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This page was last updated on: April 17, 2001 03:43 PM News For The Week Of April 16, 2001Lead StoriesNew Urban League Report Reveals Too
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Voting Scandal On Machines National NewsBlack Caucus Calls For $5 Billion To End Health Racial Disparities (Special to the NNPA) - The Congressional Black Caucus has called for a $5 billion investment over a 5-year period in order to end racial and ethnic disparities in HIV/AIDS care and other health areas. Such funding would let America "make the moral and political commitment to guarantee access to medical care as a fundamental right to all of its people," said Rep. Donna Christian-Christensen (D-V.I.), chair of the CBC's Health Brain trust. She made the remarks at a recent Labor, Health and Human Services panel. Representatives from the Hispanic and Asian Pacific caucuses joined her. The funding would cover the caucus' HIV/AIDS initiative at the full $539.4 million requested last year, and also adequately fund the newly created National Center on Minority and Health Disparity Research at the National Institutes of Health, said caucus officials. The $5 billion could be used to increase minority participation in health professions, provide for increased mental health services that are culturally and linguistically competent, increase funding for community health centers, and improve both immunization outreach and medical services for correctional facilities, they added. ##### Census: Hispanics Outnumber Blacks in Florida (Special to the NNPA) - The move of an estimated one million Latinos to Florida since 1990 has led to Hispanics outnumbering Blacks in that state, recently released census figures show. Florida, known for decades for its large Cuban-American communities, is now becoming the home for increasing numbers of Latinos. Hispanics, whose population grew by 63 percent in the last decade, are now 16.8 percent of the state's residents. There are now 2.7 million Latinos living in Florida, in comparison to 2.3 million Blacks. The state's Black population, meanwhile, increased from 13.3 percent in 1990 to 14.4 percent. The state's population grew by three million, according to census data. The 23.5 percent increase will allow it to have two additional seats in Congress. Arizona will also receive two additional Congressional seats because of Hispanic population growth. ##### American Company To Sell AIDS Drugs In Africa (Special to the NNPA) - An Illinois-based company said recently that it would sell at no profit two HIV infection treatments in Africa. The costs would only cover the manufacturing, distribution and import of the two drugs, Kaletra and Norvir, said representatives of Abbott Laboratories. The announcement comes in the wake of a worldwide pressure campaign for drug companies to drastically lower its AIDS drugs in light of the devastation the disease is causing in Africa. Bristol Myers-Squibb and Merck have already made similar decisions with their drugs. Governments will have to apply for the drugs and prove that patients would be properly treated, said Abbott officials. Health officials estimate that 25 million Africans may be infected by HIV. An estimated two-thirds of the world's AIDS infected populace is in sub-Saharan Africa. #### Cancellation Of Black Stamps A Myth, Say U.S. Postal Officials (Special to the NNPA) - The "Black Heritage" series of U.S. postal stamps has not been cancelled, contrary to about two years' worth of rumor about its coming demise on the Internet, said U.S. Postal Service officials. "I don't know where the rumor came from, but it keeps coming back and it's not true," USPS spokeswoman Frances Frazier told reporters. Claims of the demise of the series have circulated via E-Mail. The messages state that Blacks should organize to buy Black Heritage stamps in order to save the series. The "Black Heritage" stamps--the current one featuring the late Roy Wilkins, who led the NAACP during the Civil Rights Movement--have been made for 23 years. The issue shows the power of rumor on the Internet. Other such Internet "urban myths" include the possible closure of more than 10 historically Black colleges in Texas, another untrue allegation. ##### International NewsNigeria Becomes 46th ISESCO Member RABAT, Morocco (PANA) - Nigeria last week became the 46th member of the Rabat-based Islamic Organization for Education, Sciences and culture (ISESCO). Nigeria's ambassador to Morocco, Abdullah Chawni, signed the membership document at a ceremony witnessed by the organization's director general, Abdelaziz Ben Othmane Al-Twaijri. According to 1996 statistics, at least 55 million of Nigeria's 115 million people were Muslims. The objectives of ISESCO, an international institution under the Organization of the Islamic Conference, are to encourage co-operation among member states in the sectors of education, science, culture and communication. ##### AIDS Cases Rise In Ethiopia ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (PANA) - HIV/AIDS now accounts for about 50 percent of total hospital admissions in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, where casualty from the incurable disease has also risen, according to medical sources. Getachew Fisseha, head of the Addis Ababa HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control office, said the high AIDS prevalence has denied bed spaces to patients suffering from other diseases. He revealed there were now some 30,000 cases of full-blown AIDS in the country, out of an estimated 300,000 people living with HIV, the virus that causes the dreaded disease. Fissaha said some 20,000 children have also been orphaned by the disease in the nation of some 60 million people. Meanwhile, the Speaker of Ethiopian House of Representatives, Dawit Yohannes, has called for concerted efforts to stem the spread of the pandemic. The society should show concern and love to people living with the virus, he added. #### Former Premier Says Senegal Faces Danger ZIGUINCHOR, Senegal (PANA) - Former Senegalese prime minister Moustapha Niasse has called for vigilance among his compatriots or else the dream raised by the change of government on 19 March 2000 would end up in a major disappointment. Niasse, who is leading the opposition Alliance of Forces of Progress (AFP) in the 29 April parliamentary elections, was addressing a campaign rally in the civil-war-troubled southern Senegalese region of Zinguinchor. "I assure you that Senegal is in danger because a majority of the Senegalese people caused this change more than a year ago," the Senegalese news agency quoted Niasse as saying. "The youth, women, retired persons, peasants, workers and unemployed people dreamt of this change and are still dreaming simply because this dream is turning into a major disappointment," said Niasse who joined the opposition camp after being sacked by President Abdoulaye Wade, his former ally, on March 3. According to the AFP secretary general, the government supposed to bring about this change "risks to be eroded by certain behaviors which are gradually killing certain essential values of the Senegalese nation." "Let's not play with the State whose basis is a solid foundation composed of the country's people," said the former prime minister, accusing Wade's Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS) of wanting to install a single party state. "If you give a majority to these people who have shown, within the past few weeks of what they are capable of doing at the helm of government, women will weep because their children and husbands will be crying," he said. ##### National FeatureEds.: This story was sent on deadline Wednesday night (4/11), and has time references appropriate to that deadline. NAACP Urges Aschroft To Probe Cincinnati Shooting Protesters Take to City Streets To Challenge 15th Black Male Police Slaying By Andria Y. Carter CINCINNATI (NNPA) - NAACP President and CEO Kweisi Mfume Wednesday called on Attorney General John Ashcroft to order a "full investigation" into the 15th fatal shooting of a Black man by city police since 1995, an incident spurring scores of protestors to stage an insurrection in the streets earlier this week. He echoed the call of Mayor Charlie Luken and the city's other leaders to stop the disturbances, but said the Black community and the NAACP "will never tolerate excessive force" by authorities. Luken is expected next week to create a long-requested community roundtable. Charlie Winburn, the state's civil rights commissioner and former city councilman, will chair the discussion. Meanwhile, Minette Cooper, the city's vice mayor, introduced a motion Wednesday seeking a ballot initiative to change the way Cincinnati's police and fire chiefs are appointed. The actions come in the wake of massive, and often violent, demonstrations over last Saturday's (April 7) killing of 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, who was unarmed. Officer Steve Roach shot Thomas after a chase between Roach, Thomas and an off-duty police officer, authorities said. Thomas, who was wanted for several misdemeanors and traffic violation warrants, ran after being spotted by the off-duty officer who knew about his violations, they added. Roach, who had been monitoring the chase in his car, spied him climbing a fence, police said. The officer then exited his car, chased Thomas, and fatally shot him, said authorities. City council member Jim Tarbell said Monday that Roach shot Thomas because the officer perceived he was in danger when Thomas made a motion to his waist. Protesters, who began to gather angrily in the streets after the meeting with city council officials Monday marched toward police headquarters. The protestors began breaking windows, overturning trashcans and set fire to dumpsters well into Tuesday morning. Police have been dispersing protestors by shooting them with rubber bullets and tiny beanbags. At least two residents, one a pregnant woman, told The Herald they had been shot by police for no more than standing outside. Several witnesses stated that people are angry and that the rioting was symptomatic of something greater than Thomas' death. They said the rioting is the result of police abuse and the city's government's refusal to listen to its residents. Residents interviewed standing outside their homes said they were not surprised by what was happening. They said it had been coming for a long time. The violence began Monday, when a downtown anti-police march after a stormy City Council Law & Public Safety meeting turned violent when protesters began to taunt the police. After winding their way to the street where Thomas had been slain, the protestors marched to the District 1 police headquarters. Along the way, other people joined the marchers. The crowd, mainly young people, confronted police officers who were guarding District 1 in riot gear. Rev. Steven Wheeler was among the marchers. "These young people were feeling so hurt," he said. Wheeler said he looked up at one of the officers on horseback and saw him snickering. About 40 police officers, including mounted patrols, watched over the crowd. Protesters threw bottles at rows of officers. One item thrown at an officer struck the glass door of District 1. The crowd taunted the officers and yelled in their faces. Elsewhere, some businesses suffered broken windows. Some reports said 28 windows in City Hall were also broken. One city resident said she unsuccessfully tried to persuade some of the younger people, particularly those taking care of children, to get off the streets. "They are ready to fight," she said. "They are fed up." ##### Miss. Blacks Fight State Land Grab For Nissan Plant Blacks Demand Removal Of State Official Who Called Black Landowners 'Uneducated' By Carolyn Stephens Maxwell JACKSON, Miss. (NNPA) - The state's top economic development director's description of a group of rural Black landowners as "uneducated people" has stoked the flames of controversy burning over local government's involvement in acquiring Black land over a Nissan automotive plant under construction in the state. A group of civil rights leaders, elected officials, and Black landowners last week demanded the immediate resignation of J.C. Burns, executive director of the Mississippi Development Authority, during a press conference. The larger issue is the action of state officials and the Trustmark bank, who set the $24,500-an- acre price for land in Gluckstadt, located eight miles from Jackson, for the $930 million Nissan plant. Trustmark, the state's second largest lending institution and the trustee of several hundred acres of land in the proposed Nissan core site, set their price before Nissan's announcement. The move effectively denied Blacks there the ability to set their own-and substantially higher-price for their adjacent acres. Black leaders have charged the state government and insider White landowners for conspiring to cheat the Black landowners out of the rightful cost of their land, which they say could have totaled up to $200,000 an acre. Burns apparently made the remarks during sworn testimony in the Feb. 19 emminent domain hearing of real estate investor Tom Hixon, an angry White landowner who claims that he too was cheated out of a fair price. Burns, in response to a question to one of Hixon's lawyers about why he offered Black landowners Betty Cain and Andrew Archie Jr. the same amount per acre as the MDA had given to Trustmark, said the bank "had much more knowledge and much more ability than the people we were dealing with, and we went out there, we looked at it (the area containing the Black landowner's homes) and we saw that maybe there were uneducated people there, and so we made the determination that what we would do is offer those people in the core site the same amount that the adjoining property got, which was Trustmark and the $24,500 per acre." At last week's press conference, Stephanie Parker-Weaver, executive secretary of the state chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, called Burns' comments "insulting and condescendingly racist." She called for nonviolent action protests to take place in the state. She also said she would file a civil rights complaint this week against the state if Burns remains on the job. "We're not against the Nissan project, nor are we trying to stop this project," she said. "What we are doing is trying to stop the racism and discrimination associated with this project," insisted Parker-Weaver. Parker-Weaver said Burns' comments were "the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back." She said Black leaders are still angry over Gov. Ronnie Musgrove's firing of an African-American female as head of the state Department of Health and Human Services. Musgrove said the woman was let go over "philosophical differences," saying they were "not singing off the same song sheet," recalled Parker-Weaver. "We can't help but now wonder: is the song sheet that the governor and J.C. Burns are signing from called 'Dixie'?," she asked, referring to the White Southern anthem mythologizing the slaveholding South. Lonzo Archie, one of the Black landowning families, said Burns "was wrong about what he said about me and my family, as well as all the other landowners surrounding the Nissan plant...He must be held accountable. As of this day, he must go!" "You can't judge a book by its cover," he said. State Rep. Earle S. Banks said that Burns' comments "show that Gov. Musgrove has appointed at least one person with a pre-Civil Rights (Movement) attitude towards Blacks." Calls to Musgrove's office were not returned by Advocate presstime. The first eminent domain hearing for the Black landowners will be on June 28. ##### Bush Seeks Big Spending Hikes For South America By Jim Lobe WASHINGTON (IPS) -- The Bush administration wants Congress to approve major increases in aid to Colombia and its neighbors in 2002 as part of the next level in its war against drugs. In particular, the president is asking for a total of almost $800 million in bilateral economic and security assistance for Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, and Panama, according to the fiscal year 2002 international-affairs budget submitted to Congress. Aside from those big aid boosts, Bush appears to have opted for a policy of continuity in U.S. aid priorities for fiscal 2002. He has decided to ask Congress, for example, to approve the same level of funding for U.N. and other multilateral agencies as had been committed by the Clinton administration. That includes some of Clinton's more controversial commitments which have been opposed by Republicans in Congress, including $25 million for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA), $107.5 million for the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and more than $90 million for the Korea Energy Development Organization (KEDO), which was created in a 1994 accord with North Korea which Bush has said he wants to review. Although the total international affairs request -- at just under $24 billion -- comes to about 5 percent more than what Congress approved for 2001, most of the difference derives from one-time investments in upgrading U.S. embassies and the State Department's antiquated communications and information system. To compensate for those costs, and increases in bilateral aid to South America, the administration has proposed reducing appropriations for Washington's export credit agencies (ECAs), the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). But U.S. multinational businesses, the ECAs main clients, have pledged to fight those cuts and are mobilizing their considerable lobbying resources to press Congress into restoring them. The aid request submitted will be taken up by Congress over the next four or five months. Although Bush is likely to have an easier time than Clinton, whose aid requests were often bitterly opposed by the Republican majority in Congress after 1994, it is unlikely that a final bill will be approved until just before the new fiscal year begins, Oct. 1, at the earliest. In addition to the anticipated fight over ECA funding, some lawmakers, including Republicans, will clearly want to play with the numbers. The Senate, for example, voted for a resolution that favored increasing funding to fight the global HIV/AIDS epidemic by about 50 percent next year, to $1 billion by 2003. The State Department budget, by contrast, called for a 10 percent increase in 2002 over the current level of some $460 million. As in years past, Israel and Egypt, which will receive some $3 billion and $2.1 billion, respectively, in economic and military aid, will be the biggest aid recipients under the new request. Multilateral economic and development agencies, like the World Bank and the regional development banks, will also receive a big chunk of the total -- about $1.4 billion, including $186 million in voluntary contributions to specialized U.N. agencies, such as UNFPA and the U.N. Development Program ($87.1 million). Despite Republican unhappiness with some U.N. peacekeeping operations, the administration also asked for full funding of all assessed contributions to U.N. operations, at $844 million for 2002, as well as another $879 million for assessed contributions to some 44 international organizations, including the United Nations. Bilateral aid to Eastern Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union will also remain constant under the new request, at $1.4 billion, the same as this year, of which 10 percent is earmarked for Yugoslavia, another $120 million for Kosovo, and $45 million for Macedonia where recent fighting between Albanian rebels and government forces evoked concerns about a new Balkan War. The most startling increases, however, are to go to South America as part of the "war against drugs." Bush wants to provide $731 million in new funding for the Andean Counterdrug Initiative (ACI), a continuation of the Plan Colombia to which Washington has already committed some $1.6 billion. Plan Colombia, a joint U.S.