MARC H. MORIAL

(NNPA)—“No more hurting people. Peace.”—Eight-year-old Martin Richard, a victim of the Boston Marathon bombing

by Dr. Boyce Watkins

If you’ve never heard of Felicia the Goat, you’ll know about her soon. Felicia the Goat is the main character in a recent Mountain Dew commercial, created in part by Tyler the Creator.  The video shows Felicia in a line-up of criminal suspects, all of whom may be charged with a crime

A new study shows that the proposed expansion of Medicaid under the federal Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare) would dramatically boost Pennsylvania’s economy and save the state hundreds of millions but Gov. Tom Corbett remains skeptical and reluctant to support the expansion.

The governor should approve expansion which would provide Medicaid coverage to everyone below 133 percent of the federal poverty level, or about 542,000 more Pennsylvanians, including 25 percent of those uninsured.

The governor so far has balked at Medicaid expansion.

Christine Cronkright, a spokeswoman for Corbett, said the governor has not made a decision on what to do about the proposed Medicaid expansion. She said he was concerned about whether the federal government would allow continuation of the gross-receipt tax now imposed on managed care organizations in Pennsylvania.

Earlier studies by the Rand Corp. and the Pennsylvania Economy League said Medicaid expansion in Pennsylvania could create tens of thousands of new jobs and generate billions in economic activity.

The League report showed that Medicaid expansion would save about $4 billion in state health care spending over the next decade as people receiving state-funded coverage would shift to Medicaid and “uncompensated care” costs covered by the state would significantly drop. The League said Medicaid expansion could save the state $1.5 billion over 10 years.

Now a new analysis by the state’s Independent Fiscal Office, a nonpartisan agency, also projects savings and revenue to the state from the expansion of Medicaid.

The IFO report also concluded that the state would save by shifting medical costs of General Assistance recipients to the federal government, and expanding tax revenues as the result of roughly $3 billion in new federal funds going into the Pennsylvania economy.

State Sen. Vincent Hughes said in a meeting last week with the Philadelphia Tribune’s editorial board that now three separate independent studies have shown that Medicaid expansion would dramatically help the state.

Hughes pointed out how the money saved and revenue created from Medicaid expansion could be a potential source for funds for the financially-strapped Philadelphia School District, job creation and other pressing needs in the state.

As a former prosecutor and Attorney General, the governor should be used to making judgments on the basis of evidence. Based on the evidence presented Medicaid expansion would be good for Pennsylvania.

(Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune)

by Dion Rabouin

(RTNS)--I got the opportunity to go off on a lengthy diatribe to a friend this week about the harm of White Jesus when I found out that History Channel’s “The Bible” will soon be made into a feature film. The network, Mark Burnett and his wife Roma Downey will be bringing White Jesus, White Moses and the devil that kind of looks like President Obama to the multiplex to inundate a new generation of children with the notions of White privilege and White supremacy.

(If you want a better understanding of White privilege, the ability to recolor the Messiah and make him in your own image, despite prevailing and obvious factual impediments is a good place to start.)

At this point, most people agree Jesus was not the blue-eyed surfer dude that is consistently depicted upon cathedral walls and in pop culture. But whenever I start talking about the generally accepted notion that Jesus was not White, the typical response is, “Why does it matter?”

The answer to this question was perfectly answered last year when a movie based on a popular book series chose to stay true to its depiction of Black characters, at least the auxiliary ones.

When “The Hunger Games” debuted in theaters – to an insane $155 million opening weekend – in March 2012 with a Black Rue, Thresh, and Cinna, folks took to Twitter and Facebook to collectively lose their minds.

“EWW rue is black?? I’m not watching,” said @Joe_Longley.

“why does rue have to be black not gonna lie kinda ruined the movie,” said @maggie_mcd11.

“Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad #ihatemyself” said @jasphperparas.

“The posts go on and on and on. It's not just a coupe [sic] of tweets, it's not just a coincidence,” wrote Jezebel’s Dodai Stewart, who cataloged the tweets. “There's an underlying rage, coming out as overt prejudice and plain old racism. Sternberg is called a ‘black b*tch,’ a ‘n*gger’ and one person writes that though he pictured Rue with ‘darker skin,’ he ‘didn't really take it all the way to black.’ It's as if that is the worst possible thing a person could be.”

Feel free to look at the tweets yourself, there are literally hundreds of them.

You could call this racism or you could call it the shock of living a life full of White privilege and then going into the multiplex to see heroes that suspiciously don’t look like you. You’re angry, you’re disappointed and you’re just so full of apathy for these Black characters, because, you know, “EWW.”

This is the harm of a White Jesus. It’s part of a theme in American culture that internalizes the superiority of whiteness. That message is imbued to White kids and Black kids and everyone else through the etiolation of all things good and pure. The most well-worn agent of this message is the archetype of an inexplicably White Jesus.

There’s a fantastic examination of the history of White Jesus in the book “The Color of Christ” that looks at how the image worked in concert with slavery and ensuing notions of race in the U.S.

“The birth, growth, and evolution of White Jesus imagery dating from the antebellum era and exploding in the twentieth century coincided with the birth of an American empire founded, in part, in notions of race,” said Paul Harvey who wrote the book along with Edward J. Blum. “The assault on that sacralization of whiteness through the civil rights years has not, and could not, defeat it entirely, and the depth of religiously-fueled sentiment directed against Obama suggests that as well.”

Essentially, it’s a lot more difficult to justify overtly heinous bigotry, like enslaving an entire race of people, or even seemingly innocuous racism when the son of the God you pray to before every meal is a Black man and His virgin mother is a Black woman. Conversely, it’s much easier to justify when they’re not.

Ask yourself the question, why would Jesus be White? The only possible explanation is that a historically accurate Jesus isn’t palatable to greater (White) society. That should invite the follow-up question, why is that?

Portraits of White Jesus by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were created to “honor” the kings of their time who were White, but why have they endured?

“This logic is perfectly cogent,” writes Chauncey DeVega in a piece for Alternet, “a racial project of exploitation and enslavement of non-whites by Europeans, one legitimized by a belief in the natural inferiority of people of color, the pseudo-science of the Great Chain of Being, a belief in the Curse of Ham as well as other myths, must, for reasons of practical necessity, be predicated on the existence of a ‘White’ God.”

While I disagree that the paleness of Jesus can be held responsible for the historical misdeeds of centuries of Europeans, it can be reasonably asserted that a White Jesus allows for a spirit of antipathy and degradation of people of color. That spirit can be seen in ritualistic slaughter and inhumane enslavement of historical masses in centuries past or on Twitter today.

Admittedly, no one knows what Jesus really looked like. Despite the depiction of a man with hair of wool and skin of copper from the Book of Revelation, which is actually an ethereal remembrance of Christ after death, not a depiction of his living self, we don’t have any descriptions to use. But we do have common sense, which tells us that a boy who was born in the Middle East, raised in Northern Africa and was a member of a group of people that were predominately dark-skinned is probably not going to look like Diogo Morgado, Jim Caviezel or any of the other benevolent Caucasians who have played Jesus over the years.

So, does it matter what color Jesus is? Yeah, it matters a lot.

Reprinted from the Atlanta Daily World