Black History is American History

The month of February is identified by many different occasions and holidays.  We recognize President’s Day, which celebrates the birthday of President George Washington.  Arkansas recognizes Daisy Gaston Bates Day, which honors the civil rights activist for her role in the integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957.  And I should mention that Valentine’s Day, although not a federal or state recognized holiday, occupies as much (if not more) of our time as either of these days. 

But since 1920, February has had the distinct recognition of being a month in which we can cram everything we know about black history into 28 days.  Carter G. Woodson chose February to honor President Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.  It was in 1920, while pursuing a doctorate at Harvard, that Woodson founded “Negro History and Literature Week”.  

He wanted to bring attention to the contributions that black people had made and to show that their history was an integral part of U.S. history.  But in doing this, Carter noted that there was no respectable mention of black people in history books.  In many books, they were either ignored or mainly represented as slaves. Black figures in American history were not given the same intellectual examination that is always given to white figures that were in the same time period.  A good example of this is Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. 

Now we fast forward to 1975, where “Negro History Week” has now been expanded to “Black History Month”.  This expansion was bolstered by President Gerald Ford’s urging of all Americans to “recognize the important contribution made to our nation's life and culture by black citizens”.  All US Presidents have carried on this message of “recognition” since then.  However, we have not done all that we can do.

Black history, ironically, remains as segregated from the rest of American history in a manner similar to the public facilities of the Jim Crow south of the early 1900s.  It has become the “optional” history to learn about and understand, simply because it has its own month.  It would be in our best interests and the interests of future generations for us to craft our history in the most unified way possible.  But even in properly interspersing Black history throughout American history, we must be extra careful in telling and sharing the history.

The history of black people in America is largely tied to the some of the most negative and shameful moments in American history.  The path to citizenship for black people began with nearly 250 years of forced slavery and it continued for another 100 years with legally supported segregation in the Jim Crow era.  Not to mention, the abolishment of slavery was not always the top legislative agenda.  Additionally, the abolishment of Jim Crow practices, such as the introduction of anti-lynching legislation, was usually filibustered and defeated in the halls of Congress.  If one were to take an objective look at America’s past, it would seem that freedom and equality for its black citizens was never in the equation. 

Because America has not had a serious discussion about its racist history, this makes it particularly difficult to produce an educational curriculum that places Black history in the proper context within American history.  This limits us in too many ways to list here.  As referenced above, we learn all about the lives and times of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and countless more American heroes.  But little (and sometimes incorrect) information is given about Benjamin Banneker, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Daniel Hale Williams, and Charles R. Drew. 

Black History Month can still be a great tool to learn about American history.  However, we must work harder to see that our history does not remain segregated.  If we can put our history together and tell the story the way it needs to be told, we can come together and be the stronger America we always strive to be.  

Is Inequality Making Us Sick?

A couple of months ago, I watched a video entitled "Place Matters".  I wanted to share some information from the video.  Here is just a collection of statements from researchers and policy analysts about how where one lives is the greatest predictor of their health.  This includes financial, emotional, and physical health. 

JAMES KRIEGER (Epidemiologist, Seattle Dept. of Public Health): Place matters. That’s where someone works, where they go to school, or where they live, because place determines what someone’s exposed to in terms of a whole host of factors that can affect their health. So place matters because it determines what kind of physical or chemical agents you might be exposed to. It matters what kind of social environment you are exposed to. It matters if there’s a lot of violence or crime in your neighborhood. It matters if it’s easy to go for a walk in your neighborhood or find healthy foods. Who your neighbors are and the way you interact with your neighbors can also affect your health. Place ultimately is a critical determinant of health.

DAVID WILLIAMS (Sociologist, Harvard School of Public Health): When we think about health, we usually think about health care and access to care and the quality of care. But what research clearly shows is that health is embedded in the larger conditions in which we live and work. So, the quality of housing and the quality of neighborhood have dramatic effects on health. Sometimes, we naively think of improving health by simply changing behaviors. But the choices of individuals are often limited by the environments in which they live.

ANA DIEZ-ROUX (Epidemiologist, University of Michigan): When most people think of the causes of chronic disease, for example cardiovascular disease, they think of individual level risk factors which we know about: diet, physical activity, smoking. However, it’s also true that they are socially patterned. And one of the dimensions across which it’s patterned is by neighborhoods.  If we look at a map of almost any geographic area and you map up rates of obesity, for example, or of hypertension, or of low-birth weight, we’ll see that these things overlap almost exactly. And if we overlay a map of environmental hazards, it fits in as well. And, it’s very common to see all these dimensions cluster.

DICK JACKSON (Professor of Environmental Health, UC Berkeley): A friend of mine said that she’d seen 10 or 12 teenage girls now who have had their gall bladders removed. If you eat a lot of fat in your diet, you can get gall bladder disease and it turned out that they’re eating breakfast, lunch and dinner in fast food outlets. And there were no farmers markets, there were no green grocers; there was no Safeway or supermarket that was reachable by these kids. And fast food is a bargain. You can get 1500 calories for a couple of bucks. It’s not a long-term bargain, but it’s a short-term bargain. And people make that trade.

ANGELA GLOVER BLACKWELL (CEO, PolicyLink): We had vast public investments in building the suburbs of America. Federally supported loans, FHA loans, went to people who were moving to the suburbs and for many years, up until the 1960s, those loans were available on a racially restricted basis. African-Americans and other people of color didn’t have access to them.

A concluding statement from David Williams of the Harvard School of Public Health:  What all of this means is that housing policy is health policy.  Educational policy is health policy.  Anti-violence policy is health policy.  Neighborhood improvement policies are health policies.  Everything that we can do to improve the quality of life of individuals in our society has an impact on their health and is a health policy.

