March 7, 1990 • Portland ( »bserver- • Hage 3
NATIONAL FORUM
T his W av F or B lack E mpowkkmkn '
b\ Ih : l i n o n i I u liin i
Violence and Crime in the Black Community
rhc epidemic of violence in the Black
community raises several related questions.
Whai is the social impact of violence within
uui neighborhoods? What is the effect of
violence upon our children? And most
tmportantly, how do we develop a strategy
to reverse the proliferation of Black-against-
Black crime and violence?
Violence occurs so frequently in the
cities that for many people, it has become
almost a "norm al” factor in our daily lives.
We have become accustomed to burglar
alarms and security locks to safeguard our
persona] property and homes. More than
one in three families keeps a gun in their
homes. We might try to avoid driving through
neighborhoods where crack houses are lo
cated. We are trying to avoid the problem,
but we’re not taking steps to solve i t We
need to keep in mind that most of the violent
crime cases, the assailant and the victim live
ui the same neighborhood, or are members
of the same household. Half of all violent
deaths are between husbands and wives.
Many others include parents killing their
children or children killing parents, or neigh
bors killing each other. There are hundreds
of murders among Blacks for the most triv
ial reasons-everything from fighting over
pat king spaces to arguing over five dollars.
Black men are murdering each other, in
part, because of the deterioration of jobs and
economic opportunity in our communities.
For Black young men, the real unemploy-
niem rate exceeds 50 percent in most cities.
I Jvei all jobless rates for Black men with less
than a high school diploma exceed 15 per
cent. High unemployment, crowded hous-
mg and poor health care all contribute to an
environment of social chaos and disruption,
whicb create destructive values and behav
iors.
The most tragic victims of violence are
B la i k children. Black children between the
»ges one and four have death rates from
homicide which are four times higher than
for white children the same ages. According
to the Children’s Defense Fund, Black chil
dren are arrested at almost seven times the
rate for white children for the most serious
- iolent crimes and are arrested at more than
iwice the white rate for serious property
crimes More than half of the arrests for
African American teenagers are for serious
property crimes or violent crimes. For in
stance, arrest rate for black youth aged 11 to
17 for forcible rape is six times higher than
for whites. In terms of rates of victimiza
tion, nonwhite females are almost 40 per
cent more likely than white females to be
raped, robbed, or victims of other violent
crimes.
How do we understand the acts of vio
lence committed by children? We have to
begin by focusing on the concept of identity.
What is identity? I t’s an awareness of self in
the context of one’s environment. Identity is
based on the connections between the indi
vidual and his or her immediate family and
community. We don’t exist in isolation o f
each other. We develop a sense of who we
are, of who we wish to become, by interact
ing with parents, friends, teachers, minis
ters, coworkers and others.
O ur identity is collective, in that it is
formed through the inputs of thousands of
different people over many years. If the
people relate to an individual in a negative
manner, an antisocial or deviant personality
w ill be the result. If a child is told repeatedly
by teachers or parents that he is stupid, the
child will usually do poorly in school, re
gardless of his natural abilities. If a child is
cold that he is a chronic liar and untrustworthy,
he will eventually begin to lie and steal. If he
is physically beaten by his parents frequently
and unjustly, he will learn to resort to physi
cal violence against others. If he witnesses
his father using violence againsthis mother.
he could later become violent against women.
People are not bom hateful or violent. There’s
no genetic or biological explanation for
violence or crime. Violence is learned be
havior. The destructive and negative expec
tations projected on youth can create crimi
nal behavior years later.
Violence between people of color is
also directly linked to the educational sys
tem. If the curriculum of our public schools
does not present the heritage, culture and
history of African-Americans, if it ignores
or downgrades our vital contributions for a
more democratic society, our children are
robbed of their heritage. They acquire a
distorted perspective about themselves and
[fcUCTUUAL
7
I ho WOM
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their communities. If they believe that Afri
can-American people have never achieved
greatness, in the sciences, art, music, eco
nomics and the law, how can they excel or
achieve for themselves? Despite the many
reforms accomplished to create a more cul
turally pluralistic environment for learning,
most o f our public schools are in the busi
ness of ‘ ‘miseducation’ ’ for people o f color.
