Second acts for Paula Broadwell and David Petraeus

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Author Paula Broadwell and retired Gen. David Petraeus are in the news again – for different reasons and with very different reactions.

Broadwell, a guest speaker Tuesday at one of the best-attended Rotary Club of Charlotte meetings ever, is settling back into her life with her doctor husband and two young sons. The club’s report on her appearance featured the topic of her speech, military veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no mention of the frenzy that last November accompanied news of her affair with then-CIA director Petraeus.

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Sep122013 TAGS: , , , ,

Italy’s immigration debate turns racist, sexist and personal

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Cecile Kyenge is a strong woman. She has to be. As Italy’s first black cabinet minister, she has had to endure a string of repeated racist, sexist and sexually violent insults, and she has answered them with a calm that has only made her critics bolder.

In the latest incident Wednesday, Italy’s far-right Forza Nuova party left three mannequins covered in fake blood at the front door of an administrative office in Rome. “Immigration is the genocide of peoples. Kyenge resign!” read fliers with the Forza Nuova symbol, scattered around the mannequins, according to a Reuters report. Forza Nuova posted pictures of the mannequins on Facebook, with comments explaining the gruesome stunt as a protest against Kyenge’s campaign to make it easier for immigrants to acquire Italian citizenship, the story said. It wasn’t the first time the party used the tactic.

Kyenge, 49, an eye doctor and Italian citizen married to an Italian, was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo; she moved to Italy when she was a teen to continue her studies. After being elected to office, she was named minister of integration by Prime Minister Enrico Letta this year. Kyenge, who can relate to the experience of those moving to Italy for opportunity, has favored legislation that would allow children born in Italy to immigrant parents to get automatic citizenship. That’s a change in a country where nationality is judged more on blood than birth.

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Sep062013 TAGS: , , ,

Past is present as North Carolina honors 1963 march and battles voting laws

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CHARLOTTE — In North Carolina, commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s dream credited past struggles while a current battle over voting laws took center stage.

In an uptown Charlotte park Wednesday, the crowd used the examples of civil rights pioneers in a continuation of the Moral Monday protests against conservative laws from the Republican-controlled state legislature. Similar gatherings were planned in each of the state’s 13 congressional districts. While many issues, including education and health care spending, were reflected in comments and emblazoned on signs, the new state voter-ID bill was a unifying cause.

Later Wednesday evening, several Democratic and Republican legislators took questions from their Mecklenburg County constituents in a raucous forum called, ironically as it turned out, “Solving It Together.” At the top of the list in hundreds of questions submitted beforehand – voter-ID laws.

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Aug292013 TAGS: , , , , , ,

‘You knew things would be different’: How the March changed one family

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My sister remembers the day – and one particular moment. To get to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Wednesday, Aug. 28, 1963, Joan Curtis did not have far to travel. But as part of the contingent from the Civic Interest Group (CIG), a Baltimore-based civil rights group affiliated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she realized how big a step it was and how important that day could be.

“It was a bright, sunny summer day and I was happy to be there, and I was 18 and I was smiling and everything,” Joan recently recalled. Her assignment was to stand in front of a tent, handing out signs as fast as they were being made for travelers who wanted to carry slogans such as “We Shall Overcome” as they filled every spot on the National Mall.

There was a woman from the Midwest – a white woman – with her son, a little boy about 10 years old. She had a camera to make home movies, and after Joan handed her a sign, the woman had a request. “Look at you, with that smile on your face,” my sister remembered her saying. “I want to get that on my movie camera. Could you do that again, walk back and hand me that sign?”

When I spoke with my sister, prodding her memories of the day, she said that the mother and son from the Midwest were indicative of the diversity of the day’s crowd and wondered if the Joan of 1963, a smiling freshman from Morgan State, lives on in a 50-year-old movie clip. Does that boy, who would be around 60 now, watch it to bring back memories of his own?

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Aug232013 TAGS: , , ,

From rodeo clowns to voting rights, understanding race and history

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Have the folks who jeered the President Obama stand-in at that Missouri rodeo ever heard of Bill Pickett?

Pickett was an African American cowboy, inventor of the gutsy bulldogging technique, grabbing cattle by the horns and wrestling them to the ground. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries,

Pickett starred in rodeos and movies, traveled the West and in the 1970s was inducted into the National Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame. He’s depicted as a legend of the West on a U.S. stamp. Pickett was a founder of the same rodeo tradition that allowed the Missouri state fair crowd to whoop and holler, encouraging a bull to run down the “president” while an accomplice jiggled the broad lips on the mask of the clown dressed as Obama and an announcer teased violence that recalled the worst of the ways this country has treated its black citizens.

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Aug152013 TAGS: , , , , , , , , , ,

‘In the presence of justice’: remembering Julius Chambers

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CHARLOTTE — Though his name may not be as well-known as other civil-rights champions, the soft-spoken Julius Chambers fought passionately and tirelessly and got results. At his funeral service in Charlotte on Thursday, mourners remembered him, what his legacy meant, and how they could best carry on his work.

