People gather Sunday outside the scene of a shooting at a supermarket, in Buffalo, N.Y. The NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, said it will propose a sweeping plan meant to protect Black Americans from white supremacist violence. —AP Photo/Matt Rourke
People march down the street towards the Georgia state Capitol to protest the mistreatment of Black people on June 15, 2020, in Atlanta. —AP Photo/Brynn Anderson
People hug outside the scene after a shooting at a supermarket on Saturday in Buffalo, N.Y. —AP Photo/Joshua Bessex
NEW YORK — The nation’s oldest civil rights organization said it will propose a sweeping plan meant to protect Black Americans from white supremacist violence in response to a hate-fueled massacre that killed 10 Black people in Buffalo, New York, last weekend.
In a plan first shared with The Associated Press, the NAACP suggests a policy approach to stopping future acts of anti-Black domestic terrorism that involves law enforcement, business regulation and gun control. The proposal points to measures that could be taken up immediately by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.
Specifically, the plan calls for holding accountable any corporation that is complicit in the spread of bigotry and racism through news media and on social platforms, for enacting gun violence prevention measures that keep mass-casualty weapons out of the hands of would-be assailants and for reforming police practices so Black Americans experience the same de-escalation tactics often used to peacefully apprehend murderous white supremacists.
Saturday’s premeditated attack by an avowed racist on Black shoppers at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo made it clear that “democracy and white supremacy cannot co-exist,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said.
He is scheduled to meet with Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday, a spokesperson for the civil rights group said.
The NAACP revealed its proposal as Black leaders across the country fret about inaction on the part of elected leaders to prevent domestic terror attacks by white supremacists against Black Americans. From Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Birmingham, Alabama, to Charleston, South Carolina, and Charlottesville, Virginia, generations of Americans have not seen the rising death toll from such violence met with urgent legislation to prevent or reduce the threat.
The Ku Klux Klan bombing that killed four Black girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham helped spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — historic legislation that outlawed segregation. It did not address the Klan’s violence.
Gruesome images of Alabama state troopers and white vigilantes brutally beating voting rights marchers in Selma spurred enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — landmark legislation that outlawed Black voter suppression. It did not address excessive uses of police force on peaceful demonstrators.
And it had been 67 years after the murder of Emmett Till, a Black teen who was kidnapped in Mississippi, lynched and dumped in a river after he was accused of whistling at a white woman, before Congress enacted an anti-lynching law. President Joe Biden signed the bill in late March, more than a year after using his inaugural speech to warn of the rise in white supremacist ideology and domestic terrorism.
ww“White supremacy is a poison,” Biden reiterated Tuesday during a visit to Buffalo. “We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America.”
As the coronavirus pandemic gave rise to anti-Asian hate crimes, Congress quickly enacted legislation that encourages reporting of such crimes. It also gave law enforcement more resources to handle increased reporting.
But now, in the wake of the white supremacist attack in Buffalo, Black civil rights advocates are wondering if they’ll see the same haste from lawmakers on anti-Black hate crimes. The House passed legislation late Wednesday night that would bolster federal resources to prevent domestic terrorism in response to the mass shooting. Supporters of the House bill say it will help officials better track and respond to the growing threat of white extremist terrorism. But the bill still has to receive approval from the Senate.
“We need to know that our top leaders in America react and respond when we are hurt, too, like they acted and responded when others were hurt,” said prominent civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who represents the family of 86-year-old Ruth Whitfield, the eldest victim to die in the Buffalo attack.
Andrea Boyles, an associate professor of sociology and Africana studies at Tulane University, said part of the Black experience in America is seeing racialized violence against Black communities treated as a non-urgent matter.
“The message of it all has consistently been that where there is hate towards Black people, there is least likely to be consequences,” Boyles said. “We should be clear with elected officials, Black and white, Democratic or Republican, that talking points can no longer be the trend.”
The NAACP’s policy proposal seeks systemic and institutional changes that look beyond just punishing racist domestic terrorists after they have carried out mass murder. The civil rights group takes to task Fox News, the cable news channel it accuses of using airtime “to sow bigotry and racism, create dissension, spread misinformation, and promote conspiracy theories that continually encourage violence.”
It also namechecked Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has openly discussed on air the baseless “great replacement” conspiracy theory cited by the Buffalo gunman. The conspiracy is a racist ideology, which has moved from white nationalist circles to mainstream, that says white people and their influence are being “replaced” by people of color.
