The unpublished data, the broadest tally to date of such write-in responses, are a sign of a diversifying America that’s wrestling with changing notions of race.

The figures show most of the write-in respondents are multiracial Americans or Hispanics, many of whom don’t believe they fit within the four government-defined categories of race: white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander or American Indian/Alaska Native. Because Hispanic is defined as an ethnicity and not a race, some 18 million Latinos used the “some other race” category to establish a Hispanic racial identity.

“I have my Mexican experience, my white experience but I also have a third identity if you will that transcends the two, a mixed experience,” said Thomas Lopez, 39, a write-in respondent from Los Angeles. “For some multiracial Americans, it is not simply being two things, but an understanding and appreciation of what it means to be mixed.”

Lopez, 39, the son of a Mexican-American father and a German-Polish mother, has been checking multiple race boxes since the Census Bureau first offered the option in 2000. Marking off the categories of Hispanic-Mexican ethnicity, “other” Hispanic ethnicity and a non-Hispanic white race, Lopez opted in 2010 to go even further. He checked “some other race” and scribbled in a response: “multiracial.”

More than three million write-ins came from white and black Americans who appear to have found the standard race categories insufficient. They include Arabs, Iranians and Middle Easterners, who don’t fully view themselves as “white” and have lobbied in the past to be a separate race category. They are also Italians, Germans, Haitians and Jamaicans who consider ancestry a core part of who they are.

Roughly half a million black Americans — between 1 and 2 percent of their total population — wrote in answers to signify their preferred term for black. Among them: African-American, Afro-American, African, Negro, mulatto, brown and coffee. More than 36,000 described themselves as “Negro” in whole or in part. The term, which was listed as an example on the 2010 census form, drew criticism from some black groups for being outdated and insensitive.

Lopez, a mechanical engineer who helps run a multiracial awareness group, said he believes the government should provide a wider range of choices on survey forms. “Right now there’s a significant segment of the population who feel that the boxes do not adequately represent them,” he said.

While the issue of racial identity can be deeply individual, it is also highly political: census data are used to enforce anti-discrimination laws, to distribute more than $400 billion in federal aid for roads, schools and health care, and to draw political districts based in part on a community’s racial makeup. Over the past decade, the number of people identifying as “some other race” jumped by 3.7 million, or 24 percent. Experts say an increase in the write-in responses could signify limitations to the form and potentially skew government counts.

“It’s a continual problem to measure such a personal concept using a check box,” said Carolyn Liebler, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota who specializes in demography, identity and race. “The world is changing, and more people today feel free to identify themselves however they want — whether it’s black-white, biracial, Scottish-Nigerian or American. It can create challenges whenever a set of people feel the boxes don’t fit them.”

In an interview, Census Bureau officials said they have been looking at ways to improve responses to the race question based on focus group discussions during the 2010 census. The research, some of which is scheduled to be released later this year, examines whether to include new write-in lines for whites and blacks who wish to specify ancestry or nationality; whether to drop use of the word “Negro” from the census form as antiquated; and whether to possibly treat Hispanics as a mutually exclusive group to the four main race categories.

“Part of our research efforts moving forward is to examine what is happening when you see more people writing in responses,” said Nicholas Jones, chief of the Census Bureau’s racial statistics branch.

Jonathan Brent, 28, an attorney in Charlottesville, Va., said he was able to select the race boxes he needed to indicate his multiracial identity — part white, and part Asian-American, with an individual check box available to indicate Japanese. But he said others do not always find the boxes to describe themselves.

On the census form, currently only the Asian/Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native race categories have separate boxes and write-in lines to specify ancestry; those write-in answers are broken down in official census results.

Other findings from the data:

—About 2.8 million people wrote in responses falling in the white category. The answers, used to describe themselves in whole or in part, included Italian (307,000); Iranian (289,000); Arab (241,000); Armenian (185,000); German (140,000); Irish (126,000); Caucasian (123,000); Middle East (114,000); and Polish (113,000).

—Roughly 1 million respondents were in the black category. They wrote the following terms to describe themselves in whole or in part: black (366,000); Haitian (222,000); African-American (137,000); Jamaican (104,000); West Indies (83,000); African (73,000); Ethiopian (46,000); Negro (36,000); Trinidad and Tobago (34,000); Nigerian (15,000); and Afro-American (7,000).

—Some 18 million were from Latinos who indicated a Hispanic origin both as an ethnicity and race; they checked “some other race” rather than a standard category of white or black. Their answers included Mexican (8.7 million); Hispanic (5.1 million); Latin American (2 million); Puerto Rican (865,000); Spanish (531,000); Salvadoran (332,000); and Dominican/Dominican Republic (295,000).

