By E. Faye Williams
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist
I remember a time when few, if any,
Black people expressed interest in
environmental issues. Our primary
focus was on the day-to-day events
that we could see and feel, and knew
to be more tangible than air or water
“pollution.”
When the conversation centered on
coal production or coal-powered
plants, our conversations didn’t focus
on how clean the coal was or the level
of sulfur dioxide emitted by the plant.
Our first comments usually questioned
the number of Black people currently
on the payroll. When there was a
question of automotive fuel efficiency,
our response was generally concerned
with the fair representation of Blacks
on the assembly line. Like most practi-
cal people, the “bread and butter”
issues captured the attention of the
larger portion of the Black community.
Thankfully, times have changed and
many more of us have started listening
to the scientists and measuring their the-
ories with our own observations to
come to the conclusion that “Global
Warming” is real! Not only have we
acknowledged the reality of a man-
made effect on Earth’s climate, many of
us are connecting the dots of institution-
al racism and realize that Black people,
other people of color, and low income
people are the recipients of disparate
and negative consequences related to
the impact of climate change.
We may be conditioned for greater
deliberation in pondering the long-term
consequences of our decisions, but
we’re far from ignorant and know a
stacked-deck when we see or experi-
ence it.
One of the biggest wake-up calls in
recent history was Hurricane Katrina.
She was, undoubtedly, indiscriminate
in the totality of her destruction, but
her greatest impact on the human con-
dition was centered in the low-lying
areas of New Orleans’ 9th Ward. Any
serious observer (looking through the
lens of objectivity) could easily pre-
dict that a storm of major proportions
could threaten an out-of-date levee
system and inundate a community
that, for generations, had existed
below sea-level. The mainstream
media will routinely NOT take you to
the next level of understanding by
telling you how regularly people of
color are relegated to those or similar
residential circumstances by a variety
of socio-economic discriminators.
If we take a close look at the resi-
dential areas that border the major
thoroughfares and interstate highways
that transect major urban centers, we
can easily confirm that the residents of
these border areas are disproportion-
ately Black and other people of color.
The logic of this circumstance readily
conveys the understanding that those
disproportionately represented in these
residential pockets are disproportion-
ately exposed to the fumes that spew
forth from the exhausts of the vehicles
that use the roadways.
Recently, our President has created
the design to generate greater public
interest in the health impacts of
Climate Change, especially among
African Americans. Supporting this
measure, the
National
Medical
Association has
released a study
that concludes a
connection
between climate
change and
increased illness
and mortality among African
Americans.
NMA members report increased
severe cold-weather injuries among
patients. These physicians also report
increased air pollution-related increas-
es in chronic illnesses, increases in
allergic symptoms, and heat-related
effects. Other conditions include vec-
tor-borne diseases like Lyme disease
and West Nile Virus which correlate to
increased frequency based upon climat-
ic conditions. Although it is somewhat
a stretch to bring reference to the recent
discord in Baltimore to a discussion
about environmental racism, the con-
nection is clear. Placing politicians who
look favorably upon our circumstance
into decision-making positions is a mat-
ter of collectively exercising our right to
vote. The vote - that same tool that
made it possible for Baltimore State’s
Attorney, Marilyn Mosby, to bring
charges against six rogue Baltimore
cops can also be used to position those
who are dedicated to the protection of
the environmental interests of citizens
without regard to race or color.
Dr. E. Faye Williams is President of the
National Congress of Black Women.
.
◊
By Marian Wright Edelman
NNPA Columnist
The recent Department of Justice report on police and court practices
n Ferguson, Mo., put a much-needed spotlight on how a predatory sys-
em of enforcement of minor misdemeanors and compounding fines can
rap low-income people in a never-ending cycle of debt, poverty, and jail.
This included outrageous fines for minor infractions such as failing to
how proof of insurance and letting grass and weeds in a yard get too high.
n one case, a woman who parked her car illegally in 2007 and couldn’t pay
he initial $151 fee has since been arrested twice, spent six days in jail, paid
550 to a city court, and as of 2014 still owed the city $541 in fines, all as a
esult of the unpaid parking ticket. The Department of Justice found each
ear Ferguson set targets for the police and courts to generate more and
ore money from municipal fines. And Ferguson isn’t alone.
The criminalization of poverty is a growing trend in states and locali-
ies across the country.
The investigation of Ferguson’s practices came after the killing of
narmed 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer, and last month
he practice of criminalizing poverty made headlines again after Walter
cott was killed in North Charleston, S.C., Scott was shot in the back by
olice officer Michael Slager on April 4 as he ran away after being pulled
ver for a broken taillight. Scott had already served time in jail for falling
ehind on child support, and on the day he was stopped, there was a war-
ant out for his arrest for falling behind again. His family believes his
ear of going back to jail caused him to run.
