"No, Harriet Tubman is not saluting Wakanda on this new debit card" by Janelle Nanos Globe Staff, February 14, 2020
OneUnited Bank said it wanted to celebrate Black history. Instead it drew widespread scorn.
The bank, which was established in Dudley Square and is now the largest Black-owned bank in the country, announced on Wednesday that it was releasing a special-issue Harriet Tubman Visa card to celebrate Black History Month and support the now-stalled effort to put the image of the 19th-century abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor on the $20 bill, but the image depicted on the card — Tubman’s arms are crossed and her hands are clenched in fists — struck many as odd and a little too similar to the Wakanda Forever salute used by characters in the “Black Panther” film. Critics panned the decision on several other fronts: They said it pandered to the Black community, commodified Tubman’s legacy, and disrespected Tubman’s self-identification as an anticapitalist.
No different than the way they have usurped the antiwar legacy of MLK Jr.
The bank responded quickly online, saying the image was taken from the painting “The Conqueror” by the Miami-based Black artist Addonis Parker, and the gesture? “It’s the symbol for love in American Sign Language,” bank spokeswoman Suzan McDowell said in a brief interview.
And that is the bottom line.
OneUnited has had a complicated history with Boston’s Black communities. Its chief executive officer, Kevin Cohee, was a long divisive figure in the city’s banking circles, particularly when the bank foreclosed on the Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church after it failed to repay its loan. The bank has also failed to repay the TARP funding that it received from the federal government after the Great Recession.
Fortunately, they have seen surge in deposits and fees the last few years and what is left out of the above are the various connections to certain political figures (the foreclosure was the church's fault, btw).
Cohee’s wife, Teri Williams, the bank’s president, has been the face of the company for the last few years, as Cohee has spent more time on the West Coast. She said the Tubman debit cards were released as part of OneUnited’s #BankBlack Challenge, which encourages Black Americans to move their money to Black-owned banks as a way to address the economic opportunity gap.
“This is really about empowerment, and the reality is that money is power,” she said. “As a community, we spend $1.3 trillion, and so we need to recognize that we have huge economic power, and we need to use that to build wealth.”
Williams said that since launching the campaign in 2016, the bank’s customer base has doubled. FDIC filings, however, show that deposits increased by $29 million — from $353 million to $382 million — between the years 2014 and 2019, and its three Boston-based branches cleared only $25 million in deposits in 2019.
“Most bankers would consider a single branch with $25 million in deposits to be unprofitable — the average is $45 to $50 million,” said longtime local banking consultant Suzanne Moot.
Despite the negative press, Williams said, the Tubman card has been extremely popular with customers.
“We wanted to celebrate Harriet Tubman’s legacy," she said. "When it was postponed that she would be on the $20 bill, we decided we would step in and do this ourselves. . . . We have customers who are coming in and changing their card to this other card. They’re giddy that we have this.”
In a phone call on Friday, Parker, the artist, said he first collaborated with OneUnited in 2015 on a mural project in Miami, and then began working with the bank to put his paintings of Black heroes on its debit cards.
“If we were talking about Frederick Douglass, I would probably have him flexing like Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Parker said. “That’s how I view my heroes.”
If Harriet Tubman were here today, he added, “she and I would be taking a selfie.”
Oh, okay! Now I know this isn't serious. Anyone with any historical context regarding people like her no they are demonized in their own time as threatening the established order represented by the pre$$. Tubman wouldn't be lining up for selfies, she would likely have been in jail. What we have here is a usurious institution that proves cla$$ transcends race and is used to divide the rest of us. This case is particularly tragic because it is a minority taking advantage of fellow minority, but again, not necessarily unique in history. In fact, it is $OP procedure for the most part.
--more--"
"I don’t want a Harriet Tubman debit card or a $20 bill. Pay homage — but not like this" by JeneΓ© Osterheldt Globe Columnist, February 14, 2020
We were currency. Black people were literally used as money.
So when OneUnited Bank released a Harriet Tubman Visa card to celebrate Black History Month, I was baffled. It’s not just that the art is awkward, featuring Tubman doing the Wakanda salute or the love symbol in American Sign Language.
I must admit, I went back to some of my Roots last month.
It’s that Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist who escaped slavery and freed slaves, a Black woman, the conductor of the Underground Railroad who risked her life again and again to save Black lives from being bought, sold, and brutalized, should never be the symbol of American capitalism.
As Black people, our ancestors were trafficked and considered less than human so slavery could cultivate America’s economy and help it become a superpower. So, no, I don’t want to see a Harriet “Moses” Tubman debit card.
I don’t care that the bank is Black-owned. When is the last time you used your debit card or cash and really inspected whose face was on it, and cared enough to learn more about their life, and who they were? Is this really homage at all?
That's a good series of questions.
Four years ago, when the US Treasury announced the $20 bill would be redesigned with Tubman’s portrait on the front and Andrew Jackson on the back, I was confused. It just didn’t feel right, and the since-stalled plan still stinks.
I wonder if she is aware of why Jackson is on the $20 (it was meant as an insult to him).
They, of course, love Hamilton.
A slave owner who built his wealth on the backs of Black folk still gets to sit on the $20? She just joins him? This is not my version of justice or equity. The goal is not to join the oppressors. That is not equity.
I believe in representational justice. I want to see Harriet Tubman properly celebrated in American history, in Black history, in feminist history, but I cannot understand how buying services and products is respectful to her legacy. I cannot fathom how debit cards and straight cash, the very things still used today to buy humans, lifts the legacy of Tubman.
Black people built this country. Yet we were denied humanity, and, once we were free (some of our ancestors had to purchase their freedom), we were denied opportunity. Banks played a big role in disenfranchising us. Remember redlining?
No, but Bloomberg does.
Banking had a role in financing cotton crops. Banks owned slaves. Banks still have racist loan practices, and Wall Street is financing private prisons. So, no, those days aren’t over. OneUnited is Black owned and not part of that history, but economic injustice is still one of our country’s major problems, dividing and debasing people.
She has a point, but bad things happen to people who take on the banks.
I’ve not forgotten where I live, in Boston, where the median net worth for non-immigrant African-American households in the greater region is $8, according to “The Color of Wealth in Boston.” The 2015 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Duke University, and the New School didn’t get the numbers wrong: $8, not even enough to make it to the Tubman $20.
And yet her employer is always telling me how progressive is their city!
On average, Black women in the US are paid 39 percent less than white men and 21 percent less than white women, and the gap widens the more educated and successful we are. I don’t want a Black person, especially not a Black woman, and never Harriet Tubman on money.
Maybe we could put her on a currency that isn't loaned to the U.S. taxpayer at interest by a private banking cartel?
Turning Tubman into currency, the very thing she escaped being, is not how we pay our respects. Memorials, murals, monuments? I’ll take them. Let’s see some movement on the Honoring Harriet Tubman Act, the bipartisan legislation introduced by Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney, a New York Democrat, last summer to place a statue of Tubman in the US Capitol.
Tune in to “Harriet,” the film that took more than 25 years to make from the time Gregory Allen Howard was hired to write the screenplay — you know the film a Hollywood exec once thought Julia Roberts should star in as Tubman?
But putting Tubman’s face on money won’t fix that type of ignorance or systemic racism.
We need to do better by Tubman. Honor her by honoring humanity, by standing up for others, by truly celebrating her legacy. But our faces on money? That is not our North Star to freedom.
--more--"
Still can't help you stay in your home:
"Rescuer or predator? Roxbury nonprofit that loans money to distressed homeowners faces lawsuit from clients" by Andrea Estes Globe Staff, February 16, 2020
Nardella Thomas had already been evicted from her home by the time she contacted Boston Community Capital, a Roxbury-based group that specializes in helping distressed homeowners. After her son’s father lost his job, she explained, she just couldn’t afford the mortgage any longer.
So Thomas was ecstatic when the nonprofit group bought her Webster home from the bank in 2012, then sold it back to her, along with a mortgage she could afford, but the relief was only temporary. Thomas said she realized there were costly strings attached in all the paperwork she had signed when she tried to refinance her house six years later: She owed Boston Community Capital an extra $49,000 before she could get a new loan.
“Why do I have to give you all this money?” she remembered asking Boston Community Capital officials. “I haven’t been late in five years and my credit is good. This woke me up. If it happened to me, who else did it happen to?”
That extra charge — called “shared appreciation” — is at the heart of a class action lawsuit filed Friday alleging “predatory lending” against an organization more accustomed to accolades than accusations. And it’s raising questions about the best — and fairest — way to help people facing foreclosure on their homes.
Under a shared appreciation mortgage, borrowers agree to share any increase in their home’s value with the lender whenever they sell or refinance the house. In a real estate market where prices have risen more than 50 percent since 2012, that can translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars in appreciation that the borrower must pay.
Dozens of people who borrowed from Boston Community Capital, which changed its name to BlueHub Capital in 2018, say they discovered belatedly that they had agreed to a shared appreciation mortgage.
In each case, the borrowers said they had no lawyer at the closing and no one adequately explained the “shared appreciation” agreement, which included a requirement that they not talk about the terms of the deal.
“The unwary, unrepresented, desperate homeowner, already in or threatened by foreclosure, is trapped by (BlueHub) into a 30-year plus, well-above market rate mortgage with an additional final, giant balloon payment that will come out of the borrowers’ equity in their one asset, their home,” the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit also alleges that when borrowers fall too far behind on their BlueHub mortgages, the agency “forecloses aggressively,” sometimes evicting the people they set out to help.
BlueHub officials say their Stabilizing Urban Neighborhoods Initiative, or SUN, program has helped 1,100 homeowners who were in danger of foreclosure, letting them stay in their homes while lowering monthly mortgage payments significantly. BlueHub officials say 93 percent of borrowers make payments on time.
Borrowers do pay above-market interest (5.625 to 7.5 percent) and they must share any increase in value of their home with BlueHub, but BlueHub officials say the terms are fully explained — orally and in writing. All borrowers must sign a form agreeing to the “shared appreciation” mortgage.
Sara Jane Shanahan, a lawyer for BlueHub, told the plaintiffs’ lawyers that all their clients saved money from working with BlueHub — even after the shared appreciation payment. Plus, they got to keep their homes.
“If not for the SUN program, your clients would not have received any appreciation, because they would have lost their homes to foreclosure,” Shanahan wrote, but some question whether the terms of BlueHub’s loans are clear enough to homeowners who are desperately looking for a way to prevent foreclosure. Several plaintiffs said they recalled no briefing about the possibility of a large payment to BlueHub when they sold or refinanced.
BlueHub’s “shared appreciation” loan program is unusual in the business of helping distressed homeowners, according to experts in housing finance. Some nonprofits and government agencies offer shared appreciation mortgages to help low-income home buyers afford the down payment, but it’s difficult to find a similar program aimed at helping people escape foreclosure. Other housing advocates say there’s good reason for that.
“It’s a matter of what the mission is,” said John Taylor, president and founder of the Washington D.C.-based National Community Reinvestment Coalition, who could think of only one remotely similar program. “If it’s to help traditionally underserved people and people struggling with home ownership, is this the best solution?”
Bruce Marks, whose Jamaica Plain-based group, the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, is financing the suit, said BlueHub systematically exploits people in their time of need.
“In 35 years of fighting predatory lending, we’ve never seen this type of shared appreciation — shared appreciation that steals hundreds of thousands of dollars of the homeowners’ equity in their property,” Marks said.
BlueHub has grown dramatically over the years. In its 35-year history, the organization estimates that it has invested or leveraged more than $10 billion for housing, schools, health care facilities, and other businesses, but critics say BlueHub operates too much like a for-profit business. For instance, the agency’s chief executive, Elyse Cherry, was paid $736,803 in 2018, which BlueHub officials say is based on a review of salaries at other organizations and comparable to the pay of leaders at major nonprofits such as WGBH and the Boston Foundation; however, housing advocate Marks, who also helps distressed homeowners, made only $150,000 in 2017, according to his organization’s tax return.
Jon Skarin, executive vice president of the Massachusetts Bankers Association, said the SUN program appears to be a good investment for BlueHub from the start, when they buy the homes at a reduced price from lenders, to the finish, when they get a share of the increased property value.
The loans “are structured in ways to minimize their risk as much as possible and that’s all the pieces of it: the higher interest rates, different pricing on the loans, the shared appreciation,” said Skarin.
BlueHub officials say that they don’t make a profit — and that the earnings go back into the business, allowing them to help more people, or to pay off investors. They also said that shared appreciation mortgages offered by other lenders have survived court challenges.
The lawsuit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court by attorneys David Kelston and Jeffrey Wiesner, grew directly out of Nardella Thomas’s disagreement with what was then Boston Community Capital. Thomas had initially sought out the group after seeing a glowing piece on the group’s help for distressed homeowners on a network news show, but after her request for relief from the shared appreciation mortgage was turned down, Thomas launched an online petition against BlueHub’s lending practices, signed by more than 250 people, and helped organize dozens of BlueHub borrowers who say they didn’t realize until they tried to sell or refinance that they had agreed to make a potentially large payment to BlueHub.
They began meeting at Marks’s office, and they began to tell their stories.....
Globe picks up the gauntlet for them.
--more--"
Should have burned the place down instead.
If only they had been smarter:
"Boston Public Schools graduation rates drop" by James Vaznis Globe Staff, February 14, 2020
The gap between the percentage of Black and white students graduating high school in Boston widened dramatically last year, as the city’s overall graduation rate declined for the first time in more than a decade, according to newly released state data.
The decline comes as Massachusetts officials conduct their first comprehensive review of the Boston system in a decade, with members of the state education board urging Commissioner Jeffrey Riley to take aggressive steps to address low performance in the state’s largest school system. The drop in graduation rates will probably add more urgency to those calls.
“I wish the news today was better, but I’m a firm believer that we can’t make progress if we don’t fully face the facts,” said Boston Superintendent Brenda Cassellius in a statement. “The fact is, we have more work to do to help more students earn their diplomas.”
Cassellius, who took over as superintendent one month after the Class of 2019 graduated, said overhauling high schools is a top priority. In the coming months, for instance, she intends to present the Boston School Committee with a proposal to have high schools adopt MassCore, a state-recommended set of courses that align with admission requirements to state universities and include such measures as four years of math and a minimum of five electives — an area where many Boston high schools fall short.
BPS officials have repeatedly stressed they are working to reduce achievement gaps among students of different backgrounds, but the new graduation rate data reveal that the racial disparity in high school graduates widened notably.
Consequently, the gulf in graduation rates between Black and white students has more than doubled, resulting in a 10-percentage-point divide. Latino students continued to record the lowest graduation rates among the system’s racial groups.....
What the Globe incessantly does is blame bias and not the failure to assimilate amid sanctuary city policies.
--more--"
"Border patrol will deploy elite tactical agents to sanctuary cities" by Caitlin Dickerson and Zolan Kanno-Youngs New York Times, February 14, 2020
The Trump administration is deploying law enforcement tactical units from the southern border as part of a supercharged arrest operation in sanctuary cities across the country, an escalation in the president’s battle against localities that refuse to participate in immigration enforcement.
The specially trained officers are being sent to cities including Chicago and New York to boost the enforcement power of local Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, according to two officials who are familiar with the secret operation. Additional agents are expected to be sent to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Boston, New Orleans, Detroit, and Newark.
The move reflects President Trump’s persistence in cracking down on sanctuary cities, localities that have refused to cooperate in handing over immigrants targeted for deportation to federal authorities. It comes soon after the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security announced measures that will affect both American citizens and immigrants living in those places.
Given the coronavirus scare, it can't come soon enough, right?
Lawrence Payne, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, confirmed the agency was deploying 100 officers to work with ICE, which conducts arrests in the interior of the country, “in order to enhance the integrity of the immigration system, protect public safety, and strengthen our national security.”
The deployment of the teams will run from February through May, according to an e-mail sent to CBP personnel, which was read to The New York Times by one official familiar with the planning.
Among the agents being deployed to sanctuary cities are members of the elite tactical unit known as BORTAC, which acts essentially as the SWAT team of the Border Patrol. With additional gear such as stun grenades and enhanced Special Forces-type training, including sniper certification, the officers typically conduct high-risk operations targeting individuals who are known to be violent, many of them with extensive criminal records.
The unit’s work often takes place in the most rugged and swelteringly hot areas of the border. It can involve breaking into stash houses maintained by smuggling operations that are known to be filled with drugs and weapons.
In sanctuary cities, the BORTAC agents will be asked to support interior officers in run-of-the-mill immigration arrests, the officials said. Their presence could spark new fear in immigrant communities that have been on high alert under the stepped-up deportation and detention policies adopted after Trump took office.
In a statement, ICE’s acting director, Matthew Albence, said the deployment comes in response to policies adopted by sanctuary cities, which have made it harder for immigration agents to do their jobs.
“As we have noted for years, in jurisdictions where we are not allowed to assume custody of aliens from jails, our officers are forced to make at-large arrests of criminal aliens who have been released into communities,” he said. “When sanctuary cities release these criminals back to the street, it increases the occurrence of preventable crimes, and more importantly, preventable victims,” but Gil Kerlikowske, the former commissioner of CBP, which oversees tactical units along the border, said sending the officers to conduct immigration enforcement within cities, where they are not trained to work, could escalate situations that are already volatile. He called the move a “significant mistake.”
“If you were a police chief and you were going to make an apprehension for a relatively minor offense, you don’t send the SWAT team. And BORTAC is the SWAT team,” said Kerlikowske, who is the former chief of police in Seattle. “They’re trained for much more hazardous missions than this.”
You are not in Mayberry, U.S.A., anymore!
The Border Patrol squads will be charged with backing up ICE agents during deportation operations and standing by as a show of force, the officials said.
ICE agents typically seek out people with criminal convictions or multiple immigration violations as their primary targets for deportation, but family members and friends are often swept up in the enforcement net in what are known as “collateral” arrests, and many such people could now be caught up in any enhanced operations.
ICE leadership requested the help in sanctuary jurisdictions because agents there often struggle to track down immigrants living in the country illegally without the help of the police and other state and local agencies. Law enforcement officers in areas that refuse to cooperate with ICE and the Border Patrol — which include both liberal and conservative parts of the country — often argue that doing so pushes people living in the country illegally further into the shadows, ultimately making cities less safe because that segment of the population becomes less likely to report crimes or cooperate with investigations.
Yeah, local officials and advocates are condemning the Trump administration’s decision to send federal border patrol agents to Boston and other so-called sanctuary cities in coming weeks to support immigration enforcement, calling the move an intimidation tactic that could harm public safety.
The goal of the new joint operation, one of the officials said, was to increase arrests in the sanctuary jurisdictions by at least 35 percent.
The operation reflects an increasingly hawkish approach to immigration enforcement, following the firings and resignations of leaders who have been viewed in the White House as unwilling to take the harsh steps Trump and his advisers view as necessary to slow illegal immigration.
All about 2020!
--more--"
Related:
"Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Friday defended his decision to divert billions of dollars in funding for Navy and Air Force aircraft and other military programs to help pay for President Trump’s promised wall on the US-Mexico border. The Pentagon said Thursday that Esper approved shifting $3.8 billion in funds that Congress had authorized for F-35 fighter aircraft and other military programs....."
Warren wants to now put that money into a coronavirus fund.