—Among multiracial Americans, commonly used terms were mixed (156,000); biracial (77,000); brown (62,000); multiracial (38,000); mulatto (34,000); Eurasian (11,000); Amerasian (9,000); multiethnic (4,700); and interracial (2,700).

The 21.7 million people who wrote in race responses is a baseline number. Not included are people who wrote in answers such as “American,” ”human being,” or “person,” which were excluded from the tally as race-neutral terms. A separate census tally of those terms has not yet been done. A 2010 sample survey by the Census Bureau estimated that roughly 20 million people in the U.S. indicated “American” when asked to identify part of their ancestry.

Roderick Harrison, a Howard University sociologist and former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau, predicted a wider range of responses and blurring of racial categories over the next 50 years as interracial marriage becomes increasingly common. Still, he said racial categories will continue to be relevant so long as racial gaps persist in educational attainment, income, jobs and housing.

“These histories of exclusion, discrimination, and racism are central to the identities of several minority populations,” he said.

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See also: Americans ‘Very Concerned’ GOP Budget Will Force Elderly From Nursing Homes

A new study published in Health Affairs, a journal on health policy thought and research, suggests the trend may be driven largely by demographics and disparity.

Nursing homes located in areas with high proportions of ethnic minorities are often of poorer quality and more likely to shut down than those located in high-income areas, previous research has shown.

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Participants of the experiment were asked to categorize computerized images of people with varying skin tones and clothing. The results show participants were more inclined to label people dressed in suits as white and people in overalls as Black.

Even when a white face was dressed down, the volunteers’ hand movements indicated that they were at first instinctively drawn to label it Black. The researchers determined this using a hand-tracking technique that followed the trajectory of the mouse.

Read more at the Root.

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Usually the struggle with filling out college forms is found in writing a personal statement, nowadays it is identifying one’s racial makeup students, and school officials, find most perplexing.

Due to the Department of Education’s new requirement for universities to comply with broader options of ethnicities and races, how to account for racial mixes in seeking diversity on campus has been called into question. Some scholars worry that the growth in multiracial applicants could further erode the original intent of affirmative action, which is to help disadvantaged minorities.

The NY Times Reports:

The new options have forced colleges to confront thorny questions, including how to account for various racial mixes in seeking diversity on campus. Is a student applying as black and Latino more desirable in terms of diversity than someone who is white and black? Or white and Vietnamese? Should the ethnicities of one’s distant relatives be considered fair game, or just parents? And what should be done about students who skip the race question altogether — a sizable number of whom, some studies have shown, are white, and do so either in protest or out of fear that identifying as merely white could hurt rather than help their chances in this new environment?

What do you think?

Read More At NYTimes.com

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Years after slavery and Jim Crow laws, people of African and European heritage still consider themselves to be Black, according to a recent study.

The centuries-old “one-drop rule” assigning minority status to mixed-race individuals appears to live on in our modern-day perception and categorization of people like Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, and Halle Berry.

So say Harvard University psychologists, who’ve found that we still tend to see biracials not as equal members of both parent groups, but as belonging more to their minority parent group. Their research appears in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Many commentators have argued that the election of Barack Obama, and the increasing number of mixed-race people more broadly, will lead to a fundamental change in American race relations,” says lead author Arnold K. Ho, a Ph.D. student in psychology at Harvard. “Our work challenges the interpretation of our first biracial president, and the growing number of mixed-race people in general, as signaling a color-blind America.

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The only criticism I’ve heard about LeBron and it was my biggest criticism, that decision thing was just stupid. It was stupid, “The second thing when they all came out there dancing around on stage, that was silly. That’s the only thing I’ve heard LeBron get criticized about. That has nothing to do with race.

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When I was in college, I was listening this one time as a rabidly anti-white conversation swirled in the air around me.

By now, I’m sure that most of you have heard the argument, but at the time it was new to me so I was startled and shocked.

It was all about how white people weren’t “human” because the word “hue” means color and white people have no color and therefore they have no soul.

All of a sudden, another non-committal guy who had, like me, just been listening along and nodding absently, spoke up loudly.

“Not Bruce Willis!” he said. “This may be true about all the other white people in the world but my man Bruno’s got soul!”

Bruce Willis??? I thought.

If the entirely of the white people hinged upon soulfullness of one Bruce Willis, I was ready to condemn the whole race to hell.

Especially since this conversation took place years before Sin City.

If there’s one time when white kids become more admirable than Black kids it’s when they demonstratively show love for their hordes of Black heroes.

It’s no biggie at all to see a bunch of white kids in their LeBron jersey’s arguing about who’s the best MC or taking Hendrix in a similar argument featuring Clapton and Santana.

