Category: Barack Obama

Teachers are not the problem; poverty is

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By Alan Bean

The current assault on America’s teachers has been brutal and bipartisan.  The correlation between family income and student test scores has been clear  for decades, but no one, even our progressive President, wants to acknowledge the obvious. 

In the decades following the civil rights movement, everyone knew that if we sat back and did nothing for poor and struggling families and communities we would eventually be dealing with a great, sprawling undercaste.  The crisis in education is a function of poverty.  We had a choice: schools or prisons.  We chose badly.

There are bad teachers just as there are bad mechanics and bad dentists–that has always been a given.  But bad teachers are not the problem; poor and broken families are the problem.  America chose to leave her most at-risk citizens to their own devices and our teachers live with the consequences every day of the school year, Monday through Friday.  They take these consequences home with them.  The consequences come unbidden in troubling dreams. 

I am not dispassionate and neutral on this issue; my wife and all three of my children are teachers.  I live with these brave people and my perspective has been shaped by their passion and their pain.

You may have seen Diane Ravitch on the Daily Show last week.  This short essay, written for the New York Times, summarizes the thesis of Ravitch’s new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” (more…)

Careful Mike, your true colors are shining through

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By Alan Bean

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Mark 8:36

Last Thursday, potential presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee assured Stephen Colbert that Barack Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim (as 31% of Republicans believe).  An encouraging sign, don’t you think?  It’s nice to know that the leading Republican candidate in the South sides with the sane two-thirds of his party on this important issue.

Then, four days later, Mr. Huckabee informed a conservative radio talk show host that Obama was raised in Kenya and that anti-imperialistic stories about the Mau-Mau uprising in the early 1950s, imbibed from his father and grandfather, likely account for the president’s liberal politics. (more…)

Texas history texts ripped by conservative group

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By Alan Bean

“If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”  – George Orwell, 1984

George Orwell learned how easily the past is misremembered as a combatant in the Spanish Civil War and during his years with the BBC in WWII.  Orwell is a hero to both the left and the right because he believed in relating historical fact as objectively and honestly as fallible flesh is able. 

As the culture wars rage, it is incumbent upon partisans on the left and right to police their own side of the conflict.  When 57% of Republicans believe the president is a Muslim, 45% believe he was born outside the United States, and 24% believe Mr. Obama may be the antiChrist, we’ve got a problem that only Republican leaders can effectively address.  We aren’t selling out when we critique our own people; we’re ensuring that the game is fairly played.

That is precisely what the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute has done in its report on the historical curricula taught in American schools.  Their dissection of the Texas State Board of Education’s distorted historical vision is utterly devastating.  I have pasted some of the pithy highlights below, but I urge you to read the entire report. (more…)

Pardons in a punitive age

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By Alan Bean

‘Tis the season for executive pardons–or at least it used to be. 

The editorial board of the Washington Post is criticizing President Obama for making nine trifling pardons, most of which involve small crimes that date back decades. 

In a slashing opinion piece in the Dallas Morning News, Scott Henson of Grits for Breakfast questions the prevailing practice of handing out a few scattered pardons like Christmas presents while ignoring entire categories of people who have fallen victim to ill-considered policies like putting non-violent citizens  in prison for simple pot possession.

Meanwhile, NYT columnist Bob Herbert takes a stripe out of Mississippi Governor Hailey Barbour and the political establishment of Mississippi for their shabby treatment of the Scott sisters. (more…)

Bob Moser: Can Texas Democrats Stop Chasing Ghosts?

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Back in July, when the governor’s race still looked like a race

This article originally appeared in the Texas Observer.

By Bob Moser

“The only thing worse than standing for something unpopular is standing for nothing at all.”

Back in July, when the governor’s race still looked like a race, Wayne Slater of The Dallas Morning News bird-dogged Democrat Bill White for a week as he hunted for votes among the Anglo conservatives of East Texas. In one especially vivid account, datelined Palestine, Slater showed White answering litmus-test gun-rights questions at the local Starbucks. The candidate answered satisfactorily, citing a B+ score from the National Rifle Association and artfully dodging a question about the right to pack heat in church. A couple of East Texans admitted to Slater that they were considering voting for this strange, surprising Democrat. But there was just one problem, Jerry Harrison of the Farm Bureau said: “The only holdback I can see is that he’s a Democrat and he’s going to be with Obama.” (more…)

Challenging the New Jim Crow, Part 3

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By Alan Bean

This is the third excerpt from a speech delivered on the campus of the University of Chicago.  Part one can be found here two can be found here.

