Urban News Features

Who's Afraid of a Shrill Conservative? By Julianne Malveaux

April 30, 2017

Who's Afraid of a Shrill Conservative?
By Julianne Malveaux

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The shrill conservative Ann Coulter has made headlines because the University of California, Berkeley, wouldn’t let her speak at the end of April. Invited by college Republicans, her appearance threatened to incite violence, as activists on the left and on the right prepared to either protest or support her appearance. In the end, the University cancelled her appearance, saying it could not guarantee her safety, which has the effect of providing the notorious loudmouth an enlarged platform. National news programs have featured Coulter yammering about the anti-immigration speech she might have given. And credible, national newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post have both covered the issue on its news pages, but also printed opinion pieces about the disturbing trend of violent protests when conservative speakers – the Manhattan Institute’s Heather McDonald, and Bell Curve author and racist provocateur Charles Murray among them – are invited to campuses.

Who’s afraid of a shrill conservative? Liberals shouldn’t be. Sure, people like Ann Coulter deserve to be protested. But they also deserve to be heard. Protest can take many forms. Students who oppose the Coulter blather can peacefully gather outside a venue where she is speaking with picket signs highlighting their points. They can peacefully attend her lecture and attempt to ask questions after her lecture. They can take to community forums – from radio and television to campus newspapers, to articulate their opposition to her views. They can stage counter events – how about a pro-immigration speaker scheduled at exactly the same time as the Coulter lecture, where opposition attendance is exponentially larger than hers. Or, they can simply ignore her presence on campus.

Cancelling her appearance gives her more exposure than she deserves. It is also a form of censorship that cuts both ways. At Claremont McKenna College, police brutality defender Heather McDonald gave her talk via live stream because college administrators feared violence if there was a large audience. Protesters banged on the windows in the room where she gave her talk, making it difficult to hear her. How would those of us that support the Black Lives Matter movement respond if BLM leaders were treated the same way McDonald was? And aren’t BLM supporters capable of responding to McDonald’s nonsense?

Universities are supposed to be places where minds are opened and ideas are exchanged. If provocative speakers can’t visit a university, who can? And where better to hear ideas, no matter how offensive, than at a university lecture or forum. I’d not like to have Heather McDonald or Ann Coulter as a commencement speaker. In a celebratory space it would be positively offensive to have students of color be forced to share their big day with those who would implicitly deny their very right to exist. But I see no harm in having folks like McDonald, Coulter, or Murray speak on campus. Indeed, it is perhaps most effective to have them debate some of those who disagree with them. I once had the pleasure of rebutting Charles Murray after one of his Bell Curve talks. This happened more than a decade ago, but I’d like to think I handed his words back to him with aplomb. If the applause meter was any indication, I wiped the stage with him. If my memory serves me right, Murray refused a one-on-one debate proposing, instead, that he would give his talk and I could rebut it. On another occasion, I was initially contracted to debate the anti-affirmative action activist Ward Connerly. He slithered out of the debate, and even refused to appear on a panel with me. No matter. I used his printed words as a basis for refuting his flawed arguments against affirmative action. I share these instances not to toot my own horn, but to suggest that when conservatives are intellectually confronted by principled opposition, they often fold. On the other hand, when they don’t even get a chance to talk, they get to play victim to a larger audience.

Who’s afraid of shrill shills like Ann Coulter and Heather McDonald? Liberal and progressive students shouldn’t be. Odious conservatives like these should be protested in an orderly way, debated, and debunked. There is no way they should be prevented from speaking. There is nothing frightening about them or their ideas. When they talk, it becomes quite clear that they are wrong, misguided, and narrow-minded. But when they are silenced, their ideas take on an importance that they hardly deserve.

Julianne Malveaux is an economist, author, and Founder of Economic Education. Her podcast, “It’s Personal with Dr. J” is available on iTunes. Her latest book “Are We Better Off: Race, Obama and public policy is available via amazon.com

Marching for Climate While Black By Rev. Lennox Yearwood

April 25, 2017

Marching for Climate While Black
By Rev. Lennox Yearwood

Special Commentary

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - This past Saturday, April 22nd, at the March For Science in Washington DC on Earth Day, I was assaulted, roughed up, and detained by police in the shadow of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture.

It was not part of an action or planned civil disobedience. It was sadly a much more regular event - an interaction between police and a person of color gone very wrong.I have spoken at the Earth Day event on the National Mall in years past. But this year I was particularly excited to attend the March for Science to hear Mustafa Ali speak.

Mustafa, if you don’t know, courageously resigned as the head of Environmental Justice at the EPA after 24-year career. He is now Senior Vice President of Climate, Environmental Justice, and Community Revitalization for the Hip Hop Caucus.Mustafa and the rest of our Hip Hop Caucus team were already at the march. I had spent the early morning driving around handling daddy duties and was arriving at the rally about midway through.

