by Walter E. Williams

Many whites are ashamed, saddened and feel guilty about our history of slavery, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. Many black people remain angry over the injustices of the past and what they see as injustices of the present. Both blacks and whites can benefit from a better appreciation of black history.

Often overlooked or ignored is the fact that, as a group, black Americans have made the greatest gains, over some of the highest hurdles, and in a shorter span of time than any other racial group in history.

For example, if one totaled up the earnings and spending of black Americans and considered us as a separate nation with our own gross domestic product, we would rank well within the top 20 richest nations. A black American, Gen. Colin Powell, once headed the world’s mightiest military.

Black Americans are among the world’s most famous personalities, and a few black Americans are among the world’s richest people such as investor Robert F. Smith, IT service provider David Steward, Oprah Winfrey, and basketball star Michael Jordan. Plus, there was a black U.S. president.

The significance of these achievements cannot be overstated. When the Civil War ended, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed such progress would be possible in less than a century and a half — if ever. As such, it speaks to the intestinal fortitude of a people. Just as important, it speaks to the greatness of a nation in which such gains were possible. Nowhere else on earth could such progress have been achieved except in the United States of America.

The issue that confronts us is how these gains can be extended to about one-quarter of the black population for whom they have proven elusive. The first step is to acknowledge that the civil rights struggle is over and won. At one time, black Americans did not enjoy the constitutional guarantees as everyone else. Now we do. While no one can deny the existence of residual racial discrimination, racial discrimination is not the major problem confronting a large segment of the black community.

A major problem is that some public and private policies reward dependency and irresponsibility. Chief among these policies is the welfare state that has fostered a 75 percent rate of out of wedlock births and decimated the black family that had survived Jim Crow and racism. Keep in mind that in 1940 the black illegitimacy rate was 11 percent and most black children were raised in two-parent families. Most poverty, about 25 percent, is found in female-headed households. The poverty rate among husband-and-wife black families has been in the single digits for more than two decades.

Black people can be thankful that double standards and public and private policies rewarding inferiority and irresponsibility were not a part of the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. If there were, then there would not have been the kind of intellectual excellence and spiritual courage that created the world’s most successful civil rights movement.

From the late 1800s to 1950, some black schools were models of academic achievement. Black students at Washington’s Dunbar High School often outscored white students as early as 1899. Schools such as Frederick Douglass (Baltimore), Booker T. Washington (Atlanta), P.S. 91 (Brooklyn), McDonogh 35 (New Orleans) and others operated at a similar level of excellence.

Self-destructive behavior that has become acceptable, particularly that in predominantly black schools, is nothing less than a gross betrayal of a struggle, paid with blood, sweat and tears by previous generations, to make possible today’s educational opportunities that are being routinely squandered. I guarantee that blacks who lived through that struggle and are no longer with us would not have believed such a betrayal possible.

Government should do its job of protecting constitutional rights.

After that, black people should be simply left alone as opposed to being smothered by the paternalism inspired by white guilt. On that note, I just cannot resist the temptation to refer readers to my “Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon,” which grants Americans of European ancestry amnesty and pardon for their own grievances and those of their forebears against my people so that they stop feeling guilty and stop acting like fools in their relationship with Americans of African ancestry.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

by Sunita Sohrabji

EMS Contributing editor

SAN FRANCISCO — More than 265 million around the world currently face food insecurity in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, and several million have lost their life-line of remittances, according to experts speaking at an ethnic media conference May 8 on the pandemic’s impact on the developing world.

“COVID-19 is expected to double the number of people facing food insecurity. The world has never seen a pandemic like this,” said Dulce Gamboa, associate for Latino relations at Bread for the World.

Remittances — money sent from people working abroad to their families back home — have taken a huge hit, said Demetrios Papademetriou, who co-founded the Migration Policy Institute and is currently a Distinguished Transatlantic Fellow at the Washington DC-based think tank. The World Bank has estimated that $142 billion has been lost in remittances, as foreign workers lose their jobs to the coronavirus crisis.

“Remittances are an essential lifeline for people who receive that money. They will be thinner and more precarious,” said Papademetriou.

He equated the COVID-19 crisis to the decade-long Great Depression in the U.S. in the 1930s, and characterized it as an “economic abyss.”

Daniel Nepstad, President and Founder of Earth Innovation Institute, discussed the impact of the pandemic on the Amazon rainforest, the largest tropical rainforest in the world. The summer months are typically burning season in the forest, as villagers burn patches to use for agricultural purposes.

In a normal year, thousands of people would get respiratory illnesses as forests burn. This year, however, Nepstad predicted an increased number of deaths as the COVID-19 virus attacks people whose immune systems are already compromised.