The New Jim Crow comes to Jena, Louisiana

In 1991, the same year Larry Stewart was elected Sheriff of Swisher County, Texas,  J. Reed Walters became District Attorney of LaSalle Parish in north central Louisiana, winning 52% of the vote.  David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon who ran for governor that year, carried 70% of the vote in the parish, his best showing in Louisiana.  Since the LaSalle Parish electorate is 86% white, this suggests that an unapologetic racist won over 80% of the white vote that year. 

In 2008, 85.5% of LaSalle Parish voters supported John McCain; a likely indication that Barack Obama received zero support from white voters. 

When Reed Walters passed his bar exams in 1980, Speedy O. Long was still District Attorney.  Long took the young attorney under his wing and taught him the ropes.  When Speedy went to his reward in 2005, Reed Walters called him a friend and mentor. (more…)

J. Alfred Smith, Sr.: “Reclaiming our Prophetic Voice”

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Rev. J. Alfred Smith, Sr.

I first met J. Alfred Smith, Sr in 1995 when he preached a series of prophetic-evangelistic sermons at First Baptist Church Kansas City, KS.  Charles Kiker (a founding member of Friends of Justice) was pastor of FBC at the time and I was there to provide the music.  Dr. Smith and I were chatting informally before the first service; he was telling me about the impact the war on drugs was having in his community.  To my utter astonishment, the man began to weep uncontrollably–something I had never seen a preacher do before.  He wasn’t the slightest bit embarrassed by his tears.  In fact, he behaved as if weeping was the normal and appropriate response to the circumstances in which he found himself.

J. Alfred Smith, Sr. was Senior Pastor of Oakland’s Allen Temple, one of the premier pulpits in America.  He is now Pastor Emeritus of that church; his son, J. Alfred Smith, Jr., has since taken over as Senior Pastor.

J. Alfred Smith, Sr. and several of his parishioners were tremendously supportive during our justice struggle in Tulia, Texas.  It was there I began to understand the tears I had witnessed several years earlier.  I last saw Dr. Smith at the New Baptist Covenant gathering in Atlanta a couple of years ago.

The sermon below addresses several issues regularly featured on this blog.  Dr. Smith talks about the betrayal of “the prosperity gospel”, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Day, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the need for a new kind of Christianity, or, from an African American perspective, the recovery of the old prophetic gospel that once animated the civil rights movement. (more…)

School board says ‘no’ to Chavez holiday

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Cesar Chavez

By Alan Bean

Arlington school students will still have a holiday in May, but it won’t bear the name of Cesar Chavez.  Last night, a series of eloquent Latino activists (many of them in their teens) made the case for naming this anonymous holiday after the great labor organizer and civil rights activist.  Gloria Peña, president of the board of trustees, presented a motion in favor of the change.  I even made a little impromptu speech of my own.  It made no difference.

For me, this issue is personal and therefore emotional.  First, the local fight for a Chavez holiday is being led by Luis Castillo, am Arlington LULAC president, Friends of Justice board member, and friend.  (more…)

Bob Herbert brings us down to earth

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By Alan Bean

Let’s face it folks, William Wordsworth was right:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

How many of us understand what’s going on out there?  Does anyone comprehend the economic crisis raging around us?  Really? 

We listen to the pundits mutual-contradictions and say (if we are honest), “You might be right, but what do I know?  More to the point, what do you know, and how do you know it?”

This being the case, it is refreshing to find an opinion piece that limits itself to the obvious facts about which there can be little controversy.  Consider this:

“People traveling in the real world understand that the federal budget deficits are sky high because of the Bush-era tax cuts, the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the spending that was needed to keep the Great Recession from spiraling into another Great Depression.” 

Bob Herbert could have added the huge welfare program known as mass incarceration to the list, but he’s essentially on target.  How many Americans understand these obvious facts?  Judging by the recent election, not many.  (more…)