For example, Sonia Nieto’s research on
children's literature illustrates that the number
of children's books on Puerto Rican topics
or themes has dropped significantly since
the early 1970s. Less than three hundredths
of one percent of all children’s books pub
lished between 1972-1982 were on Puerto
Rican themes. Books on purely African-
American themes—not integrated topics—
comprise below one percent. African-Ameri-
can and Latino book publishers are usually
unable to crack the lucrative public school
textbook market. Black and Hispanic topics
are usually taught in white public school
systems as peripheral or secondary themes,
and virtually never integrated across the
disciplines. This type of miseducation con
tributes to negative and antisocial values
among young people of color. If all our
youth have to measure themselves by are the
distorted images of the m edia-the African-
American male as a potential criminal, for
exam ple-then antisocial behavior will be
the logical result.
We also tend to identify the issue of
violence solely with males, yet an increas
ing number of young African-American
women are caught in the cycle o f drug
abuse, antisocial behavior and crime. Ac
cording to the research of Laurence French,
between 1960 and 1974, the rate of women
incarcerated in prisons increased four times
faster than the imprisonment rate for males.
A disproportionately high percentage are
Black and Latina women. For example, in
North Carolina’s prisons, two thirds of all
female inmates are Black. Ninety five per
cent of all Black women prisoners have a
high school education or less. Sixty-five
percent of all African-American women
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and about one third of all white women
prisoners have an eighth grade education or
less. The vast majority of Black women who
are jailed earn less than $10,000 annual
income, are unemployed and/or are welfare
recipients. In short, there’s a direct correla
tion between inadequate or poor education,
unemployment, poverty and crime. The
violence of the American economic system,
the deliberate existence of joblessness and
poverty as essential components of the sys
tem, contributes to crime and violence. People
steal if they cannot eat; they will break into
other’s property in search of shelter; people
will deal crack if there are no other jobs
available to them in the ghetto.
P»4>Uh*f». If* .. New Ywk.
______
____ ___________
A T hreat And A Prom ise
A physician in Berkeley, California who
calls himself an advocate for people with
AIDS recently charged that the New Alli
ance Party is out to * ‘ take over” and destroy
the largest AIDS service agency in Alameda
County which itself has the highest propor
tion of people of color with AIDS in the
state. At a public meeting he argued that the
county health department should withhold
funding from the AIDS Project for the East
Bay or close it down until NAP is “ rooted
out."
It’s outrageous, criminal and blatantly
racist that anyone would argue for shutting
down a program such as the AIDS P roject-
no matter who ran it! Why is someone who
calls himself an AIDS advocate in effect
siding with the right wing fanatics who
would be happy to see all AIDS funding cut
off? People with AIDS need more services
than they have now. I have called on the
Project’s board of directors to demand Dr.
Alcalay’s immediate resignation from the
Alameda County AIDS Advisory Board since
he obviously does not have the interests of
the community at heart. We must not allow
the AIDS crisis and the people victimized
by this disease to be used as political foot
ball by phony gay advocates.
Dr. Alcalay’s shocking proposal elic
ited an immediate public apology to the
AIDS Project and to NAP from the chair.
But the gay press in the county mindlessly
repeated the accusation that NAP was at
tempting a “ takeover” while neglecting to
question the political motives of someone
who hates independent politics so much that
he would rather see an agency which serves
people with AIDS close its doors than see it
‘‘taken over’’ by NAP-whatever that means.
The accusation that the New Alliance
Party has taken over the AIDS Project for
the East B ay is neither true nor relevant. The
fact that the Project's director of client
services is a NAP member is hardly evi
dence of a “ takeover." But the hysteria
generated by the “ concerned physician”
and some of the area’s gay and so-called left
press is evidence of their opposition to inde
pendent politics and their allegiance to the
Democratic Party. They are so committed to
stopping a Black-led, multi-racial, pro-gay
independent party from succeeding that they
are willing to play with the lives of people
with AIDS. This is not just about N A P -it’s
about leaders in the gay movement and the
gay press allowing themselves to be used by
the Democratic Party to do its dirty work,
even if that means selling out people with
AIDS even if it means their lives. And those
in the press who lent their credibility to his
outrageous "suggestion” by uncritically
reporting his accusations against NAP are,
in my opinion, equally culpable.