Meanwhile, if you’re Black, chances are that quite early in the game you mentioned one of your white favorites and got a look of such disgust and contempt from your contemporaries that you knew better than to ever do that silly mess again.

So you probably went underground with your tastes and for the first time in your life, became as irrational as a White Supremacist watching the NBA draft.

So what did you do?

Did you summon the guts to confront your friends and say, “Look, I love me some Lady Gaga and that’s just the way that is”?

Or did you, remembering that Black American celebrities like Eartha Kitt were issued “Honorary White” passes by the then-apartheid government in South Africa, make your white favorites “Honorary Blacks” in the apartheid of your own mind?

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The Presidential Palace - Haiti (Courtesy TransAfrica Forum)

Almost seven months have passed since the devastating earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, 2010.  The destruction was massive; the financial costs are estimated at US$8-11 billion.

In my work I receive daily reports from people who are either in Haiti working on the recovery effort or who have just returned from consultations, assessments, and interviews in the country.  Across the board the reports are the same: “What we saw was horrible.  It rained every night and people still don’t have adequate shelter; you know that a lot more people are going to die and many more will suffer unnecessarily,” from one colleague.  Yet according to CBS News, “enough aid has been raised to give each displaced family [in Haiti] a check for $37,000.”  Given the outpouring of resources, why are Haitians continuing to suffer?

Despite the large amount of money pledged — over 50 percent of Americans donated to the Haiti relief effort — the efficiency of the effort has been weakened by structural problems, bureaucratic inactivity, the scope of the disaster, and other interests trying to keep their privileges while giving the appearance of change.  For example, the American Red Cross is holding more almost 70 percent of the money it raised for Haiti, which is unacceptable when Haitians are in dire need of food, shelter, and medical care.

Haiti’s 1.5 million displaced people, now living in over 1,300 camps, need basic resources now.

The lack of security in housing, food, medical care, and sanitation has placed those who are displaced, particularly women and girls, at even further risk.  Incidences of rape and violence against women have increased in both numbers and severity.  The increased occurrences of rape and other Gender Based Violence (GBV) are directly related to the current situation facing internally displaced people (IDPs).  The situation is made worse by the failure of the Haitian government and the international community to adhere to international principles for IDP care.

If the problems identified in the first six months, including corruption, human rights violations, and waste, are left uncorrected, they will continue on into the reconstruction period.

Here in the United States almost 50 percent of all households have contributed more than $1 billion dollars to U.S. charities for immediate relief from the effects of Haiti’s devastating 12 January 2010 earthquake.  Nations around the world have pledged more than $5 billion dollars for Haiti’s 18 month reconstruction period.

It is time for the Congress to begin to ask the question:  Where is the Money?

Congress’ oversight responsibility is critical to ensuring transparency and accountability during the reconstruction period.  Congressional hearings provide an opportunity to ensure that Members and the public have complete information regarding U.S. efforts on the ground, which is critical. During this August recess period members of congress will be campaigning in their home districts.  Use your voice, ask them if they plan to use their oversight authority to investigate the small amounts of money actually reaching Haiti’s shore.

The situation in Haiti is serious and warrants congressional query in order to both generate findings and to recommend changes to policy and procedures.   Americans have pledged money to the relief effort; we need to demand to know where that money is being spent, and that it will be spent on Haitians that require food, shelter and medical care.

Congressional oversight is needed, and it is needed now!

Maureen Dowd a columnist for the New York Times has an article called “You’ll Never Believe What This White House Is Missing” in which she speculates that the reason for the Shirley Sherrod mishap was due to a lack of Black advisers in the White House.

The Obama White House is too white.

It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran.

But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand “the slave thing,” as a top black Democrat dryly puts it.

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From Washingtonpost.com:

After the Shirley Sherrod episode, there’s no longer any need to mince words: A cynical right-wing propaganda machine is peddling the poisonous fiction that when African Americans or other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites.

A few of the purveyors of this bigoted nonsense might actually believe it. Most of them, however, are merely seeking political gain by inviting white voters to question the motives and good faith of the nation’s first African American president. This is really about tearing Barack Obama down.

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From HuffPost.com:

Four students have sued Savannah State University on the grounds that they were denied promised athletic scholarships because of they are white.The students – Jacob Farmer, Andrew Cannon, Rico Arellano and Forrest Hill — allege that they were “heavily recruited” by the school’s former football coach Robby Wells and offered scholarships to attend, WSAV reports.

However, after Wells resigned in January, the school defaulted on the scholarship offers.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has more on the text of the suit:

The 19-page complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, accuses Savannah State, a historically black university, of acting “unlawfully, specifically with regard to the decision to deny them admission and athletic scholarships on account of their race, white.”

