June 15, 2014

Two Days After Death, Black Press Editor Wins Economic Justice Fight 
By Joey Matthews

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Raymond H. Boone has scored anothe rvictory. In the same week the Free Press editor/publisher died Richmond, Va. Mayor Dwight C. Jones, using the theme “A Taste of Richmond,” announced that two popular local black owned eateries would sell food and soft drinks inside the Washington professional football team’s training camp in Richmond this summer. They are the Croaker’s Spot and Big Herm’s Kitchen, both popular for their fish and chicken.

The mayor also said Friday that local vendors “offering a variety of food options” will be allowed to bid to set up six food trucks on Leigh Street outside the camp. The announcement was made the same day the mayor gave the D.C. team’s new coach Jay Gruden a tour of the $10 million training camp facility.

“This seems like a very, very positive opportunity,” Herman Baskerville, owner of Big Herm’s, told the Free Press. “Last year, it raised a stink when no local vendors could sell inside the camp. I’m glad I was one of the ones who was chosen.”

The vendor deal was made public three days after Mr. Boone died Tuesday, June 3. It’s likely city officials had tired of being pounded for months by Mr. Boone in the Free Press. He decried the racist and discriminatory deal brokered by themayor and supported by Bon Secours Health Systems of Virginia that denied local vendors last summer from selling concessions inside the camp that bears the team’s racist nickname.Only national White-owned chains —Papa John’s, Johnny Rockets and Famous Dave’s — were allowed inside the camp,officials said, because they had contractswith the D.C. team that gave them sole rights inside the camp.

That infuriated local vendors, who said the city denied them the opportunity to compete for profits from the more than150,000 fans who attended last year’scamp. Byron Marshall, the city’s chief administrativeofficer, told the Free Press in February the city was negotiating with the D.C. team to allow local vendors inside the camp this summer. Baskerville said he is currently negotiating terms of the vending agreement with the D.C. team. He said he will have to give the team a percentage of his sales and did not know if he would have to pay a fee as well. He said he contacted the D.C. team when he heard they were looking for local vendors to sell inside the camp. He said D.C. officials responded, and dispatched employees to eat at his restaurant in Downtown.Calls to the owner of Croaker’s Spot for comment were not returned.

The mayor said the six other vendors would be required to pony up $2,500 in fees to set up trucks outside the training camp.Those fees would go toward the $547,685 local contribution the city and the Richmond Economic Development Authority are required to give the D.C. team in services, goods or cash each year as part of the eight-year training camp deal.

Richard Johnson, chair of the EDA’sboard, defended last year’s discriminatory deal that excluded local vendors from the camp.

“The city and EDA don’t control inside the gate,” he said, last Friday. “[The team has its] own relationships on both a national and regional basis. The (racist nickname) put their program together.”Mr. Johnson also said the fees are part of the cost of doing business at a high-profile location.

“There’s a significant cost to closing off the (Leigh) street and making that space available,” he said. “It costs to address safety concerns and barricade the street.” He praised the mayor and his administration for taking steps to open the camp to local vendors.

“I think it’s a case of extraordinary responsiveness,” he said. “This is only the second year, and the city worked to address the complaints from some local businesses. This thing has worked like a charm in my mind.” Boone also staked a claim against the D.C. team’s racist nickname last year. He announced the Free Press would no longer use the hateful nickname in the newspaper, joining a nationwide cry for billionaire owner Daniel Snyder to change the D.C. team’s mascot. Boone also called for the resignation of Roslyn M.Brock, the national NAACP chair and a Bon Secours vice president, for supporting the team’s racist nickname and the Bon Secours-sponsored discriminatory training camp deal.

June 16, 2014

Records Snafu Boosts Concerns Over Veterans' Hospital in Virginia
By Jeremy M. Lazarus

Army veteran Steffani Lynn Yates

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - After a few days of feeling weak and nauseated, Army veteran Steffani Lynn Yates went to the medical center shetrusts with her health care — the McGuire Veterans Administration Medical Center in South Side Richmond, Va.

On her second visit a few days later after the problem did not clear up, Mrs. Yates was surprised when the doctor examining her in the emergency room asked her if she had taken any illegal drugs.

“I don’t use drugs. I never have. I don’teven know what they look like,” said the 60-year-old South Side resident who is employed as a sandwich maker for a company that supplies supermarkets. When she asked the physician for an explanation, “he told me my medical records showed I had a history of cocaine use. I was shocked. And he said my records showed that I had tested positive for marijuana use in 2000. There’s just no way.”

