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4A EDITORIAL AND OPINION/ dtllE CJariotte *05# Thursday, November 16,2006 Cljarlotte The Voice of the Black Community J531 Camden Road Charlotte. N.C. 28203 Gerald O. Johnson ceo/publisher Robert L Johnson co-publisher/general manager Herbert L White editor in chief OPINIONS Time for new direction on attacking AIDS Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the presumed new speaker of the House, says voters sent a clear, simple message on Election Day: “It’s time for a new direction.” That was the Democratic leader’s own message all year on the campaign stump, and it’s her promise now, as her party regains control of Congress for the first time in 12 years. The Black AIDS Institute couldn’t agree more. And we desperately hope the Democrats are serious about charting that new course, because Washington has allowed the AIDS epidemic in Black America to run amok for far too long. Congress has failed to do the hard work of reforming the 16-year-old Ryan White CARE Act to keep up with an ever-changing epidemic. The law was due for congressional reauthorization in 2005, but the pols have yet to act on that man date. Lawmakers - including Democrats — have FROM THE IN BOX Charlotte Catholic response to pregame bigotry too timid As parents of an AfHcan American son at Charlotte Catholic, we are deeply saddened by a recent incident that occurred at a Forestview High School soccer game against Charlotte Catholic, Saturday, November 4. Forestview’s soccer team played an excerpt of Adolf Hitler lieutenant Joseph Goebbels’ speech prior to the official start of the soccer game. Equally offensive were the racial epithets directed at the players and our son being called a “nigger.” However, we are even more disappointed with the tepid posi tion of Charlotte Catholic High School and the MACS admin istration. They have not publicly addressed the insults direct ed to our players. We feel a strong message needs to be con veyed that any kind of intolerance is unacceptable. There is a Code of Ethics administered by the North Carolina High School Athletic Association that does not tolerate or con done inappropriate behaviors. Additionally, Charlotte has an increasingly diverse student population. Therefore, it is imperative that our leadership provides guidance and holds accountable any infringement of these policies. We hope this incident will serve as a learning experience to everyone. I would encourage individuals who are in a position to effect change and make a difference, act accordingly. Liince and Ho/tc Drummond Charlotn- Is affirmative action on the way out? been too busy bickering over how best to divide up inadequate funding among the varied cities and states to see the bigger picture: There’s not enough money in the program. Given the disproportionate impact the AIDS epidemic is hav ing on Black America, the Congress’s decision to break without reauthorizing the Ryan White Care—one of the primary resources for care and treatment of poor people living with HIV/AIDS—was a direct assault on the health and welfare of black America. While the administration and Congress fiddled, the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) has collapsed. ADAP subsi dizes lifesaving anti-HIV drugs for about 30 percent of those getting treated in the U.S. Just last week, AIDS advocates in South Carolina announced that three people have died while languishing on the state’s 300-person waiting list for AIDS treatment. As of the last reporting period, there were waiting lists in six states—a number that will most certainly grow if the congress does not set a new direction in the fight against HIV/AIDS quickly. Fimding for the Ryan White CARE Act has remained all but flat during the last three Congresses. Meanwhile, the U.S. gov ernment estimates an additional 200,000 Americans have con tracted HIV since 2001. According to the Congressional Budget Office, as of January 2006 we were spending $200 mil lion a day on the war in Iraq. According the coalition of local officials and advocates that has monitored the program since its inception, with the equivalent of what we spend in Iraq in one day, we could fully fund the AIDS Drug Assistance Program. But, the AIDS Drug Assistance Program is not the only part of our national response to the domestic AIDS epidemic that is failing. Local health departments and clinics around the coun try, particularly in the South, report having to cut or limit ser vices they offer in order to meet growing demands with limited resources. Addiction treatment, support groups, transportation assistance - all have had to fall by the wayside in some places. The Centers for Disease Control’s prevention efforts are being starved by lack of resources. Who suffers? African-Americans represent nearly 50 percent of the estimated 1.2 million Americans living with AIDS today and 54 percent of the new cases in our country. When care and treatment services are cut, black people don’t have access to