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Op-Ed

Emmanuel AME and the Buoyancy of Hope

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Lee A. Daniels

By Lee A. Daniels
NNPA Columnist

 

Rev. Clementa Pinckney and his fellow congregants of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. gathered as usual in the historic edifice June 17 for their Wednesday evening prayer service. They came, as always, to refresh their religious faith, to testify and bear witness to the importance of living a life of righteousness and to extend to all, including the stranger in their midst, their welcome and their trust.

How could they know that he represented a monstrous evil that would consume them?

So, once again, American society has been wounded by the dangerous forces of hatred and violence that have always shadowed the gleaming idealism of the American Creed.

As usual when the mask of American innocence slips, the crowd that loves to glibly boast of “American exceptionalism” ran for cover. Fox News propagandists led the way in desperately fleeing from the clear evidence of Dylann Roof’s racism. Instead, they claimed he was striking against Christianity and “religious freedom.” Revealingly, the same pose was adopted by the Internet’s overtly White-supremacist websites and the trolls of the right-wing Twitter mob.

But Dylann Roof’s own words and Facebook posts leave no doubt of his motivation—and leave no room for the cowardice of not confronting them.

President Obama gave voice to “the heartache and the sadness and the anger” the massacre provoked in decent people when he said, “we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries … with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it … the politics in [Washington] foreclose a lot of those avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it. At some point it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively.”

In those words the president spoke, substitute for “gun violence” the words “slavery” and/or “racism” and you have why, for many Black Americans, the terrorist attack at Emanuel AME scourged a profound historically-rooted pain.

Yet, even in this moment of grief, we ought to recognize the several truths that offer “the buoyancy of hope,” said the president, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

One truth lies in our learning something of the very people – a cross-section of the American people – who were gunned down. Their being lost to the whirlwind of evil shouldn’t be allowed to obscure their fundamental goodness and commitment to Christianity’s most cherished precepts – as shown in their families’ heart-rending declarations of forgiveness toward Roof. “We are the family that love built,” said Bethane Middleton-Brown, sister of DePayne Middleton-Doctor, during the June 19 court hearing on the charges against Roof. Middleton-Brown said her family has no room for hate in their hearts, before adding that “I also thank God I won’t be around when your judgment days comes with him.”

The tragedy has also underscored the real and symbolic meaning to Black Americans of the Black Church. It was and remains our piece of the rock: A refuge against the storm of racism and malicious indifference that has swirled about us outside its walls. A vault that has held the treasures of fellowship and the space to practice communal leadership as well as religious faith. And an armory where Black Americans forged and buffed to a luminous shine both their civic faith in the American Ideal and the weapon—nonviolent protest—they would use to demand the full measure of their American citizenship.

Another insight is that Emanuel AME is “historic” not just because of its early 19th-century founding but because it met again and again the challenge of being a full-service Black communal institution. In that regard, Mother Emanuel is, thankfully, far from unique. Innumerable Black communities across the country have a “Mother Church” of this or that Protestant denomination whose roots go back to at least the late 1800s.

Another bright gleam the tragedy cannot extinguish was the immediate rush of people of all backgrounds to stand in solidarity with the congregants of Mother Emanuel. That was most dramatically illustrated by the actions of Debbie Dills and Todd Frady, two White North Carolinians whose call to a local police officer in the morning of June 18 directly led to Dylann Roof’s capture. Dills, who spotted Roof in his car while she was driving to her job at Frady’s florist shop, said, “I saw the news coverage last night. … Since it happened I was praying for them and the church. I was in the right place at the right time that the Lord puts you.”

That shining compassion, sense of kinship and determination to redeem a terrible wrong both illustrate and justify “the buoyancy of hope” that has always fueled black Americans’ faith in America and in their march toward the future. 

 

Lee A. Daniels is a longtime journalist based in New York City. His essay, “Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Great Provocateur,” appears in Africa’s Peacemakers: Nobel Peace Laureates of African Descent (2014), published by Zed Books. His new collection of columns, Race Forward: Facing America’s Racial Divide in 2014, is available at www.amazon.com.

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Bay Area

In the City Attorney Race, Ryan Richardson Is Better for Oakland

It’s been two years since negotiations broke down between the City of Oakland and a developer who wants to build a coal terminal here, and the issue has reappeared, quietly, in the upcoming race for Oakland City attorney. Two candidates are running for the position of Oakland City Attorney in November: current Assistant Chief City Attorney Ryan Richardson and retired judge Brenda Harbin-Forte.

