Oct. 14, 2017

We're Americans Too!
By Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq.

(TriceEdneyWire.com) — Throughout #45's campaign, he made great issue of "Making America Great Again" and "America(ns) First."  Those who voted for him obviously believed him.  Given his professed preeminence for everything American, it is reasonable to think that after a natural disaster he would take a no-holds-barred, equitable approach to providing relief to our citizens.

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria have had dreadful impact upon millions.  There are those, like #45, who believe that there has been an appropriate response to those affected.  Just as many or more, believe that his response to Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands has been tepid and measured more critically than mainland relief.  The truth of this informs us who #45 considers "real Americans."

It's been said that past actions are the best indicators of character, temperament, and future behavior.  If that is fact, the past animus of #45 toward people of color would end the discussion.  We could say with some level of confidence that, to #45, people of color are not top tier Americans. I know it would not be fair to judge him solely on past actions.  People can change.  After all, it’s reasonable to assume that a majority of the Electoral College believed him capable of the personal growth necessary to become President of ALL the people.

Seemingly, his deeds undermine the trust of the Electoral College.  After these disasters, his tone and subtleties have indicated a lack of belief in the unanimity and equality of our citizens.

When we objectively compare the relief response to Harvey and Maria, we know that discrimination HAS occurred.  Our only challenge is determining why.  #45 and his cronies would decry racial/ethnic animus, but let's think beyond their assertions.

Logic informs us that importance is assessed by the attention received.  After Harvey, #45 took only four days for his first visit to Texas.  Six days later, he visited again. In contrast, it took him two weeks to visit Puerto Rico.  Initial video from the Virgin Islands depicted damage on par with Puerto Rico, yet I’ve not heard of an official administration visit.  Just call this one Conflicted Priorities.

When #45 visited Texas, he promised his unconditional long-term support to those affected by Harvey.  Only a few days later, his VP echoed the same sentiment/promise of support for a resolution that could be measured in years. Yet, when #45 visited, Puerto Rico he famously stated, "I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you threw our budget a little out of whack." Rather than a focus on the 3.5 million Americans on the island who were, and still mostly remain, without shelter, power, and lacking fresh water and food, he expressed his real concern.

Although we’ve been admonished by #45 to consider any news not sourced by FOX or BREITBART to be fake, I have trust in reports that, nearly two months after Harvey devastated Texas, FEMA still maintains a strong presence there.  This has also been confirmed to me by family in the region.  Conversely, in a recent tweet, #45 states, "...We cannot keep FEMA, the Military and the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!."  I still hear little or no reference to the Virgin Islands from #45!  Call that one Blatant Indifference!

From tossing paper towels (like bones to animals) to blowing-off fervent appeals for more aggressive relief from San Juan's mayor, to threatening to add the cost of relief to Puerto Rico's existing debt, #45 has made clear that race/ethnicity is the main distinction he uses to differentiate between "real Americans" and, I guess, “fake Americans.” While our ability to confront this may be limited, we - ALL of US – must RESIST #45 in every way, every day!

(Dr. E. Faye Williams, National President of the National Congress of Black Women, Inc. www.nationalcongressbw.org--202/678-6788). 

Oct. 11, 2017

Study Reveals: Racial Microaggressions May Reveal Deeper Beliefs  
By Kim Eckart

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNewsToday.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Whites who are more likely to make microaggressions against Black people are also more likely to hold some degree of negative feelings towards Black people as a whole, whether they know it or not, a new study suggests. “Our study results offer validation to people of color when they experience microaggressions.”

While blatant racism may seem easy to identify—a shouted racial slur, a White supremacist rally, or the open discrimination, segregation, and violence of the pre-civil rights era—more subtle forms of bias, called microaggressions, emerge in the everyday exchanges among friends and strangers alike and can offend racial and ethnic minorities.

Mirriam Webster Dictionary defines a micro aggression as “a comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (such as a racial minority).”

Such statements, uttered intentionally or inadvertently, draw upon stereotypes and are linked with racism and prejudice, according to the new study.

The concept of microaggressions has garnered greater attention in today’s political environment, explains lead author Jonathan Kanter, a research associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington.

