April 02, 2015
By Walter L Fields
NNPA Columnist
In the course of one week we witnessed the burden of being young, gifted and Black.
First, the Little League baseball Phenom Mo’ne Davis was insulted by a White college baseball player who called the abundantly talented young girl a ‘slut’ in a Tweet in response to news that Disney was planning to make a movie about her incredible rise to fame. The player, Joey Casselberry, quickly retracted the tweet in the face of a wave of criticism in cyberspace but was promptly dismissed by the Bloomsburg University team.
Then there were the toxic tweets from Jenna and Jacque Huggins, the daughters of West Virginia head basketball coach Bob Huggins, calling Maryland basketball player Dez Wells a rapist. The West Virginia team defeated Maryland in an early round of the NCAA championship tournament. The Terrapins star guard had been kicked off the Xavier University team in 2012 after being accused of sexual assault. A grand jury decided charges against Wells were not warranted and he later settled a lawsuit he brought against Xavier.
Not far from the Morgantown campus of the University of West Virginia and College Park home of the University of Maryland, a young, Black University of Virginia undergraduate student was accosted by police. Martese Johnson had his face bashed into the pavement and bloodied by Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) agents outside a pub near the UVA campus. The episode was captured on videotape. Johnson had proper ID and was not resisting arrest when the ABC agents pummeled him, causing injuries that required 10 stitches in his head.
What these three incidents have in common is obvious – Mo’ne Davis, Dez Wells and Martese Johnson are all young and Black. Lurking just beyond the obvious tie is the quality of their blackness – they are all gifted and confident in their identities. It seems in 21st century America to be young, gifted and Black is now a crime; an offense against society’s typecasting of Black youth as violent, unintelligent and worthless.
The intensity of these assaults – oral and physical – is sharpened by decades of conditioned hate, forged by theories of Black inferiority and White supremacy. The venomous words electronically spat upon Davis and Wells, and the force leveled upon Martese Johnson, are simply the byproducts of the permissiveness of racism in our nation.
It is the success of Davis, Wells and Johnson that defies and counters the mythology of Black depravity. And it is success that triggers the backlash, awakens the racist beast and brings to the surface sentiments that heretofore might have only been expressed in private conversations. By succeeding these young people frustrate those who harbor bias and leave them little room to fully exercise their demons. For some, touch pad keystrokes become a potent weapon to voice hatred from afar; sort of the lazy man’s racism that tempers it but still empowers the perpetrator. The police involved in the micro-aggression at the University of Virginia? They were acting under the assumption of “Black threat” and sending a message in the process.
This is the cruel joke played upon Black youth in America. The public message communicated to young Black women and men is to pursue excellence and rise above challenges, and be exemplary in their civic lives. That message is countered by the aural and visual assault upon their sensibilities that reduces them to thugged out and hyper-sexualized caricatures. When young Blacks rise above this stereotyping, they are then reduced to racial objects, ridiculed for being audacious in their success.
Mo’ne Davis was a “slut” in the eyes of a young White male because he believes her success is undeserving of the attention it is receiving. The privileged White daughters of a basketball coach of a major university made the determination a grand jury could not, on a charge a university could not prove and was forced to reach settlement with the accused.
Still, Dez Wells is branded a rapist because he excelled on the basketball court. Martese Johnson was just another young Black guy, a human punching bag for police who could casually dismiss the thought that they were bloodying a student enrolled in the nearby prestigious university, or more importantly, a human being and someone’s son.
Collectively, these incidents bring into sharper focus the racist rants of former University of Oklahoma SAE fraternity members in that now infamous videotape. This is the world in which young Black Americans live. It is a sobering reality that a generation that many hoped would truly be post-racial (as if that will ever be the case) is more deeply entrenched in racism than the prior generation. And institutional racism has a vice grip upon young Blacks that is more consequential than white mobs of decades past.
It’s enough to make me take a trip to the nearest Starbucks. I’ll take a latte with some truth talk.