In Manaus, Brazil, deep in the Amazon rainforest, Nepstad reported that mass graves have been erected for those succumbing to the virus. In Loreto, Peru, a lack of oxygen bottles has contributed to a high mortality rate from COVID.

The biggest threat to the rain forest comes from people fleeing there as a last resort, Nepstad said. Farmers can no longer bring their products to markets, which have shuttered in the wake of the pandemic. More than 200,000 migrants have left Lima, Peru by foot, walking through deserts and up into the highlands and from there to the rainforest for some measure of food security.

Nepstad urged the global community to support farmers in the Amazon — providing them with seed capital to grow tree crops which have a longer life-span — and also advocated for the formalizing of supply chains and for fair price support.

“Now is the time for solidarity, listening to local leaders and understanding what they need,” said Nepstad. “We tend to demonize the people that are clearing forests, but I think it’s important to have more nuance there.”

“Lots of people are extracting food by clearing the rain forests. We eat that food around the world.”

Even if there is no surge in food prices, the global hunger pandemic will continue, said Gamboa, noting that the situation will deteriorate most rapidly in countries where a large percentage of the labor force works in the informal economy.

Yemen currently faces the worst food insecurity crisis, said Gamboa, with 53 percent of its population — almost 16 million people — facing starvation.

Sudan and Nigeria are likely to be hit by famines, she said. Zimbabwe, South Africa, the Congo, and the Horn of Africa are also facing massive food insecurity issues due to high inflation, poor harvests and drought.

“Malnourished people have less effective immune systems,” said Gamboa, adding that a child who is malnourished during his first 1,000 days of life will face a lifetime of stunted growth, both physically and intellectually.

“People are saying ‘we’re going to die of hunger before we die of coronavirus.’”

“The U.S. needs to have strong leadership to help millions of people around the world, including women and children,” stated Gamboa.

Global migration has ground to a halt as countries close their borders and restrict incoming travel, said Papademetriou. However, there has been a significant amount of labor migration as people in developing countries return home, he said.

“There has been an elite consensus that has allowed migration to continue to be large and to thrive because of the demography of many of the rich countries,” said Papademetriou. “We will have to see if that elite consensus continues to hold as this pandemic continues,” he said, adding that countries will have to reassess afresh the number of immigrant workers they need, especially in the agricultural sector.

Papademetriou said it was too early to assess whether the U.S. would grant legal status to undocumented immigrants, many of whom are now considered essential workers.

“I have spent 14 years of attempting to come up with compromises that legislators on both sides were able to support. We have failed every single time.”

“The last time we failed big was in 2013 under President Obama. So it’s difficult for me to be optimistic,” said Papademetriou.­

They need protection from covid-19, too

by Katie Peeler

– As a pediatric intensive care physician, I like to think I have an unusually strong stomach for heart-wrenching scenarios. While they impact me deeply, I am not easily rattled.

But COVID-19 has rattled me. Everyone I run into is experiencing extreme anxiety over the uncertainty of what lies ahead. How many people will get sick? Will our local hospital run out of ventilators? Will my parents die? Will I die?

Imagine these questions not between adults, but between two school-aged siblings. Perhaps their parents overhear them and can quell some of their anxieties. My own son, only 5-years-old, could not fall asleep last night because at school last week he heard that “billions of people were going to die.”

Now imagine these questions, as asked by immigrant children detained in crowded shelters thousands of miles away from their parents. They are terrified, and the people they worry about most — and who they most need to love and comfort them — aren’t there.

While we are all justifiably concerned for our own children in these fraught times, we must not forget this particularly vulnerable group of children in the United States. They are just as deserving of protection during this pandemic.

Children younger than 18, who arrive at the U.S. border without a parent or guardian, are first held in border cells run by the Department of Homeland Security. Federal law requires that they be transferred within 72 hours to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is under the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The number of such children arriving annually is growing — almost 70,000 in 2019. Some ORR facilities are foster homes, which may offer better care, but others are group homes or large shelters that may house more than 1,000 children at a time.

The vast majority of these children come from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — countries notorious for rampant gang violence and governments unable or unwilling to intervene. After often long and extremely dangerous journeys, they arrive at the Mexico-U.S. border already severely mentally and physically traumatized — a fact I can testify to as a medical expert with Physicians for Human Rights.

The devastating impact of COVID-19 globally has made starkly clear how critical it is to take preventative action. The current system of detaining children in ever larger groups, and for longer periods of time, increases their severe health risks and the likelihood of human rights violations.

