Obama’s reelection sparks racially charged protest at Ole Miss

Around midnight on election night, news spread on Twitter that a group of University of Mississippi students were protesting President Obama's reelection. The crowd quickly grew from a few dozen to as many as several hundred, and the rhetoric took an ugly turn as some people shouted racial slurs. [Read more]

Marine Corps Starts Ad Campaign to Try to Diversify Officer Ranks

The United States Marine Corps, long dominated by white men, is starting a marketing campaign to attract more minorities and women into its officer corps. 

The effort kicks off on Thursday with television commercials during professional and college football games, glossy advertisements in sports magazines and a series of Internet videos. Titled “Fighting With Purpose,” it features a black lieutenant and a female captain who are actively engaged in their home communities as well as in leading Marines. [Read more]

Chart: Almost Every Obama Conspiracy Theory Ever

Mother Jones magazine documents the "fake birth certificates, ghostwriters, teleprompters, a teenage trip to Mars, and more of the most paranoid and bizarro Obama conspiracy theories out there. [Find it here]

AP poll: Majority harbor prejudice against blacks

In all, 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey.

When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell. [Read more]

The Gender Pay Gap

“A problem as long-standing and widespread as the pay gap, however, cannot be solved by the actions of individual women alone. Employers and the government have important roles to play.” [Read more]

If women have not achieved full equal opportunity, is it possible that blacks have not either? If the government has to step in to protect women, is it likely that we will need the government to step to ensure equal opportunity for blacks too?

Minneapolis Acts on Employment Equity

Minneapolis recently became the first city in the nation to adopt a resolution promoting racial equity in employment. The resolution declares that institutional racism "is a primary reason for unemployment disparities" and requires the city to take action to make sure that people of color have a fair shot at government jobs, promotions, and contracts.[Read more]

Summary Discussion: Transporting Black Men to Good Jobs

"Although African American men are underrepresented in the construction industry, they do hold jobs in construction and lost jobs when the industry took a hit during the recession. Roughly one-quarter of the decline in employment for black men from 2007 to 2011 was due to their loss of jobs in construction. Investing in transportation infrastructure is a good mechanism to improve labor market conditions for black male construction workers.

"EPI estimates that African Americans could obtain as much as 14 percent of all jobs created by large public transit investment projects.¹ Blacks are only about 11 percent of the labor force, so these projects bring a slightly disproportionate benefit to black workers. About three-quarters of the jobs created from infrastructure investments go to males, and most of the jobs pay medium-to-high wages. Projects such as addressing the backlog of repair work in all of our public transit systems would bring a tremendous benefit to the nation as a whole and provide opportunities for blacks to obtain about 160,000 jobs.²

"African Americans could gain an even larger share of the jobs . . ." [Read more]

Moving Beyond Affirmative Action

"Race-based affirmative action has been a woefully inadequate weapon in the arsenal against inequality. It treats the symptoms but not the root causes of an underlying social problem. It is limited to the more selective private and public colleges (those that accept fewer than half of all applicants), which together account for about 20 percent of all freshmen. By my estimate, between 10,000 and 15,000 black and Hispanic students enroll in selective colleges every year through race-conscious policies. This is about 1 percent of the entering freshman class nationwide and just 1 percent of all black and Hispanic 18-year-olds" [Read more]

Racial Stereotypes and Social Media

From Colbert King's summary:

Baylor University assistant professor Mia Moody did a study of social media stereotyping of Barack and Michelle Obama; her findings appeared in the journal New Media & Culture.

Moody researched hundreds of Facebook groups and pages. She found numerous examples of the president and the first lady being targeted with racist and sexist rhetoric that, not surprisingly, also indirectly spread hatred toward women and blacks.

. . .

Moody observed that, while the group professed to dislike Obama not because of his race, most comments on the page attacked the president “personally with racial slurs.” Just one example: “Obama needs to step down and go back to Africa with the rest of the coons!! He’s nothing but a jigaboo and spear chucker!!”



The scholarly article:

New Media-Same Stereotypes: An Analysis of Social Media Depictions of President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama

Mia Moody

Baylor University

Abstract
To remain relevant, it is necessary for media scholars to test theories in new media environments. Building on feminist and critical race theory, this textual analysis investigates Facebook photos and pages targeting President Barack and Michelle Obama in 2011-12. Findings indicate Facebook fans build on historical stereotypes and cultural narratives to frame the two negatively. Representations often depict them as evil, animalistic and socially deviant. Study findings demonstrate that historical representations of Blacks are strong and have an impact on modern portrayals. This topic is particularly important today in this age dubbed “post-racial” to depict an era in which U.S. citizens elected the first black president. In addition to identifying the nuances of Facebook hate groups, this study explores historical representations of African Americans, discusses how they transcend to a new media platform and offers implications for future research. To navigate the rapidly changing media climate, students and media scholars must learn how to read and critically dissect Web content. This paper provides a good foundation upon which to build.

