The Truth About Abortion and Black America

I sat trying to figure out how I would cover law school costs this fall when my phone rang. It was a campaign worker with a reminder that Virginia voters had a Democratic primary election this week and I had yet to decide who would get my vote.

It was the typical campaign call, nothing really remarkable about it. The worker wanted to know if I planned to support a conservative — not Republican — candidate at the polls. “Are you African American?” she asked. I replied in the affirmative. “I know that many African American voters are conservative when it comes to social issues like abortion. Would you describe the candidate you plan to support as conservative on the issue of abortion?”

In recent years conservative political strategists have painted African Americans as being more opposed to abortion than the white population. They have cited numbers as high as 59 percent.

But a recent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life poll found that 49 percent of black Americans — considered more religious than the U.S. population as a whole — favor keeping abortion legal in most or all cases; just 44 percent of black Americans want abortion to be illegal in most or all cases.

Experts say there is declining black support for conservative social policies like abortion. The reasons vary.

Christopher J. Metzler, an associate dean at Georgetown University who writes regularly on issues of race and politics, attributes the drop-off in support to pressing economic conditions that black Americans face.

The unemployment rate for African American workers is now at 14.9 percent, almost double the national average. “It’s just not one of our top issues,” said Metzler.

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Dialing Down the Sound of Fury

High-pitched conservative rhetoric seems to be even more shrill than usual lately; some even blame it for the recent slaying of Dr. George Tiller, the Kansas physician who performed late-term abortions and was gunned down at his church May 31.

Some Republicans are having second thoughts about the level of negative political rhetoric they have been spouting as of late. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. (1979-99), retrenched on what he recently said about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor being a racist.

Sotomayor will be the first Latina on the high court if confirmed.

It’s about time foes dialed down their fury. Maybe Gingrich realizes that he is the one who came off looking like a racist when he attacked her; then again, maybe not. Regardless, Gingrich’s half-apology comes too late and the damage might already be done.

“No party has a monopoly on saying things that are offensive at times,” said Audrey A. Haynes, an associate professor of political science at The University of Georgia. “But there is general consensus that the Republican Party, thanks to its use of wordsmith practioners and marketing gurus, has done a much better job, at least in the past, of controlling the discourse, framing the political conflicts, and being much more aggressive than the Democrats have been.”

When President Obama campaigned for the Oval Office, he vowed to help change the climate of political dialogue in Washington and beyond. In light of recent events this past week, it seems that this is a promise he won’t be able to keep.

But not because he hasn’t tried.

It was Obama who chose to deliver the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame over historically black Morehouse College. He could have taken the easier path by going to Morehouse, where the first black president would likely have been lovingly welcomed with open arms; instead he went to Notre Dame where he was heckled during a speech that called for greater understanding and fair-mindedness on all sides of the abortion issue.

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Supreme Court Nomination In Black and Brown

When Rush Limbaugh looks at President Obama and Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, he sees a reverse racist nominated by “the greatest living example of a reverse racist.”

Other conservatives view Sotomayor as an affirmative action choice who lacks the intellectual heft for the high court. She’s someone, they say, who believes Latina judges are better than white male judges.

Liberals, on the other hand, herald Obama’s choice as a stroke of political genius and rejoice in the possibility of the first Hispanic female sitting on the bench.

Some political prognosticators speculate that Obama’s nomination of Sotomayor could lock up the Hispanic vote for Democrats for years to come.

But that’s inside baseball.

What I saw when Obama nominated Sotomayor, with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. by his side, was something quite different: Power, and what it increasingly looks like in this country.

By 2050, there will be no outright majority of any one demographic group, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But 236 million minorities — everyone except for non-Hispanic, single race whites — will be the majority.

The socio-political change such population shifts bring is already starting to manifest itself.

“Seeing Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor is more and more what power is going to look like in the future,” said Allert Brown-Gort, associate director of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. “That power, quite naturally, follows demographic changes to a certain extent, but let’s not fool ourselves. The full force of those changes won’t be felt if the laws and rules aren’t in place to let the changes happen.

“Just a couple of months ago they [lawyers and Supreme Court justices] were arguing over the 1965 Voting Rights Act and whether parts of it should be voided,” he said. “This shows us why we have to keep up the fight and can’t take anything for granted, while Obama’s announcement of Judge Sotomayor shows us what is at stake.”

