Your vote counts! Remember to vote Democrat Nov. 5!
August 31, 2024 - September 6, 2024 The Afro-American A5
Volume 123 No. 20–22 Volume 133 No. 5
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THE BLACKwww.afro.com MEDIA AUTHORITY • AFRO.COM
AUGUST 31, 2024 - SEPTEMBER 6, 2024
Kamala Harris: A leader for all people AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast
Vice President Kamala Harris is now officially the Democratic nominee for president. Now voters must show up at the polls to see it all the way through. By Keith Boykin Word in Black
afro.com
Certain Black people on the internet keep raising two questions about Kamala Harris. What is her Black agenda? And why didn’t she do it during the last four years? First, if you want to know Kamala Harris’s Black agenda, look at what she’s already done. As vice president, Kamala Harris helped to pass the Emmett Till AntiLynching Act, provided a record $16 billion in funding to HBCUs, $2.8 billion for Pell grants and need-based assistance, $2 billion to Black farmers, $2 billion to clean up pollution in communities of color, doubled the number of Black businesses in America, and brought us the lowest Black unemployment rate and the lowest Black poverty rate in history.
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The Biden-Harris administration also expanded the child tax credit, which cut the Black child poverty rate in half, capped the cost of insulin at $35 for seniors, which is especially important for Black people who are disproportionately affected by diabetes, signed up 5 million more people for Obamacare, canceled $168.5 billion in student loan debt for 4.8 million people, pardoned thousands of marijuana charges, and on top of all that, even signed a law creating the first new Black-related federal holiday in forty years — Juneteenth. At the same time, they appointed more Black judges than any administration in history, and gave us the first Black woman on the Supreme Court and the first Black vice president. And those federal judges have lifetime tenure, so they’ll be on the bench for decades
to come. Trump was president for four years and he didn’t do any of those things. In fact, he was the first president since Richard Nixon 50 years ago to appoint no Black judges to the U.S. Courts of Appeals. And the judges he did appoint are the very ones striking down the laws and policies that help Black people. Now, the second question. Why hasn’t Kamala Harris done whatever thing you think she should have done in the last four years? The answer. She’s not the president. She’s the vice president, and that person’s job is to help the president. But even if she were president, people need to have realistic expectations about what a president can and cannot do. The president leads one of our three co-equal branches of government. For those who
missed “Schoolhouse Rock,” the three branches are legislative, executive, and judicial. Congress, the legislature, makes the laws. The president, the executive, enforces the laws. And the judiciary, through the Supreme Court and lower courts, interprets the laws. In the UK, the executive and legislature are combined in Parliament. The prime minister comes from the legislature and has the power to enact their own agenda. It makes it easier to get things done, but we don’t have that system in the U.S. Currently, we have a divided Congress, with a Republican House of Representatives and a Democratic Senate. The House is gerrymandered, giving members no incentive to work with a president from the other party. And the Senate is constitutionally unrepresentative
of the country. That’s why the 1.6 million people in the mostly White and rural Dakotas get four U.S. senators, while the nearly 40 million people in the racially diverse state of California get only two U.S. senators. That means the people of South Dakota have 50 times more power than the people in California in the Senate. The legislature is rigged against us. And, unfortunately, so are the courts. Because of the antiquated electoral college system for picking presidents, we have an unrepresentative Supreme Court with six of the nine justices appointed by Republican presidents, despite the fact that Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. So, even if Bernie Sanders, Continued on A5
Doctors, community members speak on opioid crisis in African-American community Results of needs assessment conducted by Virginia Department of Health reveals disturbing trends By D. Kevin McNeir Special to the AFRO From 1999 to 2020, opioid overdose deaths claimed the lives of over half a million Americans, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with opioid-involved deaths increasing each year. Even more disturbing, 2021 marked the first time the U.S. surpassed 100,000 related deaths in a single year. Yet, while a majority of adults – 61 percent – consider the misuse of opioids in the U.S. to be a major public health emergency, based on results of a Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) poll conducted this year, many Americans tend to believe that the opioid crisis is more of a national problem (68 percent), than one impacting their own state (53 percent) or their
community (36 percent). Even in areas of the U.S. where drug overdose rates have increased, public concern about addiction is down, according to a Pew survey. As for those who come from low-income or minority communities, the BPC poll indicates that they are less likely to say the opioid crisis is a major problem in their respective communities than adults who are not. However, as data from sources including the CDC indicate, they would be wrong – dead wrong. One major takeaway from the BPC poll illustrates a change in demographics over the past five years among those with the highest drug overdose mortality – from White Americans in the Northeast to other ethnic populations. Contrary to popular belief, mortality has increased by 81 percent among Continued on A5
Photo courtesy Unsplash/ Towfiqu Barbhuiya
Opioid addiction and death is a national epidemic in the United States, crossing boundaries of race, culture and class.
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