His brother told
The New York Times
that Walter Scott already felt
rapped: “Every job he has had, he has gotten fired from because he went
o jail because he was locked up for child support,” said Rodney Scott,
hose brother was most recently working as a forklift operator. “He got
o the point where he felt like it defeated the purpose.”
A 2009 review of county jails in South Carolina found that 1 in 8
nmates was behind bars for failure to pay child support. Rodney Scott
emembered his brother trying to explain to a judge that he simply did
ot make enough money to pay the amount ordered by the court: “And
he judge said something like, ‘That’s your problem. You figure it out.’”
The United States legally ended the practice of debtor’s prisons in 1833,
nd the Supreme Court ruled in Bearden v. Georgia (1983) that it is uncon-
titutional to imprison those who can’t afford to pay their debt or restitution
n criminal cases, unless the act of not paying debt or restitution is “willful.”
But poor people are being increasingly targeted with fines and fees for
isdemeanors and winding up in illegal debtors’ prisons when they can’t
ay — and in some cases, then being charged additional fees for court and
ail costs.
A recent investigation by National Public Radio, the New York
niversity Brennan Center for Justice, and the National Center for State
ourts cited a study estimating between 80-85 percent of inmates now leave
rison owing debt for court-imposed costs, restitution, fines and fees.
In some jurisdictions defendants are charged for their room and board
uring lockup, probation and parole supervision, drug and alcohol abuse
reatment, DNA samples, and even their constitutional right to a public
efender. When poor people can’t pay those fees either, the cycle of debt
nd jail time continues.
The private companies providing probation services in more than half
f the states are some of the biggest winners when poor people are target-
d. If people on probation can’t afford the fees they are charged, they
reach their probation contract; this can result in more jail time, making
t even less likely that they’ll be earning the money they need, and people
nder the supervision of these private probation companies often become
iable for charges exceeding the initial cost of their ticket or fine.
Federal law also prohibits people in breach of probation from receiv-
ng a range of benefits, including Temporary Assistance for Needy
amilies (TANF), food stamps, and Supplemental Security Income –
nce again, exacerbating the cycle of poverty, probation, and prison.
According to a study conducted by the American Bar Association’s
riminal Justice Section, there are more than 38,000 documented
tatutes nationwide creating collateral consequences for people with
riminal convictions, including barriers to housing, employment, vot-
ng, and many public benefits.
By denying these citizens access to basic services they need to sur-
ive, our policies needlessly increase the risk of recidivism and continue
o leave people truly trapped—and when we extend the cycle of poverty
y criminalizing poor people, there are only a few greedy winners and
any, many losers.
arian Wright Edelman is president of the Children’s Defense Fund whose
eave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start,
Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and suc-
essful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and commu-
ities. For more information go to
.
◊
y George E. Curry
NPA Columnist
How can you tell when a politician is lying?
When he moves his lips.
Though originally intended as a joke, the number of candidates who
ave declared as candidate for president have already ushered in a cascade
f lies — and the situation will only grow worse as more climb aboard.
Fortunately, there are at least two non-partisan fact-checking groups
hat try to hold politicians accountable for their less than accurate asser-
ions. One is FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy
enter of the University of Pennsylvania that describes itself as “a non-
artisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce
he level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.” The second is
By Julianne Malveaux
NNPA Columnist
According to the National Center
for Educational Statistics, about 1.7
million people will receive their bach-
elor’s degrees, and another nearly
750,000 will receive associate’s
degrees this May and June. The num-
bers have been rising over the past 10
years, with 22 percent more receiving
bachelor’s degrees (the growth in
women’s degrees is faster than that of
men), and 12 percent more associate’s
degrees (again, with the degrees
awarded to women growing faster
than those awarded to men).
Too many of these students will
graduate with heavy debt. While the
data suggest that the average student
graduates with about $30,000 of
debt, the fact that some students
have no debt at all makes the num-
ber even higher. African-American
students are nearly twice as likely to
graduate with debt as Caucasian stu-
dents. And it is often much harder
for African-American students to
find jobs than it is for others. Still, a
college degree makes a difference in
life chances and lifetime earnings,
which is one of the reasons that pub-
lic policy has focused on postsec-
ondary education.
Students
who have
attended for-
profit colleges
go to school
with the same
hopes and
dreams as those who attend traditional
not-for-profit-universities. They attend
schools such as Kaplan, DeVry and
Corinthian because they want to
improve their education and find bet-
ter jobs. They go into debt, and seek
grants because they believe the invest-
ment is worth it. And too many of
By Lee A. Daniels
NNPA Columnist
“Americans don’t want to imagine that
our racist history is actually an ongoing
racist reality. We like to look at racism as a
thing that has gotten better (if not gone
away completely) and that the way black
Americans are treated in society is actually
colorblind.”