In crowded settings, how is ORR able to follow the CDC’s guidance about social distancing and appropriate personal hygiene? Have they reviewed these guidelines with their staff or with the children? Attorneys with Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), a nonprofit organization that provides legal services to children in ORR custody, visited a shelter within the last week. There, they found diluted soap in the bathrooms, large groups of children crowded in a room for their legal screenings and no evidence of sanitizing the room before or after.

We’re in the middle of a global pandemic — none of this is acceptable.

We all want to protect our children and those we love. We cannot forget about the ones we cannot see.

New data from more than 2,000 pediatric cases in China indicates that young children are vulnerable to COVID-19, with severe and critical cases of children particularly noted in infants. While this is lower than adult rates, it still may represent a significant number of vulnerable and sick children. Unfortunately, there has been a history of delayed recognition of both underlying medical disorders and acute illness in detained children. ORR must take every precaution and implement creative solutions to shield children and staff from unnecessary harm.

Also of paramount importance to these children’s well-being is protecting their caregivers.

Reports from China and Italy indicate that many otherwise well children who contract this new virus are frequently asymptomatic or present with symptoms of the common cold. In the context of a crowded shelter or detention center, it is not uncommon for children to have minor colds. Without ready access to testing, it is impossible to know which virus a child has. Spread of COVID-19 will be quick. Caregivers in the shelters could also fall ill. What is the back-up plan for caring for these children if the shelter workforce is quickly depleted?

Policy change is slow, but pandemics wait for no one.

Migrant children also have significant mental health needs, given the trauma they endured at home, during their journeys, and in becoming a ward of our government. Their lives are already filled with anxiety and uncertainty.

A recent report from the Office of the Inspector General showed that despite specific guidelines that dictate the type and frequency of mental health services required for each child to receive, the actual mental health resources available in ORR shelters is far below the requirement. This need will increase exponentially in these children as their anxiety heightens with the pandemic.

Policy change is slow, but pandemics wait for no one.

DHHS must step-up high-level screening for safe sponsors of children immediately upon arrival to the border. They must expeditiously place children with such sponsors, thereby avoiding feeding into an already overcrowded shelter system.

Further, ORR must ensure all staff and children understand the CDC guidance surrounding social distancing and personal hygiene and robustly stock their shelters with soap, hand sanitizer, cleaning supplies and food. Medical triage guidelines must be clear and practiced, and mental health support should be provided for all.

Immigration court proceedings for detained children should be halted for now, and flexibility should be given to legal services organizations so they can utilize videoconferencing or individual meetings when possible.

The ORR facilities are spread out across the U.S., and there may be one or more in your state. You can encourage your local, state or national representatives to exercise oversight of ORR to ensure they are acting in the best interest of children, as well as their families and caregivers.

We all want to protect our children and those we love. We cannot forget about the ones we cannot see.

by Ron Paul

On April 21st the Washington Post savaged Georgia governor Brian Kemp’s decision to begin opening his state after locking down for weeks. “Georgia leads the race to become America’s No. 1 Death Destination,” sneered the headline.

The author, liberal pundit Dana Milbank, actually found the possibility of Georgians dying to be hilarious, suggesting that, “as a promotion, Georgia could offer ventilators to the first 100 hotel guests to register.”

Milbank, who is obviously still getting paid while millions are out of work, sees his job as pushing the mainstream narrative that we must remain in fear and never question what “experts” like Dr. Fauci tell us.

Well, it’s been three weeks since Milbank’s attack on Georgia and its governor, predicting widespread death which he found humorous. His predictions are about as worthless as his character. Not only has Georgia not seen “coronavirus … burn through Georgia like nothing has since William Tecumseh Sherman,” as Milbank laughed, but Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have seen a steep decline since the governor began opening the state.

Maybe getting out in the fresh air and sunshine should not have been prohibited in the first place!

In fact, as we now have much more data, it is becoming increasingly clear that the US states and the countries that locked down the tightest also suffered the highest death rates. Ultra locked-down Italy suffered 495 Covid deaths per million while relatively non-locked down South Korea suffered only five deaths per million. The same is true in the US, where non lockdown states like South Dakota were relatively untouched by the virus while authoritarian-led Michigan, New York, and California have been hardest hit.

In those hardest hit states, we are now seeing that most of the deaths occurred in senior care facilities — after the governors ordered patients sick with Covid to leave the hospitals and return to their facilities. There, they infected their fellow residents who were most likely to have the multiple co-morbidities and advanced age that turned the virus into a death sentence. Will these governors be made to answer for this callous disregard for life?

Yesterday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar admitted the obvious: “We are seeing that in places that are opening, we’re not seeing this spike in cases.” So why not open everything? Because these petty tyrants cannot stand the idea of losing the ability to push people around.

Shutting down the entire United States over a virus that looks to be less deadly than an average flu virus — particularly among those under 80 who are not already sick — has resulted in mass unemployment and economic destruction. More Americans may die from the wrong-headed efforts to fight the virus than from the virus itself.

Americans should pause and reflect on the lies they are being sold. Masks are just a form of psychological manipulation. Many reputable physicians and scientists have said they are worthless and potentially harmful. Lockdowns are meant to condition people to obey without question. A nation of people who just do what they are told by the “experts” without question is a nation ripe for a descent into total tyranny. This is no empty warning — it’s backed up by history. Time to stand up to all the petty tyrants from our hometowns to Washington DC. It is time to reclaim our freedom.

(Ron Paul is a former U.S. congressman from Texas. This article originally appeared at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity).

by Patrick J. Buchanan

As of April 30, the coronavirus pandemic has killed 61,500 Americans in two months and induced the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.

And if history is our guide, the economic crisis, which has produced 30 million unemployed Americans in six weeks, may prove more enduring, ruinous and historic than the still-rising and tragic death toll.

The Spanish flu of 1918-1919, the deadliest pandemic in modern history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide, a third of the planet’s population, and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims, including 675,000 Americans.

“Adjusting for the difference in the size of the American population then and now,” writes Chronicles columnist Roger McGrath, “that number will be equivalent to two million deaths today.”

Yet, the Spanish flu did not shut America down.

As the Spanish flu hit and spread in 1918, the U.S. raised, trained and equipped an army of 4 million men, sent 2 million soldiers to France, broke Gen. Erich Ludendorff’s army, and turned the tide in favor of the Allies.

By December 1918, Doughboys were arriving in New York harbor — having sailed home from Europe’s battlefields on flu-infested transports.

As the scourge continued to take its toll, Woodrow Wilson sailed to Europe, participated for months in the Paris Peace Conference, returned, went on a national train tour to sell his Paris treaty and League of Nations, and suffered a stroke.

In September 1919, Gen. Pershing led his victorious troops in victory parades in New York City and Washington. This writer’s father, a teenager then, was in the D.C. crowd.

In the history books of the 1950s, World War I, Wilson and the Senate battle over the treaty he brought home and U.S. membership in the League of Nations loomed far larger than the Spanish flu that had killed as many U.S. soldiers as the Kaiser’s armies.

But the Great Depression, to which our current crash is now being compared, did not last for just a year like the Spanish flu. The Depression lasted from the stock market crash in October 1929 to the eve of World War II.

Economically, it was devastating. Unemployment during the 1930s never fell below 14 percent. In 1937, it was back up to 17 percent.

At the bottom of the Depression, the stock market had lost 90 percent of its value, and the GDP had fallen 50 percent. Not until the end of FDR’s second term, in 1940, when the U.S. began to gear up for the war, did America really begin to pull out of it.

FDR’s New Deal, however, while it did not cure the Depression, was a historic political triumph for both the president and his party.

From 1930 through 1946, Democrats controlled both houses of the Congress every year, elected and reelected FDR four times and gave him a 46-state landslide in 1936, losing only Maine and Vermont.

What this suggests is that the economic devastation we have brought upon ourselves to battle the pandemic may prove more lasting and historic in its impact than the terrible losses of human life to COVID-19.

Politically, the Depression worked for the Democratic Party like no other event in history. After the Crash of 1929 under Herbert Hoover, the GOP held the House and Senate for only four of the next 50 years.

From 1932 to 1968, the GOP lost the presidency in seven of nine elections. Only Dwight Eisenhower’s two terms in the 1950s interrupted a 36-year reign of the Democratic Party in the White House.

Richard Nixon broke the Democratic dominance and took back the White House for the Republicans in 1968. But it would still take another dozen years before the GOP won control of either house of Congress.

President Trump predicts a V-shaped recovery, the greatest boom in U.S. history. But it is well to recall what happened to the GOP when it failed to deliver in the last Depression.

Just as the Civil War was the defining event of the 19th century, giving us 13 Republican presidents from Lincoln to Hoover and only two Democrats — Grover Cleveland and Wilson — how and when we emerge from this new Depression may tell us which party not only wins 2020 but also dominates the new era.

And as one sees the growing divisions along political lines, with conservatives and populists calling for the country to be opened up, and liberals and Democrats calling for continued sheltering in place, both seem to realize the stakes.

Democrats may proclaim that they are eager to see the pandemic come to a swift and early end and the economy to return quickly to the robust state it was in last February.

But the cold political interests of the Democratic Party today are what they were in Hoover’s time, to pray that the president fails, and fails badly, so that they inherit the estate

(Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever).