January 8, 2017

To Be Equal 

Jan. 1, 2017

Google Fiber’s War on African-American Communities
By Khalil Abdullah

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Google has long been seen as a visionary company, one that has ushered in a host of innovations that have transformed the way people live and, in the process, turned the company itself into a celebrated and iconic brand. Its national expansion into broadband is a venture known as Google Fiber, but as the corporate giant seeks to enter the business of running high-speed Internet networks in cities around the country, Google’s visionary reputation masks potentially troubling practices that recall some of our nation’s darkest days around the issues of race and economic class.

Instead of providing Internet, or broadband, service to all residents in the communities it plans to serve, Google appears to be engaged in the abhorrent practice of redlining: depriving these services to certain neighborhoods based on income, ethnicity and race. Should this pattern hold true, the inevitable result will be the undermining of communities that are in most need of broadband access, thereby deepening the digital divide. Already too many Americans are without online access at a time when such access is no longer a luxury but a necessity in every household for everything from paying bills, searching for jobs, pursuing advanced educational degrees and accessing health records.

In Kansas City, as the deadline approached for neighborhoods to sign up for Google Fiber, higher-income, European-American neighborhoods were hooked-up first, while lower-income, primarily African-American neighborhoods were not. Compounding the problem was that prospective customers need a credit card to sign up for service, something that many residents in poor communities lacked.

In Nashville, African-American religious leaders have questioned Google’s commitment to their neighborhoods. Google Fiber has installed service in mainly a few downtown buildings and residencies. Pastor Frank Stevenson of St. Luke’s Primitive Baptist Church has led a group of more than 20 clergy to raise awareness about potential digital redlining. “In this land of fast-moving access, to not have access puts us at a disadvantage,” Stevenson lamented. “We want to make sure that Google will be responsible in how they provide services in this city.”

In Atlanta, Google Fiber is initially offering service in Old Fourth Ward, Virginia-Highland, and Morningside/Lenox Park. These are some of the more affluent and popular neighborhoods in the city. As for poorer neighborhoods, they will have to wait until Google gets to them – and who knows for sure when that will be. None of this should be altogether surprising for anyone who has followed Google, a bastion of wealthy European-American males, not unlike Silicon Valley itself.

News reports have tracked the dismal record that Google and other high-tech companies in Silicon Valley have in employing African-Americans, Hispanics and women. Many apologists for Google have argued that Google’s hiring record is a result of the difficulties the company says it has had identifying minorities who have the specialized education needed to compete in the high-tech industry. Even if true, it is beyond plausibility to suggest that Google does not have the resources to cultivate American-grown talent — whatever the ethnicity or income status — by augmenting STEM programs and local, county, and state education systems.

But Google’s troubling hiring practices have extended beyond its high-skilled workers and have been reflected in its hiring of non-tech employees as well. At a minimum, this suggests that Google’s leaders operate in an insular world of high-tech wizardry. They remain either largely blind to or willfully ignorant of the larger societal issues around them.

The emerging conflicts between Google and the communities within cites targeted for Google Fiber is somewhat ironic — if not hypocritical — given that the Google has long positioned itself as the champion of a principle it likes to tout: “Democracy on the web works.”

Indeed, for all the talk of ushering in a revolutionary era, Google Fiber’s rollout bears many of the trappings of the practices of banks, mortgage lenders, telephone companies, and other corporate actors that have redlined low-income and minority communities in the past. And let’s be candid: some still do. Devotion to higher profits at the expense of greater societal good should not be excused by the thin veneer of Google returning shareholders’ value. Redlining results in the wholesale disenfranchisement of communities and, ultimately, despite short-term profits, a weaker economic foundation for America’s future.

Maybe the algorithm of how redlining undermines American communities is too sophisticated for Google to grasp, but it should halt this discriminatory practice nonetheless. Google could certainly refuse. But, as a colleague said, before we ask Washington to step in to fix this, why don’t we demand this of Google ourselves?

Khalil Abdullah is a writer, editor and business consultant. A former national editor and reporter for New America Media, and a former managing editor for the Washington Afro-American, Khalil staffed the Telecommunications and Energy Committee of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators from 1995 to 2000 when he served as Communications Director. He was NBCSL’s executive director from 2000 to 2003.

Jan. 1, 2017

Top Black Press Stories of 2016 Reveal Need for Clear Black Agenda
By Hazel Trice Edney

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – As the Obama era comes to a close, a snapshot of the top Black press stories of the past year alone reveal a need for a clear Black agenda as African-Americans still struggle for equality and justice.

“We are spending trillions in wars without end. Inequality has reached extremes not witnessed since the eve of the Great Depression. We continue to lock up more people than any nation in the world. On an average day, 27 people die from gun violence in the United States. In Canada and other western nations, the average is fewer than five per day,” wrote the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. in a post-Christmas column.

Despite good news - the facts that unemployment and poverty are down and incomes are rising – the African-American unemployment rate at 8.1 percent is still nearly twice that of Whites at 4.2 percent and remains consistently well above the national average, now at 4.6 percent.

