the 1964 Civil Rights Act but, also, the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

To be honest, the last time I paid any serious attention to John Stossel was during his now-infamous and very brief interview with World Wrestling Federation personality “Dr. D” David Schultz. Like it was yesterday, I recall Stossel making yet another ill-advised comment, this time saying to Schultz that many people in America believed that “professional wrestling is fake.”

Immediately after the words left Stossel’s mouth, Schultz hit him with an open-handed slap with his left, dropping the newsman to the ground. When Stossel popped back up, holding his head, and asked Schultz what he was trying to do, the wrestler popped him “upside the head” again, this time with a right-handed slap. Stossel dropped to the ground, once more, and, first, crawled, then ran, down the hallway, away from the wrestler. (If you don’t believe me, go on up to YouTube and view the video, yourself. It’s called “Wrestling is Fake”).

Now, I’m not generally a person who supports physical confrontation, but have you noticed that John Stossel hasn’t had very much to say about professional wrestlers since that incident?

Clearly, he needs at least a figurative slap from us on this Civil Rights issue--to get his attention, at least and, hopefully, to change his mind.

##########

For Both Williams and Specter the Black Vote Was Never Really Engaged

2010-06-04T13:38:00.000-07:00

Maybe the recent, Pennsylvania primary elections for governor and for the U.S. Senate, really had nothing at all to do with race.

There must be at least an outside possibility that the race of the candidates was not a factor, at all, on Election Day. It really is possible, I'm sure, that the voters simply went to the polling places and cast their votes for the candidates they knew best, the ones with the most experience, and the ones with the best ideas for addressing their issues.

It’s conceivable that politics in this city and in this state – unlike public school students’ demographics, residential housing patterns, access to mortgages and other bank loans, unemployment data and incarceration rates - is one of those rare things that is not impacted at all by the race or ethnicity of the participants.

Na-a-a-a-h!

I don’t believe it.

After reviewing the Primary Election results, I’m beginning to get suspicious that, in this case, the time-honored tradition of southeastern Pennsylvania Democrats voting overwhelmingly for one of their own during a gubernatorial primary, was blatantly disregarded. Regrettably, in this election, the otherwise qualified, and certainly uncontroversial, Anthony Hardy Williams, was largely overlooked by too many southeast Pennsylvania and Philadelphia voters, simply because he happeneed to be the black candidate.

The old adage --“all politics is local”-- had certainly been a guiding philosophy for electoral politics in this country, including Pennsylvania statewide elections, right up until May 18, Primary Election Day.

After all, the thinking always went, why would any sane, southeast Pennsylvania Democrat ever want to take the chance of nominating a candidate from the other side of the state and risk having reduced access to a new governor, whose longest-standing relationships and highest political priorities were in Allegheny County, or some other godforesaken part of Central or Western Pennsylvania?

It was an unwritten, but widely understood rule, and most voters and political operatives functioned accordingly, campaign in and campaign out.

If you think I’m kidding, check out what happened when Ed Rendell, the southeastern Pennsylvania/Philadelphia candidate, generally unknown outside of that part of the state, decided to run in the 2002 gubernatorial primary, against the best judgment of his own party.
What happened was that Rendell drew most of his victory margin in that primary over Robert Casey Jr. by winning just 10 out of 67 counties, in southeast Pennsylvania and in the Lehigh Valley area.

Subsequently, with the solid backing of that same part of the state, Rendell went on to win the general election in 2002 and to be re-elected governor of Pennsylvania in 2006.

Informed by that time-honored piece of political wisdom, the Williams camp didn’t expect political miracles from voters in the western part of the state, but they did assume they would receive the same levels of hometown and regional solidarity that the southeast always seemed to provide for one of their “favorite sons” in previous elections.

It didn’t happen.

In fact, when the polls closed on Tuesday, Allegheny County's Dan Onorato, a virtual unknown on this side of the state, who visited very infrequently here and whose campaign commercials failed to shed much light on what he actually stands for, had won the election very handily, with 45.1 percent of the statewide vote, far outdistancing second-place finisher Jack Wagner (also of Allegheny County), at 24.2 percent, Williams, at 18 percent, and Joe Hoeffel, at 12.7 percent.

The key to a Williams victory, said his campaign “handlers,” was to have him come out of Philadelphia with 250,000 votes – enough to overcome an expected weaker showing out west.

Williams did, in fact, win among Philadelphia voters, gaining 51.3 percent of the votes cast in the governor’s race, here in the city. But that represented only 79,968 votes, rather than 250,000. In addition, the entire Philadelphia Democratic turnout that day, at 18.8 percent, only amounted to a total of 155,678 votes being spread among all four Democratic candidates. By comparison, the rest of the state’s turnout has been estimated at about 25 percent--not good for Williams.

Also disappointing for Williams was the fact that the two western-based gubernatorial candidates – Onorato and Wagner – together walked away with 35.2 percent of the Philadelphia vote, numbers that were uncharacteristically high for out-of-region gubernatorial candidates.

In Tony Williams’ own southeast Pennsylvania "back yard," outside of Philadelphia, Onorato only lost one county, Montgomery, which gave 50 percent of its vote and a first-place finish to hometown favorite, Joe Hoeffel. It was the only county, statewide, that Hoeffel won.

Onorato also managed to place first in Bucks, Delaware and Chester Counties. Williams, by the way, finished third in Bucks, Chester and Montgomery, and second behind Onorato in Delaware County.

At that point, the case was clearly closed-- especially, when we realize that the Philadelphia vote, itself, seemed to break down largely along racial lines. In Philadelphia, wherein African Americans constitute about 60 percent of registered Democrats, Williams won 51.3 percent of the vote, and 44 out of 66 wards – most of those in predominantly black areas.

At the same time, however, Onorato was able to come in and claim 40,009 votes, or 25.7 percent of all those cast and to win 20 out of 66 wards.

Not entirely surprisingly, the 20 wards won by Onorato included those in the farthest reaches of the Great Northeast, those along the “river wards,” in Center City and in southeast Philadelphia. Whatever their reasons, they must have been strong enough – in those specific communities – to cause the residents to vote against their own regional interests, in a way that Philadelphians and southeast Pennsylvanians generally never do.

By the way, in Onorato’s own home county, Allegheny, the voters didn't bother to return the favor. Williams finished third out of the four candidates, there, with just 6.7 percent of the vote, while Onorato rolled to first place, with 52.3 percent.

At the end of the day, it will have to be said that Tony Williams started late, raised a good deal of money and ran what seemed to be a professionally managed, if not engaging, campaign.

In a gubernatorial race that was notable, primarily, for its general lack of drama, or voter interest, Tony Williams absolutely had to mount a campaign that moved beyond routine and formulaic. He also had to say and do enough to engage and excite the black electorate, without which he absolutely could not win. With some street-level "buzz," a "crusade" undercurrent and a sense of urgency driven by his campaign, it could have happened.

It reminds me of the first mayoral campaign between John Street and Sam Katz, whom some suspect is actually planning to run, again, for mayor of Philadelphia--this time as a Democrat. In any event, it was 1999, Street was the Democratic candidate and Katz was the Republican candidate, in a city wherein Democrats held a 5-to-1 registration advantage.

Black Philadelphians went to the polls and gave John Street 96 percent of their vote and, yet …. Street only beat Sam Katz by 9,000 votes. Since that time, I’ve heard John Street, curiously, say that he couldn’t have won that election without the support of the building trades unions. I say now what I said to Street then: Without a highly engaged black electorate, and an exceptionally high turnout by those voters, John Street would have lost that election. Period.

At the end of the day, too many African-American voters in Philadelphia didn’t show up last Tuesday to ensure an Anthony Hardy Williams or an Arlen Specter win. Too many perfectly good votes were left on the table in a political environment wherein Senator Williams couldn’t even trust his long-time, Democratic colleagues in neighboring counties to support him on Election Day--even when it was clearly in their own best interest to do so.

In retrospect, I’m sure he agrees.

Hey, even John Street probably agrees with that.

##########

Arizona Immigration: Just the Tip of the Iceberg

2010-06-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

About a year-and-a-half ago, the first time I heard about Igor Panarin, I was absolutely convinced that the guy was crazy.

Now, as I watch what’s been going on in Arizona, I’m not so sure.

Panarin, a former KGB official and dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry academy for future diplomats, according to a December 2008 Wall Street Journal article, has predicted that the U.S. will splinter into six, separate “Republics” and territories, during the year 2010.

Panarin’s premise is that mass immigration, economic decline and moral degradation will be the cause of a civil war in this country, and lead to a collapse of the U.S. dollar in late June/early July, 2010. The Russian also predicted that “wealthier states will begin to withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the Union," according to the Journal.

Until very recently I had thought that Panarin was just “blowing smoke,” but the more I watch the right-wing political posturing and the increasing legislative "hard line" against all non-European Arizonans, I’m starting to wonder if Professor Panarin just might be right.

Less than a month after the passage of the country’s most stringent anti-immigration law in her state, Jan Brewer, Arizona’s governor, signed, despite a strong opposing statement by six United Nations human rights experts, another anti-immigrant-focused piece of legislation. This one was designed to prohibit Arizona public schools from offering classes primarily for students of a “particular ethnic group.” In case you weren’t paying full attention, that not only would prohibit heritage-focused classes for Mexican Americans, it also would ban Native-American and African-American studies courses throughout the state, effective January 2011. In teaching ethnic solidarity, says Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, the courses are also "teaching Latino students that they are oppressed by white people."

By the way, there are more than 275,000 black residents of Arizona, and their families will also be affected by all of this, though you wouldn’t know that from mainstream news coverage.

As if all of this hasn’t been enough, the state of Arizona and its public school system has also been working under a directive that requires that teachers whose spoken English is considered “heavily accented,” or ungrammatical, must be removed from classes for students who are still learning English. "Evaluators," believe it or not, have been dispatched across the state and have audited 1500 teachers, in 2008 and 2009, on things such as “comprehensible pronunciation.”

I’m just wondering...what part of England are these Arizona evaluators from that they can discern when a person is speaking English without an “accent?” Would Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Strom Thurmond, Haley Barbour, Bill Clinton or John F. Kennedy have been evaluated by them as speaking “without an accent?"

Are there really people in any part of this country who don't have some kind of regional accent? That, in my opinion, is just thinly disguised xenophobia and racism.

Needless to say, none of this is going down without incident. The city of Los Angeles, for example, with an elected Hispanic mayor and a 46.5 percent Hispanic population, has called for a boycott of the entire state of Arizona. And at the recent summit of the Union of South American Nations, the participants issued a strong statement condemning the law. Signers of the statement, which said the law would lead to “legitimization of racist attitudes,” included the presidents of Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Paraguay, chile, Bolivia, Venezuela and Argentina.

The truth is that what’s apparently taking place in Arizona is a great deal more complex than our mainstream media and elected leaders have led us to believe.

It reminds me of a trip I took to China in the mid-'80’s. On a tour bus through Macau, which, at the time, was still a neighboring Portuguese colony, the tour guide explained that, each day, tens of thousands of vendors from the Peoples' Republic of China would cross the border into Macau, sell their wares and return home to China each night. She was careful to point out, however, that on any given day, if the Chinese government wanted to do so, it could simply dispatch millions of Chinese citizens into Macau and encourage them to stay, and that Macau would be unable to do anything at all to make them leave. Macau, in 1999, by the way, was “handed over” by the Portuguese to the Peoples’ Republic.

Until 1836, what the U.S. now calls the state of Texas was actually a part of Mexico and, in 1848, the major portions of seven other current U.S. states – California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming – were also annexed, from Mexico, by the United States.
There was, of course, great resistance by the Mexicans, there was war and many bloody battles related to all of this but, in the end, those territories became a part of the U.S. and the size of Mexico was reduced by 45 percent.

Why else would all of those great U.S. cities in the southwest have Spanish, Mexican-derived names, such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Mesa, Casa Grande, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, and El Paso?

Right up to the present day, there are many in Mexico, who still believe that the greater part of what is now called the southwestern United States is, actually, their own ancestral homeland.
To further complicate all of this, the Arizona legislature also has voted to advance a bill that would require all future U.S. presidential candidates to present their birth certificates, prior to being placed on the ballot for national election in the state of Arizona. Not adhering to the law, experts say, would be sufficient grounds to have a presidential candidate, such as Barack Obama, removed from the ballot.

All this brings us right back to our friend, Igor Panarin. According to his prediction, these kinds of controversies will lead, among other things, to Hawaii reverting to its former Asian control, Alaska reverting to its former Russian control and the rest of the continental United States being divided into four separate republics.

The “California Republic” would include seven states, including California, Arizona, Nevada and Utah. The “Texas Republic” would include nine states under the influence of Mexico, whose people, as in the Chinese example, already seem to be simply moving across the U.S. border, unrestrained, every day, and not returning home.

“Atlantic America,” according to Panarin, would include eighteen largely mid-Atlantic states, ranging from South Carolina to Maine, and the “Central North American Republic,” would include fourteen states in the North Central part of the country under the influence of Canada.

If this sounds a little far-fetched to you, please note that more than ten other states are also considering Arizona-type pieces of legislation, including Colorado, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Idaho, Utah, Missouri, Texas, North Carolina, Maryland and Minnesota. And, right here in Pennsylvania, former Lt. Governor candidate and state representative Daryl Metcalfe is a leading supporter of H.B. 2479, which would, among other things, direct the state's police officers to "attempt to verify the immigration status of suspected illegal aliens."

While I hope Panarin, the former KGB agent, was dead wrong in his predictions, I am starting to suspect that this is all so much bigger than "immigration" and it's just the "tip of the iceberg" of the deep political, scape-goating emotions that are spawned, routinely, by a depressed national economy.

While we, in the black community, watch, distractedly, what is happening to people who speak with "heavy Spanish accents" in Arizona, we would be well-advised to remember the old quote: "If they come for me in the night, they'll be coming for you in the morning."

I'm sure we'll be hearing more about all of this, in the not-too-distant future.

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The Theory of Reparations, By a Formerly Black Harvard Professor

2010-05-24T13:16:00.000-07:00

O.K., O.K., let's get started. Let's all agree that today is, officially, "African-American Question Day."

And here's the very first question for your consideration: What is it with our so-called “prominent” blacks, lately?

Are they engaging in self-hating, racially destructive public discourse because they really believe what they’re saying, or do they have some other, more base, more blatantly self-serving agenda?

The phenomenon seems to be occurring with greater and greater frequency, afflicting our most visible black elected officials, academics, media personalities and, even, regrettably, our national civil rights leaders.

Take, for example, the case of Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, who’s been commonly referred to as a “prominent black intellectual.”

The other day, in a column he submitted to the New York Times, Gates, the highly acclaimed author and professor at Harvard University, produced one of the single most misleadingly revisionist and mealy-mouthed cases against reparations I’ve seen in a very long time.