-Colombian program designed primarily to train, equip and advise Bogota's military and police forces to take control of the major coca-growing region of Putumayo in southern Colombia and eradicate coca and opium poppy fields, has drawn strong expressions of concerns from most of Colombia's neighbors who fear the "spill-over" effects of the U.S.-backed campaign in the region. The new aid plan appears designed to answer those concerns. Under ACI, Colombia is to receive $399 million in 2002, of which $252.5 million will be used for interdiction and eradication, and $146.5 million is to be used for alternative development programs and aid to the Colombian justice system and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Peru, whose current aid level is only $48 million, will receive $156 million next year, Bolivia $101 million and $39 million, all about equally divided between military and development aid, if Bush's plan is approved. In addition, Ecuador will receive an additional $30 million -- up from $5 million this year -- in economic support to support structural reform, while Peru will get $10 million for similar purposes, up from $2.2 million this year. Brazil is to receive $15 million in drug-related assistance, Venezuela $10 million, and Panama $11 million. Those figures represent increases from $2 million, 1.2 million, and $1 million, respectively. Aside from the anti-drug effort, military training assistance is also set to increase by about 10 percent next year. While the total amount earmarked for the International Military Education and Training (IMET) comes to only $65 million, Washington proposes to more than double IMET programs for Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Yemen. Foreign military financing (FMF), a program that promotes arms transfers, will also increase from $3.6 billion to $3.7 billion under the new request. Countries receiving major increases include Nigeria, which is slated to receive $10 million; South Africa, $6 million; the Philippines, $19 million (up from $2 million); Kazakhstan, $2.75 million; Ukraine, $4.8 million; the Caribbean region, $5.5 million; and El Salvador, $3.5 million. ##### The Multi-Race Category on Census Raises Questions A News Analysis By Lee Hubbard The concept of race has been central to the founding of America. In last year's U.S. Census, Americans for the first time were allowed to identify themselves as being multi-racial, which allowed them to check the number of boxes which best defines there heritage. While there were 36.4 million African Americans in America, according to the 2000 Census, 1.7 million people, identifying themselves as African American, also checked another race on the census forms. This shows a dramatic increase in the number of people who defined themselves as being multi-racial, as 1 in 20 African Americans checked this box. "While it was small, it was significant the number of people who choose more than one race," said Gregory Rodriguez, a senior fellow with the New America Foundation. "From now on, we will see a more complexities when it comes to racial data." When census began debating the issue of the multi-racial category on the census, the Census Bureau was going to have a stand along multi-racial box. The NAACP, and other Black and Hispanic civil rights groups opposed the multi-racial category. They saw it as a way to siphon off Black and ethnic group political and strength. They also said that the figure could confuse civil rights enforcement laws, and other recording purposes like health issues, where racial categories are necessary. But the multi-racial category check off was inevitable, due to the increase in interracial marriages and children. "A lot of the civil rights legislation that was passed in the 1960s was based on race data, and the situation that existed in the 1960s does not exist today," said Charles Byrd, a multi-racial activist and publisher of the Interracial News Journal. "We are in a situation today where these racial categories divide us." Multi-Racial People Speak Out Byrd, who is of Black, Indian, and White ancestry, said he believes the multi-racial category is the beginning of the end of race in America, since there is a possibility of 64 different racial classifications with the multi-racial category. "In 2010, the numbers of multi-racial people will be higher," said Byrd. "You will have too many people in too many categories for the census to do anything with. At some point we are going to have to find the courage to scrap the race and ethnic boxes and no longer count our citizens by race." While there is no scientific basis for the concept of race, race in American life, was first used in the 1790 census. The U.S. Constitution stipulates that there should be a census every 10 years to count people, and allocate seats in the United States House of Representatives. At the time, Blacks were counted as 3/5ths a person on the census. People who were mixed with Black were counted Black, due to the one-drop rule. In the 1850s, there was a "mulatto" category. The multi-racial category is a continuation of this, in a sense, although it can be problematic. That is why Byrd, thinks that race needs to be de-emphasized. Dr. Robert Smith, a political science professor at San Francisco State University, disagrees with Byrd's analysis. He points to the fact that only 2.4 percent of people on the census filled out the multi-racial category on the census form. "There are very few Blacks who choose the multi-racial category," said Smith. He questioned if the Blacks filling out the multi-racial category were truly multi-racial or where they people who had a White or other ethnic heritage down the line. "Forty-eight percent of Latinos identify themselves as Whites, and that is the dilemma," said Smith. "If a person has a chance to choose, to be White or Latino, they will choose to be White." Of the Hispanics that filled out the census, only 2 percent of Hispanics called themselves Black. This disparity, according to Smith, points to the central dilemma regarding race in America, and the multi-racial category. He said that while the multi-race category may show a clearer picture of racial heritage in America, the category also opens up the door for Blacks that want to escape Blackness, and the Black/White dilemma in America. "In the end, the Black/White thing will continue to be the central dilemma when we talk about race," said Smith. "These other ethnic and racial groups will become White, before Blacks will." Lee Hubbard can be reached by e-mail at superle@hotmail.com for any questions or comments. ##### International FeaturesWorld Bank Predicts Rebound In Global Economy By Jerome Hule NEW YORK (PANA) - Developing economies will grow at an average rate of 4.2 percent in 2001, down by one percentage point from last year's but still above the projected global growth rate of 2.2 percent this year, the World Bank says. In its recently released report, "Global Development Finance 2001," the Bank predicted the current slowdown in the global economy that began late last year will rebound later this year. The report, which looks at financing prospects for developing and transition countries, said growth would be highest in East Asia and the Pacific at a rate of 5.5 percent and lowest in Europe and Central Asia with 2.3 percent. The Bank points out that the recovery, expected to begin later in the year, will continue in 2002, when it will reach 3.3 percent globally and 4.9 percent for developing countries. The growth prospects in developing countries is predicated on the performance of the economies of the U.S., Europe and Japan. All three economies are expected to record lower growth rate this year but to recover in varying degrees next year. The report's look into capital flows to developing economies shows that there was growth in 2000 after the steep declines of the late 1990s. The growth was, however, attributed to an increase in Japanese aid to East Asian countries following their financial crisis of 1998. While foreign direct investment in developing countries fell during the year as a result of the slow down in international financing for privatization projects in Latin America and for mergers and acquisitions in East Asia, capital market flows increased modestly during the year. In 2000, aid flows increased to $41.6 billion, about $5 billion less than the peak reached in 1995, the report stated. On average, the report pointed out that donor countries provided aid equivalent to about 0.24 percent of their Gross National Product (GNP), which is still lower than the 0.7 percent GNP stipulated by the U.N. as ideal for meeting development goals. To achieve international development goals, the Bank has urged the world's leading donor nations to continue to improve on recent aid increases. The report stated that 41 countries, which owe $170 billion in external debts, are eligible for debt forgiveness under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. Out of this, 22 were approved for participation in 2000, with 20.3 billion committed for debt relief. The picture coming out of the Bank report is that there are good prospects for a recovery in capital flows to developing countries. But the report stressed that countries with better economic environment will be the ones to attract new resources. ##### ANC Unleashes Diatribe Over Newspaper Report On Mbeki JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (PANA) - The ANC has reacted angrily at a report in a South African newspaper, The Citizen, which claimed President Thabo Mbeki was a womanizer. "For The Citizen to publish such trash was proof that a leopard never changes its colors," said ANC spokesperson Smut Ngonyama. "It is publicly known and I think we should start talking about this ... I am not saying it's scandalous. He is a womanizer," the paper had quoted renowned columnist and former editor Max du Preez as saying about Mbeki. Although the President's office refused to comment, the ANC found the report and the comments Du Preez made malicious. "Max du Preez and his old friends have clearly embarked on a war path and such statements on the ANC are a declaration of war," said Ngonyama. Du Preez said he made the remarks in the context of a letter written by ANC Women's League President Winnie Madikizela-Mandela to Deputy President Jacob Zuma, in which she denied accusing Mbeki of womanizing. Madikizela-Mandela claimed the rumors about the president had been circulating for some time at ANC headquarters, Luthuli House, and they had even reached the media. Ngonyama in his statement did not refer to either Madikizela-Mandela or the fact that rumors of the president's alleged infidelity had already been printed. He accused Du Preez of "irresponsible and undermining behavior" which bordered on "hate speech and malicious character assassination." Du Preez had abused the right to freedom of expression and deliberately infringed the Constitution in a way "meant to cause harm to the image of the president, the African National Congress and the country as whole," Ngonyama persisted. "By displaying such hogwash The Citizen retreated to its historical laager as a paper initiated to be the propaganda instrument of the apartheid regime," the spokesman charged. "From du Preez' allegations, the ANC has learnt that amongst some sections in our society respect and dignity is accorded only those with a certain type of pigmentation and being black and powerful qualifies one to be the recipient of a barrage of insults and abuse," Ngonyama said. ##### Afro-Guyanese Demand Rights For Blacks By Bert Wilkinson GEORGETOWN (IPS) -- Guyana at presstime last week was bracing for a new round of demonstrations, this time aimed at ensuring equal opportunities for Blacks and other non-Indians. The demonstrations come three weeks after Afro-Guyanese first took to the streets to protest the outcome of the March 19 general elections. The elections, which saw the return of the Indian-dominated People's Progressive Party (PPP) to power for a third term, sparked a wave of strikes, the burning of sugar cane fields and street demonstrations protesting everything from racial discrimination to joblessness to alleged electoral fraud. Desmond Hoyte, leader of the main opposition People's National Congress (PNC), whose support base is Guyana's Black population, announced the new protests. He said the demonstrations will see the beginning of a prolonged period of pressure to force the PPP to deal with joblessness among Blacks, to end racial discrimination, police brutality and the awarding of contracts mostly to PPP supporters at the expense of others. His announcement came after a day-long special general council of the party and hours after the smaller Justice For All Party (JFAP) of television station owner C.N. Sharma said it was also planning to hit the streets because it was cheated out of a parliamentary seat on March 19. Hoyte, a former president, said he was embarking on a campaign for justice and good governance, starting with a peaceful march through the city to force the government to talk to him. He said the leadership and supporters of the PNC are determined to see this campaign through to the end, noting that authorities must quickly address the deep-seated anger and resentment of the thousands of Guyanese who feel that there is little hope of a better life. Guyana is in bad economic shape. The country's four main industries -- rice, sugar, gold and bauxite -- are earning less on the international market, unemployment is rising and since it first came to power in 1992, the PPP government has been unable to attract much foreign investment. Then there is the conviction by Guyana's Blacks, who make up 39 percent of the population, that the government is discriminating against them. They see the recent general elections as another example of this bias. According to media reports, some 20,000 Guyanese, said to be mainly supporters of the PNC, were not allowed to vote despite the fact that they had documents to prove that they were registered. "This will be the beginning, not the ending of the struggle," the PNC leader told 15,000 cheering supporters at a rally near President Bharrat Jagdeo's office on April 7. "There is no backing down until social justice is achieved in this great country of ours. We are determined to see this struggle through to an end once and for all until final victory." Afro-Guyanese dissatisfaction has been exacerbated by the reappointment of Roger Luncheon, a hard-line PPP insider, to head the country's public service. The PNC and labor unions had asked that a career public servant be appointed to the post as part of a process of depoliticization and of easing tensions in the mainly Black civil service. On April 7, the daily Stabroek News called the appointment "an obvious mistake," saying that the government had lost a golden opportunity to foster a climate of dialogue and reconciliation. The appointment came just hours after Hoyte went on national television to demand that the administration address the widespread perception that Blacks are excluded from jobs, contracts, promotion and scholarships. Hoyte has also complained that the government has been giving out land in traditional Black areas to PPP supporters without any consultation with the PNC. Jagdeo, meanwhile, has invited Hoyte to meet with him to talk about the current political tension in the country. Jagdeo, who has promised to run "a government for all people," says he wants no pre-conditions attached to the meeting. These talks could take place as early as this week. Hoyte is already predicting that the talks will be acrimonious. He said he is not hopeful of the outcome because the PPP cannot be trusted to implement agreements arrived at without the added prompting of thousands of people on the streets chanting anti-government slogans. The two parties have dominated Guyana's political landscape for the past 50 years. Animosity between their constituencies dates back to the immediate post-slavery era when indentured servants from India were brought by British colonialists to replace the newly freed Blacks on sugar plantations. The Indians were treated better than the former slaves and were encouraged to despise Blacks. The two groups have remained suspicious of each other ever since. Good relations were not helped by the fact that an attempt to create an inclusive political party failed in 1955 when Blacks split off from the PPP to form the PNC, or by the race riots of the 1960s, in which more than 170 people killed. ##### Gov't Words Don't Match Actions, Say Japanese Greens By Suvendrini Kakuchi TOKYO (IPS) -- Despite its own poor record on curbing greenhouse gases, Japan is urging the United States to reconsider its pullout last month from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which sets targets to reduce global warming. This position may earn Tokyo diplomatic praises, but it is not impressing environmental groups in Japan. They say Tokyo's position remains weak because its words are not matched by actions on cutting emissions of carbon dioxide, which is among the major gases that help push up the Earth's temperature. "To convince Washington, Japan should have expressed its own policies toward reductions at home," says Naoki Hata from the activist group Kikko Network. "As usual, Japan cannot be firm with the Americans." Last week, Foreign Minister Yohei Kono telephoned U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and expressed "disappointment" with the U.S. decision President Bush said he took in order "not (to) do anything that harms our economy." Over the weekend, a Japanese government delegation headed by Senior Vice Foreign Minister Kiyohiro Araki traveled to Washington and appealed to Bush to continue to cooperate in global efforts to enforce the Kyoto treaty, according to Japanese media reports. But U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Whitman rejected the Japanese demands and repeated Bush's comments -- that Washington would find acceptable a global warming treaty that has reduction commitments not only from industrialized