As speakers, friends and those he touched traced his amazing journey, they also cautioned that the fight for equality is a constant struggle. As legislators in the state he especially loved and served rush to enact rules rolling back progress in voting and education funding, his life is a history lesson North Carolina and the country could use right about now.

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Aug092013 TAGS: , , ,

Family of Henrietta Lacks gains some control over her cells and – perhaps – peace

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It’s not about money. Though many have made a lot off the cells of Henrietta Lacks, her surviving family members won’t see any of it. But her descendants will finally gain some control over how pieces of the poor black woman who died in Baltimore in 1951 are used in medical research. When scientists and doctors crave the key to the genetic code that unlocked treatments and vaccines, two family members will have a seat at the table where the decisions are made.

It’s about time.

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Aug082013 TAGS: ,

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory gives protesters cookies – seriously

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North Carolina GOP Gov. Pat McCrory hand carried chocolate-chip cookies to abortion bill protesters outside the Raleigh governor’s mansion in a let’s-make-up gesture. The surprised recipient said he told her, “‘These are for you. God bless you, God bless you, God bless you.’”  The cookies were returned, and it wasn’t because he forgot the milk. The note on the untouched plate read: “We want women’s health care, not cookies.”

The Tuesday scene, described by The News & Observer, was fallout from McCrory’s Monday night signing of legislation that, among other provisions, will make clinics adopt some of the regulations that apply to ambulatory surgery centers, and allow health-care providers to opt out of performing abortions if they object. Opponents say the new law will limit access to abortion by forcing clinics to close, while McCrory and the bill’s supporters say the health and safety of the state’s citizens, not politics, are what’s at stake.

McCrory’s sincerity is not the issue. After state health officials sanctioned an Asheville, N.C., clinic on Wednesday for “egregious violations … that revealed an imminent threat to the health and safety of patients,” it was either evidence of the need for greater vigilance or proof that current laws are working, depending on which side you support. But it certainly means the subject of clinic safety will and should remain center stage.

However, McCrory’s name on the bill was a cue for endless televised replays of his 2012 pledge during a gubernatorial debate that, if elected, he would not sign any further abortion restrictions into law. In recent Public Policy Polling, the abortion bill was supported by only 34 percent of voters, with 47 percent opposing it. By a similar 48 to 33 margin, voters preferred that McCrory veto the bill (and that number included 25 percent of Republicans).

The cookies treat for angry dissenters was a clumsy move (they chanted:  ”Hey Pat, that was rude. You wouldn’t give cookies to a dude.”) and also in keeping with some of the troubles that have plagued McCrory since he made the leap from Charlotte mayor to the most prominent political job in the state. Engaging protesters about the issue of clinic safety would have been a better move.

Though presiding over Republican super-majorities in the state House and Senate, he has seemed more follower than leader, swept along by a conservative wave of proposals that has signaled North Carolina’s change in political direction, at a loss when talking with many who must have voted for him.

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Aug012013 TAGS: , , , , , , ,

How Weiner’s woes help and hurt Hillary Clinton

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As Anthony Weiner’s latest admission that he has a sexting problem plays out, it can only help female politicians who have hopes of high office. Enough with these guys, voters might be thinking, as reminders of male politicians who have sinned cross their minds and TV screens.

Will a disgusted electorate decide that it’s time for more women in high office, with one woman in particular coming to mind? If that happens, Hillary Rodham Clinton, tops in polls of potential presidential candidates and already garnering endorsements, would seem the most likely to benefit.

But will the collateral damage of this particular scandal bring more harm to the woman who has a close tie to one of its players?

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Jul242013 TAGS: , , , ,

In conversations on race, everyone has to listen

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CHARLOTTE — If President Obama’s personal and heartfelt speech on race reached only the ears of Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, it would have been enough. “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” the president said, leaving unsaid a parent’s dream for a child, the unspoken other side of the equation, that Trayvon Martin could have become him in 35 years – an educated man, a husband and father and, perhaps, president of the United States.

“We are thankful for President Obama’s and Michelle’s prayers, and we ask for your prayers as well as we continue to move forward,” the parents responded. “President Obama sees himself in Trayvon and identifies with him. This is a beautiful tribute to our boy.” They will never have their son back but it must have been sweet relief to hear kind words from the president in a week when so many were trying to turn a 17-year-old into someone the people closest to him did not recognize.

The trial in Sanford, Fla., that ended with the acquittal of George Zimmerman for all charges in the killing of Trayvon Martin quickly turned into a debate on gun restrictions, Stand Your Ground laws, racial profiling and the justice system. Even for those who agree with the trial’s conclusion, Trayvon Martin’s life should matter.

That’s why it’s a good thing that the president’s Friday message was intended for more than an audience of two. “I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away,” he said to everyone. As people listened, they heard what they wanted to hear.

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Jul222013 TAGS: , , , , , , ,
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