Rights forum attacks racial income gap

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Nearly 200 community members gathered at the Neighborhoods Organizing for Change office for a forum on workers’ rights in Minneapolis and throughout the state, including a need for earned sick and safe time, fair scheduling, a living wage, and ending wage theft on Saturday, February 28. “When I was working at McDonald’s, I had a baby and had to go back to work ten days later or lose my job–even though I had a C-section,” said Octancia Adams, an organizer with Neighborhoods Organizing for Change. “They wouldn’t give me paid time off. We need earned sick and safe time for all workers.”Rosa Garcia Perez, a cook at McDonald’s organizing with Centro de Trabajadores Unido en la Lucha (CTUL), spoke about the difficulties of raising a family in a low-wage job. “I have to work the overnight shift by myself–and sometimes I don’t even have time to go to the bathroom or drink water,” said Rosa. “I’m currently four months pregnant, so I need to do both of those things a lot. Continue Reading

The Inequality Debate Needs to be Careful about Scale

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Two weeks ago, the Atlantic published a short (and facile) post called “the Miracle of Minneapolis” that (as is the way of media circles in insecure places) launched itself right onto the forefront of the Twin Cities social media scene. And, with good reason, the article re-kindledconversations about racial disparities that have been going on for years. Before I dive into my argument, I want to outline two crucial caveats. First, I love that we’re discussing racial disparities with increasing frequency these days. We have ignored the way that our cities have created wealth only for some (white) people, and made it almost impossible for others. The Fair Housing Act was only passed in the 60s, which isn’t very long ago, and we need to always remember how our cities treat people differently depending on race, class, and culture. Continue Reading

Leadership forum crafts united urban agenda

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They came together for the greater good. A one-day gathering of several hundred at the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs was convened by the African American Leadership Forum (AALF) and it brought together some who may have had diverging thoughts but common goals. These goals are to put into plan actions that will empower area African-Americans – many of whom have been marginalized and are not seeing the same economic, educational and political gains as their white neighbors. At a time when Blacks in the Twin Cities and throughout Minnesota are woefully lagging behind in areas of jobs, housing, education, health and political leadership, and are encountering the criminal justice system at near epidemic proportions, Jeffrey Hassan, the executive director of AALF, said the issues facing Blacks are at a critical level.African American Leadership Forum executive director Jeffrey Hassan addressing the attendees of the recent Crafting a United Agenda conference.”It’s been critical for 400 years,” said Hassan, underscoring the persistent struggle from slavery to current day for Blacks in America. “But at this time – at this moment – we have everything we need to move forward. So as Kim (Nelson, a speaker at the forum) said, if we don’t get things done now, it’s on us.”In addition to Nelson, a senior vice president at General Mills, forum attendees heard from Congressman Keith Ellison; Minnesota’s only Black state legislators, State Sens. Bobby Joe Champion and Jeff Hayden and State Rep. Rena Moran; Harvest Network founder and CEO, Eric Mahmoud; the Rev. Jerry McAfee and a host of others. Continue Reading

CenturyLink may exclude service to minorities, critics say

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Competition is good, right?Of course it is. Competition in business is so needed that there are rules in our nation that guarantee a competitive marketplace. So it may come as a shock that when CenturyLink announced it wants to compete against Comcast – Minneapolis’ only cable provider since 1983 – the communications company was met with opposition. But those opposed to CenturyLink say they agree with competition in a free marketplace, what they don’t agree with is CenturyLink being able to cherry pick where to compete – especially if CenturyLink chooses not to service areas of lower income that tend to be minority concentrated. “I would support cable competition,” said Pete Rhodes, who operates BMA Network, a channel dedicated to multicultural programming and distributed through Comcast. “It’s good for our consumers and minority communities as long as it provides minority business and programming opportunities and a fair and equitable distribution of services.”In its application to the city CenturyLink has said it will launch via new and existing lines with a 15 percent minimum coverage, but at issue is the low threshold and the company’s unwillingness to say where that area of coverage will be.”We do have maps of coverage, but we don’t want to show them in a public forum because they’re competitively sensitive and Comcast would love to have that information as well,” said CenturyLink executive, Jim Campbell during a hearing of the Minneapolis City Council Ways and Means Committee.Ward 8 Councilwoman Elizabeth Glidden said the 15 percent coverage was too low of a threshold to start and called for a minimum 30 percent city coverage and a growth plan beyond that. Continue Reading

