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GETTING ALONG WITH 300 MILLION AMERICANS WHO AREN'T QUITE LIKE YOU
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PEOPLE: THREE CENTURIES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY TOLD BY THOSE WHO LIVED IT. THE HEAD NEGRO IN CHARGE SYNDROME WE WILL BE HEARD: WOMEN'S STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL POWER
BLACK GAY, LESBIAN,
BI INDIAN LATINO WOMEN |
APRIL 2008 BEFORE THE GLASS CEILING: HARD FLOORS PROGRESS REPORT A report released this week by the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Women's Voices. Women Vote details the difficulties single women face in today's economy. Forty percent make under $30,000 a year, less than married people or single men. Of 12.2 million single-parent households in the United States, more than 10 million are headed by single women. Single women still suffer unequal pay. They make only 56 cents to the married man's dollar. Overall, women's median wages pay only 77 cents for every dollar men earn. Even after last year's minimum wage raise -- the first in a decade -- an employee working 40 hours a week at minimum wage only earns $15,080, barely above the poverty line for a family of two ($14,000) and under the poverty line for a family of three ($17,600). Improving access to higher education will also help single women close the wage gap; currently, 84 percent of single mothers do not have a college degree. Just yesterday, the Washington Post reported that nearly 50 student lenders -- 12 percent of the market -- "have stopped issuing federally guaranteed loans in recent weeks because of paralysis in the credit markets," making it harder for single women to afford college. With over 35 percent of children born to single women in 2005, single women have a large stake in their children's future. The average cost of child care can range anywhere between $3,000 and $13,000 a year per child -- an enormous burden for struggling single women. The United States and Australia are the only industrialized countries that don't require employers to offer paid maternity leave for new mothers, though some states. The housing crisis has a disproportionate effect on single women as well, as they are more likely to be subprime borrowers. They also spend proportionally more on housing than single men. "Unmarried women need a president who will make affordable housing a priority." Finally, "More than a third -- 35 percent -- of unmarried women are over the age of 50 and face retirement on their own rather than with combined savings with a spouse," and older, single women are one of the poorest demographic groups in the United States. Health coverage is a particularly important issue for women. Four in 10 women have a chronic condition that requires ongoing medical care -- a significantly higher rate of chronic illness than men experience. At the same time, approximately 20 percent of single women have no health coverage at all. WORKING CLASS WHITES DON'T OWN PREJUDICE; THEIR BOSSES DO WHICH GAP DO WE REALLY CARE ABOUT? MARCH 2008 GAYS AREN'T AS WELL OFF AS POPULARLY THOUGHT SOCIALIST WORKER A recent study by the Williams Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles shatters many of the myths in the U.S. about gay couples and wealth. The study, based on U.S. Census data from 2000, compares gay and lesbian couples to heterosexual couples in terms of median income, wealth (such as home ownership) and resources available to raise children. While the median income for same-sex couples' households is slightly higher than for straight couples, the figure drops significantly when raising children is factored in. Same-sex couples raising children reported a median income of $46,200, compared to $59,600 for straight couples. A large part of this gap is due to the fact that even if same-sex couples are fortunate to enjoy domestic partner benefits, such as health insurance, those benefits are taxed. Spousal benefits for straight couples aren't taxed. One lesbian couple interviewed in Arizona described the impact of this extra tax for them. Tina Merrell estimated this penalty at about $10,000 per year to cover her partner and their child on her health insurance. In addition, same-sex couples are far less likely at the national level to own their homes as compared to straight couples. This fact suggests that many same-sex couples do not have the same access to wealth--rather than just income--that many straight couples have. A LETTER TO OKLAHOMA STATE REPRESENTATIVE. SALLY KERN: On April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City a terrorist detonated a bomb that killed my mother and 167 others. 19 children died that day. Had I not had the chicken pox that day, the body count would've likely have included one more. . . That terrorist was neither a homosexual or was he involved in Islam. He was an extremist Christian forcing his views through a body count. He held his beliefs and made those who didn't live up to them pay with their lives. FEBRUARY 2008 ILLEGAL DISCRIMINATION HELPED FUEL SUBPRIME CRISIS KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL & GREG KAUFMAN, THE NATION - [Jesse] Jackson points to the targeting and steering of African-Americans and Latinos who were qualified for prime loans into risky subprime mortgages . . . "Redlining was to not loan to certain areas," he said. "This is what amounts to reverse-redlining - steering black and brown borrowers into subprime who were eligible for prime. That's out and out breaking discrimination laws." In 2005 and 2006, over 50% of all loans made to African- Americans, and over 40% to Latinos, were subprime - compared to only 19% of white borrowers. Martin Gruenberg, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, said at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition's Wall Street Economic Summit in January, "Only one-sixth of this differential could be accounted for by the ability of the borrower." Analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data shows that African- Americans and Latinos in New York City, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia and other cities were two to three times more likely to have subprime, high-cost loans than white borrowers with similar incomes and loan amounts. The New York Times has reported on two neighborhoods in the Detroit area - one 97 percent white with a median income of $51,000, another 97 percent African-American with a median income of $49,000. In 2006, 17 percent of the loans made in the white neighborhood were subprime, compared to 70 percent of the loans in the predominately African-American neighborhood. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan recently pointed out on National Public Radio, "An African-American earning more than $100,000 was more likely than a white person who earned less than $35,000 to be put in a high-cost, [subprime] loan. . . Clearly there is discrimination going on." The Times also reported that "around 90 percent of subprime loans originated between 2004 and 2006 carried exploding adjustable rates. Some 70 percent of subprime loans have prepayment penalties, versus 2 percent of prime loans. . . " . . It is now estimated that 2.2 million subprime home loans have already failed or will end in foreclosure - the highest foreclosure rate since the Depression - with a total equity loss of $164 billion. . . LIVING WHILE BLACK IN NEW YORK CITY YOUNG PEOPLE LEAD THE WAY ON ETHNIC, GENDER ISSUES NEW AMERICA MEDIA - With race, gender and the power of the youth vote garnering so much attention in the 2008 presidential primaries, we were curious about the demographics of the younger generation of leaders. We polled some 24 schools in San Francisco Bay Area to find out the gender and race of those they elected as their student body presidents - and found an incredibly diverse group of young people who weren't necessarily elected by a constituency that voted on racial identity alone. Of 24 schools, eight of the student body presidents are Asian, seven are white, five are African American, four are Latino, one is Arab American and one is biracial. There were 13 male presidents and 12 female presidents. Two of the schools had co-presidents, one male and one female. Some schools elected a student body president that looked like their majority populations. . . But this formula didn't hold true for all of the schools. Mohammad Abid, the student body president of the mostly white Palo Alto High School, identifies as Algerian American. Terrell Gunn, student body president of the mostly Asian Burton High School, is Filipino and African American. Statistics like these indicate a larger trend: the younger generation of voters doesn't care about the race or gender of their prospective president, a lesson from which the older generation would be smart to take a cue. The results are in line with a 2007 statewide poll conducted by New America Media entitled California Dreamers, which interviewed 600 young people via cell phone. When asked how they identified themselves, more respondents (27 percent) cited their music or fashion preference as opposed to a much smaller percentage (14 percent) who defined themselves by their race. . . JANUARY 2008 SUBPRIME LENDERS TARGETED BLACKS & LATINOS GLEN FORD, BLACK AGENDA RADIO - In a report titled, "Foreclosed: State of the Dream 2008," United for a Fair Economy details the catastrophic losses inflicted on blacks and latinos in the U.S. at the hands of predatory lenders - "the greatest loss of wealth to people of color in modern U.S. history." With more than half of blacks in many cities caught in the subprime trap - and with even these usurious financing schemes disappearing in the wake of the bubble- burst - the prospects for Blacks to amass wealth have grown bleaker than at any time in living memory. . . The report shows definitively that banks and other lending institutions trapped Blacks and Latinos in predatory lending schemes as a matter of policy. "Even a surface check of the demographics shows," the report says, "that, in city after city, a solid majority of subprime loan recipients were people of color." The very scope of the crime proves that the lending crisis is not the product of black culture, but the result of calculated policies, near-uniformly carried out by virtually all of the nation's mortgage lending institutions. . . The wealth loss is staggering: People of color have collectively lost between "$164 billion to $213 billion over the past eight years," with Latinos losing slightly more than African Americans. Before the crisis hit, it was estimated that it would take 594 years - more than half a millennium - for blacks to catch up with whites in household wealth. Now, in the aftermath of the home mortgage massacre, it could take ten times as long - more than 5,000 years - before blacks achieve homeowner parity with whites. http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/012308LA.shtml DECEMBER 2007 SUNDOWN TOWNS James W. Loewen EXCERPT: A sundown town is any organized jurisdiction that for decades kept African Americans or other groups from living in it and was thus "all-white" on purpose. There is a reason for the quotation marks around "all-white": requiring towns to be literally all-white in the census-no African Americans at all-is inappropriate, because many towns clearly and explicitly defined themselves as sundown towns but allowed one black household as an exception. Thus an all-white town may include non-black minorities and even a tiny number of African Americans. . . Independent sundown towns range from tiny hamlets such as De Land, Illinois (population 500), to substantial cities such as Appleton, Wisconsin (57,000 in 1970). Sometimes entire counties