Florida Courier - December 30, 2016

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CELEBRATING OUR 10TH YEAR STATEWIDE!

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DECEMBER 30, 2016 – JANUARY 5, 2015

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TALLAHASSEE – Florida Supreme Court Justice James E.C. Perry will retire this week and be replaced by C. Alan Lawson, who has served as chief judge of the 5th District Court of Appeal. Perry, 72, is forced to leave the Supreme Court because the state Constitution requires justices to retire when they turn 70. The law allows justices like Perry to fulfill the remainder of their terms, depending on when their birthdays fall. Perry was appointed by

Retiring Florida Supreme Court Justice James E.C. Perry gives a history lesson as he looks toward the future.

former Gov. Charlie Crist to the state’s high court in 2009. Nine years earlier, then-Gov. Jeb Bush tapped Perry to serve as a trial judge in the 18th Judicial Circuit. Born in North Carolina, Perry – who said he decided to become a lawyer the night Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated – graduated from Columbia Law School and returned to the South and went to work for Georgia Indigent Legal

Obama says he could have beaten Trump

Services. He later became Seminole County’s first Black judge after being appointed by Bush. Perry is among five jurists who make up a majority of the seven-member court, which has drawn the wrath of Republican Gov. Rick Scott and the GOP-dominated Legislature. Perry answered one question of particular interest to Florida Courier readers during an interview with The News Service of Florida

reporter Dara Kam. You can read the entire interview at flcourier.com. Q: Among your numerous accomplishments, many people have given you high praise for representing a voice thus far absent from the state’s highest court. Can you elaborate on the perspective you brought to the Florida Supreme Court? PERRY: That’s a loaded question. I hear about these labels of liberal, conservative. I think those are political terms that the other two branches of government use in order to box peo-

Top 10 stories and Kwanzaa

Played safe? But he also said a kind of complacency set in that made the Clinton campaign too cautious and thus unable to get its message out enough. “If you think you’re winning, then you have a tendency, just like in sports, maybe to play it safer,” Obama said. Obama spoke of his family, the strength he’d gotten from wife Michelle, and the improbability of his own political career. Obama also said the spirit that his candidacy originally inspired, especially among young people, was “never snuffed out” despite the last eight years of turmoil. “The idealism and the dedication stayed with the staff and got us through some really hard times,” he said.

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“You know, I am confident in this vision because I’m confident that if I – if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it,” Obama said. His comments were part of a wider discussion of what he called “ugly” sentiments of racism and xenophobia that resurfaced during the 2016 campaign. Obama repeated his assertion that Clinton faced a double standard as a woman that put her at a disadvantage.

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‘Confident’ in vision

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FLORIDA COURIER / 10TH STATEWIDE ANNIVERSARY

BY TRACY WILKINSON TRIBUNE WASHINGTON BUREAU / TNS

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama says he could have defeated Donald Trump in last month’s election by recapturing the same “vision of hope” that twice carried him to the presidency. Obama also was mildly critical of the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, saying her campaign didn’t do enough to get her message out. The remarks were notable because Obama has been careful since the election to avoid criticizing Trump, or to deliver a postmortem on Clinton’s failed bid. Obama spoke in an interview with Democratic political operative and former senior adviser David Axelrod for his The Axe Reports podcast. The interview was released by CNN Monday.

“I’m a public servant who likes the public. And my mission in life is to serve the public, to make this world a better place,” says James E.C. Perry.

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Nine years ago, the Florida Courier listed its Top 10 stories for the year and recognized Kwanzaa ceremonies happening around the state.

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50 years of Kwanzaa Celebrations promote pride, culture BALTIMORE – This time of year, 14-year-old Amir Ralph is all about Kwanzaa. He embraces the celebration of African culture, which is marking its 50th anniversary this year, and works tirelessly to spread the word about the holiday, visiting schools and communities throughout Baltimore. He and his mother, Tiffany, will be lighting the kinara, whose seven candles represent the seven days and seven guiding principles of the holiday. There will be gifts and lots of celebrating. But ask Amir what makes Kwanzaa so special, and none of that comes up. “It’s a holiday surrounding community and family,” says Amir. “It’s also one of the only holidays that connects me to my heritage, and to my past.”

Meaningful holiday Fifty years since Kwanzaa was created by Dr. Maulana Karenga, its adherents say the holiday holds as much meaning as ever, offering the AfricanAmerican community a chance to celebrate its accomplishments and remember where it came from. Kwanzaa – which officially began Monday, Dec. 26 and runs through Jan. 1 – is centered on seven guiding principles, known as the Nguzo Saba: unity (in Swahili, umoja), self-determination (kujichagulia), collective work and responsibility (ujima), purpose (nia), creativity (kuumba), faith (imani) and collective economics (ujamaa). During the weeklong celebration, stories are shared, with music and dance often a key part, and presents are exchanged, often books on African-American history and culture.

Intentionally created “Kwanzaa was intentionally created for the African-America population,” says Jeff Menzise, an associate professor at Morgan State University’s Institute for Urban Research, “as something cultural, something to help with better understanding of their cultural origins, and a practical way of applying it to their daily lives.” Like Christmas and Hanukkah, other major holidays with which it shares a season, Kwanzaa has its symbols. Besides the kinara (which evokes comparisons to the Jewish menorah and Christian Advent wreath), there are fruits and vegetables, corn, and a cup (called the kikombe cha umoja, or unity cup), all traditionally placed on a mat (mkeka) laid atop a piece of African cloth. But it’s the underpinnings of Kwanzaa, and its proud embrace of African identity and pride, that seem to speak the loudest to those who celebrate it.

First exposure “That is exactly what Kwanzaa pro-

COMMENTARY: LUCIUS GANTT: WE MUST FIND THE GREATNESS IN OURSELVES | A2 COMMENTARY: CHARLES W. CHERRY II: RANDOM THOUGHTS OF A FREE BLACK MIND | A4

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DECEMBER 30, 2016 – JANUARY 5, 2017

We must find the greatness in ourselves In 2016, we lost a lot of great people when they took their final journey to The Land of Plenty! One loss that had a tremendous impact on me came when we lost the GOAT! The GOAT was the greatest of all time, Muhammad Ali! Ali was a tremendous prizefighter. Ali is regarded as one of the leading heavyweight boxers of the 20th century. He remains the only three-time lineal heavyweight champion, having won the title in 1964, 1974 and 1978. He is the only boxer to be named The Ring magazine fighter of the year six times. He was ranked as the greatest athlete of the 20th Century.

Named himself He kinda gave himself the nickname “The Greatest” boxer of all time, but I’m old enough to know about Jack Johnson, who whipped everybody he want-

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vides,” says Menzise. “It provides a culture and a sense of legacy to people who, for a long time, had their legacy begin with the plantation, or on a slave ship. It gives you sort of permission to embrace something African that could also be popular… It provides, to some people, their first exposure to something that’s authentically African.” That sense of identity, of pride in a culture too often neglected, has always appealed to Sallah Jenkins, an art teacher living in Northeast Baltimore who has been celebrating Kwanzaa with her family – which now includes eight children and 12 grandchildren – since 1976. Even this year, with none of her children living at home anymore, she’ll be setting up a Kwanzaa table, complete with a kinara and all the accompaniments. It’s for when the grandchildren come by, she says.

History, culture “I always felt a spiritual aspect to it,” says Jenkins, 58. “When we were doing Kwanzaa, we shared everything. People would talk about our history and culture all the time.” Charles Dugger, a high school teacher living in South Baltimore, has spent much of the past several weeks setting up Kwanzaa celebrations at various branches of Baltimore’s

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ple into a corner. I don’t think that’s applicable to the third branch of government. I believe all the justices, no matter how they’re labeled, are seeking the truth, and truth is in the eye of the beholder. I believe we’re all a very objective… We’re products of our background. We bring our biases and our prejudices like anybody else. But we try to be aware of them because then you can deal with them. If you’re in denial in terms of your biases, you won’t deal with them…

‘More perfect union’ Obviously, everyone is a product of their experience. I guess my whole reason for being in the law was because of my experiences of injustice and the sense of wanting to fulfill the ideals of the founders when they said there should be a more perfect union. Of course, there could never be a more perfect union. You can only ascribe to make it as good as you can get. So yes, I knew about injustice. I knew about apartheid. I knew about segregation. I’ve experienced it, and the vestiges are still here. It’s more systemic. It was built into

Died young LUCIUS GANTT THE GANTT REPORT

ed to, and Sugar Ray Robinson, who had a professional record of 128-1-2 with 84 knockouts. From 1943 to 1951, Robinson went on a 91-fight unbeaten streak, the third longest in professional boxing history. So Ali’s boxing claim could be disputed. However, as a great man, humanitarian, activist, philanthropist and servant, his departure was way too soon. But this column is not about boxing. It is about great men and women that, like Ali, sacrificed their reputation, their livelihood, their career and even their lives to do what God put them on earth to do.

There were many great people like Ali before Ali, and many great people will come afterwards. It seems in every scenario, though, the great die too young. Jesus Christ, and all other religious prophets, died too young. Nat Turner died too young. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. died too young. Harriett Tubman, Ida Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks and other great women died too young. Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey died too young! They died too young because they fought young, spoke out young and stood up at a young age! Nobody is born great. To be great, you have to do great things. It takes time to establish a life of greatness. It takes time, effort and desire to do great things. Our community and our world

needs more great citizens. We need more people to fight the fight. We need more great messengers. We need more people that are strong, brave, skilled, talented and socially conscious like our forefathers and our ancestors were. Don’t teach your children how to bow down, how to back up and why they should fear their enemies, their exploiters and their oppressors. Teach your youth that it is great to be great!

Encourage the children Whatever your children are great at as a youth, encourage them to follow their dreams and their destiny. They can be great boxers, singers, dancers, writers, teachers, preachers, scientists, entrepreneurs, soldiers, swimmers or anything they want to be great at. But they must be dedicated, and they must work long and hard.

People only like the easy and the good things about great men and women, but the truth of the matter is many great people were whipped and beaten, many great people were jailed and incarcerated, many great people were hated and criticized at some time in their lives and careers. But they continued to do what they had to do to become great! Ali, Prince and many other greats left us in 2016. But there are still greats among us, because we all have greatness in us. Will you be the one to be great today and every day? I hope you will.

Buy Gantt’s latest book, “Beast Too: Dead Man Writing,” on Amazon.com and from bookstores everywhere. “Like” The Gantt Report page on Facebook. Contact Lucius at www.allworldconsultants. net.

Enoch Pratt Free Library. By the time he’s done, he will have visited 18 libraries, sometimes singing and clapping and leading kinara lightings before packed houses, other times playing to audiences of only one or two. He’s on a mission, Dugger says, to stress the principles of Kwanzaa – especially to young people, who he says can use all the positive role models they can get.

