Unlike Farrakhan, Trump
can get away with murder
By Rev. Susan K. Smith
George Curry Media Columnist
A friend of mine said something to
me last week that has kept me think-
ing: “Why do you think the media
lets Donald Trump say anything he
wants, but has basically censored
Minister Louis Farrakhan? Why do
you think it’s OK for Trump to say
hateful, racist, sexist things, and it’s
not OK for Farrakhan?”
In the eyes of their followers, both
Trump and Farrakhan “tell it like it
is.” Each man has a penchant for
forcefully speaking to the hearts and
spirits of people who are mostly
ignored, groups that feel marginal-
ized and forgotten — and they are
angry about it.
Farrakhan and Trump are angry, and
make no bones about it. But Trump
largely gets a pass.
An exception is Dana Milbank
who wrote in the
Washington Post
,
“Let’s not mince words: Donald
Trump is a bigot and a racist.”
Another rarity is Paul Walderman,
who also wrote in the
Washington
Post
, “The problem is that the media
doesn’t know how to handle this kind
of blatant race-baiting from a leading
politician. And just to be clear, it is
race-baiting, and nothing else.”
Those two examples are the excep-
tion rather than the rule.
For example, the conservative
Washington Times wrote, “The contro-
versial Nation of Islam leader famous-
ly labeled President Obama a ‘murder-
er’ over the death of former Libyan
leader Muammar Gaddafi.
“Last summer, Mr. Farrakhan
made headlines when he called for
an army of 10,000 to ‘rise up and
kill those who kill us.’
“In October, the Nation of Islam
hosted the 20th anniversary of the
Million Man March in Washington,
D.C., with the chilling theme
‘Justice or Else.’”
Yet, there was no reference in the
article to Trump’s racist past.
Trump’s latest boast about being able
to go in the middle of 5th Avenue in
New York City and shoot someone and
still not lose supporters has not gar-
nered a full-blown challenge. Anchors
have been giggling and have been
shaking their heads, but they have not
been willing to really confront him. It
is troubling to watch and hear.
Trump has been disparaging in his
remarks against women, Mexicans in
general and
illegal Mexican
immigrants in
particular. He
has questioned
whether former
prisoner of war John McCain is, in
fact, a war hero. He has proposed to
ban all Muslims from entering this
country. He talked disparagingly about
fellow GOP presidential rival Carly
Fiorina, saying, “look at that face!” He
likened Dr. Ben Carson, also in the
GOP race, to a child molester.
None of what Trump has said, in
person, in front of cameras or via
Twitter has been enough for the media
to turn away from him.
Farrakhan, on the other hand, has
been routinely reprimanded by the
U.S. media. The head of the Nation of
Islam has been unabashed about his
disgust with white supremacy and
Jewish people. According to the
Southern Poverty Law Center,
Farrakhan “... is an anti-Semite who
routinely accuses Jews of manipulat-
ing the U.S. government and control-
ling the levers of world power.
Farrakhan blames Jews for the slave
By Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.
NNPA Columnist
Why did Flint suffer a water catastrophe that now requires that
children be treated as if they had been poisoned?
It wasn’t because the people were negligent. From the moment
Flint began taking its water from the polluted Flint River, residents
warned about water that came out of the faucet brown, tasted foul
and smelled worse. They began packing public meetings with jugs
filled with water that looked like brown stain.
It wasn’t because the democracy failed, because in Flint democracy had
been suspended. The city, devastated by the closing of its auto plants and
industrial base, has been in constant fiscal crisis. Republican Gov. Rick
Snyder, one of the crop of proud conservative governors promising to cut
taxes for the rich and get government out of the way, appointed an emer-
gency manager to run the city. Elected officials had no say.
It wasn’t because the city manager and the state environmental
agency and the governor weren’t warned. Warnings were issued
from the beginning. General Motors even suspended using the water
because it was too corrosive for the auto parts it was making.
Nevertheless, city and state officials assured the worried residents of
Flint that it was still safe to drink.
The result is that Flint’s children — particularly those in the older,
poorer, disproportionately Black neighborhoods — have been exposed
to elevated levels of lead.
Lead poisoning isn’t like contracting a cold or getting the flu. Lead
is an immediate and unrelenting threat to health. It causes miscar-
riages and births of low-weight babies.
Children exposed to lead can have disabilities that afflict them for their
entire lives. Lead stays in your bones. Yet even after a federal EPA official
warned that the tests were being skewed to underreport levels of lead, even
after heroes like LeeAnne Walters reported that her children’s hair was
falling out and that they were developing rashes and constantly sick, even
after the heroic pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, an Iraqi-American,
reported elevated levels of lead in children’s blood, their concerns were
dismissed, their alarms scorned, they were attacked for sowing hysteria and
the poor residents of Flint were told the water was safe to drink.
Why were the people and the obvious signs and the experts ignored?