City Of Bloomington? 100+ Faith Leaders Want A Word With You

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The City of Bloomington’s insistence on prosecuting organizers of a “Black Lives Matter” protest at the Mall of America is getting more pushback from Minnesota’s religious leaders.A letter signed by more than 100 faith leaders asks City Attorney Sandra Johnson to have a community-wide dialog about race instead of prosecuting people.“The energy you have put into this aggressive prosecution needs to be redirected to a community-wide effort toward open dialogue between our justice system and those who do not receive equal and fair treatment and protection from our current system,” says the letter. “We would like to meet with you at your earliest convenience to discuss these matters.”Eleven people are charged with crimes ranging from trespassing to disorderly conduct for their attendance at the peaceful demonstration which included nearly 3,000 individuals on December 20, 2014 at the Mall of America. The protest was part of a larger nationwide demonstration reacting to police violence against African-Americans.This is the second letter faith leaders have sent to the city. The previous letter was signed by 41 clergy and also asked for the city to stop its prosecutions and invited the city to charge them too. Full text of the letterBlack Lives Matter Minneapolis Faith Leaders Letter of SupportDear Sandra Johnson,We, the undersigned, members of the clergy in the city of Bloomington, write to express our support of the Black Lives Matter movement. As a matter of background, on January 20, 2015, individuals working with the Black Lives Matter Minneapolis group were invited to present to the Bloomington Conference of Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and Minneapolis Area Synod at our monthly gathering, at which some of the undersigned were present. A representative from the synod office was also in attendance.We did not know what to expect when we invited this group to meet with us. Continue Reading

FBI director on police violence

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I kept waiting for someone to call out the FBI director James Comey’s recent so-called candid speech on race. Surprisingly too few people did, but he clearly should be called out because he didn’t have an honest conversation about race. However, he reminded us that this is more likely to stay the way it is.An honest conversation would have included telling cops to stop brutalizing and murdering U.S. citizens, not justifying their savage behavior. While people like the socially unaware Don Lemon of CNN applauded FBI director James Comey’s speech saying he was courageous. The truth is that the director actually codified and gave justification to police violence aimed at Black folks, while at the same time blaming Black folks for their own victimization by law enforcement.To be fair, he acknowledged that it is the unjust system that has put Black folks in the position they are in. Continue Reading

U rightly shifts stance on alerts

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The University of Minnesota announced Wednesday morning that it will modify its crime alert policy after more than a year of scrutiny for how the messages can perpetuate racism and stereotyping, particularly harming young black men.Under the change, Vice President for University Services Pam Wheelock and the police chief will evaluate on a case-by-case basis whether there’s enough information to include a suspect description when a crime alert is sent.This change is just one of many steps the University must take to make all its students feel comfortable on campus. But effective reform takes time, so we are pleased to see the University finally take this action.The Minnesota Daily’s newsroom uses a similar policy to the University’s new one when reporting on crime. As evident in the Daily’s pages and those of other major newspapers, suspect descriptions are almost always too vague to be helpful.Sufficiently broad policies allowing for case-by-case decisions can be effective, but they require great care.In a crime alert sent Monday, the University listed a suspect as having spoken “with an accent” without any indication as to what that manner of speaking may have been. This exemplifies a detail that does more harm than good in keeping the community safe — the opposite effect the alerts should have.As the University continues with its new, improved policy, we urge officials to err on the side of not using suspect descriptions unless they could clearly benefit to campus safety. [For original article click here: http://www.mndaily.com/opinion/editorials/2015/02/25/u-rightly-shifts-stance-alerts] Continue Reading

The Miracle of Two Minneapolises in Prenatal Care

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While looking around for some data for another project, I ran into Minneapolis Health Department’s Reports. There’s a lot of great data there, but not all of it is necessarily in amazing condition for people to build off of. One data set, entitled Minneapolis Birth Data, caught my attention. Locked away in mostly tabular PDFs are a lot of interesting numbers that tell you how Minneapolis’ neighborhoods fare by way of birth statistics: with a demographic overview of mothers’ race, age, education, marital status; what trimester they began prenatal care (if at all); how adequate that care was; what their baby’s birth weight was; and whether the birth was premature.After extracting some of the data, I made a map of the report from 2009-2011. In map form, the data is both shocking, and sadly not surprising when you know about the racial and socio-economic demographics of Minneapolis’ neighborhoods. A familiar pattern emerges, where the whitest and richest neighborhoods have a better overall access to prenatal care (West Calhoun, for instance, had 43 kids between the survey period of 2009-2011, and100% are listed as receiving adequate care. Continue Reading

COMMUNITY VOICES | Considering the intersections of privilege and digital literacy

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Do I frequently wish that my AmeriCorps service year paid me more money? Absolutely. I work a full time job teaching basic computer skills at the Roseville Library and make less than $6.00 an hour. But when I start to feel like my situation is unfair, I have to remind myself that my service year is a personal choice that I can—quite literally—afford to make. Unlike many of the patrons I serve through the AmeriCorps Community Technology and Empowerment Project (CTEP), I drive to work everyday in a car my parents gave me and have a degree from a reputable college. Continue Reading