Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (Feb. 11, 2015)
Opinion Poverty Doesn’t Have to be a State “Challenging People to Shape a Better Future Now” B ERNIE F OSTER Founder/Publisher B OBBIE D ORE F OSTER Executive Editor J ERRY F OSTER Advertising Manager L ISA L OVING News Editor P ATRICIA I RVIN Graphic Designer A RASHI Y OUNG D ONOVAN M. S MITH Reporters M ONICA J. F OSTER Seattle Office Coordinator J ULIE K EEFE S USAN F RIED Photographers The Skanner Newspaper, established in October 1975, is a weekly publica- tion, published each Wednesday by IMM Publications Inc., 415 N. Killingsworth St., P.O. Box 5455, Portland, OR 97228. Telephone (503) 285-5555. E-mail: info@theskanner.com World Wide Web site: http://www.theskanner.com Fax: (503) 285-2900 The Skanner is a member of the National Newspaper Pub lishers Associ- ation and West Coast Black Pub lishers Association. All photos submitted become the property of The Skanner. We are not re - spon sible for lost or damaged photos either solicited or unsolicited. © 2014 The Skanner. ALL RIGHTS RE SERVED. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART WITHOUT PERMISSION PROHIBITED. To see The Skanner News on your smart phone go to theskannermobile.com or scan this QR code with your app. • • • • • • • • Local news Opinions Jobs, Bids Sports Entertainment Music reviews Bulletin board RSS feeds T he racial differential in the poverty rate is staggering. Last time I checked, about 12 percent people in the United States, one in eight people are poor. Depending on race and eth- nicity, however, poverty is differently experienced. Fewer than one in 10 Whites are poor; more than one in four African Americans and Latinos are poor. Differences in occupation, income, employment and educa- tion are considered the main reasons for poverty, with current and past discrimination playing a role in educational, employment and occupational attainment. We see the discrimination when we consider that African American women with a doctoral degree have median earnings of about $1,000 a week, compared to about $1,200 a week for Black men and White women, and $1,600 a week for White men. White men earn 60 percent more than African Ameri- can women, and a third more than Black men and White women. It would not take much to recite the differences, by race, or educa- tion, unemployment, earnings and occupation. The recurrent question in reviewing the data is: What are we going to do? It makes no sense to just recite the data and then wring our hands as if nothing can be done. The three steps in social change are organization (especial- ly protest), which leads to legislation (with pressure) and liti- gation (when legislation is not B ENNETT C OLLEGE Julianne Malveaux implemented). Often laws preventing discrimi- nation have been passed but not adhered to, forcing litigation to get offenders to do the right thing. Of course, it takes more than a minute. It takes people who are committed for the long run. “The arc of the moral universe is long, and History. Both the organization and the journal have now existed for 100 years which is perhaps why ASALH chose “A Century of Black Lives, History and Culture” as its 2015 theme. (ASALH choose a Black History Month theme each year). This year, their focus on the long arc of African American life in our nation and asserts that “this transformation is the result of effort, not chance.” Carter G. Woodson made many choices that led to his education and to the creativity and brilliance that motivated him to uplift Black History through Negro History Week, now Black History Month. Woodson was the son of former White men earn 60 percent more than African American women, and a third more than Black men and White women but it bends toward justice,” Dr. Martin Luther King said in 1964. Carter Goodson Woodson understood the long arc when he founded the Journal of Negro His- tory and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915. The organization and the journal have changed their names to reflect the nomenclature of these times, and they are now called The Journal of African American History and the Associ- ation for the Study of Negro Life slaves, and a family that was large and poor. He worked as a miner in West Virginia, and attended school just a few months a year. At 20, he started high school and by 28 he had earned his bachelor’s degree. He was only the second African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard (W.E.B DuBois was the first in 1895). He was a member of the Howard University faculty and was later a dean. He wrote, “If you can contrail a man’s thinking, you don’t worry about his action. If you can deter- mine what a man thinks you do not have to worry about what he will do. If you can make a man believe that he is inferior, you don’t have to compel him to seek an inferior status, he will do so without being told, and if you can make a man believe that he is just- ly an outcast, you don’t have to order him to the back door, he will go to the back door on his own and if there is no back door, the very nature of the man will demand that you build one.” In other words, poverty can be the reality of living, but it doesn’t have to be a state of mind. Many are trapped in poverty because that may be all they know, and because protest, legislation, and litigation have not provided a passage out of poverty. No one provided a pas- sage out of