HOW AFRICAN AMERICANS CAN
CELEBRATE CONFEDERATE HISTORY MONTH
April 2010
We have learned a lot about where we stand in terms of race
relations and our collective memory since Governor Robert F. McDonnell issued a
proclamation declaring April Confederate History Month in the
Since most of us who came of age in the twentieth century were
often peddled the nonsense that the Civil War was about tariffs or some
unspecified states' rights during our K-12 education, this development
represents a major shift in our public culture. The fact that Haley Barbour, the Republican governor of
Mississippi, which has the largest black population in the United States,
callously dismissed McDonnell's critics as "trying to make a big deal out
of something that doesn't amount to diddly,"
shows that we have much work to do to achieve a healthy collective memory of
slavery and the Civil War.
There are two ways that the black community and their progressive
allies can use this controversy to move the ball forward on this issue. First,
we must apply what political scientists call the "politics of
re-articulation" to the Confederate History Month.
Re-articulation is simply giving a political act or symbol a new
meaning based on one's own interests. Progressives can easily achieve this end
by staging a remembrance ceremony in
Instead of the normal histrionics that accompany most modern
political rallies in
Bringing order to their own houses with regard to the celebration
of Confederate symbols is another way that the black community and progressives
can help the cause. One of the main arguments that Governor Barbour used to
deflect criticism of Confederate History Month is the fact that Democrats also engage
in this behavior. Consider, for example, the fact that at least four prominent
black Americans--including the civil rights leaders
Of course, the black members of the Alfalfa Club and President
Obama do not intend to glorify Confederate History. Indeed, President Obama
acknowledged the tension surrounding his decision to break the boycott by
telling a joke about how confused General Lee would be by the spectacle of a
black president if he were in the room.
Despite their intentions, participation in such organizations
definitely provides cover for men like Governor Barbour. It also shows that
even our most enlightened leaders still do not guard the legacies of the slaves
as jealously as they should. Can you imagine any respectable Jewish leader or
mainstream politician attending a dinner or joining a club that organized
initially to celebrate the birthday of General Erwin Rommel? Even 150 years
from now, I suspect that such a gesture would be unthinkable. Until
progressives begin to adopt similar standards, and stop whistling
NAACP JOINS LEGAL
CHALLENGE TO
June 2010
The NAACP in coalition with other civil rights groups filed a
class action lawsuit today challenging
"We are joining this lawsuit because the
The lawsuit charges that the Arizona law
unlawfully interferes with federal power and authority over immigration matters
in violation of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution; invites racial
profiling against people of color by law enforcement in violation of the equal
protection guarantee and prohibition on unreasonable seizures under the
Fourteenth and Fourth Amendments; and infringes on the free speech rights of
day laborers in violation of the First Amendment. A number of other states are
considering similar laws.
Several prominent law enforcement groups, including the Arizona
Association of Chiefs of Police, oppose the law because it diverts limited
resources from law enforcement's primary responsibility of providing protection
and promoting public safety in the community and undermines trust and
cooperation between local police and immigrant communities.
"As a former police officer, many of us in law enforcement
want to ensure that the resources of the police are put into fighting serious
crime and not turn them into federal immigration agents," said Reverend
Oscar Tillman, president of the Maricopa County Branch (
The coalition filing the lawsuit includes the NAACP, the
American Civil Liberties Union, MALDEF, National Immigration Law Center (NILC),
ACLU of Arizona, National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and the Asian
Pacific American Legal Center (APALC) - a member of Asian American Center for
Advancing Justice.
Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation's oldest and largest
civil rights organization. Its members throughout the
Nov 2010
On Tuesday,
Proposition 107
supporters, including Republican representative Steve Montenegro, who sponsored
the measure to amend the Arizona constitution, have invoked civil rights
activist Martin Luther King Jr's dream that "little children will
one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their
character" and twisted that into a plea for "colour-blindness"
rather than equality. Affirmative action, which began in the
A 1996 essay in the Journal for Social Issues noted that in a society where whiteness
remains the baseline and the preference – consciously or subconsciously –
people of colour are at a disadvantage:
"All else being equal,
colour-blind seniority systems tend to protect white
workers against job layoffs, because senior employees are usually white (Ezorsky, 1991). Likewise, colour-blind
college admissions favour white students because of
their earlier educational advantages. Unless preexisting inequities are
corrected or otherwise taken into account, colour-blind
policies do not correct racial injustice – they reinforce it."