The NACCP also called on advertisers, including the National Football League, to take a moral stand against the cable news outlet by withholding their ad dollars.
On gun violence prevention, the NAACP prescribes the creation of a “domestic terror watch list” and the banning of those on the list from legally purchasing a firearm. And on police reforms, the proposal calls on Biden to take executive action in lieu of the stalled George Floyd Justice in Policing Act before the two-year anniversary of Floyd’s murder next week.
“All police and law enforcement officers must submit to a thorough review of their affiliations to determine they are not aligned with white supremacist organizations,” the NAACP suggests in its proposal.
Patrice Willoughby, the NAACP’s vice president of policy and legislative affairs, said the federal government already has some of the tools it needs to begin acting on the policy proposals.
“Unless there is sort of a holistic approach to stamping out hatred, we are never going to have the type of society in which people are free to live and work without fear,” she said.
Across the civil rights community, Black activists echoed the NAACP’s call for action to address white supremacy and violence.
Amara Enyia, policy and research coordinator for Movement for Black Lives, said it’s important to acknowledge that the shooting in Buffalo was not an individual act of violence, but instead a symptom and evidence of a systemic problem that has grown significantly in recent years.
“These atrocities that are committed are systems, and they’re systems of a structural and systemic cancer,” Enyia said. “You have this person who is fueled by anti-Black racism and a society whose systems are built on anti-Black racism.
“When we understand that, it can’t come as a surprise that this person would act out in this way, because he reflects a certain worldview that unfortunately undergirded the various systems upon which this society was built. And those of us who are organizers, activists, we’ve been working to try to dismantle these systems because they’ve been harmful.”
Color of Change President Rashad Robinson noted that white supremacists and nationalists have access to wider audiences now and are able to spread hateful and dangerous rhetoric across various online platforms. Robinson has called for stricter regulation of social media platforms to prevent the proliferation of supremacist materials and ideologies.
“What we’re seeing right now, with the dominance of social media platforms, is an unchecked corporate infrastructure whose incentive structures demand a type of engagement that makes going down the rabbit hole of white supremacy way more likely,” Robinson said. “Until we actually have consequences on the 21st century, technological infrastructure, we will be a place where it’s going to be dragging us back to the 18th and 19th century.”
“During our recent redistricting process, we heard from the public as well as from advocates for persons incarcerated in state and county jails, who originally are from Philadelphia,” Council President Darrell Clarke says.
—Tribune Photo/Abdul R. Sulayman
“We cannot afford to leave millions of dollars in resources unclaimed for decades while our residents are demanding better services,” Katherine Gilmore Richardson says.
Councilmember Derek Green’s legislation to enhance building safety requirements for education buildings passed unanimously.
—Tribune Photo/Abdul R. Sulayman
Philadelphia City Council introduced an ordinance that will revise the population of the city’s Council districts. The ordinance will take into account the prison population under specific conditions.
Incarcerated men and women will now be counted at their home addresses for U.S. Census purposes instead of where they are imprisoned. According to their last known addresses in Philadelphia, the legislation will affect over 7,500 prisoners in state and county jails in Philadelphia’s 10 Council districts.
“During our recent redistricting process, we heard from the public as well as from advocates for persons incarcerated in state and county jails, who originally are from Philadelphia,” said Council President Darrell Clarke, 5th District. “We heard them, and as we said at the time, we would do the additional work needed to correctly count these individuals and apportion them into their correct home Council district. That’s what this legislation does.”
The next step for the legislation is a public hearing to be determined later.
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In other Council business:
At-large Councilmember Katherine Gilmore Richardson’s bill to account for unclaimed property passed in the finance committee.
The bill will ensure that the administration goes through the process of checking what the City is owed yearly.
Philadelphia has over $6 million in unclaimed property.
“We cannot afford to leave millions of dollars in resources unclaimed for decades while our residents are demanding better services,” Gilmore Richardson said. “This bill will ensure the Administration annually engages in a process to claim what is owed to the city.”
According to Gilmore Richardson, Pennsylvania is sitting on more than $4 billion in unclaimed property.
“One of the most important responsibilities we have as Councilmembers is appropriating funds,” Gilmore Richardson said. “It is on us to ensure we are addressing the needs of our constituents by funding the services and programs that improve their quality of life. With an estimated $6 million in unclaimed property, this revenue could help us fund crucial city operations and address budget priorities regularly highlighted by community members. Such as opening recreation centers with gyms on the weekends this summer, restoring our beautiful murals, clearing the backlog of tree maintenance, funding a community evening resource center in every police division, and more.”