The worst part of it was that he based his position on a premise that those most responsible for the global slave trade were not the Europeans and Americans, who owned the slave ships, the chains and shackles, the plantations and the slave quarters, and who forced blacks to work on an entirely uncompensated basis for more than 250 years in North America, alone. Instead, says Gates, it was the indigenous Africans, themselves, who caused the creation of the slave trade.

Gates' article is especially dangerous because it virtually absolves Europeans from any fundamental responsibility, whatsoever, for the existence of the heinous institution.

Unfortunately, the article will be seen as credible, in some circles, simply because Mr. Gates, like President Obama and Law Professor Charles Ogletree, claims an affiliation with a major Ivy League University.

In contemporary American culture, somehow, an affiliation with Harvard (or any of the other “Ivy League Universities"), or having studied in Europe (preferably at Cambridge University or Oxford University), and being able to emulate speakers of the “King’s English,” as closely as humanly possible, have bestowed instant credibility, somehow, on Americans – even on some African Americans.

By comparison, in this country, you get absolutely no credit or prestige for speaking any of the venerable and sophisticated African dialects that predate all of European culture by thousands of years, or having earned a degree at even the most important Asian or African university.

On the other hand, saying that one is a “Rhodes Scholar” instantly conveys an aura of authority, dignity and respect. I guess it doesn’t matter at all that the Rhodes Scholarship, at Oxford University, was created by, and is still funded by, the estate of Cecil Rhodes, who killed, maimed and comprehensively oppressed millions of indigenous people in Southern Africa on his way to controlling their land and, thereby, controlling the sale of 90 percent of all the diamonds in the world, through the de Beers Company, which he founded.

This was the same Cecil Rhodes, by the way, who caused the Southern African land mass that is now Zimbabwe to be named Rhodesia, in 1895.

So, when people read that the "prominent" Mr. Gates, who received his Ph.D from Cambridge University, has reduced the concept of reparations for black slavery to a “judicious (if symbolic) gesture,” they might be understandably confused.

Contrary, I guess, to the reparations that have already been paid by the American government to wrongly imprisoned Japanese Americans after World War II; or those paid by the German government to Jewish World War II Holocaust survivors; or by the same U.S. government to Native Americans, Mr. Gates seems to believe, now, that reparations is an inappropriate concept and, even worse, that Africans, themselves, created the global slave trade, which was a “business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.”

Lucrative for the Africans?

Where is the evidence for that statement, Mr. Gates? There is ample evidence that slavery was the foundation for building tremendous fortunes throughout the Western Hemisphere and for launching the fledgling U.S. economy, itself, into a global power. But where is the proof that indigenous African economies were able to grow and prosper as result of the slavery “business?”

Relying, among other things, on an obscure quote from Frederick Douglass (I guess he did mean THAT Frederick Douglass), Gates alleges that Douglass referred to the Continent's indigenous people as “the savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa.”

But old "Skip" was just warming up.

He, apparently, fully intended that, by the time Americans had finished reading his column, they would cease, finally, to “wrongly” blame whites, at all, for the institution of slavery.

In his thirteenth paragraph, Gates offers that the “conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time.” Earlier on, he contrasted that with "the romanticisized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in "Roots."

"Romanticisized?" Is that what you think slavery was, Professor Gates?

“Given this remarkably messy history,” he shamelessly continued, “the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.”

By the way, here are some things I wasn’t surprised about after reading the column: One, that Gates would, and did, find a way to excuse his good friend and fellow Ivy Leaguer, Barack Obama, from the need to address the issue of reparations, again, especially with the mid-term elections breathing down the President's neck. He does that by quoting, conveniently, the author of the latest book on Obama, David Remnick, who wrote: “He(Obama) told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations, but in practice he didn’t really know if it was workable."

In his own shoddy, convoluted logic, I guess, Gates is publicly trying to divert black America’s focus away from the U.S. and Western European governments on this issue, and to have us, now, fix our attention on gaining reparations for slavery from Africa.

Man, this guy is good...illogical, intellectually dishonest, a transparent seeker of broader mainstream academic acceptance and a greater degree of personal assimilation into Eurocentric social circles, but good at all of that, nonetheless.

Wow! How could we have all been so wrong about all that slavery stuff for all those years?

Since I started out by reminding you that today was “African-American Question Day,” here’s another one for you: Do you think the highly esteemed Mr. Gates, who for years “struggled” with the challenges of being a black scholar in a predominantly white U.S. academic environment, has been influenced, at all, in his recent thinking, by his DNA test-related discovery that he has a high percentage of European ancestry and that, more specifically, he may be a descendent of the fourth century Irish King, Niall?

It appears that Mr. Gates has found out that he’s really not as “black” as he originally thought he was, and that he's decided to begin working overtime, on his new, less-black philosophical approaches.

Hey, I can understand him wanting to come to the public defense of his new-found relatives here and in Europe, but did the Yale and Cambridge-educated, Harvard professor have to throw all black Americans and the entire indigenous population of the African continent under the historical bus, to do so?

Methinks he went too far.

And, by the way, here's the last question: Now that he’s Irish, does Mr. Gates still qualify to be called a "prominent black intellectual?"

What do you think?

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Don't Sleep the Pennsylvania Governor's Race or the Philadelphia Ballot Questions.

2010-05-17T14:12:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Pennsylvania, the Land of Gubernatorial Progressiveness!

It's starting to seem that way, isn't it? Right here in the same state where former Pittsburgh Steeler Lynn Swann ran in the Republican Gubernatorial Primary in 2006, four years later, Anthony Hardy Williams, an African-American state senator is now a candidate for governor, as a Democrat.

It almost makes you forget that in the entire history of the United States of America, only two African Americans--Deval Patrick, in Massachusetts, and Doug Wilder, in Virginia, in 1990--have ever been ELECTED governor of a state.

But, somehow, Pennsylvanians seem to have gotten comfortable with the concept. Mr. Williams is one of the leading Democratic candidates for all the right reasons--he's running a smart, professional campaign, he's raised a great deal of money in a short period of time, he has a proven track record as a state-level elected official, he's been endorsed by his party, and he just happens to have a portfolio of good, workable ideas, at a time when the state is sorely in need of them.

It seems as though the only thing that might derail Senator Williams' "train" is the fact that Philadelphia has had a long tradition of meager turnouts in “mid-term” primary elections. In fact, in the 2006 Primary, with Ed Rendell running as a Democrat and Swann running as a Republican, less than 10 percent of Philadelphia's registered voters showed up on Election Day. The fact that 61.5 percent of Philadelphia voters turned out in the 2008 Presidential Election, showed that they can, when they want to.

In places such as Arizona, New York, Illinois and Massachusetts, the gubernatorial elections are the source of nightly, national news coverage. People are rumbling and the political fur is flying.

Not here.

Philadelphia media, and the voters, themselves, have been largely disinterested in the four-way Democratic Primary. Even worse, the candidates in the Republican Primary, Tom Corbett and Sam Rohrer, have been notable only in how carefully they have both managed to avoid talking at all about any issues that impact directly upon the state's 1.3 million African-American residents.
But, there's more than the Governor's Office at stake on May 18.

In the Lieutenant Governor’s race, for example, there are actually nine Republican candidates on the ballot (wow!); secondly, Jonathan Saidel, the back-slapping, smack-talking, former Philadelphia City Controller, is running for the office on the Democratic side, with the support of his Party, in the eastern part of the state, and, third, there’s actually a black woman running as a Democrat for Lieutenant Governor – former Commonwealth Court Judge Doris Smith-Ribner. Smith-Ribner thought, for awhile, about running against Arlen Specter in the U.S. Senate Democratic Primary, but had a change of heart in December. As is her style, she’s been keeping an exceptionally low profile.

The City’s U.S. Congressmen-- Brady and Fattah-- are both unopposed in the Primary, so there’s not much conversation about those seats. At the same time, black folks can't seem to get comfortable with a notably low-key, former military guy named Sestak, with no previous profile in our community, who is challenging "newly Democratic" Arlen Specter. Black Philadelphians remember that--even when he was a Republican – Specter always managed to maintain a strong presence and a responsive staff in the black community.

If black folks show up in substantial numbers, at all, on election day, Arlen Specter should have no problem with the Philadelphia vote, and that should go a long way to boost his prospects statewide.

Out of the 28 Philadelphia–related State House seats that we reviewed, the incumbent is running unopposed in17 of them. That means that in more than 60 percent of Philadelphia’s State Representative Districts, comprising about one million residents, the incumbent-- Democratic or Republican, black or white-- has no opponent.

Hey, either the incumbents are doing an extraordinary job (and a number of them are), the potential challengers in those districts simply don’t have the courage to run against a strong incumbent, or the system, itself, is broken. In my opinion, even when an incumbent is doing an excellent job, the need to compete against strong challengers during each election cycle helps them to raise their “game” to the next level, and drives them to work even harder on behalf of their constituents.

On the subject of long-term incumbents who do have challengers, but who have clearly earned an opportunity to return to office, I would certainly count Black Caucus Chair Ron Waters (191st), Jewell Williams (197th), John Myers (201st), Babette Josephs (182nd), Curtis Thomas (181st) and Angel Cruz (180th), Pennsylvania's only Hispanic State Legislator. I just hope the people in Cruz’s district don’t confuse his challenger, Jon Ramos, with the well-respected, former City Councilman Juan Ramos, who’s definitely not on the ballot. Stranger things have happened.

Among the young, incumbent officeholders who have certainly worked diligently for voters, and who, in my opinion, should be returned to office to achieve their full potential, I would count Vanessa L. Brown (190th), Kenyatta Johnson (186th), and Tony Payton (179th), who’s unopposed in the Primary, but who will have a Republican opponent in the general election.

In the category of talented, high-potential challengers who deserve the support of the voters for their first "win," I'd certainly name Will Mega (192nd), who’s running a respectful, intelligent campaign, who is focusing on "the issues" and who’s time has come in that District. Candidates like Mega will help shape the future of politics in our community.

Finally, there are the ballot questions, here in Philadelphia. Even if you’re not excited about any of the candidates – go out and vote in your own interest on those.

Ballot Question #1 will seek voter support to give City Council the power to require that contractors and City financial assistance recipients submit Economic Opportunity Plans (for minority business and workforce inclusion). It will also give Council the power to enforce the requirement with penalties that go as far as barring non-cooperating contractors from doing future City work.

Curiously, but not surprisingly, the City's so-called "political and civic watch dog" organization, The Committee of 70, says on its website, that it will take “no position” on whether this question should be approved.

That should be all we need to know to make sure we do all that we can to ensure that black, Hispanic, Asian and white female voters turn out in droves to vote "Yes" on this question.

Ballot Question #2 seeks voter support to reduce the size of the Zoning Board of Adjustments from six to five members, eliminating a permanent appointee from the Department of Licenses and Inspections. This seems to be a move to further reduce L&I’s “clout” in the City.
This ought to happen.

Ballot Question #3 asks voter support to abolish the highly publicized and widely criticized Board of Revision of Taxes (BRT). Unlike the minority contract participation question, this one has earned a "Strong Yes" from the Committee of 70. Given all the recent negative coverage of the long-term, old-boy power base, I suspect that the BRT will be “toast” as of May 19th …but you decide.

Ballot Question #4 asks voter support for the City to borrow $65, 525,000 for transit, streets, sanitation, parks, recreation, museums and economic and community development.

Here, again, the "fat cats" on the Committee of 70 take “no position,” which probably means they believe this will provide a greater benefit for the predominantly black and minority base of City residents than to people like themselves, so they don’t care if it ever happens.

This should be all the info you need to realize that you should run right out and vote “yes” on question #4.

So, there you have it.

It's clear that there's work to be done, by all of us, on May 18.

Please, don't "sleep" these elections!
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Watching Golf Bite the Hand that Feeds It

2010-05-13T13:43:00.000-07:00

“Ingrate” is far too nice a word to use to describe the professional golfing industry and its recent treatment of Eldrick T.“Tiger” Woods.

And that’s really saying a mouthful.

When I was young, there were very few things people could say that could hit me so hard – whether they said it about me or somebody else.

The term, "hissed" by my mom and other adults about people we knew, always made me think of a person who was the lowest form of life, untrustworthy and disreputable. An ingrate, as I understood it, was a person who took freely from others and benefited immensely while, somehow, being able to feel absolutely no appreciation for what had been given to them. An ingrate was a person who curiously felt no obligation, whatsoever, to return a favor.

That sounds very much like the way the Professional Golfer’s Association (PGA) treats its most valuable commodity and most important player, Tiger Woods.

Yeah, yeah, yeah….I have read and heard, like you, hundreds of times, now, all of the sordid details of Tiger’s marital problems, the now-infamous "driveway incident" and his ongoing series of affairs with a seemingly never-ending number of women of European descent.

In addition to creating embarrassment and damage for the formerly pristine and “bulletproof” Tiger Woods “brand” and for his family, that stuff also happened to sell a great number of newspapers and kept many eyeballs trained, for millions of hours, on TV screens and computer monitors.

For awhile, there was more Tiger Woods news than anybody on earth could reasonably consume, and virtually every bit of it was negative for the golfing legend.

Indeed, in December of last year nearly 20 percent of all content on the morning television news shows was devoted to information about the “Tiger Woods Scandal.” Carole Bartz, president of Yahoo, reported that searches for Tiger’s name had increased by nearly 4,000 percent in the 30-day period following his “driveway accident.”

The PGA bills itself as the “largest professional sports organization in the world,” with 28,000 members, and sits at the top of an industry whose golf courses generate $19.5 billion in annual revenues (compared to $6.2 billion for Major League baseball, $6.0 billion for the National Football League, $3.2 billion for the National Basketball Association and $2.4 billion for the National Hockey League). The PGA clearly has one consistent, most valuable player – Woods – who has won the Golfer of the Year Award ten times and, in December – after the news broke about the scandal – was voted the Associated Press’ Athlete Of The Decade.

With 56 votes, Tiger easily beat out six-time Tour de France-winning cyclist Lance Armstrong, who received 33 votes; tennis great Roger Federer, 25 votes; Olympic Gold Medal phenom, Michael Phelps, 13 votes and multi-Super Bowl-winning New England Patriot quarterback Tom Brady, with 6 votes.

It’s not just Tiger’s athletic prowess that makes him so important to his chosen profession and to advertisers. The fact is that Woods puts “butts” in the seats and attracts viewership like no other single athlete.

As great as the PGA believes that golf, itself, has become, it is clear that it makes a huge difference for the sport, for media carrying the events and their profit-driven sponsors, whether Tiger plays or not.

When Tiger left golf in 2008 and 2009 to rehabilitate his knee, the sport's weekend TV ratings declined by 47 percent, according to Nielsen rating services. Conversely, when he returned to participate in the PGA Tour Championship, there were reports that ratings actually increased by 83 percent. When the Tiger scandal “broke,” there were estimates that TV audiences for golf would again shrink by about half and that Nike, alone, might lose up to $30 million in sales.

