Afro-Netizen

Working class Black and Brown folks caused the housing crisis & the global economic meltdown. Huh?!

Such baseless, blame-the-victim allegations are nothing less than scapegoating of Jim Crow proportions.

Blaming inner-city dwelling "high-risk borrowers", ACORN, CRA and others for America's housing crisis is akin to charging rape victims for the rape kit. It's simply unconscionable.

Did the working class own predatory lending outfits?

Did the working class dream up the Adjustable Rate Mortgage?

Did the working class own the media conglomerates and other institutions who since the end of World War II have pounded into every American's skull that home ownership is part and parcel of the increasingly elusive American Dream?

Did the working class run the real estate industry? The insurance industry? Wall Street? Madison Avenue? K Street? 1600 The White House/Capitol Hill? Hollywood? Or Silicon Valley?

Oh, one last thing:

Did the working class buy all those now-foreclosed McMansions in suburbia?

The following Lending Tree commercial from a few years back was a (now not-so-humorous) augur of America's precarious house of cards that rested on good old-fashion industry- and government-fostered consumerism and addiction to credit.

See for yourself . . .

Taser Death of Black man by White cop near Jean, Louisiana

Texas Justice in Black and White

By Dorothy Roberts
Guest Contributor

Last April, I watched Larry King interview seven mothers whose children had been taken in the raid on a Texas polygamous ranch. Militant slogans in their defense flashed on the screen beneath them:  Moms Speak Out!  Give Our Kids Back!  I felt for the mothers and their children.  I can imagine how terrified my toddler would be if he were ripped from me by strangers.  I agreed that Texas authorities had no right to snatch hundreds of children wholesale without proving that each one was at risk and without considering less harmful alternatives.  (The Texas Supreme Court ruled as such on May 29 and returned the traumatized children to their homes.)  But my main thought was, when will grieving Black mothers appear en masse on prime time TV to recount the pain of losing their children to foster care? Will Black women ever have a chance to air the wrongs they suffered when the state took their children on far less egregious charges? 

To listen to the media coverage, you would think this is the first and only case of wrongful child removal by state agents.  But there are more than half a million children in foster care and most are from families of color. Black children were virtually excluded from openly segregated child welfare services until the end of World War II.  As the child welfare system began to serve fewer White children and more Black children, state and federal governments spent much more money on foster care and less on in-home services to families. Today, Black children are grossly overrepresented in the child welfare system: they make up about one-third of the nation’s foster care population yet represent only 15 percent of the nation’s children.  A Black child is four times as likely as a White child to be in foster care.  In my home town, Chicago, almost all the children in foster care are Black.  Black children also spend more time in foster care and are less likely to ever be reunited with their parents than other children.  The Texas raid was extraordinary in part because it took so many White children from their homes; removing hundreds of children from Black neighborhoods is unremarkable because it is so common. 

The reason for the Texas round up was also unusual.  Most foster care placements result from parental neglect related to poverty, not physical or sexual abuse.  The child welfare system hides the systemic reasons for poor families’ hardships by attributing them to parental deficits that require coercive intervention instead of social change.  Foster care’s racial disparity helps to maintain the subordinated status of Black people in the United States and reinforces the quintessential racist stereotype: that Black people are incapable of governing themselves and need state supervision.

The media seem to have realized only now – when White children are at stake – that foster care has damaging effects. Reporters rarely notice that foster care routinely tears apart Black families, but they are startled when state agents haul off so many blond haired, blue eyed children. The glaring failure to value Black people’s relationships is precisely the main reason for the disproportionate placement of Black children in the first place.  When it comes to families of color, the media tend to report only on the death of children at the hands of their parents, which typically sets off a foster care panic.  Fearful of bad press, state agencies start removing children on flimsier grounds and needlessly separate thousands more children from their families while overloading the social workers charged with protecting them.  Hopefully, the public’s awakening to the plight of the Texas children will direct attention to the child welfare system’s deeper flaws that have harmed primarily children of color and that racism has long obscured.   

Dorothy Roberts is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Northwestern University School of Law and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research.  She is author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare. 

Son of Jesse Jackson bids on nation's 13th largest newspaper

A Jackson eyes Sun-Times

Jesse's son, with partner, joins bidding

By Steven R. Strahler
Crain's Chicago Business

Yusef Jackson, the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s No. 3 son, is making a play for the Chicago Sun-Times.