Nothing into something “You learn about people who took nothing and literally turned it into something,” says Dugger, whose appearance last week at the Brooklyn branch library included the invocation of more than a dozen names of African-Americans who have made a difference, from Paul Robeson to Muhammad Ali and Emmett Till. While some people try to avoid commercialism when it comes to Kwanzaa – handing out handmade gifts, for instance, or making their own mkeka – others embrace shopping for the holiday. At Everyone’s Place, which prides itself as being Baltimore’s “Kwanzaa headquarters,” kinaras run around $30, while mkekas cost about $5 to $10. The store does a brisk business, co-owner Tabia Kamau-Nataki says – especially this year, with the holiday’s golden anniversary. “There’s always a new group of people who are trying to incorporate Kwanzaa into their lives,” says Kamau-Nataki, add-

the system. America was founded on racial superiority. It was. And the fact that the Constitution, the 13th Amendment freed the slaves, Jim Crow took off after that, and the Klan and the (lynchings)…It went on until the `60s, and it went on until Brown v. Board of Education.

Law validated norms I guess I found that the law was the most conservative institution around. The law wasn’t necessarily in the vanguard of any changes. It more or less validated whatever the cultural norms were. And in a sense, there was a cognitive dissonance. Because the Dred Scott case said that Blacks don’t have any rights that Whites need to respect. And of course, Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case, said separate and equal is fine and that was the law of the land until the `54 Brown decision. Then when the Brown decision came about there was obviously a rebelling … that became the Southern Manifesto. And every congressperson, which included every senator and every representative, signed it. The (doctrine) said, “Segregation now, segregation’s very fine.” They just wanted to disregard the Supreme Court decision.

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In this file photo, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and Academy of Performing Arts celebrate Kwanzaa in Paterson, N.J. ing that interest in the holiday has been increasing steadily in the 30-some years Everyone’s Place has been in business. “Kwanzaa has breath and life; it’s just growing.”

Remembrance, recommitment That must be music to the ears of Karenga, who was active in the 1960s civil rights movement. He created Kwanzaa in 1966, finding his inspiration in African harvest festivals. In his annual Founders’ Kwanzaa Statement, Karenga wrote in part, “The 50th anniversary of the pan-African holiday, Kwanzaa, of

Continuing struggle The three that didn’t sign on were Estes Kefauver, Sen. (Al) Gore and (Lyndon) Johnson, out of Texas, President Johnson. Those were the only three that didn’t sign onto it. So you still have this struggle, within the context of the American power system. The Southerners had seniority because they would elect the same people over and over and over. So therefore they were jammed in committees, etc., etc., etc., and they had the power positions. So there was this interplay with so-called freedom. Brown was decided in ‘54. I graduated from high school in ‘62, and it was still segregated. It was segregated until probably about ‘65, I guess, in my home state. So this ‘all deliberate speed,’ what does that mean? That means you don’t really have to do it. Then you have the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Basically, what happened there is, when Johnson signed it, he said, “I’m going to lose the South forever, for the next couple of decades.” And that’s when the blue states became red. And that’s when the Democratic South became Republican. That’s the facts of life. That’s history. It’s not my opinion.

Non-stop resistance And, of course, there

necessity brings added focus and emphasis on its customary call for remembrance, reflection and recommitment. “We remember our history and the legacies left and the people who made and left them for us and the world. We reflect on the expansive meaning of being African in the world, on the context and issues of our times, and on our way forward in struggle to forge a future responsive to our needs and interests as well as those of the world. “And we recommit ourselves to our highest values, to our most anchoring, elevating and liberat-

ing practices, and as ever to the good of our people and the well-being of the world.”

was resistance to that even. Now, we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, saying he was such a great person. But then, he wasn’t. He was the most hated and vilified person in the nation, by large segments of our population, led by J. Edgar Hoover, of all people, who said he was the most dangerous man in America. I mean, this is where we are. We aren’t talking about 200 years ago. So I’m saying these vestiges are still alive and well. I don’t think a lot of people, I don’t think it’s in their consciousness, but it’s there.

when I wasn’t speeding. I’ve been targeted. As a judge, I’m going to a meeting in Tampa, a statewide trial court judge commission meeting, at the Second District Court of Appeal. The meeting was on the second floor. We were taken by van from the hotel to the court. We got out and proceeded to go to the elevator. My colleagues got out and went on the elevator, and the guard asked me, “Where are you going?” So, yes. It’s real. We’ve been subjected to this for so long. I took my wife on a 40th anniversary trip to Disney World and stayed at the Dolphin Hotel. I came down to get my car from the valet and this White woman came up to me and said, “How many can you take?” I said, “I can take five or six.” You have to maintain a sense of humor.

White privilege is real President Johnson asked the question, and I ask the question now: How many Whites – if they think everything is fair and equal – how many Whites would voluntarily be treated the way Blacks are treated in America today? How many would give up their White privilege? That was a rhetorical question. The answer is nobody would. And that’s not to place blame on anybody. That is to make people get out of this denial that there’s even a problem. They say get over it. Well, how do you get over it? You can’t get over it when you’re in it. Even as a Supreme Court justice, I’ve been stopped by police

‘Celebration of freedom’ Karenga continues: “Kwanzaa is clearly a celebration of family, community and culture, but it is also a celebration of freedom, an act of freedom and an instrument of freedom. It is an act of freedom in its recovery and reconstruction of African culture, our return to its best values and practices and our resistance to the imposition of Eurocentric ways of understanding and en-

Blacks have PTSD You’ve heard of the Vietnam vets and the Desert Storm people who have post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). That same process could be attributed to Black people in America…That’s why you would never want to change places with us. And I understand that. I would never ask you to do that. But what I would ask is that you try to understand what the problems are and try to do some-

gaging the world. “Kwanzaa is a celebration of freedom, of the freedom struggle itself in which Kwanzaa is grounded, a celebration of our choosing to free ourselves and be ourselves, as Africans, and to rejoice in the richness of our history and culture of awesome and audacious striving and struggle. “Let us hold fast, then, to our African value system, the Nguzo Saba, that has won the heart and minds of millions throughout the world African community.”

Chris Kaltenbach of The Baltimore Sun / TNS contributed to this report.

thing about it.

A possible target …I’m hesitant to walk, to exercise in my neighborhood because of some of these alt-right people who are getting ready for the race war. I’m who they’re going to have it with. That’s the thinking… And these “truthers” who believe whatever they believe. And some of them are very extreme. They might decide to go to target practice on me, not knowing who I am, but because they see my skin. Am I worried about my sons going to stores? Yes. They drive nice cars. They’re educated. They’re professional. But they’re stopped by police, thinking they must be selling drugs. When people see me driving, I drive a nice car. And they stop me. They don’t know who I am. They say, you must be something, somebody. Are you a preacher? What are you, a professional football player? I could never be a judge or a justice. That’s just the mindset of most people in the country. I don’t think they’re even aware of it. I don’t think it’s a conscious thing. It’s like fish in the water. You’re so used to the water, water’s necessary for you to breath or live. It’s just that simple. All of my water is polluted.

DECEMBER 30, 2016 – JANUARY 5, 2017

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Thousands of New Yorkers rally to send a message to President-elect Trump and his administration on Dec. 18, International Migrants Day, to fight back against hate and anti-immigrant policies.

Undocumented immigrants face deportation for minor crimes BY TERESA WILTZ STATELINE.ORG TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE

Last December, Mayra Machado was pulled over for a routine traffic stop in Arkansas. She had an unpaid ticket for failing to yield. And as a teenager, she’d spent four months in boot camp for writing bad checks. Now 31, the single mother of three, who is an undocumented immigrant, faces deportation to El Salvador, the battle-scarred country she fled when she was 5 years old. Sylvester Owino, 40, said he survived torture in Kenya as a young activist and came to the U.S. on a student visa, which ran out. A 2003 robbery conviction in San Diego resulted in a nine-year stay in prison. Now, he is part of a U.S. Supreme Court case that will determine whether immigrant detainees have a right to a bond hearing.

Increased scrutiny The two situations illustrate the variety of crimes that can get immigrants detained and deported, even after they have served a jail or prison sentence for the crime — and even if they are in the country legally. And while the federal government says it targets noncitizens who are serious or repeat offenders, immigrants with minor offenses

often are deported. Immigrants with criminal records may soon come under increased scrutiny. Republican President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to immediately deport “the people that are criminal and have criminal records.” There are, he said, “a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country.” Immigration advocates say those numbers are inflated, and point to figures that indicate most immigrants are being deported for minor crimes or for no crimes at all.

High priority First-generation immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than do U.S. citizens. But for those who do commit crimes, it’s hard to get a clear picture of whether they are serious or misdemeanors, violent or nonviolent. Since 2014, the Department of Homeland Security has prioritized deporting noncitizens who pose a serious threat to public safety or national security — and from October 2014 through September 2015, of the 235,413 people who were deported, 59 percent had criminal convictions. But federal data on criminal deportees does not specify the crimes they’ve committed — or how many of them are undocumented.

Technically, if someone is undocumented and entered the country after January 2014, they are considered a high priority for criminal deportation, even if they have committed no other offense.

A criminal alien Further complicating matters: what constitutes a “criminal alien” is not defined in U.S. immigration law or regulations, and is used broadly, according to a September report by the Congressional Research Service. A criminal alien may be someone who is undocumented or an authorized immigrant who may be deportable, depending on the crime they have committed. He or she may be incarcerated or free, or have already served time. “We see a ton of people deported for misdemeanors, probation violations, petty theft, shoplifting,” said Alisa Wellek, executive director of the Immigrant Defense Project, a legal services group that advocates for immigrant rights in the criminal justice system. “The federal government has these really overreaching laws on the books, laws that are very unforgiving for anyone who’s had any contact with the criminal justice system — even if you’ve never served a day in jail.” Noncitizens convicted of an “aggravated felony” face particularly harsh penalties. Congress expanded the definition of the term since 1988 so that they can be deported for a crime that may be neither “aggravated” nor a “felony,” according to Joshua Breisblatt, policy analyst for the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration research group. Thirty offenses qualify as aggravated felonies, including theft, failing to appear in court, or offenses that most states consider a misdemeanor or do not criminalize at all, such as consensual sex between a 21-year-old and a 17-year-old, the group said.

Facing deportation Any new offense Congress adds to the list is retroactive. So a noncitizen can become deportable even if he or she already served the sentence for the crime years before. When she was 19, Machado pleaded guilty to three felony counts: forging a friend’s name on a check, writing bad checks, and failing to appear in court. Because of her criminal history, Machado is considered a “priority aggravated felon,” according to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official. Machado, who considers herself “totally Americanized,” is in a detention facility in Louisiana. She is facing deportation any day now to El Salvador, a country where she said she knows no one and cannot read or write the language.

‘Tragic results’ Advocates for limiting immigration, such as Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, urge the incoming Trump administration to get tougher and scrap the practice of ranking crimes to decide who should be deported. The policy, she said, “exempted too many criminal aliens from deportation and allowed for exemptions based on family ties.” “All of that resulted in the release of tens of thousands of criminal aliens in the past few years,” Vaughan said. “Many of these individuals went on to commit more crimes, sometimes with tragic results.” Many local law enforcement officials agree, although many of them ignore ICE requests to detain people without a court order for fear they could be found in violation of immigrants’ civil rights.

