Tag: Black Voices

The 2017 iHeartRadio Music Awards kicked off with a bang on Sunday night as Katy Perry performed her new smash hit, “Chained To The Rhythm.” 

Then host Ryan Seacrest opened with a nice hello before winners were announced and speeches were made. All in all, the ceremony was a great time and it celebrated multiple genres of music.  

Below, check out the winners list, which will be updated as awards are announced.

Note: Most winners were not revealed during the award show.  

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

The same night “Moonlight” won Best Picture, “Get Out” ended its fruitful theatrical debut with $33.4 million in North American grosses, surpassing forecasts that estimated a $28 million opening. Jordan Peele’s horror film is expected to net another $26 million this go-round, remarkable for a genre known for steep second-weekend revenue declines.

One week alone cannot presage a seismic shift, but the coupled victories for “Moonlight” and “Get Out” send a clear message about the types of stories worth telling on the big screen. “Moonlight” is a delicate coming-of-age masterpiece with an exclusively black cast, and “Get Out” is a scalding satire that indicts America’s racial bigotry as thoroughly as any slavery movie.

The two share another commonality: rapturous reception. “Moonlight” drew near-universal acclaim and placed high on many critics’ year-end lists. It was, in many ways, the defining art film of 2016, doing first-rate business for a project that cost a mere $1.5 million to make. Similarly, “Get Out” promos boasted of the movie’s 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, at least until critic Armond White published his characteristically contrarian review in the National Review.

Because “Moonlight” is an austere drama, it found an obvious portal into the Oscar race, eventually securing eight nominations. “Get Out,” on the other hand, hails from a genre regularly ignored by awards groups. Movies released in the first half of the year aren’t often remembered by the time Oscar campaigns rev up around September anyway. But those constructs should change because “Get Out” is every bit as worthy an Oscar candidate as much of the prestige fare that floods theaters every winter.

Making his directorial debut, Peele positions “Get Out” within a through-line of classics chronicling social terrors. He has cited “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Stepford Wives” ― nightmares about female subjugation and spousal manipulation ― as key influences. Except instead of demonic neighbors or patriarchal fascism, the fear in “Get Out” is something far more common: white people. 

Peele has crafted a postmodern indictment of racial bondage that requires astute viewership. Some will call this a “horror comedy,” but that’s a simplistic label: The humor is often a tongue-in-cheek result of the terror, which derives from white faces preying on black bodies. It is history, modernized and largely depoliticized, aside from the central milky clan insisting they would have voted for Barack Obama for a third term.

As Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a black photographer, meets his white girlfriend Rose’s (Allison Williams) family for the first time at their suburban WASP manor, his anxieties are reflected in common horror tropes. Chris oozes paranoia, leaving us at first wondering, as we did with Rosemary, whether his misgivings are unfounded.

We are all acquainted with, or can at least imagine, the stresses of meeting a partner’s relatives. (In-laws are terrifying, after all.) Abetted by the tension of a psychological thriller, that familiarity invokes skeptical amusement. We chuckle nervously as Rose’s family dotes over Chris like a trophy while their black house-servants mill about like zombies. We titter as his fears are seemingly confirmed and dismissed at once. Jump-scares ― those cheap “Boo!” tricks that have come to define the horror genre ― end in us laughing at ourselves for giving in to the scene the way it wants us to. We don’t yet know Rose and her parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener) have brewed a sinister plot that lobotomizes and enslaves black people, but we can detect an intangible racism beneath the surface, and that careful escalation leaves the viewer feeling susceptible. (It must be said, however, that the film does pepper in earnest comedy, mostly thanks to Chris’ loyal best friend, played by a boisterous Lil Rel Howery.) 

“Get Out” is a piece of craftsmanship, seemingly made by a veteran director. It takes a skilled filmmaker with a deep connection to the nature of storytelling to create something that twists our familiarity with movies into something original. That it follows recognizable patterns is precisely the point. In Peele’s heightened narrative, well-meaning white people ― those clueless social liberals who would gladly dedicate their avocado toast to Black Lives Matter ― are villains without masks. These boogeymen and -women are all around us. You might even be one of them. And that idea, however brashly outlined, fosters a sociological commentary as complex as any prestigious Oscar title.

