February 05, 2015
By Julianne Malveaux
NNPA Columnist
I like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Her progressive ideas are just what we need while Hilary Clinton is straddling the fence, and still cozying up with bankers. Warren says she isn’t running for president, but there are quite a few political action committees urging her to run.
Like President Barack Obama, she released a biography (A Fighting Chance) just two years before the 2016 election. It provides details of her hardscrabble childhood, her early pregnancy and marriage, and her struggles combining work and family when she had a small child. Men and women can relate to her story, as well as at the way she became the guru for consumer rights and financial literacy. When senators would not confirm her for the permanent position in the Department of Treasury, she ran for the Senate. It was her first time running for office and she won.
Warren has consistently articulated a progressive agenda focused on those at the bottom. As progressive as she is, she has consistently ignored race matters. Perhaps this is because progressive politicians feel they will alienate part of their base if they talk about race. This makes Warren and the others not much different that conventional politicians, ignoring the economic differences between African Americans and others.
How would Elizabeth Warren deal with declining revenues for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)? Would she step in to close the unemployment rate gap or the achievement gap? Would she deal with the housing discrimination that too many African Americans face? Or, would she hide behind the common progressive refrain that when challenges at the bottom are addressed? That is: African Americans are lifted up and their circumstance will change as the plight of everyone else improves.
Another impressive Senator, Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), has articulated a progressive agenda in the Senate for more than a decade. He hails from the swing state of Ohio, and many are wondering why he doesn’t command the same kind of attention that Elizabeth Warren does. While his ideas are solid he, too, has pretty much ignored the issue of race.
At the same time that progressives have been ignoring race, we have been barraged with proof that race matters. Whether we are talking about those in kindergarten or in high schools, African American students face stricter discipline (with some of them, regardless of age, handcuffed and expelled from school), while teachers rely on their sociology classes to justify keeping White kids in school for the same infractions. Conversations about disproportionate rates of incarceration, and racial disparities in the application of the death penalty are rarely raised in Congress unless members of the Congressional Black Caucus bring it up.
Progressives should not talk about race matters exclusively, but they exhibit a pathetic myopia when they fail to talk about race at all.
African American Democrats will hold their noses and vote for Elizabeth Warren, or if they are Clinton loyalists, they will vote her instead. Indeed, Elizabeth Warren has as much a change of winning a presidential contest as I do, but her committees will challenge the Clinton positions on domestic public policy. If she is able to get Senator Clinton to alter her positions on just a few matters, she will have done her job.
Still, like President Obama, the matter of race is off the table. The president addresses race gingerly, mainly because as an African American president he must debunk the myth that he is racially biased. I don’t agree with position, or the way he dealt with it in the State of the Union address when he had nothing to lose by dealing with race or simply saying the words “African American” or “Black.” Race still matters in our nation. What national leader has the courage to say it? Warren, Clinton and Brown have more leeway than President Obama, but they have as much fear as President Obama does for addressing a key national issue.
There is significant excitement about the role Senator Elizabeth Warren will play in the 2016 election. Maybe she will garner enough delegates to force a roll call, or at least the opportunity to nominate Senator Clinton. Maybe she will have a chance to address the nation in one of the prime-time spots during the convention, just as President Obama did in 2000. Certainly, her name will be whispered or even shouted as she gains popular support. But if she is unwilling to talk about race, she will not have met the expectations of some in the African American community.
Julianne Malveaux is an author and economist based in Washington, D.C.
January 29, 2015
By Jesse Jackson
The stirring film Selma ends with Dr. King leading civil rights marchers across the bridge and to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It will help a new generation of Americans appreciate that historic accomplishment.
But what should not be forgotten is that the passage of the Voting Rights Act wasn’t the end of the battle. The effort to suppress the rights of African Americans to vote continued. Southern states and localities invented a range of techniques – from making voting and registration difficult to gerrymandering districts to get the right results. African Americans made progress, but not without a fight.
Vital to the continuing fight was the Voting Rights Act, particularly section 5 which gave the Department of Justice the right of pre-clearance of any substantial change in voting procedures or laws in states that had a history of racial suppression of the vote. But in the 2013 Supreme Court case of Shelby County vs. Holder, the five person right-wing majority of the Court ruled, in an opinion written Chief Justice John Roberts, that Section 5 was outmoded and unnecessary, and thus a violation of the Constitution. This breathtaking leap of judicial activism disabled the key enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
Immediately, Republicans across the country began to pass laws designed to constrict the vote, as well as elaborate gerrymanders designed to magnify the effect of white votes. New laws in 21 states made it harder to vote. New forms of government ID were required – in effect a tax on those – largely elderly people of color – without them. Restrictions were passed to make registration and voting harder, to cut off student participation. Voting hours were reduced; voting booths cut and made less accessible, and more. Republicans claimed that there were measures to cut down on voter fraud but were unable to demonstrate that there was any voter fraud to worry about.