Much attention has focused on the raw distrust between blacks and Hispanic immigrants. Whether it is a tug of war over jobs in New York and parts of the South or turf wars in Los Angeles, many black and brown people have been in a constant fight for the bottom for years.

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Voter ID: How Far Is Too Far?

With his signature May 5 on Georgia’s new voter identification law, Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue has set up a sure-fire showdown with the federal Department of Justice.

The Bush administration — which favored voter ID laws — was in charge the last time Georgia pushed through such controversial legislation.

This time around, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is calling the shots, and Georgia has to win his approval for an even stricter law that it now wants.

If permitted, Georgia would become the second state (Arizona is the other) to require prospective voters to prove their U.S. citizenship; currently voters in Georgia need only check a box on a registration application affirming U.S. citizenship.

In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a controversial voter ID law in Indiana, but that only led to more legal uncertainty for states.

Perdue and his supporters say stricter voter ID laws are necessary to combat voter fraud. Those who oppose it say the law has “xenophobic overtones” and maintain that it is a solution to a problem that does not exist. They add that the law would keep the poor, elderly and minorities away from the ballot box.

Perdue’s actions are part of the GOP’s efforts to put in place an array of new voting laws across the South.

For example:

• South Carolina legislators, for example, are arguing over a bill that requires voters to show valid government-issued identification at the polls. That recently prompted a walkout by several Democratic members led by the legislative black caucus.

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A Foreclosure 'Fix' That Should Be In

I read with interest New York Times economics reporter Edmund L. Andrews’ book excerpt about how he fell behind in his mortgage payments.

“I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us,” he writes. “But in 2004, I joined millions of otherwise-sane Americans in what we now know was a catastrophic binge on overpriced real estate and reckless mortgages. Nobody duped or hypnotized me. Like so many others — borrowers, lenders and the Wall Street dealmakers behind them — I just thought I could beat the odds.”

By 2007, he writes of his third mortgage servicer, JPMorgan Chase, “I was actually beginning to feel sorry for Chase. It seemed to be so flooded with defaulting borrowers that it didn’t have time to foreclose on my house. Eight months after my last payment to the bank, I am still waiting for the ax to fall.”

Not everyone facing mortgage foreclosure has had it this easy.

Lawrence Mouton, a Dallas truck driver for 12 years, purchased a $95,000 home two years ago and was paying a mortgage of $900 a month — the kind of terms Washington, D.C.-area residents like Andrews would kill for. In short order, however, Mouton’s wife lost her nursing home job and the mortgage payments jumped to over $1,200 a month.

Mouton struggled to keep the lights and gas on. He took out payday loans just to keep a roof over his family’s heads.

Home Eq, the company servicing his home loan, constantly called pushing him to pay more money, even urging him to send them his mother-in-law’s Social Security check.

“They wanted anything they could get,” said Mouton, whose bedridden mother-in-law lives with the family. “I told them we used her Social Security to buy all of her medicines. After we do that, all that little money is gone.”

Mouton was able to modify the terms of his loan when the servicer agreed last fall to lower his monthly payment by a whopping $17.86.

Mouton, 51, continued to make payments, even partial ones, but fell behind on the mortgage and his home soon went into foreclosure.

It is unclear how two homeowners with the same problem got different treatment.

Maybe it’s because they have different lenders. Or maybe it’s because one is a reporter for The New York Times and the other isn’t, said Kathleen Day, a spokeswoman for the Washington-based Center for Responsible Lending.

In the current foreclosure crisis, Hispanics and black borrowers who often took on subprime loans — even when they qualified for conventional ones — are disproportionately impacted.

“It’s a maddening system,” Day said. “There are disparities and no streamlined process to make it more efficient. That’s why we think the bankruptcy fix is key to solving the current foreclosure crisis. Without it, people have no leverage.”

On April 30, the Senate rejected an amendment to a broader housing bill (S 896) that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of a primary residential mortgage — much the same way they are already allowed to do for people who own vacation homes and yachts. (Total transparency: I worked to win legislative support for a similar bill last year as a congressional fellow.)

The provision in the Senate bill would have helped 1.7 million homeowners facing foreclosure and helped neighborhoods preserve some $300 billion in property value, according to the Center for Responsible Lending. The legislation enjoyed support from voters and key advocates, including Republican former congressman and vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp who passed away May 2.