Whether “Get Out” will remain one of the year’s best, thereby sealing its Oscar worthiness, is yet to be seen. The last Best Picture champ released in January or February was 1991’s “The Silence of the Lambs,” the only horror movie that’s ever won. But Universal would be wise to start pondering an awards campaign, particularly for Kaluuya’s effective performance and Peele’s direction and script. Even if the Academy hasn’t delivered on its promise, the Best Picture category expanded to a potential 10 slots so the Oscars could recognize popular movies regularly edged out by more somber conventions. “Get Out” is every bit as nuanced and layered as many intimate indie dramas, and at a time when our country can seem more racially polarized than ever, it’s just the sort of topical confrontation that Americans should be encouraged to embrace.

“Get Out” is now in theaters.

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

“Saturday Night Live” guest host Octavia Spencer was less interested in taking swipes at the Trump administration than in grappling with America’s confusion over its black films at the Oscars.

Spencer joked about the frequent confusion over her most recent movie, “Hidden Figures” ― which has been repeatedly conflated with “Fences,” a separate movie starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. “People have been so kind to me about that movie. So many people have been coming up to me, saying, ‘I love Hidden Fences!’” she quipped.

They’re only similar in that they feature African Americans. “Hidden Figures” is about the black female mathematicians and engineers at NASA who helped launch John Glenn into space, while “Fences” is a complex story about the African American experience in Pittsburgh that centers on a black garbage collector who once had dreams of the big leagues. Both films were up for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards (the honor ultimately went to “Moonlight”), and Spencer was nominated for best supporting actress.

Spencer also addressed the crazy Oscars ending when “La La Land” was mistakenly announced as the winner for best picture, when it was supposed be “Moonlight.”

“I get it, I get it,” she said. “There were three black movies at the Oscars this year. And that’s a lot for America.” An easy solution, Spencer said, would be a three-way mashup of the films.

”If you’re gonna get confused anyway, I thought I might as well make some money off it. So, that’s why I produced ‘Hidden Fence Light,’” she joked. “It’s the story of three black women who send an introspective gay boy to build a fence on the moon.”

In any case, she quipped, it’s nice not to have to play nurses any longer.

Spencer got to reprise a situation from yet another one of her movies on “SNL” — 2011’s “The Help” — when she reappeared as her character in that film, Minny Jackson (for which Spencer won an Oscar for best supporting actress). She turned up in the cold open with Kate McKinnon’s Jeff Sessions to offer him a version of her famous excrement pie from the movie that Minny served to her employer.

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and the driving force behind the administration’s controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, has a favorite metaphor he uses to describe the largest refugee crisis in human history.

“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe,” he said in October 2015.

“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration,” he said in January 2016. “It’s a global issue today — this kind of global Camp of the Saints.”

“It’s not a migration,” he said later that January. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”

“When we first started talking about this a year ago,” he said in April 2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. … I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?”

Bannon has agitated for a host of anti-immigrant measures. In his previous role as executive chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart — which he called a “platform for the alt-right,” the online movement of white nationalists — he made anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim news a focus.

But the top Trump aide’s repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s never found a wider audience. There’s a good reason for that: It’s breathtakingly racist.

“[This book is] racist in the literal sense of the term. It uses race as the main characterization of characters,” said Cécile Alduy, professor of French at Stanford University and an expert on the contemporary French far right. “It describes the takeover of Europe by waves of immigrants that wash ashore like the plague.”

The book, she said, “reframes everything as the fight to death between races.”

Upon the novel’s release in the United States in 1975, the influential book review magazine Kirkus Reviews pulled no punches: “The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”

Linda Chavez, a Republican commentator who has worked for GOP presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush but opposed Trump’s election, also reviewed the book back then. Forty years later, she hasn’t forgotten it.

