In Florida, an Initiative Intended to End Bias Is Killed - NYTimes.com

In Florida, an Initiative Intended to End Bias Is Killed - NYTimes.com: MIAMI — An obscure ballot initiative in Florida intended to end a legacy of bias against Asian-Americans was defeated Tuesday, apparently because voters incorrectly assumed it would prevent illegal immigrants from owning property.

Had it passed, the initiative, known as Amendment No. 1, would have removed from the state’s Constitution language adopted in 1926 allowing the Legislature to prohibit foreigners who were barred from citizenship — Asian-Americans at the time — from owning land.

No such legislation was ever enacted here, and every other state that had such laws has scrapped them on grounds of equal protection. But on Tuesday, Florida’s effort to delete the provision went down, with 52 percent voting “no” and 48 percent voting “yes.”

Immigrant advocates said they were stunned.

“It’s terribly disappointing,” said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. “At a time when our country has turned away from a history of racism, we have left a racist and anti-immigrant provision in Florida’s Constitution.”

Ms. Little and others who supported removing the provision said that a mix of confusion and prejudice seemed to have led to defeat.

Hispanic Activists Cite an Uptick in Threats of Violence - washingtonpost.com

Hispanic Activists Cite an Uptick in Threats of Violence - washingtonpost.com: Andrea Bazan said she has thick skin and is not easily frightened by death threats. But when the Hispanic activist arrived home one day to find her voice mail packed with profanity, and when she noticed a man watching her house in Durham, N.C., from a white commercial van with no license plates, her heart started to pound.

On a recent Monday night, she said, an unidentified man pounded on the front door of her house, frightening her. About a month earlier, on Labor Day, her house was broken into, and the smoke detectors were removed. 'I am a mother. . . . I was scared,' said Bazan, president of the Triangle Community Foundation in Durham and a board member for the National Council of La Raza. 'I've been open with them about the fact that sometimes I have a bodyguard.'

For some Hispanic activists such as Bazan, this is life on the front lines of the debate over illegal immigration. Leaders of the largest Hispanic civil rights groups -- the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and La Raza -- have received anonymous threats of violence and death. Bazan's home address and the names of her daughters were posted on a Web site."

Morehouse College’s Next Step in Eliminating the N-word

Morehouse College’s Next Step in Eliminating the N-word: As a first-year student at Morehouse College, Alex Bibb, 21, said the N-word every other sentence. Now a graduating senior, the word has nearly disappeared from Bibb’s vocabulary.

Morehouse is hoping to duplicate Bibb’s development from boisterous adolescent to trenchant Morehouse man with its new “Free Zone” campaign, focused on eliminating the use of cursing, sagging pants and the N-word from residence halls. Beginning this semester, every dormitory is a designated “Nigga” Free Zone, No Saggin Zone, and No Cursing Zone.

“We are not making it mandatory that you cannot say the N-word or curse or sag your pants. We want people to have an understanding of how these things affect the community,” says William Tweedle, first-year resident director of Hubert Hall at Morehouse and founder of the “Free Zone” program.

Disturbed by the frequency in which residents used the N-word and other expletives in casual conversation, Tweedle initiated the “N-Free Zone” campaign at Bowie State University in Maryland in 2004. Faculty, parents and administrators extolled the program, Tweedle says.

High school keeps Klan leader's name - Race & ethnicity- msnbc.com

High school keeps Klan leader's name - Race & ethnicity- msnbc.com: JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - A Florida school board voted late Monday night to keep the name of a Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader at a majority black high school, despite opposition from a black board member who said the school's namesake was a 'terrorist and racist.'

After hearing about three hours of public comments, Duval County School Board members voted 5-2 to the retain the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest High School. The board's two black members cast the only votes to change the name.

'(Forrest) was a terrorist and a racist,' argued board member Brenda Priestly Jackson, who is black.

Betty Burney, the board chairman and the board's other black member, also voted against retaining the name.

"It is time to turn the page and get beyond where we are," she said.

Board member Tommy Hazouri voted to keep the name and said it is difficult to know "who the real Forrest is."