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At-large Councilmember Derek Green’s legislation to enhance building safety requirements for education buildings passed unanimously.
Green said the bill originated in 2019 when a Philadelphia school teacher was diagnosed with mesothelioma most likely caused by asbestos in the schools she worked.
“The school district said give us some time as we try to address asbestos in us in our schools,” Green said. “So giving them the benefit of that, I held back on the legislation, thinking that asbestos would be remediated over a period of time and be done quickly, especially as we went into the pandemic.”
That did not happen during this school year as Julia R. Masterman, SLA Beeber, and Frankford High Schools all had hazards within their buildings.
“Since our children returned to the classroom last fall, after 18 months of online instruction and virtual learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the realization of just how in the dark we were about what is really going on inside our school facilities — where our kids, teachers, and faculty spend much of their time — was evident and stark,” Green said.
The bill will require the Department of Public Health to provide a third-party inspection of one-third of schools over the next three years. The bill also creates a Facility Safety and Improvement Advisory Group, made up of teachers, principals, and maintenance staff, to review and recommend identifying and remediating all property-related hazards.
“As the parent of a child in the Philadelphia School District and the son of a retired Philadelphia public school teacher, I can’t begin to describe my feelings regarding this issue and how crucial it is that we demand more transparency and better outcomes from school district leadership.”
New Jersey legislation that would make it the first state to outlaw the sale of menthol cigarettes advanced on Monday.
—AP Photo/Bobby Caina Calvan
Several years ago, marketing companies hired by the tobacco industry would hire attractive young women to go into bars in the Black neighborhoods in Philadelphia and give out free menthol cigarettes, as part of the industry’s longtime marketing of that product to the urban market.
In the 1960s and 1970s, attractive Black models smoking menthol cigarettes could be seen on billboards in Black communities in the city and throughout the U.S.
In September 2006, the city of Philadelphia banned smoking in most bars and restaurants. Two years later, the state of Pennsylvania implemented a similar ban.
On April 28, the Food and Drug Administration proposed a ban on menthol cigarettes, which are smoked by more than 18.5 million people ages 12 and older. More than 85% of menthol smokers are African American. By comparison, 30% of menthol smokers are white. Menthol cigarettes are also more popular in the Latin and Asian communities. From that date in April, the public, including the tobacco industry, has 60 days to make comments.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 480,000 Americans die from tobacco-related disease, every year. This is including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure.
For its part, the tobacco industry said a ban could push the sale of menthol cigarettes underground and cut more than a third of all cigarettes sold in the U.S. It would also eliminate about $20 billion in sales and many jobs.
“The actions taken in theory could save up to 654,000 lives over the next few years, including 248,000 African Americans,” said Cat Oakar, special assistant to President Joe Biden for community public health and disparities, in an interview with The Philadelphia Tribune. “Menthol has what’s known as a flavor additive that makes cigarettes taste minty and it reduces irritation and reduces the harshness, which increases the appeal and makes them easier to use, especially among youth and young adults. It also enhances nicotine’s addictive effect, so it makes it harder to quit and makes it easier for youth to start.”
For years, the tobacco industry have heavily marketed menthol cigarettes, such as Kool and Newport on billboards and buses in mostly Black neighborhoods and in advertising in Black media, according to Keith Wailoo, a professor at Princeton University. Wailoo is the author of “Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette.”
In the 1990s, RJ Reynolds singled out Philadelphia as a test market for a new high in tar and nicotine brand called “Uptown,” but city activists immediately began to fight the effort.
Coincidentally, Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, who was then-U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, was on a plane headed to Philadelphia to speak at the University of Pennsylvania, when he read a news story about activists mobilizing against the Uptown brand. He decided to join the fight.
“They used the name Uptown. Clearly this was trying to get the attention of the Black community using slang,” said Sullivan, in an interview with The Philadelphia Tribune. “I’m going Uptown. I am going to be sophisticated.”
A medical doctor, Sullivan was HHS secretary from 1989 to 1993 and former president of Morehouse School of Medicine. Today, he is chairman of the Sullivan Alliance to Transform the Health Professions in Washington, D.C.
In Philadelphia, the Uptown was a popular entertainment venture on North Broad Street, featuring Motown artists like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, along with popular local R&B groups such as the Stylistics, the Intruders and Blue Magic.