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From the AFP:

WASHINGTON — Scientists have found the reason why blacks dominate on the running track and whites in the swimming pool: it’s in their belly-buttons, a study published Monday shows.

What’s important is not whether an athlete has an innie or an outie but where his or her navel is in relation to the rest of the body, says the study published in the International Journal of Design and Nature and Ecodynamics.

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The navel is the center of gravity of the body, and given two runners or swimmers of the same height, one black and one white, “what matters is not total height but the position of the belly-button, or center of gravity,” Duke University professor Andre Bejan, the lead author of the study, told AFP.

“It so happens that in the architecture of the human body of West African-origin runners, the center of gravity is significantly higher than in runners of European origin,” which puts them at an advantage in sprints on the track, he said.

Individuals of West African-origin have longer legs than European-origin athletes, which means their belly-buttons are three centimeters (1.18 inches) higher than whites’, said Bejan.

That means the black athletes have a “hidden height” that is three percent greater than whites’, which gives them a significant speed advantage on the track.

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From Bloomberg.com:

The music industry has long sold black culture to white Americans. Now McDonald’s Corp. is doing much the same. It’s taking cues from blacks, Hispanics and Asians to develop menus and advertising, in an effort to encourage middle-class whites to buy smoothies and snack wraps as avidly as they consume hip-hop and rock ‘n’ roll.

“The ethnic consumer tends to set trends,” says Neil Golden, McDonald’s U.S. chief marketing officer. “So they help set the tone for how we enter the marketplace.”

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Pics Of The Week: 07.05.10

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From LATimes.com:

Despite much-publicized racial tensions on the campus last semester, UC San Diego has managed to slightly raise its still small numbers of African American freshman for the fall, according to statistics released by the campus Tuesday.

Some students and faculty had feared that black enrollment on the campus could be negatively affected by the “Compton Cookout,” an off-campus party in February that mocked African Americans and led to protests about UC San Diego’s small numbers of black students. That led to extra efforts to recruit African American students without violating the state’s ban on racial affirmative action in college admissions.

Although still less than 2% of the incoming freshman class of 4,206, 68 black students have said they plan to enroll at UC San Diego as freshmen in the fall, up from 50 last year. Among the 2,943 transfer students, 87 are black, up from 46 last year.

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From HuffingtonPost.com:

Michael Jackson‘s kids were photographed on the beach during a recent trip to Hawaii and his 13-year-old son Prince Michael I appears to have white patches of skin under his arms.

The Daily Mail has the photos and speculates Prince Michael could be suffering from vitiligo, the condition that causes the skin to lose pigment. Michael Jackson always claimed vitiligo, not bleaching, was the reason his skin turned white. The autopsy confirmed he suffered from the disease.

“It proves once and for all that Michael is the father!” a “family source” told the tabloid the Globe.

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By Sam Stein

One of Robert Byrd’s last notable acts in a career that spanned longer than any other in Congress was his decision to endorse then Senator Barack Obama in the Democratic primary.

The West Virginia Democrat was already in bad health though it would be a full two years before he would pass away. Ostensibly, there was little to gain from offering his political support to either candidate. His state’s primary had already taken place four days prior and the result had been an overwhelming victory for Hillary Clinton.

But Byrd’s endorsement was imbued with a powerful symbolism that transcended electoral math. He was once in the Klu Klux Klan (and not in an insignificant capacity). He helped filibuster the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He was publicly embarrassed, as recently as 2001, for using the term “White N—er” during an interview with Fox News.

For all of this, he spent much of his life expressing contrition. Appropriating money for memorials to civil rights icons was a start. But backing the first black presidential candidate with a legitimate chance at victory was a far more profound act.

The two created an anachronistic pairing. But Obama’s aides understood how a Byrd endorsement could help complete the moral arc of his candidacy as well as the senator’s career. And they worked hard to ensure that voters understood its importance as well.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly 1 in 5 American women beyond childbearing years never gave birth as fewer couples, particularly higher-educated whites, view having children as necessary to a good marriage.

An analysis of census data by the Pew Research Center, being released Friday, documents the changes in fertility rates that are driving government projections that U.S. minorities will become the majority by midcentury.

The figures show that among all women ages 40-44, about 18 percent, or 1.9 million, were childless in 2008. That’s up from 10 percent, or nearly 580,000 in 1976.

Broken down by race, roughly 20 percent of white women are childless, compared with 17 percent of blacks and of Hispanics and 16 percent of Asians. Still that gap has been narrowing: Since 1994, childlessness for blacks and Hispanics has grown by 30 percent, about three times the rate for whites.

