Columnists

To Be Equal: Desantis Has Learned The Wrong Lessons From History

Feb. 25, 2023
He Wants To Make Sure No One Else Learns The Right Ones.
By Marc H. Morial

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984

The Jacksonville ballfield where Henry “Hammerin’ Hank” Aaron played as a 19-year-old minor leaguer in 1953 now bears his name.

It’s where he and two of his teammates, Felix Mantilla, and Horace Garner, endured hostile taunts from fans. Off the field, they received death threats. When the team traveled, they couldn’t stay at the same hotels where other teammates stayed or eat with them at the same restaurants.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis doesn’t want the high school students who play on that field – at least the white ones – to know why. Other governors and elected officials, looking to capitalize on the racial resentment and white grievance DeSantis hopes will propel him into the White House, are following his lead. This insidious campaign is an effort not merely to warp Americans’ view of our past, but to thwart the dismantling of systemic and institutional racism.

To paraphrase an old business adage, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and you can’t measure what you can’t see.

White students might feel “guilt” or “anguish” to learn that Aaron was forced to hide under his bed as a child when the Ku Klux Klan marched through town. Or that after he and his teammates ate in a Washington D.C. restaurant, they listened as the staff shattered every dish they’d used. Or that he received as many as 3,000 racists, threatening letters a day as he closed in on Babe Ruth's home run record.

That’s why school administrators in Duval County, where Jacksonville is located, temporarily barred the children’s book Henry Aaron's Dream from its libraries and classrooms. Other books Click or tap to follow the link." data-linkindex="0" data-auth="Verified">kept off the shelves were Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Thank You, Jackie Robinson, Sonia Sotomayor (Women Who Broke the Rules Series),

Following a nationwide outcry, those books and others that broached the topics of racism and discrimination have been reinstated, and DeSantis has tried to pass off the ban as “a joke” and a publicity stunt. But DeSantis’ own Stop WOKE Act, which restricts the discussion of race and diversity in schools, and the Parental Rights in Education law – better known as "Don't Say Gay" – explicitly require the reviews that forced the district to remove the books.

Among the 47 books the district returned to the publisher after the review was The Life of Rosa Parks, and Separate is Never Equal.

Politicians in other states are embracing the DeSantis Stop WOKE ploy like cynical moths drawn to the flames of a burning cross.

At least 36 states have adopted or introduced laws or policies that restrict teaching about race and racism. In North Dakota teachers are effectively forbidden to acknowledge the existence of systemic racism. Researcher Jeffrey Sachs, who tracks such legislation for PEN America, said, “The law now is saying that whenever a teacher talks about racism, they may only describe it as a product of an individual's own biases or prejudices. They cannot describe it — even when the facts command them to — as something more endemic or embedded within American society.

“It's a way essentially of preventing teachers, I think, from being honest about a lot of the uglier sides of American history and contemporary society.”

If DeSantis and his imitators get their way, our schools will produce an entire generation of Americans oblivious to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, to the decades of redlining that shaped our communities, trapping families within an endless cycle of poverty and violence, to the pervasive myths that deny Black patients medical treatment and pain relief.

When Americans saw the images of Elizabeth Eckford taunted by racists as she entered Little Rock Central High School, of Alabama state troopers bludgeoning John Lewis on the Edmund Pettis Bridge of police dogs attacking teenagers in Birmingham, they were galvanized into action by what they saw. DeSantis and his imitators have learned the wrong lessons from history. They want to make sure no one else learns the right ones.

It Shouldn't Take a Fiery Crash and Toxic Spill to Push Action on Railroad Safety

Feb. 20, 2023
By Ben Jealous

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - People around East Palestine, Ohio, have been warned not to run their vacuum cleaners.

That was the reality two weeks after a train derailment in the village of about 4,700 people near the border with Pennsylvania that damaged public health and the environment in ways that still aren’t fully known.

Pennsylvania’s health department has told residents that data from its air quality monitoring “do not indicate a potential for long-term health effects,” but if people choose to vacuum after their evacuation they should do so “small amounts at a time and take frequent breaks by walking outdoors.” As confusing as those messages may be, Ohioans have gotten even less information from that state’s government.

Five of the derailed cars contained nearly 1 million pounds of vinyl chloride, a toxic flammable liquid; other cars carried butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, and isobutylene. The spills from the wreck have left a long chemical plume moving down the Ohio River at about a mile an hour. The result has been at least 3,500 fish killed. The train’s owner Norfolk Southern said it is removing contaminated soil at the crash site, which can leach toxic chemicals into the water and air, after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) raised questions.