Leaving in a huff, she placed a request for a copy of her medical records with the hospital on June 2. She was told it would take 20 days, but just three days later a package was delivered to her home on nearby Royall Avenue, where she lives with her truck driving husband.When she opened it, she found a letter from the hospital’s Record Processing Unit stating the enclosed paperwork was a response to her request.

As the Free Press has confirmed, there was one big problem with the paperwork: “The records I received were for someone else, actually a male individual I have never met,” she said, quipping, “I went to the hospital a woman and came out a man.”

For her, it was nothing unusual. She said the hospital sent her the wrong records the last time she requested her paperwork about five years ago. The hospital did not respond to a request for comment about this snafu, which appears to be an egregious breach of patient privacy laws — raising questions about McGuire’s ability to handle record keeping.

For the hospital, this snafu couldn’t have come at a worse time. Yates provided her story amid a huge uproar over patient services at McGuireand other Veteran Administration (VA) hospitals.The hospitals are now having to defend themselves from claims they are keeping patients, particularly new patients, waiting for months to see a doctor.

An audit the Veterans Administration released this week added fuel to the fire. According to the report, McGuire keeps new patients waiting up to 72 days to see a primary care physician, among the longest wait times among the 731 hospitals in the VA system.The average wait at Richmond’s VAcomplex is apparently the worst among Virginia VA hospitals. The average waits to see doctors at VA hospitals in Hampton and Salem averaged 68 days and 34 days,respectively, according to the audit.

Nationally, 57,000 patients have been on waiting lists for three months or more and have yet to get their first appointment, the audit found. These patients, the audit acknowledged, represent only about 2 percent of more than 2 million patients the hospital system see in a given year. McGuire officials are disputing the accuracy of the audit’s figures. According to spokeswoman Darlene Edwards, the wait time for an appointment currently averages no more than 37 days,and could be lower.The wait time for new patients requesting primary care has been and continues to be a focus of our staff,” she responded in a statement.

“We continue to address this through adding new staff members, additional clinic appointments and rural health outreach initiatives.” And veterans appear to support the hospital’s view. There has been no groundswell of complaints from veterans who use the hospital about long waits for an appointment. Indeed, the hospital is most notorious for the findings of racial bias against the management. Employees have repeatedly had their complaints of discrimination upheld, including a class action lawsuit that found the hospital favored White employees when it came to merit awards.The hospital also has faced its share of lawsuits over the care and treatment of patients.

June 15, 2014

Hashtag' Campaign for Kidnapped Girls Sparks Dispute

Protestors at European headquarters of U.N. in Geneva

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from Global Information Network

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – Is the social media campaign to bring back the abducted Nigerian schoolgirls an effective tool to win their freedom or just trending until the next big thing comes along? That’s the question heating up the news wires with rescue efforts at an apparent standstill and new dramas coming on the media stage.

Staff writer Joshua Keating in Slate.com was among the questioners. He compared #BringBackOurGirls to the #StopKony campaign of 2012. “Stop Kony was the most successful viral video in history and succeeded in making Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army internationally famous,” he wrote.

But the video had flaws. “It not only fudged basic facts of geography and chronology, but failed to provide viewers with any social, political or economic context for Kony’s violence,” Keating said.

Kony, a notorious Ugandan warlord, abducted over 60,000 children from 1986 to 2009, making them into child soldiers or sex slaves. Still at large, Kony is the target of a manhunt by a small U.S.-led force. Most of the thousands of young Americans in that hashtag campaign have moved on.

Researchers who studied #StopKony, linked its success to the simplicity of its message – which was oversimplified.

A second Stop Kony video presented a more nuanced picture of Kony’s Africa. It failed to catch fire with the original hashtag followers.

“Defenders of campaigns like these claim they can be gateways toward greater understanding of complex global issues,” Keating said, but the opposite may be true.

“People are outraged when they hear about evil monsters like Kony or Boko Haram that just need to be stopped. When they learn more about the issue and find out that, lo and behold, killing the monster won’t be so easy and there are larger issues in play beyond the monster itself, they lose interest.”

Marissa Jackson, a blogger writing for The Guardian, disagreed. “I am not Nigerian and I have not known the pain of having a child abducted. Neither am I familiar with the group trauma experienced by the Chibok community, or the thousands of other Nigerians who have been devastated by Boko Haram’s unspeakable actions and further victimized by their government’s indefensible inaction.