“It is really shockingly racist,” Chavez told The Huffington Post, “and to have the counselor to the president see this as one of his touchstones, I think, says volumes about his attitude.”

The plot of The Camp of the Saints follows a poor Indian demagogue, named “the turd-eater” because he literally eats shit, and the deformed, apparently psychic child who sits on his shoulders. Together, they lead an “armada” of 800,000 impoverished Indians sailing to France. Dithering European politicians, bureaucrats and religious leaders, including a liberal pope from Latin America, debate whether to let the ships land and accept the Indians or to do the right thing — in the book’s vision — by recognizing the threat the migrants pose and killing them all.

The non-white people of Earth, meanwhile, wait silently for the Indians to reach shore. The landing will be the signal for them to rise up everywhere and overthrow white Western society.

The French government eventually gives the order to repel the armada by force, but by then the military has lost the will to fight. Troops battle among themselves as the Indians stream on shore, trampling to death the left-wing radicals who came to welcome them. Poor black and brown people literally overrun Western civilization. Chinese people pour into Russia; the queen of England is forced to marry her son to a Pakistani woman; the mayor of New York must house an African-American family at Gracie Mansion. Raspail’s rogue heroes, the defenders of white Christian supremacy, attempt to defend their civilization with guns blazing but are killed in the process.

Calgues, the obvious Raspail stand-in, is one of those taking up arms against the migrants and their culturally “cuckolded” white supporters. Just before killing a radical hippie, Calgues compares his own actions to past heroic, sometimes mythical defenses of European Christendom. He harkens back to famous battles that fit the clash-of-civilizations narrative — the defense of Rhodes against the Ottoman Empire, the fall of Constantinople to the same — and glorifies colonial wars of conquest and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.

Only white Europeans like Calgues are portrayed as truly human in The Camp of the Saints. The Indian armada brings “thousands of wretched creatures” whose very bodies arouse disgust: “Scraggy branches, brown and black … All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms.” Poor brown children are spoiled fruit “starting to rot, all wormy inside, or turned so you can’t see the mold.”

The ship’s inhabitants are also sexual deviants who turn the voyage into a grotesque orgy. “Everywhere, rivers of sperm,” Raspail writes. “Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers.”

The white Christian world is on the brink of destruction, the novel suggests, because these black and brown people are more fertile and more numerous, while the West has lost that necessary belief in its own cultural and racial superiority. As he talks to the hippie he will soon kill, Calgues explains how the youth went so wrong: “That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest — none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains.”

The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Revelation 20:9 — is nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novel’s last line links past humiliations tightly to its own grim parable about modern migration. “The Fall of Constantinople,” Raspail’s unnamed narrator says, “is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.”

Raspail wrote The Camp of the Saints in 1972 and 1973, after a stay at his aunt’s house near Cannes on the southern coast of France. Looking out across the Mediterranean, he had an epiphany: “And what if they came?” he thought to himself. “This ‘they’ was not clearly defined at first,” he told the conservative publication Le Point in 2015. “Then I imagined that the Third World would rush into this blessed country that is France.”

Raspail’s novel has been published in the U.S. several times, each time with the backing of the anti-immigration movement.

The U.S. publishing house Scribner was the first to translate the book into English in 1975, but it failed to reach a wide audience amid withering reviews by critics. A rare favorable take appeared in National Review. “Raspail brings his reader to the surprising conclusion that killing a million or so starving refugees from India would be a supreme act of individual sanity and cultural health,” then-Dartmouth professor Jeffrey Hart wrote in 1975. “Raspail is to genocide what [D.H. Lawrence] was to sex.” Hart added that “a great fuss” was being made over “Raspail’s supposed racism,” but that the “liberal rote anathema on ‘racism’ is in effect a poisonous assault upon Western self-preference.”