The immediate need is to respond to make sure that harm to people, wildlife, and waters now and in the future are limited to the extent we are able. As a starting point, residents need clear, understandable answers about risks they face and support to which they are entitled. While federal authorities generally defer to state officials in disasters, the simmering mistrust caused by the strange odors residents say they smell, the soreness of their throats, and the aching in their heads seems to cry out for a different response.

The EPA and Transportation Department must ensure that Norfolk Southern meets its obligation to make things right. The Sierra Club’s Ohio director Ericka Copeland captured it – “East Palestine and the surrounding communities in Ohio and Pennsylvania deserve full transparency from the EPA, Norfolk Southern, and state leadership…Residents deserve to be able to safely return to their homes and access drinking water without the risk of everyday activities like vacuuming exposing them further to these chemicals.”

Moving forward, we need to do more to protect people and places from hazardous materials that move in more than 2 million freight cars each year. To be fair, reports show that freight rail spills happen less often than spills from trucks or planes. But we know those trains don’t run through posh suburbs. They run through places like East Palestine, a working-class White village where median household income is about two-thirds the Ohio average. They are places that historically get overlooked.

The best news is we already know what to do. While the cause of the Ohio derailment hasn’t been determined officially, reports indicate a wheel bearing in the car that caused the accident overheated; there are sensors for that we can require. Similarly, we can replace braking technology that dates back more than a century with newer brakes that even Norfolk Southern said cuts stopping distances by 60 percent.

Anyone who saw videos of the burning cars after the crash or the huge cloud of smoke when vinyl chloride was burned off to prevent an explosion may shocked to learn that the wrecked train wasn’t designated a “high-hazard flammable train,” which would trigger additional safety steps and more notice to state and local officials. This is an easy step to take.

These remedies have been proposed before. The railroad industry calls them too costly. But that claim must be weighed against nearly $200 billion in stock buybacks and dividends for the nation’s biggest rail companies since 2010 as they also cut their workforces.

We can start by restoring brake system and other safety rules rescinded during the Trump administration. Once we push for all these common-sense measures to protect ourselves and our neighborhoods, we should start asking another question – what was going to happen to all those toxic chemicals once they reached the railyard where they were headed?

Ben Jealous is incoming executive director of the Sierra Club, the oldest and most influential grassroots environmental organization in the country. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” published in January.

NFL No Black Coaches in 1973, Two in 2023

Feb. 20, 2023
By A. Peter Bailey

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - When reading or hearing about the extremely limited number of Black head coaches in the National Football League (NFL), I remember an article entitled “Where are the Black Coaches?” in the December 1973 issue of Ebony Magazine. Under the title it stated that “No Blacks lead professional teams; only five have been selected as assistants.”

The article reported that “This year in the National Football League, 198 coaches are coaching, approximately 1,118 players. While some 435 players are Black, not a single Black is listed among the 26 head coaches in the League and only 5 Blacks are among the League’s 172 assistant coaches. They are Emlen Tunnell of the New York Giants, Willie Wood of the San Diego Chargers, Lionel Taylor of the Pittsburg Steelers, Al Labor of the Cleveland Browns and Earnell Durden of the Houston Oilers.”

Fifty years later the question asked by Ebony Magazine still hasn’t been answered. In the January 11, 2023 issue of The Washington Post, included an article, “The NFL is Down to Two Black Coaches. Will anything change this offseason? It reported that “A year ago, nine teams came out of the 2022 regular season seeking a new head coach, and only one hired a black man….Now, as the 2023 NFL hiring cycle gets underway, with at least five head coach openings, the landscape is both numbingly familiar—the Houston Texans’ firing of Lovie Smith on Sunday leaves the League with just two Black full-time head coaches—and subtly altered, at least in theory, both by design and circumstances. Whether that translates into programs won’t be known for weeks.”

The 1973 Ebony article included comments by two former Black players, Gayle Sayers, a great backfield star with the Chicago Bears and previously mentioned Emlen Tunnell. Sayers was recorded as saying that “Coaching is a closed fraternity. Owners and general managers usually hire friends for a head coaching post. But I don’t think racism has anything to do with it.” Tunnell, the first Black player for the New York Giants, was quoted as saying that “The color of one’s skin shouldn’t be used to measure the wealth of a man, but it will for the rest of our lifetimes.”

