EthnicMajority

(All Headline News) The oldest African American church in DeKalb County no longer has a place to worship.

Flat Rock Community Church was established 150 years ago. Now, one of the members said it is in financial limbo.

In November, the church separated from the United Methodist denomination in a disagreement over property, reports stated. In December, membership thinned out, and the church could no longer afford the $6,500 mortgage, resulting in the building going into foreclosure.

According to senior pastor Binita Miles, members are discouraged they have to deal with political and financial issues within the church, and not religious concerns.

For the past month, the church has been meeting at the Flat Rock archive building, and starting in January they will move to Flat Rock Elementary School.

(The Atlantic) How do you run a campaign when you could be disqualified, through no fault of your own, moments before balloting begins? That’s a question a number of contenders are weighing as they vie for co-chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The possibility that the GOP may elect a woman as national party chairman for just the second time in its history is raising that prospect for candidates for the party’s often-overlooked No. 2 post. That’s because RNC rules require the co-chairman to be of the opposite sex of the chairman.

That rule will make Election Day more nerve-racking than usual for co-chairman candidates. They won’t know whether they can run until the last moment, when a new national committee chairman is elected.

Take Sharon Day, one of Florida’s representatives on the RNC, and Jan Larimer, the current co-chairman. Both are running this year, and even if one does line up the votes necessary to win the co-chairmanship, both will be ineligible to run if either of the two women seeking the top job–former Ambassador Ann Wagner and former Bush administration official Maria Cino–ends up winning.

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(Northwest Asian Weekly) 2010 was another great year for sports. We saw big international events such as the Winter Olympics and the World Cup. We saw the return of Tiger Woods to golf and the continued dominance of Manny Pacquiao in boxing.

Locally, the Mariners had a disappointing season as hopes of a World Series were quickly dashed and Don Wakamatsu was let go midway through the season. Former University of Southern California head football coach, Pete Carroll, began his first year as the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. The University of Washington football team will be going to its first bowl game since 2002. On the women’s side, the University of Washington softball team made it back to the College World Series. Lastly, the Seattle Storm claimed its second WNBA title.

There were landmark firsts in the NFL and NBA. Ed Wang became the first Chinese American to be drafted in the NFL. Harvard University guard Jeremy Lin became the first Taiwanese American to play in the NBA. In addition, former Sonics executive, Rich Cho, was chosen to be the general manager for the Portland Trailblazers. Cho is the first Asian American general manager in the NBA.

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(Mediapost) While broadband penetration in general has lagged among Asian, African-American and Hispanic households, these groups are quickly catching up.

They tend, however, to over-index in consumption of multiplatform TV, including TV viewed online and via handheld devices, according to a new study from Horowitz Associates titled “Multiplatform Content and Services: Multicultural Edition.”

The Horowitz study, based on a survey of 1,000 broadband users across the entire United States with Internet at home, found that 48% of Asian broadband users watch TV content online, followed by Hispanic broadband users at 46% and African-American and white broadband users at 35% each.

Some 16% of Asians, 22% of Hispanics and 19% of black broadband users watch TV content on a handheld device.

Despite new technologies, traditional TV viewing dominates, as most respondents said they do most of their viewing with a TV set — even when occasionally accessing alternative platforms. Among respondents who said they sometimes watch video on an alternative platform, 70% of Asians, 75% of Hispanics, 74% of African-Americans, and 75% of whites remain loyal viewers of a traditional TV set.

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(CBS News) Despite a growing recognition in political circles of the political clout of the Hispanic community in the United States, several potential 2012 Republican presidential contenders are skipping an event next month billed precisely as a way for the GOP to address that community, Politico reports.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, South Dakota Sen. John Thune, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and Texas Gov Rick Perry will all reportedly miss the first Hispanic Leadership Network conference next month in Miami. So far, the only potential presidential candidate confirmed to attend is Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Carlos Gutierrez, who served as commerce secretary under former President George W. Bush, will co-chair the two-day event. The Bush family, perhaps more than any other Republicans, have shown how the GOP can effectively court the Latino community.