March 26, 2015
By James Clingman
NNPA Columnist
The experiment that featured a Black man in the White house is on the downside now. Folks in the Obama administration are busy looking for their next job and jumping ship faster than rats. But you can’t blame them; that’s the way it is in politics. You ride your horse as long as you can and then you find a new horse. That’s just what folks in presidential administrations do. The question is: What horse will Black folks ride now?
With Barack, came new line-dances at the clubs, new phrases, and new “hope” that would finally move Black people to the front of the line for a “change.” We were large and in charge, big-ballers and shot-callers, cool and stylish, but we soon found that we were not really running anything. Having bet the farm on our horse, we now look on in agony as he comes down the home stretch. We want to move the finish line a bit farther down the track because we don’t yet have the victory, and it looks like we’re not going to get it. All we can hope for now is just a little more euphoria before November 2016.
Black folks are now between Barack and hard place. We don’t know if we are pitching or catching. As that Richard Pryor movie asked, “Which way is up?” We invested nearly 100 percent of our political capital in our current president, thinking we would get a decent Return on Investment (ROI). Unless there is a drastic uptick in the next few months, our investment will be lost forever, because we know this experiment will not be done again for a long time.
Between Barack and a hard place means that Black people, collectively, are now without a comfortable place to turn, without someone we can look to for hope and change, and without what we considered to be a foothold in politics. Being between Barack and a hard place is causing anxiety, doubt, and even fear among some of our people.
Being between Barack and a hard place will make many of us revert to our political ways by staying on the Democrat’s wagon because the Republicans ignore us and don’t like us, anyway. We will rationalize our allegiance to the same party that takes us for granted, however. And some of us will opt out of the system altogether because we are so frustrated and angry at how the previous two terms went down.
It’s very uncomfortable being between Barack and a hard place. To whom will we turn? Will Hillary help us? Will one of the Republican candidates help us? Maybe Dr. Ben (Carson) will win and come to our rescue. What are Black folks to do in 2016 as we now find ourselves wedged between Barack and a hard place with no wiggle room? Maybe we could “apologize” to Hillary for abandoning her in 2008. Maybe we could do a public mea culpa to the Republicans. After all, we need someone to turn to now, right?
Well, here are a few thoughts. Maybe we can now turn to ourselves. Maybe now we will fully understand the error of our ways and make appropriate change. Maybe we will finally work together as a solid bloc to leverage our precious votes against the 2016 candidates. Maybe we will understand that no matter who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Black folks still have to be vigilant about our political and economic position in this country. And maybe, as we struggle to remove ourselves from between Barack and a hard place, at least a small percentage of us will organize around economic and political empowerment.
The Barack experiment was cool. He sings like Al Green, dances like the steppers in Chicago, shoots three-pointers on the basketball court, plays golf with Alonzo Mourning, and even gets his preach on when speaking to Black audiences. In other words, Barack could make us feel real good, so much so that we kicked back, relaxed, and waited for him to fix our problems, to speak on our behalf, and to give us the same deference he gives to other groups. Now, we find ourselves between Barack and a hard place – no turning room, very little breathing room, and much uncertainty about our future in the political arena.
There will be a new sheriff in town in January 2017, and our guy will stand there with him or her to give congrats and well wishes right before he rides off into the sunset, back to Chicago, Hawaii, or wherever, to enjoy the fruit of his labor, and I do mean fruit. He and his family will be well taken care of, but most of our families will be in the same or worse condition, having been stuck between Barack and a hard place for eight years.
March 19, 2015
By Walter Fields
NNPA Columnist
Every morning, when I fix my teenage daughter breakfast and drop her off to school, she reminds me that #BlackGirlsMatter. Her journey has not been easy; made all the more difficult by an experience, beginning in middle school and persisting to high school, that threatened to crush her dreams by denying her access to classes education professionals deem critical to demonstrate college readiness. Had it not been for the advocacy of her parents, and the threat of litigation, my daughter would have been cast aside and surrendered to a curriculum that was not simply less challenging, but inadequate by the standards of competitive colleges and an increasingly analytical and technical workforce. Today, in her junior year, she remains one of only a handful of Black girls enrolled in advanced honors and advanced placement classes in her public high school, Columbia Senior High School in suburban Maplewood, N.J.