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Members of Oaklanders Defending Democracy political action committee with Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, center. Courtesy photo.
Members of Oaklanders Defending Democracy political action committee with Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, center. Courtesy photo.

By Margaret Rossoff

Special to The Post

OPINION

It’s been two years since negotiations broke down between the City of Oakland and a developer who wants to build a coal terminal here, and the issue has reappeared, quietly, in the upcoming race for Oakland City attorney.

Two candidates are running for the position of Oakland City Attorney in November: current Assistant Chief City Attorney Ryan Richardson and retired judge Brenda Harbin-Forte.

Richardson has worked in the Office of the City Attorney since 2014 and is likely to continue current City Attorney Barbara Parker’s policies managing the department. He has committed not to accept campaign contributions from developers who want to store and handle coal at a proposed marine terminal in Oakland.

Retired Judge Harbin-Forte launched and has played a leading role in the campaign to recall Mayor Sheng Thao, which is also on the November ballot.  She has stepped back from the recall campaign to focus on her candidacy. The East Bay Times noted, “Harbin-Forte’s decision to lead the recall campaign against a potential future client is … troubling — and is likely to undermine her ability, if she were to win, to work effectively.”

Harbin-Forte has refused to rule out accepting campaign support from coal terminal interests or their agents. Coal terminal lobbyist Greg McConnell’s Independent Expenditure Committee “SOS Oakland” is backing her campaign.

In the 2022 mayor’s race, parties hoping to build a coal terminal made $600,000 in contributions to another of McConnell’s Independent Expenditure Committees.

In a recent interview, Harbin-Forte said she is open to “listening to both sides” and will be “fair.” However, the City Attorney’s job is not to judge fairly between the City and its legal opponents – it is to represent the City against its opponents.

She thought that the 2022 settlement negotiations ended because the City “rejected a ‘no coal’ settlement.” This is lobbyist McConnell’s narrative, in contrast to the report by City Attorney Barbara Parker. Parker has explained that the City continued to negotiate in good faith for a settlement with no “loopholes” that could have allowed coal to ship through Oakland – until would-be coal developer Phil Tagami broke off negotiations.

One of Harbin-Forte’s main priorities, listed on her website, is “reducing reliance on outside law firms,” and instead use the lawyers working in the City Attorney’s office.

However, sometimes this office doesn’t have the extensive expertise available that outside firms can provide in major litigation. In the ongoing, high stakes coal litigation, the City has benefited from collaborating with experienced, specialized attorneys who could take on the nationally prominent firms representing the City’s opponents.

The City will continue to need this expertise as it pursues an appeal of the judge’s decision that restored the developer’s lease and defends against a billion-dollar lawsuit brought by the hedge fund operator who holds the sublease on the property.

Harbin-Forte’s unwillingness to refuse campaign contributions from coal terminal interests, her opposition to using outside resources when needed, as well as her uncritical repetition of coal lobbyist McConnell’s claim that the City sabotaged the settlement talks of 2022 all raise serious concerns about how well she would represent the best interests of Oakland and Oaklanders if she is elected City Attorney.

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Commentary

Opinion: “McDonald” Trump Goes Off (Color) on Arnold Palmer. Plus, Blacks and Filipinos Link at Jazzed-Up Buffalo Soldiers Tribute

After manning the fry station in Bucks County, what will “McDonald Trump” do next? The Palabok and Chicken Joy at the Philadelphia Jollibee for the Filipino vote? Unlikely.

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John Calloway, grandson of John W. Calloway, plays flute at the Oakland Museum event. Photo courtesy of Emil Guillermo.
John Calloway, grandson of John W. Calloway, plays flute at the Oakland Museum event. Photo courtesy of Emil Guillermo.

By Emil Guillermo

After manning the fry station in Bucks County, what will “McDonald Trump” do next? The Palabok and Chicken Joy at the Philadelphia Jollibee for the Filipino vote?

Unlikely.

But there’s a reason for everything the candidates do now. For example, Trump’s recent reference to Arnold Palmer’s manhood. I’ll explain.

We are in full campaign stunt mode. Candidates, it seems, would do anything to grab what’s left of the still-undecided-yet-persuadable voters.

The candidates are resorting to what I call “fracking” for votes. It’s where candidates inject hot liquid rhetoric deep down into the electorate at high pressure to create fissures, openings, hoping to loosen things up to allow extraction–not for oil or gas–but for those hard-to-get voters.