“Our study results offer validation to people of color when they experience microaggressions. Their reactions can’t simply be dismissed as crazy, unreasonable, or too sensitive,” Kanter says.

“According to our data, the reaction of a person of color—being confused, upset, or offended in some way—makes sense, because they have experienced what our data show: that people who are more likely to make these comments also are more racist in other ways,” Kanter explains.

Three examples

For this study, the team, with the help of focus groups of students of color from three universities, devised the Cultural Cognitions and Actions Survey (CCAS) and administered it to a small group of students—33 Black, 118 White—at a large public university in the Midwest. More than half of White respondents said they would think or say, “All lives matter, not just Black lives.”

The 56-item questionnaire asks the White respondent to imagine him- or herself in five different everyday scenarios involving interactions with Black people, such as talking about current events, attending a diversity workshop, or listening to music. The respondent then considers how likely he or she is to think or say specific statements.

For Black respondents, the wording of the scenarios and questions was revised slightly to assess whether they would experience racism. Each of the statements included in the survey was deemed at least somewhat, if not significantly, offensive by Black students.

In the “current events” scenario—the one that yielded the highest percentage of “likely” responses from Whites—respondents were to imagine talking about topics in the news, such as police brutality and unemployment. More than half of White respondents said they would think or say, “All lives matter, not just Black lives,” while 30 percent said they might say, “I don’t think of Black people as Black,” and 26 percent said they were likely to think or say, “The police have a tough job. It is not their fault if they occasionally make a mistake.” More than half of Black respondents identified each of those statements as racist.

Responses on the CCAS were then related to several validated measures of racism and prejudice, to determine if one’s likelihood of making microaggressive statements was related to these other measures. An additional scale controlled for social desirability—the idea that respondents might answer in ways that put themselves in the best possible light.

White privilege

Results indicated that White students who said they were more likely to make microaggressive statements were also significantly more likely to score higher on all the other measures of racism and prejudice, and results were not affected by social desirability. “It can come as a bit of a shock to a lot of White people that their behavior and attitudes are under scrutiny.”

The statement that yielded the highest statistical relation to other measures of racism among White respondents came from the “diversity workshop” scenario, in which a class discusses White privilege. Though only about 14 percent of White respondents said they were likely to think or say, “A lot of minorities are too sensitive,” the statement had the highest correlation with negative feelings toward Blacks. Nearly 94 percent of Black respondents said the statement was racist.

The correlations between statements and attitudes are averages from the study sample, Kanter says, and so the results do not address the intentions or feelings of any one person.

“It doesn’t mean that on a case-by-case basis, if you or I engaged in microaggressions, that we have cold or racist feelings toward Blacks,” he says. “But the study says that regardless of the intention behind a microaggression or the feelings of the specific person who uttered it, it’s reasonable for a Black person to be offended.

“On average, if you engage in a microaggression, it’s more likely that you have cooler feelings toward Black people, and that whether you intended it or not, you’ve participated in an experience of racism for a Black person.”

In many ways, overt racism has declined gradually since the civil rights movement, Kanter says, and White people often assume that because they do not utter racial slurs, or perhaps are well-versed in and value social justice, that they do not have to worry about engaging in racist behavior themselves“It can come as a bit of a shock to a lot of White people that their behavior and attitudes are under scrutiny,” says Kanter, who pointed out that as a White male, he has had to confront realizations about his own behavior over time. “The nature of how we’re looking at racism is changing. We’re now able to look at and root out more subtle forms of bias that weren’t focused on before because explicit racism was taking a lot of the attention.”

Why this focus?

Taken in isolation, the size and location of the study sample limit the generalizations that can be made, Kanter says. But the idea behind the CCAS is to use it elsewhere and adapt it to focus on other racial and ethnic minorities so as to better understand racism and develop educational tools to combat it. The survey has since been used at the University of Washington, he adds, where early results are very similar to those reported in the published article.

Kanter says he’s heard from critics who say the study has a liberal bias, or that the research should examine offenses against White people. But he says the point is to address racism targeted at oppressed and stigmatized groups.

