8 minute read
A lesson from Ambassador James Joseph
By Marian Wright Edelman
I recently attended a memorial service for my dear friend and former Children’s Defense Fund Board Chair Ambassador James Joseph. Ambassador Joseph was a civil rights, corporate, and philanthropic leader, including his transformative service as president and CEO of the Council on Foundations.
He was a co-founder and chair of the Association of Black Foundation Executives and a lifelong public servant. He was an advisor to four U.S. presidents beginning with President Carter, and in 1995 was appointed as the U.S. Ambassador to South Africa by President Clinton.
It was a crucial moment following Nelson Mandela’s 1994 election as South Africa’s first Black president, and Ambassador Joseph became the only American ambassador to present his credentials to President Mandela as he worked closely with his new administration.
He witnessed firsthand South Africa’s early postapartheid struggles as it sought to move away from its legacy of White supremacy, legal segregation, and racial violence towards a new future striving for truth and reconciliation. He could see the parallels between South Africa’s history and our own. He also held out hope for what both nations could become.
His own early experiences of America’s history came from his childhood in Opelousas, Louisiana, a KKK headquarters where he re- membered lynchings and racial violence as common facts of life. Later, after graduating from Southern University and earning a master’s degree in divinity from Yale University, he returned South to serve on the faculty of Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. enacts the stance of the participant who is able to look beyond the evidence and see alternative possibilities… The truth is that hope is not so much an act of memory as it is an act of imagination and courage.
This was another KKK stronghold where he became a leading figure in the local Civil Rights Movement. He participated in protests where he was attacked and beaten and received death threats. But these were the years that shaped his hope for the future.
“There is reason for hope because moments of crisis are often moments of great possibility. These are the moments when we need to remind ourselves that we did it before and we can do it again… That was one of the reasons why the mass meeting was a staple of our movement.
“Before every street march or public demonstration, we assembled in a church or auditorium, usually a church, to inspire and persuade each other not simply to face the hostile bystanders, the police dogs, and those behind them with clubs and cattle prods. We had to keep those who stood with us focused on the potential of the human spirit as well.
The urgency for addressing obesity amongst Black women cannot be understated: As the obesity epidemic grows, the health of Black women is increasingly at risk and so is our ability to work, care for ourselves, and participate in society.
It’s not enough to acknowledge obesity for what it is, a silent killer upending Black women’s lives. Acknowledgement must be tied to immediate and impactful action. To truly stem the tide of this crisis, we must dismantle the discriminatory healthcare policies that deny access for millions of Black women to the full range of lifesaving obesity care, including FDA-approved medications.
The science clearly shows that Black women are unavoidably exposed to the societal factors that lead to obesity. Yet as a society, we’re ignoring the evidence. The data say the lived experiences of Black women—disproportionate rates of poverty, gender bias, racism, and lack of access to health care—lead to higher rates of obesity.
The American Medical Association (AMA) not only rec- ognizes obesity as a complex, chronic disease. They also point out that racial and ethnic disparities are a major factor in the prevalence of obesity.
If the science is clear, then why has there been no effective solution to slowing the rates of obesity among Black women? The short answer is that national obesity policy is underpinned by outdated and punitive perceptions of the disease, resulting in discriminatory care and insurance coverage schemes that deny millions of Black women from accessing FDA-approved medication and treatment.
Obesity is a disease, and it must be treated as such.
For decades, treatment for obesity has largely focused on recommending a regimen of diet and exercise, fueled by the myth that obesity is simply a behavioral issue that can be remedied through lifestyle changes and “self-control.” For years we have left the doctor’s office with vague instructions to lose weight and eat healthy, made to feel weak as we battle this debilitating disease on our own.
But science has come a long way in the past 20 years, and we now realize there’s a lot more at play that, until now, we have not been able to control. Scientific breakthroughs have even proven that diet and exercise alone can be insufficient for treating obesity. Obesity is a disease, and it must be treated as such.
But access to its treatments are hard to come by. Medi- care does not cover anti-obesity medications, nor do most Medicaid and Affordable Care Act plans. These programs are still driven by disproven notions that obesity is a behavioral issue and not a chronic disease.
As a result, patients reliant on these and other programs— including millions of Black women—are denied access to the full range of care, which includes FDA-approved obesity medications. These policies were created two decades ago when our understanding of obesity was primitive and incomplete.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently reported that nearly 42 percent of American adults have obesity. Yet nothing has changed for obesity care coverage since the AMA’s declaration that obesity is a chronic disease a decade ago.
It’s time to modernize our federal, state and private healthcare programs based on science, address this disease seriously with coverage for comprehensive care, and ensure all Black women have access to treatment and care.