Affirmative action offers a way to counteract that racial bias –
and the gender bias – that remain pervasive in our society. The journal article
offers a statistic from the
Of course, there are those who would claim that the forces that
may have inhibited the success of women and minorities in the past have been
erased, especially since, thanks to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, we've
achieved a post-racial and post-feminist society. (Please note: tongue firmly
in cheek, here.)
It astonishes me how short our collective memory is.
Institutional racism is not a thing of the distant past, some evil that died
with the Civil war. I am 40 years old. My paternal grandparents were not
allowed to vote until they were well into their 60s, when the Civil Rights Act
was signed. My father was raised in the Jim Crow south, attending separate and
unequal schools, riding in the back of the bus, and never entering through a
white neighbour's front door. My mother's choices, as
a young woman in the 1960s, were limited both by the biases against black
people, but also against women.
For generations upon generations, people of colour
and women were barred from positions of power, from voting for their own
government representation, and from taking part equally in opportunities for
growth and success. That marginalisation made it more
difficult to lay the foundation for the achievement of future generations. The
idea that we have made up for hundreds of years of oppression in barely 50
years is ludicrous.
And oppression is not
merely history. Bias and inequality live and "the playing field" is
not equal. Women still earn 77 cents to the male dollar.
Extract from that black and
"[W]ithout affirmative action, the percentage of black students
at many selective schools would drop to only 2% of the student body (Bowen
& Bok, 1998). This would effectively choke off black access to
top universities and severely restrict progress toward racial equality."
These figures may seem
startling to some – according to the New York Times, "maybe
because of the popular perception that affirmative action still confers
significant advantages [my emphasis] to black
job candidates, a perception that is not borne out in studies. Moreover,
statistics show even college-educated blacks suffering disproportionately in
this jobless environment compared with whites."
It is a privilege to
believe in a level playing field, a privilege to believe in post-racialism and
post-feminism. Women and people of colour cannot
afford to be so naive. Arizona, a state that voted no to a Martin Luther King holiday and
wants brown folks to routinely have their "papers" checked, just
made it a little harder for marginalised people to
get along. In a disingenuous effort to guard against discrimination,
Republican lawmakers have led Arizonans actually to enshrine inequality in the
state's governing document.
NOVEMBER 5, 2010
ANNAPOLIS — The Maryland State Police and
the NAACP clashed Friday before the state’s highest court over documents the
group says it needs to determine if troopers are stopping motorists based on
their skin color and whether the agency is taking adequate steps to prevent and
investigate complaints.
In February, a lower court ordered the state
police to surrender about 10,000 of the requested documents sought under the
Maryland Public Information Act.
Arguing on behalf of the state police,
Assistant Attorney General Steven M. Sullivan told the Court of Appeals that
the documents — which relate to internal investigations of racial-profiling
complaints — cannot be disclosed under the act.
The agency seeks to comply “with an express
mandate of the legislature,” said Sullivan, chief of litigation at the attorney
general’s office. “If it’s a personnel record, don’t disclose it.” Blacking out the names in the personnel file
would not fully mask a trooper’s identity, Sullivan said, since “the trooper’s
name is all over” other documents in the records.
But the NAACP’s pro bono lawyer, Seth A.
Rosenthal, said the law’s overriding goal of shedding light on possible police
wrongdoing supersedes the troopers’ asserted privacy interest, especially since
the group does not object to officers’ names and other identifying information
being redacted before disclosure.
“These records reflect upon the state police
as an agency,” not on individual troopers, he said.
