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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (April 1, 2015)
Opinion ‘Ambitious While Black’ is No Crime “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. © 2015 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 M ultnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith appar- ently works too hard and spends too much on her con- stituents. Is that a sin? According to a recent news article, Smith’s office has sponsored more county tables at nonprofit events than any other commissioner. She’s attended too many national conferences and spent too much on hotel rooms. All of this money, by the way, came out of the expense budget for her office –the same amount that all the commissioners get. Smith could have spent it on staff. Instead, she sponsors com- munity nonprofits and brings food to events serving some of the county’s most needy families. Smoking gun: Smith spent $2,000 to support a program for Black youth through the National Association of Black County Officials. The organi- zation gives scholarships to Black youth entering govern- ment service and helps counties around the coun- EDITORIAL The Skanner News try— including Multnomah County –improve education and career prospects for Black boys and men. The donation was allowed under you get home? That’s not corruption. It’s human nature. I’d bet most of us have done something sim- ilar. What’s a commissioner to do? Is she supposed to repre- sent Multnomah County by staying in the YWCA? Stay home? I guess Portland has nothing to learn from cities like Atlanta, Memphis and Washington DC. Smith This city would benefit from more capable people of color in government that take risks. Loretta Smith has shown herself to be both capable and committed to public service county rules. Smith’s expense claims have been put under the microscope. But is it really wrong to pay your $50 bar tab with the same card you’re using for other expenses, so long as you pay it back when should just forget about sitting on national boards and work- ing with national experts. The central accusation against Smith is that she is ambitious and interested in running for city commissioner or other offices. That means, her detractors say, that every- thing she does must be self-serving and self- promot- ing. It’s laughable. This city would benefit from more capable people of color in government that take risks. Smith has shown herself to be both capable and commit- ted to public service. That should be commended not attacked. Being Ambitious While Black is not a crime. It’s the Tall Poppy syn- drome. Whenever somebody stands above the crowd they must be cut down. Smith is spending more than the other commissioners on certain work-related expenses. Therefore, small minds imag- ine she must be doing something wrong. We don’t support everything Commissioner Smith says and does. But we are not going to fault her for working harder than almost any other elected offi- cial to support her constituents. That’s why we elected her. Her record is clean. Mo’ne Davis: Young, Gifted, and Abused I n the course of one week we witnessed the burden of being young, gifted and Black. First, the Little League baseball phenom Mo’ne Davis was insulted by a White college baseball player who called the abundantly talented young girl a ‘slut’ in a Tweet in response to news that Disney was planning to make a movie about her incredible rise to fame. The player, Joey Casselberry, quickly retracted the tweet in the face of a wave of criticism in cyberspace but was promptly dismissed by the Bloomsburg University team. Then there were the toxic tweets from Jenna and Jacque Huggins, the daughters of West Virginia head basketball coach Bob Hug- gins, calling Maryland basketball player Dez Wells a rapist. The West Virginia team defeated Maryland in an early round of the NCAA championship tournament. The Terrapins star guard had been kicked off the Xavier University team in 2012 after being accused of sexual assault. A grand jury decided charges against Wells were not warranted and he later settled a lawsuit he brought against Xavier. Not far from the Morgantown campus of the University of West Virginia and College Park home of the University of Maryland, a young, Black University of Vir- ginia undergraduate student was accosted by police. Martese John- son had his face bashed into the pavement and bloodied by Vir- ginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) agents outside a pub near the UVA cam- pus. The episode was captured on videotape. Johnson had proper ID and was not resisting arrest when Page 2 The Portland and Seattle Skanner April 1, 2015 It is the success of Davis, Wells and Johnson that defies and coun- NNPA ters the mythology of Black C OLUMNIST depravity. And it is success that triggers the backlash, awakens the racist beast and brings to the sur- Walter face sentiments that heretofore Fields might have only been expressed in private conversations. By suc- ceeding, these young people frustrate those who harbor bias the ABC agents pummeled him, and leave them little room to fully causing injuries that required 10 exercise their demons. For some, stitches in his head. touch pad keystrokes become a What these three incidents have potent weapon to voice hatred in common is obvious – Mo’ne from afar; sort of the lazy man’s Davis, Dez Wells and Martese racism that tempers it but still By succeeding, these young people frustrate those who harbor bias and leave them little room to fully exercise their demons Johnson are all young and Black. Lurking just beyond the obvious tie is the quality of their blackness – they are all gifted and confident in their identities. It seems in 21st century America to be young, gift- ed and Black is now a crime; an offense against society’s typecast- ing of Black youth as violent, unintelligent and worthless. The intensity of these assaults – oral and physical – is sharpened by decades of conditioned hate, forged by theories of Black inferi- ority and White supremacy. The venomous words electronically spat upon Davis and Wells, and the force leveled upon Martese Johnson, are simply the byprod- ucts of the permissiveness of racism in our nation. empowers the perpetrator. The police involved in the micro- aggression at the University of Virginia? They were acting under the assumption of “Black threat” and sending a message in the process. This is the cruel joke played upon Black youth in America. The public message communicated to young Black women and men is to pursue excellence and rise above challenges, and be exemplary in their civic lives. That message is countered by the aural and visual assault upon their sensibilities that reduces them to thugged out and hyper-sexualized caricatures. When young Blacks rise above this stereotyping, they are then reduced to racial objects, ridiculed for being audacious in their suc- cess. Mo’ne Davis was a “slut” in the eyes of a young White male because he believes her success is undeserving of the attention it is receiving. The privileged White daughters of a basketball coach of a major university made the deter- mination a grand jury could not, on a charge a university could not prove and was forced to reach set- tlement with the accused. Still, Dez Wells is branded a rapist because he excelled on the basketball court. Martese Johnson was just another young Black guy, a human punching bag for police who could casually dismiss the thought that they were bloodying a student enrolled in the nearby prestigious university, or more importantly, a human being and someone’s son. Collectively, these incidents bring into sharper focus the racist rants of former University of Oklahoma SAE fraternity mem- bers in that now infamous videotape. This is the world in which young Black Americans live. It is a sobering reality that a generation that many hoped would truly be post-racial (as if that will ever be the case) is more deeply entrenched in racism than the prior generation. And institutional racism has a vice grip upon young Blacks that is more consequential than white mobs of decades past. It’s enough to make me take a trip to the nearest Starbucks. I’ll take a latte with some truth talk. Walter Fields is Executive Edi- tor of NorthStarNews.com.
