January/February 2012 Community Connection NOW AVAILABLE!

Click on the photo above to read the January/Februar 2012 Edition of the Community Connection
(or download a PDF version HERE).

We Dream A World: The 2025 Vision For Black Men And Boys

We Dream A World: The 2025 Vision For Black Men And Boys [click link to read entire report]

LA CAN, as part of the National 2025 Campaign, is proud to present, “We Dream A World: The 2025 Vision For Black Men And Boys.” The report is the culmination of hours of community engagement, planning, research, and documentation. The report serves as national “call-to-action” while local efforts continue to blossom.

Stay tuned, much more is headed your way.

New Report Presents Path to Closing Disparities for Black Males in U.S.

For Immediate Release: Thursday, December 9, 2010

Contact: Jenice R. Robinson, 202.906.8007 NATIONAL or Pete White, 213.434.1594 LOCAL

 

New Report Presents Path to Closing Disparities for Black Males in U.S.
By 2025, A Black Boy’s World Should Look Different

(Washington, D.C.) – The 2025 Campaign for Black Men and Boys, a broad coalition of national and local organizations, today has released a new report with recommendations aimed at drastically altering life outcomes for black men and boys. We Dream A World: The 2025 Vision for Black Men and Boys identifies concrete policy solutions to close educational achievement gaps, ensure workforce success, reduce health disparities, improve conditions for low-income fathers and improve the overall well being of black men, their families, and communities.

 

“It’s old hat to talk about how too many of our young black men don’t live up to their potential,” said Rhonda Tsoi-A-Fatt, We Dream A World author and senior policy analyst at the Center for the Law and Social Policy (CLASP). “The state of black men in the United States calls for bold and immediate action. The status quo won’t do. We need fresh ideas, political will at all levels, and a clear vision forward to ensure that we don’t lose yet another generation of young black men who could contribute to the economic and social well-being of our country.”

The We Dream A World vision is the culmination of five years of research and dialogue aimed at taking a candid look at outcomes and conditions for black men and boys and what it will take to improve their lives. The project was established after a series of meetings between 120 participants from 22 national organizations led to the formation of the 2025 Campaign for Black Men and Boys. The campaign’s vision is grand. It wants to ensure that by the time black boys born in 2007 turn 18 (in 2025), the nation’s policies and social mores will have changed drastically enough that collectively they will fare far better than today’s young black men.

 

“This report effectively creates a platform and plan of action to respond to a national crisis facing America’s Black Men and Boys. Moreover, it also creates the impetus to organize our communities and demand immediate attention,” says Pete White of Los Angeles Community Action Network and the Los Angeles Black Men & Boys Coalition.

 

Currently, less than half of black male students graduate from high school on time and only 11 percent complete a bachelor’s degree. In June of this year, the unemployment rate for black men was 17.4 percent – nearly double the rate for their white counterparts. And among black males with a bachelor’s degree, only 43 percent have a job that pays at least $14.51 per hour, or enough to put them significantly above the federal poverty level if they have to support a family of four.

 

We Dream A World’s strategy focuses on five areas: education; employment and wealth; health; fatherhood and families; and justice, rights, responsibilities and opportunities.

 

On January 12, 2011, CLASP and the 2025 Campaign for Black Men and Boys will convene a meeting of national advocates and organizations to advance the vision and policy solutions presented in the We Dream A World report.

 

Read the full report at http://www.clasp.org/admin/site/documents/files/2025BMBfulldoc.pdf.

 

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The 2025 Campaign for Black Men and Boys is a national collaborative effort of several organizations and individuals. The mission of the 2025 Campaign is to collaboratively develop and implement an initiative for the educational, social, emotional, physical, spiritual, political and economic development and empowerment of black men and boys in the United States. The Campaign is currently housed at the Twenty-First Century Foundation (21CF).  Visit http://2025bmb.org/index2.php for more information.

CLASP develops and advocates for policies at the federal, state and local levels that improve the lives of low income people. We focus on policies that strengthen families and create pathways to education and work. Through careful research and analysis and effective advocacy, we develop and promote new ideas, mobilize others, and directly assist governments and advocates to put in place successful strategies that deliver results that matter to people across America. Visit www.clasp.org for more information.

President Obama Signs “The Fair Sentencing Act”

President Obama signs Historic Legislation: The Fair Sentencing Act

Indeed, as detailed in our May 2008 report, Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States, blacks and whites engage in drug offenses—possession and sales—at roughly comparable rates. But because black drug offenders are the principal targets in the “war on drugs,” the burden of drug arrests and incarceration falls disproportionately on black men and women, their families and neighborhoods. The human as well as social, economic and political toll is as incalculable as it is unjust.

–Human Rights Watch, “Decades of Disparity: Drug Arrests and Race in the United States”

The “War on Drugs,” which more appropriately should be considered a war against the civil and human rights of the Black community, has lost the full potential of one of its mightiest weapons—the disproportionate targeting, prosecution, and imprisonment of Black drug users.  President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act, passed by both the House and Senate with bi-partisan support, and severely reduces the disparity of prison sentences faced by Black people charged with drug crimes and begins to reverse the crash course our communities has been on for decades.  Reduce but not eradicate.

Since the 1980’s mandatory-minimum sentencing guidelines, used primarily to penalize Black users, have openly discriminated against African Americans. From 1999 through 2007, 80% percent or more of all drug arrests were for possession rather than sales (Human Rights Watch). Ignoring FBI data, which clearly illustrated users and not dealers were being netted, Administration after Administration continued to pursue their failed War on Drugs. It needs to be mentioned that the biggest boost of “war on drugs” funding was appropriated during the Clinton Era.

A key piece of the failed and discriminatory War on Drugs is the discrepancy known as the 100-1 ratio which sentenced a person in possession of just five grams of rock cocaine [the form of cocaine most prevalent in Black communities] to five years in prison on the first offense. However, a person needed to be in possession of no less than 500 grams of powder cocaine [the form not readily available in Black communities] to receive the same sentence.

The Fair Sentencing Act lessens the ratio, or racist application, by 82% thus changing the 100-1 disparity to an 18-1 ratio.

African Americans across the nation know all too well the impacts of the proliferation of crack cocaine on their families, communities, and overall health. However, just as devastating as the drug itself has been the mass incarceration of wholesale numbers of Black men, and more recently Black women, and the irreparable damage it has caused them.

As Pete White with the Los Angeles Community Action Network, a member organization of the National 2025 Campaign puts it, “ Mass incarceration has not only removed us from our communities, but it has also stripped us of all potential leaving us stranded in a desert of inequity.”

Make no mistake: what’s left of the War on Drugs is still very powerful and damaging to Black communities.

But today, President Obama has reduced the discriminatory sentencing power that has been used to destroy of our communities.  This is a significant victory, yet there remains much work to be done to achieve equity.