No convictions One way to get a glimpse into the types of crimes immigrants have been convicted of is to look at so-called detainers. Detainers

are requests by ICE to local, state and federal law enforcement to hold noncitizens for possible deportation. Half of the 95,085 immigrants targeted by ICE for possible criminal deportation in fiscal 2015 did not have criminal convictions at all, according to an analysis of ICE data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. (TRAC has examined detainer requests issued between 2003 and 2015, which it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.) The rest had convictions for drunken driving (6.7 percent), assault (4 percent), drug trafficking (2.1 percent), burglary (1.8 percent), sale of marijuana (1.7 percent) and traffic offense (1.6 percent). Fewer still had convictions for illegal entry, larceny, sale of cocaine and domestic violence. All the evidence shows that serious crimes committed by noncitizens are “extremely rare,” said TRAC Director Susan Long. “The issue is, what do you do when you can’t find that many serious criminals?” she said. “We don’t want murderers and rapists in our midst regardless of their citizenship, but you have to find them.”

Blacks susceptible A detainer is the first step in a long process and does not always include complete details of a detainee’s criminal history, according to ICE officials. Black immigrants are particularly susceptible to getting caught in the prison-deportation pipeline, said Wellek of the Immigrant Defense Project. According a 2016 report by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, a research and advocacy group, more than one in five noncitizens facing deportation for criminal offenses is Black. Black immigrants also are more likely than other immigrants to be deported because of a conviction.

Professor under fire for ‘White Genocide’ Twitter post BY JONATHAN TANNENWALD PHILADELPHIA INQUIRE TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE

PHILADELPHIA – Drexel University officials had a quiet holiday weekend loudly interrupted Sunday night, after a professor took to Twitter to let loose some extreme views. “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide,” associate professor of politics and global studies George Ciccariello-Maher posted Christmas Eve.

He then wrote Sunday: “To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed.” George Not long thereCiccarielloafter, CiccarielloMaher Maher’s tweets were picked up by conservative websites. His tweets are not public, or at least

weren’t as of Monday morning. It is public, though, that he has over 10,000 Twitter followers and has posted over 16,000 times.

Humor falls flat Sunday, Ciccariello-Maher said he had “sent a satirical tweet about an imaginary concept, ‘white genocide.’ “‘For those who haven’t bothered to do their research, ‘white genocide’ is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from inter-

racial relationships to multicultural policies (and most recently, against a tweet by State Farm Insurance). It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I’m glad to have mocked it.” Many readers and social media followers didn’t get the humor, though – and his employer didn’t either. Drexel condemned the Twitter post. “While the University recognizes the right of its faculty to freely express their thoughts and

opinions in public debate, professor Ciccariello-Maher’s comments are utterly reprehensible, deeply disturbing, and do not in any way reflect the values of the university. Ciccariello-Maher teaches in Drexel’s Department of History and Politics. His biography on Drexel’s website says he is “an expert and frequent media commentator on social movements, particularly in Latin America.”

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DECEMBER 30, 2016 – JANUARY 5, 2017

Syria, Russia and American desperation It is no coincidence that anti-Russian propaganda is being ramped up at the same moment the Syrian government is poised to retake its country from terrorists. Barack Obama and the rest of the war party are left to sputter nonsensical statements because their grand plan to realize the neocon Project for a New American Century is in very big trouble. The American corporate media ignored the suffering of Syrians in the city of Aleppo until their captivity was broken by the Syrian Arab army. Ever since 2012, ISIS and other terrorist groups sponsored by the United States, NATO, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have held thousands of people hostage there. Turks picked the region apart, raiding Syrian factories and transporting them piece by piece back to their country.

who run afoul of regime-change plans. The five-year-long effort to destroy the Syrian state has produced many victims in that country, and it always threatened to spark a larger international conflict. The assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey could be such a moment. The gunman’s last words and obviously his actions were a call to jihad. Even 100 years later, the 1914 assassination in Sarajevo is not far from memory.

Playing on emotions

The key player

Now that the Syrians are retaking the city with the help of their Russian and Hezbollah allies, there is a steady stream of news about Aleppo. All of it is meant to pull at the heartstrings of uninformed people as the human rights industrial complex reliably goes about its dirty work. Human Rights Watch and other groups who work to promote United States foreign policy speak endlessly about war crimes. They didn’t say much when America’s allies were terrorizing Syrians; but now they suddenly point fingers, and always at the people

MARGARET KIMBERLEY BLACK AGENDA REPORT

But the United States is the principal actor in this drama. None of the other nations involved in this crime would have acted absent American direction. All the casualties, the sieges, the hunger and the frantic search for refuge can be placed at America’s feet. So too the death of the Russian ambassador. This international tangle is covered with American fingerprints. The Syrian government is determined to take back its country and the Americans and their allies are equally determined to thwart it. The recent successes

Democrats and media have lost America’s trust In many ways, the election was a referendum on the mainstream media and the Democratic Party. Both got clobbered. Most objective observers have to admit that the Democratic Party and its mainstream friends live in a closed bubble and mutual admiration society. They also have something else in common. They are neither trusted nor respected by the American people and are in a full Titanic-dive to irrelevancy!

Little confidence As to the mainstream media, an April report from the American Press Institute found that only six percent of adults surveyed said they had “a great deal of confidence” in the press. Five months later, a September Gallup poll found that Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history. Just before the election, the Suffolk University/USA Today poll found that nearly 76 percent surveyed believed the media, including major newspapers and TV stations, wanted to see Clin-

CLARENCE V. MCKEE, ESQ. GUEST COMMENTARY

ton elected. And after the election, a poll by the well-respected Media Research Center (MRC) found that 78 percent of voters believed the news coverage of the presidential campaign was biased. Nearly a three-to-one majority (59) percent, believed that the media were for Clinton; and, 69 percent did not believe the news media are honest and truthful. Thankfully, 97 percent of voters said they did not let the media’s bias influence their vote. MRC President Brent Bozell summed up these results nicely saying that the media was in full “panic mode” adding, “…People didn’t believe the nonsense that the media were politically neutral. When you have a strong majority of actual voters saying the national ‘news’ media were biased in favor of Hillary Clinton…; and believing they are funda-

Random thoughts of a free Black mind, v. 290 The year 2016, an annus horribilis – That’s Latin for a “horrible year.” It’s what Queen Elizabeth II called the year 1992 when both her princely sons divorced their princesses and her main residence, Windsor Castle, almost burned to the ground. Seems that 2016 was also an annus horribilis with so many deaths, both personal and in popular culture. Four of my Morehouse College schoolmates died just after they turned 60 years old this year. Ironically, two of them were medical doctors. Dr. Frederick V. Miller, who I knew for 42 years,

QUICK TAKES FROM #2: STRAIGHT, NO CHASER

CHARLES W. CHERRY II, ESQ. PUBLISHER

died in April in a hospital bed as I held his hand. My South Florida homeboy and classmate, Dr. Elton Gaddy, died in August. Then another classmate, Daniel “Philly Dap” Baldwin, then actor Bill “Radio

of the Syrian army explain part of the desperation coming from Obama, the Democratic Party and corporate media. Blaming Russia kills several birds with one stone. It continues the propaganda war against a country that will not knuckle under and accept American hegemony. The “hyper-Russophobia” was also an attempt to make the unpalatable and incompetent Hillary Clinton more appealing. And its continuation is being used by Democrats and Republicans to stop the incoming president from having any chance to improve relations with that country or curtail the regime change doctrine. The war party never sleeps. Barack Obama’s last press conference was replete with lies and insults aimed at Russia and Vladimir Putin. He should have been embarrassed to say that Russia was “smaller,” “weaker” and “doesn’t produce anything that anybody wants to buy except oil and gas and arms.” He completed his bizarre rant by saying that Putin was “the former head of the KGB.” He was no such thing, and of course Obama knows that. It isn’t clear if he expected anyone to believe him, or if facing his failure carried him away to heights of rhetorical foolishness.

Hollow legacy Obama thought that Hillary Clinton would win and complete his regime change plans. Not onmentally dishonest, you have a major problem that can’t be fixed with an apology. The public has rejected this institution as being either objective or truthful.” Just as these polls show that American people have rejected and do not trust major media, they also have similar misgivings and distrust of Democrats. According to MSNBC, since Barack Obama took the helm of the Democratic Party in 2008, Democrats have lost 11 Senate seats, 60 House seats, 14 governorships, and over 900 state legislative seats.

VISUAL VIEWPOINT: OBAMA VS. TRUMP

RICK MCKEE, THE AUGUSTA CHRONICLE

ly did she lose and deprive him of his third term, but the hollowness of his legacy is clear. Obviously “hope and change” was a marketing tagline meant to hide his commitment to the worldwide neoliberal project. Donald Trump will be president of the United States in just four weeks. That is a short period of time in which to pull off a soft coup. He will be inaugurated, but team Obama want to make sure he cannot upend the status quo they work so hard to uphold. While the Democratic Party rank-and-file are anxious about racism, immigration, Islamophobia, judicial appointees and voter suppression, their leaders only care about maintaining imperialism. Obama and the rest of the Democratic Party are unworthy of the loyalty they engender. On January 20, thousands of people will head to Washington to protest Trump. Meanwhile, the Demas champions of the poor and downtrodden…we have somehow let a little camp of elitistsounding, snobby people come into the party, and it’s obnoxious. They talk down to people and everybody hates it.” The same can be said of the major media. The elites of both institutions have forgotten, if not abandoned, the interests, concerns and values of average American workers of all colors.

What do they stand for?

Why do Americans mistrust and reject major media and the Democratic Party? Regarding the Democratic Party, former Obama advisor and CNN commentator Van Jones, recently on ABC’s “The View,” said, “Everybody knows we have a problem with elitism. Liberals and Democrats, we see ourselves

In the closed-door world of the mostly White liberal elites at the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major newspaper outlets; executive suites of major cable and network news organizations; and, of course, the Democratic Party power structure; there is a common highbrow vision of America. That vision is one of transgender bathrooms in public schools, open borders, sanctuary cities and protection of illegal immigrants; condoning or remaining silent on anti-police “pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em’ like bacon” rhetoric and blaming rioting, looting, and arson on racism, to name just a few. As they found out, such views are not shared by the vast “redstate tide” which swept Donald

Raheem” Nunn, who attended Morehouse during my time there. None of them lived long enough even to begin collecting Social Security. On the professional side, outstanding Black journalists George Curry and Gwen Ifill died. In pop culture, Muhammad Ali, Prince, Tommy Ford of the “Martin” sitcom, David Bowie, Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire, Carrie Fisher of “Star Wars,” and Gene Wilder are all gone. Don’t forget Harambe the gorilla. He’s gone, too! Then there’s Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. DEAD. As of this writing, there are still a few days left in 2016. I know that time is an artificial human construct based on the earth’s rotation on its axis and the time it takes our glorious planet to orbit the sun. But still, I’ll be glad to

turn the page to 2017, as arbitrary as that number is… Black church clichés – During my occasional forays to Sunday church services, I’ve heard preachers come up with nonsensical sayings that good God-fearing church people repeat without thinking. Some of these ‘proverbs’ sound good, but don’t make sense to me. One is, “God is good all the time.” The truth? God is GOD all the time, and the single letter in “good “vs. “God” makes all the difference. How? Because being a “god” means being in complete and absolute control. Clearly God allows inexplicably bad things to happen to good people. Rationalize it all you want, but bad WILL happen. Just read any newspaper obituary page and you’ll know what I mean. Another popular saying now

Dems shellacked Putting that in perspective, according to National Review, two-thirds of the nation’s governors are Republicans; more than two-thirds of our state legislative houses are under Republican control; Republicans control both houses of Congress and have just captured the White House.

