http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/_Rz1cN_xQGk/130618101734.htm
Women in the US exposed to high levels of air pollution while pregnant were up to twice as likely to have a child with autism as women who lived in areas with low pollution.
Sent by gReader Pro
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/Aw24qYw1MPM/130618131830.htm
Scientists have found that exposure in infancy to nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a component of motor vehicle air pollution, is strongly linked with later development of childhood asthma among African Americans and Latinos.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Urban Institute revisits Daniel Moynihan’s "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action" and finds that a lot has changed. Mostly for the worse: “These demographic trends are stunning. Five decades after Moynihan’s work, white families exhibit the same rates of non-marital childbearing and single parenting as black families did in the 1960s when Moynihan sounded his alarm. Meanwhile, the disintegration of the black nuclear family continued apace.
“That the decline of traditional families occurred across racial and ethnic groups indicates that factors driving the decline do not lie solely within the black community but in the larger social and economic context. Nevertheless, the consequences of these trends in family structure may be felt disproportionately among blacks as black children are far more likely to be born into and raised in father-absent families than are white children.”
Continue reading…
http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/revisiting-the-moynihan-report/276936/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/race-vs-class-the-false-dichotomy.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Race vs. Class – The False Dichotomy
THE decision is in. All consideration of race in college admissions is over.
No, the Supreme Court has not yet announced its decision in the landmark case of Fisher v. University of Texas; that ruling is expected any day now. But an alarming number of scholars, pundits and columnists — many of them liberal — have declared that economic class, not race, should be the appropriate focus of university affirmative-action efforts.
How can we explain this decision to throw in the towel on race-based affirmative action? Are we witnessing a surrender in advance of sure defeat? Or just an early weariness with a debate that, a decade ago, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor predicted would last another 25 years?
Perhaps it is the presence of a black president that has encouraged so many to believe that race is simply no longer a significant factor in American life. It is true that we have come a long way since the days of Jim Crow segregation. But the plain fact is that race still matters.
It matters with frightening frequency in the encounters of young black men with the police. It matters in our ability to get access to affordable housing, and in the wealth accumulated (or not) by our families. Whether the name on our résumé is Lakeisha or Leslie matters when we try to get a job interview. And it matters often, though not always, in our views about the continuing significance of race in American life.
Race isn’t the only factor that matters, of course, and universities should take seriously their obligation to educate poor students of all races. But nor should class be the only factor: after all, it was also true in the early 1960s that ignoring race and merely providing more resources to segregated schools would have benefited some poor black students — but that certainly didn’t mean that separate was equal, or that segregation was constitutional, or that pushing for desegregation was a waste of time.
What we might learn from the decades-long (and painfully incomplete) experience of desegregation is the need to deploy multiple efforts to address a chronic problem. In the context of higher education, that menu of efforts should include considering income (if not wealth), as well as an aggressive campaign to raise the quality of K-12 public education.
But that menu must also include race, for a variety of reasons. For one, in places like Texas and Alabama and Maryland, public universities train the vast majority of the state’s leaders. Greater classroom diversity helps ensure that minority and white students alike are prepared for leadership at a time of rapid demographic change.
That diversity includes class. To serve as their state’s leaders one day, students at the University of Texas and the University of Maryland will need to understand that not all blacks are poor, not all whites are rich, and not all Latino students speak Spanish.
In fact, by pushing universities to substitute class for race, we may simply reinforce stereotypes within the student body that will equate minority students with poverty, masking both the economic (and ideological) diversity within minority communities but also the challenges that confront white working-class students. At any rate, the true benefits of diversity cannot be achieved when, as the University of Texas discovered in 2003, nearly 80 percent of its classes contained only one black student, or none at all.
What about the stinging charge that race-based affirmative action benefits only middle-class and well-to-do children of professionals, because selective colleges prefer those students over the poor? This is simply untrue as a blanket statement, and it obscures a more troubling and complex reality.
Selective universities first and foremost favor students with higher S.A.T. scores and those who have graduated from academically rigorous high schools. Those students, whether white, Hispanic, black or Asian, tend to come from middle- or upper-class families, with parents who can afford tutoring and exam prep courses that are out of reach for poor students. But that is mostly a reflection of selective universities’ overreliance on standardized tests like the S.A.T. and the L.S.A.T., not an indictment of race-conscious affirmative action.
All of this is complicated and uncomfortable — which is why it’s not surprising to hear some commentators argue, in good faith, that we should abandon the consideration of race in affirmative action simply because using race is “unpopular.” But what progressive policy in pursuit of racial equity ever is?
In any case, even that argument is dubious: a recent New York Times poll showed that most Americans support affirmative action.
If there is public discomfort, it is precisely because race still does matter, because it still resonates so powerfully in American life. This is evidence that we need more contact among students of different races, not less.
If the Supreme Court reverses its 2003 decision to uphold affirmative action on campus and outlaw any consideration of race in admissions decisions, it would be radical — a tragic culmination of decades of backtracking on racial justice. But the battle for racial diversity in higher education will not end, because neither the court nor the country can simply will away the enduring importance of race in determining life chances.
Whatever the court decides, students, parents, universities and leaders will continue to fight for diversity, because they recognize, as a majority of the court did in 2003, that the very legitimacy of our democracy depends on ensuring that the doors of opportunity are open to all.
Sherrilyn A. Ifill is the president and director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Education Fund Inc.
The “war on marijuana” has become a war on minorities.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/racismreview/nYnz/~3/XXRThnCjK0o/
Two events that took place just hours apart 50 years ago serve as a metaphor for our nation’s struggle for racial equality.