treatment. When HIV pre vention efforts are undermined, black people get infected with HIV. If Rep. Pelosi is true to her word, shell indeed steer a dra matically new dirdction on AIDS. She can start by demanding that the House pass a budget that adequately funds compre hensive prevention efforts, and puts enough funding into the CARE Act to keep Americans living with HIV/AIDS alive no matter what state they live in. PHILL WILSON /.s' CDO andfounder of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Aiif’eles. He has ixirticiiHited in numemus international conferences on AIDS and n’fl.v selected by the Ford Foundation in 2001 as one of "Twenty Leaders for a Changing World." Wilson has been living with HIV for more than 25 years and with AIDS for 15 years. He can be reached at Phillw@BlackAIDS.org. The disappointing passage of Proposal 2 in Michigan, after similar Right-wing suc cesses with Prop 209 in California and Initiative 200 in Washington state, coupled ■with other attacks, means that pro-affirmative action forces need to become more aggressive in defending and explaining affirmative action. A failure to do either will spell the end of affir mative action as we know it. The irony of the misnamed Michigan Civil Rights Initiative pass ing in Michigan is that it was the suit against the University of Michigan Law School that paved the way for the United States Supreme Court upholding the concept of affir mative action. The court, rejecting a more numbers-ori- ented affirmative action pro gram that the University of Michigan used at the under graduate level, approved the more holistic approach used by the law school. Writing for the 5-4 majority. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor stated, “The Law School’s narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a com- pelhng interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body is not prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause.” What the law likes to refer to as a “reasonable person” would have concluded that / the issue was clearly settled. Far from it. Instead, Ward Connerly, the conservative Black California business man who once benefited from a state set-aside program, decided to take his anti-affir mative action crusade on the road. After winning in Michigan, he may be heading to your state. Connerly is part of a well-funded national campaign to win with confus ing ballot initiatives what conservatives clearly lost in pleadings before a Supreme Court dominated by conserv atives. While Connerly leads the attack on one flank, an even more successful assault is being carried out by the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative think tank opposed to affirmative action. By simply threatening to file suit against universities, the institutions usually buckle rather than litigate. Dozens of universities have scrapped race- or gender-sensitive pro grams rather than fight back. Sadly, even the Justice Department came down on the side of CER and pressured Southern Illinois University to terminate three fellowship programs whose recipients were mainly imderrepresent- ed women or people of color. But the Center for Individual Rights didn’t stop there. It is now suing the Virginia Commonwealth University and the Dow Jones Newspaper Fimd for operat ing a two-week high school journalism program designed to encourage African- Americans to go into journal ism, a field in which they are underrepresented. CIR and other conservative groups are basically using the “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment, which was passed to end discrimi nation against African- Americans, to attack pro grams aimed at helping Blacks. It has shamelessly turned the 14th Amendment on its head. And, as I’ve said countless times, there is no infrastructure on the Left to' coimter the energy and mis chief of the Far Right. They’ve been so successful that the news media has adopted the language of the Far Right. Conservatives have been successful in get ting not only the news media to adopt their misleading lan guage, but even our ovm lead ers have fallen into that trap. I saw a S3Tidicated column this week by a national civil rights leader that asserted that Michigan’s Proposal 2 “bars use of preferences by state colleges and universi ties as well as government agencies.” How can we get news outlets to stop equating to race- and gender-sensitive actions with “preferences,” if we’re using the loaded lan guage ourselves? As a 1995 report by the National Association of Black Journalists pointed out, “Since polls have shown that the public supports, affirma tive action, but opposes ‘pref erential treatment,’ using the terms interchangeably, under Civil rights commission hits rock bottom The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was estabhshed as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. It was enhanced by the Commission on Civil Rights Act of 1983. It is to receive and analyze complaints and to provide studies and advice to the president