Oct. 20, 2013

To Be Equal 
Washington Football Team Should Drop the “R” Word
By Marc H. Morial

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “At a moment when President Obama and Republican leaders remain deeply divided, this week saw them come to a bipartisan agreement on one thing: It is time for Washington’s NFL team to stop using a racial slur and to finally change its name.” Oneida Indian Nation radio ad

This past Sunday, as Dallas and Washington revived their annual NFL football rivalry, they also found themselves in the middle of an escalating fight over the name of the Washington football team.   In fact, as part of its “Change the Mascot” campaign; the Oneida Indian Nation is running radio ads in Dallas and the other cities where the Washington football team is playing this year calling for DC’s team to drop the “R” word from its name.

This is all part of a larger movement among civil rights organizations and political leaders from both the left and right who correctly point out that the term “Redskins” is a racial slur.  Suzan Shown Harjo, a Native American woman who lives in Washington and directs the Morning Star Institute, has been leading this fight and others like it since the 1960s.  President Obama recently weighed in,  saying, “If I were the owner of the team and I knew that there was a name of my team–even if it had a storied history–that was offending a sizable group of people, I’d think about changing it.”  He added that he did not believe “attachment to a particular name should override the real, legitimate concerns that people have.”

Team owner, Dan Snyder disagrees.  He has vowed to never change the name and in a letter to season ticket holders last week he called the team name, “a badge of honor.”  Obviously not everyone agrees.  The controversy has now gotten the attention of top NFL officials.  NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell recently said, “If we are offending one person, we need to be listening and making sure that we’re doing the right things to try to address that,” And officials of the Oneida Indian Nation and the NFL are scheduled to meet next month to discuss the issue.  Consistent with our commitment to equality and the dignity of every human being, the National Urban League stands with all those demanding the Washington football team stop using the R word.

Ray Halbritter, leader of the Oneida Indian Nation, recently stated his opposition this way: “Let’s be clear, the R word is defined in the dictionary as an offensive term.  It was the name that was used against our people when we were forced off our lands at gunpoint.  So it is has a sordid history and it’s time for a change.”  He added, “History is littered with people who have vowed never to change something – slavery, immigration, women’s rights – so we think one thing that’s really great about this country is when many people speak out, change can happen.”

The Dallas vs. Washington football game this year was played on the eve of Columbus Day, another reminder of the legacy of discrimination and oppression inflicted on Native Americans.  Demanding the Washington football team remove the “R” word from its name is a simple request for respect.  As the Oneida Indian Nation radio ad states, “This country may be politically divided…but we should all be able to agree that racial slurs are unacceptable and they shouldn’t be used to market this country’s capital city.  We deserve to be treated simply as what we are:  Americans.”

Oct. 17, 2013

Pres. Obama Signs Bill, Reopens Government
By Frederick H. Lowe

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from TheNorthStarNews.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - President Barack Obama signed congressional legislation early Thursday morning to reopen the federal government, which had been closed for 16 days.

Sylvia Mathews Burell, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said federal employees could return to work today.

The legislation, which the president signed after midnight, also reopened federal parks and monuments.

President Obama signed the legislation, which funded government operations, after it passed both houses of Congress. He said he would act quickly.

"Once this agreement arrives at my desk, I will sign it immediately," he said in a statement. "We 'll begin reopening our government immediately, and we can begin to lift this cloud of uncertainty from our businesses and from the American people." (see today's video)

The U.S. Senate voted 81 to 18 Wednesday night to reopen the federal government and to raise the nation's borrowing limit. The House followed the Senate, voting 285 to 144.

The Senate bill will fund the government through Jan. 15, 2014, and it will extend the $16.7 trillion debt ceiling through February 7, 2014.

Observers praised the president for his tough stand against Republicans.

"Credit for this victory belongs entirely to President Obama," wrote Chris Bowers, senior campaign director for the Daily Kos, a newspaper. "Two years ago he vowed never again negotiate with Republicans over the debt limit, and his refusal to negotiate is why we have emerged victorious."

The legislation does affect the Affordable Care Act, which Republican/Tea Party members shutdown the government to defund. The legislation puts tighter restrictions on income-verification standards for individuals receiving subsidies in the Affordable Care Act's new insurance marketplaces.

Oct. 20, 2013

Stop the Slavery Comparisons
By Julianne Malveaux

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The brilliant surgeon, Dr. Benjamin Carson, is out of order and out of control when he compares the Affordable Care Act to slavery.  As a physician, he must know how many people lack health care, and how much work this administration had done to right that wrong. 

As a health advocate, he must have seen those men and women who decide to forego pain medication in favor of something to eat for their children.  As a distinguished medical leader, he must have read the Institute of Medicine (IOM) reports that talk about the differential ways in which health care is delivered in emergency rooms, with black and brown men less likely than others to receive medication for their pain, even when it involves a broken bone.

So when Carson says that the Affordable Care Act is “worse than slavery”, I truly wonder what he knows about slavery.  Does he know about being dragged from one country and placed on an auction block in another?  Does he know about enduring backbreaking work, day after day, hour after hour, where the most human desires like love and companionship are snuffed out by the needs of greedy masters?  