The numbers coincide with broader U.S. trends of delayed marriage and increased opportunities for women, who now outnumber men in the work force and have drawn even with them in advanced degrees. After reaching a high of 3.7 children per woman during the baby boom, the U.S. fertility rate dropped to a historic low of 1.7 during the mid-1970s and stands at about 2.

RELATED: More Single Black Women Choosing Adoption

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The findings also come amid a historic demographic shift in which blacks, Hispanics, Asians and multiracial people are growing rapidly in the U.S. population and wielding more influence in politics and society. Minority babies now make up nearly half of all U.S. births.

“Social pressure to bear children appears to have diminished for women and that today, the decision to have a child is seen as an individual choice,” according to the report by Pew researchers Gretchen Livingston and D’Vera Cohn. “Improved opportunities and contraceptive methods help create alternatives for women.”

While higher-educated women overall are more likely to be childless, that may be slowly changing. In 2008, about 24 percent of women ages 40-44 with a master’s, doctoral or professional degree did not have children, a decline from 31 percent in 1994.

In the meantime, childlessness has risen sharply for women with less than a high school diploma — from 9 percent in 1994 to 15 percent in 2008.

Other findings:

–Less than half, or 41 percent, of surveyed Americans said that children were very important for a successful marriage. Still, a rising share of people — about 38 percent in 2009 — say the trend of increased childlessness is bad for society.

–More births are from women who never married. Among never-married women ages 40-44, about 56 percent were childless in 2008 compared with 71 percent in 1994.

RELATED: Black Children 7 Times Less Desired By Parents Seeking Adoption

–U.S. childless rates were somewhat similar, if not higher, compared with other industrialized nations. About 17 percent of U.S. women were childless at age 40, compared to 22 percent in England, and 17 percent in Italy and Ireland. The rates were between 12 percent and 14 percent for Spain, Norway, Denmark, Belgium and Sweden.

Pew, an independent research group, based its findings on 2008 data from the Census Bureau. The report analyzes the population of women who do not have biological children, as opposed to adoptive or stepchildren. Figures for “white” refer to those whites who are not of Hispanic ethnicity.

Queens County District Attorney's Office

From NYTimes.com:

In the public’s imagination, the classic hate crime is an assault born of animus against a particular ethnicity or sexual orientation, like the case of the Long Island man convicted in April of killing an Ecuadorean immigrant after hunting for Hispanics to beat up.

But in Queens since 2005, at least five people have been convicted of, or pleaded guilty to, committing a very different kind of hate crime — singling out elderly victims for nonviolent crimes like mortgage fraud because they believed older people would be easy to deceive and might have substantial savings or home equity.

And this month, Queens prosecutors charged two women with stealing more than $31,000 from three elderly men they had befriended separately. The women, Gina L. Miller, 39, and Sylvia Johns, 23, of Flushing, were charged with grand larceny as a hate crime.

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This approach, which is being closely watched by prosecutors across New York State, has won Queens prosecutors stiffer sentences, including prison for criminals who could otherwise go free, even after draining an elderly person’s savings. Without a hate crime, theft of less than $1 million carries no mandatory prison time; with it, the thief must serve for a year and may face 25.

The legal thinking behind the novel method is that New York’s hate crimes statute does not require prosecutors to prove defendants “hate” the group the victim belongs to, merely that they commit the crime because of some belief, correct or not, they hold about the group.

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From CNN:

There was a time when if a white actor or actress was cast in the role of a character of color, there was very little outcry.

When Swedish actor Warner Oland portrayed Asian detective Charlie Chan or Elizabeth Taylor was cast as Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt, there was no call for boycotts or publicized outrage.

But times have changed, and these days some fans ask the question why, with so many talented black, Latino and Asian actors, does Hollywood continue to pass them over?

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“It seems that not a year goes by where this debate isn’t had, and I think it’s a worthy debate,” said Andrew Wallenstein, editor for The Hollywood Reporter’s website. “I think this stems from a long-held frustration regarding the access of minority actors to leading roles. It’s bad enough that they are far less likely to be cast in those roles in general, and it’s downright galling to them that in roles in which they are perceived as having a natural advantage they are still getting beaten out.”

The latest example is the controversy surrounding the news that Angelina Jolie has been tapped to play the Queen of the Nile in a planned film based on the forthcoming biography “Cleopatra: A Life.”

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From TheRoot.com:

I’m the son of a black father and a white mother. As a child coming up in the 1980s and ’90s, I immersed myself in hip-hop style and culture, excelled at sports, rocked aerodynamic hairstyles, and spoke in the same florid body language that the older brothers at the local black barbershop were fluent in.