So, Trump went fast food for some fast votes, but Harris topped him, saying she’d work to change the federal minimum wage from $7.25 so that service workers could afford a decent life. What’s Trump offering? Extra ketchup?

Last week, Trump was in Latrobe, the birthplace of the great golfer Arnold Palmer. At a campaign event, he elevated Palmer and the girth of his manhood into the 2024 campaign rhetoric.

It was crude and unpresidential. But Trump’s a convicted felon, who has been found liable of sexual assault and defamation in a civil court and has lied repeatedly on just about everything. After the Access Hollywood tape of 2016 where he crudely talked about grabbing women by their p—y, how would he top it in 2024? Trump used Palmer to “frack” for votes among undecided men, suburban women, Blacks, and Latinos.

OAKLAND MUSEUM’S FILIPINO AMERICAN HISTORY TRIBUTE

I went to a unique celebration at the Oakland Museum last weekend.

John Calloway, jazz musician and San Francisco State music lecturer, presented his live multi-media experience on Buffalo Soldiers and the Philippine American War to a packed theater.

Calloway’s grandfather John W. Calloway was a Buffalo Soldier, the Army’s regiment of Black soldiers who served in the Philippines in the 1890s.  He also reported on the war for the Black press, notably the Richmond Planet.  While the mainstream press insisted on the colonization of the Philippines and its savage people, John W. Calloway’s compassionate writings showed how Filipinos were anything but savages.

It was a two-way street. Through the Buffalo Soldiers, Filipinos learned about American culture and the difference between white and Blacks. “The colored soldiers do not push us off the streets, spit on us, call us damn niggers, abuse us in all manner of ways, and connect race hatred with duty,” a Filipino interviewee told John W. Calloway.

He concluded, “The future of the Filipino I fear, is that of the Negro of the South.”

He said no one has any scruples regarding the rights of the Filipino, who is kicked. cuffed at will, drawn up and degraded before their eyes, cast into prison after prison, stripped and searched time and again, humiliated, brutalized.

It was one of the best Filipino American History Month celebrations I have ever attended. Enough facts and all the feels.

Get tickets to the show here: https://themarsh.org/monday-night-marsh-stream/

About the Author

Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. See his micro-talk show on www.patreon.com/emilamok. He performs an excerpt from his Emil Amok Monologues, “Transdad,”  Nov. 4 and 18th at the Marsh, 1062 Valencia St,  San Francisco.

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Activism

OP-ED: Slogans Over Solutions: The Real Cost of Defunding the Police

Let’s be blunt: Defund the Police is not just a failure—it’s a farce. Consider Oakland’s much-hyped MACRO program, designed to respond to 911 calls without armed officers. In theory, it was supposed to lighten the police’s load and ensure that non-violent incidents were handled by social workers. In practice, it’s a bureaucratic disaster. Nearly all of its service recipients are homeless, and a mere 6% of calls result in meaningful help. The cost to taxpayers? Nearly $3,000 per referral.

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Dr. Jennifer Tran is a Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University.

By Dr. Jennifer Tran

It’s time to cut through the slogans and set the record straight on the “Defund the Police” movement. What started as a rallying cry, borne out of real pain and injustice, has become a case study in misguided policy, political opportunism, and unintended consequences. It is, in fact, a lesson in the tragic comedy of American politics, where grand gestures replace practical solutions, and the impulsive dreams of self-serving politicians only succeed in plunging cities into chaos. And the communities that were supposed to benefit from these reforms? They’re the ones paying the steepest price.

To understand how we got here, let’s rewind the tape to 2013, when the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement emerged in response to horrific instances of police brutality. The deaths of Black men and women at the hands of law enforcement rightly shocked the public, and for once, there was a reckoning with the systemic inequities that had long plagued the American criminal justice system. It wasn’t just theory anymore, buried in the pages of university texts. Viral videos of police brutality turned those academic arguments into raw, painful reality for millions. People were outraged, and rightly so. We demanded change.

Then came 2016, when Oakland’s Anti-Police Terror Project decided the solution to police violence was to cut the police budget by 50%. In a utopia where crime doesn’t exist, maybe that could work. But on the streets of America, where real people face real threats, the idea was nothing short of delusional. The group, bankrolled by millions from the Akonadi Foundation and its president Lateefah Simon, pushed to slash Oakland’s police budget in half and divert the funds to social services. Sounds noble in theory. A better society, they promised, lay just beyond the horizon—one where cops were obsolete and violence simply evaporated once social workers entered the scene. But there’s a reason serious policy experts dismissed this as fringe from the start—it was.

And then, the murder of George Floyd in 2020 gave this once-fringe movement a national megaphone. “Defund the Police” became the rallying cry for protests that swept across the country. City councils from Oakland to New York City fell over themselves to slash police budgets in response to activist pressure. Progressive politicians saw an opportunity to appease their activist base by passing “bold” policies, irrespective of the practical consequences.

But herein lies the rub. Defunding the police is not a policy—it’s a moral pose, an empty chant masquerading as a solution. What exactly did anyone think would happen when cities with already strained police forces began gutting their budgets? Did they think crime would simply cease? That communities terrorized by violence would find comfort in knowing that more mental health workers were on call while fewer officers patrolled their neighborhoods?

The reality struck like a hammer. When police officers, demoralized by public scorn and abandoned by their city leaders, began resigning in droves, crime spiked. Homicides, carjackings, and robberies surged in cities like Oakland, while the communities that supposedly stood to benefit from defunding were left more vulnerable than ever. In fact, it became clear that the only people who thrived in this brave new world were the criminals.

What’s worse, the political damage was catastrophic. Not only did the Defund movement fail to deliver on its promises, but it handed Republicans a golden opportunity to paint Democrats as reckless and soft on crime. In the 2020 elections, the backlash was evident as Democrats struggled to shake off the taint of these disastrous policies. What could have been a serious conversation about police reform—about how to make law enforcement both effective and accountable—was hijacked by the extremists who would rather tear it all down.

Let’s be blunt: Defund the Police is not just a failure—it’s a farce. Consider Oakland’s much-hyped MACRO program, designed to respond to 911 calls without armed officers. In theory, it was supposed to lighten the police’s load and ensure that non-violent incidents were handled by social workers. In practice, it’s a bureaucratic disaster. Nearly all of its service recipients are homeless, and a mere 6% of calls result in meaningful help. The cost to taxpayers? Nearly $3,000 per referral.

Meanwhile, Oakland’s police force remains understaffed, overburdened, and demoralized. Despite budget reversals in 2022, the damage was done. Many officers, tired of being vilified, left the force altogether. And now, the city is struggling to recruit replacements while crime rates continue to climb.

But rather than learn from failure, the Defund movement doubled down. When reducing police numbers didn’t deliver the utopia they’d promised, they shifted their focus to local district attorneys, funding campaigns for candidates who promised to stop prosecuting crimes altogether. The result? A crime wave unlike anything we’ve seen in years. Retail theft, carjackings, burglaries—if there’s a crime to commit, it’s being committed in cities where these “progressive” prosecutors are in charge.

And in Oakland, the epicenter of this failed experiment, District Attorney Pamela Price is now facing a recall. Why? Because the voters who once supported her are now living with the consequences of her policies. They know what happens when ideology collides with reality—and reality always wins.

Yet despite all of this, the architects of this movement are still trying to sell us their snake oil. Lateefah Simon, the financier and architect behind the entire movement to Defund the Police, is now running for Congress. Backed by the same billionaire funders who helped launch the Defund debacle, she’s hoping to take her failed ideas to Washington, D.C. And if we’re not careful, she just might succeed.

But there is a better way. I support a new and bold piece of legislation called the Modern Cities Act, which offers a sensible alternative. Instead of gutting the police, we need to invest in police departments to reform them. Under this plan, we can have both public safety and justice. This approach recognizes that we need mental health services, housing solutions, and job programs to address the root causes of crime, but we also know that without police, those programs won’t have a chance to succeed. Reforming police practices doesn’t mean getting rid of police—it means holding them accountable while making sure they have the resources and training to protect our communities while never endangering community members.

The truth is, we don’t need fewer cops. We need better cops. We need training, transparency, and yes, accountability. But the notion that we can simply defund the police into oblivion and expect society to flourish is not just naive—it’s dangerous. We should be questioning the judgment of any politician who ever supported this harmful experiment, and they should never be allowed in public office again.

So, the next time someone tells you that defunding the police is the path to progress, ask them this: who’s going to keep your family safe when the police are gone? And then ask them if they’ve learned anything from Oakland. Because the rest of us certainly have.

Dr. Jennifer Tran is a Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University. She is also the President of the Oakland Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce, and Democratic Party candidate for US Congress in Oakland’s District 12. This article was sponsored by the campaign of Dr. Jennifer Tran for Congress.

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