On June 11, 1963, John F. Kennedy gave a speech to the nation demanding that the federal government aggressively put in place measures to guarantee the constitutional rights of blacks. JFK was comprehensive in his goals, insisting that the federal government be actively involved in addressing institutional racism in housing, the labor market, schooling, access to voting, and public accommodations. This call for racial equality occurred when Jim Crow laws were the norm, a majority of public schools were racially segregated, and blacks were politically disenfranchised. When JFK gave his speech, more than 80 percent of all black workers were concentrated in farming, manual labor, and service-sector jobs that guaranteed subsistence wages and intergenerational poverty.
JFK’s call was righteous, radical, and quintessentially American. It was a demand for equal rights and opportunity based on the Golden Rule. Kennedy argued
"We are confronted primarily with a moral issue . . . whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated."
The next morning, in Jackson, Miss., white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith sat hidden behind a bush, waiting for Medgar Evers, the local NAACP field secretary and a father of three, to return home. Beckwith shot the civil rights activist in the back, and he died within the hour. Although the evidence linking Beckwith to the murder was overwhelming, he was acquitted twice by all-male, all-white juries. Thirty years later, Beckwith was retried and convicted of murder. He died in prison in 2001.
Social scientists are fond of pointing out that when individuals, typically white individuals, discuss racism, they use the past tense. As a nation, we like to believe that the odious and racist views of people like Beckwith have died out and been replaced by the idealism of an equitable and just society embodied in the aspirations articulated in JFK’s speech on racial equality. How much has changed in 50 years? Is our democracy self-correcting, with our moral arc consistently bending toward justice, as evidenced by Beckwith’s eventual conviction? Or is this just another example of “justice delayed is justice denied,” an enduring feature of how this nation treats racial minorities and newcomers?
JFK’s own words allow us to empirically examine the progress in racial equality over the last 50 years. He observed
"The Negro baby born in America today . . . has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is seven years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much."
Compare JFK’s statistics with today’s. In 2010-11, whites graduated from high school at a rate of 76 percent and blacks at 60 percent. In 2010, whites graduated from college at a rate of 62 percent, blacks at 40 percent. In 2013, unemployment for whites was 6.7 percent; it was 13.2 percent for blacks. In 2010, 35 percent of whites and 24 percent of blacks worked in “management, professional, and related occupations.” A salary of $10,000 in 1963 would be worth $75, 990 today; 18 percent of black families and 34 percent of white families made $75,000 or more. On average, whites live five years longer than blacks. Median household income in 2011 was $55,214 for whites, $32,229 for blacks.
At least in the categories mentioned by JFK, it is undeniable that progress has been made. A mountain of earth remains to be moved, however, to level the playing field.
We like to believe that people like Beckwith die off or are marginalized by good people of conscience, and that their exit means social progress is being made. We are invested in the narrative that growing racial tolerance necessarily means shrinking racial inequality, although this equation no longer depicts reality. A black president can be elected (twice), and we may not blink at an interracial couple walking down the street, but that doesn’t mean that racial inequality is in decline or in its death throes. The recession has hurt almost everyone, but it has disproportionately wreaked economic havoc on some racial minorities.
What we should be asking ourselves is, Where are the speeches like Kennedy’s that appeal to the citizenry’s better angels to right a social wrong? Where are the pleas to Americans on moral and ethical grounds by those who can use the bully pulpit to raise public awareness of the social inequalities that continue to plague our nation?
————————————
Charles A. Gallagher is chair of the department of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. E-mail him at gallagher. See some of his work here.
Food is only going to get more expensive over the next decade, according to a new report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. The report cited several reasons for rising prices, including: increased demand for food and biofuels as a result of a growing population and higher incomes and standards of living, slower growth in food production, and rising energy costs. Limited water resources and farmland availability, as well as price hikes on necessities such as fertilizer, are expected to slow the increase in food production worldwide from 2.1 percent last decade (2003 – 2012) to 1.5 percent in the next decade.
Meat, fish and biofuel prices are expected to rise more than fruit, vegetables and grains, but meat production is still expected to continue to expand, with China becoming the world’s largest consumer of pork by 2022. The report notes that “increasing environmental pressures” — which include climate change-fueled storms, drought and flooding — will be one of the main factors slowing the growth of food production around the world. In China in particular — a country the report focused on, with a fifth of the world’s population and steadily rising income levels — water shortages will be one of the key problems facing food production as rainfall becomes more variable. And there will be other risks for China as well. As the report notes: “Food availability will be impacted by changes in temperature, water availability, extreme weather events, soil condition, and pest and disease patterns.”
But China’s not the only country that faces threats to food production from climate change. Last year, a report from Oxfam warned that extreme weather events would cause food prices around to world to soar in the coming decades. The report projected worldwide corn prices to spike by 500 percent by 2030, and that another U.S. drought in 2030 could raise America’s corn prices 140 percent on top of that. The OECD and U.N. FAO’s report says key to meeting the demands of a growing global population is improving agricultural productivity and reducing food waste — a problem that has risen sharply over the past few decades. It warns that continued use of unsustainable farming practices will do little to improve food security around the world: There is a growing need to improve the sustainable use of available land, water, marine ecosystems, fish stocks, forests and biodiversity. It is estimated that some 25% of all agricultural land is highly degraded, with growing water scarcity a fact for many countries. Many fish stocks are over-exploited, or in risk of being over-exploited. As fish stocks decline and more people are consuming seafood, the report projects that aquaculture will surpass capture fisheries as the world’s main source of fish by 2015. This may be good news for rapidly depleting fish stocks, but a major expansion of aquaculture presents its own environmental and health-related concerns.
|