And when Tiger decided to rejoin the Tour after his five-month-long, scandal-related hiatus, CBS News President Sean McManus predicted that the opening round at the 2010 Masters would probably qualify as the “biggest media event of the past 10 or 15 years, other than the inauguration of Barack Obama.”

It turned out that this year's Masters’ first round was the most-watched golf telecast in cable history, beating out the previous most-watched golf event – Tiger beating a fairly anonymous pro named Rocco Mediate in the 2008 U.S. Open.

While no one can ever condone Woods’ late-night, off-the-course activities, the great hypocrisy is that the premise for the many lectures and admonitions sent his way following those disclosures was that no other professional golfer, and by extension, no other professional athlete, has had, or is currently having, extra-marital affairs. The other premise is that the sport of golf, itself, has had a pure, fair and ethical track record and is beyond reproach.

Both concepts, of course, are ludicrous.

Regarding other golfers, let me just say that I sincerely pray that the newly “sainted” Phil Mickelson and his family will be able to live up to the “holier, more deserving, more pure and more American-role-model-like” image that has been given to them by media outlets, following his Masters victory last week.

Trust me, Phil can’t possibly be that perfect. It’s unfair to expect him to be, but the event managers and the media contingent have leaped at the opportunity, anyway, to present the “on again, off again” hero, Mickelson as the “anti-Tiger,” and as living proof that “good guys" can actually win.

The Wall Street Journal, that bastion of global business journalism, even ran a photo of Phil and his wife, Amy, on the front page of its Monday’s edition, the day after the Masters. On that Tuesday, the same newspaper carried a full-page ad by one of Mickelson’s sponsoring companies, Bearing Point, congratulating him on his victory and his strong “family values.”
I just hope Mickelson can withstand the scrutiny.

Even worse than the fawning by the media regarding Mickelson’s victory was the high-handed criticism delivered about Tiger, as he arrived at the Augusta National Golf Club, by the club’s chairman, a man by the name of Billy Payne.

Payne's club membership is still about 98 percent comprised of white males – and no women. His tournament, until 1983, still demanded that players use only the black caddies provided by the club, and his participating pros, themselves, were virtually all-white. The Augusta National course is built on the grounds of a former plantation and its top, non-cash prize is not just the highly publicized "green jacket," but a silver-plated replica of the former plantation’s “Big House.” Despite that shameful history, Payne, somehow, felt he had the moral standing to remind Tiger, publicly, that he thought his conduct had been “egregious” and that Tiger had “disappointed all of us and, more importantly, our kids and our grandkids.”

Say what?

Was this the same golf club whose former chairman, a guy who went by the nickname “Hootie,” vowed that women would only be admitted as members at the “point of a bayonet?”

Is there nothing at all in Augusta National’s questionable, racist and sexist history (and present) that children and grandchildren should be “disappointed” about other than Tiger Woods?

Hey, Billy Payne, “Wake up and stop biting the Cablinasian man’s hand that’s been feeding you.”

Tiger Woods, though admittedly human and consequently imperfect, is still the very best thing that has ever happened to your sport and to your racially and gender-insensitive tournament.

You should try treating him accordingly.

As to your grandchildren, if you play your cards right, perhaps one day you’ll be able to tell them that you once met, and had a cordial conversation with a man named Tiger Woods, the greatest golfer who ever played the game.

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When You Understand the Airlines, You Understand the U.S. Economy

2010-04-13T13:14:00.000-07:00

While the White House and mainstream media have had us focused so intently on the cost of healthcare, over the past year or so, the cost of virtually everything else we’re forced to buy has also grown, exponentially in many cases, far outpacing the cost of medical care.

When are we going to begin to talk honestly about the fact that healthcare costs -- as painful as they may be – are just one symptom of a much larger economic problem in our country – a badly outmoded business model under which jobs, wages and the overall economy are definitely not rising--but prices are?

I think, for me, the very last economic "straw" was hearing last week that Spirit Air, which bills itself as the “first ultra-low cost airline,” has announced that it will now begin to charge up to $45 for each piece of luggage that passengers carry onto their planes and place in an overhead bin. In my opinion, if you really want to understand what’s wrong with the U.S. economy, pay very careful attention to all that Spirit has done to gouge its own customers--not just last week, but throughout the past decade.

Under this most recent scenario, Spirit Air's customers, who were already trying mightily to avoid the previously imposed and deeply resented $15 and $25 "baggage check fees," are going to be penalized for the audacity of taking their personal belongings along on their flights, whether they check them or carry them.

It’s not as if this was Spirit’s first customer infraction. No, these were the same guys who had already been charging $2 for previously complimentary beverages during their flights, including bottled water. They’re the ones who charge “seating fees” -- $7 for a middle seat and $12 for an “aisle” or “window.”

Is it a coincidence, at all, that a published report in June 2008 indicated that Spirit had eliminated its customer service department, or that the company was fined $375,000 last September for flight overbooking, lost customer baggage and deceptive advertising?

I imagine that the executives at Spirit aren’t really “sweating” the fine. They know they'll probably make that up and more in just a few months with the new "carry on luggage" fees. If you doubt that, then you obviously haven't seen the recent disclosure that, as early as 2007, airline “checked bag fees” had generated $464 million for the carriers and that, by the first nine months of 2009, those fees had jumped to nearly $2 billion. With that kind of unchecked revenue on the horizon, how long will it take for virtually every other airline to follow Spirit's lead?

This would already be a very distasteful story, if this kind of behavior was limited only to Spirit Air, or only to the airline industry. The problem is that it just "ain’t" the airlines. At the end of the day, is there really any difference, in this insatiably greed-driven and dangerously unregulated economy, between excessive fees charged by airlines, banks, credit card issuers, cell phone or mortgage companies?

This, of course, is all being permitted to happen while the average household income has stagnated and family savings and net worth have declined. How long can we, as a nation, continue to play that game without risking serious social unrest? And, more importantly, does anyone in government seem to care?

The problem is further complicated by the fact that the federal government seems to have been engaged in economic “newspeak” in recent years, blatantly twisting, and incongruously mixing the meanings of long-standing economic terms, e.g., "jobless" and "recovery," in an apparent attempt to put a “happy face” on the misery people are actually experiencing out in the real world.

What's next, "good is bad," "peace is war?" If we fall for "jobless recovery," we'll most likely accept those old Orwellian re-definitions, too.

On the subject of joblessness, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has just reported that nationwide unemployment as of March 2010 is 9.7 percent, but that African-American unemployment is 16.5 percent, with black women at 12.4 percent, and black males at an astounding 19 percent. Despite those numbers, African Americans are still being sternly warned not to expect any black-specific job creation support, lest we embarrass the president. Seems a poor trade-off: Protecting one man's job at the expense of the well-being of millions of severely impacted black families, but, hey...

How bad is 19 percent black male unemployment? Put it this way: Greece, a country teetering on the brink of total financial collapse, reported an unemployment rate of 9.2 percent in June of last year; Iceland, whose government actually did collapse last year, due to poor management of its own economy, recently reported a 7.7 percent unemployment rate. Pakistan's unemployment rate is 15.2 percent and Iraq's is at 18 percent.

How can U.S. black male unemployment be greater than that in "developing nations" with which the U.S. is currently at war?

A much-massaged report in February that, I imagine, was designed to make us all feel better about the economy, disclosed that the U.S. “core inflation” rate was better than it was 12 months ago, moving from 1.7 percent to 1.6 percent. On the surface that sounds like a good thing until you realize that "core inflation" is arrived at by leaving items such as "food " and "energy" that might, otherwise, fairly and appropriately, increase the inflation rate, out of the calculation. Hey, maybe the government's economists, after they get promoted high enough into the administration, don't have to actually shop at supermarkets or take their own cars to gas stations, anymore, so they don't know. That would explain it, wouldn't it?

By the way, the Consumer Price Index tells us that energy, alone, increased by 17.1 percent over the 12 months ended February, 2010; transportation, which includes the cost of gas, increased 13.8 percent; education increased by 4.5 percent and medical care by 3.3 percent.

Oh, and while we’re on this subject, let's not overlook the continuing extraordinary disparity between the pay scales of company CEOs and their average employee. In 1970, the average U.S. CEO’s compensation package was about 25 times that of the average production worker. By the year 2000, CEO compensation had climbed to an average $2.2 million, about 90 times the average worker’s pay and by 2004, CEO compensation was 500 times that of the average worker.

Is there any wonder why there is growing anxiety and anger among average Americans about the state of the U.S. economy and their role in it?

A recent report on the faltering U.S. economy by the Rockefeller Foundation informs us that, while most Americans are suffering in this "low pay/high cost" environment, the effects on women are especially painful. The report concludes, not unexpectedly, that women, especially women of color, are more worried, in this economy, about paying bills, losing jobs, providing for children and saving for retirement. While 26 percent of white women told the researchers that they have “had trouble paying bills" in this economy, that number grew to 42 percent for Hispanic women and 48 percent for African-American women.

As I mentioned earlier, we can readily understand just how volatile and dangerous the economy has become for Americans--and for black folks, specifically--by watching the business practices in industries such as the airlines.

Recently, for example, Continental Airlines surprisingly seemed to leave just a little something on the table for its customers when it announced that, in one more "cost-cutting" move, the carrier will now only offer food on intercontinental flights and, on certain international flights. Veteran airline-watchers were initially just a bit comforted when Continental added that it would continue to provide food on domestic flights longer than six hours. That concession seemed to be a bit customer-friendly, they thought.

But, just when they wanted to believe that Continental was at least retaining a small, soft spot in its numbers-crunching, corporate heart for cross-country fliers, they learned from United Airlines that a flight from L.A. to Philadelphia lasts just five hours and seven minutes. It appears that air travelers are going to have to fly a bit farther than coast-to-coast, if they want to be served food on a domestic Continental flight.

Sadly, it's becoming clearer every day that we're living in an economy under which the average consumer just can't win--and nobody seems to care.

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It’s Time to Stop U.S. Hypocrisy In Haiti.

2010-04-06T08:51:00.000-07:00

Did you see the despicable "Haiti story" in the New York Times the other day?

I’m referring to the one about the 30 Haitian earthquake survivors, who had been ushered onto planes bound for the U.S., while the cameras were rolling and the world was still paying attention to the tragedy in their country. That's the same story that said that, since their arrival, here, the Haitians have all been held as prisoners of the U.S. Immigration System, in detention centers, in Florida.

Doesn’t it make your head spin to think back to two weeks ago, when former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush traveled to Haiti “to remind Americans that Haiti is still suffering and in need of long-term, quake-related relief?"

Those poor detained souls – none of whom happened to have any sort of criminal record – had been “waved” onto military flights by U.S. Marines, with no time for normal immigration processing. You were probably watching as it happened, on the evening news. Now, apparently, the evacuees are learning that they must have done something terribly wrong.

According to news reports, when they showed up in the U.S. without visas, they were immediately taken into custody by immigration officials and held for deportation – and you won’t believe this – back to Haiti.

Sounds like a “B” movie plot, doesn’t it? Maybe they can get that brother, Tracey Morgan, to play the lead role.

If I were Haitian, my jaws would be “locked.”

The United States, it seems, has always treated the Haitians like "step children," contributing significantly, through its policies, to the country’s status as the "poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere." This latest debacle is entirely consistent with that long-standing pattern.

Maybe our founding fathers and their political descendants have never quite gotten over the fact that, in 1791, the Haitians pulled off the only successful slave-led revolution in history, overthrowing French rule and becoming the world’s first, independent, post-colonial, black nation.

Maybe that’s why the United States stood by and didn't intervene, in 1825, despite the adoption of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, while the French staked an initial claim of 150 million francs in reparations to be paid to the former French slaveholders. As a result, the new Haitian government was quickly bankrupted and forced to borrow the money from French banks to make payments to the slaveholders. Those same banks wound up controlling the country’s economy, despite Haiti's newly won “independent” status, and plunging the Haitian people into the poverty from which they have never, really, emerged.

As onerous as all of that may have seemed back in 1825, France’s claim for 150 million francs in reparations to its slaveholders was just a pittance compared to the $1.8 billion in peak debt the tiny island nation wound up owing to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Bank.

So, what were “Bill” and “W” really doing down there in Haiti, anyway? In an interview with the Miami Herald, Clinton said that his mission in Haiti, along with George W. Bush, was to “...help fill the gaps of human needs and help create jobs…by stimulating entrepreneurship…”

By "stimulating entrepreneurship," was he referring to quickly restoring the earthquake-ravished Haitian apparel and textile production industry? That’s the one, by the way, that, over a ten-month period ending in October, 2009, exported $424 million in clothing items for brands such as Hanes and Jos. A. Bank men’s clothing to the U.S., all while paying the Haitians who worked to produce those items a minimum wage of $3.09 for an 8-hour day. (That, by the way, represented an increase, amazingly, from $1.72 a day, just a year ago). One news account pointed out that a pin-striped men’s suit produced by a young Haitian woman at the $3.09 wage scale would be shipped stateside to Jos. A. Bank, where it would be sold for $550.

With those kinds of numbers, it’s easy to understand the U.S. concern about the earthquake’s impact in Haiti--not so much for the safety and well-being of the Haitian people, but because the island's highly profitable apparel production has been down by 50-70 percent, since the January 12 earthquake.

I often wonder whether the U.S. really is still holding some sort of strange “grudge” against the Haitian people for having staged their successful slave revolt. Strangely, the U.S. government doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as adamant about deporting its 7-20 million predominantly Latin American illegal immigrants as it seems to be with the Haitians.

In fact, just a week ago, the President, himself, offered high praise for a bi-partisan immigration reform proposal from Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Under the proposal, the U.S. would address its "immigration issue" by “improving border security,” “introducing a new system for admitting temporary workers,” by “issuing biometric ID cards" and (here’s the “kicker”) by “establishing a process for legalizing illegal immigrants currently residing here in the U.S."

According to Schumer and Graham, current "illegals" would be given “legal” status, if they paid any back taxes and fees they owed, if they submitted to background checks, if they completed an English proficiency test and performed “community service.”

Bam! Just like that…they’d become legal U.S. citizens.

While all of this was being worked on, the same Obama administration, right up to the day the earthquake actually struck Haiti, had been engaged in a high-profile initiative to deport 30,299 Haitians out of the United States, even in the wake of last year’s horrendous tropical storm on the island that destroyed 15 percent of the nation’s economy, left 800 dead and tens of thousands homeless.

I wouldn’t want you to get the impression that the Obama administration has been acting in any way inconsistently with U.S. policy toward Haiti. Just the opposite appears to be true. The Bush administration, you may recall, maintained a standing practice of denying entry to this country by Haitian immigrants and turning back Haitian refugees who tried to reach these shores by boat. The new administration has, apparently, simply picked up where George W. Bush left off.

Here’s the question: Does the United States still maintain separate "admission standards" for potential African and black immigrants than it does for other people who are “yearning to be free?”