He says, “We’re interested in developing interventions to help people interact with each other better, to develop trusting, nonoffensive, interracial relationships among people. If we want to decrease racism, then we need to try to decrease microaggressions.”

The study appears online in the journal Race and Social Problems.

Kim Eckhart is a public information officer for University of Washington.

Oct. 15, 2017

What is a Black Identity Extremist?
By Julianne Malveaux

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - While White men are beating Black men on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, while a lone White wolf is shooting people from the Mandalay Bay Hotel, while the word “terrorist” is hardly used to describe these men, the FBI, under the leadership of the racist Attorney General Jeff Beauregard Sessions, is thinking up a new way to oppress Black people.  Despite the fact that there is no evidence of a “movement”, the FBI has described a group of black people as “black identity extremists” who pose a domestic terrorist threat to police officers. (https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4067711/BIE-Redacted.pdf)

Hold up!  We have seen domestic terror threats, though there are those of limited intelligence who cannot fathom them.  The man who shot up an Orlando, Florida nightclub was a domestic terrorist.  Dylan Roof, who worshipped with the parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME church was a domestic terrorist so highly regarded by law enforcement that they bought him a meal before taking him to jail.  The man I will not mention in Las Vegas was a domestic terrorist.  But the FBI is manufacturing evidence to focus on us African Americans who embrace our Black identity.

Foreign Policy, the magazine and website that broke the story of this new classification of “woke” black people, leaked the FBI document that links black identity with extremism and threats to police officers.  The document mentions Black Lives Matter, although the connection between Black Lives Matter and anti-police violence has not been established.  For the FBI to identify “Black Identity Extremists” as domestic terrorists is to declare war on black people.  After all, what does it mean to be a “Black Identity Extremist”?  Does it mean we love our Blackness and refuse to back down when we are attacked?  Does it mean that we revel in our identity and use every available platform (thank you, Colin Kaepernick) to lift our voices up against injustice?  Why is this embrace of Blackness so frightening to melanin-deficient people?  They prefer us silent, docile, grateful, acquiescent.  They demand no such acquiescence from their melanin-impaired friends who gleefully walk through civilized streets of places like Charlottesville and parry racist chants like “you will not replace us, Jews will not replace us”.  That’s domestic terrorism, Beauregard!  Call it like it is instead of inventing a Black movement that does not exist.

Andrew Cohen (https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/fbi-new-fantasy-black-identity-extremists) wrote about the FBI report for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and reports that “there is no “BIE movement,” but in the fertile mind of those within the Trump administration that want you to believe there is some sinister Black force out there bent on attacking police officers. No journalists or academics have discovered and chronicled such a movement or its leaders. No such leaders have come forward to say they are part of such a movement. No one has killed a cop in the name of such a movement. The only citations to the movement, the Foreign Policy piece tells us, come from “internal law enforcement writings made over the past two months.”

Journalist Sam Fulwood III, writing for the Center for American Progress blog, Think Progress, (https://thinkprogress.org/fbi-targets-black-activists-83628a5eb611/) describes the FBI report as an “ominous siren call coinciding with President Donald Trump’s penchant for stoking racial divisions in the country.”  He says that “the administration views

The FBI report says the Black Identity Extremist movement began after a Ferguson; Missouri police officer unnecessarily killed Michael Brown.  Andrew Cohen notes that the FBI report lists six cases where so-called BIE perpetrators killed police officers.  These cases are so isolated that if these men were white they would have been classified, as Dylan Roof was, as mentally ill or troubled.  They would have gone to McDonalds with those who arrested them!  Instead the FBI has figure out another way to demonize Black people.

Meanwhile, 173 Black people were killed by police officers so far this year.  Six instances of BIE folks allegedly (do we know they are BIE, or just crazy) killing police officers is a pattern, but 173 Black folks being shot by police officers is what?  Business as usual?

Julianne Malveaux is an author and economist. Her latest book “Are We Better Off? Race, Obama and Public Policy” is available via www.amazon.com for booking, wholesale inquiries or for more info visit www.juliannemalveaux.com

Oct. 9, 2017