I played basketball fiendishly, and on the asphalt, other black players addressed me without thinking as nigga. Once or twice, some white person referred to me (also without thinking) as a nigger. I was black back then, period.

As I’ve gotten older, however, my clothes have started to fit slimmer and my interests have widened. And I can’t help but notice that I’ve become less black to others.

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From The New York Times

Today, the practice of excluding blacks and other minorities from Southern juries remains widespread and, according to defense lawyers and a new study by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit human rights and legal services organization in Montgomery, Ala., largely unchecked.

In the Madison County case, the defendant, Jason M. Sharp, a white man, was sentenced to death after a trial by a jury of 11 whites and one black. The April hearing was the result of a challenge by defense lawyers who argued that jury selection was tainted by racial discrimination — a claim that is difficult to prove because prosecutors can claim any race-neutral reason, no matter how implausible, for dismissing a juror.

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From BlackVoices.com:

The New York Times recently wrote about the economic challenges of black residents of Memphis, Tenn. In the piece, the author describes how the recent recession, creating a double whammy of high unemployment and foreclosure, has created an unprecedented amount of financial hardship for African-American residents in the city. The median income of black Memphis residents rose steadily until about five years ago. Since that time, it has dropped to levels not seen since 1990 and remains at half the median income of white Memphis residents.
Black unemployment in Memphis, which is at 16.9 percent, is more than three times greater than white unemployment, which is at 5.3 percent. The problems being faced by Memphis residents are part of a larger national trend, in which the wealth gap between blacks and whites has increased over the past several decades. The Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University recently released a study stating that the wealth gap between blacks and whites has grown fivefold since 1984. Additionally, a Federal Reserve study states that for every dollar of wealth possessed by white families, a black or Latino family has only 16 cents.

There is more evidence of African American suffering during the recession. The Economic Policy Institute recently found that during the 2009 recession, black family wealth dropped by more than twice as much as white family wealth. The median white family has $94,600 in wealth, while the median black family has just $2,100.

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Jesse Jackson: Racial Wealth Gap Requires Civil Rights Intervention

From TheRoot.com:

In the movie The Color Purple, sisters Celie and Nettie reunite after being separated by decades, oceans and the spite of an abusive Mister.

Running through a lush pasture, neither quite believes her fortune upon reuniting. Old women now, they stumble through the field, arms outstretched, calling to one another, “Ceeeeeelieeeee!” “Nettieeeeee!”

I got to enjoy my very own “Celie-Nettie” moment when I walked into the Center for Inquiry on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., last Sunday afternoon. The African Americans for Humanism conference hosted four to five dozen non-believers–the largest gathering of African-American atheists in history. (As a member of the Center, I was part of the planning committee, and I was also a speaker at the event; “Spare the Rod, Save Your Child,” was my topic.)

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From The UK Guardian

A huge wealth gap has opened up between black and white people in the US over the past quarter of a century – a difference sufficient to put two children through university – because of racial discrimination and economic policies that favour the affluent.

A typical white family is now five times richer than its African-American counterpart of the same class, according to a report released today by Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

White families typically have assets worth $100,000 (£69,000), up from $22,000 in the mid-1980s. African-American families’ assets stand at just $5,000, up from around $2,000.

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Again I found myself reading the comments posted on one of my blogs when this little gem, posted by QueenOfDaJungle83, jumped out at me:

“if god was racist there would be nothing but white. blacks, spanish, chinese and any other race that is non white would not exist.”

I remember thinking uh oh… then waiting with a little bit more than trepidation as I fully expected the 21^st century descendants of Nat Turner in the form of Califemme23, Maatra or one of their ilk to jump all over the poor woman and get all down her throat.

When that didn’t happen, I decided that this would be a good topic for a post.

Now, being that my objectivity as a journalist has constantly been called into question here at Newsone, I’ve decided to stay out of it.

So I won’t be offering up any personal opinions.

I will, however, present the following interpretations—some pop culture, some not—and read along eagerly as ya’ll make of them what you will.

• Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel (pictured above) was painted between 1508 and 1512 and is, for many, the definitive visual image of God.
• The “Black Jesus” episode of Good Times was seen as near blasphemy when it first aired back in 1974.
• China’s Jade Emperor unsurprisingly looks like a Chinese man. What’s interesting about this guy is that he spent aeons contemplating his own navel.
• Since it’s generally considered a sacrilege punishable by death to even depict the prophet Muhammad, you can imagine why nobody’s had the guts to attempt a rendition of Allah.
• In Things Fall Apart, writer Chinua Achebe explained the complicated Ibo system of monotheism where there is one main Creator, yet several personal gods or “chi”.
• Ha Wen Neyu or the Iroquois “Great Spirit” was one of the bigger deities on this hemisphere before Columbus.
• Buddha, like Christ, was an actual man that lived. He was born in Nepal, died in India, and his teachings have, among other things, helped Phil Jackson coach teams to 10 NBA championships.
• In director Kevin Smith’s Dogma, God was presented as a woman and female in the form of 90s pop star Alanis Morrisette.
• The bible itself offers us a Solomon—ancestor to Christ—who, by his own definition, is “black”. Note: this was written long before the term “black” had any racial connotations.

