THE POWER OF LOVE

It is hard to receive a finger pointing in your direction for something that you did not do. As a Black American, I totally get that. But if we are to become change agents in the solution to the problem of racism, we must admit that it exists. And we must admit that it is systemic. In America, it is in our DNA and we have to unlearn it. American racism, then, is not about people individually-it is about the systems that have supported it for centuries. I like the definition of racism given by The National Council of Churches Racial Justice Working Group: "Racism is the intentional or unintentional use of power to isolate, separate, and exploit others....Racism is more than just a personal attitude; it is the institutionalized form of the attitude."

I think in order to take emotions off the table in dealing with racism we must be logical in our study of it. As I learned in my first year of college, we must start by attempting to disprove the hypothesis. If we think that racism no longer exists, start by research in the opposite direction. This has been my working model that has helped me grow tremendously. While I have not changed my position on every issue, I certainly have gained a lot of knowledge about the other side. So I grew as I gained knowledge and I gained knowledge because I read…everything. I read what agrees with my positions and what does not. After all, SUN TZU advised that in order to win any struggle you have to know your opposition.

The Preamble to our Constitution talked about a goal: "to form a more perfect union". We are not there yet. And those lofty words even then did not acknowledge the disparities that existed. In order to reach those goals that the Preamble promised, we must open up the wounds of our ugly past in order to acknowledge it, move on, and have a more perfect future.

We must acknowledge that Black people were miseducated for a reason. During slavery a Black person could be blinded, beaten or killed for attempting to learn to read. After slavery "ended" there was no government mechanism in place to educate the former slaves. Separate and unequal schools were the law of the land until 1954. We only have to re-read NY Sen. Chuck Schumer's 2008 speech before the Urban League and Action for a Better Community, Inc. titled "The Crisis of African-American Male Unemployment" to see the link between lack of education and unemployment.

The mortgage crisis in this country occurred not because middle class people (both Black and white) put a gun to someone's head and made them give them a mortgage, but instead happened because of greed. Mortgage companies and banks and everyone in between made money and middle class people lost homes. But how has this been played out? Story after story of people (many of them Black, but certainly not all) portrayed as dishonest and liars simply because they wanted a piece of the American Dream. Right wing pundits often put a Black face on the guilty party in this crisis.

The criminal justice system has been highlighted most recently because of the Troy Davis execution. Like everybody, I do not know whether Troy Davis committed the crime for which the State of Georgia killed him. I do know, however, there was too much doubt to do so on September 21, 2011. North Carolina has instituted the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, a program to review all cases where defendants maintain their innocence. Three people have already been released. Craig Watkins, District Attorney in Dallas County established a Conviction Integrity Unit and as a result there have been 21 DNA exonerations as of February 2011. Most frightening, though, is that since 1973, 138 people in 26 states have been released from death row. 138 innocent people would have been killed if someone had not taken a second, and third, and maybe a fourth look at their case. The majority of these innocent citizens have been Black.

Lastly, the opposite of love is hate. There is a record high 1002 active hate groups in America as documented by the SPLC Intelligence Project. These are men and women who have professed on some level their dislike other men or women because of their ethnicity, the color of their skin, their sexual identity, or some other perceived difference. These men and women more than likely have children who they are also teaching hate. This hatred has now emboldened those who “represent” us in the halls of our local, state and national political institutions and now we regularly hear hate speech among our politicians. It has become an us versus them dialogue. We must repudiate them if they do not share our values.

As for me, I choose the power of love. And because knowledge always increases power, I choose to open my eyes fully and see how and why we are where we are as a society. And to do my part to pass this knowledge on. Most importantly, I try also to reconcile all the above with the words spoken in the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians.

Post-racial? We're not there yet

The sentence in Story 1 was handed down a few months after Barack Obama was sworn in as the President of the United States. In Story 2-a few months before. Are there any observable and glaring differences in not only the sentences, but in the tone used by the Judges? Just asking. Ms. Harris just happens to be Black, and Ms. Gamble is white.