Federal Judge BLOCKS Florida’s New Welfare Drug Testing Law

From the Washington Post

A federal judge temporarily blocked Florida’s new law that requires welfare applicants to pass a drug test before receiving the benefits on Monday, saying it may violate the Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

Judge Mary Scriven’s ruling is in response to a lawsuit filed on behalf of a 35-year-old Navy veteran and single father who sought the benefits while finishing his college degree, but refused to take the test.

The judge said there was a good chance plaintiff Luis Lebron would succeed in his challenge to the law based on the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches.

The drug test can reveal a host of private medical facts about the individual, Scriven wrote, adding that she found it “troubling” that the drug tests are not kept confidential like medical records. The results can also be shared with law enforcement officers and a drug abuse hotline.

“This potential interception of positive drug tests by law enforcement implicates a ‘far more substantial’ invasion of privacy than in ordinary civil drug testing cases,” Scriven said.

The law’s proponents include Gov. Rick Scott, who said during his campaign the measure would save $77 million. It’s unclear how he arrived at those figures.

The rest of the article is available here. 

President Obama: "Occupy Wall Street 'Not That Different' From Tea Party Protests"

From Yahoo! News:

President Obama, who has become a target of the Occupy Wall Street protests sweeping the country, today embraced the economic frustration being given voice on the streets and said that his vision for America’s economic system is best suited to resolve protesters’ concerns.

“I understand the frustrations being expressed in those protests,” Obama told ABC News senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper in an exclusive interview from Jamestown, N.C.

“In some ways, they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party.  Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren’t looking out for them,” he said.

Obama said the most important thing he can do as president is express solidarity with the protesters and redouble his commitment to achieving what he described as a more egalitarian society.

“The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side, and that we want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you’re supposed to do, is rewarded,” Obama said. “And that people who are irresponsible, who are reckless, who don’t feel a sense of obligation to their communities and their companies and their workers that those folks aren’t rewarded.”

The rest of the article is available here.

Does the GOP lack competence among its competition?

There's a lot to like about Herman Cain. He's funny and personable. He's a great American success story. His 9-9-9 tax plan may be half-baked, but the concept behind the plan (replace the corporate income tax with in effect a consumption tax) has a lot to recommend it.  

Finally, in a political cycle that has seen too many coded racial attacks on President Obama and his family, it's a source of great pride to me to see an African-American topping my party's polls.

If Herman Cain had served as governor of Georgia, or even mayor of Atlanta, he'd be a valid and credible candidate for president of the United States.

But here's the trouble: he has not held those offices or any other executive office at any level of government. He did serve on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in the 1990s, including two years as chairman -- a distinguished position and an important responsibility, but not one that involves the management of a public agency.

So what?

So everything! The president's most fundamental job is to run the government. That job is very, very hard. The consequences of a mistake are very, very serious.

For that reason, Americans have historically demanded a record of successful accomplishment in public office from their presidential candidates. The current president is an exception to the rule, and -- well -- enough said.

Barack Obama became president despite a negligible record in large part as a reaction against the perceived failures of the George W. Bush presidency. Many voters in 2008 made a calculation like: "Obama may never have governed anything. But George W. Bush was a two-term governor of the country's second biggest state, and he got us into Iraq and a terrible recession. So maybe experience doesn't count. Maybe what we need is a different style: somebody more cautious than Bush, somebody who doesn't always go with his gut."

Herman Cain You might expect Republicans to react similarly against the Obama presidency, demanding from their nominee skills that Obama lacked: administrative experience, negotiating skill, deep policy knowledge.

But no.  From Donald Trump to Michele Bachmann to Herman Cain, the Republican activist base has again and again fixed its hopes on people who have never held an executive public office and who defiantly reject the very idea of expertise.

The rest of the article is available here.

Raising Cain: Popularity Soars for GOP Presidential Hopeful Herman Cain

From Bloomberg News

Herman Cain, a one-time pizza magnate and sunny-skies orator, is entering a new phase of scrutiny after a wave of Republican Party dissatisfaction with its presidential choices has thrust him into the upper tier of candidates.

Cain, 65, whose come-from-way-behind campaign has been conducted largely via television, presents himself as destined for victory: His new memoir is called “This is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House.”  Now, in the run-up to tomorrow’s Republican debate in New Hampshire, Cain is being pressed on his so-called 9-9-9 tax plan -- a flat 9 percent rate on corporate and personal income and a national sales tax -- his criticism of the Occupy Wall Street protesters and his lack of experience in public office.

“Get ready for an aberration of historic proportion,” Cain said in an interview yesterday during “State of the Union” on CNN. “People who are criticizing me because I have not held public office, they are out of touch with the voters out there.”

The rise of Cain, political analysts say, is a reflection of prolonged hunger among a segment of Republican voters for someone to inspire -- someone who isn’t former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who has been criticized for inconstancy. In the past week, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin declined to enter the race. Texas Governor Rick Perry has stumbled, creating an opportunity for Cain.

The rest of the article is available here.

Economy leads young Americans to put adulthood on hold

The slackers of the 1990s are remembered as listless MTV watchers and basement dwellers who opted out of America's striving, mercenary ethos. Many young adults today look similar at first glance. They're in their 20s or early 30s, they don't have jobs or spouses, and many live with mom and dad. But that's not by choice.

This generation of reluctant slackers is eager to get started building careers, owning homes, getting married and having kids. They have put their lives on hold, though, thanks to the bleak economic climate.

This year, 5.9 million Americans between the ages of 25 and 35 lived with their parents, according to Census Bureau data. That's an increase of 25 percent from before the recession. And between 2007 and 2009, the share of Americans living in a multi-generational household shot up by 4.9 million, or 10.5 percent, a Pew study found.

The rest of the article is available here.