One question today is how many 2023 Black NFL players share the positions attributed fifty years ago to Sayers and Tunnell. Another question is whether they have the me, myself and I attitude expressed by too many Black folks today. If today’s Black NFL players do share the positions attributed to Sayers and Tunnell a question about the lack of Black head coaches will still be relevant fifty years from now. On the other hand if the players work together and are backed by serious Black folks that question will be irrelevant.

Taking on the Symptom that is Gun Violence and the Disease Behind It

Jan. 30, 2023
By Ben Jealous

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - We’ve had more mass shootings this year than we’ve had days this year.

It’s sad to imagine that Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park will join a list with Uvalde and Buffalo and Orlando and Charleston and Sandy Hook and Columbine, reference points for a national epidemic we haven’t mustered the will to end despite decades of tragedies. But they likely will unless we can confront both the symptom that is gun violence and the underlying disease that causes it.

I shoot for sport, and I’ve trained others to shoot. I live in a coastal community in Maryland where hunters and hikers share wild places and work together to preserve them.

I also live not far from the Capital Gazette’s offices, where a man armed with a shotgun and angered by newspaper stories about him killed five and injured two five years ago. For generations, many in my family have served in law enforcement. I support common-sense steps to keep guns out of the hands of those who have demonstrated they shouldn’t have them. We all know that list by now -- more and more thorough background checks, bans on assault weapons and unnecessarily large magazines, red flag laws that allow guns to be taken away from those who are risks to others or themselves, and penalties for gun owners who fail to keep them out of the hands of children, teens, and mentally unstable people.

Fighting the disease at the root of the violence demands that we address it like the public health crisis it is. I realized that as a graduate student at Oxford when I started exploring rates of suicide in the United States. Almost unfettered access to guns, particularly handguns, has a lot to do with the numbers. If you try to kill yourself with a firearm, you’re much more likely to succeed. While suicides among young black men sparked my research, I learned that white men over 55 were more likely to die of suicide with a gun than black men 15 to 30 were to kill each other with a gun. You would never have known that from the media and popular culture at the time.

What pushes those two trend lines in the same direction are shared causes – hopelessness, economic uncertainty, downward mobility, and addiction all made more painful by social isolation. Those same factors feed the cultural and political polarization that has many wondering about the future of our republic.

Let’s not accept the isolation so many feel and the polarization we see in our public discourse as reinforcing and insurmountable. Let’s be determined to act now to find the solutions we can agree on – even gun owners overwhelmingly support some regulations, just as majorities support helping those with mental health needs.

I’ve seen this happen. When I was young, my dad organized a peer counseling program for abusive men, with 80 men taking part every six weeks. Men grew not only more empathetic but more humane. Some eventually wanted to do more together and formed Whites Interrupting Racism in our community. It was one of many lessons my dad taught me – that how we treat each other in our lives shapes what we’ll permit in the structures of our country.

Ben Jealous is the incoming executive director of the Sierra Club, the oldest and most influential grassroots environmental organization in the country. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” published in January.

Woodson's Wisdom

January 30, 2023
By Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq. (Ret.)

(TriceEdneyWire) – Carter Godwin Woodson, The Father of Negro (Black) History, remains an invaluable source of historic information and critical thinking which prepares today’s young African Americans to confront and challenge the persistent racism that continues to plague the national psyche. Ninety years ago, when most sources of public information characterized African Americans as ignorant, non-contributing, sub-human vermin who had no legitimate place in American society, Carter G. Woodson was a vocal champion of African American contributions to the nation and the reconstruction of a new, positive mindset among African Americans. In my opinion, the 1933 publication of his “The Mis-Education of the Negro” is one of the most important literary works introduced to African Americans and this nation.

Among his notable quotations (and one of my favorites) is: “If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.” In the context of my interpretation, the ghetto is not a location, it is a mindset. In that same context, feeding is more than food, it is the constant barrage of information that molds our thinking.

During this year’s celebration of Black History Month, we must reevaluate the information or lack thereof, we and our children are being fed. The real destruction of a race begins with the destruction of its children. Woodson states: “As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.”

