Books That Matter — The Publisher‚Äôs Choice
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Title: The Covenant with Black America
Author: Tavis Smiley, editor
Category: Non-Fiction
Format: Paperback, 254pp
Publisher: Third World Press
Web site: thirdworldpressinc.com
Publication Date: March 2006
List price: $12
ISBN: 0883782774
The Covenant is about the future, about the hope of Black youth yet unborn. It is about our past and the courage of our ancestors. About the present–right here and right now. The Covenant will reflect our independence, our interdependence and our interconnectedness.
By Johnnie Grant
The Covenant with Black America is a collection of essays by scholarly African Americans that examine issues of disparity plaguing African Americans and other minority communities through facts from its participants, and suggested calls for action.
The Covenant with Black America is the brainchild of Tavis Smiley, a nationally syndicated African American talk show host and producer best known for his yearly “State of the Black Union” that airs nationally on C-SPAN following the president\’s State of the Union address. He is the author of eight books, including Doing What’s Right, Hard Left, How to Make Black America Better, and Keeping the Faith. As the host of BET Tonight with Tavis Smiley, he is a three-time winner of the NAACP Image Award.
For seven years Smiley listened in sheer anguish to comments about everyday disparities facing minorities in the United States. With a passion for resolving problems, he set out to chart a course and a call to action. Seeing that simply exchanging concepts and ideas was not sufficient, he decided to solicit the help of African American scholars from various disciplines to try to structure a workable blueprint to combat problems facing minority communities. Together these masterful minds assembled to address the devastating social, political, and economic disenfranchisements facing many African Americans and other “people of color.” From this collaborative effort emerged a scholarly collection of ten short essays by these experts.
Contributing authors include such leading intellectuals as former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher; Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights; Angela Glover Blackwell, founder of the research think tank PolicyLink; and Cornel West, professor of Religion at Princeton University. Each Covenant (chapter) looks at one pivotal issue in America\’s minority communities and supplies the reader with a list of resources on self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and self-determination, along with suggested plans of action that individuals as well as governments can undertake to make a difference in their communities. This review focuses on Covenant Eight.
Covenant Eight – (Accessing Good Jobs, Wealth, and Economic Prosperity)
One can applaud the progress that has been made in minority communities, but it is imperative to put in place a planned and structured initiative to address what must still be done to reverse the economic stagnation that continues to plague families and people of color. With the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina still emblazoned in our minds, and the offering of help from around the world when our government was slow to act, it\’s clear that there remains a significant wealth gap: when it comes to full economic gains, there is still a long, long way to go.
Dr. Marc H. Morial, CEO of New York\’s National Urban League and former Mayor of New Orleans, writes, “What this means is that without the wealth and equity of homeownership and sound investments to fall back on, African Americans stand on shaky ground. In hard economic times, as the saying goes, “When White America gets a cold, Black America gets pneumonia!\’ And now that the recession is over (for some), and the rising tide is once again lifting the boats of many, that tide is pushing the boats of minority families further and further out to sea. America must wake up! The growing wealth gap is not just leaving behind Black America; it is leaving behind middle-class America and Urban America, Rural America and Hispanic America, too!”
“On home ownership, the gap can be closed by lowering down payment requirements and making mortgages more available and affordable to all. Government officials must strengthen the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), a civil rights law prohibiting discrimination by banks against low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. The CRA imposes an affirmative and continuing obligation on banks to satisfy the need for credit and banking services of all communities in which they are chartered.”
Other issues discussed in Covenant Eight address a range of problems and options for dealing with them.
To Monitor and Prevent Predatory Lending
Minority communities must petition the Federal Government to enact and enforce regulatory laws as necessary to protect citizens from predatory lending. Predatory lenders target elderly, poor, and uneducated borrowers into bad loan obligations, and strip the equity from their homes. Some predatory lenders trap borrowers in bad loans through the imposition of prepayment penalties in order to qualify for a more favorable loan. While the borrower may be able to qualify for a lower-cost loan, the prepayment penalty charges often prevent the owner from refinancing. Prepayment penalties often provide kickbacks by lenders to brokers (yield-spread premiums) for placing borrowers in loans at a higher interest than the borrower could otherwise qualify for.
Establish Tax-Free Homeownership Savings Accounts
Congress should strive to close the homeownership gap by creating a new tool, such as “Individual Home Ownership” development or savings accounts. This would allow working Americans to save money for a down payment on a home tax-free, similar to the legislation Congress passed years ago to establish 401k accounts to encourage employee saving.
Commit to National Job Training and Career Counseling Efforts for Youth
Today and in the future, jobs are and will become more technological, skilled, and learning oriented. There must be a massive public and private investment in science and technological education. Supporting mentorship programs and identifying entrepreneurial role models and work-based incentives are important. The federal, state and local governments should fund programs tailored to stimulate interest in science and technology and put into place diversified Industrial Vocational Education programs designed specifically for those non-college-bound young adults.
There must also be nationwide efforts to break continuing class and race segregation in job markets, particularly in the fastest growing industries. African Americans are vastly underrepresented in the high-tech industry — one of the key industries for America\’s future economic progress. It should be noted that these programs of Vocational Education should be implemented in correctional facilities as well.
The book unavoidably leads to this question: If economic, disparities continue to exist as they do today, who will be the future producers and manufactures of the nation\’s products to the world? More business leaders and corporate CEOs recognize that closing the equality and economic gap is not merely a challenge for African Americans and other peoples of color, it is equally a challenge for the nation if we are to maintain our economic leadership in the world.
What makes this treatise unique is the practical guidance it proposes, in advocating evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary solutions to plaguing inequalities within our minority communities. The Covenant with Black America will inspire anyone who reads it to get involved personally, and to lend their talents to the eradication of the intractable impediments that seem to slow the progress of minority communities.
“Black America has spoken and the message is, “We care about the state of our families, access to education, jobs and health care,” Smiley says. “This text provides the research and background on how to approach these issues and improve the welfare of Black America.”
We look forward to conversations from community meetings and information-gatherings from all readers, coupled with the actions they will take to implement positive change. The staff of The Urban News & Observer challenges everyone, regardless of ethnicity or cultural background, to form a “Covenant Group” in their church, mosque, synagogue, sorority, fraternity, or social or civic organization, to study these essays and take action. In a popular phrase, “It\’s a party with a purpose.”
An interesting note about the cover:The background image on the cover of The Covenant with Black America is an original photograph by world-renowned photographer Chester Higgins, Jr., of eight-year-old Sojourner from New York. Overlaid on the girl\’s face are historical photos submitted by African Americans from across the United States.