The board listened to passionate arguments from those on both sides. More than 140 people crowded into the meeting room, with another 20 watching the meeting on a television in the lobby.

Many urged a name change, saying the Forrest name was an insult.

"Nathan Bedford Forrest was part of the Ku Klux Klan, no matter how you put it. Nathan Bedford Forrest needs to be changed," said Stanley Scott, who is black.

Study First to Link TV Sex To Real Teen Pregnancies - washingtonpost.com

Study First to Link TV Sex To Real Teen Pregnancies - washingtonpost.com: Teenagers who watch a lot of television featuring flirting, necking, discussion of sex and sex scenes are much more likely than their peers to get pregnant or get a partner pregnant, according to the first study to directly link steamy programming to teen pregnancy.

The study, which tracked more than 700 12-to-17-year-olds for three years, found that those who viewed the most sexual content on TV were about twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy as those who saw the least.

"Watching this kind of sexual content on television is a powerful factor in increasing the likelihood of a teen pregnancy," said lead researcher Anita Chandra. "We found a strong association." The study is being published today in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

There is rising concern about teen pregnancy rates, which after decades of decline may have started inching up again, fueling an intense debate about what factors are to blame. Although TV viewing is unlikely to entirely explain the possible uptick in teen pregnancies, Chandra and others said, the study provides the first direct evidence that it could be playing a significant role.

Color Connection: Studying Abroad in India - washingtonpost.com

Color Connection: Studying Abroad in India - washingtonpost.com: ...I studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. I stayed in a home-stay, where you live with a host family as an adopted member. The first interaction I had with my host mother and father: I walked into the apartment, and, when I was waving hello, she looked at me and said, 'What part of Africa are you from? Nigeria?' I said, 'No, no, I'm American.' And she scrunched her face oddly and walked out of the room. I was taken aback. I couldn't understand initially what that was all about until I learned there is a deep, embedded color-grading in India that's probably been there for centuries. Obviously, as an African American, that was a point of contention for me. Sometimes when I would walk around in the markets, there was a sense of awe, which I appreciated. I guess, in the United States, many times I'll walk around, and I can sometimes feel invisible. But there it was the opposite: There was a sense of intrigue that I noticed in other people's eyes.

The School That Chocolate Built - washingtonpost.com

The School That Chocolate Built - washingtonpost.com
... The 5,000-acre campus of the Milton Hershey School is located in the town named for its founder, chocolate magnate Milton S. Hershey. The grounds are pristine: all green rolling hills and jewel-like gardens. The school and administrative buildings are spotless, and the student homes look like neatly landscaped suburban dwellings with swing sets and bird feeders outside. There's an AstroTurf football field, lots of computer labs and a recreation area with three swimming pools, a water slide and two sandy volleyball courts. A wealth of after-school activities are available, from motorcycle-building to horticulture, a rabbit-raising club, soccer, dance or cooking.

It's a residential school for 1,800 underprivileged students from preschool through high school, many of whom arrive with learning deficits and psychological issues. More than 70 percent of the students, who must be U.S.-born, come from families at or below the poverty line. The school doesn't take students with significant criminal records, and acceptance is based on a complex analysis of poverty levels, living conditions and geography. Priority is given to students who come from the three Pennsylvania counties surrounding the school, though 65 students from the Washington area attend.

Creating More Opportunities for American Indians in Science and Engineering

Creating More Opportunities for American Indians in Science and Engineering: While many have doubted the ability of American Indian students to thrive in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, Dr. Herb Schroeder is converting skeptics with his Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program.

“The attitude is you can’t get native kids to do engineering,” said Schroeder, the associate dean of undergraduate studies at the University of Alaska at Anchorage.

“I confronted so much racism from the administration,” Schroeder said about the program he launched in the early 1990s. “I was a new professor and my dean told me, ‘we are not going to dumb our program down just to get more native around here.’”

