EthnicMajority

(Kansas City Star) A federal trial opening Monday will examine the legality of South Carolina’s new voter ID law and also put on display the state’s history of racial discrimination.

The question: Has that history of racially charged politics faded into irrelevance? Or is the state still stacking the deck against African-Americans?

Dozens of S.C. legislators, officials, professors and interest group leaders will testify for five days under questioning by attorneys from a Washington law firm representing South Carolina and by civil rights lawyers with the Justice Department.

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(NPR) Venus and Serena Williams, Sloane Stephens and Donald Young will be among those vying for Grand Slam Glory at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, which start Monday at Flushing Meadows in New York.

Those four are the only African-Americans who rank among the top 100 men's and women's players in the country at this stage. Some tennis enthusiasts say the game has got to do better than that – and they are working at the grassroots to level the playing ground.

Take the nonprofit Washington Tennis & Education Foundation, which gives free tennis lessons to kids, while providing academic help and all-around mentoring.

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(SFgate) A former project manager for Genentech, Kimberly Bryant remembers going to technology networking events in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, looking around and finding that she was often not just one of a handful of women in attendance, but also one of just a few people of color.

(UPI) Racial attitudes may be a big factor in the U.S. election, particularly since a so-called implicit bias exists among many white voters, researchers say.

Lead researcher Anthony G. Greenwald and colleagues conducted a survey of 15,000 U.S. voters from January to April, which asked respondents about their political beliefs, how "warmly" they felt toward black and white people, and which presidential contender they preferred.

The survey was done while the Republican hopefuls included Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum.

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(Huffington Post) Univision, the network behind the nation’s most-watched Spanish-language news programs, announced late Thursday that itwill host a pair of Facebook forums with the presidential candidates leading up to the election.

The network’s lead anchor team, Jorge Ramos and Maria Elena Salinas, will moderate what the company described in astatement as the “first-ever meet the candidate” events to, “directly address topics of importance to the Hispanic community in Spanish and English.”

The network did not respond to requests for comment about the event or about whether the forums are related to the nearly two-week-long public battle launched by Ramos, and Univision President and CEO Randy Falco against the Commission on Presidential Debates.

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(The Root) "A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Tuesday shows President Barack Obamaholding a four point lead over Republican challenger Mitt Romney," Ned Resnikoff reported for NBC News' "Lean Forward" blog. "But among African Americans, the poll shows an even stronger lead for Obama, as First Read reports:

" 'Looking inside the numbers, Obama continues to lead Romney among key parts of his political base, including African Americans (94 percent to 0 percent), Latinos (by a 2-to-1 margin), voters under 35-years-old (52 percent to 41 percent) and women (51 percent to 41 percent).'

"That's right: according to this poll, Romney has zero percent support among African Americans.

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(National Journal) In 2011, Latinos for the first time became the largest minority group in four-year colleges and universities across the United States, according to a Pew Hispanic Center report.

The number of 18- to-24-year-old Latinos enrolled in college surpassed 2 million in 2011, accounting for 16.5 percent of the student population. The increase may be associated as much with population growth as with modest gains in high school graduation rates, according to the report released on Monday by the nonpartisan research center.

High school graduation rates reached an all-time high for Latinos in 2011, the Pew study found. The number of Latinos earning a high school diploma or General Education Development certificate increased to 76 percent in 2011, up from 73 percent in 2010, researchers said. Nearly 47 percent of those graduates were enrolled in a two-year community college or four-year undergraduate program.

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(Atlanta Journal Constitution) UPDATE at 5:50 p.m.: Regarding the section of the law that makes it illegal to knowingly transport or harbor illegal immigrants, the court found not only that Georgia’s law infringes on the federal prerogative to make immigration law. The court further ruled that Georgia could not make it illegal to induce an illegal immigrant to enter the state once already present in the U.S. Those provisions remain blocked from taking effect by a court injunction.

To be clear, and to correct my inapt phrasing in the original post, the court did not say the other sections of the law are constitutional. A lower court had enjoined two sections from taking effect while the question of constitutionality is argued. The section of the law dealing with checking detainees’ immigration status is still being challenged, although the Supreme Court’s rulingabout a similar law in Arizona suggests that section is likely to remain in place until and unless there are specific challenges to the way it is applied.

ORIGINAL POST:

The 11th Circuit has upheld the controversial section of Georgia’s 2011 illegal-immigration law that allows law enforcement to check the immigration status of people detained for certain crimes. The federal appeals court found 22 of the law’s 23 sections met constitutional muster and kept only one section blocked from taking effect. 

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(Chicago Tribune) On Monday, dozens of Asian-American organizations filed amicus briefs at the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that universities should be allowed to consider race in admissions decisions. Five Asian-American groups were not among them.

That's because those groups already filed their briefs in the closely watched University of Texas case — on the other side. They argued in May that the school's race-conscious admissions policies hurt Asian-Americans by giving less qualified candidates a leg up on admissions.

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(SpeedTV) Two of the biggest brands in all of sports, NASCAR and FOX Deportes, announced today they are teaming up to provide the sport’s most expansive Spanish-language broadcast offering ever with coverage of 15 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races as well as original programming, daily news segments and weekly updates starting in 2013. 

Of the 15 race broadcasts, FOX Deportes, the No. 1 U.S. Latino Sports network, will carry live six NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races, including, for the first time ever, a Spanish-language broadcast of NASCAR’s biggest race, the Daytona 500 (Sunday, Feb. 24).

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