If so, we really do need to address that, as soon as humanly possible.

Africans continue to be the very highest educated of all immigrant groups admitted to this country, and Haitians, as far as I can tell, have become good and productive citizens, in the main, once they arrive here. Indeed, Mr. Obama and other residents of our third-largest city – Chicago, Illinois – should be especially sensitive to that issue, given that the City, itself, was founded in the late 1700’s by a Haitian of African descent named John Baptist Pointe du Sable.

This whole issue about the egregious treatment of the Haitian people really came to a head for me after I read about the 30 Haitian detainees, including one 25-year old, whose surname is Ulysse, but whose family, ironically, gave him the very pro-American first name, "Reagan."

So, there he is, Reagan Ulysse, sitting in a detention center, waiting to be deported back to Haiti, after having been flown out by military transport “for his own good,” while CNN, Fox, Reuters, and the Washington Post were all watching, 10 weeks ago.

Can you spell "hypocrisy?"

If so, the next time you communicate with Bill Clinton, George Bush or Barack Obama, let them know that you believe U.S. treatment of Haiti has been hypocritical, at best, and, certainly, inhumane.

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Let’s Not Let A.I. Go Out Like This.

2010-03-29T13:51:00.000-07:00

I’m not all that concerned about Donovan McNabb. I’m sure he’ll land on his feet – somewhere.

On the other hand, I really do hate to see Allen Iverson “going out like this."

After what has been, without a doubt, one of the most productive careers in NBA history, the stories that are following this guaranteed Hall of Fame player to the “exit door,” have largely been about his “drinking problem,” his “gambling habit” and his wife’s recent divorce filing. In the context of his entire career, that is grossly unfair. It’s, also, deeply disappointing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m certainly not in favor of “problem drinking” and if A.I. really does have an issue in that regard, like so many others in our country, I hope he’ll take steps to address it.

But in a country wherein we have a $65 billion, legal, national casino industry, with more than 1500 commercial casinos, including nine here in Pennsylvania, I believe it’s pure hypocrisy to paint A.I .as a disreputable figure, somehow, because he visits and plays at casinos.

As to his wife’s divorce filing, while it’s certainly a private matter, I am concerned that his family, including his five children, may be negatively impacted by it. At the same time, in a country wherein it's estimated that more than 50 percent of first marriages and nearly 65 percent of second marriages now end in divorce, such filings should, by definition, be far less newsworthy, and certainly shouldn’t be used to paint either party as a social misfit.

As a public figure, A.I. brought this kind of attention upon himself, at some level, when he signed his first NBA contract. I realize that. Let's not, however, let these latest characterizations obscure a career-long demonstration of basketball prowess that we will probably never see again in our city--or anywhere else.

Unfortunately, Philadelphia has a history of inexcusably disrespectful treatment of great athletes. In 1968, Wilt Chamberlain was infamously traded by the same 76ers, to the Los Angeles Lakers. This was after a career, up to that point, during which Wilt had scored 100 points in a single game for the team, averaged more than 50 points a game for an entire season and pulled down an all-time record 27.2 rebounds per game, over an entire season. Somehow, by the time local sportswriters had finished “trashing” Wilt’s personality, commitment to win and other "limitations," the stage had been set for what was arguably the dumbest, single trade in NBA history.

Jumping over to football, Randall Cunningham, one of the first players to prove conclusively that an African American could successfully lead an NFL franchise as quarterback, was also treated disrespectfully by local sportswriters and football fans, despite a multi-year All-Pro career. After leaving the Eagles, Cunningham went on to join the Minnesota Vikings, where he led that team, in 1998, to a 15-1 record.

In baseball, of course, there was Dick Allen, National League Rookie of the Year with the Phillies in 1964, who was one of the greatest sluggers in baseball history. Allen, the Phillies first, true, black, star player, was run out of town after a fight with a teammate named Frank Thomas, a racially insensitive bully, who had swung a baseball bat at him.

After Thomas was released, local media and the fans, taking Thomas’s side, began to harass Allen incessantly, leading to his eventual trade to the Saint Louis Cardinals. Without missing a stroke, Allen went on to make the All Star team in St. Louis. He eventually joined the Chicago White Sox, where he led the American League in home runs – twice.

With all of that as background, we shouldn’t be surprised to see how A.I. has been treated throughout his career, here.

Maybe the local media never really understood the incident at the Hampton, Virginia Bowling alley that led to the 17-year old A.I. being given a 15-year sentence and a felony conviction for “maiming by mob” (an obscure legal statute that was originally created to discourage lynchings in the state). In this case it was used in a fight between black high-schoolers and white high-schoolers. Curiously, only the black students were arrested, including Iverson.

Iverson, who adamantly claimed his innocence, wound up serving four months at a Virginia correctional facility, before being granted clemency by the state's first black governor, Doug Wilder. The Virginia Court of Appeals subsequently overturned Iverson’s conviction in 1995, citing insufficient evidence.

There is a sneaking suspicion that Iverson’s exoneration was never quite enough for Philadelphia sportswriters. They criticized him for his hair style, for his tattoos, for his childhood friends, for his cars, and for virtually anything else he said or did. Even as he sank that memorable jump shot against the Lakers, then calmly stepped over the pitifully crumpled body of Tyron Lue, who had vainly tried to stop his progress to the basket, they seemed not to like him.

Even as he notoriously “broke Michael Jordan’s ankles” twice with his signature “crossover” move and sank that two-pointer from the foul line in his rookie year, he still couldn’t please the sportswriters.

Didn’t local sportswriters notice that a whole generation of young NBA players, recognizing Iverson’s greatness, was coming into the League emulating his aggressive style, his crossover dribble, his cornrows, and his "tats?"

Wasn’t it enough that A.I. was an 11-time NBA all star, ranking him only behind Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett and Shaquille O’Neal, as active players, and tying him with retired "greats" such as Dr. J, Charles Barkley, and Patrick Ewing?

Wasn’t it enough that he was NBA season scoring leader four times – behind Michael Jordan’s 10 times, certainly, but ahead of Kareem, Shaq, Tracy McGrady, and Kobe, each of whom have done it twice?

Didn’t his sixth all-time highest NBA highest scoring average--at 26.7 points per game--count for anything?

How about winning the all-star MVP trophy twice? How about winning the NBA regular season MVP award in the 2000-2001 season and being the shortest player to ever win that award, smaller than the 6'3'' Steve Nash, smaller even than the 6'1" Bob Cousy?

It probably has confused Philly sportswriters that A.I. has always been a clear fan favorite outside of Philadelphia, no matter what they have written about him. The people at the NBA Store recently disclosed that, over their first 10 years in operation, only Michael Jordan's and Kobe Bryant's jerseys outsold Iverson's, and, in China, A.I.'s jerseys have consistently ranked among the top five most popular, out-selling even those of China’s national hero, Yao Ming.

It's sad to watch as this African-American hero, who, by the way, also led his high school team, as a quarterback, to the Virginia State championship, has his career reduced to a series of carelessly negative "sound bites," by people who should know better.

Prior to the emergence of the current storylines about his marriage and gambling, there was the painfully predictable, re-playing of the “We’re talking about practice” interview, which, taken out of context, was always presented as "proof" that Iverson never really had a work ethic.

Despite all of that, here’s our chance to finally do the right thing, to finally demonstrate that our city has a little appreciation for athletic greatness, a little class, and a little dignity.

Wouldn’t it be great if the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, The African American Chamber of Commerce, the Mayor’s Office, Philadelphia City Council, Philadelphia sportswriters and/or other local leadership organizations would come together and thank Mr. Iverson, formally, for all he has contributed to our City’s sports history?

He really does deserve at least that.

Who will step up?

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For Europe and Africa, It's a Small World, After All.

2010-03-23T08:52:00.000-07:00

When I read and listen to the news, now, about the growing prospects for financial collapse by the major European nations, I think back to something my grandmother used to say: “Boy, it’s a small world.”

If we happened to be “downtown” and “ran into" some friends she knew back when the family lived on Union Street in "the Bottom,” and they unexpectedly offered some information on a long-lost relative, she would shake her head, on our way home, and say: “It’s a small world, boy, and don’t you forget it.”

She’d say that all the time.

In my grandmother’s mind, almost everything that happened to any of us was somehow connected to other people in unexpected ways, and those connections were greater and more direct than we realized. She hadn’t read that anywhere. Like so many other things, she just knew it.

In a very related way, over the past 20 years or so, the concept of “Six Degrees of Separation” has been postulated, i.e., that everyone on earth is no more than six steps away from any other person on earth, even though we don't realize it. In fact, the “Six Degrees" concept is now being tested scientifically with some noted success, and has been included as a premise on Internet sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and others. Curiously, it’s also been converted into a parlor game that incorporates the relationships and experiences of Philadelphia-born actor Kevin Bacon. Bacon, by the way, has turned his own connection to the phenomenon into a charitably based social network (http://www.sixdegrees.org/).

But, now, we’re finding that "Six Degrees" is much more than a parlor game. Indeed, the Europeans are being faced with dealing with, both, the concept of a “small world” and another, Biblical concept, “reaping what you sow,” even as you read this.

There is, in fact, strong evidence that one of the largest single factors in the prospective economic collapse of Europe is not simply the financial shenanigans by Goldman Sachs, or each respective country's real estate "bubble," or, even, the greed of their corporate leaders. Instead, in a "Six Degrees" kind of way, the answer lies in an event that was celebrated late last month – the 125th anniversary of the Berlin Conference. That was the event that launched the infamous “Scramble for Africa,” in which a handful of European nations, together with the United States, met in Germany and came away having allocated all of Africa’s land – except Ethiopia and U.S.-controlled Liberia – into 50 nation-states, whose boundaries still exist today.

Up to that point, Europe had grown rich and prosperous from 400 years of capturing, selling and exploiting primarily Western African people through the Trans- Atlantic slave trade. But in the late 1800’s, that despicable industry had become outmoded, no longer cost-effective and, in many places, illegal.

In addition to creating the African colonies, the Berlin Conference also served the purpose of reducing the constant small wars among competing Europeans for African wealth. Over more than a 70-year period, dating back to 1884, Europe was able to continue its growth and global influence in the post- slave-trade world economy. As a result, Europe grew richer and richer and the colonized African nations grew poorer and poorer.

Gold? Africa provided it. Diamonds and platinum? Africa provided them, too. Rubber, petroleum, copper, agricultural products, iron ore, and titanium? Africa, Africa, Africa, and, again, Africa.

In fact, Germany’s loss of its valuable African colonies, including German Southwest Africa, Cameroon and Togo, to the Allies, during World War I, contributed significantly to the tremendous economic hardship experienced by the German people in the 1920’s and 1930’s, leading to social unrest in that country and the rise of the Nazi party, there. The economic desperation in the country and the resulting German nationalistic aggression led to the instigation of World War II.

Fast-forwarding to today, we’re not only recognizing the 125th anniversary of the heinous Berlin Conference, but also the 50th anniversary of the independence of 17 of the previously colonized nations, created, drawn and named, arbitrarily, by the European colonizers, who met in Berlin.

The process of African reclamation that began with the independence movements across the continent in 1960 has led to the outright elimination of free natural resources for former European colonizers or the need for Europe, finally, to pay at least something for those assets. That began the gradual decline of Europe’s comparative global advantage.

I remember being amazed, during my first career in the commercial backing industry, to learn that our bank’s clients that wanted to do business in places such as Nigeria, Uganda and Ghana, were forced to conduct that business through financial intermediaries in London, England, rather than directly through the African countries, themselves.

As a naïve young man, back then, I thought that was peculiar and not very efficient. Now I understand why that situation existed.
Every year since that time, as more and more African nations have won their independence from Europe, the inherent strength of the European economies has continued to weaken.

How do you – if you’re England, France, Belgium or Portugal – replace the diamonds, gold, bauxite, lumber, etc., that had been so easily available through your African colonies?

The fact is that you simply don’t.

And, unless Europe can quickly devise a strategy that will help restore the unfettered access to natural resources it once enjoyed, at Africa’s expense, the short-term outlook for its economic recovery looks bleak, no matter what they report in the Times of London.

How much longer can Europe’s leaders afford to stand by and watch as their economies shrivel and their citizens call for their resignations? How much longer will they be content to see their people marching in the streets, carrying picket signs, demanding jobs, lower taxes and a return to their “old way of life?”

At the same time, while we’re on the subject of "small worlds," there’s a growing issue on the African continent about "integration." No, it’s not the kind of integration you’re thinking about – not the Civil Rights-era “white-only” drinking fountains, dogs and hoses, school busing and whites and blacks in the same classroom thing.

For growing numbers of Africans, "integration" means giving more and more serious consideration to eliminating the old boundaries between what are now 53 African nations that were drawn arbitrarily in the 1800’s by their former European colonizers.

Because not a single indigenous African was invited to participate in the Berlin Conference, those boundaries wound up “lumping together” ethnic groups that had never previously been forced to co-exist, and splitting groups, that did have strong cultural relationships, into two or three separate European-designed countries.

That being the case, New African Magazine informs us that African and African-born leaders, such as Sudanese-born telecommunications mogul Mo Ibrahim, have suggested that African countries, as defined and created for business purposes, by the Europeans 125 years ago, are too small to survive and prosper in today’s world. Like many others, Ibrahim feels that many of those countries' boundaries need to be eliminated and their people "integrated" into fewer, larger, more powerful African nations.

There are two things to watch for in all of this. First, how long can the 450 million Western Europeans, who have already slipped demographically to represent barely 8 percent of the global population, continue to suffer economically without resorting to tactics that can restore their economic stability?

And directly related to that, how long will it take the African people, 125 years after the Berlin Conference and 50 years after their first successful independence efforts, to reorganize themselves into a solid, militarily and economically viable geo-political entity?

As difficult to believe as it may seem at first glance, both issues are directly connected to each other.

It really is a "small world," isn’t it?
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What's the Real Agenda Behind the Attacks on Public School Leadership?

2010-03-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

In the aftermath of the now- infamous, inter-racial confrontations at South Philadelphia High School, I’m concerned that, rather than using what appears to have been a relatively isolated, negative occurrence as a springboard for much-needed learning and for more effective inter-cultural, inter-ethnic communications, we’ve actually figured out a way to utilize the situation to drive us all farther apart and to promote other ongoing, negative agendas.

When I saw Tony Auth’s editorial cartoon in last week's Philadelphia Inquirer, depicting South Philadelphia High School’s principal as “sleeping on the job," I knew that we, in the City, were still heading in opposite directions, on one more critical issue, at break-neck speed.

I read Judge Giles’ “Report and Recommendations” on the incident and, aside from the general complexity of the issue, what struck me was the clear impression that LaGreta Brown, the school’s principal, was not only wide awake, but that she also took several decisive steps to ensure the safety of all of her school’s students, at a time when tensions at the facility were extremely high and no one else seemed to be available to do so.