Rosenthal agreed that the purpose of the
personnel records exception is to protect the privacy of state employees. But
such privacy concerns do not apply to the documentation of traffic stops and
whether a complaint was adequately addressed by the police, he added. Troopers “do not carry with them a reasonable
expectation of privacy” regarding traffic stops, Rosenthal said, “What occurs
at traffic stops does not have reasonable expectation of privacy.”
Behind the numbers
The dispute over records follows a 2003 consent decree
that requires the Maryland State Police to submit quarterly reports regarding
racial-profiling complaints.
The American Civil Liberties Union of
Maryland sued on behalf of the Maryland State Conference of NAACP Branches,
seeking the internal documents the agency uses in preparing the reports.
During Friday’s session, judges grilled
Sullivan on how the NAACP could ever verify the accuracy of MSP reports without
seeing the documents the agency uses to compile the data.
“They want to go behind the numbers,” said
Judge Lynne A. Battaglia. “In order to do it, you
have to go to those forms.”
Rosenthal was pressed on the risk that
disclosure of the documents would expose to public view internal investigations
of specific troopers, an invasion of privacy the MPIA’s
personnel-records exception was designed to prevent.
Judge Glenn T. Harrell Jr., for example,
invoked the Ten Commandments in saying the personnel-records exception reads
like “Thou shalt not disclose.”
Rosenthal countered that the General
Assembly sought to protect only confidential personnel records, such as test
scores or missed workdays, not documents about the troopers’ on–the-job
activity of pulling over wayward motorists and how often those actions resulted
in profiling complaints that were inadequately investigated, he said.
Access to such records is essential to
ensure the MSP is complying with the spirit of the consent decree, Rosenthal
said. Without such oversight, the police
“could have thrown [racial-profiling complaints] in the circular file and no
one would be the wiser,” said Rosenthal, a partner at Venable LLP in
The Daily Record and a dozen other news organizations joined a brief that
the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press submitted to the high court in
support of the NAACP. The brief states that exempting the internal records from
disclosure “would serve as a serious blow to journalists and the public who
depend on them to hold the police accountable for their actions.”
2008 settlement
The 2003 consent decree ended a 10-year legal battle
in federal district court between the MSP and the NAACP over the racial-
profiling practice sardonically referred to as “driving while black.”
In April 2008, the state Board of Public
Works approved a $400,000 settlement to resolve claims alleged by individual
plaintiffs. State police did not admit to practicing racial profiling in either
agreement.
That June, Baltimore County Circuit Judge
Timothy J. Martin — over the MSP’s objections —
upheld the NAACP’s request for the documents under the condition that officers’
names and identification numbers be redacted.
Martin also told the NAACP to select three
attorneys to review unredacted MSP records and
identify the documents they wanted released in redacted form. These attorneys
would be barred from disclosing the names of any troopers mentioned in the
documents, Martin said.
When the Court of Special Appeals ruled that
the documents sought are not personnel records, the MSP sought review by the
Court of Appeals. The court did not
indicate when it will render a decision in the case, Maryland Department of
State Police v. Maryland State Conference of NAACP Branches, No. 41, September
Term 2010.
BLACKS
STRUGGLE WITH 72% UNWED MOTHERS RATE
Things move slowly here. Women sit shoulder-to-shoulder
in the narrow waiting room, sometimes for more than an hour. Carroll does not
rush her mothers in and out. She wants her babies born as healthy as possible,
so Carroll spends time talking to the mothers about how they should care for
themselves, what she expects them to do — and why they need to get married.
Seventy-two percent of black babies are born to unmarried
mothers today, according to government statistics. This number is inseparable
from the work of Carroll, an obstetrician who has dedicated her 40-year career
to helping black women.
"The girls don't think they have to get married. I
tell them children deserve a mama and a daddy. They really do," Carroll
says from behind the desk of her office, which has cushioned pink-and-green
armchairs, bars on the windows, and a wooden "LOVE" carving between
two African figurines. Diamonds circle Carroll's ring finger.
