Know The Issues
Learn more about the issues NAACP West Palm Beach tackles every day to dismantle racism and build Black political, social, and economic power.
Education
The State Board of Education approved new academic standards for instruction about African American history.
Black community leaders, including a former Palm Beach County School Board member, sharply denounced Florida's new education standards Wednesday, packing a school board meeting to plead for teaching "facts, not fiction" about Black history.
More than 30 speakers pinned "Black facts, not history" buttons on their shirts and shared their disgust with the new state standards, which they said attempt to reframe chattel slavery.
"This governor and his cronies are attempting to tie the hands of teachers and imprison the minds of children," said Debra Robinson, a former school board member and chair of the Coalition for Black Student Achievement. "We are here to announce that we will not let that happen. Not on our watch. Not in our county."
RACE & JUSTICE
The Challenge
When we talk about race and justice, we're talking about the ways that discrimination, policing, prosecutions, and incarceration practices impact Black communities.
Our criminal justice system is shaped by biased policing and unfair judicial precedents, rooted in anti-Blackness and racial disparity. The emotional, mental, physical, and financial impact on our communities is a tangible experience for millions of Black people in the U.S. The cost of an unjust justice system is high.
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Black people are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites.
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65 percent of Black adults have felt targeted because of their race. Similarly, approximately 35 percent of Latino and Asian adults have felt targeted because of race.
Inner City Innovators started out as a movement of individuals who grew up in the hood, still lived in the hood, and grew tired of the conditions plaguing their hood. After experiencing one of the deadliest summers on record for West Palm Beach, Ricky Aiken and Terryon Chapman began organizing their peers and stepping up to the plate in order to advocate for their community.
Health & Wellness
Black Nurse Practitioners of
Palm Beach County
THE CHALLENGE
Everyone has a right to good health and well-being, but America's promise has fallen short. Individual health does not exist in a vacuum. It is tied to the community conditions in which we are born, grow, live, work, and age. For people of color, geography, income, and race are longstanding predictors of health outcomes. The roots of historic inequity run deep in fragmented public and private health systems and disadvantaged opportunities across the lifespan.
NAACP is committed to ending racial health disparities. Our aim is not simply disease prevention, but to create an inclusive culture of healthy people and communities. We collaborate with communities through coordinated action to improve the social determinants of health — racism, poverty, exclusion, inferior schools, unsafe housing, poor nutrition, and toxic environments. We disrupt the status quo by working at the intersection of policy and systems change to drive sustainable impact for the sake of our future.
Throughout the world, the coronavirus pandemic has underscored how important it is for a healthy nation to offer its residents robust health care options. In the U.S., our collective unwillingness to ensure affordable, accessible, quality, and timely health care for all has cost too many Black lives and unnecessarily compromised our nation's health and economic security. The U.S. is overdue for a health care system that truly bolsters health for all its people rather than fragments them further.
The Nurse Practitioner Council and the Black Nurse Practitioners of Palm Beach County were honored with a proclamation during a recent City of Riviera Beach's Council meeting, by City Councilwoman Shirley Lanier, officially recognizing November 12th through November 18th, 2023, as Nurse Practitioner Week in Riviera Beach.