Story 1







Georgia Tech thief gets 10 years in prison
By STEVE VISSER

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Monday, March 16, 2009

Fulton County Superior Court Judge John Goger sentenced a former Georgia Tech employee to 20 years Monday — voicing disdain for the defendant and calling the prosecution’s suggested sentence too lenient.
Citing the “obscene amount of money she stole” and her violation of the public trust, the judge sentenced Michelle Harris to 10 years in prison and 10 years on probation for stealing more than $173,000 from the university by running up fraudulent charges on her university credit card.
Goger noted that Harris , also known as Michelle Dunbar , started stealing within six months of being hired as a program coordinator. The money came from federal and private foundation grants.
“Take her away,” Goger told deputies who took Harris to the Fulton County jail.
Harris had thrown herself on the mercy of the court. Earlier, she had balked at pleading guilty in a plea agreement, which called for her to spend three years in prison. She blamed the media spotlight on her case for her last-minute rejection of the plea deal.
On Monday, state Attorney General Thurbert Baker’s office recommended six years in prison.Harris’ attorney Clay Thompson asked the judge for leniency in part so his client could start repaying the money she stole. Goger told Thompson, who was just recently hired, that he warned Harris a year ago that she would have to have made some restitution by the time of her sentencing to get a break on prison time.
“Has she restored one nickel to Georgia Tech — just one nickel?” Goger asked Thompson .
Thompson said Harris was on the cusp of making a payment and possibly borrowing from family members.
“Is the answer no?” Goger asked.
“The answer is no,” Thompson said.


Find this article at:
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/atlanta/stories/2009/03/16/georgia_tech_pcard.html?cxntlid=homepage_tab_newstab






STORY 2





Former Georgia Tech worker gets 2.6 years for purchases
Donna Gamble admitted spending $316K with state credit card
By BILL TORPY

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

In the end, a former Georgia Tech employee who stole $316,000 with university credit cards stood mute before a federal judge as she was sentenced to 32 months in prison.
Donna Renee Gamble of Marietta was too embarrassed to talk in open court Tuesday or to even ask friends to come and speak on her behalf, said her defense attorney, Jimmy Berry . He suggested she was struck by some sort of “obsession” over a five-year period that caused her to buy things like a jet ski, a popcorn machine, a wide-screen TV, robotic vacuums, a treadmill and Auburn University football tickets.
“You just never know why,” Berry said after the brief hearing. “People get away with things and they mushroom. She did it a few times, there were no checks and balances at the school and it took off from there.
“The things they bought were for the betterment of the family,” Berry said of the 43-year-old mother of two daughters. “I guess it was something like that, she rationalized.”
U.S. District Court Judge Jack Camp cited the “frivolous nature” of her purchases before sentencing. Gamble, who worked in the Parker H. Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Bioscience, also was ordered to repay $316,000. Authorities have seized many of the items she bought with grant-funding from the National Science Foundation. The cards, called “p-cards,” are issued for state employees to buy work-related goods and services.
“I don’t see why you didn’t see it was wrong to steal $316,000 from the Georgia Institute of Technology,” Camp said before pronouncing sentence.
Neither Gamble, nor her husband Mickey , who sat with her before the hearing, spoke afterwards.
Federal prosecutor Russell Phillips called her actions “incredibly greedy, selfish and wasteful.” Gamble purchased a total of 3,800 items with 2,000 separate purchases, many of them from her computer at work, he said.
“It takes a lot of time to buy 3,800 items in 2,000 transactions,” Phillips said. “It’s much worse than if she wrote a single check for $316,000.
Gamble’s spending spree went unnoticed until August 2007 when a tipster called Georgia Tech auditors. Results of an investigation of the p-card program at the state’s 35 public colleges and universities found 18 cases of fraud, according to a report released in January by the University System of Georgia. Gamble was the only federal prosecution so far.
The state has indicted four people in other cases of alleged p-card fraud, said Russ Willard of the Attorney General’s office, noting one had pleaded guilty. He said other cases are being investigated.
Another former Tech employee, Michelle Harris , a former program coordinator in the school’s College of Management , was indicted this year and charged with using $173,000 in school money for personal expenses, including a diamond ring, laptop computers, digital cameras and making several debt payments.
Brad Douglas, the commissioner of the Department of Administrative Services, said the number of cards had been reduced from about 20,000 to 15,000. The program had grown from a small purchasing program into a more then $300 million in annual charges.



