EthnicMajority

(Guardian) A Nebraska town, angry over a surge in the number of Hispanic residents, is voting today in a referendum on a new law that would require foreign nationals to get a licence to live in the town.

The referendum in Fremont has been prompted by a sharp rise in Hispanic people drawn by work at local meatpacking plants combined with fears over job losses and demand placed on the town’s social services because of the economic downturn.

If approved, tenants who are not US-citizens would be required to get an “occupancy licence” from the city council. Even residents of nursing homes would be required to obtain such a licence.

Federal law requires employers to verify the immigration status of workers but the proposed Fremont law would also open violators to local sanctions. Supporters insist it is not racist and is essential to protect jobs, healthcare and education for local people because the town’s Hispanic population has surged from 165 to more than 2,000 in the past 20 years.

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(National Journal) During today’s House Judiciary Committee field hearing in Los Angeles on the proposed Comcast-NBC Universal merger, minority critics accused Comcast, the nation’s largest cable television operator, of doing little to promote media diversity. “We find it unacceptable that none of the 250-plus channels that are offered on the Comcast platform are 100 percent African American-owned and widely distributed on their nationwide platform,” complained Stanley Washington, president and CEO of the National Coalition of African American Owned Media, in prepared remarks. The dearth of black-owned channels is particularly disturbing, he said, because Comcast has “millions of African American subscribers that contribute approximately 40 percent, or $15 billion, of Comcast’s annual revenue.”

Alex Nogales, president and CEO of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, echoed the criticism with this claim: “NBC has a relatively fair record with the diversity initiatives I mentioned earlier. Comcast does not.” His group has battled Comcast for years in an effort to convince it to carry more Spanish-language channels in markets with sizable Hispanic populations.

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(USA Today) Colleges and universities should adopt affirmative-action policies based on socioeconomic status, argues a new report that finds the most disadvantaged students on average score 784 points lower on the SAT than those from the wealthiest, most educated families.

Despite recent efforts by about 100 selective colleges to provide more need-based aid and improve graduation rates of recipients, low-income and minority students are increasingly concentrated in the least selective schools, the report says.

“It doesn’t do any good to offer a generous financial aid package to low-income students if you don’t also admit them,” says Richard Kahlenberg, a longtime advocate of class-based preferences in admissions, and editor of Rewarding Strivers: Helping Low-Income Students Succeed in College, published today by the Century Foundation.

A 2003 Supreme Court ruling allows colleges to consider race in admissions, but the SAT research finds that socioeconomic factors, such as parents’ education and income, contribute significantly to differences in student scores.

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(Asian Week) Harvard education. NBA skills. Jeremy Lin has both.

Lin, a 6′3”, 200-pound point guard, is training in anticipation of the NBA draft next Thursday, June 24. Lin, a Taiwanese American, would be rare in a league dominated by white and Black players.

“Jeremy loved soccer and basketball even before the age of 5. He would go to all of his older brother’s practices and just do the drills on the sideline by himself. When he was in the fourth grade, we realized that YMCA basketball was no longer challenging for him, so we started looking for higher level basketball leagues,” said Lin’s mother, Shirley.

Lin’s parents immigrated to the United States from Taiwan. They are both computer engineers. Lin’s father, Gie-Ming, is a huge basketball fan and shared this love with his three sons. When Jeremy began playing Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) basketball, Shirley and Gie-Ming realized that Jeremy had a talent. Even with talent, Shirley doesn’t forget the hard work and effort that her son has put in since he was young in order to one day play in the NBA.

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(CNN Money) The mortgage meltdown is hitting the African-American and Latino communities harder than whites, a new study has found.

Of borrowers who took out mortgages between 2005 and 2008, some 8% of both African-American and Latino borrowers have lost their homes to foreclosure, compared to 4.5% of non-Hispanic whites, according to a study by the Center for Responsible Lending, released Friday.

The racial and ethnic disparities continued even after controlling for income differences. The center’s research shows that African-American and Latino borrowers were about 30% more likely to get higher-rate subprime loans than white borrowers with similiar risk characteristics.

