The State of Black America: Message to the President

[Empowerer]

The National Urban League today released its annual State of Black America report. This year's report is subtitled "Message to the President" and is directed to President Barack Obama.



Dear Mr. President:

Two years ago, you concluded your Foreword to The State of Black America 2007: Portrait of the Black Male” with the following charge to us all: "It is in our shared interests and in the interest of every American to stop ignoring these challenges and start finding the solutions that will work. For in the end, we want the story for Black America to be one universal story where success is the norm and struggles are overcome . . . This is the journey we are on together."

You completed this Foreword just a few weeks before you launched the campaign that led to your election as the first African-American president of the United States. But that historic campaign did not mark the beginning of your journey. In fact, as you told us during the National Urban League’s Annual Conference last summer, your journey began many years before when you became “a foot soldier in the movement the Urban League built – the movement to bring opportunity to every corner of our cities.”
. . .
The State of Black America 2009: Message to the President does more than report on the conditions of our urban communities. It offers you, your administration, Congress and others a clear roadmap of specific steps that you can and should take to revitalize our cities, empower our people and grow our economy. In addition to a rich blend of National Urban League’s empirical data, unparalleled “hands-on” experience gained through our work in urban communities, analysis and commentary by America’s most insightful thinkers and doers, we present the quiet yet powerful voices of ordinary people who simply want their government to respond to their concerns . . . We hope that the information and ideas in The State of Black America 2009: Message to the President will provide you a roadmap for the strong, bold and decisive action needed to set our nation on the road to full economic and social equality for all of its citizens and to create “to be one universal story where success is the norm and struggles are overcome It is in this spirit that we offer our hands and our help to you and your administration in hopes that we will achieve the goals we have shared and strived for these so many years.

Yes, Mr. President, this IS the journey we – all of us – are on together.

From the Afterword to The State of Black America 2009: Message to the President, National Urban League www.nul.org

It is great to see this kind of engagement and proactivity from the grassroots.

[HopeOverFear]

1. Kicked and recd

[genna]

2. I saw the former mayor of New Orleans on Morning Joe the other morning trying to make the case

for the Urban League's report.

What are some of the findings? Are they different from last years' report?

[Empowerer]

4. The report looks at different issues each year and includes an "Equality Index" that measures

the status of blacks vis-a-vis whites and shows trends over a longer period of time. They look at hundreds of factors in the areas of Economics, Health, Education, Social Justice/Civil Rights and Civic Engagement.

This year's Equality Index number is 71.1%, which means that blacks are, overall, doing about 71% as well as whites in America. This is down slightly from last year. They look at these numbers over a five-year period and show that while progress is being made, it is happening so slowly that more needs to be done to close the gap between the races.

One of the things they report is that, unlike the recovery under Bill Clinton, the Bush recovery did little to improve conditions for blacks - or for whites, for that matter. In fact, conditions worsened for both races in the 21st century. The problem is, according to the Urban League, that blacks always lag so far behind whites that it is difficult to catch up, even in good economic times.

This report is really very interesting and enlightening - it's also probably the only place where you can easily get these kinds of in-depth, across-the-board statistics about African-Americans.

Two years ago, the report was called "Portrait of the Black Male" and focused on the black male crisis. Barack Obama wrote the Foreword to that one, by the way. Last year's report was called "In the Black Woman's Voice" and focused on issues affecting African-American women - and all of the essays were written by black women.

This year's report lays out policies and recommendations that President Obama should pursue in the areas of housing, education, health, jobs, etc. It has essays by some excellent scholars - some famous and some not. There are also articles by Chris Dodd, Barbara Lee and Chaka Fattah, as well as Martin Luther King, III, Earl Graves, Jr., and Michelle Bernard (yes, the pundit from MSNBC - the Urban League is non-partisan) and lots of others. The Urban League has a long and highly-respected track record of providing direct services in these areas in communities across the country, so they have a lot of credibility on these issues.