Has he had a limb – a leg, an arm, a tongue, severed to make an example for others?  Has he felt a shackle on his neck, across his Adam’s apple, so tight that he could not breathe?  Has he tried to run, and been captured and beaten?  Or beaten even if he did not run?  Does his back show the signs of white rage?  Has he seen his own child sold at auction?  Has he lain down with his woman, his love, knowing that she had no say in who the master decided t have sex with her?   Has he been literally, not metaphorically, been emasculated, his body a victim to a master’s rage. Has he learned to read, because according to North Carolina law, “to teach a slave to read is to excite dissatisfaction in the general population.” 

Whites who taught slaves to read were fined as much as a year’s wages.   Slaves who taught each other to read risked 39 lashes.   I don’t know what the amazing DR. Ben Caron is thinking when he compares anything in our current space to slavery.  He has not known a slave’s life, and blessedly neither have most of us.  But we know that affordable health care is not the same thing as slavery.

I am tired of people making slave comparisons as if, while acknowledging slavery as horrible, reduces it to a political volleyball.  The minimum wage is “worse than slavery”, but slaves were never paid.  Health care, however flawed, is worse than slavery, but slaves had little health care, especially after they failed to produce for massa.  A hardship here, a problem there, is worse than slavery.  Memo to those who lack historical consciousness – no it isn’t!

Slavery means having no control over your destiny unless you choose to take control, and even then, slavery is about conforming or risking life and limb.  Slavery is about the evisceration of families, about the lives and loves shattered for the profit of those who failed to value black people as equal, as human.  Slavery is not about a law you don’t like, not about a wage you don’t like.  Anyone who lives and breathes air in these United States today will never know the brutality of a century and a half ago.

I will acknowledge Dr. Ben Carson as an amazing surgeon.  That is, after all, what he is known for.   Somebody put a mike up to his mouth though, so he decided to step off medicine and into politics. If he is into slavery he needs to go back to his own plantation.  You have choices, Dr. Carson, and slaves did not.  We may agree or disagree about the Affordable Health Care Act, but we will never agree that the Affordable Care Act is worse than slavery.  If you don’t know slavery, pick up a book.  And understand that if you picked up this book in more than fifteen states in 1831, you’d acknowledge that enslaved people didn’t have the right to vote.  You do.  Only after you feel the lash of slavery can you speak to this. You are generating headlines but not good sense with your slavery comparisons,

Dr. Julianne Malveaux is a DC based economist and author.

Oct. 14, 2013

Man Who Spent 41 Years in Solitary Confinement Dies Surrounded by Friends

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from TheNorthStarNews.com

Jackie Sumell and Herman Wallace

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Herman Wallace, who spent more than 41 years in solitary confinement in a Louisiana prison, died on Friday, October 4, three days after he was released because he was deathly ill.

"About sunrise this morning, Herman Wallace passed away a free man, unshackled, in a New Orleans home, surrounded by supporters who loved him dearly," Jackie Sumell, Wallace's close friend, wrote on her Facebook page. "His dying words were 'love y'all,'" Sumell wrote.

Prison officials released Wallace, who was suffering from terminal liver cancer, to Interim Louisiana State University Hospital in New Orleans. Hospital officials released him to friends and to supporters so he could die in a home. He was 71 years old.

Wallace was serving a 50 year-prison sentence for armed robbery at the Louisiana State Prison in Angola, La., when he and two others were convicted of the 1972 stabbing death of prison guard Brent Miller.

Miller's widow, Leontine Verrett, has said in a video that she did not believe Wallace, Robert King and Albert Woodfox were involved in her husband's murder. All three men denied involvement in the crime.

There was no DNA evidence linking Wallace to the crime, said Amnesty International.

The men, known as the Angola 3, were framed for the murder because they had founded a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party, argue supporters. The three were sentenced to solitary confinement, which according to the website Solitary Watch, means inmates are locked in their cells 22 to 24 hours a day.

Amnesty International said during his more than 40 years in solitary confinement, Wallace was allowed out of his six-foot-by-nine-foot cell only seven hours each week to shower and to engage in solitary recreation.

"Under international law, these conditions amount to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment," said Steven Hawkins, executive director of Amnesty International USA, which is based in New York.

In 2011, Amnesty International published "USA: 100 Years In Solitary: The 'Angola 3' And Their Fight For Justice."

King was exonerated of Miller's murder and released from prison in 2001 after 29 years in solitary confinement. Woodfox still remains in solitary confinement.

On Oct. 1, in the case of Herman Miller versus Howard Prince, warden of Angola prison, Judge Brian A. Jackson, chief judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana, overturned Wallace's murder conviction because women were prohibited from serving on the Grand Jury that indicted Wallace. The ruling, however, was moot because Wallace's life was quickly coming to an end.

After learning of his death, Hawkins issued this statement: "Today is a very sad day for the family and friends of Herman Wallace and for those who spent so many years working toward his freedom. We at Amnesty International offer our condolences to his loved ones."