countries but from developing ones too. Scientists say that greenhouse gases -- including carbon dioxide, which comes from the combustion of fossil fuels, like coal and oil -- are responsible for the warming of the Earth's atmosphere over the last century. Bush's pullout makes the fate of the Kyoto protocol even trickier than it is now. While former president Bill Clinton and other leaders signed the protocol, no parliament has ratified it. The mechanisms by which those greenhouse gas reductions are to be achieved are still under protracted negotiations that collapsed late last year. The next round is scheduled for Bonn, Germany, in July, by which time Bush is expected to have come up with a new framework. The new U.S. proposal is expected to call for a collective reduction measure with developing countries. The proposal ditches the Kyoto accord that called on the United States to achieve a 7 percent reduction target, Japan 6 percent, and the European Union to reach 8 percent of their 1990 levels by 2012. During negotiations over the Kyoto accord, developing countries balked at being put in the same basket as industrialized countries, saying more responsibilities were required of rich countries that produce the bulk of greenhouse gases. Some said they were being forced to cut greenhouse gas emissions to block their growth. The United States, for instance, produces one quarter of total greenhouse gas emissions. Critics add the emissions of developing countries pale by comparison to industrialized countries on a per-capita basis. Analysts point out the American withdrawal from the Kyoto treaty -- many say Washington's move killed it -- has put Tokyo in a dilemma. An expert at the Global Industrial and Social Progress Research Institute, which is affiliated with the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, points out that Japan is far behind its global warming targets. Its carbon dioxide emissions recorded almost a 10 percent leap in fiscal year 1999, which ended in April last year. Most of the emissions came from the transport sector. "There is a collective feeling among Japanese companies that it is difficult, almost impossible, to meet Kyoto targets," he explains, on condition of anonymity. He adds that the current recession in Japan has added to this gloomy prediction. "Deep down, it could be possible that businesses could be applauding the U.S. move," he points out. Officially though, Japan and its corporate sector are supporting the Kyoto protocol. Observers say Japan is mindful of domestic and international opposition to the United States -- and this is behind its lack of all-out support to its most important foreign ally. Japan also cannot ignore the needs of its two of its most important Asian partners, China and India, which are staunchly opposed to making commitments at par with industrialized nations. At the end of the two-day meeting here, environment ministers from China, South Korea and Japan issued a joint communique in which they "sincerely hoped the U.S. government will actively work with all parties for a successful outcome to the U.N. climate change conference and the implementation of the Kyoto accord." In Tokyo, China's State Environmental Protection Administration Minister Xie Zhenhua reiterated China' stance that responsibilities differ between industrialized and developing countries in achieving reductions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. A European Union delegation is now in Tokyo to discuss the repercussions of U.S. junking of the Kyoto pact. The EU troika delegation, led by European environmental commissioner Margot Wallstrom, is on a mission to Japan, Russia, China and Iran (the current head of the Group of 77 developing countries) to drum up support for the anti-global warming accord. The EU is advocating strong support for Kyoto targets even without U.S. blessings, a stance environmentalists want Japan to follow as well. The EU also says it will ratify the protocol, with or without Washington. Environmentalists point out that despite the difficulties in its path, there is overall support for the Kyoto targets. Last month, Japan's Ministry of Environment released a report stating the need for new technological measures to meet Kyoto protocol targets. The ministry outlined that greenhouse gas emissions can be cut by 33 to 56 million metric tons through increased use of waste materials and wind for electricity generation, as well by enhancing the efficiency of nuclear power generation. Toyota Motor Corp. expressed its commitment to follow the Kyoto commitments in a press statement. The report says other measures, including the implementation of co-generation systems and the promotion of low-emission vehicles, can help limit heat-trapping gases by 1.05 to 1.18 billion tons by 2010, from 1.27 billion tons recorded in 1998. "The general feeling, even among companies, is that global warming is a real threat and something must be done about it," says Hata. ##### In South Africa, Indigenous Africans Demand Recognition JOHANNESBURG (GIN) -- South Africa's indigenous people have united to demand redress for past wrongs, the return of stolen land and official recognition as South Africa's first indigenous nation. The groundbreaking reunion of 36 of the country's major indigenous groups, once derided as Bushman, Boesmans, Basters and Hottentots, took place in Oudtshoorn two weeks ago in the Southern Cape. The meeting kicked off with a speech from Deputy President Jacob Zuma. He described the meeting as a significant moment in South Africa's history. Speaking to a packed auditorium, Zuma praised the Khoisan (indigenous peoples) for being the first people "who waged wars of resistance against the colonial onslaught." The conference opened with choirs and dance groups from the Inqua and San children who portrayed traditional tribal stories through dance routines. Outside the conference center, people of the Inqua, Xu, Griekwa, Nama, Hessequa and other Khoisan tribes embraced each other warmly on arrival. Historians and archaeologists believe the Khoisan people inhabited South Africa well over 100,000 years ago. Still, the Khoisans were marginalized and oppressed by successive South African regimes in which some include the current administration of the African National Congress. Since the end of apartheid and the country's first all-race elections in 1994, the government has given the Khoisan people limited recognition and begun several projects to preserve their culture and uplift economically impoverished communities. Many Khoisan remain angry that current land restitution laws only apply to property seized after 1913, long after the theft of Khoisan land had begun. A resolution passed at the conference urged the government to address the issue of Khoisan land stolen since 1652. "Our people still suffer terribly," said Dr. William Langeveldt, one of the conference speakers. "Without access to our ancestral land, we have to work for a boss ... we are dependent on other people. "The people are fed up," said Abraham Andrew Stockenstrom le Fleur II, paramount chief of the Griqua National Conference, one of 36 indigenous peoples' organizations at the gathering. Under colonialism and apartheid the Khoisan were made to feel ashamed of their heritage. Many rejected their past and assimilated into South Africa's mixed-race communities. An estimated 1 million of South Africa's 45 million people are thought to have some Khoisan ancestry, but few maintain allegiance to their roots and still speak the ancient languages. Only a handful of communities in remote rural areas continue to live a traditional existence. The Khoisan at the conference demanded constitutional recognition of their identity, legal protection for their culture and promises that their languages - some of which are in danger of dying out - will be taught in schools. Integral to the conference discussions will be the next step in the National Khoisan Legacy Project, which strives to develop heritage resources significant to the Khoisan people. ##### CommentaryNNPA Exclusive Op-Ed The Conyers Report Justice and The African Seminoles By William Loren Katz More than five years ago African American members of the Seminole Nation brought suit in federal court seeking their fair share of the $56,000,000 fund appropriated by Congress to compensate them for the loss of their lands in Florida prior to the Civil War. Their adversary, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), has tied up the case, arguing over "procedures" rather than merits. Those Seminole leaders who support the BIA position and who seek to deny their Black members equal status show little understanding of their history. Seminoles of African descent have one of the most valid claims to equal treatment of any people on the face of the earth. Africans, who escaped from British colonial plantations in Georgia and Carolinas beginning in the late 1600s, had settled in a largely ungoverned Florida (claimed by Spain) and built communities largely free of European interference. By the beginning of the American Revolution, the Seminole people, a breakaway segment of the Creek Nation, left Georgia to seek a new life in Florida. There the Seminoles were welcomed by Africans, who in all probability taught them methods of rice cultivation they had learned in Sierra Leone and Senegambia. Then the two peoples of color formed an agricultural and military alliance and basically reconstructed the Seminoles as a multicultural nation. Though some Africans chose to live in separate villages, racial intermarriage also marked the new era. "The two races, the Negro and the Indian, are rapidly approximating; they are identical in interests and feelings. . . ." reported Major Gen. Thomas Sidney Jessup, who was both the U.S. commander in the field years later and an incisive expert on the Seminoles. The Seminole alliance withstood tests of time and adversity. For decades Black and Red Seminoles united to fight off U.S. slave-hunting posses. When the United States purchased Florida from Spain in 1819, one of its major aims was to end this refuge for fugitives from American slavery. As slavecatchers and U.S. troops arrived to seize African members, Seminoles claimed they were their "slaves." In 1827 U.S. Indian Agent Gad Humphreys described the actual relationship: "The Negroes of the Seminole Indians are wholly independent . . . and are Slaves but in name; they work only when it suits their inclination." Gen. Jessup found that as long as the U.S. insisted on re-enslaving the Black Seminoles, peace would remain elusive in Florida. With Blacks in leadership, the Seminole nation waged a forty year war against the U.S. Army, Navy and Marines, and at times tied up half of the U.S. Army. "The warriors have fought as long as they had life, and such seems to be the determination of those who influence their councils -- I mean the leading Negroes," reported Jessup. He added: "This is a Negro, not an Indian war." It was both. A Seminole people seeking its share of the American Dream for all its people had to battle a U.S. government that seized its lands, tried to re-enslave its African members and sought to terminate its sovereignty. By the Civil War and with many of its African members finally assenting, the Seminoles finally agreed to accept U.S removal to the Oklahoma Indian Territory. During the first months of the U.S. Civil War--before Emancipation--Red and Black Seminoles fought their way through Confederate territory to Kansas, and then enlisted in the Union Army and fought some of its earliest battles. After the war, six men of African descent were elected to the 42-member Seminole governing council. The Black Seminole claim to equality stands on this worthy history. Those Seminole figures who today oppose the racial brotherhood and sisterhood pioneered by their warrior ancestors, are advocating a crude version of "ethnic cleansing." It is all the more repugnant because its sponsors represent in lineage the first victims of racism and genocide in the Americas. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is also deserving of condemnation for which slyly winking at this violation of the laws of the land. William Loren Katz, a longtime Black Press contributor, is the author of "Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage" (Atheneum Publishers) and almost forty other books. His website offers information on this subject, his books and lectures: www.williamlorenkatz.com . ##### NNPA Weekly Op-Ed Supreme Court Understands Affirmative Action Is Tool Of The Past By Armstrong Williams The U.S. Supreme Court ignited furious debate in Op-Ed sections across the country last week when they agreed to revisit a 1995 affirmative action case. It was one in which Adarand Constructors sued the U.S. Department of Transportation for awarding a lucrative contract to a minority owned company, despite the fact that they were outbid. The contract was awarded as part of a government program designed to offer minority owned businesses special help. The rationale being that businesses with 51 percent minority ownership are inherently disadvantaged. Adarand Constructors charged the policy amounted to reverse racism. To at least some degree, the Supreme Court agreed. In a move that sent shockwaves through the civil rights community, the justices set strict standards for race-based government action. Or, as Justice Scalia put it: "government can never have a compelling interest in Page IV discriminating on the basis of race in order to make up for past racial discrimination in the opposite direction. Under the Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. We are just one race in the eyes of government." Affirmative action advocates, many of who feared the decision would foretell a new chilliness between the government and their cause, ferociously contested everything about this decision. The wagons were quickly circled, and a chow line of racial prophets began toting a similar tune, best surmised by Justice Brennan's own famous invocations on race-based action: Affirmative action was "designed to break down old patterns of racial segregation and hierarchy . . . .to open employment opportunities for Negroes in occupations which have been traditionally closed to them. . . .To break down old patterns of racial segregation and hierarchy . . . .to open employment opportunities for Negroes in occupations which have been traditionally closed to them." For obvious reasons, the racial prophets neglected to mention that when Justice Brennan uttered these words in 1979, he never intended affirmative action to become a permanent plan. Still, affirmative action advocates continue to invoke Justice Brennan's eloquent words. But, in an odd way, their defense of affirmative action as an absolute truth may lead them down a slippery slope. Is affirmative action, in fact, an absolute right? Should perfectly competent adults be judged on the fact that their great, great grandparents may have been slaves? Should full-grown capable adults blame the missed opportunities of their lives on the slavery that transpired centuries ago? If affirmative action is an absolute and unwavering right, then the answer to these questions is yes. In 1995, the Supreme Court asserted a different perspective: that while the government is not disqualified from issuing race-based action, it ought not presume victim status for all members of a fixed group. In the absence of any compelling evidence that minorities are actually earning less because their great, great grandparents were slaves, race-based action ought to be subject to at least some scrutiny. After all, while the laws may be instruments of civil rights, they are not instruments of social retribution. (See Nazi Germany, Islamic fundamentalists experiments, Salem witch-hunts.) As it turned out, the hubbub about how the 1995 Supreme Court decision would send minority businesses careening into a black hole proved a bit overstated. In fact, according to The U.S. Census Bureau, the number of minority owned businesses rose 60 percent since the decision. It seems the presumption that minorities are inherently disadvantaged was widely exaggerated. Go figure. As the Supreme Court prepares to revisit the 1995 case, those activists who are the most vigorous defenders of our civil rights, remain hamstrung by the unwavering belief that affirmative action is an absolute right. It would be nice if our racial prophets didn't type cast their followers as absolute victims of a centuries-old institution. Instead, they have chosen a far more precarious position: the passive destroyers of any hope we might have to move beyond those initial steps taken with the civil rights legislation of the 60s. For further information, go to www.armstrong-williams.com . #### My Last Assignment By Rev. Jesse Jackson When people discuss Dr. Martin Luther King and Memphis, Tennessee, they invariably think of the "I've Been To The Mountaintop" speech, Dr. King's last public address before his assassination the next day. They listen to the poetry of King's last refrain and omit the substance in the body of his message. America has a way of decorating the messenger and mutilating the message. My last assignment emanated from an often-overlooked portion of Dr. King's famous "Mountaintop" speech. By reviewing the text, one will better understands that my passion/crusade/mission the last 33 years is a direct result of the last assignment Dr. King gave me. Dr. King stated, " We are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy--what is the other bread?--Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right." Columnists have recently suggested that I "hustle" companies into trading with companies of color. I do not. When African-Americans and Hispanics supply companies with large portions of their market and revenues and they, the corporations, don't contract with people of color, don't have any people of color above middle management or on their board of directors, they boycott us even though our consumer dollars keeps the company in business. As Dr. King stated on April 4, 1968, " Let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice." It was unjust in 1968 not to hire people of color above the broom and mop level, just as it is unjust now. We must trade with our power to open closed doors. We must invest to develop institutions in our own community. The Rainbow/PUSH Wall Street Project is Operation Breadbasket grown-up. Last week, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Silicon Valley Conference continued Dr. King's last assignment, which was to utilize our private consumer power to leverage companies for reciprocal trade. The object was not to put the companies out of business; it is to put justice in the business. Economic justice is fair and balanced trade. We have money, market, location and talent. Corporations have capital, access, product and opportunity. We need each other. We went to Silicon Valley not to boycott, but to seek mutual trading partners because the dream continues. Keep Hope Alive! ##### Selling the Dream By Julianne Malveaux I just about did a double-take last week when I was riding around an urban downtown and thought I saw the image of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on a billboard. The civil rights leader was standing across from the Washington Monument, but instead of thronged crowds, there was empty space. "Before you inspire, before you can touch, you must first connect," said the script below the image of King. It was an advertisement for Alcatel, a French company that describes itself as a leader in telecommunications. (The company also has a television commercial featuring a digital image of King, delivering his speech before the same empty space.) Whatever they are, I am appalled, even as I learned that Dr. King's heirs were paid well so that Alcatel could use Dr. King's image. I suppose I should be grateful. After all, Alcatel could be selling something far more concrete than telecommunications awareness. What if they were selling food, athletic shoes, or prescription drugs? Then we'd have to wonder how consistent those sales were with Dr. King's dream. Communications is fuzzy and nebulous enough to be embraced, no matter what its content. So if I am to count my blessings in this dream-selling context, I suppose I should be happy that officials of an American company have recognized the power of the King image, the fact that his rhetoric and imagery sell. They have made it clear that King has enough posthumous appeal to make his image worth something, and they've recognized our civil rights leader in the only way they know how, in the marketplace. By paying his heirs, they've also put a value on King's dream, a value that has not been revealed because no one wants to say what a dream like King's cost. It seems as if we have moved from "I Have A Dream," to "Money, Money, Money, Money." It would be useful for the King heirs to remind themselves that Dr. King said, "If you will respect my dollars, then you must respect my person." Through Operation Breadbasket, he led boycotts against companies that did not fully include African Americans in their governance and operations. If he were alive today, would King embrace Alcatel or reject their corporate policies? Some will see the King commercial debut as evidence that we have come a long way, baby. Indeed, one might say King's appearance in the commercial world is the highest compliment that our capitalist society can offer anyone. I see it as a reminder that we still have a long way to go. After all, African Americans remain relatively absent in corporate executive suites. We are a tiny fraction of those who pull down six-figure earnings. We don't shatter glass ceilings, but batter our heads on concrete ones. And, while our images have commercial value, our work efforts are often undervalued. You can't turn on a television without hearing the Motown sound used to sell anything from automobiles to fast food. You can't listen to a radio without hearing a cadence that sounds African American, whether it is real or a matter of imitation. Network television anchors have adopted Ebonics as a second language, "dissing" and "chilling" with the worst of them. African American life has been woven into our nation's popular culture, though African American lives are often pushed to the periphery. Now, they've got King, too. They've taken a classic speech and turned it into a commercial moment--taken a moment in history and attempted to turn it into sales. To be sure, they paid for it, and so they should not necessarily be condemned. The fact that King was for sale, though, ought to be cause of condemnation. A moment of conscience has been turned into a commercial construct. The dream that has motivated so many has been turned into something that can be priced, auctioned, and sold. I wouldn't mind the dream being sold if the dream had been attained. But even as we are being barraged with the Alcatel commercial, we are also being told that a Michigan court will not accept admission standards at the University of Michigan Law School when race is included as an admission factor. Alumni, athlete, or any other status is okay. Race can't matter, this court says, because it is unfair. The real unfairness, of course, is that race has mattered for so long that the court cannot understand that they cannot simply assert a level playing field. That's not all. Even as we are being barraged with a "dream" commercial, we face a nightmare tax cut that will exclude 57 percent of all African Americans and Latinos from its reach. Dr. King's heirs can sell his image, but they cannot cash out the dream because, by now, the dream no longer belongs to them. It is a dream that many share, and that many aspire to. It is a dream that transcends the trite commercialism of an Alcatel ad, a dream that the heirs can't put a dollar figure on. They can sell Dr. King's image, but they can't sell his spirit. Indeed, perhaps the King they sold will remind us to search for the dreamer in his works and in his words. Julianne Malveaux is a Washington, D.C.-based economist, columnist and commentator. ##### Joint Tax Returns May Be Hazardous, Unfair By Marilyn Barrett (WOMENSENEWS)--At last, Stephanie Toth thought, she and her young son were free to put their lives back together. That was the day in 1998 when her husband began a 30-year prison sentence, ending years of beatings, rape and forced prostitution. Then the IRS showed up. Stephanie, it turns out, had filed a joint income tax return for 1993, a year in which she lived with her abusive husband for only about three months. After he was in jail, the Internal Revenue Service came to her looking for $10,000 of unpaid taxes. Even though the IRS was aware of the abuse Stephanie had suffered at the hands of her former husband and even though the divorce judge ruled that her former husband was entirely responsible for the tax debts, the IRS said Stephanie had to pay. Margaret, who asked not to be identified further, also had to pay taxes really owed by her abusive husband David because she filed a 1994 joint tax return with him. At trial, her daughter testified that she saw David throw Margaret across the room, grab her hair and slam her against the wall. Nevertheless, the judge decided that, although Margaret was a victim of abuse, she had not proved she was being abused at the precise time she signed the return. She was, the judge said, liable for any unpaid taxes for 1994 even though she and David were now divorced. Stephanie Toth and Margaret became just two more of the women knocked off their feet by joint return liability. These are extreme examples, but the risk of liability holds true for all women who file joint tax returns. This is the type of "marriage penalty" President Bush should address, not the small adjustments to the current income tax rules he is advocating. The "marriage penalty" Bush is referring to is the one that results from the fact that there are different tax brackets that apply to married persons and single persons. In some tax brackets, if two married persons earn about the same amount of money, they pay more taxes--the "marriage penalty"--than they would pay if they were not married and paid taxes as single individuals. If only one spouse works, however, the married couple will pay less tax than if they were not married--a "marriage bonus." President Bush's recent tax proposal does not solve these problems. Under his proposal, the marriage penalty would be reduced by at most $990, and for many married couples considerably less. The marriage bonus would not be changed. Moreover, Bush's proposal doesn't do anything for the biggest "marriage penalty" of them all: joint return liability--a penalty that is particularly appalling when the woman is the victim of domestic violence. Filing Joint Returns, Women Can Be Liable for 100 Percent of Unpaid Taxes Joint return liability will continue to be a major problem for divorced men and women for years to come as the divorce rate continues to hover around 50 percent. It is particularly onerous in cases like those of Stephanie Toth and Margaret who are first victimized by their husbands and then victimized again by a tax system that makes them pay their abusers' tax debts. If a woman files a joint return with her husband and the IRS later claims that they didn't report all of their income or took improper deductions, the IRS can collect 100 percent of the unpaid taxes from her (and vice versa, of course). And she must pay--even if she has been long divorced from her husband and even if the unpaid taxes are attributable to money he made or expenses he took. Sometimes a taxpayer can escape joint return liability if she can prove to the IRS that she is an "innocent spouse." She has to demonstrate to the IRS that she didn't know that the taxes were not properly paid, that she had no reason to know of the impropriety and that she didn't financially benefit from the underpayment of tax. In 1998, Congress passed a law that purported to make it easier to qualify as an innocent spouse. This law also allows taxpayers to retroactively file a separate return if they are divorced from the spouse with whom they filed a joint return and they didn't know that taxes were underpaid. To do so, taxpayers must be able to prove how much tax they would have paid if they had filed separately in the first place. This can be hard to do when many years have gone by and records needed to prove their separate income and expenses are lost. More than 99,000 taxpayers have asked the IRS to relieve them of joint return liability since the 1998 changes. But even under the new law, it is very hard to qualify as an innocent spouse or qualify for the separate return filing. For example, for a spouse to prove that she didn't know about the underpayment of tax, the IRS and the courts hold that, as long as the woman knew about the underlying transaction, she is deemed to have known that taxes weren't properly paid. That is, if she knew that the couple received cash from an exotic investment that wasn't reported properly on their tax return, the IRS and the courts hold that she then knew that taxes related to the investment were underpaid. And they hold her liable for these taxes even if she didn't understand how the investment worked, she didn't know how it ought to be taxed and she didn't know that it wasn't taxed correctly. 'Married, Filing Separately' Avoids Joint Return Liability--But Taxes Higher Joint return liability can be avoided by married couples filing tax returns as "married, filing separately," and married couples increasingly are doing so as they become aware of the risk of joint return liability. However, married couples who file separately lose other benefits and pay more tax than if they filed joint returns and joint returns are still more common. Sometimes an abused woman can escape joint return liability by proving that she signed the joint return under duress, but perceptions about what constitutes duress vary greatly among IRS agents and judges. The IRS recognizes that special handling is required for joint return cases in which the woman has been abused. The IRS recently announced that victims of domestic violence who want to claim that they are "innocent spouses" can note that their case is a "potential domestic abuse case" on Form 8857. This is the form they submit to claim innocent spouse relief, and the IRS is bound not to reveal their current addresses and other confidential information to their abusive husbands. However, this does not prevent the IRS from making victims of abuse pick up the tax tab for their abusers. Joint return liability could be eliminated by simply converting to a separate return filing system. All individuals--single and married persons alike--would file their own individual returns, be subject to the same tax rates and brackets and be separately responsible for their own tax liabilities. Other democratic countries, including England in 1990, have already done so. Instituting Separate Return System Would Eliminate the 'Marriage Penalty' A separate return system would be consistent with today's family economics. More married women enter the workforce everyday and the government should finally acknowledge that the Ozzie and Harriet days are over and change the tax system to conform to that reality. One-earner couples would lose the marriage bonus under a separate return system, but, as more women work, fewer couples qualify for the bonus. A separate return system would eliminate the marriage penalty and equalize the taxes paid by unmarried and married taxpayers. It would allow the IRS to use the resources it currently uses to sort through the vast number of claims for joint return relief to pursue true tax cheats. It would eliminate the financial hardship and emotional devastation suffered by divorced taxpayers who become faced with massive and unforeseen taxes owed on a joint return on tax items they didn't even know about. And it would eliminate the further victimization of women who have already suffered intolerable abuse at the hands of their former husbands. Marilyn Barrett is the author of "The Ten Biggest Legal Mistakes Women Can Avoid." She is a corporate and tax partner at the Los Angeles law firm Alschuler Grossman Stein and Kahan LLP. She is a former chair of the taxation sections of the California State Bar and the Los Angeles County Bar Association. For more information, visit "The Ten Biggest Legal Mistakes Women Can Avoid": http://www.legalmistakes.com . ##### Playing into the Hands of a Bigot By George E. Curry Right-wing demagogue David Horowitz could not have bought all of the publicity he received when he tried to place an incendiary anti-reparation ad in college newspapers across the country. A controversy was ignited when Horowitz repackaged a column he had written last year, mailed it to 50 campus publications as paid advertising, and waited for the predictable campus uproar over decisions to either accept or reject the drive-by harangue. More than half of the newspapers, including those at Harvard, Yale and Columbia, rejected the 1,300-word ad titled, "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea - and Racist Too." When the ad ran in the University of California-Berkley's Daily Californian, protesters stormed the newspaper office and demanded an apology. The editor acceded to the protesters, apologizing for the newspaper being "an inadvertent vehicle for bigotry." Editors at UC-Davis and Arizona State University offered similar apologies. The decision by the University of Wisconsin's Daily Badger to publish the controversial ad also sparked protests, with students calling for the editor's resignation. But the editor neither resigned nor apologized. At Brown University in Providence, R.I., the independent Daily Herald also refused to apologize. Student protesters stole many of the papers displaying the ad and replaced them with fliers listing their objections to the attack on reparations. Through it all, Horowitz, who has been variously denounced as a "racist," a "real live bigot" and as the "White Al Sharpton," watched his publicity stunt work to perfection. "My Andy Warhol moment has come just as I had hoped it would: on offense, baiting the left," wrote Horowitz, a regular columnist for Salon.com, a well-known magazine on the World Wide Web. "...I couldn't be more pleased by the attention these issues are getting." Horowitz has tried to cast this as a First Amendment issue of free speech and as yet another example of political correctness gone amuck. It is anything but that. Editors and publishers, whether ensconced on college campuses or in downtown newsrooms, make decisions every day not to publish ads that would offend the sensibilities of their readers. Still, it was a mistake not to run the ad. Rather than playing into the hands of a bigot, it would have been wiser to publish the entire Horowitz tome and have it accompanied by articles that take an opposing view. And Horowitz provides plenty to oppose. For example, he asserts: "There is no one group that benefited exclusively from its [slavery's] fruits." However, historian John Hope Franklin correctly notes, "All Whites and no slaves benefited from American slavery. All Blacks had no rights that they could claim as their own. All Whites, including the vast majority who had no slaves, were not only encouraged but authorized to exercise dominion over all slaves, thereby adding strength to the system of control." On another point, Horowitz says "reparations to African-Americans have already been paid....Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the advent of the Great Society in 1965, trillions of dollars in transfer payments have already been made to African-Americans in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences..." Even Gregory Kane, a Black conservative, had to take his philosophical brother to task for re-writing history. "It is here that Horowitz left himself open to the charge that his ad was racist," Kane wrote in The Baltimore Sun. "He's guilty of muddling a bit of history as well. Welfare payments didn't start with the Great Society in 1965. They started during the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt as the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. And it isn't only Blacks who receive welfare payments. Plenty of Whites do. To call them 'reparations' for Blacks is just downright silly, and preferential jobs and admissions for Blacks are no more reparations than similar preferences given to veterans." Horowitz asks, "What about the debt Blacks owe to America?... If not for the dedication of Americans of all ethnicities and colors to a society based on the principle that all men are created equal, Blacks in America would not enjoy the highest standard of living of Blacks anywhere in the world, and indeed one of the highest standards of living of any people in the world. They would not enjoy the greatest freedoms and the most thoroughly protected individual rights anywhere. Where is the gratitude of Black America and its leaders for those gifts?" Eric Alterman, a contributor for MSNBC, says the notion that African-Americans should be grateful for slavery is "so foolish it barely requires refutation." Nevertheless, Alterman observes, "One might just as appropriately ask Jews show their 'gratitude' to Germany because of all the gifts bestowed on them there, aside from that small matter of the Holocaust. After all, didn't individual Germans intervene to prevent the killing of Jews in that nation? Didn't a few die in the process? Don't the remaining Jews in Germany live pretty well now?" As we have seen, supporters of reparations should be eager for David Horowitz to express his views. The more he expresses them, the more we see how flawed they are. And no amount of publicity stunts can hide that weakness. George E. Curry is former editor-in-chief of Emerge: Black America's Newsmagazine. He can be reached through his Web site, www.georgecurry.com ##### UC Minority Recruitment Rip-Off By Emory Curtis During the 1960s community action program days, it was common to see front-page stories on tax-funded programs that were well funded, produced little or no results, and didn't account for the money it received. When Blacks were leading the program, the news story would state or imply that the program's leadership was, at best, incompetent or, at worst, crooked. Jesse Jackson and his organizations are getting that kind of coverage and focus now because the money received by the organization far exceeds the services rendered. In essence, the implication left with many Whites was that 1) the programs were too big for Blacks to run and 2) since they weren't strictly audited, naturally they ripped it off. That's why many community service programs in our communities are perennially under funded. The sponsoring agency just gives it the minimum funding needed for the sponsoring agency to get credit for funding the project, but not near enough to make a dent in the problem. And no matter how efficiently the program is run or effective it is combating the problem, a Black-run organization's funding would still be limited simply because it is a Black-run organization. All of those thoughts ran through my head when I saw how the University of California (UC) is ripping off the public dollar in our name through a program that is supposed to benefit us by getting more of our Black, Latino and American Indian youngsters into the UC system. UC has spent $420 million of tax money over a three-year period to boost minority enrollment and there has hardly been a change in the admission of those youngsters. In comparison, UC's statistics would make Jesse's KidCare Chicago program look good. PUSH, one of Jesse's organizations, got $700,000 for helping 151 families get KidCare applications when other organizations were getting $50 per application, according to The Chicago Sun-Times. Look at the results as released by UC. It's outrageous--even when viewed from a Jesse Jackson perspective. Here is what that $420 million bought. In 1997, 38,428 students were admitted to UC of which 1,435 were Black, 307 were American Indian, and 5,494 Latino. In 2001, UC's admissions rose to 46,130 students of which 1,508 were Black, 271 were American Indians, and 6,801 were Latino. That's an increase in admissions of just 1,344 under represented students into UC in 2001 over the number admitted in 1997; in that same period, the Asian admissions increased by 2,929 and the White admissions increased by 1,791. Giving the UC minority recruitment effort credit for all of the under represented admissions increases (which is way above the real number they deserve) over the 1997 numbers, results in a cost of $312,000 per recruited student number increase. Can you believe it? That story would have been spread across the front page of every newspaper in this country and would be the subject of TV news program after TV news program if that project had been carried out by PACT (a Black-run San Francisco education non-profit on whose board I served). Instead, UC's performance only came to light when they reported to the state legislative oversight committee. Even then, it barely made the news because the legislature was holding hearings all over the place looking for a way to dig California out of its electrical power problem. Coverage of the roving Blackout problems gobbled up nearly all the news space. California has a power problem because in 1995 the legislature--Democrats and Republicans--in a near-unanimous vote deregulated public power utilities to let the free market work its magic, which it has. The magic has resulted in homeowners who were used to a $40-$50 utility bill are now seeing $400 and $500 bills. Naturally, the actions by the legislature and the governor dwarfed any other news coming out of the state capitol, Sacramento. UC's report to the legislature on what they achieved with $420 million dollars was tissue paper-thin. For instance, from their report, a key finding from their project was that students in low-performing schools are too far behind academically to go to UC. Amazing. Does my old alma mater have people in leadership who are too dumb to see that? There is plenty of data showing that Black and Latino students average less than a "C" in the ninth grade. Only about a third or less of Black and Latino students who enter an academic high school graduate. The UC research team on that near half-billion dollar project could have looked at data from the San Francisco public schools to see that their high school focus was a guaranteed loser. In the fall of 1989 the Grade Point Average (GPA) of Black students in San Francisco public schools was 1.85 (less than a C), Latinos were 1.98, Whites were 2.62, and Chinese were 2.85. San Francisco's premier academic high school, Lowell, is the number-one feeder to the UC system. Test scores and middle school grades are used to determine entrance eligibility for Lowell. Blacks make up 16 percent of San Francisco public school students and 1.6 percent of Lowell's incoming students; Latinos are 21 percent of students and 4.3 percent of the incoming class. From that data, to get more under represented admitted to UC, the focused program has to start at the elementary and middle school level. At least, that's what the data will even show dense UC researchers. Let me hear from you: (916) 961-1859 (V); (916) 961-1596 (FAX); e-mail; accords@hotmail.com. or 8931 Bluff Lane, Fair Oaks, CA 95628. To see back columns http://home.earthlink.net/~accords . ###### Bush and Black Leaders Wrong To Snub Each Other By Earl Ofari Hutchinson President Bush touted his recent White House meeting with a hand picked group of Black ministers, farmers and business owners as part of his continuing effort to reach out to Black leaders. Yet members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the traditional civil rights leaders were absent. Bush's idea of outreach seems to be to stage well-publicized photo-op sessions at Black elementary schools, talk up the safe issues of education, his tax proposals and aid to historically Black colleges, and remind Blacks that he appointed Condeleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Rod Paige to top policy making positions. That he would snub Black Congressional member and civil rights leaders is no surprise. They are nearly all solid Democrats. And they have waged relentless political warfare against him since November. They pound him with allegations that the Republicans cheated Blacks out of thousands of votes in Florida and hijacked the White House. They fume at him for picking ultra-conservative John Ashcroft as attorney general. They rail that he will pick more Supreme Court justices such as Clarence Thomas. They are scared stiff that he will torpedo civil rights and gut public education programs. Yet Bush makes a terrible mistake in treating Black Democrat officials and the traditional civil rights leaders as soreheads because they attack him. For the past 30 years, they have fought tough battles in the courts and the streets for voting rights, affirmative action, school integration, an end to housing and job discrimination, and police abuse. They are the ones who accurately capture the mood of fear and hostility the majority of Blacks feel toward Bush. The dismal one out of 10 Black votes that he got was embarrassing proof of that. This is much lower than the number of Black votes Republican Presidential candidates Robert Dole, and Bush Sr. got in their failed election and re-election bids. Post-election opinion polls show that nothing has changed. Blacks don't believe that he'll convert the Republican Party from a chummy club of rich White guys into a party that promotes diversity. However, they do believe that he will lash them with more social pain. Still, Bush must remember his own oft-repeated words that he was elected not to serve not just those who voted for him but all the people. He is duty bound to keep trying to reach out to those Blacks who oppose him. And when he does they must reach back to him. The reality is that Bush--not Clinton or Gore--is in the White House, and he will be there for at least four years. And there are three crucial issues that scream for their immediate attention. They are also the issues that carry the least political risk for Bush to relent on. •Minimum Mandatory Sentencing. According to the Sentencing Project, more than one million Blacks are warehoused in America's jails. Many are there because of the deeply flawed, racially warped drug sentencing laws that mandate long stretches for mostly Black and Latino petty drug offenders. The U.S. Sentencing Commission twice recommended that these laws be modified. Former President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno agreed. Congress didn't. Bush has at least expressed some concern over the drug law enforcement. Black leaders should push him to prod Congress to amend the drug sentencing laws. •The HIV/AIDS crisis. In January the CDC reported that Blacks make up more than half of all new AIDS cases in the country. This is a health danger that potentially affects all Americans. Black leaders must push Bush to radically increase funding for AIDS prevention, treatment, and education programs. •School vouchers. Bush has slightly backed away from them but has not dropped the issue. Vouchers would drain billions from cash strapped, failing public schools and doom those Black students left behind to virtual educational extinction. Most Americans oppose vouchers. Black leaders should urge Bush to do the same. By snubbing each other, Bush and Black leaders run the fatal risk of repeating the racial freeze out of the Reagan years. Black leaders and Reagan declared each persona non grata. This cost Blacks dearly. Republican conservatives launched a withering assault on affirmative action, slashed and burned social and education programs, and pandered to the Party's most rabid, ultra-conservative elements. This cost Republicans dearly. It cemented the belief among Blacks and minorities that the Republican Party is an insular, bigoted party hostile to their interests. They flocked to the Democrats in droves, helped boot Bush Sr. from the White House, and virtually enshrined Clinton as their savior. Former District of Columbia Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, who attended the White House meeting Bush held with Black leaders, said she came to hear what he had to offer. Bush and Black leaders should heed her words and listen to each other. ##### Thoughts For Success The Four Stages Of Life: Education, Sensation & Experience, Power And Immortality By Herbert Harris (Author of The Golden 12: Universal Rules For Achieving Success) THE FIRST STAGE OF LIFE is the stage of education. This stage generally occurs from conception to 20 or 25 years of age. During this stage you learn the basic fundamental rules of the game of life. You formulate, or accept, a value system. You get your basic instruction in reading, writing, counting, logic, and decision-making. Generally, in the education stage, you lay the foundation--thoughts, attitudes, emotions, and associations-on which the rest of your life is based. It is in this first stage that you develop your basic attitude towards yourself--your self- image. You also develop your attitude toward other people, and the world in general. It is here that you develop self-confidence, or fear; faith, or doubt; cowardice, or courage. Your nature, thief or benefactor, is molded. The challenge in this first stage is that most of your education comes from other people. You, the child or young adult, had very little input in the matter. Thus, the thoughts, attitudes, emotions and experiences (positive or negative) of your parents, teachers, ministers or any other authority or admiration figure tend to be perpetuated in the child and young adult. If this foundation stage is not laid down solidly, then very often, at some point later in life, that crack in the foundation will manifest. It will show up like a thief in the night and snatch away your peace of mind, your good health, your glory and your possessions. When this foundation is built on truth, honesty, love, faith, discipline, confidence, compassion and all of the positive aspects and attributes, then nothing is impossible. The young adult who has properly completed this stage of education is now properly prepared for the next three stages, and the rest of their lives. Learn. Practice. Master. THE SECOND STAGE OF LIFE is the stage of emotion, sensation and experience. Chronologically, we are speaking of 20 to 40, or 25 to 50 years of age. This is the stage where you begin to experiment and find out things for yourself. It is in this second stage that you truly experience the living process. You generally strike out on your own, and face the challenges of an adult reality. Here you experience love, sex, alcohol, drugs, competition, insecurity, success and failure, frustration and all the other sensations that make life exciting, intense, and challenging. It is in this second stage that many people get stuck for a major portion of their lives. As the stark realities of life confront them at every turn, they can get hooked on a feeling, a sensation, a person, a drug or other addiction. They use their addiction as a means to escape or cope with their life situation. It is in the second stage when your habits tend to make you or break you. Here you must develop and master the art of self- discipline. You must learn to control your thoughts, emotions and appetites. It is in this second stage that you are challenged by the realities of survival. What does it take to keep a roof over your head and food on the table for you and your family, and still have time, energy and resources for continual personal growth and development? Men have a tendency to get stuck on the feelings generated by sex, alcohol and physical conquest. Women get stuck in the search for love or attention. The essence of the second stage of life is the search for a particular feeling. The challenges of this stage are centered on self-discipline, and personal mastery of your physical and emotional appetites. THE THIRD STAGE OF LIFE is the stage of power. It is in this stage that you perfect your ability to make things happen. Chronologically, we're looking at 40 to 60, or 50 to 75 years of age. It is in the third stage of life that it should all come together. During this stage you generally attain your greatest successes or experience your greatest failures. Having learned the basics of life and mastered your appetites and emotions, it is during this third stage that you learn how to reach down to the very core of your being and pull out just a little bit more of whatever is needed. Here you master the laws of success and help others do the same. The challenge of this third stage is: "...chose you this day whom you will serve..." (Joshua 24:15) You serve either good or evil. It's your choice. The third stage is where your true mettle comes out. It is also where you are forced to repeat lessons which you should have mastered in previous stages, but didn't. The challenges that confront you, and how you handle them, brings about a reality adjustment as to who you are inside. It is in this stage that you establish or accept the type of human being that you would like to be. THE FOURTH STAGE OF LIFE is the stage of immortality. Only when you have fully mastered the power stage will you be able to effectively move into the stage of immortality. This fourth stage is generally 60 to 80 years, or 75 to 100 years. In this stage you assess what you wanted to accomplish in your life--your purpose. Evaluate the donations or contributions you have to give to the world. What can you give, or how can you live so that those contributions outlive your existence? It is at this point in your evolution that you must become a visionary, and see things as they can be, rather than as they appear to be. Create in yourself something that extends beyond the boundaries of one lifetime. Reach within and summon the forces and vibrations that you can initiate and direct in the present. Cultivate those strong forces and vibrations to create a presence that will continue to grow beyond your lifetime. ####### John Hope Franklin And The Horowitz Debate By Dr. Conrad W. Worrill Dr. John Hope Franklin, the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus at Duke University, has entered the debate surrounding the David Horowitz ads that have appeared in numerous college newspapers across America entitled, "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea-and Racist Too!" Dr. Franklin is a well-known and distinguished historian who has written numerous books on Africans in America history and is considered by many to be the leading expert on the period of slavery in American history. His classic book, "From Slavery To Freedom," has been read, and continues to be read, around the world. Although many of us in the Pan-African /Nationalist Movement have disagreed with some of Dr. Franklin's interpretations and conclusions of Africans in America history, it must be acknowledged that he has been a superb researcher who has dedicated his life to writing and teaching about the history of African people in this country. Lu Palmer, the popular and noted Chicago journalist, popularized a slogan in the late 1960s and 1970s through his newspaper columns and radio commentary: "That's enough to make a Negro turn Black!" What this slogan exemplified was that often some African people in this country find it hard to identify and support issues that impact on the masses of our people, including the current issue of reparations, until some White person does something so outlandish that it makes the issue crystal clear. This is not to say that Dr. Franklin has not clearly seen many of the issues that have impacted on African people in this country during his long career as a teacher, professor, and author, but he has not been an outspoken advocate on the question of reparations. David Horowitz has caused Dr. Franklin, and many others in the African Community in America, to publicly state their opposition to his position against reparations. In fact, the absurdity of Horowitz's position against reparations has so incensed many African people in America that they are now joining and actively participating in the struggle to intensify the demand for reparations in America. This is witnessed by the student protests against Horowitz's ads on college campuses. Let us now examine Dr. Franklin's open letter to Horowitz that was recently circulated on the Internet. Dr. Franklin points out, "All Whites and no slaves benefited from American slavery. All Blacks had no rights that they could claim as their own. All Whites, including the vast majority who had no slaves, were not encouraged but authorized to exercise dominion over all slaves, thereby adding strength to the system of control." Further, Dr. Franklin writes, "If David Horowitz had read James D. DeBow's "The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-Slaveholder," he would not have blundered into the fantasy