The book received a second life in 1983 when Cordelia Scaife May, heiress to the Mellon fortune and sister to right-wing benefactor Richard Mellon Scaife, funded its republication and distribution. This time it gained a cult following among immigration opponents.

May’s money has also been instrumental in funding the efforts of John Tanton, the godfather of the anti-immigration movement in the U.S. Tanton, who began as an environmentalist and population control proponent, founded a host of groups focused on restricting immigration, including the Federation of American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA and U.S. English. May’s fortune has fueled these groups with tens of millions of dollars in contributions over the years.

Linda Chavez was recruited in 1987 to head U.S. English, which advocates for English to be designated the country’s official language. But then a series of disturbing stories painted Tanton’s motives in a racial light. Among other issues, Chavez said she learned that his funding came from the pro-eugenics Pioneer Fund and from May, who Chavez knew had helped publish The Camp of the Saints. Chavez recalled seeing Tanton’s staffers carrying the book around their offices. She quit the group.

Tanton, who insists his opposition to immigration is not connected to race at all, told The Washington Post in 2006 that his mind “became focused” on the issue after reading The Camp of the Saints. In 1995, his small publishing house, Social Contract Press, brought the book back into print for a third time in the U.S., again with funding from May. Historians Paul Kennedy and Matt Connelly tied the book to then-current concerns about global demographic trends in a cover story for The Atlantic.

“Over the years the American public has absorbed a great number of books, articles, poems and films which exalt the immigrant experience,” Tanton wrote in 1994. “It is easy for the feelings evoked by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty to obscure the fact that we are currently receiving too many immigrants (and receiving them too fast) for the health of our environment and of our common culture. Raspail evokes different feelings and that may help to pave the way for policy changes.”

In 2001, the book was republished one more time, again by Tanton, and again gained a cult following among opponents of immigration like the border-patrolling Minutemen and eventually the online “alt-right.”

Bannon’s alt-right-loving Breitbart has run multiple articles over the past three years referencing the novel. When Pope Francis told a joint session of Congress that the U.S. should open its arms to refugees in September 2015, Breitbart’s Julia Hahn, now an aide to Bannon in the White House, compared his admonition to Raspail’s liberal Latin American pontiff. And the novel’s thesis that migration is invasion in disguise is often reflected in Bannon’s public comments.

The refugee crisis “didn’t just happen by happenstance,” Bannon said in an April 2016 radio interview with Sebastian Gorka, who now works for the National Security Council. “These are not war refugees. It’s something much more insidious going on.”

Bannon has also echoed the novel’s theory that secular liberals who favor immigration and diversity weaken the West.

“Do you believe the elites in this country have the backbone, have the belief in the underlying principles of the Judeo-Christian West to actually win this war?” he asked Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), now the attorney general, in June 2016.

“I’m worried about that. … They’re eroding, regularly it seems to me, classical American values that are so critical to our success,” Sessions replied.

Like Raspail, Bannon has reveled in the past victories of Christendom over Islamic forces.

“If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers kept their stance, and I think they did the right thing,” he said in a 2014 speech broadcast to a conference at the Vatican. “I think they kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna [the Battle of Vienna in 1683], or Tours [the Battle of Tours in 732], or other places. … They were able to stave this off, and they were able to defeat it, and they were able to bequeath to us a church and a civilization that really is the flower of mankind.”

Now Bannon sits at the right hand of the U.S. president, working to beat back what Bannon calls “this Muslim invasion.” And Trump is all in on the project. During the campaign, he called for a ban on all Muslims entering the country. His Jan. 28 executive order, since blocked in the courts, turned this campaign idea into executive policy.

Trump has continued to defend the executive order as a life-or-death national security issue. “We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America,” he said in his first speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.

Five days earlier, Trump had called his immigration enforcement efforts a “military operation.”

Although Department of Homeland Security officials walked back that statement, the president’s conflation of immigration with warfare did not go unnoticed.

“They see this as a war,” Chavez said.

