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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 16, 2015)
Opinion Black Votes Taken for Granted “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 C hristen M C C urDy 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 2015 MERIT AWARDS WINNER A s we enter the 2016 polit- ical campaign season with numerous candidates for president of the United States in the Republican and Democratic parties, it appears once again that the political and economic inter- ests of Black America are not be- ing adequately addressed by either of the major political parties. It is as if the Black American vote is being taken for granted. The Black vote is important first to the Black community and secondly to American democracy. The right to vote and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did not come about without a struggle. Many brothers and sisters went to jail and paid a heavy painful price to acquire the right to vote. Some even died in the struggle to ad- vance Black political and civic participation. In the Civil Rights Movement, voting rights were deemed pre- cious and a sacred moral respon- sibility to everyone of voting age. Today, there is need for the Black community to reassert the value and strategic leverage of the Black vote. It is one thing for the status quo to ignore the political interests of the Black community, but it is another when so many of us are Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. NNPA President and CEO missing in action on Election Day. According to the United States Elections Project, Black voter turnout has been significantly in- creasing steadily from 48.1 per- cent in 1996 to 52.9 percent in 2000 to 61.4 percent in 2004 and peeking at 69 percent in 2008 the U.S., will determine the out- come of the elections. We should recall that in the 2012 elections, for the first time in history, Black voter turnout was higher than White voter turnout – 66.6 percent to 64.1 percent. Why do all these voting statis- tics matter? The short answer is because if we can continue to in- crease our voter turnout we will be better positioned to advance the interests of the Black community. A few weeks ago, the Pew Re- search Center reported that for the first time in history, there are at least 364 counties, indepen- dent cities and other county-level equivalents in the U.S. that did not We should recall that in the 2012 elections, for the first time in history, Black voter turnout was higher than White voter turnout when Senator Barack H. Obama was elected president. In 2016, we should have no less than a 90 percent Black turnout. If that hap- pens, the Black vote, more than any other single voting group in have a White majority population – “the most in modern history, and more than twice the level in 1980.” Ninety-two of the 364 counties are predominantly Black. This is leading to the election of more Blacks as county sheriffs, county chief executives, and other high public offices at the county and regional levels. Some would say it is poetic justice, but it is a rapidly chang- ing racial demographics reality in terms of population density in- creases and Black elected officials are on the rise particularly in the 11 states that once made up the old Confederacy: Alabama, Ar- kansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisi- ana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. That’s not surprising when you consider that 55 percent of all African Americans reside in the South, up from 53.6 percent in 2000. It’s not surprising that some of the most intense efforts to sup- press the Black vote is taking place in the South. Yes, Black Lives Matter! We must do whatever is necessary to improve the quality of life for our families and communities. Do not fall into the cynical attempts to persuade us that our votes do not count. Our votes do count and do make a big difference for the bet- terment of Black America. Yes, Black Votes Matter! The Skanner has received 20 NNPA awards since 1998 The Skanner Newspaper, es- tablished in October 1975, is a weekly publication, published each Wednesday by IMM Publications Inc. 415 N. Killingsworth St. P.O. Box 5455 Portland, OR 97228 Telephone (503) 285-5555 Fax: (503) 285-2900 E-mail: info@theskanner.com www.TheSkanner.com The Skanner is a member of the National Newspaper Pub lishers Association 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 unsolicit- ed. © 2015 The Skanner. ALL RIGHTS RE- SERVED. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART WITHOUT PERMISSION PROHIBITED. To view The Skanner website on your mobile device, scan this QR code • Local news • Opinions • Jobs, Bids • Sports • Entertainment • Music reviews • Bulletin board • RSS feeds Criminalizing Black Protest and Black People Is #BlackLivesMatter a crim- inal organization that advocates attacks on and murder of White police officers? That’s the snake-oil pitch the conservative echo chamber is making these days – even as news accounts every week bring new proof that neither Black law-abiding citizens nor, frank- ly, Black criminals, nor anyone else are preying upon the po- lice. Washington Post columnist Radley Balko’s Sept. 10 column offers a must-read examination of the data that shows that assaults on and murders of police officers have fallen to dramatic lows in recent years, and there’s no indi- cation they’re about to increase. Balko emphasizes, The so-called war on cops“just isn’t true.” Instead, what continues to be true is that a significant number of individual cops and prison guards continually seek the slightest ex- cuse – or no excuse at all – to bru- talize Blacks and other people of color. Look at the video released last week by the Fairfax County (Va.) sheriff’s office of five offi- cers wearing biohazard suits, gas masks and rubber gloves taking Natasha McKenna, a 5’4’’ men- tally unstable Black woman, from her cell – apparently completely nude – last February and shoot- ing her with a stun gun four times while she lay face down on the floor outside her cell. She died days later. Read the Sept. 10 New York Times account of the death in April of a Black mentally ill in- mate at New York’s Fishkill state prison, Samuel Harrell, allegedly at the hands of a so-called “Beat Up Squad” of prison guards, and their subsequent efforts to intim- Lee A. Daniels NNPA Columnist idate inmates who witnessed the killing into silence. Watch the video of a bully-boy New York City undercover cop jumping retired Black tennis star James Blake in front of a Manhat- tan hotel Sept. 10, and read of this dirty cop’s record of assaulting in- nocent people. These three terrifying examples don’t begin to indicate the scope of the reality so many Black and the post-Civil War achievements Blacks forged during the Recon- struction Era, or the mid-twenti- eth-century Civil Rights Move- ment. Revealingly, it was after the massive March on Washington of 1963 that arch-racist F.B.I. direc- tor J. Edgar Hoover called Martin Luther King, Jr. — not Malcolm X — “the most dangerous Negro in America.” Today, the striking success of Blacks in marshaling their voting power has provoked the Republi- can Party’s national campaign to block Blacks’ access to the ballot under the smokescreen of prevent- ing voter fraud. And conservatives have constantly attacked President Obama himself as “lawless.” For example, in October 2008, when his victory over the McCain/Palin the many injustices of the crimi- nal justice system that, thanks to videos, e-mail, tweets and text messages, have become more and more visible to more and more people. Further, #BlackLives- Matter has added a compelling, straight-from-the-streets energy and urgency to the high-level ef- forts of Obama administration and elected officials and public-policy scholars to reform the criminal justice system. Another reason for the conser- vative movement’s attack against today’s Black protest move- ment stems from its own abject failure in several of the “theaters” of the war it’s been waging against the Obama administration and American democracy. Its miserable record of failure— from not defeating Obama electoral- ly, to not blocking Obamacare either in the Congress or the courts, to neither halting nor slowing the expansion of rights for gay and lesbian Americans, to its humiliating in- ability to undermine the landmark treaty Obama and the leaders of six European na- tions forged with Iran to prevent the latter from developing nuclear weapons—underscores why chaos continues to rule the Republicans’ presidential sweepstakes process. In other words, two of the pil- lars of the anti-#BlackLivesMat- ter campaign suggest the third desperate motive for it, and exem- plify what conservatives often do when they find themselves stuck in a political quagmire: They play the dirty game of “blame the Black people.” What continues to be true is that a significant number of individual cops and prison guards continually seek the slightest excuse – or no excuse at all – to brutalize Blacks and other people of color Hispanic Americans face from the front-line “troops” of America’s criminal justice system. But they are enough to show up the “crimi- nalization gambit” as just another rotting plank of the structure of American racism. Criminalizing Americans of col- or, especially Black Americans, has long been a constant of Amer- ican society. Racists have often tried to diminish black protest movements, and Black achieve- ment itself, by characterizing them that way — be it the pre-Civ- il War abolitionist movement, Page 2 September 16, 2015 The Portland and Seattle Skanner ticket seemed assured, conserva- tive pundit Michael Barone wrote a column bemoaning the “coming liberal thugocracy” his adminis- tration would be. Naturally, his phrasing was rapidly picked up by the conservative confederacy. That framework helps illuminate three specific reasons conserva- tives are pushing the criminaliza- tion gambit against #BlackLives- Matter now. One is their fear of its success in giving blacks and many pro- gressive-leaning Whites a means of direct-action protest against
