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Page 10 THE REVERE ADVOCATE – FRIDAY, JANUARY 14, 2022 Mayor Arrigo Announces Microenterprise Grant Program to Support Local Businesses and Protect Jobs in Revere Nearly Half a Million Dollars in Grant Dollars Will Provide Assistance to Small Businesses REVERE - Mayor Brian M. Arrigo and the Revere Department of Planning and Community Development (DPCD) this week announced $415,000 in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funding to establish a Microenterprise Grant Program. The program is aimed at microenterprises and aims to help those small entrepreneurs as they withstand the continued pressures of operating in a COVID environment. Micro-enterprises are defi ned as businesses with no more than fi ve employees - such as hair and nail salons and small family-run operations. “The microenterprise grant program is an opportunity to assist our smallest Revere businesses through the third year of the pandemic,” said Mayor Brian Arrigo. “The CDBG program has been instrumental in assisting our business owners - the new microenterprise grant program only furthers this progress and sets a precedent for economic relief in the City of Revere.” The maximum grant award for each business is $15,000 to cover up to three months of operating expenses - the average grant is expected to be approximately $10,000. Applications for this program will be live on January 18 at www.revere.org/ smallbusiness and are open until February 8 at 11:59 PM. Upon the closure of the application period, the City’s DPCD will review applications for completeness, conduct a preliminary eligibility determination, collate materials, and begin the qualitative evaluation process for applicants who meet all deadlines and eligibility requirements. The City's DPCD reserves the right to deny or defer review to ineligible or incomplete applications. DPCD has also outlined a series of resources to support businesses through the application process, including: • A grant eligibility and application basics webinar will take place on Wednesday, January 19 at 11 AM to answer any questions business owners may have. Registration is required for this webinar and you can do so at www.revere.org/smallbusinessgrant. Spanish interpretation is available. • Applications will be available in both English and Spanish. Additional translations may be available upon request. • In-person technical assistance sessions will take place on January 25 from 5:30-7:00 PM and February 2 from 9:0011:00 AM in the City Council Chambers (281 Broadway, Revere). Support in both Spanish and Arabic will be available inperson at these seminars. • Questions about the grant application should be directed to smallbusiness@revere.org. “After hearing from so many small businesses who are still hurting from the pandemic, I am so very happy that we are launching another small business grant that will provide fi - nancial support and stabilization for microenterprise businesses,” said John Festa, Business Liaison for the City of Revere DPCD. “By hosting an information webinar and conducting technical assistance sessions, we hope to create a more accessible application process for Revere small-business owners and entrepreneurs.” This work coupled with the city's overall master plan, Next Stop Revere, will create the tools and policies necessary for the next generation of success in Revere. Visit the Department of Planning and Community Development’s webpage on revere.org for more information. Like us on Facebook advocate newspaper Facebook.com/Advocate.news.ma ~ OP-ED ~ Teach MLK, Not CRT By Dr. Paul G. Kengor H ere’s a critical question for enthusiasts of critical race theory, particularly its growing number of advocates on the religious left: How did MLK do what he did without CRT? That is, how did the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. manage to accomplish what he did without critical race theory? MLK preceded CRT, which began its rise in the 1970s, exploding in American universities still later. King was assassinated in 1968. A few more questions: • How did Rosa Parks do what she did without this very, very narrow ideological theory known as CRT? • How about Thurgood Marshall? • How did the NAACP, founded in 1909, ever get off the ground without CRT? • How about Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, and the Freedom Riders? • How about Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass? • What about Abraham Lincoln? • Juneteenth long preceded critical race theory. How was that possible? Returning to the Rev. King, how did he manage to accomplish what he did without critical race theory? The answer is obvious: MLK didn’t need CRT. Neither did any of these other fi gures. Neither do you. King, in fact, would have rejected CRT, least of all because of its roots in Marxist critical theory, whose origins are the destructive Frankfurt School. I asked David Garrow, the preeminent biographer of King (and certainly no conservative), about King and CRT. “CRT so post-dates him that there’s no connection,” Garrow told me, “but MLK would have most certainly rejected ANY identitybased classifi cation of human beings.” No question. For King, you were to be judged by the content of your individual character, not lumped into an ethnic category based on the color of your skin. You were a child of God made in the image of God. You were defi ned as a person, not stereotyped according to a group. As St. Paul stated, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The Christian faith, which of course was King’s faith, rejects these identity-based classifi cations of human beings. King’s associates who survived him certainly rejected CRT. Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker was close to the Rev. King. He stated: “Today, too many ‘remedies’—such as Critical Race Theory, the increasingly fashionable postMarxist/post-modernist approach that analyzes society as institutional group power structures rather than on spiritual or one-to-one human level—are taking us in the wrong direction: separating even school children into explicit racial groups, and emphasizing diff erences instead of similarities.” Walker stressed: “The roots of CRT are planted in entirely diff erent intellectual soil. It begins with ‘blocs’ (with each person assigned to an identity or economic bloc, as in Marxism).” For the record, I get asked constantly about the Rev. King’s views on Marxism and socialism. They are frustratingly and notoriously diffi cult to pin down. Garrow would put King in the camp of some form of “democratic socialism,” probably closer to that originally envisioned by “social justice” Catholic Michael Harrington during his founding of the Democratic Socialists of America in the early 1980s, a DSA far removed from today’s DSA—the DSA of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Cori Bush. Today’s DSA is saturated with members who are sympathetic to Marxism—what its leadership calls “our 94,915 comrades”—and to atheism (and also virulently anti-Israel, if not anti-Semitic). Harrington would have been very troubled by this. It was precisely the atheism of communism that bothered the Rev. King. “Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God,” noted King. “I strongly disagreed with communism’s ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fi xed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything—force, violence murder, lying—is a justifi able means to the ‘millennial’ end.” King would have vehemently rejected the embrace of Marxism by the likes of BLM founder Patrisse Cullors, a stalwart proponent of critical theory generally and CRT in particular. “We are trained Marxists,” says Cullors. “We are super-versed [in] ideological theories.” If only Cullors knew what a terrible racist Karl Marx was. I’ve written about this at length in articles and books. Both Marx and Engels nastily fl ung around the n-word; that is, the actual American-English racial epithet for black people. It’s alarming to read letters between Marx and Engels in German and be struck by the n-word jumping off the page. Of course, Cullors probably has no idea of that. She attended our universities. She would have learned only good things about Marx and Engels, and about critical theory. Dr. King would surely recoil at statements like the one issued at Thanksgiving from Cullors’ Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation blasting what it dubs “White-supremacist-capitalism.” The statement declared: “White-supremacist-capitalism uses policing to protect profits and steal Black life. Skip the Black Friday sales and buy exclusively from Black-owned businesses.” The shocking statement continued: “Capitalism doesn’t love Black people.” It’s hard to imagine the Rev. King engaging in similar deeply divisive Marxist-based rhetoric. This is what can happen when the ugly specter of communism is dragged into civil rights. It divides. That’s what Marxism has always done. It’s a toxic ideology with corrosive eff ect. All of which brings me back to my opening question: Why do so many people on the left, and particularly the religious left, feel the need to embrace critical race theory in order to teach about the nation’s past racial sins? Believe me, I know. I’m hearing from them constantly, especially as modern times have prompted me to regrettably write about CRT, which for years I avoided like the plague because it’s so incendiary. Few modern topics have become as divisive, which is no surprise, given that CRT divides. It divides people into groups pitted against one another, into categories of oppressed vs. oppressor. And your group defi nes you. This certainly fl ies in the face of the Judeo-Christian conception of all individuals as children of God. King and Parks and the others, to the contrary, united everyone with their struggle. Sure, they were opposed by racists of their day. Today, however, they are national icons, widely respected if not revered by all sides. We’ve grown so much that there’s now a national holiday for King. Everyone celebrates it. It was approved by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, even given Reagan’s early questions about the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When Reagan was MLK | SEE Page 16

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