Chavez, who supports some of Trump’s economic policy proposals, called the direction the White House is taking on immigration and race “extremely dangerous.” She said Trump’s immigration moves are “a kind of purging of America of anything but our Northern European roots.” Bannon, she added, “wants to make America white again.”

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

Hours after Donald Trump accused his predecessor Barack Obama of wire-tapping Trump Tower before the election, the president’s fans gathered in cities across the country to show their support.

And with the help of Trump protesters, many of the crowds appeared to top dozens of people or more. 

To be sure, there were throngs of people in cities like Nashville, Tennessee, parts of Florida and some other states. And crowds were decidedly bigger than that really sad, lonely one in Maine. But the “March 4 Trump” rallies Saturday showed a stark contrast between crowds in support of the president and the hundreds of thousands of people who swept the nation in protest over the past few months.

According to organizers at March4Trump.org, the rallies were held for just that ― support of the president:

President Trump has thankfully set a new course, and no matter your race, creed, color, gender, orientation, age, or anything else traitors exploit to divide, We The People are one.  Come show your support for him, each other, and our country right in the heart of our capital.

Speakers at various demonstrations railed against the media and protesters, called for Obama and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to be jailed, accused Democrats of “forgetting 9/11” by electing the 44th president and generally lamented people lamenting Trump. An outbreak of violence was also documented at the capitol building in St. Paul, Minnesota.

“Hoping that our president fails ― our president who is the captain of the American ship ― if you hope he fails, we will all sink on that ship,” one speaker said at a rally in Washington, D.C.

Trump, who was scheduled to stay at the Mar-a-Lago Club over the weekend, reportedly stopped a motorcade in Palm Beach to wave at supporters.

Here’s a look at some of the rallies across the country that folks on Twitter shared images of:

Colorado

Indiana 

Tennessee 

Minnesota

 Washington, D.C. 

Ohio

Patriots from both sides of the aisle took over Columbus.

Missouri

New Jersey

Pennsylvania

Florida 

 New York

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

On a number of occasions, I have been in the presence of White people who want to learn more about the “struggle.” But their desire to learn is not motivated by the fact that they have done any self-reflection and therefore understand their role in being complicit in the oppression others. Rather, it is motivated by the fact that they have had some contact with a marginalized community and decide that it is now their job to save them.

But here’s the thing: We don’t need your saving. Nor do we need you to flaunt your privilege by demonstrating what it looks like to be subjected to a system of oppression that is keeping us down, but which leaves you relatively unscathed.

I recently had an especially traumatizing encounter with a White man who reacted to my comments that Muslims were inherently more vulnerable to targeting due to the current atmosphere (and well, the last 15 years of the War on Terror), by responding that he would do whatever it took to get attention from the government and that he would beg to get arrested.

Not recognizing his privilege in any sense of the word, this individual didn’t seem to even begin to understand how offensive his comment was; that while the rest of us have to wake up and live in fear, others like him have to beg to be targeted. Despite his proclamations, what this man also didn’t understand or didn’t care to understand is that this “valiant” act that he was proposing would have virtually no impact on how the rest of us fare and therefore provide us with no utility to our struggle. Heroism, after all, must come at the expense of real sacrifice, not privilege that you give up knowing that it will be returned in form because of that very privilege.

What’s worse is that alongside such individuals, the struggles that many of us face as Black and Brown folks are often couched in ways that make social justice more palatable to White people. Thus, our quest for social justice becomes centered inadvertently on White people.

What makes White people feel good then becomes the driving force behind the work that we do because they either want to participate in the movement or need to be convinced its worth participating in. This comes at the expense of centering our own voices in addition to push back against our refusal to collaborate with fallacious narratives that obscure the cruelty of White colonialism and imperialism.

It’s not my job to get my people free and offer solutions for how white people can do better, they need to exert their extraordinary privilege and find a way to do better, without asking for the labor or black and brown bodies.