Twelve Democrats in the Senate joined Republicans in rejecting the amendment, not because of its expense (it doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime), but because mortgage banking lobbyists argued a more appealing case.

Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin , D-Ill., — who has spent much of the past two years promoting the benefits of allowing bankruptcy judges to lower interest rates, reduce principal or stretch payment periods for struggling homeowners — blamed the defeat on lobbying efforts of the banking industry — considered by most to be politically battered after six months of federal bailouts and economic disaster.

“The big banks, JPMorgan Chase, you see them all over the United States — they were at the [negotiating] table until last week and they decided, ‘No, we will walk away, we are not interested in this conversation,’” he said. “Wells Fargo, Bank of America, the list goes on and on. If any of the names sound familiar, it is that they are surviving today because of our taxpayer dollars.”

The foreclosure language — a process referred to as “cramdown” — is in a House-passed version of the legislation (HR 1106) and will come back up during conference, Durbin said. But its chances of survival are marginal.

President Obama’s $75 billion foreclosure prevention program has gone further than any other initiative Congress has come up with, but even it has limitations.

The plan only really got off the ground in March and many lenders still don’t have the personnel in place to handle an overwhelming number of loan modification requests. Plus, it is still voluntary, meaning lenders don’t have to participate if they don’t want to, which has largely been the case since the crisis began.

Meanwhile, Day predicted 9 million foreclosures over the next four years, which will cause 92 million neighboring families to see their own property values drop by an additional $1.9 trillion.

In 2009 alone, she said, 2.4 million families will lose their homes, leading to a $502 billion additional drop in value for 70 million neighboring homes.

“This is why we think that eventually they will have to come back and resurrect the bankruptcy fix,” she said. “It is the only thing that makes sense.”

Mouton eventually found help from the Dallas Urban League, one of the oldest civil rights groups that helps economically empower African Americans.

It took a housing counselor at the organization five months to track down Mouton’s lender and convince a resistant servicer to modify his loan. With lots of patience and persistence, the company finally agreed to modify the terms of his loan, one week before his house was to be sold.

The total price of the home grew to $102,000 — about $20,000 above its current appraisal, Mouton estimated. But the Dallas Urban League also got the company to drop Mouton’s interest rate to 2 percent and cut his mortgage payments in half, to $628 a month.

Terms, Mouton says, he can live with.

Fixing the Crack in U.S. Drug Policy

Eugenia Jennings’ mother left her at a neighbor’s house and never returned to get her.

The people who were supposed to take care of Eugenia, wound up beating and molesting her instead.

Eugenia was sexually abused by another neighbor and a prostitute at the age of seven. A year later she was raped by a step-brother and the man who called himself her step-father tried so when she was a teenager.

Eugenia ran away at 13, and shortly thereafter got hooked on crack-cocaine and alcohol.

“She stopped using when she learned she was pregnant but after she gave birth at age 16, desperate for money to support her and her daughter, she began selling drugs. Of course, she was eventually caught,” said her brother, Cedric Parker, who will testify before U.S. senators this week about federal mandatory drug sentences.

While in prison Eugenia got clean, earned a GED and gave birth to another child. But after getting released in 1999, she relapsed.

In June 2000 Eugenia Jennings was arrested for trading 13.9 grams of crack cocaine – differing quantities on two different occasions - for clothing.

She was charged in federal court with two counts of distributing crack cocaine. She pleaded guilty and, because she already had prior offenses for small amounts of drugs, Eugenia was sentenced in 2001 to nearly 22 years in prison; she was 23 years old.

The irony here is, had Eugenia Jennings been found with powder cocaine instead of crack, she would have gotten less than half that amount of time behind bars.

The system, the judge said when sentencing Jennings, had let her down.

“Mrs. Jennings, I’m not mad at you. . . . The fact of the matter is, nobody has ever been there for you when you needed it. Never. You never had anyone who stood up for you. All the government’s ever done is just kick your behind. When you were a child and you had been abused, the government wasn’t there. When your stepfather abused you, the government wasn’t there. When your stepbrother abused you, the government wasn’t there. But, when you get a little bit of crack, the government’s there.

“Now is that fair? No. It’s not. And have you been punished? You bet,” according to a transcript of the court proceedings. “Your whole life has been a life of deprivation, misery, whippings, and there is no way to unwind that. But the truth of the matter is it’s not in my hands. As I told you, Congress has determined that the best way to handle people who are troublesome is we just lock them up. Congress passed the laws.

