Ta-Nehisi Coates' cover story at The Atlantic, " The Case for Reparations," published last night - and the subject of this week's Moyers & Company interview - shows how dramatically the legacy of slavery and centuries of legalized and institutionalized racism have held back our country's African-American population.
With the eyes of the world on Ferguson, Missouri, our collective attention is focused on the different treatment of black and white people at the hands of America's criminal justice system. The focus is well deserved.
In nearly all states, white students go to school with other white students, and black students go to school with black students. You can see that segregation in these maps from the Urban Institute. The vast majority of white students, for example, attend majority white schools: The map for black students makes a large swathe of the US look well-integrated.
Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images A report released in August by the Center for Reproductive Rights, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health and Sistersong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective paints a distressing picture of the health conditions facing black and Latina women in the United States.
BALTIMORE - In the beginning, when they knew just where to find everyone, they pulled the children out of their classrooms. They sat in any quiet corner of the schools they could claim: the sociologists from Johns Hopkins and, one at a time, the excitable first-graders.
America's racial divide is older than the republic itself, a central fault line that has shaped the nation's history. This month it has manifested itself in sometimes violent protests in Ferguson, Mo., after a police killing of an unarmed young black man.
We all have different places in the racial hierarchy. But we can still work together for justice. In the first campaign I ran as a young organizer, I worked with fifty homeless families, the vast majority of them African-American, who were trying to escape a slumlike welfare hotel in San Francisco for subsidized permanent housing.
As I write this, it's been about three months since the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic cover story about reparations. That's not a very long time relative to the span of a human life, but it's significantly longer than the average lifespan for most Internet #longreads.
There's been some debate on the issue, for sure, but most of the research has been conclusive-you should go to college. As of 2013, to the Department of Labor, the nationwide unemployment rate for those with just a high school diploma was 7.5 percent. But for those with an associate's degree, it was 5.4 percent.
The children heading back to school this fall make up the most diverse cohort of students ever. For the first time, minorities will make up a majority of the students in American public schools. But the individual classrooms these students enter aren't necessarily more diverse. In fact, many of them are segregated.
Posted: African-American women are the only demographic in the United States whose unemployment rate has not improved over the past year, according to a National Women's Law Center analysis of the latest jobs data. The overall unemployment rate dropped from 7.2 percent to 6.1 percent between August 2013 and August 2014, and women's unemployment rate dropped from 6.2 percent to 5.7 percent, the NWLC noted.
The Myth of "Minority" The Atlantic released a report yesterday that this year is the first in which "minorities will outnumber white students" in US public schools. It's apparent what they mean, but the oxymoron speaks volumes about the way we think and speak about race in the US-that is, always in relation to whiteness.
In nearly all states, white students go to school with other white students, and black students go to school with black students. You can see that segregation in these maps from the Urban Institute. The vast majority of white students, for example, attend majority white schools: The map for black students makes a large swathe of the US look well-integrated.
The events in Ferguson last month laid bare many of the tensions that are simmering in America. In a report for The New York Times' Dealbook , Matthew Goldstein adds another to the list: Americans are still reeling from the 2008 fiscal meltdown, the resulting crash in the housing market and monied interests taking advantage in minority neighborhoods like Ferguson's.
Black Americans are five times as likely to be sent to the emergency room with police-caused injuries as their white counterparts, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data compiled by the Sunlight Foundation. The rate of injuries also appears to be rising for black people, while it's barely budged among white Americans since 2001.
There was a stubborn bit of data buried in the August jobs report released on Friday: The unemployment rate for blacks (11.4 percent) was more than twice that for whites (5.3 percent). We call this stubborn for one simple reason: In the 42-year period during which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has separated out unemployment data into different races, black unemployment has always been higher than white unemployment.
One in every 10 American drivers was pulled over for a traffic violation in 2011, according to a Justice Department report released last year. As The Washington Post reports this week, traffic stops for minor infractions such as speeding or equipment violations are increasingly used as a pretext for officers to seize cash from drivers.
How did America come to have the highest rate of incarceration in the world? In this video, lawyer and activist Michelle Alexander says that unfortunate fact is not simply a response to crime but deeply connected to racial attitudes, fears and anxieties exploited by politicians over the decades.
Gun violence is disproportionately affecting the country's African American population. Black Americans are more than twice as likely to die from gun violence than whites, according to a new study that surveyed more than a decades' worth of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
When it comes to building wealth, whites have a vast advantage over their black and Hispanic peers. Writing at Demos, Matt Bruenig dug into the Federal Reserve's latest Survey on Consumer Finances and found a huge wealth gap by race and ethnicity.
CONYERS, Ga. - Since moving to this small city on the eastern flank of Atlanta's suburban sprawl, Lorna Francis, a hairdresser and a single mother, has found a handsome brick house to rent on a well-groomed cul-de-sac. She has found a good public school for her teenage daughter.
Americans are justly proud of their historic achievements in advancing civil rights. But behind all the nostalgia of recent months, it’s not too hard to detect notes of melancholy. In the past few years, we’ve celebrated the 50th anniversaries of many seminal events and landmark achievements of the civil rights movement, from the nonviolent...
The collapse of the housing market in 2008 and the credit crunch that followed it continues to disproportionately affect minorities. Black homeowners in the United States are so likely today to return to renter status that the gains made by blacks in homeownership since the 1970s have been effectively wiped out.
This was supposed to be "Golden Week" in Ohio, a prime window one month from the midterm election when the state's residents could both register to vote and cast their ballots at the same time. In theory, political participation doesn't get much easier than that.
Posted: 1) Affluent blacks and Hispanics still live in poorer neighborhoods than whites with working class incomes. On July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, officially banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It also ended racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and in general public facilities.
