Politics

Black Women Protest Delay in Confirming Loretta Lynch

Published

10 years ago

March 31, 2015

Oakland Post

Melanie Campbell (left) and Avis Jones-DeWeever protest delay in confirming Loretta Lynch.

By Jazelle Hunt
NNPA Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Hundreds of Black women and girls representing the Black Women’s Roundtable descended on the nation’s capital last week to petition the Senate to confirm U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch as the next attorney general.

“Loretta Lynch has been waiting over 140 days to get a vote on the floor. That’s never happened in the history of this country,” says Melanie Campbell, convener of the Roundtable, and president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation (NCBCP).

The Black Women Roundtable is the intergenerational arm of the NCBCP.

“They’re holding her up because they’re having a partisan battle,” said Campbell. “…. Why is this happening to a Black woman? The American people believe in fair play. It’s not fair, and it’s not correct.”

Campbell was one of about two-dozen members of the Roundtable who visited Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office on Thursday and attempted to meet with him on the matter. They were told he was busy and would not be able to meet with them, or greet them.

The women held a prayer vigil outside his office; security was called, but did not escort them out. They were able to meet with McConnell’s chief of staff; Campbell describes his response as “on-message stock answers.”

In addition to meeting with representatives, the Black Women Roundtable (BWR) released its 2015 Black Women in the United States report.

“This report is a little bit different than the last one in that it gives both the 50,000-foot view by providing data analysis across a variety of areas and indicators,” said the report’s editor, Avis Jones-DeWeever. “But in addition to that, it’s augmented by the stories from women…who are BWR members in states all across this country, whose voices are literally infused into this report. So you not only get the data, you also get the narratives behind the numbers.”

A similarity it shares with last year’s inaugural edition is the mix of celebration and concern.

And the concerns are many. First, every state with a large Black population, with the exception of Maryland and Delaware, plus Washington, D.C., is home to high numbers of uninsured Black women. All of the states in question have refused to expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act. At the same time, reproductive services are disappearing in these states, resulting in a rising maternal mortality rate among Black women, from 30 to 42 deaths out of 100,000 live births (compared to 12 deaths for White women).

“Already as it stands, Black women have maternal mortality rates that are frankly unheard of anywhere else in the industrialized world,” Jones-DeWeever said at the report release event. “If you are a Black woman in America, you have a better chance of surviving childbirth if you gave birth in Libya than in the United States of America. Our women are dying because of lack of care, and there’s no excuse for that.”

Black women also experience violence at disproportionately high rates; they’re more than twice as likely as all women, and three times as likely as White women, to be murdered. More than half of Black women who knew their murderers were romantically involved with them.

Economic success is another uphill battle. Despite national gains, Black women’s unemployment has remained the highest among all women – 8.9 percent compared to the national rate of 5.5 percent. While that’s lower than last year, the rate has been on a slow rise, contrary to unemployment stats for other women.

In the report, wage disparities play out across income categories, and especially across education levels. For example, Black women with master’s degrees earn slightly less than Black men with bachelor’s, and White men, Asians, and Latinos with associates or post-secondary degrees.

The good news, though, is that Black women are seizing political power as never before.

This year, Alma Adams (D-N.C.) became the 100^th Black woman elected to Congress. There are two new Black-woman mayors of major cities. Two new congressional representatives became the first Black congresswomen elected from their states (New Jersey and Utah), and Mia Love became the first Black woman ever elected to Congress as a Republican. There are two Black women running for Senate in 2016 – It’s been 17 years since a Black woman has occupied a Senate seat.

Three Black women representatives, Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), and Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI), were also present at the launch and spoke on the need to be involved in the reproductive, civil, and human rights, and other political conversations that impact Black women most.

The Black Women in the United States report is released each year as part of the BWR’s National Women of Power Summit, which brings girls and women from all over the nation to exercise their civil rights, develop solutions for sociopolitical problems, and honor Black women making strides in these areas.

“We try to bill the summit as an organizing summit…we’re going to take our key priority issues, delve deep, and then…get into smaller groups and talk strategy,” Campbell said. ““We’re not a research institute, but we know we have to have good data to be able to quantify what we’re doing [and] to understand what’s going on with us. We try make sure we tell the story about the challenges, but also what we’re doing well.”

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U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Published

13 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

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MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

Published

14 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.