People close to the situation say that Mr. Jackson, a lawyer who heads an Anheuser-Busch Cos. distributorship in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, bid for the paper with supermarket billionaire Ronald Burkle, whose Los Angeles investment firm once controlled Dominick’s Finer Foods Inc.

The amount of Mr. Jackson’s bid couldn’t be learned. But a newspaper industry analyst who helped Mr. Jackson evaluate the Sun-Times calculates the paper’s value at about $440 million, or nine times projected cash flow this year.

Mr. Jackson is interested only in the Sun-Times and none of the 90-odd other local publications of Chicago-based Hollinger International Inc. that also are on the block. That’s a significant hurdle because of ownership’s preference, for tax and other reasons, to sell Hollinger’s more than 150 papers around the world in one piece.

Mr. Jackson, president of River North Sales & Service, did not return calls. A spokesman for Mr. Burkle declined to comment.

Final bids for Hollinger’s papers are due March 23. The Jackson consultant says Hollinger’s investment banker, Lazard LLC, hopes to get as much as 13 times cash flow, or $2 billion, for the entire portfolio. Potential bidders include media companies like McLean, Va.-based Gannett Co. and financial buyers like New York private-equity firm Blackstone Group. Chicago-based Madison Dearborn Partners LLC’s interest is minimal.

The Sun-Times’ appeal to a financial or strategic buyer is less than it is to a bidder like Mr. Jackson, who could instantly transform the city’s No. 2 daily into the nation’s only major mainstream newspaper owned by an African-American. With a weekday circulation of 482,000, the Sun-Times is the 13th-largest paper in the U.S.

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Brown University to Examine Debt to Slave Trade

By Pam Belluck
The New York Times
NYTimes.com

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - When Ruth J. Simmons became the president of Brown University nearly three years ago, one striking fact could not be overlooked.

A great-granddaughter of slaves, Dr. Simmons was the first African-American president of an Ivy League university. But the 240-year-old university she was chosen to lead had early links to slavery, with major benefactors and officers of it having owned and traded slaves.

"It certainly didn't escape me, my own past in relationship to that,'' Dr. Simmons said. "I sit here in my office beneath the portrait of people who lived at a different time and who saw the ownership of people in a different way. You can't sit in an office and face that every day unless you really want to know, unless you really want to understand this dichotomy.''

Now, Dr. Simmons, whose office is in a building constructed by laborers who included slaves, has directed Brown to start what its officials say is an unprecedented undertaking for a university: an exploration of reparations for slavery and specifically whether Brown should pay reparations or otherwise make amends for its past.

Dr. Simmons has appointed a Committee on Slavery and Justice, which will spend two years investigating Brown's historic ties to slavery; arrange seminars, courses and research projects examining the moral, legal and economic complexities of reparations and other means of redressing wrongs; and recommend whether and how the university should take responsibility for its connection to slavery.

Dr. Simmons, one of 12 children of an East Texas tenant farmer and a house cleaner, said she was motivated by a sense that the multifaceted subject of reparations had too often been reduced to simplistic and superficial squabbles.

``How does one repair a kind of social breach in human rights so that people are not just coming back to it periodically and demanding apologies,'' she said, ``so that society learns from it, acknowledges what has taken place and then moves on. What I'm trying to do, you see, in a country that wants to move on, I'm trying to understand as a descendant of slaves how to feel good about moving on.''

Dr. Simmons does not believe that her history will sway the inquiry's results. ``I don't think there can be a person with a better background for dealing with this issue than me,'' she said. ``If I have something to teach our students, if I have something to offer Brown, it's the fact that I am a descendant of slaves.''

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Franken, Garofalo to host liberal radio

By Seth Sutel
Salon.com

NEW YORK (AP) -- Comedian Al Franken is baiting conservatives again, and this time he's bringing along a bunch of friends to back him up.

Franken will be the lead personality on Air America Radio, a start-up venture promising a liberal alternative to powerhouse radio talk show pundits like Rush Limbaugh.

The backers of Air America announced their programming lineup on Wednesday and said they planned to launch the network on March 31 in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco.

Franken will be joined by fellow TV comedian Janeane Garofalo, both of whom will have co-hosts for their live three-hour shows. Other shows will be hosted by Randi Rhodes, a radio personality from southern Florida, and Lizz Winstead, a co-creater of "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central.