Here are some of the recommendations - there are a lot more in the report:

- Fully fund No Child Left Behind, ensure that all monies authorized are appropriated to reach all eligible children and close the Equality Gap by ending resource inequities in our schools;

- Require states to compare and publicly report resources available to achieve a sound and basic education for every child in every school;

- Guarantee that all three- and four-year olds have access to full day, developmentally appropriate, high quality early childhood education;

- Implement a comprehensive and universal health insurance system for all Americans;

- Develop a comprehensive health infrastructure for the delivery of health education, prevention and intervention initiatives for African Americans;

- Examine chronic health conditions in a context of economic, sociologic and environmental contributors;

- Increase funding for proven and successful models of workforce training and job placement for under-skilled workers between the ages of 16 and 30 such as the Department of Labor’s “Responsible Reintegration of Youthful Offenders;”

- Direct a percentage of all infrastructure monies to job training, job placement and job preparation for disadvantaged workers;

- Target workforce investment dollars to the construction industry jobs that an infrastructure program will create and, where reigniting the construction industry is a goal, pre-apprenticeship programs must be funded in that sector;

- Pass a “Homebuyers’ Bill of Rights” that:

1. Funds homeownership education and counseling, financial literacy workshops, credit counseling, fair housing advocacy and foreclosure prevention assistance that uses national minority housing intermediaries with a track record of providing effective counseling assistance in underserved minority urban communities;

2. Strengthens the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) as it is applied to banks and expands its reach to non-bank financial institutions in to encourage banks to respond to a variety of needs in low- and moderate-income communities and enforce stricter standards that eliminate incentives for predatory loans and provides greater transparency;

3. Demystifies the credit reporting system through creation of a public education and awareness campaign about credit scoring and its impact on wealth creation, and establishment of a penalty structure for credit reporting bureaus that maintain inaccurate client files.

- Restore and Make Permanent the Small Business Administration’s Community Express Loan Program;

- Continue Funding for the New Market Tax Credit Program Beyond 2009;

- Develop an Affordable National Health Insurance Option.

http://nul.org/thestateofblackamerica.html

[Thrill]

3. Good thing Obama is a young and calm leader. Because the problems put on his table

would cause someone to think suicide. Issues like this really need to be talked about and dealt with. Just so many problems.

[BlooInBloo]

5. You have to BUY the damn thing? wtf?

[EffieBlack]

6. What's wrong with that?

The National Urban League is a non-profit organization that does outstanding work in local communities all around the country. They posted the Executive Summary and Abstracts on their website for anyone to download for free. But I'm sure a project like this isn't cheap, so I have no problem with them charging for the book, since the money goes to an excellent cause.

[BlooInBloo]

7. It means very few people will read it.

[Exilednight]

8. Abstracts are not the same as the whole report. It's like one of those .........

books for dummies. Personally, I would love to read it, but I'm not going to shell out the money to buy it.

[EffieBlack]

9. The Urban League has provided ample information about what's in the book so that people who don't

want to "shell out the money to buy it" can get plenty of info. But the Urban League is a non-profit organization that probably cannot afford to just give away all of its products for free - especially products that likely are not cheap to produce, such as this one. The book gets very wide distribution every year, so there are obviously plenty of people who are willing and able to pay $19.95 - less than the cost of a couple of CDs or a night at the movies or a concert ticket or a popular novel or Barack Obama's memoir - to learn about an important topic. For those who don't think it's worth it, well . . .

But it is interesting to me that so many people insist that black leaders and black organizations address problems in our communities and offer rational solutions, not just complaints - yet when they do, they get criticized for not giving away their products for free. Funny, I didn't see people complain when Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Stephen King, John Grisham, etc. charge for THEIR books.

I think this 300-page book is well worth the cost (I spend more than that on home decorating magazines in a month) and am very pleased that, in purchasing it, I am helping to support the excellent work of this organization and making it possible for them to continue doing what they do without going broke doing it. For me, it's $20 well spent. Anyone who can afford it but just doesn't want to spend the money - it's their loss.

[Empowerer]

10. Exactly. Thank you for breaking it down.