Newspaper Page Text
6A
JANUARY |, 1998
President should
abandon race talks
By Harry € AHord
President/CEO, National Black Chamber of
Commerce.
ur President, WilliamJ. Clinton,
has decided to organize a na
tional dialogue on race. Is thisa
wise thing to do at this time?
America, the nation founded on
racism via the genocidal assault on the
indigenous inhabitants, enslavement of
Africans, theft and destruction against
Mexican settlers and indentured servi
tude of Asians. This nation made its
biggest gains through racism and has yet
to ever apologize or even acknowledge its
vicmunfincy The nouveau idea ap
pears to softly speak and babble like
Rodney King’s “Can’t we all get along?”
The answer to that question Mr, Presi
dent is this: HELL NO!
oud. - ghaas s e ockio o
ith someone pain
on me and my lovedonu”mw!w
does not acknowledge the wrongs done
and being done and who wants to exclaim
“discrimination no longer exists!” cannot
expect to sit down and chat. Before we can
sit down and talk, there must be some
significant recognition, reparation and
rules of future engagement that will be
mutually agreed to.
I have personally studied the lives of my
parents, grandparents and great-grand
parents. | have witnessed their denial of
education, owiership and economic eq
uity. I have awakened to a 10 foot cross
burning in our front yard because we
chose to buy a home in a particular neigh
borhood. That incident occurred when |
was eight-years-old and it will never be
forgotten. I've had to urinate out in the
woods because | was not allowed to use
public rest rooms. I've had to go thirsty
because I couldn’t drink from clean drink
ing fountains. | went hungry because |
couldn’t eat in any of the existing restau
rants, My crime? |am Black!
Is today much better? I don’t think so,
Have a Happy,
Healthy and
Prosperous
New Year!
Sugsn (Fey I
Since 1981
A Walker Group Publication
1143 Laney Walker Blvd,
AUGUSTA FOCYS
not when it comes to money and the equal
min Wfl;‘l lur:
a t
in Washington, D.C. We made our offer,
produced cash for the deal but were
et s Yo S
folks aren't supposed to live in this neigh
borhood. This neighborhood has former
VbPrmww‘f&:ww
retary of state living there
ing vile racism — right now in 19&'.‘5“:1
want to sit down and discuss it? No! I'm
”‘"‘op.mn,”“wm' is not the
ing up wi not the way
tosolve racism. The first thing you need to
do Mr. President is to clean up your own
shop. Racism is dripping from the very
mndudy"ouminconu'olof. The FBI is
filbdzi m Wbcnmy:t;pingto
clean it up Department of Agricul
ture blatantly discriminates against Black
farmers. Whnnmyouph}tochmthat
up? The US Department of Transporta
tion has virtually corrupted the highway
affirmative action program and has, thus,
eliminated Black contractors from doing
any business on our freeway mm‘
When are you going to clean up?
Blacks get less than two percent of all SBA
loans. When are you going to improve
that? Black business is at an all time low
with federal agencies. Black employment
has gone into reverse and downward. Why
don’t you “dialogue” that?
If you wanted a “real deal” discussion,
why didn’t you recruit the Honorable An
drew Young? Where is Dr. Arthur A,
Fletcher, the author of affirmative action?
Shouldn’t he have a word in this matter?
Discussion is going toorandupwounda
and resurrect the hurt, If you want to do
something constructive, then order your
cabinet to stop overseeing the wanton
racism and discrimination that occurs daily
at the federal level. The “good old boys
roundup” mentality still exists and you
aren’t addressing it.
Clean up your employees and business
practices and then, be then, we can sit
down and rap awhile,
Editorial
Charles W, Walker
Publisher
Frederick Benjamin
Managing Editor
Dot T, Ealy
Marketing Director
Debby Rivera
Advertising Production
Christy Allen
Writer/Reporter
Bheila Jones
Office Manager
Lillian Wan
Layout Artist
Loretta LaGrone
Classified Ad Manager
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GEE, THE 1998 NEW YEAR SURE KS PREPARED -
NAW SONNY. ALL THAT PROTECTION IS JUST FOR EL NINO!
THIS WAY FOR BLACK EMPOWERMENT By Dr. Lenora Fulani
%
When kids perform, theylearn!
he Development School for
Youth, a project I co-direct, em
ploys a new performance-based
educational approach that chal
lenges the prevailing view of how
young people learn. It is a rigorousthree
month leadership training program for
young adults between the ages of 16 and
22 that uses performance to enable them
to make the transition from school —
which is where they are now —to the
world of work.
The Development School for Youth is
structured as a 12-act “play” in which
the students, most of them in high school,
perform as leaders in a variety of “scenes.”
These are some of the scenes in which the
first group of 17 trainees, who graduated
last May, performed: a tour of the New
York Stock Exchange, conducted by a
retired managing director of Merrill
Lynch; a visit to the ABC-TV television
studios in midtown, led by a senior writer
on a popular daytime show; a public
speaking class taught by a professional
actor; classes in computer proficiency,
resume writing, and dressing for success
and a two-day visit to Washington, D.C.,
during which the students made presen
tations to members of Congress on issues
of concern to youth, All of these work
shops are led by adult professionals who
are supporters of the program and who
volunteer their time. Many of these
TO BE EQUAL Guest Column by James T. McLawhorn Jr.