Atheists are invited to play along as well. I’ve noticed that just because ya’ll don’t believe in God hasn’t stopped you from having an opinion.

From BVX.com:

A white guy, disguised as a a black guy, managed to rip off four banks and a CVS in Ohio before he was caught. No, we’re not kidding.
Maybe Conrad Zdzierak was inspired by “Soul Man (1986),” or even Robert Downey Jr.’s performance in “Tropic Thunder” (2008), but the 30-year-old, former Florida resident didn’t rely on tanning pills or surgical procedures, respectively, to darken his skin. Instead he played out his John Dillinger Chaz Williams dreams while wearing a Hollywood style mask (called The Player) that was good enough to fool bank tellers and police into thinking their suspect was an African-American.

You don’t get the feeling anyone bothered to ask, “Are you sure the culprit was black?,” though.

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There were 784,764 U.S. residents who described their race as white and black in the last census. But that number didn’t include Laura Martin, whose father is black and mother is white.

“I’ve always just checked black on my form,” said Martin, a 29-year-old university employee in Las Vegas. She grew up surrounded by black family and friends, listening to black music and active in black causes — “So I’m black.”

Nor did it include Steve Bumbaugh, a 43-year-old foundation director in Los Angeles, who also has a black father and white mother. “It’s not as if I’d have been able to drink out of the white and colored water fountains during Jim Crow,” he said. “And I most assuredly would have been a slave. As far as I’m concerned, that makes me black.”

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Friday was the deadline to mail 2010 census forms. Although the results are expected to show an increase in the number of multiracial people, some African-Americans with one white parent are deciding to simply “stay black.”

This is only the second census to allow people to identify themselves by more than one race. About 7 million people, or 2.4 percent of the U.S. population, chose that option in 2000.

It’s impossible to know how many of the 35 million people counted as “black alone” in 2000 have a white parent. But it’s clear that the decision to check one box — or more — on the census is often steeped in history, culture, pride and mentality.

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Famous Biracial Americans

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Exhibit A is President Barack Obama. He declined to check the box for “white” on his census form, despite his mother’s well-known whiteness.

Obama offered no explanation, but Leila McDowell has an idea.

“Put a hoodie on him and have him walk down an alley, and see how biracial he is then,” said McDowell, vice president of communications for the NAACP.

“Being black in this country is a political construct,” she said. “Even though my father is white and I have half his genes, when I apply for a loan, when I walk into the car lot, when I apply for a job, they don’t see me as half white, they see me as black. If you have any identifying characteristics, you’re black.”

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There is evidence, though, that while some may be resistant to the idea of identifying as multiracial, white attitudes are moving in that direction. In a January poll by the Pew Research Center, 53 percent of white people said Obama is “mixed race” and 24 percent said he is black. In contrast, 55 percent of black people said Obama is black and 34 percent said he is mixed.

This also may represent a new twist on the “one drop” concept, which for centuries held that even one black ancestor made a person black. Now a brown-skinned man is president, and for many white people, one white parent means you are NOT black.

But the logic is simple for Ryan Graham, the brown-skinned son of a white-black marriage who defines himself as multiracial.

“Say you’re wearing a black-and-white shirt. Somebody asks, ‘What color is your shirt?’ It’s black and white. There you go. People ask me, ‘What race are you?’ I say I’m black and white. It’s that simple,” said Graham, a 25-year-old sales consultant from Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Graham’s mother founded Project Race in 1991 to fight for a multiracial classification in the census. Graham testified before Congress on the issue when he was 8. He’s disappointed that Obama chose not to check the white box on the census, but said that people should be allowed to define themselves however they choose.

“It’s frustrating from a point that there’s a lot of multiracial people out there who see Obama out there doing that, knowing that he’s multiracial, and they think maybe that’s the right choice. But there’s a lot of people saying maybe it’s the wrong choice.”

For those who decline to check the white box: “Think about your family, think about what makes you you,” Graham said. “How you are, who you are, where you come from.”

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Most experts say there is very little genetic difference between people of different races — as little as 1 percent. “Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,” goes a much-repeated quote from J. Craig Venter, who led one of the first projects to decipher the entire human genome.