Find this article at:
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/atlanta/stories/2008/08/19/georgia_tech_sentencing.html

SOME THOUGHTS ON 9-11

Like everyone else on the planet today, I have been thinking backwards ten years. And of course I ask the usual questions. Do I remember where I was at the exact moment the first plane smashed into the World Trade Center? When the second plane went into the second tower what was I thinking? As the news unfolded that two other planes had been hijacked, who did I think was responsible? What must the victims have thought was happening to them? Who could have hated the United States so much that they were willing to die in order to kill as many Americans as possible?

I KNOW my answers to all of these questions, but today is not a day for what I thought then, or even what I think now. Today is a day to concentrate on the innocent victims. Those who were killed at the World Trade Center, in a Pennsylvania field, at the Pentagon, and aboard American Flights 77 and 11, and United Flights 93 and 175. A total of 2,996 people lost their lives as a result of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. They were Americans of every age, race and sex. They all seemed to have loved America dearly. Some of them were living pay check to pay check, and some had no money worries at all. Some of them were working a job they loved, and some were working just to pay the bills. The common denominator was that in all the biographies I have read about the victims, they were all connected to someone who misses them now that they are gone. Their lives had a purpose-no matter how big or small.

Many cultures who live closer to the earth feel that the essence of a person is the spirit, and not the physical body. Also, they believe the spirit never dies. This is true of the Native American culture, and it is true of most African cultures. Simply saying their name is part of the process of keeping the spirit alive. If you talk about a person for a day, they ‘live’ for that day. So on this 10th anniversary of the tragedy of 9-11, I would like to list the names of a segment of victims that is usually lumped in with the other victims. Now, I have no problem with that at all, because I have cried many tears about the loss of life of ALL the victims. But because I cannot list the names of almost 3,000 people, I will list the names of Americans of African descent-those born in America and those born elsewhere. America truly is a melting pot and those who lost their lives illustrate this. They all had unique lives and their lives told their story. I don’t think we realize the numbers that this subset of victims represents. We should not be surprised, though, because we are an integral part of the fabric of America-both the good and the bad. Their biographies can be found all over the internet if one is really interested in their stories.

The first long set of names are those Americans of African descent who died at the World Trade Center towers. The last sets are the victims who died on the planes and at the Pentagon.

For today-their spirit lives.


Ignatius Udo Adanga
Sophia B. Addo
Godwin Ajala
Yaphet J. Aryee
Sharon Balkcom
Sheila Barnes
Jasper Baxter
Balewa Albert Blackman
Sean Booker
Veronique Bowers
Larry Bowman
Jonathan Eric Briley
Janice Brown
Kenny Caldwell
Sandra Campbell
Del-Rose Cheatham
Vernon Cherry
John A. Cooper Jr.
Benjamin Keefe Clark
Eugene Clark
Tarel Coleman
Denease Conley
Brenda E. Conway
Helen Cook
Conrod Cottoy, Sr.
Elizabeth Darling
Titus Davidson
Jeffrey Mark Dingle
Clinton Davis
Daphne Ferlinda Elder
Sadie Ette
Christopher S. Epps
Samuel Fields
Andre Fletcher
Godwin Forde
Donald Foreman
Lucille Francis
Clyde Frazier Jr
Lillian Frederick
Tamitha Freeman
Ervin Gailliard
Boyd Gatton
Rodney C. Gillis
Harry Glenn
Calvin Gooding
Harry Goody III
Keith Glascoe
Winston Arthur Grant
Derrick Arthur Green
Wade B. Green
Tawanna Griffin
Joan D. Griffith
Vaswald Hall
Aisha Harris
Anthony Hawkins
Ronnie Lee Henderson
William L.Henry Jr
Clara Hinds
Neil O. Hinds
Tara Y. Hobbs
DaJuan Hodges
Uhuru Gonja Houston
Lamar Demetrius Hulse
Todd Isaac
Farah Jeudy
Charles Gregory John
Lashawana Johnson
Linda Joyce Jones
Karl Joseph
Stephen Joseph
Lisa Kearney-Griffin
Abdoulaye Koné
Nathaniel Lawson
Charles Lesperance
Michael W. Lowe
Gene Edward Maloy
Marion Manning
Margaret Mattic
Tyrone May
Keithroy Maynard
Kaaria Mbaya
Stanley McCaskill
Tonyell McDay
Evelyn McKinnedy
Darryl L. McKinney
Walter Arthur McNeil
Eskedar Melaku
Shevonne Mentis
Wesley Mercer
Wilbert Miraille
Sharon Moore
Dorothy Morgan
Damion Mowatt
Marcus R. Neblett
Oscar F. Nesbitt
Curtis Terrence Noel
David Ortiz
James Parham
Michael Parkes
Richard A. Penny
Anthony Portillo
Shawn E. Powell
Carol Rabalais
Lorenzo Ramzey
Bruce Reynolds
Vernon Richard
Michael Richards
Venesha Rodgers
Catharina Robinson
Jeffrey Robinson
Nolbert Salomon
Jacquelyn Sanchez
George Eric Smith
Leon Smith Jr
Rochelle M. Snell
Walwyn Stuart
Donnie Brooks Taylor
Lorisa Ceylon Taylor
Dorothy Temple
Capt. William Harry Thompson
Nichola A. Thorpe
Abdoul Karim Traoré
Felicia Traylor-Bass,
Karamo Trerra
Pauline Tull-Francis
Courtney Wainsworth Walcott
Derrick Washington
Nathaniel Webb
John S. White
Malissa White
Wayne White
Crossley Williams Jr.
David Williams
Louie Anthony Williams
Olabisi Shadie Layeni-Yee
Barrington L. Young Jr.
Jacqueline "Jakki" Young