A Three-Pronged Approach to Jobs for African Americans

1. Direct-Public Sector Employment:
   In the past 50 years, the private-sector has not been able to put sufficient numbers of blacks to work. It appears that the only way we will approach full-employment for black workers is by having the public-sector directly hire workers from high-unemployment communities.
2. Job Training with Job Placement:
   Sectoral job training programs are good, but even after receiving sectoral job training, blacks may still be hired at lower rates than other groups. Because of the strength of the bias against black workers, organizations must be assessed on their ability to place black workers in jobs and not simply on their ability to train them.
3. Wage Subsidies for Hiring Workers from High Unemployment Areas:
   Wage subsidies targeted to hiring workers from high-unemployment communities in businesses in high-unemployment communities are also likely to be an effective employment strategy for blacks and for the economic development of black communities.

[Read more]

Life Expectancy Shrinks for Less-Educated Whites in U.S.

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance. [Read more]

EVENT: Transporting Black Men to Good Jobs

Transporting Black Men to Good Jobs: Transportation Infrastructure, Transportation Jobs, and Public Transit By race and gender, black men have the highest unemployment rate. Among male workers with a high-school diploma, black men have the lowest average hourly wage. This briefing will show how investments in transportation infrastructure, transportation jobs, and public transit can be an effective way to increase black male employment in good jobs. Wednesday, September 26, 2012 8:30 - 10:00 am Rayburn House Office Building - Gold Room (2168) 45 Independence Avenue, SW Washington, DC 20515 Coffee and a light breakfast will be available. This event is open to the public and free, but please REGISTER HERE. Presenters Algernon Austin Director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy Economic Policy Institute Jeff Brooks Administrative Vice President and Director of the Transit Division Transport Workers Union of America Anita M. Hairston Senior Associate for Transportation Policy PolicyLink Michelle Holder Senior Labor Market Analyst Community Service Society of New York Brian Turner Executive Director Transportation Learning Center Moderator Linda Harris Director of Youth Policy CLASP

Segregated Schooling by Race and Class Increases

In spite of declining residential segregation for black families and large-scale movement to the suburbs in most parts of the country, school segregation remains very high for black students.  It is also double segregation by both race and poverty.  Nationwide, the typical black student is now in a school where almost two out of every three classmates (64%) are low-income, nearly double the level in schools of the typical white or Asian student (37% and 39%, respectively).  New York, Illinois, and Michigan consistently top the list of the most segregated states for black students.  Among the states with significant black enrollments, blacks are least likely to attend intensely segregated schools in Washington, Nebraska, and Kansas. [Read more]

Four questions for Mitt Romney

(1) Under the federal tax code, a couple with two children earning less than $26,400 will pay no federal income tax because the standard deduction and exemptions reduce their taxable income to zero. The Tax Policy Center has explained that this reflects components of “the basic progressive income tax structure that intend to exempt subsistence levels of income from tax and to adjust for differences in ability to pay based on family size."

Do you disagree with that approach? Do you believe that this family’s tax burden is too low? If so, how would you raise it?  Eliminate the deduction for children?  Raise marginal rates? Make the tax code less progressive? [Read more]

Children exposed to violence declines

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4472

Difference in African-American and Standard-American Sign Languages

Carolyn McCaskill remembers exactly when she discovered that she couldn’t understand white people. It was 1968, she was 15 years old, and she and nine other deaf black students had just enrolled in an integrated school for the deaf in Talledega, Ala.

When the teacher got up to address the class, McCaskill was lost.

“I was dumbfounded,” McCaskill recalls through an interpreter. “I was like, ‘What in the world is going on?’”

The teacher’s quicksilver hand movements looked little like the sign language McCaskill had grown up using at home with her two deaf siblings and had practiced at the Alabama School for the Negro Deaf and Blind, just a few miles away. It wasn’t a simple matter of people at the new school using unfamiliar vocabularly; they made hand movements for everyday words that looked foreign to McCaskill and her fellow black students. [Read more]

Mitt Romney: Do you believe in a safety net?

(1) Under the federal tax code, a couple with two children earning less than $26,400 will pay no federal income tax because the standard deduction and exemptions reduce their taxable income to zero. The Tax Policy Center has explained that this reflects components of "the basic progressive income tax structure that intend to exempt subsistence levels of income from tax and to adjust for differences in ability to pay based on family size."

Do you disagree with that approach? Do you believe that this family’s tax burden is too low? If so, how would you raise it?  Eliminate the deduction for children?  Raise marginal rates? Make the tax code less progressive? [Read more]

Single-black-father families see declines in poverty

"By family type, for all families with children under 18 years old, only families headed by single¹ fathers showed a real decline. This decline appears to be driven primarily by a large drop in the poverty rate for families headed by single black men." [Read more]

More Upward Educational Mobility in Britain

"British schools now do a better job than American schools of lifting students up the social ladder, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said in a report published Tuesday. In Britain, a student whose parents never graduated from high school has a 60 percent chance of attending college, while in the United States the odds are just 29 percent, one of the lowest levels among the 34 countries with advanced economies that make up the O.E.C.D., which is based in Paris." --NYTimes.

Who is to Blame for Black Unemployment?

“The federal government—the president and Congress working together—and the Federal Reserve can positively or negatively affect unemployment for blacks and in general,” Austin says. “We need to talk about how do we build an economy where everyone who wants a job can find a job; how do we create an economy than can produce full employment for blacks?” [Read more]