This is partially the reason economic justice remains among the 10 top Black stories of 2016. The following are synopses of other revealing stories told through the Black press last year:

• Election of Donald Trump as President of the United States – President Obama has announced a farewell address to be given in Chicago Jan. 10. The end of his eight-year tenure as America’s first Black president begins a new era for America. It is one marked by the national shock of the Nov. 8 election of business billionaire Donald Trump – a person who not only tormented Obama with racist questions about his country of birth until the president finally produced his birth certificate as proof that he was born in America - but also a person who won the official endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan. He has since surrounded himself with a cabinet of nearly all White males, including his chief advisor Steve Bannon, a founder of Breitbart news, the voice of the so-called “alt-right” with its White supremacist and racist views.

• Racial attacks - Since the Trump election, race-related harassment and intimidation has sky-rocketed across the country. In the first month alone (between Nov. 8 and Dec. 12), the Southern Poverty law center, a foremost monitor of hate groups and activity, received reports of more than 1,000 incidents - mostly anti-immigrant and anti-Black. “Overall, anti-immigrant incidents (315) remain the most reported, followed by anti-black (221), anti-Muslim (112), and anti-LGBT (109). Anti-Trump incidents numbered 26 (6 of which were also anti-white in nature, with 2 non-Trump related anti-white incidents reported),” states the organization’s website, SPLCenter.org.

• Guilty verdict for murderous White supremacist Dylann Roof: A federal grand jury on Dec. 15 convicted 22-year-old Dylann Roof of murdering eight Black parishioners and their pastor last year as they attended Bible study and prayer at the historic “Mother” Emanuel A.M. E. Church in downtown Charleston, S.C. Roof, who represented himself, pled not guilty during the trial although he had confessed to the killings, saying he had hoped to start a race war. He now faces either life in prison or execution. Roof sat for an hour with Emanuel parishioners and their pastor Clementa Pinckney, also a member of the S. C. State Senate, on June 17, 2015, before firing his 45-caliber pistol. President Obama gave Pinckney’s eulogy. The shooting sparked the removal of the Confederate flag from public use from many sites across the nation – including atop the S. C. State Capitol.

• Death of Gwen Ifill - Gwen Ifill, the iconic, award-winning journalist who broke racial barriers in journalism, was laid to rest in a star-studded funeral after dying of cancer Nov. 14. President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder were among those who paid their respects. Ifill, 61, spent decades climbing the ranks from print journalist to news anchor and famed political moderator. Last spring, she co-moderated the Democratic primary debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Ifill had performed that role solo during vice presidential debates in the 2004 and 2008 general election campaigns.

• Opening of Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) – More than a century after Black veterans of the Civil War proposed the idea of a Black history museum in D.C., the opening of the NMAAHC on the Mall took place in grand style Sept. 24. Led by Georgia Congressman John Lewis, it was then-President George W. Bush who signed legislation in 2003 that allowed the project to begin. President Barack Obama officially dedicated the museum, saying, “What we can see of this beautiful building tells us that it is truly a sight to behold. But what makes it special are the stories contained inside.”

• Death of George Curry - George E. Curry, the dean of Black press columnists, died suddenly of heart failure August 20. The funeral service, held in his hometown of Tuscaloosa, Ala., drew national civil rights royalty, including the Rev. Al Sharpton who gave the eulogy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who preached a memorial, the Rev. Charles Steele, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Curry’s lifelong friend and comrade; and Dr. Benjamin Chavis, president/CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, where Curry served as editor-in-chief of the NNPA News Service for a collective nine years. Before coming to NNPA, he was editor-in-chief of his beloved Emerge Magazine for seven years until it went defunct. Curry was among the most respected voices in Black press journalism. When he died, he had founded Emergenewsonline.com, a digital version of the hard copy magazine, which he never gave up hope to revive.

• Police shootings and abuse of Blacks - Black Lives Matter activists and civil rights leaders across the country continued to protest police shootings of African-Americans. The controversy came to another peak last year after the police killings of Alton Sterling of Baton Rouge, La. on July 5 by two Baton Rouge, La. police officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake and the July 6 shooting of Philando Castile by Officer Jeronimo Yanez, in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota. Castile’s girlfriend recorded the aftermath of the shooting on Facebook Live as Castile died. Then, on the evening of July 7, 2016, allegedly in response to the two previous shootings Micah Johnson, killed five law enforcement officers in Dallas. Johnson was then killed by police operating a robot with a bomb. In another police killing, the trial of Officer Michael Slager, in the videotaped back-shooting of Walter Scott as Scott fled the officer in South Carolina April 4, 2015, ended in a mistrial Dec. 5. Slager is slated to be retried.

• Death of Prince - The shocking death of Academy Award winning singer, songwriter and musician Prince on April 21 rocked the entertainment world. He died in his home after accidentally overdosing on opioid fentanyl. The 57-year-old, perhaps best known for his 1984 Academy “Best Original Musical”, “Purple Rain”, was discovered unresponsive on an elevator in his Chanhassen, Minn. home and recording studio.