Contrary to the grossly unfair characterization in the Inquirer’s cartoon, the report indicates that Principal Brown, among other things, swiftly and efficiently put into place a comprehensive emergency security plan, which included: Clearing and securing all halls and stairwells; locking of lavatories; revocation of hall passes; recruitment of City Year Volunteers as additional support; and the assignment of the school’s assistant principal and a school police officer to assist on the building's second floor. In addition, she decided that she, herself, would also be present on the second floor, during parts of the day. Even further, the principal called a “dismissal strategy meeting,” wherein she decided to have a “silent dismissal” of the building’s students and initiate its longstanding “Safe Corridor Program” to ensure safe passage home for students who were concerned.

Does that sound like a principal who was “asleep on the job?”

It appears, now, that the primary reason that safety was compromised, at all, for any of the students, once they left for home that day, despite Principal Brown's plan, was that several members of the Philadelphia Police Department, who had been assigned to the school, were called away, just before dismissal, to respond to an incident at another South Philadelphia school.Curiously, there doesn’t appear to be very much energy being expended by any of the most vocal critics of the South Philadelphia High School incident – in the Asian community, in the media, or even among parents – to find out why that decision was made.

Nevertheless, with "perfect 20/20 hindsight," and from the comfort and safety of their own homes or offices, the "armchair principals," including the Inquirer editorial cartoonist, have been full of suggestions about things that Principal Brown might have done differently. But, for Brown, her staff, and those students “-- black, Asian and Caucasian”-- all of this was taking place in “real time,” and it appears to have been done in an absolutely responsible way. That, of course, made the Inquirer’s editorial cartoon, in my opinion, an indefensible, inaccurate "cheap shot.”

In addition, I can’t help but believe that the cartoon was also intended to serve as just one more piece in what has been an ongoing pattern of irrationally harsh media criticism of Superintendent Ackerman and her administration.

I have no doubt in my mind, whatsoever, that a major contributing factor to the appearance of that cartoon was the fact that the School District would not make either Superintendent Ackerman or Principal Brown available to be interviewed for the paper’s feature story on Judge Giles’ report, two Sundays ago. It was apparent, even in the body of that story, that reporters and editors felt that they deserved to have a much more detailed reaction to Judge Giles’ report than Dr. Ackerman’s statement that implied that it was “time to move forward.”

The Inquirer's reaction and the appearance of the cartoon, therefore, shouldn't have come as a complete surprise to anybody. It's clear that if you don’t make yourself available to speak to reporters when they seek your input, that doesn’t stop them from doing their story. They just won’t include your side of the issue in the finished product. In a more perfect world, both Dr. Ackerman and Principal Brown should have offered more substantive comment on the report.

Another critical reason for the South Philadelphia incident playing out in the way that it did is the fact that local Asian advocacy groups are exceptionally well organized and don't hesitate--for a second--to put up picket lines, print posters, write op-ed pieces, work the Internet and reach out to reporters on any of the issues in which their community is involved. Most media accounts about "South Philadelphia," not surprisingly, have been heavily influenced by their perspective. The black community used to be like that....

So, beyond what actually took place at South Philadelphia High, what are all of these ongoing cases of media sniping, calls for public apologies and for intervention by the Justice Department really all about?

There is no question in my mind that there has been, and continues to be, a concerted campaign being waged in the City to discredit Arlene Ackerman in her role as Philadelphia Schools Superintendent.

Ackerman has brought a direct, informed, no-nonsense style and a strategic focus to her responsibility. It seems, however, that, in Philadelphia, we’ve always been more comfortable with “leaders” who err on the side of being overly polite to one another, even while, “the house is on fire.” We especially seem to prefer that our black leaders (and our black athletes) in Philadelphia be low-key, self-effacing, constantly smiling and overly polite, even if they get nothing, at all, done.

We need to “get over that.” We no longer have that luxury.

It’s been interesting to watch as moves toward greater teacher and principal accountability, espoused early on, here, by Ackerman, and strongly opposed, immediately, by many in the local education establishment, begin to be made at the federal level. In the same "Ackerman-esque" way, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, four months ago, proposed that student test scores be used to determine teacher tenure, up in the “Apple.”

When the new Superintendent arrived in town and seemed to want to make the school system accountable for improved performance for all students and also, finally, for its largest population segment– low income black students – that didn’t seem to sit too well with those who’ve always lived very comfortably at underperforming black students’ expense. The undeclared war against the Superintendent has been waged ever since.

There’s another clear lesson to be learned from the South Philadelphia incident. If black, Hispanic, Asian and white parents don’t soon begin to have forums available to them for ongoing dialogue among themselves and for breaking down long-standing stereotypes and misunderstandings, their children will certainly have a very slim chance of successfully negotiating our increasingly multicultural educational environments. In addition, our schools, already cognizant of the growing diversity among their students, need to have improved programs and resources, now, to ensure that multi-cultural input from communities is also welcomed and acted upon.

And while we're working on solid, long-range solutions such as those, people in our community--regardless of race-- who have always said that they cared about improving the educational performance in public schools and, especially for long-overlooked black students, need to step up now and protect the assets they have right now in people like LaGreta Brown and Dr. Ackerman, who are in the trenches, doing just that, every day.

Step up now, before it's too late.

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The Great Gathering: What We Must Do When No One Else Will Help

2010-03-12T13:32:00.000-08:00

I don’t feel like looking it up … was it Chicken Little, Henny Penny or the Little Red Hen, who finally said , “...then, I’ll do it myself,” when none of the other farm animals agreed to step up to plant and harvest the seeds necessary to produce the food they all needed?

Something like that just took place two weeks ago in Columbia, SC, when three major black religious denominations, The African Methodist Episcopal (AME), the AME Zion and the Christian Methodist Episcopal, joined to convene “The Great Gathering.” The event was designed to address the disparities that exist between African Americans and “Mainstream America” and to focus specifically on the problems that impact young black men.

The churches, collectively, claim five million members, and more than 5,000 people attended the event – far less than the average NFL game attendance, but way more, perhaps, than the average 76ers game.

It was the first time that these large black denominations had come together for a single purpose since 1964, when they decided that rampant segregation and discrimination had gone on for far too long in this country and decided to join in the effort to defeat them.

In recent years, quite frankly, the black church has seemed to be largely removed from what has been going on outside of their congregations and from the plight of the national black community. While some have clearly done good things, on the whole, they’ve given the impression that they are now more focused on building "mega-churches" and looking within themselves, and have become largely invisible on critical national issues, unless they happen to be invited to meetings by politicians who create funding sources, or who seek their endorsements.

To complicate all of this, in recent years, conditions have worsened to the point wherein the term “black community” automatically brings to mind, for most Americans, an image of joblessness, poor education, drug addiction, incarceration and abject failure. We do, of course, have a segment of our community that has risen, as a result of access provided during the Civil Rights era, to hold corporate positions, public office, impressive academic degrees and to own fine homes, but they are in the distinct minority.

It’s not as if the black folks who have been catching all of the “bad breaks” have been unaware of what has been going on around them. Indeed, they have seen, first-hand, the doors of economic opportunity being closed to them.

They have also wondered why, since "Brown vs. Board of Education," children in private schools and suburban schools are able to receive high-quality educations from high- caliber teachers, while schools in their own communities are perennially under-resourced and left to operate without the very best teachers available.

They see their young people being incarcerated at a rate that is 8-to-10 times greater than the rate for whites, who commit the same non-violent crimes.

They wonder why a country which has one of the very highest, global murder rates and, certainly, one of the highest rates of death by hand guns, still permits arms manufacturers to pump their guns into their neighborhoods, contributing significantly to all of the mayhem.

They know that their neighborhoods weren’t always like this, and that, prior to the onset of drugs, guns, and excessively high incarceration rates, beginning in the late 60’s and early 70’s, black communities were neighborly. They know that most black folks, going all the way back to slavery, had jobs and, they know that we, too, left our doors open, back then, so that friends and neighbors could come and go as they wanted.

But when we began to see our “black world” spin out of control, we began to seek outside assistance and support.

We joined the national civil rights organizations, we registered to vote, we joined churches, we elected mayors, councilpeople, congressional representatives, state office holders – many of whom were now black... We even voted, almost unanimously, for a new, "black president." And, then, we waited, naively, for the “insanity" to be reversed.

Somehow, none of that has worked for us.

Perhaps most disturbingly, in recent weeks, we’ve seen that our “national black leaders” have developed a curious, new inability to say the word “black,” or to represent our specific concerns.

With all of that as background, it was reassuring to see the Great Gathering take place. It was a sign that there still is a large, powerful institution, somewhere in this country, that is committed to helping us to address the problems, on the ground, in our neighborhoods.

At the conclusion of the Great Gathering, the organizers produced a 28-page document, which they called the Male Investment Plan. They also agreed to raise $10 million and to recruit one million volunteers to address, the special plight of black males between the ages of 5 and 25. In addition, they agreed to establish a series of Saturday Academies at AME, CME and AMEZ congregations nationwide, to develop working partnerships with HBCU’s and to create effective mentorships for the young men.

It sounded very good. I have confidence that now that we understand that these other, political interests are largely uncommitted to addressing our issues, we’re finally on the right track, like the Little Red Hen, in "doing it ourselves."

Interestingly, even though some early slaveholders believed that Christianity was a way to exercise social control over their slaves and to remind them that the “meek shall inherent the earth,” some of the most forceful black leaders back then were also very religious people. In fact, Nat Turner, who led the famous slave revolt in Virginia, in 1831, was widely known, among blacks and whites, as a deeply religious and spiritual person. Denmark Vesey, whose own slave revolt included a plan to seize the city of Charleston, SC, also established a branch of the AME church in his state, in 1816. In addition, the great Harriett Tubman, abolitionist, Union spy during the Civil War, and Underground Railroad leader, was actually a member of the Thompson Memorial AME Church of Zion in Auburn, NY, in her later years.

Unless we forget, Martin Luther King, Leon Sullivan and Malcolm X were also religious leaders. In the same vein, I am extraordinarily excited to see what these, new 21st century religious leaders have now decided to do.

At the same time, I trust that they understand, as they set out on this expanded new mission, that just talking to our young men, alone, will not be enough. Unless they also have meaningful dialogue with elected officials about bringing jobs back from overseas, unless they fight to stop the importation of heroin from Afghanistan, and unless they take meaningful and productive steps to stop the sale of hand guns in our cities and to bring racial fairness to the judicial process, even this new effort will be unsuccessful.

Despite the fact that the “first black president” couldn’t fit this historically significant gathering on his agenda (he sent a video), I trust that Mr. Obama will find a way to provide direct, unabashed, assistance to their important mission at some point in the not-too-distant future.

I’d also point out that this is an effort that is so critically important that it should not be limited to the AME, CME and AMEZ within the national black church community. I sincerely hope that all black denominations, by the way, find a way to play a meaningful role in this top-priority issue.

It is, certainly, the right thing for them to do.

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The Political Clout of Large Contractors: Keeping Blacks Away from Construction Sites. (Part II)

2010-03-09T13:29:00.001-08:00

For many Irish immigrants in the early-to-mid 1800's, according to Dennis Clark, author of "The Irish in Philadelphia," an appropriate route out of the unskilled labor pool was to become a small building contractor, and many of them did.

It's important to understand that those who found success as contractors worked very closely with their fellow immigrants to establish craft guilds, or labor unions, to provide and control the labor supply that would be needed on their own construction sites. Many of their earlier contracts grew out of the demand from their community for separate, Irish Catholic institutions-- especially churches and schools--but eventually those contracts began to expand across the entire spectrum of construction opportunities in the city.

There was James P. McNichol, whose firm completed the Broad Street Subway excavation from City Hall to South Philadelphia, the Market Street Subway tunnel, the Ben Franklin Parkway and the Roosevelt Boulevard.

There was Matthew McCloskey, who went on from Philadelphia to serve as national finance chairman for the Democratic Party, working closely with President John F. Kennedy; and John McShain, who built the Philadelphia Board of Education Building, and then went on to build the Jefferson Memorial and the Pentagon, in Washington DC.(In the interest of perfect disclosure, in a stranger-than-fiction coincidence and personal note, I discovered later in life that the Martin de Porres Scholarship, through which I had been able to attend the prestigious St. Joseph's Preparatory School, out of North Central Philadelphia, had been funded by none other than Matthew McCloskey, whom I had never met).

To enhance the prospect of gaining public sector construction projects, the Irish contractors focused, simultaneously, on gaining control of the major political parties in the City. In fact, Clark points out that "...for fifty years the Irish installed one of their own as chairman of the Philadelphia Democratic Party."

Consequently, powerful, politically connected Irish contractors emerged in Philadelphia, enhancing the political and economic power of the Irish community, all while remaining true to their history and emphatically excluding black participation in their industry.

Unfortunately, even after the McNichol's, McCloskey's and McShain's passed on, the current crop of major contractors, including the Keatings, Driscolls, Turners, et al., still play largely the same role, still control the political environment through substantial campaign contributions and still have the power to dictate the complexion of the people on their worksites.

Over the past five election cycle years, according to www.Followthemoney.com, the construction industry contributed an average of $70 million annually to state and federal elected officials. And, in just the years 2007 and 2008, six construction-related national labor unions (electricians, laborers, plumbers, carpenters, teamsters, and operating engineers) contributed an additional $68 million to elected officials. Interestingly, each of those unions contributed, individually, more, over that period, than Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup or Bank of America. Not surprisingly, many elected officials are largely intimidated or compromised by this level of influence. At the same time, media seem to be largely uninformed about the issue, or disinterested in telling the story.

W.E.B. DuBois, the great African-American, Harvard-educated Ph.D., who published his landmark study of black Philadelphia for the University of Pennsylvania, in 1899, observed, 111 years ago: "Even in the world of skilled labor, the Negro is largely excluded. For years, the Negroes filled satisfactorily the trades of the city and today are still prominent in many parts of the South and, yet, in Philadelphia, a determined prejudice, aided by public opinion, has succeeded nearly in driving them from the field."

"All these (situations)" Dubois continued, "prove the rule, namely that without strong effort and special influences, it is next to impossible for a Negro in Philadelphia to get regular employment in most of the trades, except he work as an independent workman and take small transient jobs."

Regrettably, in the year 2010, not very much has changed.

There is light, however, at the end of what has been a very long tunnel.

It just so happens that, even in a distressed economy, construction industry inclusion is precisely what the City's economy needs. It's also what the industry, itself, requires for its own survival. Here's the issue: Increasingly, the sons and daughters of many of the long-time, white ethnic union members have gravitated to college campuses and to white-collar professions, and have shunned the job opportunities that were waiting for them on construction sites. Not entirely coincidentally, the national percentage of unionized construction workers stood at 14.2 percent in 2008, down from 50 percent in 1966. So, opening the industry to greater levels of African-American inclusion also can ensure the continued viability of the building trades, themselves. Despite the fundamental logic of all of that, to make it happen, we're still going to have to have "strong effort and special influences," as DuBois accurately described.

The key issue is whether the current crop of elected officials and business leaders have the "political will" to do what needs to be done to ensure that this can happen.

It is generally agreed that the fastest and most effective way to increase the number of black and minority workers on construction sites is to increase the number of black and minority contractors who win bids on those projects. In that regard, about seven years ago, I was a part of a small group that created the Technical Assistance Center for Emerging Contractors, or the TAC, whose offices are located in North Central Philadelphia. The organization trains, provides financing sources and contract bidding assistance to black and minority contractors. The TAC recently supplied a list of 35 top-level, black and Hispanic contractors to the facilities manager at St. Joseph's University, as an example. We know there is the capability, by black and minority contractors, to bid successfully and to perform on local projects.

In March of last year, I was a member of a group called The Mayor's Advisory Commission on Construction Industry Diversity, which presented Mayor Nutter with the results of an 11-month-long review of what needs to be done to correct the problems of racial and gender disparity on the City's construction sites. The report included a review of the disparities, together with scores of recommendations for achieving workforce and contract inclusion goals.

The Mayor mentioned the report recently during a "minority business" press conference but, so far, quite frankly, we’re still waiting to see the specific construction-related recommendations implemented. But, we're optimistic that between and among the Mayor's Office, the members of City Council, and the leaders of the construction industry, itself, we'll start to see some significant improvement in the City's construction industry diversity.

But the goals for inclusion have to be meaningful, the timeline for achieving them have to be appropriately urgent, and there have to be real and tangible consequences for project owners, construction management firms and labor unions who don't participate. Fines should be levied, contracts should be terminated, firms should be debarred, from doing further business and project labor agreements should be curtailed, as necessary. If we’re serious, that's what we'll finally do.

But this should not be seen as punitive, negative, anti-business, or anti-union--- just anti-discrimination. Such improvement and an appropriate utilization of the vital, construction-related resources that reside in the local black community are well within the enlightened self-interest of those who are responsible for expanding the City's economy.

In Philadelphia, where it’s been reported that 50 percent of black males don't have jobs, a continuation of the status quo should be simply unacceptable, for all of us.

Even 111 years ago, W.E. B. DuBios said it best: "How long can a city say to a part of its citizens, it's useless to work; it is fruitless to deserve well of men; education will gain you nothing but disappointment and humiliation? How long can a city teach its black children that the road to success is to have a white face? How long can a city do this and escape the inevitable penalty?

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Blacks Were Among the Country’s First Construction Workers. What Happened? (Part I)

2010-03-08T13:13:00.000-08:00

There’s been a long history of racial exclusion and discrimination on construction sites, which has contributed to economic and political powerlessness in black neighborhoods and has negatively impacted men and women who simply wanted to work and to provide for their families, but who have not been permitted to do so.

History also tells us that there has been a substantial degree of antagonism between blacks and the Irish in the Philadelphia construction industry. While the Irish have not single-handedly constituted an impediment to black inclusion in the industry, they have clearly played a critical role in minimizing black advancement on work sites.

Aside from their discriminatory treatment of blacks in the construction business, however, I must confess that I have a great deal of respect for the way in which the Irish, as a people, organized themselves, in the mid-to-late 1800's, to take significant control of the industry. They utilized construction, and the political process, to pull themselves up from the margins of Philadelphia society to become some the city's most important and respected leaders. There’s a lesson in there for Philadelphia’s black community, especially today. Why can’t we do the same?

According to one source, during the early 1800's, the Irish and Germans were commonly viewed as racially inferior to and/or religiously and linguistically incompatible with the native-born, predominantly British population in the U.S. Dennis Clark, author of “The Irish in Philadelphia,” further described the Irish condition in the City when he wrote: "In 1885, the foreign-born Irish alone accounted for 35 percent of the arrests in the city, while representing only a tenth of the population."

I’m not sure if the Irish, who still control much of the construction industry, or the blacks, who are still excluded from much of it, are fully aware of how we arrived at this place, but both groups continue to play roles that were scripted about 160 years ago, in this city. The fact is, however, that the economic exclusion of a group that constitutes 45 percent of the City’s population is not a very smart thing for an industry to do ─ or for a city to condone.

The 2002 Census informed us that black construction firms participated in just $140.9 million (0.5%) of the $25.6 billion in greater Philadelphia’s construction industry revenues.

It’s also important to note that construction work, especially union construction work, is one of the few remaining sources of good wages and benefits available to workers who don’t have college educations. That's especially important because more than 80 percent of Philadelphians are not college graduates.

In Philadelphia, construction jobs are only 11 percent of all blue-collar jobs, but they do represent 38.5 percent of blue-collar jobs that pay wages above $20.00 per hour.

In addition, in a city wherein we have a significant number of ex-offenders, we can't overlook the fact that the construction industry, historically, has served as a vital, informal "re-entry" program. It has routinely provided the opportunity to previously incarcerated people to move solidly into the middle class--people who had been restricted from employment in banks, insurance companies and, even, in most government jobs.

To emphasize this point, a report by the University of Missouri, in September 2008, called "The Road to Good Jobs," described minority construction industry participation in 25 metro areas, including Philadelphia. The researchers found that blacks are employed in construction at well below their level of participation in the overall workforce, nationwide. They estimated that if blacks had commensurate access to such jobs, more than 137,000 additional black workers would be employed in the construction industry, in just those 25 locations.

Think back to every major, publicly funded construction project in the City’s recent history: The Eagles stadium, the Phillies ball park, the original Convention Center construction, the Convention Center expansion, etc., etc. In each case, there was resistance to black and minority inclusion, as businesses or workers, on those sites. And this, remarkably, was on projects funded with public dollars.

Usually, the employment opportunities on these very-Philadelphia projects are kept from Philadelphia residents and reserved, in the overwhelming majority, for people who live in the surrounding suburbs, or, even, in other states. That's not much help, at all, to a city whose population is comprised 61 percent by African Americans, Hispanics and Asians, and which, according to the Census Bureau, currently enjoys a 25 percent poverty rate, the highest among America's 10 largest cities.

So how did all of this begin?

Most of you are aware that the first African slaves in British North America arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. You might not be aware, however, that, closer to home, Philadelphia’s Quakers were also slave owners. They purchased their first slaves, the entire cargo of 150 Africans, from the merchant ship Isabella, in 1684.

While most Americans are familiar with the stereotype of the African slave as an agricultural field hand or as a domestic servant, there was also significant utilization of slaves as mechanics, builders and craftsmen.

African craftsmen, some of whom brought their craft with them from Africa, and others, who learned under an apprenticeship to a white craftsman, were considered more valuable than field slaves because of their training and ability. They made repairs to buildings and tools and worked as mechanics, blacksmiths and carpenters.

Accordingly, when the U.S. government decided to construct its Capitol Building in 1793, slaves in the Washington, D.C.-area made up a substantial portion of the labor pool. In fact, the 400 slaves who worked on the project represented half of the entire documented workforce.

"The History of Slave Laborers in the Construction of the Nation's Capitol," was a report written in 2005 for the members of the U.S. Congress, by William C. Allen, architectural historian of the Office of the Architect of the U.S. Capitol. Allen's report confirmed that, for one of the country’s most important, most recognizable and longstanding structures ─ the U.S. Capitol Building ─ African slaves actually cleared the trees on the site, dug up stumps, baked the bricks and dug the trenches for the foundation and walls. Black men sawed lumber for the interior walls and floors, cut sandstone from the Virginia quarries, and laid the stone that still holds up the Capitol, to this day. In addition, Allen pointed out that slaves were also responsible for some of the most impressive architectural features inside the Capitol building.

Ironically, when it was finished, the Capitol Building began to be commonly called “The Temple of Liberty."

In addition, the White House, itself, was built substantially with African slave labor. Pierre L’Enfant, who was appointed by President George Washington to design the new Capital City in 1791, hired slaves, from their masters, to help dig the foundation for the building. While the foundation was being dug, “25 able-bodied Negroes” were also brought on to quarry the stone for use in the walls of the White House. In fact, Allen went on to disclose that “The homes of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were all constructed with the help of slaves.”

Unaware, or in denial, about that history, many Philadelphians still doubt African-American aptitude to build even the smallest construction project.

Meanwhile, back in Philadelphia, in the 1800’s, according to Dennis Clark, there was a tremendous influx of largely unskilled Irish laborers into Philadelphia. “To obtain jobs, the immigrants had to compete, and some of the competition, as in the building trades, was racial, with the Irish displacing Negro mechanics (and craftsmen).” "Race riots between blacks and Irishmen occurred between 1832 and 1842 in Southwark and Schuylkill, for blacks were competitive with the Irish for menial jobs.”

In next week’s column, we’ll examine the dynamics of that relationship and how it still impacts black exclusion from the construction industry, even today.
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If It's No Longer "About Race," Are Civil Rights Groups Still Needed?

2010-03-03T13:15:00.000-08:00

When I saw what resulted from the meeting that Ben Jealous, Marc Morial and Rev. Al Sharpton had on Wednesday with the “first black president,” it reminded me that today was Valentine’s Day.

No, not because I "loved," or even liked, what they had to say about black-specific issues during their meeting (i.e., nothing), but rather because the outcome made me think about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which took place on February 14, 1929. That's when seven Chicago organized crime figures were lined up against a wall and shot in the back, in a garage, on Chicago’s North Side, by a group of gangsters working for the notorious Al Capone.

Unfortunately, the poor victims didn’t suspect until the very last minute that they were in trouble, because two of the “shooters” were dressed as Chicago policemen. The way the shooters carried themselves had given the victims a false sense that they would, somehow, be alright. In the same way, we believed that the "black leaders" were actually going to the White House to represent our interests. It turns out that we were wrong. What actually happened wasn't a literal "murder," but it did, arguably, signal the figurative “death” of three major civil rights organizations, and the total discreditation of their national leaders.

While it didn’t actually happen on St. Valentine’s Day, it did take place during Black History Month and that made what transpired especially hard to take.

In short, here’s what occurred in DC: The “first black president” had finally agreed to "give a meeting" to Jealous of the NAACP, Morial of the National Urban League and Sharpton of the National Action Network. Dorothy Height, of the National Council of Negro Women, had also been invited, but she, understandably, just couldn’t “handle” the snowstorm, and didn’t participate. For those of us who had always believed that it would be a "cold day" before the president actually held a meeting to discuss black issues, there was little surprise that this event took place during a blizzard.

After all, in a period wherein the national unemployment rate is 9.7 percent, the black unemployment rate has grown to an astounding 16.2 percent, 18.2 percent for black men and 43.8 percent for black teens, as compared to 23.5 percent for white teens.

It was the NAACP, wasn’t it, that sued two major banks last March, citing systematic “institutionalized racism?" Has racism been eliminated in America since then? I must have missed it.

While we're on the subject, it is still true that black businesses participate in only about .4 percent of all gross receipts generated by U.S. businesses. In that regard, the Transportation Equity Network recently disclosed that out of $163.8 million allocated to date in direct contracts to companies for street, highway and bridge construction under the Stimulus Program, $4.7 million, or 3 percent, has been distributed to Hispanic-owned firms, but not a single dollar has been won by African-American-owned businesses.

It’s also true that the Congressional Black Caucus has become increasingly outspoken against the way in which the President’s policies consistently ignore the ongoing economic crisis across the national black community.

Disappointingly, however, a little more than an hour after the meeting commenced, the three “black leaders” emerged, stood out on the front steps of the White House in the driving snowstorm – without the president, I must point out – and lamely explained that, somehow, they had traveled all the way to Washington, in a blizzard, to NOT talk about black-specific issues. It was a pitiful sight-- the three "national leaders," standing in the snow, under just one, way-too-small umbrella held by Rev. Al Sharpton, saying, with straight faces, that their conversation with the President hadn’t really been about race, at all. Even worse, the Associated Press pointed out that the meeting also didn’t “yield immediate announcements or initiatives.”

How disappointing – no black-specific topics, nothing immediate, no initiatives.

Would Hispanic, Jewish, gay, labor or Asian advocates have come out of the White House in that storm and admitted to their followers that they hadn’t even brought up their own topics?

I don’t think so.

How, then, do you explain Jealous's announcement that they had all agreed to focus on “geographic areas, urban and rural, where assistance should be located?” How do we accept the embarrassingly transparent effort to provide even more “cover” for the President, when Jealous blurted out something about the President’s non-black-specific program being a viable one “…if Congress lets it work?”

Then, reminding us all that it probably has been a very long time since he’s actually been "on the ground “in the black community,” the president of the NAACP curiously said: “When you’re on the ground, the poor black community is the same as the poor white community.”

That’s absolutely absurd and totally untrue. There is ample evidence, in fact, that poor black people are substantially "more poor" than poor white people. As an example, only 11.2 percent of whites live below the poverty level, as compared to 24.7 percent of blacks, and the average black household earns only about 60 percent of that earned by the average white household. Does that look "the same," Mr. Jealous?

Finally, remembering that he probably should say something that might resonate with a national black audience, Jealous began to channel Jesse Jackson or Jay-Z, and said: “This is about place. It’s not about race.”

How condescending. How embarrassing.

Even more curious, neither Sharpton nor Morial were able to say anything more constructive. Sticking very closely to the White House "talking points" that must have been given out along with the Kool-Aid, Sharpton made a commitment to try to get Republican Congressional leaders to pass the President's generic, mainstream “jobs legislation."

The three "black leaders" surely must know that the “rising tide lifting all boats thing" is just the President’s entirely inaccurate and shamefully weak excuse for not focusing directly on black issues, and that the “rising tide” does not, and never has, lifted “black boats” during previous economic cycles. In 2005, for example, when the U.S. economy still appeared to be robust, when real estate values were still rising, when the equities markets were still setting records, the overall unemployment rate in America was 5.3 percent, but the black unemployment rate was exactly twice as high, at 10.6 percent.

The "tide" had clearly risen, exactly how high had the"boat" risen for black folks, then?

How can our "black leaders" say that the African-American community’s economic problems have nothing at all to do with race, and then go right back to their offices, where they get paid handsomely for advocating and creating programs to reduce racial disparities? Don’t they realize that when they say those things, they also send a message that there is no longer a need to have a NAACP or a National Urban League or a National Action Network?

Maybe the three of them have simply grown tired of being "on the outside" and have increasingly come to enjoy receiving even an empty White House invitation. Maybe it’s no more complicated than that. But if that’s true, then I have a suggestion: Maybe it’s time for the three "national black leaders" to quit – today – and to make room for new people who have the energy and the commitment to hold the government and the private sector accountable, finally, for providing a level playing field for 40 million still-largely-marginalized black people in this country.

The three "black leaders" just demonstrated that they are no longer interested in doing the job. Without question, however, someone else has to seriously accept the responsibility. This is real, and it needs to be discussed.

Oh, and before I forget … Happy Valentine's Day!