I was walking in the rain and carrying an umbrella down Constitution Ave. from the National Archives Building towards the Washington Monument. Constitution Ave. was closed and I was excited to see so many people out for the Science March. As I approached 14th St. on Constitution, the walk sign was on, but there was an MPD officer in the middle of street letting cars proceed across 14th so I stayed on the curb. I waited as the crossing signal turned red and then it turned back to walk, signaling clearance for all of us on the curb to cross, which we started to do.

I was the only person of color in the immediate area.The police officer then told everyone to get out of the crosswalk. By then I was about half way across the street. I paused in the middle of the street and then decided it was easier to proceed to the other side of the street, in effect getting out of the crosswalk.The officer then ran up to me, grabbed me forcefully by my jacket and swung me around, slamming me up against a food truck. I yelled, “What are you doing? Stop grabbing me.” He told me to stop resisting, to which I responded that I wasn’t. I dropped my umbrella, and put my hands up. I told him I was there for the Science March. He said he had to detain me because I “could be on drugs.”

YES, he really said that. By this time I’m surrounded by five police officers, still in the street, next to the food truck into which I had been slammed. It was very serious. I was in fear for my life. The officer then asks if I had an ID because he wanted to check for outstanding warrants. He asked if I had heard him, I said not until I was in the middle of the crosswalk, when I, like everybody else had started walking. I asked why he was detaining me and why he roughed me up. He told me to shut up and to give him my ID.

I unzipped my rain jacket, which revealed two things - my clergy collar showing that I’m a minister and a VIP badge for the March for Science. At that moment the officer’s demeanor changed, as his perception of me changed slightly. It was as though until that moment he didn’t believe I was “supposed” to be there. Yet, he still detained me, ran my ID, and when he found nothing, told me it was easier to rough me up then stop cars from coming into the crosswalk, and then ultimately, he let me go.As unfortunate as it is to say, this interaction with the police is not the first or worst I’ve had of this kind, and it is all too common for people of color in Washington DC and all over this country.

But the deeply disappointing truth of this Earth Day case of racial profiling, was that none of my fellow science marchers stopped or took issue with what was happening. They didn’t question or pause to witness in a way that one would for a member of one’s community. There was one young woman with bright pink hair, who asked if I was okay, told the cop she knew me, and asked if I wanted her to make a phone call for me. She was encouraging. Otherwise, not a move was made at a march about protecting our planet and communities, to speak up or attempt to correct an injustice that was happening right in front of them.I am a prominent leader in the climate movement. It is not hyperbole to say, if this can happen to me, than imagine what it feels like for a young person of color who might be coming to a march like this for the first time.

When something like this happens, I think first of my two teenage sons and all that might go wrong for them in an interaction with police, and it scares me as only a parent can get scared at the thought of losing a child as so many have.I also think of all the various efforts within the climate and environmental movement that are meant to broaden and grow the movement in numbers and diversity.

And I think, all those efforts will not be as successful as they should be until there is true recognition of what it means to march for climate as a person of color, and until there are meaningful things put in place to create a multicultural movement that accounts for the different experiences we have even at the same climate march, let alone in the same country, and certainly on the same planet.I hope my platform in this movement and the reality that I was profiled and assaulted by police at a climate march further brings to light the work we need to do to change the culture of our movement by first defining what a truly inclusive movement is from the perspective of the very communities we want to have more deeply involved in the issue of climate change.Still, I’ll be marching again next weekend at the People’s Climate March in DC.

Can’t stop, won’t stop, as we say in Hip Hop, because too many lives depend on us solving climate change and revitalizing vulnerable communities.Although I missed Mustafa’s speech on Saturday among many other powerful speakers while being detained, I caught them on video later. Please watch Mustafa’s powerful words on revitalizing vulnerable communities because together we can win.All power to the people!

Federal Judge Rules Texas Voter Law Was Enacted to Discriminate Against Blacks

April 25, 2017

Federal Judge Rules Texas Voter Law Was Enacted to Discriminate Against Blacks

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNewsToday.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - A U.S. District Court judge has ruled that Texas’ 2011 voter photo ID law, the nation’s strictest, was written and passed by the Texas legislature with the intention of keeping African American and Hispanic voters away from the polls in what is fast becoming a swing state instead of a Republican stronghold.