In 1988 no other traditionally Demo
cratic Party constituency was subjected to
the relentlessly hostile propaganda warning
voters to stay away from my independent
presidential campaign with which the gay
community was steadily bombarded up until
the eve of the election. The attacks ranged
from poison pen leaflets and articles in local
gay publications to rumor campaigns that
made their way around the country to threats
of physical violence against an independ
ent, militantly pro-gay African American
woman.
In the spring of 1988 Sue Hyde, the
director of the National Lesbian and Gay
Task Force’s Privacy Project, authored a
page and a half long, single-spaced letter
attacking me and NAP which was sent ac
companied by a viciously racist, anti-NAP
pamphlet entitled Clouds Blur the Rainbow,
to gay newspapers around the country. Many
of them published Hyde’s shamelessly self-
serving attempt to whip lesbians and gays
into line behind Michael Dukakis, the noto
riously homophobic, anti-poor governor of
Massachusetts.
Yet despite the fact that the beholden-
to-the-Democrats gay establishment did
everything it could to scare lesbians and
gays away from my independent candidacy,
I received 2% of the national gay vote.
Yes, NAP is a threat. Not to the lesbian
and gay community but to all the sellouts
and hypocrites who stand in the way of
independent politics and the empowerment
of those who have been passed by and
passed over. And I ’m prepared to fight the
enemies of our people with everything I've
got for as long as it takes. And that's a
promise.
CiviC “
R ights Journal
by Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr.
Keep Pressure And
Sanctions On South Africa
Pan Africanism: The Key to Global
Progress For The Black World
In his most famous speech, “ Message
to the Grassroots,” Malcolm X explained
that “ revolutions are fought for land.”
Malcolm pressed the point that ” . . . land is
the basis of independence.” The struggle in
the world today Malcolm suggested was
between "th e landless and the landlords.”
Malcolm X was driving home the point that
African people in America and the world
need to liberate, maintain and develop land.
For as the old blues rendition goes, “ mama
may have, poppa may have, but God bless
the child that got his ow n.” Africa should be
the principal land base for African people in
Africa and the world.
In 1961 W.E.B. Dubois wrote: "Today
out of Africa come 95 percent of the world’s
diamonds; 80 percent of the cobalt,; 60
percent of the gold; 75 percent of the sisal
hemp; 70 percent of the palm oil; 30 percent
of the chrome and manganese; 15 percent of
the coffee; and an increasing part of the
uranium and radium and large amounts of
tin, iron and spices.”
That was in 1961. No doubt Africa’s
share of most of these categories of miner
als, raw materials and cash crops has dra
matically increased since that time. And
Africa has gained a new- found prominence
as an oil producing continent It was not by
accident that Europeans sat down at the
Congress of Berlin in 1884 to systematize
their mad scramble to carve up and colonize
Africa. From Britain to Belgium, from
Germany to Portugal, Italy and Spain, Euro
peans knew that Africa is the richest conti
nent on earth.
The great tragedy is that since the great
holocaust of the trans-Atlantic slave trade,
the enormous human and material wealth of
Africa has been used to develop and enrich
Europe and America at the expense of the
development of the indigenous people of
Africa and her sons and daughters in the
diaspora. The great challenge confronting
the Black world as we face the 21st century
is the urgent need to break the psychologi
cal, cultural and political-economic chains
ol slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism
in order to reclaim the resources of Africa
for the development of Africa and the Black
world.
To confront this challenge is not to
succumb to a kind of narrow, self-centered
global ethno-centrism. It is simply to recog
nize that' ’Charity begins at home and spreads
abroad." That we as African people must
learn to love our neighbors as we LOVE
OURSELVES. Indeed the humanistic char
acter of our traditional African values sug
gest that Ethiopia will stretch forth its hand
to lead the world
As we face the dawning of a new cen
tury, the cold facts arc that western Europe
is slated to consolidate an economic and
political union in 1992. East and West
Germany are on the verge of reunification.
Eastern Europe is posed for a possible eco
nomic common market of its own. Last but
not least, the United States and the Soviet
Union are embarking on an unprecedented
era of cooperation and collaboration. The
obvious question is, where will this escalat
ing economic and political unity of Europe
and America leave Africa and the Third
World?
The answer is also obvious. Africa and
the Third World will be left out, perma
nently locked in a condition of poverty,
underdevelopment and subservience. This
is the unpleasant reality we face unless there
is a growing commitment to economic and
political co-operation between African na
tions on the continent and a solid link be
tween the nations of Africa and Africans in
America, the Carribean and the rest of the
diaspora. These pan-African economic and
political relationships can then become a
basis for increased Third World political
solidarity and economic cooperation.