Bernard Curtis Brown II-11 years old, aboard American Flight 77
Sara Clark-teacher, aboard American Flight 77
Asia Cottom-11 years old, aboard American Flight 77
James Daniel Debeuneure-teacher, aboard American Flight 77
Rodney Dickens-11 years old, aboard American Flight 77
Hilda E. Taylor-teacher, aboard American Flight 77
LeRoy Wilton Homer Jr.-First Officer aboard United Flight 93
Wanda Anita Green-Flight Attendant aboard United Flight 93
CeeCee Lyles-Flight Attendant aboard United Flight 93


Ada L. Mason Acker-Pentagon
Samantha Allen (Lightbourn)-Pentagon
Carrie Blagburn-Pentagon
Angelene C. Carter-Pentagon
Sharon Carver-Pentagon
Julian Cooper-Pentagon
Ada M. Davis-Pentagon
Johnnie Doctor Jr.-Pentagon
Amelia V. Fields-Pentagon
Sandra N. Foster-Pentagon
Cortz Ghee-Pentagon
Brenda Gibson-Pentagon
Diane M. Hale-McKinzy-Pentagon
Carolyn B. Halmon-Pentagon
Jimmie Ira Holley-Pentagon
Peggie M. Hurt-Pentagon
Sgt. Maj. Lacey B. Ivory-Pentagon
Brenda Kegler-Pentagon
Nehamon Lyons IV-Pentagon
Maj. Ronald D. Milam-Pentagon
Odessa V. Morris-Pentagon
Maj. Clifford L. Patterson Jr.-Pentagon
Scott Powell-Pentagon
Marsha Ratchford-Pentagon
Cecelia E. Richard-Pentagon
Judy Rowlett-Pentagon
Robert E. Russell -Pentagon
Janice Marie Scott -Pentagon
Antionette "Toni" Sherman-Pentagon
Edna L. Stephens-Pentagon
Sgt. Tamara Thurman-Pentagon
Lt. Cmdr. Otis Tolbert Jr.-Pentagon
Willie Q. Troy-Pentagon
Lt. Col. Karen J. Wagner-Pentagon
Meta L. Waller-Pentagon
Staff Sgt. Maudlyn A. White-Pentagon
Sandra L. White-Pentagon
Maj. Dwayne Williams-Pentagon
Kevin Wayne Yokum-Pentagon
Donald McArthur Young -Pentagon
Edmond Young-Pentagon
Lisa L. Young-Pentagon