###############

Does "Mixed Race" Emergence Mean the End of Black Momentum?

2010-03-01T13:38:00.000-08:00

I used to wonder how people really felt after they had lived through great social upheavals.

I imagine, for example, that the advent of air travel must have been starkly unsettling to people at the turn of the 20th century, who had lived their entire lives, up to that point, knowing only travel by land and sea.

All of a sudden, the whole transportational paradigm had changed for them and they were forced to move away from that which had always been familiar and taken for granted, and toward that which was suddenly the inescapable new reality.

I’m beginning to feel that way about the emergence of the "mixed race" phenomenon, here, in the U.S. I’m not concerned, at all, that there are, now, more and more people who proudly self-identify as "mixed race." I’ve always believed that people should be proud of whoever they are.

What I am concerned about, however, is whether the “mixed race” movement carries the potential, over time, to reduce black people, the racial identity I have always known, to statistical and cultural irrelevance, in the U.S. For example, February was Black History Month. How many more years, if this trend continues, will blacks have the demographic significance to qualify for such an annual cultural recognition?

I never thought I’d ever have to think about that.

But, according to 2008 U.S. Census estimates, 5.2 million people in the U.S. identified themselves as belonging to "more than one race," an increase of 3.4 percent over the previous year, marking “mixed race” as one of the fastest-growing demographic categories in the country.

The election of the first “mixed race” president, Barack Obama, just four months after the 2008 Census data were released, is expected to encourage even more people to self-identify as “mixed race,” in future Census counts.

There are caution signs to note, however. First of all, it seems, those whose "mix" includes African genes are still finding that they are a distinct minority, in America, even as compared to their "mixed race" peers. Among those classified, now, as "mixed race," only 10.9 percent are black/white mixes. That group is outnumbered by white/Asian persons at 11.9 percent and by white/Native Americans, the highest, at 17.3 percent.

Now, I’m going to start a little trouble.

Before there can be “mixed race” children, of course, there must clearly be inter-racial parents. And, here, a PEW Research Center report points out that, in 73 percent of all black/white mixed race couples, the husband is black. That must be indicative of something, but I’ll refrain. I’m sure the “sisters” will have a great deal more to say on that topic.

For me, the issue, as always, must be reduced to a political calculation and whether "mixed race" people will, eventually, become their own separate, voting bloc. While it’s now still too early to tell, I have read that “mixed race” Americans have begun to express some dissatisfaction with President Obama, because they consider him “one of their own,” yet “he does not champion the ideas of 'mixed race' identity,” as a local woman in an inter-racial marriage was quoted.

The noise from that particular debate, I’m sure, will grow louder as we approach future election cycles.

Even at this early stage, I can’t help noticing, however, that "mixed race" self-identifiers only voted 74 percent for the new, "mixed race" president, as compared to 92 percent for the black race-only self-identifiers.

Is that where we’re heading? Will "mixed race" voters line up, more and more, to vote for "mixed race" candidates, or will they tend to vote as they did in 2008, more for the white candidate than black voters did? Even further, will they, having grown more secure in their own mixed identity, begin to move out of predominantly black and predominantly white neighborhoods and into predominantly "mixed race" communities? Will they establish "mixed race" schools and universities?

Hey, wait a minute. I’ve already seen this movie.

We’ve already had an uncomfortable history of what were, then, predominantly mulatto and light-complexioned communities, schools, churches, universities and social clubs, in the U.S. Even some of our most prominent HBCU’s were known, in years past, as being predominantly populated by mulatto or light-complexioned students. In fact, some of those institutions and organizations are still functioning today.

Hey, I remember leaving North Philadelphia one night to go to a party in what I thought was just another black community along Lincoln Drive, when I was in college. I will never forget, after approaching one of the young ladies, there, and asking her to dance, being told by her that I was "too dark," and that she just couldn’t bring herself to dance with me (I probably don't need to mention that I actually hadn’t been INVITED to that party, but that some friends and I had heard about it, on the street).

Most of that kind of complexion-based class consciousness, thank God, has begun to dissipate in our community, over recent decades. But, now, with the emergence of an otherwise sincere "mixed race" movement, I’m not so sure what to expect.

Aside from Black History Month, the question now is whether black businesses will lose customers who were previously black; and whether we will need, or support, black radio stations or newspapers, once all of those in our community, who might possibly claim "mixed race" status have done so. Will advertisers start focusing more and more on reaching "mixed race" consumers, at the expense of the black market? And, how long will it take them to determine the "annual buying power" of "mixed race" people?

Not long, I would guess.

Once those of us who are not only part-white, but also part-Asian, part-Cherokee, part-Apache, and part-Comanche, are finished self-identifying, will there be enough black Americans left to form a critical mass? How far below the current black national population count of 40 million people will the future black Census count drop?

In South Africa, during the Apartheid era, in an effort to create divisiveness among non-whites, the ruling Afrikaner population established its own racial classifications. They consisted of blacks, whites, Indians, and Coloureds (their version of people who were of "mixed race").

As part of the bargain, Coloureds were permitted to live and worship separately from black South Africans and were also permitted to vote for white candidates. In addition, they didn’t have to carry the demeaning “pass cards” that were mandatory for black South Africans. Coloureds also spoke Afrikaans, rather that the indigenous Zulu or Xhosa dialects of the dominant, black population group.

It’s interesting to note that the Coloureds who, thereby, were classified as "not quite white," but "at least not black,” in South Africa, wound up voting in significant numbers against Nelson Mandela’s presidency in 1994, in the country’s first, all-race elections. The Coloureds were reportedly concerned that a Mandela victory and a winning ANC party would take away the “privileges” they had enjoyed under Apartheid.

But that was there.

So far, there’s no reason to expect a return of the old “light, bright, damn-near white” phenomenon that existed years ago in black communities, here, or the highly separatist profile of the South African Coloureds, but.... you never know.

I used to take for granted the fact that I was part of a proud and growing community of people who would always find common ground and mutual support in their shared black experience. I took for granted that, over time, 40 million black Americans would grow to 45, 50 or 55 million. Now, I’m not so sure.

As I said, I’m beginning to feel that we’re on the verge of a very traumatic time in black history.

We’ll see.

#######

A Few Things Obama Should Have Added to His SOTU

2010-02-23T11:03:00.000-08:00

For awhile, I was just disappointed with Barack Obama’s glaring disinterest in addressing the longstanding social and economic disparities between blacks and whites in this country.

But, since his first State of the Union (SOTU) address late last month, I’ve moved beyond disappointment and I'm now verging on total despair.

Maybe I expected too much from him. Maybe he really is the “president of all the people” and perhaps he doesn’t really have time in his busy schedule to be bothered with black issues. I’m sure he's got a very important job.

After all, how would it look?

So what if African Americans gave him, without much direct outreach at all from his campaign, 96 percent of our vote. The fact is that neither Barack Obama, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel nor, even, the ever-loyal and obedient Donna Brazile ever made a direct commitment that there would be a significant improvement for black people if Barack Obama were to be elected. We just sort of, somehow, came to that conclusion on our own – and we voted accordingly.

The truth is that the "first black president" never really, directly, specifically, promised to do anything at all for black voters – and, so far, he’s kept his word.

If you were confused about the president’s "post-Scott Brown" shift to a more conservative political agenda and his move farther away, apparently, from African -American issues, you really should have listened carefully to his rather-long-ish SOTU address.

First of all, in what turned out to be the lengthiest of the 412 speeches the president had given over the past year, he failed somehow, to mention the words, “black,” “African American” or even “Negro,” which his own Census Bureau now says is an appropriate description for us, again – whether we like it or not.

I couldn’t help thinking that you wouldn’t even have to be the "first black president” to recognize that African-American communities are still a part of the nation, as a whole, and that they still deserve--no matter what conservative pundits or the president's advisors say--full and equal access to the country's economic opportunities.

In that regard, there are quite a few other initiatives that the "first black president" should have announced that evening, if he was concerned, at all, about “doing the right thing.”

For example, while he certainly made it his business to insert the phrase “middle class” into his remarks and to give it a high priority, there was no commensurate mention of low-to-moderate income people, who constitute a significant, and rapidly growing, percentage of the country’s population.

In “Obama world,” it seems, if you fall below the middle-class income floor of $55,000 per year, you also, apparently, fall off the president’s radar and are no longer deserving of the government's attention.

Perhaps the president doesn’t really know that 86 percent of the households in this country that are defined as "middle class" because they earn more than $55,331 annually, were headed by a person of European descent and that, conversely, only 7.4 percent of such households are headed by an African American.

Maybe he doesn’t realize that when he talks about focusing his attention on issues that are important to the "middle class," he’s effectively excluding 92 percent of black people from his focus.

But, then again, maybe he does understand that...completely.

I’m really confused about how the president could look out at the vast landscape of economic disparities in this country and only single out, during his speech, the need to ensure that "women get equal pay for an equal day's work.”

Granted, a recent report from the National Women’s Law Center points out that non-Hispanic white women earn just 73 cents for every dollar earned by white men.

A bigger issue, it would seem--if the president were interested in being fair about this issue at all-- is the fact that the average black household earns about 58 cents for every dollar earned by a white household in America, and that’s down from 63 cents, over a recent 30-year period.

I would think that even the most hard-hearted, right wing conservatives would be moved positively by an announcement by the president that he is now interested in eliminating the black-white poverty gap of 26 percent to 9 percent; or the black-child-to-white-child poverty gap of 36 percent to 11 percent, or the black-senior-citizen-to-white-senior-citizen poverty gap of 22 percent to 7 percent.

But, hey, how would it look if the president made a specific mention of black economic disparities? What would that do to his approval ratings? First things first, I guess. What do we want … blood?

Let me further remind the president and his advisors that even though white females do earn just 73 cents for every dollar earned by a white male, black females earn substantially less than that, at 61 cents.

But here's something else for the Administration to consider: In order to even have your level of income compared, at all, you need to have a job, in the first place. As dire as things have gotten for white females, as of December 2009, the unemployment rate for women stood at 8.2 percent, as compared to 16.2 percent for blacks, overall, and 18.2 percent for black males.

Didn’t the president think that was deserving of a mention while he gave his SOTU speech? Isn’t that a part of the State of the Union in 2010? But, then again, how would that have looked?

Even further, a 2005 report from the American Sociological Association(ASA), “Race, Ethnicity, and the American Labor Market,” disclosed that while 40 percent of white females in the labor market do not have jobs, that figure is closer to 50 percent for black males, and that African-American women are twice as likely as white women to be unemployed.

Hello?!

The report further stated: “The roughly 2-to-1 ratio in unemployment rates between African Americans and whites (for both men and women) has been constant throughout economic expansions and recessions, despite a shrinking gap in educational differences between the two groups.”

I don’t want to go out on a limb or anything, but it seems to me that it would have been a good thing for the president to have read that section of the ASA report before he began saying that the best thing he could do for the black economy is to improve the overall economy.

This report clearly indicates that there is absolutely no evidence for the president’s position and that there is a strong need to have a specific focus on black economic under-representation, if we have any hope of repairing the overall economy.

In my opinion, the president could have demonstrated real leadership and an informed problem-solving style by announcing an initiative to address that issue, but, then again, maybe he just didn’t want to be seen as doing anything that would "favor" black citizens.

"Favoring" the overwhelmingly white middle class? Fine. "Favoring white females?" Perfectly acceptable. "Favoring" gays and their issues with the military? Timely and appropriate, according to his speech. Immigration reform? Long overdue, he would want you to believe.

Seriously, if the President of the United States can say all of that, and if he had 70 minutes in which to say it, why couldn’t he have said a single word that would be specifically supportive of substantive African-American concerns?

Would just that statement have been enough to ruin his whole SOTU report?

Would just that expression of concern about the plight of the country's 40 million black residents have been enough to destroy his entire political career?

Would it have looked so bad?

You tell me.

#########

Maybe Obama’s Opponents Aren’t Anti- Black, After All.

2010-02-15T07:50:00.000-08:00

There’s no question. The week of January 18th, the week in which he celebrated his one-year anniversary in the White House, wasn’t the best of times for the man we’ve been calling “America’s first black president.”

It was coming at him from all sides, it seemed. There was the normal run of bad news from Afghanistan, the continuing horror of after-shocks in Haiti; there were more negative headlines about joblessness and the still-worsening economy; and several polls released that reflected continuing declines in his job approval ratings.

As if all of that wasn’t enough, the week before that, the “Massachusetts Miracle” happened, when a heretofore unknown, underdog, Republican state senator from Massachusetts, named Scott Brown, became a national household word and the most sought-after political interview in the country, by beating an endorsed Democrat named Martha Coakley in the special election to replace “Ted” Kennedy in the U.S. Senate.

This all happened despite the fact that the president had staked his political reputation on a Coakley victory by flying into Boston to rally the troops two days before the election.

Unfortunately the results in Massachusetts were no better than they had been when he tried to help two other fellow-Democrats, last year, in New Jersey and in Virginia.

Things had gotten so crazy that there was speculation that Mr. Brown’s election could almost singlehandly lead to the demise of the Health Reform legislation, and a shut down, for all intents and purposes, of the Obama Administration’s entire political agenda. By mid-month, there was speculation that Barack Obama, following the “Miracle,” was now destined to be a one-term president. There was even talk about Scott Brown being considered as a strong candidate for president, himself, in 2012.

On top of all of that, and complicating the whole national leadership issue for Mr. Obama, were the results from a late November Pew Research study that raised, once again, the nagging question of his racial identity and its political implications.

With everything moving so swiftly in a negative direction, in whatever few, quiet moments the president had available to him, he could still take consolation in the fact that black Americans, in the main, were still solidly in his corner.

In the Gallup Poll’s presidential job approval survey for the week of January 11, 42 percent of whites said they approved of the job the president was doing, 69 percent of Hispanics approved and a whopping 91 percent of blacks approved.

What the pollsters and, perhaps, what Mr. Obama, himself, don’t seem to understand is that black folks are committed to the “black president” no matter how hard he works to separate himself from them, politically, or how much, apparently, they suffer under his administration’s economy.

In fact, a recent Pew Research Center survey made the point that there is a significant disconnect between the way black survey respondents answer questions posed to them about their economic circumstances and the actual level of economic pain being experienced in the African-American community.

It’s no secret that the most recent national unemployment data disclosed a 10 percent unemployment level for Americans, in general, but a 16.2 percent unemployment rate for black Americans, and an even-worse 18.2 percent unemployment rate for African-American males.

Despite that, the percentage of blacks who rate the national economy as “excellent or good,” according to Pew, stood at 14 percent in December, down just two percentage points from December 2006. Over the same period, the percentage of whites who rated the economy as “excellent or good” declined from 42 percent to 7 percent.

How can that be, you ask?

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that most black Americans have made an emotional investment in Barack Obama’s success, much in the same way that we normally do with all significant “black firsts.”

