By Dedrick Muhammad

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Bloomberg Businessweek magazine has released its latest issue to much-deserved uproar and outrage. On its cover, the magazine featured Jim Crow-esque caricatures that portrayed people of color as money hungry and implicitly suggested that they will cause a future housing bubble. Unfortunately, this offensive image is only the second worst thing about this cover.

Since the housing bubble burst in 2008, a myth has been perpetuated that minorities, not predatory lenders, are responsible for and profiteers of housing bubbles. The implications of this false narrative are particularly problematic as they can inform the very economic and housing policies that will determine the availability of homeownership for most Americans today.

Discriminatory lending has existed in the housing market since the Great Depression, when government incentivized homeownership chiefly for white Americans. Homeownership - the primary source of wealth - catapulted many white Americans to the middle class, leaving African Americans behind. The result - an economic chasm between whites and blacks now commonly referred to as the racial wealth divide.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights community helped convince the government to enact policies to break down many barriers for African American homeownership. But, many of these gains were eroded with the onset of deregulation. During the 2000s housing bubble, minority borrowers were near 30 percent more likely to be sold a subprime high-cost loan than a homeowner in a white suburb. And African-Americans with similar credit profiles and down-payment ratios to white borrowers were more likely to be given subprime loans as well. Mortgage lenders and brokers were even incentivized to exploit minority borrowers as lenders were paid more to push them towards riskier products and not underwrite their loans.

By 2008, the housing bubble burst due to reckless banking and the mortgage market was in freefall. While foreclosure rates skyrocketed all over the country, communities of color experienced disproportionate rate of foreclosures and lost a disproportionate amount of wealth. White families in America lost 16 percent of their net worth on average while black, and Hispanic families lost 53% and 66% respectively.

In fact, the erosion of wealth in minority communities was so severe that a recent study finds the ratio of wealth between black and white families has tripled over the past 25 years.

However, with all this documented history, many Americans still believe that racial inequality is related to individual behavior, choices, character, marriage and child bearing. As Thomas Shapiro of the Institute on Assets at Brandeis University notes, "homeownership has been the biggest cause of racial wealth disparity."

Though Bloomberg Businessweek's actual article, "The Great American Housing Rebound", notes how homeowners have yet to recover from the financial crisis, the corresponding cover only included Blacks and Latinos in a home surrounded by mounds of dollars. Apparently, and to our profound disappointment, the editorial team decided it was an "easier sell" to have a cover scapegoating minorities for a possible second housing bubble than a cover that honored the facts in their very own article.

Faced with a vocal response, BusinessWeek issued a classic "non-apology" expressing regret for the strong reactions their cover may have generated. They then, ironically, attempted to scapegoat their Latino illustrator for the offensive and misleading cover art. We cannot let Businessweek off the hook for this grave offense.

Bloomberg Businessweek needs to respond to the demands put forth by organizations like the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, The National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development and the Center For Responsible Lending. We are asking Businessweek to take full responsibility and appropriate action for their outrageous cover and to print a story on the importance of homeownership particularly for communities of color. Such a well-regarded magazine such as Bloomberg Businessweek should welcome the opportunity to set the record straight on this important economic issue. And organizations like the NAACP look forward to the day they do.

Dedrick Muhammad is director of the Economic Department of the NAACP. He can be reached at 410-580-5777.

by Hazel Trice Edney

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The NAACP views it as “lynching’s cousin”. In a nutshell, that’s the reason that NAACP President/CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous predicts the end to the death penalty in America within the next 10 years.

“We’re moving fast,” says Jealous. “This is one of our top national priorities as it has been for the last 104 years. We were founded to end lynching and lynch mob violence and we have always seen the death penalty as lynching’s cousin.”

He envisions, “We could abolish the death penalty in the next 10 years. We have abolished it in six states in six years. It’s reasonable to believe we can abolish it in eight more [states] in the next eight years and then head to the Supreme Court and have it done within 10 years.”

Jealous’ projections came during an interview last week as he and other fellow death penalty foes celebrated the Maryland legislature’s vote to repeal executions in the state. The bi-partisan support bill, signed by Gov. Martin O’Malley, signals to the rest of America that the death penalty is not only cruel and unusual punishment, but racially disparate, Jealous says:

“The death penalty from its inception was linked to lynching in this country. Across the country, the death penalty is 40 percent Black. In Maryland, it’s 80 percent Black. It’s impossible to look at the death penalty in this country and not conclude that race is at play here.”

Maryland was another major battle won, but the war against capital punishment continues to rage. So far, the states of Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Maryland have repealed the death penalty. Colorado, Delaware, New Hampshire and Kansas are reconsidering their death penalty statutes this year.

Racial disparity is a key reason, but not the primary reason for opposition to the death penalty. According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP), “chief among the concerns is the risk of executing an innocent person which can never be completely eliminated.”