went sundown, usually when their county seat did. Independent sundown towns were soon joined by "sundown suburbs," which could be even larger: Levittown, on Long Island, had 82,000 residents in 1970, while Livonia, Michigan, and Parma, Ohio, had more than 100,000. Warren, a suburb of Detroit, had a population of 180,000 including just 28 minority families, most of whom lived on a U.S. . . Most Americans have no idea such towns or counties exist, or they think such things happened mainly in the Deep South. Ironically, the traditional South has almost no sundown towns. Mississippi, for instance, has no more than 6, mostly mere hamlets, while Illinois has no fewer than 456. . . Sundown towns are no minor matter. To this day, African Americans who know about sundown towns concoct various rules to predict and avoid them. In Florida, for instance, any town or city with "Palm" in its name was thought to be especially likely to keep out African Americans. In Indiana, it was any jurisdiction with a color in its name, such as Brownsburg, Brownstown, Brown County, Greenfield, Greenwood, or Vermillion County-and indeed, all were sundown locales. . . The sundown town movement in the United States did not begin to slow until 1968, however, even cresting in about 1970, and we cannot yet consign sundown towns to the past. . . POLL EXPLORES TENSIONS, COMMON GROUND
OF U.S. ETHNIC GROUPS Latinos (44 percent) and Asians (47 percent) said they are generally "afraid of blacks because they are responsible for most of the crime." Blacks (51 percent) and Asians (34 percent) said Latino immigrants are taking away jobs, housing and political power from the black community. Latinos (46 percent) and blacks (53 percent) said Asian business owners do not treat them with respect. . . Other findings showed that groups with a higher immigrant population expressed a far greater optimism about achieving the American dream. A majority of Latinos (74 percent) and Asians (64 percent) believes that if you work hard, you will succeed in the United States. In contrast, more than 60 percent of blacks said they do not believe the American dream works for them. . . New America Media's poll was co-sponsored by nine founding ethnic media partners: Asian Journal, Asian Week, Korea Times, Philippine News, La Opinion / Impremedia, Nguoi Viet News, Sing Tao Daily, Sun Reporter, and World Journal. SEPTEMBER 2007 NY TIMES ADMITS CONCEPT OF RACE LACKS SCIENTIFIC BASIS WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BLACK CONGRESSIONAL CAUCUS? GLENN FORD, BLACK AGENDA`REPORT - The rot in the Congressional Black Caucus has led the body, as a whole, to vote in opposition to their own constituents and progressive values in sometimes greater numbers than the Democratic Caucus. What was once the most progressive political grouping on Capitol Hill - reflecting the values of the most leftist demographic in the U.S. - has devolved into a club of corporate money-takers and hired votes. The descent of the Congressional Black Caucus has been swift, and striking. Every instinct of the African American polity is to defend the CBC - but that is no longer possible. There still remains a progressive majority in the Black Caucus, but they cannot act effectively within the organization's structures, which are hitched to corporate funding. The most dramatic examples are the Caucus's acceptance of funding from Wal-Mart, and the ill-fated deal they made with arch-racist FOX News to televise presidential debates. . . Therefore, progressive CBC members have been forced to work their legislative initiatives outside of the Black Caucus, which has become a hostile environment. . . WORLD LOSING A LANGUAGE EVERY TWO WEEKS NY TIMES - Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks.) Some endangered languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television. New research, reported today, has identified the five regions of the world where languages are disappearing most rapidly. The "hot spots" of imminent language extinctions are: Northern Australia, Central South America, North America's upper Pacific coastal zone, Eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and Southwest United States. All of the areas are occupied by aboriginal people speaking diverse languages, but in decreasing numbers. . . At a teleconference with reporters today, K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, said that more than half of the languages have no written form and are "vulnerable to loss and being forgotten." When they disappear, they leave behind no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture. JANUARY 2007 STUDY: BETTER EDUCATED WHITES PREFER SEGREGATED SCHOOLS, NEIGHBORHOODS RICE UNIVERSITY - A study, co-authored by Rice sociologist Michael Emerson, shows that increased education of whites, in particular, may not only have little effect on eliminating prejudice, but it also may be one reason behind the rise of racial segregation in U.S. schools. Furthermore, higher-educated whites, regardless of their income, are more likely than less-educated whites to judge a school's quality and base their school choice on its racial composition. Black-white racial segregation has been on the rise in primary and secondary schools over the past decade. While whites, especially those who are highly educated, may express an interest in having their children attend integrated schools, in reality, they seek out schools that are racially segregated. In the study, researchers found, on average, that the greater the education of white parents, the more likely they will remove their children from public schools as the percentage of black students increases. Emerson and research colleague David Sikkink, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, know that income and other factors come into play in terms of school choice, but their study shows that, even after