Those words, written by
Washington Post
reporter Philip Bump a year ago, provide con-
text for the polls of last week showing that
Americans as a whole believe “race relations”
have grown sharply worse in the aftermath of
the death of Baltimorean Freddie Gray in
police custody and the protests it provoked,
and why we once again see a widening of the
“racial divide” on issues involving police and
Black Americans.
For example, the New York Times/CBS
News poll found that 61 percent of
Americans believe race relations now are
generally bad, up from the 44 percent who
said so after the police killing of Michael
Brown last summer.
The Wall Street
Journal/
NBC News survey found that 96
percent of those polled expect more racial
disturbances this summer.
The Pew Research Center on the People
and the Press poll sought answers to five
different major questions in the aftermath of
the Baltimore protests. It found that, on the
one hand, overall 61 percent of Americans
believed the violent protests were largely the
result of some people “taking advantage” of
the situation to engage in criminal behavior
(54 percent of Blacks said so compared to
66 percent of whites). On the other hand,
overall 56 percent of those surveyed also
said that tensions between the police and the
Black community played a significant role
in the protests as well.
Not surprisingly, these and other surveys
found that Blacks and whites had signifi-
cantly different responses to many of the
questions. For example,
The Wall Street
Journal/
NBC News survey found that 60
percent of Blacks said the Baltimore protests
reflected “longstanding frustrations about
police mistreatment of African Americans.”
Just 32 percent of whites agreed. In
The New
York Times/
CBS News poll, 79 percent of
Blacks said police are “more likely to use
deadly force against a Black person” than a
white individual; but only 37 percent of
whites said so.
None of these surveys’ individual or overall
findings are surprising, of course. In fact,
Americans’ new worry about worsening race
relations is just the latest turn of the wheel of
the continuing dynamic of “racial déjà vu” I
wrote about in a recent column: a racial crisis
loop rooted in the age-old issue of Black
Americans’ status in American society.
Incidents of sharp racial controversy that
push that issue to the top of the American
agenda always lead Americans — largely,
white Americans — to believe race relations
are getting worse. One reason is that white
Americans have always been significantly
shielded, by government and private-sector
actions, from the reality most Black
Americans of high and low status face every
day. Another is that the white majority has
historically always taken refuge in the belief
that the lack of a racial explosion means, as
Bump wrote, the promised land of racial
equality of opportunity and treatment has
arrived. They’re repeatedly shocked to dis-
cover that’s not so.
One fresh proof that’s still not so today
can be found in the April employment
data released last week by the federal
Bureau of Labor Statistics. The good
news was that the overall unemployment
rate was essentially unchanged at 5.4 per-
cent. The “shocking” news was that,
while the white unemployment rate was
4.7 percent, the Black unemployment rate
in April was 9.6 percent—and that this
actually represented a decline from its
being above 10 percent in February and
March. (The unemployment rate for Asian
Americans was 4.4 percent; that of
Hispanic Americans was 6.9 percent.)
Think of that:
While the white
unemployment rate is
officially near the
generally accepted
level for “full
employment,” the
Black unemployment
rate is now just a few
points below the
10.0-percent unem-
ployment high-water
mark reached during
the Great Recession.
And that’s not merely the result of poorly
educated Blacks lacking labor-market skills. A
2014 study by the Center for Economic and
Policy Research, a progressive Washington-
based think tank, found that in 2013, 12.4 per-
cent of Black college gradu-
ates between 22 and 27
were unemployed, com-
pared with the national rate
of 5.6 percent, and that even
those Black graduates with
degrees in the sciences,
engineering, technology and
mathematics were enduring
high unemployment and
underemployment rates.
Study after study over
the past two decades has
shown why that particular
gap persists: continued
racial discrimination in the
job market.
That’s another “racial
reality” America’s white
majority likes to pretend it
can’t see.
Lee A. Daniels is a longtime
journalist based in New York
City. His new collection of
columns, Race Forward:
Facing America’s Racial
Divide in 2014, is available
at
◊
Page 5
May 18 - May 24, 2015
THE LOUISIANA WEEKLY -
YOUR MULTICULTURAL MEDIUM
MALVEAUX
WILLIAMS
DANIELS
EDELMAN
CURRY
Seeing and not seeing our racial reality
Environmental racism
How can you
tell when a
politician is
lying?
Criminalizing
poverty is big
business
Continued on Page 13
For-profit colleges –
Let the buyer beware