@
Robbing our future
henitcomes tocrime, Ameri
can Society seems caught in
a paradox. Crime rates have
plummeted in cities across
the country, in the down
towns and in poor neighborhoods, too,
Yet, while actual crime has abated, the
crime-scare rhetoric has not. More dan
gerously, the imprudent rush to build more
and more prisons — a direct consequence
of the crime-scare rhetoric of the 19808 —
hasn't eased, nor has the push to try more
and more juveniles as adults. Both are
among the reasons why so many young
African-American males wind up in cor
rections systems throughout the country,
President Clinton during an interview
this week from the Oval Office referred to
another reason: discriminatory behavior
by police officers, and he vowed to “find a
highly visible public forum” to discuss the
Of course, African Americans have long
been aware of such unfair treatment, as
President Clinton has heard from black
professionals and young people around
the country,
According to a U.B. Department of Jus
tice survey released last month, law en
forcement officers threatened or used force
in onflnwwm ’[’l?a estimated 500,000
people in 1996, report especially
noted the disproportionate number of en
counters African Americans and Hispanic
Americans have with law enforcement
Rl Baee
percen popu
tion 12 years of m::d older, they
up B 0 percent of who've had intimi
dating and threatening experieii vs with
adults have told me how it has been
developmental for them, too!
A scene that was recently added to our
development play was directed by one of
our supporters. the owner of an advertis
ing agency. This advertising executive
and members of his staff met with the
young people to develop an advertising
campaign for their Development School
for Youth as a way to show them some
thing of how the advertising business
works. As part of creating the “cam
paign,” the young people were organized
into a “focus group” where they came up
with a slogan to describe the leadership
training program: School as it should be,
In addition to such basic performance
requirements as being ready to go on
stage, on time and “in costume” for each
scene, the students are expected todo the
homework assignments based on the ex
ercises inLet's Develop! —the marvelous
book by Dr. Fred Newman that is our
textbook. They also produce a profes
sional resume and take part in a mock job
interview, All 17 members of the spring
class were placed in paid summer intern
ships. We are enormously proud of the
rave reviews our students received, with
several of them being invited to come
back next summer or offered permanent
part-time jobs after school.
The current class consists of 14 young
people who graduated on December 17,
law enforcement. Representative Nydia
M. Velasquez, D-N.Y. pointed out that in
New York City, people of color register 80
percent of the police brutality complaints,
Law enforcement officers are the
gatekeepers of the criminal justice system,
Their discretion at the point of arrest often
determines whether juvenile offenders
especially are given a simple warning, a
citation, taken into custody, or referred to
juvenile court, Ascriminologist A.R. Rob
erts wrote in a recent issue ofJuvenile and
Family Court Journal, “To a great mea
sure it is the officer’s exercise of discretion
that really controls the disposition of juve
nile cases,”
In the way that discretion is exercised
now, it too often adversely and unfairly
affects minority youth. As Tom Teppen,
the columnist, recently wrote, “Race is
why the white cop, even if unaware of its
influence, sends a black kid to juvenile
court for an offense he'd only scold a white
kid for, And it is why the criminal justice
system, after pilingup similar decisions all
along the line, at the end produces death
rows that are grouaquonxbllck,"
Too many of our juvenile justice systems
have become feeder systems f‘or:'!rilons —
the nation’s fastest growing industry,
In fact, prison construction is at an all
time high, In fiscal year 1982 the states
spent almost $9 bill{on on their correc
tionssystems. Ten years later, the amount
had increased to more than $29 billion,
according to date from the ÜB, Census
Bureau, Thus far, the trend shows no sign
of easing. In 1994 the total state appro
priations for corrections grew by nearly 10
percent, the biggest percentage increase of
Like the first group of trainees, the class
is very heterogeneous. It includes a
Muslim young woman; a 15-year-old from
Hong Kong whose family came to New
York two years ago; a Jewish young man
who is a freshman at John Jay College (at
22 he is our elder statesman); several
young people whose parents are recent’
immigrants from the Caribbean and Af
rican-American youngsters. |
In the Development School for Youth,
young people are performing ahead of
themselves, doing more than they are
“seheduled” to do, stepping outside the
fixed identities that keep them
undereducated and unconnected to the
world at large.
As the co-director of the DSY, I've also
been performing. At the Development
School for Youth and the All Stars, we're
participating with the young people in.
creating new developmental perfor- |
mances for all of us, and together are
learning a great deal in the process. |
Lenora B. Fulani twice ran for Presi
dent of the U.S. as an independent, mak
ing history in 1988 when she became the
first woman and African American to get
on the ballot in all 50 states. Dr. Fulani
is currently a leading activist in the Re
form Party and chairs the Committee for
a Unified Independent Party. She can be ‘
reached at 800-288-3201 or at
www.Fulani.org,
any category of state expenditures, Tocite
Jjust one example, South Carolina now
spends an average of $28,000 per inmate
incarcerated; it spends roughly $5,000 per
pupil to educate its public school pupils.
Studies by The Sentencing Project, a
Washington, D.C.-based think tank, paint
an even more frightening picture of the
racial nature of incarceration in America:
In 1996, one of three black males, 20-29,
wasinvolved in the criminal justice system
in some negative way — in prison, on
parole, or on probation,
This emphasis on incarceration as the
quick-fix solution to the crime problem is
foolish policy. Yes, we must focus more of
our efforts on deterring youth from com
mitting crimes. But we must also require
that law enforcement officers wisely exer
cise the great discretion they have, Afri
can-American and Hispanic-American
youths must receive from law officers the
same positive quality of discretion white
youths benefit from. With them, as with
their white counterparts, the goal should
be to prevent as many juveniles as possible
from becoming ensnared in the juvenile
Justice system,
Black Americans — who are dispropor
tionately the victims of so-called street
crimes as well as those disproportionately
locked up for committing street crimes —
must challenge our neighborhood and com
munity leaders and elected officials to pur
sue this course, Todo anything less would
be to rob Black America ~- and America as
a whole —of its future by shelving a
substantial segment of our human capital,
James T. McLawhorn Jr. is president of
the Columbia (8.C.) Urban League. :