The law required voters to produce a photo ID card to cast a ballot. Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos wrote in her opinion that evidence establishes that discrimination was at least one of the substantial or motivating factors behind passage of SB 14 which took effect in 2013.In Judge Ramos’ decision, she focused on how the Texas legislature rejected efforts to soften the “racial impact” of SB14, such as reducing the costs of obtaining ID or allowing voters to use more forms of ID. The law accepts handgun licenses to establish a voter’s identity, but student IDs, military IDs and passports are not accepted forms of identification. The law also does allow driver’s licenses as voter IDs.

“Many categories of acceptable photo IDs permitted by other states were omitted from the Texas bill,” Judge Ramos wrote.The Republican-led legislature claims it passed the bill to reduce voter fraud. The Texas Attorney General said Judge Ramos’s decision disappointed him.Plaintiffs, including the Texas State Conference of the NAACP Branches and the Mexican American Legislative Caucus of the Texas House of Representatives challenged the law under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the Texas law has the effect of discriminating against minority voters and that the legislature passed the law with the intent to discriminate based on race, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

This was the fifth time courts have ruled that the law had or was intended to have a discriminatory effect. Some are predicting Texas could become a swing state in 2020 because of its large Hispanic population.

Forced Out at Fox: The King of Cable News Gets Canceled by Marc Morial

April 25, 2017

To Be Equal

Forced Out at Fox: The King of Cable News Gets Canceled

By Marc Morial

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “Bill O’Reilly has helped set the bar for the normalization and dissemination of right-wing hatred, offering incendiary commentary about sexual harassment and assault, gender, race and ethnicity, low-income people, the LGBTQ community, Muslims and refugees, immigrants, and reproductive rights..” — Media Matters for America

Bill O’Reilly’s public downfall was a long time in the making—set in motion by a string of sexual harassment claims and the hemorrhaging of high-profile advertisers from “The O’Reilly Factor,” a Fox News channel mainstay and money maker.

According to reporting by the New York Times, for a period that spanned 15 years, O’Reilly and 21st Century Fox—the parent company for Fox News—together settled five separate allegations of sexual harassment brought by female Fox employees—which included accusations of verbal abuse, unwanted advances and explicit comments—for $13 million. And since that report was published, more women have come forward alleging gross and inappropriate behavior by Fox’s biggest star.

O’Reilly’s cable news program was—and remains—a cash cow for Fox News. It is nothing short of a testament to the show’s money generating power and vaulted cable ratings perch that Fox News kept O’Reilly on payroll as the company quietly purchased the silence of his accusers for over a decade. In a nod to television’s obsession with re-runs, the so-called swift end to O’Reilly’s career at Fox News was preceded by a similar scandal involving Roger Ailes, the network’s co-founder and then-chairman. Accused of multiple acts of sexual harassment, 21st Century Fox paid out $35 million to Gretchen Carlson, a former Fox News anchor, and several unidentified women to settle their lawsuit against Ailes. Fox News also lost two top hosts, Greta Van Susteren and Megyn Kelly (who later accused Ailes of sexual harassment) and paid $40 million in severance to Ailes in the ensuing fallout.

Following the ouster and made-for-television-scandal of Roger Ailes, 21st Century Fox released a statement that vowed to, “continue our commitment to maintaining a work environment based on trust and respect. We take seriously our responsibility to uphold these traditional, long-standing values of our company.” Yet, O’Reilly remained on the payroll—his last contract even included a clause for his termination in case any new cases of harassment came to light—and women who claimed to have suffered under his abuse were being quieted, as per usual.

It is clear that if Fox News could not be moved by decency to maintain a “work environment based on trust and respect,” it was certainly moved by dollars.

O’Reilly was also a problematic figure in many other ways. He has a long and well-established history of making racist remarks. Days before his expulsion from Fox News, O’Reilly watched a speech Rep. Maxine Waters gave from the House floor discussing patriotism in our nation’s current political environment, and his response was to mock her hair, calling it a “James Brown wig.” Outraged that a college president was criticized as racist for posting a picture of his staff dressed in sombreros and mustaches, O’Reilly claimed that if you go to any Mexican restaurant in the world, staff comes out, “singing "Guantanamera” with the sombreros on.” I’ve had my own brushes with O’Reilly, including an interview where he demanded that leaders such as myself “stop the BS” in relation to reducing what he coined “the Black crime problem.” But it was neither racism, nor the bitter fruits of sexism that ended O’Reilly’s storied rise at Fox News.

Fox News had a choice to make: keep O’Reilly, whose ratings were still strong despite the scandal, or hurt the bottom line and lose 90 advertisers, and counting, who had stampeded away from the taint of scandal. Despite O’Reilly’s repeated denials of the harassment claims and support from people like Sean Hannity, a Fox news contributor who is now facing his own accusations of sexual harassment, and President Trump, who has his own colorful history with women, including boasting about grabbing them, and dealing with his own accusations of sexual harassment, Fox News could no longer bear the cost of keeping their star contributor.

