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!
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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