Commentary: Get Out The Vote
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
I don’t do a lot of rants (I had a different story I was going to go with ), but today’s radical Supreme Court decision calls for a rant. Beyond the (in my opinion) justified finger pointing at 2016 we need to look at the larger picture. As a veteran of GOTV (get out the vote campaigns) of over 30 years, we as progressives have been getting outworked the last 10 years on the campaign trail. When I started out in the early nineties it was Democrats and Progressives who outorganized the Republicans and Conservatives, now that advantage has whittled away. Many causes to why that is true some more outside our collective control (demise of unions, big money legalized, etc.) but many are within our control.
We (meaning all of us) need to focus more on local races. Too often I see huge vanity online campaigns raising huge sums of money going to federal candidates in uncompetitive races, when local state legislative races in swing or competitive districts remaining underfunded. We need to be smarter, more focused, and more informed on local races. Gerrymandering is an issue, but smart organizing can flip these lower level, lower turn out races.
We need to be more focused on courts. For too long Democrats just underplayed the issue, while Republicans heavily invested in it. The composition of courts need to be front and center of progressive campaigns. Unpopular court decisions need to be tied to conservative judicial movement. Not just on Roe v Wade, but also issues like civil forfeitures, lax gun rights, the attacks should be just focused on the Supreme Court but on the entire conservative legal movement. Conservatives turned the term “liberal activist judges” into an effective political slurs. We need to do the same, staying on, on message, and reinforcing it.
We need to remember that a large part of political campaigns isn’t just getting out the base vote, but also persuasion. In my time I’ve seen too many progressive give up on the persuasion idea and focus just on turn out. Yes, turn out is important, I’ve worked on dozens and dozens of primary campaigns were you focus just on base voters, but that isn’t the same as general election campaigns were you work on persuading voters. Many of these voters don’t need to be persuaded to agree with you, they need to be persuaded to even vote. Swing voters aren’t just voters who swing between the voters, but voters who swing between voting and not voting.
But as to voters who are true swing voters, we need to work more on persuasion techniques. If your comfortable and agreeing with everything every voter in your coalition believes in, your coalition just isn’t broad enough. We need to focus on where we agree and not where we disagree. Overemphasis on disagreements lead us to this day, only refocusing on coalition building will get us out of this hole.
We also need to challenge online misinformation, because our (in my opinion) older less tech savvy leadership don’t fully grasp the new media landscape . The political right has perfected making short videos where comments are taking out of context, conspiracy theories are propagated on Instagram, Tik Tok, and WhatsApp (especially in Spanish), we badly need content creators to combat this. The party or musicians, artist, and entertainers, is badly getting outworked in a market we should own. Focus less on content that pushed angry buttons to get clicks, and more that pushes emotional buttons to engage and educated.
Everyone make a pledge to get involved. Save a vacation day to work at the polls, volunteer to do GOTV, make phone calls, find 5 local candidates in swing districts to donate $10 to, watch a relatives children so they can go to the polls, but don’t sit on the sidelines — we’ve lost that luxury — we need to organize and fight.
If you don’t like today’s results there is only one remedy to regain women the right to make decisions about their own bodies , get out the vote, get out the vote, get out the vote.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Rosandra Daywalker had always excelled. The daughter of Haitian and Jamaican parents in Miami — one an auto parts clerk, the other a nurse — she’d received a nearly perfect score on the SAT, earned a full academic scholarship to the University of Miami, graduated summa cum laude from Morehouse Medical School, and was inducted into the prestigious Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society.
Then came the icing on the cake: She matched into the elite and highly competitive specialty of otolaryngology, a field she’d fallen for after watching an elegant head-and-neck cadaver dissection in medical school. Standing on the stage during Morehouse’s Match Day festivities in 2015, Daywalker beamed. Her family could not have been more proud. The fact that fewer than 1% of otolaryngologists are Black seemed a distant concern.
Her residency at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston started well. She was the only Black trainee but felt welcome. She earned accolades and stellar reviews: “A well-liked team player.” “Always professional.” “Talented in the O.R.” She won a leadership award.
But when her supportive female program director left, everything changed. Suddenly, Daywalker could do no right. She was told she wasn’t closing clinic notes fast enough, even though she thought she closed them as quickly as other residents. She was told to be on campus all day even though other residents often worked from home. Her previously excellent performance reviews dropped in every area. According to a lawsuit Daywalker brought against UTMB, she was intimidated in the operating room, denied rotations she requested, falsely accused of posing safety issues, subject to faculty members’ hostile comments about Black and Hispanic patients, and retaliated against for raising concerns about how a Black patient was treated.
No matter how hard Daywalker studied and worked, she couldn’t seem to get traction. She started to doubt herself and suffered panic attacks. She couldn’t eat or sleep. When she returned from a medical leave, she was demoted. “I saw my wife go from being a super confident, growing superstar — in terms of medicine, she’s 10 times better than me — to just getting by, waking up anxious and depressed. It was really hard to watch,” her husband, Marcqwon, a family medicine attending physician at a health center outside of Houston, told STAT.
After more than three years of training, she left her residency in 2018. While she was not fired, the Texas Workforce Commission ruled she had been “constructively discharged,” meaning her workplace situation was so intolerable, she had no choice but to leave. “What’s painful is I wasn’t allowed to make that choice for myself,” she said. “It was stolen from me.”