Since the 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty in America, 1,295 people have either died by lethal injection, gas chamber, electric chair or firing squad.

According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty at NCADP.org, The 10 top reasons for the anti-death penalty movement are:

1. Executions are carried out at staggering cost to taxpayers.
It costs far more to execute a person than to keep him or her in prison for life.

2. Capital punishment does not deter crime.
States without the death penalty have much lower murder rates. The South accounts for 80 percent of U.S. executions, and has the highest regional murder rate.

3. States are unable to prevent accidental executions of innocent people.
The wrongful execution of an innocent person is an injustice that can never be rectified. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty, at least 138 men and women have been released from death row nationally – some only minutes away from execution.

4. Race plays a role in determining who lives and who dies.
Since 1977, blacks and whites have been the victims of murders in almost equal numbers, yet 80 percent of the people executed in that period were convicted of murders involving white victims.

5. The death penalty is applied at random.
 Politics, quality of legal counsel, and the jurisdiction in which a crime is committed are more often the determining factors in a death penalty case than the facts of the crime itself.

6. Capital punishment goes against almost every religion.
Almost all religious groups in the United States regard executions as immoral.

7. The U.S. is keeping company with notorious human rights abusers.
The vast majority of countries in Western Europe, North America and South America — more than 128 nations worldwide — have abandoned capital punishment in law or in practice. Year after year, only three countries execute more prisoners than the United States – China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

8. Millions of dollars could be diverted to helping the families of murder victims.
Funds now being used for the costly process of executions could be used to help families put their lives back together through counseling, restitution, crime victim hotlines, and other services addressing their needs.

9. Bad lawyers are a persistent problem.
Perhaps the most important factor in determining whether a defendant will receive the death penalty is the quality of the representation he or she is provided. Almost all defendants in capital cases cannot afford their own attorneys.

10. Life without parole is a sensible alternative to the death penalty.
Almost every state in the U.S. now has life in prison without parole. Unlike decades ago, a sentence of life without parole generally means exactly what it says – convicts locked away in prison until they die. Unlike the death penalty, a sentence of life in prison without parole allows mistakes to be corrected or new evidence to come to light.

Armed with these arguments, opponents project a new beginning is possible within a decade with help from the Supreme Court.

“We only have to abolish it in eight total more. We’re at 18. We only have to do it in a total of 26 before we go to the Supreme Court and make the argument that the punishment’s not just cruel, but unusual and therefore abolish it in the entire country,” Jealous says.

Maryland State Conference NAACP President Gerald Stansbury says the movement is about equal protection under the law. “This decision will make our justice system fairer and more effective. I hope it will inspire leaders in other states to follow suit.”

To Gov. O'Malley, it’s simply about humanity. “There’s no such thing as a spare American,” he said during a press conference following the vote. “Every life is important.”

Updated March 21, 2013

CBC Chair Now 'Confident' on Obama's Diversity Commitment
By Zenitha Prince and Hazel Trice Edney

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), has significantly toned down her chiding of President Obama after saying his cabinet so far is too White male-dominated. She has now taken a wait and see approach after a conversation with Obama’s White House advisors.

“I have talked to the White House and I am confident, after our conversations, that the President is committed to diversity, so we are waiting to see what the rest of the cabinet will look like,” Fudge told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on air March 15.

Fudge was not available for further elaborate this week. Her latest posture is a major step down from a letter to the President dated only three days earlier in which she took him to task for not appointing any African-American cabinet members thus far.

“I am concerned that you have moved forward with new cabinet appointments and yet, to date, none of them have been African American,” she told the president in the March 11 letter. “You have publicly expressed your commitment to retaining diversity within your cabinet. However, the people you have chosen to appoint in this new term have hardly been reflective of this country’s diversity.”

The letter followed an earlier letter Fudge sent the President in January in which she asked him to consider her colleagues Rep. Mel Watt (D-N.C.) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) for the posts of Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of Labor, respectively.

Attorney General Eric Holder is currently the only African-American member of the Obama cabinet. There are two African-Americans with cabinet rank but who are not part of the order of succession for the presidency: U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice. Kirk announced he would step down March 14. Valerie Jarrett, a Black woman, is a highly regarded and highly visible senior advisor to the president and his assistant for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, but not a cabinet member per se.

This absence of more diversity among Obama’s top advisors and agency heads has frustrated Blacks, a feeling that Fudge initially said “is compounded by the overwhelming support” the president has received from that community. Her posture this week reflects hope that the President is simply not finished with his appointments. As expressed in her recent letter, she says, diversity is essential for moving all of America forward.

“As you continue choosing your critical advisors, we want to stress the importance of ensuring every community has a seat at the table,” Fudge said in her letter. “The absence of diverse voices leads to policies and programs that adversely impact African Americans.”

Zenitha Prince is a reporter for the Afro American Newspaper.

