After the Election, Blacks Turn Inward

By Hazel Trice EdneyNNPA Washington Correspondent WASHINGTON (NNPA) – African-Americans should place less emphasis on electoral politics and more focus on economics and other forms of community empowerment, some activists suggest. “I’ve always believed that voting has to be done in combination with other things,” says Ron Daniels, executive director of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, a non-profit legal and educational organization dedicated to protecting the rights of citizens. “We should mix it with some of the things that we don’t like to do that this period will force us to do.” With the high cost of the war in Iraq, a bloated federal deficit that exceeds $400 billion, Blacks realize that they must increasingly rely on themselves, not the federal government. “We need a resurgence in African-American-based organizations like the NAACP, like the Urban League, like other local community-based groups,” says National Urban League President and Chief Executive Officer Marc Morial. “We need to continue to recognize that when we had no voice in the political system, we had our historic organizations and they carried the ball. Always on top of my list is economics and jobs.” The Urban League operates job-training programs for the unemployed. Every chapter has a jobs board that carry job openings. Still, the Black unemployment rate 10.7 to the White unemployment rate is 4.7. And even when Blacks and Whites acquire the same level of education, Whites are paid more than Blacks. According to the University of Georgia’s Selig Center for Economic Growth, annual Black spending power stood at $688 billion in 2002 and is projected to reach $921 billion in 2008. Many activists say redirecting a significant slice of that pie to Black businesses could transform the Black community. However, Bill Spriggs, senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based economic research organization, has mixed feelings about that prospect. He says if African-Americans were mobilized and motivated to combine resources, mass investments or even near takeovers of certain industries could help force the hiring of or doing business with African-Americans. “I suppose there is a way in which you could lower the discriminatory barriers in things like Hollywood, for instance or the recording industry where we have a significant foothold or the sports industry where we have a big foothold,” he says. “We live in a very decentralized economy. It’s a pure capitalist economy,” says Spriggs. “It’s just very hard for people to imagine how you’re going to do something that’s so centralized and then, ‘How does that benefit me?'” Many Blacks fed up with Corporate America or have opted for early buy-out programs, are trying their hands at business. And to some experts, that’s long overdue. “One of the things people do is when they go to college, they feel like they’re going to college ‘So I can work for IBM.’ But entrepreneurship is what makes America and what has made America and that is a viable option,” says Rosalind Pennington, president of the National Black Business Council (NBBC) in Culver City, Calif. The 823,000 Black-owned businesses in the U. S. make up only 3 percent of the 21 million companies in the U.S. Both Latino businesses (6 percent or 1.2 million firms)and Asian-American companies (4 percent or 913,000) exceed the presence of Black companies. Louis Sullivan, former secretary of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, says African-Americans also need to take care of some personal business – their health. Of the 15 leading causes of death in the U.S., Blacks top the list in 11 categories, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Our population generally needs to focus on healthy lifestyles and disease prevention,” Sullivan says. Lack of health insurance contributes to those numbers. Research by the University of Minnesota commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that 18 percent of working African-Americans have no health care, compared to 11 percent of working Whites. The report, made public in May, gave several healthcare options for working people without health insurance, including free community health screenings and clinics. It also recommended a free brochure by Families, U. S. A., a health care consumer advocate, that lists low cost health insurance programs, community health centers, free clinics and pharmaceutical assistance programs throughout the country for uninsured working people. The “Free Care Manual” can be obtained by going to www.healthinsurancepartnerships.org or by calling 202-737-6340. Both conservatives and progressives agree that more emphasis should be placed on education. Although Blacks have made tremendous progress in closing the gap in high school graduation rates, there is still a 12 percentage point difference between the high school graduation rates of White and Black students. “We’re going to have to have to find ways to get our children to stay in school, do well in school. We need to take control of our schools and help them graduate in record numbers,” says Washington Bureau Director Hilary Shelton. The NAACP has a 20-year-old Back to School/Stay in School Program that gives academic and personal guidance to youth who have dropped out or are in danger of dropping out of school. It operates from more than 40 sites around the nation and focuses on academic excellence, improved self-esteem, cultural enrichment and parental/community involvement. At the other end of the education scale, the NAACP operates its annual talent competition called ACT-SO (Academic, Cultural, Technical and Scientific Olympics). “We put as much emphasis on academic success as athletic success and the young people go and cheer each other,” Shelton says, referring to the program created by Vernon Jarrett, a journalist who died earlier this year. The Urban League’s Read and Rise program is also available. In Read and Rise: Preparing Our Children for a Lifetime of Success, NUL has partnered with Scholastic, the worldwide children’s publishing and media company, to equip children with early literacy and pre-reading skills to prepare them to do well in school. Affordable housing and homeownership is another goal that needs attention, says Derrick Span, national president of the Washington, D.C.-based Community Action Partnership (CAP), a non-profit coalition of anti-poverty organizations. The National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) predicts that between 700,000 and 800,000 people are homeless on any given night and over the course of a year between 2.5 and 3.5 million people will experience homelessness in the U. S. NAEH links the problem of homelessness directly to the shortage of affordable housing, incomes that do not pay for basic needs and the lack of appropriate services for people who need them. In addition to affordable housing programs, NAEH says the answers lie in advocacy for increased funding for homeless programs, training homeless individuals for employment through community organizations; registering homeless people to vote, and organizing or participating in community fundraising drives for homeless service agencies. “Home-ownership is the most effective anti-crime, anti-poverty program, asset-building program available to low-income people in this country,” Span says. “We’re going to have to build coalitions with housing organizations. We’re going to have to build strong coalitions with banks and credit unions and things of that nature.” Within the African-American community, less than 50 percent of U. S. citizens are homeowners, compared to 70 percent for Whites. The Pearl River Valley Opportunity, Inc., a CAP affiliate in Columbia, Miss., is working to change that. It formed a coalition between the organization, local contractors and banks to produce an entire low-income community of 293 houses, Span says. Intervention must also be sought to reduce the number of Blacks headed for prison. Approximately 4,810 Black males per 100,000 are incarcerated compared to 549 per 100,000 White males, a difference of nearly 776 percent. The disparity is drastically wider for African-American females at 349 per 100,000, compared to 66 per 100,000 for White women, a difference of nearly 429 percent, writes James R. Lanier, senior resident scholar for Community Justice Programs at NUL’s Institute for Opportunity and Equality in Washington, D.C. Lanier conducted special research for the NUL’s 2003 State of Black America report that proposed alternatives to incarceration such as developing more community programs with education and work components. Ninety percent of Black voters supported the Democratic Party in the Nov. 2 elections, but Democrats failed to win the White House or a majority of the U. S. Senate or House of Representatives. Therefore, while placing pressure on government, placing that same pressure on private corporations will also be a key, says Julia Hare, co-founder of the Black Think Tank in San Francisco, Calif. “We need to go back and complete the unfinished revolution and the business of the 60s because in that one decade, Black people got more than we got probably 60 years before and 60 years after that period,” “Corporations opened doors to bring Blacks in because they saw we were not kidding.”