But Sullivan said he knew that his decision to speak out could put his cabinet position on the line, and he was willing to do so.
According to Sullivan, in the George H.W. Bush Administration, cabinet secretaries were required to submit any speech they planned to make, to the White House for review a day in advance. But Sullivan directed his staff to send the speech to the White House a few hours before the speech, knowing that by the time the White House reviewed it, Sullivan would be on the way back to Washington.
“I called out RJ Reynolds and said this is corporate irresponsibility. Indeed I was outraged about the promotion efforts of RJ Reynolds,” Sullivan said. “It was just what the Black community did not need when they were already fighting to survive rising tobacco-related disease and death. I pointed out that tobacco is the No. 1 cause of preventable deaths in the country.
“The president didn’t call me in. In a meeting later, he said, ‘Lou we are behind you.’ That was his way of saying you did OK.”
Afterwards, Sullivan wrote a letter to the CEO of RJ Reynolds, calling the Uptown marketing effort “despicable” and pointed out that it would cause damage to the health of all Americans, but would disproportionately hurt Black people.
“They shut it (Uptown) down four or five days later,” Sullivan said. “I was quite surprised. I was prepared for a long bloodbath. But it was very quick.”
Meanwhile, FDA plans to move quickly, once the 60 days of public comments ends. The ban is proposed to take place in 2024.
“Based on those comments, they may decide to alter the rule-making process or issue a final rule, but it will depend on the public comments they get and that’s really the crux of the rule-making process,” said Oakar, the special assistant to Biden.
During this time the agency is planning public listening sessions June 13 and June 16.
An estimated 40 million Americans smoke some type of tobacco product, either cigarettes or cigars.
“This (ban) has tremendous potential to save a lot of lives, reducing disease and death from combustible tobacco products, which is frankly the leading cause of preventable deaths,” Oakar said. “So the proposed action could do a lot in reducing youth experimentation and increasing the number of adult smokers who quit.”
A sign stands outside the National Security Administration (NSA) campus in Fort Meade, Md. Racism and cultural misunderstandings are being found inside the nation’s largest intelligence service. —AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
Diversity leaders with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Sherry Van Sloun, left, and Stephanie La Rue stand together in Virginia last week.
—Office of the Director of National Intelligence via AP
WASHINGTON — The peril that National Security Agency staff wanted to discuss with their director didn’t involve terrorists or enemy nations. It was something closer to home: racism and cultural misunderstandings inside America’s largest intelligence service.
The NSA and other intelligence agencies held calls for their staff shortly after the death of George Floyd. As Gen. Paul Nakasone listened, one person described how they would try to speak up in meetings only to have the rest of the group keep talking over them. Another person, a Black man, spoke about how he had been counseled that his voice was too loud and intimidated co-workers. A third said a co-worker addressed them with a racist slur.
The national reckoning over racial inequality sparked by Floyd’s murder two years ago has gone on behind closed doors inside America’s intelligence agencies. But publicly available data, published studies of diversity programs and interviews with retired officers indicate spy agencies have not lived up to years of commitments made by their top leaders, who often say diversity is a national security imperative.
People of color remain underrepresented across the intelligence community and are less likely to be promoted. Retired officers who spoke to The Associated Press described examples of explicit and implicit bias. People who had served on promotion boards noted non-native English speakers applying for new jobs would sometimes be criticized for being hard to understand — what one person called the “accent card.” Some say they believe minorities are funneled into working on countries or regions based on their ethnicity.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, the first woman to serve in her role, has appointed diversity officials who say they need to collect better data to study longstanding questions, from whether the process for obtaining a security clearance disadvantages people of color to the reasons for disparities in advancement. Agencies are also implementing reforms they say will promote diversity.
“It’s going to be incremental,” said Stephanie La Rue, who was appointed this year to lead the intelligence community’s efforts on diversity, equity and inclusion. “We’re not going to see immediate change overnight. It’s going to take us a while to get to where we need to go.”
The NSA call following Floyd’s death was described by a participant who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private discussion. The person credited Nakasone for listening to employees and making public and private commitments to diversity. But the person and other former officials said they sometimes felt that their identities as people of color were discounted or not fully appreciated by their employers.
The NSA said in a statement that the agency “has been steadfast in our commitment to building and sustaining a diverse and expert workforce.”