I offered some thoughts on how White people often dominate social justice spaces at the expense of the people whose very lives are at stake. This must be changed and it must be rejected. We must develop categorical principles of justice that bind White people or send them on their way. There’s no more time for coddling or providing comfort and if you’ve read this post and are still going to beg to get arrested, then you are no comrade of mine.

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

It was a popular sentiment. 

Stylist Shannon Stokes, who worked alongside Farren Fucci for the shoot that took place in New York last month, said her team took inspiration from the singer’s “budding acting career” ― she’s set to appear with Cate Blanchett, Sandra Bullock and Anne Hathaway in the all-female “Ocean’s Eight.” The resulting imagery casts her “as a high fashion clerk in a bodega of the future.”

For those keeping track at home, Rihanna has also invented the practice of grocery shopping.

Rihanna discussed her philosophy of charity while speaking at Harvard. The singer helped set up a state-of-the-art center for oncology and nuclear medicine and funds a scholarship program to help Caribbean students attending U.S. schools.

“All you need to do is help one person, expecting nothing in return,” Rihanna said. 

She just keeps giving.

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

Samuel L. Jackson joined Jimmy Fallon to strike down people’s angry Facebook comments with great vengeance and furious anger on Friday night.

The duo read out online tirades about the price of Girl Scout cookies, the taste of Pop-Tarts and the location of tissues inside Walgreens for the hilarious “The Tonight Show” segment.

Check out the full clip above.

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

President Trump made his first visit to a school as president on Friday, amid reports that he is planning an expensive and widespread federal school choice program.

He did not visit one of the traditional public schools that 90 percent of American students attend. Instead, he spent the afternoon in a private Catholic school that participates in Florida’s tax credit scholarship program. That program gives tax breaks to corporations and individuals who donate money to a scholarship granting group. This group, in turn, helps low-income kids attend private schools. 

Trump’s visit has been seen as a show of support for programs like Florida’s, which make it easier for students to attend private schools. He has signaled his support for such programs before, although it is unclear what a school choice initiative from his administration would look like. 

Trump visited the school with an entourage, including U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner. He visited a fourth-grade classroom and participated in a roundtable discussion with school leaders. 

St. Andrew Catholic School in Orlando serves students from pre-kindergarten to eighth grade. The school’s website says: “our goals are simple: College and Heaven.”

While at the school, Trump highlighted Denisha Merriweather, a young woman who enrolled in a private school through Florida’s school choice program. Earlier in the week, Merriweather was one of his guests to his address to Congress. 

He said he hopes to see “millions more to achieve the same success” as Merriweather during the visit.

After one child told him she wants to start a business, he joked that she’s “gonna make a lot of money. But don’t run for politics,” he said, according to the Associated Press.

Public education leaders strongly criticized Trump’s trip to the school, citing evidence that school voucher programs ― a close cousin of tax credit scholarship programs ― are ineffective and drain resources from public schools.

“To borrow a word from President Trump, it’s so ‘sad’ that the president and his secretary of education have demonstrated such an antipathy toward public schools,” said president of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten in a statement. “He has taken a page right out of the extremist playbook by criticizing, undermining and proposing the defunding of public schools and instead trumpeting private alternatives.” 

Similar to tax credit programs, voucher programs also use taxpayer money to pay for children to go to private schools. President of the National Education Association Lily Eskelsen García noted that unlike public schools, private schools do not have to accept every student and are not held accountable for their performance. 

“A child’s success should not depend on a gamble, and yet today’s visit by President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos shows they’re doubling down on failed policies like voucher schemes that steal taxpayer dollars from public schools to fund private and for-profit schools, all at the expense of students,” said García’s statement. 

In recent days, groups like The Century Foundation have also released reports criticizing Trump’s education agenda and emphasis on private schools.

Richard Kahlenberg, report author and a senior fellow at the left-leaning foundation, says that if Trump follows through on his proposed education plans, it could help lead to the privatization of the American public school system.

“I think public education is under a bigger threat than any time in my memory,” Kahlenberg told The Huffington Post. 

Kahlenberg noted that tax credit programs essentially have the same result as voucher programs, in “diverting public money from public schools to private schools.”

