Opinion
‘Ambitious While Black’ is No Crime
“Challenging People to Shape
a Better Future Now”
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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.