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Your Black Politics: How To Eliminate Poverty — Shannon Joyce Prince
Poverty: Policies and Possibilities
By: Shannon Joyce Prince
Reprinted From Black Agenda Report
“Poor people can use themselves as weapons against poverty.”
With the recession imperiling the nation’s well-being, poverty is on everyone’s mind regardless of their political orientation. Yet too often the poor are cast as ignorant and impotent pawns needing either a kick in the pants or a magical cocktail of resources and programs. The dialogue typically stalls around what “we” must do for or to “them” as though the poor lack ingenuity and agency.
In this commentary I identify four ideas that can be used to battle poverty: ending marriage penalties, deregulating selected industries, creating tax-funded social programs run by the poor, and creating community gardens. [...]
The problem often isn’t that the poor aren’t pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but rather when they do so they are told they don’t have the appropriate credentials. [...] For example, many poor black women braid hair as a way of making money. However, as the National Center for Public Policy Research points out, many states have threatened these women with arrest because they don’t have cosmetology licenses; licenses that often demand taking courses that cost around $10,000, and frequently don’t even cover hair braiding in their curriculum [...]
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Your Black Scholar: Hope and Wisdom — By Shannon Joyce Prince
Hope and Wisdom
By: Shannon Joyce Prince
Remember back seven years ago to the aftermath of September 11th, when the world was divided into the good and the axis of evil, those who had democracy and those whose envy of it drove them to murderous fundamentalism? Remember the charge of the extreme right – that anybody who didn’t support the ‘War on Terror’ or didn’t show the appropriate level of ambivalence towards Islam or Middle Easterners, or paused to quibble over whether or not “enemy countries” had weapons of mass destruction, was unpatriotic and insufficiently American? Remember how the left, the middle, and the moderate right took issue with that kind of Manichean thinking while the war hawks said it didn’t matter if those who were leading us to war were honest or which Middle Eastern country we bombed, because we were representing the concepts of freedom and democracy, thus the nitty-gritty about reality and truth weren’t important?
I’ve been stunned to hear that same kind of rhetoric from the left. Either you support President-elect Obama or you’re a too cool for school revolutionary snob, a Gloomy Gus, or someone too idealistic, unrealistic, or cynical to be pragmatic or useful [...]
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Your Black Life: Black Female Critic Of Tim Wise Speaks Out
Word to the Wise (Tim Wise, that is)
By: Shannon Joyce Prince
In writing to condemn an attitude held by a white anti-racist activist I respect, I must begin with the words of William Lloyd Garrison, another white activist who is his intellectual antecedent. Garrison said, “Little boldness is needed to assail the opinions and practices of notoriously wicked men; but to rebuke great and good men for their conduct, and to impeach their discernment, is the highest effort of moral courage.” Tim Wise is clearly a great and good man and one of the nation’s foremost anti-racist activists, yet his recent blog post “This is how fascism comes: reflections on the cost of silence” reveals not only a powerful lack of discernment but also an intolerably ugly hatefulness.
[...]
To cruelly mock those whose way of life is different from your own and to ascribe to such people all the failings of American society is hateful and unacceptable – particularly from someone who considers himself liberal and progressive [...]
Full Article At Your Black Life
To Read Tim Wise’s (Quite Crass) Response: Click Here
Your Black Life: How To Eliminate Poverty (Part 2) — Shannon Joyce Prince
By: Shannon Joyce Prince
Contributing Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
Imagine a program that built a childcare center which gave teens construction work experience, used Department of Agriculture funds to pay poor women to cook for poor children, taught poor women to become day care teachers and run day cares, and helped poor women get their GED’s. Imagine this program also provided mortgage counseling and founded a health center that provided forty local women with jobs. Now imagine the program was run almost entirely by black welfare mothers. Such a program did once exist. It was called Operation Life. It was at its peak during the 70′s and 80′s and is detailed in the book Storming Caesar’s Palace by Annelise Orleck.
Operation Life was based on the principle that the poor themselves are the experts on poverty and many current successful programs make that adage their foundation. [...]
Another factor in reducing poverty is looking for creative solutions that solve multiple problems. [...]
For example, many poor neighborhoods have constructed community gardens in vacant lots. In Philadelphia, crime on some blocks dropped 90% after the creation of community gardens [...]
More At Your Black Life