My daughter’s story is neither unique or an aberration. It is the reality facing Black girls in America. This is what the recently released report Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected confirms. The Center for Intersectional and Social Policy Studies at Columbia University and the African American Policy Forum, authors of the report, have provided the nation with a powerful narrative of the dilemma of Black girls in our country. The report describes the disproportionate punishment meted out to Black girls in school, with data showing that they are suspended six times the rate of white girls as ‘zero tolerance’ policies hit with racial precision. Black girls also receive more severe sentences than other girls when they enter the juvenile justice system and are the fasting growing population in the criminal justice system. They are also victims of bullying, sexual harassment and violence in school. Our girls are being pushed out but there is little public alarm, policy focus or media attention to their marginalization. Unlike our understandable focus on Black boys, as seen in President Obama’s ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ initiative, our girls are being left to fend for themselves. And we are losing them.
Black girls suffer the discriminatory equivalent of hypertension. Racially based gender bias is a silent killer. It infests the spirits of girls with self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy, and early on narrows their possibilities. Black girls mostly suffer in silence, absorbing the blows, but incurring significant psychological damage along the way. Bright lights are extinguished early as Black girls encounter institutional bias in school buildings where their uniqueness, in everything from hair to dress to personality, is deemed anti-social and popular culture bombards them with stereotypes of Black females ranging from helpless to raging anger or hyper-sexualized. The intelligent, inquisitive, creative, caring and beautiful Black girl is virtually an urban myth in America when the imagery of them on the cultural landscape is surveyed.
Making matters worse is a nation that hides the suffering of Black girls from public view. Perhaps that is why I find President Obama’s recently announced ‘Let the Girls Learn’ initiative so disappointing. The White House looked beyond the shores of this nation to launch a global offensive for girls when if they simply Googled a zip code in Washington D.C., they would find Black girls deserving of its attention and policy focus. This might simply be the result of an African-American father who has not had to wrestle with his daughters feeling inadequate or experienced seeing pained expressions of silent suffering given that his children have been fortunate to be shielded by much, given the President’s privilege and position. It is, however, a glaring omission by the Obama administration that defies what we know to be the experiences of Black girls in America. We need not search the world for girls in need when our children stand before us broken, rejected and yearning for recognition.
What I desire for our community of Black girls is what I wish for my daughter. I want us to embrace their individuality and celebrate their expressiveness and cultural dynamism. We must recognize their intelligence and support their intellectual curiosity while also encouraging their socializing and affirming their right to be different from boys, yet equal in standing. It is our responsibility to root out gender bias and make certain that our institutions are not simply diverse but gender-inclusive, meaning opportunity is rooted in equity and not guided by male dominated definitions of worth and success. And, we must hold accountable those who trade in misogynist imagery that limits Black girls’ imaginations to the stripper pole, video vixen or reality TV villains. There is a ‘Black is Beautiful’ canvas for Black girlhood that we must paint so our daughters can see the full expression of God’s intent for their lives.
It is with this conviction that we must embrace the mantra #BlackGirlsMatter; because they do, and without the benefit of the full expression of their humanity we suffer as a people. There is no ‘better day’ for Black America if we persist on wearing gender blinders and if Black men, fathers or not, do not come to terms with the reality of shared suffering and become champions for gender equity. When I look in the mirror I have to see my daughter and make certain the reflection is one of strength, hope, faith and confidence that her life will have meaning and she will be given the opportunity to direct and fulfill her purpose in life.
