Community Organizers Applauded as Great Patriots and Great Assets to America

Community Organizers Applauded as Great Patriots and Great Assets to America
THE HUFFINGTON POST

MONROE ANDERSON

Palin, GOP find community challenges a real hoot

At the expense of Barack Obama, community groups and their organizers were a running joke in St. Paul last week at the Republican National Convention.

Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani and much of the rest of the GOP apparently believe that small town mayoring is oh-so-important while community organizing is a real thigh-slapper.


Like much of what goes on among American conservatives, I suspect the marginalizing of the community organizing is just one more coded race reference. And, like much what goes on among the Republicans, George W. Bush and the Palin McCain campaign, it's obvious that this is another topsy-turvy twist on reality.

To assure that the community organizers are removed from the GOP's one-liner lists and moved back into the important things-to-do column, the AfroSpear, a collective of black bloggers across America, has called for a day of blogging in support of community organizing. I'm just one of dozens. This is my contribution.

Small town government, of course, does call for responsibilities. But, like volunteer fire departments, in many small towns, running it is only a part-time job--or should be. Community organizing in Chicago, on the other hand, is a full-time challenge that impacts lives of American citizens by the tens of thousands.

No one knows this to be true more than Phillip Jackson. At one time Jackson was the head of the Chicago Housing Authority. One of the housing projects he was in charge of, Robert Taylor Homes, was where 100,000 of Chicago poorest residents called home. When Jackson left the CHA in the mid-1990s, he founded The Black Star Project, a community group with a daunting task: to improve the quality of life in Black and Latino communities of Chicago and nationwide by eliminating the racial academic achievement gap.

Jackson boasts that The Black Star Project successfully spearheaded the Million Father March 2008 that "took place in 475 cities with about 600.000 men taking children to school--because of communities organizers in these cities."

If Palin, McCain, Giuliani and the gang think Jackson's mission is a laughing matter, then they've got another think coming. Although he's just one of a countless number of dedicated, patriotic citizens trying to improve the lot of the less fortunate in one great American city, his message is worth exploring.

Here's the latest of what Jackson, a community organizer, has had to say in his latest commentary:


Without High School Diplomas,
Young Black Men in America Are Expendable!


By Phillip Jackson, Executive Director of The Black Star Project

Less than fifty percent of young Black men graduated from high school in the United States during the 2005-2006 school year, according to a new report commissioned by the Schott Foundation for Public Education.

Dropping out of high school sentences young Black males to menial jobs, street-corner hustling, illicit activities, fathering children out of wedlock, drugs, gangs, crime, prison, violence, death and worse - these young Black men are literally being prepared to destroy the Black communities in which they live.

Inability to achieve becomes hopelessness. Hopelessness becomes despair. Despair becomes destruction.

Dropping out of school annihilates the concept of family in the Black community because young Black men without high school degrees seldom become good providers for their families and strong anchors for their communities. The fabric of the Black community becomes unwoven.

This is an unnatural disaster and a national disgrace with little-to-no effective response from the U.S. government or the Black community where this destruction is taking place.

The media and many foundations ignore this problem. The United States responds to catastrophes in China, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Sudan, Georgia and other parts of the world, but the media and our government will not constructively respond to the genocide of young Black men that is happening here in the United States. Young Black men in America have become expendable!

The poor quality of education for young Black men is an impending national catastrophe for the United States with international ramifications. The rest of the world sees the hypocrisy of the "rhetoric of concern" in the United States verses the lack of difference-making action. Why aren't we outraged? Why won't we do something?

Before information on the educational status of Black males in America was available, the question could have been, "Why don't we know this?" Now that we know, the question becomes "Why don't we care?"

Please see the estimated graduation rates for Black males in the lowest 28 districts in the United States with Black male enrollments of 8,000 or more during the 2005-2006 school year versus White male graduation rates in those cities and the 2003-2004 Black male graduation rates:

Black Male Black White Black Male
District Enrollment Male Male Gap 2003-04
Indianapolis, IN 11,539 19% 19% 0% 21%
Detroit, MI 59,807 20% 17% -3% 31%
Norfolk, VA 12,672 27% 44% 17% 30%
Rochester, NY 11,270 29% 36% 7% 32%
Pinellas County, FL 11,319 30% 50% 20% 21%
Richmond County, GA 12,091 31% 43% 12% 30%
Baltimore City, MD 38,966 31% 37% 6% 31%
Buffalo, NY 10,666 31% 50% 19% 33%
Milwaukee, WI 26,818 32% 46% 14% 34%
New York City, NY 159,555 32% 57% 24% 26%
Chatham County, GA 11,218 32% 42% 10% 25%
Palm Beach County, FL 26,259 33% 0% 26% 29%
Birmingham, AL 14,956 33% 21% -12% 38%
Charleston County, SC 11,489 34% 66% 32% 44%
Dade County, FL 51,188 34% 55% 21% 31%
Atlanta, GA 21,722 34% 58% 24% 35%
Cleveland, OH 20,894 34% 35% 1% 33%
St. Louis, MO 16,705 35% 38% 3% 37%
Memphis, TN 52,720 35% 64% 29% N/A
Clayton County, GA 19,605 36% 26% -10% 33%
Orange County, FL 25,367 37% 58% 21% 27%
Chicago, IL 102,185 37% 62% 25% 35%
Nashville-Davidson, TN 17,792 38% 60% 22% N/A
Broward County, FL 52,537 38% 55% 17% 36%
Jackson City, MS 15,736 38% 42% 4% 44%
Minneapolis, MN 8,044 38% 76% 38% N/A
Cincinnati, OH 12,834 38% 49% 11% 25%
Duval County, FL 28,608 38% 55% 17% 26%