What’s the problem?

Charles W. Cherry II, Esq., Publisher

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ocrats will be making last-ditch efforts to help jihadists destroy Syria.

Protest the Dems Some of the protesters ought to target their ire at Obama and the Democrats, and not just because of their electoral failure. They ought to pledge an end to support for warmongering Democrats altogether. If it is true that Trump is a fascist, he won’t be the first one in the White House. His predecessor fits that description just as well. But events may have spun out of his control. The fate of Syria may not be in American hands any longer. And that is why the desperation is so evident.

Margaret Kimberley’s column appears weekly in BlackAgendaReport.com. Contact her at Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgendaReport.com. Trump into the White House with a resounding Electoral College victory. They are out of touch, out of ideas, and out of time.

Blaming others So, what is the mainstream media and Democrats’ reaction to their massive loss? Instead of heeding Shakespeare’s famous “The fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves,” they blame everybody and everything else. First it was FBI Director James Comey’s fault. Then it was because of “fake news” even though the fake news of the decade was Hillary blaming the Benghazi terrorist attack on a YouTube “video.” Next it was because our political system uses the Electoral College rather than the popular vote to determine presidential winners. The latest excuse is that the Russian’s meddled in our election process. Stay tuned for the next hot air excuse coming from the MediaDemocratic bubble…

Clarence V. McKee is a government, political and media relations consultant and president of McKee Communications, Inc., as well as a Newsmax.com contributor. This article originally appeared on Newsmax.com. is, “Favor ain’t fair.” That’s a halftruth. FAILURE ain’t fair either, but good people fail all the time due to uncontrollable circumstances. My point? You have to acknowledge the good with the bad. I like the Apostle Paul’s attitude in Philippians 4: “…I have learned to be content regardless of my circumstances. I know how to live humbly, and I know how to abound. I am accustomed to any and every situation to being filled and being hungry, to having plenty and having need. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.” Happy New Year!

Hit me up at ccherry2@ gmail.com.

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DECEMBER 30, 2016 – JANUARY 5, 2017

EDITORIAL

Aborted recount effort is ‘Grand Theft Electoral’ It’s one thing to abstractly claim that U.S. elections are a farcical exercise to legitimize the rule of a bipartisan imperial oligarchy. It’s quite another to publicly lay bare some of the stinky moving parts of that farce. The attempted recount initiated by 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein did exactly that, starkly illuminating 3 facts: • that U.S. elections are intentionally and fundamentally broken and rigged, recount-proof and audit-proof; • that both the capitalist parties like it that way, and; • that state and federal courts are willing to issue patently absurd rulings from the bench to keep it that way. The 2016 presidential election was certainly stolen on, before, and after Election Day. • It’s certain that voters were disappeared by the millions in the months leading up to the election. It wasn’t the Russians that did this. For some time now, Republicans have found themselves in a demographic dilemma. They are unable to get substantial numbers of Latino or Black voters, and the numbers of their base constituencies are declining. So for a generation, standard Republican strategies have included making Democratic voters and votes disappear by the thousands and hundreds of thousands at state level, and by the millions on the national scale. In the months leading up to the 2016 election, millions of likely Democratic voters were prevented from registering by voter ID laws and uncooperative local registrars. Spurious police raids and criminal prosecutions hindered voter registration drives, and Republican-sponsored private initiatives like CrossCheck, a database designed to provide the excuse for state election authorities to challenge legitimately registered voters with names similar to voters or alleged felons in other states. All these measures combined to remove a seven-figure number of voters from the rolls across the country. • It’s likely that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions more votes were made to disappear on Election Day. Russians didn’t do this, either. The tactic of sending all the old and broken-down voting machines to ghetto precincts and the newer ones less likely to break down to Whiter Republican ones is a standard move practiced by election authorities in large and diverse counties and cities from coast to coast. In Detroit, the state has long since relieved residents of even the pretense of self-government. Detroit and Flint have their own mayors, city councils, election authorities and the rest, but their budgets are all subject to approval by officials appointed by the state’s Republican governor. The same crop of state appointees who decided Flint residents should drink from their poisoned river, denied Detroit’s request to spend some of its own money on new voting machines. The aborted recount effort revealed that an astounding 59 percent of all Detroit’s voting machines failed Election Day, and more than 75,000 ballots went uncounted. In Detroit and

BRUCE A. DIXON BLACK AGENDA REPORT

The recount reminded millions of people that the Green Party exists as an alternative to the two capitalist parties. The corporate media work long and hard to keep any left alternatives beyond the pale and out of the political discussion. The attempted recount put us in that discussion in a way that would not otherwise have been possible. And for those paying attention, it delegitimized both Republicans and Democrats, and makes the case for something completely different. much of Wisconsin too, voters mark their choices on paper ballots which are fed through optical scanners that count the vote. Or not. Similar patters appeared in Flint, and in Dearborn, Mich., the largest concentration of Arab-American voters in the U.S. Trump only carried Michigan by 10,000 votes. • State and federal courts intervened to abort any recount before detailed and damning evidence could be developed in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The specious “reasoning” behind legal rulings which aborted meaningful recounts is roughly on a par with the quiz questions Dixiecrat registrars once used to fend off Black registrants. They’d ask prospective Black voters how many bubbles were in a bar of soap. It was good enough then, and it’s good enough now. Michigan’s attorney general made the astounding ruling, seconded by state court judges, that Detroit’s paper ballots must not be examined by humans who might easily determine the intent of those 75,000 voters. Wisconsin officials didn’t allow their recount to go as far as Mich-

America is just average, not exceptional Americans love to bask in the glory of our “exceptionalism.” We are great, we are wonderful, we dominate the world. Scholars who study “us” say that our exceptionalism is rooted in the fact that we have offered leadership in international affairs. We have committed more resources than other countries to the United Nations, to NATO, and to other organizations committed to international peace. But we do this with a sense of paternal largesse, as if we are the greatest, the most wonderful, the benefactor.

Are Russians smarter? But we have allowed our electoral system to be thrown into chaos because Vladimir Putin has a grudge against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and he used his minions to actualize his grudge.

DR. JULIANNE MALVEAUX TRICEEDNEYWIRE.COM

Hillary Clinton got nearly three million more votes than Trump, but he has an Electoral College victory. Is this American exceptionalism? A hacked democracy vulnerable to the intrusion of foreign powers?  We talk as if we are No. 1 or No. 2 in achievement, but the fact is that we are No. 14 or 15 by many measures. We aren’t exceptional. We’re just average, ranking below a dozen countries, hitting the median mark.  When science literacy is measured, 24 countries rank higher than the United States. The OECD (Organization for Economic Co-

igan’s. They left it to each county whether the supposed “recount” would be accomplished by human observers tallying the paper ballots, or feeding the paper ballots into the same broken machines, or simply reading the totals the broken machines had coughed up on Election Day. The proposed recount in Pennsylvania was a joke from the beginning, since the majority of that state’s voters are forced to use audit-proof Direct Record Entry machines which record voter choices directly to electronic media – with no recountable permanent paper record. A federal district court judge in Michigan summed it all up when he declared that “...a recount as an audit of the election has never been endorsed by any court...” Current law then holds that socalled “recounts” are utterly meaningless, and it’s perfectly OK for elections to be unaccountable and not subject to any audit whatsoever. You wouldn’t run a taco truck business without an audit. But an election? Wisconsin eventually halted the recount with Milwaukee, the state’s largest concentration of Black voters, NOT recounted by hand, declaring that since Stein was not within striking distance of a win in that state, she had no standing to ask for a recount in the first place. • Why didn’t Hillary Clinton expose the massive interstate tampering with ballots in largely Black constituencies? Why didn’t Hillary Clinton’s campaign seize upon the persuasive indications of widespread fraud to mount challenges in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and for that matter Alabama, Georgia, Arizona, Indiana, Florida, Texas and other places where tens or hundreds of thousands of presumably Democratic votes vanished or went uncounted? Hillary’s campaign was forced to send token observers to the recount effort. Hillary partisans operating without the campaign’s permission did the original research and drew up a Wisconsin petition alleging foreign intervention as the reason a recount was needed – a petition which Stein carelessly endorsed, to the embarrassment of most Greens. Some 150,000 small Democratic donors funded the Stein recount effort. Team Trump had suits in court and boots on the ground everywhere in the three states recounts were attempted. Hillary’s campaign had the money to orchestrate challenges in a dozen states, and to launch a sustained campaign to expose the national pattern of electoral apartheid centering upon Black and Latino communities. But they didn’t. Evidently the one-percenters who call the ultimate shots for the Democratic Party just don’t much respect the millions of Black and Latin voters in places like Detroit and Philly and Jacksonville who provide that party with what Donna Brazile and others call its “base vote.” It’s a lot easier, and far more in line with the capitalist one percenter self-interest and world view, to blame the Russians. • The attempted recount showed the need for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote. Democrats in the 1970s, ‘80s and earoperation and Development) average score on science literacy is 493, and the U.S. was close to the average, at 496.

Hacked again? Singapore, Japan, Finland, Canada, Vietnam, Australia, the UK, German, Switzerland, Ireland and Portugal were among those with higher scores. Really? These folks will be among those hacking us in a decade if we don’t make better investments in education!  We’re kind of average with reading literacy, as well. The OECD average is 493, and the US average is 497. Singapore, Canada, Finland, Ireland, Japan, Norway, Germany, Poland and the Netherlands outscore us. We’re in the band with France, the UK, and Spain. Our math comparisons with other countries are especially alarming. The OECD average for math literacy is 490, but the U.S. score is 470. At least 30 countries, have higher scores than the U.S. Why?  The federal Department of Ed-