“Beyond the mission imperative, NSA cultivates diversity and promotes inclusion because we care about our people and know it is the right way to proceed,” the statement said.
A former NSA contractor alleged this year that racist and misogynistic comments often circulate on classified intelligence community chatrooms. The contractor, Dan Gilmore, wrote in a blog post that he was fired for reporting his complaints to higher-ups. A spokeswoman for Director Haines, Nicole de Haay, declined to comment on Gilmore’s allegations but said employees who “engage in inappropriate conduct are subject to a variety of accountability mechanisms, including disciplinary action.”
The U.S. intelligence community has evolved over decades from being almost exclusively run by white men — following a stereotype that Rep. Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat, referred to in a hearing on diversity last year as “pale, male, Yale.” Intelligence agencies that once denied security clearances to people suspected of being gay now have active resource groups for people of different races and sexual orientation.
Testifying at the same hearing as Himes, CIA Director William Burns said, “Simply put, we can’t be effective and we’re not being true to our nation’s ideals if everyone looks like me, talks like me, and thinks like me.”
But annual charts published by the Office of Director of National Intelligence show a consistent trend: At rising levels of rank, minority representation goes down.
Latinos make up about 18% of the American population but just 7% of the roughly 100,000-person intelligence community and 3.5% of senior officers. Black officers comprise 12% of the community — the same as the U.S. population — but 6.5% at the most senior level. And while minorities comprise 27% of the total intelligence workforce, just 15% of senior executives are people of color.
A 2015 report commissioned by the CIA said the “underrepresentation of racial/ethnic minority officers and officers with a disability at the senior ranks is not a recent problem and speaks to unresolved cultural, organizational, and unconscious bias issues.” Among the report’s findings: Progress made between 1984 and 2004 in promoting Black officers to senior roles had been lost in the following decade and recruitment efforts at historically Black colleges and universities “have not been effective.”
“Since its founding, the Agency has been unmistakably weak in promoting diverse role models to the executive level,” the report said.
Lenora Peters Gant, a former senior human capital officer for the CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, wrote last year that the intelligence community constantly imposes barriers on minorities, women and people with disabilities. Gant, now an adviser at Howard University, called on agencies to release some of their classified data on hiring and retention.
“The bottom line is the decision making leadership levels are void of credible minority participation,” Gant said.
ODNI is starting an investigation of the slowest 10% of security clearance applications, reviewing delays in the cases for any possible examples of bias. It also intends to review whether polygraph examiners need additional race and ethnicity training.
The intelligence community currently doesn’t report delays in getting a security clearance — required for most agency jobs — based on race, ethnicity or gender. The months or years a clearance can take can push away applicants who can’t wait that long.
The office is implementing annual grant monitoring and assigning additional staff to work with universities in the intelligence community’s Centers for Academic Excellence program, intended to recruit college students from underrepresented groups. A 2019 audit said it was impossible to judge the program due to poor planning and a lack of clear goals.
The program also got a new logo after ODNI officials heard that the previous “IC CAE” insignia appeared to spell out “ICE,” an unintended reference to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Additional quiet changes are taking place across the agencies. Officials say the changes were in process before Floyd’s death, though conversations held with employees brought new urgency to diversity issues.
The NSA stopped requiring applicants for internal promotions to disclose the date they were last promoted to the boards considering their application. Officials familiar with the change say it was intended to benefit applicants who take longer to move up the agency ladder, often including working parents or people from underrepresented communities.
The agency said in a statement that officials “regularly examine the outcomes of our personnel systems to assess their fairness.”
The CIA two years ago formally tied yearly bonuses for its senior executives to their performance on diversity goals, measured next to factors such as leadership and intelligence tradecraft. Last year’s class of new senior executives was the most diverse in the agency’s history, with 47% women and 27% people from minority backgrounds, exceeding the percentages of women and minorities in the agency’s total workforce.
Said CIA spokesperson Tammy Thorp: “We are proud of the agency’s progress in ensuring our hiring, assignment, and promotion processes do not create barriers to advancement.”
La Rue, the chief diversity officer for the intelligence community, has hired several data analysts and plans for her office to issue annual report cards on diversity for each intelligence agency. She acknowledges advocates have to break through enduring skepticism inside and outside government that diversity goals undermine the intelligence mission or require lower standards.
“The narrative that we have to sacrifice excellence for diversity, or that we are somehow compromising national security to achieve our diversity goals, is ridiculous,” she said.