By Cathy Cohen and Jon C. Rogowski

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from America’s Wire 

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - In a democracy, few rights are as cherished as the right to vote.  Yet, in the United States people of color, mainly Latinos, African Americans, Asians and Native Americans, are finding that the more they demonstrate their civic responsibility by voting, the more obstacles that surface designed to weaken the power of their votes.

Since 2008, when the nation elected its first African American president, there have been numerous efforts in various states to impact ballot access.  Legislatures in 19 states have tightened identification requirements for citizens who wish to vote.  Many of these new laws require citizens to show a state-issued form of photo ID.

The New York University School of Law Brennan Center for Justice warned in 2006 that because identification documents are not distributed equally across the population, voter ID laws would significantly affect voter access for people of color — especially Latinos and African Americans — who possessed photo identification at considerably lower rates than whites.

That prediction became reality last November.  A study conducted immediately after the 2012 election surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,500 young people between the ages of 18 and 29 with large oversamples of Blacks and Latinos.  Consistent with other national reports, the study sponsored by the Black Youth Project confirmed that a high voter turnout among youth. It also determined that young people of color—especially Black youth—were asked to show identification when voting at considerably higher rates than white youth.

Even in states with no identification laws, 66 percent of Black youth and 55 percent of Latino youth were asked to show ID, compared with 43 percent of white youth. When nonvoters were asked to indicate the reasons why they did not vote, Black youth were three times as likely as white youth (17 percent compared with 5 percent) to say that they did not vote because they lacked the proper identification documents. The study provides compelling evidence that identification laws are applied inconsistently across racial groups, and appear to reduce turnout disproportionately among people of color.

In the aftermath of the 2012 election,  also under attack is the principle of  “one person, one vote” established in 1964 when the Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. Sims that legislative districts must contain equal numbers of citizens.

Several states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia, recently considered or are considering measures to apportion their electoral votes by congressional districts in place of the winner-take-all system currently in place. Discussions of these proposals have focused, not incorrectly, on the implications for the outcomes of presidential elections.  But these proposals are designed explicitly to reduce the electoral influence of citizens living in densely populated areas—precisely those areas more likely to contain larger proportions of people of color—and increase the electoral importance of people living in more sparsely populated areas that take up larger swaths of geography.

As Sen. Charles Carrico, who introduced the measure in the Virginia State Senate, explained, residents in rural areas “were concerned that it didn’t matter what they did, that more densely populated areas were going to outvote them.”  Under these plans, the gerrymandering of congressional districts ensures that Black voters in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania would have considerably less influence on the apportionment of the state’s electoral votes.

For instance, the 538 blog recently reported that President Obama would have lost twelve of Ohio’s 18 electoral votes had they been apportioned by congressional district. Not only would this have distorted the voices of Ohio’s voters writ large (Obama received more than 100,000 votes more than Romney), but it also would have significantly weakened the influence of Ohio’s Black voters. Nearly percent of 65 percent of Black residents of Ohio are concentrated in the four congressional districts (mostly in the Cleveland area) in which Obama won. Along with weakening the political potency of urban voters generally, proposals to apportion Electoral College votes by congressional district seriously devalue the votes from people of color.

This tension between individuals and geography is also found in the debate surrounding the current Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder. At issue is Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires states with a history of racially discriminatory voting practices to receive federal clearance before changing electoral laws.

In oral arguments on February 27, attorney Bert Rein argued on behalf of Shelby County, Alabama that this provision is “an inappropriate vehicle to sort out the sovereignty of individual states.” But the sovereignty of states should not be privileged over the equal protections constitutionally granted to individual citizens. Just as states like Ohio and Pennsylvania should not be allowed to weigh the votes of rural residents over votes from urban areas, neither should Alabama be excluded from provisions designed to protect Alabama citizens’ voting rights because Alabama’s sovereignty is judged to be more important than their citizens’ electoral voices.

Rein is right, though, on at least one point. As he and some of the conservative justices on the Court pointed out, the South is not uniquely racially discriminatory.  Schemes to apportion Electoral College votes by congressional district, for instance, have been discussed mostly by states that are not required to receive federal preclearance. But this is not an argument for striking down Section 5. Indeed, any measure that limits ballot access or dilutes some group’s electoral influence in any state ought to be opposed.

However, if states like South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and others currently subject to Section 5 have their way, significant numbers of people of color are especially likely to feel the negative consequences of new electoral laws. Keeping Section 5 in place will continue to help guard against attempts to limit the influence of people of color on Election Day.

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Dr. Cathy Cohen is the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Jon C. Rogowski is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Washington University.  Dr. Cohen and Prof. Rogowski work with the Black Youth Project. America’s Wire is an independent, nonprofit news service run by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. Our stories can be republished free of charge by newspapers, websites and other media sources. For more information, visit www.americaswire.org or contact Michael K. Frisby at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.