WE ARE HOUSEHOLDS AND FAMILIES, NOT GUINEA PIGS Join us at Louisville Metro Housing Authority (LMHA) Board Meeting: Tuesday, July 15 at 3pm at LMHA, 420 South Eight Street. Board meeting is open to public and starts at 3:30pm. But if they keep the smaller room it could fill up fast. Get there early. Bring a sign. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 14, 2014 Louisville social justice leaders to express concern on LMHA “experiment” on poor Black women and children. (Louisville, KY) On Tuesday, July 15 at 3:30pm people upset about what activists are calling a Louisville Metro housing Authority experimenton poor Black women and their children will converge on the board meeting at 420 South 8th Street to show their concerns. Participants have coordinated a creative way to express their distress and opposition to the experiment. While several cities have declined the HUD request to participate in the voucher rent study, Louisville and Lexington are moving ahead with plans to be part of it. The plan has moved ahead in Lexington, but strong public outcry in Louisville has slowed progress here. A planned vote by LMHA at the Tuesday board meeting has been postponed while LMHA hosts a national expert to convince locals that this study is legitimate. In particular, social justice leaders, including the Metro Housing Coalition, Louisville Showing Up for Racial Justice, Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, National Action Network, Metro Louisville Chapter, Women in Transition, Fairness Campaign, the ACLU of Kentucky and others have challenged the fact that the participants in the study are overwhelmingly Black. Concerns have also been raised that there is no opt out right by those being experimented on. Kathleen Parks, Co Chair of the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, summarizes the sense of outrage about the plan: From Slavery to Jim Crow, African Americans have been Americas favorite guinea pig because we were labled as brainless, useless, subhuman and inferior to Whites and they wonder why we dont trust this structurally imbalanced housing system that has the audacity to impose a culturally biased study on black women against their will...Seriously??? Chanelle Helm, a leader of Women in Transition, states We are households and families, not guinea pigs. According to a statement released by the ACLU: the study, if approved, would impose a new rent calculation formula upon a randomly selected group of participants that will have the effect of requiring those individuals to pay more in housing costs than those who are not chosen for the program. The ACLU argued that, in this context, the use of random selection to unequally distribute government benefits may run afoul of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Jul 2014 00:23:15 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015