African-American Boys Are More Likely to Be Viewed as Adults Than White Boys

"black boys are 18 times more likely to be tried as an adult than are white boys . . . for the exact same offenses." [Read more]

Weaker Background Checks Leads to Spike in Gun Homicides

In 2007, Missouri repealed a law requiring gun buyers to obtain a license demonstrating they'd first passed a background check. In the years that followed, the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research tracked the results. In the forthcoming issue of Journal of Urban Health, the center will release it's findings: The law's repeal was associated with an additional 55 to 63 murders per year in Missouri between 2008 and 2012. For more on the report, Audie Cornish speaks with Daniel Webster, the director of the center. [Listen to the story]

Jeopardy Contestants Avoid Black History Like the Plague

Happy Black History Month, everyone, courtesy of last night's all-white College Jeopardy panel! In the second round of play, the contestants sailed through five of the categories—including "International Cinema Showcase," "Weather Verbs," and "Kiwi Fauna"—but avoided the sixth like the, ahem, black plague. That category was "African-American History."

In other words, these kids were more confident in their knowledge of weird animals in New Zealand than black human beings in America. [Read more]

The Bias Against Black Bodies

Charles Blow provide a good overview of the biases in the criminal justice system against blacks (among other things) here.

Violent Crime Continues to Decline

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Tuesday that violent crimes, including murders, fell by 5.4 percent in the first six months of 2013 compared with the same period in 2012, continuing a long reduction in violent crime across the country. [Read more]

How Inequality Hurts Marriage

The problem is not that poor people fail to appreciate the importance of marriage, nor is it that poor and wealthy Americans differ in which factors they believe are important in a good marriage. The problem is that the same trends that have exacerbated inequality since 1980 — unemployment, juggling multiple jobs and so on — have also made it increasingly difficult for less wealthy Americans to invest the time and other resources needed to sustain a strong marital bond. [Read more]

Crist: Race was a reason GOP panned Obama hug

Former Florida governor Charlie Crist cited three reasons the hug with President Obama was so devastating to his standing in the Republican Party: "The fact that Obama was in Florida to talk about his stimulus plan, the president's Democratic Party affiliation and his race." [See the video.]

Howard U. makes Peace Corps top college list

Howard University, a school that prides itself on a history of social engagement, on Tuesday landed on a national list of colleges that send the most volunteers to the Peace Corps.

The university in Northwest Washington ranked 16th among medium-size schools in the number of undergraduate alumni volunteers serving in the corps. [Read more]

President Obama to launch major new effort to help young men of color

Obama on Thursday will announce a new White House initiative called “My Brother’s Keeper,” which will bring foundations and companies together to test a range of strategies across the country to support young male minorities, taking steps to keep them in school and out of the criminal justice system, a White House official said. He will also announce that his administration will launch a more vigorous evaluation of what policies work best and publicize results to school systems and others across the country. [Read more]

Intensive Small-Group Tutoring and Counseling Helps Struggling Students

A new paper being released Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests a promising approach for helping the most challenged students, who often arrive in high school several years behind their peers.

The study, which was conducted by a team led by Jens Ludwig, the co-director of the University of Chicago Urban Education Lab, provided a program of intense tutoring, in combination with group behavioral counseling, to a group of low-income ninth- and 10th-grade African-American youths with weak math skills, track records of absences or disciplinary problems. Those students learned in an eight-month period the equivalent of what the average American high school student learns in math over three years of school, as measured by standardized test scores, over and above what a similar group of students who did not receive the tutoring or counseling did. [Read more]

Racism May Accelerate Aging in African American Men

A new University of Maryland-led study reveals that racism may impact aging at the cellular level. Researchers found signs of accelerated aging in African American men who reported high levels of racial discrimination and who had internalized anti-Black attitudes. Findings from the study, which is the first to link racism-related factors and biological aging, are published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. [Read more]

Obama Commutes Sentences for 8 in Crack Cocaine Cases

President Obama, expanding his push to curtail severe penalties in drug cases, on Thursday commuted the sentences of eight federal inmates who were convicted of crack cocaine offenses. Each inmate has been imprisoned for at least 15 years, and six were sentenced to life in prison. [Read more]

Tackling a Racial Gap in Breast Cancer Survival

Despite 20 years of pink ribbon awareness campaigns and numerous advances in medical treatment that have sharply improved survival rates for women with breast cancer in the United States, the vast majority of those gains have largely bypassed black women. [Read more]

Santa’s skin color flies right over kids’ heads

The color of Santa’s skin — though a hotly debated topic among adults this week — pretty much means bupkis to the kids mobbing Kris Kringle at a Hyattsville mall. That red suit means loot. And it basically ends right there. “I’m just excited to see him, and I want him to bring me some doll babies,” Dae’Lese, 6, said as she waited in line at the Mall at Prince Georges, which features one of the region’s few African American Santas. But his race wasn’t what brought Dae’Lese and her mom, Masche Williams, 26, to the mall. “I don’t care if he’s yellow, black, green. And she doesn’t care — she’s so excited to see him because he brings toys,” Williams said. [Read more]

South Africa's Unfinished Revolution

For all his remarkable achievements, Nelson Mandela died with his dream for South Africa incomplete. Democracy and peace were attained, yet real racial harmony, social justice and equality seem, in some ways, further away than ever. 


South Africa’s economy still stifles the aspirations of most of its black citizens — a situation that threatens the sustainability of the project of national reconciliation that is a central part of the Mandela legacy. [Read more]

Some Are Freaking Out Because Miss France is Tan

“I’m proud to represent a multicultural France,” gushed Flora Coquerel last Saturday as she accepted the title of Miss France 2014. Unfortunately, some of her countrymen did not feel the same kind of egalitarian pride.


Within minutes, social media was drowned in comments: Miss France set Twitter on fire with over 1.1 million tweets that night, according to TF1, Gala, and Le Télégramme. And a portion of those comments were horrifying: “I’m not a racist but shouldn’t the Miss France contest only be open to white girls?” to “Fuck, a n***er” or “Death to foreigners.” Hateful tweeters put up offensive collages like this.

[Read more]

The Real Lessons from the PISA Results

What the top-scoring PISA nations do: (1) invest in early childhood education; (2) target resources to the most disadvantaged children; (3) provide teachers with time to prepare lessons and collaborate; (4) have a robust curriculum; (5) use tests to diagnose, not punish; and (6) foster partnerships between all educational stakeholders, not battles.

Many blacks and Latinos have no retirement savings, study shows

More often than not, blacks and Latinos benefit little from the tax breaks and other policy initiatives aimed at bolstering retirement security because they typically have no money to save for retirement in IRAs and other vehicles outside the workplace, according to Diane Oakley, executive director of the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS), which conducted the study.[Read more]

U.S. poverty rate decreased over past half-century thanks to safety-net programs

While the government has helped keep poverty at bay, the economy by itself has failed to improve the lives of the very poor over the past 50 years. Without taking into account the role of government policy, more Americans — 29 percent — would be in poverty today, compared with 27 percent in 1967. [Read more]

Hoop Dreams Versus Hoop Reality

“Growing up in a wealthier neighborhood is a major, positive predictor of reaching the NBA for both black and white men.”

 

“It’s expensive for a kid to make a traveling AAU squad,” the coach said. “Our best players have parents who support them, travel with them, and provide the money to make it possible for them to be on the team. Yes, from time to time, there’s a promising kid who might make our team but just can’t afford to because his family isn’t there to support him.” [Read More]