The time for action is now!
Dr. Donna Christensen is the first female medical doctor to serve in Congress and serves on the Medical Advisory Board of Choose Healthy Life. Debra Fraser-Howze is the founder and president of Choose Healthy Life, a nonprofit organization that addresses health equity through the Black church. Shavon Arline-Bradley is the president and CEO of the National Council of Negro Women.
As he put it decades later, “I have been able to remain hopeful in the midst of great adversity because I learned early in life to make a distinction between hope and optimism. It is not just hopetheologians but hope-psychologists as well who remind us that optimism adopts the role of the spectator who surveys the evidence in order to infer that things are going to get better.
Hope, on the other hand,
“It was that same potential that enabled us to keep hope alive in what appeared to others to be almost hopeless situations. As [Dr. King] put in one of our mass meetings, ‘Basic to our philosophy is a deep faith in the future. Ours is a movement based on hope because when hope fades the movement dies.’”
Ambassador Joseph also loved to quote Czech leader and writer Vaclav Havel: “I am not an optimist because I do not believe that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist because I do not believe that everything ends badly. But I could not accomplish anything if I did not have hope within me, for the gift of hope is as big as the gift of life itself.”
It was fitting that South Africa awarded Ambassador Joseph the Order of Good Hope, its highest honor bestowed on a citizen of another country, because he sustained the gift of good hope his entire life.
By Chuck Richardson
The recent death of a New York homeless man, Jordan Neely, is not merely a reflection of two individuals caught in a Shakespearian tragedy— one, the victim Neely, and the other, Penny Daniels, the perpetrator of the crime. Rather, this incident is a microcosmic reflection of many White Americans’ view of Black lives.
The “Black Lives Matter” slogan was prompted by the realization that George Floyd’s horrific death by a White policeman was a stark representation of many Americans’ subconscious lack of value for the life of a Black American.
hold would result in the death of the individual being strangled, usually administered against the enemy.
Marine Corp training is complete, thorough and explicit. There are no exceptions or excuses for not understanding the consequences of behavior. In the Marine Corp, the consequences of a mistake are punishment that is brutal and severe. I distinctly recall the practice of mass punishment by drill instructors—that is, if one Marine in a platoon made a mistake, the entire platoon was punished. This ensured the unlikelihood of any Marine forgetting his or her training.
While the experience of viewing a homeless Black person acting strangely can be traumatic for most White Americans, it is no reason to suspend common sense behavior. Daniels suspended the use of his knowledge that his hold on Jordan Neely would kill him. He was taught this fact emphatically and as effectively as he was taught to execute a naked stranglehold.
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During a 2020 interview, Ambassador Joseph had the chance to look back over his lifetime of experiences and connect them to the growing movements for racial justice following George Floyd’s murder. When asked what he would say to the next generation of social activists, he answered: “This is your moment. A lot of attention is given to our movement in the ’60s, but those were different times.
“We accomplished a lot, and we left a lot undone. This is your opportunity to complete the American Revolution.” This is a reason for hope.
Marian Wright Edelman is founder and president emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund.
The solution to this subliminal reality will not be defined by the conviction of the perpetrator, Daniels. Penny Daniels’ 15-minute stranglehold suffocation of Jordan Neely was a clear and concise example that revealed the death of Neely was never even considered in the mind of Mr. Daniels, or few if any of the White observers on the scene.
This incident reinforces the long-held belief (since slavery) that a Black person’s life is immaterial or three-fifths, at best, the value of White lives when compared with the safety of White lives.
As a Marine, I was trained to execute what was called a naked stranglehold on an opponent. We were also fully advised that beyond two and a half to three minutes, a successfully sustained strangle-
It therefore goes without saying that, if Penny Daniels learned the naked stranglehold in the Marine Corp, he also learned the consequences would be death if maintained longer than two and half to three minutes.
It is possible, but highly implausible, that Daniels did not realize that Neely could very well die. But, Daniels is unable to plead ignorance—ignorance of the law is no excuse. However, he could plead a subliminal lack of value and respect for the life of a Black person. Therefore, he felt no compunction to release Neely after three or four minutes.
While I loathe any references to hypothetical, I would venture to say, had Jordan Neely been a blonde-headed White homeless person, Penny Daniels most certainly would have thought about releasing him before he expired. Daniels fully realized that there are consequences to the death of a White man.
The larger implication here is that Penny Daniels is the culprit of Jordan Neely’s death. But the real killer is yet at large—a racist and subliminal mentality.
Chuck Richardson is a decorated Marine veteran with two purple hearts and a Vietnamese cross of gallantry.