Please consider these simple goals that can lead to solutions for fixing the problems of young Black men:

Short term
1) Teach all Black boys to read at grade level by the third grade and to embrace education.
2) Provide strong, positive Black male role models for Black boys.
3) Create a stable home environment for Black boys that includes contact with their fathers.
4) Ensure that Black boys have a strong spiritual base.
5) Control negative media influences on Black boys.
6) Teach Black boys to respect all girls and women.

Long term
1) Invest as much money in educating Black boys as in locking up Black men.
2) Help connect Black boys to a positive vision of them in the future.
3) Create high expectations and help Black boys live into those high expectations.
4) Build a positive peer culture for Black boys.
5) Teach Black boys self-discipline, cultural awareness and racial history.
6) Teach Black boys and the communities in which they live to embrace education and life-long learning.

Let's compare Palin's mayoral goals and accomplishments with Jackson's and then can decide who deserves the last laugh.

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Check out his blog at monroeanderson.typepad.com

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Black Dreams, White Liberals

January 18, 2008

Black Dreams, White Liberals
By Charles Krauthammer

Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ... It took a president to get it done. -- Hillary Clinton, Jan. 7
WASHINGTON -- So she said. And then a fight broke out. That remarkable eruption of racial sensitivities and racial charges lacked coherence, however, because the public argument was about history rather than what was truly offensive -- the implied analogy to today.

The principal objection was that Clinton appeared to be disrespecting Martin Luther King Jr., relegating him to mere enabler for Lyndon Johnson. But it is certainly true that Johnson was the great emancipator, second only to Abraham Lincoln in that respect. This was a function of the times. King was fighting for black enfranchisement. Until that could be achieved, civil rights legislation could only be enacted by a white president (and a white Congress).

That does not denigrate King. It makes his achievement all the more miraculous -- winning a permanent stake in the system for a previously disenfranchised people, having begun with no political cards to play.

In my view, the real problem with Clinton's statement was the implied historical analogy -- that the subordinate position King held in relation to Johnson, a function of the discrimination and disenfranchisement of the time, somehow needs recapitulation today when none of those conditions apply.

The analogy Clinton was implying was obvious: I'm Lyndon Johnson, unlovely doer; he's Martin Luther King, charismatic dreamer. Vote for me if you want results.
Forty years ago, that arrangement -- white president enacting African-American dreams -- was necessary because discrimination denied blacks their own autonomous political options. Today, that arrangement -- white liberals acting as tribune for blacks in return for their political loyalty -- is a demeaning anachronism. That's what the fury at Hillary was all about, although no one was willing to say so explicitly.

The King-Johnson analogy is dead because the times are radically different. Today an African-American can be in a position to wield the emancipation pen -- and everything else that goes along with the presidency: from making foreign policy to renting out the Lincoln Bedroom (if one is so inclined). Why should African-
American dreams still have to go through white liberals?

Clinton is no doubt shocked that a simple argument about experience versus inspiration becomes the basis for a charge of racial insensitivity. She is surprised that the very use of "fairy tale" in reference to Obama's position on Iraq is taken as a sign of insensitivity, or that any reference to his self-confessed teenage drug use is immediately given racial overtones.

But where, I ask you, do such studied and/or sincere expressions of racial offense come from? From a decades-long campaign of enforced political correctness by an alliance of white liberals and the black civil rights establishment intended to delegitimize and marginalize as racist any criticism of their post-civil rights-era agenda.

Anyone who has ever made a principled argument against affirmative action only to be accused of racism knows exactly how these tactics work. Or anyone who has merely opposed a more recent agenda item -- hate crimes legislation -- on the grounds that murder is murder and that the laws against it are both venerable and severe. Remember that scurrilous pre-election ad run by the NAACP in 2000 implying that George Bush was indifferent to a dragging death of a black man at the hands of white racists in Texas because he did not support hate crime legislation?

The nation has become inured to the playing of the race card, but "our first black president" (Toni Morrison on Bill Clinton) and his consort are not used to having it played against them.

Bill is annoyed with Obama. As Bill inadvertently let on to Charlie Rose, it has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with entitlement. He had contemplated running in 1988, he confided to Charlie, but decided to wait. Too young, not ready. (A tall tale, highly Clintonian; but that's another matter.) Now it is Hillary's turn. The presidency is her due -- the ultimate in alimony -- and this young upstart refuses to give way.

But telling Obama to wait his turn is a tricky proposition. It sounds patronizing and condescending, awakening the kinds of racial grievances white liberals have spent half a century fanning -- only to find themselves now singed in the blowback, much to their public chagrin. Who says there's no justice in this world?
letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers Group

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