Fast forward to January 2023 in America. As recently reported by ABC's Averi Harper, members of the (Ron) DeSantis-appointed Florida Department of Education rejected the optional AP African American Studies program in a letter to SAT test administrators, the College Board -- incorrectly claiming that the program "significantly lacks educational value." Given appropriate thought and consideration, this offensively bold assertion negates the presence of African Americans in this nation. This is not a new or unexpected phenomenon, but one must ask how this position affects the student who sees no evidence of “self” in her/his educational process.

This “theft” of history may be codified in Florida, but it is replicated in so many other academic jurisdictions. A lack of relevant knowledge by teachers or their direct intent to ignore or exclude Black History from local curricula delivers the same result. Woodson opines, “Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.” Or even worse, “If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.”

Woodson echoes my greatest fear, “The education of the Negroes, then, the most important thing in the uplift of the Negroes, is almost entirely in the hands of those who have enslaved them and now segregate them.” If we accept this reality, we have limited choices in our plan to resolve this problem.

I submit that when/where our numbers are sufficiently large or when we can collaborate with other “out” groups to exert our influence, that we do so. White supremacy is sustained and enlarged with the exclusion of the historic contributions of those they wish to demean. The historic reduction of their self-aggrandizement only diminishes their truth of superiority.

When our numbers are insufficient to exert that measure of influence, we must do it the old-fashioned way – we must value, learn, and then teach our history. No one will do this for us. No one else has a vested interest.

(Dr. E. Faye Williams is President of The Dick Gregory Society (http://thedickgregorysociety.org/. Click or tap to follow the link." data-linkindex="0" shape="rect" data-auth="Verified">thedickgregorysociety.org; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) and President Emerita of the National Congress of Black Women)

What’s an Eruv – and What Can It Teach Us?

Jan. 24, 2023
By Svante Myrick

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - If you’ve been watching news or social media recently, it’s hard to miss a disturbing trend in American culture. It seems like antisemitism is back in a very public way – and not just in the white supremacist circles where it’s been all along. It’s heartbreaking. And it got me thinking about an experience I had fifteen years ago in my hometown of Ithaca, New York.

I was on the city council, and a local rabbi came to me with a concern. He explained that in traditional Jewish communities, many activities that are considered work are not allowed on the Sabbath. These include carrying objects from place to place outside the home. So tradition accommodates this restriction by creating a larger area called an eruv: a space that defines home as several houses and streets within a community. The boundaries of the eruv are designated by markers around the neighborhood, often attached to utility poles and wires.

The eruv symbolically enlarges the home – so the necessities of faith and of daily life can coexist.

For years, the rabbi said, the Jewish community had been asking to put up eruv markers in parts of Ithaca, but the city council hadn’t responded: could I help? I’m happy to say that we got it done. But not without some resistance -- including pushback from people who called themselves progressives, who opposed what they called “catering” to a religious community.

That disappointed me then, and it bothers me even more today. Here’s why.

The alarm bells that are ringing about the rise of antisemitism are on both the Right and the Left. On the Right, we know that white supremacists, militant Christian nationalists and other bigots pose a deadly threat. And the way to combat this is with a strong, progressive, multiracial coalition. This is what happened in the civil rights era, when a Black-Jewish alliance played a major role in the fight for desegregation and voting rights.

But alarm bells are also ringing on the Left, because today there are fractures in that old alliance. A mix of cultural and political influences has left some in the Black community feeling like we’re not all on the same team. And what happens when good people are not aligned is that evil gets the upper hand.

There are plenty of examples of this throughout history. And I don’t use the word “evil” lightly. Think of Nick Fuentes, the far-right activist who grabbed headlines for his dinner with Donald Trump and Ye. Fuentes has openly praised Adolf Hitler. It doesn’t get much worse than that.

This is the kind of viciousness that we are facing today, with a Far Right that became louder, bolder and more aggressive under Donald Trump – and hasn’t gone away. This is a time when the Black community and Jewish community need to come together, and not be driven apart by forces with a divide-and-conquer agenda. We can acknowledge that there are differences between us, things we can talk about, while still having each other’s backs.

In other words, we can symbolically enlarge our home.

Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday just passed, famously reminded us that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Those of us who want equity and justice need to want it for all people. Our real and symbolic home should be with each other, where we are united by our shared humanity and where hate by any name is excluded. Let’s make that space, and welcome each other in.

Svante Myrick is President of People For the American Way. Previously, he served as executive director of People For and led campaigns focused on transforming public safety, racial equity, voting rights, and empowering young elected officials. Myrick garnered national attention as the youngest-ever mayor in New York State history.