Commentary

Have you ever visited the Eubie Blake National Jazz Institute and Cultural Center? I have. Do you know who Eubie Blake was? I didn’t. That is, not until his life story would significantly impact my own. This experience began at age 16, when I was in desperate need of a summer job. In my search for that job, I was directed to apply for work through the Mayor’s Office of Art and Culture, back when there was such an office. t was there that I met a rather stern, yet gregarious, woman named Hattie Harrison. Ms. Harrison was an esteemed member of the Maryland legislature and a Baltimore public school teacher. I remember sitting in her office undergoing an examination of sorts, as if she were trying to determine if I would be a good fit for what was to come.

The COVID-19 pandemic delayed routine screenings and primary care visits, leading to worse health outcomes for many Marylanders and their families. Unfortunately, as we continue to emerge from the pandemic, health insurers are making matters worse and interfering with the relationship between patients and physicians by blocking access to critical and timely care. To alleviate these barriers, Maryland lawmakers must take action to help improve access to health care for patients, particularly those living with chronic conditions.

The brutal killing of Tyre Nichols is yet another example of police violence against Black people, and again raises the familiar question: What will it take to end it? In Maryland, let’s start with the truth. Five years ago, Eastern Shore teenager Anton Black died when police chased, tased, and pinned him facedown for six minutes. Led by then-Chief David Fowler, Maryland medical examiners ruled his death an “accident,” claiming Anton died of “natural” causes due to a heart condition, alleged drug use, and bipolar disorder. Despite video showing officers tasing, tackling and forcibly restraining Anton, the autopsy claimed “no evidence” linked police restraint to his death.

Maryland's housing shortage has a state House committee taking notice as a veteran in Annapolis called on the Legislature to take action. Topics in the discussion included both renovation and renters. “As a committee and as a Legislature, we need to focus on the No. 1 problem, which is the lack of (housing) supply,” chair of the House Environment and Transportation Committee, Del. Kumar Barve, D-Montgomery, said during the hearing.

It is hardly a secret within America’s newsrooms that our profession has lost much of the public’s trust. Gallup, which has polled “Confidence in Institutions” for decades, found that, as of last summer, just 16% of Americans had either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers — down from 25% a decade earlier and 35% in 2002. For TV news, the latest results were even worse. Only 11% of Americans trust it; 53% don’t. Most of us, in or out of the news media, would surely agree that this is a bad thing. We were a saner country when we could argue from a common set of uncontested facts. But we have a harder time agreeing on why trust in media collapsed and, more crucially, on how it can be restored.

There is a public health crisis being forced upon the transgender community — and lack of access to life-saving health care for transgender Marylanders is one of the biggest barriers we face. Passing the 2023 Trans Health Equity Act (House Bill 283 sponsored by Del. Anne Kaiser with 56 cosponsors and Senate Bill 460 sponsored by Sen. Mary Washington with 12 cosponsors) is a critical step towards correcting this injustice. Maryland’s transgender community, like many transgender communities across the nation, is in a particularly vulnerable place. Widespread discrimination and harassment, victimization, criminalization, and lack of access to resources and care, all leave trans Marylanders with alarmingly high rates of homelessness, joblessness, mental health and substance use challenges, and more.

I had just gotten home from dinner with good friends when I settled in to watch President Biden deliver his State of the Union Address. I should have stuck with the Terp game. It began in a very upbeat, positive, and bipartisan manner.  The President congratulated Kevin McCarthy on being elected Speaker of the House without mentioning that it took nearly a week to earn that gavel. The President turned toward the McCarthy and said, “Mr. Speaker, I look forward to working together.” He also took time to recognize Senator Mitch McConnell as the longest serving Senate leader in history. You could almost hear “Kumbaya” playing in the background.

During the first term of Barack Obama’s presidency, my then 8-year-old daughter asked a simple question. “Why do Black people have a special month?” I responded with a mini-lecture on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow and the efforts of the Harvard-educated historian Carter G. Woodson, who championed Negro History Week. She calmly took it in and responded with another question: “When the bad men were kidnapping people from Africa and turning them into slaves, was the president Black?” I laughed, although her question made perfect sense. The only president she had known was Black; so why couldn’t a Black person have served as president prior to the Civil War? Afterward, I found myself reflecting on her underlying point. Why, in modern America, do we even have Black History Month?