As President Obama said in April, ““The stark and simple truth is this — the right to vote is threatened today — in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago,”
And these laws are having the effect intended. In North Carolina’s tight Senate race in 2014, Republican Tom Tillis beat incumbent Kay Hagen by about 43,000 votes (1.7% of the vote). Tillis had ushered through the state legislature one of the harshest voter suppression laws, eliminating seven days of early voting (and at least one Sunday of “get your souls to the polls” rallies at African American churches), eliminating same day registration, forcing voters to vote in their own precinct and more. 700,000 voters had voted in the now eliminated early seven-day window in 2012, 200,000 in the 2012 bi-election. 100,000 largely African American voters took advantage of same day registration in 2012. The voters eliminated may well have exceeded the vote margin.
Similarly in Florida, Governor Rick Scott reversed his predecessor’s reforms that allowed former convicts who had served their time to regain the right to vote. That disenfranchised far more than Scott’s margin over his Democratic opponent. In Florida, an ugly one in three African American men is permanently disenfranchised. This is the new Jim Crow on the march.
Making registration and voting easy and accessible to minorities, students, the elderly, the disabled, the working class isn’t hard. We know what works.
What we witness is simply a continuation of the battle that reached one of its turning points on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The Voting Rights Act was passed, but the opponents of equal rights never surrendered. They have continued to resist and obstruct. What the film Selma depicts is history, but it is also a call to action – for the struggle for even the basic right to vote in America is still not secure.
Jesse L. Jackson is founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
January 22, 2015
By Julianne Malveaux
NNPA Columnist
One could not help but be impressed by the millions that turned out in Paris to stand against the Islamist terrorists who killed workers at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and four others at a kosher grocery store. Two law enforcement officers were also killed, bringing the total to 17.
About 40 heads of state and more than a million others crowded into Republique Square; even more rallied around France. In total, it is estimated that 3.7 rallied for freedom. They wore shirts and carried signs that said, “I am Charlie.” Some said, “I am Muslim and Charlie” or “I am Jewish and Charlie.” Those crowds transcended race, religious and political lines.
President Obama got mixed reaction to his not attending the solidarity rally. Ambassador to France Jane Hartley, someone with much less status, represented the United States. Critics said the president could at least have sent Vice President Joe Biden; Attorney General Eric H. Holder was in Paris and could have attended. The president may be doing something much more substantive by convening a summit on world terrorism at the White House in February.
I wonder if these gatherings will address terror in Nigeria, where the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram abducted 276 girls, and still holds 219. A hashtag campaign, #BringBackOurGirls was joined by First Lady Michelle Obama, former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, British Prime Minister David Cameron and others. Few of the 40 who rallied in Paris have ever mentioned the abducted girls and those terrorists who took them. Indeed, the abducted girls have all but disappeared from the headlines and from the public consciousness.
The girls were abducted on April 14, 2014. Since then, our attention has been riveted by other news from the African continent, as the Ebola virus killed thousands (we in the U.S. were mostly focused on our handful of casualties), and as ISIS has escalated its activity around the globe. While some have forgotten about the Nigerian girls, many have not. Obiageli Ezekwesili, a former Nigerian government official who is now vice president of the World Bank’s Africa Division, has been among those continuing to focus attention on the girls.
People fear that Boko Haram may have sold the schoolgirls into slavery, forced some into marriage, or killed others. Given the fact that Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the UN Security Council have decried the Islamist militant terrorist group, it is alarming that the world community has been so indifferent to the plight of the abducted young girls. Some of the indifference does not start with the world, but in Nigeria. Will Goodluck Jonathan, the Nigerian president who is running for reelection, mention the girls at all before February, when voting takes place? Or, has the fate of 219 kidnapped girls been forgotten?
Demonstrations have taken place daily in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, despite the fact that the police have ordered these demonstrations to stop. Meanwhile, Boko Haram continues its terrorist plundering in Nigeria, destroying villages and towns in the northeast part of the country and killing thousands. It is estimated that they have destroyed more than 3,700 structures – homes, churches, and public spaces. Tens of thousands of Nigerians have fled to bordering Chad because they fear for their lives.
I don’t know if it would be effective for world leaders to rally in Abuja to pressure Boko Haram to return the girls. I don’t know if T-shirts or signs saying, “We Are the Nigerian Girls” would do much more than direct attention back to these young students whose hopes and dreams have been stomped on by irrational terrorists. I don’t know if it would make a difference if Nigerians all over the world came together to demand return of the girls. I don’t know the efforts of feminists around the world would make a difference.