“Yet I clicked and shared updates about the Chibok girls and the abusive antics of the president's wife, Patience Jonathan, and I even used the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls a couple of times, feeling self-conscious about it.

“All too often, we protest too much and accomplish too little. But that’s not what’s been happening here.

“Rather, the movement to #BringBackOurGirls, which actually originated in Nigeria, has thus far demonstrated the virtues of solidarity and grassroots international cooperation, within and beyond the African diaspora. It has shed much meaningful light on how to make visibility and voice to the invisible and voiceless.

“As a black woman in the United States, this movement has become as meaningfully encouraging as it is frustrating because for the first time ever, I am witnessing men and women come together to notice when a group of black girls goes missing, and demand decisive action.

“Equally significant has been the pan-African unity on the issue. That people of West Indian and Caribbean, North American, Afro-European, and African descent have rallied in support of the Chibok girls, their families, and indeed, all of Nigeria, is no small feat.” 

June 15, 2014

Perceptions of Equality
By William Spriggs  

 
(TriceEdneyWire.com) - A recent interview of Morgan Freeman by CNN host Don Lemon lit a firestorm of conversation. Freeman argued that his personal success, and that of Lemon’s, made it clear that racism was not a factor in closing America’s growing problem of inequality. Freeman argued that inequality was a crisis because a vibrant middle class was needed for the growth of the economy and stability of society, and the current chasm between the 1 percent and the 99 percent was unhealthy. Clearly, Freeman’s views on inequality are incontrovertible, so why the storm about his statement on the role of race?

Recent work by business school professors Clayton Critcher, of the University of California—Berkeley, and Jane Risen, of the University of Chicago, note that people’s views about the role of racism in America's inequality is shaped by their knowledge of African Americans who succeed outside the realm of current Black success, like professional sports or music. When shown pictures of African-American business leaders, for instance, even in the context that the individual is an exception, the respondents become less sympathetic toward the racial polarization of American life and its role in holding down African-Americans.
But the narrative used to explain high poverty, high unemployment and low wealth among African Americans is important, not just to race relations, but because the story line Americans buy in accepting the tenuous economic position of African Americans is integral to the story line of accepting American inequality broadly.

How does one explain how America alone as a democracy is so accepting of levels of inequality that are closer to Mexico and Turkey than to France, Canada or Denmark? How do we elect politicians that benefit the 1 percent to such extremes, and are in the process of destroying class mobility—once the key to America’s core identity?
        
Despite moments of exceptions like for their geo-political role in sports victories when Jessie Owens won at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmelling in 1938, America held fast to denying African-Americans access to the American dream of social mobility, including Southern Democrats in Congress shaping the New Deal to limit African American access to the new safety-nets of labor standards, unemployment insurance and Social Security and the full benefits of increasing home ownership provided by the Federal Housing Administration and later the GI Bill.  Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro have laid out how various policies interacted with race to create the huge wealth divide between African-Americans and Whites.

But in the era since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Medicare in 1966 (ending segregation in health care) and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, Americans have been forced to reconcile racial inequality with the American ideal of social mobility. Don’t we now have equal opportunity? Isn’t that enough to assure equal outcomes? One resolution is as ancient as the forces that held slavery together—racism, an abiding belief that African-Americans are inferior in character and culture. The other is to understand the many layers of inequality and their interaction with the lack of wealth, income and employment with ongoing policies. A third is to understand that racism is still an ugly factor in American life.

I think those who disagree with Freeman think his dismissal of race was an assumption that equal opportunity exists. If African Americans are not held back in moving up the class ladder, then how can anyone in America claim to be held back? If the economic game in America is fair and not rigged against African American success, which Americans can call foul?

Just as the victories of Owens and Louis did not mean the end of segregation or discrimination, neither does the victory of President Barack Obama mean the end of Donald Sterling’s sprawling Los Angeles real estate empire that discriminated against black and Latino tenants. The 1 percent benefit from a different set of rules, from lower marginal tax rates to bigger tax deductions for their homes, savings and health.
Blaming African-Americans for not seizing the day and rising to the top is an indictment of the 99 percent. Racism is not an “excuse,” but a way to understand the rules are not fair, this is not a lack of will, but acknowledgement rules are rigged for multinational corporations to give away our jobs and Wall Street to steal our homes. It is an understanding that inequality is not a natural state, but is manufactured.