American Morning

We Listen – Your comments 7/10/09

Editor's Note: As the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People prepares to celebrate its Centennial in New York, the city of its birth, I’m confident that we as a nation have turned an important corner on the long road toward racial and economic equality for all Americans. Now, insistent questions have arisen about the relevancy of our mission: Haven’t we entered a “post-racial” era in America, with the election of President Obama?

House Minority Leader John Boehner is a fierce critic of the stimulus.  He recently posted a web video featuring a bloodhound named “Ellie Mae” on the hunt for stimulus jobs.  The video asks, “Where are the jobs?” As it turns out, he should have released the hounds on his own home turf.  We visited Boehner’s Ohio district where we found the Butler County Sheriff got almost a million dollars in stimulus dollars. He’s using the money to hold on to correctional officers he had planned to layoff.  If he had lain off those officers, the Sheriff says, he would have been forced to release inmates. It’s his department’s policy to have to maintain a safe ratio of officers to prisoners.

A Philadelphia-area day care center said Thursday that members of a private swim club made racist comments about the center’s children, and the club then canceled their swimming privileges. The Creative Steps Day Care children — ages kindergarten through seventh grade — went to the Valley Swim Club in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, on June 29. The day center’s director, Alethea Wright, had contracted to use the club once a week. During their first visit, some children said they heard club members asking why African-American children were there. One of the boys told the Philadelphia Inquirer that a woman at the club said she feared the children “might do something” to her child.