A6
OPINION
AUGUST 10-16, 2016
NEW PITTSBURGH COURIER
Mental Health issues in the Black community
Guest Editorial
Toppling voting ID laws a win-win for democracy Two recent federal court rulings on voter ID laws are victories for minorities and democracy. In North Carolina, a federal ruling resulted in throwing out a voter identification law that the three-judge panel said was designed to discriminate against minorities. The state was also found to have not only discriminated against minorities, but passed tougher election rules with the intent on doing so. The 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruling last week means an additional 100,000 voters could be casting ballots in November. In 2013, the Republican-led government in North Carolina passed a wide-ranging law that cut the number of days for early voting and eliminated same-day registrations and out-of-precinct voting. The statute also required people to show a photo ID before voting took effect with the March primary elections. Republicans said the law was designed to prevent voter fraud. In Texas, officials agreed Wednesday to modify their voter ID law, which federal courts have said discriminated against minorities and the poor, and left more than 600,000 registered voters potentially unable to cast a ballot. The state is working to making changes to the law before November’s election, moving from requiring voters to show one of seven forms of suitable ID—a list that included concealed handgun permits, but not college IDs—to letting those without such an ID to sign an affidavit that will allow them to cast an official ballot. Texas must also spend at least $2.5 million on voter outreach before November, according to the agreement submitted to U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos, who must still approve the changes. In North Dakota’s voter identification requirements are on hold after a federal judge sided with a group of American Indians who said the law unfairly burdens them. Several other states have had election rules sidelined for the coming fall election. In addition to the North Carolina law that required photo identification, federal courts loosened a similar measure in Wisconsin and halted strict citizenship requirements in Kansas. These changes come as judges across the U.S. are blocking several Republican-controlled states from imposing stricter election rules in November. While some Republican state officials have not ruled out eventually going to the U.S. Supreme, the federal rulings are critical safeguards for voters, especially poor and minority. (Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune)
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Ulish Carter
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Violence and mental health…Do they go hand in hand? Do mental health problems lead to violence? Or does violence lead to mental health problems? I would say both, but the county recently received $500,000 to battle violence as a public health issue. Violence in the Black community is no different than violence in Vietnam or any war, or the trauma people suffer when their love ones are killed in an accident or in a shooting. Just like the families and whole communities had to receive treatment after various school shootings, residents in Black communities with high amounts of violence should receive the same kind of help but don’t. What is the city, county or state doing in Pittsburgh or any major urban city such as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Detroit, to help the family and friends address the fear, anger, hurt of a love ones or just an associate death. Many if not most veterans of wars have serious mental problems that lead to addictions, detachment from family and friends, homeliness and sometimes--even violence. No man can be put in a situation where he sees other men killed, or he kills others or each side is trying to kill or hurt the other and it not affect him or her mentally. This is the case in the Black community with the high rates of crime and violence, both domestic and street. And I’m not just talking about the people involved. What about the kids who now are without a brother, sister, uncle, father, or friend? What about the mothers who can’t afford a psychologist for herself or her kids? How does she make it through this tragedy? Yes I know a lot of people are correct
Ulish Carter
Just Sayin’ when they say that most of the killings and shootings are drug related. I shoot you and your friends shoot me. And everybody knows it so we don’t go to the police because we deal with it ourselves and the vicious cycle just keeps going around and around. Everybody knows who did the shooting but they are either afraid or seeking revenge. So what is the solution? Move to the suburbs? No. Drugs are out there too. The governor and all his top people are having a series of meetings, and conferences to find out how to curtail the heroine and Opium epidemic in Pennsylvania, which is hitting the suburbs just as hard as the inner city. Addictions create more mental health issues. Yes drugs are behind most of the street and domestic violence but children and adults need mental health specialists to help them cope with a family member or friend strung out on drugs, or alcohol. The $500,000 is much needed but if we are to tackle the massive problems in front of us we are going to need much more. At least the politicians are recognizing the problem and attempting to address it. Kudos goes out to Rashad Byrdsong who addressed this problem a few years back and was called crazy by
some people. Not to his face. Oh yes and why we are dealing with the Mental Health Issue of violence, we need to also address the issue of why such a large percentage of Americans of all incomes and races feel the need to get high in the first place. Eliminate the need to get high and you eliminate the drug trafficking problem. America is the getting highest people in the world. The jails are packed and we are still getting high. I had an interesting conversation with a young person recently about police killing Blacks. What she said was what really pissed her off about the police killings is that no matter how much video shows the police killing a Black person who was not a threat to them, the first thing that comes out of the policeman mouth is, “I feared for my life.” And what the prosecutor always says is, “We need more evidence. We need to see more video.” There’s never enough evidence when it comes to a cop killing a Black man, or the standard statement of “I feared for my life.” “If cops are that afraid of Black men, and the conditions in the Black communities throughout this country, then why do they become cops? That is a choice. They chose to be police. They get up every morning and put on that uniform to protect all people not just White people. But we can’t get up in the morning and decide to not put on our Blackness or take it off. We are born with it. He can take that uniform off anytime he likes. There are far too many White officers who don’t come in contact with Black people until they go on the job. If all they meet are criminals then all of us are criminals to them.”
(Ulish Carter is the managing editor of the New Pittsburgh Courier.)