of claiming that no single group benefited from slavery. Planters did, of course. New York merchants did, of course. Even poor Whites benefited from the psychological advantage of having a group beneath them." On the question of education, Dr. Franklin reaffirms the fact that "laws enacted by states forbade the teaching of Blacks any means of acquiring knowledge-including the alphabet-which is the legacy of disadvantage of educational privatization and discrimination experienced by African Americans in 2001." In this context, Dr. Franklin makes clear the following: "Most living Americans do have a connection with slavery. They have inherited the preferential advantage, if they are White, or the loathsome disadvantage, if they are Black; and those positions are virtually as alive today as they were in the 19th century." On this point, Dr. Franklin makes it clear that, "The pattern of housing, the discrimination in employment, the resistance to equal opportunity in education, of justice, the low expectation of Blacks in the discharge of duties assigned to them, the widespread belief that Blacks have physical prowess but little intellectual capacities and the widespread opposition to affirmative action, as if that had not been enjoyed by Whites for three centuries, all indicate that the vestiges of slavery are still with us." Finally, Dr. Franklin writes, "And as long as there are pro-slavery protagonists among us, hiding behind such absurdities as 'we are all in this together' or 'it hurts me as much as it hurts you' or 'slavery benefited you as much as it benefited me,' we will suffer from the inability to confront the tragic legacies of slavery and deal with them in a forthright and constructive manner." Thank you, Dr. Franklin, for setting the record straight in a clear and concise manner and for providing the kind of rationale that may help many African people in America understand why they should actively join and participate in the Reparations Movement. One of the ways to do this is to join your local National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N`COBRA) chapter and prepare to participate in the 12th Annual N`COBRA Convention that will be held June 22 - 24, 2001 in Baton Rouge, La. Let's keep up the fight for REPARATIONS! (Dr. Worrill is the National Chairman of the National Black United Front / NBUF, located at 12817 S. Ashland Ave., Flr. 1, Calumet Park, Ill. 60827, 708-389-9929, Fax 708-389-9819, E-Mail: nbufchi@allways.net , Web page: www.nbufront.org .) ##### NNPA Uncut Op-Ed Ten Reasons: A Response to David Horowitz By Robert Chrisman and Ernest Allen, Jr. David Horowitz's article, "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea--and Racist Too," recently achieved circulation in a handful of college newspapers throughout the United States as a paid advertisement sponsored by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. While Horowitz's article pretends to address the issues of reparations, it is not about reparations at all. It is, rather, a well-heeled, coordinated attack on Black Americans calculated to elicit division and strife. Horowitz reportedly attempted to place his article in some 50 student newspapers at universities and colleges across the country, and was successful in purchasing space in such newspapers at Brown, Duke, Arizona, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, University of Chicago, and University of Wisconsin, paying an average of $700 per paper. His campaign has succeeded in fomenting outrage, dissension, and grief wherever it has appeared. Unfortunately, both its supporters and its foes too often have categorized the issue as one centering on "free speech." The sale and purchase of advertising space is not a matter of free speech, however, but involves an exchange of commodities. Professor Lewis Gordon of Brown University put it very well, saying that "what concerned me was that the ad was both hate speech and a solicitation for financial support to develop anti-Black ad space. I was concerned that it would embolden White supremacists and anti-Black racists." At a March 15 panel held at UC Berkeley, Horowitz also conceded that his paid advertisement did not constitute a free speech issue. As one examines the text of Horowitz's article, it becomes apparent that it is not a reasoned essay addressed to the topic of reparations: it is, rather, a racist polemic against African Americans and Africans that is neither responsible nor informed, relying heavily upon sophistry and a Hitlerian "Big Lie" technique. To our knowledge, only one of Horowitz's ten "reasons" has been challenged by a Black scholar as to source, accuracy, and validity. It is our intention here to briefly rebut his slanders in order to pave the way for an honest and forthright debate on reparations. In these efforts we focus not just on slavery, but also the legacy of slavery, which continues to inform institutional as well as individual behavior in the U.S. to this day. Although we recognize that White America still owes a debt to the descendants of slaves, in addressing Horowitz's distortions of history we do not act as advocates for a specific form of reparations. 1. "There Is No Single Group Clearly Responsible For The Crime Of Slavery" Horowitz's first argument, relativist in structure, can only lead to two conclusions: 1) societies are not responsible for their actions and 2) since "everyone" was responsible for slavery, no one was responsible. While diverse groups on different continents certainly participated in the trade, the principal responsibility for internationalization of that trade and the institutionalization of slavery in the so-called New World rests with European and American individuals and institutions. The transatlantic slave trade began with the importation of African slaves into Hispaniola by Spain in the early 1500s. Nationals of France, England, Portugal, and the Netherlands, supported by their respective governments and powerful religious institutions, quickly entered the trade and extracted their pieces of silver as well. By conservative estimates, 14 million enslaved Africans survived the horror of the Middle Passage for the purpose of producing wealth for Europeans and Euro-Americans in the New World. While there is some evidence of Blacks owning slaves for profit purposes -- most notably the creole caste in Louisiana -- the numbers were small. As historian James Oakes noted, "By 1830 there were some 3,775 free Black slaveholders across the South. . . . The evidence is overwhelming that the vast majority of Black slaveholders were free men who purchased members of their families or who acted out of benevolence" (Oakes, 47-48). 2. "There Is No Single Group That Benefited Exclusively From Slavery" Horowitz's second point, which is also a relativist one, seeks to dismiss the argument that White Americans benefited as a group from slavery, contending that the material benefits of slavery could not accrue in an exclusive way to a single group. But such sophistry evades the basic issue: who benefited primarily from slavery? Those who were responsible for the institutionalized enslavement of people of African descent also received the primary benefits from such actions. New England slave traders, merchants, bankers, and insurance companies all profited from the slave trade, which required a wide variety of commodities ranging from sails, chandlery, foodstuffs, and guns, to cloth goods and other items for trading purposes. Both prior to and after the American Revolution, slaveholding was a principal path for White upward mobility in the South. The White native-born as well as immigrant groups such as Germans, Scots-Irish, and the like participated. In 1860, cotton was the country's largest single export. As Eric Williams and C.L.R. James have demonstrated, the free labor provided by slavery was central to the growth of industry in Western Europe and the United States; simultaneously, as Walter Rodney has argued, slavery depressed and destabilized the economies of African states. Slaveholders benefited primarily from the institution, of course, and generally in proportion to the number of slaves they held. But the sharing of the proceeds of slave exploitation spilled across class lines within White communities as well. As historian John Hope Franklin recently affirmed in a rebuttal to Horowitz's claims: "All Whites and no slaves benefited from American slavery. All Blacks had no rights that they could claim as their own. All Whites, including the vast majority who had no slaves, were not only encouraged but authorized to exercise dominion over all slaves, thereby adding strength to the system of control. "If David Horowitz had read James D. DeBow's 'The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-slaveholder,' he would not have blundered into the fantasy of claiming that no single group benefited from slavery," Franklin continued. "Planters did, of course. New York merchants did, of course. Even poor Whites benefited from the legal advantage they enjoyed over all Blacks as well as from the psychological advantage of having a group beneath them." The context of the African-American argument for reparations is confined to the practice and consequences of slavery within the United States, from the colonial period on through final abolition and the aftermath, circa 1619-1865. Contrary to Horowitz's assertion, there is no record of institutionalized White enslavement in colonial America. Horowitz is confusing the indenture of White labor, which usually lasted seven years or so during the early colonial period, with enslavement. African slavery was expanded, in fact, to replace the inefficient and unenforceable White indenture system (Smith). Seeking to claim that African Americans, too, have benefited from slavery, Horowitz points to the relative prosperity of African Americans in comparison to their counterparts on the African continent. However, his argument that the Gross National Product (GNP) of Black America makes the African-American community the 10th most prosperous "nation" in the world is based upon a false analogy. GNP is defined as "the total market value of all the goods and services produced by a nation during a specified period." Black Americans are not a nation and have no GNP. Horowitz confuses disposable income and "consumer power" with the generation of wealth. 3. "Only A Tiny Minority Of White Americans Ever Owned Slaves, And Others Gave Their Lives To Free Them" Most White union troops were drafted into the Union Army in a war the federal government initially defined as a "war to preserve the Union." In large part because they feared that freed slaves would flee the South and "take their jobs" while they themselves were engaged in warfare with Confederate troops, recently drafted White conscripts in New York City and elsewhere rioted during the summer of 1863, taking a heavy toll on Black civilian life and property. Too many instances can be cited where White northern troops plundered the personal property of slaves, appropriating their bedding, chickens, pigs, and foodstuffs as they swept through the South. On the other hand, it is certainly true that there also existed principled White commanders and troops who were committed abolitionists. However, Horowitz's focus on what he mistakenly considers to be the overriding, benevolent aim of White union troops in the Civil War obscures the role that Blacks themselves played in their own liberation. African Americans were initially forbidden by the Union to fight in the Civil War, and Black leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany demanded the right to fight for their freedom. When racist doctrine finally conceded to military necessity, Blacks were recruited into the Union Army in 1862 at approximately half the pay of White soldiers -- a situation which was partially rectified by an act of Congress in mid-1864. Some 170,000 Blacks served in the Civil War, representing nearly one third of the free Black population. By 1860, four million Blacks in the U.S. were enslaved; some 500,000 were nominally free. Because of slavery, racist laws, and racist policies, Blacks were denied the chance to compete for the opportunities and resources of America that were available to native Whites and immigrants: labor opportunities, free enterprise, and land. The promise of "40 acres and a mule" to former slaves was effectively nullified by the actions of President Andrew Johnson. And because the best land offered by the Homestead Act of 1862 and its subsequent revisions quickly fell under the sway of White homesteaders and speculators, most former slaves were unable to take advantage of its provisions. 4. "Most Living Americans Have No Connection (Direct Or Indirect) To Slavery" As Joseph Anderson, member of the National Council of African American Men, observed, "the arguments for reparations aren't made on the basis of whether every White person directly gained from slavery. The arguments are made on the basis that slavery was institutionalized and protected by law in the United States. As the government is an entity that survives generations, its debts and obligations survive the lifespan of any particular individuals. . . . Governments make restitution to victims as a group or class" (The San Francisco Chronicle, March 26, 2001, p. A21.). Most Americans today were not alive during World War II. Yet reparations to Japanese Americans for their internment in concentration camps during the war was paid out of current government sources contributed to by contemporary Americans. Passage of time does not negate the responsibility of government in crimes against humanity. Similarly, German corporations are not the "same" corporations that supported the Holocaust; their personnel and policies today belong to generations removed from their earlier criminal behavior. Yet, these corporations are being successfully sued by Jews for their past actions. In the same vein, the U.S. government is not the same government as it was in the pre-civil war era, yet its debts and obligations from the past are no less relevant today. 5. "The Historical Precedents Used To Justify The Reparations Claim Do Not Apply, And The Claim Itself Is Based On Race Not Injury" As noted in our response to Reason 4, the historical precedents for the reparations claims of African Americans are fully consistent with restitution accorded other historical groups for atrocities committed against them. Second, the injury in question -- that of slavery - was inflicted upon a people designated as a race. The descendants of that people -- still socially constructed as a race today -- continue to suffer the institutional legacies of slavery some 135 years after its demise. To attempt to separate the issue of so-called race from that of injury in this instance is pure sophistry. For example, the criminal (in)justice system today largely continues to operate as it did under slavery -- for the protection of White citizens against Black "outsiders." Although no longer inscribed in law, this very attitude is implicit to processes of law enforcement, prosecution, and incarceration, guiding the behavior of police, prosecutors, judges, juries, wardens, and parole boards. Hence, African Americans continue to experience higher rates of incarceration than do Whites charged with similar crimes, endure longer sentences for the same classes of crimes perpetrated by Whites, and, compared to White inmates, receive far less consideration by parole boards when being considered for release. Slavery was an institution sanctioned by the highest laws of the land with a degree of support from the Constitution itself. The institution of slavery established the idea and the practice that American democracy was "for Whites only." There are many White Americans whose actions (or lack thereof) reveal such sentiments today -- witness the response of the media and the general populace to the blatant disfranchisement of African Americans in Florida during the last presidential election. Would such complacency exist if African Americans were considered "real citizens"? And despite the dramatic successes of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, the majority of Black Americans do not enjoy the same rights as White Americans in the economic sphere. (We continue this argument in the following section.) 6. "The Reparations Argument Is Based On The Unfounded Claim That All African-American Descendants of Slaves Suffer From The Economic Consequences Of Slavery And Discrimination" Most Blacks suffered and continue to suffer the economic consequences of slavery and its aftermath. As of 1998, median White family income in the U.S. was $49,023; median Black family income was $29,404, just 60 percent of White income (2001 New York Times Almanac, p. 319). Further, the costs of living within the United States far exceed those of African nations. The present poverty level for an American family of four is $17,029. Twenty-three and three-fifths percent (23.6 percent) of all Black families live below the poverty level. When one examines net financial worth, which reflects, in part, the wealth handed down within families from generation to generation, the figures appear much starker. Recently, sociologists Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro found that just a little over a decade ago, the net financial worth of White American families with zero or negative net financial worth stood at around 25 percent; that of Hispanic households at 54 percent; and that of Black American households at almost 61 percent (Oliver & Shapiro, p. 87). The inability to accrue net financial worth is also directly related to hiring practices in which Black Americans are "last hired" when the economy experiences an upturn, and "first fired" when it falls on hard times. And as historian John Hope Franklin remarked on the legacy of slavery for Black education: "Laws enacted by states forbade the teaching of Blacks any means of acquiring knowledge-including the alphabet-which is the legacy of disadvantage of educational privatization and discrimination experienced by African Americans in 2001." Horowitz's comparison of African Americans with Jamaicans is a false analogy, ignoring the different historical contexts of the two populations. The British government ended slavery in Jamaica and its other West Indian territories in 1836, paying West Indian slaveholders $20,000,000 pounds ($100,000,000 U.S. dollars) to free the slaves, and leaving the Black Jamaicans, who comprised 90 percent of that island's population, relatively free. Though still facing racist obstacles, Jamaicans come to the U.S. as voluntary immigrants, with greater opportunity to weigh, choose, and develop their options. 