Incomes continue to rise, but Texans
of color still seeing a gap
On the economic front, 2016 was
a year of modest improvements for Texas residents.
Incomes continued to creep up. Overall poverty slightly
dipped. The share of poor children in some areas of the
state with the highest rates of child poverty dropped.
But U.S. Census estimates also underlined
a familiar narrative of income inequality within the
state’s borders: Some Texans of color continue to be left
behind when it comes to economic improvement.
The median household income in
Texas last year hit $56,565 — up almost 2 percent from
2015. That’s fairly close to the national figure but still
puts Texas behind 24 other states with higher median
household incomes.
In 2016, median household
incomes increased for all of the state’s major racial and
ethnic groups. Household incomes for white and Asian Texans
— at $70,131 and $82,081, respectively — easily
surpassed the state figure. But black and Hispanic
households, whose median household incomes don’t cross the
$45,000 line, still bring home less money.
Despite a sharp
drop in poverty in 2015, the state’s overall decline
in poverty — down to 15.6 percent in 2016 compared with
15.9 percent in 2015 — was muchmore
modest this year. That still translated to a few thousand
fewer Texans classified as poor in 2016.
But the share of people living
in poverty in half of the state’s 25 metro areas surpassed
the state figure, and roughly half of the state’s
metro areas saw increased poverty rates in 2016.
TAKE ME TO THE RIVER: LIVE! Memphis Soul and
Rhythm & Blues Revue featuring William Bell, Bobby
Rush, Charlie Musselwhite
Take
Me to the River presents a live
performance experience based on the
award-winning film and record that brought together
multiple generations of iconic Memphis and
Mississippi Delta musicians to record a
historic new album and re-imagine the utopia
of racial, gender and generational collaboration of
Memphis (Stax, High records) in its heyday.
This
historic show features a once-in-a-lifetime
chance to see legends William Bell
(2017 Grammy Winner), Bobby Rush
(2017 Grammy winner), and Charlie Musselwhite
(2014 Grammy winner) share the stage and perform
classics and new TMTTR collaborations. Backed by an
ALL-STAR Memphis band, the event includes the HiRhythm
Section (27 Gold and Platinum records, All of
Al Green’s classics) and Grammy award winner Boo
Mitchell, award-winning director and Grammy
Nominee Martin Shore, alumni from the
STAX Music Academy, and special appearances from
Academy Winner Frayser Boy and
Critics Choice Award winner Al Kapone.
TMTTR
believes that the power of positive expression –
through music, film or other art forms – leads to a
permanent foundation of community, and strives to
bring together those from all political, racial and
generational backgrounds to communicate, cooperate,
collaborate and create together as a community.
This is
a ticketed event for the covered seating area. Free
tickets are available (4 per person over age 16 while
they last) at the Miller Outdoor Theatre box office
the day of the performance between the hours of 10:30
AM-1:00 PM. If tickets remain at 1:00 PM, the box
office will re-open one hour before show time to
distribute the remaining tickets. As always, open
seating on the hill. The shows goes on rain or shine.
Presented
Miller Outdoor Theatre
EPA examining toxic Houston area
floodwaters
Low-income and minority communities could
be facing a new challenge from Hurricane Harvey – toxic
water. An analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity
found that nine of 16 flooded Superfund sites were in
neighborhoods where a majority of residents are minority or
low-income. A New York Times investigation discovered E.
coli levels at four times the amount considered safe in
“water flowing down Briarhills Parkway in the Houston
Energy Corridor.”
“There’s pretty clearly sewage
contamination, and it’s more concentrated inside the home
than outside the home,” Lauren Stadler, an assistant
professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice
University who participated in The Times’s research said.
“It suggests to me that conditions inside the home are
more ideal for bacteria to grow and concentrate. It’s
warmer and the water has stagnated for days and days. I know
some kids were playing in the floodwater outside those
places. That’s concerning to me.”
In the Clayton Homes public housing
development, which is alongside the Buffalo Bayou, levels of
E. coli were measured 135 times higher than what’s
considered safe. The water also included elevated levels of
“lead, arsenic and other heavy metals in sediment from the
floodwaters in the kitchen.” The Buffalo Bayou has been
polluted for years, and it’s been reported that minority
residents have suffered the most from the consequences.
Officials with the Environmental
Protection Agency said they are still trying to get a handle
on what exactly is percolating in the lingering floodwaters
which contaminated many people’s homes and personal
belongings.
They already know it’s some mix of
bacteria, viruses, metals and other potentially toxic
pollutants leached from the myriad of refineries and
chemical plants in the area, along with an untold number of
submerged septic tanks and dozens of Superfund sites.
Collecting enough samples to draw sweeping
conclusions about how polluted the water is, and the impact
to specific neighborhoods, could take a while – especially
as government agencies grapple with staffing shortfalls.
“We’re trying to get a good picture of
what’s in the water,” said Latrice Babin, the deputy
director of pollution control for Harris County. She said
the staff of about 10 water samplers at the agency is
struggling to complete testing of industrial sites and waste
water treatment facilities. Gov. Greg Abbott says the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency had completed site
assessments at all 43 Superfund sites in areas affected by
the storm. He said two of those sites – the San Jacinto
Waste Pits and the U.S. Oil Recovery – will require
further assessment, which will take several days to
complete.
At least 168 water systems across the
state impacted by Harvey still have boil-water notices,
including the system in Beaumont.
Dr. James McCarthy, the chief of emergency
medicine in the Memorial Hermann Red Duke Trauma Institute,
said the hospital has seen an uptick in soft tissue
infections since the storm. That’s not surprising given
that people are spending a lot of time in polluted
floodwater.
More Black athletes leaving pro
sports to tackle racism
All-Pro NFL wide receiver Anquan Boldin
inked a new contract with the Buffalo Bills this summer
worth nearly $3 million for one season. Weeks later, Boldin
pulled a Dave Chappelle. Like the funnyman who walked away
from a multi-million dollar television deal, Boldin decided
there were things in life more deserving of his time and
energy besides football.
Speaking with Sports Illustrated, Boldin
cited the Charlottesville,
Va., melee, where one woman was killed during a
counterprotest against supporters of Confederate monuments,
as the tipping point. “I just remember lying in the dorm
room and thinking, there’s no way I can continue to play football,”
said the gridiron legend.
The recent focus on
athletes-turned-activists has centered squarely Boldin’s
former teammate Colin
Kaepernick, whom many believe is being denied the chance
to play football in retaliation for his season-long protest
of the national anthem. While Kaepernick was allegedly
stiff-armed out of the league, a growing number of Black
athletes are voluntarily exiting professional sports because
of the anti-Blackness that saturates the sports industry and
out of concern for their personal health and safety. Many of
these jocks are investing their newfound free time in
projects to combat racism and the problems plaguing Black
people.
Former running back Rashard
Mendenhall ditched his cleats and the NFL years
before Kaepernick’s kneeling. At age 26, Mendenhall chose
to retire at the peak of his athletic ability and during his
most lucrative earning years as a professional player.
Feeling compelled to explain why he prematurely ended a
successful career, which included two Super Bowl
appearances, the former ball carrier provided a heap of
specifics in his 2014 farewell essay.
He relished the people, experiences and
millions of dollars football allowed him to have, but
confessed that in addition to 300-pound tacklers, he had to
“fight through waves and currents of praise and criticism,
but mostly hate.” Speaking with a retiree’s frankness,
Mendenhall added he’s lost count of “how many times
[he’s] been called a ‘dumb [n-word]’.”
In addition to racist epithets, Mendenhall
eloquently explains how Black athletes are perceived in the
same niggling ways as Black people who’ve never scored a
touchdown. “I am not an entertainer. I never have been.
Playing that role was never easy for me. The box deemed for
professional athletes is a very small box. My wings spread a
lot further than the acceptable athletic stereotypes,” he
wrote.
One of the ways racism injures Black
people is by suffocating aspirations. Mendenhall and
generations of Black people are propagandized to think
physical aptitude is their lone path to brilliance. The
extra brawn, puny brain accusation was zealously endorsed
for years, and helps explain why white men still most often
coach Black athletes at all levels.
Former Baltimore Raven John Urschel
grappled on the hyper-violent offensive line by day and
moonlighted as a Ph.D, student at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology during his final NFL season. He
retired in July, also at the age of 26. Working towards a
doctorate in mathematics, Urschel acknowledged his decision
to subtract pro
football from his life was influenced in part by new
research suggesting football players frequently suffer
long-term traumatic brain injury. The former Raven sustained
a concussion in 2015. Urschel disclosed the damage was so
severe he was temporarily unable to solve high-level math
problems. For some, it’s incomprehensible that some Black
people are now voluntarily leaving the cheerleaders, the
field and mountains of cash to preserve their physical
well-being.
Apparently, a daily recurrence of racial
abuse is prompting more players to permanently drop the
ball. Jonathan Martin played three NFL seasons before
retiring at the age of 25. While playing for the Miami
Dolphins in 2013, Martin alleged that he was subjected to
constant harassment and racist insults from fellow
teammates. He also charged that this abuse was tolerated and
encouraged by the coaching staff. A lengthy investigation
found that Richie
Incognito, one of Martin’s white teammates, called him
the n-word, mulatto, and “darkness.” Incognito’s brand
of humor also included threatening to kill Martin and
swapping text messages with teammates about shooting Black
people.
If Anquan Boldin had played this season,
he would have been Incognito’s new Buffalo teammate. While
Incognito remains an NFL employee, Martin wrote publicly about
being “petrified of going to work” as a professional
football player. The turmoil lead him to substance abuse and
multiple suicide attempts. In his time away from the game,
he’s nourished his mental health and delivered numerous
talks to youth about depression and the importance of
practicing self-confidence.
While Martin uses his retirement to
encourage children, Boldin now has more time to lobby
Congress. Months before his retirement, he shared his
personal commitment to end police violence against Black
people at a congressional forum on criminal justice reform.
Boldin’s cousin, Corey
Jones, was shot and killed by a Florida plainclothes
officer in 2015. The killing motivated Boldin to conclude:
“At this time, I feel drawn to make the larger fight for
human rights a priority. My life’s purpose is bigger than
football.”
Lifetime activist and Hall of Fame
football titan Jim Brown, despite his
recent comments about Colin Kaepernick shocked the
league by retiring in his prime in 1966. Iconic protests of
the ’60s and demands for Black power profoundly impacted
Brown and how he prioritized football. More than a half
century later, renewed demonstrations are prompting some
modern Black athletes to value Black lives more than white
ballgames.
In the Wake of Harvey, Is It Time to Rethink How We Use
Buffalo Bayou Park?
Houston
has an extraordinary ability to bounce back from storms, but
it doesn't always happen overnight, and it's looking like it
will take a while for Buffalo Bayou Park, in particular, to
shake off Hurricane Harvey and get back to normal.
The water from Harvey is still rushing
through Buffalo Bayou Park — in parts of the park the
sloshing past the trunks of the trees closest to the bayou's
natural banks is the only sound you can hear, despite the
Houston traffic zooming by on either side. Silt covers the
lower banks and many of the trails while trash dangles like
the world's ugliest Christmas decorations from countless trees
along the way. It will likely be weeks before the bayou
recedes entirely.
But it's already clear that the water —
more than nine trillion gallons dumped on Houston during the
seemingly endless onslaught of rain at the end of August —
has done some serious damage to Eleanor Tinsley and other
sections of Buffalo Bayou Park.