A5

VISUAL VIEWPOINT: A CHINESE CHRISTMAS

SEAN DELONAS, CAGLECARTOONS.COM

ly ‘90s failed to consolidate the victory won by the Voting Rights Act of 1967. While they held the moral and political high ground for a generation, Democrats, including Black ones, failed to nail their victory permanently into the nation’s fundamental law by amending the U.S. Constitution to include a specific right to vote. Little by little, racist authorities encroached upon voting rights by refusing to comply with “motor voter” laws, by prosecuting clerical errors by voter registration and absentee ballot drives as felonies, gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and administrative machinations. Democrats John Kerry and Barack Obama, both serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee, resisted the pleas of voting rights activists to filibuster the appointments of Justices Roberts and Alito – neither of whom made a secret of their extreme right-wing views. So a few years later with Obama in the White House, the Supreme Court was able to gut the Voting Rights Act. Given the current briar patch of voter ID laws, gerrymandering, CrossCheck databases, felony disenfranchisement restrictions on who can vote and when, black box voting, and machinations of state and local officials, along with courts declaring voters have no right to an auditable election the only way to clear the obstacles to voting rights, to make every vote count and ensure every vote is counted is by amending the U.S. Constitution. Other nations have constitutions that spell out a right to vote along with the right to a clean environment, a quality public education, and more. Why not here? • Did the attempted recount damage the Green Party? Certainly not. Stein asked the Green steering committee to be a fiscal sponsor of the thing, and they wisely declined. If the Greens had done this, they’d have enabled large donors to drop tens of thousands of bucks at a time into the effort to fund the recall, a move that goes entirely against the declared intention and tradition of the Green Party. The dispute among Greens over aspects and ramifications of the recount and the aftermath of the 2016 has sparked a lively national discussion among Greens on how to make the Green Party more “small-d” democratic and sustainable. That can only be a good thing. The Green party’s refusal to sponsor the recount meant it had to be funded by small donors. That was another good thing. According to the Stein campaign, about 150,000 individual donors

kicked in an average of less than $50 apiece to pay for the recount effort. Those small donors who habitually give to Democrats, but once on the list of the national and state Green Parties, they can be directly addressed, messaged and contacted by state and local Greens. A significant number will be converted, since Democrats would NOT stand up for their own voters or their own alleged principles. The Stein campaign has pledged to donate leftover funds to voter integrity efforts around the country. Some of those efforts should specifically target the communities which were disenfranchised, and most of these efforts be run by Greens and not Democrats. • Was all this necessary? Only if you imagine taking part in elections is meaningful in the first place. In 2017, local Green parties will be working with candidates for municipal and local offices, for school boards and alderman and mayors and county commissioners. If the Green Party knows widespread vote tampering is taking place in 2016 and does nothing about it, how can we look local activists in the eye and tell them they ought to run for mayor and school board in 2017? That would make us hypocrites – almost Democrats. The recount reminded millions of people that the Green Party exists as an alternative to the two capitalist parties. The corporate media work long and hard to keep any left alternatives beyond the pale and out of the political discussion. The attempted recount put us in that discussion in a way that would not otherwise have been possible. And for those paying attention, it delegitimized both Republicans and Democrats, and makes the case for something completely different. The attempted recount was a good thing. It demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt not only that this was a stolen election, but that the laws, the courts, and corporate media are complicit in a bipartisan electoral crime wave of national proportions targeting communities of color. Our job now is to tell that story again and again so it becomes common knowledge, and the foundation for whatever transitional demands – like amending the U.S. Constitution – that we can organize around for the near future.

ucation should deal with the matter of standards. Common Core, while not popular among some educational leaders, is a way of ensuring that those who graduate from our nation’s high schools have a common foundation of knowledge. Implementing Common Core may be challenging, especially when some high schools lack the resources to offer the broadest curriculum. While many schools offer advanced courses, including advanced placement, some do not. Every student needs to have an opportunity to access advanced learning.

al Student Assessment measures learning outcomes. But when students from 73 educational systems tackle the same tests, objections can be pushed aside. Even with a flawed measure, even with adjustments, we must conclude that the United States is just average. If we want to be exceptional, we must do more than sell wolf tickets and crow over our competitors.

Just average

Bruce Dixon is managing editor of BlackAgendaReport. com.

The bottom line The Russians were smart enough to hack us and mess with our elections. Are we as smart as they are, or are we average? Mr. Trump says he will create jobs. He needs to make resources available to the Department of Education. If he wants to “Make American Great Again,” he needs to make American smart again by investing in education.

More importantly, those who do educational policy must look at the ways our students are lagging in the international environment. Are we content to be 14th, 22nd, 34th in international measures? When it comes to learning, we are merely average and often below average when we review Julianne Malveaux is a Washinternational measures. Some will quibble with the ways ington, D.C.-based economist that the Program for Internation- and writer.

TOJ A6

FLORIDA

DECEMBER 30, 2016 – JANUARY 5, 2017

Climate scientists concerned about Trump’s picks a leader of the Florida Climate Institute. Formed in 2010, the institute has dozens of scientists and other scholars from nine member universities, along with some 400 local politicians, business executives and other community leaders. “Trump’s all over the place,” Bloetscher said. “Nobody really knows his position on anything. He’s got to play to this rabid anti-science base that he mobilized, but I don’t know what his end game is. Some of his choices are really provoking a lot of objections and protests that may work as a counterbalance.”

BY JAMES ROSEN TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON – The world’s leading global warming scientists, many of them living and working on the front lines in Florida, are hoping against hope that President-elect Donald Trump and his top advisers will not take the country backward in the fight against rising sea levels, increasing temperatures and looming environmental dangers. For the experts in Florida, pushing forward in the face of defiant political leadership is nothing new. They’ve spent almost six years forging ahead despite public skepticism from Gov. Rick Scott, a prominent climate change denier who mobilizes for hurricanes and flooding, but who rejects the science that explains why his state may face fiercer storms and more flooding as a result of global warming. So strong is Scott’s aversion to climate change, some state employees say, he prohibited them from uttering the term, an allegation he’s denied.

Different impacts LANNIS WATERS/PALM BEACH POST/ZUMA PRESS/TNS

An area off Lake Trail by the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach is flooded after high tide on Oct. 17. pening,” Sauls told McClatchy. “There’s no magic wand, but we’re trying to combine science and urban planning so we can participate in multidisciplinary solutions.”

Initiative with FIU

Trump criticized

In Miami, Steve Sauls, a former Florida International University (FIU) lobbyist who now consults with the school on global warming, is overseeing an ambitious initiative called the University City Prosperity Project. With almost 60,000 students, professors and administrators, FIU is the country’s sixth-largest university. Saul’s project is aimed at enabling them to walk more and drive less through a range of mass transit, infrastructure and other upgrades as they move between the Miami-Dade campus and neighboring Sweetwater, just to its north. “They’ve been measuring sea level rise in the Florida Keys for 100 years, and they’ve been measuring it in this area at least since 1992, so sea level rise is hap-

Environmentalists have pilloried Trump for tweeting in November 2012 that the Chinese created “the concept of global warming” to make American manufacturers less competitive. While the New York billionaire told Fox News on Dec. 11 that he was “open-minded” about climate change, he added “nobody really knows” and said “it’s not something that’s so hard and fast.” Some of Trump’s Cabinet picks have voiced less ambivalence: Former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt is Trump’s choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, the lead federal department enforcing laws and regulations to limit carbon emissions. Pruitt has initiated or joined 13 lawsuits against the EPA. In May, he and Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange

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published an opinion column in which they said scientists “continue to disagree” about climate change, even though 97 percent of those surveyed agree it’s occurring and is being caused by human activity. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Trump’s choice to head the Energy Department, has also sued the EPA to block its efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. During his unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign, Perry accused the agency’s scientists of manipulating data while attacking the “hysteria” over global warming and its “contrived phoniness.” Trump has tapped Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana to lead the Interior Department, which oversees drilling and mining on public land. Zinke has an ambiguous stance on climate change: In 2008, he called global warming a national security threat and later signed a letter asking President Barack Obama and Congress to pass legislation combating it. But since joining Congress in January 2015, he’s earned a 3 percent rating from

the League of Conservation Voters. When the Interior Department released a regulation in June placing new limits on coal, oil and natural gas exploration on federal and tribal lands, Zinke and Sen. Steve Daines, a fellow Montana Republican, accused the Obama administration of pursuing a “jobkilling, anti-energy agenda.”

Less alarmist approach These choices dismay Dan Weiss, a clean-energy consultant in Washington who has led climate change programs for several major environmental organizations. “Nominating climate science deniers to head EPA, Energy and Interior is the same as appointing an arsonist to head the fire department,” he told McClatchy. “South Florida should get used to higher floods than it has today.” In Florida, experts who’ve studied global warming for years are trying to adopt a less alarmist approach. Frederick Bloetscher, a civil engineering professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, is

Gary Mitchum, a marine sciences professor at the University of South Florida who also belongs to the Florida Climate Institute, said the different impacts of global warming across the United States make it harder to combat. “When you’re talking about climate changes, the sea level rise that we face in Florida is only part of the problem,” he said. “There are other problems with rainfall changes and temperature changes. The southwestern part of our country is projected to have super-droughts. Everybody is going to be affected if the change that is projected comes to pass, but different places will be affected in different ways.” Those differences might explain in part why most Americans don’t appear to be especially concerned about global warming despite the scientists’ dire warnings. In a Gallup poll earlier this year, people were provided a list of 19 issues and asked which ones were important or very important to them. Sixteen issues were ranked ahead of climate change. Only 47 percent of those surveyed identified it as a top concern. Even some Floridians who could suffer future effects of global warming seem indifferent.

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DEC. 30, 2016 – JAN. 5, 2017

A review of ‘Hidden Figures’ See page B3

SHARING BLACK LIFE, STATEWIDE

A taste of Miami Just for schoolkids See page B4

SOUTH FLORIDA / TREASURE COAST AREA

WWW.FLCOURIER.COM

Eugene Leech and Mr. John distribute the papers in Central Florida.

Chicago Jones, who is based in South Florida, manages the entire distribution team.

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The Jacksonville crew includes Robert Wilson, Zachariah and Zandrea Matthews.

Devon Williams delivers the Florida Courier in Tampa Bay.

Willie Kittles distributes the Daytona Times and the Florida Courier in the Volusia County area.

THEY ALWAYS DELIVER BY ANDREAS BUTLER FLORIDA COURIER

T

he launch of the Florida Courier as the state’s only statewide African-American newspaper was proceeded by an initial question: how could a free newspaper be economically distributed throughout a state as large as Florida? First, the newspaper’s ownership divided the state into zones composed of multiple counties: — the South Florida area, including MiamiDade, Broward (Fort Lauderdale), Palm Beach, and newspaper’s original home in St. Lucie (Fort Pierce) Counties; — The “Sun Coast” area of West Florida, including Hillsborough (Tampa) and Pinellas (St. Petersburg) Counties; — Central Florida, including Orange (Orlando) Volusia (Daytona Beach), and Seminole (Titusville) Counties; — The “First Coast” area, including Duval County (Jacksonville). The Daytona Times, the Florida Courier’s older newspaper “sister,” has been distributed exclusively in Volusia County since 1978. Both newspapers needed to be printed at the same time and at the same facility. Doing the first year of his existence, the Florida Courier was also distributed in the state capital, Tallahassee.

Started in Miami The first issues were printed in Miami. Initially, it was an all-hands-ondeck effort, mostly involving the Charles W. Cherry, Sr. family members, relatives, friends, and company employees. The circulation manager, Lonnie “Chicago” Jones, lives in Ft. Lauderdale and is a member of the Cherry’s extended

As Black Florida’s statewide newspaper begins its second decade of operation,here’s a look at the dedicated people who get the newspaper where it needs to go. family. Jones has been delivering the Florida Courier since day one in March 2006. “I carried the very first paper when we went statewide. I picked up the first issue off the press. Back then, the route was Miami, Port St. Lucie, Tampa, Orlando, Daytona, Jacksonville and Tallahassee. “I would drive all the way to Tallahassee in a rental van. Then I rented a car and drove to Jacksonville, then I would take a flight home to Fort Lauderdale. Truck drivers don’t do that,” said Jones. “It was like that for the first four years.”

earlier on Tuesday, because the storm was to come Thursday.”