7. "The Reparations Claim Is One More Attempt To Turn African-Americans Into Victims. It Sends A Damaging Message To The African-American Community" What is a victim? Black people have certainly been victimized, but acknowledgment of that fact is not a case of "playing the victim" but of seeking justice. There is no validity to Horowitz's comparison between Black Americans and victims of oppressive regimes who have voluntary immigrated to these shores. Further, many members of those populations, such as Chileans and Salvadorans, direct their energies for redress toward the governments of their own oppressive nations -- which is precisely what Black Americans are doing. Horowitz's racism is expressed in his contemptuous characterization of reparations as "an extravagant new handout that is only necessary because some Blacks can't seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others, many of whom are less privileged than themselves." What Horowitz fails to acknowledge is that racism continues as an ideology and a material force within the U.S., providing Blacks with no ladder that reaches the top. The damage lies in the systematic treatment of Black people in the U.S. 8. "Reparations To African Americans Have Already Been Paid" The nearest the U.S. government came to full and permanent restitution of African Americans was the spontaneous redistribution of land brought about by General William Sherman's Field Order 15 in January 1865, which empowered Union commanders to make land grants and give other material assistance to newly liberated Blacks. But that order was rescinded by President Andrew Johnson later in the year. Efforts by Representative Thaddeus Stevens and other radical Republicans to provide the proverbial "40 acres and a mule," which would have carved up huge plantations of the defeated Confederacy into modest land grants for Blacks and poor Whites never got out of the House of Representatives. The debt has not been paid. "Welfare benefits and racial preferences" are not reparations. The welfare system was set in place in the 1930s to alleviate the poverty of the Great Depression, and more Whites than Blacks received welfare. So-called "racial preferences" come not from benevolence but from lawsuits by Blacks against White businesses, government agencies, and municipalities which practice racial discrimination. 9. "What About The Debt Blacks Owe To America?" Horowitz's assertion that "in the thousand years of slavery's existence, there never was an anti-slavery movement until White Anglo-Saxon Christians created one," only demonstrates his ignorance concerning the formidable efforts of Blacks to free themselves. Led by Black Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Haitian revolution of 1793 overthrew the French slave system, created the first Black republic in the world, and intensified the activities of Black and White anti-slavery movements in the U.S. Slave insurrections and conspiracies such as those of Gabriel (1800), Denmark Vesey (1822), and Nat Turner (1831) were potent sources of Black resistance; Black abolitionists such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Richard Allen, Sojourner Truth, Martin Delany, David Walker, and Henry Highland Garnet waged an incessant struggle against slavery through agencies such as the press, notably Douglass's North Star and its variants, which ran from 1847 to 1863 (Blacks, moreover, constituted some 75 percent of the subscribers to William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator newspaper in its first four years); the Underground Railroad, the Negro Convention Movement, local, state, and national anti-slavery societies, and the slave narrative. Black Americans were in no ways the passive recipients of freedom from anyone, whether viewed from the perspective of Black participation in the abolitionist movement, the flight of slaves from plantations and farms during the Civil War, or the enlistment of Black troops in the Union army. The idea of Black debt to U.S. society is a rehash of the Christian missionary argument of the 17th and 18th centuries: because Africans were considered heathens, it was therefore legitimate to enslave them and drag them in chains to a Christian nation. Following their partial conversion, their moral and material lot were improved, for which Black folk should be eternally grateful. Slave ideologues John Calhoun and George Fitzhugh updated this idea in the 19th century, arguing that Blacks were better off under slavery than Whites in the North who received wages, due to the paternalism and benevolence of the plantation system which assured perpetual employment, shelter, and board. Please excuse the analogy, but if someone chops off your fingers and then hands them back to you, should you be "grateful" for having received your mangled fingers, or enraged that they were chopped off in the first place? 10. "The Reparations Claim Is A Separatist Idea That Sets African-Americans Against The Nation That Gave Them Freedom" Again, Horowitz reverses matters. Blacks are already separated from White America in fundamental matters such as income, family wealth, housing, legal treatment, education, and political representation. Andrew Hacker, for example, has argued the case persuasively in his book "Two Nations." To ignore such divisions, and then charge those who raise valid claims against society with promoting divisiveness, offers a classic example of "blaming the victim." And we have already refuted the spurious point that African Americans were the passive recipients of benevolent White individuals or institutions which "gave" them freedom. Too many Americans tend to view history as "something that happened in the past," something that is "over and done," and thus has no bearing upon the present. Especially in the case of slavery, nothing could be further from the truth. As historian John Hope Franklin noted in his response to Horowitz: "Most living Americans do have a connection with slavery. They have inherited the preferential advantage, if they are White, or the loathsome disadvantage, if they are Black; and those positions are virtually as alive today as they were in the 19th century. The pattern of housing, the discrimination in employment, the resistance to equal opportunity in education, the racial profiling, the inequities in the administration of justice, the low expectation of Blacks in the discharge of duties assigned to them, the widespread belief that Blacks have physical prowess but little intellectual capacities and the widespread opposition to affirmative action, as if that had not been enjoyed by Whites for three centuries, all indicate that the vestiges of slavery are still with us. "And as long as there are pro-slavery protagonists among us, hiding behind such absurdities as "we are all in this together" or 'it hurts me as much as it hurts you' or 'slavery benefited you as much as it benefited me,' we will suffer from the inability to confront the tragic legacies of slavery and deal with them in a forthright and constructive manner. "Most important, we must never fall victim to some scheme designed to create a controversy among potential allies in order to divide them and, at the same time, exploit them for its own special purpose." Ernest Allen, Jr. is a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Robert Chrisman is editor-in-chief and publisher of The Black Scholar. ###### Big Pimpin' Bourgeois Style: The Demise of Tavis Smiley's "BET Tonight" By Mark Anthony Neal I was pulling into the parking lot of my 2-year-old's daycare when I first heard the news that the contract of popular talk-show host Tavis Smiley was not being renewed. The announcement came courtesy of Tom Joyner, who is the host of the largest syndicated radio program targeted to African-American audiences. "The Tom Joyner Morning Show" is part of my everyday ritual as my daughter and I get to listen to some old-school soul and I get off on the humor of J. Anthony Brown and the twice weekly commentaries provided by Tavis Smiley. For sure I was surprised by the announcement, even letting out a loud chuckle at the irony of the move, as I stood in the parking lot. Hell, it was only two years ago that Newsweek said Smiley was one of the 20 or so people who were changing how we get out news and, of course, he was the winner of the coveted NAACP "I Make Negroes Look Good" Image Award three years running. He had also achieved the distinction of being BET's highest paid on-air talent. But my surprise turned to reservation as I prepared for the inevitable "rally around the race" pitch that Joyner et al. were going to employ to get Smiley reinstated at the helm of "BET Tonight." By the time I returned to the car 10 minutes later Joyner was giving out the e-mail address and phone number to Viacom CEO Mel Karmazin. I had been here before. Over a five year period Smiley and Joyner have spearheaded several campaigns aimed at "empowering" the Black community. Using the visibility that Smiley was afforded on BET and their access to an audience of seven million spread out over 100 radio markets, Smiley and Joyner had redefined the "chitlin' circuit" for the digital era. At their best they inspired listeners to send faxes and e-mail to the heads of congressional and senate committees for a range of things from disaster relief for a North Carolina town that had been damaged by floods to brokering for a Congressional Medal of Honor for Civil Rights era matriarch Rosa Parks. At their worst, they were engaged in mundane bourgeois activism that had little to do with the everyday realities of most Black folks, such as forcing Christie's to scrap plans to auction off antebellum era collectibles. Their celebrated "boycott" of CompUSA for the failure of the company to significantly advertise with Black media (namely the Joyner program) is possibly the most notable example of their bourgeois activism. At one point during their boycott efforts, Joyner read a racist fax on-air that was supposedly from the CompUSA president, only to find out that it was a hoax. It was quite clear that as CompUSA's president appeared on "Joyner" to apologize and pledge a commitment to advertise in Black media, that he had also acquired a half-hour of free publicity for his company as did Smiley and Joyner for themselves. They became playas, big ballers, shot callers able to leap global conglomerates in a single bound -- Look, it's a bird, it's a plane...no it's "Big Pimpin' Bourgeois Style." Quite frankly, I was offended that Joyner would ask listeners to hold Viacom accountable in a way that they had never held Bob Johnson accountable when he owned BET. Frankly I was offended that Black listeners were asked to fight for a program that had significantly underachieved as a legitimate vehicle of progressive thought and critique. In support of Smiley, there were clearly restraints placed on him at BET. Even a casual Joyner listener could discern the freedom and passion that Smiley brought to his twice- weekly commentaries that were absent in his role at BET. In a world dominated by heady conversations that include a notable absence of Black commentators and critics, "BET Tonight" could give its audiences a regular view of Black public intellectuals such as Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West, prominent Black clergy such as Bishop T.D. "Big Pimpin' for the 'Lawd' and Capitalism" Jakes and popular authors like the "high priestess" neo-Afrocentric mystic Ilyanla Vanzant. Like Arsenio Hall in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Smiley's show allowed Black folk to see themselves taken seriously, while Smiley himself, with his forays into "big mama" wit and Ebonically authentic diction, created a comfort zone for some audiences -- an intelligent, savvy, Foghorn Leghorn on the Black-owned ghetto-fabulous version of PBS-TV's "Firing Line." In a moment when Black public intellectuals have to work as hard--and even harder--at promoting themselves than the actual scholarly work they do, Smiley redefined self-promotion, using both BET and "The Tom Joyner Morning Show" as vehicles to promote his three books and his numerous speaking gigs and trips to Krispy Kreme. One of the running jokes on "Joyner" -- courtesy of comedian J. Anthony Brown, the real intellectual on the program -- was the fact that Smiley's commentary was often just an opportunity to tell listeners what the next stops were on his book tour. These aspects aside, if PBS-TV's "Charlie Rose" can be identified as the model for heady liberal talk on television, "BET Tonight With Tavis Smiley" was a legitimate, though significantly flawed Black equivalent. Part of the problems with Smiley's show was that it was often reduced to cronyism. During one recent appearance by attorney Johnnie Cochran and Cornel West, Smiley introduced the duo as his good friends, effectively undermining his value and authority as a host, since he was unlikely to really challenge them in any significant ways. It's apropos to the numerous "softball" interviews that Ahmad Rashad did with Michael Jordan, in which most audiences were not privy to the fact that Rashad was part of Jordan's inner circle. For the record, Cochran and West were on the show to discuss the acquittal of Sean "Puffy" Combs as BET and MTV (both Viacom networks) became "Puffy Central" for the duration of the trial. In comparison, Smiley once invited Russell Simmons on to the show, seemingly just to berate the mogul for calling Smiley a "sell-out Uncle Tom" when Smiley debuted the show, then called "BET Talk," with a conversation about the then-recent murder of hiphop star-actor Tupac Shakur in 1996. The incident spoke volumes about the way Smiley used the show to craft and protect his image, as if his audiences should have been as offended by Simmons's quip as Smiley was. Though the aforementioned West and Dyson were prominently featured, and rightfully so, on "BET Tonight," Smiley rarely invited Black scholars and intellectuals who were not known quantities to his audiences. Thus Black scholars and public intellectuals such as Joy James, bell hooks, Tricia Rose, Cathy Cohen, Jill Nelson, Michelle Wallace, Barbara Smith, Hazel Carby, (there's a pattern here, huh?) or male thinkers such as Phillip Brian Harper, Robin D.G. Kelley, Houston Baker, Derrick Bell, Todd Boyd (who recently appeared with Dyson to talk about Marshall Mathers) and others, who are just as engaging and knowledgeable as West and Dyson, were rarely, if ever, given regular forums on the program. In retrospect, it seems as though Smiley would only invite thinkers who were already accepted by his audiences as being smarter than he was. This reading is supported by the fact that Smiley often and dramatically genuflected to the likes of Dyson and West, often admitting that he didn't quite understand what they were saying. On other occasions, when Smiley was forced to deal with issues of popular culture, particularly hip-hop, he seemed terribly out of touch. Granted, he was often forced to do such shows so that the network could attract younger audiences, but he rarely seemed to come up to speed with the issues germane to those audiences and noticeably tried protect his inadequacies by framing the conversation in very specific terms. On a show which featured Common, Dead Prez, and writer Kevin Powell (check the new book, "Step Into A World: A Global Anthology Of The New Black Literature"), Smiley spent more than 20 minutes asking all of the panelists individually how they defined "conscious" hip-hop, wasting a unique opportunity to have a progressive conversation with some of the more progressive voices in hip-hop, Common's homophobia notwithstanding. The reality is that it is hard to come up to speed with your guests if you are on one seemingly continuous 50 city book-tour -- just ask Puffy when was the last time he was behind the boards. The day after Joyner first announced that Smiley's contract was not being renewed by BET, Smiley appeared on "Joyner" during his regularly scheduled commentary. He publicly addressed his dismay that his contract was not being renewed, saying that the word was delivered to his agent via a four-sentence fax. Despite protests from his staff, many of whom suggested the Smiley resign immediately because BET didn't "deserve" him, Smiley also announced that he would stay with the station until his contact actually ended in the fall. While Smiley remained silent, Joyner and company continued their assault on Viacom, suggesting that Smiley's contract was not renewed in retribution for his political stances. One caller even suggested that Viacom went after Smiley in response to his efforts to get the struggling Black hospital drama "City of Angels" renewed for the 2000-2001 television season, despite the fact that the quality of the show was at best uneven and not widely supported even by African-American audiences. Bob Johnson et al responded very quickly to the old-school wolf tickets being sold by Joyner and Smiley by publicly affirming that it was an in-house decision made by Johnson himself to pull the plug on Smiley's term with the network. In a press release issued hours before Smiley's appearance on "Joyner," the network stated that it was a "creative decision made by BET as part of our regular planning process for the new season debuting in September." Nearly 48 hours after that statement, BET would issue another statement that Smiley's contract would be terminated immediately. Bob Johnson himself would suggest that "recent actions by Mr. Smiley left us little recourse but to make this move." Some have suggested that Smiley had become too politically hot for the conservative Bob Johnson. Some industry insiders have suggested that Johnson and BET/Viacom moved on Smiley in response Smiley's selling of an exclusive interview with former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olsen to ABC's "Primetime Live." (Johnson said BET was disrespected because Smiley did not offer the interview to BET first.) While both may have come into play in the decision to remove Smiley, Johnson was also likely personally offended by the end-around criticism by Joyner et al, that suggested that it was a decision made over Johnson's head. Though Johnson sold BET for $3 billion last October, the company is still run on a day-to-day basis by Johnson and his management team. Johnson has recently been proven to be very sensitive to public criticism, hence his very public disputes with cartoonist Aaron McGruder, who regularly clowns BET and a host of other Black folk in his newspaper comic strip "The Boondocks." From Johnson's vantage, the criticism that suggested that he didn't make the decision may have infuriated him as much or more than the criticisms of the move itself. Johnson admitted during his unprecedented appearance during a special one-hour "BET Tonight," where viewers were able to call in and e-mail one of the most prominent gatekeepers of Black intellectual and entertainment property, that the specific reason for Smiley's removal was because of the interview with Sara Jane Olsen. Johnson is disingenuous though when he suggests that Viacom did not play a part in his decision-making process, particularly because Smiley's appearance on "Primetime Live" helped ABC trounce the debut of the heavily promoted urban cop drama "Big Apple" on Viacom-owned CBS. "Big Apple," which has been shelved by this writing, was a show