The continuing fight for the rights to vote (GEORGE CURRY MEDIA)--Last week, a panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rebuked the North Carolina legislature for acting with “discriminatory intent” in passing restrictions on the right to vote that “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” The decision came as we celebrated the 51st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act on August 6. Reinforced by similar rulings in the appellate court in Texas and a district court in Wisconsin, the decision is a victory for our democracy and our Constitution. The voting impediments were passed by North Carolina in 2013 in the wake of the Supreme decision in Shelby v. Holder that struck down the central provision of the Voting Rights Act: the requirement that areas with a history of discrimination gain prior approval from the Justice Department before changing voting regulations. Chief Justice John Roberts, the activist Republican judge, decided to rewrite the law that was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, arguing that since we now live in a “post-racial society,” requiring prior approval for voting law changes was no longer justified. The flood of legislation that followed—all erecting barriers to make voting harder for African-Americans in particular— proved the chief justice’s fantasy was a lie. In North Carolina, the legislature acted immediately after the Supreme Court decision came down. Its motivation, the Fourth Circuit panel found, was clear. African-American turnout had surged in 2008 and 2012 (with Barack Obama at the head of the Democratic ticket), nearing parity with the turnout of White voters for the first time. Obama had taken the state in 2008 and barely lost it in 2012. But in 2010, conservative Republicans had
Jesse Jackson Sr.
Commentary taken control of the legislature and the statehouse. The new majority acted aggressively to fend off the threat posed by growing African-American turnout. As Judge Diana Motz, writing for the unanimous panel, summarized, the legislators “requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African-Americans.” The three-judge panel in Richmond, Va., unanimously concluded that the law was racially discriminatory, overturning a requirement that voters show photo identification to vote and restoring same-day voter registration, a week of early voting, pre-registration for teenagers, and out-of-precinct voting. As Ari Berman, the voting rights expert who reports for The Nation magazine noted, the decision comes after North Carolina’s presidential primary in March provided a troubling indication of what might be expected in the general election— students waiting in three-hour lines, foreign-born U.S. citizens asked to spell their names to poll workers for no justifiable reason, and elderly voters born during Jim Crow turned away from the polls for not meeting the new ID requirements. “The Fourth Circuit Court of
Appeals exposed for the world to see the racist intent of the extremist element of our government in North Carolina,” exulted the Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP, on a press call Friday afternoon. “The ruling is a people’s victory, and it is a victory that sends a message to the nation.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the movement that culminated in the Voting Rights Act over a half-century ago. He understood that voting was the foundational right of citizenship. To strip someone of the right to vote is to strip them of their place in a self-governing community. In a 1957 speech titled “Give Us the Ballot,” King argued, “So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind-it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen observing the laws I have helped to enact-I can only submit to the edict of others.” King understood that discriminatory election laws not only hurt minorities or the working poor, they also undermined the legitimacy of our elections and thus of our government. The North Carolina decision and similar decisions in Texas and Wisconsin offer the hope that the courts will act to frustrate at least the most blatant versions of new Jim Crow laws. Those decisions will remove barriers for literally millions of voters. But the courts can only reaffirm the right to vote. That right is not effective if it is not used. The courts have lowered the barriers in North Carolina and other states. Now the citizens must mobilize and vote in large numbers to exercise the power that they have.
(Jesse L. Jackson Sr. is founder and president of the Chicago-based Rainbow PUSH Coalition. You can keep up with his work at www.rainbowpush.org)
We have to end the war on women in cyberspace (NNPA)—I don’t know whether you have been following this, but there is a very disturbing trend that has been underway. Women in cyberspace are under attack. These attacks are very much focused on programmers and video game designers. These attacks are nothing short of vicious. Yet, the attacks have expanded. Just recently Leslie Jones, a co-star in the reboot of the film “Ghostbusters,” came under such a vicious online assault that she took a breather from Twitter while Twitter management decided to purge some of her worst attackers. What Leslie Jones has experienced, i.e., these vicious online assaults, is something that an increasing number of women that work in cyberspace and technology careers have been living through for years. Subterranean assaults carried out in the dark of night that make life miserable for their targets have become a current feature of our times. This has expanded so much so that it has even become part of popular culture, such as a plotline of one of the “Law & Order” franchises. What is motivating these attacks?
Bill Fletcher Jr.
Commentary These attacks are acts of misogyny, pure and simple. They are being carried out, quite blatantly, by men who believe that there are certain fields that should be the exclusive territory of men. As a result, they want to carry out what can only be described as the “gender cleansing” of different fields, with technology being one of them. Yet, as is the case with Leslie Jones, these cyber assaults are not limited to women in that work in technology. In the late 1990s, I noticed something which I coined “The Wizard of Oz Phenomenon.” In essence this took the form of people developing one personality when they were behind a keyboard and another in real life. I encountered people who were
rude, arrogant and intolerant over the Internet, yet when you would meet them in person they would be nothing short of a cuddly teddy bear. I believe that “The Wizard of Oz Phenomenon” has expanded and it has become the means through which some very mean-spirited, arrogant men have decided to conduct a war against women. Hiding behind the “curtain” of the Internet, they harass women to the point that some have decided to abandon their field of interest entirely, simply because they have concluded that the harassment is not worth it. So, here is my proposal. There are some good hackers out there. I think that there is a need to develop a battalion of such hackers who are interested in bringing a halt to this online misogyny. Their assignment, should they choose to accept it, would be to search out, identify and publicize the existence of these harassers and, as they say, return the favor. Any volunteers? (Bill Fletcher Jr. is a talk show host, writer and activist. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and at www.billfletcherjr.com.)