Since that conversation, Schroeder has expanded his program from the Anchorage campus to other colleges and universities. He recruited more than 350 native students majoring in engineering to both the University of Alaska’s Fairbanks and Anchorage campuses as well as Alaska’s Kuskokwim Community College, the University of Washington, the University of Hawaii Manoa and Kapiolani Community College. Roughly 200 more indigenous students are studying biology at these schools.

More than 70 percent of students who participated in Schroeder’s programs graduated with science or engineering degrees, he said.

Race and the Suburbs - Campaign Stops Blog - NYTimes.com

Race and the Suburbs - Campaign Stops Blog - NYTimes.com: ...It’s not that most suburbanites are racist, but rather that they tolerate more manifestations of racial bias than their urban and rural counterparts. What’s more, although minorities (particularly blacks and Hispanics) are moving in greater numbers to the suburbs, these bedroom communities are among the most segregated counties in America.

The problem, according to research by the Brookings Institution, is that minorities moving into the suburbs tend to be lower income families, and they are choosing (or in some cases are forced to for financial reasons) to live in the same communities, creating pockets of poverty in affluent areas. Indeed, a number of recent studies show that the income gap between blacks and whites is greatest in the suburbs.

Op-Ed Columnist - What? Me Biased? - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - What? Me Biased? - NYTimes.com: For the last year and a half, a team of psychology professors has been conducting remarkable experiments on how Americans view Barack Obama through the prism of race.

The scholars used a common research technique, the implicit association test, to measure whether people regarded Mr. Obama and other candidates as more foreign or more American. They found that research subjects — particularly when primed to think of Mr. Obama as a black candidate — subconsciously considered him less American than either Hillary Clinton or John McCain.

Indeed, the study found that the research subjects — Californian college students, many of them Democrats supportive of Mr. Obama — unconsciously perceived him as less American even than the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

It’s not that any of them actually believed Mr. Obama to be foreign. But the implicit association test measured the way the unconscious mind works, and in following instructions to sort images rapidly, the mind balked at accepting a black candidate as fully American. This result mattered: The more difficulty a person had in classifying Mr. Obama as American, the less likely that person was to support Mr. Obama.

It’s easy to be skeptical of such research, so test for your own unconscious biases at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo or at http://backhand.uchicago.edu/Center/ShooterEffect.

Fewer Children Entering Gifted Programs - NYTimes.com

Fewer Children Entering Gifted Programs - NYTimes.com: The number of children entering New York City public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last under a new policy intended to equalize access, with 28 schools lacking enough students to open planned gifted classes, and 13 others proceeding with fewer than a dozen children.

The policy, which based admission on a citywide cutoff score on two standardized tests, also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes, according to a New York Times analysis of new Education Department data.

In a school system in which 17 percent of kindergartners and first graders are white, 48 percent of this year’s new gifted students are white, compared with 33 percent of elementary students admitted to the programs under previous entrance policies. The percentage of Asians is also higher, while those of blacks and Hispanics are lower.

Parents, teachers and principals involved in the programs, already worried at reports this spring that the new system tilted programs for the gifted further toward rich neighborhoods, have complained since school began that they were wasteful and frustrating, with high-performing children in the smallest classes in a school system plagued by pockets of overcrowding.

Women Buying Health Policies Pay a Penalty - NYTimes.com

Women Buying Health Policies Pay a Penalty - NYTimes.com: WASHINGTON — Striking new evidence has emerged of a widespread gap in the cost of health insurance, as women pay much more than men of the same age for individual insurance policies providing identical coverage, according to new data from insurance companies and online brokers.

Some insurance executives expressed surprise at the size and prevalence of the disparities, which can make a woman’s insurance cost hundreds of dollars a year more than a man’s. Women’s advocacy groups have raised concerns about the differences, and members of Congress have begun to question the justification for them.

The new findings, which are not easily explained away, come amid anxiety about the declining economy. More and more people are shopping for individual health insurance policies because they have lost jobs that provided coverage. Politicians of both parties have offered proposals that would expand the role of the individual market, giving people tax credits or other assistance to buy coverage on their own.

