National Black Census finds police brutality, employment amongst Black Americans major concerns
7th October 2019 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
When officials with the Black Futures Lab, a national non-profit empowerment group, approached the New Orleans’ Ubuntu Village organization to help conduct the first large-scale, nationwide survey of Black Americans in a century and a half, Ubuntu Lead Organizer Myron Miller jumped at the chance to mobilize his volunteers to pitch in on the enormous effort.
The survey effort – designed to assess the beliefs, attitudes and needs of the Black community across the United States, and then present them to political candidates and politicians at all levels of government – dovetailed perfectly with Ubuntu’s mission of educating, mentoring and advocating for the New Orleans African-American population.
Miller thus sent dozens of Ubuntu volunteers into the city and all over southeast Louisiana to spur people to take Black Futures Lab’s online Black Census survey.
The process produced data attesting to many of the issues that have faced Black Americans for decades – police aggression, availability of employment, quality of education – but Miller said he was somewhat shocked at the sheer, daunting scale of the fears, anxiety, anger and desperation expressed by the Black community.
“I thought, ‘Damn, we got a lot of work to do,’” he told The Louisiana Weekly.
In order to unveil some of the Louisiana-specific findings of the Black Census and generate local enthusiasm for the survey’s political-empowerment goals, Miller and more than 100 other activists, scholars and other interested people attended the Black Futures Lab’s forum at the Ashe Cultural Center in New Orleans last week.
Miller said he was encouraged by the enthusiasm expressed by participants at the forum and glad that the Black Census effort has gone over so well in New Orleans, but he expressed dismay and frustration at the failure of local and state politicians to attend the event and actually, for once, listen to members of the Black community.
“The politicians need to be here,” Miller said. “They need to be here to hear us, and we invited everybody [candidates]. I guess this is not a top priority for them.”
The Black Futures Lab partnered with local groups Ubuntu Village and Friends and Families of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children to conduct the local census canvassing and present the results to the public at last week’s dinner and town hall. The event in New Orleans was one of six such town halls being held by Black Futures Lab around the country.
More than 30,000 Black Americans throughout the U.S. responded to and provided information for the survey, and the Lab partnered with roughly 30 other advocacy organizations around the nation to undertake the Black Census.
Although Alicia Garza, the principal of Black Futures Lab and the creator of the Black Census, was unable to attend the forum last week due to illness, several Lab officials spoke to the crowd in attendance to explain the purpose of the effort and impress upon them its massive scale.
“We want to engage Black people,” said Brittany Ferrell, a fellow at Black Futures Lab and the lead presenter at the forum. “Not only did we talk to 30,000 Black people, but now we’re also going to create a Black agenda that we can push and show politicians what our people said.
“We want to tell [candidates], ‘This is what we want,’” Ferrell added. “We want to use this to hold them accountable.”
A major theme of the night was the way many political candidates and politicians – including some Black ones – come to Black communities to cut a ribbon or campaign for votes but don’t truly listen to the needs and challenges facing the very people they’re addressing. Several attendees essentially called out politicians for simply paying lip service to their Black constituencies.
Ferrell said Black Americans also need to be prepared to face difficulty and roadblocks and citizens attempt to scale the walls of power with the information generated by the Black Census.
“It’s going to take a lot of work to get [candidates] to pay attention to what we actually say,” she said.
At the forum, organizers gave a powerpoint presentation breaking down and analyzing the responses of the roughly 1,500 Louisianians who took the Black Census survey. The specific results of the cities of New Orleans and Lake Charles were also broken out.
While the Louisiana results, as well as the regionally-specific data of other geographic areas, are not being made available to the general public yet, one jarring trend did emerge from the numbers Lab staffers revealed last week – a major disparity between the responses of city-dwellers versus those from the whole state. For many of the issues – such as the failure of the educational system, police brutality and unemployment – the respondents in New Orleans and Lake Charles provided stark and even bleak opinions and views toward life.
The date showed that many Black Americans carry a cynicism and despondency that affects their willingness to even vote and otherwise participate in the political system. To that end, presenters at last week’s forum stressed the lack of local candidates and governmental officials – only three politicians were counted.
One government official in attendance was New Orleans City Councilwoman Cyndi Nguyen. Another attendee included L. Jameel Shaheer, a candidate for State Representative for the 99th District. Shaheer said he was disappointed by the lack of other candidates at the forum.
“When I got here, all the information [in the Black Census] showed how much work is needed,” Shaheer told The Louisiana Weekly. “I thought that there probably should have been 20 candidates here tonight.”
Shaheer said many politicians have no interest in interacting with voters who are educated and politically savvy, because it’s those informed voters that are ready to hold politicians’ feet to the fire. It’s those citizens, he said, who can reveal how little governmental officials care.
“They don’t want to talk with educated voters,” he said, “because when (candidates) have to answer the hard questions, it doesn’t look good [to the public]. It doesn’t paint them in a good light.”
This article originally published in the October 7, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