March 12, 2015
By Julianne Malveaux
NNPA Columnist
Congressman Jeff Denham (R-Calif.) couldn’t bring his French bulldog, Lily, on an Amtrak train. So when Amtrak funding came up for a vote, he inserted a provision that required one car on an Amtrak train to be designated a “pet car.” Pet owners will pay a fee to bring their furry companions on the train, and there are size restrictions to the pets that can travel. Still, this new provision is seen as a victory for pet owners who ride trains.
Would this new provision have been proposed had Rep. Denham’s dog not been rejected from an Amtrak train? Republican members of Congress were warned by the Club for Growth and Heritage Action, fiscally conservative groups, that they should not vote to subsidize Amtrak. Would they have joined Democrats in voting $1.4 billion a year for the next four years had their Republican colleague made his pitch about pet travel?
All too often, good legislation is only supported when someone with a personal agenda is able to add an amendment to further that agenda. Perhaps the pet cars make sense, but there might not be a pet car had not Rep. Denham pushed the agenda for his Lily. I’m not perturbed that he made the personal political. I’m just wondering what might happen if more members of Congress had to experience the same things as the rest of us.
What if members of Congress were routinely rejected from receiving bank loans (unlikely given their average net worth of more than a million dollars and rising, compared to the $81,000 median wealth of a U.S. family)? Might they then not look at some of the rules that banks use to restrict access to capital? What if members of Congress were stopped and frisked occasionally? Might that not provoke examination of stop and frisk laws?
What if members of Congress had to sleep on the street for just one night? Might they not consider the way our nation deals with the homeless? What if they had to travel hundreds of miles to obtain an essential medical service? Might they not, then, reconsider restrictions against abortion, a medical service many women consider essential? What if members of Congress had to survive on food stamps for even a week? Would that increase their empathy for those, some employed full time, who rely on food stamps in order to eat?
Let’s not stop there.
What if members of Congress were required to spend a week, without staff and handlers, in a strange community? Take House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and leave him in East Oakland, Calif. wearing a hoodie and some jeans. Take Small Business Committee Chair Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) and leave him in Fifth Ward Houston with just a few dollars in his wallet. Let Financial Services Chair Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) hang with a homie as his BFF in Ferguson, Mo. Put Darrel Issa (R-Calif.) in a housing project in Los Angeles. Let Homeland Security Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas) spend a little time in New York’s Riker’s where civilization sometimes takes a break. Let Budget Chair Tom Price (R-Ga.) stand in line for a couple of hours to learn about unemployment benefits.
Will these legislators then be able to put their humanity on leave as they process their experiences?
The provision to fund Amtrak passed 316-101, and it wasn’t a perfect piece of legislation. Members of Congress ride the high-revenue Northeast corridor (Washington to Boston), so despite the warning from their influential fiscal conservative groups, they choose to continue to support Amtrak. Still, they didn’t support using revenues from the heavily traveled Northeast corridor to subsidize less-traveled routes in cities that are distant from airports.
This may mean that service in some smaller cities may be cut. Why not drop members of Congress into some of these cities and let them figure out how to get from one place to another? If we believe in the notion of a nation, we ought to have as strong an interest in the citizen in Washington as the citizen in a much smaller city. Those members of Congress who would privatize Amtrak have rejected the notion of national connections and equal access to transportation in favor of profligate profit seeking.
Members of Congress live a privileged existence. Some say they deserve it because of the service they render to our nation. But if their health care access were the same as ours, if their access to transportation were the same as ours, if their access to financial services were the same as ours, might they behave differently? If they spent just a minute with a gun pointed at their head because they had the temerity to jaywalk, if they were beaten because they dared ask questions of a police officer, if their 5-year-old child was handcuffed because she had a tantrum, would our laws be different?
Thanks to Congressman Jeff Denham, whose dog could not ride Amtrak, we know how personal inconvenience can turn into transformative legislation. If members of Congress spent a week living in a constituent’s shoes, how might our laws change?
Julianne Malveaux is a Washington, D.C.-based economist and writer. She is President Emerita of Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, N.C.