Buffalo Bayou rose to a record 38.7 feet at
the Shepherd Drive bridge during the course of the hurricane,
and while the upper portions of the park weathered the storm
and the subsequent torrent of water that rushed down the
bayou, with little damage to the perennial gardens,
upper-level trees and trails on the higher portions of the
park, water swallowed the bottom two-thirds of the park. That
has made it difficult for the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, the
entity that oversees Eleanor Tinsley and the rest of the
160-acre Buffalo Bayou Park system below Shepherd Drive, to
actually assess the damage that has been done, let alone to
start making repairs. Johnny Steele Dog Park, wiped out in
every major flood in the past two years, is still underwater
post-Harvey and an odor, a mix of brackish water and a heavier
stench of manure, permeates much of the area near the bayou
banks throughout the park.
A lot of equipment has basically fritzed out
thanks to being doused in water, including the Wortham
Fountain and the nifty trail lighting system, as well as some
of the lighting at Lost Lake and the Water Works. (These two
cool features of the park system came through the hurricane
without any serious damage.)
Still, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership sought
to be as reassuring as possible about the problems caused by
the storm.
"Please know that Buffalo Bayou Park
was designed to flood, although we did not anticipate three
historic flooding events in one and a half years,"
Buffalo Bayou Partnership stated in a release issued about the
time staff began to wade in and start the cleanup process on
September 6. "Working with the Harris County Flood
Control District, designers from SWA, the park’s consultant
firm, created a landscape that helps channel runoff and
provides greater flood water conveyance capacity."
And as they pointed out, the design worked
on some levels. The stainless steel park signs, the benches
set firmly in concrete, trashcans and stair railings all held
up to the latest flood.
The
PINNACLE Center is free* for use to Fort Bend and City
of Houston residents that are ages 50 and above.
Dance Classes
– Line Dancing, Two Stepping and Swing Out
Veterans Assistance &
Social Service Assistance
Financial Planning
Knowledge is POWER DAY
Computer Classes
Table Games -
Bingo, Dominos and various Card Games
Marketplace Monday -
Vendors welcome on the 1st Monday of each
month
Verlander Leads Astros to First Division Title Since 2001
With
a 7-1 win over the Seattle Mariners on Sunday, the Houston
Astros won their first-ever A.L.
West division title and first division crown since 2001.
The Astros, who surged to first place in the
division in May and never looked back, will make their first
postseason appearance since 2015, when they fell to the future
World Series champions Kansas City Royals in the A.L.
divisional series.
Through much of this summer, the Astros were
the best team in the American League and were on pace for more
than 100 wins, earning comparisons to the 1998 squad, which
won 102 games. But Houston suffered a series of injuries and
limped out of the All-Star Break, allowing the Cleveland
Indians — helped in no small part by an A.L.-record, 22-game
winning streak — to claim the league's best records.
If that pace holds through the final 12 days
of regular season play, this means the Astros will play the
division winner with the third-best record in the first round
of the playoffs, likely the Boston Red Sox. In their only
series so far, the Red Sox took two of three games. But
Houston visits Boston for the final four games of the regular
season — a coincidence that could potentially mean the teams
would meet for nine games in a row.
Sunday brought another bit of good news —
further validation that the Astros made the right choice in
acquiring ace right-hander Justin Verlander from the Detroit
Tigers at the end of August. Verlander struck out ten batters
in seven innings, increasing his record to a perfect 3-0 in as
many starts for Houston this season.
The Astros will need Verlander and No. 2
starter Dallas Keuchel to supplement the team's hot bats to
make a deep playoff run. With the division clinched, the
Astros can afford to rest weary players and enter October with
a fresh lineup. Expect second baseman Jose Altuve to keep
hacking away, though. With a league-leading .348 batting
average, Altuve is on track for his third A.L. batting title
in four years and is a strong candidate for MVP.