As the issue of black unwed parenthood inches into public
discourse, Carroll is among the few speaking boldly about it. And as a black woman who
has brought thousands of babies into the world, who has sacrificed income to
serve
"A mama can't give it all. And neither can a daddy,
not by themselves," Carroll says. "Part of the reason is because you
can only give that which you have. A mother cannot give all that a man can
give. A truly involved father figure offers more fullness to a child's
life." Statistics show just what
that fullness means. Children of unmarried mothers of any race are more likely
to perform poorly in school, go to prison, use drugs, be poor as adults, and
have their own children out of wedlock.
The black community's 72 percent rate eclipses that of
most other groups: 17 percent of Asians, 29 percent of whites, 53 percent of
Hispanics and 66 percent of Native Americans were born to unwed mothers in
2008, the most recent year for which government figures are available. The rate
for the overall
This issue entered the public consciousness in 1965, when
a now famous government report by future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
described a "tangle of pathology" among blacks that fed a 24 percent
black "illegitimacy" rate. The white rate then was 4 percent.
Many accused Moynihan, who was white, of "blaming
the victim:" of saying that black behavior, not racism, was the main cause
of black problems. That dynamic persists. Most talk about the 72 percent has
come from conservative circles; when influential blacks like Bill Cosby have
spoken out about it, they have been all but shouted down by liberals saying that
a lack of equal education and opportunity are the true root of the problem.
'Nobody talks about it'
Even in black churches, "nobody
talks about it," Carroll says. "It's like some big secret." But
there are signs of change, of discussion and debate within and outside the
black community on how to address the growing problem.
Research has increased into links between behavior and
poverty, scholars say. Historically black
In September,
"There are a lot of sides to this," Carroll
says. "Part of our community has lost its way."
There are simple arguments for why so many black women
have children without marriage. The
legacy of segregation, the logic goes, means blacks
are more likely to attend inferior schools. This creates a high proportion of
blacks unprepared to compete for jobs in today's economy, where middle-class
industrial work for unskilled laborers has largely disappeared.
The drug epidemic sent disproportionate numbers of black
men to prison, and crushed the job opportunities for those who served their
time. Women don't want to marry men who can't provide for their families, and
welfare laws created a financial incentive for poor mothers to stay single. If you remove these inequalities, some say,
the 72 percent will decrease.
"It's all connected. The question should be, how has
the black family survived at all?" says Maria Kefalas, co-author
of "Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before
Marriage." The book is based on
interviews with 162 low-income single mothers. One of its conclusions is that
these women see motherhood as one of life's most fulfilling roles — a rare
opportunity for love and joy, husband or no husband.
"It's trying to kill a tree by pulling leaves off
the limbs. And it carries a message of shame," said Clayton, a black woman
born to a single mother. "I came out fine. My brother is married with
children. (NWNW) makes it seem like there's something immoral about you, like
you're contributing to the ultimate downfall of the black race. My mom worked
hard to raise me, so I do take it personally."
Demetria Lucas, relationships editor at Essence, the magazine for
black women, declined an invitation for her award-winning personal blog to
endorse NWNW. Lucas, author of the forthcoming book "A Belle in
70 percent of professsional
black women are unmarried
Lucas says 42 percent of all black women
and 70 percent of professional black women are unmarried. "If you can't
get a husband, who am I to tell you no, you can't be a mom?" she asks.
"A lot of women resent the idea that you're telling me my chances of being
married are like 1 in 2, it's a crapshoot right now, but whether I can have a family
of my own is based on whether a guy asks me to marry him or not."
Much has been made of the lack of marriageable black men,
Lucas says, which has created the message that "there's no real chance of
me being married, but because some black men can't get their stuff together I
got to let my whole world fall apart. That's what the logic is for some
women."
That logic rings false to Amy Wax, a law professor at the
University of Pennsylvania, whose book "Race, Wrongs and Remedies: Group
Justice in the 21st Century" argues that even though discrimination caused
blacks' present problems, only black action can cure them.
"The black community has fallen into this horribly
dysfunctional equilibrium" with unwed mothers, Wax says in an interview. "It just doesn't work."
"Blacks as a group will never be equal while they
have this situation going on, where the vast majority of children do not have
fathers in the home married to their mother, involved in their lives, investing
in them, investing in the next generation."
FEWER
BLACK BASEBALL PLAYERS A DISTURBING TREND AMONST
April
2010
Major
League Baseball celebrates an iconic American figure April 15. Each year, baseball honors Jackie Robinson.
Not only did Robinson compile a Hall-of-Fame career in 10 marvelous seasons,
but he also broke baseball's color barrier, progressed race relations in
professional baseball and effectively "led off" the effort for equal
rights for blacks and minorities in the
Robinson
paved the way for black athletes to play the game that, at the time, was
According to Gallup Polls conducted between 1951 and 1954, 52 percent of blacks admitted to actively following Major League Baseball.
Fifty years later, Gallup Polls have shown a disturbing trend. In 2002, only 5 percent of blacks considered baseball their favorite sport, giving way to overwhelming popularity for basketball and football.
The incredible decrease in popularity of baseball among the black community is troubling for several reasons. Fewer blacks are watching baseball -- but more disturbingly -- fewer black athletes are playing baseball than ever before.
As a fan of the sport, I grew up admiring the likes of Ken Griffey Jr., Gary Sheffield and Barry Bonds. Recent steroid scandals aside, all three of those players were among the most talented and popular players in the game. They were as fun to watch as anyone on the diamond. During long summers filled with whiffle ball home run derby, I'd often step out of my comfort zone and switch sides of the plate to imitate Griffey, one of my favorite center fielders of all time.
In my coverage of the University baseball team this season, I have noticed the same trend in Mid-American Conference. Fewer black athletes are choosing to play baseball now than at any time in the sport's storied history, and although some may argue this problem is being blown out of proportion, I disagree.
Granted, choosing to play a respective sport is a matter of personal preference, but there are reasons that choice may no longer be in the hands of black youth. Look no further than MLB's implementation of the RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities) and Junior RBI programs, which aim to, among other things, "promote greater inclusion of minorities into the mainstream of the game."
Baseball is an expensive sport, and many inner-city communities simply do not have the capabilities to provide opportunities for many black youths to play baseball at a young age. Many of those children shoot jumpers on basketball courts or toss footballs on vacant lawns; sports less expensive to establish and play compared to baseball.
I believe the problems begin with the lack of opportunities for blacks, but no one jumps straight from grade school to the MLB.
Because of Title IX, colleges with state funding are required to provide an equal amount of scholarships to both males and females. In recent years, the number of baseball scholarships on the college level has plummeted, providing fewer financially-assisted education opportunities to baseball players.
Consequently, more black athletes stray away from baseball and turn to basketball and football -- two sports providing more scholarship opportunities and a better chance at moving on to the next level.
I don't think this was what Jackie Robinson had in mind for his posterity.
Baseball
is a game steeped in tradition and grandeur. Although several events tainted
the game's storied past, baseball has overcome its own struggles and remains a
popular game in
With the systematic decline of black athletes choosing to play baseball, there are even fewer reasons for black youth to get into the game.
In 1975, 27 percent of Major Leaguers were black, and any child turning on a television would get to see "Hammerin' Hank Aaron" or "Mr. October," Reggie Jackson hit towering home runs and establish a legacy worthy of imitation.
The
lack of black major leaguers is a major problem, and the trickle-down effect
has never been more apparent. Baseball is a sport that has benefited from
racial and cultural diversity for decades. In a time in which sports have
become more publicized than ever, the opportunity to present that diversity to
Baseball cannot thrive without cultural diversity, and the declining popularity of the game proves this. It is our responsibility to raise awareness of the problem and take steps to ensure Jackie Robinson's legacy does not fade away.
Next
year, the University will be the home to Brandon Howard, a top-ranked black
middle infielder from
What
we as a society must do is recognize the decreasing number of black baseball
players as a problem, and do something about it. American ideals are centered around inclusion and diversity. If baseball truly is
Jackie Robinson once said, "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives."
So
often we forget how much impact we can have on those around us.