They would not have been ignored if these were wealthy suburban
neighborhoods and the water suddenly turned brown. They would not have
been ignored if the children of an all-white community were at risk.
State officials dismissed the complaints as exaggerated. The brown
water was just rust. Officials thought people ought to be grateful for
what they had. The laws, they wrote, ensure the water is “safe to drink.”
It doesn’t regulate how it looks, its “aesthetic values.” The water looks
bad because it’s from the “Flint River.” Flint is old and poor. The pipes
are old and poor. The people are Black and poor.
They just have to learn to put up with it. And if the lead seems to be at
dangerous levels, flushing the system before the tests, skewing the sam-
ple to the most recently built systems can jigger the results to get by.
Some might get hurt, but no one worth caring about.
This is the ugly reality of the right-wing assault on America’s working
people and particularly on people of color. They want to get “govern-
ment out of the way” — out of the way of their greed. The successful
have earned special treatment — in taxes, in contracts, in interest rates,
in public investment. The unsuccessful need to learn self-reliance. They
need to accept what they get and be grateful for it.
Flint is not a bug in their perspective; it is a feature. They fought
against African Americans getting the right to vote. Now they use
“emergency” to set up dictators - emergency managers — to occupy
predominantly African-American communities. They worry that the
poor get too much “free stuff” — food stamps (once a Republican pro-
gram), health care through Medicaid (so they refuse to expand it),
unemployment insurance when they lose their jobs (so they limit its
coverage), minimum wages (which they fight against) and “costly regu-
lations” that require safe water and clean air and safer workplaces.
The “establishment” Republican candidate Jeb Bush has called for a
“regulatory spring cleaning” to strip away regulations that protect health
and safety. The Republican Congress annually seeks to cut backs EPA’s
budgets and authority. The Republican governors gleefully gut the bud-
gets of their own state agencies. They don’t worry. The children of the
rich will be protected. It is the poor — of all races but disproportionate-
ly people of color — who will be left at greater risk.
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder should have the common decency to
resign. The state and the federal government should step in and rebuild
Flint’s water system immediately. A federal investigation should issue
indictments where justified. But this isn’t simply about water and Flint.
This is about an ideology that believes in this rich country, the privileges
of the few must be protected, even if the necessities of the many are sac-
rificed. “Of course there is class warfare,” billionaire Warren Buffett
once acknowledged, “and my class is winning.”◊
By Lee A. Daniels
George Curry Media Columnist
“It’s all just poison now,” Annette Williams, a grandmother of
three in Flint, Mich., told a reporter from the British newspaper,
The Guardian
, recently, gazing at the Flint River, which she could
see from her home on the city’s northeast side.
That’s the river whose water, flowing through the city’s aging, cor-
roded pipes, has for the past two years subjected her family and
apparently many of the 100,000 other residents of Flint to a toxic
mix of lead and other dangerous chemicals.
The danger facing Flint’s residents is heartbreaking and extraordinary
— a tale seemingly out of 18th-century Europe, or scattered parts of
today’s less-developed nations rather than the 21st-century United
By Julianne Malveaux
NNPA Columnist
Three unarmed Black men encoun-
tered a group of white men walking
down a dirt road in Slocum, Texas on
July 29, 1910. Without warning, and
with no reason, the white men
opened fire on the Black men. And
for two days white men simply
slaughtered Black people.
Eight deaths have been officially
acknowledged, but historians who
have studied the Slocum Massacre say
that it is likely that dozens more were
killed, with some saying as many were
killed in Slocum as in Tulsa in 1921
(and those numbers range into the
hundreds).
The New York Times
quot-
ed William Black, the sheriff at the
time of the massacre: “Men were
going about killing Negroes as fast as
they could find them, and so far as I
was able to ascertain, without any real
cause. I don’t know how many were
in the mob, but there may have been
200 or 300. … They hunted the
Negroes down like sheep.”
History mostly swallowed the horror
of the Slocum Massacre. Some descen-
dants of those massacred pushed for
official acknowledgement of the hor-
ror, but there have been efforts to cov-
er up the carnage, with some in
Slocum pretending that the Massacre
never happened. It took more than a
century, until 2011, for the Texas
Legislature to formally acknowledge
the massacre. A roadside marker com-
memorating the tragedy was just
placed on January 26, 2016.
A local member of the Anderson
County Historical Commission
opposed the marker because “The citi-
zens of Slocum today had absolutely
nothing to do with what happened
over a hundred years ago. This is a
nice, quiet community with a wonder-
ful school system. It would be a
shame to mark them as racist from
now until the
end of time.”
E.R. Bills,
author of
The
1910 Slocum
Massacre: An
Act of
Genocide in
East Texas
, says that there are more
than 16,000 historical markers in the
state of Texas. “The Slocum
Massacre historical marker will appar-
ently be the first one to specifically
acknowledge racial violence against
African Americans.” His book metic-
ulously documents the Slocum facts,
and asserts, “Many white folks got
away with murder”.