Black College Advocates Praise Report Calling for More Equitable Funding of Maryland HBCUs

Black College Advocates Praise Report Calling for More Equitable Funding of Maryland HBCUs: The formula to bringing Maryland’s historically Black universities on par with the state’s traditionally White institutions will require increased funding for critical improvements, according to an expert panel established by Maryland state officials.

The six-member Panel on the Comparability and Competitiveness of Historically Black Institutions in Maryland released a 33-page report earlier this week calling for numerous enhancements to Maryland’s four historically Black universities, including the construction of new science and technology facilities and increased investment in undergraduate retention efforts as well as in doctoral programs at Morgan State University and the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore.

Dr. Earl Richardson, the president of Morgan State University, praised the report for validating what Morgan State officials and Black college advocates in Maryland have been saying about the state’s Black universities being seriously underfunded and lacking resources. Between 2000 and 2005, the state of Maryland was under order by the U.S. Education’s Office of Civil Rights to improve programs and facilities at historically Black institutions in the state, a remedy to vestiges of past discrimination. Black college advocates have since contended that the state has failed to fulfill its obligations to the predominantly Black campuses.

Minorities less likely to receive care for depression - Better Life - USATODAY.com

Minorities less likely to receive care for depression - Better Life - USATODAY.com: Whites in the USA are much more likely than racial or ethnic minorities to receive needed care for depression, and, for some, the lack of care can be life-threatening, two new studies suggest.

About 60% of whites with symptoms of depression had received treatment in the past year, compared to only 41% of blacks and about a third of Asians and Latinos, in one new study, published in the November issue of Psychiatric Services. The results were pooled from three national surveys of 9,000 adults by researchers at Cambridge Health Alliance and Harvard Medical School.

Care is one thing -- good care something else. Using widely-accepted criteria, minorities also came up short on access to good-quality care even if they were treated, researchers say.

Depression isn't just about the mind or emotions, it's a mental disorder that can endanger physical health. There's strong evidence that patients with heart disease who are depressed have a 2-to-4-fold higher risk for complications and death from their cardiac problems.

Depression is common in heart patients, but blacks are only half as likely as whites to receive treatment for their mental disorder, suggests new research from Duke University Medical Center. The Duke researchers studied 827 patients who received cardiac care over three years at their center.

Illinois Professor Wins Poetry Prize

"Paul Martinez Pompa, a faculty member in the English department at Triton College in River Grove, Ill., is the 2008 recipient of the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize given by Letras Latinas, the literary program of the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies (ILS), university officials announced.

Martinez Pompa was honored for his manuscript Men Watching Men.

The prize, a collaboration with Notre Dame Press, supports the publication of a first book by a Latino or Latina poet and is awarded every other year. The name honors the late Andres Montoya, author of the award-winning collection 'The Ice Worker Sings.”

Administrators of the prize said Letras Latinas seeks to enhance the visibility, appreciation and study of Latino literature, particularly projects that identify and support emerging Latino and Latina writers."

All-Star Player and Wife Start Education Foundation

Holli Martinez dropped out of college when she married a baseball star but returned 14 years later, partly to be a better role model for her three children. She recently graduated magna cum laude from the University of Washington's Bothell campus.

Her husband, Edgar Martinez, who retired after an All-Star career with the Seattle Mariners, returned to school, too, completing a nine-month business program earlier this year.

When they started their own foundation, education quickly became the theme.

The Martinez Foundation, which launched September 25, aims to help more Latino students attend college and more minority students become teachers.

"We want to offer opportunities," Edgar says. "That's what we can do.

What if I didn't have the opportunity? Maybe I'd still be struggling back in Puerto Rico."

The foundation is the latest in a long list of philanthropic efforts for the Martinez couple, so many that, in 2007, Edgar was inducted into the World Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame.

They have contributed about $200,000 of their own money to their foundation so far, and at minimum will give 10 scholarships of $20,000 each to Latino undergraduates. But they are not making promises about how many scholarships they will offer to students in teacher-training programs until they see how much they raise at their first event, scheduled for Oct. 18 at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle.

The undergraduate scholarships will go to students with at least a 2.7 grade-point average who will attend a college in Washington state. The College Success Foundation, which administers scholarships for a number of organizations, will select those students.