Of the total pool of homeowners, 17% of Latinos have lost their homes to foreclosure or are at imminent risk of losing their homes, while 11% of African-Americans are in that position. By comparison, 7% of non-Hispanic whites have lost their homes or are about to.

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(Asian Journal) More than a hundred Asian American workers gathered last week to make their voices heard about the unique challenges that Asian Americans face on the job. In a historic meeting arranged by the New York chapter of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), workers defined the barriers to organizing, the need for improved community and labor partnerships, and shared successful organizing strategies.

“When my rich employer gave me a stale pizza, threw it in the kitchen table without a plate, I was convinced then that after the apartheid era, slavery and racism still exist in this country,” Mona Lunot, a Filipina domestic worker said in the hearing.

Lunot added that she directly experienced slavery, abuse, discrimination, sexual harassment and other violations of human rights from the moment that she left her life in the Philippines in 2000 to become a domestic worker for a diplomat here in the United States.

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(Boston Globe) When Henry Louis Gates Jr., a prominent Harvard professor of African-American studies, was arrested for disorderly conduct by a white Cambridge police officer last summer, President Obama led a chorus of critics denouncing the local Police Department.

Gates, who is African-American, described his arrest as a “teaching moment’’ about race relations in America.

His case drew national attention to the relationship between policing and race. Obama wound up hosting Gates and the officer who arrested him for a so-called beer summit at the White House. And the arrest, for some, raised the question of whether officers disproportionately arrest blacks for disorderly conduct, considered one of the most discretionary and most abused charges in the nation’s criminal justice system.

But a review of the Cambridge department’s handling of disorderly conduct cases from 2004 to 2009 finds no evidence of racial profiling. Instead, the analysis by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting finds that the most common factor linking people who are arrested in Cambridge for disorderly conduct is that they were allegedly screaming or cursing in front of police.

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(WABC) Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers in men. For African American the numbers can be frightening. Rates of prostate cancer in the US are 60 percent higher among African American men.

Long before social networking and the flood of information on the Internet, the barber shop was the original social club where men gathered to talk politics, sports, and in recent times, about prostate cancer.

“We cracked jokes about it, reading the pamphlets,” said Virgil Simons, the founder of The Prostate Net.

This idea of using the barber to spread the message about prostate health in minority communities was the brainchild of Simons, who created The Prostate Net website right after he recovered from prostate cancer surgery.

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(BLR) In a move aimed at enabling small businesses to “participate in the nation’s economic recovery, including businesses owned by women, minorities, socially and economically disadvantaged individuals, and service-disabled veterans of our armed forces,” President Obama recently established an interagency task force—”The Interagency Task Force on Federal Contracting Opportunities for Small Businesses.”

Stating that “the federal government is the world’s largest purchaser of goods and services, with purchases totaling over $500 billion per year,” President Obama’s task force is intended to further Congress’ goal of awarding at least 23 percent of all federal prime contracting dollars to small businesses. Congress also established governmentwide contracting goals for participation by small businesses that are located in Historically Underutilized Business Zones (at least 3 percent) or that are owned by women (at least 5 percent), socially and economically disadvantaged individuals (at least 5 percent), and service-disabled veterans (at least 3 percent).

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(The Root) To his credit, the nation’s first black U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder, has not shied away from discussing race and its impact on our criminal justice system. Shortly after he was confirmed, he famously said that ”in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards”–a statement for which he was roundly criticized, but for which he deserved praise.

Holder has done more than just talk about race. He has launched an examination of the criminal justice system, focusing on the effects of race and on ways to rid the system of racial bias.

The pervasive influence of race on the criminal justice system is well-documented and shocking. Earlier this year, in a case that challenged the systematic disenfranchisement of former felons in Washington State, Farrakhan v. Gregoire, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a watershed opinion that recognized ”compelling” evidence of racial bias in the state’s criminal justice system. The court found that, ”in the total population of potential ‘felons’[in Washington State]…, minorities are more likely than whites to be searched, arrested, detained, and ultimately prosecuted.” National statistical data bears that out: In 2007, African Americans represented 13 percent of the general population, but they comprised 39 percent of the nation’s federal prison population.

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