“And it is an awful thing, an awful thing, to separate a mother from her children,” the judge continued. “And the only person who had the opportunity to avoid that was you . . . . .At every turn in the road we failed you. And we didn’t come to you until it was time to kick your butt. That’s what the government has done for Eugenia Jennings.”

Click to find out what happened to Eugenia, and please leave a comment here or here. Thanks, ~Sunshine

Politics of Color for Obama in Cuba

Miriela Mir Fonseca left her mother as well as four brothers and sisters behind in Cuba. Her relatives often don’t have enough to eat, she says.

So when President Obama recently lifted travel and remittance restrictions for the tiny island nation, Mir Fonseca considered it a blessing.

“With Obama, I can go home anytime I want,” said the 33-year-old, who works as a baker for a popular pastry chain in Buffalo, NY. “Can I tell you my dream? My dream is for my mother to come visit me, and for my brother to come here to help me start my business.”

Mir Fonesca is the face of a little-understood side of U.S.-Cuba relations. She is Afro-Cuban.
Fidel Castro’s relationship with blacks in the U.S. goes all the way back to when he stayed in Harlem after getting rejected by Western and European leaders attending a UN General Assembly meeting in 1961; he was welcomed by El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (also known as Malcolm X). Castro has chosen to visit and deliver speeches in Harlem ever since.

The tiny island nation has long offered to provide free medical school to African Americans, and took a harsh stance against South African apartheid, even as the American government would not.

Over the years, Fidel Castro has encouraged his country – about 60 percent of which is of African descent — to not only identify themselves with African Americans, but to have an affinity for them. And he used America’s racism to discredit U.S. policy on the island, according to Mark Sawyer, associate professor of political science at UCLA and author of Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba.

Obama’s election means the Cuban regime might not be able to demonize the U.S. as it once did.
But despite his reversal of Bush Administration policy toward Cuba travel, it more than likely will prove difficult to follow that with a quick end to the 47-year-old trade embargo.
For one thing, Cuban leaders aren’t sure the country is ready for the embargo to be lifted. That’s why we see mixed messagescoming from the Castro brothers about opening a dialogue with the U.S.

And Castro isn’t stupid. He saw what happened to the Soviet Union in the 1980s after it opened itself up to the West — its economy collapsed.

“Cuba is an island of 10 million people and it has a very small economy,” Sawyer said during a recent telephone conversation. “Opening up with the U.S. could potentially overwhelm their economy; and it could dramatically undermine Cuba’s power, control and its domestic policy.”
Like Mir Fonseca, Afro-Cubans tend to want the embargo put to rest; but they also want their families to maintain the gains of the revolution, such as universal health care and a guaranteed quality education. (Cuba has one of the highest life-expectancies in the world, and Castro is credited with basically eliminating illiteracy in the country.)

A report released earlier this year by Sen. Richard G. Lugar , R-Ind., recommended establishing a bipartisan commission to forge a new, multilateral strategy on Cuba with Latin America and the European Union. It also urged Havana’s reintegration into western-dominated international institutions, such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, among other steps.

Borrowing money from the International Monetary Fund could impact Cuba’s domestic policy, by forcing the country to put caps on how much money it spends on education, health and poverty reduction. And it could affect how much Cuba can tax remittances. Currently taxed at 20 percent, that money allows Cuba to provide social services to its citizens.

Possible negotiations with the U.S. are further complicated by an issue that has a decidedly racial component.

When 25,000 elite, mostly white Cubans, fled the island between 1959 and 1993, Castro allowed their homes to be taken over by the maids and other servants – mostly black – who, in many cases, worked for the families that moved to Miami. “These wealthy families want to be paid back for their homes,” said Sawyer. “Under the radar, this is being talked about in terms of possible negotiations with the U.S.”

Cuba could be bankrupted if forced to repay wealthy exiles for their property, Sawyer said.
And that would further hurt poor black Cubans, like the realtives of Mir Fonesca.

As grateful as she is to be able to see her family more than once every three years, as the Bush Administration permitted, she wants more for them, and thinks ending the embargo would be the right start.

“Our families are starving,” she said. “We’re praying for a new start for the USA and Cuba.”