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(Afro) Black residents are increasingly departing large U.S. cities a shift that could affect African-American political power according to data from the first results of the U.S. Census Bureau’s population census.

The population of the nation’s capital now exceeds 600,000 residents, 53 percent of whom are African American, and there has been a gain of nearly 30,000 new Washingtonians since a decade ago. But, according to Census Bureau data released Dec. 21 and cited by The Washington Post, much of the increase is due to an ongoing influx of Hispanics and Whites moving into the city—a change brought on by a gentrification process that has forced many African-Americans out of city neighborhoods.

According to the Post, Blacks in D.C. face the prospect of being a population minority in the city by the time of the next census in 2020.

In New York, the number of Blacks leaving the city has exceeded the departure of Whites since 2000, and as a result, that city has now suffered an overall decline in Black population for the first time in history, according to GBM News.

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(Boston Globe) Governor Deval Patrick, deepening his imprint on the state’s highest court, nominated what would be its first Asian-American justice yesterday, declaring that the highest ranks of a state’s government should reflect the diversity of its people.

He nominated Appeals Court Justice Fernande R.V. Duffly, 61, to fill the seat held by Roderick L. Ireland, who on Monday was elevated to chief justice, becoming the first African-American to lead the Supreme Judicial Court.

If confirmed by the Governor’s Council, Duffly would be Patrick’s fourth appointment to the seven-member court, the Western Hemisphere’s oldest appellate panel.

“For someone who has spent much of her career as a lawyer serving the public interest, there can be no higher calling than this,’’ said Duffly, a Cambridge resident. Duffly said she supported the SJC’s 2003 decision to legalize gay marriage as a matter of equality.

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(Wall Street Journal) Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi and a potential Republican presidential candidate, said Tuesday that he didn’t condone the Citizens’ Councils known for opposing racial integration in the Deep South decades ago, softening remarks he made in a recent magazine interview.

Mr. Barbour released a written statement augmenting remarks that he had made in The Weekly Standard published Monday. When asked why his hometown had avoided the violence that accompanied public-school integration in other locales, Mr. Barbour had spoken well of the Citizens’ Council in Yazoo City.

“You heard of the Citizens’ Councils?” Mr. Barbour said in the magazine interview. “Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town.”

Liberal critics, many historians and some Republicans said Mr. Barbour’s characterization ignored the intent of the Citizens’ Councils. First organized in Mississippi Delta communities, the councils were made up of local business leaders who opposed integration by exerting economic pressure on black workers.

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(Philadelphia Inquirer) I ASKED A 17-year-old I know what he thought about Kwanzaa and he said, “That Jewish holiday?”

Uh, no.

Clearly, his high school hasn’t embraced the multicultural thing and isn’t teaching students about the 44-year-old Afrocentric holiday. But I don’t knock his ignorance because the truth is that Kwanzaa has never caught on with the majority of black Americans. At the same time, though, it has grown in mainstream acceptance as evidenced by the Kwanzaa postal stamps and greeting cards.

No one can say for certain how many people celebrate Kwanzaa, which began in 1966 and has roots in the Black Nationalist movement. Keith Mayes, author of “Black Power and the Making of the African-American Holiday Tradition” (Routledge, 2009) said that conservative estimates are that between 1 million to 2 million African Americans celebrate Kwanzaa. Organizers of The African American Cultural Center in Los Angeles put the figure at 40 million worldwide but that includes similar festivals in Africa and elsewhere.

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(The Right Perspective) Frustrated Hispanic students have vowed revolution and retribution against White Americans after the so-called DREAM Act failed to pass a Senate vote this past weekend.

“This is war!” Phoenix student Aldemar Cruz is quoted by Examiner.com as shouting after the vote. “Republicans may have stopped the DREAM Act, but they won’t prevent La Reconquista from happening.”

“White people, watch out!”

Other Hispanics agreed with the sentiments expressed by Cruz. “Undocumented” student Olivia Perez called on Latinos to “fight back” against the defeat, using every measure “Blacks did to get their civil rights,” including mass-scale rioting.

However, Elena Cruz of the Center for Latino Rights advocated taking a non-violent and legal approach.

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