controlling for these variables, education has an unintended effect. Whites with more education place a greater emphasis on race when choosing a school for their children, while higher-educated African Americans do not consider race. "I do believe that white people are being sincere when they claim that racial inequality is not a good thing and that they'd like to see it eliminated," says Emerson. "However, they are caught in a social system in which their liberal attitudes about race aren't reflected in their behavior." According to the researchers, part of this behavior is explained by the place and meaning of schooling for children of more-educated white parents. Degrees, for example, become status markers, regardless of income. Parents seek quality education for their children to ensure they are not hindered from achieving the "good life." As earlier studies indicate, education is a key to social mobility and one of the most important forms of cultural capital. Emerson and Sikkink cite earlier work on school choice in Philadelphia, where race was found to be a factor in whites' evaluations of the quality of a school. Unlike blacks, who judged schools on the basis of such outcomes as their graduation rates and students' test scores, whites initially eliminated any schools with a majority of black students before considering factors such as schools' graduation rates. When they analyzed a national data set of whites and non-Hispanic blacks to see if the level of their education would have an impact on their school choice, Emerson and Sikkink found a similar pattern. "Whites with higher levels of education still made school choices based on race," explains Emerson, "while blacks did not." The researchers found that regardless of income, more-educated whites in their data set also lived in "whiter" neighborhoods than less-educated whites. Higher-income African Americans also lived in whiter, but more racially mixed, neighborhoods than lower-income blacks. "The more income African Americans made," Emerson says, "the more likely their children attended more racially mixed schools than did African American children of less-educated, lower-income parents." This, he explains, is because more highly educated or higher-income African Americans often live in areas with racially mixed local public schools, close to high concentrations of whites that have undergone desegregation plans, while African American children of less-educated, lower-income parents attend largely black schools. When separating income from their analysis, however, the researchers concluded that unlike whites, African American parents' higher-education levels don't affect their school choice. "Our study arrived at a very sad and profound conclusion," says Emerson. "More formal education is not the answer to racial segregation in this country. Without a structure of laws requiring desegregation, it appears that segregation will continue to breed segregation." Titled "School Choice and Racial Residential Segregation in U.S. Schools: The Role of Parents' Education," the study will be published in an upcoming issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies. http://www.rice.edu/sallyport/2006/fall/sallyport/segregation.html PLANET OUT - More than one in three LGBT Web users, 36 percent, report visiting their favorite personal blogs daily, compared with 19 percent of straight people, according to a national survey by Harris Interactive. LGBT online users also visit networking Web sites like Myspace and Friendster more than their straight counterparts, according to the Harris survey. Twenty-seven percent of LGBT adults in the country who are online said they visit the video-sharing site Youtube.com, compared with 22 percent of heterosexuals. Twenty percent were more likely to visit Craigslist.org, compared with 13 percent of heterosexuals. http://www.planetout.com/news/article.html?2007/01/03/5 DON'T ASK DON'T TELL DON'T WORK ZOGBY - Nearly one in four U.S. troops(23%) say they know for sure that someone in their unit is gay or lesbian, and of those 59% said they learned about the person's sexual orientation directly from the individual, a Zogby International poll of troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan shows. More than half (55%) of the troops who know a gay peer said the presence of gays or lesbians in their unit is well known by others. According to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, service members are not allowed to say that they are gay. . . According Congressman Marty Meehan (D-MA), "These new data prove that thousands of gay and lesbian service members are already deployed overseas and are integrated, important members of their units. It is long past time to strike down 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' and create a new policy that allows gays and lesbians to serve openly." Of those in combat units, 21% said they know for certain that someone in their unit is gay or lesbian, slightly less than for those in combat support units (25%) and combat service support units (22%). One in five troops (20%) in other units said they know for certain someone is gay or lesbian in their unit. Overall, nearly half (45%) say there are people in their unit they suspect are gay or lesbian, but they don't know for sure. Slightly more than half (52%) say they have received training on the prevention of anti-gay harassment in the past three years. But 40% say they have not received this type of training, which is mandated by Defense Department policy. Prominent supporters of "don't ask, don't tell" have expressed concerns about privacy in the shower, Dr. Belkin said, but nearly three out of four troops said in the Zogby poll that they usually or almost always take showers privately – only 8% say they usually or almost always take showers in group stalls. http://www.zogby.com/CSSMM_Report-Final.pdf |