For better or worse, we believe our destinies are tied to his, because he is a “first black.” That being the case, we not only have a great deal of pride in his achievement, we also feel, deep down inside, that if he fails, we also will fail. If he, somehow, does a poor job as President, we believe, it will be a very long time, if ever, before another African American will receive serious consideration for the job.

We did the same thing for other ‘black firsts.’ When Benjamin O. Davis was promoted to being the first African-American general in the history of the U.S. Army, black men and women across the country who were absolutely opposed to war and who wanted nothing at all to do with the U.S. military, rooted for him to be successful.

When Shirley Chisholm became the first black female to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, black people ─ and especially black females ─ prayed that she would be successful ─ because they were proud, and because they knew that, based on her performance, both black and white voters would determine whether any other black females would ever deserve to be elected to Congress.

In the same way, Guion Bluford, the first black astronaut, in 1983, and Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut, in 1992, brought black folks back to cheer for the “space program.” The list goes on: Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court Justice was absolutely important to us, as is Xerox’s Ursula Burns, the first black female CEO of a Fortune 500 Corporation, who assumed her position as recently as May 2009.

In the same way, black folks want , more than anything to see Barack Obama be successful ─ so much so that I believe that they are actually reluctant to say anything negative about him to inquiring pollsters ─ even if they have not been absolutely pleased with his performance. I’m not saying that they would actually lie to the pollster, I’m just saying that they are extremely reluctant to say anything at all that would make him look bad. That’s because, in their minds, he is ‘the first black president” ─ and that’s enough for them.

But, in that regard, here’s something that’s really strange: With all of the talk about the U.S. having elected its “first black president,” Pew Research Center, in its telephone survey done during November 2009, asked black, white and Hispanic voters: “Do you think of Obama as black or mixed-race?”

Shockingly, only 23 percent of Hispanics said they think of Obama as a black man. The majority of Hispanics (61%) said they see him as “mixed-race.”

It was much the same kind of response from whites, only 24 percent of whom think of Obama as black. Fifty three percent of whites see him, also, as “mixed-race.”

It appears, in the minds of most American voters, even though a man named Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election in November 2008, they still don’t believe they’ve ever cast their vote for a “black” candidate for that office.

If that’s really true, then we’re way off base when we suspect that the President’s opponents are anti-black. If we believe Pew Research, it appears that a certain percentage of “Obama haters.” are simply “anti-mixed race.”

Who knew?

With the country’s voters admittedly confused about the President’s actual ethnicity, those of us who want to know the truth have no choice left but to find out directly from him how he defines himself.

Perhaps we can gain some insight by understanding something that Mr. Obama said in a telephone presentation to a conference of 2000 Asian-American leaders in May of last year.
This is what he said: “I am a Pacific Islander…I consider myself one of you.”

Now what?

Is Barack Obama, after all this time, not really black at all? Is he really the "first Asian/Pacific Island president?"

Who knew?

###

The U.S. Census: A Tradition of Black Undercounts Since 1787

2010-02-08T09:47:00.000-08:00

There's a long history of blacks being undercounted in U.S. Census-related activities. Remember the shameful “three-fifths of a person” section of the U.S. Constitution, and how it was used to hold down the number of Congressional representatives in the southern states? While it pre-dated the first, formal, national census, it certainly was the first black Census issue, and things have gotten only marginally better, over the years.

In December, several black leaders met with U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, whose department is ultimately responsible for conducting the Census. As part of that meeting, they warned African Americans, as they seem to do every ten years, about how important it is “to be counted,” that approximately 3 million blacks were actually undercounted in the 2000 Census and that whites, on the other hand, were overcounted, by one percent.

Then, as they always do, they strongly recommended that the whole “undercount thing” could be quickly rectified, if the Census Bureau simply increased that part of its advertising budget that focuses on black communities. That’s what Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the NAACP and National Urban League all said in their meeting, and afterwards, in comments to the assembled media.

The more I listened, the more I thought that I had heard all of that before. It sounded exactly like what they said prior to the 2000 Census, prior to the 1990 Census and just before the 1980 Census.

I wasn’t impressed.

I just don’t think the meeting, the press conference or the well-worn cry for more advertising dollars, carried enough impact to “bust a grape” on this critically important issue. In fact, I think the Census Bureau is paying scant attention to "our official black spokespeople" on this issue, and has apparently decided to throw in some blatant disrespect along with its normal disregard and ambivalence on Census matters related to African Americans.

How else do you explain the Census Bureau’s recent announcement that it would return-- in 2010-- to including the word “Negro” as an option for people of African descent who want to describe themselves on their questionnaires?

Somewhere in Washington, D.C., men and women wearing expensive suits, in very well-furnished offices, are probably “cracking up” laughing and “high-fiving” each other, right now. I don’t even think they, themselves, expected to get away with that one. But, so far, they have.

Negro?

Where did that come from--Harry Reid?

The truth is that the U.S. Census, according to the Constitution, was conceived to produce an “actual enumeration” of the nation’s population every ten years and to establish a basis for determining the number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives from each state. For me, however, the numbers just never seem to "add up."

One of the most confusing aspects of the entire Census process is how illegal immigrants--people who are not even U.S. citizens-- are routinely included in the Census count and how their numbers contribute substantially to the exploding numbers of Congressional members in certain states. Is it a coincidence that the three states in the country with the greatest number of illegal immigrants--California, Texas and New York -- are also the same three states with the greatest number of members in the U.S. House of Representatives?

No.

In addition, do you ever wonder why the southern states, wherein black slaves significantly out-numbered white families, now have so few black residents, according to the Census counts? For example, South Carolina, whose population was about 75 percent black, immediately following the Civil War, is listed , according to the Census, at 28.5 percent black. North Carolina is officially 21.6 percent black; Georgia, 30 percent; Alabama, 26.4 percent; Mississippi, 37.2 percent, and so on, and so on…

If the numbers in those former slave states were anywhere close to being accurate, there would have been no logical reason for the white majority in those states to try to intimidate black voters at southern polling places, over so many years. There would have been no need to threaten lynchings or to invent the Ku Klux Klan.

In a related vein, in the 1930 Census, the “counters” were advised that a person who had both white and “Negro” blood was to be listed on the Census form as a "Negro," no matter how small the percentage of black blood. On the other hand, and inconsistently, Census “counters” in 1940 were instructed that Mexican Americans should be listed on the Census forms as “white,” regardless of their percentage of Mexican blood. That may be the primary reason why an actor born in Chihuahua, Mexico, as Antonio Rudolfo Oaxaca was able to rise so easily to mainstream Hollywood stardom, when he arrived in the United States. Simply by changing his name to Anthony Quinn, Mr. Oaxaca was accepted by the movie industry, and by most movie-goers, as a "white" actor.

By 1980, the Census Bureau, which never has had an incentive to produce an accurate count of the black population, or to contribute to black political and economic empowerment through its numbers, admitted that low-income, minority groups were definitely being undercounted, by about 3.2 million persons. By the year 2000, the Census Bureau announced it planned to use statistical sampling to more accurately count historically underserved black and minority communities.

Curiously, that announcement was met with a lawsuit by Congressional Republicans, which led to the Supreme Court prohibiting the use of statistical sampling in the production of Census counts.
For the 2010 exercise, the Census Bureau has already warned us that the people most likely to be undercounted are those who are economically disadvantaged, unattached/single, and those living in high density ethnic enclaves, i.e., the “hood.”
Here we go, again.

As hard as it is for me to admit, given my own marketing and communications background, what’s keeping the Census Bureau from, finally, producing fair and accurate counts of blacks in this country has very little to do with its communications budget.

There are two, major complicating factors: Dating back to 1790, there are entrenched special interests in Washington, DC who, for blatantly political reasons, are absolutely opposed to having an honest tally of black Americans; and secondly, the Census Bureau's plan to hire 1.2 million people to go door-to-door to conduct its research is an outmoded concept.

That approach may be good for stimulating temporary job growth, but a computer-assisted review of birth certificates, death certificates, legal immigration records, and other database information should be sufficient to provide the true count needed for determining political representation and government funding levels. Other optional questions can be addressed a lot more cost-effectively through low-margin-of-error sampling techniques.

Somehow, I believe the Census Bureau, the Commerce Department, the U.S. Congress and the President of the United States all know this. They apparently just don’t feel the need to tell us precisely how many African Americans there really are in this country.

Reminds me of William “Boss” Tweed. He was the guy who famously led Tammany Hall, New York City’s all-powerful, Democratic Party political machine in the mid-to-late1800’s. Once he was featured in a political cartoon, responding to a question about whether people in New York City would turn out to vote in an upcoming election.

Tweed was depicted as saying: “As long as I count the ballots, what are you going to do about it?”

That’s pretty much where black folks find themselves with regard to the consistently inaccurate Census data that have limited their full political and economic participation in this country, since the days of George Washington.

Trust me, it’s not the advertising, or the people who go door-to-door, or whether people in black communities fill out their questionnaires. The problem is the lingering, racial biases and political agendas of the people who are actually doing the counting.

Someone in high office needs to change that, once and for all, sooner than later.

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When Blacks Become Lawyers, Does Discrimination Finally Stop?

2010-01-13T13:02:00.000-08:00

To paraphrase an old saying: “Despair is seeing your lawyer being discriminated against.”

Seriously, in a society wherein we've been taught to rely on advice from our attorneys when we've encountered discrimination, it's very disconcerting to realize that they, themselves, aren't being treated fairly.

Race-based economic, housing, professional and educational disparities are wide and growing wider. We're finding, now, that not even highly educated, well-trained lawyers have been spared.

Up to now, we’ve been programmed to believe that blacks who are having the most difficult time being fairly included in this economy are those who are less educated, those who “haven’t applied themselves” or those who may have fallen into conflict with the criminal justice system.

That’s what they tell us.

The fact is, however, that some of the very best and brightest, most well-educated, most law-abiding and career-focused black people in this country are still “catching a bad break" – right now – simply because of their race.

The most glaring and surprising example of that phenomenon, I guess, is how African Americans are being treated in the legal profession – not the defendants, but the black lawyers, themselves.

It almost makes you want to take up a collection for all of the well-dressed lawyers in town...almost.

To get a handle on all of this, let’s start with a story you may have seen in last week’s New York Times, the one that pointed out that, over a 15- year period ending in 2008, the percentage of black law students has declined from 7.9 percent to 7.3 percent of all law school students. This happened, said the Times, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had ruled in 2003 (Grutter v. Bollinger) that race absolutely can be taken into account in law school admissions because there is a compelling state interest in having diverse student bodies in law schools.

Despite the fact that black law school applicants have actually improved their scores on law school admissions tests, and their grade point averages, over the period, fewer are being admitted and a smaller percentage is currently enrolled than were attending law school in 1993.

If that looks to you as if the so-called "best and brightest” black students are actually moving backwards rather than forward in their career pursuits, regardless of hard work, clean records and higher test scores, then you, my friend, are very, very observant.

In fact, the Times also pointed out, data captured in a study by a Columbia University professor named Conrad Johnson disclosed that, from 2003 to 2008, 61 percent of black applicants were denied acceptance at law schools to which they applied. By comparison only 34 percent of white applicants' applications were rejected.

As bad as this all seems to be for black law students, it may be even even worse for you, if you believe legally trained blacks will bring greater levels of awareness and sensitivity to a justice system that sorely needs it.

For example, another report last week revealed that although whites in New York City, as a group, are the heaviest users of marijuana, they are least likely to be incarcerated for it. The same report indicated that blacks in New York are seven times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. In fact, during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s first eight years in office, marijuana arrests increased by 50 percent, as compared to the experience during Rudolph Guiliani’s term as mayor, and 87 percent of those arrested for those crimes were black or Latino.

Interviewed by a Times reporter, John Nussbaumer, from the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Auburn Hills, Michigan, couldn’t have said it better: “…as the American population becomes more diverse … the lawyer corps and judges are remaining predominantly white.”

Now, if we had evidence that racial bias is no longer factored into critical everyday decisions, such as black admittance to law schools, then the race of our lawyers and judges wouldn’t matter. But, clearly, it still does.

For Philadelphia, the nationwide reduction in black law school admissions simply projects that an already shameful record of black inclusion at major law firms will probably get worse.

It appears that most black law school grads have just a slim prospect of landing a job at a credible local law firm or an opportunity to be invited to serve as a partner or shareholder. According to the Association for Legal Career Professionals (NALP), Philadelphia law firms have done an unquestionably sub-standard job of attracting talented black attorneys and moving them up to partner/shareholder level.

In fact, according to NALP’s 2008 survey of law firms in 46 cities, there were 61,572 total partners practicing law in those places, of which 5.92 percent were “minority” and just 1.68 percent were black.

Because Philadelphia is one of the five largest cities in the U.S., because it's home to some of the country’s most prestigious law schools and because the city’s population is about 45 percent black, you’d expect the number and percentage of black partners, here, to be substantially greater than the national average and greater than that in most cities.

If you expected that, you’d be wrong.

The percentage of black partners at Philadelphia mainstream law firms, according to NALP stands at 1.75 percent, which translates to about 22 persons.

Let's think this through: We’ve got about 626,000 black people in Philadelphia and just 22 of them are partners in mainstream law firms, making them members of one of the most exclusive "clubs" in America. That's embarrassing.

As bad as that sounds, you don’t actually begin to realize how much work needs to be done to correct the problem, here, until you understand that Philadelphia’s percentage of black partners ranks behind 19 other cities in this category. Philadelphia has a lower percentage of black law partners than Atlanta (4.1 %), Baltimore (3.18 %), New Orleans (3.16%), Washington D.C. (2.92%) and the Detroit area (2.87%). Even worse, law firms in cities and towns such as Birmingham, Alabama; Charlotte, N.C.; Miami; Columbus, Ohio; Cleveland; Richmond, V.A. (the former seat of the Confederacy), and even Wilmington, Delaware, have a higher percentage of black partners.

In a recent conversation with one of the city's black law firm partners, I learned that, in 1976, there were actually 26 black partners in major Philadelphia law firms, as compared to the 22 who hold those positions today, 34 years later. In addition, according to the same partner, there is a direct correlation between Philadelphia's relatively small African-American business community and the lower propensity of large law firms to create black partners. The belief is that if the firms were seriously interested in attracting the business of substantial black-owned companies, they would feel compelled to create more black partners to lead those efforts.

Sounds like one more good, synergistic, reason to nurture black entrepreneurship and business growth in our City.

Black partners also firmly believe that the City government, itself, could play a much more impactful role in encouraging the creation of additional black partners. It appears that the City has in recent years made significant outside legal expenditures, without communicating any desire that qualified firms that do work for Philadelphia should also employ black and minority associates and partners.

Apparently, a business practice modification as simple as that would incentivize black-, Hispanic- and Asian-focused recruiting practices at the large firms.

O.K., here’s the question: "Now that we all have a better understanding of the problem, what are we going to do about it?"

Or, don't we really care?

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