Only 11 were arrested for their role
in the massacre. Seven were indicted
but none were prosecuted for their
crimes. The 11 were only the known
criminals. According to Bills, many
By Marian Wright Edelman
George Curry Media Columnist
Sarah is three years old. She and her six-
year-old brother, Bryce, are inseparable
except when it’s time for him to visit the
summer food program that provides meals at
a school near his Ohio home for children
who otherwise would go hungry. Sarah’s too
young to make the trip.
One morning after Bryce had his fill of
food for the day, he made a detour before
heading home. He walked to the trashcans
and began rummaging through food others
threw away. Winnie Brewer, the Food
Services Supervisor in Marion City
Schools, noticed the little boy and tapped
him on the shoulder to ask why he was
sifting through the garbage. “My little sis-
ter,” he explained. “She’s hungry.”
Bringing her leftover food was the only
way he knew to help.
“We run into a lot of situations where kids
will come and say they have younger sib-
lings at home,” Brewer says. “They always
want to know if they can take something
back.” After Brewer spoke with Bryce, staff
members followed him home with a care
package for little Sarah. This was a tempo-
rary solution to a huge problem Brewer wor-
ries about every day. “Until we see that child
digging food out of a trash can, it doesn’t hit
home,” Brewer says. “Once it does, you
know you have to do something.”
Nearly 220,000 Ohio children under six
are poor and young children of color are
more likely to be poor. More than half
(55.5 percent) of Black children, 40.3 per-
cent of Hispanic, and 19.1 percent of white
children under six in Ohio are poor; 21
percent of them live in families where at
least one parent works full-time year-
round; 47 percent have at least one parent
working part of the year or part-time; and
32 percent have no employed parent.
Nearly one in four Ohio children lacks
consistent access to adequate food — that’s
653,410 Ohio children of all ages in every
corner of the state. Nationally, 15.3 million
children were food insecure in 2014. The
majority live in families with one or more
working adults, but are still unable to consis-
tently afford enough food to keep the wolves
of hunger from their door.
There is no excuse for any child in
America to go hungry or malnourished in
the richest nation on Earth. Yet, child hunger
is a widespread, urgent and shameful prob-
lem that cannot wait. We all have to do
something - now. Bryce and Sarah (names
were changed to protect their identities) are
far from alone as shown in a new Children’s
Defense Fund-Ohio searing report calling to
end the childhood hunger many thousands of
Ohio’s youngest children suffer every day.
Babies, toddlers, and preschoolers suffering
hunger and malnutrition face increased odds
of negative health outcomes during their
years of greatest brain development. Food
insecure children under age five are:
• Nearly two times more likely to be in
“fair or poor health;”
• Nearly two times more likely to experi-
ence developmental delays;
• Two times as likely to have behavioral
problems;
• More than twice as likely to be hospital-
ized;
• Two and a half times more likely to
have headaches, and
• Three times more likely to have stom-
ach aches.
Food-insecure children are more likely to
be behind in social skills and reading per-
formance in kindergarten. By elementary
school, they are four times more likely to
need mental health counseling. Risks keep
accumulating: malnutrition from childhood
food insecurity has been linked to adult
diseases including diabetes, hyperlipidemia
and cardiovascular disease. The stress and
anxiety of early childhood hunger also
make it harder to learn skills that help later
relationship development, school success
and workplace productivity.
Babies born to food insecure mothers
face tragic odds: they
are more likely to be
born pre-term and at
low birth weight and
to struggle with
breastfeeding, which
contributes to
increased infant mor-
tality rates. Babies
who survive are
more likely to strug-
gle with disabilities
during childhood and
adolescence and face higher risks of chron-
ic disease as adults.
School-age food supports of free and
reduced price breakfast and lunch are criti-
cally important to the health and academic
success of older children but young children
should not be forced to
suffer from lack of food.
Not a single parent or
grandparent would want
our young children or
grandchildren rummaging
through trash cans seeking
food for younger brothers
and sisters.
It’s long past time for
political leaders at every
level and all of us to end
child hunger. Coretta Scott
King once said, “I must
remind you that starving a
child is violence.”
Continuing to condone
the pain of hunger and
malnutrition in America is
unforgivable. Please
demand our political lead-
ers act right now.
Marian Wright Edelman is
president of the Children’s
Defense Fund. For more
information go to
drensdefense.org.
◊
Continued on Page 13
Continued on Page 13
Page 5
February 8 - February 14, 2016
THE LOUISIANA WEEKLY -
YOUR MULTICULTURAL MEDIUM
MALVEAUX
DANIELS
EDELMAN
JACKSON
SMITH
Flint’s
man-made
tragedy
Flint’s water
crisis and
the GOP’s
class war
Continued on Page 13
Hungry children in Rich America
Standing on sacred ground