But while O’Reilly may be down, he is far from out. His permanently tarnished reputation aside, we haven’t seen the last of Bill O’Reilly. Just days after his unceremonious ouster from Fox, O’Reilly is making his media comeback online, resuming his “No Spin News” podcast. His publisher has said he will continue to publish O’Reilly’s books. And he received a sizeable parting gift from Fox News in the amount of $25 million—a year’s worth of his salary.

There is a victory to celebrate here, but it is a qualified one. If, at the highest levels of leadership, we commit to the belief that “women, children, and men have inherent dignity that should never be violated.” The rise and money-padded fall of O’Reilly sends a mixed message, to say the least, to women and men in the workplace.

Jeff Sessions is Rolling Back Basic Rights by Jesse Jackson

April 25, 2017

Jeff Sessions is Rolling Back Basic Rights
By Jesse Jackson

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(TriceEdneyWire.com) - As Donald Trump nears the end of his first 100 days, media commentary focuses primarily on how little he has achieved in comparison to other presidents. It’s a mistake, however, to discount the threat that the Trump administration poses to our fundamental rights. His attorney general, former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, is a case in point.

Sessions has set out with a vengeance to transform the Department of Justice into a Department of Injustice. He’s been hindered by the incompetence that characterizes this administration. He’s home alone in his department, with no nominations offered for the heads of top DOJ units — the civil rights, criminal or national security divisions. His deputies — Nos. 2 and 3 in the DOJ — have been nominated but not confirmed.

That has slowed but not stopped Sessions’ efforts to rollback basic rights. He’s reversed the Justice Department’s position of challenging voter identification laws; he deems the Voting Rights Act too “intrusive.” Now the DOJ will intervene in favor of states that pass discriminatory measures to restrict access to the ballot. The right to vote — the fundamental right of a democracy — will now depend on the willingness of judges to stand up for the truth, as U.S. District Court Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos did in ignoring the DOJ intervention and ruling that the Texas ID law was “passed, at least in part, with a discriminatory purpose.”

Sessions has issued orders to revive the old, failed war on drugs. The promising bipartisan efforts to reform sentencing provisions to end the mass incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders are to be abandoned. Sessions wants to revive private prisons and insure them a steady stream of prisoners. People of color, particularly young African-American men, will be the greatest victims of this injustice.

Sessions has called for a “review” of all the reform agreements that Obama’s Civil Rights Division has reached with police forces. His DOJ sought to delay implementation of a consent decree reached in Baltimore in the wake of the Freddy Gray killing. Sessions scorns these agreements as “political expediency” that will “handcuff the police.” In Baltimore, the judge ignored the DOJ’s efforts to impede reform. But despite the outcry at the killings of young black men and women, Sessions is clearly telling police they can act with impunity once more.

And Sessions has been point on the administration’s efforts to ramp up deportation, terrorize immigrants and defend the president’s unconstitutional Muslim ban. He expressed amazement that a “judge sitting on an island in the Pacific” could overturn the president’s order. That judge was a federal district court justice in the state of Hawaii, part of the union for 58 years.

Sessions has issued letters to nine sanctuary cities, counties and states, including the state of California, New York City, Chicago and Cook County, threatening to deny federal grant funds — largely funds for local law enforcement — unless they commit to cooperating with the administration’s sweeping assaults on immigrants. This arbitrary assertion of federal power is particularly remarkable from Sessions, who as a senator declaimed endlessly about the glories of states’ rights. Luckily, Sessions wasn’t at Herod’s side when Mary and Joseph sought sanctuary in Egypt with the baby Jesus.

The sanctuary jurisdictions have vowed to resist Sessions edicts. Speaking for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, spokesman Matt McGrath noted: “The administration’s plan to deny federal funds to cities that are standing up for their values is unconstitutional, and Chicago is proud to stand with 34 cities and counties across the country in asking a federal court to prevent the federal government from illegally
withholding federal funds.”

New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio declared that New York City will “remain a city welcoming of immigrants who have helped make our city the safest big city in the nation. Any attempt to cut NYPD funding for the nation’s top terror target will be aggressively fought in court. We won’t back down from protecting New Yorkers from terror — or from an overzealous administration fixated on xenophobia and needless division.”

The assault on rights — for the LGBT community, for people of color, for women, for immigrants — is clear. Efforts to rollback voting rights, civil rights, police reform and sentencing reform have already begun. The resistance — from courts, from decent public officials, from activists and citizens of conscience — has been and will be fierce. Sessions’ Department of Injustice is measure of the damage that Trump can do. Instead of making America a more perfect union, Americans will have to mobilize to defend their rights from the very department that is tasked with protecting them.