• Homicides – Street violence continued to be the number one cause of Black males between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Perhaps no city has been hit harder than Chicago, which ended 2016 with 762 homicides, 57 percent more than last year. Gun violence plagues the streets of major cities year after year. Despite citizen pleas for new gun laws, partisan stalemates prevents Congress from moving new legislation. Other programs to deal with the social aspects of street violence appear to do little without the balance of the gun laws.

Despite major strides by Obama, particularly in areas of health care and criminal justice reform, civil rights leaders say a clear Black agenda is necessary for major progress.  A Jan. 14 march planned by Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network aims toward that end. Trump will be inaugurated Jan. 20. Sharpton said the march aims to “warn President Trump and Congress that the fight for criminal justice, voting rights, affordable health care, improvements in education and other issues around equality and justice continues.”

Jan. 1, 2017

News Analysis

How a Repeal of the Affordable Care Act  will Affect Blacks
By Glenn Ellis

President Barack Obama, Vice President Biden, members of Congress and guests before the signing of the ACA on March 23, 2010. PHOTO: The White House

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Racism has historically had a significant, negative impact on the health care of Blacks and other people of color in the United States. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is truly the first time that African-Americans have, collectively, had significant access to health care. It is noteworthy that America’s first African-American president is chiefly responsible for this access.

Improved access to care; Medicaid expansion; prevention medicine; and lifting of barriers for pre-existing conditions, are all aspects of the ACA that have been of great benefit to Blacks. But there is a thick air of uncertainty on the horizon.

In a few weeks, Donald John Trump will become the 45th president of the United States.

It is unclear how quickly, or when, Trump's vow to repeal and replace Obamacare will play out. But make no mistake, just like the adage, “when white folks catch a cold, black folks get pneumonia!”, a repeal of the ACA would disproportionately hurt blacks.

Republicans in Congress have put out their plans: to repeal most of the ACA without replacing it; doubling the number of uninsured people - from roughly 29 million to 59 million - and leave the nation with an even higher uninsured rate than before the ACA.

Let me point out a few ways that Blacks have, specifically, benefitted from the ACA, what many now call "Obamacare". Given the low incomes of uninsured Blacks, nearly all (94 percent) are in the income range to qualify for the Medicaid expansion or premium tax credits. Nearly two thirds (62 percent) of uninsured Blacks have incomes at or below the Medicaid expansion limit, while an additional 31 percent are income-eligible for tax subsidies to help cover the cost of buying health insurance through the exchange marketplaces. Under the new law, insurance companies are banned from denying coverage because of a pre-existing condition, such as cancer and having been pregnant.

Importantly, for people living with HIV there also new protections in the law that make access to health coverage more equitable including the expansion of Medicaid and in the private market, prohibition on rate setting tied to health status, elimination of preexisting condition exclusions, and an end to lifetime and annual caps. The passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in March 2010 provided new opportunities for expanding health care access, prevention, and treatment services for millions of people in the U.S., including many people with, or at risk for, HIV.

Safety net hospitals play a critical role in the nation's health care system by serving low-income, uninsured and medically and socially vulnerable patients regardless of their ability to pay. Also, in agreeing to lower payments, hospitals in the 31 states that expanded Medicaid under the law, have made up that revenue in part through the Medicaid expansion.

These places are critical to the health of Black communities, and in the poorest neighborhoods. They have been among the loudest voices against repeal of the health law, as they could lose billions if the 20 million people lose the insurance they gained under the law. This could bring about widespread layoffs, cuts in outpatient care and services for the mentally ill, and even hospital closings.

Under the ACA, these hospitals have received subsidies (or credits) to provide care based on a patients’ income levels. Should this change, community hospitals may have more difficulty weathering the storm of an increase in the number of uninsured.

Admittedly, there are some real problems with the ACA as we have come to know it; not the least being steady increases in premiums (midrange plans increased 22 percent nationally in 2016, with the average premium set to rise 25 percent in 2017); nearly 70 percent of all ACA plan provider networks are narrower than promised; and the high-deductibles and co-pays. Perhaps the most universal complaint is the “individual mandate”, that requires everyone in the United States to have insurance, or face a financial penalty.

Republicans are dead set on repealing the Affordable Care Act. Congress will likely pass significant modifications to the Affordable Care Act this month, which will be signed by incoming President Trump.

The plans they have proposed so far would leave millions of people without insurance and make it harder for sicker, older Americans to access coverage. No version of a Republican plan would keep the Medicaid expansion as Obamacare envisions it.

Donald Trump’s presidency absolutely puts the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in jeopardy. A full repeal is unlikely, but major changes through the budget reconciliation process (which cannot be filibustered) are nearly certain.

But let me be clear; changes are needed in the ACA, but the idea of dismantling it remains a troubling prospect for Blacks.

Glenn Ellis, is a Health Advocacy Communications Specialist. He is the author of Which Doctor? and Information is the Best Medicine. A health columnist and radio commentator who lectures, nationally and internationally on health-related topics, Ellis is an active media contributor on Health Equity and Medical Ethics.

Listen to Glenn, every Saturday at 9:00am (EST) on www.900amwurd.com, and Sundays at 8:30am (EST) on www.wdasfm.com. For more good health information, visit: www.glennellis.com