poverty for Woodson. He worked as a miner to earn a liv- ing, and he transcended his status as a miner to make a life of embracing his people and our his- tory. He wrote about the ways that our thinking could oppress us as much as living conditions can. He is a role model and example for African Americans today because, motivated by a desire to be educat- ed, he fought his way out of poverty. There is a difference between thinking you can live like Carter G. Woodson, and thinking that you can’t. See www.ASALH.org for more infor- mation. Did NBC’S Brian Williams Lie about Katrina? “N BC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams has finally admitted that he had incorrectly asserted that a helicopter he trav- eled aboard while reporting on the Iraq War in 2003 was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, forcing an emergency landing. “This was a bungled attempt by me to thank one special veteran and by extension our brave mili- tary men and women veterans everywhere…” he said on air. Williams’ admission came on the heels of a story published in the military publication Stars & Stripes that challenged his retelling of events. “NBC News anchor Brian Williams has told a war story over the years since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It grew to where he was claiming to be on a Chinook heli- copter that was forced down after taking rocket-propelled grenade and small-arms fire,” the newspa- per reported. “In his on-air apology Wednesday, he backed off that, but said that he ‘was instead in a following aircraft.’ Soldiers who were in two Chinook compa- nies say he was not in, nor ever near, a helicopter that was being fired upon.” Williams, who makes $13 mil- lion a year, has drastically altered his story over the years, according to a timeline published by CNN. Lt. Col. Jerry Pearman, the mis- sion commander when one of the three Chinooks took fire, told Stars & Stripes, “I can say with 100 percent certainty that no NBC reporters were on any of the aircrafts.” Fairness & Accuracy in Report- ing (FAIR), the media watchdog T HE C URRY group, said, “Now that he’s R EPORT cleared that up, there are some other tall tales that Williams might want to take back. Take his George E. recounting of the aftermath of Curry Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (Dateline NBC, 8/22/10; Extra!, 10/10): “You know, I’ve been around a Following his public admission, lot of guns and a lot of dead bod- Williams said that he would forgo ies, and a lot of people shooting at his anchoring duties at the top- people to make dead bodies. But rated network news program “for you put them all together and you the next several days.” put it in the United States of Amer- Politico.com, describing what it ica, and boy, it gets your called “a sign of deepening trou- attention…. ble,” reported on Sunday that “It was clear already there Williams cancelled an appearance weren’t going to be enough ‘Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence’ on “Late Night with David Letter- man” that had been scheduled for Thursday. It was on an earlier Letterman show that Williams also gave his now-discredited account. The New York Times reported, “In 2013, Mr. Williams told David Letterman that he had actually been on the helicopter that got shot down, adding that a crew member had been injured and received a medal. ‘We figured out how to land safely,’ he said, ‘we landed very quickly and hard. We were stuck, four birds in the desert and we were north out ahead of the other Americans.’” Of course, none of that was true. Page 2 The Portland and Seattle Skanner February 11, 2015 cops…. Everywhere we went, every satellite shot, every camera shot, we were at the height of the violence and the looting and the— all the reports of gunplay downtown. Well, who’s bathed in the only lights in town? It was us…. “We had to ask Federal Protec- tion Service guys with automatic weapons to just form a ring and watch our backs while we were doing Dateline NBC one night…. State troopers had to cover us by aiming at the men in the street just to tell them, ‘Don’t think of doing a smash and grab and killing this guy for the car.’” FAIR stated, “As long as he’s in a confessional mood, Williams might as well admit that he didn’t see ‘a lot of people shooting at people to make dead bodies,’ nor would people have killed him for his car if he hadn’t been surrounded by feds – none of which appeared in his original reporting.” The New Orleans Times- Picayune reported in a Pulitzer Prize-winning story, “Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimag- inable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.” To Williams’ credit he did air a week-long series called “After the Storm: The Long Road Back” in which the network tackled racial discrimination, among other issues. He said Katrina was differ- ent from most disasters and that NBC would “keep covering it.” However, that was not the case. FAIR observed, “… Katrina’s impoverished victims faded rapid- ly away from NBC’s coverage thereafter. By the six-month anniversary in February, NBC had joined its rivals in limiting cover- age to a brief look at the struggles of putting on Mardi Gras in a depopulated city, then moving on before anyone could accuse them of peering too deeply into matters of race or class.” Perhaps it was another ”bungled attempt” by Brian Williams to por- tray himself as a hero.