Brownsville Wins $1Million Prize for Academic Gains

One of the nation's poorest school districts, already tousled by a hurricane and nervously awaiting division by a fence being built along the U.S.-Mexican border, won the coveted $1 million Broad Prize for Urban Education last week in recognition of its academic advances.

The prize will be divided among the district's graduating seniors for college scholarships.

'This is considered the Nobel Prize in education,' an elated Hector Gonzales, the district's superintendent, said by phone at the award presentation in New York. 'It will help us move to the next level where all our students succeed.'

Announcing the decision in New York, Eli Broad, founder of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, said: 'Brownsville is the best kept secret in America. In the face of stark poverty, Brownsville is outpacing other large urban districts nationwide because it is smartly focusing all resources on directly supporting students and teachers.'

The Brownsville Independent School District serves nearly 50,000 students -- 98 percent Hispanic and 43 percent who are learning English. Ninety-four percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch, a common measure of poverty. Surrounding Cameron County had the highest poverty rate for a county of its size in the country at 34.7 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Notre Dame Among Hosts for 2010 Hispanic MBA Expo

The University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business will be the lead academic sponsor for the National Society of Hispanic MBAs’ (NSHMBA) National Conference and Career Expo in Chicago on Oct. 21-23, 2010. The university announced the selection last week.

'We have matching missions,' said Carolyn Woo, Martin J. Gillen Dean of the Mendoza College of Business. 'Both the Mendoza College and NSHMBA seek to develop business leaders who have a concern for the greater good of society as well as their organizations. The conference is an exciting opportunity for us to support their vision.'

Hispanic Magazine has ranked Notre Dame 13th on its 2008 list of 'Top 25 Colleges for Latinos,' the sixth year the university has made the list since its debut in 1999.

Past conferences have connected more than 8,000 Hispanic MBA students with 240 corporations and 70-plus academic institutions to promote professional development in the Hispanic community.

During the three-day conference, participants will be able to attend presentations by world-class leaders representing nonprofits, higher education and corporate America. The conference also offers resume and interview clinics, a case competition and the job expo.

HBCU Students Take the Stage at Kennedy Center

HBCU Students Take the Stage at Kennedy Center: Last month one of Renata “Toni” Roy’s dreams became reality when a choir of 105 students representing dozens of the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities took the stage in front of a packed audience at the 2,500-seat John F. Kennedy Center concert hall in Washington, D.C.

Roy’s idea for the “105 Voices of History” concert began developing four years ago during her days as special assistant for private sector partnerships for the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Roy, whose son and daughter are graduates of Dillard and Hampton universities, began to think about the role HBCU choirs traditionally have had in growing and promoting the institutions.

“Music is the legacy of our schools,” says Roy, who formed the choir and concert under her nonprofit, Partners Achieving Success. “That was the foundation. That’s what helped build buildings. When you needed money, you got the money from the choir. I really want to make sure that they still utilize that resource.”

Ohio University and Eight Historically Black Colleges and Universities Form Alliance

Ohio University and Eight Historically Black Colleges and Universities Form Alliance: Ohio University and eight historically Black colleges and universities have joined together in a strategic partnership aimed at enhancing the number of resources and educational options available to students at all nine schools.

The partnership emerged from a discussion Dr. Roderick McDavis, president of OU had with Dr. James Renick, the former president of North Carolina A&T University, and Dr. Andrew Hugine, former president of South Carolina State University, in 2005.

“We began talking about issues that related to students and faculty, pipeline issues and getting more people of color for administrative and faculty positions. Realizing that we were having similar issues, we said, ‘how about creating a consortium that would allow us talk about our issues of concern?’” McDavis says.

After a number of meetings and more conversation, the Interlink Alliance was born.

Through the alliance, nine inaugural members will share resources and talent to create new opportunities for faculty, staff and students. At the forefront of the agenda for the new alliance is faculty development, student leadership and Black male development. Among other activities, the collaborative will establish faculty- and student-exchange programs.