that was likely to attract a significant Black urban-based audience. Culling perceptions from radio appearances by Al Sharpton and Cornel West on New York City's WRKS, the "Joyner,"and various listservs dedicated to African American issues, the general consensus is that Smiley was in fact being punished for his political views. While such a view is an obvious response to Smiley's firing, Smiley's body of political work doesn't suggest that he is pushing for any ideas that are not already part of the status quo of Black mainstream political activity. Given the choices offered to the American public this past Presidential election, Smiley's efforts to increase voter registration and increase voter consciousness did little more than popularize the efforts of traditional Black elected leadership, albeit to the flavor of old-school Soul. Given the age range of Joyner's baby-boomer core audience--hence the relevance on the term "Old-School--those efforts did little to reach out to the youngest segment of the African-American electorate and instead preached to a choir who had been preached the same sermon consistently over a 20 year period since the first election of Ronald Reagan. Even Smiley's highly publicized "State Of The Black Union" events, the first held at the eve of the Democratic National Convention last August and the most recent this past February, gives a portrait of how mainstream Smiley's sensibilities are. Nearly all of the participants in the most recent forum, broadcast in two parts on C-SPAN, were the kind of known quantities that made regular appearances on the his show and the numerous other "talking head" television programs. While Smiley should be commended for including a wide range political voices, including conservative stalwarts such as Armstrong Williams, Stanley Crouch and Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell (he of Bush inauguration fame), scholars Lani Guiner and Mary Frances Berry, and "young" voices like Aaron McGruder and Farai Chideya, there were no major radical voices such as those of Black Radical Congress leaders, scholar Manning Marable and Bill Fletcher, no major leaders from within the Black gay and lesbian communities, and no one doing the kind of grassroots organization of welfare recipients. It was the classic coming together of policy makers and policy informers, but no one who is policy affected; such a situation speaks to the general disconnect of bourgeois mainstream Black political activity. I say all this to suggest that Smiley has not posited anything in his formidable political body of work that would suggest that he is at all a threat to the political status quo. If anything, he has himself become a media commodity; this does not guarantee that his politics travel with him, though no doubt Smiley himself will travel well to another network hosting a syndicated talk show of some type. The stark reality was that the show's viewership did not justify Smiley's salary. "BET Tonight" reached an average of 212,000 viewers. In comparison, "BET News With Ed Gordon" (who returned to the Johnson plantation last year after a stint with MSNBC) attracted 253,000 viewers, which means that over 40,000 houses would change channels or turn off the television when Smiley came on. More telling is the fact that "BET Live," an underwhelming late night show hosted by former NBA star John Salley, has an audience almost double that of BET Tonight at 409,000. For the record, the network's highest-rated program is the often vulgar and atrocious "Comic View," a show notable for the fact that until recently most of the comics who appeared on the show were not paid any residuals, even though appearances of folks such as Original "Kangs" D.L. Hughley and Cedric the Entertainer were still regularly shown four or five years after their initial tapings. The fact that the show is supported by more than 500,000 viewers speak volumes about the network's core audience -- folks who watch such low-brow entertainment like the Tom Green knock-off "Hits From The Street" and the supposedly "woman-centered" program "Oh Drama!," where actress Kim Whitely (of "Sparks" and "Me and My Brother" fame) regularly reminds audiences that she is "not getting any." In this context, Smiley's forced departure seems a no-brainer. It is important to note that this is an audience that Johnson himself has aggressively tried to cultivate since 1996, when long-time "Video Soul" host Donnie Simpson was put out to pasture. Two years later Bev Smith, who hosted the talk show "Our Voices," also separated from the Johnson plantation. Johnson has shown a distinct pattern of pulling public affairs and "adult" programming when they do not reach the kinds of audiences and more importantly, generate the kind of ad revenue that BET desires. In this regard, Smiley's departure was likely plotted last fall, when the show was reduced to a half-hour show instead of the one-hour call-in show that it debuted as in 1996 as "BET Talk." In its current format, the show has quite frankly been bad. What troubles me is that suddenly BET's moves are being aggressively criticized because Viacom now owns it. Black audiences have been disappointed, dismayed and at times disgusted at BET's primary programming for more than five years, which is why Aaron McGruder's critiques of BET in "The Boondocks" held such a resonance with many. It was less than a year ago that Johnson with the advice of Vanguarde Media's Keith Clinkscales ceased publication of George Curry's Emerge magazine, arguably the preeminent source of political commentary about Black America. Where was the outcry and public disdain for that decision? Did Tom Joyner et al give out fax numbers and e-mail address of BET and Vanguarde Media in response to the demise of Emerge, or the removal of Donnie Simpson and Bev Smith or those damn "bling-bling and booty shaker" videos that run all day, for that matter? Because BET was then a "Black-owned" company, Bob Johnson was protected as audiences and supporters closed ranks around the "premiere" Black media outlet. Ultimately, the Viacoms of the world can and will make decisions detrimental to African-American audiences if only because of the general inability or unwillingness for those audiences to hold themselves accountable. There is unfortunately no fax number and e-mail address that can rectify that. Cultural critic and historian Mark Anthony Neal is an assistant professor of Africana Studies and English at the State University of New York at Albany. He is the author of "What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture" (Routledge, 1999) and the forthcoming "Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic." Neal's work has appeared in The Washington Post, Emerge magazine, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, The Western Journal of Black Studies, and CommonQuest Magazine. ##### DepartmentsBusiness & Economy Women In Tech Restless Over Industry's Demands By Kathleen Melymuka (WOMENSENEWS)--When it comes to information technology and the intense, 24-7 demands of time and commitment, women may well be the canary in the coal mine, the first to say no more heroics, according to recent surveys of women balancing work and their personal needs. "The knowledge worker is not just a machine that keeps on going," said Liz Ryan, founder of World Women and Technology, an online information technology networking group. "She comes with upkeep requirements." A recent survey of 265 women technology professionals, coauthored by Mindy L. Gewirtz and Ann Lindsey of GLS Consulting, Inc., Boston, found that women may be the "canary in the coal mine," alerting everyone that work and personal life-family needs are out of kilter. The survey results should be a warning to corporate America that the 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week expectations prevalent in the new economy are ultimately counterproductive, detrimental to employees in general and organizations in the long run, the authors said. While many women are dissatisfied with the overwhelming pressures of the new economy workplace, they also face persistent salary inequities. Studies show that salaried men in information technology earn 12 percent more than salaried women. Women on contract, however, earn 8 percent more than men, indicating women are finding ways to combine job flexibility and high pay, although most contract workers do not receive benefits. Contractors in general constitute 45 percent of the I-T workforce. Women Appreciate Freedom, Growth, Advancement--Time's the Killer The survey found that women in technology love the creative freedom, opportunities for growth and relative lack of barriers to advancement in the field. Equally strong, however, are their feelings that the hours and level of commitment required in many information technology jobs can destroy a healthy balance between work and personal life. "You cannot live your life on burst mode. It's not sustainable," said Ryan from World Women in Technology, whose members were interviewed for the survey. "You will not win and your employer will not win." The survey found that 73 percent of respondents were passionate about their sense of achievement, impact, opportunity for growth and creative freedom in information technology. They particularly valued flexible hours, the opportunity to work at home and a measurement of success linked to results rather than "face time" in the office. Given that flexibility, they said, they are willing to put in longer hours than they would in a traditional office environment. On the other hand, 68 percent expressed deep concern over the stress induced by the long hours and intense commitment information technology requires, and 65 percent said that has had a negative impact on their personal lives. "We believe that women are frustrated and really ready to effect social change," said Gewirtz. "The findings were very specific as to what women are seeking in the workplace." Despite Much Work Satisfaction, 41 Percent Consider Job Change The survey also indicated that women who don't get what they seek won't stay forever. Despite their enjoyment of the positive aspects of work, 41 percent reported that they are considering leaving their jobs. Ryan said corporate managers need to realize the unrelenting information technology work style may cost them valuable employees. "Women are asking, 'Is it still worth it?'" Ryan added, "and that's a very big question mark." Mary Mattis, senior research fellow at Catalyst, the New York-based research organization focusing on women in business, said the new survey reinforces Catalyst findings: "Especially in I-T, there's been the notion of heroic leadership: 'The longer I can work, the better; I can sleep in my office,'" she said. "I don't think that's a lifestyle that is realistic for most people and especially for women. And if you asked men, I suspect you'd have similar findings." Ryan agreed. "This might be advance notice of a trend that will overtake all of us." Two other recent surveys show how balance and imbalance between work and personal life can affect women's salaries in the information technology field. Salaried Men Earn 12 Percent More, Contract Women 8 Percent More A study by Computer Jobs, an employment Web site, and Contract Professional, a national magazine for information technology contractors, underscored that women in information technology may do best outside the structure of a traditional office environment. It reported that while salaried male information technology workers earn 12 percent more than salaried women, female contract workers in the same field earn 8 percent more than their male counterparts. This supports the findings of the Boston study that, given a flexible work environment, women will put in more hours. Women's success as information technology contractors is particularly significant since the information technology contracting industry has grown tremendously over the past decade. According to the Gartner Group, an information technology research firm in Stamford, Conn., contractors constitute as much as 45 percent of the workforce, with the trend moving upward. Conversely, a survey of 200 technology professionals in the securities industry showed that, in Wall Street's information technology, men earn 50 percent more than women. This study, conducted by the New York-based AG Barrington, Inc., indicated the median income for male financial technology professionals was $218,000. The median for women was $143,000. The difference was due to the low number of women in high-paying, direct-sales jobs, said survey author Alan Geller, AG Barrington's managing director. He noted that there are only 12 women among the 131 directors of sales or worldwide heads of sales in Wall Street firms. Geller attributed this to women's relatively higher concern with family and personal life issues, which keeps them from choosing the long hours and frequent travel required in sales jobs. Kathleen Melymuka has been writing about the intersection of people and technology since 1983. She lives in Duxbury, Mass., and covers diversity and management issues for Computerworld. ##### Technology Tech Talk About Binary Formats By Eric Harris Computer technology covers a lot of formats. As computers continue to improve, the data formats will be important in the interchange of data and the execution and transmission of commands. Data formats are used by applications in communicating instructions, reading configurations and managing default settings. To understand data interchange, it is important to understand binary formats which differ tremendously from standard text formats. Binary formats are formats for representing data used by some applications. The other main formats for storing data are text formats, such as ASCII and EBCDIC, in which each character of data is assigned a specific code number. Binary formats are used for executable programs and numeric data, whereas text formats are used for textual data. Many files contain a combination of binary and text formats, although such files are usually considered to be binary files. A binary file is computer-readable but not human-readable. All executable programs are stored in binary files, as are most numeric data files. In contrast, text files are stored in a form--usually ASCII--that is human-readable. ASCII is an acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Pronounced "ask-ee," ASCII is a code for representing English characters as numbers, with each letter assigned a number from 0 to 127. For example, the ASCII code for uppercase "M" is 77. Most computers use ASCII codes to represent text, which makes it possible to transfer data from one computer to another. Text editors and word processors are usually capable of storing data in ASCII format. Most data files, particularly if they contain numeric data, are not stored in ASCII format. Executable programs are never stored in ASCII format. EBCDIC is the abbreviation of Extended Binary-Coded Decimal Interchange Code. Pronounced "eb-sih-dik," EBCDIC is a code for representing characters as numbers. Most computers, including personal computers (PCs) and Macintosh (Macs), use ASCII codes. The standard ASCII character set uses just seven bits for each character. A bit is the smallest unit of measure on the computer. There are several larger character sets that use 8 bits, which gives them 128 additional characters. The extra characters are used to represent non-English characters, graphics symbols and mathematical symbols. The DOS (Disk Operating System) operating system uses a superset of ISO Latin 1 set of characters, which is used by many operating systems, as well as Web browsers. Files that have a combination of binary and text formats usually are considered to be binary files even though they contain some data in a text format. To learn more about binary formats and text formats, there is additional information available to explain the history of the character set and provide tables and guidance regarding conversion utilities and other tools that can be used for data interchange. Eric Harris is president of OASYS Information Services, Inc. (www.oasysis.com or www.highspeedsolutions.net), an information technology firm in Raleigh, NC, that specializes in Web Hosting, Electronic Commerce, Networking and DSL Internet Access. If you have a technology question, send e-mail to eharris@oasysis.com. ##### Advice Ask Gwen Baines I Am Getting Furious Because I Can't Make My Brother Come Home! Dear Gwendolyn: I have a brother who has been living in Boston for about 17 years. He never comes home. I recently called and asked him why he cannot come home. He told me what he always tells me: that is he is coming. Then and he doesn't come. I don't know what is wrong with him. He is not sick because I see him every year when I go to Boston. Gwendolyn, what is his problem. He lives with my family there in Boston. They come home, but he doesn't. Wonder why? Denise Dear Denise: You may never know the reason and, in time, maybe he will come. Then again, he may never return to visit the place of his childhood. I am sure you have heard people remark "You can never go home again." I feel that statement refers mostly to individuals who try to return "home" to live after being away for years. Some can adjust, but many cannot. As to your brother, don't waste too much of your life trying to persuade him to return. I am sure you all love him, but that seemingly is not enough to cause him to come back even for a brief visit. You did not mention about your parents, so I am assuming they are deceased. If they are not, I do hope (for his sake) he will return to see your parents. However, if they are living and in good health, then I suggest that your parents make a visit to see their son. Denise, life is just too short and precious to be overly concerned about another adult; I don't care who the adult may be--- brother, uncle, cousin, or even a dad. When adult individuals have a set mind, it is too difficult sometimes to bring them to change. Let me tell you this: This is not a good situation, I agree, but again I strongly suggest that you do not spend another waking thought on this matter. Move forward with your own life. Continue to love your brother and continue the yearly visit and enjoy every moment. It doesn't matter where the enjoyment is; the fact being you are with him and he is with you. Stop this unsuccessful crusade because the problem could be deeper than you know. Think about it. Something may have happened 17 years ago that is not good--some secret perhaps. If he has been in Boston for 17 years, then maybe he is in trouble in your home city with the law. He probably left in his 20s, to say the least. That would make him quite an adult. If, however, he is not fleeing the law, then just maybe Denise, he is running away --- from himself. Got a problem? Ask Gwendolyn Baines. Visit her on website: www.gwendolynbaines.com, or write P. O. Box 78246, Nashville, TN 37207, or email: gwenbaines@hotmail.com ####
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