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
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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.