of the United States. It can not enforce anything but the body can advise and pro vide input in regards to the civil rights of American citi zens. The finest da}^ of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights were under the management and chairmanship of Arthur A. Fletcher, who served under President George H.W. Bush. His best accomplish ment was a detailed study on the implementation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for each major federal agency. He also did much work in assuring that the U.S. mili tary carried on with its tradi tion of exemplary affirmative action. Art, the “Father of Affirmative Action,” was cer tainly on the case and the nation was better for it. From there, it was “rock bottom” as the opposite side, the anti - affirmative action right-wingers decided to put on the mother of all charades. Tbday, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is an anti affirmative action clique with a mission to neutralize the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and destroy what it can of the Voting Rights Act. It is anti-civil rights. It seeks to hurt and provide hurdles to those trying to diversify the American economy. Let’s look . at their membership. Chairman Gerald A. Reynolds comes from the Center for New Black Leadership. Don’t let the name fool you. This is a White organized group of racial animus pointed against those of the tradition al civil rights movement. They couldn’t lead 100 Black folks to a barbeque. According to the STLtoday.com, Reynolds “doesn’t just oppose affirmative action; he abhors it. Affirmative action is The Big Lie. It is, he writes, a cor rupt system of preferences, set-asides and quotas... a con cept invented by regulators and reinvented by political interest groups seeking money and power. Furthermore, many of the problems devastating low income Black commimities are the result of a spiritual decay. Reynolds would reme dy that through school choice programs, faith based institu tions, replacing self-defeating values with middle class val ues, urban economic develop ment and opposing the use of racial preferences in educa tion and the workplace.” Wow, what a slap in the face of Art Fletcher, MLK, Rosa Parks, Whitney Young and the entire civil rights move ment. I think we are talking “nut case” here. Along with Reynolds are three other Republican slots filled by equally venomous anti-affirmative action atti tudes - total of three Negroes and one Hispanic. Go to www.usccr.gov and view their pictures. They are strar^! There is another slot that is reserved for an “Independent.” However, that independent is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an ardent anti-affirmative action think tank. It’s rather disingenuous to think that she is actually “independent”. Two of the three allotted Democratic seats are filled by a Hispanic and a Native American. They have proven to be staimch defenders of affirmative action but by virtue of a 5-2 vote their views become muted. Affirmative action has been the key to the black middle class of America. It has been the driver for improvement in education, job opportunity and career enhancement. Thus, it brought economic power to a group of Americans who were living 75 percent under the poverty level at the time of enactment in 1968 (Art Fletcher under the Nixon Administration). Ibday, 75 percent of African Americans are living a mid dle class lifestyle. While there is still much room for improvement we can aU say that there has been much success. HARRY C. ALFORD is the president/CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce. Website: wwwjuztionalbcc arg. E-mail: president@nationalbcc.org. the guise of objective report ing, unfairly characterizes affirmative action.” It further explained, ‘Using the term ‘preferences’ in this context betrays a fundamen tal misunderstanding of the reason behind affirmative action: that it is intended to counter the built-in, system atic ‘preferences’ for white males that stiU exist.” In addition to losing the language war, we are not effectively arguing our case. Admission to college has never been based strictly on test scores and grade point averages, yet the public is made to feel guilty because Jennifer Gratz, a white apph- cant, was not immediately accepted into the University of Michigan undergraduate school while supposedly “less qualified” African-Americans were. In one of its briefs, the University of Michigan noted, “In 1905, when petitioner Gratz applied...more than 1,400 white and Asian- American students with lower adjusted high school GPS or test scores than hers were admitted, while more than 2,000 white and Asian- American students with higher adjusted GPAs and test scores were rejected So much for Jennifer Gratz being discriminated against. 'This war on affirmative action is not over. But we shouldn’t continue to show up for the battle unarmed. GEORGE E. CURRY is editor- in-chief of the NNPA News Service. mm
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