Given the tremendous changes that are
unfolding before our eyes almost daily, African
people the world over had better be prepared
to make a serious commitment to the afro
centric development of Africa as a eco
nomic and political power base for African
aspirations the world over. In the context of
this scenario, African-Americans must
undergo a serious change of attitude to
wards Africa, our role as African people in
America and our vision and mission on the
world scene. We will either transform our
selves, or we are destined to enter the 21st
century just as we entered the 20th century
. . . as peons in America and on planet earth.
Now that South Africa finally has freed
Nelson Mandela and suspended some of the
restrictions and bans thathad been instituted
against the African National Congress and
other groups, there are many, including
President George Bush, who are saying the
time has come to relax the pressure on South
Africa. To the contrary, we believe the anti
apartheid movement should increase the
pressure and international economic sanc
tions campaign on South Africa. In spite of
the latest government actions, apartheid is
still very much alive in South Africa.
Despite the eloquence of South African
F. W. DeKlerk’s speech to the racially ex
clusive and segregated South African Par
liament, the basic racist principles and insti
tutions of apartheid are being maintained.
Yes, changes are now unfolding in South
Africa. Yes, DeKlerk’s speech was a wel
come departure from the rigid positions of
past South African presidents. Yes, we greet
the freeing of Nelson Mandela with a great
sense of joy. But it is exceedingly clear that
the changes that are now occurring in South
Africa are a direct result of pressure from
the majority African population in South
Africa and from the global anti-apartheid
movement’s economic sanctions against
South Africa.
Yes, sanctions have worked and will
continue to make a difference. Sanctions are
effective and this is a concrete method of
helping to force change in South Africa.
We salute the faith, fortitude, courage
and irrepressible strength of Nelson Man
dela after living through the ordeal of being
unjustly imprisoned for twenty-seven years
AT JON
in South Africa as a political prisoner.
M andela's struggle embodies and epito
mizes the struggle of the people for free
dom, justice, self-determination and peace.
President Bush stated, " I think when
people move in the right direction, it is
certainly time to review all policy . . . I view
it positively, and most people around the
world will.” Yet most people around the
world, particularly in southern Africa, are
calling for keeping the pressure on South
Africa so that more changes toward disman
tling apartheid will occur. Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher following Bush’s per
spective concluded, “ We believe in carrots
as well as sticks and . . . the South African
government should now have some of the
former.” Thatcher should be reminded that
the problem in the past has been the diplo
matic and economic support of “ apartheid' ’
by the Western notion through “ construc
tive engagement” that has helped to pro
long the life of apartheid. Racist apartheid
should not be fed “ carrots." the United
States and Great Britain should refrain from
supporting the apartheid regime in Pretoria.
The African National Congress responded
to DeKlerk's announcement. The ANC stated,
‘ ‘We welcome the lifting of the bans on the
ANC and other organizations. We also
welcome other positive measures announced
by F. W. DeKlerk. We are, however, gravely
concerned that the Pretoria regime has taken
the decision that some political prisoners
will not be released, that the state of em er
gency is not lifted in its entirety and that the
practice of detention without trial will con
tinue. These decisions subtract rather than
add to the process of creating the proper
political climate. The normalization of rela
tions between South Africa and the rest of
the world must continue to depend on end
ing the apartheid system. We therefore expect
no country committed to ending white
minority domination in South Africa will do
anything to lessen the isolations of the apart
heid regim e.”
Therefore, together with the African
National Congress Bishop Tutu, Rev. Allen
Boesak, the Mass Democratic Movement of
South Africa, and millions of others we say,
“ Keep the pressure on South Africa until
victory is finally won.”
SCHOLARSHIP
DEADLINE
High school students who are
UNDER A "PARTNERS IN EDUCATION" BANNER-Dr. Beverly C. Glenn,
dean of the Howard University School of Education, addresses students,
teachers and parents at Nalle Elementary School to seal a partnership between
the school and the university. The dean has launched an assault on forces
contributing to p<»or learning at the school located in a drug-infested area of the
nation's capital. (Photo by Marvin T. Jones)
Interested In applying fo r $1,000
college scholarships should request
applications by M a rc h 16,1990 for
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Scholarship Foundation, 721 N .
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