That’s one reason why the American racial system is “facing taxonomical meltdown,” said Nell Painter, a Princeton University history professor and author of “The History of White People.”

“The complications of the classification system, the resistance that people are mounting, the weight of immigration and marriage mixing, young people are checking more than one box,” Painter said. “The system might just all fall away.”

Which would leave blackness to be defined person by person, according to how they think, the way they look at the world — blackness as a state of mind.

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Tony Spearman, author of “Why Am I Black,” was born to two white parents. He grew up in a mostly black town, worked at a historically black college, taught physics to predominantly black students.

On every census since 1996, Spearman has marked one box: black.

“My wife got angry at me, my father got angry at me,” said Spearman, 42. “They told me, ‘You gotta be truthful!’ I said, ‘I am!’ … Race is a foolish thing. It has nothing to do with our humanness.”

“The system is breaking down, and I hope it continues to break down,” Spearman . “Because when it fully breaks down, we’ll start to measure people by the content of their hearts.”

From Bwog.com:

The youngest-ever president of the NAACP, Ben Jealous, CC ‘94, will be speaking at Columbia College’s Class Day. At a celebration tonight in Havana Central’s back room, Class Council 2010 President Cliff Massey revealed Jealous’s selection after weeks of speculation that saw names floated including Bill Clinton and Kofi Annan.

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Jealous, who was involved with the BSO and several other student groups while on campus,  got his B.A. in political science at Columbia before heading to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar for his Master’s in comparative social research. He has worked at the Rosenberg Foundation, Amnesty International, and the National Newspaper Publishing Association. He was among the 2009 honorees for the John Jay Award, given every year to an alum of the College for his or her distinguished professional career.

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I recently watched a television show about standards of beauty around the world. I sat in awe as little Chinese girls went ga-ga for White Barbie, and their mothers and sisters stood in a drive-thru line to have a surgeon slice away the fat from their eyelids to make them more Euro-chic. On one level, it felt good to know that African-American women are not alone in the emotional struggle to love ourselves enough to call ourselves pretty.  But that feeling quickly vanished as the show then focused on Nigerian women who loathed their natural locks, opting for lye to straighten them out and a needle and thread to weave in wigs of women’s hair from places like India.

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It reminded me of that scene in the movie, Good Hair, where Chris Rock took bags of African hair all over town trying to “sell” it to beauty aficionados who turned up their noses and, in some cases, were even afraid to touch it.  Sadly, Chris would not even have been able to sell that African hair in the Motherland amidst an emerging Euro-centric redefinition of beauty.  Even without a social scientific interpretation of the now-infamous “Doll Test” – a 1950s experiment where the majority of Black children tested preferred White dolls and attributed positive characteristics to them – my anecdotal evidence convinced me that little Nigerian girls and little Chinese girls were no different from little African-American girls.

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Last month, at a signing for my book, Nappy, one African-American girl asked me, “What does Nappy mean?” I explained to the audience that Nappy was a strong word used to describe the kink and the curl in our hair.  In the book, I use it as a metaphor to for strength, explaining that Black women in history were strong just like the kink and curls in our hair.  Women like Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune and Ella Baker endured unfairness in our society but rose above it because they were strong. Nappy.  Women like Rosa Parks and Josephine Baker may not have had hair that was as tightly coiled as mine, but Nappy represents them too because it is about strength, self-esteem and standing up for yourself and your community.

Not convinced, the girl’s mother later asked me if Nappy was a word that could really be “reclaimed” as something positive.  Unlike the other controversial “N” word that most of us believe cannot, I told her “Nappy” is a word that is nowhere close to needing a funeral. Social scientists have written tomes about the power of language and word choice on our minds. Clearly, if we are to have any hope of winning the war for our children’s minds being waged by Barbie and the mass media, we need a word with superpowers to let our girls know that they are beautiful and strong.  Nappy means that we must always remember to love our history, our hair and ourselves.  It is a message that I hope Nigerian, African-American and even Chinese mothers will bring home to their children.

Charisse Carney-Nunes is the author of the award-wining children’s books, I Am Barack Obama, I Dream for You a World, and Nappy. She is a Harvard Law schoolmate of President Obama and was recently at the center of a national controversy pitting alleged school indoctrination against children’s expressions of civic engagement. Charisse is also the creator of “Nappy Narratives,” a companion video weblog series to Nappy that connects hair and women’s history. Watch them online at www.BrandNuWords.com.

A Tennessee-based public relations executive lost his job after forwarding an email that contained images comparing First Lady Michelle Obama to a chimpanzee. While this isn’t the first time that people sending racist emails have been implicated, it is still shocking each and every time.

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Check out the CNN video below:

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