Franken, in a swipe at Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, plans to call his midday show "The O'Franken Factor".

[Let's hope these guys are progressive enough to share their new air space with some hardcore Black progressive talent!]

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Sharpton's Next Role? Talk Radio? Reality TV?

By Jim Rutenberg
The New York Times
NYTimes.com

ASHINGTON, March 7 - He may not have won many votes this primary season, but the Rev. Al Sharpton won credit from various quarters for often stealing the show at Democratic presidential debates, where his wit and sense of humor often made his opponents seem like, well, politicians.

Now, as he contemplates leaving the campaign trail, Mr. Sharpton, a onetime child preacher who went on to become a firebrand activist and presidential candidate, is talking about what he hopes will be his next incarnation: multimedia sensation.

While Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts is trying to ride his campaign momentum to the White House, Mr. Sharpton is trying to ride his into a career in television and radio, books and movies.

Mr. Sharpton, who retained the William Morris talent agency two weeks ago, said he wanted to be the host of his own cable news and radio programs, and his talent representatives said they were pursuing talks with all conceivable outlets.

But, perhaps unsurprisingly for a man who is running for president, Mr. Sharpton's media ambitions do not stop there. He has already had an informal discussion with Fox Television Studios about a possible reality television show, officials there said on Friday. And he recently met with Sid Ganis, the Hollywood producer who included Mr. Sharpton in the 2002 remake of "Mr. Deeds,'' to discuss future roles.

"For months they were saying to me from various parts of the media world that they wanted me to do a syndicated radio show, a syndicated TV show, and now these guys with a reality show,'' Mr. Sharpton said. "I said I wanted to wait for the end of the campaign. Now that we're halfway through, I told William Morris to go and complete some deals.''

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Illinois Senate Race Attracts 7 Candidates in Millionaire Range

By Monica Davey
The New York Times
NYTimes.com

CHICAGO, March 5 — In a cramped radio studio on a recent morning, a handful of candidates for the United States Senate were heaping scorn on an absent opponent — one with higher poll ratings than theirs, and a lot more money.

"We're on the poverty level compared to him," Maria Pappas, a Democrat, complained. Another Democratic hopeful, Joyce Washington, said solemnly, "If we start believing that a megamillionaire can come in here and buy a seat, this is a sad day."

The man they were grumbling about, Blair Hull, is undeniably rich. A former securities trader who began his climb to wealth counting blackjack cards in Las Vegas, Mr. Hull has promised to spend as much as $40 million of his own money in this campaign, more than any Senate candidate in Illinois has ever done.

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In a Historic Black Hamlet, Wal-Mart Finds Resistance

By ANDREW JACOBS
The New York Times
NYTimes.com

SANDFLY, Ga. — Alexander Luten's grandfather did well for a man born into slavery. So, too, did the other newly emancipated field hands who worked the nearby rice plantations and settled this buggy strip of coastal Georgia. Like the others, Benjamin Luten built a prim four-room shack for his family and made sure his children and grandchildren got a nice wedge of land and a decent education.

"Life wasn't always easy, but we prospered," said his 70-year-old grandson, a retired principal who, like most of the Luten clan, still lives in this marshy hamlet, which historians consider among the oldest African-American settlements in the country.

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Dems Query U.S. Role in Haiti

By Ron Howell
Staff writer
New York Newsday
NYNewsday.com

Congressional Democrats criticized the Bush administration's handling of the crisis in Haiti yesterday and questioned whether the United States pushed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile.

"You didn't want a diplomatic solution to this problem. You wanted to get rid of Aristide," said Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-Far Rockaway).

Others said the Bush administration's failure to support Aristide sent a chilling signal to democratically elected governments.

Rep. Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, said people in this hemisphere were "watching this government turn its back on democracy .... The message is clear. This government will not stand up for a democratically elected head of state they do not like."

Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega was the target of the grilling yesterday at a hearing of House International Relations subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.

Members of Congress wanted to know whether the United States was covertly involved in recent events that led Aristide to leave his country. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said she and other legislators hope to find how much money was spent recently by the CIA and other U.S. agencies operating in Haiti.

She and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) also demanded that Noriega produce proof Aristide himself composed the document which U.S. officials say is a letter of resignation. "Was the letter of resignation composed by - not just signed by - but composed by President Aristide?" Schakowsky asked Noriega.

"I assume he wrote it," Noriega answered.

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