I do know that about 219 Nigerian girls are gone, and a terrorist group is responsible for taking them. I know that they are reputed to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda and with ISIS. I know that while the world has rallied to show solidarity in the fight against terrorism in France, there has been no such gathering to show solidarity in the fight against terrorism in Nigeria. I don’t know (and I might be misinformed) if offers to help contain or eliminate Boko Haram have been made by the world community.
The war against terrorism has been embraced in Paris, with millions there, and thousands in the rest of the world, taking it to the streets to express their outrage. Where is the outrage for the more than 200 Nigerian girls? Nine months after they have been snatched from their school, who remembers? Who cares?
Julianne Malveaux is an author and economist in Washington, DC
January 15, 2015
By James Clingman
NNPA Columnist
“Whoever loves money never has enough.”
– Ecclesiastes 5:10
I would offer that verse from the wisest man in history to our national NAACP president and board. They sent me at least five letters in December asking for money to help meet a $100,000 goal. Are they that strapped for money? After all, when Ben Jealous left just a short while ago, he boasted about having increased their coffers from $29 million to $46 million during his tenure. Rather than the above Bible verse, maybe the folks at the NAACP subscribe to one of the most misunderstood and misused verses in the Bible, Ecclesiastes 10:19: “Money answers all things,”
Having served in several positions in my local NAACP, including a brief stint as branch president, it is very clear to me that the primary purpose of the national NAACP is to get more money. While local branch members work tirelessly as volunteers, the national office is comprised of salaried elitists who pass down edicts from on high like a pimp in a 1960s Blacksploitation movie. “Branch betta have my money!”
Most people don’t know that only $14 of each $30 membership fee stays with the local branch. Branches are not allowed to own real estate, and we only have one fundraiser per year, the Freedom Fund Banquet, from which 25 percent of the profit must be sent to the national as well. With thousands of local branches under its rule, you would think the NAACP would have enough money and not have to beg intermittently for another $100,000 or so throughout the year.
After receiving the solicitation letters, I wrote back a few times but never got a response. I told them I would not be giving one dime to the organization until it cleans up its act vis-à-vis its treatment of local branches. They want their money on time, but they are not timely when it to comes to rectifying situations left by the likes of their field director, Gill Ford.
What I now call “The National Association for the Acceptance of Corrupt Personnel,” is mired in legal battles with local branches, allows voter suppression and voter intimidation, requires voter photo ID’s at its elections, does nothing about corrupt practices in its local elections, that is, unless it’s to help their chosen candidate, and stands by a man who has left a trail of destruction in his wake by participating in and sanctioning illegalities in local elections. That man is Gill Ford; and they are asking us to send more money? You gotta be kidding me.
Since my last article on the NAACP, I have received emails from several other branches that are getting the Gill Ford treatment. This guy has a history of partisanship, intimidation, retaliation, and ruthless arrogance toward local branch officials. He must have something on the national office because they refuse to do anything to stop his “inimical” behavior. And they want more money? “Not one dime,” is my answer.
In Cornell Brooks’ initial letter as president asked: “Is the NAACP still relevant?” Our local branch in Cincinnati proved our relevancy by doing our work despite Gill Ford’s collaboration with our detractors. We maintained the highest integrity and excellent stewardship of our funds, growing $40,000 in branch funds to more than $250,000. Relevancy is relative, and while the national NAACP may yet be relevant, it should clean up its own house.
The larger question is: “To whom is the NAACP relevant?” Is it only relevant to the national office and board? Is it only relevant to celebrities who get Image Awards? Is it relevant to convention hotels that offer suites and other perks to officers and board members? Is it relevant to young people who are well prepared to take the reins of the NAACP? Is it relevant only to unions and Democrats? Is it relevant and responsive to its many branches? Or, does the national office just see us as conduits through which our local money flows back to their coffers?
Nelson Rivers called the NAACP “The big dog!” If the big dog just barks and doesn’t bite, no one will fear it. And it will be irrelevant. NAACP, before asking for more money, stop biting the hands that feed you. Be a true leader for your branches by empowering them rather than imposing non-economic liberal policies on them. Help us rather than stymie us; we do most of the work —for free! Do the right thing and do not allow yourself to be pulled beneath the waves of mediocrity, greed and lust for money, political partisanship, and selfishness. Rise above it and stay above it, and there will no longer be a need to pose the question, “Is the NAACP relevant?” Its relevancy will be quite obvious. Remember: Whoever loves money will never have enough.
Jim Clingman, founder of the Greater Cincinnati African American Chamber of Commerce, is the nation’s most prolific writer on economic empowerment for Black people. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Cincinnati and can be reached through his Web site, blackonomics.com.