Daywalker is not alone. A STAT investigation found that Black residents either leave or are terminated from training programs at far higher rates than white residents. The result of this culling — long hidden, dismissed, and ignored by the larger medical establishment — is that many Black physicians have been unable to enter lucrative and extremely white specialties such as neurosurgery, dermatology, or plastic surgery. It’s a key reason these fields have been unable to significantly diversify their ranks even as the total number of residency spots has increased nationally.
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Americans have spent over 150 years arguing about what kind of history we should teach to our children. In “Schoolbook Nation,” a book that examines the history of conflicts over American curricula, historian Joseph Moreau noted that a variety of Americans have worried about the sky falling if the “wrong” versions of history were taught in our schools. Americans, as Moreau documented, were concerned about this in the 1870s, again in the 1920s and, as we’ve seen recently, they are still concerned today.
One present source of tension is the question of whether and how we should teach children about racism, as well as other less rosy aspects of the nation’s history. Politicians, parents and other influential actors have strong and divided views about this. One side assumes that teaching a more critical version of history would be beneficial to our children and thus argue for adding more lessons critical of American history to curricula; the other side assumes that such lessons would be harmful and therefore argue that critical content should be banned from the classroom.
This, though, raises an important empirical question: What actually happens when we teach students critical lessons about American history? Or, put another way, what happens when American children learn about racism?
Social scientists have studied this question for years and found that, overall, there is a lot to be gained from schools teaching students about more challenging aspects of American history. For instance, in one field experiment conducted in high schools across the Chicago metropolitan area, University of Chicago political scientist Matthew Nelsen randomly assigned nearly 700 high schoolers to read different versions of history textbook segments and then measured what effect they had on students from different racial backgrounds.
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“If Congress had set out to say something like, ‘Let's create a law that's going to expand opportunities in scholastic and collegiate sport,’” Buzuvis said, “that law might have looked very different, and it might not have chosen the single axis of sex and might have been more broad-based.” Five Thirty Eight: Title IX Didn't Guarantee Black Women An Equal Playing Field
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Dawn Staley won three Olympic gold medals as a basketball player and another as a coach, and she has two national championships to her name at South Carolina. She has bona fides that would seem to earn her a comfortable perch at the top of her sport. But as a Black woman in college basketball, she’s not satisfied with the status quo. She knows that even with the promise of gender equality, Black women don’t get a fair shake.
“When we want all women to be successful, I do believe it falls under Title IX,” Staley said. “But I don’t think there’s enough support for Black women. I just don’t.”
The passage of Title IX in 1972 imparted unmistakeable and profound gains for female amateur athletes in the United States — strides that went far beyond the competitive confines of the field, court or track. But those gains have not been distributed equitably. Black female participation in college sports has long lagged behind that of white women. The word “race” isn’t featured among the famed 37 words of the law, and, perhaps tellingly, one of the chief figures tasked with ensuring Title IX compliance once quipped that issues of racial and gender discrimination needed to be solved one at a time.
As we approach the 50th anniversary of the landmark bill, that differentiation appears to have left some disparities. According to a study by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport on athletes at Division I schools outside of historically Black colleges and universities, Black women made up only 12 percent of all female athletes in 2020-21 — about 2 percentage points lower than in 2008, the first year in which data is available.1
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OneTen announced today the launch of a career marketplace to help Black talent without a college degree find work and build skills that could lead to better jobs and family-sustaining opportunities.
The coalition, which focuses on job opportunities and skill-building, made the announcement on the one-year anniversary of its launch. OneTen’s mission is to help facilitate the hiring, promotion and advancement of 1 million Black individuals over 10 years.
“There’s a 10-year journey to 1 million, so this is all about how you put into place a framework that we can then scale. That’s what we’re doing now,” Maurice Jones, OneTen’s chief executive officer, told theGrio.
OneTen has more than 70 member companies in its coalition to help create economic opportunity, including Merck, IBM and Delta, as well as more than 100 additional partners who help provide skill-building.
OneTen is already off to a good start. From March to December 2021, Jones said, 30,000 people were hired or promoted into family-sustaining careers. On its website, OneTen notes that MIT’s Living Wage Calculator says family-sustaining means wages just north of $60,000 to $90,000 and more, depending on the region of the country.
OneTen’s 2021 annual report shows the importance of focusing on those without a four-year college education. Three out of four Black adults don’t have a degree, making it harder to earn livable wages.
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I am shocked but not surprised. And I am angry.
For all women in the United States, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade will reverse half a century of progress in women’s healthcare.
For Black women, this decision represents something even more sinister. For us, losing access to legal abortion could spell the difference between life and death.
That may sound like a melodramatic statement, but it’s not. If the past is any guide, ending the right to abortion will spark a public health crisis for Black women defined by more maternal deaths, higher rates of poverty and greater inequality overall.
That cannot be the promise of America.
Let’s look at the facts. Black women already face significant health and economic disparities. Today the maternal mortality rate is three times as high for Black women as for white women. Black women are more likely to experience maternal health complications, like preeclampsia, than white women. And more than 1 in 5 Black women lives in poverty, compared to around 1 in 10 white women.
And while just 13% of American women are Black, 38% of those receiving abortions are Black.
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