DeVos, Trump’s controversial secretary of education, has long been a supporter of these types of programs. She has said she sees tax credit and voucher programs as a way to provide the same opportunities to poor families as rich families. 

 ― ― 

Rebecca Klein covers the challenges faced in school discipline, school segregation and the achievement gap in K-12 education. Tips? Email: Rebecca.Klein@huffingtonpost.com.

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

It’s been about about a month since residents of East Chicago, Indiana, were told they should not drink their tap water without filtering it.

The Environmental Protection Agency said actionable levels of lead had been found in the city’s water supply and warned residents to use certified filters until further notice.

The discovery was yet another setback for a city already dealing with lead and arsenic levels in soil surrounding a Superfund waste site that are so high that Gov. Eric Holcomb declared an emergency disaster.

Advocates say state and city officials aren’t doing enough to keep residents safe from the multiple ways they can be exposed to toxic lead. A coalition that includes the Natural Resources Defense Council, local organizations and East Chicago residents on Thursday issued a petition urging the EPA to launch a comprehensive emergency response to the city’s crisis.

The petition calls for the EPA to “immediately” provide East Chicago residents with free faucet filters and bottled water, and to ensure the filters are installed correctly. The coalition also called for blood testing for children younger than 7, who are at high risk of lead exposure, and expanded water testing for more households than the EPA sampled last year.

“Nobody should be forced to endure contaminated water,” Anjali Waikar, a staff attorney at the NRDC, told HuffPost. “We’re asking for temporary, short-term relief to ensure that people aren’t consuming contaminated water and asking for the agency to provide these basic life necessities until the situation is resolved.” 

Neither EPA nor city officials responded to requests for comment.

The petition arrives at a time of upheaval at the EPA under President Donald Trump. Reports emerged this week that the agency’s budget could be cut as much as 24 percent.  Many programs targeted for cuts could affect cleanup efforts in East Chicago. 

The EPA’s brownfields program could be slashed 44 percent, or $11 million, according to reports, and the agency’s state grant programs for drinking water and lead are listed for 30-percent reductions. EPA compliance and civil enforcement programs could see large cuts, too.

The budget numbers are preliminary and the agency can still contest them. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer this week that he would resist cuts to state grant or infrastructure programs. Pruitt commented elsewhere that he would protect funding for Superfund cleanup.

“We’ll work through the budgeting process to protect those dollars,” Pruitt told the CNN.

Advocates said they want Pruitt’s EPA to move promptly in East Chicago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has noted that no amount of lead detected in blood can be considered safe, and many East Chicago residents have likely been exposed — through soil, air and now water — for decades. 

As Waikar sees it, East Chicago and other lower-income communities of color are where a slashed EPA budget would be felt the hardest.

Of particular concern to Waikar is a proposed reduction of 78 percent, or $5.2 million, to EPA’s environmental justice program, which helps communities address industry pollution. 

“This situation is an illustration of why the EPA is so important,” Waikar said. “Communities like East Chicago are exactly the types of communities at risk of being impacted by these budget cuts.”

Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, expressed similar concern with the reported slashing of EPA environmental justice funds. He said in a Wednesday statement that the proposal “sent a shameful message: The health of poor Americans is less important than that of the wealthy.” 

The lead crisis in East Chicago recalls the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, where the EPA was criticized for intervening too slowly in that city’s lead-contamination problems.

Pruitt said during his Senate confirmation hearing in January that there “should have been a more rapid response” to the Flint crisis. Trump, on the campaign trail, blamed the Flint crisis on “incompetent politicians” and said it “would have never happened if I were president.” 

Debbie Chizewer, a law fellow at Northwestern University’s Environmental Advocacy Clinic who has been assisting East Chicago residents, said the city’s crisis is a chance for Pruitt and the Trump administration to make good on their remarks.

“I hope they recognize that this is an opportunity to show how they’d handle situations differently,” Chizewer said.

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Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices