If Jacqueline and Linden Thompson are perplexed over the massive media attention and public outpouring of support for Bobbi and Kenny McCaughey, the parents of the Iowa septuplets, it is understandable.
On May 8, the Washington, D.C., couple set the American record for the longest sextuplet pregnancy at 29 weeks and six days. They also were the first African-American couple to give birth to sextuplets. The children were delivered by Caesarean section. One was delivered stillborn. Mrs. Thompson remained hospitalized for a month at the Georgetown University Medical Center.
Sextuplets are almost unheard of. Other than the Thompsons, there has been only one other recorded birth of sextuplets in the United States this year. Yet unlike the McCaugheys’ media-dubbed “miracle birth,” the birth of their children stirred no interest in the media. In an extensive search of all major publications, I found no record of any TV news feature, special report or print feature on them in any major daily. If not for a brief news blurb on the Thompson births in the black weekly Jet magazine, the event would have gone completely unnoticed.
It’s not hard to figure out why. Unlike the McCaugheys, the Thompsons are a low-income, working-class African-American couple. They do not live in a small, tight-knit mid-American Iowa community. They did not use a fertility drug. As a result, the Thompsons did not get this treatment:
- Free advertising in major newspapers for their family assistance fund.
- The donation of a 12-seat Chevrolet van.
- A year’s supply of groceries from a national supermarket chain.
- An offer by Iowa’s governor to build a new and larger home.
- A year’s supply of baby care products.
- The cover of both Time and Newsweek.
- A phone call from President Clinton congratulating them on their “amazing adventure.”
- A special invitation to the White House.
- A bid of $250,000 from a tabloid weekly to tell their story.
The Thompsons’ story only became the subject of mild passing interest after the McCaughey septuplets made news and a caller to a black Washington, D.C., radio station complained about the lack of help the Thompsons had received.
This prompted a local community group, Sisters in Touch, to make the Thompsons’ plight an issue. The Washington Post did a back-page story on them. But even that wasn’t enough to spark the kind of national offers of help that flooded into the McCaugheys.
A Proctor & Gamble spokesperson announced the company would consider a six- to eight-month supply of diapers, but added that this was the standard contribution for families with multiple births. A spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson suggested that the Thompsons contact the company to determine if there are “things we can do.”
With the assistance of the D.C. Housing Finance Agency, the Thompsons were able to move out of their cramped one-bedroom duplex unit into a three-bedroom apartment. Since then, they’ve managed to find a six-bedroom house, but they couldn’t move in. Even with Linden Thompson’s salary from two jobs, they can’t afford the $1,500 rent. However, thanks to growing media awareness of their case, a nonprofit foundation reportedly has offered to give the family a house.
And, as a result of the appeal letters on their behalf by Sisters in Touch (P.O. Box 4337, Largo, MD 20775), they are now receiving free day care at a local child-care center, and they were notified that they will be eligible to enroll their children in the Head Start Program. The group also reports that due to the slightly increased media attention on the Thompsons, a handful of individual and corporate donors have offered to help the family: Chevrolet wants to give them a 1998 Astro, while an auto dealership in New Jersey has weighed in with a Ford Aerostar.
While the Thompsons have been forced to shoulder the tremendous physical and emotional strain and financial burden of caring for five children alone, they have expressed pleasure at the showering of support for the McCaugheys. Their only regret is, as Jacqueline Thompson said, that her community and the nation did not support them the same way. It didn’t and still hasn’t. And that underscores the general indifference of much of America when the children in need are not media-sensationalized products of “miracle births” but children of the minority poor.
) Pacific News Service
LOS ANGELES
most people assume that California’s anti-affirmative action measure, Proposition 209, which was pushed by California governor Pete Wilson and Bob Dole in a campaign bankrolled by the state’s Republican Party, passed because angry white males voted for it.
What this ignores is the fact that slightly more than one out of four
blacks who cast a ballot voted for the initiative slightly higher than
the percentage of Hispanics who supported it, but less than the 39 percent of Asian-American voters who voted for it, according to exit polls
reported by the Los Angeles Times.
Opponents of 209 insist that blacks who supported it were “racial traitors,” confused by its deceptive language or misled by Republican trickery. These explanations overlook
the deeply conservative strain in the black community. Many blacks
agree with those who argue that affirmative action, like welfare, discourages incentive and unfairly stigmatizes blacks. They are convinced that they achieved their success in business and the professions through hard work and ability, and
are particularly insulted when whites claim they got ahead because of color, not competence.
Such sentiments have been fueled by a new wave of black radio commentators, writers, academics and politicians. They oppose not only affirmative action, but welfare,
abortion and government spending in general and advocate school prayer,
more police and prisons, and “personal responsibility.”
Early warning signs that more blacks were joining the growing
conservative sea change emerged during the debate over the nomination of
Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991. A USA Today poll found that
nearly half of the blacks surveyed at the time supported self-help and
not government quotas. Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican National
Committee, claimed that 25 to 45 percent of blacks called themselves
“conservative” a fair prediction of the anti-affirmative action vote
by blacks in California.
One key reason for the shift is rising black prosperity. Since the 1970s
the number of black managers, professionals, technicians and government
officials has increased by 52 percent. A sizable percentage of them now claim they are pro-life, pro-school prayer and anti-gun control. As more than one analyst has
argued, middle-class blacks are more likely to be solid patriots than
protesters.
There’s another reason that more blacks define themselves as conservatives: African-Americans may vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic party, but they have always through their churches, social organizations, political and economic associations embraced programs of self-help, business development, law
and order, and religious and family values. The NAACP, the Urban League and other mainstream civil rights organizations always waged their fight for jobs, education, civil rights legislation and political representation within the tradition of American reform. Their recent national conventions have emphasized self-help programs, personal responsibility and family values.
Many blacks will continue to vilify other blacks who think that
affirmative action and indeed all government programs are lose-lose
propositions whose time has long since past. But if the black vote
against affirmative action in California is any indication, their ranks
are likely to grow.
) Pacific News Service
Quote of the day
Death chat
“Want to talk about torturing to death? I have a kind of fascination with torturing till death … I want to surrender completely. I want to die.”
a message posted by Sharon Lopatka in a bondage and discipline chat room. Lopatka’s asphyxiated corpse was later found buried in the front yard of Robert Glass, a computer analyst “with a good work record.” (From “A fatal step into twilight” by Daphne Merkin, U.S. News & World Report, November 25 1996.
LOS ANGELES —
“Freeway” Ricky Ross — the central character in the
alleged CIA/Contra/black drug dealer connection story — was a phone
guest on a recent radio talk show here. Spewing apologies and mea culpas about his actions, Ross, currently held in a Federal prison in San Diego on drug charges, wailed that he was a pawn of the government and that the CIA “made me do it.”
This was predictable coming from someone who banked millions dealing deadly drugs in his own community, got caught, convicted and faces a mandatory life
sentence.
While it was painful to listen to Ross’ self-serving apologies, it was
even more painful to listen to black callers sidestep his guilt. With one
or two exceptions, most callers charged that the crack scourge was part
of a genocidal plot by the CIA and other unnamed government forces to
wipe out African Americans. The issue of black culpability, personal
responsibility, and punishment for black drug dealers was buried in the
rush to pump the conspiracy line.
This isn’t surprising. Since the 1960s, such conspiracy theorists
have believed that anything bad that happens to African Americans is part
of a secret plan. Following the urban uprisings, the theory goes, the
ghettos were flooded with drugs, alcohol, gangs and guns. During the
1980s, AIDS was added to the barrage of woes. The “white establishment” wanted to stop blacks from developing unity, strong political organizations and programs to counter oppression. The plot was to get blacks to
self-destruct.
While there is no proof that this is true, African Americans have ample cause to be suspicious of their government’s behavior. According to public documents, for example:
- Army Intelligence, the Justice Department and the FBI intensively
spied on black leaders and organizations between the World Wars.
- In order to observe the advanced stages of syphilis, federal health officials for decades knowingly withheld curative medical treatment from a group of black men in Alabama who suffered from the disease.
- The FBI conducted a massive surveillance campaign against Malcolm X,
Martin Luther King, Jr., the Black Panther Party and other black groups
in the 1960s.
These revelations are just enough to make the alleged CIA-cocaine
connection the jewel in the crown of the conspiracy theorists. They ignore the fact
that the reporter, Gary Webb, who broke the story in the San Jose Mercury
News, did not explicitly charge that CIA officials directly conspired to
or approved any plan to push drugs in black neighborhoods.
Webb did claim that, in the early 1980s, key operatives within the
Nicaraguan Democratic Force (a Contra faction organized and supplied by
the CIA) for a brief time supplied cocaine to Ross in order to raise money to continue their illegal war against the Sandinista. However, that Ross and the Contras were responsible for starting the crack epidemic — as the Mercury News stories claimed — has since been called into question by stories in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
Still, even if some of Webb’s allegations are confirmed, then at least some CIA operatives turned a blind eye to the dirty deals. While this hardly
constitutes smoking-gun proof of direct CIA official involvement — let
alone of a massive government conspiracy to dope black communities — it
more than justifies outrage from all Americans.
But many blacks shoot themselves in the foot by side-stepping the direct
culpability of men like Ross while pounding on the conspiracy theory with
only the scantiest of evidence. They increase the damage
by making the erroneous claim that “everyone in the black community has
been affected by the crack plague.” This reinforces the stereotype that
the drug problem is exclusively a black dilemma. On the contrary, a
recent University of Michigan survey on drug use found that black high
school seniors were the least likely of any group of students to use cocaine.
By rushing to judgment and spreading these myths, black activists and some black elected
officials give the media an excuse to question their general credibility, to downplay
the drug issue as just a black problem and to ridicule the charges as yet another case of “black paranoia.” This allows the Clinton administration and the Justice Department to ignore the more substantiated charges and prevents blacks from gaining broad support from elected officials and non-blacks for the appointment of a special counsel to fully investigate those charges.
Government agencies occasionally play fast and loose with the law, and
their reckless actions damage lives. But this doesn’t prove that there
are conspiracies or secret plots to commit genocide against blacks. Nor
does it excuse or absolve blacks of the blame for their criminal wrongdoing. Thinking otherwise is a trap that must be avoided.
Quote of the day
Rev. Pod
“The man accused of being the biggest brainwasher in America has moved into mainstream
Republican Americana. They’ve decided to hold their nose and take his
money.”
— Anson Shupe, a professor of sociology at Indiana-Purdue
University, on the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s nationwide “Family Values” conferences. (From “Rev. Moon Tries to Go Mainstream: Conferences draw blacks, GOP leaders,” in Thursday’s
San Francisco Chronicle