Accepted eventually

Making adjustments As the Florida Courier’s printing location moved from Miami and then to Ocala before settling in its current location at the Scripps Treasure Coast printing facility in Port St. Lucie, just south of Fort Pierce, Jones had to adjust this route accordingly. Jones’s day now starts 3 a.m. on Thursday mornings, just after both newspapers’ electronic files are delivered to the Scripps facility. He doesn’t return home until late Friday night, or sometimes Saturday between 11 a.m. and noon. The trip includes 18 hours driving and a journey totaling 750 miles roundtrip. Jones gets the paper out to the various zones. Then other people deliver to locations throughout their respective areas. The couriers of the Florida Courier always deliver despite holidays, rain,

Willie Neal and Eddie Rumph distribute the newspapers in South Florida. hurricanes, accidents, road closings, floods, tornadoes, mechanical breakdowns, family illnesses and deaths, or any other natural or manmade disaster. “I drive all night delivering the paper. It’s like delivering the mail. There have been storms and accidents, but the paper still has to get out,” remembers Jones. He further added, “It’s been challenging, but it’s been good. This is a very demanding job. You must be alert driving on the highway. I-4 East and West (Between Tampa and Daytona Beach) is a very dangerous highway. You can’t be stressed driving, or you won’t make it.

We’ve been blessed.”

Working around Matthew “There are two accidents I recall, both going north towards Jacksonville on I-95. The first one, a gray pipe fell off a truck and went through my windshield. I still get the shakes from that. Another time, a truck flipped and slid towards me. I was able to get out the way. I was alert and no cars were behind me,” remembers Jones. Jones even made it through Hurricane Mathew back in October. “We still had to deliver. It was rough. There was a lot of uncertainty. We pushed printing up a day

Linda Fructouso delivered the Florida Courier around the Jacksonville area for more than four years. She now lives in North Carolina, but remembers what it was like. “Initially, we had to get permission to drop the paper off at locations. At the time, some places in Jacksonville had two local Black papers. We had to let them know that it was a statewide publication,” she recalled. The reception of the newspaper warmed over the years. Radio helped with that. “Over time, the reception of the paper really warmed up around the state. It also happened that the Cherry family who owns the papers also owned several radio stations, including a few in Jacksonville. The radio guys really helped get the word and the paper out as well as my husband who I was married to at the time,” Fructuoso said. The Florida Courier’s excellent content and writing style also moved the paper’s popularity and distribution forward. Fructuoso explained, “The Courier had good reporters and good writing, which made a difference between it and the others around at the time.”

Taking over Robert Wilson is a retiree who now spends around four and half hours circulating the Flor-

ida Currier throughout the “First Coast.” “It’s been pretty OK, other than the gas prices and the weather. I deliver the Westside, Northside and Southside. I’ll be out a few weeks. I just had a knee replacement, so I had to get a replacement driver,” said Wilson. “It’s pretty much a good reception, but at times I have been a little disappointed that some people no longer want to get the paper. When they ask, we stop delivering. “For the most part it’s received well, especially with seniors and churches. I also deliver to a lot of community centers and libraries. Places that want a lot of papers we either increase from 50 to 100 or 125 copies. Places that don’t want as many copies, we go down from 50 copies to 25 copies,” Wilson explained.

Gets calls Jones echoed, “The paper has been totally accepted. There have been some people who didn’t want it. There have been boxes stolen. The boxes are very expensive. Some want it but because of their location, they will meet you somewhere else to get it. I often get calls in cities where people are looking for the drivers.” The staff at the Florida Courier and Daytona Times are truly like family. Delivering the paper has even been a family affair for Jones. “My son originally filled in for me when I attended a funeral of a family member or when I got sick. When you get sick or can’t do it, someone has to fill in for you. Now my two grandchildren, my son’s kids, deliver the paper in Jacksonville. We have three people delivering in Jacksonville,” said Jones.

CALENDAR & BOOKS

B2

DECEMBER 30, 2016 – JANUARY 5, 2017

STOJ

FLORIDA COMMUNITY CALENDAR

SMOKEY ROBINSON The legendary singer performs Feb. 9 at The Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg.

BENJI BROWN

Tickets are on sale for the Miami Festival of Laughs on Jan. 14 at the James L. Knight Center. The 8 p.m. show will feature Michael Blackson, Benji Brown, Arnez J, Mike Epps, Jay Pharoah and Felipe Esparza.

KOOL & THE GANG

The iconic group will perform March 10 at the Pembroke Pines City Center. Tickets go on sale on Jan. 6.

Tampa: Catch Katt Williams on Feb. 4 at the USF Sun Dome. The show starts at 8 p.m.

Jackson Center, 1002 W. Carter St. Details: Dropd.williams@ gmail.com or call 407234-1527.

Jacksonville: See the Xtreme Motorcycles and other acts in the UniverSoul Circus on Jan. 26 through Feb. 2 at the Prime Osborn Convention Center Arena.

Fort Lauderdale: South Florida Jazz presents the New York Standards Quartet on Jan. 7 at the Miniaci Performing Arts Center.

Tampa: The Tampa Bay Soul Fest featuring Brian McKnight, Johnny Gill and Al B. Sure is Jan. 15 at the USF Sun Dome. St. Augustine: Tickets are on sale for a March 9 concert featuring Earth, Wind & Fire at the St. Augustine Amphitheatre. Orlando: The fourth annual MLK South Street Jazz & Blues Cookout takes place Jan. 7 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the John H.

Clearwater: Catch Gladys Knight on Jan. 20 at Ruth Eckerd Hall for an 8 p.m. show. Miami Gardens: Obamacare Awareness workshops and enrollment will be held every Wednesday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. and Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Betty T. Ferguson Center, 3000 NW 199th St. Licensed agents will be on site. Jacksonville: An Evening with Nth Power takes place Dec. 30 at the Ritz Theatre.

Professor delivers smart book about sci-fi writer BY JIM HIGGINS MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE

Reading Gerry Canavan’s “Octavia E. Butler” is like opening up a second screen on this great American writer. Not only does Canavan explicate the sources, patterns and preoccupations of Butler’s speculative fiction, he also explores her early drafts, false starts and unpublished fiction — and her notes to herself and others about her work. It may both thrill and chill Butler fans to learn, via Canavan’s voyages through her archives, that behind some of her dark, dystopian novels are even darker, more dystopian versions of those stories. Canavan, an assistant professor of English at Mar-

quette University, writes with an enthusiasm that matches his command of the subject. I’ll confess I had to look up an occasional word (hello, “alterity”), but I never minded doing so.

‘Grim fantasy’ Butler (1947-2006) is best known among casual readers for “Kindred” (1979), which she called a “grim fantasy”: A contemporary African-American woman is continually pulled back in time to a slave plantation before the Civil War, eventually realizing that her existence depends on keeping a cruel White slaveowner alive, because he is one of her ancestors. When the Milwaukee Public Library chose “Kindred” as its Milwaukee Reads book in 2002, Butler spoke about how she

FC

FLORIDA COURIER

walked along Maryland highways while researching the novel “to understand what her modern-day Black heroine would encounter when she traveled back in time,” Geeta Sharma Jensen reported.

Still an inspiration In 1995, Butler became the first science fiction writer to win a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship, colloquially known as a “genius” grant. As a Black woman sci-fi novelist who made her bones when the field was often unfriendly, even hostile, to AfricanAmerican writers, she continues to inspire people today. While discussion of Butler’s distinctiveness often revolves around her race, Canavan points to a differ-

ent fault line in her fiction: “One might say that Butler saw not race but men – masculinity, not just on the level of ideology but on the level of biology – as the real problem to be solved.” Citing the relationship of Doro and Mary in “Mind of My Mind” (1997), Canavan writes, “Over and over again Butler imagines an intense, cold, powerful, and attractive man who is usually a borderline abusive gaslighter – and then imagines a powerful female survivor as his associateprisoner-competitor-lover (and typically all of them at once).” In her journals, Canavan reports, Butler wondered why she often wrote about mixed-race couples, such as Dana and Kevin in “Kindred.” “She concluded,” Cana-

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Back,” seeing him as a cartoonish representation of Black people. Canavan’s book republishes Butler’s smart essay “Lost Races of Science Fiction” (1980), which dryly notes that “Blacks find a certain lack of authenticity in a genre which postulates a universe largely populated by whites, in which the power is in White hands, and Blacks are occasional oddities.”

BOOK REVIEW “Octavia E. Butler” by Gerry Canavan; University of Illinois Press (224 pages, $22) van writes, “that she wrote about them for the same reason she wrote about sexually egalitarian societies: an effort to imagine ‘not utopias, but societies in which women do as they please.’ “

‘Amazing experience’ Canavan first encountered Butler’s fiction in college, reading “Parable of the Sower” (1993) as a freshman and then “Dawn” (1987) — his favorite of her novels — as a graduate student. He pitched this critical study of her work to the University of Illinois Press at roughly the same time the Butler archive opened at California’s Huntington Library, making him one of the first scholars to spend extensive time with her papers. “Seeing her process … was an amazing experience, particularly the way she rewrote and transformed ideas,” Canavan said in a recent interview. During these archival dives, Canavan read two fairly different versions of Butler’s unpublished novel “Blindsight,” featuring a blind man with psychometric powers who learns things about people and objects by touching them. Canavan describes “Blindsight” as a supernatural thriller a la Stephen King; Butler “felt sure she could match (King’s) tremendous successes if she could just find the right story … .”

Crush on Shatner While this is a critical study, not a biography, Canavan’s book offers many details about her life, including her fandom. She loved original recipe “Star Trek” and had a serious fan crush on William Shatner; she also watched “Deep Space Nine” and “Voyager” with interest. But she disliked Lando Calrissian in “The Empire Strikes

Died at age 58 The Huntington archive gave Canavan a rich view of how Butler wrote her work, but it also presented him with ethical decisions. Butler died suddenly at age 58 following a fall, without the opportunity to prune private materials from the archive if she had wanted to. “There are places where she’s very clearly depressed and writing about it,” Canavan said. “I tried to have a light touch with some of that stuff,” he said, explaining that he did not want to exploit her depression. Canavan understands that some may look askance at a White male scholar writing about this Black female writer. “I could never tell somebody not to be irritated about that,” he said. A good thing, he points out, is that other scholars are also doing great work on Butler, such as Ayana A.H. Jamieson, founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network. He began his critical work with the desire to read and understand Butler specifically as a science fiction writer. But as he burrowed in deeper,

Suggested reading Canavan became aware of Butler’s desire not to be siloed or limited to a single audience. Later in her career, she pushed her publisher to court the New Age audience, wanting to add them to the circles of scifi fans, African-Americans and feminists already reading her. She wanted to write bestsellers. For readers new to Butler, Canavan suggests “Kindred,” “Dawn” and “Parable of the Sower” as good entry points. For post-Butler reading, he recommends Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson and Nisi Shawl, three active writers “who take her trajectory and move it in different ways.” He also likes “Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements” (AK Press), an anthology of stories whose writers, Canavan said, look to Butler “almost like a figure out of her own work.”

STOJ

DECEMBER 30, 2016 – JANUARY 5, 2017

FINEST & ENTERTAINMENT

Meet some of

FLORIDA’S

finest

submitted for your approval

B3

Think you’re one of Florida’s Finest? E-mail your high-resolution (200 dpi) digital photo in casual wear or bathing suit taken in front of a plain background with few distractions, to news@flcourier. com with a short biography of yourself and your contact information. (No nude/ glamour/ fashion photography, please!) In order to be considered, you must be at least 18 years of age. Acceptance of the photographs submitted is in the sole and absolute discretion of Florida Courier editors. We reserve the right to retain your photograph even if it is not published. If you are selected, you will be contacted by e-mail and further instructions will be given.

LeBron James was named the Associated Press’ Male Athlete of the Year this week, an award he also won in 2013. James led the Cleveland Cavaliers to win the NBA Finals title this year. He was named MVP of the finals.

U.S. Olympic gymnast Simone Biles was named the Associated Press’ top female athlete on Monday. The gymnast won four golds and a silver this summer at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

‘Hidden Figures’ a crowd-pleaser in the best way BY KENNETH TURAN LOS ANGELES TIMES TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE

LOS ANGELES – Like the calculating women whose lives it celebrates, “Hidden Figures” knows what it’s doing. A Grade-A Hollywood crowdpleaser that happily celebrates its shameless moments, “Hidden Figures” can be teased, but it can’t be ignored. The film may not be restrained, but stars Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae are powerfully effective and its little-known true story is so flabbergasting that resistance is all but futile.Before the word “computer” referred to a machine, it was a job description used for people, often women, who ran the numbers and did the heavy mathematical lifting serious science required.

The ‘computers’ As detailed in Margot Lee Shetterly’s book (which veteran producer Donna Gigliotti purchased just from an outline), not only were a group of these AfricanAmerican women “computers” working in the segregated South, they turned out to be critical to getting America’s 1960s space program off the ground. Shetterly writes in the book’s introduction that the never-before-told story “defies our expectations and challenges much of what we think we knew about American history.” “Hidden Figures” never misses a chance to go for the heart-tugging and the obvious as scripted by Allison Schroeder and directed by Theodore Melfi, a veteran commercial director who corralled Bill Murray in “St. Vincent.” But, frankly, if the film’s aesthetic standards were more rigorous, the end product might not be as out-and-out effective as the result undeniably is here.

Math prodigy “Hidden Figures” begins with a brief 1926 prologue introducing us to a young Black girl who is a math prodigy inspiring awe in all who know her. “I’ve never seen,” a teacher tells her parents, “a mind like your daughter has.” Thirty-five years later we meet that girl as the adult Katherine Johnson, one of three wom-

“Hidden Figures’’ is the untold story of Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) and Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) as brilliant African-American women working at NASA. The film premieres nationwide on Jan. 6.

MOVIE REVIEW en carpooling to work at NASA’s Langley Memorial Research Lab in Hampton, Va. Or at least trying to: Their sturdy Chevrolet has broken down. Momentarily stranded, the three women soon reveal their core personalities. Johnson (Henson), is still the brainy one, a complete whiz with numbers. Dorothy Vaughan (Spencer) is the practical one, looking under the hood to see what the problem is. Mary Jackson (Monae), momentarily occupied with her lipstick, is charismatic and ambitious.

Different challenges These three are part of what is known at Langley as the West Computing section, some 20 mathematicians who were all African-American women. As Jeff Nichols’ film “Loving” made clear this year, Virginia in 1961

was as segregated as any state in the Deep South. These women could not eat in the same restaurants, drink from the same water fountains or even, as brazenly becomes a major plot point, use the same restrooms as their white colleagues. Though they all work at Langley, each of the three has a different job challenge and a different way they have to contend with the inescapable racism of the time and place. Super-capable Vaughan, for instance, wants to be made a supervisor, but NASA is dragging its feet, and her White boss, Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst), is not going out of her way to help. Jackson wants to become an engineer, and despite how bleak her chances are (no AfricanAmerican woman has achieved that title to date) she is determined to make the attempt.

Johnson’s story The most interesting trajec-

tory, so to speak, turns out to be Johnson’s. NASA is in a dog-eat-dog race with the Soviets to put people into space, and the man in charge of the Space Task Group, crusty Al Harrison (a composite figure deftly played by Kevin Costner), is a tough nut known to eat computers for lunch. Out of desperation as much as anything else, Johnson is given a shot at a place on his staff, and though we know that she is as much of a wizard as Albus Dumbledore, “Hidden Figures” milks the situation for all its worth. “Hidden Figures” also provides glimpses of the personal lives of its characters. Mary, for instance, is married to the civil rights firebrand Levi (Aldis Hodge), who initially does not see her struggles as significant. Johnson, for her part, a widow raising three daughters, catches the eye of Col. Jim Johnson (Ma-

hershala Ali, a star, like Monae, of “Moonlight”), a good man who discovers that she is more impressive than he realized.

Show-stopping speech Understandably excited to be playing significant women, the lead actresses are uniformly excellent, but the film’s script is structured to make Henson the first among equals, and she takes advantage of her opportunities. She has a show-stopping speech (hint: It involves those bathrooms) and the actress’ ability to put enormously complex equations on a huge chalkboard is impressive because the numbers and symbols had to be faultlessly memorized. The real Katherine Johnson, still alive and vibrant at age 98 and a recent recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, couldn’t have done it any better.

B4

CULTURE

DECEMBER 30, 2016 – JANUARY 5, 2017

STOJ

A taste of Miami for schoolkids

PHOTOS BY EMILY MICHOT/MIAMI HERALD/TNS

The Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau took a group of fourth grade students from Charles R Drew K-8 on a unique food tour through Little Havana, Wynwood and Little Haiti as a celebration of the bureau’s Miami Heritage Month December campaign. One of the favorite dishes the students tasted was at Jimmy’z Kitchen Wynwood where they got to sample the popular Bolitas de queso (cheese balls).

Liberty City students treated to a tour of Little Haiti, Little Havana and Wynwood that combined culture, history and cuisine.

used to link the agricultural communities of Tampa and Miami. The bus stops in front of Domino Park, where septuagenarians are throwing down dominoes. “I’m not taking you to a chain. This is a real family-run restaurant. The real deal,” Harris tells them as they walk to Old’s Havana next door to the park. Waiting for them under the awning outside the restaurant are platters of chicken and ham croquetas, salsa music blaring as tourists slip by them on the sidewalk. The kids double-fist them, the warm, crispy croquetas leaving their fingers glistening.

BY CARLOS FRIAS MIAMI HERALD/TNS

MIAMI — Lonely turkey sandwiches on white bread sit inside a cooler in the back of MiamiDade school bus No. 138. Call it a necessary precaution. There’s no telling how the 27 fourth-graders at Charles Drew Elementary will like some of the food they will be eating for the first time. “I eat anything. I eat octopus,” Suzane Bush, 9, says confidently as she sits up front in the school bus, next to her friend Deztinie Lewis, ready to roll through Little Haiti, Wynwood and Little Havana on a different kind of field trip: a tasting tour of Miami. Deztinie, also 9, sits with a journal and a No. 2 pencil in her lap, ready to take notes on her food journey. At the top of the page she writes, “My first tour.”

Azucar Ice Cream Student Markevion Parrish holds a large mortar and pestle handed to him by restaurant owner Chef Jimmy Carey at Jimmy’z Kitchen Wynwood. a cactus in someone’s front lawn. “They eat that kind of cactus in Mexico,” she tells them. Some children laugh: Eating cactus? “They make tacos out of it,” she says. There’s a communal ohh. Colorful murals and graffiti art signal the transition into Wynwood, and Harris tells them about the art community that sprang up here and now draws the annual art celebration Miami Art Week, which puts the focus on South Florida. “I want you to think art when you’re in Wynwood. It’s one of the best places in the world to see street art,” she tells them.

Eager minds Some lessons can only be learned outside the classroom. That’s why the school system’s Cultural Passport program teamed with the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau and Miami Culinary Tours to take a group of children on a field trip that combined culture, history and cuisine. They chose this Liberty City school, where 96 percent of the students qualify for a reduced lunch. And they chose these particular students for being among the school’s most deserving — the best combination of good grades, good attitudes and eager minds. “Food, like music, can bring people together,” Connie Kinnard, vice president of multicultural tourism at the visitors bureau, tells the students as they sit quietly in the school’s auditorium awaiting to board the bus. “I want you to learn more about our culture in Miami.”

New aromas The bus rumbles out of Liberty City, east toward Little Haiti, passing McDonald’s, Burger King, a Church’s Chicken. Less than 15 minutes later, it hisses to a halt outside of Piman Bouk New Florida Bakery. The accordion doors open and the scent of fresh-baked bread puffs inside, filling it with a mouth-watering aroma. “What is that smell?” Rodrick Wilson, 10, says. The aroma is new and intoxicating. They walk around to the side

Puerto Rican delights Students, from left, Bernicka Holt, Ayanna Gunder, Frank Mike, Jr., and Brandon Yarborough enjoy a scoop of Abuela Mar’a at Azucar, a famous homemade ice cream store in the heart of Little Havana. of the building, next to a colorful mural of a Haitian sunset, where they meet up with Miami Culinary Tours guide Mirka Roch Harris. She is speaking through a hip-mounted system to be heard over the rush of cars on the other side of the fence.

Cocoye and more The teachers open a white cardboard pastry box packed with free-form tablet cocoye, a coconut-ginger cookie that is hard to find off the island. “I want you to get a little taste of Haiti,” Harris tells them. “Think coconuts, think ginger. Very Caribbean. They’re crunchy, they’re sweet. They’re things you would only find in Haiti.” The dense, chewy patties pull apart like coconut macaroons. Deztinie takes a tentative bite and then a larger one. “Do they put lemon in this?” she asks. “No, it’s ginger, that little bite you’re tasting. Good palate,

though!” Harris tells her.

Sweet adventure The ginger is subtle but unfamiliar enough for some of the students to stop after one bite. Not Anthony Pavón, though. He finishes his cookie and asks for a plastic bag to carry three others he wants to take home for his mother and two older brothers. “You wanna switch?” Kani Powell, 9, asks him, looking at his bag. “No way. Finders keepers,” Anthony tells him. “When you first bite it, it tastes like lemon. The more you eat it, it tastes like sweet potato pie,” he says.

History and art Harris follows the children onto the bus and sits halfway back, narrating the history of Little Haiti, from its origins as Lemon City and its citrus groves, as the bus turns south and heads toward Wynwood. She points out

Suzane shares that her stepfather is an artist. She reads the elaborate spray-painted writing on one wall as the bus stops in front of Jimmy’z Kitchen. A table is set up outside, and soon waiters trot out tray after tray of bolitas de queso, creamy cheese balls with a crispy coating, drizzled in guava sauce. Owner Jimmy Carey, a Johnson & Wales-trained chef raised in Puerto Rico, meets them outside to tell them about Puerto Rican fare. He brings with him a bucket-sized mortar and pestle used to make his mofongo, the traditional Puerto Rican plantain and pork mash that is his restaurant’s specialty. Bryunna Knight and Armani McClain, both 9, pose for a selfie with their bolitas de queso. Bryunna fires off a snap for Snapchat. Harris teaches them to say it in Spanish, repeating after her: boh-lee-tahs de keh-so.

Croquetas and salsa Soon they’re off again. As the bus winds through downtown and west toward Little Havana, Harris paints a picture of a changing Miami, from Bahamian to Jewish to Cuban. And this street, Calle Ocho, she tells them, is called Tamiami Trail because it

The teachers look down at their watches. Miami traffic has been kind, and they still have time for two more stops. They cross the street to Azucar Ice Cream, the gelato shop with Latin flavors, whose facade of a giant ice cream cone draws cheers from children. The scent of fresh-made waffle cones when the door swings open inspires ahhhs. From how quickly the children dig into cups of Abuela Maria ice cream, you wonder whether they heard what goes into the ice cream. But they do. “Vanilla, guava, Grandma’s special cookies. Delicious,” says Shaina Garvy, 9, licking the end of her spoon.

Mangoes, rambutans Harris leads the children down the street to Los Pinareños fruit stand, where a clerk tells them about several Caribbean fruits, from mangoes to rambutans. What’s a rambutan, they ask? The clerk holds up what Deztinie later describes in her journal as a “hairy lychee.” They pass around a bag of the freaky-looking fruits. “What is it? How do you open it?” Anthony asks before learning to crack it open with his fingertips. He eats the tender fruit inside down to the seed. “You can tell some of them are in areas of Miami they had never been in before,” said Matthew Sabatella, program director of the Cultural Passport program, who went along for the tour. “They’ll probably remember this day for a very long time.”

Cool food As the children head back toward the bus that will return them to Liberty City in time to join the car line, Harris sends them off with a final salute. “You guys were exceptionally well-behaved,” she says. “You ate everything. You loved everything. Now when you go shopping with your mom or dad, keep your eyes open. There’s a lot of cool food right here in Miami.” No one even remembers the turkey sandwiches.

STOJ

DECEMBER 30, 2016 – JANUARY 5, 2017

FOOD

B5

CARAMEL-NUT POPCORN CRUNCH Yield: 20 pieces 10 cups freshly popped popcorn 2 cups whole almonds 1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar 1/2 cup butter or margarine 1/4 cup light corn syrup 2 teaspoons vanilla 1 teaspoon almond extract 1/2 teaspoon baking soda Heat oven to 225 F. Spray 15-by-10inch baking sheet with nonstick spray. In large bowl, mix popcorn and almonds. In medium saucepan, combine brown sugar, butter and corn syrup. Over low heat, stir mixture until sugar dissolves. Increase heat to high and boil 5 minutes. Remove from heat; stir in vanilla, almond extract and baking soda. Pour over popcorn and almonds, immediately stirring gently to coat. Pour mixture onto prepared baking sheet, spreading evenly. Bake 1 hour. Cool completely. Break into pieces and store in airtight container.

FROM FAMILY FEATURES

No matter the occasion, every celebration is better with snacks. Whether you’re hosting game day with the guys, catching up with girlfriends, gathering for family movie night or inviting your kids’ friends over for a grade school sleepover, you can’t go wrong with popcorn treats. Popcorn is the perfect partner for a broad span of flavors, especially when they’re sweet or salty – or both. You can make each mouthwatering bite pop even more by adding texture with crunchy nuts or silky melted chocolate. Even if you simply serve plain popcorn to your guests, you can feel good about serving healthy, whole grain, freshly popped popcorn, which is naturally low in fat and calories, non-GMO and gluten free. Find more ways to pop up more fun for your next party at popcorn.org.

MAPLE BACON POPCORN MIX Yield: 2 quarts 6 slices thick-cut bacon 1/4 cup pure maple syrup, divided 8 cups popped popcorn 2/3 cup pecan halves, coarsely chopped 2/3 cup dried cranberries 2 tablespoons butter or margarine 1/4 teaspoon coarse ground black pepper 1/4 teaspoon maple extract Heat oven to 400 F. Line jelly roll pan with foil. Place wire rack in pan. Arrange bacon in single layer on rack. Bake 15 minutes, or until ends of bacon start to curl. Remove and reserve 2 tablespoons bacon drippings. Brush bacon with 2 tablespoons maple syrup; bake 15 minutes until browned. Cool then coarsely chop bacon. In large bowl, combine popcorn, pecans and cranberries. Combine butter, black pepper, maple extract, remaining maple syrup and reserved bacon drippings. Cook over low heat until butter is melted. Drizzle over popcorn mixture and mix thoroughly. Spread popcorn mixture in jelly roll or roasting pan. Bake 5 minutes. Toss in bacon pieces. Serve warm. POPPY CHOW Yield: 2 quarts 2 quarts popped popcorn 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter or margarine 1/2 cup creamy peanut butter 1 cup milk or semi-sweet chocolate chips 1 cup confectioners’ sugar Place popcorn in large bowl; set aside. In microwave safe bowl, combine butter, peanut butter and chocolate chips. Microwave 2 minutes; stir until smooth. Pour chocolate mixture over popcorn and stir until well coated. Sprinkle confectioners’ sugar over popcorn and stir until coated. Cool to room temperature before serving. Store in airtight container, refrigerated, up to 24 hours. ENGLISH TOFFEE POPCORN BARS Yield: 20 bars 2 1/2 quarts popped popcorn 1 cup peanuts 1 cup flaked coconut, toasted Toffee: 1 1/2 cups butter or margarine 1 1/2 cups sugar 3 tablespoons water 4 1/2 teaspoons light corn syrup Chocolate Topping: 1 1/2 cups (9 ounces) chocolate pieces 1 tablespoon shortening Heat oven to 200 F.

In large bowl, combine popcorn, peanuts and toasted coconut. Cover bottom of buttered 15 1/2by-10 1/2-by-1-inch jelly roll pan with half of the popcorn mixture. Keep filled pan and remaining popcorn mixture warm in oven. To make toffee: In heavy 2-quart saucepan, melt butter over low heat. Add sugar and blend well. Continue to cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until mixture reaches full boil. Add water and corn syrup; mix well. Wash down sides of pan with pastry brush dipped in water to remove any sugar granules.

Cook and stir over low heat until mixture reaches soft-crack stage on candy thermometer (280 F). Immediately pour mixture over warm popcorn in jelly-roll pan, making certain all popcorn is covered. Quickly spread and press remaining popcorn mixture into hot toffee. Set aside to cool. For topping, melt chocolate and shortening over low heat. Spread over popcorn mixture, making certain any loose pieces are held in place. Cool. Cut into bars. If bars will not be served immediately, wrap in plastic wrap for storage.

B6

DECEMBER 30, 2016 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; JANUARY 5, 2017

S

B6

FOOD

DECEMBER 30, 2016 – JANUARY 5, 2017

FROM FAMILY FEATURES

A commitment to health and wellness means taking care of yourself and your family, exercising and eating right. The New Year is the perfect time to refocus your goals and make better health a priority. A nutrient-rich breakfast can set you up for success each and every day. Dairy foods like milk, cheese and yogurt are good sources of high-quality protein, which is an essential part of a healthy diet. Protein serves as the building block for cells throughout the body and may aid in managing weight by helping you feel full. By adding protein to your day, health and wellness goals can become easier to achieve. Daily protein needs should be met by spreading intake throughout the day in every meal and snack you eat. Not only does protein help satisfy hunger, which may aid in weight management, but it also helps preserve muscle. No matter your breakfast style, dairy foods can enhance your dish. These recipes show how, from sweet to savory and cold to hot, your breakfast can be unique while providing high-quality nutrition in each bite. Learn more about the role of dairy in a healthy diet at MilkMeansMore.org.

BLUEBERRY BUCKWHEAT PANCAKES Recipe created by The Chef Next Door on behalf of Milk Means More Prep time: 5 minutes Cook time: 15 minutes Servings: 4 3/4 cup buckwheat flour 3/4 cup all-purpose flour 2 tablespoons sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 1 3/4 cups lactose-free, 2 percent milk 2 tablespoons vegetable oil 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract 2 cups fresh blueberries, plus additional for topping (optional) syrup (optional) In large bowl, whisk together flours, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt. In small bowl, beat eggs then add milk, oil and vanilla; mix well. Stir wet ingredients into dry ingredients and mix to combine. Heat griddle or large skillet over medium heat. Using 1/4 measuring cup, pour batter onto griddle. Gently place several blueberries all over surface of pancakes. Flip pancakes when bubbles start to form around edges and bottoms are golden brown. Cook on other side until golden brown, about 2 minutes. Remove to plate and cover to keep warm. Top pancakes with additional blue berries and syrup before serving, if desired.

HUEVOS RANCHEROS OATS Recipe created by Comfortably Domestic on behalf of Milk Means More Prep time: 5 minutes Cook time: 15 minutes Servings: 2 Oats 1 cup 2 percent milk 3/4 cup water 1/8 teaspoon salt 1 cup old-fashioned oats Huevos Rancheros 1/2 cup sweet onion, peeled and chopped 1 1/2 teaspoons light olive oil 1 can (10 ounces) diced tomatoes with green chilies 1/4 teaspoon chipotle chili powder 2 eggs kosher salt black pepper 1/4 cup sharp cheddar cheese, freshly grated In medium saucepan over medium-high heat, bring milk, water and salt to boil. Stir in oats. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer oats, stirring occasionally, 4 minutes. Remove oats from heat and place lid on saucepan. Set aside. In nonstick skillet over medium heat, saute onion in olive oil until soft, about 4 minutes. Stir canned tomatoes with green chilies and chipotle chili powder into onions to combine. Continue to heat salsa to boil, about 1 minute. Make two wells in middle of tomato salsa. Crack eggs into wells. Season eggs with salt and pepper, to taste. Cover skillet and poach eggs in salsa to desired doneness; about 3-4 minutes. Divide oats evenly between two bowls. Spoon eggs and salsa over oats. Serve immediately with cheddar cheese.

TOJ

WHITE PIZZA FRITTATA Recipe created by Rachel Cooks on behalf of Milk Means More Prep time: 10 minutes Cook time: 35 minutes Servings: 8 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil 1 large clove garlic, minced 12 ounces frozen spinach, thawed and water pressed out 12 large eggs 1/4 cup skim milk 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano leaves 3/4 cup part-skim ricotta cheese 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese 1/4 cup minced fresh basil 1/2 cup shredded, part-skim mozzarella cheese Heat oven to 325 F. In oven-safe skillet, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add garlic and cook 2 minutes, or until fragrant. Once garlic is fragrant, add spinach; break up to incorporate and heat. In medium bowl, whisk together eggs, milk, pepper, oregano, ricotta, Parmesan and basil. Add egg mixture to skillet, reduce heat to low and cook 1 minute, stirring gently. Move to oven and bake 25-30 minutes, or until eggs are almost completely set. Carefully remove from oven and add mozzarella. Return to oven and bake until mozzarella is melted, about 5 minutes. May be served hot, at room temperature or cold. RICOTTA AND FIG OATMEAL Recipe created by Foxes Love Lemons on behalf of Milk Means More Prep time: 5 minutes Cook time: 3 minutes Servings: 1 3/4 cup milk 1/2 cup old-fashioned rolled oats 1/8 teaspoon kosher salt 2 tablespoons ricotta cheese 2 dried figs, halved 1 tablespoon sliced almonds 1 tablespoon honey In microwave-safe bowl, stir together milk, oats and salt. Microwave on high 2 1/2 minutes, or until oats are tender and most liquid is absorbed. Remove bowl from microwave; stir in ricotta. To serve, top with figs and almonds, and drizzle with honey.

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